I told Serena that I didn’t want to miss this city while I was still in it, because that makes it impossible/hard to enjoy, and enjoying is the only living thing

I’m sitting in one of the alcoves made of greenery and metal and wooden fences, hiding me from the view of the street as well as effectively canceling out much of the noises coming from the other patrons at this amazing community cafe. Will say more about the cafe in a moment, but I am currently watching the struggle of a butterfly on the ground, near my feet, about to die. Or so I think. It seems injured somewhere, I am not a biologist, or an insect specialist or an animal lover. Partially I am freaked out of the winged creature coming too close to me with its frantic movements, trying to fly I think. But from the twenty minutes or so of observation I say it’s not gonna make it. S/he has been fluttering uselessly around my table, unable to get off the ground, making the same poor circling movements, and sometimes lying down so still I think it’s dead. Seconds later I see the opening and closing of the wings like the flutter of a nervous woman’s eyelids.

Cafe is closing. My Americano is drunk, and I must pack up and leave before I can post this. And the butterfly is still there. I don’t want to leave it dying alone.

Ignatius Cafe: I only found it because it was close to the USC Village where I could drop off my Amazon return item. Tis run by a Korean Catholic parish folks. In the hour I had stayed a priest/father came by, a young couple with their baby, half a dozen Asian Am students no doubt from the school, some white folks and brown folks working on stuff or deep in conversations. A kind girl paid for my coffee because I had no cash (should’ve known… it’s donation-based) while the barista just told me to enjoy it for free at first. There’s no password to the WiFi. And did I mention I am sitting in a green alcove?

In about two minutes I will walk out, hopefully to a car that’s not broken into. The neighborhood this cafe is situated in is where I’ve grocery-shopped during my first ever “urban mission” back in the summer of 2005. I met Curtis that summer. I read Amos. I decided that the comfortable Church needed to hear about the wrath of God. A lot has happened since then.

The butterfly had not died yet.

Ode to the house I remember as the one I lived in right after my aunt had died

This is an old piece, so old that I do not even have the original typed up, in Google Drive or my email inbox or as a Word doc saved anywhere. Only the edited down version lives as a post on the Peel Pages Tumblr (thanks Molly).

But I like it a lot. I thought of it quite a few times as we made the trek up the cemetery again this past Thursday, what would have been my aunt’s 60th. Two bouquets of flowers, Hannah and I.

 

I remember the summer I came home after freshman year when I had nothing planned–no summer school, no internship or job, no traveling. It was right after Hurricane Katrina had hit, months after my aunt passed away of heart attack. My parents had moved immediately to house and look my two newly orphaned cousins.

My parents’ room, I would sleep there sometimes, not having a space of my own. One morning I woke up crying. The muscles were tense in sorrow, tear ducts already in motion. I couldn’t stop the tears even after I had realized it was a dream. The girl in my dream was playing and jumping on a row of beds like Snow White and her seven dwarves. From one bed to another, she bounced across till she reached the end of the row, and I met her there to hold her in my arms. Where’s your brother? I asked, time to go now. But she looked sad as I stroked her hair, her head in my lap. I have no family, she said, I don’t have a home to go back to. I sat there, she laid still. As the body came to consciousness, I told myself, this isn’t real. But I will cry for you little girl. I will cry for you my cousin.

The living room was spacious with a real fireplace and hardwood floor, enough room for two sets of couches: one from our old apartment, another from my aunt’s old house. We held a party here once, Christmas/housewarming/birthday party for Hannah. My mom said that losing her mom shouldn’t rob Hannah of her celebration. So for her birthday two days before Christmas, we spent more than two hundred dollars buying fancy ornaments at Macy’s, per Hannah’s request: handmade glasses, colored orbs, beads and angel figurines. I got so upset with the selfishness, the extravagant planning my mom had never done for me. She invited friends for a feast and a gift exchange. We all sat in a circle in that huge living room on a sumptuous carpet, opening presents: a box of Ferrero Rocher, stuffed animals and coffee mugs. What we ate, I don’t remember. People left early, their gifts sitting unwrapped in the living room.

An arched opening from the living room led to another spacious dining room. In it was a piano my grandpa bought me a long time ago. I rarely played, but it was my jazz ensemble phase. I tried to practice that summer but only succeeded in creating miserably loud banging of keys in chords so blue my mom didn’t understand a single note. What are you playing? She would ask, and I would shut up in bitterness. She never appreciated my musical endeavors. Sometimes Hannah would also bang the keys to some Korean pop songs, sheet music of boy bands silly and sugary. One evening we were trying to have a family dinner. Hannah was hitting the keys so loud. We told her to stop–maybe she was upset at something or someone or both. It was always a fight trying to come to terms with her, see eye to eye. This lasted through the rest of that dinner.

There was a tiny bathroom by the dining room opening to Hannah’s room. It was locked from the guest side for her privacy. She had decorated it well in pink Hello Kitty paraphernalia and scented bath salts she never used. The house suffered from a drainage problem, old pipes blocked by deep tree roots. All the bathrooms would clog from time to time, and nothing would flush or drain. Sometimes sewer water filled back up the sink, the toilet, the tub, leaving us smelling like shit. It was usually me or my brother or her brother Paul, trying to plunge things into order, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not.

Hannah’s room had a walk-in closet so big it could’ve been a studio. Her clothes all hung coordinated by colors like a rainbow of shirts and jackets and dresses. Half of them I had never seen her wear. Bags and bags of them from her mom’s store now run by my parents and me. That’s what I did all summer, keeping track of tank tops and belts from small to large in red and black and white, while Hannah dropped in every now and then to take things. I protested once. My mom said, leave her alone, it’s her mom’s store. In anger I raided her closet, picking out stuff I wanted to wear. Once we had a big fight. She locked herself in that room; I was ready to ax down that door, calling her names, hollering, throwing my body against the door that did not open.

Right outside her door was the kitchen with new stove top, new oven, new microwave, new everything. I started baking for the first time. I bought butter and white flour to bake cookies: peanut butter, chocolate chip, oatmeal raisins. But nothing would come out pretty. Nothing looked anything like the ones on allrecipes dot com. For my brother’s birthday, I tried a fancy cheesecake recipe. This time it came out beautifully; I decorated and garnished with pride. Later I saw my present, still cooling in the fridge, broken. A slice missing. Hannah ate it. Even before we had the chance to celebrate him, before dinner, before my parents came home from work, she broke the cake. I was beyond angry–that must have been when I charged upon her locked door. I took off and found myself driving all the way to my aunt’s cemetery, fuming through the long L.A. traffic up to Rose Hill in Whittier. I couldn’t find her grave though and instead spent hours driving around, eventually giving up, and just sat down on the grass. Letting go.

God I have no idea how we survived it all.

Monologue for an Onion by Suji Kwock Kim

I don’t mean to make you cry.
I mean nothing, but this has not kept you
From peeling away my body, layer by layer,

The tears clouding your eyes as the table fills
With husks, cut flesh, all the debris of pursuit.
Poor deluded human: you seek my heart.

Hunt all you want. Beneath each skin of mine
Lies another skin: I am pure onion–pure union
Of outside and in, surface and secret core.

Look at you, chopping and weeping. Idiot.
Is this the way you go through life, your mind
A stopless knife, driven by your fantasy of truth,

Of lasting union–slashing away skin after skin
From things, ruin and tears your only signs
Of progress? Enough is enough.

You must not grieve that the world is glimpsed
Through veils. How else can it be seen?
How will you rip away the veil of the eye, the veil

That you are, you who want to grasp the heart
Of things, hungry to know where meaning
Lies. Taste what you hold in your hands: onion-juice,

Yellow peels, my stinging shreds. You are the one
In pieces. Whatever you meant to love, in meaning to
You changed yourself: you are not who you are,

Your soul cut moment to moment by a blade
Of fresh desire, the ground sown with abandoned skins.
And at your inmost circle, what? A core that is

Not one. Poor fool, you are divided at the heart,
Lost in its maze of chambers, blood, and love,
A heart that will one day beat you to death.

 

A boy gave me this book another summer I was in love. Notes from the Divided Country, I read again the dog-eared pages. It’s as beautiful as the first day.

These coffee shops need to stop playing Frank Ocean, seriously, just stop it

For your love is better than life, my lips will praise you, sings the psalmist. They’re my own words I’ve repeated since high school when I first learn to read the Scripture on my own. I now recall the summer school art class, right before my first year, probably the last time I’ve ever painted. Come to think of it, I’m impressed with the choice I make, 15 at most, not knowing a single soul in what’s to be my high school. Well, that’s a lie, I did know one girl, from my old church (I stopped going because dad got fired from the church, and we all walked out one Sunday in the middle of service, and we never went back). She & I are not particularly close at this point. So maybe as an act of rebellion against boredom that summer I take an art class at this new high school. The classmates are all white kids, or at least the ones I remember, or would consider “white” then, Armenians most likely. The teacher also is an old white dude, Armenian most likely, and I remember him really trying. He did give us interesting assignments: we played with patterns & shapes (that’s how the Psalm 63:3 made it into the story); I remember one about “perspectives,” two or three still-life scenes from one lookout point, to teach us about space and lines and angles; a charcoal/pastel/pencil drawing. Wish there were oil thrown in too, but we were not that good or motivated. Tis an intro class for snotty kids bored out of their minds after all. The teacher looked at my Psalm 63 piece and commented something about me having postmodern eye or something. Maybe I make this up. He made a comment, is all I remember.

Summer is hard. I feel it in my body that I love it. The heat, the humidity, the sun, the intolerable sweat, stickiness, mosquitos, burns, what most folks think suck, I don’t mind, I actually enjoy. What strikes me as unfortunate is so many of my terrible painful memories start in/with summer. These months are when I am most prone to depression, to fall in love and get my heart broken, to mourn loss for/of friends and family, to become unhinged. That doesn’t happen very often, and I realize there are plenty of summer months when I feel as beautiful as a goddess and alive and remember joy and listen to Cuban jazz and splash and tan and bask in the golden waves. Summers are wonderful. I have to take the bad with the good. I must remember and remind myself. I must fight for my joy. Even if I’m so tired and feel incapable, I must. Because I don’t want to die; I want to live.

All California interstates inevitably lead to you

Sentences appear and disappear like a mirage. Incomplete clauses in Korean—some imploring, half questions, to whom about what unknown—ebb and flow. I wish for them to land, take shape, that I may cross them out.

The shrubberies are verdant; the ocean grey; a thousand palm trees line The 101. I remember the wildfire, encouraged by signs of soot and new greens scattered along the road. The sight of the water takes me back to last September. I wrote a poem then, a five-mile hike up the Marin Headland, thinking. Beautiful you, ended the stanza. I’m just as tongue-tied now as I was then. He said he preferred the mountains to the beach. I want to put an end to everything. But I don’t know how. I don’t know how.

forever young

forever young