Table for One, page 24
* * *
Jinu said that his dream was to be “above average.”
“A person who can play Czerny 30 or higher, who can easily join a game of soccer as midfielder, who can dance—at least techno and break-dance—who earns a bit of money, who’s in better health than others, who isn’t excluded from the group no matter where they are! Maybe not the best, but better than average. That’s my dream. I want to be someone like that.”
Hearing him speak, I felt like I knew a lot of similar people.
“I know people like that,” I said. “The Hongdo Park my mother gave birth to is supposedly ‘above average.’ ”
“But then how are you not?” Jinu thoughtlessly blurted out before quickly covering his mouth with his hands.
We could hear a faint clatter by the front gate. Considering how the other kids weren’t really saying hello to the person making the noise, it had to be the art teacher. Of course: she walked by with her heels clacking in six-eight time. Did everyone have to move through life so quickly? Jinu and I were ambling along in four-four time. As he stepped forward, Jinu’s head started to bob as quickly as the art teacher’s had, then, after a bit, he returned to our original pace. I opened my mouth.
“My mom is so good at getting refunds that sometimes I wonder if she’ll exchange me for a refund. Since I’m not the kid she wanted.”
Jinu took a bite out of his cotton candy, wearing an ambiguous expression on his face.
“There’s no way your mom will return you,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
After Jinu walked away, his face buried in cotton candy, my gait grew even slower than four-four time. If I went home, my tongue would probably be dyed green from vegetables again. It would be a bit shameful to be given back to wherever I came from, but sometimes I did wish Mom would return me. I imagined she’d say something like this: “I watered this plant thinking it was a flower for my greenhouse, but it’s turned out to be a weed!”
And then the store employee would look Mom over and ask the following: “Did you purchase the plant with a card or with cash?”
“A card.”
“The plant’s not dead, is it? We can give you a refund as long as the date specified by the return policy hasn’t passed.”
“Yes, she’s a recent purchase. She’s not even old enough to have an ID card yet.”
The employee taps on the card reader like it’s a piano. Her skills are way beyond playing Czerny 30. The register dances, break-dances, as it spews out a receipt.
“Purchase cancellation,” the receipt says.
Mom looks satisfied as she sticks her credit card and the receipt in her wallet and then leaves the store. The employee uses my ear as a handle to pick up my body, and after judging that I can’t be recycled, she throws me down the drain. I fall down the pipe and drift into junk food heaven.
“This is your duty,” Mom said. “Just eat two bites. It’s pickled glasswort: it’s good for you.”
Dang it—of course Mom would be the gatekeeper to junk food heaven. Once again, she’d prepared a fresh dinner with twelve different kinds of vegetables, and she was staring at me intently. Could I get a refund for this meal?
“Mom, what did you want to be when you were a kid?” I asked.
Mom answered while holding out a chopstick full of pickled glasswort.
“A good wife and a wise mother,” she said.
Clearly, not everyone achieves their dreams.
3. ORGANIC CLUB
Change the world with dirt.
That’s what was written on the cover of Mom’s notebook. The notebook was a blacklist, given to Mom when she joined the organic club. On its first few pages was a list of cancerous ingredients that were going to destroy the earth, written in letters as small as sesame seeds. I’d taken a peek at the notebook once. The words inside were so long that if you told me it was a family tree for a Russian dynasty, I would have believed you. The unwieldy words were like Genesis 1: one name begat another, and another, and another, and the list continued on and on. It was so tedious that even if my own name was somewhere in the middle of the page, I wouldn’t have been able to find it.
Whenever Mom bought a product, she checked the ingredients one by one against the blacklist. Because of that, we’d wasted two whole hours at the cosmetics store. Just to buy a bottle of toner. Mom’s goal was to find cosmetics that didn’t list “parabens” as an ingredient. The news had been reporting on the chemicals: apparently if you used cosmetic products that had parabens in them, your chances of getting skin cancer within thirty years were 0.9 percent. It was horrible news, but the more horrible thing was that there were almost no cosmetics that didn’t contain parabens. Parabens were a preservative that made the products last longer. As my fussy mother and I turned the makeup counter upside down looking for the right product, an employee began talking to us faster and faster. It was clear that she was growing anxious. When she saw that we’d selected yet another item and were checking the ingredients, she went into the storeroom, like she couldn’t handle it anymore. Soon she emerged and showed us a rare, dust-covered bottle.
“This doesn’t have anything in it,” she said.
Nothing in it! The rare, natural cosmetic she’d given us did contain sorbic acid, though. Sorbic acid was another substance that triggered cancer. Mom was sensitive to cancer. After Dad had died of cancer—no, even before—Mom’s life was a war against the disease. We finally left because she couldn’t find a makeup product without any dangerous substances. We went to the drugstore, and Mom bought several bottles of glycerin. She’d decided to make her own toner. My whole body was sore. Considering how many stores we’d gone into, we’d hardly bought anything at all. I was suspicious of why someone as meticulous as Mom had chosen to marry Dad.
My school’s front gate was the main venue for the ceaseless blacklist-inspired purge. Nonorganic sugar and wooden chopsticks from China, American corn and pizza cheese—they all disappeared. Elementary school kidnappings became a growing problem, and hats with brims were added to the blacklist. The kidnappers in the news wore hats to cover their faces, so it was decided that no one within three hundred meters of the school could wear a hat or a mask. Children weren’t exempted from the new rule. We couldn’t wear a hat anymore when going to school or coming home. Every morning during our assembly, those covering their faces were asked to think of the children.
“For the sake of the children, please refrain from wearing hats or masks.”
After a banner emblazoned with those words was hung over the gates, the cotton candy man started to act a bit awkward. He was always wearing a baseball cap decorated with three or four studs as he rode around, cotton candy dangling in clusters from his motorcycle. I’d never seen him without his hat. The cotton candy man and his baseball cap were stuck to each other like Siamese twins. Rumors spread that not even our mothers’ meddling could separate the two.
A “habitual” hat wearer: this was how the organic club moms designated the cotton candy man. They gently suggested a couple of times that he take off his cap, but the cotton candy man didn’t understand why he should. Soon, his status had changed: to an “intentional” hat wearer.
The more you’re told to stop doing something, the more you want to do it. That’s how it was. Seeing the cotton candy man insist upon wearing his hat even though he was told not to—that excited the salivary glands of us kids. Every afternoon, we bought cotton candy to commemorate our release from prison. One day, I saw my mom out front. She hadn’t come to pick her daughter up from school, she’d come to scold the person waiting with treats for the newly released prisoners: the cotton candy man.
The organic club moms sometimes mobilized like they were crime scene investigators. Mostly they were just on the lookout for flashers, who’d try to excite the lower-grade students, or they were cracking down on junk food. The front of the school was like a stage for the moms. They wore green clothing and stood exactly one meter apart from one another, so if you looked at them from a distance, they resembled trees bordering the street. There were a lot of trees. Sometimes trees I’d never even seen would nag at me. Not just me: the trees interrupted everyone passing through the gate.
“Please take your hat off. There are children around.”
Someone stepped forward from the organic club crowd. The cotton candy man revved the engine to his motorcycle, his attitude toward the moms nastier than ever. Vroom vroom. Drowned out by the sound, the organic club’s rallying cry still didn’t change.
“This is your duty,” they told the cotton candy man. “It’s a rule you have to follow.”
The next person to step forward was my mom. I didn’t have the courage to walk up to her, so I watched from a distance. There was a manhole at my feet. Twenty small, round openings were drilled into the manhole cover. I wanted to go inside one of them and hide.
“If you want to be an ethical businessperson, you can’t do this,” she scolded him.
“Ethical businessperson?”
The cotton candy man had a vacant expression on his face. The man’s head and hat were eventually separated, according to the ethics of business. Without his hat, his forehead showed off a rough-looking scar. He looked like someone who’d been struck by lightning. A few days later, the cotton candy man was back to wearing his hat. Apparently, scars didn’t match the school’s image. The school began to allow people to wear a specific kind of hat: pink hats, like the one the cotton candy man was now required to wear. Pink was our school’s official color, seen everywhere from our gym uniforms to the wall paint.
* * *
Another banner was hung above the front gate to commemorate a maternal victory.
“A school without the shade of a hat brim means cheerful children.”
When the organic club moms saw the banner, they swelled with pride as if looking at a monument celebrating a victorious battle. The children tilted their heads, confused. So many signs hung from the gate that it was now constantly in shadow, making it hard to accept this place as a shade-free school. All the banners were changed to pink. School was starting to get absurd, even without the hat battle.
“Our field trip is on the nineteenth,” our homeroom teacher told us, wearing a pink necktie. “Don’t come to school that day: we’ll meet at Konkuk University Station, on line 2.”
The field trip was a legitimate reason to escape from school, but the destination was terrible. To think—it was a field trip, and we weren’t even going to an amusement park or to a mountain for hiking: we were visiting a university. No one was on the campus when we arrived. Some kids thought that meant April 19 was a university holiday and said they wanted to be in college, too. We were lucky that there was no one around to see us, looking silly as we walked around in single file, one after another. We toured the campus and the student cafeteria. The university visit was tolerable.
Our homeroom teacher made an impassioned speech about how we all needed to know why April 19 was an important day. It commemorated students who’d protested for democracy in the 1960s. When he asked, “What day is April 19?,” one child who’d been carefully listening to his monologue answered innocently: “Field trip day!”
Our teacher seemed so obsessed with April 19 that some kids began to whisper about whether April 19 might be the teacher’s birthday. April 19 was an important day for me, too. It wasn’t just the day of our field trip, and it definitely wasn’t our teacher’s birthday: it was the day my mom and my teacher met for the first time.
Mom shattered all my expectations about their first encounter, though. Mom was going to drive me to our class’s meeting place at the subway station, but first she stopped the car briefly at a kimbap store where we were regulars. Honestly, I didn’t understand why someone who loved organic and handmade things so much was buying kimbap for her daughter’s field trip, and from a twenty-four-hour carryout joint. Mom claimed that it was because the kimbap at this store was made from domestic black rice. But it smelled like excuses to me.
While Mom was packing up her kimbap order, I went to the bathroom on the side of the building and peed. As I was leaving the bathroom, I heard a strange sound. It was Mom’s voice. I snuck a glance around the corner and saw Mom getting all worked up in front of the car.
“You didn’t pick up your phone!” she shouted. “If you just park your car here, what am I supposed to do?”
A man came running from the end of the alley. He explained that he hadn’t heard his phone ringing, that he’d pull out his car quickly. But something about his actions seemed sluggish. The two things Mom hated most were illegal parking and not answering the phone. This man had done both. Now that he’d been caught, his day was ruined, too.
“You have no manners!” Mom continued. “Really, not answering the phone when you’ve blocked someone else’s car!”
The pitiful man had, of all things, lost his keys. As he scrambled to find them, Mom’s patience reached its limit. Her shadow traced an imposing shape on the ground. The man’s shadow, on the other hand, looked tiny.
“This isn’t parking, you were basically trying to abandon your car,” Mom said to him.
The man’s movements grew a little faster. He checked the front and back of his suit and took off his sunglasses. In that moment, I saw his face. It was my homeroom teacher!
“You don’t have a key?” Mom questioned. “Are you sure you’re not trying to get rid of your car?”
I ran toward the front of the parked car and pointed to the note on the dashboard.
“He’s not throwing it away. Look, it’s written right here,” I said. “ ‘Temporarily parked’ …”
Mom kept repeating the same words, like she was deaf and blind.
“Were you disposing of your car just now?” she asked.
The note said he’d parked his car! Could she not read? Mom didn’t pay attention to me. Instead, she shot fire from her eyes at the man. He was flustered by my mom’s imposing voice. Then he noticed me, hidden behind this unfamiliar woman. Our eyes met. The sky spun like sugar candy melting inside a ladle.
“Hongdo!” he shouted.
It seemed like an order. With my homeroom teacher calling my name, the atmosphere changed. My teacher stopped moving helter-skelter, and his eyes traveled between Mom and me. Then Mom began to act a little frazzled.
“Are you Hongdo’s … mother?” my teacher asked.
For a second, I could almost see an exclamation point flit across Mom’s face, like she was a cartoon character realizing something important. I hadn’t known that my teacher and Mom would meet so soon, and I also hadn’t known that the encounter would end this quickly. Mom’s face grew yellow, like a well-heated piece of sugar candy.
“No!” she yelled.
Mom then hurried into our favorite kimbap place. Only after she disappeared did my homeroom teacher find his car keys in his pants pocket. It was as if people really did emanate auras, and this black-rice kimbap shop was the sole point at which my mom’s and my teacher’s auras would ever overlap.
His hands still shaking, my teacher started his car’s engine. He asked again if the woman was my mother. I was conflicted for a moment. She had already denied her maternity, so could I really say that she was my mom?
“She’s my aunt,” I explained.
Only after parting with my teacher did I realize that I’d lied pointlessly. Mom … aunt … what was the difference?
Mom finally took me all the way to the field trip site and then hastily left. Mom said that there was no way she could run into my homeroom teacher again. She couldn’t pretend to be my aunt. She told me that someday she’d introduce herself to him properly, but now wasn’t the time. She left me and my black-rice kimbap all by ourselves. I didn’t like the look of the kimbap, so I ate it up so fast that I hardly breathed until it was gone.
When I came home after the field trip, Mom was still wearing makeup as she pulled dusty organic sweet potatoes out of a box.
“What I did this morning was for your own good,” she said.
That was her excuse for lying to my teacher. If my classmates learned that I had a mother like this, I would become even more of a joke. As if everything were my fault, Mom started to complain about being stuck in the kimbap joint for over ten minutes that morning.
“How could I have known he was your teacher?” she asked. “He looks so young, I would have thought he was a college student—ugh.”
“He’s thirty-three.”
Mom didn’t reply. Only after I pushed her to ask me questions about my teacher did she ask the following: “How many kids does he have?”
“He’s not married,” I answered.
“He’s thirty-three and doesn’t have kids or a wife? Is he dating?”
Mom said it like she didn’t understand how someone could be single.
“It’s strange not to have anyone in your life at thirty-three,” she said. “He must be in a lot of debt.”
“He’s not in debt!” I argued. “He’s not!”
My mom’s pessimism made me upset, and I didn’t want to finish my dinner. I’d barely sat down when she said, gulping down a spoonful of soup, that my teacher’s car looked shoddy. I replied that you couldn’t judge someone by appearances.
“Are you admitting that he’s attractive?” I asked her grouchily. That was my start as a timid matchmaker. Mom didn’t answer and for a while just picked up dried slices of daikon and ate them. She sounded anxious as she chewed on the radishes. Mom found people who asked questions frustrating. She had the tendency to wait until the asker was about to die of curiosity before opening her mouth. Finally Mom spoke.
“He looked like the actor Leslie Cheung.”
4. FIRST SEMESTER ART CURRICULUM
My art teacher called me into the staff room and told me to look carefully at my drawing. I looked at it vacantly for a while, and then the art teacher said in a slightly condescending tone: “Here—is it supposed to be night in this picture?”
