Static, by Lauren Cho
*Note: italics = English, regular = Korean
Eagerly clutching at the piece of paper in her hands, she ran from where the bus had let her off at the sidewalk up the steps to her house. She nearly tripped over the first two stairs—but she wasn’t afraid, she’d done it before. Bravely, she steadied herself and skipped up the rest of the way to the little, second-floor apartment she had never questioned was home. Hana Kim was 7 years old and wonderfully innocent.
As she’d expected, the door was already open, and Hana saw a warm, familiar face smiling down at her.
“Mommy!”
Giddily, she jumped up for a hug. Her mother returned the embrace, squeezing softly as her daughter began to ramble excitedly about her day at school. A soft, quiet woman, Jaeyoung Yoo carried an air that seemed not so much old as was lined and chiseled by the little gifts Life often left at her doorstep. There was a time when she was not so soft and quiet; but those days were long gone, and she now had more important things to take care of than her trivial and silly desires.
Hana impatiently pulled on her mother’s sleeve as they walked into the house. “Mommy, are you listening?” she whined, huffing. “I drew a picture of us at school!” Proudly, she displayed the now-slightly crinkled paper. Four stick figures clothed in hanboks were drawn messily with bright dashes of crayon, holding hands and laughing. A father, a mother, a brother, and a sister, in that order.
Jaeyoung set her daughter down on the kitchen table as she took a brief look and smiled. “Our little daughter is so talented!” she crooned gently, patting Hana on the head. Hana grinned and snuggled closer to her hand, basking in the motherly affection. A warm pause; then Jaeyoung pulled away to grab a mop and resume cleaning the floor. Hana hopped off the table and made her way to the couch in front of the TV.
“Mommy, is Daddy not home yet?”
Another pause; this time, frigid and stiff. “No, sweetie, Daddy’s out working. He’ll be home soon.” The wet squeaking of the mop against the floor grew a little louder. Then it stopped. “Do you want some fruit, dear?”
Hana perked up. “Yes, please!”
A bowl of oranges was placed in her hands. Hana picked one up and popped a slice in her mouth, slowly relishing the sweet juices flooding her mouth as she turned to the TV. She leaned forward, intently studying the screen, and pretended with great earnest to understand what the characters on the screen were saying.
The door opened and closed loudly, and an unfamiliar bustle of voices speaking in a familiarly-unfamiliar language crowded the room. Surprised, Hana turned around to see her older brother, Haram, enter with two other boys. They were tall and loud and intimidating and—she tilted her head—looked similar to the characters on the screen.
“Mom, I’m home,” Haram said in a bored tone, tossing his backpack on the couch next to Hana. His lofty air seemed slightly forced, and Hana stared at him, confused; why wasn’t he speaking in Korean like they always did? “I brought some friends over, so order something like pizza for dinner.”
Turning to the two boys, he said, “You guys can go on ahead to my room. Second room on the right down the hall.” They hesitated, probably wondering if they should give—how they should give—the Asian woman looking at them a greeting.
Jaeyoung seemed a bit shaken but abruptly put aside the mop and smiled with awkward politeness. “He-llo, boys,” she said, clumsily trying to draw out and round her “o’s”. Scanning them, she wrinkled her nose when she saw that they hadn’t taken off their shoes at the doorway. “Oh, shoes—”
“Mom!” Haram shot her an irritated glare. Tense silence; Jaeyoung’s smile frozen on her face, eyes darting back and forth. The two boys shuffled their feet, clearly wanting to get out of the situation.
“Oh, come on, son, let your mom be,” she paused, still smiling, back and forth, back and forth, “hos-pi-ta-ble.” She smiled a bit wider, clearly proud that she had remembered such a difficult word. Walking over to the kitchen, she poured two glasses of barley tea and offered them. “Would you like some drinks?” Nodding as if to reassure herself, she began to ramble. “It’s a… a tea, made out of wheat, or barley I think—”
One boy took a sip and frowned. The other awkwardly gave the cup back. “Um, just water please, Ms. Kim.”
“Oh, of course, of course,” Jaeyoung’s face was slightly flushed as she handed them two glasses of tap water instead and fumbled to respond. After a few clumsy words, she stopped talking as if her own voice hurt her ears—smiling and nodding, her mouth stretched so wide it seemed almost painful.
Haram rolled his eyes. “Come on,” he said to his friends. As the door to his room closed, Jaeyoung slowly and mechanically dropped her smile. Her phone began to ring, the ringtone a Korean trot song that she had enjoyed listening to with her own mother back in the day, back when she was still living in Korea with Korean friends and classmates and strangers. Now, the song embarrassed her; glancing quickly towards the direction that her son and his friends had gone, Jaeyoung picked up the phone with hasty fingers.
A deep breath. “Jaeyoung Yoo speaking, who is this?”
“Hello!” An obviously American voice rang out of the phone, chirpy and almost fakely upbeat, and Jaeyoung involuntarily winced. “This is Sean’s mom, Sarah! I believe my son came over to your home to play with Har— Har-ahm?” Jaeyoung hated the way this woman’s sentence ended with a question.
“Yes, he- he did. My name is Jaeyoung.”
“Oh, it’s so nice to meet you!”
A pause.
“Do you mind if I call you Jay? It’s just easier for me to say, and it can be like a little nickname! Us moms should get closer, you know.” A chuckle that seemed to insinuate that what she just said was funny and charitable.
Jaeyoung didn’t find it funny at all. But she grit her teeth and reminded herself that it was for her children, all for her children whom she’d sacrificed so much for already. Suppressing her pride just a bit more wouldn’t— shouldn’t—hurt.
“...Yes, that’ll be fine.”
“Great! Then I’ll call you later, Jay! Please take good care of my son for me!”
“Yes, of course.”
Jaeyoung hung up.
The boys had begun to blast pop music in her son’s room, and Jaeyoung sighed, walking over to Hana and sitting down next to her on the couch. Hana quietly chewed on her oranges and looked at her mother, sensing that something was off but not knowing what.
Abruptly, Jaeyoung asked, “What do your friends call you at school, Hana?”
“Umm.” Hana squinted her eyes, thinking. “Um. They call me,” she paused, testing her tongue. “Hannah.” She glanced up at her mother’s face. Jaeyoung wore a distant expression, staring into space as she slowly began to nod. “I see.”
She smiled, almost as if in relief, but her eyes showed conflicting emotion. “I’m so glad we chose a name for you that the people here don’t have a hard time saying. When you say it like that, it sounds like a proper American name.”
She got up and began to dial the number to a local pizza store, repeating the name almost robotically to herself. “Hannah…”
The door opened and closed for the third time; Hana swiveled around and smiled brightly as she saw who had come home. “Welcome home, Daddy!” she cheered, jumping up from the couch to grab her drawing from the kitchen. Running towards him, Hana eagerly showed him the paper as she had shown her mother. Eyes barely skimming it, he gave her a tired smile and patted her on the head once before making his way into the living room. Sensing the lack of attention, Hana pouted as she trailed after him, drawing dangling limply from one hand.
Finishing up her call, Jaeyoung turned to her husband. “How was work, Sung-ho?” she asked cautiously, trying to assess his mood. Sung-ho flopped onto the couch, letting out a tired groan. Unlike his wife’s, the lines on Sung-ho’s face were sharp and severe. “How do you think it was?” he retorted sourly. He then noticed the music blaring from his son’s room and paused. “What’s that boy doing?” Glancing down, he saw the dusty shoe prints on the floor and growled, getting up. “Those disrespectful—”
“Dear, please calm down.” Jaeyoung nervously placed a hand on his shoulder. Sung-ho brusquely shrugged it off, huffing as he sat back down. A strained heartbeat.
Eyes looking anywhere but at his face, she asked, “Why don’t you tell me more about your day today?”
“Woman, how do you always manage to insist upon talking about the things I don’t want to talk about,” Sung-ho said jeeringly. He cleared his throat, anger evidently rising. “It was horrible, okay. Yet another ignorant American who called me a—” his eyebrows furrowed in disgust, “—a chink.” He spat out the word in disdain. “It’s a derogatory way to say that someone’s Chinese, apparently.” Throwing his hands up in exasperation, Sung-ho let out a derisive laugh. “It’s been a year since we came here and I’m already sick of this. I’m not even Chinese!”
Grumbling, he added bitterly, “I wish I could give them a taste of their own medicine.”
“You need to be careful,” Jaeyoung responded in a quiet, flat voice. “If you lash out, you will lose your job. And then how will we feed our kids?”
Sung-ho scoffed loudly. “See,” he sneered at her, face twisting into something ugly and foreign, “this is why it’s no use talking with you women. All you focus on is money, money, money, with no concern for pride or honor or anything of the sort. What would you know about earning money anyway?” His voice growing louder and more heated, “All you do all day is stay inside the house and clean and cook mediocre dishes. What a comfortable life you’re living!”
The stillness was deafening. Hana, who heard her father raise his voice, peeked out fearfully from the corner of the hallway. The muffled pop music continued to play, starkly out of place with the atmosphere in the living room.
Silently, Jaeyoung began to set the table for dinner. Sung-ho let out another scoff and walked into his room, closing the door with heavy and deliberate finality.
The TV shone with a cold whiteness, illuminating the room in an austere light. Jaeyoung slowly turned to the screen as it switched to a beauty commercial of a Caucasian woman smiling brightly and posing. Her eyes glazed over and she brought a hand up to her face, tracing her skin with her fingertips as if in a trance. Hana stared at her mother and saw it as an act of pride.
But the mother was unaware of any such beauty to be proud of from herself. The defeated look not leaving her face, Jaeyoung mumbled, “Hana, dear, be a good girl and go play in your room until dinner comes.”
“Okay!” Hana responded cheerfully, running out of the living room. Jaeyoung sank down into the couch, burying her face in her hands as the TV continued to gleam, the light accentuating the hollowness of her cheeks and the wrinkles that her daughter had yet to see.
When the pizza was delivered, Haram barely spoke a word as he took a box straight to his room. Sung-ho looked after Haram’s retreating back, cursing his son’s lack of respect for his parents under his breath and that he ought to get a good ol’ beating to straighten him out. Jaeyoung quietly placed the pizza on the table and called for Hana to join them after washing her hands.
Hana’s eyes sparkled as she smelled the pizza—it wasn’t every day that she got to eat it—and excitedly ran over to the kitchen, the previous fight between her mother and father long forgotten. “Thank you for the food!” she exclaimed, not noticing the lack of conversation between her parents as they chewed and swallowed in suffocating silence.
It wasn’t until the left-over pizza had been wrapped up, the trash taken out, and the dishes were being washed that Hana finally noticed that something was missing.
“Mommy…”
“Can you wait a bit, dear? Mommy’s a bit busy.”
“It’s just that…”
“What is it? Say it quickly.”
“My drawing’s missing,” Hana blurted out, her face scrunched with worry. Jaeyoung sighed, clearly not in the mood to entertain her daughter’s silly concerns. “Where did you last put it?”
“On the kitchen table…”
Briefly scanning the area, Jaeyoung said, “Well, it’s not here.” Calling out to Sung-ho, who was sitting on the couch and watching the evening news, she asked, “Do you see Hana’s drawing over there?”
“No,” he replied curtly, not taking his eyes off the TV.
Jaeyoung turned to her daughter, who was looking frantically around the room. “Don’t worry, honey,” she said, trying to be comforting. “I’m sure it’ll come up somewhere. What— what’s the matter with you? Why are you crying?”
She went over and hugged her daughter tiredly, slowly rocking her back and forth as Hana began to cry, at first softly, then louder and louder. Hana could tell that her brother and his two friends could hear her cries, as the chatter from his room quieted down to nothing. She could tell that her father was displeased as she heard a gruff, muffled voice asking, irritated, When will she grow up? She didn’t know why she was crying so passionately, but she got the feeling that it was because she knew her drawing was irrecoverable, and she knew that nobody in this house but her truly cared, and she knew that nobody in this house but her knew how important the drawing was and how horrible was its absence. Hana Kim was 7 years old and wonderfully innocent.
But that much, she knew more clearly than anyone else.
The four stick figures drawn messily with bright dashes of crayon sat deep in the trash bag, squashed and stained alongside the used, greasy napkins and paper cups and plates, as the blaring of the TV, the obnoxiously loud pop music, the deafening silence, and Hana’s cries all blurred into a garishly white, static screen.
Comments