There’s a light in every drop as it drips down the windshield; a life that rises through the earth. The green stems that eventually flower kiss the rain falling on their faces, upturned and never looking back at the dirt.
A trail of rainbow-tinted gasoline followed me into the world. One burst from the spray-can and I blasted off, crossing highways and headlights, painting a landscape of New Jersey. From the trainyards of Newark to the city of our fallen towers, I tagged cold hard surfaces with the portrait of a girl I once knew.
One day it was a masterpiece. The next day, it was gone.
Now I’m riding in summer highway mist with my dad, remembering this: New Jersey from above, the panorama of bumper-to-bumper traffic, the contagion of mini-malls, red and green lights tinged with blue halos, the concrete expanse darkened with that last rain.
“Ya, i-saeki-ya. This is your big chance,” my dad says in Korean. We inch up in the rain, getting closer to the exit for Fort Lee near George Washington Bridge. “You mess this up, there’s nothing for you anymore. You’ll be stuck at home, wasting your life, working at the gas station. You know how long I had to pump gas before I got my chance to open my own business? You think it’s easy? Anyway, you have a talent, don’t waste it. Just use your head and obey the law. Don’t make trouble like before.”
We’re on our way to Fort Lee where there’s a showing at the local library spotlighting “Asian-American Artists and Voices,” a theme I used to avoid like the plague when the last thing I wanted was to be labeled, not to mention have my work displayed somewhere as humble as a local library. My dad, on the other hand, is certain, as he always is, that this could be my big moment. He insists on driving me there.
“Dad, how come you never became a photographer?” I ask him for the first time.
He sniffles and wipes the windshield. I feel the chill of freon on my arms and hear the static of KBS radio.
“Ya, i-saeki-ya, he repeats in Korean, this time more gently. “Do you know how hard you have to work to raise three children? Do you think it’s easy? It doesn’t matter if you live in America or Korea or any country. Wherever you go, you have to work hard. You can’t buy a house and put your kids in college by taking pictures.”
“What if you never got married or had kids? You could’ve traveled the world and lived your dreams,” I point out, half-jokingly.
Dad grows quiet for a moment, perhaps thinking of all the places he once dreamt of traveling to, before finding himself married to my mom with three kids. Maybe he could’ve been snapping photos for magazines and living with his hair flowing in a wind that only breezes through exotic locations, instead of standing over a steam-press in the ghetto, opening and shutting the corrugated metal gates of a dry cleaner covered in graffiti.
“I wasn’t a great photographer,” Dad replies after a while, quietly, as if reminding himself of all that he has. “The best pictures I ever took were of you guys when you were growing up. My dream was to buy a house and see my children go to college. I don’t have regrets.”
“I’m going to make you proud, Appa. I’m going to go back to school. I’m going to work hard.”
“Gu-rae,” he concedes, and sniffles again. “Yeolshim-I hae-ra. Work hard.”
Sniff.
Decades of working the steam press left him with a perpetually runny nose.