The Magical Language of Others

by E.J. Koh

Hi beams outward like the sun’s rays. The tone transports energy without expecting reciprocity. One may absorb Hi with a casual wave or respond with a smile. Hello boomerangs for a response. Over the phone, one says Hello to hear a voice calling through silence. Hello is an alteration of Hallo or Hollo from Old High German Halâ or Holâ, used to hail a ferryman. Hello comes as a question. Are you there? Hello fetches me across an expanse of water.

Forty-nine letters were discovered after an unknowable number had been trashed or forgotten. In Buddhist tradition, forty-nine is the number of days a soul wanders the earth for answers before the afterlife.

The present is the revenge of the past.

There is a Korean belief that you are born the parent of the one you hurt most.

That same day, at the hospital, my mother wiped her ripped parts and bussed to her job at the dry cleaners across town, passing her home—a six-hundred-square-foot unit at Sunnyhills, crowded apartments in Milpitas near sewage treatment ponds.

If I had never seen my mother and father hurt each other, I might never have known how they loved each other.

The house itself sat on a tilted stoop where it heaved forth a long-drawn-out sigh.

They put me up to live with my brother and left the country in a hurry. My father flew with a briefcase so he could go to work as soon as he landed.

Children have no concept that every moment comes to end, but rather feel as though their suffering, at present, will last for an eternity.

“Everything comes to the surface eventually!”