Miracle Creek

by Angie Kim

Tragedies don’t inoculate you against further tragedies, and misfortune doesn’t get sprinkled out in fair proportions; bad things get hurled at you in clumps and batches, unmanageable and messy.

Young knew the type. Her own mother had belonged to this breed of people who used manners to cover up unfriendliness the way people used perfume to cover up body odor—the worse it was, the more they used.

Americans were so proud of things being a few hundred years old, as if things being old were a value in and of itself. (Of course, this philosophy did not extend to people.)

In Korean, he was an authoritative man, educated and worthy of respect. In English, he was a deaf, mute idiot, unsure, nervous, and inept. A bah-bo.

Pak accepted this long ago, on the first day he joined Young at the Baltimore grocery store. The preteen hoodlums saying “Ah-so” in fake accents, pretending they couldn’t understand his “May I help you?” and sniggering as they repeated in bastardized singsong, “Meh-yee ah-ee hair-puh yoooooh?”—that, he could dismiss as the antics of children trying on cruelty like a shirt in a store. But the woman who’d ordered a bologna sandwich: her struggle to understand his “Would you like a soda also?”—a phrase he’d memorized that morning—had been genuine. She said, “I couldn’t hear; could you repeat that?” After his louder, slower repetition, she said, “Say that one more time,” then, “I’m sorry; something’s wrong with my ears today,” and finally, just an embarrassed smile—the embarrassment for him, Pak realized—and shake of her head. With each of the four repetitions, he felt heat radiating through his cheeks and forehead, as if his head were bowed over burning coal and being pushed down centimeter by centimeter. He ended up pointing to a Coke and miming drinking it. She laughed in relief, saying, “Yes, I’d love one,” and taking her money, he thought of the beggars outside, taking change from people like this woman, with kind but repugnant pity in her eyes.

BEING A WITNESS was like acting. On a raised stage, all eyes on him, trying to recall someone else’s scripted words.

This was the thing he regretted most about their move to America: the shame of becoming less proficient, less adult, than his own child.

That was the thing about lies: they demanded commitment. Once you lied, you had to stick to your story.

But that was the way life worked. Every human being was the result of a million different factors mixing together—one of a million sperm arriving at the egg at exactly a certain time; even a millisecond off, and another entirely different person would result. Good things and bad—every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every

illness—resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.

Han. There was no English equivalent, no translation. It was an overwhelming sorrow and regret, a grief and yearning so deep it pervades your soul—but with a sprinkling of resilience, of hope.