The Queen of Tears (8 page)

He’d looked so good on paper when she’d decided to marry him. Wealthy, good-looking, college-educated. She’d never even thought until recently that the combination of these three things often create something toxic. It was like when she was a bartender. Chivas, Glenlivet, and Patron may be quality stuff on their own, but mixed together? Well, you got the stuff you squeeze out of a bar rag. When did she start hating her husband?

She went to the fish tank to feed the fish. When she opened the lid, the larger oscar rushed the surface, and his fat black lips broke the surface of the water. He waited there. Won Ju closed the lid. Let them starve. She walked into the bedroom with the cylinder of fish food still in her hand. She was going to fight with her husband, and she needed something to throw at him.

-3-

Soong sat at the small circular table in the hotel room with Darian, missing Long Island. The air conditioner hummed as she put a coat on. She hated air conditioning, but in a hotel in Hawaii, you either left the thing on or sweated out a pound of water. Their conversation in Korean started. Though Darian could not write in Korean, her spoken Korean was eloquent. “So what’s this about leaving school,” Soong asked, “are you getting bad grades?”

Darian stood up and looked into the mirror above the wooden dresser. “No Mom, my grades are good. I don’t know, maybe Dad’s death is finally getting to me.”

It had been over a year since the stroke came that finally killed Soong’s second husband. It took four to kill the tough ex-army captain, but the years of cigars and Scotch whiskey had finally caught up to him. Strokes and stomach cancer. Soong missed him too. Despite everything, he had been the love of her life. Darian was the only one who’d flown to New York for the funeral. “He wouldn’t want you to use his death as an excuse.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say. Sometimes a cliché is all that’s left.

“I know. But I don’t know, lately I’ve been feeling like what I study there, I don’t know, like it’s worthless. Like you’re spending thousands of dollars on nothing.”

Darian walked back to the table and sat down. Soong looked at her daughter’s face. She was a very pretty girl. In fact, she looked like Soong when she was young, only more American. Soong did not know what this meant, and couldn’t pick out a physical trait which was not Asian but distinctly American, but to her Darian would always be her American child. “I told you to study something more practical.”

Darian sighed. “I know. You know what’s funny? You know what I’m studying in the English Department at U.C. Berkeley? I’m studying you.”

“I don’t understand,” Soong said.

“I’m studying literature written by first-generation Asian-American immigrants. I’m reading the works of their children. I’m reading about us.”

“And it seems worthless?”

Darian stood up again. “It’s not that it’s worthless; it’s…” She paused and said in English, “Problematic.” Then she reverted back to Korean. “It’s a problem. Sometimes I feel like we’re studying ourselves with a kind of detachment that’s scary. I don’t know what they called it in Korea, but here we call these intellectual learning centers ‘ivory towers.’ It’s sad. A bunch of people who may have grown up Asian, saying their thoughts and experiences are the valid ones. Turning isolated experiences into rules of thumb for entire races. Feeling sorry for themselves because they think they’re second-class citizens.”

Darian sat back down. “Kids like me, Mom. Second generation. Some can speak their ethnic language but not read or write it, like me. Some can’t speak, read or write. Only a few can do all of it. But we all pretend like we know what’s going on. But in truth, we’re just twenty-something-year-olds swapping sob stories and using ridiculously big words to rationalize our experiences. Ivory tower, Mom, looking down on the masses, isolated, out-of-it.”

Soong frowned. “And what does your father’s death have to do with all of this?”

“Dad was second-generation Korean. His parents came and worked the sugar plantations of Hawaii. He grew up dirt poor, he was in World War II and the Korean War because he thought that was his only way out of plantation life. He liked to drink Scotch and tell stories. I loved him. You were a famous actress in Korea who came up from nothing. You lived through national scandals and immigrated to a foreign country not being able to speak any English. It’s like what right do I have to dwell on my heritage and call it my own when I never experienced any of the stuff you guys experienced? I feel like a self-righteous fraud.”

Soong thought about this. “Maybe your father and I earned your right to dwell for you. Maybe it is a right that’s inherited and doesn’t need to be earned.”

Darian shook her head. “It’s like meeting Kaipo tonight. You know, Crystal’s brother.”

How could she have forgotten that man, his neck, and his absurd red hair? His bravado reminded her of her second husband, but it wasn’t a childlike arrogance and will that motivated this huge man; Soong knew it was anger. She’d seen that anger in some of the poor faces in Korea years before. Ex-soldiers missing limbs or women missing innocence. It was horrible. But didn’t you have to get over the anger? “He’s trash like his sister.”

Darian frowned. “No, they’re not. You know, back at school there’s this girl from Hawaii. She writes papers on being Hawaiian, being local. But she’s never done drugs, never stolen a car, never been in a fight. She’s never been abused by a parent, never had to buy food with food stamps. How can she write about being Hawaiian or local without these experiences? She has no right to represent people whose lives are much different than hers. It’d be like Kenny writing a book on the contemporary Hawaiian experience. This girl, like Kenny, is local, but only a certain kind of local. I’m Korean, but only a certain kind of Korean.”

Soong laughed. “You cannot always pity those who refuse any attempts to better their position. A lot of these Hawaiians don’t even try. That’s why I sometimes hate this place. They’re like the blacks in New York, the Mexicans in Fresno. Complain, complain, but don’t do. I walked over a hundred miles for a better life when I was fourteen.”

Darian smiled. “That’s true, Mom, and I respect you for it. But you know what? Crystal just may be you, if you didn’t get hit by that fancy car in Seoul that day. Crystal could be you.”

Was it dumb luck that changed Soong’s life? She’d asked this before, and sometimes she believed it, and sometimes not. Tonight, she decided not to believe it. “No way. There’s a difference. I was starving. People don’t starve in America.”

Darian shook her head as she walked to the door. “Think about it, Mom, you could have been Crystal.”

The door shut. Education. The highly educated always looked at others as if they were waiting for the people around them to discover some archaic punchline so that they could finally pat them on the head. Maybe Darian was right; her education was a waste of time. Soong sighed and made her way to the bathroom, where she began to disassemble herself.

Soong meticulously wiped off her make-up and dressed for bed. She brushed her teeth. Looking in the mirror, she thought, what is it that make-up manages to conceal? When she’d been young, it was used to accentuate features. Redder lips, whiter skin, more luscious eyelashes, sharper, cleaner eyebrows. But now it was for repair. Not as many wrinkles, not those dark bags under the eyes, not as tired-looking. These were two very different types of masks. She missed the first one immensely.

She thought about her children. She thought about the money. She was almost sixty years old, and her children still cost her money. When did the duty end? The tightness of her second dead husband made it more difficult for her children to get money, but now she was facing them unarmed. She couldn’t say no to any of them. She should’ve stayed in Long Island, but without Henry, it seemed stupid. Long Island was their life together, but now that life was over. She spat out toothpaste and sighed. When did a mother stop being a mother?

She turned off the light. She walked to the bed and carefully slid under the covers. The air conditioning was blasting away. When her eyes finally adjusted to the darkness, she laughed. It never used to take that long for her eyes to adjust. She thought about the money again. If only she had more. Once she gave, not loaned, gave her son the twenty thousand, she would be down to her last twenty. If her older daughter’s business failed—and considering the poor state of the tourist industry, it eventually would—her daughter would need help again. If her younger daughter went back to school, a year of tuition would be more than she would be able to afford. And she knew her son’s business would fail. He was a failure. Considering that the price of gold was down, her jewelry would not be much help either. Now, if she died, it would be a different story. She had a one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy that the kids would split in three. Now there’s a solution, she thought. If only I were to die. In a split second her life flashed before her eyes. She told her mind to do it. It was a good life, an exciting life. Yes, perhaps it is best to die penniless, she thought. That’s maybe how I’ll know I’m finished with life. It will be done when I no longer have anything to give my children but my death. She smiled. Then why spend twenty thousand on my thirty-eight-year-old son? Because she knew she would. But that was O.K. She was afraid of many things: heights, flying, the ocean, going over sixty in a car. She was afraid of pain for her children. But she was not afraid of death. In fact, this night, as she closed her eyes, the thought that they might not open again soothed her. Her breathing slowed and her thoughts became misty. That night she dreamt of how nice it would be to live until she saw her grandson happily married, then die. She wanted to see her grandson in an elegant tuxedo eagerly waiting to enter the Institution. That would be when he would begin the most interesting journey this life has to offer. Yes, she thought, I’ll wait for my grandson to find his mate, then die.

-4-

Like every other morning, including weekends, Won Ju opened her shop in the Pacific Beach Hotel at six o’clock A.M. When she had first signed the lease for the twenty-by-thirty-foot shop ten years ago, she felt as if she had a sure thing. The Pacific Beach Hotel had a large Japanese clientele, who as everyone knew spent the most money in Hawaii. And this particular hotel had an attraction that was hard for the tourist mind to resist. In the middle of the hotel, serving as a backdrop to two of its restaurants, the Oceanarium and the Neptune, stood a two-hundred-and-eighty-thousand-gallon salt-water fish tank. Almost a thousand fish of about one hundred and twenty-five species swam behind this twenty-six-foot wall of glass. Most of these fish were indigenous, like the stingray, the ulua, and the uhu, or parrotfish. Others were imported, like the Florida native, the tiger-striped jack. But all could only be seen swimming together in this florescent lighted tank. It was artificial. Deep-sea fish swam in the same water as reef fish. Sand dwellers, like the stingray, fed with the nocturnal red menpachi. They were all forced together under the white lights that made the fish glow unnaturally. And Won Ju had put her faith in this ecological experiment. She’d believed that the tourists would never stop coming to see it.

And they hadn’t. They’d just stopped spending money in the shops like hers. At first it had been great. The Japanese had the money to spend on the expensive goods she sold. The Bally leather belts, the Louis Vuitton purses, the Ray Ban sunglasses. She’d once sold thousands of dollars of goods a day. She’d made more than her husband did when she’d first opened. But much of this money went into expanding her inventory. She bought more and more expensive watches, more and more gold jewelry. She knew, like every other shop-owner, that Asians, especially the Japanese, could get this stuff much cheaper in Hawaii than in Japan.

Then Asia took a financial hit. The tourists kept coming, but slowly stopped buying. Won Ju’s shop was overstocked, and just as suddenly over-employed. Her business, which had once employed six girls, was now down to one. She opened her shop at six A.M. and closed it at eleven P.M. At least four days a week, she would stay all seventeen hours. Her last girl was forced to work sixty-hour weeks. She knew if she closed down and dumped her inventory now, she’d have just enough, with her savings, to pay off the rest of the lease and pay her mother back the fifteen thousand she owed her. But after that, she’d have to rely on Kenny. Kenny the Tightwad. Kenny who would give her a bad time with every twenty-dollar bill she would take. She’d also have to stop giving her son money. And she loved giving him money, because even though she knew she might be wrong, she felt it made her a good mother. With every twenty she gave him, she felt like she was giving her son choices. No, he did not have to paddle a canoe at the Hawaiian Canoe Club, he could go to the movies. No, he did not have to surf, he could go to the arcade. No, he did not have to come home and scrounge for food, he could buy a meal anywhere. She wanted to give her son choices. She did not want him to become like his father if he didn’t want to.

So when she opened her shop at six A.M. the day after her brother’s wedding, she did so with a pounding headache. Her hangover from the champagne the night before combined with the stress of money made her head hurt. She slid open the glass door and turned on the lights. She grabbed a pink feather duster and brushed it against the rack of belts, purses, and the glass cases that held the jewelry and watches. She turned on the cash register and sat on her stool. She thought about the fish tank and cursed it. Then she wondered if, since her mother seemed to be staying in Hawaii, she would want a job, or maybe even a partnership. She chided herself for the thought. Her mother had enough trouble already. She pretended to dust for most of the next eight hours.

At one o’clock Donny walked in. He was dressed nicely as usual; black slacks, a tucked in blue Polo shirt. His face wore the look of a healthy-sized hangover. He walked up to the counter and leaned against it. He smiled, took off his sunglasses, and started the conversation in English. “I just talked to Mom. She’s going to give me the money.”