Re Jane (2 page)

E
very Sunday we went to church. On the way you passed the American Roman Catholic church, the Korean Roman Catholic church, the Chinese Buddhist temple, the Pakistani mosque, and an ever-expanding assortment of Korean Presbyterian and Methodist churches. (The Korean Protestants, unlike their Catholic counterparts, seemed to multiply like Jesus's five loaves and two fishes.) Service was held in one half of a two-family house. After Pastor Bae gave the sermon, the mothers prepared
bibimbap
in the kitchen for the entire congregation.

Every Sunday, for as long as I can remember, Eunice Oh and I would find each other after the service. She'd always been the same Coke-bottle-glassed girl since childhood. In truth she and I were bound together less by common interests than by our differences from
them,
the more popular kids in our year: Jessica Bae—Pastor Bae's daughter, who just graduated from Columbia. James Kim, who went to Wharton and was about to start at Lehman—his parents owned a deli downtown. John Hong, who was at Sophie Davis—his father's herbal-medicine practice was down the block from Food. Jenny Lee, who went to Parsons and now did graphic design for
CosmoGirl!
magazine—her mother owned a nail salon on the Upper East Side, but her father graduated from Seoul National and, according to my Aunt Hannah, “was too proud to get a menial job.”

But this was our last Sunday together. Eunice was leaving again, this time for good. First it had been for MIT, where she'd majored in something called “Course VI.” Now for San Francisco, where she'd gotten an offer from Google. Eunice had had her pick of offers—including one from Yahoo!—but she went with Google. Why she would take a job with a dot-com immediately after the dot-com crash, no one could understand, but I suspected it had to do with her American boyfriend, a guy called Threepio. He'd also accepted a job in Silicon Valley. They were heading out the next day.

“The job search, how goest?” Eunice asked, pushing up the nosepiece of her thick glasses with a chubby finger.

“It goest—” I started, then stopped. You never knew what you were going to get with Eunice. One day she spoke like an Orc, the next like Shakespeare. Sometimes I found myself imitating her without even realizing I was. “It's going. Actually, it's not. There's nothing on the market.”

She waved one hand in the air and rummaged through her bag with the other. The other girls from church carried purses, but Eunice had had the same Manhattan Portage messenger bag since the seventh grade, which I knew was filled with its usual jumble of stubby mass-market paperbacks, a well-thumbed C++ pocket guide with some chipmunk drawing on the cover, magazines ranging from
Scientific American
to the
501st Daily,
assorted highlighters, and German mechanical pencils (.5-mm thickness) and their lead refills. Eunice Oh could not wait for the day when paper went digital.

She pulled out a copy of the
Village Voice;
its circulation in our part of Queens was nonexistent. The page was opened to the classifieds, her finger pointing to one of the listings.

I peered down. An ad for a fertility clinic. “You want me to sell my eggs?”

“
No.
This one.” She jabbed again. And there, wedged between the clinic's posting and one from an escort service offering “discreet and seXXXy services” was the following:

BROOKLYN FAMILY DESIRING AU PAIR

We wish to invite into our family an au pair
(i.e., a live-in “baby-sitter,” although n.b.
,
we take issue with such infantilizing labels; seeing as the term has yet to be eradicated from the vernacular, we have opted—albeit reluctantly—to use it in this text for the sole purpose of engaging in the lingua franca) who will foster a nurturing, intellectually stimulating, culturally sensitive, and ultimately “loving” (we will indulge the most essentialist, platonic construct of the term) environment for our bright (one might even say precocious) nine-year-old daughter, adopted from the Liaoning province of China. In these postmodern, postracial times, we desire said au pair
to challenge the existing hegemonic . . .

The ad cut out, exceeding its allotted space.

Eunice knew I was supposed to be looking for a job in finance, not a nanny gig. It was insulting that she thought so little of me. I might not have gone to a name-brand college like MIT or Columbia (even though everyone at church thought that Columbia was one of the easiest Ivies to get into), but I'd still gotten an offer from
Lowood.
I wanted out of Flushing, but not so badly that I'd be willing to change diapers or the equivalent in order to do it. I had spent enough of my lifetime watching my cousins Mary and George walk all over me because they knew I had absolutely no power over them. I had a plan. Baby-sitting was not part of that plan.

“Don't you want to get out?” Eunice asked, looking at me. “A very sheltered existence you lead.”

She was one to talk. “So you're telling me to go live with a bunch of total strangers. Who can't even write normal English.”

“What do you expect? They're probably academics.”

“They live in
Brooklyn.
” The whole point was not to trade one outer borough for the other but to upgrade to
the city
. We had spent countless rides on the 7 train, watching as the Manhattan skyline bloomed into view. As kids we used to imagine living in deluxe condos that overlooked Central Park.

I sighed. “A bunch of places have my résumé on file. If something comes up in the next year—”

“Much can happen in a year,” she interrupted. “Just apply. Worst-case scenario, you hate them, they hate you, you part ways. But I have a
good
feeling about this. Their daughter's Asian, you're also Asian”—she glanced up at my face, revised—“
ish.
And you can play up your whole epic sob story: uncle, grocery store, orphan. Everyone loves a good orphan story.” (Technically I was only half an orphan.) “Jane. Your ticket out, this could be.”

Eunice extended the paper anew. Reluctantly I took it from her.

We made our way to the line for food. Eunice's father was standing in front of us. I bowed; Dr. Oh and I were nearly the same height. “Eunice-ah,” he said, after I greeted him. “Make sure you mail letter to Jane after you leave home.” Dr. Oh spoke a fluid, gentle English, a far cry from the choppy waters of Sang's speech.

“Abba: letter writing is obsolete.”

“Yes, well . . .” He fumbled for words; finding none, he patted a warm hand on his daughter's back. But instead of leaning into her father's embrace, she pointed ahead. “Abba, the line. It's moving.” Eunice Oh had no
nunchi
whatsoever.

The mothers heaped rice onto our Styrofoam plates, and we loaded up on bean sprouts with red-pepper flakes, spinach and carrots drizzled in sesame-seed oil, ground beef marinated in a sweet soy sauce, brown squiggles of some
namul
root whose name I didn't know in English, fried eggs with still-runny yolks, shredded red-leaf lettuce, a spoonful of red-pepper paste, and of course squares of cabbage kimchi.

We headed to the kids' table. Jessica Bae dabbed at her mouth with a napkin and said, “So, Eunice, you're, like, leaving us. That's so sad!”

“Yo, Eunice, isn't that, like, mad stupid? Working for a dot-com right now?” James Kim said.

“A good company it is. A greater company it will be.” When she spoke, she looked at no one in particular, which gave the impression that she was talking to herself. Sometimes I wondered how Eunice Oh had ever managed to get a boyfriend.

Jenny Lee tittered into her napkin. Jessica Bae turned to me. “So . . . Jane!” she said brightly. “That, like, totally sucks about Lowood. How's the job hunt going?”

“. . .” I hated when it was my turn.

“My mom said she saw you at your uncle's store yesterday.” Jessica paused. “It must be really tough to get a job when, like, you know . . .”

“You know” meant
“You only graduated from CUNY Baruch.”

I could feel Eunice studying my face. “Jane
has
a job she's considering. An au pair job.”

I shot her a look of
nunchi,
but Eunice pretended not to see me.

“A
what
pair?” said John Hong.

“Isn't that, like, a housemaid?” said Jenny Lee.

“That doesn't look good
at all,
” Jessica Bae continued. “Do you know about our rotational internship? At Bear Stearns?” She repeated the name of her firm, as if I could forget. “You should apply? It's, like, for college seniors, but I can
totally
put in a good word for you?”

Did I mention Jessica Bae only got into Columbia off the wait list?

Then my cousin Mary came to our table with a plate full of just vegetables (in public she was perpetually on a diet) and took the seat next to John Hong. She smiled brightly at him. She smiled brightly at everyone, except Eunice, at whom she curled her lip and said, “
Eu
nice.” When her eyes fell on me, they grew round. “Omigod, Jane,” she said, pointing at my face.

Everyone's eyes followed the direction of her pointing.

“You've got . . . on your forehead . . .”

I swiped at my face, thinking red-pepper paste had splashed me. My fingers fell on a tiny bump. I saw James Kim feeling his own face for pimples. He'd had horrible acne since the eighth grade. When I looked at Eunice for confirmation, she just shrugged. “Darker matters have come to pass,” she said.

Jessica Bae began rooting through her tiny purse. She pushed a travel-size bottle of astringent and a Baggie of cotton pads into my hand. “Here. Go to the bathroom.”

Since everyone expected me to drown my pimple in purple-tinted salycylic acid, I got up, dreading how their eyes would once again latch onto my face when I returned. On the short walk to the bathroom, I ran into Pastor Bae and his wife, Jenny Lee's parents, James Kim's, John Hong's, Eunice's, and of course Sang and Hannah. I forced myself to go bow, bow, bow to each and every adult I met.

I finally reached the bathroom, and leaned all my weight against the locked door. My neck was sore from the rapid succession of bowing. My cheeks hurt from all the strained smiling. I lifted my eyes to the mirror. What I saw was limp black hair. Baggy brown eyes. Sharp and angry cheekbones, pasty skin, pointy chin, and—like a maraschino cherry on top of the whole mess—a furious red pimple smack-dab at the center of my forehead, the same spot where Hannah's finger had jabbed me the day before. At first glance I looked Korean enough, but after a more probing exploration across my facial terrain, a dip down into the craters under my eyebrows, or up and over the hint of my nose bridge, you sensed that something was a little off. You realized that the face you were staring into was not Korean at all but Korean-
ish.
A face different from every single other face in that church basement.

* * *

After lunch Eunice offered to give me a ride home. Staring down the expanse of Northern Boulevard through the windshield, she let out a long, low sigh. But soon she would leave Flushing and slip back into her world, the one where each
ping
she volleyed forth would be met with its appropriate
pong.
I was glad for her. Sad for me, but glad for her.

She gripped the steering wheel and drove off.

When we pulled up to 718 Gates, I said, “I guess this is it.”

Eunice's eyes were still fixed on the road ahead. “That's right.”

I reached for the door handle, paused, and blurted, “I'll miss you.”

“I know.” Her words sounded canned.

I jerked open the handle. “Well, don't get all mushy on me.” One foot was already out the door. “See you, Eunice.”

“It's ‘So long, Princess . . .'” Eunice's tone changed to the one she used when enlightening the unenlightened, but there was a hitch in her throat. She stopped, started again. “Good-bye, Jane Re. I wish you well. May the Force be with you.”

“And also with you,” I found myself saying.

We shook hands.

“Lose the
nunchi,
Jane,” Eunice said. With these words she drove off and we each went our separate way.

T
he next day I boarded the 7 train leaving the Main Street–Flushing station. There was an unmistakable rattle whenever you stepped aboard the 7, as if the train cars were hinged together by a single loose pin. We passengers accepted this precariousness with not much more than a sigh before slumping into our seats.

But I wasn't heading for the city, the way Eunice Oh and I always imagined when we were growing up. I was on my way to
Brooklyn.
There was a geographical irony of leaving Queens for Brooklyn—two outer boroughs that abutted each other. The fastest route was to make a right angle through Manhattan, crossing both bridge and tunnel.

It's not that we had beef, per se. We acknowledged our kindred scrappiness to Manhattan. We were, after all, Bridge & Tunnel: all our roads led to Manhattan. It was the borough that blazed in its own violet light and threw scraps of shadows on the rest of us.

I had been to Brooklyn only a handful of times in my life. Whenever we drove through, Sang would make us roll up the windows and double-check that our car doors were locked. He'd written off the entire borough after a fruit-and-vegetable he owned on Smith Street went up in flames during a blackout. According to Hannah, Sang had stumbled home that night with burnt clothes, a black eye, and a busted rib. Since then his mind conflated the three B's: Brooklyn, black people, and the blackout. Add to that one more B: a baby. A bundle of joy. Me. When I arrived not one year later, he was still picking up the pieces of his broken store. He took to carrying a metal baseball bat on the passenger side of his car. His wife was budding with her own pregnancy. I was a burden, the daughter of his dead younger sister—and a
honhyol
bastard to boot.

My mother was one of four children: two boys and two girls. First was Big Uncle, a man I'd never met, who still lived in Korea. Sang was second. Then my mother only two years later. Emo, the youngest, trailed behind them all by more than a decade. I had never met her either. Sang spoke little of the family in Korea and even less about “that stupid thing” my mother had done as a college student up in Seoul: she fell in love. It was an indulgence at a time when most marriages were arranged. Worse, she fell for an American man, a GI, or so the story went. My grandfather kicked my pregnant mother out, or maybe she left of her own accord; Sang was stingy with the details, and Hannah filled in patches of the narrative of the sister-in-law she had never met, colored with her own perceptions. (
“Your mother was a wild fox-girl. Don't you dare grow up to become like her.”
) In any case, my mother had me—a
honhyol,
a mixed-blood. Then she died of carbon monoxide poisoning from the fumes of cheap coal briquettes used for cooking and heating—an all-too-common occurrence in Korea back then. Rightfully I should have died, too, had not Providence, or maybe it was the police, saved me from the wreckage.

After my mother's death, the responsibility of dealing with me defaulted to my grandfather. The way I pictured it, was he was stepping outside one morning to get a drink from the well and there I was, swaddled on his doorstep. He stared down at me and thought,
Oh, shit.

There was no question I would have been stigmatized if I'd stayed in the motherland—a society where the slightest physical differences were scrutinized like a genetic anomaly. Where my dubious lineage would have undoubtedly come to light. So perhaps my grandfather was benevolent in sending me to live with my uncle in America, when he could have carted me off to an orphanage instead. Either way, he rid himself of an inconvenient problem. But here's another geographical irony for you: I traveled nearly seven thousand miles across the globe to escape societal censure only to end up in the second-largest Korean community in the Western world.

We were stuttering our way out of Queens. The 7 train was like that: Tourettic. The lights blinked on and off; the rickety train cars jerked from side to side as much as front and back. I stared at the other slumped passengers. The faces repeated in a pattern: Korean, Hispanic, Chinese, Chinese again, Indian. You could always tell by their worn expressions that they were going from home to work. You could always tell by their worn shoes: sometimes high-top sneakers with the backs cut out to form makeshift slippers, sometimes pleather platforms or paint-splattered construction boots—all sharing the same thick rubber soles, designed to absorb the work of the day.

The train emerged aboveground, the windows opening to the sprawl of Flushing. First you saw a beautiful clock tower sitting on top of a concrete storage warehouse with loud capital letters: U-H-A-U-L. Then the Van Wyck, snaking its way through heaps of sand and ash, through auto-body shops and junkyard lots. Wood and steel beams had lain in abandoned stacks for as long as I could remember; whether they represented the start of construction or the aftermath of demolition was anyone's guess. There were rows of brown, frayed, tarped storefronts with Korean lettering. Then the view of Shea: a stadium the shade of working-class blue with dimly lit neon figures at bat. On game nights you could barely make out the halfhearted roars in the half-empty seats—a smattering of loyal fans in blue-and-orange satin jackets. Ahead, the silvered peaks of the midtown skyline glinted in that violet light. This was our Queens wasteland.

Then the lights flickered off.

In the expansive darkness of the tunnel between Queens and Manhattan, the 7 stalled and let out a low, hesitant sigh that echoed inside the train car as one passenger after the next breathed out with exhaustion. It was the same sigh Eunice had let out on the drive home. We were frustratingly close, yet so far from where we wanted to be.

Then the lights flickered back on and we surged forward, Flushing falling away behind us.