Casey refilled her glass with water.
“I can’t support you forever,” he said. “Your father is not a millionaire.”
Casey’s first thought was, And whose fault is that?
Tina knew when not to speak. She unfolded her thin paper napkin and spread it across her lap. In her mind, she ticked off the Ten Commandments—this thing she did when nervous; and when she felt particularly anxious, she recited the Apostle’s Creed and the Lord’s Prayer back to back.
“When I was your age, I sold kimbop on the streets. Not one piece”—Joseph raised his voice dramatically—“I couldn’t afford to eat one piece of what I was selling.” He lost himself in the memory of standing in a dusty corner of Pusan’s marketplace, waiting for paying customers while shooing away the street urchins who were hungrier than he was.
Using two spoons, Leah filleted the fish from its skeleton and served Joseph first. Casey wondered why her mother never stopped these self-indulgent reveries. Growing up, she’d heard countless monologues about her father’s privations. At the end of 1950, a temporary passage to the South had been secured for the sixteen-year-old Joseph—the baby of a wealthy merchant family—to prevent his conscription in the Red Army. But a few weeks after young Joseph landed in Pusan, the southernmost tip of the country, the war split the nation in two, and he never again saw his mother, six elder brothers, and two sisters, the family estate near Pyongyang. As a war refugee, the once pampered teenager ate garbage, slept on cold beaches, and stayed in filthy camps as easy prey for the older refugees who’d lost their sense and morals. Then in 1955, two years after the war ended, his young bride died from TB. With no money or support, he’d abandoned his hopes to be a medical doctor. Having missed college, he ran errands for tips from American soldiers, ignored his persistent nightmares, worked as a food vendor, and taught himself English from a dictionary. Before coming to America with his wife and two little girls, Joseph labored for twenty years as a foreman at a lightbulb factory outside of Seoul. Leah’s oldest brother, Hoon—the first friend Joseph made in the South—had sponsored their immigration to New York and given them their American first names. Then, two years later, Hoon died of pancreatic cancer. Everyone seemed to die on Joseph. He was the last remnant of his clan and had no male heirs.
Casey wasn’t indifferent to her father’s pain. But she’d decided she didn’t want to hear about it anymore. His losses weren’t hers, and she didn’t want to hold them. She was in Queens, and it was 1993. But at the table it was 1953, and the Korean War refused to end.
Joseph was gearing up to tell the story of his mother’s white jade brooch, the last item he’d possessed of hers. Of course he’d had to sell it to buy medicine for his first wife, who ended up dying anyway. Yes, yes, Casey wanted to say, war was brutal and poverty cruel, but enough already. She’d never suffer the way he did. Wasn’t that the point of them coming to America, after all?
Casey rolled her eyes, and Leah wished she wouldn’t do that. She didn’t mind these stories, really. Leah imagined Joseph’s first wife as a kind of invalid girl saint. There were no photographs of her, but Leah felt she must have been pretty—all romantic heroines were. A lady who died so young （only twenty） would have been kind and good and beautiful, Leah thought. Joseph’s stories were how he kept his memories alive. He’d lost everyone, and she knew from the fitful way he slept that the Japanese occupation and the war returned to him at night. His mother and his first wife were the ones he had loved the most as a young man. And Leah knew what it was to grieve; her own mother had died when she was eight. It was possible to long for the scent of your mother’s skin, the feel of her coarse chima fabric against your face; to lie down for the evening and shut your eyes tight and wish to see her sitting there at the edge of your pallet at dawn. Her mother had died from consumption, so she and Joseph’s first wife were entwined in Leah’s imagination.
Joseph smiled ruefully at Tina. “The night before I left on the ship, my mother sewed twenty gold rings in the lining of my coat with her own hand. She had these thick rheumatic fingers, and the servant girls usually did the sewing, but. . .” He lifted his right hand in the air as if he could make his mother’s hand appear in place of his own, then clasped the right one with his left. “She wrapped each ring with cotton batting so there’d be no noise when I moved around.” Joseph marveled at his mother’s thoughtfulness, recalling sharply how every time he had to sell a ring, he’d unstitch the white blanket thread that his mother had sewn into the coat fabric with her heavy needle. “She said to me, ‘Jun-oh-ah, sell these whenever you need to. Eat good hot food. When you return, my boy, we shall have such a feast.’” The yellowish whites of Joseph’s eyes welled up.