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Dept. of English
Humanities Building
SUNY at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, NY 11794-5350
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State University of New York at Stony Brook

Site Designed by Melissa Bishop/DoIT Last Modified 09/03/2003 12:02:14 PM EDT

We threw our bodies into our words. We gestured with our hands, rotated our heads like we had necks made of coiled-wire springs. The vocabulary we shared served as the connective tissue of our relationship. The narrow strip of common ground upon which we stamped our feet and danced.

I met Katy during orientation before our freshman year at Berkeley. She stood out as one of the few black women there. We wound up talking to each other. And later we ran into our fathers who had coincidentally become acquaintances.

Seeing them stand together reminded me of when I was six years old. I witnessed my dad call a black man his “brother.”

It was about eight o’clock at night. We walked to the Boys Market on Western Avenue three blocks from our house, in the heart of Koreatown. As we entered the store, a tall black man, about my father’s height, came out with shopping bags in his hands. His image flashed for only a second in the blue fluorescent light.

My father had his strange accent that sounded kind of Asian, but kind of Jewish. He came to the United States in the early Sixties. The Jewish were getting out of their small businesses in South LA and the Koreans were coming into them. My dad lifted his hand and said, “What’s up, brother?” The man looked surprised. He gave a quick smirk in response.

My father and Katy’s father had these huge, dumb-looking grins on their faces. You could see my father’s periodontal disease.

They stood close to each other like old college buddies. However my dad had gone to a university in South Korea and her father never had the chance to finish college. At the age of nineteen, he and his wife immigrated from Trinidad.

Nonetheless, my father had owned a gas station in the Eighties on Martin Luther King Boulevard. And Katy’s father worked a few blocks away on Jefferson Boulevard in South LA for nearly fifteen years.

Katy was not only a black woman, but had this wonderful Trinidad accent. She said “dem tings” for “those things.”

We made the most awkward pair. I barely broke five feet. Katy was a large woman of five feet eight. She wore Nikes and sweatpants—the college sweater-wearing type of girl—and I wore a black cashmere sweater I had found in a pile at Nordstrom Rack, black slacks, and a pair of duct-taped combat boots.

We both disguised our accents, mine being faintly Korean, hers being Caribbean, behind a sort of South LA talk. We overused phrases like “You know what I’m saying, girl?” and “Shit, that’s some fuckin’ bullshit right there.”

When I was around Katy, I felt like spitting in the face every single “English as a Second Language” class I had ever taken. There was that time in Ms. Sam’s fifth grade class when I described my home in English. I intended to define the garage as a “shack” but called it a “shag.” Or the time my friends made fun of me because I said that during Tae Kwon Do class I got front kicked by a ten year old, brown belt in the “crouch.”

I didn’t feel lonely around Katy. It was easy to talk to her. We often chattered until the sun came up and slowly burned the night sky.

Katy and I lived on the same floor of Stern Hall. We had our own roommates. But we met up with each other for lunch and dinner when we could.

We became so close we laughed with our mouths open and walked around half-naked in each other’s presence, not fearful of what we thought of each other’s bodies. We sat in our floor lounge, talking in an unharnessed way, with accents and our own kind of grammar. We relished in our rebellion, saying a secret “Fuck you” to every single kid that ever messed with our words.

Although we spent late nights debating issues like Affirmative Action or gay marriage rights, in the mornings we always greeted each other with sleepy, familiar grins. We continued to plot our adventures with a map and even a compass, day and night, in Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco.

Jonathan Renaud, our Graduate Student Instructor for Ancient Art History, was our favorite subject of conversation. We dissected him, probed into his clothes. We made a game out of who noticed what about him and mocked ourselves and each other for our stupidity.

“Did you see the kind of hat he was wearing today?”

“Yea, I saw it. But do you know what kind it was?”

“No.”

“Well, I do.”

He had the shiniest blonde hair that looked like grass from somewhere in the middle of America. Blue eyes that glowed on even the darkest days when you felt yourself drown in the color grey.

You could imagine him in a red, plaid shirt, plowing the earth. He had the look of someone who belonged on a vast landscape, an open field, amongst “amber waves of grain.”

However, what came out of his lips was ambrosia. Honey-tongued, he spoke of things ancient, stories embedded into dusty artifacts, painted along the walls of villas and temples. Sea-faring Minoans, the Parthenon, the Golden Age.

Pure exotica for two girls from the ghetto.

We tried hard to talk to Jonathan. We went to office hours, appeared to be the most diligent students in class. We believed it was possible to absorb some of the light into ourselves and glow for the rest of the day.

I loved Katy. She had such a thick nostalgia for Trinidad.

She talked about the beaches. The tough skin of fruits. The way soft sand felt between her toes. The sticky after-feel of mango on her fingers and palms. The very smell of Carnival. And how much she missed and loved her family. How she hadn’t seen her cousins in years. And she admitted to me her loneliness, and pain, which I thought was difficult for a woman with so much pride.

I sometimes envied her memory. I didn’t remember much of Korea. I was born there, moved here at age five. My memories seemed cold and stale, distant and detached, compared to the pulsating vibrancy of hers.

And it was hard for me to be nostalgic about anywhere or anyone, to become that attached to one place. I didn’t remember my grandparents other than what they were in black-and-white photographs. My maternal grandfather, tall and elegant. My grandmother, tough like a tree stump.

The photographs of my father’s parents boxed up, tucked away in some place I would never know.

My parents didn’t talk about North Korea, where they were born. They drowned the thought of what they had fled and left behind. And I could only imagine, make a floating, yet almost physical, myth out of how hungry they were. How my grandparents picked lice off their bodies. How many days and nights they spent walking south. How their feet hurt. How they were scared. How much time it took to finally stop crying, to fold and pack all the emotions and pain neatly away.

I had little access to their memories, their vaults full of secrets. I presumed they would shed light on every dark part of me.

Therefore, it was much easier to pick up a book, to take a GE course on something that seemed solid—the very foundation upon which we stood.

Katy had an awful time her first year. As a Mathematics major, black, female, and with an accent to boot, she confronted some real shit in most of her classes.

Tim Malone, a second-year student who must have had an employee discount at Banana Republic, studied with us for Honors Calculus. He asked Katy what kind of accent she had.

She had this stunned look on her face. She always figured she hid it well. She told him she was born in Trinidad.

And Tim-with-the-endless-supply-of-khakis asked, “Who owns you now?”

Katy looked at him, surprised. Her eyebrows reached nearly the center of her forehead.

And he said, “Who OWNS you now? You know…Britain or Spain?”

Katy said, “Neither.”

I felt like shoving my boot right up his San-Jose-ass. But Katy had already begun to ignore him. She continued with her problem set for Calculus.

I became so angry with the silence I pretended to be tired and put my head down. I shed tears over my homework and the one hundred fifty dollar calculator my parents had bought me for Christmas.

I thought of the things I could say and do. But instead I stammered, choked on words at the tip of my tongue.

I watched Katy. I marveled at her stoicism. The way she bit her lip, rubbed her brows with a pencil-holding hand. I felt frustrated with my inability to detect any sort of anger in her face.

I talked to her later over the sludge they called dinner in the dorms.

“Why didn’t you say anything, Katy?”

“Don’ tink I never heard dat before. Dat ‘who owns you?’ bullshit.” She continued to chop at the thick macaroni and cheese. She didn’t intend to eat it.
“Girl, don’t let him think he can talk to you like that.”

“Well, wat you want me to do? You tink I gonna cuss him out and it gonna change someting. Dam, Kari, only way he change is when someone beat his ass. You tink I wanna go to jail? You tink my mom work two job so I can go get kicked outta school and sit on my ass in jail?”

She cracked a smile. She didn’t put a scrap of food in her mouth.

Later that night Katy came by to study. My roommate, Jessica, had already left to go party with some friends.

We both had a lot of homework for Math and Art History.

She seemed a bit distracted.

“Hey, you okay?”

“Yea. My mom just called. My parents got what dey call ‘issues.’”

I could relate to her. It was always a downer to get a phone call from your parents fraught with financial anxieties, problems at home. It was better to stick your head in a book, do a math problem, read about the sun god Ra, than think about the things you worked to get away from.

We didn’t make it all the way over there for nothing.

In the mid-Eighties, my parents sold the gas station in South Central. They bought a men’s clothing store in a mini mall on Pacific Boulevard in the city of Huntington Park, a little south of South LA.

I played with the children who worked in the neighboring stores. In the blinding sun, we ran without direction in empty, dirt-covered lots outside the mini mall. We searched for tiny holes, openings into underground labyrinths. Merciless, we prodded the tunnels with dried-up twigs.

The aftertaste of carne asada and kimchee lingered on my tongue as we sweated out the pulsing pleasure of our youth.

There was Christina and Nga, whose parents had come from Vietnam and owned a toy store. They sold the most wonderful cars—plastic fire engines and miniature, candy red Lamborghinis. They sold the largest stuff animals I had ever seen. My heart ached every time I looked at them piled at the back of their store.

And every Christmas I itched for the kind of Santa Claus I saw on television. I dreamt of stockings hung up by a warm fireplace, toys and candies bursting out of them. Instead, on Christmas Day my family worked from nine in the morning. Our gift was to go home at five instead of at eight p.m.

In the beginning, I distrusted Christina and Nga. I narrowed my eyes to them each time they walked by my parents’ store with ice cream cones dripping on their freckled hands. They wore gold necklaces and jade.

I didn’t own a single piece of jewelry, other than a copper ring with a heart on it. It was the kind of thing you buy for twenty-five cents in a vending machine. It had begun to leave an embarrassing green ring around my finger.

I only heard them speak Cantonese to each other. One day I was taken aback when they spoke English to me. I had been off running an errand for my mother. I found them at the supermarket munching on Fritos. Nga turned to me and smiled. She asked me where I was from. And we soon made quick friends after she offered me one of those mango lollipops covered in chili.

We also played with a boy named Juan, whose mother worked behind the counter at the grocery store. He had a thin face and big, floppy ears. Beautiful and inquisitive eyes, wet with enthusiasm.

I thought he had a crush on me. He often came to my parents’ store. I hid within the dress shirts rack, being careful not to breathe loudly or sneeze from all the dust. I watched him between the folds of fabric—both fearful of and curious about his affection.

The four of us played hide-and-go-seek in each other’s stores. We hid in the clothes racks and told scary stories from each of our respective countries of birth. La Llorona, who cried in the dead of night for the children she had drowned in a fit of insanity. Beh Guai Jhag, the ghost that Christina said would sit on me, suffocating me in my sleep, if I was bad and didn’t fairly split my Skittles with her.

At night when the wind howled, chilling the bones in my body, I thought of La Llorona. I imagined her to be a beautiful, sad woman with long, black hair. I would use my sympathy for the insane as a sword to slice open my fear and would finally fall asleep in a tragic romantic trance.

We pretended to be assassins, bank tellers, even politicians. We spent summers memorizing our subtleties, gossiping and talking shit, but always loving and looking for each other.

“Katy. Katy! Where you going, girl? Class gonna start in two minutes.”

“Girl, I gotta fix my hair. Shiiit. You tink I gonna let my man see me like dis.”

She continued to run past me. Her light, Cal logo backpack bounced up and down. I waited outside class.

When our man Jonathan came by and opened the door, I greeted him with a “Good afternoon, Jonathan.” With a pout on my rouged up face. “I hope your knee is doing better. Is it feeling okay?”

He recently suffered an injury because of a kick to his left leg playing lacrosse.

“Why, yes.” He smiled.

I felt myself slide, fall like a blinding avalanche.

“Thank you for asking.” He entered the classroom.

I smoothed down my hair. I opened the door and took a seat close to Jonathan in our circular, crop formation of chairs. I saved one beside me, but farther from Jonathan, for Katy.

She walked in a few minutes late. Her face, matted down with powder. Her eyelashes, long and flickering like little butterflies. My sweatpants-wearing best friend transformed into a coquette in less than five minutes.

I had studied until nearly three a.m., ignoring the problem sets I needed to do for Calculus.

I knew the Minoans by heart. I knew the name of every painting, amphora, hydria, every god-damned alias for a water jug. I had done web research. Done online study guides. Memorized almost everything from the Egyptians to the Romans. My guns drawn.

He started off discussion with the weekly, “Does anyone have any questions about lecture? Or the readings?”

I raised my hand, a bullet shot into the air. “I’m very much intrigued, or shall I say captivated, by the use of phallic imagery in the wall paintings at Pompeii.” I cleared my throat. “I’m wondering how I can find out, or discover, anything about the importance of the phallus as a symbol amongst the Roman elite.” Nearly perfect. Just like how I had written it down the night before.

Jonathan began to open his sweet mouth. Katy said, “You can always refer to Brendel. He wrote a pioneering essay in 1970, ‘The Scope and Temperament of Erotic Art in the Greco-Roman World.’ You can find his essay in an issue of Studies of Erotic Art at the Art History/Classics Library. I actually read it yesterday and found it to be an engaging read.”

She sounded nearly British. I imagined her with a cup of tea and a monocle wedged in her right eye. Katy smiled, mentally chalking herself up a point.
I said, “Oh…thanks.” I grinned a playful fuck you.

As I got older, I began to resent having to work for my parents during school vacations. While my classmates were at home playing Super Nintendo, making out with boys, crank-calling teachers from numbers in the White Pages, I was folding slacks, counting change, estaba aprendiendo español.

I was so bitter I nearly willed destruction.

Christina, Nga, Juan and I still talked but less frequently. We sometimes spent entire school years not seeing each other. When we reunited in the summers or during winter break there were those unspoken and uncomfortable alterations—the new ear piercing, the different hairstyle, the different clothes, make-up, newly sprouted boobs. It was difficult to deal with or grasp the little changes that seemed to signify something greater.

So when the Riots were happening, I felt a mixture of excitement and fear. It looked like anarchy on television. Instead of staying with my parents, I locked myself into my bedroom, cranked up an LA Guns song and felt giddy. I imagined how I could now spend my summers kissing boys like Jimmy Friedman and watching Headbangers’ Ball at the house of my friend Sandy, who had cable television and Jack Daniels under her bed.

By the second day, things changed. Television became a reality when I looked outside my window and saw stacks of smoke towering the sky. The world had a lurid, menacing glow.

My neighbor, Mrs. Choi, came running to our house in her slippers and nightgown. She cried, saying her husband had gone with some friends, and a shotgun, to defend his store. Mrs. Choi, with the permanent apron, was the kind that watered her lawn and smiled. She had no children. She loved to give candies and chocolates to me and all the other neighborhood kids.

For the rest of the day, we watched television. On the screen, stores burned. My father was scared and wanted to stay home from work.

For the first time in their lives, my parents sat in front of the television set all night, whispering to each other. My mother chewed her nails. My father looked back broken, bent over. The glow of the television, casting shadows in the crevices of his face.

And I sat on the floor, held on to my mother’s foot, saw her weep. I wondered what thing so terrible could make my mother, the stoic with the crack calloused feet, break down. I couldn’t help but cry.

And my adolescent troubles—the bad acne, not scoring Guns N’ Roses tickets for Saturday night, not putting my bangs into the perfect AquaNet wave—burned away. They dissolved into a terrible mess as my mother wept.

After the Riots, I never knew what became of Nga and Christina and Juan. Everybody, too busy fending for themselves. The mini mall became cracked glass and bent metal. There was nowhere for me and my friends to hide, no dark place to tell stories.

People cursed to themselves. They were unsure of who or what greater thing to hold responsible for the despair and destruction reining their lives. Everyone looked at each other with suspicion, without the words or knowledge to blame.

“Dat boy…mmm…mmm…mmm…he was lookin’ at me, girl! You should’ve seen him.”

We were eating lunch at the Golden Bear.

Katy glowed. The sun lit her face as it came in through the window.

It was one of those moist days after a rainstorm. I wanted to roll around in the grass, damp with dew, to bake myself in the soft sunlight.

She had gone to Jonathan’s office hours. I had gone to Chemistry lab.

“He was lookin’ at me funny, girl. You should’ve seen him. He looked…he looked good enough to eat.” She hadn’t touched her food. She fed off the excitement of her moment, her memory with him. I stabbed into my garden salad.

“He said...” She cleared her throat. “He said, ‘Katy, what an excellent start for your paper. This is a great topic.’”

“He had on dem grey slacks, and dat white dress shirt, with ‘tree buttons on the top unbuttoned. And he was smilin’ da whole time tru. I tink he was impressed with my papeh.” She smiled, looked beautiful, beaming with love.

I started to feel sick, sweating in the sunlight. I loosened the black scarf around my neck. It seemed to choke me.

Sometimes I wondered what you could be without history, without memory, without nostalgia thick enough to consume. Would you be like La Llorona or like the “sitting ghost?” Would you be someone else’s myth, malleable, amorphous, without flesh and bone, without anything solid within you?

Whose myth would you be? Would someone else own you?

If I cut myself open, could I bleed it out? Could I make a pool out of it? Would memory be concrete as the color red? Would something be in its reflection?

Our Art History paper was due the following week. I decided to go to Jonathan’s office hours to discuss my paper on femininity and female representation in Classical Greek sculpture. It was one of those pesky three-page assignments in which they expected you to say so much shit in so little time.

I was nervous and I liked having an excuse to go to office hours.

With our fluffy house slippers and thermal mugs, Katy and I spent the night before office hours in the downstairs study lounge at Stern Hall. We took two classes together. We had a Calculus final in a week. But we were both busy reading for Art History

I would glance over at Katy to see what page she was on or to get a glimpse of how much she wrote in the margins. And I could sense her dark eyes looking at me too.

We were letting it consume us. We were becoming a little obsessed. I mean, Art History was just a GE and Calculus was a pre-requisite for our major.

However we wanted to take more Art History courses. We both enrolled in Renaissance Art for the next semester. Unfortunately, Jonathan was not going to teach in the spring.

We often studied until three or four every morning, learning the nuances of every work of art, every slide we had to memorize. We counted each, dear hair on Claudius’ marble head. I could close my eyes and picture my hands running up and down the sides of Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian columns. I felt the differences beneath my chalky, eager fingertips.

Maybe at first Jonathan was something good to share. But in the end, we each got fed up by how much we actually received. Maybe even sharing meant we weren’t good enough for the whole.

I mean, this is America. Can’t we all just get along?

Tuesday, office hours, room two-two-three. Fifteen minutes early.

I wanted to be there first. So, I could take my time with Jonathan.

I took out my book on Roman Art and tried to finish my reading for the next day’s lecture.

The hall was empty, dead quiet. I heard whistling. The Delphonics’ “Tell Me this is a Dream.” A decent attempt at a fairly impossible song to whistle. Katy.

I heard her before I saw her. It was like the sound of seven blaring trumpets--apocalyptic.

She came happily down the hall. Then she noticed me sitting there.

She thought she would be first. I beat her.

We both tried to smile. She sat down beside me on the floor. She said, “Hey.” I said, “Hey” back.

She turned toward me. Her lips, glossy like glass. She said, “Hmm…I don’t recall you mentioning you would be here.” She sounded formal, unnatural.

“No, I just decided spontaneously to come. I don’t recall you mentioning office hours either.”

We didn’t look at each other. We couldn’t see how ridiculous it all was.

She said, “Oh…well…I’m just here to have Jonathan look over the first draft of my paper. We’ve been talking about a lot of issues that have come up in my research. So I wanted to see what he thinks of the first draft. We’ve been talking through email, you know.”

She looked at me and smiled. Her long, thick eyelashes fluttered. Her face had no glow, matted down with a layer of powder.

I shrugged and looked away, trying not to care. I knew she was ahead of me.

I looked at her hard. “You look different today.” She wasn’t wearing her usual Cal or Berkeley logo paraphernalia. She had on a long skirt, colorful like a Monet meadow. She wore a white, collared blouse, starched stiff.

She eyed me. “You look different, too.” In that I started to hear her accent peek up from its hole. Perhaps, we were not just upset, but hurt, too.

“Katy…Girl, it don’t need to be a competition all the time. Let’s be real, girl.”

She glanced at me. She puckered her lips like she tasted something sour and looked away. “It ain’t no fil-ty competition. Why can’t I look good, girl, wit-out you naggin’ me? Can’t help it if Jonathan likes me best. Can’t help it.”

I whispered, not looking at her. “When’d you get so damn prissy?”

”Don’ even go there, gy-url.” Her eyes widened. Her accent got thicker. “Don’ even. Don’ be bringin’ yo feel-ty mind up he-ah. Jus’ cuz I bet-tah you don’ need to be act-een’ like a dam teef.”

I was sorry. I wanted to take back what I had said. But also angry she called me “feel-ty,” a “dam teef.” I was so upset my eyes had begun to water. So sorry at the same time that I began to cry. I cursed to myself in Korean. I couldn’t say it, but could only think, “Who owns you now, Katy?”

She started to cry, too.

The next thing we knew, he was standing there, looking at us. He asked if we were okay. We cried bitterly, cursing to ourselves in our languages. Too ashamed to look up at him. Embarassed, we looked away. He just stood there, probably didn’t know what to do. So, he unlocked the door to the GSI office. Disappeared.

We were so ashamed we couldn’t speak. The tender wound, our secret exposed.