Chang-Rae Lee - Native Speaker

The woman mumbled something in an unusual accent about my not knowing what kimchee was, but I didn’t answer. I thought she was a very distant relative. She didn’t look at all like us, nothing like my mother, whose broad, serene face was the smoothest mask. This woman, I could see, had deep pockmarks stippling her high, fleshy cheeks, like the scarring from a mistreated bout of chicken pox or smallpox, and she stood much shorter than I first thought, barely five feet in her heeled shoes. Her ankles and wrists were as thick as posts. She waited for me to turn and start for the house before she followed several steps behind me. I was surprised that my father wasn’t waiting in the doorway, to greet her or hold the door, and as I walked up the carpeted steps leading to the kitchen I saw that the food and drink I had prepared had been cleared away.

“Please come this way,” he said to her stiffly in Korean, appearing from the hallway to the bedrooms. “Please come this way.”

He ushered her into the guest room and shut the door behind them. After a few minutes he came back out and sat down in the kitchen with me. He hadn’t changed out of his work clothes, and his shirt and the knees and cuffs of his pants were stained with the slick juice of spoiled vegetables. I was eating apple quarters off the tray. My father picked one, bit into it, and then put it back. This was a habit of his, perhaps because he worked with fruits and vegetables all day, randomly sampling them for freshness and flavor.

He started speaking, but in English. Sometimes, when he wanted to hide or not outright lie, he chose to speak in English. He used to break into it when he argued with my mother, and it drove her crazy when he did and she would just plead, “No, no!” as though he had suddenly introduced a switchblade into a clean fistfight. Once, when he was having some money problems with a store, he started berating her with some awful stream of nonsensical street talk, shouting “my hot mama shit ass tight cock sucka,” and “slant-eye spic-and-span motha-fucka” (he had picked it up, no doubt, from his customers). I broke into their argument and started yelling at him, making sure I was speaking in complete sentences about his cowardice and unfairness, shooting back at him his own medicine, until he slammed both palms on the table and demanded, “You shut up! You shut up!”

I kept at him anyway, using the biggest words I knew, whether they made sense or not, school words like “socioeconomic” and “intangible,” anything I could lift from my dizzy burning thoughts and hurl against him, until my mother, who’d been perfectly quiet the whole time, whacked me hard across the back of the head and shouted in Korean, Who do you think you are?

Fair fight or not, she wasn’t going to let me dress down my father, not with language, not with anything.

“Hen- ry ,” he now said, accenting as always the second syllable, “you know, it’s difficult now. Your mommy dead and nobody at home. You too young for that. This nice lady, she come for you. Take care home, food. Nice dinner. Clean house. Better that way.”

I didn’t answer him.

“I better tell you before, I know, but I know you don’t like. So what I do? I go to store in morning and come home late, nine o’clock, ten. No good, no good. Nice lady, she fix that. And soon we move to nice neighborhood, over near Fern Pond, big house and yard. Very nice place.”

“Fern Pond? I don’t want to move! And I don’t want to move there, all the rich kids live there.”

“Ha!” he laughed. “You rich kid now, your daddy rich rich man. Big house, big tree, now even we got houselady. Nice big yard for you. I pay all cash.”

“What? You bought a house already?”

“Price very low for big house. Fix-her-upper. You thank me someday…”

“I won’t. I won’t move. No way.”

Byong-ho , he said firmly. His voice was already changing. He was shifting into Korean, getting his throat ready. Then he spoke as he rose to leave. Let’s not hear one more thing about it. The woman will come with us to the new house and take care of you. This is what I have decided. Our talk is past usefulness. There will be no other way.

In the new house, the woman lived in the two small rooms behind the kitchen pantry. I decided early on that I would never venture in there or try to befriend her. Her manner unnerved me. She never laughed. She spoke only when it mattered, when a thing needed to be done, or requested, or acknowledged. Otherwise the sole sounds I heard from her were the sucking noises she would make through the spaces between her teeth after meals and in the mornings. Once I heard her humming a pretty melody in her room, some Korean folk song, but as I walked toward her doorway to hear it better she stopped immediately, and I never heard it again.

She kept a clean and orderly house. Because she was the one who really moved us from the old house, she organized and ran the new one in a manner that suited her. In the old Korean tradition, my presence in the kitchen was unwelcome unless I was actually eating, or passing through the room. I understood that her two rooms, the tiny bathroom adjoining them, and the kitchen and pantry, constituted the sphere of her influence, and she was quick to deflect any interest on my part to look into the cabinets or closets. If she were present, I was to ask her for something I wanted, even if it was in the refrigerator, and then she would get it for me. She became annoyed if I lingered too long, and I quickly learned to remove myself immediately after any eating or drinking. Only when a friend of mine was over, after school or sports, would she mysteriously recede from the kitchen. My tall, talkative white friends made her nervous. Then she would wait noiselessly in her back room until we had gone.

She smelled strongly of fried fish and sesame oil and garlic. Though I didn’t like it, my friends called her “Aunt Scallion,” and made faces behind her back.

Sometimes I thought she was some kind of zombie. When she wasn’t cleaning or cooking or folding clothes she was barely present; she never whistled or hummed or made any noise, and it seemed to me as if she only partly possessed her own body, and preferred it that way. When she sat in the living room or outside on the patio she never read or listened to music. She didn’t have a hobby, as far as I could see. She never exercised. She sometimes watched the soap operas on television (I found this out when I stayed home sick from school), but she always turned them off after a few minutes.

She never called her family in Korea, and they never called her. I imagined that something deeply horrible had happened to her when she was young, some nameless pain, something brutal, that a malicious man had taught her fear and sadness and she had had to leave her life and family because of it.

* * *

Years later, when the three of us came on Memorial Day for the summer-long stay with my father, he had the houselady prepare the apartment above the garage for us. Whenever we first opened its door at the top of the creaky narrow stairs we smelled the fresh veneers of pine oil and bleach and lemon balm. The pine floors were shimmering and dangerously slick. Mitt would dash past us to the king-sized mattress in the center of the open space and tumble on the neatly sheeted bed. The bed was my parents’ old one; my father bought himself a twin the first year we moved into the new house. The rest of the stuff in the apartment had come with the property: there was an old leather sofa; a chest of drawers; a metal office desk; my first stereo, the all-in-one kind, still working; and someone’s nod to a kitchen, thrown together next to the bathroom in the far corner, featuring a dorm-style refrigerator, a half-sized two-burner stove, and the single cabinet above it.