The Queen of Tears (2 page)

Donny sighed. “The last time I saw him, he looked fine. Turning into a real local boy, though. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him driving a truck like the one in front of us in a few years.”

Soong shook her head. It was the truck of an uneducated, blue-collar man who blew all of his money on yellow, accordion-looking things to put under his truck, and big tires. Soong had heard of Freud. A penis substitute. Her grandson would never come to that, and she knew that Donny was just trying to scare her in what she considered feeble retaliation. “And how is your sister doing?”

“She’s good.”

Soong nodded. They entered the H-1 Freeway, which led to Waikiki. Donny lit a Winston cigarette and rolled down the window. He had an effeminate way of smoking a cigarette that bothered her. “You should quit,” she said.

The car whizzed by the industrial buildings surrounding the airport. “Don’t start, Mom. And besides, why do you demand to stay in a hotel? You should save money and stay with me.”

“I can’t stand your smoking and drinking. Just drop me off at the hotel. If I stay any longer, I will stay with your sister.”

“When is Darian coming in?”

Soong thought about her youngest child with a mixture of fear, lack of comprehension, and pride. Darian was her American child. Why she, like her older daughter, gave her child a name she could not pronounce correctly, she would never understand. Darian was flying in from U.C. Berkeley the following week. “Next Tuesday.”

“She can stay with me and save money.”

“She’ll stay in the hotel like me.”

“Figures,” Donny said in English.

Soong sighed. Donny seemed always wanting to take any action by her as a slight against him. And some of this, she knew, was warranted. They didn’t talk for the next fifteen minutes. Soong peppered the time with light coughs until Donny finally threw his cigarette out. Right before they got off of the freeway, she saw a tiny thread hanging from the sleeve of her blouse, and refused, with all of her will power, to pull it.

When they reached Waikiki, Soong was excited to see how it had changed since her last visit. Waikiki was a lot bigger than she remembered, but also more quiet. She had heard business was bad, and as they passed the lightly populated sidewalks, she believed it. Despite the white beaches, luxurious hotels, and palm trees growing out of the sidewalks, the allure of Hawaii was fading. The fact that the Asian economy was crashing hurt Hawaii even more. There were a few tourists walking the streets, though. Most wore bathing suits and absurdly red tans that screamed “skin cancer” to Soong as they passed vendors selling T-shirts. Others sipped on sodas or licked ice cream cones as they pointed at, but did not enter, the surrounding shops. Some were white, most were Asians, and all did not look like they were buying merchandise. She hoped her older daughter’s shop wasn’t losing too much money. She knew she’d have to be the one to bail her out. “Is business in Waikiki as bad as I’d heard?” she asked.

Donny sighed. “Worse.”

The streets of Waikiki were indeed emptier than she’d remembered them. But it looked more modern. The sight that struck her most was the traffic lights. The rectangular boxes with the three lights were no longer simply stuck on the tops of poles, but now most of the traffic lights were attached to shiny brown metal structures suspended over Kalakaua Avenue. The state was obviously sinking money into renovation. Soong laughed to herself. Hawaii was finally caught in the paradox it relied on for survival. Its main industry, tourism, depended on the natural beauty of the state. The fact that it was a state of the U.S., a capitalistic nation, demanded that it spend the money it’d made from tourism on destroying its natural beauty with big buildings, golf courses, and modernization. Hawaii was beginning to devour itself. Soong quickly calculated her assets in her head and wondered if she had enough to keep her children away from the feeding frenzy.

“Which hotel was it again, Mother?”

Soong sighed. She’d told him the name at least a half a dozen times over the phone. She looked down at her sleeve and yanked the loose thread off.

-2-

Won Ju Akana looked up at the movie poster hanging in the very middle of the largest white wall in her living room. A black lacquer frame bordered the colorful print. In the middle of the old poster, a beautiful, bird-like young Korean woman embraced a chubby, round-faced Korean soldier. The soldier looked, in an overly dramatic manner, like he was determined to leave. The woman, dressed in the traditional green Korean wedding dress, held two fistfuls of beige warmonger material, not letting the man walk away. Won Ju examined the angular, flawless face. The eyes were closed hard. But there was just enough in the face to suggest that the woman would eventually let the soldier go. It was funny because her hands suggested quite the opposite. It was a beautiful piece of melodrama captured for eternity. It was like poetry.

This woman had been one of the most celebrated actresses in Korea during the late fifties and early sixties. She had married a famous movie producer when she was seventeen, then after he died, she married a former Korean-American GI. The GI brought her to America with her two children. The second marriage had its ups and downs, and after the birth of their child, the actress found herself back in Korea, allegedly having an affair with a then-local politician and party leader, now one of the most powerful men in South Korea. The well-publicized affair had lasted only several months, then the actress returned to her American husband. In Korea they called this actress: “Noon Mul Ui Yau Wang.” The Queen of Tears. Won Ju called her: “amah.” Mother.

Someone tapped Won Ju’s back. It was her fourteen-year-old son, Brandon. “Hey, Ma, I’m gonna go to the mall.”

“Did you ask your father?” she asked, with her accented English.

Her son’s dark face looked tired. “He’s sleeping.”

“Well, I don’t know. You know your grandma just came in today. We were going to have dinner with her tonight.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be back home by six. There’s this computer game I wanna check out.”

Another computer game. Her son spent so much time in front of his computer. “Maybe you should wait for your father to wake up.”

“Ma!”

“O.K., O.K. Do you need money?”

Her son shrugged. She walked to her purse and gave Brandon forty dollars. Before his tall, spindly body left the living room, she asked, “Wasn’t your grandmother pretty?”

Without looking back, he said, “Yeah, I guess.”

She looked back up at the poster. She wondered why she looked so different from her mother. Won Ju was a little taller, darker, and more voluptuous. Her face seemed to lack the ability to communicate profound conflict or deep feeling. She had a natural poker face, which many mistook as dullness or stupidity. In fact, during most of her waking moments, her head was like a can of soda that she couldn’t keep herself from shaking.

Though her darker looks and natural curves had made many men salivate in the past, she still felt fat and ugly compared to her mother. Looking back up at the poster, she saw the porcelain skin, the petite body, and the face that could reflect three different emotions at the same time. Compared to this woman, and to the soap-opera life she’d lived, Won Ju did not feel very dynamic. She felt like a ten-dollar amusement-park teddy bear compared to a thousand-dollar porcelain doll. The Queen of Hugs, not The Queen of Tears.

Won Ju turned around and walked to the kitchen. She had scrubbed the tiled floor and counters twice earlier in the day, but she felt like she needed to go over it again. She laughed. A forty-one-year-old woman still trying to please her mother. She shrugged, opened the cupboard under the kitchen sink, and took out the tile cleaner and rags. She got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the white tile, square by square. There were a couple of faint, beige stains on one tile square that, no matter how hard she scrubbed, would not come out.

When she was done, Won Ju put the tile cleaner and rags away, and decided to vacuum the carpet in the living room again. But before she started, she remembered that she needed to feed the fish. The rectangular thirty-gallon fish tank, which was her son’s birthday present from his father two years ago, had only three fish in it. There were two tiger oscars, one about ten inches long, the other about a half a foot long, and one clown loach, a striped bottom-feeder that kept the tank clean. Won Ju unscrewed the cap of the fish food and sprinkled the pellets into the water. The oscars immediately went for the small, floating spheres, especially the big one. The big, black lips of the big one broke the surface of the water.

Won Ju didn’t like these fish. They were such pigs. The oscars, dull, black fish with orange blotches on their sides, had voracious appetites. She’d never seen fat fish before, but these fish were definitely fat, aggressive, and slow. When they’d been a bit smaller and—it was now hard to imagine—cuter, they used to constantly chase the poor clown loach around. Of course they’d never catch it; the loach was always a sleeker, faster fish, but at least back then, they got exercise. Now they simply floated around the plastic plants, waiting to get fed. The tank was too small. The growth of all three fish was probably stunted because of the lack of space. While she screwed the cap of the fish food back on, Won Ju watched the clown loach scramble for leftovers that sunk to the bottom of the tank. It hovered above the gravel, sucking up the scraps. Won Ju got back to vacuuming.

While she was busy pushing the Eureka Enviro Vac with the True Hepa Filter over the plush white carpets of the apartment for the second time, Won Ju’s husband stepped into the living room. Dressed in only black Calvin Klein boxer shorts, his usual home attire, his dark, athletic frame looked attractive, but manufactured, in a way. His body was a three-dimensional map of hard mountains and squiggly rivers. It was as if a cartographer drew out what his or her ideal map would look like. Kenny plopped down on the black leather sofa. She turned off the vacuum. “Sorry, did I wake you?” she asked.

Kenny rubbed his stomach. “Yeah.”

He stood up, walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge. “What time is dinner?” he asked.

Won Ju followed him. “How does eight o’ clock sound?”

“What time is it now?” Kenny asked, squinting at the clock on the microwave oven.

“You need glasses.”

“Why don’t we just take her to the Club?”

The Club. “You know my mother, she only eats Asian food. I made reservations at the sushi bar by the hotel she’s staying at.”

He took out a bottle of Mauna Loa Hawaiian Natural Spring Water and in one swig gulped half the bottle down. He looked around the kitchen and smiled. “You sure it’s clean enough?”

She walked back to the living room and sat at the dining room table. “You know how she is.”

Kenny walked in and sat across from her. “Unfortunately. Where’s the kid?”

“Oh, out with his friends.”

“You didn’t give him money, did you?”

“No.”

“Good. You know, instead of hanging out at malls and staring at that computer all day, I’d rather see that kid at the beach or something. It’s cheaper and healthier.”

Won Ju got up and turned the vacuum cleaner back on before he finished.

-3-

“Crystal,” who had borrowed the name from thousands of strippers before her and many who were sure to follow, had been born Monica Mahealani Sellers. As “Monica,” she had been a damn hottie in Waianae High School, a bit flat-chested, though. When she transformed herself into “Crystal,” or the doctors did anyway for the price of a high school diploma and a year of toil at McDonalds, she began to shed her clothes for money. She remembered this as she looked at Crystal’s body in the full-length mirror. Unsatisfied, she walked to her closet and grabbed a pair of four-inch white platform shoes. She put them on and walked back to the mirror. Much better. It wasn’t that her legs were short; she was five-eight and had pretty long legs. But she’d always wanted to be taller. Crystal always wanted to be taller than most men.

She cupped her breasts. Worth every cent. She turned around and looked at her buttocks. Still as high as a kite. When she faced the mirror again, she ran her metallic-lavender fingernails through her thin stripe of black pubic hair. She tingled. She stepped back and tried to soak it all in. No tan lines, no wrinkles. Abeautiful body, a real moneymaker. Just one problem: a scar. A surgical scar on the lower, right side of her abdomen. It was because something was ruptured, or something was bleeding, that’s what she remembered the doctors saying. She’d been in pain and fourteen—naïve little Monica. She ran a lavender fingernail on the scar and felt a different kind of tingling. Then she grabbed her black thong panty from the bed and put it on.

She sat at her dresser and picked up the much smaller hand mirror that lay face-down. She sighed and looked at her face.

She knew she was pretty. Yet for some reason, she was sometimes unsure of it. She’d often been called “the kind of girl who actually looks even better without makeup,” but sometimes she just didn’t feel attractive. Sometimes she felt her face was too dark. Sometimes her eyes were too green. Her father’s eyes. At times, she wanted to pluck them out. It would be like shucking oysters.

Sometimes her chin was too big. Sometimes her eyebrows were too bushy. Sometimes she looked too Hawaiian. Sometimes too white, too haole. Nobody told her, but she suspected that everybody saw either the too-dark or too-light version. Everybody, except for Donny Park, her little yobo boy. Donny was perfect. He was shorter, uglier, and more irresponsible than her. And the best was that he couldn’t get it up. He’d make the perfect husband.

They’d met two years ago at Club Mirage, the most well-known all-nude strip bar in the state of Hawaii. She was dancing her third set to the standard, long-haired, hard-partying, now-defunct eighties rock music, when Donny, wearing khakis, a black Polo shirt, and wire-rimmed shades, sat at the stage in front of her. He was thin, a little shorter than she was, and his wide Asian face had the cutest little adolescent mustache. His hair was Asian standard issue; short on the sides, no sideburns, gelled, side-combed. Straight and a little bit spiky. He put his thin forearms on the edge of the stage and let his long, thin fingers stretch across the surface. When she squatted in front of him, he smiled and looked away. This surprised her. She thought the sunglasses were enough for him not to see.