Part 2: The biggest fight with my bro
The drama in Korea continues...
This is part two. Here’s the first part, in case you missed it. Quick recap, I just asked my mom to choose: me or Isaac.
Asking Mom to choose is useless because I know she won’t. If she was held at gunpoint and forced into it, she’d pick her child with a penis. It wouldn’t even hurt my feelings at this point. I expect it.
When Isaac was a baby, people used to give my mom a wink and a nod, asking if he was an accident, given the large age gap with his sisters. Mom would smile and say he wasn’t.
I don’t recall exactly when she told me, but before she got pregnant, Mom said she prayed to God for a son. Was this what she hoped a son would be like? Or was God punishing her?
Mom opens her mouth to speak, but I refuse to hear what she has to say. I walk into my room. I want my brother to disappear. I wish I could disappear.
I hear a buzzing. Ugh, another mosquito. Korean mosquitos are indicative of the country—they’re small and don’t mess around. If you don’t catch it right away, they’ll continue biting you until you have no choice but to wake up, flip on the lights, and become a mosquito hunter. I’ve been eaten alive since I got here.
I feel bad about closing the door on Mom before she was about to say something, but I don’t feel like listening to her Mother Teresa-like speeches right now. We’re family. We need to love and support each other. Your brother doesn’t know any better, so it’s your duty to uplift him and show him how to be better.
Fuck that. I stare at the pink, swollen bites on my legs. What if one family member is like one of these annoying mosquitos, constantly sucking the life out of the others? How long until you take out the bug spray and douse yourself to say, enough?
My head burns, and my eyes are hot. I wipe my face with a towel and lay on the bed. I stare at the ceiling and swat at the buzzing mosquito.
Why did I throw everything away to come here? How will I survive a year in this apartment with my mom and brother?
I want to jump in a time machine and tell Mom the two-letter word that would’ve saved me from today’s drama and anguish—that word is no.
Why couldn’t I have just said, “No, Mom. I can’t move to Korea.”
Or how about, “Mom, I already helped you and Dad at the market and the bakery. I sacrificed high school summers, after-school days, and college weekends making cakes, cleaning, and ringing up customers.”
Instead, I focused on what saying no would do to me. The guilt would inevitably creep up. How could I say no to Mom? The woman who always made sure a tray of red jello, and baked fresh cornbread was waiting for me in the fridge after school.
Mom called three months ago with her brilliant business idea. She hardly ever calls, so I thought maybe something terrible happened. She tried to sound casual, but I noticed an unusual amount of chuckling and half-laughs, an indication she was nervous.
Mom is a smart cookie. She knows her kids well, especially her middle child. She didn’t start off the call with, “Want to move to Korea?” No, no. That’s a rookie mistake and a surefire way to get an immediate rejection. She never even asked me to move.
Instead, she went into the making money part, the success and fame part. She had it figured out. Eemo, my aunt, my mom’s younger sister, owns a five-story building in Korea.
The excitement in my mom’s voice grew, “The bottom floor is empty, so that’s where the school will be. The top floor has a three-bedroom apartment, so we can live there.”
Three bedrooms, for me, Mom, and Isaac. The thought of living with him made me cringe. I pictured living with the world’s angriest and laziest teenager.
I wondered how Isaac was managing without weed, now that he’s living in Korea. There is a zero-tolerance policy on all drugs in Korea. Weed is hard to get, and you go straight to jail if you get caught.
Mom continued, “Based on what Eemo said, the school could be a good business.” She pronounced the word business like bee-jee-nis.
“Think about it—our school wouldn’t be in Seoul, where competition is crazy. Ulsan is smaller, so word of mouth about our school could spread quickly.”
She said this as if I was unfamiliar with the city’s podunk vibe, where locals speak with an accent and everyone knows each other by first name.
“Eemo said that in Ulsan, moms would go crazy over a Korean-American credentialed teacher. The other after-school academies use Korean teachers whose English is worse than mine. You know Eemo is well-connected in the community. All she has to do is tell a few of her friends, and word will spread quickly.”
Her proposal took me by surprise. But as she spoke, I wasn’t thinking about the cash cow opportunities. I kept picturing myself in Korea with Mom and my brother. I hadn’t lived with either of them since high school. It would be… weird. I’m too old to be living with my mother.
Korea might as well be on another planet. I visited plenty of times as a kid and teenager. By the end of each trip, I was always homesick.
Imagining a life in Ulsan was like adjusting the antenna on an old TV—fuzzy and colorless. I didn’t have friends in Ulsan and my Korean sucks. I didn’t want to be the star teacher at our school.
I held the phone with my lips pursed tightly together, eyes shut. My mind went to the last business my parents owned—the bakery. When I think about the bakery, I remember being hot. Summers were the worst. There was no AC in the building, and the floor-to-ceiling oven in the back always made it ten degrees hotter.
Over the years, I became a pro at decorating birthday cakes—eight-inch, quarter sheets, half sheets, and full sheets. I cut the cake bread horizontally in half, layering the center with custard and fresh strawberries.
On particularly steamy days, I’d have to work fast because the heat caused the icing to melt. I decorated them with flowers, buttercream, and whatever toys the customer asked for—anything from Beauty and the Beast to Winnie the Pooh.
I stood on one side of the cake-decorating table while my sister worked on the other. We tied our hair in messy buns on the tops of our heads and had the same, permanent sheen of sweat covering our sticky faces. We’d be on our feet for ten hours on really busy days.
I was silent, so Mom kept talking.
“You’d be able to set your own schedule, and of course, I’d pay you—we’d be like business partners. It will take time to make a profit, but once we do, you’ll make way more than you’re making in Brooklyn.”
In a gentler tone, she said, “Think about it; you don’t have to give me an answer right now.”
To be continued…
