Re Jane

VIKING

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First published by Viking Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2015

A Pamela Dorman Book / Viking

Copyright © 2015 by Patricia Park

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ISBN 978-0-698-17078-0

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

To Umma and Abba

“Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!”

—
Jane Eyre

H
ome was this northeastern knot of Queens, in the town (if you could call it a town) of Flushing. Northern Boulevard was our main commercial thoroughfare, and two-family attached houses crowded its side streets. They say the neighborhood once contained a hearty swath of the American population, but when I landed here as an infant, Flushing was starting to give way to the Koreans. By the time I graduated from college in 2000, Northern looked like this: Daedong River Fish Market, named after the East River of Pyongyang. Chosun Dynasty Auto Body, run by the father of a girl from my BC calc class. Kumgang Mountain Dry Cleaning, owned by my uncle's accountant's cousin on his mother's side. This was my America: all Korean, all the time.

Flushing. The irony was that none of its residents could pronounce the name of their adopted hometown; the Korean language lacked certain English consonants and clusters. The letter
F
was assimilated to an
H
or a
P.
The adults at church would go
Hoo
before they could form the word, as if cooling it off their tongue. My uncle and aunt's rendition: Poo, Rushing. It could've been poetry.

Home was 718 Gates Street, Unit 1. It was my Uncle Sang's house, and I lived there with his family: his wife, Hannah, and my younger cousins, Mary and George. A few blocks away was his store. It was a modest-size grocery carrying a mix of American and Korean products, along with the usual emergency supplies—flashlights and batteries, candles and condoms. From Northern you could spot our green awning, bearing four white letters in all caps: F-O-O-D. Below it were large wooden tables stacked with pyramids of fruit.

One day in late summer, I was crouched in one of the aisles, turning cans of beans face out and flush with the lip of the shelf. I heard someone say, in Korean,
“Jane-ah. I heard about Lowood. What a shame.”

It was Mrs. Bae, the wife of the pastor of our church. I stood and ducked my head into a bow. At five foot seven, I towered over most of the women of Flushing. Her words were like salt sprinkled on the sting of being the only one in my graduating class still bagging groceries and restocking merchandise. The economy—with the exception of the tech industry—was, for the most part, still booming. I'd had a job with Lowood Capital Partners lined up since my senior year last fall, never anticipating that in the months that followed, here's what would happen: The company would be heavily leveraged in dot-com investments, the CEO would resign after accusations of insider trading, and the interim CEO would issue a hiring freeze. My job offer had been rescinded.

Mrs. Bae went on. About how her daughter Jessica worked such long hours at Bear Stearns yet still she would wash the rice and do the laundry and help her little sister with her homework after she got home. How Mrs. Bae felt undeserving of such a devoted daughter. What Mrs. Bae didn't know was that “Jessica the PK” (Pastor's Kid) had cut class every Thursday our senior year of high school to shoot pool at Amsterdam Billiards in the city.

“I'll tell our Jessica to help you,”
Mrs. Bae said, staring back with the usual curious expression she seemed to reserve for me. You'd think that after all these years I would've gotten used to it. I didn't. I averted my eyes, focusing on the hairline cracks running through the floor tiles.

“No, no, that's too much trouble for you.”
That was Sang, approaching us.

They had the usual exchange—“
No, no trouble at all, you and Mary's mother must be so worried.” “Eh, what can you do?”
—before my uncle turned his head sharply, shooting me a look. I thanked Mrs. Bae. He shot me another look—that was my cue to go get her some fruit, on the house. And none of the cheap stuff.

That was the power of
nunchi.
There's no word for it in English; perhaps its closest literal translation is “eye sense.” My friend Eunice Oh sometimes likened
nunchi
to the Eye of Sauron: an all-knowing stink eye that monitored your every social misstep. Other times she said it was like the Force, a way of bending the world to your will. But Eunice had an annoying tendency of bringing everything back to
Star Wars
or
Star Trek,
Tolkien or Philip K. Dick. For me
nunchi
was less about some sci-fi power and more about common sense. It was the ability to read a situation and anticipate how you were expected to behave. It
was filling your elder's water glass first, before reaching for your own. The adults at church always said that good
nunchi
was the result of a good “family education.”

On my way to the fruit stalls, I was intercepted by Mrs. O'Gall, a petite Irish granny who frequented Food every day. Cradling a head of iceberg lettuce, she demanded help with the Hellmann's mayonnaise: “It's too damn high.”

The jars on the shelf were at hip level—I handed one to her. Mrs. O'Gall shook her head. “No, gimme the smaller one.” When I told her that eight-ounce jars were the smallest we carried, she said, “Unbelievable. You people.” She told me to put in a special order from our distributor.

“Yes, Mrs. O'Gall. I'm sorry, Mrs. O'Gall.”

She walked away with her iceberg and mayo, leaving a trail of her particular scent in her wake. Mrs. O'Gall had that unwashed smell the elderly sometimes had, one that made you think of brown paper bags left out in the rain and chin whiskers and absentee adult children. It was the smell of abandonment.

I returned to Mrs. Bae with the fruit, but she was gone. I was making my way back to the shelf of beans when another customer stopped me. Then I rushed to man the second cash register—a line of new customers had formed. The delivery guy from the beverage distributor cut to the front, waving a pink invoice at me. “Who checked your cases?” I demanded. “The little guy,” he said. I knew he was referring to our stock boy, Hwan. I jerked my head, motioning him to the back of the line—we were
his
customers, so he could very well wait—and when I reached him, I paid him with the dirty twenties we kept at the bottom of the cash drawer, the crisper bills reserved for the shoppers.

I was just about to leave the register when Mrs. O'Gall returned; I processed her mayonnaise refund, even though she'd opened the jar and removed one teaspoon. Then it was over to the wooden stalls, to pick out the bruised and dented fruits from their unblemished counterparts.

I was making my way back to the bean cans again when I saw Sang. His was a harried gait, and it always struck me as less a rush
to
his destination than a hasty departure
from
—like he couldn't get out of a place fast enough.

He frowned when he arrived at where I stood. “You do this?” he said, handing me a pink invoice—the soda delivery I'd just signed off on. My uncle usually spoke to me in English, even though it was his weaker language.

I could hardly expect him to clarify. Sang had a very specific organizational system for running Food; he knew that store and its many intricacies like the back of his chapped hands. The problem was, that knowledge was all in his head and none of us had access to it. And he expected you to read his mind.

Sang had other rules, too, that I'd had to learn over the years:

No chew gum.

No back-talk to customer.

No act like you so special.

No ask stupid question.

“Go to office get last week invoice,” he ordered. I rushed past the aisles of produce and dairy cases to the back corner of the store. This was our “office”—cardboard boxes flattened into walls and duct-taped to leftover PVC pipes. The desk was a slab of scrap wood suspended by L-brackets drilled into the concrete wall. The chair was an upended milk crate. As I rummaged through the banana box on the floor—our version of an accounts-payable/accounts-receivable department—I thought of my interview at Lowood on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center. My cubicle would have had walls of sleek frosted glass, overlooking an office that overlooked the river.

I found the soda invoice. In my haste to get back to Sang, I tripped on the cinder block propped against the door of the walk-in refrigerator box. I would have pitched forward if Hwan hadn't dropped his hand truck and rushed to break my fall.

“You okay, Miss Jane?” he said, steadying me to my feet.

“That stupid door,” was all I managed, my cheeks flushed with embarrassment. The problem with the walk-in was that unless you knew how to jiggle the handle a certain way, the door failed to latch. The refrigerator kept things cold as it was, but if it was sealed properly, its contents would stay preserved for up to three days, even if the power blew out. The door, as it stood, was a liability. But whenever I brought the subject up to Sang, he'd wave my words away.
If not broke, why you gotta fix?
For Sang the inverse was also true: Everything broken could be jerry-rigged to working order. It was his own special form of madness—he never stopped trying to salvage the unsalvageable.

“Why you take so long?” Sang said when I returned with the invoice. He jabbed a finger at the offending signature.
My
signature. Apparently we were supposed to receive credit for two more soda cases, but the new invoice didn't reflect that credit. I realized, with sinking stupidity, that I should have called for my uncle on the spot, instead of taking the deliveryman's word as a given. Things like this happened every now and again—the delivery guys would do a bait and switch, “pocketing” the extra pallet or two—but the store had been busy. I knew what Sang would have said if I'd paged him over the loudspeaker
—Why you ask stupid question? Where your
nunchi
?
—as though it were something I'd carelessly misplaced somewhere, like a set of keys or a receipt.

“Why didn't you just tell me about the credit?” I asked. “Then I would've known—”

“Don't talk back to your uncle,”
my aunt interrupted, walking toward us. Then, to her husband,
“It's Mr. Hwang, from Daedong Fish.”

Sang rushed away, and it was just Hannah and me. Her eyes studied mine.
“Are you trying to make his high blood pressure go up?”
she continued in Korean.

I toed a loose floor tile. Yet one more thing that needed to be fixed. I made a note to grab the contact cement and putty knife in the office.

“Don't you know how lucky you are?”
she said.
“You should be grateful.”

Hannah was echoing what everyone in this tangle of Queens thought about my situation. They knew all about my dead mother—I could see it in the way their eyes have fixed on me these past twenty years. Just as I knew who borrowed money from whom to start a business and which of those businesses were flourishing and floundering. I knew their children's SAT scores, their college acceptances and subsequent job offers, but I also knew who was dating whom, who was cheating on whom, where they went to get drunk or high.

In Flushing your personal business was communal property. Such intimate knowledge was stifling. I tapped a hand to my chest, seeking relief. I felt
tap-tap-hae
—an overwhelming discomfort pressing down on you physically, psychologically. When the walls felt as if they were closing in around you, that was
tap-tap-hae.
When the strap of your bra was fastened too tightly across your chest, that was
tap-tap-hae.
When you were trying to explain to the likes of Hannah how to turn on the computer, let alone how to operate the mouse, that was unbearably, exasperatingly,
tap-tap-hae.

I must have been frowning because suddenly I felt a harsh rap on my forehead: my aunt had flicked a finger at me.
“Stop that,”
she snapped
.
Hannah had a theory that scrunching your face led to early aging.
“
You
of all people need to worry about wrinkles.”

Then don't touch me,
I thought, but if I spoke the words aloud, I'd only set off the cycle anew.
Don't talk back. You should be grateful.
It was easier to comply silently. So one by one I loosened the features of my face. I became expressionless, unreadable.

Then Hannah pointed down the aisle to the shelves of beans.
“Why'd you make such a big mess over there? Go finish.”

As I reshelved the beans, I thought once more about that job at Lowood. Flushing and Food would have been an indistinguishable speck from the office windows. I'd have had the chance to see how a real business was run. Not Sang and Hannah's mom-and-pop operation: decidedly rustic, with none of the homespun charm.

I tapped my hand once more to my chest.
Tap-tap-hae.
All I wished was for this feeling to go away.