Happy Birthday or Whatever (4 page)

“Go to kitchen. Give me something to spank.”

All the muscles in my neck and arms went stiff. This was a new situation. Normally she would storm directly to the middle drawer under the stove and grab a spoon or a spatula. Or she would dash to the front door and find the long shoehorn. Or she would find my red Snoopy ruler. But this time, it was my choice. I couldn't make my legs move.

“Get it from kitchen. Now! Go!” She sprayed angrily. Ants scattered from the poison, wiggled around in circles, and then stopped dead.

I walked slowly toward the kitchen, my chest hiccupping from crying. I stalled and looked back at her, pleading with my puffy, pink eyes, trying to convince her that I had learned my lesson and didn't need a spanking and would never, ever lie again and would study even harder. Copy each word twenty times. A hundred even.

“ANNIE, why you wait? GO!”

I went into the kitchen and looked around. I knew that if I chose something soft, like a towel or basting brush, she'd get even angrier and find something herself—not a good idea. But, I didn't want it to be too painful. I stood in the kitchen, thinking about my options.

“Why you take so long? What you do?”

I opened a drawer. Barbecue tongs? No, not good. A cheese-grater? No, too dangerous. A rolling pin? Definitely not.

“Come back here now!”

I went with an old rice spoon. I was familiar with its sting. It was made out of dark wood and shaped like an oversized screwdriver. It used to have a long, thin handle, until it broke one day while my mother was spanking my brother and me after we had wrestled and pummeled each other with all the living room cushions. Years of mixing, scooping rice, and spanking children had taken its toll on the spoon, and the handle had snapped in half. Right after it broke, we were all silent. Even my mother was a little shocked; she seemed incredulous that she hit us with enough strength to split wood. Still, she smacked us each once more on the thighs, testing out the more aerodynamic and portable version. It suited her fine and fit better in the drawer, so she kept it around.

I walked back to the living room and nervously gave my mom the broken spoon. She seemed to approve of my choice.

“Annie, do you understand why you get spank?

“Yes…” I gulped and choked. My toes curled as I tried to prepare myself for the sting, but it wasn't the spanking that would hurt.

“Why?”

“B-b-because I hid the test.”

“And why you hide test?”

“B-b-because I got a b-b-bad grade.”

“You have to study harder. You have to get A. You have to promise never, ever lie to Mommy.”

“I promise, I promise.”

She hit my palms a few times and remembered it wasn't good for piano, so she moved on to my bottom. Doubled over her lap, I sobbed. My tears and drool collected in a small pool near her bare feet. I went up to my room, where my stuffed animals consoled me, and I slept.

The next day my mother brought home several glossy workbooks, each about an inch thick. She pushed them across the kitchen table. One of the covers pictured a classroom of gap-toothed children and a teacher. One kid reached his hand high in the air with a sense of urgency and excitement. He looked as if he needed to go to the bathroom.

“See, Annie, this for you. You get A in spelling now. Always. You do five page every week. And you do five page English and five page math.”

“But I'm doing good in English and math—”

“ANNE!”

She called my extra worksheets “Mommy homework.” Aside from the homework my teachers assigned in regular school and Korean Saturday school, I now had to complete fifteen pages of math problems, English exercises, and spelling worksheets. I noticed that the math and English workbooks were for the grade level above me, but I didn't protest. With the spanking still fresh in my mind, I silently completed my Mommy homework. I started receiving perfect scores on my spelling tests again—partly from the spelling workbooks, but mostly because my mother made me copy each word twenty times. She drilled me relentlessly—over every meal, in car rides to my piano lessons, during my baths, while I dried the dishes.

Near the end of the school year, my teacher held a class spelling bee. The top three finishers would compete in a school-wide contest later that month. Twenty-eight of my classmates and I stood in a line that wrapped around the room. Miss Jensen called out a word and if a student misspelled it, he or she had to take a seat. I watched as my classmates sat down one by one. I defeated them easily—
picnic, measure, astronaut
—they were all words I could spell backward. I was the last person standing, the best speller in class, and I enjoyed the glory for about two seconds. Then I realized that I'd be competing against older students in front of the entire school. There was no way I could win. The prize for winning the class spelling bee was to be humiliated in front of the whole school.

“Spelling bees are stupid. I hate spelling.”

“Not stupid, Anne. It like game.”

“It's a stupid game.”

“You try. We try together. Maybe you win.”

“I don't want to win.”

“You have to try, Anne.”

My teacher gave me a list of words I should study—words that appeared on the fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade spelling tests. My mother put the math and English workbooks on hold while we studied the words together:
manufacture, extraterrestrial, whimsical, bureau.
I had no idea what these words meant, but I learned to spell them all in a month.

On the morning of the school-wide spelling bee, I woke up with terrible stomach cramps. I writhed in the bathroom, wishing I could jump down the sink and end up in the Pacific Ocean, swimming with the dolphins. My mother knocked and slid my spelling list under the door. I whimpered. I never wanted to spell anything ever a-g-a-i-n; I hated words and what they had done to me. I
started shaking. I was a quiet, shy kid in school and I preferred to die rather than stand on stage and spell
sincerely
.

“Anne, you come out now.”

I opened the door so my mother could see my pale sickly face and maybe take pity on me and let me stay home from school for the rest of my life.

“Mom, I don't want to go.”

“You have to go.”

“I feel sick.”

“No excuse. Go. Now. You be OK, I promise.”

On stage there was a long table where three teachers sat. Each had a clipboard, and one had a dictionary the size of a mattress. There were almost forty contestants, ranging from third to sixth grade. We sat in chairs near the stage, while the rest of the school watched in boredom. Parents were not invited; I couldn't even imagine competing in front of my mother. When my name was called, I slowly approached the stage. At first, I hoped that I wouldn't fall. Then I hoped that I would fall, break every bone in my body, be whisked away in an ambulance, and never have to spell again.

“Spell
garage.”

I sighed with a combination of relief and dread. Relief because it was an easy word. Dread because I knew I could spell it and would have to spell another word. And possibly another one and another one.

“
Garage
. G-a-r-a-g-e.
Garage
.” I whispered into the microphone.

“That is correct.”

I shuffled toward my seat. This continued for nearly two hours. As the words got harder—
sculpture, capacity, ingenious—
students began misspelling words. I managed to spell everything correctly
and I spelled my way to the final five students. In the final round, if a contestant misspelled a word, the next contestant had to spell it correctly and then spell a new word. I looked around at the last five students. I was the youngest; the others were fifth-and sixth-graders. I had beaten all the fourth-graders. I wore a Minnie Mouse sweatshirt while the other girls wore nail polish and lip gloss. I was scared of the boys; they looked like men. One had a moustache. I fidgeted in my seat until it was my turn again. I walked up to the microphone.

“Spell
lyre.
”

Easy, I thought, I can do this one. If there was one word I could spell, it was this one. I relaxed just the tiniest bit.

“
Lyre.
L-i-a-r.
Lyre,
”

“I'm sorry, that is incorrect.”

I was stunned.
Liar.
I knew how to spell it; they were lying to me. I walked back to my seat in a daze. How else can you spell
liar
? I fumed. They must've made a mistake. A lanky sixth-grade girl stepped to the microphone. She had long straight hair with feathered bangs and wore a jean skirt and ankle boots. She smiled confidently.

“
Lyre.
L-y-r-e.
Lyre.
”

“That is correct.”

What?
That couldn't be right. I looked at the teacher with the oversized dictionary. She nodded and gave her approval. What is a lyre? I simmered in my seat. I came in fifth. After all that work, I lost.

My mother picked me up from school. I slammed the car door and jerked on my seat belt.

“Mom, what's a lyre?”

“Someone who not tell truth.”

“How do you spell it?”

“L-i-a-r.”

“Some girl spelled it l-y-r-e.”

“Well then she spell wrong.”

“No, she got it
right.
The teachers said so. What's a lyre?”

“I don't know. We look up at home.”

We checked in our World Book Encyclopedia.

“Why didn't they just ask me to spell
harp
? That was no fair!”

“You supposed to ask for definition, Anne.”

“It was a mean trick! I hate spelling. I should've won!”

My teacher approached me the next day, patted me on the back, and handed me a thick booklet. It was full of words—hundreds of words in alphabetical order. Some contained more vowels than any other word I had ever seen. Other words were packed with x's and q's, and my tongue couldn't curl enough to pronounce them. The booklet contained the words most frequently used in the National Spelling Bee. Because I came in fifth place, I was the second alternate contestant for the regional competition. In the case that one of the three finalists and the first alternate couldn't make regionals, I would go in their place. My mother and I knew that I didn't have a chance of going. I wasn't sure if I wanted to go anyway because I hated spelling. But just in case, I kept the booklet on my bedside table. Every night before I drifted off to sleep, I opened it to one of the pages in the back to read the most exotic and challenging words. My favorite was
ytterbium
. I wondered what it meant.

I
n one of my favorite photographs of my mother, she is standing in front of her college in Seoul with three friends. Her eyes are half closed and her mouth is hanging wide open with her tongue slightly lolling out. Her head is tilted a little backward, allowing a clear view of her nostrils, which, for some reason, look larger than normal. Her elbows jut out at awkward angles as her hands reach up toward her face, in effort to hide it before the photographer clicked the shutter button. It's quite an unflattering picture of my
mother except for one thing: her clothes. She is wearing a striped A-line dress with a high collar and wide cuffs at the end of long, tight sleeves. The hemline floats well above her knee-high boots with stacked heels. Though the photograph is a little blurry and black and white, I can tell her outfit would have turned heads until they twisted right off their necks. Her friends, also caught in various states of graceless surprise, are wearing long, plain skirts and modest blouses. One young lady is wearing a boxy cardigan, most likely purchased in Mr. Rogers' neighborhood. Next to her friends, my mother looks modern—confident, independent, and sophisticated.

My mother always considered every moment in public as an opportunity to show off her sense of style, as if walking to the post office were like strutting down a catwalk. When she was young, friends and relatives called her a “Hollywood movie star” and asked for an autograph. Most Korean girls are raised to be demure and bookish, but my mother liked being the center of attention, and often demanded it. Clothing elevated her above the rest of the crowd and allowed her to distinguish herself as an individual, while still belonging to a special group—the glamorous and sophisticated elite. When she was older, my mother cringed at the mousy moms who wore sweats and flip-flops when they picked up kids from school: “They look like they just wake up!” My mother pulled up to my elementary school wearing a fitted blazer and pinstripe slacks, as if carpooling required business-professional attire. She felt that just because she was a stay-at-home mom, she didn't have to dress like one. She coordinated colorful silk blouses with sassy pleated skirts and Italian leather pumps. She wore sweaters in every style imaginable—V-neck, scoop neck, turtleneck, mock neck, cowl neck—and they came in mouth-watering colors that she described as lemon, lime, and raspberry. Even her socks were stylish—argyle, polka dots, stripes, checkers. One of my chores when I was
young was to fold laundry and matching her socks was the only fun part.

The labels of my mother's clothes announced sophistication and a certain level of financial comfort, but she picked through department store sales and outlet malls to buy brand-name fashion at sensible prices. While I squirmed on the floor or rearranged the clothes by color, she browsed the racks for hours, sliding hundreds of dresses, shirts, and skirts from one side to the other. Every few minutes she would hold up a garment and tell me its designer, and then critique their latest line for the season.

“Ralph Lauren for fall look so silly, with tight pants and big boot. It look like clothes for riding horse! Who has horse? Only farmer has horse and he wear Osh Kosh!”

Going to the mall with my mother was like going to fashion school. At six years old, I learned that cashmere came from goats and was thinner and warmer than wool. Before I knew how to multiply, I knew that linen garments wrinkled easily at first, but after several washings they would become softer and less prone to creases. Throughout elementary school, I learned exactly when plaid was in and when it was out, and when it was in again, and I found out what kind of people wore certain designers. Chanel was for the “old lady with big hair and little dog.” Calvin Klein was for the “girl who look hungry but not eat.” Liz Claiborne was for “lady with big hip and big purse.” Versace, she explained one afternoon at Nordstrom when I was nine, was for women who wore two diamond rings on each finger and fur during a Los Angeles winter.

“Veh-sahch-ee for lady who get many plastic surgery.”

“What's plastic surgery?”

“When you old you get plastic surgery to make young face. Young face, with no wrinkle. You know, wrinkle, like what you give Mommy!”

She laughed and showed me a Versace blouse. It was silk with red, bloated sleeves and a frenetic print of yellow lassos, blue flags, and white life preservers. It had oversized golden buttons in the shape of anchors.

“Ew, gross! Who'd wear that?”

She listed women at my Korean Saturday school who participated in this mutiny against good taste. Edward Kim mommy, Michelle Choi mommy, Sujin Lee mommy, to name a few. “You know, Anne, it cost lot of money.”

I looked for the tag. “How do you know? There's no price.”

“Because it
Veh-sahch-ee
. Not have price because people who buy not care price. They see ugly shirt—oh Mommy can't believe how ugly—and they see name and they buy even if three hundred dollar and they can—”

“THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS?”

It was the first time I had heard of such a thing, spending a large sum on such a revolting shirt, something made out of curtains pillaged from a yacht. Until that moment, I had assumed that hideous clothes cost nothing, because that is what I wore and that is how much they cost.

Even though my mother had refined taste, she did not use it when she dressed me. Instead, she dressed me the way my aunts dressed their children. Exactly like them. As in, I wore all their old clothes, which would've been fine had they just been normal. Because I was the youngest and smallest of all my cousins, my closet was the last stop on a hand-me-down's journey through time and two continents.

The odyssey would begin in Seoul, where my aunt would buy a new sweater for her twins Jung-ah and Jung-yun. In the beginning, they probably fought over the sweater, wanting to be the first to wear it. Then after a year, when the novelty had worn off, they
most likely mashed it into the back of a drawer along with their mismatched socks. Eventually the twins would unload the crumpled sweater on Yoon-chong. As the artist in the family, Yoon-chong probably modified the sweater, adding ribbons or pins, and she would wear it often, only to outgrow it and pass it to her younger sister. Yoonmi, as the free-spirited dancer in the family, probably ripped off the ribbons to put them in her hair and used the sweater as a jump rope until the stitches barely held together. Now the sweater, by this point faded and stretched to fit over the changing bodies of four girls, would migrate across the Pacific Ocean to Tina in Los Angeles. The shipping alone would've cost more than a dozen new sweaters, but my family has never understood cost efficiency. At the command of her mother, Tina would wear the sweater until her arms outgrew the sleeves and the cuffs no longer covered her watch. By the time I got the sweater, it would stink of dried fish and mothballs, and have several stains—pickled cabbage, soy sauce, mustard, chocolate. There would be a series of holes in each armpit and the hem would unravel at the slightest movement. But these would be the least of its problems. Even after my mother would dry clean and mend the sweater, it wouldn't be suitable for wearing. It wouldn't even be suitable to line the bottom of my rabbit's cage. No amount of chemical solvents and thread could repair a sweater that was hopelessly out of style. Still, my mother would force me to wear it anyway.

According to my mother's rationale, it would be wasteful and disrespectful to not wear these clothes after they traveled so far to get to me. Hand-me-down clothing was a way to keep in touch with our family in Korea, to hold on to the people we rarely saw. I'm sure my mother realized how atrocious these hand-me-downs were, but she figured that if these clothes were good enough for my Korean cousins, they were good enough for American me. She figured wrong.

At one point in Korea, any kind of English writing was cool when it appeared on clothes. When I was six, I received a gold, nylon vest printed with the words “The fun of soup bring Spring.” My mother didn't know what it meant, and neither did I, but she did know that my cousins were hip, so if I wore their clothes I'd be hip too, a kind of secondhand coolness. This vest also had matching nylon pants with the same phrase printed along the entire side of one leg. The
shoop-shoop
sound the pants made every time I moved was a constant warning to all that could hear and read that I was an undeniable loser. As I was learning how to read, I discovered what nonsense I was wearing, and when I could read, my classmates could read.

“What does that mean?”

“I dunno.”

“You think soup is fun?”

“No.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don't.”

“Soup's not fun, it's boring. You like soup, so you're boring. Ha, ha, ha, Annie Fannie Choi-boy likes soup! Chinese, Japanese, Indian chief!”

I went home and cried to my mother.

“Why you cry? You clothes match, see? Top and bottom go together. Everything match! It very nice set, Anne. It fashion in Korea!”

“But I'm not in Korea!”

“Anne, I tell you, if you in Korea, everyone say you look like model!”

“But I'm not in Korea! Everyone makes fun of me.”

“Then tell them you model in Korea and they bad kid. Very bad. And they make they mommy such shame.”

Another problem was that all the clothes I got were about a decade behind the current trend in Korea, which was yet another decade behind America in fashion. So according to my calculations, the hand-me-downs I was forced to wear in 1986, were actually from 1976, but looked like they were from 1966. So in the 80s when most of the kids were wearing neon-pink, peg-legged jeans, I was wearing dirt-brown bell-bottoms. When girls were wearing long, belted tops that fell off of one shoulder, I was wearing checkered polyester pant suits.

Then there were clothes that looked over two hundred years outdated. One of my mother's favorite outfits she forced me to wear was a pair of bright green knickerbockers and a white blouse with an unruly amount of lace ruffles at the collar and cuffs. It was an ensemble appropriate for Paul Revere's stable boy, and the first time my mother laid the outfit on my bed before school, I felt she had stopped loving me.

“NO, NO, NO! It's ugly, I hate it. I don't want to wear it.”

“No, Anne, it cute. Mommy like it very much.”

“Then
you
wear it!”

“ANNE!”

“I said, I don't want to wear it!”

“You have to wear, I make you wear.”

“I want to wear something else. THIS IS UGLY!”

“Anne, shhh, everyone like it. You teacher say ‘Oh Anne you so pretty today I wish I had same clothes!'”

She shoved me into the car, with my frilly blouse and knickerbockers soaked with tears. She assured me that I would be the center of attention, and she was right. My eight-year-old classmates stared until their eyeballs popped out of their heads and even my teacher looked confused. Miss Jensen didn't know how to tell me that the American Revolution was over.

Another one of my most memorable garments was a heavy wool, dark brown dress with a white lace collar and an oversized velvet bow. The dress came nearly to my ankles and looked as if it belonged in
The Little House on the Prairie—
all it needed was a bonnet and Michael Landon. My mother found this outfit so adorable that she forced me to wear it in the summer. On a 110-degree Southern California afternoon, the wool dress was not appropriate. I itched. I sweat. I cried. Then I took it off when she wasn't looking. Once this was at the grocery store. The ice cream SECTION OF OUR GROCER'S FREEZER WAS JUST BEGGING ME TO STRIP.

“
ANNE! What happen to you dress?”

“I don't know.”

“
WHERE IS DRESS?
”

“It's too hot, it's too itchy. I hate it.”

“YOU PUT DRESS ON NOW. YOU RUN IN STORE NAKED. I SO EMBARRASS. YOU MAKE MOMMY VERY MAD!”

My mother, so dramatic—It's not like I was naked. I started wearing an undershirt and shorts underneath the dress in order to minimize the contact between my skin and that itchy, burlap sack. This probably contributed greatly to my overheating, but choosing between a heat stroke and a rash was not easy.

When I turned nine years old, I started picking out my own clothes for school, and I salvaged a few articles that were possible to wear without being stoned by classmates. After years of negative reinforcement, I had figured out which clothing was acceptable. Miraculously, Tina had passed on a pair of plain, white pants, and I was finally making friends. These white pants were unobjectionable, unlike the red and white polka-dotted square-dancing dress with the fifty-pound pink petticoat (“But you love pink color!”).
My mother and I started shopping to buy clothes to supplement the ones from my cousins. Everything I picked out in the store was a solid color—white, beige, gray, black. The wide-legged, paisley jumpsuit didn't look so bad after a blue jacket covered half of it up. At last, pants and shirts and dresses, absent of extra zippers and large buttons that served no purpose, made me feel at peace.

When I started middle school, the trickle down of clothes from my older cousins finally stopped. They had all gotten their growth spurts, and their broad shoulders cruised at a higher altitude than mine. By twelve years old, I still measured less than five feet tall and weighed well under a buck. But even though I looked more like an eight-year-old than an eighth grader, my mother decided that it was time to dress like a sophisticated lady like herself.

“What you think this skirt, Anne you like? It tweed.”

“Ugh, Mom, It's like totally itchy. OH MY GOSH, it has a matching jacket TOO?”

That woman pushed tweed suits like a drug. At the junior's department at Robinson's, my mother could sniff out tweed in a rack full of cotton separates. She didn't understand that most junior-high girls just wanted to fit in, which meant looking like other junior-high girls, not Jackie O. or a basement couch.