Suburban Renewal (27 page)

“Then it's time to stop,” I told her. “It's time to own up to everything and start moving forward from here.”

“But I can't have a baby,” Jin repeated. “A baby would ruin my life. It would ruin all my plans.”

“Yes, it would,” I agreed. “But, Jin, honey, you can always come up with new plans. I make up new plans for my life every day. And if there is anything that I can testify to, it's that the things I
haven't
planned have turned out to be best.”

“Don't you believe in a woman's right to choose?” she asked me.

“I do,” I told her. “I absolutely do. No woman should bear a child because somebody else tells her she has to. Every baby born deserves to be wanted.”

She nodded, but there was still question in her eyes.

I continued. “The word
choose
implies there are at least two answers to the question. Or in your case, two different paths in front of you. You're at a crossroads.”

I was thinking of my own crossroads and I was hoping, praying that some wisdom I might have gleaned would help.

“You can continue down the path you've been on,” I told her. “You can keep lying to your parents about being in love with Nate. Or you can stop loving him, stop seeing him. You can continue your education and go toward all those things that you think that you want. But in order to really choose, you've got to give some thought to that other path, the one that you'll leave behind forever.”

She frowned. She looked so young, so scared. I
smoothed a stray hair away from her face and laid my hand against her chin.

“You're afraid of that other path,” I said. “You're afraid because you don't know what may be down there and you think it might be bad. Your family may be disappointed in you. Your life may be harder than you hoped. Your dreams may get postponed or even canceled. All those things may happen, but they may not. The truth is, you don't know what's really around the corner of either one of these paths. Do you?”

“No,” she admitted.

“You're a scientist, Jin. Scientists don't make decisions based upon what frightens them or what they
think
they know.”

1998

W
e knew immediately the day that Jin finally told her parents. I remember that morning perfectly. It was still early on Main Street, no one but the store owners were there. The business district of my childhood had developed into a very slick retro look in keeping with the city's new motto prominently displayed on billboards along the expressway: Lumkee, Oklahoma: Small Town America.

The truth was that Lumkee had long since ceased being “small town America.” It was suburbia with a small core of tourist-friendly streets kept like a living museum of the 1950s.

But it was what had kept the downtown from dying completely. There were lots of little communities, once Lumkee's rivals, that were now nearly deserted, their buildings boarded up and their young families moving elsewhere. We were close enough to Tulsa to have been swallowed up by it. Yet, we had enough local people who wanted the old Lumkee to linger that we'd managed to save a few vestiges of the past.

I drove down the alley to my parking place behind the back door. Hye Won came out of her store immediately, as if she'd been watching for me. She ap
proached me carrying some papers. I gave her a big grin, but she wasn't smiling.

“Good morning, Mr. Braydon. I hope that you and your family are well.”

Her words and the expression of her greeting were very formal, as if we hadn't been friends and business associates for years.

“We're fine,” I told her. “Is everything okay at your house?”

She nodded but didn't elaborate on that.

“My father and mother have asked me to convey their abject apologies,” she said. “They will not be at their jobs today, and they have asked me to humbly present these letters of resignation.”

I accepted the proffered papers and quickly glanced through them. They were formal and generic, without complaint or explanation.

I glanced up at Hye Won. She gave me a little nod as if our discussion was finished.

“Wait,” I insisted. “This is about Jin and Nate, isn't it?”

She didn't say anything and her expression was unreadable.

I took a deep breath, trying to figure out what to say.

“I can only apologize for my son,” I finally managed. “I am very sorry if Nate's behavior has…has insulted your family or…dishonored your sister. I…they are grown, adult people. I…”

Hye Won held up her hand and shook her head.

“Please Mr. Braydon,” she said. “Do not concern yourself with this. My father does not hold you accountable for any bad behavior. It is not that at all.”

“Then what is it?”

“It's hard to explain,” she said. “It is very Korean.
The relationship between our families is now forever changed. My father cannot be employed by the family of his daughter's lover. It just cannot be done. It would be a shame and an embarrassment for him. I am sorry.”

So that was it. Mr. and Mrs. Chai never set foot in Okie Tamales again. Their son Chano came in that afternoon to retrieve their personal items from their lockers. He requested that their last paychecks be mailed.

The rest of the Korean staff showed up on time, but most immediately gave notice. They didn't want to work for me. They had only stayed because they worked for Mr. Chai. I managed to convince them, with bonuses, to stretch out their termination dates so that I would have time to hire replacement staff.

The last of the Korean employees were gone by the first of June. I was employing anybody that I could. Over the summer, it was mostly high school kids. But the wonderful life I'd been leading, with a dependable, hardworking, trustworthy production line, was a thing of the past.

Not that non-Koreans weren't good workers. Many were. But the commitment to a difficult, monotonous job was hard to maintain. The turnover was constant. I eventually found three middle-aged women who I could count on to stay, and they kept the revolving door of other employees trained. But I was now full-time production manager as well as working sales, delivery, human resources and payroll. Twelve-to fourteen-hour days now became the norm.

The Chais bought a small building across the street. It had been a dry cleaners when I was a kid. For the last several years it had been a gift shop. They opened a small grocery. The bins of produce were kept out on
the sidewalk. That was a good idea since the interior of the place, crowded with merchandise, was hardly big enough for a half dozen customers. It was quite a contrast to the huge supermarkets where we all shopped. I was certain that nobody would come downtown to buy groceries.

And I couldn't understand why the Chais didn't just retire. Their oldest son was married now, well off and appeared quite capable of supporting them. Hye Won had a thriving business as well and looked after her parents in her own home. Chano was graduating high school. Although he wasn't brilliant, like the rest of the kids, he was a good-looking, affable guy. Plenty smart enough for any reasonable purpose. He'd gotten an athletic scholarship to run track at Kansas State.

And there was Jin. Jin was living at our house. She and Nate were still not married. I couldn't begin to know what was going on between those two. But with Lauren off to school and mainly involved in saving the world, Corrie and Jin had somehow become very close.

“We have
mo-jeong,
” Corrie explained to me one night as she sat up in bed reading. Her stack of books on Korean history and culture was on the bedside table.

“Moo-junk?” I asked. “Is that like the Korean word for
bullshit?
”

She gave me a look, not appreciating my humor at all.

“Mo-jeong,”
she corrected. “It's a bond of trust between two people. Jin and I recognize that we are inevitably connected by ties of caring, respect and nurturing.”

I nodded.

“You're really getting into this Korean stuff, huh?”

“It just helps me understand what's going on so much better,” she said. “So much of Korean culture is left unsaid. They all understand what's meant, but those of us from Western culture are just clueless.”

I shrugged.

“Weren't you confused about the Chais' attitude to Jin finishing her semester at Syracuse?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “It would have been stupid to drop out in April when she could easily do two more months of school and have that many more credits toward her degree.”

“That's what I thought exactly,” Corrie said. “As long as she's healthy, she should finish the courses she'd signed up for. The Chais are so keen on education, I thought they should see that. But in Korean culture they believe that the lessons the baby is learning inside the mother's womb are as important as the first ten years of education after birth. They want the mothers-to-be to refrain from stressful endeavors, live in peaceful surroundings, read only good literature, look at beautiful pictures and eat colorful, exquisitely prepared food. Knowing this, of course, they wouldn't want her to return to a dorm room, eating in the cafeteria and knuckling down to the rigors of education.”

“The Chais are very smart people,” I pointed out. “They wouldn't believe all this stupid stuff like a pregnant woman looking at beautiful pictures and reading good books helps the baby.”

“What about that finding on classical music?” she asked me. “Now the pregnant American moms are playing Mozart with the headphones on their belly because they think it makes the child's brain form more intricate neural connections, which will raise the kid's math scores ten years later.”

“Okay, maybe there is something to that,” I said.

“Besides, it's a difficult and confusing time for Jin's family,” Corrie said. “In difficult and confusing times, we all fall back on what we know and what we perceive as familiar.”

Around my house, there was very little that I perceived as familiar. Jin had moved into Nate's room, which Corrie had totally redecorated in pale yellow. The curtains and bedding were patterned in Asian-style flowers. Nate had been banished to his workshop, where he'd carved out a corner for his own living quarters. I didn't know if his living separately had to do with them not being married or was more of the Korean birth preparation.

On September 28 at 3:55 in the afternoon, Makayla Moon Braydon was born at Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa. She weighed six pounds, five ounces.

Mr. Chai, Jin's brother Song and I spent about three hours hanging around the waiting room together. Mr. Chai was open, friendly, cheerful—just as I remembered him when he used to work for me. Song carried most of the conversation. He had been in this very room only six weeks earlier when his wife gave birth to their firstborn son.

Nate and all the women were all in the labor room with Jin. Corrie had studied for this day as if it were a final exam. She was determined to win over the entire Chai family and heal the breach between Jin and her mother by being rigorously attentive to the
taegyo
and
samchilil.
Whether that actually worked or not, I don't know. But in the three weeks after Makayla came home from the hospital, Mrs. Chai or Hye Won were in my house more than I was.

I had snuck home from work one afternoon, to try to
get caught up on paperwork without being interrupted from the production floor every five minutes. Mrs. Chai had left early and Hye Won wasn't coming over until after the drugstore closed. Corrie was watching over the new mother and baby. She came into the family room where I was sitting at her little home-office desk.

“Jin and the baby are both asleep. I've got to run to the store for more diapers,” she told me. “Here's the monitor.” She plunked down a piece of blue-and-white plastic that looked like a teddy bear walkie-talkie. “If she calls for anything just tell her I'll be right back. Don't let her get out of bed!”

The not-out-of-bed thing was Korean. She was supposed to recover for three weeks. Corrie had recovered in three days. But she was now completely committed to these ancient rules from the Koryo dynasty.

“Okay,” I said. “If she needs something, I'll help her.”

It was only a few minutes later when I heard a voice on the monitor.

“Who's there?” Jin asked.

“It's Sam, honey,” I answered. “What do you need?”

“Was that Corrie's car I heard leaving?”

“She went to get diapers,” I said. “She'll be back in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

There was a long pause.

“Do you need something?”

“Sam, I'm going to jump into the shower real quick,” she said. “If you hear the baby cry, come up and check on her.”

“You're going to take a shower?” Corrie had explained that not only were traditional Korean mothers
not supposed to get out of bed, there were no showers or bathing for twenty-one days.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” I asked her.

“I promise not to wash my hair,” she said. “But I've just got to shower. When it comes to that, I think there's more Oklahoma in me than Korea.”

“I won't tell if you won't tell,” I said.

Neither of us did and as far as I know, no one ever suspected, though I'm pretty sure Jin sneaked several more showers before her time was up.

Once her lying-in was completed, Jin and Makayla, or Little Mac as Nate and I called her, became the center of our family life. Corrie had taken the year off from teaching to be at home with the new baby. And I think we both found grandparenting as freeing and energizing as parenting had been confining and exhausting.

Little Mac was the prettiest, sweetest, most intelligent baby I'd seen since our own were tiny. And she was loaded for bear with personality. Charming, funny, gleeful, stubborn, willful and rebellious. Exactly the kind of kid you would expect to get from having Nate and Jin as parents!

Finally, since apparently nobody else would, I broached the subject of marriage.

“So when are you two going to tie the knot?” I asked one snowy cold winter afternoon when everything in town was closed up for bad weather.

Little Mac was sitting in her jiggle seat, a sort of vibrating sling chair, looking around as we all watched her inspecting us.

“That's really none of your business, Dad,” Nate said.

His words were not angry or disrespectful, but I was stung by them, anyway. Jin tried to soften the blow.

“There's no hurry,” she assured me. “Everything is going so well, why would we want to mess that up?”

“Well,” I said, “maybe because it's nice for mommies and daddies to be married to each other. You don't want her having to explain things to her little classmates in kindergarten.”

“By the time Little Mac gets to kindergarten,” Nate said, “most of the kids in her class won't be from families with two married parents.”

He was probably right, but I didn't like it, anyway.

“Nate, I know you've made a life out of never doing anything that we want you to do,” I said. “But this is not about getting my goat or acting out against your mother and me. You are somebody's father now. You can't be that and still act as irresponsible as a kid.”

Nate glowered at me, preparing for a sharp comeback, when Jin reached a hand over and touched my arm.

“It's not Nate,” she said. “He's taking the blame for me. But it's not him. I'm the one who's just not sure.”

She looked down at Little Mac and then back at me.

“There is so much that I want for my life,” she said. “Things that I can't have here in Lumkee. I'm not ready to give up on that. If I marry Nate, then I'm giving up.”

Her defense was admirable. And I knew there was some truth to it. But I looked into Nate's eyes and knew this wasn't the whole truth.