ashley kim

The Big Sad

The morning that Halmoni passes away, emaciated from acute pneumonia accelerated by dementia, in the fetal position, on her floral quilts previously snuck into the hospital, grasping Mom’s tender hand, the Big Sad appears. He stiffly stands on the white squeaky linoleum floors. He wears a black horsehair hat and an immaculate wool suit.

DUST WILL RETURN TO DUST, the Big Sad says, emphasizing the second dust.

His voice is honeyed and deep, the bong of hitting your hand against a rough thousand-year-old clay pot. I do not say anything. I am not sure if Halmoni is really dead or if the Big Sad is real. Mom explains to the nurse that Halmoni stopped breathing. I contemplate that to pass away implies the existence of somewhere to pass away from. Halmoni looks the same as she did yesterday. She does not look like she has passed away into the afterlife of judgment and paradise. Perhaps this is a passing nearby, rather than a passing away. As if he could read my thoughts, the Big Sad says empathetically, using my childhood nickname, LOU, SHE’S REALLY GONE.

WHERE IS SHE NOW? I say silently, hoping that he will scrape my thoughts like earwax.

The Big Sad looks forlorn but does not answer.

The week after, Mom and I hold a small funeral for Halmoni in our living room. Dad is on a month-long business trip in New York, and he can’t find time to make the occasion. It’s my mother, Mom sobs on the phone. I only have one. But Dad is relentless in his pursuit of work-based excellence, and he bluntly refuses. A few relatives drive to the occasion in their gray and silver Hyundais and KIAs from scattered suburbs about an hour or two away, donning the proper Western black dresses and suits, holding bouquets of supermarket white chrysanthemums. A few hours before they come, Mom frantically Google searches how to create a Korean funeral altar, and she confuses jesa with the funeral customs traditionally carried out immediately following the deceased’s death. “Louisa, jesa is for anniversaries and Seollal,” she murmurs, placing a photograph of Halmoni surrounded by magenta hibiscuses in the Queen Kapiolani Garden we visited on our vacation to Oahu. Halmoni had remarked that they looked like mugunghwa. I had responded that they were the same species, but at that point, Halmoni had already begun to forget the English she knew and halfheartedly nodded in confusion instead.

The relatives who come are Mom’s younger brother; his British wife he met while completing his Ph.D. in Philosophy abroad; their two young daughters, who do not understand what the photograph of Halmoni and the flowers are doing in our living room; Halmoni’s surprisingly healthy older sister, wearing a somber black hanbok, accompanied by Mom’s cousin, who both flew from Incheon for the occasion; Dad’s younger brother and his plump-cheeked younger wife; and Dad’s parents, hoping to see their son for the first time in a year. Only Halmoni’s sister, Mom’s cousin, and Dad’s parents know what the altar is for. They take turns to bow, their heads prostrate in respect for the dead. I see the Big Sad again. He stands near the tan leather couch, still wearing the horsehair hat. When the family members finish honoring Halmoni, the Big Sad also pays his respects. He remains in the child pose for a long time, the tip of his hat touching the mousy brown carpet.

THANK YOU, I say silently. Perhaps he is real, not just a ghost or an imaginary whisper, destined to disappear into the interstices of my mind and the walls of the house.

Mom never cooks Korean food, but today she serves homemade yukgaejang, scarlet spicy soup with thin stringy strips of beef, made with Baek Jong-won’s recipe from a YouTube video. The food is edible, even good, but it lacks the humble, earthly quality of Halmoni’s spontaneous cooking. The family cups their bowls and chopsticks in paper-toweled hands, and they eat sitting on the couch or criss-cross-applesauce at the red lacquered pine table on the floor. The Big Sad does not eat. He treads cautiously toward the kitchen, bends down, takes the lid off the pot of soup, and sniffs it with curiosity. The steam settles gracefully on his horsehair hat. I divert my eyes to Halmoni’s stoic portrait for a second, and the Big Sad is by the doorway now, his gray house slippers settled among black Korean market clogs and light-up neon pink Stride Rite sneakers. The Big Sad is almost as tall as the burgundy wooden door, and he rests his hand on the top of its cold golden knob, observing my family from afar. Most of his facial features are blurred by distance and the shadow of his hat, but I see the outlines of something vaguely human. Mom’s cousin, who speaks English rather well for living in Korea all her life, taps my shoulder. “Areum-i,” she says, calling me by my Korean name, “haven’t you learned Korean yet?”

“No, I want to, though,” I respond, slightly ashamed.

“It’s important,” she says. Her red lipstick and cakey makeup attempting to cover her wrinkles look almost clownish, and her manicured hands, which grasp mine with certainty, are unpleasantly cold. “Your mom doesn’t know Korea because she doesn’t know Korean. You two are American. But language is culture, ya.”

“Ye, ye,” I respond. “Maybe I’ll learn my senior summer.”

“You should learn and she should, too. What year are you, again?”

“Junior.”

“Have you taken the SAT and ACT yet?”

I nod.

“Did you get 100%?”

Not even close, I want to say. Since Halmoni was diagnosed with moderate dementia three years ago, my academics went down the drain. I spent my afternoons and evenings helping to take care of Halmoni with my mother. Mom drove Halmoni to her neurology appointments and handled the housework, while I spent hours accompanying her each day—listening to the good and the not-so-good, following her as she wandered aimlessly around the downstairs, reading to her from the boring books I had to read for English class to get her to sleep.

Instead, I avoid her question. “That’s really hard to do,” I choose my words carefully.

“Not impossible.”

I don’t say anything. I survey the room for the Big Sad, but he is not by the doorway. To my shock, he is by my side. He is not warm like a human being. He is cold, a wintery draft in the middle of our stuffy living room. I find comfort in his presence. SAY SOMETHING, I furrow my bushy eyebrows, glancing in his direction. He has not said anything since the morning at the hospital. I take an opportunity to feast upon his face for the first time. His skin is white as snow upon mountains, his thin lips are pale pink, and his eyes are black and hollow, without whites and irises. 

-<>-

The Big Sad disappears for two weeks until Mom and I spend a few days sorting through Halmoni’s stuff from her air-conditioned room downstairs. On top of her floral quilts we pile vividly patterned blouses, neon puffer jackets, holey ten-year-old socks from Costco, and silk slacks. They smell like sweat, garlic, and cheap perfume. Mom wants to donate most of Halmoni’s clothes because they have no use just sitting in the closet, but I don’t want to give all of them away. So I ruin our careful folding by clutching a random pile of soft, cool clothing to my chest. Mom tells me that I’m wasting time. I want to dress the two giant stuffed bears from Costco that guard my bed in her orange and yellow dresses, quilt her blouses into an extraordinarily ordinary ajumma hodgepodge, or make a rope with the few pairs of cargo pants and tie my mother’s hands to the wooden bedpost that Halmoni used to support herself when she got out of bed in her later days. Maybe then Mom will reconsider her decision to donate any of Halmoni’s stuff three weeks after her death. I do not say any of this. Instead, I scowl at Mom and hope that my thoughts will overpower hers, like the Goguryeo generals that Halmoni told me about that overpowered their enemies to form a unified Korea long ago.

“Louisa, I don’t appreciate when you frown at me,” Mom says wearily.

“Do you even miss Halmoni?” I blurt.

Mom sighs. “I do.”

“You really want to get rid of her stuff,” I mutter.

“It’s just not practical to have it all lying around,” she replies. “I’m keeping some of it, Louisa. It’s just that there’s so much. Wartime generation, I guess. She kept stuff she didn’t need.”

My frustration is interrupted by a memory of Halmoni, one of our first longer conversations. Halmoni once told me that she should have understood Mom more. It was about two months after she moved in, four months after Halabeoji passed away, three years before she was diagnosed with dementia. I was only ten. “Imagine being one of the only Korean kids at school,” Halmoni said with resignation. “Lou, we weren’t rich. Happy Dry Cleaners always did all right but never well, and it was humbling work. Now that I think about it, your eomma’s Korea was composed of dirty Los Angeles Koreatown streets, convenience stores, the occasional bowl of hot soup, and the dry cleaners. I wouldn’t like Korea or her lack thereof, either, Lou.” And then she laughed heartily and boisterously, like bubbling sikdang seolleongtang broth, a chortle that began in her stomach and crescendoed through her lips.

Mom sorts through more of Halmoni’s belongings, but I catch her quickly sniffing one of Halmoni’s blouses as she refolds the pile that I messed up. “I’m going to get the warm laundry from the dryer and fold it,” she sighs. “You can pick out whatever you’d like to keep, but it stays in your room.”

I hate crying in front of other people, especially my mother. I hold my tears until Mom closes the door, and then I silently sob, choking, hiccuping, some medium in between. I lie on the quilts inside Halmoni’s room, and her clothes wrap themselves under my back and around my feet, forming a rainbow fortress of dragon prints and flowers. A peculiar cool wind swirls around my face and dries my tears the moment they roll onto my splotchy, reddened cheeks. He does not show his face, but I am sure that the Big Sad is here.

-<>-

A couple of weeks later, Mom unceremoniously buys shaved beef at Trader Joe’s and a loaf of white bread, a few freezer meals for work, shiitake mushrooms, onions, green onions, and lots of chicken breast. When she arrives at our doorstep with two thick paper bags, I help her unpack the groceries into our cluttered refrigerator and look at the shaved beef in shock. Mom never buys beef because she says it’s too expensive. She sticks with her too-dry, reliable chicken breast bake and sweet apple pork tenderloin from her Food Network recipes. Then we eat her meat of choice with unseasoned, microwaved vegetables and a big scoop of white rice from the rice cooker, the only Korean kitchen appliance we had before Halmoni moved in. Halmoni argued with Mom about her cooking all the time. “Beef is an essential part of Korean cuisine,” Halmoni lamented. “If Lou doesn’t eat beef, how will she understand Korean food?” Mom complained that she had to learn how to cook from American cookbooks because Halmoni had no time to teach her. “No, you refused to learn in high school,” Halmoni shot back, “and then went to college in the East Coast, away from your father and me.” Halmoni worried that when Mom married Dad, Dad and his family would find her Korean cooking unsatisfactory. To her simultaneous disappointment and relief, Halmoni discovered that Dad never came home, and when he did, he chose to eat takeout in his office every day, even on weekends.

From the moment she moved in, Halmoni demanded that Mom drive her to Costco every two to three months, where she would lug bright blue Styrofoam, plastic-wrapped, juicy short rib and stew beef. With the meat, she made galbitang with softened white radish and broth simmered for hours, tteokguk with swimming rice cake discs and a surprise of beaten egg, galbijjim with bright orange carrots and chestnuts, or homemade galbi. The galbi was for special occasions, like Mom’s birthday or my middle school graduation. Every day, I watched Halmoni cook in the kitchen. It was mesmerizing to see her liver-spotted hands chop green onions or gut dried anchovies for dashi broth with ease, and Halmoni clearly explained everything that she was doing. Even when her memory and words failed, her hands did not, and she only stopped cooking for the three of us in the last few months of her life. That was when I knew. Halmoni was no longer herself.

Mom unpacks the shaved beef by poking a hole into it with a pair of kitchen scissors. “Are you making bulgogi?” I ask, incredulous.

Mom nods.

Although Halmoni cooked a variety of dishes, she made bulgogi almost every week. She used shaved beef from the Korean market or Trader Joe’s, marinating soy sauce and sugar in a two-to-one ratio with mirim, crushed garlic, freshly ground hochu, and fragrant sesame oil, massaging the oozing marinade into the meat with tenderness, letting the bowl sit in the refrigerator for an hour before piling it onto a pan with a spoonful of sesame oil and stir-frying the whole shabang. In the kitchen, Halmoni’s confidence radiated from her five-foot-two frame, but now Mom appears to be hesitant at best, second-guessing every additional splash of soy sauce or mirim for the bulgogi marinade. Then Mom chops the shiitakes and onions and adds them to the bulgogi, which has barely sat for five minutes—Halmoni would be furious!—and hastily mixes them with plastic tongs, sprinkling finely chopped green onions on the meat and vegetables a few minutes later. “We’re going to let the marinade get into everything,” Mom says to me, or to herself.

Halmoni used to say that the beoseot, yangpa, and bulgogi became schoolyard friends in the pan. “They have to get dressed in the same uniform,” she laughed. I like the way Halmoni said it better.

Mom places the finished bulgogi into a frilled serving bowl with tongs and brings the bowl to the dining table, along with a bamboo serving spoon. I bring two bowls of sloppily scooped rice, along with metal spoons, chopsticks, and our seasonal placemats. It is the end of winter, so the placemats are burgundy with Christmas-esque holly. We eat in silence. Then I notice the Big Sad walking into the dining room with an empty stainless steel bowl and chopsticks. He sits at Halmoni’s old spot, directly across from me, and he uses his chopsticks to delicately pile bulgogi in his bowl. Mom doesn’t notice. He chews pensively and dips his head towards Mom in humble gratitude.

WHY ARE YOU HERE? I ask silently.

He does not answer. Mom and I eat without a word. The house feels hollow, even with the Big Sad sitting in Halmoni’s chair, his slippered feet planted firmly on the floor. Halmoni’s toes barely touched the carpet. The bulgogi is slightly bland, probably because Mom put a lid on it to accelerate the cooking. Halmoni told me that doing so would minimize its charred flavor.

“I miss Halmoni,” I say, half-eaten bulgogi in my mouth. “I wish she was here.”

Mom doesn’t say anything.

“She wouldn’t want us to get rid of her stuff,” I say. We had donated some of her belongings to Goodwill a few days ago.

“It was time, Louisa,” Mom finally says wearily. “And we can’t stop doing stuff because Halmoni died. Life still goes on.”

I see flashes of Halmoni at the end of her life, crying for her own mother, or for others we couldn’t understand, back in Korea, delusions crowding her foggy mind. Alzheimer’s had reduced my grandmother into a dead woman in three arduous years. A dead woman hesitantly sipping rice porridge, the only thing she could eat. A dead woman occasionally babbling jumbled sokdams, ghosts of her past eloquence. A dead woman closing her soulful brown eyes. It is a thought I refuse to accept.

“Louisa, she’s actually dead,” Mom interrupts my thoughts. “I know you don’t want to let go, but you have to accept that she’s actually dead. Louisa, do you want a hug?”

My entire body is constricted, stuck in a rice box without food and water, like the lustful and violent Prince Sado in the movie with Song Kang-ho and Yoo Ah-in that Halmoni and I watched a few years ago. I am trapped in Grief’s chokehold. The last thing I want is a hug. I look at the Big Sad for guidance, but he only gently frowns and places his chopsticks in a neat line on the table. I furrow my eyebrows at his hollow eyes, urging him to respond to my internal outcry. I refuse to speak for five minutes.

TALK TO ME, I demand silently from the Big Sad. WHAT DO I TELL MY MOTHER? WHERE IS HALMONI? DO YOU KNOW?      

The Big Sad’s countenance flattens.

TELL ME, I shriek in my mind.

I scowl to maintain a relatively ordinary facial expression in front of Mom.

Mom sighs. “I know you were close,” she says. “I know it’s difficult.”

I awkwardly wipe my tears with my red sweater sleeves. I don’t understand my thoughts at all. They are slimy, sticky globs of memory—of cooking galbijjim; listening to stories about Goguryeo, the Later Three Kingdoms, and Joseon; passionately cheering on for the revolutionary heroes of the Korean Independence Movement; binge-watching terribly cliché dramas for the fourth and tenth times; taking afternoon walks through her favorite park, as Halmoni joked that we should drop ssuk seeds and make the park a ssuk debat. I would make lots of ssuk tteok, Halmoni assured me. Then we laughed together, her mellifluous chortles and my gasping for air, as if I was being suffocated by a period drama poison or mauled to death by a tiger.

At the table, Mom is deep in thought. Yet, to my surprise, the Big Sad has tears rolling, rolling, rolling down his pale cheeks from his black, pitted eyes. His shoulders slump in resigned melancholy, and across the table, he extends a hesitant hand, mostly covered by his suit sleeve, toward mine. When I grasp his hand by his glossy fingertips, the Big Sad disappears, leaving my mother, the giant mostly uneaten platter of bulgogi, and me all alone

-<>-

The last day of school was about a week ago, and I don’t have any summer plans. My days are numb. My nights are numb, except when I step into Halmoni’s naked room, sit on the mattress, and contemplate her absence. The wooden bedframe, a hand-me-down from the master bedroom, creaks in welcome. Her stuffed closet is bare, and her scattered photo frames have relocated to the living room, but the naemsae still remains. Cheap watery perfume. Garlic. Old people sweat. It sits at my slippered feet and crawls into my nostrils. Sometimes I think I see the Big Sad from the corner of my eye, but to my disappointment, it’s just the shadow of the standing lamp or the gently ajar door.

Today is a Saturday morning, and Mom usually sleeps in, but I wake up earlier than usual to busybody footsteps around the house. I wipe the dry, yellow nunkkob around my puffy eyes, straighten my lopsided polka dot pajama pants, and shuffle downstairs in a haze. Mom is clearing the clutter—mostly month-old mail and her Post-It-Note scribbles, accompanied by the occasional T-shirt flung aside—from the living and dining rooms. She hands me a slapdash pile of stuff and hastily asks, “Louisa, you’re awake. Can you put this on my desk in the master?”

I am still half-awake. “Wait, why are you cleaning up?” I mumble. I can barely put my warm, fuzzy hands into fists without pins and needles.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Mom scrunches her face. “I called a cleaning service.”

“Wait, a cleaning service?”

Mom clarifies, “The ladies who clean houses?”

Something is seriously wrong, but I can’t figure out what. Then I know with certainty. The moment the cleaning ladies walk inside our house, Halmoni’s smell will disintegrate. In unadulterated panic, my eyes widen, my mouth dries, and my hands shake. “Wait, Mom, cancel the cleaners.” I grab her with urgency. But my tongue flops in limp rebellion—I cannot tell her that the cleaners must not clean Halmoni’s room, not after she told me that Halmoni was actually dead, whatever that means. I CAN’T LOSE THE SMELL, I scream to the Big Sad, but he is nowhere to be found. Mom will never understand why I need the garlic and cheap perfume preserved. I hate cleaning, but I have no choice.

“Mom, I’ll clean the house,” I plead, planning to skip Halmoni’s room.

“The entire house?”

“Yes,” I say adamantly, making direct eye contact with her.

“We can afford the cleaners,” Mom says, as if that matters.

I go down on my knees. My knees are uncomfortably cradled by the hardwood floors, and tears flow down my face, past my cheeks and onto my jutting collarbones. “Please, Mom, let me clean the house,” I beg, grasping the bottom edge of her beige sweater. 

Mom’s face scrunches with concern. “Fine, I’ll cancel the cleaners. But tell me what’s going on.”

Mom is too American. Her emotions are consumerist—shock and sorrow for the first months, only in public, when the neighbors will sympathize during conversations near the mailboxes, and stone-cold pragmatism at home, throwing away Halmoni’s clothes to the local Goodwill. How can she know why Halmoni’s existence must be preserved in amber? How can she comprehend that I must have the smooth silk of Halmoni’s clothes bound around my feet, her bulgogi stuffed into my intestines like Build-a-Bear stuffing, and her motherland stories engraved on my lips?

“You won’t understand,” I say.

Mom sighs. “Louisa, I can’t understand you if you don’t talk to me. When you’re ready to talk, I’ll be there. That’s what mothers are for.”

I wash my face with my Face Shop Rice Water Foaming Cleanser (a gift from my aunt, who says my skin is terrible), brush my teeth until my gums hurt, tie my hair with a pink silk scrunchie, and wear old P.E. shorts and my pajama T-shirt. Then I make a mental checklist: Swiffer the tile floors in the kitchen; scrub down the kitchen counters and floors; vacuum the carpeted living room, stairs, and upstairs bedrooms; dust the window panes; deep clean the bathrooms with bleach. That should be enough to satisfy Mom’s random desire to clean the house.

I tug a dripping Swiffer wet wipe from its silvered packaging and clumsily shove its four corners into the proper receptacles. I Swiffer the kitchen floors until the insides of my wrists ache. Urgently, I try to not slip on the freshly cleaned floors, squirting citrus all-purpose cleaner with my left hand and using some old rags to scrub the counters. I listen to a classical piano playlist on Spotify, dissonant with the aching rhythm of my crazed cleaning. I only remember one song entitled, Le mal du pays, or homesickness. The drip-drop of the melody stabs my empty gut. Ironically, I haven’t eaten yet.

The kitchen is foreign, and she refuses to smell like my grandmother. I name her Dolores for no reason. I wonder where the Big Sad is. He and Dolores the Kitchen can be friends.

I vacuum the living room and stairs, taking pains to remove all the thick black hair from the vacuum cleaner. Both Mom and I shed like autumn leaves, except we have no autumns in California. I’ve never seen a real autumn. Real autumns scatter leaves of scarlet, orange, and gold across the sidewalks of university campuses and beside commonplace bus stops. Real autumns reign on top of mountains, speckled in vivid hues of victorious glory. Halmoni loved her Korean autumns. She wanted to go back before she passed away. She never did.

Then I dust the window panes with the fluffy fluff thingamabob, the cattail, the whatever. I don’t know what it’s actually called. Halmoni would agree that life isn’t fun when we actually know what things are called. The fluff is soft, like the gentle wind of the Big Sad. For an odd reason, I miss his gaping eyes and black hat. It is not a complex, nuanced missing, like the emotions sung by the Korean balladists on Halmoni’s Spotify playlists, dense as grocery bags in the sedan trunk. Rather, the missing is simpler than expected, like the smooth velvet of the Big Sad’s top hat or the pale orange of a parkside sunset.

We only have two bathrooms, but we don’t use the downstairs bathroom out of convenience. So I lug a heavy container of Clorox bleach and a roll of paper towels to our sole upstairs bathroom for its deep cleaning. Water stains adorn the silver sink, and the bathtub is clogged with a wet mass of hair, but I take a few moments to look at my sweat-stained face in the mirror. My cheeks are flushed like piglets, and my eyes are haunted, not only red from blatant exposure to chemicals, but black—not comforting like the Big Sad’s, but empty as Alzheimer’s disintegrated basal forebrain cholinergic neurons, hollow like wind whistling through the trees. I inhale and exhale. I bathed Halmoni here with the gentle setting on the showerhead, drool and soapy water dribbling down her chapped lips because she forgot how to drink. I dried her thinning gray-white-black wisps of hair. On this very toilet, she wet her pants for the first time, screaming in humiliation and resigned anger before she forgot it happened in less than a day. Then we transitioned her to diapers. And I changed those big fat adult diapers here, kneeling on the freezing tile, wanting the Alzheimer’s to end, even momentarily. In some cases, right before death, Alzheimer’s patients gain a sudden clarity in a condition called terminal lucidity—an astonishing clarity of memory, a return to the former self. I prayed for terminal lucidity every single night. But when Halmoni lay on her deathbed, withered by the Alzheimer’s and old age, fluid in her lungs, I knew that my honeyed terminal lucidity daydream had whooshed away. Dust returned to dust. I cry. Then I clean the bathroom to the echo of my sobs across the walls.

Finally, my hands starchy and taut with astringents, I approach Halmoni’s room and collapse on her bed in brute exhaustion. I marinate like short ribs in the smell of chemicals befriending her cheap perfume in artificial harmony. A few minutes later, I hear a sharp knock. 

“Louisa?” Mom calls. “Is everything all right?”

I sit up in anticipation. Then Mom enters—with beige cashmere and socked feet—and sits next to me on Halmoni’s bed.

“I’m almost done,” I mumble.

“I’ll do the rest,” she says. “Get some sleep.”

I want to tell Mom about the bathroom, but my mouth refuses to obey. My voice warbling with sheer effort, I finally speak. “Mom,” I ask, “do you miss Halmoni?”

Mom does not answer. She subtly gulps, her hands steady on her lap, and illuminated by the sunlight creeping through the windowpanes, I see a thin tear roll down her cheek. I squint to focus on her face. Her face is egg-shaped, like mine, with deeply set chestnut eyes. Mom usually doesn’t wear any makeup, but she wears a thin layer of foundation, probably in past preparation for our cleaning service guests. As I observe Mom silently crying, I am an outsider. I may have lost my Halmoni, but Mom lost her mother.

A wind whooshes into Halmoni’s room, and the Big Sad sits beside my mother. His pale face is barely visible under his horsehair hat. He puts a hand on her shoulder, but she doesn’t respond. I smell Halmoni’s hyangsu of cheap perfume and the stench of garlic, but this time, the aroma is more complex, with hints of soil and earth, soy sauce, dried grass, and Tiger Balm, which Halmoni joked could cure her dementia, at least in its early stages. Now Mom’s face contorts into weird pink shapes, and her wails ooze. For the first time in months, my mother is loud and I am silent. But my silence is not forced. It flows from comfort, both Korean and American, the cotton bed sheets hugging my butt, the tear-stained song of my mother, and Halmoni’s smell, complete and not lacking.

I do not cry with her. In gratitude, I merely look towards the Big Sad, staring with his black eyes at my mother’s flushed face, crowned by delicate locks of runaway hair. 

-<>-

Halmoni’s favorite place in our small town was the ssuk debat park where we took walks every afternoon. On the speckled concrete sidewalk, our steps kept steady time, her feet nestled in rainbow socks and black marbled plastic clogs, and mine in five-year-old neon blue Crocs. Sometimes her hand, thin as a chicken leg, clasped mine. Her hands were so cold. Whenever we stopped for a break, sitting on one of the sleighed metal park benches, I warmed her hands by rapidly rubbing them between mine, one by one. Then I bought her hand-warmers from the local outdoor supply store and carefully placed them in her puffer jacket pockets. Fascinated and amused, Halmoni waddled, clutching the hand warmers in her pockets, a suburban Technicolor penguin, like a five-year-old child who just discovered sugar.

On these walks, Halmoni discussed anything and everything under the sun. She wove stories about the tumultuous history of Korean independence, bringing forth everything from the courageous temporary government in Shanghai to the comfort women mercilessly raped by Japanese soldiers and the escapades exaggerated by every mildly patriotic Korean blockbuster film. She chronicled her childhood spent in wartime, not extensively, avoiding the trauma like fish bones in saengseon-gui. She described the motherland herself. With her words, she molded her lush mountains, brooks with small silver fish, and chestnut trees nestled in the countryside. She made me recall every president of South Korea and that most of them were terrible leaders, ironically not worth remembering. We shared a pair of airplane headphones while listening to illegally downloaded old Korean songs on my old iPod Touch. She patiently listened when I talked about anything—archery in P.E. class or my latest obsession with the intelligence of magpies.

I hadn’t stepped foot in the park since Halmoni couldn’t get out of bed, about a week after she stopped cooking and six months before her passing. But today is Halmoni’s birthday, August 15, so in her honor, I walk to the park to watch the sunrise. The path there is familiar, and I step onto the speckled concrete, creating my own rhythm with neon Crocs. I bring hand warmers from my desk drawer. I feel more alone than I’ve ever felt, and then I realize that the Big Sad is right beside me, matching my slow, somber pace, his black Oxfords clacking on the sidewalk. The sun peeks its bright and hesitant head from behind the gray clouds, halfheartedly obscuring vivid orange and pink.

THE SUNRISE IS BEAUTIFUL TODAY, the Big Sad ruminates.

I stop in my tracks, my Crocs squeaking uncertainly. “You talked to me,” I say aloud.

I DID.

“Do you like sunrises?” I ask him.

I DO, LOU, the Big Sad nods vigorously, sheepishly adjusting his hat.

We walk in time. The wind rustles in the sparsely set trees and the pudgy grass, rejuvenated by the boisterous clang of the morning sprinklers. The orderly cracks in the concrete track the rounds we make around the park, past the benches that Halmoni used as brief rest stops, the pond for the ducks and geese, and the playground with its stand-out scarlet swings. Sometimes we would stop there briefly, and Halmoni would watch me propel my legs forward and backwards to reach the sky—swinging higher, higher, higher—until the path from refreshing sky to scraggly tanbark would become a blue-brown exhilarating blur. This time, I don’t stop. The Big Sad’s steps are steady as the click-click-click of the stove. Then, the Big Sad’s head gets stuck in the low-hanging leaves of a meandering tree. I chuckle as his lips pout and his fingers, so long and gangly, attempt to untangle his hat from the twisted branches. It is the first time I’ve laughed in months. My laugh blends with the gentle hum of the sprinklers, which now coat the grass in a closing tune. In response, the Big Sad subtly smiles, his pale lips curving upward like a crescent moon.

LOU, LET’S GET YOU HOME, the Big Sad says.

I rub the Big Sad’s hand with both of mine to warm it, like Halmoni’s. “I don’t even know where home is,” I cry.

The Big Sad says nothing. He wraps his arms around my thin frame, protecting me in his cold, comforting embrace. He still smells like cheap perfume, garlic, and sweat, but also like the sweet, smooth wind of the park. I close my eyes and sob into his suit jacket. After about a minute, he lets go. He holds my hand like I am a child. Halfway through the walk, I realize that my hand is holding nothing.

A few months later, Mom and I visit a fancy hat store downtown, and I buy a black velvet hat, much to my mother’s chagrin. She says that it will make me look like I’m forty. I tell her that it reminds me of a friend. I turn on the air conditioning in the hot, dry summers and listen for the wind whoosh from the vents. My eyes linger at the plain white dress shirts at Costco for too long. I buy Halmoni’s perfume and stir fry some bulgogi just like she used to. Although the Big Sad is nowhere to be found, I’m sure he’ll turn up somehow.