The Eyes Are the Best Part

by Monika Kim

the thought of walking in there and seeing my mother slumped over her pillow made me feel sick to my stomach.

I wanted to sleep, to ignore everything that was happening.

In the middle, there was a big stone pot filled with braised beef short ribs, my father’s favorite. Next to it was an entire fish, deep-fried, the napkin underneath it spotted with oil. I saw soy-marinated soft tofu and steamed egg speckled with bits of green onion, which jiggled when the table was touched.

This sounds so fucking good rn

where she sat, wilted like a thirsty flower, her hair wild.

Umma shrugged and pointed at the pile of fish on the table. “Fish eyes are good luck. If I eat one, maybe it will bring your father back.”

“If anything, I’m glad you don’t want to try. Your mother needs all the luck she can get.”

The truth is that Appa left because he met another woman. I know this because I heard him say so myself.

I woke up, startled by a sudden bang, and opened my eyes just in time to see a shower of sparks from the window, the smoke curling lazily in the air.

Outside, I heard raised voices. I assumed that the neighbors were arguing again. I rubbed my face and turned to listen. Right away, I realized that the voices weren’t coming from outside.

They were coming from my parents’ bedroom next door. It was past midnight, though the fact that they were still awake wasn’t unusual since my father often went to bed late.

Umma was a passive, easygoing woman. She never dared to argue with my father, who in our home was both a king and a god. His word was law; the rest of us, his pawns, did what we were told to do.

the sharpness and acidity of my father’s tone and the waterlogged quality of my mother’s, as though someone was holding her head underwater.

“Then what’s your reason? Is it really because of me? Yeobo, please. Give me a chance to fix this. You’re right. I haven’t been a good wife to you lately. I understand this now. I can do better. I will do better.”

I was overwhelmed by the need to know. How was Appa going to respond? What was he going to say? I waited, holding my breath. My father’s voice was so low that I had to strain to hear him speak. “I can’t stay,” he said. “I met someone else.”

My mother was howling. The pain in her cry was so intense that it made all the hair on my neck stand on end,

didn’t want to hear any more. I didn’t want to know any more. All I wanted was to sleep, to forget. But for the rest of the night, my mother’s sobbing continued.

I wondered how my father was able to stand it, lying next to her like that.

Even when I tried to muffle her sounds, hugging my pillow over my head, it was as though s...

She hovers by the entrance of our apartment at all hours of the day, more ghost than human. She haunts the shoe rack and the closet right next to the doorway,

Umma is someone who is used to waiting. In fact, she’s probably spent more of her life waiting than not.

When the next-door neighbor’s daughter died in her sleep, she was nothing more than a whittled skeleton. Hearing the news, my grandmother and grandfather were deeply shaken.

Their little tin house had no insulation, and the children became sick, their heads and bodies hot with fever, the sleeves of their clothes hard and crusted with yellowed snot. Ha-joon had a deep cough that made his lungs rattle.

He was secretly convinced that they had been abandoned and that nobody would ever come back for them.

I can’t help but wonder what Umma would have been like if she had followed her brothers and sisters instead of staying behind. Would she still be this person, waiting around for my father, who doesn’t even want her?

“Didn’t you worry that Halmeoni and Harabuji would never return?” “Never. I never doubted them for a second.” “But how were you so sure?” “They were my parents,” she said softly. “I knew they were going to come back.”

I opened my mouth, unable to stifle the frustration growing inside me. It came up like bile, the need to say something mean and biting,

The want to make her feel small. But soon, that feeling gave way to sadness. I felt sorry for her. Sorry that every part of her l...

She was back in that little tin house, the hail clattering noisily against the walls. It was winter, and she was alone, her cries lost to the wind.

There are some things that you can never truly escape. Not really. Maybe that’s why, even now, she’s stuck in the past, long after everyone else has moved on.

“Why are you girls ignoring your poor mother?” “I’m not,” Ji-hyun says flatly, without looking up. “It seems like it.” “Okay.”

“Fine,” Umma snaps. “If neither of you care about me, I’ll go crawl in a hole and die. You’ll both wish you were nicer to me when I’m gone.”

Krystal core

“You’re all I have in this world. I have nobody else.

Not this shit

The tightness in my chest loosens. My sister has a gift for sidestepping conflict, for easing tension, for turning things around.

Ji-hyun and I pile on top of her, and for a moment we’re a happy bundle, our problems forgotten.

No Korean men. If there’s even a chance that you might end up like me, why take it?”

Girl.

Ji-hyun, on the other hand, shakes her head. “I’m not promising anything,” she says. We’re lucky. For once, Umma drops the subject.

The other night I stumbled upon a pair of Appa’s sweaty black socks behind the laundry basket in the bathroom. They had been forgotten for months, and seeing them almost made me cry.

But the worst is when I find the little red-and-white candies that he turned to once he quit smoking.

“I can’t believe you,” Ji-hyun says, her expression reproachful. “You’re disgusting.” “It’s okay! You should try it too, here—” I push the plate toward her, but she swats my hand away. “Leave me alone, you fish-eye-eating freak. I’m not hungry anymore.”

I tell her the same thing every time: that I’m too busy and that I have to focus on my studies. But if I said that I didn’t want to be in love, just once, it would be a lie.

Umma turns the fish over and tears out the other eye. I reach for it, suddenly starving, but before I can say anything she pops it into her own mouth with a smile, all thoughts of Appa gone for the night.

For him, words were magic. The people who knew how to use them, who were able to bend them to their will, sat in their nice houses and ate meat with every meal.

Words, he understood, were a way into that world.

More than anything, he hated that everything in his life served as a reminder of his failures.

I don’t blame him. Maybe because I know what it’s like, to live a life so defined by want. That’s why I was able to recognize it in him—it was what I had been feeling for so long.

“It’s not fine. Those guys are assholes. If you google ‘toxic masculinity’ you’ll probably find pictures of those clowns. They don’t understand all the shit that you women have to put up with. It’s important that women feel safe around me.

Oh fuck thatttt i dont trust this man

The truck looks new, and as we walk by it, I see a bumper sticker on the back: I’M REPUBLICAN BECAUSE WE CAN’T ALL BE ON WELFARE.

Oh god

big enough to fit twenty people, and when I see him sitting alone in such a big space, I snort. The image is ridiculous. He’s like a king sitting on his throne, waiting for his subjects to enter.

No spice.” “But I like my food spicy,” Ji-hyun interjects. “And isn’t that too much food? It’s just the four of us.” “No spicy,” Umma says. “George can’t eat spicy.” Of course he can’t fucking eat spicy food.

Swearing on your mother’s life is something so American, so white, that neither of us can truly understand it. In our culture, swearing on your mother’s life is probably one of the worst sins you can commit. What is there that’s more important than your mother, your father, or your grandparents? It doesn’t sound like George has ever heard of filial piety.