They sip their drinks, and it all seems strangely civilized. A father and son, sharing a round of cocktails as the night ticks slowly toward dawn. Kyung was hoping for this, this last window of quiet when he could ask the things he’s always wanted to know.
“You got mad at Mom for something when I was ten. Something that happened at a party, I think. You ended up knocking out one of her teeth.” He pauses, trying to erase the image of the bloody, broken tooth, an incisor that he later found under the edge of a rug. “What made you mad enough to do that?”
“Is this really what you want to talk about right now?”
Mae was more traumatized by the loss of her tooth than by any bruise or black eye she’d ever received. She cried about it for days, probably because it was something she couldn’t hide under her makeup or clothes. Kyung remembers trying to comfort her when they were alone, wrapping his arms around her shoulders as she sat on the bathroom floor. For his efforts, he limped away with a backhand to the face.
“Yes, this is exactly what I want to talk about.”
“It was the price tag,” Jin says, staring into his drink. “My department, they had a reception for everyone who got tenure that year. All the wives were invited. I didn’t want your mother to come—the men and women used to socialize separately in those days—but it would have been strange for her not to be there.” He crosses his legs, frowning as he flicks a stray piece of grass from his shoe. “I told her to buy a new outfit, an expensive one. I even gave her a list of things the other wives would be interested in, so it’d be easier for her to make conversation. But during the reception, I noticed some of the women laughing at her, talking about her behind her back, and then some of the husbands too. It kept getting worse and worse. So there I was, trying to feel proud of what I’d done. I’d finally gotten tenure after six years of people whispering about whether I was good enough, whether my research even mattered. I’d put up with my idiot students trying to correct my English and having colleagues pick me apart in meetings because they knew I wouldn’t challenge them. I’d survived all these things, and it was like none of it even mattered that night because of her.”
The thought of people talking down to his father or complaining about his work is completely at odds with Kyung’s understanding of him. In Korea, everyone openly admired Jin. Their neighbors and relatives called him “professor” long before he even finished his degree. They treated him like someone to be reckoned with, so to come to a place where the opposite was true—Kyung can imagine the shock of it. He can see why his father always held himself to such impossibly high standards. Jin thought he had to be perfect. And Mae and Kyung and the house, they had to be perfect too. They were his extensions into the world, the things by which he was judged, and to hear it now, Kyung understands that people sometimes weren’t kind. It makes sense, then, why the smallest things often mattered to Jin, why a burnt dinner or sullen expression or innocent mistake were all cause for a reaction. It makes sense that when the valve opened even slightly, the pressure building up inside needed a form of release. But why take his anger out on his wife instead of the people who mistreated them? This is where everything seizes up for Kyung, where his mind simply narrows and no amount of empathy can squeeze through to the other side.
“I don’t understand what a price tag had to do with anything.”
“Your mother was wearing it—she forgot to cut it off. That’s why they were laughing at her.” Jin winces, as if his embarrassment is days old, not decades. “The worst part was, she wasn’t comfortable spending money back then, so instead of doing what I told her to do, she went out and bought something on sale. Her dress had been marked down so many times, there were bright orange stickers all over the tag.”
“That’s the worst thing you can think of? The stickers?” Kyung clutches the armrests of his chair. “That’s the worst part of this story for you?”
“You don’t know what it was like back then.”
“But I was there, remember? Maybe not in the same room, but I was there. I heard what you did to her.”