Mom, though, had not been so alone. She still had family left in Korea. Two sisters. A couple of nieces and nephews. Everyone comes from somewhere. But it seemed that something bad had happened, and she stopped talking to them years ago. When Suzy asked Mom why, she was told to stay out of the adults’ affairs. Family feud, Suzy later assumed. Probably about money—what else? Couldn’t be much money, though. Mom did not come from wealth. Suzy gathered that much.
The subculture of immigrants had nothing much to do with the rest of America. When the girls took sick, Mom would get a concoction from a local Korean pharmacy where they never asked for a prescription. When Dad lost his appetite, he would visit an herbalist in Astoria for a dose of bear’s galls. When her parents had some money they could put away, which was hardly ever, they would turn not to a bank but to a gae, which was a Korean communal-savings pool where a monthly lottery was drawn to grant the winner a lump sum. It was beyond Suzy’s understanding why her parents, like most Korean elders, preferred Maxwell House instant coffee to fresh coffee, or why they wouldn’t touch grapefruits or mangoes, though they kept boxes of dried persimmons at home. Had she stayed in just one neighborhood long enough, had she been allowed to build intimacy with one friend, one neighbor, one relative, then perhaps this perpetual Korea, which hovered somewhere in the Far East, might have seemed more relevant. She kept up with the language. She followed the custom. But knowing about a culture was different from feeling it. She would bow to the elders without the traditional respect such bows required. She would bite into the pungent spice of kimchi without tasting its sad, sour history. She would bob her head to the drumbeats of the Korean folk songs without commiserating with their melancholy. But how could she? She recalled nothing of the country.
Yet American culture, as Suzy was shocked to discover upon leaving home, was also foreign to her. Thanksgiving dinners. Eggnogs. The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Monopoly. Dr. Seuss. JFK. Such loaded American symbols meant nothing to her. They brought back no dear memory, no pull of nostalgia. Damian hailed her as the ultimate virgin. He laughed when, at one Thanksgiving dinner, he saw Suzy’s face brighten as she tried turkey covered in cranberry sauce for the first time. A blessing, he said, to be raised in such a cultural vacuum. But the blessing came with its price. Being bilingual, being multicultural should have brought two worlds into one heart, and yet for Suzy, it meant a persistent hollowness. It seems that she needed to love one culture to be able to love the other. Piling up cultural references led to no further identification. What Damian had called a “blessing” pushed her out of context, always. She was stuck in a vacuum where neither culture moved nor owned her. Deep inside, she felt no connection, which Damian seemed to have understood.
“Nabokov… If he hated America so much, does that mean that he loved Russia?” Suzy is fingering the pack of cigarettes in her coat pocket, but this is not a cigarette moment. That would be too close to home. A late-afternoon park in November. A cup of coffee. Jen sitting by her side.
“I don’t believe he did. I don’t believe he was capable of that kind of love or hate for a country. He was too selfish. You can see that in his writing. He picked each word as though his entire life was at stake. He was notorious for jotting down every thought on three-by-five index cards. His life was a string of exile, from England to Germany to France to America to Switzerland. It was right after renouncing Russian that he threw this verbal masturbation of a novel called Lolita at the American public. Here’s this Russian guy who’s only been living in the U.S. for a decade or so, tripping on English prose like Faulkner on acid! What’s worse, just as the American readers can’t get enough of him, he skips out to Switzerland. The reason? His obsession with butterflies. Of course he was strange, no doubt about it. But I think Harrison is wrong. Russia versus America would’ve been too simple for Nabokov. If he’d been tortured, which I believe he was, then it was about something less obvious. The Cold War might have contributed, but his oddness, that something which doesn’t quite add up about him, goes way deeper. No, I’m not talking about the sexual perversity of his book, which is hardly relevant, but something else, the neatness, the systematic design of his life, like those index cards. Did you know that he lived exactly twenty years on each continent? Twenty years in Russia, twenty in Western Europe, twenty in America, before his final attempt in the neutral Switzerland, where he ended up dying in his seventeenth year? If he had lived, would he have moved again once he filled his twenty-year quota? Where would he have gone?”
Suzy is hardly listening anymore. Too selfish for exile. Was there a bigger reason behind her parents’ constant moving? Or had they always been fleeing from one situation to another? Were they skipping out on unpaid rent? Why did they leave Korea?
Once, when Suzy was either seven or eight, she was awoken in the middle of the night. “Get dressed,” Mom whispered, shoving the clothes and books into big black garbage bags. Both Suzy and Grace stumbled out of bed and threw on whatever they found, grabbing their favorite dolls before following Mom out. Dad was waiting outside in his dove-gray Oldsmobile. When they stole into the night, both Suzy and Grace fell asleep, only to wake up a few hours later at a roadside motel along Route 4, off the New Jersey Turnpike. The family stayed in a tiny linoleum-floored room for about a week before moving into the studio apartment in Jersey City. Her parents never talked about it afterward, but the silence of the night road stuck with Suzy. The hurried steps of Mom gathering things in their old apartment; the clammed-up face of Dad behind the wheel. Before Suzy fell asleep in the back seat, she remembers, Mom turned around a few times to look through the rear window. Suzy wanted to look as well, but she felt too sleepy and afraid.
Strangely enough, the weeklong stay at the motel was not so bad. Neither Suzy nor Grace minded much. It didn’t happen every day that they could skip school with their parents’ permission. It was almost fun to be stranded in a strange room with all their belongings stuffed in bundles. It felt like playing house, to search through the bags for toothbrushes and a matching sock. They amused themselves with whatever they found curious in that motel room. There was an airbrushed painting of Jesus Christ hanging above one of the beds, which Suzy and Grace tried to copy onto a piece of paper. Neither could draw, and their finished sketch revealed a scary-looking, bearded old man. Suzy remembers the drawing vividly, because it belonged to one of the rare moments when Grace laughed with her, when they had no school, no house chores, no Korean-language lesson. Both Mom and Dad would set off each morning, presumably to look for housing and work, leaving them with a bag of food, mostly from the fast-food counters along the highway, a couple of burgers, a bag of potato chips, and a family-sized Coke. It was a treat. McDonald’s every day, like eating out for each meal. Grace still ate things like that then. Only later, when she started high school, did she become obsessed with dieting.