I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight (11 page)

Of course, I was incredibly lax about throwing those huge pads away, and my negligence was punished with more lessons on how to properly dispose of them, as if they were radioactive nuclear waste. My father even started to shout about my lackadaisical, unsanitary sanitary pad refuse, but he never really completed the thought because I think he realized, midscream, that he was out of his jurisdiction. My father didn't talk much, anyway. If anything, he hollered. But, even then, he was brief. Korean parents are like that. It is appropriate and traditional for parents to show no discernible affection or emotion toward their children. My father was positively textbook when it came to this. My mother was too watery, too in love with the French, too mommy, to comply. My father said maybe five things
during my entire childhood and adolescence that I remember, one being unprompted and very odd. I had just come home from school one day and was walking up to my room when he shouted, "You will never use tampons." That was it. Wow. Thanks, Dad. Words to live by. This was during the big Rely toxic shock syndrome scare, which vied with the Hillside Strangler as women's number one fear. Toxic shock was ominous because they never really said how you got it, or why, or what happened when you did get it. It just struck you dead in the cunt. It had the combined qualities of a nuclear fallout warning and a stalker-rapist on the loose. What an awful joke that name Rely was! As if women who dared rely on anything would be duly punished.

My monthly flow staged its own rebellion. I constantly bloodied my sheets with robust flamboyance. My bed often took the appearance of the scene of a crime. My mother would wash the sheets without a word, and the secrecy around the curse kept me from having to do laundry ever. When I became a comic, it was drilled into me by several other women comics that we should never talk about our periods. Male comics often stereotyped female comics and dismissed them because "all they do is talk about their periods." Talking about menstruation became tantamount to a black person eating watermelon. We just couldn't do it. Even now, I'm a bit ashamed when I must disclose that I menstruate at all. It's probably because since I don't truly menstruate anymore, it gives me enough distance from it to voice my once hidden thoughts about it. What's the deal? Why must I feel like I bleed alone? Or that I once bled alone?

my mother

I
really, really, really, really love my mother. It's not the best between my family and me. There are so many crimes left unpunished, debts unpaid, white elephants in the middle of the room that no one will even offer a peanut to. We are in the red, emotionally speaking. But with my mother, things are easy, flexible. She bends and moves with grace, and even though she is barely five feet tall she looms over me still.

There are lots of things you don't know about her. She speaks French like a Parisian, because she was one for many years. In the early '60s, she kept a tiny bedsit in the City of Lights and taught classes to foreign students. She had her hair flipped and wore heavy black eyeliner above her upper lashes, just like Brigitte Bardot's. After I was born, she spent many hours designing clothes for me. The best I remember was a red wool coat and dress set, trimmed with black mink, with a matching pillbox hat. She liked the way that Jackie Kennedy had such understated elegance, and so she felt that it was only right that I should have the same.

Even though she made all my clothes, she never fell into the awful trap young mothers do at times of making matching mother-daughter outfits. My mother thought that to be gauche and beneath our stature, for we were going to be future fashion icons. We didn't really get to do that because she had to work so hard at the little snack bar
my parents ran then, and the dresses were fewer and farther between. She kept drawings of amazing gowns, gowns that would exist in theory only, and bolts of cloth unused in cabinets. After I got married, the sewing machine was sent to me, but it was too complex for me to use. I still sew everything laboriously by hand, but I make my own things, which are unique and lovely, just like she taught me.

My mother loves gigantic jewelry, and keeps the most valued pieces wrapped in toilet paper in a Folger's coffee can. She is most fond of amber, especially the variety that is opaque and honey yellow, and she wraps her neck with long strings of beads of different sizes and hues.

When my mother dreams, she flies, and she loves it. She says she visits me often in these dreams, flying over my house, over her sisters' houses all the way on the other side of the world, seeing all of us from above, sending us love and whatever good things she remembers to bring along before she goes to bed. She worries because she's not sure that I'm happy, and she's right about that sometimes, but that can't always be helped, which maybe is just the way things are in life. She accepts this, but flies over the cities she loves most nonetheless: Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Seoul, Paris, New York.

My mother is an accomplished flamenco guitarist, completely self-taught. I don't know who dances for her. I can't picture my father in tight black pants, red rose clenched between his teeth, but you can never really know your parents. They're your parents, and they're not meant to be much more than that, unless you're very special and get
to have your parents also as your friends, but even then there is a limit to this intimacy, borders not to be crossed. Flamenco dancing, or even the tango, are not the type of secrets that get disclosed between mother and child.

My mother had surgery on her heart. She's fine, and was discharged from the hospital in a day or so. Yet there were many hours when we didn't know if she would be fine. Many slow, terrible minutes were spent waiting by the phone. I could do little but sit down, stand up, then sit down again. Well-meaning friends, insistent on helping me, wore me down even further. The Rescuers, like the little mice with berets on their heads, were infuriated at their own inability to do anything to ease my worry. There were lots of bad thoughts, scary visions, sweet memories and crying—oh, lots of crying.

I don't think I have ever heard my father so scared in my life. He downplayed his alarm with false laughter, and by turning off his cell phone "by accident." He makes me angry because the bridge I burned so long ago between us will have to be rebuilt, hurriedly, and that's hard to do. He has been in love with my mother for over forty years, and even though he has not been particularly good at anything having to do with love at least he was still there, sleeping in the waiting room, all through that long night. Even though I disowned him and was adopted by a lovely, lively, brilliant painter-poet-writer-historian, tattoo aficionado gay father, I have to take him back, because he's trying, and that's going to have to be good enough for now.

If you have parents that you like, or one parent that you like, enjoy it. Remember that whatever happens, it's okay, that they're okay, that everything that's part of life is okay, because life is life and life is okay. Always.

my mother's heart

M
y mother's heart is small. Its borders reach out much farther than the tiny nation of her body. If you picture Monaco, then try to fit all of North America including Canada, even Quebec, into that miniscule, opulent kingdom, then you have it about right.

My husband drove my brother and me to see her. She was up, on her feet, quickly, albeit slightly less quickly than before, padding around her huge, slightly spare home, filled with photographs and massage machines of every caliber—kind of like an elderly version of
Toys in Babeland
, with odd lumbar pillows everywhere, the physically fortifying detritus of the aged.

My parents adore my husband, for it gives them a deep feeling of relief, an interior solidity and gratitude, that they have not completely failed me in my upbringing. Since they can't attribute any of my artistic and financial achievements to themselves—wrongfully so, for I would not be this insane had it not been for the chaotic universe that once was my childhood—they look to my husband as a gentle savior, which he is, but not in the ways they think he is. I don't care; they love
him and that's what matters. When my father tells a man who is not Korean, who is white, who is not a lawyer or a doctor and doesn't play golf, that he loves him, that he has been blessed with another son, that he must be addressed as "Daddy" or temper tantrums may erupt unexpectedly, it's worth it—at least to me. It's my parents' failure that brought me the artistic humility and grace that would make my own failure impossible, so I guess I have to thank them.

I found a scribbled note stuffed in my mother's purse, no doubt when she dashed, by herself, to the hospital. In a frightened and almost unintelligible script, she made a treasure map to all the jewelry hidden in the house, to give to me and only me. She doesn't keep it in some pretty box, hiding it instead as if there's a war still on, which, ironically, there is.

The jewelry is hidden in the oddest places, which I won't disclose here, only to say that I also have picked up this odd habit, except I used to hide drugs the same way. My hiding places now will be filled with her precious jewels. They are the most important things in the world to her, and to me, and not because they are valuable; the money spent on them is not why they are so protected. My aunt's ring and necklace are fashioned of emeralds and diamonds, broken off the crown of some deposed princess, and made just for my mommy, the true Queen, a gift of thanks—unbelievable gratitude to my mother, when she was the only one in the family who could take care of my aunt's father as he lay dying. The rest of the family was consumed with grief, too paralyzed to carry their paralyzed father to his bed, too teary-eyed to drive to the hospital day after day, too shattered to
secure a burial plot and comfort him through the terribly painful eclipse of life, as the soul slowly leaves the body, and even though my mother was not his biological daughter she was his son's wife, the only one to step up to be the midwife in his death.

The jewelry is mine now. I'm fucking wearing it, and don't think for a second that I'm not gonna wear it all at the same time—that's right, biaaatch!!! I'm wearing my aunt's pearl necklace—my Kun Immo—who died far above the world, halfway between the hospital and her home, aboard a plane over Seattle. Before she died, she promised my mother this pearl, and during the divvying up of all her beautiful things—my aunt was not only a beauty herself but surrounded herself with beauty, big-ass beauty—it somehow got lost. But the pearl, my mother knew, was the most important of the jewelry, and it was hers. She would not leave without it. She looked under every couch pillow, picked through every pocket, emptied every purse, turned that motherfucker of a house inside out—everything—until she found it hidden in a tiny zippered pouch in an old handbag.

The pearl necklace is mine now, too. It hangs directly over my heart, and this heart is now a fortress of jewels, over a century's worth of the history of the women of my family, their love expressed through their rings and necklaces, pendants and earrings. Things they were not able to buy themselves but were given by their husbands, and, therefore, were all they had to give, but it means everything. Because of this history, this jewelry is powerful; yes, a bracelet can move a mountain. I'll show you sometime.

My mother gave me all of it, bags and bags of it, because she
doesn't want to keep it anymore hidden away, like our history, our stories left untold, for these jewels and their stories are my inheritance. They can't be appraised. If I brought them to the
Antiques Roadshow
, they would throw them back in my face. Some of it is plastic, some of it is fake, some shit came from QVC, and then there are souvenirs from seaside honeymoons at the turn of the century, happy times, terrible times, then, now. But its value surpasses all the money in the world. It isn't bling. It's love, this long, long love that these sisters had for each other, with hands reaching across the sea, even though separated by continents and hardship—war, immigration and isolation, war, racism and hatred in the new land, war, loneliness and death, war, madness and suicide, war, cancer and AIDS and Alzheimer's, war, a little peace, and then the bad marriages of the '70s. And now another war.

I am now the keeper of the ring. And the brooch, and the bangles. Don't fuck with me.

dinkies

T
he last fingers on each of my hands are so small that they can't even rightfully be called "pinkies" because they are even smaller than that. They are more like "dinkies," and usually they are not noticed for a long time, because, normally, unless you are shopping for an engagement ring or getting a manicure your hands don't get eyeballed
in a way that makes it clear that you're a finger freak. I have dinkies so small it is as if one joint were missing, as if it is just two parts instead of all three, but the parts are intact, and supposedly it's a family trait and not a deformity, although when trying to call attention to myself I would claim that it was the result of a rare disease or bone disorder in an attempt to appear more glamorous.

The last person in my family to have "the finger" was my great-great-grandmother, who was a notorious and riotous great wildebeest of a woman. She had the blackest hair, which she never cut and wore in a tight bun at the base of her neck. Her hair remained midnight black until her death, at the age of 122! Her laugh was loud, and could be heard from miles away, even in other villages. Although Koreans are a staunch, deliberately arrogant patriarchy, and unwavering in their commitment to it, everybody—even the biggest men—were scared of this giantess with black hair and tiny dinky pinkies. She wore pants, and nobody even commented on it, which is an incredible thing, considering the customs of the village she lived in.

The legend of her ugliness spread far and wide, and people traveled many miles in pilgrimage, if only to catch a glimpse of her and stand in awe of what they considered to be some kind of holy error, yet she wore her massive features and bull-in-a-china-shop personality like a badge of honor. Smoking her corncob pipe, she held her family together during terrible times. She had an unfailingly good nature, but was rumored to have killed people with her bare hands, using just four fingers on each, in order to protect her precious children, her sisters, her brothers, her husband, whom she loved with
voluptuous passion, ravenously and overwhelmingly, since he treated her exactly as she was, a warrior and a goddess, a love that defied the conventions of the time, and lasted for more than a century. Even random people in her village were privy to her protection. Her power was legendary, and she was generous with it, because she saw her village as an extension of herself; like her hair, it grew and grew, and it was all hers, held tightly at the back of her head, a symbol of unity in a world filled with strife. The town's inability to judge her for her eccentricity, her famous "ugliness," her trousers and her ever-smoking pipe, her unabashed defiance of convention, tradition and sexual persona, was an astonishing feat of heroic confidence in her true identity.