Sublimation(52)

She tugs the cord and gets out at the bus stop. The town looks like Seoul from fifteen years ago, a little—something in the design of the buildings and the signage. It’s a transposition of the world that no longer exists. Like Soyoung has time traveled and returned to the Seoul from when she was a teenager. And then she blinks and the world around her returns to being the backdrop of Rose’s adolescence, the town is just the town, it’s just where she grew up, and it’s not Korea. Pay no attention to how half the signs are in hangul, because a quarter are in Spanish, and everything has English subtitling underneath. Nostalgia, no, not nostalgia, just the faint feeling that something is missing from the way she is supposed to feel about this place, as if she is unmoored from the current presence of it.

Soyoung begins walking to the restaurant, the same one that Rose always meets her mother at. If Fort Lee feels like a time capsule to an antiquated Korea, then this restaurant feels like a time capsule to the years before they started putting gochujang in aioli. She goes inside, nods at the server, looks around the room to spot her mom, and there her mother is, sitting at the same spot she always takes.

“Hi, Umma,” Soyoung says, and her mom gets up to give her a hug. This is pretty much as maternal as her mom gets. That, and cutting fruit for Rose and bringing it to her when she was studying.

“Hi, Soyoung-ah, it’s so good to see you,” her mom says, or the approximation of that phrase in Korean.

“Hi,” Soyoung says again, and squeezes her mom, and her mom squeezes back, and for a moment everything in Soyoung’s brain is suffused with the illusion that everything’s going to be okay.

“Soyoung,” Rose’s mom says, and draws back. Rose’s mom puts her hand on Soyoung’s face. Tilts it to the left and the right before Soyoung can react, and besides, this is Rose’s mother. This is her mom. She looks the same as Rose remembers and different from Soyoung’s mom in ways that are hard to articulate, only that it’s obvious that this is a different woman from the one who Rose met with, who Soyoung was raised by. The wrinkles on her face are different. Which version of them was happier? Rose’s mom has more laugh lines. Both versions of her mom smell the same.

“So, you reintegrated?”

Soyoung whips her head back and out of her mom’s grasp.

“How the f—”

Pure Rose, down to the excised expletive. How did she know! Is this what motherhood is? Can she tell from Soyoung’s face? Something about her expression? Something she wore? Something ineffable from Soyoung’s demeanor, how did Rose, purely herself, carry her weight, how did she move, what were the differences?

“Soyoung, I’m your mother,” her mom says. “And your aunt told me what happened.”

Soyoung sits down. Her face feels very tense.

“You still talk with people in Korea?”

“Sometimes,” her mom says, and then nothing else. She sits down.

Soyoung looks down at the paper placemat. Advertisements for Kumon, a dentist. She moves her chopsticks around. Takes a sip of water. Looks back up.

“You wouldn’t have been able to tell, otherwise?” she demands. “Just from looking at me?”

“Look, they have a lunch special now.”

“Mom,” Soyoung says.

Her mom makes a gesture as if she’s brushing something away from her.

“I don’t know, Soyoung. I think I would have been able to tell. I’m your mom. But I knew already, so.”

“Mom,” Soyoung says again.

She’s thinking about how her mom in Korea had mistaken Rose for her. How she had looked at Rose, until she realized who she was talking to.

She looks at the menu. It’s the same menu that this place has had for decades. They haven’t changed anything except for the prices, which have been crossed out and handwritten.

“I’m getting the soondubu,” Soyoung says. Rose always got the soondubu. Soyoung hadn’t had a standard Korean restaurant order. Her mom is still looking at her. Soyoung doesn’t like it. Her mom frowns.

“Are you doing okay, Soyoung-ah?”

The packet in Soyoung’s bag feels like a physical manifestation of a lump in her throat. Like if she unwraps the package the entirety of Harabeoji’s house will unfold in the space around them and they will be sitting there again and she will be ten years old and her mother and grandfather will be shouting at each other across the kitchen table.

“Why did we move to the States?”

Rose’s mom looks surprised.

“You know, because of my work. You know.”

Oh sure, work. The new job that her mom had gotten, a month before their move. They had talked about it, in the sense that her mom had talked about it at Rose, because her mother had always prided herself on being blunt with the facts. Soyoung, your father left us. Soyoung, I got a new job in the States. Soyoung, we’re moving to New Jersey, yes, this is where it is on a map. But there were never any explanations. The world was described matter-of-factly and the rest of it was left to imagination.

“No, I mean, why’d you get the new job? Why’d you want to come to the States? Why were you and Harabeoji fighting so much about it, the entire time? Like—Mom, come on. What were you thinking?”

Neither Soyoung nor Rose had ever asked that question before, to either version of their mothers. Soyoung had never thought about it much. But Rose had. Rose had sat in sixth grade English class and only been able to read two-thirds of the words on the worksheet. Rose had been asked where she was from and told them New Jersey and it had never been the answer that anyone wanted. Rose had needed to make new friends, had needed to learn the social dynamics of American middle school and there had been a lot of weird, lonely moments, when she had felt like a little alien, or that she was surrounded by aliens.