Their Clear Unobstructed View

Years after we had moved out, men in coveralls and yellow hard hats cleared our grove of avocado trees. The trees had been dead for decades, nothing but rotted trunks. Trees stood through my childhood, clawing upward past dirt and the mat of curved leaves. An excavator pulled the stumps. The eucalyptus were next, chainsawed limb by limb. The men swarmed over the house, tearing out the walls and floors, collapsing sheetrock and stucco, and carting away broken fixtures and stripped carpet. The backhoe dredged the creek; what survived followed the water down to the valley marshes. Months after the house was gone, stucco duplexes with red cylindrical shingles came up along the clearing. Beyond the duplexes was an eighteen-hole golf course. A clubhouse where members enjoyed drinks and a view of the ocean below the mesa.

The ocean had never been visible from the house, blocked by the eucalyptus.

***

Halmoni crouched over the bathtub, a cigarette in her mouth. Her breath was garlic and smoke and a faint rattle. The suds warmed my chest. She scrubbed my arms and back. The tap water smelled of minerals, not quite overpowered by the baby shampoo. No words, just the washcloth on my skin, the warmth of the water, and the mirrors gone white with steam. Halmoni’s face, and the memory that contained it, was drenched in the colors of light behind closed eyelids—bright yellows, greens, and violets, the colors of rubbing your eyes for too long.

***

We lived in a place for people who did not matter. No one considered it a town—just an overpass above the freeway, dry fields to the east, overgrown hills to the west, a place cars passed under without stopping. We called it the Mesa. It was unincorporated and secluded: sandy hills covered with eucalyptus trees and ice plants, with dilapidated barns, mobile homes, and trailers, each with a shallow well and septic tank, unlike the valley or the beach, with their fancy stoplights. Everything was eucalyptus—pods, bark, thick piles of scythes blanketing the roofs and the ground, shielding us from the sun and suffocating us in menthol dust. Our house was covered in the same stripped white paint as the barn beside it, a dead car inside.

***

There was a persimmon tree between the house and the barn. Each fall into winter, dozens of fleshy golden fruits grew on its branches. Halmoni and I picked them using a long stick and a potato sack. The ones we couldn’t catch in the sack bruised or splattered on the dirt. We buried the damaged ones in the compost mulch, but never deep enough. We heard raccoons fighting over the fruit on those nights, hissing and chattering.

We peeled and tied them in pairs with strong twine, hanging chains of them in the kitchen window. On the second day, we moved them into the barn, hanging them from the old meat hook in the dark and returning every day for a month to massage their drying flesh. When they were finished, they became stiff to the touch, coated with a sweet, white dust. They were gelatinous, chewy, and sweet. Candy. We called them kotgahm.

Mom forbade me from having candy. I saw the other kids eating it in front of the mini-mart next to my bus stop, and the bright wrappers littering the road and our creek. For me, kotgahm was candy, and it was wonderful. I couldn’t understand how it could frighten a tiger.

Halmoni told me of how, in a quiet village in the mountains, a mother hushed her young boy who would not stop crying. A Siberian tiger heard the threat and considered eating the child to end the racket. “If you don’t stop crying,” the mother said, “a tiger might listen to and eat you.” Defiant, the boy shrieked even harder. Before the tiger could pounce through the door, the mother told her son, “What if I gave you a kotgahm?” and he stopped crying. Listening but unable to see inside, the tiger noticed that, while the threat of his jaws didn’t stop the boy’s crying, the threat of a kotgahm did. Terrified, he ran to hide in the woods. I didn’t realize until many years later why he was terrified of it: he never tasted one.

***

I rode a bus to school every day. The school was closer to the ocean and had no other Asian children. My first language was Korean, which I spoke with Halmoni, but I also spoke English to Mom and Dad. I had no friends on the Mesa. Our neighbors lived far enough away that we never knew any of them, aside from maybe recognizing their cars. The only other children I encountered were the teenage boys who rode bicycles up and down the road, but they ignored me if they saw me. Sometimes, they sat under our bridge and smoked cigarettes out of view of their parents.

It was difficult for me to speak at school. My tongue wanted to slip into Korean. Languages had flavors, and English tasted like soggy cutlets and canned green beans in the cafeteria. I wished to speak in Korean, which tasted like sesame oil, garlic, and chili paste on my tongue.

The other children looked at me from a distance. Their parents worked with mine; one boy’s mother worked as a cashier at the market where Dad cut meat, and a girl’s father was my mother’s manager at the restaurant. Still, they didn’t speak with me, and during recess, I walked alone around the playground while the others played. Some of the boys teased me, holding the corners of their eyes up and making noises, exaggerating what my language sounded like to them. Other times, they tripped me or wrestled with me on the playground. Even if I fought to get away, others would join in. Sometimes, I came home with spit on my clothes.

***

I walked into the kitchen to Halmoni peeling and slicing a persimmon, arranging it on a plate.

***

Mom couldn’t hide her disdain when she looked at me. My lips were too thin, my nostrils too big like Dad’s. I didn’t look white enough, and I didn’t look Korean enough. No matter how she cut my hair, it formed a sloppy bowl. She said that I looked like a dirty Chinese. Hwagyo. When she was growing up in Korea, Hwagyo were Chinese peasants who became either beggars or criminals. Her mouth upturned as she combed my hair. And she was beautiful.

She looked like a character from the Technicolor movies we watched together on television.

“I saw this in Korea in the theater,” she said as we watched The World of Suzie Wong.

She was the title character: long, beautiful hair, raised cheekbones, and the lightest skin. It distinguished her from the other poor women working in bars or as seamstresses, struggling to eat.

“Mom, were you a waitress in Korea, too?”

“Something like that.”

Every time we watched the movie, Mom fell in love with Robert Lomax, the way Suzie did.

There weren’t many scenes showing Suzie’s infant son. A landslide collapses Suzie’s house, killing him. Lomax asks Suzie to marry him at the baby’s funeral. Funeral flowers where her child had been.

***

When we finished the fruit, we walked to the creek. Halmoni always held a cigarette, smoke rising from her open mouth. The sun was dusty through the eucalyptus.

A crane walked on the mud, its legs bent so that its knees faced behind it. It was taller than I was. Purposeful but tentative, a step, another, its three black toes dug under the surface of the mud, then the others. It dipped its beak into the water, its eye a dead black disc.

A loud crack. Dad’s white Chevy van, rusted through its back panels. It backfired, spilling smoke from the exhaust as he headed up the driveway. The crane’s wings rose instantly, and the yellow and black beak pointed into the air. Its wings heaved downward once, then fluttered, and the crane slowly lifted into the air. We saw it make its way up into the sky, then glide out of view.

I caught small white dandelion plumes from the air; they gathered in my palms and dimpled knuckles. Halmoni squatted with her hips at her heels, cigarette in her mouth; she held her mouth open as smoke rose from her lungs. Deep wrinkles broke under her eyes and on each side of her mouth. She said I had her dark eyes, which rested on raised cheekbones. Her hair was gray, and she did little to care for it.

No one saw or spoke to her besides me.

Her eyes, almost black, were filled with muted light whenever she looked at me. She smiled and touched the hair on the side of my head. I held her hand as she smoked, rubbing my knuckles on her cuticles. She kissed me noisily on the forehead, tousled my hair, and bit me in the cheek. I giggled as I tried to squirm out of her grasp.

***

My father was a column of steam. His hands were dry, calloused, and nicked with scars; they didn’t feel like skin anymore. He woke before sunrise to drive his white van, followed by a hazy brown cloud, down the driveway, bridge, creek, and foggy valley. I only saw him at night, when his van came back down the driveway just as the sun set. In the backroom of a grocery, he put a white butcher’s smock over his work shirt and a hard white plastic bump hat over his hair, oily and fragrant with Vitalis.

The beef carcasses hung on hooks, headless, cut in half lengthwise, their feet and organs removed: dense pink fat, blood-grained flesh, gray bone sawed crosswise, revealing blood-black marrow. Dad cut cheap, tough cuts of meat like flank or tri-tip. He threw scraps into the iron grinder with thick chunks of suet; the flecks of fat pressed against the cellophane like baby teeth. At the end of each day, Dad sprayed the concrete floor with hot water, and the steel trays and meat saw fogged up with steam. No matter how much bleach he poured, there wasn’t enough to overpower the smell of blood and fat. It was a film on his hands, greasy and rank.

Dad made a decent wage as a butcher at the supermarket in town. It paid the mortgage for our property. He had a gun locker in the barn, but I never saw what was inside. Once, on the Fourth of July, we stood near the bluff’s edge, watching the fireworks shoot off from the pier miles away.

He fired a pistol into the air. The shot was the loudest sound I ever heard, and it turned off all sound except for a violent hum.

Just before I was born, when they first moved onto the mesa, Dad was unemployed. For cash, he slaughtered and butchered animals for people who had livestock but didn’t know how to do it or didn’t want to. He brought hogs, cattle, and sheep down our driveway, shot them behind the barn, and let them bleed out before hanging and rendering them in the barn.

When Mom got pregnant, Halmoni pleaded with her to get him to quit the job. She insisted that it was bad luck. Mom agreed, and Dad became a butcher. Halmoni thought that was bad luck too, but after that, there was no trace of the animals in the barn, just the old van and a refrigerator for kimchi.

***

We gathered herbs and vegetables that grew freely around the mesa. Dandelions and nettles grew everywhere. We found burdock by its bright purple spiny burrs. Wild watercress and garlic mustard grew in and along the creek, shepherd’s purse and wild parsnip around the house. Most of what we gathered was too bitter to eat raw, even though we tried only to pick the youngest and most tender plants. Halmoni blanched or boiled them according to how tough or bitter they were, or pickled them in brine.

Halmoni grew garlic; I helped her bury the cloves, which grew into green shoots. She picked the chives while they were still tender, stir-fried them in oil, and mixed them with chili paste, sugar, and sesame oil. The other plants she let grow into maturity, waiting almost a year before she dug up the bulbs. The bulbs flavored nearly everything we ate, lingering on our breaths. Only Halmoni and I ate the chives. The hollow stench emanated from Halmoni’s mouth and pores, mingling with the odor of dishrags and cigarette smoke.

***

Heart. Tripe. Kidneys. Spleen. Lengths of intestine. Not red like steaks or roasts, but the color of organs: purple, black, and fleshy white. They would have ended up on the shop floor, but Dad wrapped them neatly in butcher paper and brought them home. And Halmoni cooked everything. Bile floated to the surface of the steaming water as the tripe boiled, never combining with the layer of grease. Black specks of shit floated on the surface within the gray foam. She dumped the water, rinsed the guts, scrubbed them with salt, rinsed again and again. She trimmed the fat. She stewed them with chili paste and onion. The beef heart she sliced thin and quickly grilled over a gas burner on the highest setting. She cooked the kidneys and spleen in soup until they were tender and bitter with iron.

“You are lucky,” Halmoni told me as we ate it together, with rice, kimchi, and garlic chives. “You have never been hungry. And there is always meat. You don’t even know how lucky you are.”

“You were born so well. Aren’t you the greatest thing ever?”

She sneered, but fished out the smoothest tripe and laid it on my rice.

***

Halmoni told me stories as I sat on the kitchen counter while she cooked or cleaned, listening to her talk.

“A long time ago,” she told me, “a prince came from heaven and landed on a big mountain. An enormous mountain! He was all covered in light, all over his body, all coming down from the sky. This was in Korea. There were no people there back then. Just animals. And all the animals saw his light. But first, only two animals. Can you guess what they were?”

“A dog and a cat?”

“You’re a fool—I love you! It was a tiger! And a bear! They walked up to the light and followed it until they climbed to the top of the mountain. And all the light was coming from the prince. They walked up to him. But they knew from the light that he was magical. And that it was powerful magic, the kind that lets you do anything. What do you think they asked the prince?”

“They wanted food.”

“No! They wanted to be people. They wanted to be human, walk on two legs, wear clothes, and speak with words instead of growls and roars. They wanted to eat cooked food and sleep on warm wooden floors rather than on the ground. So the prince said yes, he would, but only if they could live together in a cave for one hundred days. A cave that would be blocked with a boulder so they couldn’t see any sunlight, and eat nothing but twenty cloves of raw garlic and a stack of mugwort.”

“Why?”

“He wanted to see if they could stand it. They would have to become the strongest if they were to become human. The ones who weren’t afraid to suffer. Or to be hungry.”

“Can tigers eat vegetables?”

“No! The tiger wouldn’t eat any of them. And he became hungry. He wanted meat and to eat other animals. So he left the cave. But the bear—”

“Wanted honey?”

“Shut up. I love you—don’t interrupt me, you little brat! The bear kept eating the garlic. And the mugwort leaves. You know how bitter they are when you don’t put sauce on them? Or cook them? So the prince was very impressed that the bear stayed twenty-one days and, when it came out, he turned her into a beautiful woman, one with black hair and high cheekbones, and skin that was light like yours, not brown and wrinkled from the sun, not like mine. And then what did he do?”

“He made a man for her?”

“No! He was the man for her! She was the first Korean. He blew on her–his breath gave her a baby. She became pregnant from his breath and had a baby. And that baby was the first king of Korea. That’s why all Koreans are bears. Half-bears, half-breath from Heaven. All of us are related to a bear who ate raw garlic in the dark. We are not spoiled because we are bears. We can eat raw garlic and mugwort forever if we have to, not like your mother and father. They will always be tigers because they would rather starve than eat something they do not like. And neither one would ever do as any prince told us to, being so stubborn. The garlic is good for you. It will turn you into a man. You need to eat as much as possible!”

“But if it turns bears into women, what will happen to me?”

“That’s the clove, not the stem. And shut up.”

“So the mountain was a real place? Or pretend?”

“That mountain was my home, a place called Pyongyang. I was born there, grew up there, and married Haroboji there. Your mom and her brother were born there. We lived in a big brick house with bright wooden floors until it was all taken away, and we had to leave with nothing. It was a war. By the time it was over, everyone was starving. So many people were dead.”

“You’re so lucky,” she said. “Anything is better than that place. Even though your mother is crazy, you are very lucky.”

She kissed me noisily on the cheek, shaking me and cackling under her breath.

“Are these stories real?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Did they really happen? There aren’t talking bears. And is Korea really like that? People walking around in heaven?”

“In the story, they are real.”

“What does that mean?”

“In the story, they are real. When you dream of something, it’s real in the dream. When you remember something, it is real in your memory.”

She wiped her hands with a rag.

“These are the ways I want you to remember me when I am not around.”

“But you are always around.”

***

Pyongyang existed on the Mesa. I see Halmoni washing the dried soybeans overnight, then soaking them, and boiling them in a worn iron gamasot. I feel the hot steam coming from the sokuri, faded from years of use, its bamboo frayed at the edges. I hear the heavy wooden jeolgu pounding the cooked beans, then watch her hands forming the coarse paste into cakes. I see the fermenting soy lining the walls of her storehouse in Pyongyang, tied into bricks with straw. I smell them, pungent, rich, and savory throughout a house I have never seen, that never existed in my lifetime.

***

Halmoni and Mom once argued at the dinner table. I didn’t know what they were talking about, only how their voices changed, how the language formed edges and grew brittle, bloodying the air around us as they began screaming at one another. Halmoni threw her rice bowl hard enough onto the floor that it shattered. Mom picked up her bowl and chopsticks and threw them noisily in the sink. When they became silent, they each quietly began cleaning up the broken rice bowl: Halmoni gathered the pieces of cheap ceramic in her hands while Mom picked up the scattered cooked rice with a washrag.

I asked Dad what they were fighting about.

“How would I know? It’s all gook shit.”

***

We kept chickens next to our porch. They had a house and a run covered on all sides and top with fencing to keep them in and the raccoons and possums out. Three of the hens were black, and one was speckled gray. As they grew older, we had them breed with the neighbor’s rooster so that we could raise the chicks. Only the speckled salt-and-pepper hen’s eggs hatched, and one day, three chicks followed her around the run.

Halmoni placed vegetable trimmings in the run for the chickens. We saw the speckled hen and her chicks.

“What’s on her side?” I asked, pointing to the smallest chick.

“It looks like blood,” she said.

Then, the small chick caught up to the mother, reaching for radish peelings in the feed tray.

Without hesitation, the hen began to strike its beak mechanically at the chick. The chick ran away, but its mother followed, striking and pecking.

“They just do that,” Halmoni said.

She opened the door at the side of the run and went inside to separate them, but when she stepped inside, they scattered. The chicks entered the hen house, and the hen walked to the corner of the run. Halmoni reached, picked up the chick, and brought it outside. The black spot on its side was dried blood. It had other pecks on it, some fresh.

“Why would the mother want to do that?”

“They’re birds,” she said. “Animals. Why do they do anything?”

***

Mom sucked air through her teeth in a wet hiss, shaking her head at me as Halmoni arranged torn lettuce leaves in a colander next to a bowl of brown ssam-jjang, fragrant with sesame oil and red pepper. Mom did all the shopping and didn’t buy romaine lettuce the last time she was at the market. No matter how upset she was, she never admonished her mother for the occasional produce she stole from the fields Mr. Hashiguchi owned down the hill. She scolded me instead.

“You know who picks vegetable off of ground? Keujji! You want people to think you’re geuji?”

“No, Umma.”

“Then don’t let her do that! Mr. Hashiguchi might see you do that. He thinks you’re low-rent! Are you low-rent?”

“No, Umma. We are high rent.”

She slapped my face, hard. I felt tears going down my face, too hot to leave tracks. She pounded her fists against me, my arms, shoulders, and chest. My breath stranded me. I put my arms over my head and drew my knees to my chest. She swatted me with the sides of her feet.

***

Halmoni and I walked on the black dirt of the valley below the Mesa. We descended on the fields when the pickers clocked out before Mom or Dad left their jobs. In the workday bustle, crops dropped in the dirt roads, sliding off open trailers. We hurried onto the fields and picked up the fallen vegetables: a few misshapen cucumbers, an untrimmed flower head of broccoli, or maybe some lettuce or cabbage.

“We’re not keujji because we pick up vegetables,” she said.

“Farmers here have so much lettuce that they wouldn’t miss whole truckloads of it. So they would never have left it on the ground if they needed it or were hungry. No one knows what real hunger is like in America. When Americans went through a war, it wasn’t like when the Koreans did. The soldiers didn’t come into their towns, into their homes. They didn’t have to march to find new homes. Their babies didn’t starve to death at breasts that couldn’t give them milk. Everyone here sleeps well. And the dead are all in graves.”

I nodded.

We followed the black silt to the Lemos’ easternmost field, where white daikon grew, even thicker than my arms. Halmoni held one up.

“Look, it’s one of your stupid mother’s legs.”

We gathered it into a paper shopping bag with the two heads of lettuce we found earlier.

Halmoni pulled a kotgahm from the paper bag and fed it to me. It was sweet, and it took me a long time to chew. She didn’t eat any. She lit a cigarette.

“Let’s go home and eat your mommy’s leg!”

***

We heard laughing under our bridge as we approached the creek. Boys. And we smelled smoke. We continued walking. Halmoni’s gentle tugging on my hand told me she didn’t want to stop.

They were giggling and speaking in brash, smug tones. As our footsteps hit the bridge, they hushed one another. We were almost over the bridge when the boys beneath went silent. I looked at Halmoni; she looked straight ahead and kept pulling me, preventing me from slowing down.

A loud bang, like Dad’s van backfiring, and all the sound in my ears was suddenly muffled. I could see Halmoni had stumbled. She was saying something as she picked herself up, but I couldn’t hear her voice over the ringing in my ears. The boys were at the edge of the bridge, and one tossed another lit firecracker.

“No,” Halmoni’s mouth formed, her hand held in surrender. “No…never mind!”

The boys laughed at her and threw another. It exploded in the air near my face. Halmoni had a streak of dirt on her forehead, her eyes wide. We ran up the driveway, her shower slippers slapping against the bottoms of her feet. She dropped the shopping bag; the daikon rolled out. I looked back to see it lying innocently on the ground. The gravel slipped beneath our feet, the dandelion plumes in the air.

“Please, never mind!”

“Never mind!” the boys taunted, no longer hiding in the creek.

***

Halmoni made me undress and guided me to the tub, scrubbing me with a rough red washcloth with black stripes. It sloughed the dead skin off my shoulders and back, gray slivers floating in the bathwater. My skin turned red and glowed. The dandelion plumes, the red dirt that coated the driveway, that covered our shoes in the entranceway, all of it floated at the surface. She filled a bowl with water and rinsed baby shampoo out of my hair. There were still dirt smudges on her forehead and cheek.

I stood as she dried my body and hair with a towel, rubbing baby lotion onto my legs and back. The pink cream stung the welts from mom’s hands, and I quickly shuffled my feet, but she didn’t say anything. I wore white briefs and a white undershirt to bed, the cotton sheets soft against my skin, and I reflexively rubbed my legs against the cool fabric, mesmerized by the pleasure of clean skin against soft, clean sheets.

***

The chickens squawked and ruffled as I passed the coop; I saw a mouse’s tail disappearing into the salt-and-pepper hen’s throat. She swallowed, then puffed her chest, slowly scratching her feet before the other hens. I quickened my pace. The speckled hen walked inside the coop. She pecked at her chick, her baby. Her beak made staccato pokes at its yellow down, trying to rend it to pieces. The black scabs blended into dewy blood spots. It backed away as Halmoni picked its mother up, wings fluttering angrily. She quickly wrung the hen’s neck, its head swinging like a hinge while she held it by its legs, its wings thrashing. Halmoni placed it in a pot of boiling water to scald off the feathers. Later, I saw the partially digested mouse in the trash among the hen’s entrails. I tried not to eat the grilled chicken at dinnertime that night, but she kept putting the best pieces in my rice bowl.

I chewed and swallowed them as quickly as I could. Wasting food made her angry, like when I didn’t finish the heaping bowls of rice she scooped for me, or when there was uneaten food in the trash, or when she saw strawberries scattered on service roads, or when she watched television and saw Lucy and Ethel in a pie fight.

“Why would you do that to food? Why is that funny?” she asked the television’s glow.

***

Mom drove us into town in the brown Thunderbird. I sat between Mom in the driver’s seat and Halmoni in the passenger seat. I sank into the fabric upholstery and pushed the rectangular radio buttons, changing from one AM station to another.

You see,

I’ve forgotten if they’re green or they’re blue.

Anyway, the thing is, what I really mean

Yours are the sweetest eyes I’ve ever seen

Click.

She talks kinda lazy

And people say she’s crazy

And her life’s a mystery

Oh, but love grows

Where my Rosemary goes

And nobody knows like me

Click.

Did you know that true love asks for nothing?

Her acceptance is the way that we pay

Did you know that life has given love a guarantee

To last forever and another day?

Click.

Snowy sound of static.

Click.

More static.

I clicked the buttons anyway.

Static.

Static.

We pulled into the hospital parking lot.

The examination room was bright and gray, with fluorescent lights and no windows. I looked at Halmoni sitting at the table, wearing a paper gown. The stout doctor with gray hair and a pockmarked nose showed us Halmoni’s chest X-rays on a lighted wall panel. The doctor spoke slowly and deliberately with my mother, repeating himself to make sure she understood, never looking at Halmoni, never looking at me.

Halmoni stared at the x-ray of her lungs: the outline of wings surrounding white dots. While Mom clumsily translated the doctor’s words, Halmoni was expressionless, as if Mom was telling her how many minutes were in a day, or how many ants were on our driveway. The white dots were indistinct from the dandelion florets in the breeze, only these drifted in the wind that was her breath.