Drifting House (4 page)

For example, no matter how normal his parents pretended they were, he knew they were different. Sure they worked at normal jobs, his mother as a waitress in a
galbi
restaurant and his stepfather exterminating bugs and managing the duplex they lived in. His mother read him Korean folktales and his father taught him algebra, his oversize dandelion head wagging on the short stalk of his body, and though Mark spotted shortcuts that would save a calculation or two, he feigned confusion so his father could feel helpful. Then suddenly the State Department would call, or his father would notice someone following their used Kia. Last week an official in charge of the four, now three, North Koreans in Los Angeles ­County—he, his mother, his father, and a man who had killed himself last ­year—visited. He congratulated them on how quickly they had adapted, calling them “model refugee cases.” His father’s eyebrows knotted together, but he smiled and said, “I’ve never considered myself some case,” then changed the subject. Once, his father had believed in the North Korean leader Kim Jong–il the way the Korean immigrant community around them believed in God.

“Is he better than his dad, Kim Il–sung?” Mark asked that night at the dinner table.

“He’s a very, very bad man,” his father said as quietly as his shuffle, his signature on paper,
Choecheol Ra,
and the neutral colors
he wore that made him resemble an animal seeking camouflage.

“How bad?” Mark said now, and leaned into the marinated beef insulting his vegetarian eyes. “Any bloody thumbs?”

His father’s Adam’s apple danced. He said, “There was a school lesson they taught us that went, ‘One plus one equals two dead Americans.’”

His mother made a nervous, tickling motion with her hand on her throat. Nothing scared her but the past. She said, “Myeongseok’s only nine. Don’t pollute him.”

His father said, “Then who’s ever going to know?”

She said decisively, “Your problem is you live in the past.”

His father planted a kiss on the back of her palm. She blushed.

“I’m happy! If that’s what you want,” his father said. “Of course I’m happy all the time.”

On May 22, the most important day of the year, since it was the day Mark was born, new renters to their duplex knocked on their door. A woman bowed, pausing as she dipped down ­ballerina-style, then rose. Her dress reminded him of a cloud. Though everything looked wrong about ­her—the sharp nose against the pillowy softness of her face, her snowy head of hair and wispy ­eyebrows—she carried herself with a grace more swan than woman. Hiding behind her were puzzle fragments of a girl his age. Mark looked for a limp, a missing finger, a wig. That was their ­neighborhood—everyone was missing something.

“Come in!” his mother boomed, her voice fiercely friendly, squeezing her bountiful, ­three-tiered waterfall of a stomach, as
she greeted them. When she wasn’t wearing makeup or a dress, people thought she was a man.

The woman dropped the basket of rice cakes in her hand, but his father caught it, then winked at Mark.

“I’m pleased to meet you for the first time,” the woman said, her lips barely moving as she spoke. “We’ve come for the keys.”

“Oh, don’t run away, have some cake,” his mother said, and tugged the woman into the house by the arm. “Wouldn’t your granddaughter like some cake? It’s our son’s birthday.”

The woman said in that feathery voice, “This is my daughter.”

His mother looked displeased at being contradicted. She expected obedience. His father tugged nervously at his belt; Mark spotted a ­twenty-dollar bill protruding out of his father’s sock. His father kept money in the strangest places.

His father said, “Please save us. You’ll be doing our health a favor if you help us with my son’s cake meant for twelve people.”

Behind the clownish twist of his father’s face, there was a carefulness as he studied them, as he studied all strangers, like a textbook.

The woman regarded his father with suspicion. Mark was used to this. His father looked far too young to be his father. His mother was the same. She had been sixteen in China when a farmer she had been sold to made her a baby, which was Mark. Once, she had said, “Thank the Lord, the man hasn’t left a trace in my son.” But age was age, and cake was cake. His new purple cape flared behind him as he ran backward, so these strangers wouldn’t take more than their proper share of the cake that he’d especially requested with the frosted letters
SAY NO TO PLASTIC
.

The girl stepped out from behind her mother’s back, a finger
in her mouth, her eyes on his cake. Mark stopped breathing. She looked like a cartoon character: copper pennies for eyes, two pigtails as aerodynamic as rockets, a fancy dress resembling lemon meringue that covered ­nine-tenths of her, making the friendly sun her nemesis. He stared at her, a girl so serious she seemed afraid to smile, while his mother brought out plates and a stinky tea that was supposedly good for your health. The girl stared back.

They found a place to sit despite his mother’s habit of hoarding chairs, sofas, and old magazines that neighbors threw out. Once, she had become enraged after finding half a rotting peach in the refrigerator. “Even animals don’t waste!” she’d said.

The old people began talking in careful, ­fake-friendly voices. “Your daughter’s so tall….” “Arrived from Korea a week ago….” “This is a good country,” his mother said, though after they had arrived from the Bangkok detention center four years ago she never left the Los Angeles Koreatown so never
really
needed to speak English, especially with Mark as translator, interpreter, and the youngest personal secretary in history. His mother fired away with questions. She liked to know what was what. Husband, hometown, hobbies, work.

“I’m a shaman, widowed,” the woman said, each syllable separated, her head tipping higher with each word. “You should know this about us.”

“Jesus saved us,” his mother said emphatically. “I don’t do shamanism.”

His father, embarrassed, poured more stinky tea. He said, “Everyone’s welcome here.”

The woman sat, hands folded impassively together, her eyes watching and waiting.

Mark asked, “What does a shaman do?” He only remembered muddy photographs of ceremonial food at an altar and an old woman moving a paper boat over a white strip of cloth.

His mother said, “Keep quiet!”

His father said, “He’s just curious.”

The girl had gone very still, like her mother; she was watching the old people.

“What’s your name?” Mark asked her, then saw that, like her mother, she didn’t understand English, so he switched to Korean.

“I’m Chanhee,” she said. The words came out crisp but slow, as if she weren’t used to talking.

“And, little boy”—the girl’s mother turned to him with her cheerless smile—“what’s that around your neck?”

“I’m not little.” Mark pushed up the glasses he had begged his mother to buy so he would look more intellectual. “I’m average height for my age, which today is now ten, so I’m much too old to be a boy. This is a stethoscope.”

“He’s going to be a doctor,” his mother said.

“I’m going to be a heart surgeon and buy Omma and Appa a house in Beverly Hills.”

“It’s good to have a son!” his father said, and cut him the best slice of cake crowned by two plastic bags made of sooty icing.

They began talking more quietly, their bodies turned away from Mark.

“You’re weird,” Chanhee said, faster this time.

He studied his feet. “Depends on your definition of
weird
.”

He knew small talk was important to fueling a conversation, so he said, “You know the ­twenty-ninth U.S. president, Woodrow
Wilson? He used to carry a stomach pump with him everywhere he went, his digestion was that bad.”

She shot back with, “Can you wiggle your ears?”

She made her white lobes flutter like pale butterflies.

Her mother, his mother, his father, all of them were lost to the importance of the moment when Chanhee’s ears went pink as they tilted his way. She said shyly, “If I’m your friend, will you check me with your ­steth—  That thing around your neck?”

A friend. So what if there were oil wars in Iraq, ritual dolphin murders in Denmark, Los Angeles pollution blackening his lungs? He had Chanhee as a friend. But that night his mother said that a shaman sounded like trouble.

“It’s blasphemous,” she said. “It’ll bring us bad fortune to live near someone talking to the dead.”

She threatened to kick the new renters out. His father, uncharacteristically, refused. His father was an atheist, even if it was the church that had helped them with free counseling, jars of kimchi and shopping bags crammed with clothes, and finding jobs. “Kim Jong–il was enough worship for me,” his father would mutter when his mother wasn’t around.

“You women should understand,” he said. “She’s new to America. Remember she’ll have to fight for herself and her daughter, and don’t you know what that’s like, fighting for your family’s life?”

“I know, I know, don’t I know!” his mother said, her words punching the air. “What should we have for dinner?”

“All she’s doing is trying to help people,” his father said.

“Just who can a shaman help?” his mother said. “I see what happens when they charge the price of a cow and pretend to talk to the dead. People practically give their money away when it doesn’t change anything.”

To Mark’s relief, his father got in the last word.

The next time Mark saw Chanhee, she waved, then rushed into her side of the house. Their white door identical to Mark’s swung open and closed, back and forth, as if it couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. He smelled incense and heard the ping of drumming that his mother would complain about all summer.

He paced, his legs outstretched like a ­goose-stepping soldier. He crushed weeds, twisted the neck of a prickly poppy with his hands. He was smart and had a smile as winning as ­chocolate-covered marshmallows. He didn’t understand why kids tried to pull off his pants or walked behind him, poking between the crack of his buttocks with a stick. Once, they’d lifted the sewer lid and left him down in the mucky dark for half an hour, trying to scare him, but he didn’t scare. Not much. He had loudly recited the names of all the counties in Southern California until the boys said, “Someone’ll hear him!” and pulled him out. He didn’t know why Chanhee would change her mind about him.

He went back to his house and faked being his regular brilliant self.

At night he couldn’t sleep. He considered stabbing himself with his father’s ­nose-hair scissors, drinking laundry detergent mixed with ­Kool-Aid. His goodbye note would have to be read at his funeral. He scouted the house. In the kitchen he saw his father at the table without the lights on. His face was veiled with shadows, and in front of him was a tidy pyramid of unopened beer cans. He
must have been carrying heavy equipment all day; he rubbed at his shoulder hard enough to leave a bruise. There was something ruined about his posture, like the brick remains of a demolished building. His father didn’t notice ­Mark—he wanted very much to be noticed. Maybe he should give his father a hug and cheer him up the way his mother seemed so simply, so foolishly, to respond to Mark, but his father and he had never been that way with each other; there had always been this politeness that made Mark feel as if his father were training to be a father and he were training to be his son. He was afraid of the way his father’s face shrank into a despairing mask, as if this were his true face, and not the quiet man who was always laughing at his mother’s plans and at the universe. He started tiptoeing back to his room.

His father looked up at Mark’s first step. His father ­smiled—or tried to ­smile. “This is what happens when Omma doesn’t send the boys to bed.”

“Appa, what were you doing outside?”

His father cracked open a can. “I miss my family.”

He meant the family he had had in North Korea that seemed more important to him than Mark, and they weren’t even here.

“Tell the story about how I almost died,” Mark said.

It was his favorite story, the one about how his mother and he had escaped the truck returning them to the North Korean border, where death awaited him; the North Korean authorities prized pure Korean bloodlines and despised babies born from Chinese men. But after a car crash and a sympathetic local’s help, they had escaped. His parents had later met in China, walked across the entire country, finally carrying Mark through the jungles of Laos with no maps, no compass, just a route in their heads
they had memorized. It was a good story because it was a happy story.

His father gestured to the chair beside him, which relieved Mark enormously. Except his father said, “It’s wrong how we pretend we keep going forward.”

“But we
are
going forward,” Mark said. “Tomorrow isn’t today and today isn’t yesterday.”

The silence in the room spread and became part of the vast black penumbra outside the window, where danger lived; he wanted to find shelter in his father’s arms, but the darkness of his father’s face was no friendlier than the darkness outside.

Finally his father said, “People think an exterminator is a terrible job. At church they keep trying to find me better work, but this is really all right with me. You know why, Myeongseok?”

Mark couldn’t think of a single valid reason for choosing face–to–face contact with a cockroach, an insect that could stay alive for over two weeks
after
it had been beheaded. A fact he wished he didn’t know.

“It doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t. You fight the termites, the rats, the ants, you pretend that with your uniform and goggles and respirator and chemicals you’re in control, though you know the entire time you’re going nowhere. It’s what we do every day, pretend we’re going somewhere.”

His voice dipped so Mark could no longer hear his father muttering.

Late each night Mark began getting up for a glass of milk. But each time he stole to the kitchen, hoping not to see his father, there he would be in the dark, his ear turned upward, listening to the silence.

In June summer vacation began. His parents were at work and Mark was supposed to be at a math day camp funded by the Korean Presbyterian church his mother diligently attended. But after a boy aimed a softball to strike Mark in the eye, he worked out a deal with his parents and attended the academic morning classes and skipped the dreary afternoon activities like pottery and softball for dummies; he had told his mother a love-struck girl was stalking him, and for his safety, he had better stay off the field.