Grandfather- Katya Moon Dec 4, 2010.doc
“Grandfather”
by Katya Moon.
December 2010
He rushed me up the stairs, closed the door, and lay me down. He stroked my hair away from my face. It was damp, knotted with sweat. I cried. I was safe.
He saw the tears drop, one then another, streaming down and losing form so they were no longer distinguishable, one from another. He went away and reappeared with a sheet of white cloth in his hand, placed one on my cheek and wiped away the wetness. It was a swath of gauze. He quickly placed a few more layers of it on my left arm, just below the shoulder. He was gentle, but swallowed hard when I winced and stiffened my body. I took one big snort of breath to suck back the tears and the nose drip. When I reopened my eyes and turned my head, a small white cloud was hovering over an erupting volcano, my flesh its underbelly.
My little sister and I had had a fight in the tub; I fell, and the bloody gash was the consequence. I kept my head turned away from him, but I managed to see from the corner of an eye his fingers as they maneuvered the gauze to clean up the blood and a gluey white liquid that oozed out of the wound and dripped onto the floor—I wondered in half-consciousness if blood could lose color if it got thick enough. He pinched the gauze with tweezers and dabbed at the deeper cuts of the flesh, lightly. My body stiffened so hard that I think my blood must have stopped mid-traffic. He then held my head firmly against his chest and let me know that I will hurt but for an instant. I guess I felt pain. I must have, since alcohol on an open gash stings without mercy, especially to a five-year-old. But all I remember is the warmth of his left hand, like a benediction on my head, while the fingers of his right hand moved deftly, with precision, to sew up the gaping rawness of flesh.
A heavy dose of sleep weighed me down. I wanted to drop to the floor and close my eyes, but he kept me seated on the padded table as he put the finishing touches on the dressing. I always loved the smell of the tape he had used to seal the dressing in place—I had hung around his examination room many times while he poked and prodded his patients, just so that I could breathe in that smell. So in the midst of pain and fatigue, I breathed in the tape as he secured the last corner of the gauze on my skin. The aching in my arm and the pounding in my head were worth that treat, the fresh pungent smell of ointment and surgical tape. I’ve never smelled it since, though I’ve put my nose to band-aids from time to time in hope.
My arm healed quickly, thanks to my Grandfather’s handiwork. And each time he changed the dressing and cleaned the wound, he took measure of its progress and worried in silence. I learned later how much he had feared and fretted that a scar would mark the spot where his skillful surgeon’s hands had been. His work required instantaneous, instinctual judgment, but despite his caution connecting skin and thread to skin, the fruit of that labor was to be permanent. I wear the scar, worn down from countless baths and faded from the sun’s strong rays, with gladness. It is the gift my grandfather gave me, like the imprint of a kiss that remains forever.
He was a man of silence. But he had an opinion on everything. Smell this one, my child, this melon is the real thing. See, the bright yellow and the pale green lines, they tell you something. As I put my nose to the chosen melon and sniffed all around it like a puppy dog, he selected another from the basket, put it under his nose and then began to peel. Working along the length of the fruit, each movement of the knife revealed the succulent white flesh that promised the taste of honey. He cut the melon in half and dug out the seeds with two quick movements of the blade. I stuck out my chin and took a bite out of the half he held up for me. And he watched the muscles in my cheeks massage and suck the crisp juicy bits. Before I could say more, he placed the other half in my mouth. I bit and chewed and swallowed and promised myself I would never eat anything else from that moment on. I could tell by the way his jaws slowly moved, his head tilted slightly back, eyes closed, that he too was making the same promise.
I learned that bright yellow on a melon was a good thing but that bright yellow on my skin was bad. Grandfather was adamantly opposed to the miniature yellow bikini that the saleswoman pointed to in the display case. It’s the only time I can recall his being unnerved and insistent. To strangers, I’m sure he looked unreasonable—a silver-haired man surrounded by his large family of children and sundry grandchildren all eyeing the beautiful pool ahead of them at the exclusive hotel—Walker Hill Sheraton, the only one of its kind back then in a South Korea still recovering from war—wanting to blow up their beach balls and floating tubes and join the children who were already bobbing in the water. But everyone waited. He continued to insist to the saleswoman that he would not allow his granddaughter to wear a yellow bikini. He reprimanded her as if she had forgotten a cardinal rule: Didn’t she know that yellow was a most inappropriate color for Asians?
Before she could answer, let alone take in the question, he made sure the dumbfounded woman and the long line of guests all could hear: No, his granddaughter would not don yellow. He would rather have her swim in her natural flesh! Then and there, a compromise was made. He decided that I would wear the only other option in the display case: the tiny forest-green swimming trunk. Yes, a boy’s trunk imprinted with two white stripes. My grandfather was satisfied and quickly paid.
I was proud of that green trunk. (I wore it like a trophy until my bottom grew too big and the seeds of feminine modesty took root.) If it was okay with him that I wear a boy’s trunk, then it was okay with me. After all, grandfather knew his colors: I always got the sweetest melons! To my five-year-old way of thinking, his demanding lesson on color was very reasonable, for he expected the clothing to suit my skin and not the other way around. Besides, everyone in the family commented regularly that he had the best eye for style and quality. For example, he taught us that German-made eyeglass frames were the most handsome and well-made, durable-chic, he would say in his own language, aware that he was originating an important concept.
Back then in the 1960s, he himself donned turtlenecks and ascots and all-leather wing-tip shoes to accent his tweed coats when no one else dared to imagine such items in an old man’s closet, especially in a Korea that was recovering from war and scarcity. Other people sought out nylon and faux-leather as investments in modernity.
Even today, I study eyeglass frames made in Germany with particular interest and admiration because it was part of my special education that only Grandfather could offer. He wanted me to know the secrets of life, like how to peel roasted chestnuts so that the bulk of the gem inside stays intact until it enters my mouth. He also did not discriminate between what a child should know and what a person should know. By six, I could discern which kind of salted dry fish would serve as the best companion to a shot of stiff 100-proof rice wine, baegal, his favorite.
The bikini aside, Grandfather and I continued to share other things yellow. He taught me that there is only one way to prepare corn that’s worth eating: roasted over open flame. I believe this to be truth. Roasted sweet potatoes share this law of nature. Waiting was our solemn duty, witnessing the kernels of corn or potato skin wrinkle up and pop as their flesh contracted and their juices got squeezed out of the charred blisters into flame and smoke. We watched the starch-steam float, our nostrils flaring unwittingly as our mouths awaited the mushy blend of sweetness that would warm and coat our tongues. Fire-roasted kernels in the belly on an icy cold day. That is how corn and cold are to be enjoyed.
I learned to endure cold for him. Once. And I learned to hate white tights. It was another occasion that brought tears, but those, I didn’t want to show because there was a purpose I wanted to honor. We were a big family, traveling like an amoeba mass through Yonsei University campus in search of good photo spots. I have the pictures pressed into my childhood album, and all I see is cold, cold, cold. No me, no family, no celebration, no honorary degree for Grandpa, for which our large group was gathered. Just shivers covered up by polite smiles.
But I was not so polite, although I did not let the tears flow in front of the camera. In between shots, I cringed, whined. I wanted to pull off my white tights which felt like a thin layer of ice sticking to my calves. I hated my mother for depriving me of warmth and turning my legs into icicles. I hated the navy blue mini-fedora, which on any other day I adored, for it kept flying off and allowed the wind to slap around my face and head. But I knew why I had to endure. I knew that the hat and tights and plaid blue blazer, not to mention the stiff Oxford shoes, made my grandfather’s eyes happy. It was style. My mother and I sacrificed body heat to commemorate his achievement. And somewhere inside, a warm spot burned in my heart.
From time to time, I don something and wonder what my grandfather would think. When given the choice, I quickly shed the plaid-and-Oxford scheme. Now in my forties, I understand that comfort, not flying hats and chic photo ops, should dictate style. But a smart suit and flowing scarf? Sheer gray stockings highlighting the sinews around my ankle and feet? I give a wink to myself and wish my grandfather were here to witness and nod with quiet pleasure that his style genes indeed live on.
There are other photos yellowing in the albums of my youth. My grandfather doesn’t appear in many, since he was usually behind the shutter focusing on me. Sometimes, my grandmother or aunt, puppy dog or doll, join me. In black and white and later in color, he captured my sleep, including my slouched back and double chin at seven months, my two-year-old’s attempt at a ball toss, enacted by uncertain limbs and determined face.
There are those that capture contemplation. His. Usually his left hand is supporting my tiny waist while his right hand points out something, somewhere in the distance. A moment of earnestness distilled. His hand reaching into the space beyond the rectangle of photo, my eyes fixed on the horizon line of his finger.
Grandfather had an expansive mind. His feet took him from his native mountain tops of northwest Korea in the 1920s to cosmopolitan Seoul, where the Japanese colonial government and the legacy of American missionaries coexisted. Both had emphasized modern education. He enrolled himself into those modern schools, topping his intellectual growth off with the best modern medical degree he could get in Korea, from the Severance Hospital of Presbyterian-founded Yonsei University. All this with the money he had stolen from his mother, who would never have let him go, the woman who ran not only the family estate but the entire village back up north, the mother who later would become forever out of reach, past the 38th parallel that was merely a cartographic measurement at the time he fled from home. He left his beloved mountain tops as a teenager and eldest son; he arrived in Seoul and became a man and physician.
I believe he picked up his inclination toward fancy clothes and shiny shoes in the big city, for Grandmother, already a Seoulite, once told me that the only reason she had noticed him in the first place was because of his peculiar shoes. She kept her eyes to the floor, not out of feminine modesty, but because those shoes were the fanciest things she had ever seen in Seoul or anywhere else. She was supposed to be tending to her sick brother-in-law at Severance Hospital, but her youthful mind could only focus on the young doctor’s shoes.
After marriage to my Grandmother, he took regular train trips to Manchuria to show his eldest daughters, aged eight or seven, new vistas. He took his girls hunting, dressing them up in smart English-style riding suits, when most boys could not ride horses or put on anything but white cotton cloths to keep warm. My mother, the eldest, and my aunt, born next in line, still retain some of that willfulness and wild pride that only mountains and deep woods and the encouragement to buck the femininity of the times could have instilled in them through Grandfather’s vision, efforts, and own enjoyment.
He traveled to other places around his part of the Pacific Ocean, but crossing the actual borders wasn’t as important for him as the geography in his own mind. He walked around the house with dictionaries, memorizing English words by the thousands although he had never formally learned the language or stepped foot on the soil of the British Empire. And he wrote poetry in his vernacular Korean as well as Chinese, letting the years and years of tutelage in the Chinese classics and arts guide his modern sensibilities. He was of course familiar with the language of the colonizer, fluent enough to teach and practice medicine decades later (1970s) in Japan. And his medical training back in the early 1930s had required him to access German. But he took all this variety of linguistic and cultural terrain as his natural home. A cosmopolitan individuality in a time and place that were ruled by alien conquerors and native traditionalism.
Grandfather never commented one way or another about any of his real or imagined explorations of lands and peoples. I never heard him speak badly of the Japanese or heroically of the Americans although both penchants were in vogue among his generational cohort in Korea. But he waxed romantic about one thing: the subtle beauty and diversity of his mother tongue.