Happy Birthday or Whatever (10 page)

“I don't know where to get marijuana. It's probably hard to get since it's illegal. But if you're interested, I can try to find out. There might be someone from Berkeley who'd know.”

“No, no I don't want it. Drug very bad for you. I hope you never do it.”

 

My mother keeps her breast on her cosmetic table. Among the bottles of anti-wrinkle cream and toner and palettes of eye shadow,
there is a gelatinous flesh-colored mound of silicon. The prosthetic doesn't feel like a real breast—it's much squishier and has no nipple—but it mimics the weight and shape of one. It sits in a special bra that has a soft cup for her healthy breast on one side and a special pocket for her prosthetic breast on the other side. She always wears her bra over a thin tank top because the elastic chafes the sensitive skin of her scars.

The right side of her chest, where her breast used to be, there is a wall covered in pale, soft skin. Small mounds of white scar tissue speckle the area. Underneath the thin, mottled skin, there is a layer of strong chest muscles that stretch over her chest plate, which protects her heart with a lazy valve. When the supportive bandages first came off around her chest, eight months after her mastectomy and three months after her car accident, her right shoulder kept on rising to meet her ear in an awkward half-shrug. There was no breast to weigh her shoulder down and no bandages to hold the shoulder muscles back. The muscles in her shoulder and chest had not adjusted yet. She kept on using her hand to push down her shoulder.

“It won't go down. It make Mommy so frustrate.”

Under the guidance of her doctor, she learned exercises to help loosen the muscles in her shoulder and stretch and strengthen the muscles in her chest. The exercises were painful, I could tell by her wincing when she practiced lifting her arms straight to the side like an airplane.

“How badly does it hurt? Maybe you need to take a rest.”

“It hurt but you know, I have to do. I have no choice. I have to practice so I can play golf.”

Even after she completed chemotherapy and went into remission and her scars had healed, my mother did not want reconstruc
tive surgery and a breast implant. She wanted that part of her body and that part of her life gone forever.

“Why I need breast? I have no baby, I not need breast, right?”

“I thought I was the baby!”

“Anne, you have your own breast.”

So her doctor fitted her with a prosthetic breast. She wears the same clothes she has always worn; she never wore low-cut blouses or dresses so the prosthetic is never a problem. She plays golf better than ever, placing in tournaments. She's in great health; in fact, she's probably healthier than me. When I visit her, she gives me hard hugs and crushes me against her chest, and I forget about everything.

Occasionally, when my mother is lying in bed, under her electric blanket watching TV or reading, she calls for me. She doesn't bellow my name as she normally uses, but instead she whimpers. “Anne…Anne…you there?”

I immediately stop what I'm doing and run to her side. My mother does not tolerate weakness, so when she whimpers and groans softly in pain, I start thinking about tumors again. Maybe this time it isn't a tennis ball, but an orange or a grapefruit growing in her body somewhere. My stomach tightens and my fists clench and my brain struggles to shut off.

“Anne?”

“I'm here, are you OK? You look pale.”

“Can you get your old, sick mother a glass of water?” she says in Korean. She smiles at me weakly.

“Are you OK? Do you want me to get you anything else?”

“No, no I'm OK. Maybe I need hot tea.”

“Just tea, anything else?”

“Maybe some chocolate.”

“OK, tea and chocolate. That's it?”

“Cookie.” She laughs softly.

“OK, tea, chocolate, cookie.”

“And fruit.” She laughs a little louder. “Don't forget bring knife. And napkin. Maybe you can go get ice cream for me? I like green tea mochi from Trader Joe's.” She explodes into laughter and claps her hands together. “I'm too lazy to get myself.”

It's a cruel joke and I fall for it every time, but I never laugh harder.

I
n my sophomore year high school, one of my best friends read
Diet for a New America
by John Robbins and decided to become vegetarian. Eating animals, Alyson explained to me, was bad for the Earth, bad for your health, and like totally bad for animals. Livestock was pumped full of antibiotics, hormones, appetite stimulants, and tranquilizers and then they were debeaked, dehorned, and castrated so they could wind up on our kitchen table and in our bodies where their flesh would slowly fester and poison us
and cause heart disease, tumors, and a black soul. I did not want a black soul; I wanted to keep it fresh and yellow. Like a squash. So, I became vegetarian too. I didn't even bother reading the book. I figured if John Robbins could convince Alyson, then he could convince me. Done and done.

“WHAT?”

“No meat. I'm vegetarian.” My mother and I were sitting on the living room floor, folding laundry. I crumpled Mike's shirt into a tight, wrinkled ball and tossed it aside. I figured if he wasn't going to help us, then I wasn't going to help him. “It's a better way of life.”

“Better for who? You not eat meat, you get very sick. Then you die.”

“Actually, you're wrong. Meat makes people sick. It's bad for you.”

“What you mean bad for you?”

“It causes heart attacks and stuff.”

“No, Anne, you cause heart attack. Who tell you this?”

“John Robbins.”

“Who John Robbin? You friend at school? Teacher? I want have talk with him.”

“No, no, his family started Baskin-Robbins.”

“He ice cream man? What do ice cream man know? When you get so crazy? How can you be Korean without meat?”

“Grandma is Korean, and she's Buddhist and vegetarian.” Actually I knew my mother's mother wasn't really vegetarian, but I thought I'd try to slip that by my mother.

“Anne, Grandma eat meat!”

My grandmother is quite active at her small Korean Buddhist temple in Los Angeles. I used to accompany her to her temple, which is actually a two-story house converted into a temple, and
play with my stuffed animals behind a large golden statue of the Buddha. I also used to take a burning stick of pine incense and run around with it, pretending to be an Olympic torchbearer.

“Yeah I know, I know, but she's not supposed to eat meat. She's gonna go to Buddhist hell, where everyone is vegetarian.” I laughed at my own joke. Clever, clever girl.

“So that mean you go hell too because everyone in heaven eat meat.”

OK, maybe not that clever. Mother 1, Annie 0. “Whatever.”

“Grandma break rule because she know meat is good. She only vegetarian at temple. She say she vegetarian enough.” My mother reached over and unfolded one of my shirts I had folded. “Fold this again. Why you fold like monkey?”

“It doesn't matter—I'm still not eating meat. And I can fold my own shirts anyway I want.”

“I not cook for you. You starve.”

“I can cook for myself.”

My mother laughed. “Like what?”

“I can make spaghetti.”

“Everyday? Who eat spaghetti everyday?”

“Italians.”

“Who you are? So-pia Loren?”

“I can get a cookbook. I can make us all vegetarian food. We can all be healthy together.”

“No one eat it.”

“More for me then.”

My mother sighed and studied my face. Her eyes slowly moved over my eyes, nose, and cheeks. She seemed to be looking at me for the very first time; I was growing up and making my own bad decisions about my life, just like normal adults. “How long you be vegetarian? One year?”

“Forever.”

“Forever?”

“Forever.”

“That long time, Anne. Forever is until you die.”

“I know what forever means, and I mean it. Forever.”

“You eat fish then.”

“No, fish is meat, and I don't eat meat.”

My mother smiled slyly as she folded a pair of my pants. “You remember when you little you want to be mailman. You want to drive little car. Then you want to be ballet dancer and you take one ballet class and you say, ‘Mommy, my feet hurt so much,' and you cry
waah waah
.”

“This is it. I'm a vegetarian. I'm never eating meat again.”

“OK, we see.”

The next week my mother prepared all my favorite dishes, which all happen to have meat: chicken stewed with potatoes and carrots, brisket slow-cooked in soy sauce, kim chee stew with pork, soy bean stew with clams and shrimp. I knew what she was doing, trying to lure me back to the dark side, the side rich with protein and iron and low in carbohydrates, but I remained strong. This was not a war over meat, but like any teenage rebellion, it was a war over will, Annie and John Robbins vs. Mother and Pretty Much Everyone in the World, including America and Korea. Luckily, Korean food is pretty vegetarian-friendly. Each meal has several side dishes that consist of some kind of salted, pickled, or fried vegetable. I was perfectly content to forego the main dish, which once stood proudly on four legs or had wings.

“What's wrong with Annie?” My father looked at my mother, confused. “She's not eating. Is she sick?”

“Very sick. Ask your daughter.”

“What's wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why you not eat?”

“Because I don't eat meat.”

“When did this happen?”

“Like forever ago. Last week. Where have you been?”

“I've been eating meat. Why are you vegetarian?”

“I already went through this. Meat is murder. It's bad for everyone. Even Earth.” I wrapped a piece of dried seaweed around some rice and stuffed it in my mouth.

“You have to eat meat. How will you live without meat?”

“I've been living pretty awesome without meat.”

My father looked to my mother for reinforcement. She rolled her eyes. “Don't bother,” she said in Korean, “your daughter does what she wants to do.”

“You have to cook her something without meat.”

“I'm not cooking anything special for her. She says she can take care of herself.”

“She's lying. She's fifteen, what does she know?”

“Actually, I'm sixteen.”

“Eat meat.”

“No.”

“I told you not to bother. Just leave her alone.”

“I mean it Annie, eat meat.”

“No.”

“How could you let her do this?”

“I didn't let her do anything. She did this all on her own.”

“Dad, it's not even an issue. It's just the way it is. Besides, I'm totally full and didn't even eat meat. How about that?”

Eyeing my bowl of plant matter, my father cringed. “Why do you do this to yourself? How will you eat my steakie?”

My father calls steak “steakie,” which is a derivative of the Korean word for
steak
,
suh-tay-kuh
. My father prides himself on two things in the kitchen. The first is “steakie” for which he takes two slabs of London broil and sprinkles salt, pepper, garlic powder, and MSG on each side. After he's done broiling it, he uses scissors to cut the meat into perfect one-inch cubes that are tough and chewy enough to unhinge jaws. His second specialty is Rice Krispies treats, in which he uses margarine instead of butter, cuts the amount of marshmallow, and adds peanut butter, vanilla extract, peanuts, and raisins. The mixture is extremely crunchy, with the texture and flavor of drywall with peanuts and raisins. He packs it into a pan so tightly that they turn into sandy bricks that shred the roof of my mouth into a bloody mess. Once my father caught me making normal light and fluffy Rice Krispies treats, using the traditional, unaltered recipe that the good people of Kellogg's developed, tested, and approved, and he looked so hurt that I never did it again. I used to plead for both of my father's specialties until I tried the real versions, but by then it was too late. My father had built his entire identity in the kitchen around chewy meat dice and drywall.

“I guess steak is the one thing I'll miss.” I smiled apologetically and helped myself to more sautéed bean sprouts.

Because I like to make my life as difficult as possible, I became vegetarian right before Thanksgiving. My family always hosts all the relatives for Thanksgiving and my mother spends the day cooking a traditional turkey dinner plus a large Korean meal. I told her once many years ago that Thanksgiving was too much work, that she should just stick to the turkey and skip the Korean food, and she scoffed and asked what kind of meal didn't have Korean food? When I explained that the pilgrims probably didn't eat Korean food, she laughed and said that they missed out—had they eaten Korean food they probably wouldn't have starved.

During the course of Thanksgiving dinner, my brother outed me and announced to the entire family that I had become vegetarian “like some kind of dirty hippie” and soon all my aunts, uncles, and cousins were riding the express train to Nagsville.

“You're going to get jaundice, and if you're lucky, you'll die.”

“Leave me alone, Mike.”

“Do you eat anything that casts a shadow?” My cousin Andy is athletic and health-conscious, but even he decided that eating vegetarians was better than being one.

“Hey, isn't your belt made of leather?” My cousin Woo-jay asked me in Korean, “Isn't that made from animals?”

“No, it's fake,” I lied.

“What about seaweed, do you eat that?” my uncle asked me.

“Yes.” I sighed and concentrated on my broccoli.

“What about yogurt, do you eat that?”

“Yes.”

“What about eggs, do you eat that?”

I groaned. “Yes, Uncle, yes.”

“Why not become a vegan? A Communist one. Start some kind of revolution against meat. Against everything delicious with lungs.”

“I said, leave me alone, Mike.”

“But you're just skin and bones, if you don't eat meat, you'll start fainting,” my aunt remarked in Korean. She tried to put turkey on my plate but I moved it away.

“Please, no turkey. Really, I'm fine.”

“OK try some of this,” my uncle slopped a spoonful of stuffing on my plate.

“There's turkey in it!” I pushed the stuffing to the side.

“But you can't see the meat so it doesn't count. Stop being difficult.”

“Meat tastes good, you should eat it,” Tina said simply. She is the nice one in the family. “Just eat some turkey and everyone will leave you alone.”

“Everyone, please, I'm fine, there's plenty of food here.” The truth was there was a ton of vegetarian food: broccoli casserole, mashed potatoes, yams, beets, fried rice, three kinds of kim chee, scallion pancakes, fried tofu, and fruit salad. Clearly, there was enough food to feed an entire kibbutz of dirty vegetarian hippie revolutionaries prone to fainting, but without meat, I would starve to death, if jaundice didn't kill me first.

 

After my mother got cancer and then beat it into submission, she became more conscious of her health. She bought an enormous juicer that was powerful enough to squeeze juice from a rock, and proceeded to throw in everything she could get her hands on: apples, oranges, carrots, tomatoes, celery, beets, lettuce, persimmons, more or less everything in the produce aisle. She started making juices from strange combinations like apple-tomato-beet and celery-spinach-orange and offered me some, which I declined. I explained that I preferred to chew my vegetables. She talked to both her Western and Eastern doctors about dietary supplements and started taking vitamins, something I've never had the energy to research. She started eating a lot of oatmeal because it was better for her stomach, which was prone to ulcers, and drastically reduced her caffeine intake, another thing I've never been able to do but know I should.

“Anne, see? Now I eat like you. Vegetarian.”

I had returned to college to start my second year and knew my mother had changed her eating habits, but I would never have thought my mother would actually become vegetarian. “What? Seriously? You don't eat any meat at all?

“No, no meat. Only I eat fish, a lot of fish.”

“That's not vegetarian. You eat fish.”

“But I eat a lot of vegetable. So healthy! I think my skin feel better. How come you skin so dry? Maybe you not eat enough vegetable.”

“I just have dry skin.”

“Eat more vegetable.”

“I do eat vegetables. That's all I eat. I'm vegetarian. A real one.”

“Then maybe you need to eat fish.”

I groaned. I can never win. “So you're not eating beef?” There is always some form of beef on the table.

“Doctor tell me I have to watch my cholesterol, so I eat very, very little beef. Better for me. See? I'm vegetarian, like you.”

My mother gave me a few tofu recipes that were simple enough to prepare on my own and talked about the fruits and vegetables that were high in antioxidants and vitamins that could improve my skin. She told me to drink a lot of water and eat more beets. I imagined she sounded a lot like John Robbins, though I didn't really know since I hadn't read his books.

A few weeks later, my mother had fallen off the quasi-vegetarian wagon just as fast as she had gotten on it. She decided that life with very little mammal and poultry was not a life she wanted to live.

“Vegetarian so hard. What you eat?”

“I eat plenty.”

“I get so hungry, I keep eat and eat and eat. I waste so much time.”

“I thought you liked to eat. Everyone likes to eat. You know, people complain when they don't eat.”

“Everything taste same.”

“No they don't. Spinach and mushrooms do not taste the same, and tofu tastes different too.”

“I miss beef and chicken and pork too much. They miss you too.”

“That's ridiculous. They miss me because they know I won't eat them.”