I was born on the fourteenth day of the first month, the day before the first full moon of the year, and so it was doubly unfortunate that I was born a girl. Women in Korea take special care not to go visiting the day before the first full moon of the year, since bad luck will enter with them and stay for the year; because of me, a wrong-sexed baby arriving on an inauspicious day, bad luck moved in and became part of the family.
Because of me, my oldest sister always reminded me, our family could not participate in what was to be the last full-moon celebration in our village; before the year was out, the Japanese soldiers arrived to enforce the Emperor’s edict banning Korean holidays.
We all had to sit around and look at you, all crinkly red and ugly, she used to say, while outside we could hear nuts and fire-crackers exploding in the bonfire, scaring away demons, wild animals, and mosquitoes into the next year.
Oldest sister was especially bitter, because that was the first year she had helped to weave the rope to be used in the male-female tug-of-war contest. She had even planned to position herself near the front—if not at the very front—of the rope so all the boys could see her; in this way she’d planned to lure a future husband and pull him to her side. She mentioned this every year until the year our parents died and she betrayed me, paying me back.
Because I was the youngest and she was the oldest, my sister loved to torment me. The other two, second and third sisters, teased me too, but their taunts held no malice. They were just like little birds chirping out whatever words oldest sister fed them. They had each other and were happy, not having to worry about the responsibilities of oldest sister while at the same time having someone to order to refill the rice or water bowls.
Oldest sister, though, snapped at me out of anger. She was old enough to realize I should have been a boy. She was old enough to have traveled with my mother to Samshin Halmoni’s shrine and old enough to pray. She was old enough to understand what my parents wished for and what the villagers would have celebrated.
If you were a boy, she used to tell me, we would have had a hundred-day party for you. We would have dressed you in a crown and a rainbow-sleeved hanbok as if it were New Year’s or Harvest Day. We would have made a feast, with special red-and-black bean cake sprinkled with honey to show how much we loved you, if you were a boy.
I want my own child to know that I gave her a hundred-day celebration, that I love her and thank the spirits for her health, even though she is not a boy and not in Korea. Or perhaps I celebrate because she is a girl, an American girl.
I sew her hanbok and crown out of the best satin on sale at Sears. I make special red bean cake topped with white sugar and place it at the four compass points in the house, to bar disaster and welcome happiness. And I prepare enough rice cake for one hundred people to ensure her a long life, even though I do not know one hundred people to invite to the party.
My husband and the minister wives who come to the party do not care for the rice cake. My husband says, Tastes like Styrofoam. What blasphemous waste. The neighbor ladies say, No, no, it’s not so bad, but they wrap their pieces in a napkin and leave it on the table. Then they take pictures of my Beccah-chan, a tiny face lost in voluminous clouds of color, and leave.
When my husband takes the newspaper into the bathroom, I carry the baby and the platters of rice cake to the porch. I settle my daughter into her basket, then crumble each cake, precious in its own way as salt, until she is surrounded by miniature mountains of crumbs.
I place a bit of rice in my baby’s mouth and throw a handful high over the railing. When birds fly in for the feast, my daughter flaps her arms and crows as the bravest swoop over her basket and into the piles of rice cake surrounding her. Faster and faster, I scatter crumbs by the fistful, calling more and still more birds to come and join us, until there must be well over one hundred pecking in a frenzy at the ground and at their tails, flapping along the porch railing, hopping next to the basket where my baby girl laughs and I sing over and over, into the ball of flurry and heat made by their beating wings: Thank you, thank you for coming, thank you for coming to my party.
12
Since my mother died, I dream the dream from my childhood.
I am swimming in water so blue that even when you’re dreaming you think nothing this pure exists in real life, a blue so translucent you can almost breathe it. I hunt black-and-white fish as they dart through red coral reef, when suddenly I am wrenched from behind. I try to kick away but cannot move my feet. Something pulls me under. I begin to feel dizzy with the effort of not breathing, and when I know I will drown, I wake up, gasping for air.
I found my mother after she had been dead a night and a day and another night. I usually stopped by to check on her before and after work and during the day on the weekends, to see if she was lucid, eating, sleeping, combing her hair. Since moving into my own apartment last year, I missed only one day, and on that one day she chose to die. I think she did it on purpose, to punish me. Or, maybe, to release me.
I brought doughnuts that morning, my usual peace offering of maple bars, planning on having breakfast with her on the lanai. The lanai was the main reason my mother bought the house when we first saw it, almost two decades ago. When Auntie Reno badgered the realtor for a list of homes in our price range, this house was last on her list and so the first one we visited; Auntie Reno believed in saving the best for last.
The ten-year-old, white-with-blue-trim two-bedroom home in Manoa was relatively inexpensive but did not convey the image of spirituality Reno felt a prominent fortune-teller’s home should. “You need a cottage in Kahala or, better yet, Nu‘uanu—you know how many ghosts stay in Nu’uanu?” Auntie Reno sniffed. “Manoa not bad, but dis house, jeesh!” She snorted loud enough for the realtor to wince. “Jus’ like one Leave It to Beaver house wit one open port garage, gimme a break.”
“I like it, Auntie Reno.” I hung on to my mother’s arm and sniffed the air. I remember that the air was so fresh and alive it stung my nose, like I was smelling the rain through the sun. I think I thought that we could run away from Saja with his stench of Red Disaster, that the Death Messenger would never find us in this clean-smelling house that sang of green things. Now I think that it was just the first house I smelled that didn’t stink of roaches. “It smells like my dream home,” I said.
Auntie Reno ignored me, as she did—and still does—when what I say isn’t useful to her. “Let me pick dah right house, okay? Image stay nine-tenths dah battle,” she told my mother. “And dat’s my job. You jus’ predict dah future, and we goin’ make it.”
My mother drifted behind our realtor, a large, long-necked ostrich of a woman. As the realtor strutted through the kitchen and bedrooms of the house, swiveling her head toward the home’s highlights—the “refurbished cabinetry” and “economic use of space” and “quaint powder rooms,” all of which had Reno harumphing and rolling her eyes—my mother nodded her head and smiled politely. But when my mother peeked behind the pea-green curtains that hid the sliding glass doors of the master bedroom, she stopped smiling and nodding.
The saleslady fidgeted. “Well, sure, the back’s not in the best shape now,” she said. My mother unlatched the door and pushed until the doors screeched apart. As my mother stepped onto the faded wood deck, just avoiding a jutting nail, the saleslady hopped forward to lead her away from the termite-hollowed railing. “But, ah, notice the potential. It, uh, it leads right into the garden.” We all looked into the backyard, where yellow-flowered vines of wedelia swelled in waves to drown out a border of fly-specked hibiscus bushes, where the heads of overgrown red ti shook on thin stalks above the roof. Banana trees dropped their rotting fruit, which lay one on top of the other, dying in layers. Pom-poms of white-and-blue ‘uki ’uki lilies swayed on wiry necks above nut grass that grew as high as my knees. The realtor stammered, then, trying to distract us once more, pointed toward the sky. “Look up!” she almost shouted. “The mountains! Now isn’t that a beautiful view of the Ko‘olaus!”