“Did you close the windows near the laundry?” Umma1 asks.
My contemplations wash away when I realize a fatal error in my jangma2 preparation: I forgot to close the outer layer of the intricate Korean windows. When I enter the living room to lock the larger windows, the floor is already a gushing river. Rainwater soaks the fresh laundry I had just hung up on the dryer, submerges my favorite cotton slippers, and drowns my cacti. I hurl myself against the wind and wrap my arms around my clothes, tucking them safely underneath towels. When the window finally clicks into the latch, I dread turning around. Umma tells me to act with nunchi – read the room.
I look at the mess I have created. The rain has birthed giant puddles on the cherry wood floor that no longer boasts its gleaming brown polish, and the water reflects a decade’s worth of chipped paint. Through the puddles, I spot a reflection of myself, revealing my distorted face in the murky water. In hindsight, because I dismissed Halmoni’s3 rules for her cherished floor and furniture, I know I’m the decade-long culprit of the excessive wear-and-tear, so I dig my nails into the heels of my palms as I remember every time that I had recklessly played tag or furiously swept on Halmoni’s most prized possession. I rush to the kitchen before every memory cascades onto the ground and pools together in a muddy puddle of guilt and regret, infinitely expanding like the universe laughing back at me.
I grab a frail, ripped rag and desperately pat my mess. My mom calls me pathetic, and I grit my teeth in acceptance. I watch as the rainwater seeps between the cracks in the hardwood floor inside a room that I refuse to claim as mine. Maybe Halmoni treasured the floor because Korean floors are so intricate, designed to be kept cool during the summer and warmer during the winter. She used to lay the yo, or the mattress, on the ground and tuck me in my blanket woven with vibrant florals and embroidered with techniques passed down in my lineage for centuries– until my birth. In the heavens, my ancestors probably wallow in grief that their family traditions, so intricate and glittering and worth being shared and celebrated with the world, have been butchered by their clumsy, callow teenage descendant: a true case of involuntary manslaughter. My soggy fingertips sting from the holes I’ve punctured in my skin instead of the fabric. I wonder if Halmoni will ever forgive me for neglecting her embroidery and polished floor, and for yearning to leave this house to escape from the perennial evidence of my petty crimes. I plug in Halmoni’s old hair dryer to the nearest outlet and let the warm air blow at the ground until some of the puddle evaporates. Although the water on my hands dries, my stubborn guilt will never evaporate.
The floor is not completely dry yet and looks like a mosaic of old, yellowed rags, but I move on to my slippers. Drying them with Halmoni’s hair dryer, I regret that I peered outside, drumming my fingers to the chirping tunes of the cicada flocks on the birch instead of listening to her. My mother’s family never had a dialect, and yet the Korean language still traveled in monotone fleets, swimming between the pitches and inflections of the English tones that I understood, perpetually stuck in the vacant space between the Anglican treble and bass clef notes. After five years of piano lessons, I felt like I had an unfortunate, peculiar abnormality of two left hands and music note dyslexia, and I couldn’t bear to decipher the furious annotations on my music sheets or the connotations behind the Korean language. How could I understand or play the same tune if I couldn’t tell which fingers should press the keys?
“Don’t wear these outside the house, okay?” Halmoni said when she first handed me the soft slippers eight summers ago. The same week, I carelessly wore them outside to a bingsoo store with her and Haraboji.4 I grabbed my grandparents’ hands and obliviously ate the frozen dessert, unaware of why my grandmother suggested going outside when I asked about her absence every Wednesday. I dug through flakes of ice, ravaging the decadent rice cakes and red bean paste, in search of everything but the truth. The raindrops drip off the slippers and onto the ground, creating another puddle. Is this actually working?
I walk into the dimly lit bathroom, holding my cacti, and pour out water into the sink. The leaves droop and fall off the sickly and almost dead stem, and soggy spines bend against my fingers. Although I don’t bleed, I would rather be pierced by adamant thorns instead of sad pricks. Cacti evolved spines as a survival mechanism to prevent water loss in arid deserts at the expense of losing their ability to withstand floods. Cacti are supposed to be low maintenance, to be taken care of with ease, and yet, I had ravaged a succulent pot of this thriving living organism. However, Halmoni’s favorite small fuchsia-shade flowers on the tips of the branches are still alive and in full bloom. My spine curls over the sink, watching the flowers sag, sitting in giant puddles of futility in the vase. When the plant dies, the flowers will wilt as well.
Eight jangmas ago, no one was inside Halmoni’s house when the sun filled the room with its radiant morning light and gushed into my vision. I secretly listened to Umma’s call with Haraboji when she returned home hours later. As tears rolled down my cheeks, I sat in silence until they became choking sobs. My fingers locked into each other and around my mouth like a tight clasp until I choked back words that never existed. The rain should have poured in buckets from the heavens, the air should have suffocated and crushed with overbearing humidity, the atmosphere should have erupted from the storms it was holding, and the sun should have refused to shine. Yet, the sun beamed in the blue sky and I heard laughter from the neighborhood playground; it was just another beautiful day for everyone outside Halmoni’s house.
As I walk back into the room, sunlight pours through the windows, drying the rag-covered floors and slippers while I drown in grief. Eight summers have passed, but I am still alone in the shadows of my grandmother. The sunlight has not reached me yet.
Translations
1.Umma – mom
Jangma – monsoon
Halmoni – grandma
Haraboji – grandpa
Jiyoo Choi is a high school junior from Seoul, Korea. She aspires to encapsulate her relationship with grief, sense of identity, and experience moving ten times throughout her life into literature. Jiyoo has been recognized by the Scholastic Writing Awards and the Creative Communications Poetry Contest. In her free time, she writes for her blog (i’m)mutable, creates digital art, and listens to Steve Lacy.