Chapter 31
Although there were photos of me with my grandfather when I was five years old, I didn’t have any memories from that time.
It was as if getting on a plane and circling the world had erased them.
I read that when you replace one language with another, you can lose memories, too.
It was true that the Korean I spoke as a toddler was overtaken by the English I learned when we arrived in the US.
I knew words and phrases and could understand more than I could speak, and I used to think it was because I didn’t grow up in a Korean community the way Channing did.
But she didn’t speak much Korean either.
I guess your language proficiency depended on whether your parents talked with you at home in that language and whether you yourself had a talent for it.
Harabeoji kept after me and Channing with Korean words and encouraged us to speak.
He spoke English pretty well—he was one of those who had a talent for languages.
Since I couldn’t remember the kind man who sat with me by a garden in Seoul that the photos showed, I count the time when I was nine years old as the first real experience of meeting my grandfather. It coincided with the day when Channing and I had an actual conversation.
My parents and I had traveled to East End in late June, a week before my aunt’s funeral, which was held in the Korean church in the center of town on a street with so many churches it was called Church Street.
Everyone gathered at Channing’s house. It was even more crowded than the grand parties before my aunt’s death.
This time, instead of being told to go upstairs with the other children, my mother put me to work, directing me to put serving spoons into bowls of food people brought.
When we ran out of paper plates, she told me to get more from the pantry. It was a word I’d only read in books.
She pointed toward a door off the kitchen I’d never noticed before.
Inside was a giant honeycomb of shelves full of boxes and cans in all colors and sizes that seemed endless.
I closed the door behind me in reverence, as if it should be kept protected from the commotion in the rest of the house.
Cautiously I walked down the aisle, noting the names in Hangul and English, my hand gliding over the shiny labels.
I walked up and down aisles that reached the ceiling full of juices and sodas; bags of rice and packages of dried mee-uk; rainbow assortments of jelly beans, chocolates, jams; and every variety of almond, peanut, and cashew butter in glass jars.
I’d never heard of cashew butter before.
In the covered clear plastic bins were beans and several kinds of flour.
Running my hand across the jars, I wondered if I could take a few jelly beans.
My parents didn’t let me have any food with artificial dyes.
The jar was heavy and required me to stand on my tiptoes to reach it with both hands.
I hugged it to my chest as I lowered myself to my knees and set it on the hardwood floor.
The lid gave a soft suctioning release sound as I lifted it by the small metal handle on top.
The jar had a wide mouth. I must have put the lid down beside me because the next thing I knew I had sunk both hands inside.
The smell of sugared cherry, green apple, black licorice wafted up.
So engrossed was I in picking through the various flavors, clutching a few in my sweaty palm with the same hand that was reaching for more, that I didn’t realize I was being watched.
Channing was sitting on the floor with her arms around her raised knees, huddled. She studied me as if I were a creature on her video screen she was hunting.
I pretended I didn’t notice her and walked away, hoping I could leave with the few jelly beans I had.
The problem was I couldn’t find my way out of the pantry and had forgotten what I’d been sent there to retrieve.
I just wanted to get away from Channing.
Her stare had been hostile, as if I didn’t belong there, and held a bit of venom, too, as if I’d intruded on her privacy.
When I was afraid, I showed others I was not and walked with confidence in any direction.
Picking an aisle, I went all the way down and around and knew I was doomed when I saw the jar of jelly beans again and my cousin’s huddled form.
She was staring at me, with laser-sharp loathing. I wanted to run away.
“Get out,” she shouted.
I flinched. “I’m trying to! I can’t find the door.”
She got to her feet, stomped off, and I followed.
When she pushed through the door, the sounds of the people talking and laughing in the kitchen shattered the cocooned quiet of the pantry.
I’d missed the way out by only one aisle.
I’d walked right instead of left. From the way people’s heads turned in my direction, I knew Channing had alarmed them by running away from me.
I wanted to tell them I hadn’t done anything to her, none of it was my fault.
I’d discovered her in the pantry by accident.
The promise I’d made my aunt hovered in my mind.
There was nothing I could do when she didn’t want my help, was there?
The day after the funeral, my mom told me to call Channing for breakfast. She’d seen her go out to the yard.
I hesitated. Even if I told her to come, she might not.
The day before, during the funeral, I’d been pushed toward a tall Korean man whom I was told was my grandfather.
He stood before me now offering to accompany me.
I was relieved I wouldn’t have to face that mean cousin of mine alone. We walked alongside each other, and he asked me questions. No adult had done that before except my aunt. I remembered she’d said that he was like a father to her. It made me feel closer to him.
He spoke to me in Korean and I replied in English, but I didn’t know this at the time. To me it seemed we understood the same language.
There was a moment when I felt a sadness cloak his face. He said he wished he’d moved to America sooner. As we walked, I told him about not having friends and wishing I lived somewhere else. “You were in the wrong place, but when you find the right place you’ll be okay, you’ll see, Dahee.”
The yard had numerous trees, small fruit trees like a mini orchard. Harabeoji seemed pleased to identify them as apple trees. “Something to look forward to in the fall.”
My mother had said to call Channing in from the yard, but there was no sign of my cousin. The vastness of the lawn made it hard to gauge the distance we’d walked. There were woods ahead of us that seemed to take a long time to reach. Harabeoji seemed intent on walking straight into them.
“Could she be out in front of the house instead of back there?” I asked.
“Possibly,” he said, but he kept on his path.
“Do you want me to run to the front and see?” I offered.
“I think she’s waiting for us in there,” he said, and pointed ahead of him.
“How do you know?” I asked.
He halted just then and said, “Have you ever just known something to be true, Dahee?” He’d crouched down and looked right into my face.
I saw parts of my father’s face in his. The space between the eyes and nose were the same.
I saw Channing’s father’s face in Harabeoji’s, too. The shape of his mouth in his wide jaw.
I shrugged. “I guess so.” I didn’t know what to say. I thought he should stand up again. My mother sat like that with her feet under her and got back to her feet easily, but it took my father longer. I didn’t know if I’d be able to help this man if he stayed that way.
Harabeoji waited with his hands on his knees.
I admitted I didn’t understand what he was talking about.
He laughed at that and thanked me for being honest, and then he said, “Your grandmother was from a long line of women in Jeonju who had very good—” He looked up at the sky.
“What’s the word in English when you know something but there’s no reason you should? ”
“Kun-eomma called it ‘intuition,’” I offered.
“That’s close, but I think it’s stronger than that,” he said. “But let’s call it that for now. What does your ‘intuition’ say?”
I suddenly saw a clearing in the woods with logs lying in the dirt, but Channing wasn’t sitting on them. Instead, she was huddled the way she’d been in the pantry with her knees raised and her head down at the base of a tall pine tree nearby. The atmosphere around her seemed ominous.
“Straight ahead, yes?” He pointed toward the woods, and I nodded.
Then he stood up and we started walking again.
It was as if I’d described it to him without speaking aloud.
He knew about the clearing somehow. He led the way in my memory, but later I’d learn from him that I had shown him.
At the time, I thought Channing must have mentioned it to him. There was no other explanation.
Sure enough, after another ten minutes on a path that forked left, there was Channing, huddled at the base of a tree, near a clearing with logs just as I’d seen it. There were shadows cast along the ground. I was glad to have Harabeoji beside me.
She turned her head as we approached as if she had been expecting us.
“My mom died. Did you know?” She directed her question at me and didn’t say anything to our grandfather, which made me feel sorry for him. He had an air of calm curiosity.
“Yeah, she was nice,” I said.
“Not all the time. She was never around; she read books all the time. I hate them because they took her away from me. I think she got sick because of them.”
“She knew a lot about books,” I said.
“More than anything else. I don’t know if I’m even going to miss her. She was never around, you know. She was always in her room working,” she replied.
“But that was because she was sick.”
She looked at me with anger in her eyes. How dare I correct her? She was still the girl from the pantry who had shouted at me.
“She’s my mom, I know her better than you. She reads all the time, she loves books, more than people, more than me or my dad or anyone.”
I backed away. “You’re right, she’s your mom, you know her.”
Our grandfather took that moment to say, “Sometimes we feel the opposite of what we think we should feel.”
Channing seemed to take that in, and I saw her shoulders slump.
“She didn’t get to tell me all of the Chunhyang story. I’ll never know it since she’s gone,” she said.
I think she was crying. I looked away.
Harabeoji said he knew that story. It was from his hometown in Korea.
He’d tell her the ending, not to worry. And also, he would tell us about Jeonju, where our grandmother was from, which was near Namwon, Harabeoji’s hometown, and how all plants and vegetables and flowers grew better there because the soil was rich and plentiful. Channing quieted down.
And then he said Channing would always remember her, she wouldn’t forget, like how she used her left hand for her chopsticks so she could keep her spoon in her right hand.
“Most people use their right hand for both, one at a time, but not your mother. Also, you know you’re never to stab your chopsticks into your rice and give it to someone you love, or else they would be hurt.
Those chopsticks should be laid gently crossways. ”
“My mom makes me do that,” Channing said.
“Chopsticks make my hand cramp,” I said.
“They used to do that to me, too, but I’ll show you the right way,” she said. “My mom can show you.”
We’d slipped into talking about her mother in the present tense as if she were still alive, and up until a week ago, she had been.
I didn’t notice at first because my aunt’s death wasn’t real to me.
It probably wasn’t real to Channing either.
We were only nine years old. But then we were brought back to reality when my cousin asked, “Why are you both here? Were you looking for me?”
I couldn’t tell her that my mom had asked me to get her to come inside. Saying I had a mom seemed hurtful when she no longer did.
“There’s a frog hiding under there. Right there,” Harabeoji said, pointing to Channing’s feet.
Channing lifted a leaf gently. “That’s a toad, Harabeoji.”
It stayed very still before hopping away.
“It’s time for breakfast,” I said, remembering my mission. That was all I needed, just a moment to think of something that was the truth but didn’t include mentioning my mother.
Channing nodded, got to her feet, and followed us into the house.
I was grateful to Harabeoji for his help.
Any other adult would not have known what to say.
Channing had seemed so alone and at the mercy of something dangerous out there in the woods.
I couldn’t figure out what it was. It was just a yard.
But it was a big yard. We had to walk far to get back to the house.
Anything could have happened to us out there, and no one in the house would have heard our call for help.