Prologue
Parishioners believed he could heal them with his hands. As a kid, I knew my father was different, and it had nothing to do with the fact that he was a preacher. His legs were shriveled down to bone and he walked funny, sometimes with a cane. His face beamed. He forgot to eat. He liked Maine, because the rocky terrain reminded him of home. At first, there were four of us, and then there were five: my father, my mother, my brother, my sister, and me in the middle. My older brother and I fought mean and hard, locked in a death match from the day I was born. Blissfully oblivious to the slugfest, my baby sister sat back and let the adults fuss over her. She was the pretty one. Together, the three of us practiced our musical instruments, spoke English at home, and got straight As in school. We grew up ringing church bells every Sunday, pulling down the ropes and flying up into the belfry. My sister and I sang in the choir as my brother pummeled toccatas and fugues out of the organ. There was Sunday School, bible study, and neighborly visits to the nursing home, but the part I liked about church was Christmas, and the fancy food.
I could cook before I could read. I could read before I was four, because I was mad that my older brother was Sacred Cow Oldest Number One Son, and he got to do everything first. From birth, I knew the weight of karmic injustice, and I knew what that meant thanks to those theological discussions at dinner. Not only would I never be older than him, he would always be smarter. And a boy. His Korean name began with "Ho," which in English means "Great." Humph. What's so great about him? How come he gets to be a Ho?" I would howl, a pudgy ball of rage stamping angrily on tabletops. "It's not fair! I want to be a Ho!" Sure, he could make electric generators out of Tinker Toy sets, but I could make layer cakes, and I had friends. So there. Cakes win.
With Auntie Ima the babysitter, I baked coffee cakes and apple pies. With my mother, I made mondu (dumplings) and nangmyun (noodles). The church ladies taught me how to knead dough and whip cream. I didnt eat the goodies that I made. Nothing about me was sweet, including my teeth. My great food love was meat, the kind of meat that demands a sharp knife and a taste for blood. We never seemed to have much. I suppose we were dirt poor, but so was everyone else. Poor was normal. Poverty was too. Instead of plastic reindeer glowing on front yards, winter meant gutted deer hanging off porch roofs, hovering lightly in the blue air, black noses sniffing the ground. Id extend a searching hand, flicking away flakes, and stick my nose in where it didnt belong. Like magic, the deers length and heft became food and it was Good, the body and blood of Amen, a serving of flesh tying the community together through the violence of hunger.
Deer and hunter walked the same paths through the woods. I wanted to follow them.
Sunday dinners at the parsonage, guests would discard the gristle, the cartilage, the marrow, and the rind, all the stuff that pale priests and thickening colonels refused to touch in mixed company. Id serve and clear the table, acting the perfect hostess as my baby sister sat there, cheerfully basking in her cuteness, and my savant brother played young Christ before the Elders. Back in the kitchen where no one would see me, Id grab bones off dirtied plates and gnaw off that bulbous white knob at the end, my favorite part, a tasty tidbit that only appeared after the commonplace had been excavated. Lollipops for carnivores. It wasnt meat that I really craved. I loved liver and heart, along with the tangled tissues that connected the big sheets of muscle together. The offal fed to animals was the stuff that I wanted chew, because I was more contrary than Mary, not halo Mary mother of God but the stubborn one that ruled Scotland before she lost her head.
So, Miss Mary Mary, how does your garden grow?
Oh, very well, thanks to the corpse of my murdered husband fertilizing the marigolds.
Nursery rhymes mask vicious politics. So does a well cooked meal.
A giblet was a meat pacifier, rubbery and melting at the same time. It resisted. It put up a fight. I cherished its toughness, as I gnawed and glowered in the kitchen, a fat feral gnome surrounded by the aromas of love and yeast and holy ghosts I did not believe in.
It does not matter if you believe in God, my father said with infuriating patience. Because God believes in you.
But Im an iconoclast, I protested loudly, trying out my interesting new word.
So was Martin Luther, my father responded placidly. Youre a protestant through and through.
No Im not!
Yes, you are.
And so I was boxed into a corner.
+++
Around the age of eight, I read Anna Karenina, the greatest novel ever written about a French-speaking Russian adulteress. I didnt grasp the big themes, but for reasons I could not explain, the story of her tragic affair put me off meat for almost two decades. (Leo Tolstoy, I later learned, was both a devout Christian and vegetarian who drove his wife crazy. I suspect that had something to do with it.) My parents did not understand my decision to become a vegetarian, especially since the fresh flesh of animals was the only food group I could safely eat. From almonds to zucchini, just about everything else produced unfortunate effects, ranging from discordant fits of sneezing to bouts of hyperactive screaming. Some of my earliest memories are of intense itching and being swaddled so I wouldnt claw myself to bits. Using an old-fashioned washboard and wringer, my parents rinsed out daily dozens of cloth diapers dripping with diarrhea and frowned in confusion when my perpetual rash got infected because I was allergic to detergents.
Fish? Allergic! Cats? Allergic! Sunshine? Allergic! Etc. For all that I was a surprisingly functional little kid, but being allergic to everything sets up a relationship to the world that is inescapably adversarial. You cannot take anything for granted, including Gods purported benevolence as he watches over the (hmmm
tasty?) sparrows. Me, I was being eyeballed by the Almighty of Abraham, the judgmental Old Testament God that was busy smiting sinners and turning unworthy women into pillars of salt. Sulkily sucking my thumb (-- not allergic. Safe!), I used to imagine that I was Lots wife reincarnated, which explained both my liking for salt as well as my instinctive aversion to marriage. It pissed me off that she was Lots wife” instead of, say, Veronica or Betty. These things register when you come from a culture that keeps the family unit sorted by calling you Oldest Daughter.”
And yes, I know that Christians dont reincarnate. Thats for Buddhists. Sorry.
Korean parents dont understand vegetarian.” In general, survivors who immigrate due to war find it odd when someone rejects a perfectly acceptable food group just because. What, no Spam with your eggs? But you love Spam! Dried squid is good! American chop suey is good! Aigu, aigu, my mother wailed. What is wrong with Oldest Daughter? No eight-year-old has a food philosophy. Refusing to eat meat was just something I had to do. In retrospect, I am glad that my father was assigned to churches in tiny towns where psychiatrists did not practice, because in rural America, food allergies are still namby-pamby liberal myths, setting me up for exceedingly vexed relationships with human authority figures who insisted on making me eat home-grown tomatoes and hand-caught lobsters and did not connect the dots when I began crossly exploding into hives. Adding insult to injury, most of my allergies werent fatal. That would have been interesting. No, mine were the kind that merely damned me to the perpetual motions of misery: wiping snot off my nose, knobbling watery eyes, watching my tongue swell, lather, rinse, repeat. Boring!
My dream was to get away from grownups telling me to stop sneezing. My mantra was self-sufficiency, and I started going after it as soon as I was able to crawl. The faster I could learn to fend for myself, the sooner I could set out on my own. I started by running the back roads of Maine, observing the quirks of the local ecology: fiddleheads to eat, pine cones for weapons, and beer cans worth money if you redeemed them. I ran to get out of the house. I ran because I was jumping out of my skin. I ran so I could be alone, running on restless legs that walked in and out of homerooms, kicking bullies in the schoolyard and slamming my brother in the shins. My sister just sat back and watched me fight, blinking bewildered black eyes and sucking contentedly on cookies. She could never figure out why I was so furious all the time. She was born with grace. Predictably, her Korean name, Young-Mi, means "flower." Mine is Young-Nan. It means "egg."
Young Mi-ya!” my mother would call up the stairs to my baby sister. To me: Young-Nanny! Young Nanneeeee! Wake up your sister! Youre late for school!”
Not Young Nanny,” Id glower, and pull my snoring sister out of bed. As I got her ready for school, my blissfully sleeping sister would drool lavishly on my hand-me-down shoes.
Having a crippled older religious man as your father means your parents start out gods with feet of clay, and they become mere mortals as soon as youre on solid food. The emotional launch into adulthood starts long before biology catches up with you. By the time I was teenager, between convulsive bouts of school, Id begun waddling around small continents in sensible shoes, carting around my precious packet of toilet paper, sunscreen, and a jar of antihistamines. Disappearing for months and years, I burrowed into cities such as Florence, London, and Seoul but mostly Paris, a place that bears remarkably little resemblance to the romantic fantasies spun about it. This was fine with me. I wasnt looking for love, drugs, yoga classes or any other girl” narratives attached to stories about free spirits bravely traveling alone. When your trips abroad are being paid for by your father/divorce settlement/publisher, youre not free. Youre expensive. Besides which, I grew up foreign in a native country. From birth, youre an alien being, a world traveler by default: dropped down the chimney by migratory storks.
In cities called Cosmopolitan, everyone is born of a bird. We are all the same kind, fine in our feathers but naked in our skins. Not all birds fly. Not all birds can.
There is no homing device in my head.
My mother prayed Id run into a nice Korean boy and start making legally wedded babies. My father hoped my peregrinations would put me on the road to Damascus, where Id see Gods truth and start preaching His word, writing letters to the Corinthians and voting Republican. I was St. Pauls namesake, after all. My parents had been expecting a boy, because apparently Id been one in the womb. Thats what the baby doctors told them. I chose to disagree. Given my conversion when I saw the light, my destiny was to become an apostle. Failing that, my father was thinking accountant. A good career choice for girls.
Ah, but in Latin, Paul also means little,” which is what I ended up being. Or rather, very short. Sometimes wee, mostly Weeble. The wobble was incontestable.
I knew my mind, and it was strange. It disagreed with my body, and my body struggled to get away. Amazingly, wherever my body went, my brain went too, barking, No meat for you!”