This Korean American coming-of-age story doesn’t move in a straight line — it drifts the way memory actually does, backward and forward at once, between a father’s shuttered store and a brother’s summer nights.
My mom said to me once that life is always a struggle. When it’s not a struggle for money, it’s a struggle for love and always one thing or another. I always wished that I could take her pain away. What else could I do but give her aching shoulders an occasional massage and read next to her on the couch. Eat all the food she cooked for me and imitate my father with a deep grunt of satisfaction from the pit of my soul, saying chal moh guh sum ni dah! And leave the table to watch T.V while she cleared the dishes. Yeah, in some ways I was a good son. For what I lacked in grades and obedience, I made up for in these areas to bring sunshine to our mornings when we would drink coffee at the kitchen table and I would dream out loud about the mansion I would buy for her once I got rich and successful. And I wish God would take all her pain away. But instead, God gave all those things to me.
My parents grew up in Seoul, right in the aftermath of the Korean War. It seemed like every story I ever heard was set in winter, in snow, in ashes. My mother’s biological mother, a gambling woman, set the crying baby girl wrapped in a blanket tucked inside a basket on the steps of a family no better off than she. Yeah, the old woman played hattoo till her last day. For a long time, I didn’t understand why I had two grandmothers on my mama side. These things were never really explained to me. My mom never talked much about Korea. Her past. Like many things, it was just a part of myself I had to figure out. And I learned not to ask too many questions. Because I couldn’t stand to watch my mother cry.
My mom was a lonely girl. It’s hard to imagine being a girl in those times. Being a girl that was abandoned. A quiet girl with a hard life, in a hard country, with soft skin, daydreaming at her window wishing a friend would come in. And then she did. A girl who lived up the street whose name my mom won’t speak to this day but I can hear her voice like it was 19 fifty something, like she was standing outside her window calling Kang Bok Hee! Bal lee nah wah! Kah chi nol jah! They were quite a pair. Two little girls in a broken city walking the streets inseparable. In those days, there wasn’t much to else in the world but never-ending winters and a best friend to face the long miles to school in the snow. The girl was fearless. With a quick whip of a tongue unladylike to make the bullies think twice. Bare knuckles like a boy for the bullies that blink once. She was rough without a doubt and in the neighborhood the ahjuhmas could see she’d be nothing but trouble once she got to be an age to start drinking and hanging in company of the boys, living up to rumors that fatherless daughters could give fuck about. But in those days, she was just chasing them in the snow to blast them with snowballs like bombs that fell on their city in the brilliant pink and blue winter twilight. And wherever she went, my mom followed. Two girls holding hands on the long white road as evening falls. The long shadows that capture their adventures in dying light of day, neither of them ever wanting to go home. Like the rising steam from a bowl of broth they share, like the thin sweaters and paper shoes they wear, like my moms head on her best friend’s shoulder and their illuminated frosted breaths sharing the same dream of a husband who would be smart, handsome, and could fight. Like a see-through scarf that tie them close like sisters under the shelter of a roadside shack as snow falls again and again.
Every morning my mom heard that voice outside her window. And even in that world of winter with parents that worked in factories and drank themselves to death, bullies at street corners and bullies that bullied the bullies on the street after, and the school beatings they shared being unladylike cane coming down on their calf cry now and laugh for hours later, there was nothing my mom couldn’t face with her best friend. I feel so alone sometimes, I told my mom one morning as we sat at the kitchen table with our coffee. And my mom remembered her friend in that one moment, and we cried together, for the all the love that we lost. For the morning that my mom found out her friend killed herself- and she had to walk those long miles to school with no footprints in the snow beside her.
I don’t know how she met my father. I never asked. Just one of those things. I’d never seen them embrace, kiss, or even hold hands. Frankly, I wonder how I was ever born. But she must’ve found something intriguing in his character. I knew what he must’ve been like because she says I’m so much like him. Noh moo dal muh. When I’m happy, I’m loud in a group of hysterical friends. When I’m mad, I throw things. When she first met him, he told her his hobby was to travel. I imagine him captivating her mind with fantastic stories of places he had never really been. Where I got my game from. The dancing fire in his eyes as he told her about the places he would take her, gardens they would walk, mountains they would climb, oceans they would swim. And my mom fell in love with his dreams. There was nothing she wanted more than to escape.
This skinny kid with a chip on his shoulder from a childhood trying to take care of three sisters and three brothers, doing what he had to do to put the fashionable shoes on his feet to walk amongst the rubble that was their backyard. Him and his boys pushing up cinderblocks on a homemade bench-press they put together from the junk the American army left behind. My father rolled around with a gang of neighborhood kids as they all did back then. It wasn’t cool to walk alone in those days. If you were a boy, you were going to find yourself in circles knuckling up with some kids from the other side for nothing else than respect. All you had was respect. If you were a boy, you got beat up in class, after school, beat up at home. You drank shots and walked the avenues where the girls loved the stylish clothes you wore. Shit, you’d wear a good outfit damn near everyday if you had one. You dreamt of better things: a dream girl, a dream home, a place called America.
It was 19seventy-something when they flew across the water in a plane holding their daughter. Hands squeezed so tight. The excitement of my father’s imagination brought me to this life.
In New Jersey, in the ghetto, my father set up shop in East Orange right there on Main Street. Left the old name on the sign. Floridian Cleaners. None of us knew what it meant. It just meant that it used to be someone else’s name. Like the sound of a steel train that sang on the tracks across the way, the smell of dry cleaned clothes was the background to his life sweat and tears. I can close my eyes and still see inside that old store. From the late 70’s to the day it closed, nothing really changed. There was still that little fitting room where my mom would fit folks with her safety pins and measuring tape, that old sign that claimed if folks didn’t pick up their clothes in 30 days, we weren’t responsible. There were a lot of folks who never came back for their clothes. My dad usually gave them to me and my brother if we liked what was left behind. He said they probably got locked up why they never came back for them. I can still see my father in a cloud of steam with a towel around his neck fiddling with pipes and gauges. My mother cooking miyo guk on the hotplate with pins in her hair. Korean AM radio news crackling in a dusty corner, the assorted cookie tins and boxes filled with every color button, just a little more than enough to paint impressionistic wool coats upon a ghetto winter.
This is the middle stretch of every Korean American coming-of-age story like this one — the store, the routine, the years that pass so ordinarily you don’t notice you’re living inside a history.
My mom said business was real good in the 70’s when we first opened up. Before my sister, me and my brother were born. When it was just my noona and my parents up in the apartment. Folks were feeling good in their polyester suits, getting their outfits pressed for the weekend. Everybody was going out to barbecues in the afternoon and dancing at night, going to church or the mosque in the morning. My mom had a slim figure and a big perm, everybody said she had the prettiest smile and everyday helped her learn a little more English. My dad had an untamed hair-do, no potbelly, and smoked Kent cigarettes out in the street nodding to folks as they walked by. He even hired some folks he knew from the neighborhood. An older woman named Ms. Davis to answer the phones with her dragon-lady nails. She always watched Eyewitness News on the television and talked about how things done changed. Old Uncle Charlie on the press. Good rhythm and music in the back room, listening to what we now call solid gold soul because it’s old. Yeah, he was always in a good mood. Everything was like the summer evening when the streets cool down and kids stay playing in the shadows while the smell of dinner and music comes through screen doors. The hood was different back then.
Shit got crazy in the 80’s. When the summer nights were hotter and the night was thick like every air conditioner broke. In a crack epidemic the atmosphere was the smoke. And while my brother and I chased each other between great racks of suits, coats and dresses, there were people in those streets sweating giving out the holy message. Hollering THE END IS NEAR! REPENT FOR THE END IS NEAR! Fiends breaking into my dad’s car to take his tool set. A crack-head took money from our drawer. Crip graffiti laced the side of our store. And at night when the freaks would roam and the steel curtains were drawn, gangsters would hustle in our parking lot from dusk till dawn.
We moved out of the apartment to a place my mother and father saved sweated and froze for. A home on a street where the flowers grew, the scene was lush and an ordinary kind of beautiful. In the suburbs, people care about their lawns. A swing-set and a driveway for a wood-grain wagon we call Moon-star because of all the dents. My oldest sister had homework. My other sister had Care-Bears and Barbie dolls. Me and my brother were blowing out candles on a birthday cake.
Los Angeles was set on fire. Pandemonium in the streets. Korean shop-keepers stood on top of roofs with rifles. Store windows get smashed and looted. All because they said we were bleeding the hood. But we came here with nothing only believing we could. One generation starving just so the next could have, but still they’ll find a way to say there’s something wrong with that. In church, my pastor preaching a testimony about a Korean shop-keep’s store was untouched because his workers stood sentinel with aluminum bats. Did I mention that the Korean shopkeeper was a Christian and that the workers were Black?
My father watched the riots and clicked off the T.V. My mother answered the phone then returns to the hum of her sewing machine. Things changed in the 90’s. My dad more tired, a little more gray. My mom with the same pins in her mouth, more lines in her face. Crack calmed down, but the gangs were still there. Walking around with fades, waves, and braids in their hair. Ms. Davis passed away. Old Uncle Charlie was gone too. Business slowed down and my father went to a lot of funerals. Lost all his employees to old age sweet chariot ride. Makes me think about life as we drive past the Parkway cemetery next to exit 145.
My father lost his store about six months ago. I wonder if he lost a part of himself as well. We don’t bother clearing the dishes for my mother as we never do, and sometimes I resent his lack of affection for her. I try to stand up and hug my mother sometimes. As a son should. As I wish my father would. But what can I say? He gave his life for me and my brother and sisters and watched all his children walk with caps and gowns because of that. But I can’t help but wonder if he has regrets sometimes. Does he look back and close his eyes to envision the beaches he could’ve awakened to instead of a humble store on a corner in the ghetto. I tell him don’t worry about it, but he knows what I mean when I get flustered trying to even talk at all. When I really mean thank you. But we’re men. How can we express these things properly? We don’t even speak the same language. Literally. We curse at each other a lot for this reason. But he knows and I know its all love. And I guess I was born just because.
I can’t describe the smell of old air freshener and damp blue velvet inside that old blue Reliant, but that’s the best way to describe the man. My father was listening to the static of a barely comprehensible Korean AM news broadcast as we inched along the bumper to bumper, rain diddling the endless miles of commercial congestion, the cemetery next to exit 145. Rain, cursing, honking, followed by angry high beam provocative hand signs. Riding in the passenger-side, I remember using my fingertips to paint pictures on a foggy window. In the back of my mind I could hear my father ramble. My father cleared his throat and said something.
What? I said.
He lowered the volume and the air grew thick. Study hard… I heard him saying in Korean… I’m poor… nohmu-shim-duh-roh… study hard…you don’t want to pump gas…
he paused to ask if I understood what he was saying and I refrained momentarily from using my pointer to paint pictures on the fogged glass and gave him the yeah yeahs. He hissed backwards, something you learn to do if you’re Korean and have kids. He would then search for broken English, give up and continue in Korean…
how will you find a wife pumping gas…your friends won’t be there for you if you fuck up…study hard…
I pressed the button and my face was no longer hidden by overcast reflections on the window and simultaneously I watched my fingertip masterpiece disappear forever.
As I grew up, these were the things my father said to me. I watched his dream of flying sacrifice itself into my flight. I heard him washing his face in the early morning light as I slept. In words he can’t understand I’m going to tell him I was just flying kind of like the way that you flew. With great expectations and a heart raw and tough for when it all turns out to be something only God could imagine.
New Jersey, you could stay your whole life in one place and be happy like a rock, just bearing the weather and growing old with mossy stains forever searching for a North Star. I promise.
When you see me falling, you’ll find something shining in the sky. Lord knows the wind would take me far away from home. Yes, I am flying away, towards a destiny, away from all these things I’ve lost. These things that make me leave everything else far behind. And I bring to life the death of this monster that I’ve held inside.
When I fly too close to the sun, burning back down to Earth with fire like Icarus. Dreams of touching God this way. The ashes from the feathers fall into the sea. Put out the fire. And it’s the sky that drowns me. People have dreams of touching God this way.
My brother quit the football team after freshman year and trained his knuckles on an iron plate instead. In the summer night, he ran his nightly suicides with no shirt on, raining sweat onto the bluish orange illuminated summer streets. He shadowboxed all night under the streetlight while I sat close by on the curb, chain-smoking and smacking mosquitoes. We were always in the street during those summer nights. When we just couldn’t take it anymore, our mother chasing us out of the house throwing Bibles and SAT workbooks on the lawn. My brother never stopped dribbling his basketball. I’d drink a bottle of Robitussin and talk shit, cough syrup tripping before I’d fall.
I’d dream of becoming famous while we’d ride, just to ease my mind and pass the time- to see my name never fading from the concrete walls and the tracks that connect these New Jersey train stations, the train tracks looking like a cemetery of spray-cans. I’m trying to live forever someday.
I remember running. I remember walking to the bus stop from my house promising I was never coming back. I was really looking for something in those summer streets. Finding myself in the daily crossings of the street under the shoes that hang from telephone wires and traffic lights that guide you past corners of desire. No streetcar to get there. Didn’t pack shit for tomorrow. Didn’t tell a soul. Didn’t care about the destination, I just rode up the bus somewhere up north and walked around in strange neighborhoods all during those nights, getting on and off the bus at random, just to see where God would take me.
I remember sleeping on a sidewalk, lying there on the concrete in that green alley, the ferns and ivy dripping rain in the night. I prayed nights like that.
You need to go to church. Believe me I heard it from my mother. But after Sammy Chang got caught stealing cars in the church parking lot, she relented, figuring I would only embarrass her with my own act of crime if she kept forcing me to go. I went to the summer retreat anyhow. Those were always fun. You could really fall in love with a girl at one of those things. Just ask Henry.
They called me Master-jipo because I was good at stealing. They called me Turtle because I talked slow like the old turtle in the Tootsie-roll pop commercials. 80’s babies know what I’m talking about. There’s a lot of things your ass will never know.
I remember watching November pass through my bedroom window, the way me and my brother would put on our socks and shoes and ninja into the night’s changing seasons just to talk about the girls we liked at school and at church, watching the autumn leaves catch the smoke from our cigarettes burning away the time that eventually became ashes themselves, disappearing with the wind into the once blue air, midnight bringing the first snows in the darkness, the white breath of laughter dancing away from us, when the world turns to winter and thorns grow on the branches and we never come back.
A year later, Dimes would enter the Essex County prison system with the fierce longing for opiates and surrender to enter his veins. He hung himself in his jail-cell.
Got me thinking about Noodle. An adopted Korean kid, about two years younger than myself, a kid I used to play with in elementary school. Last I heard, he dropped out of high school and hung around Dunkin Donuts on the lower side of the avenue wearing long-sleeved T’s in the summer because of where he’d been, tracks on his arms, buses he’d been taking into the Bricks to find that same sort of surrender. A bus ride up Bloomfield Avenue will get you a stairway in a stamped plastic envelope.
I didn’t play sports and didn’t fuck with needles. I saw Requiem for a Dream before I got into any of that junk nonsense- that movie is more effective than a ten year D.A.R.E program. I smoked a lot of weed and waited for the day I would run away for life; robbing banks, escaping in a non-descript Cadillac with the top down, my beautiful accomplice with her top down- you know, daydreams like that.
I’m not going to act like it was so bad. I was accepted and hung with the white boys- wandered from group to group and had good times in every circle.
But damn, I was really wandering.
I watch the streets through the passenger-side of a New Jersey drive riding with the windows down halfway. Holding in the smoke until I can’t see anymore, then letting it all go watching the colors come back to me with milk spelling my mood through the nostrils. Feeling kind of lost in the song playing, this tape that helped us get by on those rides, on a road to fame or some kind of reasonable state of happiness.
How do you know this life isn’t a dream? I once asked my brother. We were sitting in the swings with the light of the sunset breaking through the trees, my shoes dangling just above the dirt, his were fully planted.
Because it isn’t, he said.
But how do I know?
You just do, he said.
I think about God when I wake up. Moments of yesterday with my brother taking high rides underneath the trees showering the streets with shimmering shadows that breathe, to the sunset, purple in its most faraway and distant places, blue broken by the pink pollution that paints pictures in the sky, streets under heaven and the decent lives that live in them. Live from Essex County, fuck it I’m drifting…
There was darkness. There were windows. There was music.
“Yo, this shit is done?”
“This shit is done. We’re here anyways.”
The blunt was pinched shut and became a roach flying out the crack of the window to lie somewhere in the street amongst the litter. My brother and I rolled onto the scene, flying through the streets with the taste of invincibility on our cotton lips. We arrived at Broad Avenue parallel parking somewhat diagonally. Good enough. Love that moment when the bright storefront lights mirror off your window- breaking away as you open your door. Step out into the night and breath the freedom, my friend. I’m pretty sure that’s one of the best parts. The stars were the night smiling. We were very stoned.
We walked like gangsters into the dark entrance of the bar where a lovely girl in black led us further into candlelight. We gave the bartender the old nod and followed the girl’s light footsteps while she made her decision like duck-duck-goose. She placed our menus down and disappeared with a toss of her dark red Sassoon. It’s a Korean ballad. I swear it’s in our blood to be sentimental like this. Looking for a concubine or two to stay out with and a wife to call home. Those are the sides of the rippling ribbon tied n the hair of Asian women. Sweet games of chase.
The bar was dim and decorated with small candles glowing softly in glass bowls. Atmosphere like black cherry, we laid back smooth and relaxed like cognac and the blues. We lit our cigarettes with the candle and slouched a little further into our seats. I tipped the pitcher, pouring my brother’s glass first, and then my own. The amber nectar cascaded and foamed over the frosty lip. A toast to the ones wandering- walk away from it all, I swear it’ll get better.
Most of the kids in that bar were like us, toasting friendship and saying dramatic goodbyes before they went off to college or wherever their travels would take them. You got to love that one over-emotional girl who always cries quietly and needs to be comforted in the bathroom. Maybe all the girls will be crying. But its all love, you got to feel good with that. The strong promises of brothers, whether blood or not, make a person really want to live another year or two- just to do it all over again in different clothes and the same jubilant voices. Chopsticks and shot glasses played percussion to that Korean ballad.
Damn, I wonder if Dimes had ever been to Broad Avenue.
The New Jerus Blues
In the end, that’s what this Korean American coming-of-age story really is — a father’s shuttered store, a brother’s fists against an iron plate, and the friends whose names outlast them.
Further reading:
- 1992 Los Angeles Riots — Britannica — background on the riots referenced in this chapter, including the role of Korean American shop owners
- Korean War — Britannica — for context on the war that shaped the narrator’s parents’ early lives
- Essex County, New Jersey — overview — background on the county this memoir is rooted in
More reflections and stories from Kimchi x Kafka on the Stories page.