Two Birthdays
- Two Birthdays
One from the womb, the other for a passport.
April 10, 1936
Halmoni midwifed herself. Red stains between her legs, she could not walk to the tent with the red stain flapping above. So her daughter was not stamped a proper colonial subject. Being a girl, it was of no consequence, until she wanted to leave.
October 15, 1937
Chusok, the harvest moon, in the year of the ox. The fortune-teller conjured the date because the ox is the strongest swimmer and the moon perambulates both edges of the Pacific. For his services, he requested kimchi and sesame oil.
She still curses him for that luckless pairing of stubborn ox and duplicitous moon. Others scold, be grateful! Rebirth on different day is small price for passage through Angel Island. [End Page 77]
Even her own children can’t get it right. She wants them to celebrate both; they remember nothing. Instead they send cards on Mother’s Day folding her inside pastel envelopes that seal her midnight howls at Japanese soldiers pulling comfort from the skirts of village girls and muffle her strange lullabies to Baby Sister, dead from diarrhea and cold war before she could claim even one birthday.
Sengil, chuka hamnida. Happy Birthdays to You. She insists on keeping both. One birthday for the naturalized, tennis-playing mother behind Louis Vuitton sunglasses and one for the desiccated baby, the girls with the torn hanboks, and the woman she was before these births split her in two. [End Page 78]
Miliann Kang is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and affiliated faculty in Sociology and Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her book, The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work (University of California Press, 2010) examines service interactions between women in Asian-owned nail salons, and won the Sara Whaley book prize from the National Women’s Studies Association. Currently, she is researching work–family issues for Asian American women and the ways that gender and race influence motherhood and career paths. Her research has been supported by the American Association of University Women, the Ford Foundation, the Institute for Asian American Studies at UMass Boston, the Labor Center at UMass Amherst, and the Social Science Research Council.
