This Part Is Silent by SJ Kim

Author:SJ Kim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2024-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

정오빠 에게,

Once, I wrote a short story about you and my teeth. I built the story around a scene of you comforting me when I lost my first tooth. I imagined you as a sensitive child who loved art. You were a sensitive child, clearly, but I don’t remember if you particularly loved art.

My mom says you loved exercise. You had dreams of becoming a bodybuilder. She still talks about how you turned up at our apartment in Seoul one day to surprise her with a pair of small hand-weights because you wanted her to stay strong. She’d just had me. It was all my crying that cut your visit short.

Sometimes I don’t know what to do with this fury—at our mothers and our fathers and our aunts and our uncles—and grandmother, who was alive for your death, I think. Was she? 정오빠, 오빠, I can’t remember now. But then I realize I do nothing with my anger all the time, though sometimes I write and I cry as I write.

I realize I don’t know and/or forget important things all the time. Sometimes I want to ask my mother: When exactly did grandmother die? What became of her ashes? But I hate making my mother cry.

정오빠, I don’t even know if you were buried or burned anew. I imagine there was a fight. Our Buddhist grandmother. Your then-Catholic father—who last I heard was Buddhist again and raising rodents and studying poetry. I still have the prayer beads your father gave me during his last bout of Buddhism, the ones he said a monk carved by hand during a vow of silence, the prayer beads your father pressed into my palm the last time I saw you in your narrow room with a single window.

He’s fine, he’s fine, our mothers said as they ushered me away from you. He’s OK.

My last words to you were, “오빠, 괜찮아?”

I still fall into spirals of imagining I save you, somehow, on that day. I cry and refuse to leave until the adults let me take you to see a doctor. I bring you to America. I get you to speak. You thank me and we are OK. You help my dad at the ice-cream store, the strong son he and my mother never had. You do all the heavy lifting for him with ease. You take to the work, and you come to really love it, ice cream and the people, our life in America. I breathe a little easier knowing you are there to help me take care of my parents. One day, my dad will pass the business on to you.

My unselfish wish for you is this: I hope you meet our grandfather. May he shake your hand before he holds you close. I know he must be so proud of you, his oldest grandchild who is a grandson, a daughter’s son to undo his disappointment in her. May you spend as long as you need in his embrace, having nothing asked of you and beloved.

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