Scotch Tape

I was nine the day I noticed the wrinkles on my forehead. I was in the room that comprised our entire home, in the Gwanak District of Seoul. The floor was covered wall-to-wall with yellowish-beige linoleum printed with an intricate red floral pattern, each hexagonal flower about the size of a baby’s head. (I know this from baby pictures of me lying down; my head just covers one of those shapes.) I was kneeling on the ground, practicing piano on the keys I had scribbled with crayon on the floor. When I pressed down on the drawn keys, the spongy linoleum cushioned my fingers. I closed my eyes, hearing the music in my head.

“Suyeon-ah! Wrinkle!” The yell complemented the piece I was playing: Chopin’s Military Polonaise, forte. I kept going.

“Wrinkle,” the voice repeated, this time pianissimo. I stopped, dazed by the interruption. My eyes opened to my umma’s smiling face. “I’m going to have to tape your forehead again.” Umma laughed and smoothed my furrowed brows with her thumb, as if ironing silk.

“Tape? Again?” I said.

“Your baby journal—I’m copying it to this new notebook.” Umma picked up a plastic-covered notebook resting on top of some tattered loose paper on the floor. “See here? The very first entry, when you were two days old.” I moved beside her to see the elegant Korean letters:

What a beautiful baby my darling little girl is. Such light hair, it’s almost brown. Big round eyes. Everyone is asking where she got such long eyelashes. Such a frown! Her whole forehead wrinkles up. The nurses said I should put tape on it to make sure it doesn’t cause wrinkle marks.

“I did, you know.” She covered her face with her hands, but I could see the mix of her delight and embarrassment at this memory. “You always frowned so hard. Even sleeping. We joked you must be a genius concentrating on solving the world’s problems.”

“You taped my skin?” I said, scrunching my eyebrows. As soon as I realized I was frowning, I looked at Umma, and we burst out laughing.

“See? Wrinkling again, even laughing,” Umma said.

I put my hand to my forehead. Such contrasts—smooth skin separated by sharp, deep lines.

“Every day, I put tape between your eyebrows.” She touched the top of my nose. “No good. The Scotch tape made you frown harder, got creased up in ten minutes. I had to replace it with new tape all the time. Then you got a rash from the tape.” She shook her head with a chuckle. “Such an impossible baby! I gave up on the whole thing after a few weeks.” She brushed away my hair to kiss my forehead, then returned to her copying.

I sat for a while in front of my drawn piano, feeling my wrinkles and picturing Umma putting tape on the baby me, trying to kiss my wrinkles away, the same way she put bandages on my scrapes and kissed the hurt away. Part of me couldn’t believe how much time she’d spent on this silly and ultimately futile task. And yet I could. Umma’s life in Korea was dedicated to doing things for me. Some big things. Like the previous month, when my teacher slapped my hands with a ruler for volunteering to run for class president. A hard slap, punctuated by, “That’s for thinking that a girl can be president of anything.” Umma marched over to that big concrete school building, walking so quickly I had to run to keep up, and demanded to see the principal. Even from outside the door, I could hear the restrained anger in Umma’s voice. She came out with her lips pressed into a thin, straight line, gripped my hand, and marched me home. Three weeks after that, my imo in America, Umma’s younger sister, put in an immigration application for us.

But I think it was the everyday things that made me feel special. Like the lunches Umma packed. The standard fare for children’s...