When she was through piling the red things into a mountain in our living room, my mother said, “We need to burn the red from your life. Everything.”
At first, I didn’t understand what she meant to do; sometimes she said such things to her clients, then just waved a lit incense stick or a moxa ball over their heads. But when my mother took an arm-load of clothes to the kitchen sink and lit a match, I scrambled to the floor and rooted through my possessions, trying to save something.
When the material in the sink caught fire, my mother came and took the one thing of mine I had managed to find: the tie-dye T-shirt I had made with rubber bands, melted crayon, and Rit dye in Arts and Crafts the year before. “Beccah,” she told me, “honyaek, the cloud of Red Disaster, is all around you. I am trying to weaken it so it won’t trigger your sal and make you sick.”
Red Disaster, the way my mother explained it, was like the bacteria we had learned about in health class: invisible and everywhere in the air around us, honyaek was contagious and sometimes deadly. Burning the red from our apartment was my mother’s version of washing my hands.
The fire in the sink kept sputtering out, held in check by flame-resistant clothing, until my mother added her talismans and money envelopes and a dash of lighter fluid. When she held a match to this kindling, the fire licked, hesitant at first, and then devoured what was offered. Flames shot up amidst coils of thick smoke that blackened our kitchen walls and ceiling. When this first batch had almost burned down, the smoke alarm sputtered to life with grunts and whines and a final full-strength shriek before my mother whacked it with a broom. After she cracked open a window, my mother continued to burn our possessions, even the Red Hots, which melted like drops of blood-red wax, filling the apartment with the stench of burning cinnamon.
Since I was particularly susceptible to Red Disaster that year, my mother did not want me wandering about in unknown places, picking up foreign honyaek germs. I was not allowed to ride the bus without her or to swim at all. Consequently I was not supposed to attend school field trips. When my classmates went to Bishop Museum and to Foster Botanical Gardens and to Dole pineapple cannery, where they sampled fresh juice and fruit slices, I stayed behind in the school library, reading and helping Mrs. Okimoto shelve books according to the Dewey decimal system.
But when my sixth-grade social science teacher arranged a snor keling expedition at Hanauma Bay, I signed my own permission slip after practicing my mother’s signature for so long that even now I cannot write her name without my letters cramping into her small, painfully precise script. I remember my hands shook when I turned in this first forgery on the day of the excursion, but Miss Ching just shuffled the form and the fare I had stolen from the Wishing Bowl into her carryall folder. Pushing me into line with the rest of the class, she counted our heads and led us like ducklings onto the bus.
Since my mother had burned my red-heart bathing suit, I wore an olive-green leotard—not the sparkling Danskin kind with spaghetti straps, which might have passed, but one that was cap-sleeved and frayed in the butt. I knew I would catch stares and snickers from the Toots Entourage (led now by Tiffi Sugimoto, since Toots spent all field trips in detention hall for smuggling packs of cigarettes to school in her tall, frizzy rat-nest hair), but I also knew that this trip would be worth it. And even though I had to pair up with Miss Ching in the walk down the winding trail from parking lot to beach, and even though I sucked in water each time I tried to breathe through the snorkel, and my mask fogged no matter how many times I washed it with spit, the trip was worth the teasing and the lies. Because when I trudged across the network of coral reef to dive into pockets of water as deep and clear as God’s blue eyeball, I felt perfect, seamless, and as whole as the water that closed over me.
Only afterward, on the hike back to the parking lot, did I begin to feel the sting of Red Disaster. With each step, I felt a prick against my heel. By the time we reached the top, what had started out as an irritation had turned into bolts of fire shooting jagged through my leg.
In the middle of that night, my mother said she woke up on the couch in a suffocating heat, the sheets clinging to her body, a damp second skin. She fought to take each breath, her throat and lungs burning, and worked her way toward the bedroom, where the waves of heat originated.
“I thought there was a fire in there, that you were burning to death,” my mother told me when I woke the next morning, my feet bandaged in strips of bedsheet.
“I swam through heat so heavy the room rippled before my eyes, and when I touched the bedroom door—aigu! Red hot!” My mother flung her hands into the air, showing off the raised welts on the palms. “I had to take my pajama, hold like this, then open.”
The night of the terrible heat, sure that I was surrounded by a ring of fire, my mother wrapped the bottom of her nightgown around the doorknob and, waist bared, burst into the bedroom to rescue me. She was knocked immediately to the ground from the heat and enveloped in smoke that was not black but red. She pulled the collar of her nightgown over her nose and mouth to filter out the worst of the heat and the red smoke. “Just like a dust storm,” she said. “Or like that plague curse in The Ten Commandments that killed off all the children—only red, not black.
“Red Death filled the room, thickening every breath I took, clouding my eyes so that I could barely see you—a motionless lump—on the bed. I called on the Birth Grandmother to help me beat a path through the honyaek to the windows. I tried to push some of the poison out, but the wind blew in even more honyaek.”
My mother, who could not swim in water, would always pantomime the breast stroke when she told this part of the story. “I dove into red thick as blood pudding, fighting the tentacles of honyaek that tried to pull me under, and found you sweating and shivering under the blankets. I reached out to feel your forehead, but you burned so hot I could not touch you with my bare hands. I tucked the blankets underneath your body and carried you just like you were a baby again. But I could barely lift you; the Red Death sucked my energy, fed on my fear for you, so that I felt weak and unsure. I could barely force my legs forward as the fog of honyaek swirled around us, trying to trip my feet into missteps. I knew one wrong turn would lead us into the land of homeless hobo ghosts, yongson, where we could wander for ten thousand years without even one person knowing we were gone.
“I closed my eyes and told the Birth Grandmother to guide my feet, and when I opened them, she had led us to the bathroom. I placed you in the bathtub and turned on the water. At first the water evaporated as soon as it left the faucet, turning into red steam when it hit your body. I turned the cold on full blast, and finally enough trickled out to dampen the blankets and cool you off.”