Table for One, page 23
The arrow was nowhere to be found. Clearly, it had escaped J’s throat and evaporated out of her body. J lay on the floor, docile once again. Her hair was matted with blood. I pulled her close and wiped the blood off her wrists and eyes. J had a pained expression on her face, but she didn’t get angry with me. Just hold on for a little bit, just a little bit. I took out the whales I’d bought at DEAD and stuck them in the holes in her genitals and nipples and forehead and tongue and all over her body. Only then did J smile dimly, like she was remembering the whales.
* * *
“Sir, are you in there?”
I must have dozed off not long after sprawling out on the ground. It’s the woman who owns the building, banging on the door.
“You’ve been quiet as a mouse for the past few weeks!” she exclaims. “I need to know if there’s a tenant in here or not. I said I was going to call someone to open the door for me if it was still locked today—remember?”
“Why?” I ask.
“What do you mean why, can’t you smell it? This rotting smell?”
I sniff the air but don’t notice anything.
“Sheesh, it’s coming from this room,” she says. “This place smells foul! Just let me in.”
Cold air comes in from behind the door as it rattles open. The items in the room, scattered as if a typhoon has come through, slowly grow in size. A half-opened dresser, escaped clothing, cigarettes I put out on the floor, books that have fallen on the floor, a thick encyclopedia, old illustrated animal and plant guides, and a black dot lying beneath them. The black dot grows, too. The round thing gets bigger and bigger: it’s the black dot, the black circle, then the black skull, with two thin arms sticking out from its sides.
It’s a person wrapped up in a blanket. A young woman, flowers of blue and red blood blooming all over her face. A crustacean with whales studding her body. I peer at the woman’s face for a long time. It’s unfamiliar. It’s a face that I know must exist, that I’m sure I’ll come across at some point in the future, but right now it’s unfamiliar to me. Why is this person here?
And where is J?
9. DON’T CRY, HONGDO
1. ORGANIC HELL
I joined the other hungry fourth-graders, lined up like links of sausage, as we awaited our release from prison. Our nametags identified us by grade, then class, then student number: 40510, 40728, 40834, 40938, 40821, 40118, 41112, 40231, 40106, 40513, 40224, 40916, 40134, 40618, 40129, 40827, 40418, 40228, 40332, 40511. We took off the tags and put them in a bag. Beyond the school gates, there was no need to reveal that I was in grade four, class five, number eleven: 40511.
The dried fish fillets, roasting over a food stall’s hot fire on this warm spring afternoon, were so fresh they looked like they might rise from the dead days after being cooked. The lettuce in my hamburger crinkled like cellophane. Children crossed through the school’s front gate with rolling backpacks as high as their hips. They dropped their bags and headed to the sugar candy stand, where golden-brown sugary discs were stamped with shapes like stars and hearts. Children took turns making their own candy, their wrists twirling nimbly as they stirred cups of melted sugar. It wasn’t so much cooking as it was dancing, less dancing than it was spinning a top. The whirlpool swirling inside the ladle made a black hole, and the day melted into it. Holding the ladle over a flame was as quietly thrilling as using a magnifying glass to burn textbooks in the sun. The kids at the cotton candy stand next to the sugar candy opened their mouths wide like the black hole inside the ladle. They crammed cotton candy into their muzzles, pulling it off the stick like they were gnawing on beef ribs. Other students slurped down bloodred slushies. Like marathon runners guzzling water, the kids quenched their thirst with sugar ice.
“Excuse me, this is junk food, right?” I asked.
The cotton candy seller glanced at me before pulling a large sack of sugar from below his motorcycle. The sugar looked like a sandbag. Organic. Sustainable. Chemical-free. Sugar.
“So it isn’t junk food?”
“Have you ever seen junk food made with organic sugar?” he demanded.
“It’s not junk food?” I asked again. “But it is, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“It’s junk food, right?”
“I said it’s organic sugar. Haven’t you heard of clean eating? If you’re not going to buy anything, go away. Stop blocking the street.”
It’s not a good selling point to insist that cotton candy is clean eating. For me, junk food was worth buying, but what was the point if it was healthy? My home was already filled with wholesome things to eat.
In April, just after fourth grade started, a love of all things organic had begun to spread like a virus. It rushed past the gates of my school at a frightening speed and soon turned the entire campus into an organic meadow. Thanks to the wind blowing its organic gusts, we kids became hosts to a parasite we called “organic.”
Not long after the cafeteria meals went organic, a declaration of war was posted at the school’s entrance. A banner declaring “Wholesome food for wholesome children” fluttered over the front doors like one of our mothers’ skirts. And then, one after another, our favorite street vendors disappeared. The few that managed to remain sold foods made with ingredients bearing the required label: “organic.” The man selling sugar candy claimed to use organic sugar, the slushy man said he ordered ice made from mineral water, and the man selling fish jerky said that he dealt directly with vendors who caught fish from unpolluted waters.
“Hey—are you buying anything or not?” the cotton candy man asked. “Oh, and you know what you’re holding?”
“Wooden chopsticks,” I said.
“That’s a domestic product, kid.”
I stared blankly at my utensils. The fervor for not only “organic” but also “local” had overtaken everything from cotton candy to chopsticks. Instead of Chinese chopsticks, we now used domestically produced ones. Because of this, the man’s prices had gone up by two hundred won.
Cotton candy that was two hundred won better than before lay on the stand amid a swarm of children, squished against each other like layers of pastry dough. The fluffy concoction twirled around the axis of the cotton candy machine, inflating as strands of sugar sucked up air. Who cared if the chopsticks were made in China or Korea, or even if they were from outer space?
* * *
“You’re acting like this because you eat all that junk,” my mom complained to me.
Mom said that the snacks sold at school were ruining children who ate organic food at home, but I disagreed. I was only able to be myself because I did a certain amount of snacking at school. If not for the street vendors, I would have been a pretty awful kid. Mom had recently joined an “organic club” and now spent her time memorizing things like “how to prepare a fresh meal with twelve kinds of vegetables.” But as far as I could tell, a table covered with twelve kinds of vegetables was a field, not a meal. Mom’s obsession with organic had made me start to like pesticides. That’s what organic food had really done to me.
I was drawn to the flavor of beef stock as soon as I stopped breastfeeding. But even back then, my mom’s taste was different from mine. She would always try to serve me unappetizing vegetable gruel.
“Hey, at least two bites,” she’d say. “It’s your duty!”
Every time she tried to get me to eat cabbage salad when I was little, she said the same thing. I’d bombard her with endless questions before following her orders to open my mouth.
“Mom, what’s this?” I’d ask.
“Um, Snow White.”
The cabbage salad would come a few inches closer to my mouth. I’d flutter my eyelashes while trying to imagine that the cabbage really was Snow White. After I swallowed a mouthful of Snow White, the next runner in the food relay stood at the ready.
“Mom, what is it now?”
“Cinderella.”
Later, when my mom understood my food preferences better, she knew to give the cabbage salad names like “dog poop” or “chicken beak.” Nothing had really changed since then. Every day, she pulled together an organic dinner that you might as well call rabbit food. Today, the main course was stuffed spring cabbage rolls. Mom put a little bit of multigrain rice inside the cabbage leaf, garnished it with soybean paste, and held the wrap out to me.
“Junk food is what first-graders eat,” she said. “If you keep it up, your insides are going to be a mess. Eat this. It’s your duty.”
Mom didn’t push the spoon at me outright, but the “duties” kept coming. I thought of how my cabbage salad used to turn into a princess and decided to play our old dinnertime game, speaking in a singsong voice.
“Mom, what’s this?” I asked.
Mom answered brusquely.
“It’s spring cabbage.”
“Nooooo. Mom, what is it?”
“I said it’s spring cabbage.”
Mom was basically a rabbit living off grass, and her powers of imagination had bottomed out. When I asked her what the responsibility on my plate really was, she said it was spring cabbage, and when I asked again, it was still spring cabbage. The third time I asked about my duty, it became “Stop it! It’s spring cabbage.” Vegetables at our organic dinner table no longer turned into something else. Mom didn’t understand why I was hungry again as soon as I finished eating. Eating organic makes people unforgiving. Would I have to move out before I became just as mean? Maybe Mom would get a boyfriend like Jinu’s mom had. Jinu’s mom was married, but she had a boyfriend anyway. The boyfriend gave her necklaces and one time he bought ice cream for Jinu.
“I decided to keep my mouth shut about the affair until I finished the ice cream,” Jinu told me.
Jinu had a big mouth, so he went around bragging about how his mom was having an affair. To be honest, maybe he wasn’t bragging. Maybe I was just secretly jealous. I was jealous of Jinu’s mom’s skill. Jinu’s mom—who had a husband and wasn’t that pretty—had a boyfriend, and my mom—who wasn’t married and was pretty—didn’t. The difference between them was loneliness. My mom needed to be a little lonelier.
I was no less of a loudmouth than Jinu. I told Mom about Jinu’s mother’s affair as soon as I heard about it, blurting it out in hopes of getting Mom worked up. She listened while peeling garlic, without much of an expression.
“What kind of cheating is that?” she asked. “That’s nothing.”
“But what about his dad?” I asked.
Mom acted like she was about to say something, then she shut her mouth.
“Jinu’s mom isn’t the kind of person who throws her family away for another man,” she said. “The boyfriend is just a fling.”
Mom spoke like she was an expert.
“Mom, you should date, too!” I exclaimed. “I don’t mind if you throw away your family.”
I was serious, but Mom hit me on the head. Then she pulled me into a hug and rubbed my cheeks.
“Hongdo, you’re everything to me!” she exclaimed. “My sweet daughter!”
I hated that expression, and when I struggled to get away, Mom hugged me tighter. In moments like this, I really noticed Dad’s absence. I was all Mom had, so I had to play the role of daughter and husband. Were other relationships this stressful? Jinu shared his thoughts about my situation, trying to comfort me.
“This is how an only child always feels,” he said. “But things change once the second kid is born.”
The problem with Jinu was that he always spoke in generalities. Unfortunately, I wasn’t getting siblings anytime soon. That meant there was only one way for me to free myself from my mother. Mom needed a boyfriend.
2. THE FIRST BACHELOR IN NINE YEARS
The Hongdo Park whom my mom fed organic food was a completely different daughter from the Hongdo Park who secretly snacked on junk. The organic Hongdo was a lot more pretentious. After joining the organic club, Mom started to lie, and she lied a lot. Lies and imagination obviously occupied different parts of the brain, considering Mom’s lack of creativity.
“Oh, my daughter’s nothing special,” she’d tell other mothers. “She’s just gotten into the habit of studying without me even having to push her.”
As recently as last month, Mom had been trying to enroll me in classes at Sparta Tutoring Center, the same place Jinu went to, and I kept shouting that I wouldn’t go. Mom was creating a new Hongdo Park. This new Hongdo was going to grow up eating only organic, attend a prestigious university, and become a doctor. That was Mom’s dream, and she wasn’t afraid to make it public. While Mom was busy turning her child into a college graduate and doctor, I couldn’t understand why I had to attend elementary school. Honestly, I didn’t have any hopes or dreams.
“There’s really nothing you want to be when you grow up?” my homeroom teacher asked me in school one day. “Not even the president?”
My teacher asked me about my ambitions several times during our one-on-one meeting. Was it really such a problem that I didn’t want to become anything? Ten-year-olds have endless opportunities to tell adults about their goals. But even so, it was rude to keep asking what a kid like me wanted to be when she grew up. Open-ended questions are just stressful.
“The president?” I replied. “I guess it would be nice to be president, but it doesn’t seem possible.”
“Why not?” my teacher asked. “If you study hard and get along with your friends, you could do it.”
“Do you really think that?”
My teacher looked at me like I’d disappointed him and added, “Why not? Do you hate the president?”
“My mother’s family sympathized with the Japanese during the occupation. How would it be possible for me to be president?”
My homeroom teacher took my statement as a joke. Or maybe he was just forcing himself to laugh. Then he asked if I knew what it meant to sympathize with the Japanese. He thought I didn’t know! It made me angry.
My teacher urgently tried to come up with a career path for me, a child with no interest whatsoever in becoming president. I should have said I wanted to be a CEO or a manager, like everyone else did. Or if not those jobs, then I could have said something like “a celebrity.” Seriously, though, I had no ambition. That was it. But adults treated children without aspirations like they were children without thoughts.
“Do you have anything else to tell me?” my teacher asked.
“You’re not married, right?”
My teacher shook his head.
“Then are you divorced?” I continued.
“You’re making fun of me for being an old bachelor, aren’t you?”
My homeroom teacher smiled as he said it. Several days earlier, when he had first started working here, rumors spread that he was the “first unmarried male teacher” at our school in nine years. The first bachelor in nine years was a substitute for our regular homeroom teacher, the Shrew. Now that he was teaching Korean instead of her, I had to find my long-untouched Korean textbook before class started. I could have gone to the bookstore to buy a new one, but it was a hassle, so I just stole a copy from the classroom next door. Lots of kids had the same idea, and there was suddenly a shortage of the formerly unpopular textbook.
When the semester started, I should have paid closer attention to the Shrew’s belly. If I knew when she was going on maternity leave, I could have prepared more for her replacement’s arrival. I would have actually studied for Korean class, or at least not lost my textbook. Honestly, no one in our class imagined that the Shrew would really have a baby. We thought that her bulging belly was filled with several years’ worth of fat. So when the Shrew left to give birth a month after the school year started, we were shocked. There were still rumors in school that she hadn’t disappeared to have a baby, but to take a massive dump.
Some of us kids believed it was possible to overcome a certain amount of age difference in a relationship. When I thought of the new homeroom teacher, though, I didn’t imagine him taking an interest in me: that was inconceivable. When I saw him, I thought of my mother. Our teacher was thirty-three, and so was Mom. Age-wise, they were perfect for each other. The homeroom teacher was the type of person matchmakers wanted. He had a good job, looked presentable, and most importantly, he was considerate. It would be good for Mom to have a young partner, and if they started dating, my life at school would get easier. Plus, the teacher didn’t seem like the cheating type. You got that feeling looking at him. This was extremely important. Dad had been a cheater, so Mom didn’t miss him much. The only thing cheaters were good for was dying, and I didn’t want Mom to become widowed a second time. This is why her new boyfriend was not allowed to cheat.
“Sir, what kind of food do you like?” I asked the new teacher.
“What kind of food do I like?” he repeated.
I asked about his palate the way people asked about blood type or zodiac sign. When he didn’t answer right away, I gave him some choices. One: junk food. Two: health food. My teacher smiled widely and then answered that he preferred health food. Ding-ding, correct! His answer proved he was a good match for my mom. As our one-on-one meeting ended, I asked him another question, like I was trying to hit a second bull’s-eye.
“What do you like more, meat or vegetables? Do you eat foods like chicory?”
“I drink green juice every morning,” he said.
The blades of his juicer whirred in my ear. They sounded like they were clapping to congratulate these two people—my teacher and my mom—for meeting each other. Goosebumps broke out on my arms, as if my entire body were absorbing the vibrations. I imagined Mom walking next to my homeroom teacher while they drank green juice together. A match made in heaven! If they start dating, Mom wouldn’t be so bored, and she’d pay less attention to me.
