When I first saw my husband he was sitting cross-legged under a tree on the quad, his hair as short as peach fuzz, large blue eyes staring upward, smile on his face so wide and undirected as to seem moronic. I went flying by him every minute or two, guarding man-to-man, or chasing down a pass, and out of the corner of my eye I would see him watching and smiling. What I noticed about him most was his tremendous capacity for stillness. His hands were like still-life objects resting on his knees; his posture was impeccable. He looked so…
My father’s dentures sat in a cup full of water by the bathroom sink, each tooth eerily elongated, pink gums gleaming. I hated and feared them. They seemed to watch me, regarding my habits of hygiene in permanent gnashing judgment. I began to drape them with toilet paper whenever I went in. My father found them uncomfortable. When in the house, sitting in the orange armchair reading his magazines, he always left them out. His mouth without them was puckered and concave, giving his narrow face the appearance of a skull. He took them out at the dinner…
Thirty-five years ago the street had been dirt, narrow and rutted; there had been stables along it with tired ponies, all their ribs showing through dull, matted coats. Now, as he walked along the red-tiled sidewalk, he watched the cars glide over the smooth black tar, watched the men on bicycles, loaded in back with toilet paper, chickens, and ice, weave in and out of traffic with the intensity of racers.He couldn’t help comparing the world he had known with what he now saw; ever since he’d come back, he’d felt this curious simultaneity in his mind, as though the…
The day my mother was hit by the bus, I was making love to a bald man. His name was David Pritchett and he was my Asian Studies professor at Harvard. You know the type—in love with the Far East, wears a short kimono over boxer shorts and eats instant ramen with splintered chopsticks. The love affair of his life ended badly. A Japanese girl he’d met on sabbatical in Osaka. Her parents disapproved of him and married her off on the sly to the son of a family friend. It was then that his hair fell out, he said,…
BLONDE: dark yellow, gaudy as margarine; deep like a buttercup held to the chin; soft, the silky-headed down of chicks; the color of cold, precious metals like the shining luster of gold or platinum, silver-foiled and heavy; garish like an albino rock star's hair, not white out of age, but obliterating, like the sun that no one can look into because it is too hot. We are a dark race, unified by a strict genetic conformity. Our great, great ancestors were Mongol horsemen who rode the desert plains of Asia in wild pursuits and conquest. The eyes, they say, are…
Sang Chul sat in his father's store. He did not have to look to know where the merchandise was kept: pet food and cleaning agents (aisle one); cereal, breads and snacks (aisle two); in aisles three and four, produce nestled in plastic grass, luminous waxed apples and pale heads of iceberg lettuce. Refrigerated cases along the far wall were stocked with dairy products and processed meats. There were Asian items as well, jars of kimchi and packets of pressed fish cakes, small frozen packages of dduk between the Häagen-Dazs and TV dinners.Behind the register Sang Chul perched on a high…
I'm sitting at a table at my sister's wedding reception in the Harrington Hotel in Schuyler, Massachusetts, setting paper bells on fire with my Bic lighter. The tissue paper burns easily, with great efficiency and a minimum of residue, and has very little odor that I can detect. Drinking has an astonishing effect on my sense of smell. A few Jack Daniels is, for me, an olfactory stimulator. I can smell the molecules of air, recognize and decode the intermingled fragrance of dust motes and perfume, chicken divan, sweat and industrial cleaning fluid.Smoke wafts toward the high atrium ceiling, above…
That summer, in that place, heat had a presence, insinuating, intimate, like a stranger rubbing against you in a crowd. Everywhere she went that summer, Suzanne walked slowly, moved economically—chin up, arms slightly away from her body—to keep from breaking into a sweat for as long as possible.She walked up and down the stairs of the underground street crossings; past the narrow shops cluttered with merchandise, uniformed shop girls beckoning; past the supermarkets with their basement restaurants specializing in dumplings and seaweed rolls; past the blind beggar with her baby; the shoeshine boys squatting on the stairs; the Buddhist monks…
The Halloween I was ten, my parents let me go out trick-or-treating by myself. I was a skeleton with a skull-face mask and a costume of bones painted on crisply-ironed cloth. My mother made me wear long underwear, which made me look bulky, with peculiar bulges around the middle where the top tucked into the pants. She wanted me to wear my blue parka as well, but I refused. This was my first store-bought costume, (it came in an orange and black box from People's Drug), and I was not going to cover it up. I did wear the dark…
I went to the island that summer, at Webb's invitation, because he and the island were foreign to me, mysterious, not in dark or cunning ways, but with brilliance and light. The beach and his hair gleamed with gold, his eyes and the sea flecked fathomless blue, and the sun and his smile dizzied me with prodigious heat. I was not of the island in substance or form, was not glancing light on water or pearly shell. I hoped being with him might transform me.Our last night together, we went to a restaurant. As usual, the women's heads turned as we…
One day I stopped looking in the mirror. I was tired of my face, tired of finding fault with it, of wishing it looked a different way or trying to make it look a certain way. It was always just my face. Nothing could be done. So I stopped looking. And an odd thing happened. My face went away. It disappeared. Or at least the reflection of my face went away, the only means I had of regarding it.Isn't it strange? That we can never look at our own faces without the aid of some object, a mirror or a…
Toward the end of my affair, I became obsessed with my lover's wife. I had met her only once the previous autumn, at the house of a mutual friend. This friend knew all about the affair, but he was a discreet fellow and quite amiable, and I think he was interested — in a somewhat prurient but civil way —in the dynamics of an evening spent with all of us in one room. We had been invited to watch a baseball game, the participants in which, I knew, were meaningful to the men — to my lover, Josef A., to…
Everyone looks as my grandmother walks bowlegged down the aisles of Shop-n-Save. They pretend they're not, glancing out the corners of their eyes, peering behind boxes of corn flakes and laundry detergent, but I see them staring. One little kid in a Yankees cap points right at her. His mother scolds him, then sneaks a peek herself as they wheel around the corner.I am following behind with my mother, pushing the shopping cart as slowly as possible. Adam is bagging groceries at the front of the store. I saw him when we came in, and I'm not wearing the red…
Jae Soo puts the box on the glass coffee table, kneels beside it and pulls on the cardboard flaps. Dust flies. Haejoon leans forward on the couch and wipes at the box with crumpled tissue. Mia sits beside her, knees tight together, creasing and uncreasing a piece of paper on her lap.Struggling against the outer box, Jae Soo draws out another, smaller box. It is wrapped in packing tape. He stares at this smaller box a moment, sadly, as though it defeats him. Mia makes a small noise, like a cough, and he startles, rips open the inner box with…
Gordon Spires lived across the courtyard from Leonard Hillman, concert master of the M— Symphony, and his lover, Kyoung Wha Jun, the second violinist. Leonard and Kyoung Wha often practiced together outside in the courtyard, under the brim of a large oak tree. The neighbors would hear them playing Debussy or Brahms and sometimes something contemporary that they wouldn't recognize.Gordon liked to listen to them. He was in love with Kyoung Wha, who was slender and lovely, and he believed that she secretly returned his affection but could only reveal it through her music. So when she played Mozart, it…
It has started again. This time I think it's serious, the pain in the chest, the funny fluttering beneath the ribcage. I go to the doctor and he says it's heartburn. But I haven't eaten anything with grease or spices, only yogurt with honey and a bowl of Chinese noodles. It infuriates me because my father died of heart attack. And two of my cousins have stomach cancer. I tell Dr. Chadwick this and he smiles, a closed-lip smirk that condescends to listen, then he shakes his head, hands deep in the clinical white pockets of his lab coat."Oh, now,…
“Did I ever tell you about the time I ran away to Salt Lake City?" June said, settling back on the couch."You ran away to Salt Lake City?" he echoed. His face and voice were eager, urging her forward.It was the first time June had invited him to her apartment. They had taken the tour; he had admired the photos on her mantel, the watercolor of a New England church, her collection of Depression glass. They had stood awkwardly in her tiny kitchen as she poured wine into mismatched glasses. Now they sat in her living room. He sprawled across…
When I was very young, my mother made me wear a clothespin at night to encourage my nose to form a salient bridge, instead of disappearing into the front of my face and emerging like a mushroom at the end of it. “Please God, give me a new nose, give me a new nose” was the nasal prayer I intoned, clothespin astride my face, feeling the futility and the force of my mother’s optimism at one and the same time. As my mother recovered from Stephen’s death – the clothespin long since abandoned and my nose no less flat…
My name is Isadora Myung Hee Sohn and I am eighteen years old. I was recently ninety-five days in a pediatric burn unit at Tri-State Medical Center, in Albany, New York, being treated for second- and third-degree burns on my legs, complicated by a recurring bacterial infection. The same fire that injured me killed my parents, Hae Kyoung Chung and Tae Mun Sohn, on June 11, 1976, at approximately 3:20 a.m. It’s very isolating to recover from a severe burn injury. The pain requires a great deal of attention and inward focus. While your skin tissue rages and dies, you…