Nests by Eugene Lim - Fiction - Cagibi Literary Journal

I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.
—Joe Brainard, I Remember

I remember my mother remembering her father.

I remember walking with my mother through the woods near her home. She points out a small purple flower. She says they called these “ring-flowers,” and in her childhood they would pluck these flowers and make from their stalks a kind of ring. I remember she didn’t stoop to pluck one but mimed the act.

I remember my mother remembering her family walking south on a broad road during a proxy war that had just made them refugees.

I remember one afternoon when taking a walk with her through a park, asking her something about her father, and I remember how my mother, usually reticent about the past, spooled out an afternoon of memories.

I remember telling people I usually don’t remember anything before third grade.

I remember my mother remembering her family, having just become refugees, walking south on a broad road and her mother carrying their valuable plates on her head. My mother remembers being carried, strapped to her mother’s back by a wide cloth.

I remember my mother remembering that her sisters said she would cry too loudly and how one time this endangered their lives. The family was hiding in a barley field from bombers overhead, and the family thought her cries would alert the enemy.

I remember in my childhood my mother being slightly scared of gloves because she associated them with tales she was told as a girl of North Korean agents sent to strangle children in their sleep.

I remember my mother saying there was a Korean woman she had met once, an owner of a dry-cleaning business in Columbus. She was a little older. I remember my mother remembering this other, older woman had told her she had seen her mother killed in front of her by a bomb.
Of course she was devastated, said my mother.

I remember my mother remembering that they fled to the south for perhaps a year. When they returned they discovered their home had been completely destroyed, burned to the ground.

I remember in my childhood my mother being slightly scared of gloves because she associated them with tales she was told as a girl of North Korean agents sent to strangle children in their sleep.

I remember my mother remembering how a new home had been built, one they liked, but it too had to be abandoned. This time they had to sell it so they could pay the school fees for her eldest brother.

I remember my mother remembering her father as a self-taught country doctor who had schooled himself using Japanese medical books.

I remember my mother’s mother knowing Japanese.

I remember my father’s mother knowing Japanese.

I remember my mother remembering her father delivering babies.
That was the most regular money, she said, baby delivering.
I remember my mother, walking in the woods, and saying to me the word “forceps” and stopping to mime the pulling out of a child by the head from its womb.

I remember my mother remembering that her father treated sex workers for venereal disease, which they had picked up from, or transmitted to, American soldiers.

I remember my mother remembering a man in the village who had suffered a terrible burning of his face, and how her father—my grandfather—had cared for this man. And I remember my mother remembering this man, whom she said always called her father “father” as an honorific and as gesture of gratitude. I remember the face of my mother remembering this.

I remember my mother walking through the woods, which she does every day, very slowly, explaining her spinal stenosis to me, and about the surgeries she’s had that have made things, she says, worse. I remember my mother using the words “L4 and L5,” “bulging disc,” and “scar tissue.”

I remember hearing once at a bar a phrase that I struggled to comprehend, which later I read was a Yiddish saying, that went: When the father gives to the child, both laugh. And when the child gives to the father, both cry.

I remember my mother remembering her father teaching her how to write Chinese characters.

I remember my mother remembering her father paying special attention to her education because he recognized—and declared to their family of six children—that she had a rare intelligence. Though my mother wouldn’t quite put this this way.

I remember last week being annoyed that my Seamless order was late by 15 minutes.

I remember being annoyed that the new dishwasher didn’t seem to clean as well as the old one.

I remember being upset my parents didn’t seem happier or more supportive of my decision to try to become a writer.

I remember being home and watching with my mother a K-drama in which one brother, who is a wannabe filmmaker, says to another brother, “We have a saying in my business. Your own story is only interesting to you.”

I remember my mother remembering how she waited under a blanket for hours and hours in her last year of high school while her brother made the day-long journey to Seoul to check on a bulletin board where the names of those that had passed the entrance exam to enter medical school would be posted.
I remember my mother remembering how she felt when she learned she had passed.

I remember not long ago, lying in bed with my four-year-old son, his mother in the shower, waiting for him to wake up so I could make his breakfast of oatmeal, watching him breathing.

I remember my father, who is also a retired physician, saying that the entrance exam to medical school in Korea at the time also included a physical fitness portion. You had to throw a ball as far as you could. I remember my father remembering my mother throwing a ball. My mother laughs when he mentions this. She laughs and says her score on this part of the exam was pathetic.

I remember realizing my son’s reaching of the age of four has coincided with a cloud of sadness and I remember, as I lay in bed with him, watching him breathe, that I thought I might know why. I had a theory but I didn’t know how much faith to put in it. I remember thinking that perhaps all parents, if they’re lucky, feel a sadness, an undercurrent to something good, something fortunate. But this wasn’t my theory.

I remember my mother remembering her family preparing to abandon their home in 1951 to walk south as war refugees. I remember my mother remembering her mother sewing cotton balls into the lining of thin coats to add another layer against the cold.

I remember my grandmother, the woman who had sewn cotton balls into the linings of her family’s coats, crying when I visited her in California, a few months before she died. I remember how I had visited infrequently.

I remember my sister and I took her out to a Mexican restaurant, and I remember my grandmother, who had carried plates on her head and my mother on her back and who had walked south with her family as a war refugee, repeatedly and reflexively (since I was the eldest male present) offering me the salsa bowl.

I remember my mother coming to this country in 1973 not knowing she was pregnant. I remember an odd pride when I realized this meant I was conceived in Korea.

I remember my mother remembering when they returned from the south to find their house burned down, how her father had found a carpenter to build a new house on the same land, which the family came to be very fond of. It had mud walls and a straw roof. But, to the chagrin of her oldest brother, they had to sell it to pay for his school fees and from then on, the family lived in a series of rented rooms.

I remember my mother remembering her older brother complaining of the loss of their home.

I remember my mother saying that the older siblings had it more tough. I was too young, she said, and I didn’t know we were poor.

I remember my mother remembering how, when I was two years old, she had to send me away to live with her sister-in-law’s family. My aunt and her family had immigrated from Korea to Mississippi.

Decades later, I remember being a little shocked when realizing my cousins spoke English with both a Korean and an American Southern accent.

I remember learning that in Korea it was a tradition to buy your parents a gift of long underwear with your first paycheck. I remember failing to send my parents any underwear.

I remember my parents having paid for all my schooling and that I’ve no student loans to pay back.

I remember very clearly being heartless to my mother.

I remember my mother remembering wanting to go to America quite badly, an ambition she said was an unstated one her father also had for her. He wanted her to go to medical school and then to America.
I remember my mother remembering her father learning she had gotten into medical school. “He was so happy,” my mother remembers.

I remember my mother remembering bringing my father to meet her father for the first time. In addition to telling him he shouldn’t smoke, her father made my father read and translate a poem of Chinese characters.
“As a test?” I ask my mother.
“Yes, sort of,” she says.
“How’d he do?”
“Good! More than 90%.”
“Was it good enough?”
“Ha! It would never have been good enough!”

I remember my father writing my name in Chinese characters and telling me each character’s meaning. I remember thinking that I cannot read my own name.

I remember being told that after nine months with my aunt in Mississippi, after I was returned to my mother, I kept calling another woman, “Mommy.” I remember my mother always laughed when she recalled this detail. And I remember realizing, only after having a child of my own, how much this laughter hid.

I remember my mother remembering the decision to go to America. I was young, she said, I had no fear!
My mother says, Now, I’m scared to travel on vacation!

I don’t remember much before eight. When I’m lying in bed with my son, watching him breathe, I remember that I have almost no memories prior to my eighth year.

I remember my mother remembering her father always encouraging her and her siblings to go the United States.
But, she says, when it came time to really go, we went to their house to make our final farewell bows and her father leaned down to her and said: Don’t go.

When lying in bed with my son one morning, watching him breathe, waiting for my wife to come out of the shower, waiting just to wait, in the moments before I’ll rise to begin making him his breakfast of oatmeal, honey, and peanut butter, I remember that I’ve no memory of age four—the age my son is now. I remember also that I’ve no memory of years five or six or seven.

I remember lying with my son and thinking about my mother and father new to this country, alone but for each other, scared but bent on survival. And I think I’m blank on that time due to witnessing their trauma, living through it—my response an erasure of memory.
And so, in my son, I see both his peaceful sleep and his childhood—but also I remember not remembering and so see just underneath or beside it something else, a negative space, my absence of memories, which points to, which suspects, imminent pitfalls, lurking traps, the ambient potential of tragedy—and so realize I have a throat-catching sadness that remains largely inexplicable, unremembered.

We have a saying in my business. Your own story is only interesting to you.

I remember sitting on a bench with my mother during a walk in the woods and asking her about her father. I remember her
remembering her father. I remember
her remembering her father’s words to her in the
last moments before her departure to the United States and
during the last time she would ever see him. I remember her remembering her father saying,

“Don’t go”—and I remember us both
bursting out in laughter at this expected but unexpected punchline.

Don’t go.