Mom - Seung Won Park

MOM

By: Seung Won Park

My mother is fifty-four years old now, though she barely looks forty. This is not the compliment of an adoring daughter who believes her mother will forever be the most beautiful woman in the world—

to her, of course—

but a clinical, unflinching testament to the hard work put in by the matriarch herself.

My mother has gleaming skin that should have begun to wrinkle decades ago. She is noticeably slight of frame: not in the stark Didion manner where its ascetic, acerbic core, fueled by cigarettes and salted almonds, undercuts its fragility even as the body continues to hurtle toward the physical limits of its own frailty,

but softer. Arms nearly devoid of muscle, almost cartoonish in their refusal to widen from wrists to elbows to shoulders. Narrow waist, precariously balanced atop wider hips than one would anticipate for a woman of her build. Protruding collarbones and a neck seemingly overflowing with tendons, though the pearls hung about them ensure they never jump too far out of place. Flesh draped gentle and thin over the bones, like the black Rick Owens and Issey Miyake garments she likes to wear: always flowing, always smooth, never rigid nor, god forbid, harsh.

Softer.

As if she had never looked any other way; as if she had existed since 1967 merely to defy our understanding of fifty-four—

whereas you, Cho Yeo-Jeong—who just starred in Bong Joon-Ho’s international blockbuster, Parasite, not two years ago—you’re only forty yourself. But you, too, look far younger, as many South Korean women do.

You and my mother are beautiful in the same way. In fact, you two could quite reasonably be assumed to be sisters. And when I watched you in Parasite for the first time, playing that comically naive Mrs. Park, I found myself so immediately reminded of my own mother; not in your gleaming complexion, though, nor your wide, fawn-like eyes,

at least, not until I saw them nearly pop out of your head as you gasped in fear, suddenly reminded of a longrepressed trauma you’d worked so hard to rewrite as your only son’s childhood fiction—

sure, he says he saw a ghost, sure, he had a seizure because of it, but he’s so smart and children say the weirdest things anyway; he’s alright, he’ll be alright—

fear, that’s it, I now realize. Fear can arise at any moment.

My mother is also of the particularly nervous sort. And not just the classic Korean anxiety that emerged so silently from its postwar resilience: one that has displaced itself into a sparkling hyper-industrial order under which we have turned plastic surgery into a rite of passage and alcoholism into a reward

(though we have wifi in every subway station, I always joke);

but a more deeply entrenched, unsettling fear, which I regret not asking more about. I think I am afraid to.

My mother couldn’t enter public restrooms until she was nearly sixteen, she would tell me as she tried to comfort me as I wrestled with my own fear. I was a nervous wreck by seven years old, unable to tolerate the stimuli of a world that seemed to be constantly encroaching on the walls of my family’s pristine apartment,

as if a specter of some sort were lurking in a basement that, to the best of my knowledge, didn’t exist, as one did in yours some sort over a fear I couldn’t yet comprehend, she would tell me not to worry. “I couldn’t use public restrooms until I was sixteen, you know. I was too afraid.”

My own fearlessness—though perhaps it was just recklessness at the time—is one she has had to come to terms with. I have watched her struggle to accept it in vignettes: waking up to her looking over me in the hospital bed after an adolescent bender gone south, feeling sick watching her go near-mute for hours after finding birth control in teenage me’s desk drawer, noticing the way she would send fewer and fewer texts begging me to come home a little earlier and how she had even started to turn in early when I refused: finally exchanging sleepless nights over my delinquency for a good night’s rest, fueled by the hope that I would make it home the next day, as I always did at the time.

And now, she merely shakes her head at my bad habits. Perhaps because we both know I have come a long way. I tell her I’ll have an occasional cigarette and she tuts, saying I’ll sully the divine process of aging “gracefully.” I laugh and retort that it seems I can probably buy a graceful enough face regardless.

I make a horrid little joke about babies’ malleable heads, and my so-called agenda to mold her future grandchildren into “Japanese square watermelon babies.” She laughs, surprisingly, and when she does, I continue the bit. “That’s so fucked up, I can’t believe you think it’s funny to do that to babies,” I faux-seethe. She laughs harder.

On Mother’s Day, I give her a hug. “Happy Mother’s Day,” I coo. “Maybe

next year we’ll be celebrating together.” Finally, something she wasn’t ready for. My father and I cackle as she sputters that women shouldn’t be running their mouths like that.

“Keep that thing closed.”

(My mother is of the quiet and demure sort, the easily horrified crowd—much like you.)

But resistant as she seemed whenever I’d try to goad her into brashness, even vulgarity, she slowly started to grow more comfortable with my own. I’d say she even started leaning into it herself at some point. And because I had so earnestly mistaken her manicured quietude for a pretentious shallowness, when she started to open up about her own anxieties I never probed further than she’d allow.

I figured, if it stressed her out that bad to chip a nail, it wasn’t really my place to see how many skeletons I could wrench out of her closet.

Fear never sleeps, though, even when it’s small. One can bury it in the deepest corners of one’s mind and still, again—it may arise at any moment. It always does, no matter where you try to hide it.

It’s not that fear thrives best in the dark, necessarily, but where people don’t care to search for it.

God knows you never looked in that damn bunker.

Anyways, you gasped dramatically— “AUGHHH,” one could put it onomatopoeically—and I saw my own mother’s face in yours, the fear we had all tried desperately to quell contorting your beautiful features into a grimace of open-mouthed horror.

It’s played for laughs. And you did it really well. I laughed.

Like many people—maybe more than I should give credit for—I am excellent at laughing through discomfort.

Whereas your generation (no offense, gorgeous—yours and my mom’s both—) is excellent at merely smiling through it.

They’re different ways of coping, no doubt about it. Back in my worst days I’d crack suicide jokes and my mom would gasp—“Don’t joke about things like that, it isn’t funny.” And I’d respond,

“It is actually very funny, to me.”

And I’d stop laughing eventually and she’d start smiling again eventually and we wouldn’t speak of it, and I’d start resenting her for not asking me the million-dollar question of, well, “why do you want to kill yourself?” As if she must have wiped her kid’s distress out with her makeup at the end of the night.

I wonder if you ever asked your son about the ghost he said he saw.

Sometimes I’ll remember little things she used to say to try and help me through destructive, self-hating spells she could not understand.

“It’s alright to not eat one day out of the week if you need to stay skinny.”

“Everybody gets suicidal at some point in their lives.”

I see now that she meant it out of love, yet I still feel how deeply those

words, among many others, cut me. And the ones that spilled out in the briefest, most infrequent moments of rage—

words whose venom she could not control:

“You’re lucky. Some mothers would kill themselves over something like this.”

“You’re not my daughter.” (I was seven)

and once to my brother, screaming at her to understand why he called the police on himself one night,

“Why didn’t you just do it then?”

and the one that made me, at seventeen, decide that I hated her and her fucking shallow piece of shit value system of looking nice and shutting the fuck up—

“You don’t understand what I went through to have you.

You ruined my body.”

And so I grew to hate her.

And none of us—we’re also Parks, by the way—spoke of any of these times. Perhaps because times are very different now.

You see, I don’t hate my mother anymore. In the moment that I believed I would hate her the most,

when I begged her to understand that me and my brother’s mental illness may be a lot more fucking hereditary than the rest of us were willing to admit, while my brother drunkenly mediated from the couch, when she spat that I’d always hated her, that I’d made a monster out of her, I screamed back for the first time in my life.

“I don’t hate you,” at what felt like a million decibels burning in my throat, “I feel fucking sorry for you.”

And we were all silent in that room, because as much we all realized I said it out of sheer spite, we also knew it was true. I did feel sorry for her. I do now.

Because it took me far too long to acknowledge out loud that she had buried all her anxieties, all her fears— ones I may never know, nor do I ask to—close to her chest, for as long as she could remember. Every beautiful outfit, every pound shed, every sweet denial was another layer of armor. As it seemed to be yours.

It made me sick to watch, honestly. It made me sicker to remember when she would ask me to do the same;

and it wasn’t just looks, of course, though that was the primary target—

it was school, “speaking nicely,” hanging out with “nice” (coded: similarly wealthy) people,

but in the midst of all of these things she wanted from me I did not once feel that she wanted me as I was. And, met with denial so many times over, I had no incentive to scream about it. So I was happy to oblige in serving her the fiction she wanted so badly to make a home out of, having left her own—

so in America, I was skinny and pretty and outgoing and got good enough grades and then when I finally had to come back to Korea (for the longest

time I’d spent there since I left with her, too)

I had to start hiding from her, harder than I ever had to—that I didn’t eat anymore and that I had to stash my box cutter and liquor in an empty suitcase I opened every night when she went to sleep and that I was still more cripplingly sober than I’d liked,

that my brain was legitimately fucking fried from a bipolar misdiagnosis and the ensuing cocktail of pills a medium-shitty doctor from college counseling services haphazardly put me on,

that I was so miserable and didn’t know how to make it stop without making anyone else privy to a funeral I figured would at least be wellcatered,

that I feared if I laid all my cards out on the table—and the deck was hideous—

my suspicions would be true, and I wouldn’t be worth a thing in her eyes, because the core of who I was was abjectly fucking disgusting.

And she couldn’t take disgusting. Her moral compass had always seemed to be governed by the laws of aesthetics alone.

I mean, the amount of time she spent perfecting every inch of her and my dad’s new apartment in Seoul, like they’re even in it all that much—

your fake house is beautiful, by the way. It looks like my dad’s side of the family’s house in Seoul. My uncle on that side actually went to jail for fraud! I know Bong Joon-Ho would eat that shit up. Anyways, it seemed things were always either beautiful or they weren’t. And she was very good at being beautiful, and I guess what I took away from that is that I had to be beautiful in the way she told me I was supposed to be, and if I wasn’t I was disgusting,

and that’s really not all that sustainable, so yeah, I did a lot of immersing myself in my own molecular fiction of sorts. Substance abuse, I mean. I abused a lot of substances. (I don’t anymore, I’m happy to say).

It wasn’t something I wanted to own up to, but I figured a reality check was in order. If I could at least explain some of the fictions I had clung to, perhaps she would shed some of her own. I guess I didn’t realize that I was trying to do so at the time, but it had certainly dawned on me long ago that I barely knew her as a person,

beyond the face she wore and the clothes she bought and the restaurants she liked to be seen at.

And she didn’t know me, except what I had written myself out to be.

So I told her what I thought I really was at the time, which was a floundering degenerate one more overdose away from the bin. And her mouth opened, just like yours, except it wasn’t funny in the slightest,

and I started sobbing because I didn’t have anything else to aim at her, I just needed help because it had been so long since she knew who I was and I didn’t even know who I was at that point, and I at least just wanted to be a person who keeps on living for as long as they can practically manage. And I could not manage, because I had everything, really, and I still felt like the most disgusting, rotted shell of a person and, perhaps even worse,

like a huge fucking waste of so much money.

And then for the first time in her life, she apologized. She had so much fear, she said. And when she caught glimpses of my own, she thought she was helping me by insisting I adopt the only way she herself knew how to get by.

Smiles, jewels, fancy dinners and a college degree had taken her farther than she’d anticipated. And she guessed maybe that wasn’t all, because she was still so afraid. She had it all—still has it, to be honest— and still, something eats at us both.

I didn’t know what that was until recently. Eight people, mostly Asian women, were shot in Atlanta. I cried, I screamed, I attempted to rationalize my feelings through the guise of “discourse” with my nonwhite friends, I sobbed as my white friends made earnest, but still weak attempts to help me, and I kept sobbing as I saw them ultimately doing alright themselves. I fell into a catatonic depression: no sleep, no food, occasionally getting up to take a piss, and every night the same: just me and my bed coalescing into a cesspool of ever-deepening fury. I felt it was hopelessness, but I know it was fury.

[I screamed, I attempted to rationalize my feelings through the guise of “discourse” with my non-white friends, I sobbed as my white friends made earnest, but still weak attempts to help me, and I kept sobbing as I saw them [ultimately doing alright themselves.

I thought only in fragments. I had flashes of roll call in school, when teachers refused to pronounce my name correctly, as if that’s even the worst of all of this shit,

of times I played along with friends (at the time) and made racist jokes at my own expense

and a sleazy fucking pig at my first college party slurring, “Lemme see that tight Asian pussy,” at me

his window at me and yelled “This corona shit is your fucking fault, you fucking Chinaman” (it must be noted that both parts of that slur are false, but that doesn’t make it feel any better)

and the way I refused to speak Korean until I graduated high school and how I still struggle with it because something I wish weren’t so fucking humiliating about trying to speak it, my mother fucking tongue, still is

and the guy I dated briefly who pulled my eyes back and I screamed at him and he laughed it off and so I laughed it off, too, nauseatingly

as I laughed everything off, because I’m fucking rich and pretty and smart and I’m okay, right?

I’m enough, right? If I build enough of a foundation under myself, who I’m supposed to hate, apparently, I’m good enough,

for a chink, that is.

You, too. At least it’s chinks all the way down in Seoul.

I thought of what you read off that part of the script, the part right after your initial horror wears off. Something about ghosts being good luck. I don’t think it’s the ghosts that are good luck. I think it’s the fucking McMansions they haunt.

My parents call me for a few minutes once or twice a week, partially because the time difference is huge but mostly because we’ve never had all that much to say to one another. More things have been said lately, I guess.

But they didn’t ask about the shooting. And I know it’s been on the news. I don’t really want them to ask. I don’t think they want to ask, either.

Eight ghosts now. They live with us.

Still, I tell them things are good in Philly and they tell me things are good in Seoul. Sometimes they give me a veiled warning that feels far more encouraging than I wish it did: “Stay safe.”

I wish my worth weren’t dictated by the measures of self-preservation I feel I have to take.

I shelter my heart in two hands when I leave the house now. One fist clenching a brand-new bottle of pepper spray, the other trying not to shake in my boyfriend’s. He’s happy to walk me anywhere, though I wish I didn’t have to ask him.

I’m enough, right? If I build enough of a foundation under myself, who I’m supposed to hate, apparently, I’m good enough, for a chink, that is.

I wish he would know what I mean when I say that not everybody sees me like he and my friends do.

That some people still find me beautiful and capable, but only for a.

Some part of me knows I am both those things and more, and another part of me wishes I didn’t feel like I have to be.

Some part of me knows I could move back to Korea like my parents think I should. “Your life would be so much easier, you know.”

Maybe it would. Maybe I could be like you. I could live every moment as if another tragedy were not looming beneath its precipice, waiting for the fatal blow of my falling body.

Maybe I could wither into something beautiful: cooler, though, more subdued, like my mother. As close to a marble statue as I could get. Something that would at least shatter more gracefully.

Bloodless.

I wish I wanted to freeze. I don’t know if it would be easier.

It’s not easy now, though.