How to Age with Grace

1

The present is the revenge of the past.

There's a Korean belief that you're born the parent of the one you hurt most. I was revenge born in 1988 at O'Connor Hospital in San Jose, California. I was the reincarnation of somebody wronged and no wonder I took a chunk of my mother's body. It was late September. Not the average six pounder, I weighed eleven pounds. The crown of my head split a fissure, and when my shoulders passed through, I nearly killed her. Broad-looking, swathed in muscle and green veins, I was hairless except for the faint whiskers of eyebrows, and hungry, giving my mother and the doctor the impression of another boy.

That same day, at the hospital, my mother wiped her ripped parts and bussed to the dry cleaners across town, passing her home—a six-hundred-square-foot unit at Sunnyhills, crowded apartments in Milpitas near the sewage treatment ponds. It was her first month at the dry cleaners. She couldn't tell anyone that the stitches on her parts opened. She hid in the bathroom weeping. Since her own mother died early, she looked after her siblings until she married. Of her two brothers and sister, only she and her son followed her husband and his elderly mother to this country where the desk bell rang. She reached down where it hurt. Her eyes swelled shut like those of the glazed ducks with baked eyes that they hung out on hooks at the Lion Market. My whole life she was gone until she returned.

________

She never left again until one day she told me, at the age of fourteen, I'd move ninety-three miles north to Davis onto Oleander Place, a cul-de-sac off Covell Farms, into a one-story with a roof that sank slightly above the garage. The house was brown with white trim. The lawn, overgrown, midway to yellow. Two concrete steps led to a porch, a tin mailbox anchored by the door. From the driveway, an arch of a forty-foot ancient oak in the backyard, its knobby branches spread out, half covering the house in shade. The sidewalk dipped into a water ditch. The fire hydrant to the left was pure rust. The noise of traffic beyond a main road followed the signs to a college campus nearby. The house itself sat on a tilted stoop where it heaved forth a drawn-out sigh. My parents put me up to live with my brother, who was four years older, and left the country in a hurry.

________

When I was four, the doctor suspected I was a mute. They couldn't tell if I could read. Other babies talked at one and a half years. I didn't speak for four and a half. My mother used a tone of voice that terrified me. At the Berryessa flea market, the Lion Market in Milpitas, or deep inside Yaohan where I could lose myself, she used my name like a fire poker to stoke me alive. The teacher urged her to put me in a school for children with learning disabilities. But it was unthinkable to my mother, who decided to tutor me herself. She'd have to stay home more. However, they needed extra money until my father graduated from school. At our Sunnyhills unit, she spoke quietly, since my father's mother napped on a floor pad in the same room, and instructed me, "Try to say what you hear." She pinched her fingers over alphabet cards. She repeated the words. After a silence, she resumed. She taught me English words I heard in Korean. "Epper." Apple. She held it up. She took a bite of it. Drew a picture. When she found out she was pregnant again, my father and his mother urged her to lose the baby. She defied them for the chance that it might be a daughter. "Epper." Four doctor's visits, and she refused.

________

My father had been the first to fly out of San Francisco with his briefcase to work...