It’s the most my father has ever said to me at once. He’s not even angry as he says it. He talks like he’s trying to teach me something basic. One plus one equals two, son.
Ever since he bought the oil paints for omma, I’ve wanted to have a conversation like this with him. I’ve wanted to know why he wants the things he wants for us. Why it’s so important to him. I want to ask him if he thinks omma’s life would’ve been better if she’d kept painting. I want to know if he’s sad that she gave it up for him and for us.
Maybe this moment right now between my dad and me is the meaning of today. Maybe I can begin to understand him. Maybe he can begin to understand me.
“Appa—” I begin, but he holds his hand up to silence me and keeps it there. The air around us is still and metallic. He looks at me and through me and past me to some other time.
“No,” he says. “You let me finish. Maybe I make it too easy for you boys. Maybe this is my fault. You don’t know your history. You don’t know what poor can do. I don’t tell you because I think things are better that way. Better not to know. Maybe I am wrong.”
I’m so close. I’m at the edge of knowing him. We’re at the edge of knowing each other.
I’m going to tell him that I don’t want the things for myself that he wants for me. I’m going to tell him that I’ll be okay anyway.
“Appa—” I begin again, but again his hand goes through the air. Again I am silenced. He knows what I’m going to say, and he doesn’t want to hear it.
My father is shaped by the memory of things I will never know.
“Enough. You don’t go to Yale and become a doctor, then you find a job and pay for college yourself.”
He walks back to the front of the store.
I’ll admit that there’s something refreshing about having it all laid out for me like this. Future or No Future.
My suit jacket is still crumpled by the door. I grab it and put it on. The lapel almost covers the bloodstain.
I look around for Charlie, but he’s nowhere to be found.
I walk to the door. My dad’s behind the cash register, staring off at nothing. I’m about to leave when he says the final thing, the thing he’s been waiting to say.
“I saw the way you look at that girl,” he says. “But that can never be.”
“I think you’re wrong,” I tell him.
“Doesn’t matter what you think. You do the right thing.”
We make and hold eye contact. It’s the holding of eye contact that tells me he’s not sure what I’m going to do.
Neither am I.
DAE HYUN BAE OPENS AND CLOSES the cash register. Opens and closes it again. Maybe it really is his fault that his sons are the way they are. He’s told them nothing about his past. He does it because he’s a father who loves his sons fiercely, and it’s his way of protecting them. He thinks of poverty as a kind of contagion, and he doesn’t want them to hear about it lest they catch it.
He opens the register and packs the large bills into the deposit pouch. Charlie and Daniel think money and happiness are not related. They don’t know what poor is. They don’t know that poverty is a sharp knife carving away at you. They don’t know what it does to a body. To a mind.
When Dae Hyun was thirteen and still living in South Korea, his father began grooming him to take over the family’s meager crab fishing business. The business barely made any money. Every season was a fight for survival. And every season they survived, but just barely. For most of his childhood, there was never any doubt in Dae Hyun’s mind that he would eventually take over the business. He was the eldest of three sons. It was his place. Family is destiny.
He can still remember the day that sparked a small rebellion in his mind. For the first time, his father had taken him out on the fishing boat. Dae Hyun hated it. Trapped in the cold mesh-metal baskets, the crabs formed a furious, writhing column of desperation. They scrabbled and clawed their way over each other, trying to get to the top and to escape.
Even now, the memory of that first day still crops up at unexpected times. Dae Hyun wishes he could forget it. He’d imagined that coming to America would wipe it clean. But the memory always comes back. Those crabs never gave up. They fought until they died. They would’ve done anything to escape.
IT’S HARD TO KNOW HOW to feel now. I don’t really trust what’s happened, or maybe I just haven’t had enough time to process it.
I check my phone. Bev’s finally texted. She loves, loves, loves Berkeley. She says she thinks she’s destined to go there. Also, California boys are cute in a different way from New York boys. The last text asks how I am, with a string of broken heart emojis. I decide to call and tell her what Attorney Fitzgerald said, but she doesn’t pick up.
call me, I text.
I push my way through the revolving doors and out into the courtyard, and then I just stop moving. A handful of people are having lunch on the benches next to the fountain. Separate groups of fast walkers in suits go in and out of the building. A line of black town cars idles at the curb while their drivers smoke and chat with each other.
How can this be the same day? How can all these people be going about their lives totally oblivious to what’s been happening to mine? Sometimes your world shakes so hard, it’s difficult to imagine that everyone else isn’t feeling it too. That’s how I felt when we first got the deportation notice. It’s also how I felt when I figured out that Rob was cheating on me.