Nonfiction from Daniel Choe

Photo: Pexels

Frozen

I was thirteen, and my brother eight, when I first heard mom wailing that she couldn’t live, that she was ripped in two. I was vibrating, but not actually moving. Numbed. From the top bunk, I heard nothing from my brother. I understand now that he was shadowing me, learning to hide inside himself too. My parents fought using Korean, of course. Dreaming, fucking, suffering: you grind them down to nubs, and what remains appears in relief, inscribed in your first language. It was three o’clock in the morning, but the light pouring in from the edges of our closed bedroom door looked like an eclipse in the shape of an obelisk. It wasn’t just the living room light or the kitchen light, but both. I hadn’t heard dad yet when he called for my help: “Yuna! Ppalliwa!” [1] I still wouldn’t move. My brother had to be awake. I imagine now a silent promise not to hold one another accountable. To somehow fall asleep again with dad’s desperation knocking around in our heads.

My life coach says that people are familiar with the fight-or-flight responses to stress, but less familiar with freezing and fawning. I would guess because freezing feels like insured doom, fawning like surrender. You’re expected to fight until you’re dead, precluding both the freeze and the fawn. You’re to scream as loudly as you can about ideals while you’re torn apart or your head drops into a basket. You’d be in mid-sentence: “FREEDOOOOOO—.” They wouldn’t let you finish, would they? And if unable to flee or fight whether by circumstance or age? There, it seems also that freezing and fawning would offer little.

The next morning, the living room and kitchen were spotless. Books, a mug stuffed with ballpoint pens, and the television remote controls were all set at perfect right angles, stacked neatly where necessary, categorized large to small. The kitchen was clinical. Mom wasn’t messy by any means, but it was too pristine, alien. The knife block was empty and there was the smell of metal, heavy in the air and so hard to ignore that it tested my family’s ability to conceal. Our family had a fear of transcendent moments. Maybe that’s why they get me every time now and I remember them so well, wishing I had done something more. I’m always looking for more of those moments too, trying to strike them head-on, no dodging.

I told my life coach about a home health nurse who came to change the dressing on mom’s pressure sores. The nurse had to take her demographic information first, to register her for repeated visits. “Gender?” he asked. Her English is near where my Korean is, around third grade level. When she didn’t immediately understand gender, the nurse gave her some examples: male, female. Mom latched onto that: “Ooh-mon!” That’s how it sounds when she says “woman.” She’d go on to explain she’s not anything weird and modern, like in-between. How do I engage with her on that? We’ve come a long way since I was a child, now forthright about emotions and hurt feelings, but gender feels too far, like religion or sex. The nurse asked her to identify her race, giving her a couple samples again: white, black. She hooked onto that awkwardly: “Oh, I’m yellow. You know, just Asian.” She didn’t realize what she’d said, not really. The reason why yellow indicates cowardice (sometimes Madness!) is obscured by the endless theories on the origin. It’s the same with the explanations for why people in old photos don’t smile. It’s culture, it’s history, psychology. You choose the angle that works best for you and move on.

When I was seventeen, I was perched somewhere on Mount Shasta for the Water of Life Presbyterian Church’s annual summer retreat. We’d driven there on thin, gravel roads and steep drop offs, tight bends where an occasional cracked mirror dangled from a tree. These mirrors were meant to warn of a car approaching from the opposite direction. It was three o’clock in the morning again and I was restless. New situations, adrenaline. The first time I was up this early, my youth group bunk captain scolded me. “Who takes showers after midnight and what the hell are you doing anyway?” I should’ve answered, “adrenaline.” Outside, I looked up for resolution. Away from the city, the unimpeded lights in the sky formed river rapids, curved and complete with banks and shores. I breathed in mountain-star clarity. I heard rustling and cracking wood to my left behind the darkness. I calculated how close I was to our cabin door after swimming out to sea like a fool. When you run into bears, what are you supposed to do again, be loud and intimidating or quiet and meek? It’s all the times you get a 50-50 toss wrong that you remember most in life. I stood there, as still as I could for…I have no idea how long I was there. It snuffed and belched, it grunted and shuffled. The tightness in my chest, now that I recall it, had that familiar vibrating quality again. I wasn’t shivering, but I shook still. Soon I was back in the bunk and it was morning. I told Joe there was a bear outside and I had thought I might die. As usual, Joe was smooth, Joe was cool. It probably wasn’t a bear, he says. We met each other when we were ten. If you know a Korean born in America, you’re a single degree of separation from the Korean Christian Community, the KCC. That bloody kitchen happened because dad slept with some lady from the KCC. All the tougher things we witnessed as children slid off Joe’s back like nothing, instead pouring right into my gaping heart.

We’ll soon have our first child. My wife is here with me and the blood, the bears, the KCC distant. As distant as God ever is from humans, as the church says. My wife and I walk toward the exit of a parking garage, and as we come forward, two children, one on an electric bicycle, one on an electric scooter pass us on the left, startling us with their scream: “MREEEEEH.” They must be twelve or thirteen. As they recede from our view further into the garage, I say, “Hey, fuck you!” The e-bike child responds, “Wudd you say?!” He turns his bike around as the scooter kid stands by. His bike hums toward me and I freeze. I can’t attack a twelve-year-old, even in defense. He looks just like Hob from Robocop 2, a kid whose early, unmediated exposure to guns hardens him to now challenge anything that moves. Aha, but this time, I fawn! I tell Hob I’m sorry and walk away. Hob yells after me, “You better walk away!” And I can’t stop thinking about this for the rest of the week. Each time I play it back, my heart jumps to the beat of every alternative. The ones where I harm him provide more relief than the others, in which he returns home saying he scared the little Asian man. In which he believes himself lord of Roseville, able to cow any subject by running them down by e-bike, beady eyes bulging from their sockets, hair expertly gelled and separated into sharp, serrated rows. Unintuitively, as my hand hammers against a child’s head in my shameful fantasies, the bodily vibration from the bear, from the blood, goes away. And then my pride is back, along with my ego, and they want to do it all again. Later in the movie, it turns out Hob was just a damaged kid and needed a nice Robocop to love him. Maybe I’m misremembering that. In my dreams, when I yell “Hey, fuck you!” to my fears of parenthood, my latent child appears to turn back to me and asks, “Wudd you say?”

My life coach says I did the right thing. He says Hob could have been dangerous. Hob could have put me in jail. You were with your pregnant wife and you kept her safe. But I say, “Twelve or thirteen years old!” I say this so loudly it keeps my core vibrating at night. Eyes wide in the dark, I can get my mind off it momentarily, redirecting my thoughts, but only about as well as I can redirect that old spiral into depression. I’m better than I used to be at that, but I still like to throw myself into that old chamber, taking my time circling the drain until finally plunking into the pile of coins for The Ronald McDonald House. Fawning. Women who fawn over men, Asians fawning over everyone. The East fawning over the West. I’m reduced to a cute little boyfriend—never attractive, just cute. I think of the fawn, the young deer. Aren’t fawns female? No, it just means young or small. Fawn is also a shade of yellow. But just outside my vision, really small, I see there’s something fulfilling about a good, healthy swoon. No Hob, no Orientalism. Or if I were a better person maybe I would fawn for Hob knowingly, hoping that opening yourself up to whatever is coming, fully alert, is more true? There’s something bordering on elegance in that fawn: to be struck by an oncoming calamity and assent to submission in its wake.

[1] 윤아! 빨리와!
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Daniel Choe‘s parents were born in Korea and he was born in Ann Arbor. He currently works for the State of California.