Miracle Creek

by Angie Kim

Tragedies don’t inoculate you against further tragedies, and misfortune doesn’t get sprinkled out in fair proportions;

carapace

Hard upper shell of a turtle or crustacean

She’d railed against the blatant, unapologetic sexism inherent in Korean culture and confided that because of it, sometimes she hated Koreans, hated being Korean, and then she’d laughed at how ironic it was that by trying to escape Asian gender stereotyping, she’d fallen into white America’s racial stereotyping and become a cliché: the overachieving Asian geek.

The problem was, Americans didn’t like silence. It made them uneasy. To Koreans, being sparing with words signaled gravitas, but to Americans, verbiage was an inherent good, akin to kindness or courage. They loved words—the more, the longer, and more quickly said, the smarter and more impressive. Quietness, Americans seemed to equate with an empty mind—nothing to say, no thoughts worth hearing—or perhaps sullenness. Deceit, even.

And his inability to keep up—that was supposed to happen. Not only because she’d been here four years longer but because children were better at languages, the younger, the better; everyone knew that. At puberty, one’s tongue set, lost its ability to replicate new sounds without an accent.

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.