My mother pounced on the signs of sal with quick efficiency, spotting the evidence of my decay in every shortcoming. Whenever I snapped at her, or overslept, or forgot something as simple as leaving an offering for the Seven Stars on the seventh day of the seventh month, she’d wave a lit incense stick about my head and yell, “Sal!”
Where earlier I had cherished the moments my mother paid attention to me, recognizing me as her flesh-and-blood daughter, I now began to cringe whenever she studied me, targeting a single part of my anatomy for any length of time. Because I knew that if I did not move out of her scope, she would hit me with another barb. Once, when I was about to kiss my mother goodbye before leaving for school, she grabbed my face, pressing my cheeks into my lips for a fish pucker. She held me that way for a blink or two, then announced, “Stink-breath. Sal from your father.”
Sal seeped from the pores of my skin—proclaiming itself in feet that smelled like stale popcorn and armpits that smelled like fermenting potatoes—and pushed my body beyond its known topography. Knees and elbows erupted into sharp and dangerous angles. Zits bubbled onto my forehead and chin. Hair sprouted in damp, unexplored crevices. Knots of flesh fisted behind my nipples, punching up small hills.
And my mother’s eyes and hands darted in to pinch and pull, poke and worry over each development.
I learned to study my body carefully in order to find and eliminate the signs of sal before my mother saw them. I sucked on breath mints, rubbed deodorant under my arms and on my feet. When my hands started to sweat, I swiped a layer of Secret across them too. And each night in the bath, I’d lie back and wait for strands of downy hair to float away from my body in exploratory tendrils, then pluck them out with eyebrow tweezers. The removal of each hair brought a flash of tears to my eyes, the sting of a tiny arrow.
I wore large, oversize T-shirts, which 1 pulled toward my knees to flatten my breasts. The kids called me a “mini-moke,” because I slunk around the playground rolling my hands into the front of my shirts and slouched over my desk like one of the big, tough boys who smoked dope at the bus stop before school started. All of my shirts looked misshapen and distorted that year, even after Miss Ching announced during health education that “Some girls, who shall remain nameless, are ruining their clothes when they really, in the name of decency, should just go out and buy a bra.” She looked right at me, and though I could feel my face burning red, I looked right back, sending a sal to strike her eyes. And her mouth.
My mother prayed for me. Alternately wailing over my out-of-control body and cursing my father, who passed on his sal to me, she berated the spirits and begged them for advice on how to save me. “Beccah,” she told me after a long conference with Induk the Birth Grandmother. “No matter how much we cleanse the Red Disaster away from you, it comes back, because the sal keeps getting stronger.” She sniffed at my skin, and under the mint and the “rain-fresh” scent of Secret, she detected another genetically embedded arrow, more evidence of impurity left by my haole father: the odor of cheese and milk and meat—animal waste. “You have to stop feeding the sickness in your body, and starve the sal out of you.”
To cleanse the impurities from my system, I ate food blessed by the spirits. For breakfast and dinner, my mother set blocks of white rice cake, bowls of water, oranges, and mixed vegetable namul onto our altar, offering the Birth Grandmother and her sisters first helpings. After rubbing her hands in prayerful supplication, she’d bow stiffly from the waist. “Please share with us our food and your blessings,” she’d say. “Please make this house peaceful. Please make the child turn out well.” Then we would both kneel, waiting for the spirits to finish their meal. When the rice no longer sent spirals of steam into the air, we knew that the spirits were finished and that it was our turn to eat.
I tried cheating, eating the hot lunch at school. Pizza and Tater Tots, or loco-mocos—over-easy egg over gravy over beef patty over rice—cost twenty-five cents, so if I took only one money envelope from the Wishing Bowl, I could eat whatever I wanted for several weeks.
But my body always betrayed me. My mother listened to my stomach’s noises, looked into my eyes, smelled my feet, and knew that I had eaten dirty food. “Rotten cow’s milk, pig guts, and red-hot fat,” she would comment, and that night I would have to drink endless bowls of blessed water while my mother chanted and sprinkled the ashes of burnt incense stick on my stinking parts. Sometimes this would go on through the night, so that when I woke in the early-morning hours to use the bathroom, I created landslides from ashes piled on the pillow near my mouth, on the sheets near my hands, on my stomach and crotch and feet.
When I stopped fighting and ate only what was acceptable to my guardian spirits, I wondered why I had fought in the first place. Eating food that had been blessed, I began to feel the spirits fill my body, making me stronger, smarter, purer than my normal self. Each bite of the food tasted and tested by the Birth Grandmother and the Seven Stars seemed to ripen and bloom in my mouth, so that even one grain of rice, one section of orange, one strand of bean sprout, filled me to fullness.
I became so full that I consumed only what the spirits themselves ate, feasting on the steam evaporating from freshly made rice, on the scent of oranges and pears. I saw food take flight from its physical manifestation, turning into light that shot through my body. And I saw the light flow through me, swirling like blood under skin turned translucent as the shade of a lamp, until it eddied in the tips of my fingers.
My mother saw the light in my hands as well. “Your hands are so pale,” she murmured once, “I can see the blue hyolgwan burning under its skin.”
And when I massaged her back, my fingers migrated toward the sal hidden in her muscles, alongside her bones. “Saa, saa, saaa,” my mother would groan with pain and pleasure. “Kill the sal.” And I would press my fingers into the knotted muscles until I felt them loosen and dissolve under my heat. With the light, I could dip into her body to pull out the walnuts of pain lodged in her back, sucking like leeches against her spine or between her shoulder blades. Sometimes when I massaged my mother, I felt my arms disappear up to the elbows, my body reabsorbed by hers. In those moments, I knew I was truly my mother’s daughter, that I nursed her with my light.
I aimed the light into myself, feeling for the poisoned arrowheads implanted in my body in order to kill my own pain. I fed the light with more spirit food, until it grew larger than myself. The bigger the light within me became, the smaller my body got, until I seemed to shrink into myself, becoming as elemental as the food offered to and consumed by the gods.
My body reabsorbed my hips, my breasts, the small belly that sloped between my pelvic bones. My hair fell out, leaving tufts of dry lifeless strands tangled in hairbrushes or in the shower drain. I knew that except for the down—like the woolly lanugo coating the fetus in the womb—developing on my arms and legs, I would soon become hairless as a newborn. I continued to devour the steam of rice, waiting until I would be tiny enough to slip completely into the world my mother lived in.
But no matter how clean, how small I became, the sal—too deep within me to uproot—remained, a seed burrowed low in my belly, to kill the light.