For years, we traveled from the east coast to the west coast, from north to south, to every state of the Union. Rich enough to own a private car called a wagon, we drove through stretches of farmland so flat and yellow with grain that there was no way to judge time or distance. The land, smooth and bland as the dish called pudding, hypnotized me. Every once in a while, I would blink and rub my eyes, as if waking from a daze, and realize I was still caught in the dream: the same field, the same barns, the same cattle grazing along the same wire fence, endless. I felt that we were traveling in circles.
Trying to break the monotony, my husband pressed the car horn whenever we passed cows along the roadside. When we first entered the farm country, the beeps, sparse and irregular, jolted me. As we drove on, they became like the land, regular and lulling as a heartbeat.
I think it was the car horn that made me understand just how rich America was: in just a few hours, we beeped enough times for every family in Korea to have a cow, yet my husband said that only a handful of ranchers owned the cattle we saw. A country of excess and extravagance, America was so rich that one man could own a hundred cows.
We packed and unpacked, living out of two bags and a box, sleeping sometimes in college guest rooms or motels, but mostly in the car at roadside rest stops. At these stops, I took a wad of Kleenex and ran behind the building to do my business, and I cleaned myself with napkins dampened at the drinking faucet. Though my husband complained, lecturing on how cleanliness was next to godliness, I could not bring myself to stand in line to use the toilets and showers. I felt cleaner skipping showers than remembering the way the Japanese referred to the recreation camps as public rest rooms.
Some of the rest stops and gas stations along the road had what were called vending machines, where anyone with a coin could pull a knob and receive candy—something that I thought only America must have. If the husband had money left over from filling the tank, he would give me the change so that I could practice using the vending machine. I memorized which coins to put in the money slot, learned to match the knob to the candy that I wanted, and watched as the belt rolled forward to push my selection off the shelf. At first I found it comforting that there was always another candy bar behind it, waiting to take its place. But the more of it I ate, the more it began to bother me: it was so easy, so cheap, so easily replenished.
During the first few months of traveling, I ate only candy bars and salad with Tabasco sauce. Nothing else appealed to me; American food did not have any taste. I could not eat the food the husband ordered for me to put meat on my bones: potatoes fried or smashed and covered with gravy, bread so white and fluffy I couldn’t remember swallowing it, meat I could not recognize. I did see meat that I could tell was meat, but it was something we never ordered. Once, at the counter of a diner that didn’t turn us away because I looked Japanese, the woman sitting next to me ordered a plate of something that looked like kalbi. I watched out of the corner of my eye, and was surprised that she refused the best part: the chewy, tastiest meat—closest to the bone. When she pushed her plate away and touched the napkin to her lips, I picked up one of her bones and bit into it.
Excuse me, the woman said as she jumped up.
The husband grabbed the bone from my hand and put it back on her plate. No, Akiko! he said to me, and then to the woman: Excuse us. She is not from our country; her people tend to share plates.
She’s a scrawny little thing; maybe you should feed her. The woman’s eyes flicked at my stomach and breasts, and then lingered on my husband’s face. She smiled. Where’s she from? Where’re you from?
Sorry I am, I said, my tongue stumbling in English in front of this woman who would not look at me. I not knowing you still wanting meat.
The lady did not look away from my husband. How quaint, she said, a poor little orphan Jap.
To learn to be an American was to learn to waste. Food, paper, clothes—everything was thrown away when we got tired of it, because there was so much. The cities, especially, were places of waste; it seemed like everything everyone had ever thrown away collected in the cities. Looking up, you saw buildings so high they could catch the clouds, but then you stepped into side streets littered with rotting paper and old food and throwaway people wearing throwaway clothes. Rivers of cars snaked between buildings and blared at people as if they were cows. And the rivers of water were thick as sludge, slick enough with oil to catch fire. The cities all looked like shit alley to me.
In one of the cities, my husband took me to the highest building in the world. We rode to the top in a box that made me so dizzy I clutched at my husband’s arm to keep from falling. See the numbers, he said. I looked up at the numbers lighting faster than I could count and dropped to my knees. At the top of the sky, everything glittered, the sun glinting off metal and concrete. From so far away, the city seemed beautiful, because you could forget about the waste and the dirt when you didn’t have to step in it. Maybe that’s what the earth looks like to people in heaven, to ghosts and to God.
That’s what all of America was like to me. When you see it for the first time, it glitters, beautiful, like a dream. But then, the longer you walk through it, the more you realize that the dream is empty, false, sterile. You realize that you have no face and no place in this country.
My husband never talked about a home, about family, and I never asked. In fact, it did not occur to me that he might have a family, parents who loved him, until two letters from the place where he was born caught up with us at the First Friendship Bible Church in Illinois. The first letter we opened, from the manager of Cuyahoga Falls Sunnyside Retirement Community, told my husband that his mother had died. The second one told him she was ill.
We followed the letters back to their origin and found the last place where my husband’s mother lived. After several false turns along roads that spiraled into dead ends, we entered the building’s soot-stained parking structure. Someone had planted a handful of mugunghwa, the everlasting flowers, along the walkway that led into the three-story building. I took seeing them as a good sign, even though their stems seemed withered from the smell of burning tires and bent under the heavy eyes that looked down on them from the building’s windows.
The lobby smelled of mildew and of old people without families to care for them, ancestors without descendants. It smelled like abandonment and loneliness and ghosts. It smelled like home.
As we waited for the elevator, old people flocked to us, eager to touch our young people’s skin and smell our young people’s breath as we received their questions.
You related to Mrs. Bradley? Never knew she had a son. Never knew he was married to a Chinee. All them people are so small, see? How adorable! You speakee English?
They crowded against us, eager to escort us to my husband’s mother’s door, eager to tell us of her death and her funeral, which was beautiful, just beautiful, even though none of her family saw fit to come.
When we entered the mother’s apartment, her ghost rushed out at us. She enveloped us with a heavy stickiness that sucked us into the room. A fat spirit, she demanded in death the space she had never had in her life as a thin, sickly woman. She pushed us up against each other, the furniture, the knickknacks and mementos that filled shelves and counters and floor spaces.
Jesus Above, Good Lord in Heaven, my husband said, trying to maneuver his way between a Dalmatian-dog lamp and thigh-high stacks of National Geographics to get into the kitchen. What’ll we do with all this junk?