Monopoly: Against the Deck
Diana Ha
©
Copyright 2020 by Diana Ha
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The Korean version of Monopoly, at least for blue
collars in New York in the 70s, went something like this. GO: Get an
apartment. Move three spaces. Open a dry cleaner’s. Move six.
Add $2000 to private chest. And after many, many rolls of the dice
and the sweat equity that stacked the deck, you moved east, out of
Main Street, and bought a house. Either my parents didn’t know
the rules or the dice and cards were rigged because on our board,
after hopping two hopeful spaces (a brief stay at two neighboring
apartment buildings), my parents walked in place the next four
decades.
We settled into The Willows, a euphemism for the
prosaic brick six-story that personified Elmhurst. There we filed
into the 5H studio before graduating to the one-bedroom on the first
floor, eventually replacing my cousin on the third when she secured
her house after moving her ten spaces in the game. The bedroom in 3F
would give us room to breathe, the window in the kitchen a saving
grace for Umma in the broiling summer. We were still new and fresh
with hope of a life bigger than the building that stowed a cross
section of Queens: Hispanic, Black, Mexican, Indian, Chinese,
European, and Korean immigrants. The cologne, curry, and biting
kimchee stew just sat, fat in that hallway, our unventilated life. No
matter that Umma kept our home spotless. The roaches and rodents
scuttered out from behind the walls and crevices of all those smells,
all those countries jammed together, and one night a mouse licked my
toe where I was sleeping on the wooden floor. I didn’t know if
it was the one we found dead, neck pinned and bloody under the metal
trap the next day. Mice squirmed other mornings, helpless on the
sticky pad. I felt bad for Appa whom it fell on to clear these sated
traps, and for all men, knowing they wished they could pass on the
job.
It went like soft machine gunfire in the first floor
apartment, the soundtrack to our life that greeted me after school.
When I walked in, I’d see Umma feeding polyester squares
through her sewing machine, the mountain of fabric at her feet
growing as the one beside her shrank. She had joined the army of
Latino and Asian garment workers who packed the industry in the 80s,
but without the skill to navigate curves, she brought home patterns
for strings and pockets she could shoot out in a merciful line.
Nowhere to go but straight. My little brother David and I would use a
chopstick to poke up a corner of the finished rectangles and flip
them into shirt collars. At two cents a piece, time was the enemy.
The flexible hours that enabled her to raise her kids did not
transform easily into dollars. Umma moved fast, which is how the
needle flew off the Singer and disappeared like lightning into her
finger one day.
Gwen chahn ah. “I’m okay,” she
assured Hal Muh Nee, swaddling the finger in a paper towel that
soaked quickly with blood. Umma’s voice stayed soothing and
artless as she sought to dispel her mother’s alarm. Umma spoke
as though it were a bump of an arm even as I felt the burn of her
pain.
Umma had a high tolerance for pain. She skinned hot
sweet potato right off the steamer to break it open for me and David,
fingers unscathed. I don’t remember her ever having the cold or
flu though she must’ve had her share in the sharp New York
winter because she never complained, never took a day off. For many
years, I ascribed her ready forbearance to personal character -
thermoresistant powers aside - but it may have been something bigger,
a part of a social contract. Having watched her mother feed and raise
her family alone through the war and its aftermath, Umma understood
that suffering followed women in a singular way.
Her father, a stern and taciturn man, passed away
after giving blood to a cousin, leaving behind a wife and six
children who, three years later, fled down the Korean peninsula on
foot when the communist North invaded Seoul. My mother became the
youngest in the family when her brother at three died en route from
the pneumonia they could not treat in the winter flight. They buried
him on the road, and Umma watched her mother put one foot in front of
the other in silent heartache and grace.
Filling the patriarchal role, my mom’s eldest
brother raised Umma in a psychological straight-jacket, giving her
little room to see girlfriends, let alone date men. And so when Appa
came along, she could not see beyond the gifts and the charm, could
not begin to wrap her head around the suffering that awaited her. The
drinking and beating, even as she was carrying me, her honeymoon
baby, were bad enough. One time when I was three, the knife he hurled
barely missed her. But she didn’t learn who his lover was until
five years into the marriage when Appa’s sister pointed at the
woman who’d joined our family and friends at the airport to bid
us farewell as we set out for the States. How could Umma know that
the woman who’d befriended her, who'd come to her house with
seaweed soup, had a history with her husband that predated her?
Unable to make a scene, Umma, swollen in the last trimester with my
brother, stuffed the shock and rage and got on the plane.
My parents didn’t know Elmhurst was the armpit
of Queens, only that Umma’s second older brother had settled
there with his wife and kids, and that it was among the more
affordable places in the area. It had to be. No one knew you weren’t
supposed to lay deep roots in Elmhurst, which meant you hadn’t
done as well as Flushing, and that Koreans who found themselves
getting an apartment in this city-town turned it into a stepping
stone for the eventual leg up out to the suburbs of Bayside or Long
Island. Most, anyway.
We touched down at John F. Kennedy Airport. We had
made it. Mee Gook. America, where she’d been led to believe her
husband would finally give himself to his marriage and family. This,
more than anything, carried her, along with the unwritten promise of
good things this country held for her children. Bracing herself for a
whole new kind of suffering, for the go seng, trying to shake the
incubus of her life in Korea, my mother did not have the wherewithal
to dream or nurse the luxurious Western notion of emotional healing.
She had mouths to feed. But like every newcomer to this land, she
imagined reaching higher ground someday. Suffering, after all, is
supposed to bring reward, especially if you’re good at it.
Would Umma have wanted to know that all her striving,
all the dawn risings, the tens of thousands of dollars she’d
save would, in her closing years, only deliver her to a blind alley,
the very street where she’d first unpacked her bag and resolve?
I don't know why people seek out fortune tellers. Why
would you want to know the heartaches that lie ahead, the betrayals,
your failures, pull the curtain on the hardship that awaits? And the
joys. We’re told to track down our dreams like they’re
already ours. But then we’d have to expunge words like faith,
hope, trust from our language, and God’s foreknowledge up our
sleeve would no longer require living the questions. What would Umma
have done, what could she have done, with that knowing, with her
superhuman will, and the four walls that were her destiny? Of course
life is more than a hefty mortgage and a garage, but what if the
seven-by-four kitchen meant your life was small, very small? It ought
to mean that one day you’ll have more room. What if - with
never an inclination for books or study - she memorized historical
facts about this new country and picked up enough English to
recognize the test questions and passed the American citizenship test
over against her husband’s naysaying?
“When was the Declaration of Independence
adopted?”
“JuLY Poh, sebenteen sebendee seexeuh,”
Umma would answer, her voice celadon glaze, smooth through the
accent.
What if she even got her driver’s license and
zoomed the highways of Queens to grab merchandise at the warehouse
for the deli? What if those who saw the movie of her life said no one
worked harder? No one had forgiven her husband so much or shoveled
dirt in so big a hole he didn’t know how to fill to lay the
ground for their life. She will spend herself for her family and the
promise she’d made to herself that money would come and it
would stay, that doggedness would win the day, that her husband would
go to bed and wake up truthful, and the vicious fights would somehow
cease. What would Umma have done knowing her best intentions, her
hunger, her hopes were insufficient before she had even lifted that
ambitious hand? How do you do life - why do life - if you know the
end from the beginning, with no discovery and becoming in the
journey?
What do you do with futility?
My heart hurt for Umma as she bustled about,
collecting her things to get to the doctor. How is she going to get
the needle out? I wondered. Apparently, that was a good question
because the doctor left it in.
A graduate of the
University of Pennsylvania, Diana Ha publishes in various genres. Her
articles, narratives, and poetry feature in magazines and
anthologies, among them New
York's Emerging Writers, California's
Best Emerging Poets, and as an honoree in the Steve Kowit
International Poetry Contest, The
San Diego Poetry Annual. With a master's in education, she has
headed the elementary Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program in
the public schools, taught composition at California Baptist
University, and teaches writing at education conferences. Diana
discusses culture, writing, and achievement with over 16,000
followers on her blog at holisticwayfarer.com.
You can read more of her professional development services
at writexpressions.art.
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