김준희

Sean Kim '21

THE FRUIT OF DESIRE, GRACE SUN '23

김준희

Sean Kim '21

In our masks, protecting ourselves from the pandemic raging throughout the world, my mother and I wait in the TSA line, shortened to only five people needing to get somewhere during this chaos. Perhaps we were the most desperate to get to our destination, to a small townhouse in the quaint Delawarean neighborhood of Limestone Hills, our hands fumbling with our passports as we pass through TSA, the near-sprint while passing the shuttered stores and empty gates with their black screens, the odd stares we receive as we breathe heavily once we arrive at our gate. My mother picks at her nails and her eyes flicker out the window to the plane that will take us to where my mother’s sister waits, healing from her first round of chemotherapy, her days and nights spent in bed, her curtains closing off the sun, only adding to the pallor of her skin. Once in the plane, seated across the aisle from me, my mother sits utterly still, her arms crossed, her eyes closed, the dangling of her blue earbuds the only movement from her, but an hour into the flight, her knee starts to shake, her fingers begin to twitch. She seems to count the seconds to Delaware, 18,000 seconds, and from the last time she went to Delaware for my aunt’s first round of chemotherapy, my mother knows how slowly 18,000 seconds can pass. For those five hours, my mother’s knee bobs and her fingers fidget, her earbuds blaring multiple episodes of a Korean podcast on the world economy, filling in the silence of the humming plane, feeling as if she were strung up 38,000 feet in the air, ready to plummet into the dusty earth below. Despite the rambling of economists and investors, fabricated fears of her sister’s condition torment her. However, when we land in Philadelphia, my recovering aunt comes to pick us up, eager to see us, and her healthy condition calms both my mother and her fears. All born on the same wooden floor in Busan, South Korea, my mother and her siblings, my two aunts and uncle, have always looked after each other. From spoon feeding bone broth to her littlest sister, to catching her brother as he takes his first stumbling steps, my mother, as the eldest, finds herself accountable for all her siblings, so when we step into the car, my mother takes in my aunt, checking how much weight she has gained, how much black has spread under her fingernails, and how steady her movements are. Although miles away from the home they grew up in, my mother becomes the older sister she was, and always has been, and when we arrive at the white-wood panelled townhouse with its distinct bay window, my mother does not bother to go to her room and drop her bags, but starts cooking. After washing the rice, pouring the rice into the rice cooker, and pressing the start button, she checks the food she left behind from her first visit, taking note of the half-empty bag of rice, the bag of untouched granola on the kitchen island, the unorganized pill bottles scattered in the medicine cabinet. And her hands still damp from washing rice, she unpacks the Korean side dishes double-wrapped in plastic bags from her carry-on, and moves some to the fridge and the remainder to the table, a container of kimchi, a jar of pickled onions.

When night comes, I lay in my bed, a mattress on the floor of the office, and let myself be enveloped in the grey dark, the humming of the printer, and the occasional beeping of the computer. I once feared the dark, afraid of what hid in the obscurity of night, afraid of the pile of clothes on my chair; afraid of the blackness of night. It took me until sixth grade, when I didn’t sleep next to my snoring mother, when I pulled myself away from the comfort of the warmth of her body, the lull of her breath, and the soft rambling of the television that threw muted shades of blue into the dark. She had always been the anchor I held onto when it seemed as if the ceiling fan turned into a gargoyle, the rocking chair into a demon.

One night, in the third grade, I woke up to the pounding of my heart, the nightmare disintegrating into incomprehensible fragments, and I turned to my mother. In the dark, I studied my mother’s round nose, curved forehead, small ears, the rise and fall of her chest, and in the backdrop of gray night, my third-grade brain realized the dark did not panic me – the dark was shallow, lanced through by a night-light, soothed with my adjusted eyes – but rather, the silence gripped me in its prickly grasp, quickening my breath, hammering at my heart. I feared that I would hear nothing, no puffs or snorts of air, no crinkling of blankets, only the grinding of thoughts in my skull, ludicrous thoughts that my parents had left behind, that the world would end tomorrow, that I would die during my sleep. But in the depth of immobilizing fear, my mother rolled over to me, letting out a huff of air, and out of pure maternal instinct, wrapped her arms around me. Without a sound from me, she had sensed my fear, and comforted, I fell back to sleep.

Yet, now, it seems like I am the one turning to my mother, sensing her fear. From the way she takes note of my aunt’s condition every available time, to the hours she spends cooking, I hear her breath quicken, her heart hammer. And during the time left with nothing to do, she fills the sticky air with her podcasts and music, out of fear of being left alone to the suspicions that her sister might be getting worse, despite the shrinking tumor size and the effective rounds of chemotherapy. My mother avoids the silence, avoids the inevitable path to only thinking about the worst case scenario, avoids being overwhelmed by the doubts of her sister’s promising progress. We share the same fear of silence, the same fear of being lost to our own pessimism.

When left in silence, I know that I cannot bother my mother. Any day, when my mother cuts off the babbling of her economic podcasts, when even the clocks seem to tick quieter, and I come to her room, my mother sits pegged to her headboard, her back flat against the darkwood panel, her legs laid straight out infront of her. Although in the vastness of the California King, she takes up less than a quarter of the space, her solemn, straight-backed spirit fills the whole bed, and her closed eyes, jutting lips, and wrinkled forehead stifle my “good night.” In this eerie silence, the spring of the doorknob sounds like a gunshot about to start an avalanche, the still air scented with a cryptic agitation, and my mother’s rigid body, one wrong word away from detonating. She is left defenseless to the silence, and I, unable to pull her from the distorted worries that plague her.

That’s why she surrounds herself with long phone calls with her friends about gossip and life updates, rambling analyses on the American stock market, screaming movies about Korean zombies. To avoid the grasps of silence. To avoid the lies she spins, lies about her sister’s health, lies about her own happiness. To avoid being blinded from reality, and deceived by her apprehension.

So for the next few days, my mother lived by her phone, the tattered red case always at hand, blue earbuds tangling with her cooking, her evening walks, her runs to the supermarket. During the day, she listened to the spiking numbers of COVID cases, to Buddhist monks calling out for inner peace, Christian lectures on self-healing, and Korean politicians struggling to strike a deal. At night, she lays in her bed binging Korean dramas, letting the fantastical noises of shrieking zombies dressed in traditional Korean garb or weeping heiresses falling in love with the wrong man, lull her to sleep. She was afraid to think of the purpose for our visit, to nurse my cancerous aunt, her body being pumped with cell-killing chemicals every Wednesday morning, yet after our first week, I knew that she had fallen deep into silence when the only sound was the humming AC.

In spite of her teeming social life with weekly lunches friends and frequent visits with family (in a pre-COVID world); in spite of her outward bluntness during arguments or even when ordering food, where her loud voice overpowers the other to get her way – whether it be what color the Christmas ornaments would be or what she wants me to major in for college; in spite of her laugh bubbling out at crude jokes or inappropriate moments that I cannot repeat in this essay, sometimes oblivious to the the fact she might be at church or a call with her lawyer, my mother overthinks, overcontemplates, rehearsing every possible way she could respond to my aunt’s illness, from what foods she could buy to ease the nausea, to what organic soaps would be least irritating for peeling skin, the intensity of her reflections winding up nowhere, unable to answer how such an affliction could take over her younger sister. So she plugs her ears and distracts herself with the sounds of others, forcing herself to listen to the tedious droning of political and economic experts on the current state of our world, so that she does not need to think about her own state of world.

For four weeks, we repeat the same routine, a blur of podcasts during our scheduled Wednesday drives to the chemotherapy appointments at the Christiana Cancer Center, earbuds and evening walks under a sky aflame with drifting fireflies around our ankles, our occasional homemade lobster rolls, the mornings at BrewHaha coffee, weekend trips to pick blueberries or hike around Chesapeake Bay. And thankfully, during that time, my aunt healed smoothly, her tumor shrinking in size, and my mother, soothed by the good progress, began to leave her blue earbuds bundled up by her bedside table, next to her silent phone, weaning herself from the buzz of phone calls with long distance friends and the bustling of

On a morning in July, during our walk on Pike’s Creek trail, my mother and I find ourselves out of breath and out of conversation, and despite the silence that settles between us, we simply continue to walk under the canopy of leaves throwing splotches of light on an asphalt walkway between towering trees. Only the sound of leaves underfoot, the warble of an unknown bird, the panting of a dog and its owner passing by. No sinking feelings of dread. No stony faces. No demons crawling in the silence. The catastrophic scenarios of my aunt’s health we had once spun, disappear, and the anamorphic figures twisted in the dark revert to their true form: a pile of clothes, a chair, an absurd statistic, a dash of doubt from the rare stories of cancer metastasizing to different parts of the body. So between trees and creeks we walk, the droning of cicadas and the trilling of cardinals filling the canopy of leaves, reverberating in the balmy silence that hushes our quickening breath, our hammering hearts. And when back at our car, buckling up and pulling out of the small parking lot, we get on the road to pick up my aunt. However, even without the sounds of the forest or the sounds of a droning economic specialist, my mother relaxes in her seat, her grip on the wheel loosening up as we acclimate ourselves to the silence, like pupils that dilate in the dark.

My mother possesses the traits of an overthinker, yet in this moment, with none of her panicking doubts of her sister’s condition straining the air between us, I realized how much she overanalyzed, and thus overcomplicated her life. In this state of momentary normalcy, I found that the true source of this onslaught of agitation was within herself. As I had laid in bed one night, paralyzed by my own nightmares of death and catastrophe, my mother’s nightmares of death and catastrophe had paralyzed her. Yet in this car ride to the cancer center, my mother commanded the silence, rather than it commanding her, and for once, we drove by the Delawarean greenery in calm silence, the garlands of vine-wrapped telephone wires draped over trees heavy with feathery leaves, and rather than focusing on the abyss below, my mother took in how the mid-afternoon light seemed to tint the tops of the trees with a verdant glow, how the wildflowers sprouted along the highway, how the sky seemed to be clearer than before.

And for the next three weeks we preserved this feeling of normalcy, noticing the family of deer that passed by the road, the rain and thunder that burst from mild skies, the turtles from the nearby pond that wound up on our doorstep. However, I had to return to San Diego, leaving my mother and my aunt behind with the belief that I would not see my mother for another two months. Despite what we had planned, she returned two weeks later, at a launch of a legal issue.

In late August, my mother sits down at the dining room table, dropping her bags at her feet, and she cries. She cries, sputtering and shuddering under the weight of her guilt of having to leave her sister behind, and I stand there, unable to do anything except watch her fall apart. Between gasps she bawls out her resentment against the legal issues with our tenant, tearing her from her sick sister, she claws at the knot of guilt in her chest for being unable to be next to her sister, to nurse and cooker for her, and she lets out the remorse she held within herself for six hours, too intense to hold in. She cries and cries, her clothes still holding the scent of Delaware, but her hands too far away from her sister, and when her tears sputter out, she curls up, once again feeling the heaviness of silence that lay upon her shoulders.