What Suzy experiences is dread. The absolute dread of what is to come. It will only get worse, she thinks. This is not a good story. This is what I have come for.
“The business began to pick up after the renovation, although your father put down only a fraction of the money he’d promised. He also stopped doing the delivery work and hired someone instead. He was now practically running the whole store. Both our wives were behind the cash registers, since your father installed a second one for the night shift. I told him it was a bad idea. It’d only exhaust everyone. Seven days a week is one thing, but twenty-four hours? A couple of nights later, he called to say that our partnership wasn’t working, exactly what I’d been thinking, and that it’d be better if my wife and I were to stop showing up. I was flabbergasted. I thought he must’ve gone insane. It was my store, I mean our store, although he hadn’t fulfilled his end of the deal. What did he mean, stop showing up at my own store! That’s when he laid it on me—‘I could get you deported within twenty-four hours.’”
Sometimes the answer is there even before you are told. You may have suspected it all along. It has only been a matter of time.
“My wife overheard. She snatched the phone and started yelling. She told him he was a traitor, the lowest of the low. I’d never seen her lose control like that. All that work, those sleepless hours behind the register hadn’t been kind to her. She was tired, the way your mother had been tired. My wife still had some fire left in her. She wanted to fight out the battle. She didn’t want to give up. Your father threatened to report us if we showed up at the store just once more, but we ran there anyway. It’s so long ago now, but still so vivid. The ugliest, the saddest day of my life.” He takes another cigarette out of the pack. His fingers on the lighter are unsteady. It takes him a couple of tries to get a flame. He can only keep his eyes on the cigarette. Anywhere else will be her face, the girl’s face, which is too reminiscent.
“Your father called the INS right in front of us. He reported us while we stood there in our own house. It was like he’d done it before. He knew the number right off the top of his head. He didn’t even raise his voice. He looked calm through the whole thing. I saw your mother weeping in the corner. She was silent, even in crying. She didn’t want him to hear her cry.”
The informers.
No record of green cards or visa.
How many people did her parents sacrifice to obtain their citizenship? How many did they turn in for rewards?
Suzy never questioned why they moved each year. She did not think it odd when they could suddenly afford two bedrooms. She never thought twice when her parents bought a store, a house. She believed that it was the result of their hard work. But hard work, did it really pay off for all immigrants? Reporting an illegal immigrant is a vicious act, an immoral act. No immigrant can do it to another, knowing the fear, the absolutely mind-numbing fright, that a mere mention of the INS brings to those whose underground existence in the forgotten patches of Lefrak City is a source of a collective paranoia. Could her parents have been capable of such a betrayal? Was it out of greed? Could greed be enough motivation for turning on their own people? Why is Suzy not surprised?
“We ran. We shoved our bags into a car and drove to the first place we could think of that was far away. We ended up hiding out at a church member’s house on Long Island. That’s where my wife fell ill. All that fire inside of her suddenly went out. She kept blaming herself for what happened, for trusting your father. She kept saying that she was useless, that she was a burden to me, and that she was too old to start over. A few weeks later, while I was out looking for work, she took a whole bottle of sleeping pills. She was dead before we even reached the hospital. I buried her out there, in a town we’d never been to before. She was only forty-eight.” His voice is small and strained. He is relieved that his story is almost over. “She left me a note, begging me to go back to Korea. But I’m still here, and the only thing I have to show for the past thirteen years is this wretched age, and burying my wife, who wasn’t old enough to die. But how could I go back to Korea? Who would look after her? Who would lie beside her out on Long Island?”
From the minute Suzy set foot in this dark, desiccated corner, she might have known that it was her parents who drove him here, who called her here, who wanted her to hear everything, who are now asking her to make judgment on their lives, which, she is finally convinced, could not have been saved.
The tea is tepid. The barley flakes have sunken to the bottom. Boricha. It may be years before she tastes it again. Will she like it still? Will she then recall this room, where a dejected man has finally revealed to her what might have been at the root of her parents’ murder?
“But I had nothing to do with your parents’ death,” he says quietly. “That wouldn’t have brought my wife back.”
What about others? He mentioned that there were many with grudges against her parents. None of them could have gone to the police. How could they? Illegal immigrants, the cheapest target before the law. If her parents had stolen this man’s store right under his eyes and driven his wife to suicide, what else had they been capable of? Could her parents have confided to the police as well? Could they have traded information for some sort of protection?
Even Suzy knew that many Korean fruit-and-vegetable stores crumbled in the early nineties. Especially after the Los Angeles riots of ’92, relations between Koreans and blacks were at their worst. Over eight hundred Korean stores were destroyed in South Central. Many were torched in Flatbush and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Back then, it was not unusual to find a circle of picketers outside a Korean market, which inevitably drove a store out of business. It was also around then that the Labor Department began cracking down on Korean markets for breaking minimum-wage laws or hiring illegal immigrants, which Suzy learned later through her interpreting. As one wisecracking lawyer put it, “Everyone feeds off the illegals until they get an urge to scratch.” Yet, from what she recalls, her parents had never suffered from the upheaval. They thrived, in fact, even bought a house during that time. How did they manage when so many others collapsed? The INS alone would not have guaranteed their lucky fortune. It is possible that the police might have had something to do with it. They could have left her parents alone, in exchange for the names of store owners guilty of breaking labor laws. It would not have taken much. A few names. A few handshakes. And how would the police have reacted when two of their snitches were found dead one morning in their South Bronx store? Would they have rushed to track down the murderer? Or would they have feared the exposure of their involvement? Why had the police been so quick to dismiss her parents’ murder as random? We didn’t ditch them cold, Detective Lester told her. Then why so eager now to pin the murder on those ex—KK members? The gang denied the killing. They insisted that her parents were already dead when they got to the store. Who had sent them there? Whose order were they following on that morning of November 1995?
“What about Mr. Lee of Grand Concourse? And Mr. Lim? I saw him after the last time I came here. He might’ve been following me. He certainly hated my father. What do you know about them? What did they have to do with any of this?” Suzy is surprised at her relentlessness. Leave the man alone, she thinks. Hasn’t he been through enough?
“I don’t know,” he says curtly. “I’m not like your parents. I don’t squeal on my fellow men.”
Of course not. Not many would side with the INS against their own people. Suzy lowers her eyes, suddenly stumped. It is then that she notices the full ashtray again. A black plastic ashtray, the kind that belongs in a bar rather than a home. She carefully picks it up and empties it in the garbage can underneath the table. Immediately she is struck by the haze of stale ashes, and a pang of disappointment. Nothing, the ashtray reveals nothing. Just a common circular shape. What did she expect?