“No.” Jin frowns, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m talking about the university, the town. It wasn’t always like this, with blacks and Asians and Hispanics everywhere. Not in the ’70s, it wasn’t. I was the only one on campus for years, and people never let me forget that. They went out of their way to make me feel like nothing.”
Kyung tries to imagine his father as a young man, a newly minted Ph.D. coming to America with a woman he didn’t want to marry, a woman whose parents simply outbid the family of the other girl he wanted more. He’s willing to accept the possibility that life was as hard as Jin claims, being the only nonwhite person to walk into a classroom or an office building. He has memories of his own to confirm this, faded memories of stares and snickers and nicknames that he didn’t want, fights in the school yard that he could never win. He never mentioned these indignities to his parents; he assumed he suffered them alone. Kyung knows that he and his mother were a burden to Jin, especially during those early years when they relied on him for everything. What he doesn’t understand is who blinked first—if his father was cruel to Mae because she couldn’t help him cope, or if she didn’t try to help because he was cruel.
“So are you done with your questions now?”
“No, not yet. Tell me about Mom’s cousin. The one you actually wanted to marry.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know if things would have been different with her.”
Jin stirs his drink with his finger. “She died young. In her forties, I think. Cancer.”
“I’m not asking what would have been different. I’m asking if you would have been different.”
“You have a Ph.D.,” Jin says, lobbing the first grenade. “Act like you earned it. Say what you really want to say.”
Kyung nods. “Fine, then. If you’d married this other woman, do you think you would have hit her too?”
The expression on Jin’s face is smug at first. Then it settles into something that almost resembles a smile. “I probably would have hit her more.”
It’s not the response Kyung expected. He wanted Jin to say that things would have turned out differently, that the absence of love in their present was caused by an absence of love from the start. To hear him admit that nothing would have changed erases any last trace of doubt. There’s no alternate version of history in which he and his family live happily, untouched by violence. They were always going to end up this way because of Jin. Until now, Kyung was able to sit calmly in his seat and just listen, but Jin’s expression continues to taunt him.
“You’re proud of hitting women?” he asks, drawing his hands into fists. “You think this is funny?”
“No. I’m not proud at all. I’m just being honest. You asked me a question, so I answered it. Your mother’s cousin was a beautiful girl, but the people she came from … they were farmers. Look how much trouble your mother gave me, and she supposedly came from a good family.” He tries to make quotation marks with his fingers as he says “good,” spilling some of his drink on the sofa. “Your mother couldn’t even read a book for the first three years we lived here. She was always trying to steal your schoolbooks to look at the pictures, as if reading and looking were the same thing. Do you know what it was like, taking my illiterate wife to dinner at my dean’s house, praying that no one would notice how stupid she was?”
The second grenade. Something isn’t right here. It hasn’t felt right for a while. Jin rarely talks this much, and now it seems like he’s saying the most hateful things he can, whether he means them or not. Kyung feels like he’s being baited, forced to react before he’s ready.
“I was hard on your mother. Too hard in the beginning. I understand that. And then you turned on me and told the reverend our secrets. You took her side.”
“I took the right side.”
“You took her side,” he repeats. “So I tried to make it up to her. I did exactly what Reverend Sung told me to do. I put my wife on a pedestal. I worked day and night to give her this house and the kind of life we came to this country for. Anything she laid her eyes on, I gave it to her. Art, jewelry, a house at the beach. If she wanted to remodel the bathroom a year after she’d just remodeled it, I kept my mouth shut and opened my wallet. I let her spend entire paychecks on those antiques of hers. And you know what she finally said to me after thirty-six years of marriage, after I’d spent nearly half of them trying to make up for what I did? She said she was leaving. She was going to work—ha!—she was going to work for that friend of hers. She was planning to give up this house to live in a storeroom, a storeroom, somewhere in Connecticut, and she never wanted to see me again.”