by Suphil Lee Park
As Uncle Seung’s hand reached for my waist, I wondered for a moment whether he was going to give me a ride on his shoulder. I awkwardly froze, halfway holding my arms out, as his hand left something in the kangaroo’s pouch of my favorite overalls. I had turned seven just a few sweltering weeks ago.
“It’s yours,” whispered this usually towering man, slouching apologetically. We were standing in an ill-lit hospital corridor lined with private rooms for terminal patients. Before I could see what it was he gave me, one of the doors slid open, and my mother and her two older sisters appeared in ghostly forms. The door shut behind them with a timid tut. The next thing I knew, Aunt Mee was charging toward us. I scampered aside just in time, before she grabbed my uncle by the scruff and bellowed: YOU WORTHLESS SCUMBAG.
Years later, the redundancy of that sentence would strike me with the comicality of a tragic event that sneaks up on an unprepared family; I would remember Aunt Mee clawing at her gangly younger brother, and Aunt Hui having a tearful fit.
The fight was the first ever to occur in this clan of soft-spoken father pleasers. As if to compensate for all lost opportunities, my mother’s siblings had taken to war-horn voices and yelling contests overnight, except for the second aunt, Hui, who was known to have fainted in and crawled out of her first autopsy class and dropped out of nursing school, only to lead a traumatically eventful life afterwards. It didn’t occur to me at the time, however, that well within earshot was their dying father. Surely my grandfather would have listened throughout the commotion and realized that his imminent death was to rip his children apart.
The fight ended when a nurse forced the hissing Aunt Mee off Uncle Seung. My mother let out a sigh of relief and pulled me closer. Her gesture failed to comfort me, though, because Uncle Seung was my favorite after all, and I didn’t like him looking so defeated. He would pinch my nose, ruffle my boyish bob, or tickle me under the rib, and say things like “You little pert thing” or “Less than a pint” but always with a knowing grin. Uncle Seung began to make his way, looking like a pole in wet clothes, to the staircase. My mother looked down in an attempt to make eye contact. The opening of my overall pouch must have been agape. I heard her gasp.
“What’s this?”
She pulled out a wad of bills and asked me with alarm in her voice, “Where did you get this?”
I started to explain, “He said it’s for me,” but my voice trailed off as the initial confidence wavered at the sight of her flaring nostrils, “I didn’t know what it was.”
Never again in my life would I see my mother that enraged. With the bills clutched in her fist, she rushed toward her baby brother, whom she, the youngest daughter with much older siblings, had always doted on. Strangely enough, Uncle Seung turned and simply stood there, teetering. The bills slapped him across the face and fluttered to the floor. I staggered after, feeling robbed and baffled. But I also felt a tickle of pity for my toddler brother, who had been left behind with my oldest cousin and missed all the action.
“You do whatever you want,” my mother snarled, “but don’t you dare think you’re entitled to some indulgence.”
What did Uncle Seung say in response? Did he retrieve the scattered bills or insist on her keeping the money? I only remember Aunt Hui’s tear-stained fingers gently nudging me away, and Uncle Seung glancing over. Several hours later that night my grandfather passed away. My mother and Aunt Mee were banned from the funeral. The eldest uncle, Kuen, became the head of the family with Grandfather permanently out of the picture. With his newfound authority, he decided his two sisters should be disowned and not allowed to see the rest of the family again. Grandmother did not protest; from all that she’d learned, a wife’s fate was decided by her husband, a widow’s by her sons. Her eldest son’s words were now to be her opinion.
I didn’t see any of them for the next decade.
I like to think of my grandfather as a beekeeper, although that is far from the truth. He did own a pear orchard seething with bees, which made my mother, understandably, particular about pears. She’d say, “Nothing could compare with our pears. Your grandfather bred these new, improved varieties of Korean pears. The best there are.” But I’d never manage to recall the flavors of those pears I myself had eaten many times.
My mother’s favorite bedtime stories pictured her father as one versatile hero: a middle school principal, scholar of linguistics, and master of Korean calligraphy seoye. He was referred to as cheonghak, his ho—official names those with intellectual achievements received before the Korean independence times. It meant “blue crane,” emblematic of integrity and purity in Korean culture. Among other things, he also was a shrewd businessman who rode the whirlwind in his forties and made a small fortune. Here, my mother would add, dramatically, “Who would have known that was to be the undoing of my family?”
The grandfather I remember is a bit different, though. Whenever my busy parents left me at his countryside house, my grandfather opened a cabinet full of jars of honey, as if flaunting collectibles, and spoon-fed me the sweet thing. And it happened often during the first five years of my childhood, as we then lived in a small villa downtown that my grandfather helped pay for.
In spite of her job as a kindergarten teacher before marriage, my mother believed kindergarten education contributed little, if not nothing, to kids’ intelligence. Or any form of contemporary Korean education, for that matter (hence the immigration later, owing in large part to this philosophy). So there I would be, most weekdays, basking in the sun all over my grandfather’s taechungmaru instead of learning songs and words along with other kids my age. This indoor patio of his traditional Korean house, open-walled on three sides, let in all the sun it could, and there my first freckles made their slow but sure way to the surface. After lunch, my grandfather let me have a spoonful of honey, and I’d find myself ruminating over my options before the row of jars gleaming in shades of gold from a translucent daffodil to a murky amber.
Despite the lack of photos, I remember my grandfather’s lean face down to the minutiae—his smiler’s eyes in not unhandsome discordance with his thickets of brows, for one example. A Freudian psychologist would diagnose my case—enduring obsession with arts, written words, and sweet things of all kinds—as an outcome of having had this one more paternal figure.
Aunt Mee died of breast cancer when I was twelve. None of her family, not even my mother, attended her funeral. My mother herself had been bedridden after undergoing a surgery to have a tumor removed, and my father decided to keep silent about the bad news until she fully recovered. It took years. It took another few years until we eventually learned that Aunt Mee had suffered from financial difficulties on top of the emotional, physical toll of having combatted cancer for years. I would sometimes wonder had Uncle Kuen not disowned Aunt Mee, and had she, the eldest daughter, received her fair share of the inheritance, if that added monetary aid could have prolonged her life somehow.
Once in a while Aunt Hui managed to make secret phone calls to let us in on what was going on with the rest of the family. Uncle Kuen had been repeatedly cheated out of business, fallen in with the wrong crowd. But this was around the time Aunt Hui, after a series of predicaments and her husband’s death, had begun to hear voices, and we would not know whether to trust her (later, other relatives would vouch for the validity of her stories). Aunt Hui never had good news. Uncle Seung had become depressed and reclusive after breaking up with his fiancée, and of course, Grandmother was heartbroken. But they continued to shun my mother throughout her illness and my entire childhood. Only after Uncle Kuen stopped supporting them financially did they take back my mother.
When I saw Uncle Seung again, I was a pessimistic, skinny teenager who begrudgingly wore bell-bottom jeans in vogue at the time that wiped out any pants of straighter lines. I kept tripping and stepping on my own pants that flapped around my bony ankles every step, and had yet to learn how adolescence, in truth, had most to do with outgrowing much bodily discomfort.
Grandmother’s derelict apartment turned out to be an hour’s drive from our house. The apartment, with its three rooms squeezed against each other with little space for a kitchen, had nothing in common with my grandfather’s countryside house. That countryside house no longer belonged to the family, Aunt Hui had explained during one of her phone calls. Uncle Seung and Aunt Hui, Grandmother, and Uncle Kuen’s two children shared the apartment and its only bathroom; Uncle Kuen lived in a house in another city, we were told.
While my father unloaded the packages of groceries he’d brought along, Uncle Seung would not show his face. He didn’t come out of his room even when we started to devour a feast my grandmother had prepared in silence. “Leave him be,” said my mother. But after lunch, I mustered the courage to venture inside his room.
The windowless room reeked of cigarette smoke and was nearly foggy, blankets and pillows on the floor. In one corner, in front of an old desktop, was a skeletal man staring fixedly at its screen, hand jerking to move the mouse now and again. An ashtray brimming with cigarette butts seemed to be an accidental, solitary decoration.
He asked, without looking, “Who’s it?”
I found myself torn between shock at his changed looks—hollow cheeks, Adam’s apple protruding like a doorknob—and the urge to inquire into what had happened a decade ago. Was he swayed by Uncle Kuen who blamed his domestic unhappiness and following failures on his sisters who defended his wife when she divorced him, was he just tempted by the idea of having a larger share of the inheritance? All those years, I’d found it hard to believe that our estrangement wasn’t for some better reason, probably a graver fault on our part. The questions burned my tongue with a renewed, almost tangible, discomfort, but vanished when I spotted his chewed-down thumb. I kneeled down next to him, rested my head against the arm of the chair he was sitting in.
“Oh,” he said after a sidelong glance. “It’s you.”
Then he awkwardly patted my head, retrieved his sweaty hand just as awkwardly. When we left, later that afternoon, he stayed in his room.
When I saw Uncle Seung for the last time, he was a wailing, balled-up mess on the floor. Next to him was my mother, in no better state. I watched with my eyes dry as the inexpensive black coffin, with my grandmother’s body inside, finally caught fire.
I thought: Burn on out of my life.
Throughout the cremation, I replayed the scene in which I’d last seen her alive; just a few days prior, I visited her in the hospice full of irritable patients and even more irritable nurses. Her room was so small that I had to stand with my butt sticking out of the doorway, my mother sitting on a chair between two beds. On the wall there was a spot where the paint had peeled off in a shape reminiscent of the crown of a head, which gave me something to stare at the whole visit. Grandmother tried to look away from the sight of my mother, and when her frail body didn’t allow it, frowned her eyes shut. We would find in her fist residues of a half-smashed pink pill, and my mother wet a towel and wiped them off of her hand in silence. By the time my grandmother demanded to know where her son was, I had to leave the room, unable to bear the scene. Her first son left her broke in that moldy apartment and burdened her last decade with his two children to take care of. Her youngest son lost that apartment and made her homeless for god knows what good reasons—“a gambler” people pointed fingers behind his back. Still, she sought security in their presence. Still, this woman didn’t understand that no man was to come to her aid.
The week before, I’d visited Aunt Hui; her good looks had withered into one vague expression of grief, like many others in the asylum, purplish in the face. She slid her hand over mine, squeezed—an astonishingly warm, affirming grip—and said, “Look after yourself.”
The post-cremation funeral service took place in a hospice basement, where we were asked to take off our shoes. Uncle Kuen had also invited his widely disliked girlfriend, which immediately riled up whispered conversations among the attending relatives, distant and closer alike.
“Your legs must be tired,” Uncle Keun cooed at his girlfriend as she massaged her bare legs for all to see, which older relatives stared at with bulging eyes, probably thinking it outrageously disrespectful for the place and time. Uncle Kuen carried his girlfriend’s black heels to her like a bejeweled crown, triumphantly trampling on many other black shoes on his way.
One of the relatives said in a reproachful tone, “Did you see her shoes?” They went on to discuss the brand of her heels, and how he could still manage without having a job. They must have been oblivious to my incongruous presence, but how could they possibly know? I was the enigmatic, Americanized niece who had never attended any family gatherings, who took little after my mother, who they did recognize.
It was probably because of this, but at long last my mother exploded and proclaimed it was Uncle Kuen that killed their mother. Uncle Kuen, as it turned out, had just as many things to holler at her. “You left Mother penniless,” my mother yelled from one side of the room, trying to drown out Uncle Keun who was calling her names from the other end.
Then she dropped the bombshell, “Wouldn’t even let her die somewhere more decent than that shithole. And did I not offer to pay?”
When he accused my mother of offending him by making such an offer at all—making her momentarily speechless—I left, cursing at no one in particular. It was pouring outside. The August heat had softened as dusk set in.
Against one of the mold-flecked pillars was Uncle Seung smoking. Surprisingly, I discovered he still was my favorite, probably because he had proven to be the most self-aware of the many pilfering, fibbing men in my family. Or, probably, if I had to be honest, simply because he took most after my grandfather. His fidgety hand guarded the cigarette, but there was not even a whisper of wind. This time I failed to think up any question to ask. Somehow I knew, from then on, there wouldn’t be any questions. I snuck away and wandered down ten slippery blocks in the rain. Little was unchanged, save for the useless gutters, of the city Ulsan where I’d spent my childhood, when Grandfather was still around.
At a café, I scarfed down a teeth-bendingly sweet strawberry tart and looked outside through the muggy steam of hot chocolate. There I sat, adding sweat to my already rain-soaked black dress, until my iPhone lit up with an incoming call. “Weasel out alone like always,” my father chided as soon as I picked up. But irritation in his voice quickly gave way to audible resignation, then to a contemplative pause.
“Think you can find your way back?” he asked.
“I guess,” I said. And I did.
It was at Grandfather’s that I first tasted honey, the third or later spring of my life. At home, I wasn’t allowed sweets, not until my adult teeth proved straight. The first time I sucked at the spoon Grandfather held for me, the honey dense like a gold chain pressing onto my tongue, he told me that bees dance in the formation of a figure eight. It took me years of speculation to finally see what he might have seen in those tiny, winged insects: the structure of infinity. Mobius strip, life in circles.
He withdrew one jar from the cabinet and held it upside down, so I could see its bottom, “Look how clear it is. If you want to make sure the honey’s real, just look at the bottom of its jar.”
Maybe I was under the influence of my first sugar rush, maybe it’s a trickery of my memory, but he sounded slightly resonant, like a prophet dictating an important truth, a rarity I would learn to appreciate in time.
“If it’s sugar-layered at the bottom, it’s no good. Some people water down good honey, and add cheaper things to make it sweeter. But that always leaves traces deep down.”
In a few years his children would be fighting over the assets he had made working a teaching job and in the field, and running businesses day and night. In a few years his hard-earned fortune would begin to dwindle fast, down to what he’d had after the Korean War—nothing. In a few years he would be dying, and I would make him promise, that very night he died, to get better soon. In a few years, I would first hear the word indulgence. In a few years, on the day of his funeral, my mother and Aunt Mee would be denied entrance to their own father’s funeral, and I’d write a short nonfiction piece about it the following week. In a few years, I would know the meaning of death. But my grandfather would never find out that his rough will, devised with death as some remote possibility in his mind, led to the downfall of his sons and wife. I’d never have the chance to tell him, as if some neural switch was flicked on, the night he died, I fell asleep with an itching desire to write something out. For the first time.
But that spring day, talking about bees and authentic honey, my grandfather was unaware of this chain of events waiting ahead. And I, savoring the eye-shutting taste I’d just discovered, pursed my lip and thought—
So, this is sweetness.
Suphil Lee Park is a cross-genre writer and translator from South Korea. She translated a former democracy activist’s nonfiction book If You’re Going to Live to One Hundred, You Might As Well Be Happy (Union Square Books and Rider, Penguin UK, 2024), and a novel, A Twist of Fate, which is forthcoming (Bantam, 2025). As a poet, she wrote the collection, Present Tense Complex (Conduit Books & Ephemera, 2021), which won the Marystina Santiestevan Prize; and the chapbook, Still Life (Factory Hollow Press, 2023), which won the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Her nonfiction has received recognition from such places as AWP and Best American Essays. You can find more about her at: https://suphil-lee-park.com/.