The Right Way
by E.H. Jin
“Okaaaay!!!”
Per my Hal-muh-nee’s instruction, I grabbed the fork once again, but this time with my right hand. The fork stem felt awkward, and the only way I could wield to any effect was to hold it like a dagger. The tines land across the plate in bouncy, screechy skids. I looked at her and scowled. I was tempted to lung it at her, but instead put the fork back in my left hand.
When a baby is born, the undeveloped mass of flesh and viscera is tender and yields to the molding of the outside world.
We were trying to eat lunch, but I was still groggy from my nap. My hair was matted to forehead and cheeks. I napped during the summers to sound of my grandmother fanning me. We didn’t have an electric fan, and even though the apartment had an air-conditioning unit. Our family refused to turn it on, no matter how high the thermostat rose. It mattered little how vehemently I protested, or even if I used my best threats – food wall art or really loud percussion performances.
To appease me, my Hal-muh-nee cut out the side of an extra large, economy-size Kellogg’s cornflakes box and fanned me while I slept. Without fail, no matter how many times I might awake, she was always there with the “woosh woosh” of the cardboard.
It was lunch time and I tried to eat in peace, putting the fork back in my left hand. She slapped my left hand saying, “Only byung-shin use their left hands!” Her worst fear is that I become left-handed – a definitive sign that I will be doomed to mental retardation.
“Ay-yah, Hal-muh-nee! That hurts!”
Cells divide. Made to elongate and differentiate, each has an individual purpose and self-determination.
My grip tightens on the fork, and it is all I can do to suppress an urge to lunge it toward her. Hal-muh-nee’s anger was a mystery. What did I do that was so bad? When I turned the dining table and bed sheets into a jungle hut, she was not impressed. When she discovered I used all my mother’s lipsticks to decorate my new hut, she was livid. Everything that required imagination, she deemed unholy. I only came to understand what was “bad” through a long and painful process of elimination. Who would have known that using one’s left hand was not the right way?
My body was subject to her rule. My grandmother also had a ritual which I called the nose-squeeze. She would take her hand and form a pair of pliers with her thumb and the rest of her fist. She would then place her hand on the bridge of my nose and repeatedly pull in hopes of forming a more western profile.
My family was well versed in secrets of the body. For instance, it was a well-known fact that sleeping babies when placed on their backs can grow to have flat heads, and thus, have a one-sided view of the world. Hal-muh-nee, well aware of this, placed me on alternating sides when I sleep, thus giving me a rounded head – a head-shape that denotes intelligence. She was equally convinced that leaving me left handed and flat-nosed would doom me to a fate of mental weakness and lifelong misery.
Cartilage has yet to be replaced by bone, and sinews of body take shape.
Before I make my last attempt at holding the fork with my right hand, my grandmother reaches over to squeeze my nose. Having enough, I jump away, and run run into the living room.
Sudden spurts of growth render the frame unsteady and unwieldy.
I am unable to stop, and my body, seemingly of its own volition crashes into the coffee table. Hal-muh-nee races in and screams when she looks down. She whisks me up in her arms, and covers her shirtsleeve over my eye.
Holding me in on arm, my grandmother scrambled for the piece of paper on the refrigerator, red finger prints almost entirely cover the phone number on the paper. Her index finger fumbles on the rotary phone, turning the dial, and she makes the call.
“Hello?”
“Itchan nah, Eh-gi gah sah-goh-nassuh,” my Hal-muh-nee hysterically cries in Korean.
“What??!?” My mother screams. “What kind of accident?”
“Jahl-morrah. Noon-eh suh, pee gah mahk-nahohn-dah.”
“Oh my God, I’ll be right there. I’m calling 911!”
Later that afternoon, I woke up in the hospital room, with a nurse smiling down at me. “Hello, sweetie, how are you feeling?”
I smiled back and looked around the room. I have to turn to the right to see the entire room. I stared at the painted rainbows and bears through my left eye. Through a glass window to the left of the bed, I see my mother and grandmother. Hal-muh-nee’s head is down, chin to chest, as my mother drones on loudly, but I can’t hear anything she says.
“You’re a very lucky little girl, and your eye will be fine in no time,” the nurse says before she leaves the room.
My mother comes in the room, alone, and sits on the bed. Her eyebrows furrowed with concern, she says, “When you fell, you almost lost your eye on the coffee table,” she continues, but with her eyes pursed, “We’re not going to let you get hurt again.”
Negotiating new surroundings, the soft form is vulnerable.
“Where’s hal-muh-nee?”
“Hal-muh-nee left …”
“Where did she go?”
“She’s going home to Uncle’s house.”
”but…”
“She’s going to stay at Uncle’s for a while.”
“Whhhyy?”
“Hal-muh-nee should have been watching you more carefully.”
“But it was me…”
“Shhhhh… rest now”
My jaw drops and my lips part, my mother leaves the room as I cry,”
“But it was me, Mom! I should be in trouble, not Hal-muh-nee. Please, Mom! Pleeeasssee!!!! It was me! Don’t take her away.”
My grandmother moved out that evening. I only saw her on holidays and birthdays after that.
I spent the next afternoon at my neighbor Peter Stratsky’s. His mom served us macaroni and cheese with peanuts and raisins in a paper cup after lunch. Mrs. Stratsky paid not attention to which hand I ate with or how I held my fork, but I ate with my right hand anyway.
Though easily injured, the young body is flexible and heals. Some scars fading, it makes itself whole. |
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