CHILDREN’S DAY WAS THE ONLY saving grace in May. Otherwise, it was a terrible collection of thirty-one days, and there was great potential for it to get worse now that we were in the United States. What kind of a demented country was this? Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse were born from this soil, but no Children’s Day? The fifth of May was a national holiday in Korea, but here there was no such thing.
Parents’ Day followed three days after. It used to be called Mother’s Day, but then the fathers got mad and demanded a day of their own. Nay, declared the Korean government. You’ll have no such day. Instead, we’ll just dump you in there with the mothers and let the children decide who’s more important. In Korean, the day is called uh-buh-ee-nahl, which literally translates to Moth-Fath-Day. When Koreans say they’re going to merge something, they don’t mess around.
And finally, there was May 23, Noona’s birthday. She wanted gifts, two of everything, because under the Western zodiac, she was a Gemini. “Gemini is a twin,” she told me. “So now there’re two of me to celebrate.”
“A twin,” she said with such vengeance that I lost all desire to argue.
If it was a ploy to double her number of gifts, it wasn’t a bad one. I made a note to increase my birthday loot next time by leveraging my own zodiac sign, Aquarius, the water carrier.
Sick,” Father said into the phone. “David Kim sick, Susan Kim sick, everybody sick. Yes yes, thank you.” He hung the handset back on its cradle and turned to Noona and me. “Today we’ll have Children’s Day,” he said, “even if we have to lie a little.” Then he winked at us and I wished he hadn’t, because I still had a hard time with that wink. It dripped of an oiliness that made me want to run the other way.
He had one more call to make, to a wholesaler to let them know that he wasn’t coming in. On Mondays, Father drove to New York to shop for new things to sell, but not this day. “Whatever you want to do, we’ll do,” he said.
“Nothing too expensive, though,” Mother added quickly.
“Great Adventure,” Noona and I said together. The night before, we’d agreed on a plan of action. If we didn’t speak with one voice, we’d probably end up doing nothing.
Neither Father nor Mother knew what we were talking about, so we threw our best pitch. Great Adventure, we told them, was an amusement park filled with roller coasters and Ferris wheels and games and shows and it wasn’t just for kids . . . no way, it was for grown-ups, too. Plenty to do for everyone, so can we please please please go?
“How much?” Mother asked.
Neither Noona nor I wanted to answer this, but of course we had to.
“Fifteen dollars? Per person?”
Start high, Noona had said last night. Start high then tell them the real price. Then we’ll have ’em. We brought out our coupons and displayed them on the table, each neatly cut on its perforated edges, each offering a five-dollar savings.
“But,” Noona said, “as you can see, it’s much cheaper on Mondays, thanks to these coupons we found.”
Father nodded to Mother, giving his okay. Mother looked at the coupons and then at us and said, “On one condition: We take lunch.” That was Mother, who’d never been to an amusement park yet instinctively knew that food there would cost an exorbitant amount. Mother was shrewd like that when it came to money, and so was Noona. When I think back to these times now, I’m positive they should’ve run the store instead of Father, or at least he should have enlisted their help in some way, but of course that just wasn’t the way things were done. Invisible walls existed everywhere in our household. I wanted to help with lunch but Mother shooed me away, citing the unwritten law that kitchen work was for the women of the house. She and Noona went to work for the next two hours, wrapping roll after roll of Korean sushi.
By eleven we were off in Father’s ugly green station wagon (“our station wagon,” he corrected again, but I didn’t want any part of that thing). Noona and I sat in the backseat, excited beyond words. We’d only seen pictures of this wild place that was full of precipitous roller coasters and free-falling elevators, their sole purpose to test your nerve, to make you scream as the wind rushed into your mouth. The drive down I-195 to Jackson Township, New Jersey, was an hour of agonizing anticipation. Noona and I hardly talked, our bodies readying for the heavy-duty gyrations to come.
“We’re the first ones here!” I said. There would be no line for us, the early birds.
“There’s nobody else here,” Noona said.
“I know. Isn’t that great?”
When we got out of the car, we realized we were one of about twenty cars in the huge parking lot that seemed to have no end. We trudged to the entrance and saw the horrible truth: because it was so early in the season, the park was open only during the weekends. In a couple weeks it would be open every day, but that wouldn’t do us any good today.
“We should’ve called them,” I said, but more to myself than anyone else. Nobody thought of it because we were all afraid of the telephone, of having to muddle through with our broken English as the distant American voice on the other end of the line grew impatient. Father’s vocabulary was by and large limited to sales-related words, Mother could count and knew a handful of phrases, and although Noona and I had been learning with ESL classes for the past three months, we ran into trouble unless people spoke slowly and carefully. I felt angry at my family for being so stupid, at this country for speaking a language we didn’t know, at our fear and pride for handicapping us.
“We’re here, let’s see what’s out there,” Father said.
“Why bother,” I said, kicking a loose stone across the pavement.
“So when we come next time, we’ll know where to go,” he said.
“When will we come back?” I said. Father promised a lot of things and didn’t follow through. Like the new vacuum cleaner he promised to buy a month ago, where was that?
“I don’t know exactly when, but we’ll be back, I promise.”
Then he winked.
We walked the park’s periphery and admired the rides we couldn’t enjoy. There was Lightnin’ Loops in the distance, a short roller coaster that took you down, looped you around, took you up, then did it all over again . . . backwards. I’d heard one of my classmates, Jimmy, talk about that one, how everyone just lost it when it reversed. I saw the tippy-top of the Buccaneer, where you climbed aboard a ship and it swung you around like a pendulum. Jimmy said people threw up, and that change fell out when it goes really far up. And in the far corner, you could see the twisty-turny skyways of Rolling Thunder. Jimmy got sore shoulders after riding in it just once. I wanted sore shoulders. I wanted to throw up.
“We’ll be back,” Noona said. Lately her mood needle had swung over to the nice part of the scale, and for that I was grateful. She could be so nice when she wanted to be, like a young, sprightly version of Mother.
When we walked back to the front of the park to return to our car, a man called to us. He was a young guy in a blue uniform, probably the security guard. He stood behind the barred gates and yelled, “Hey!”
“Yes?” Father said.
“What’re you guys doing here?”
“Go in?” Father said, pointing to all of us. For a second my hopes rose; if anybody could let us in, it would be this man.
“Not today,” the security guard said. “We’ll be open on the weekend, though.”
“Children’s Day,” I blurted out. “Today.”
He eyed me suspiciously. “Children’s Day? Never heard of it.”
I walked up close, my face pressed against the cold metal bars. “Korea, today Children’s Day.”
“Not here,” the security guard said. “No day for children in America, bud.”
I said to Noona, “We should take them somewhere they really want to go and when we get there, it should be closed.” Three days later and I was still bitter.
“That’s not very nice,” Noona said, setting a new record for most consecutive good-mood days. She was just getting sweeter, if that was possible, and it was beginning to get on my nerves, but it was only a matter of time until she’d be back to her mean old self, so I decided to appreciate this miraculous downtime.
For Parents’ Day, we agreed to give service-related gifts since we had no money. We had a hard time figuring out just what to offer because Friday was a workday and they were gone from nine in the morning until nine at night. I was hoping we could wash their car before they left, but it was still too cold in the morning, and besides, it was lame. About the only thing we could do was prepare a late dinner for them.
“What are you going to make?” Mother asked, nervous. She had a hard time with American food. After forty years of eating kimchi and rice, her body couldn’t handle grease- and fat-laden dishes.
“Spaghetti,” Noona said, remembering the one time we had it in a diner when a friend of Father’s was visiting. Even though Mother hadn’t loved it, at least she was able to eat it.
“Spaghetti is okay,” Mother replied that Friday morning as she readied for work. She packed up lunch for the day, chopping this and boiling that, putting the bahn-chahn, the side dishes to be eaten with the rice, into little glass jars that used to contain strawberry and concord grape jelly. Watching her, I recalled the same routine back in Korea, when she worked at a bag factory on the outskirts of Seoul. She had run the machines that made and pressed paper bags of all kinds and colors—yellow shopping bags for Lotte Department Store, plain brown bags for the neighborhood grocers, long thin ones for the flower stores around the city. She’d liked that job, and was going to be promoted to an assistant manager position before we flew in a plane for eighteen hours and arrived at this strange place.
When we returned from school, Noona and I laid out our plans. “I’m sure I can make spaghetti,” she said.
“Really? Have you ever cooked it before?”
I was excited at the idea of cooking something. I knew so little about it. “I can help, right?”
“Of course,” Noona said. “You can do the chopping, dicing, stuff like that.”
Father left us ten dollars to buy the ingredients, which was plenty. We had to get spaghetti and spaghetti sauce, and maybe a loaf of some nice Italian bread, which would definitely cost less than ten.
“We should get a treat for ourselves,” I said.
“We’ll see,” Noona said, sounding more like Mother every day.
The A&P was a block away from our apartment. We didn’t talk much as we walked, just chatted about television shows. We were both fond of the sitcom Three’s Company, mainly due to John Ritter’s physical comedy. It reminded us of the variety shows we used to watch in Korea, where the humor of the body dominated over the humor of the word. Actors were always falling down, slipping on something, though never on banana peels because bananas were very expensive and slipping on one would hardly be funny.
Noona and I had watched these shows together, looking up at the nine-inch black-and-white screen, sitting on the floor. And here we were, in a different country, still sitting together and watching and laughing. As we approached the A&P, it occurred to me that this wasn’t the way it was always going to be. Noona wouldn’t always be next to me, watching TV or strolling to the supermarket, because soon she would grow older and go to college and get a job and move away, just like everybody else. And sadder still was the fact that once she left, things would go on. The hole in my heart would remain, but I’d find a way to look somewhere else.
“What’s the matter?” Noona asked as we stepped through the automatic door. I looked into her dark pretty eyes and saw the tiny reflection of my own face. I should’ve said something poignant, or maybe even something stupidly sentimental, anything but what actually came out of my mouth.
“Nothing,” I said.
Inside the supermarket, as we walked around gathering the ingredients for our Parents’ Day dinner, I held her hand, and she didn’t mind.
We didn’t start cooking until eight-thirty, since our parents weren’t due back until half past nine. In the kitchen we spread out on the counter a box of spaghetti, a jar of sauce, a bunch of scallions, four eggs, and an English-Korean dictionary to aid us in figuring out the directions.
While we waited for the water to boil, I set the table. Noona insisted that we have forks and spoons instead of chopsticks. On TV, families ate their spaghetti by spinning the noodles against the spoon, keeping the rotation tight to create a nice, even mouthful. “Don’t worry, we’ll teach them,” she said, happy about this idea. Mother would probably opt for chopsticks, but it was worth a shot.
Noona cracked open four eggs, diced the scallions, mixed them all together, and panfried the mixture. I chopped the fried eggs into thin little strips while she warmed up the sauce. When I’d finished, she slid the eggs into the sauce and lowered the range temperature. The clock read 9:25. “Almost there,” Noona said.
Using a pair of scrunched-up dishtowels, my sister and I lifted the steaming pot and emptied the noodles into the colander and what came out was one big sticky pile of goo, a deformed giant ball of pasta.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Noona said. “Maybe it cooked for too long.” She glanced directions again and pointed at a word. “There. I think we were suppose to stir it as it cooks. And use more water.”
“What do we do?” I asked, panicking. It was 9:35, our time was up.
“Plan B,” Noona said. She found a box of Japanese noodles and boiled two pots of water to save time. These things took three minutes to cook, so by the time the door opened and Mother and Father walked in fifteen minutes later than usual, we were ready.
“I’m glad you’re late,” I said.
“You can thank Mr. Hong,” Mother said. “I never thought he’d leave.”
Father removed his coat and threw it on the couch. “He just wanted to make sure you and his wife are gonna meet up next week.”
“I don’t like her,” she said. Mother often made up her mind about people in advance.
“Come on,” Father said, “you hardly know her.”
On the dinner table, our parents found plates of quasi-genuine spaghetti waiting for them.
“Mmmmm,” Father said, taking in the aroma.
“This is better than the spaghetti we had at that restaurant,” Mother said. “The noodles are much softer, like our Japanese noodles.”
They ate fast. Obviously they’d skipped their usual dinner to wait to eat our food.
Afterwards, as Noona washed the dishes and I dried them—much to Mother’s chagrin—we dreamed of ways of becoming rich and famous with our daring gastronomic invention, Japanese Spaghetti. “You can be the chef and I’ll be your assistant,” I suggested. Noona would wear the puffy white hat and I’d wear the dirty apron, and that’s how we would stay together after she grew up and left. We’d work together in our kitchen. She’d boil the water and I’d chop the scallions.
By the time her birthday rolled around, Noona’s irrational rage was back in full force. Not a trace remained of the sweetheart that I wanted to be with for the rest of my life on Parents’ Day. She was mean, she was vicious, and she wanted to go bowling.
Originally, she’d also wanted to go to a French restaurant, where she was determined to gobble up caviar and frog legs. “And soufflé,” she added, having just learned the word in school. “It’s this thing that puffs up and you have to eat it real fast or it sinks down, deflates, like a leaking balloon.” Amazingly enough, Mother talked her out of it, enticing the wild beast with her favorite food, mahn-doo, bite-sized Korean dumplings filled with ground beef, vermicelli, spinach, onions, and tofu. I loved it, too, but obviously you had to throw an epic tantrum to get these things made around here.
“Fine,” Noona agreed, “we’ll stay home and eat. But we are going bowling.”
Why bowling? Nobody questioned Noona when she got into one of her moods—we just went along the best we could.
We found some lanes nearby at a faded pink block of a building named Bowl-O-Rama. Father had gone bowling before, so he knew the routine of borrowing the shoes and picking out the ball. Mother initially said she didn’t want to play but changed her mind, curiosity playing a part.
“These shoes feel funny,” I told Father when we sat in our lane.
“They’re supposed to feel like that.”
“I think there’s something in there.” More in my left foot than the right.
“You’re probably just nervous. It’s no big deal,” Father said.
“Shut up, Junior,” Noona said. That was the nickname she used when she was trying to get under my skin. “Shut up and just bowl.”
Father went first, so we could see how it was done. “It’s all in the wrist,” he told us; then he aimed, brought back the ball, stepped forward four steps, stopped, slid, and launched the black bowling ball, all in one fluid motion. The collision was thunderous and complete. “Strike!” he yelled in English. “That’s how it’s done.”
Mother was next, and she used both hands, shuffling toward the lane with the ball swaying dangerously between her knees. Though her delivery looked nothing like Father’s, she also knocked down all the pins. “Oh, oh,” she said, and looked to Father, who laughed and said, “It can be done like that, too.”
I glanced at Noona, wondering if she wanted to go next, but she wasn’t even looking in my direction, staring instead at the rest of the alley. Three lanes over, a group of boys were bowling away, high-fiving each other after every turn. Concentrate, I told myself, and aimed my burgundy ball like Father and pitched it like Mother, a two-handed effort. It seemed to roll forever, and it started out centered but ended up in the left gutter.
“It’s all right,” Mother said. “You’ll do better with your second ball.”
That one was even worse, sliding into the right gutter not even halfway down the lane.
“This game is stupid,” I said.
Before we could say anything else, Noona got up from the lime-green molded chair, clawed her lime-green ball, and whipped it down the lane so hard that she almost lost her balance. It was as if the pins fell down to avoid her fury.
“I don’t want to bowl in this lane,” Noona said.
“What?” Father asked. “Why?”
“Because I don’t like it. And it is my birthday, isn’t it? I should get what I want.”
“Listen,” Father said. “This doesn’t make any sense.” He looked to Mother for help, but she just shrugged.
And with that, Noona took her ball and walked two lanes away and started flinging. The sound of the impact between ball and pins was deafening.
“Hey,” the guy behind the shoes counter yelled at her. “You can’t bowl there.”
“I pay,” Father yelled back, holding up his wallet. “I pay.”
“Well, then pay now,” he said. While Father sighed and walked up, Noona picked up a spare and another strike.
“Whoa, girl,” one of the boys in the third lane said, a tall and gangly sort. “You sure can bowl.”
“Yeah, you’re really good,” another one agreed, this one with a crew cut so short he almost looked bald.
Noona paid them no attention. She floated her hand over the air vent, picked up another ball, and knocked down more pins. She never looked at me or anyone else as she continued to roll.
Mother attributed most of Noona’s tirades to her periods, but I didn’t buy it. There had to be something else to her madness, something more singularly Noona than a trait shared by every woman who walked the Earth.
“She’s just this way,” Mother said to no one in particular, rubbing her belly and grimacing. Mother swore that on our birthdays, she felt intermittent pain in her lower stomach, nature’s reminder of her struggle with our births.
“Has she always been like this?” I asked.
“Not always,” Mother said, waving off Father who gestured it was her turn. “You bowl for me, my stomach hurts.” Father threw the ball with two hands, which made Mother laugh.
“As long as I can remember, she’s been like this,” I said.
“She was a lovely baby,” Mother said. “Never cried, not like you anyway. Even as a little girl, she was always happy.”
“So what happened?”
We watched Noona hurl another fireball down her lane, this one going down the left gutter. Her beginner’s luck had run out, but she didn’t seem to care.
“She’s just your sister,” Mother said finally. “This is who she is now, and you should be happy and thankful that you even have one.”
I wasn’t happy but I was thankful, thankful that I only had one nutty sister and not more.
Back at our apartment, Noona blew out two cakes, one vanilla and one chocolate. Maybe what she needed was a sugar fix, because after having a piece of each cake, she was all smiles.
She received a pair of matching gold bracelets from our parents, which she immediately put on her wrist, admiring their glitter as she twirled them under the kitchen light. I gave her my present, silver earrings with green snakes that dangled like worms on a fishing hook. They had cartoonish bug eyes and were wearing oversized black-rimmed glasses and a big pink nose with a mustache, and Noona loved them. She gave each of us a hug, even me, and as she held me close, she whispered in my ear, “Thank you,” the earnestness of those words so sincere that they raised goosebumps on my arms.
“You’re welcome,” I said, though what I wanted to say was: “Please don’t hurt me.”