In Stitches Read online

  I hadn’t realized this.

  “Hard work being a baby doctor,” I say.

  “Very hard work,” my mother says. “But there are all kinds of doctors. Family doctors, eye doctors, nose doctors, hand doctors, foot doctors—”

  “That’s good,” I say. “Because I’m never going to be a baby doctor.”

  A RELATIVE SETS them up. I’m sure someone from my father’s side. That’s the only way this beautiful daughter of a high school principal would meet, much less date, the son of a poor farmer, the oldest of nine children. He has potential, true, and they have at least one thing in common—he has been accepted to medical school, and she is studying to be a nurse. She likes him right away. When he talks, he speaks with a quiet confidence. And passion. He has big dreams. After completing medical school in Korea, he plans to move to America and do his residency and become rich. He vows to send money home every month, and when he becomes a trained American doctor, he will return to Korea and pull his family out of poverty. She falls for his steely determination and the touch of his strong hands. Soon after they are a couple, he brings her home to meet the rest of his family and see the farm. Smart move. Because if she’d seen the farm before she fell in love with him, she might have had second thoughts. Her mom—my grandma—certainly does. She voices early and frequent objections about him, his poor background and his religion—he was raised Buddhist and not Christian—and his crazy future plans.

  Good thing she doesn’t take her mom with her to the farm. That would clinch it.

  A small patch of land. A balding rice patty. A few humped and crooked rows of radishes and onions. A teetering shell of a farmhouse. Rotting, patched, sweltering walls. Paper-thin floors that buckle and creak. Three tiny rooms. Nine kids. No plumbing. A pot in each room to piss in. A pot in the last room to shit in. A large basin sits near the back wall of the middle room. My grandmother fills the basin with buckets of cold water she pulls from the corroded well outside so each of the nine kids can occasionally bathe. The farmhouse has no stove, just a mound of kindling under a small grate. Chickens roam everywhere. The hens drop eggs that the kids pick up for breakfast. The older chickens become lunch, dinner, and part-time pets.

  I wonder how my father could have lived this way. Before bedtime, I ask my mother.

  “You make do,” she says. “You play the hand God deals you.”

  I’m too young to understand. My father’s former life seems unreal, impossible, invented, a figment of some Korean folk tale. That appalling, crumbling farmhouse bears no resemblance to our sturdy, spread-out ranch house on a wide plot of land in a small town in Michigan.

  “Day and night,” my mother says as if reading my mind. “Your father came from nothing. Now look. All because of hard work. And faith. You become resourceful.”

  I don’t know what she means. She tells me a story. I pop my thumb in my mouth, nuzzle against her cheek, and close my eyes to her words.

  During the war, when my father is my age, soldiers descend on the farm. They see it as a safe house, a place to spend the night, an opportunity for a home-cooked meal. My grandmother sees the soldiers as predators. If she feeds them, she will have no food left to feed her family. She’s afraid that her family will starve. To preserve her food supply, she buries all of the rice she has in the backyard. When the soldiers arrive, she tells them that she has no rice to feed them. They don’t believe her. They crash through the tiny rickety farmhouse, overturning pots, upending the meager furniture, smashing dishes, searching for the rice stash. They give up and move on.

  “Your grandmother took care of her family,” my mother says. “Your father takes care of ours.”

  . . . .

  DAD COMES TO America. A Korean right off the boat. Steve. That’s his new name. The name he calls himself. I imagine some racist encounter drove him to Steve. His actual name, his given name, the name he changed, is Suck. In Korea, parents often give their oldest child the same middle and last names. Technically, then, my father’s name is Suck Youn Youn. Pretty bad, but not as bad as his brother’s name. His middle name is Bum, sticking him with the unfortunate handle: Suck Bum Youn.

  Let’s face it. Suck Youn and Suck Bum both suck.

  Steve is better.

  Newly arrived, my father’s residencies take him and my mother on a rock band–like road trip of the Midwest, moving them from Pittsburgh to Detroit to Dayton, Ohio, finally planting them down just outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan. There my dad struggles to find his place, struggles to fit in. He feels like an outcast. He doesn’t make friends easily because of his long hours and difficulties learning English. One time some doctors invite him to a barbecue. They ask him to bring the beer. The word is new to him, the beverage unfamiliar. Confused, unsure, he brings two six-packs of root beer. The rest of the barbecue does not go well. The doctors don’t ask him to socialize with them again.

  In Grand Rapids, he takes out a loan and starts his own practice. The people in the area shut him out. They refuse to embrace a foreign ob-gyn who speaks broken English. He makes them uncomfortable. The practice fails. Desperate, my father scans medical journals for other opportunities. He finds one in Greenville, about forty-five minutes away. Their one and only ob-gyn has retired, leaving an opening. My father shuts down the Grand Rapids practice and sets up shop in this tiny blue-collar factory town. These people don’t care that my dad is Korean and that he speaks broken English. They’re having babies and they need a doctor. His practice booms. His English improves. He purchases a ranch-style house, a big-screen TV, a fancy car. He and my mom raise a family of their own.

  And that brings us here, to Greenville, where I live, population 7,945, 7,941 of whom are Caucasian.

  I’M PUSHING SEVEN. Thanks to my best friend, Chris, Sesame Street, and school, I speak fluent, impeccable, American elementary school English complete with midwestern twang. Close your eyes and you’d never know I looked Asian. To be honest, there are times I wish I were white, like everybody else in my class. I have a lot of friends, but some of the tougher, dumber kids call me names and make fun of the way I look and my Korean heritage. Eating our traditional dinners every night doesn’t help. We sit at the table using the blunt end of our chopsticks to bash in the skulls of half-dead crustaceans who circle the surface of our sizzling, crackling soup. I grimace and hold my nose as I chew. My father pops pieces of the things into his mouth like candy.

  My mother, squirming in her chair to find a comfortable position, pregnant with my sister, says in Korean to my father, “How was your day?”

  He swallows, and a smile climbs up his face like a sunrise. “Good day at the office. Daddy worked hard. Two C-sections!” The words burst from his lips at a volume needled up with excitement.

  “Daddy making big money so Daddy can retire early. Play golf five days a week.” He winks at me, his co-conspirator. “Daddy want to leave you kids a lot of money when he dies.”

  I say nothing. At this point in my life, halfway through second grade, I’m having some doubts about becoming a doctor.

  My father giggles. “Yesterday. I do laparoscopy. Fifteen minutes. One thousand dollah. Fifteen minutes, one thousand dollah!”

  He shakes his head. Then I feel his eyes on me. I slink into my chair, try to disappear inside the soup.

  “Tony, you become transplant surgeon. One transplant, five thousand dollah. That’s what they pay. One proceejah, five thousand dollah.”

  “Wow. Great. The only thing is sometimes I wonder if, you know, I should be a doctor when I grow up.”

  Time stops. Silence like a tomb. Crickets chirping. A bomb ticking . . .

  Did I just question my father?

  Not the brightest thing to do.

  My mother looks off, pats her belly to soothe her suddenly kicking unborn child, then pokes through her soup with her chopsticks. My brother stares at me, his lips locked in a stunned, frozen circle. He lifts his eyebrows. He says something, but I can’t make it out because of the loud thumping of my
heart, which has traveled into my head and drowned out every other thought and sound.

  “You what?” My father stares at me, his eyes filmy with incomprehension. He looks as if he’s been slapped.

  I have to fix this. At least make an attempt. “It’s nothing definite. I’m just saying that I’d like to keep my options open. I’m only seven. I’m still relatively young.”

  “But what . . . what you do?”

  I’m regretting every second of this meal. Wishing I had never opened my mouth. Wishing I could evaporate into the steam.

  “Daddy doesn’t understand. You want to become salesman?”

  He spits the word out. The equivalent of garbage collector or drug dealer.

  “Or maybe you work at factory? Assembly line? Make fan belts? Make boxes? Become unhappy drunk?”

  I look down into my soup bowl. I feel as small and defenseless as the half-dead squid staring back at me.

  “Look across street. Poor Chris father. He not doctor, he get fired. Doctor never get fired. Daddy has best job. Daddy has best boss. Daddy.” My father shakes his head slowly. He begins absently rearranging the silverware. “You have to think, Tony. How you gonna pay your bills? How you live? You gonna live on street? Or worse—live at home when you’re thirty-five?”

  “No, I—”

  “Doctor is the only thing. Every other job is no good for you. You have to make Daddy proud.”

  I glance at my mother and my brother. They shake their heads in a sad chorus, twin windshield wipers. My father picks up his bowl with both red hands, pinkies extended, and slurps his soup. Conversation over.

  And that’s how I decide to become a doctor.

  FIFTH GRADE. I now have a sister. Lisa. She’s cute and playful, kind of like a puppy. I like to tickle her, get her laughing. She’s easy. She waddles after me, which I like. She occupies a lot of my mother’s time. Fine with me. Lisa can’t do that much, and I have a lot on my mind.

  The thing is, I wish I weren’t different. I wish I looked like everybody else. I don’t want to stick out. I don’t want to be special. Special means weird. I want to be cool. But that’s out. That’s impossible. Asians are not cool. Think about it. Rank the cool cultures. Which people are cool? Black people are cool. Latin people are cool. Australians. Italians. Spanish people. Irish people. All cool.

  Asians?

  Forget it.

  When you think of an Asian guy, what comes to mind?

  A short, skinny, brainy supernerd with thick glasses, buckteeth, braces, a bowl haircut, and a Nikon camera strapped around his neck.

  By fifth grade, I’ve hit every one of those marks. Except the camera. But some days my mother makes me wear my cloth chin guard to school in addition to my braces. I look like an eleven-year-old Hannibal Lecter. That trumps the camera.

  What makes things even worse is the new kid. Kirby.

  Kirby—heavily Korean—transfers to our school in fifth grade. Naturally, because I’m the only other Asian kid within miles, every teacher and kid in the school assumes that Kirby and I will become instant best friends, or that we already know each other because all Asians know each other.

  The morning of Kirby’s first day, our teacher assigns him the desk next to mine. Kirby is Korean, all right, but he’s tall and athletic and belligerent and wears a buzz cut. He talks out in class, earns glares from teachers and kids, and when one particularly annoying redneck hillbilly kid makes fun of him, Kirby shoots him the bird.

  “See you on the playground . . . Chink,” says hillbilly redneck.

  At recess, hillbilly redneck shows up with ten of his closest hillbilly redneck friends. I’m standing next to Kirby. The teacher has asked me to show Kirby around, give him a tour of the playground—as if this dusty asphalt blacktop is a local tourist attraction—and introduce him to my friends. I do. Grunts. Kicking of dirt. Muttered hellos. Can’t say I see much chemistry there.

  With the redneck horde now descending, Kirby looks at me and nods. I think he assumes we’re in this together, as if we’re the leads in the Baldwin Heights Elementary School production of Rush Hour. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only am I not bosom buddies with Kirby, but I am also not into fighting. A few months ago my mother enrolled me in karate class. I made it to yellow belt. Yellow belt is the grade up from white belt. Everyone gets a white belt. You join the class, you pay the fee, you get a white belt. Yellow belt means you’ve advanced to the point where you can put on your gi properly and get into your fighting stance without falling over. Almost everybody earns a yellow belt. I got mine. Barely. I recently announced at dinner that I hate karate and want to quit. My mother, after a short, passionate exchange in Korean with my father, agreed but insisted that I replace karate with another after-school activity. Something less violent, I pleaded.

  Which is how I joined the church choir.

  As hillbilly redneck and his army surround us, I decide this is probably not a good time to explain to Kirby that even if I were his trusted ally, which I’m not, I am no longer even a yellow belt. I am a tenor.

  I needn’t have worried. Kirby is a junior Bruce Lee. He kicks, chops, punches, and wipes out the entire fifth grade.

  Karate, I know, is an Asian stereotype.

  Wiping out a swarm of fifth-grade douche bags, though, is cool. And since I’m standing next to Kirby when he does it, I, too, have become cool.

  For the moment.

  2

  Jawzilla

  Cool, I discover, has a short shelf life.

  Sixth grade.

  My jaw is growing. Subtly and steadily it advances, protruding Alien-like, a beast inching, crunching forward, unchecked, unstoppable. My mother and I attend countless consultations with dentists, orthodontists, oral surgeons, and jaw specialists. She bombards them with questions. Why is this happening? What did he do? What did he not do? Can you make it stop? In return, we receive a cacophony of theories and explanations accompanied by elaborate charts, milky X-rays, medical mumbo jumbo, and flailing rubber-tipped pointers. The theories include:

  • My constant and passionate thumb sucking mangled my bite, causing what dental journals will soon hail as the world’s all-time number one most extreme underbite.

  • My thumb sucking played absolutely no part whatsoever. My dentist simply didn’t alert my orthodontist soon enough.

  • My dentist alerted my orthodontist in plenty of time. My orthodontist didn’t fit my braces properly.

  • My dentist and my orthodontist both screwed up. And my favorite theory and the one I believe:

  • I don’t know. It’s just nature. Nature decided to mess me up. It happens. That’s why we have dwarfs and giants and Siamese twins and people with cleft lips and webbed feet and three breasts and girls born with penises and . . . twelve-year-old kids with jaws that won’t stop growing!

  My mother puts her faith in the last guy we see, mainly because he’s convincing and we’re exhausted. He decides, bottom line, that my orthodontist, at the very least, put the pressure in the wrong place. He will have to reset the braces, fit me again, and I will have to wear my chin cup and headgear all night and all day. Every day. Twenty-four/seven. At home and at school. We have to pull the front teeth forward and push the back teeth back. We have to correct the correction. Or else—

  I can’t envision the or else. I picture a cartoon kid with a massive, jutting Jay Leno jaw. A chiseled chin sticking out like a front porch. Grotesque. Deformed. And I imagine my friends pointing at me and snickering and laughing out loud and making faces, sticking out their chins in comic exaggeration of my own. It’s not bad enough that I’m saddled with thick, goofy glasses, a bowl-cut haircut, Kmart wardrobe, and Korean features with no karate to back me up. I now have to deal with Jawzilla?

  As my jaw thrusts forward, my inner nerd rides out with it. I enter middle school and promptly retreat into my room, losing myself in comic books and video games. I discover a knack for drawing. I fill up notebook after notebook with sketches of ca
rtoon characters I copy from my comic books and create on my own. To appease my parents, who want me out of my room, I take up the cello and join the school orchestra. While I play classical music at school, at home I listen secretly to the Carpenters, Olivia Newton-John, and John Denver, whose maudlin sentimentality mirrors my own. Might as well slam the exclamation point after my name—Tony Youn, nerd! In my room, my sanctuary, I devour each new issue of Spider-Man and watch The Karate Kid over and over, memorizing every scene, every line, every inflection, every moment. Both resonate with the same theme: skinny loser nerd overcomes hideous looks, beats up jock bad guy and his stupid jock friends, and of course, gets the cute strawberry-blond girl.

  Yes, I’m noticing girls. I differentiate now between those who cause my heart to seize up as they walk by and those I want as science-fair partners. One fateful morning I notice that a small cluster of facial hairs have unmistakably popped up on each cheek. I look as if my cheeks have begun to sprout pathetic minuscule Brillo pads.

  At school, as my nerd identity expands along with my jaw, the few authentic Greenville nerds attach themselves to me like magnets. We form our own little nerd fraternity, committing ourselves to the most uncool, socially depressing Saturday nights imaginable. We gather in our finished basements and play marathon games of Risk, Axis & Allies, and Ultima, or watch each other fight monsters, battle armies, and maneuver through mazes in the latest and greatest video game. In our recently deep voices that occasionally crack, we lament that the girls we ogle in the hall ignore us, snub us, or body-check us. No surprise. We are the original Geek Squad. We lob Cheetos at each other and try to catch them in our mouths. We exchange glasses, compare astigmatisms. We make the guys in Big Bang Theory seem like studs.

  And then everything flips upside down.