Before it was a shiny, gated, upper-middle-class suburb with good schools
and a Mercedes dealership, in the early Eighties, Sugar Land was the wide
blue sky of Texas and acres and acres of sugarcane owned by the Imperial
Sugar Company for which the town was named. My parents searched for almost
a year for a house to buy in that magical-sounding place where the cane was
being tamed, but my mother and father stayed away from the neighborhoods
too close to the prison, and did you know that even in magical-sounding
places there are prisons?

The lady from the custom homes company sat with us in the air-conditioned
trailer among gurgling Poland Springs coolers. My mother patted the space
next to herself and I ran up to a book which was the size and thickness of
a wedding album and paged through the samples with Mother’s hand on my
small round child shoulder, and I could feel the lady’s eyes on me, curious
and disapproving: she wasn’t used to having her customers incorporate their
five-year-old children into serious deliberations. But that is what happens
when you are the eldest in an immigrant family and your mother is gentle
and dotes on you as if you are her whole world.

“Hyeseung-ah, kong-ju, princess,” my mother said. “What
do you like for the wallpaper?” She had big eyes, my mother, like blinking
saucers, and I look like her, big blinking saucers in a small round child
head set jauntily on a thin neck. I blinked at the custom homes lady and
her eyes fringed with Maybelline blinked back at me, and probably she
didn’t think I had big eyes, but I did—I did not have small eyes just
because I was Oriental. I saw in her empty blinking that she thought
nothing of me, and did not see me, not because I was a child but because I
was that kind of child, and I would carry those imprints forever
in the book of my life.

“I like the flowers, Ummah,” I said in Korean, and I turned the
page to a pattern of small tulips, and I had said that I liked the flowers
because I knew that my mother liked flowers more than anything, and even
then I was trying to please, especially her, and I had learned to do it
well.

“Yes, that is nice and quiet.” And my mother stroked my hair, nicely and
quietly. “If the pattern is too busy, it’ll look garish and maybe give me a
headache.”

And my mother, father and I chose the color of the exterior of the house
(raw umber), the carpet (low-pile in white, which would prove,
unsurprisingly, defenseless against cherry Kool-Aid), the tile for the
foyer and fireplace mantel (white marble), and the patterns of the
wallpaper (the nice and quiet tulips in the kitchen; light peach dots in
the master). Brand new house, brand new school for me, brand new spindly
little oak sapling (one planted in the middle of the rectangular yard).

And a brand new mortgage, which coincided with my father’s regretful
decision to quit his salaried engineering job in order to do what he felt
he was meant to: heed the siren call of the American dollar. Enormously
ambitious, idealistic, mono- and hypomanical, he is a man for whom it has
always been Go Big or Go Home. In his mind, he is neither
several-hundred-thousandaire nor millionaire: he is a titan of the
billionaire variety—a Carnegie, a Bloomberg, a Buffett—and his decision to
crawl towards this very distant mirage, dragging us with him through the
much-traversed Desert of Broken Dreams, set off what was almost forty years
of our family’s financial underperformance and serious domestic strife. My
father’s emigration promise to my mother—“Five years and we’ll go back to
Korea”—was never made good, of course, and the grand theme of my childhood
was watching my mother play The Good Wife and support my father through
dozens of failed businesses while The Life That Could Have Been slipped
away.

When the Sugar Land house was finally built, the wallpaper hung, the
fireplace mantel installed, and the carpet laid, we bade farewell to our
previous home, a small second-floor apartment in the bustling neighborhood
of Bellaire where every street had a strip mall and every strip mall was
book-ended by an Exxon. A mortgage had to be tended to now, and with my
freewheeling father working through my parents’ savings to start something big—always big—my mother sat the nursing boards, found a
job at a hospital an hour away in Houston and, like that, she wasn’t around
much anymore. My father, on the other hand, didn’t seem to work at all—or
maybe he worked all the time, toiling, just not in the same way my mother
did at a job outside the home. He soon took my little brother’s room as his
office, and the two of us of kids would sit cross-legged on the floor there
while our father chain-smoked Marlboros, flicking the ashes into empty Cup
O’Noodles bowls. Surrounded by pads upon pads of paper and crumpled up
napkins, Houston Chronicles, Yellow Pages, books with exclamatory
titles like

How to Make a Thousand Dollars a Day from Home!, Be a Millionaire
Tomorrow!,

or Don’t Be Left Behind: 10 Foolproof Ways to Get Rich Quick!? and
Post-its, everything covered with numbers written in my father’s decisive
hand, he seemed a possessed man—a John Nash, an Alan Turing. Except my
father was not establishing the fundamental principles of game theory or
cracking the Nazi Code to save Western civilization: he was working to save
some overwhelming part of himself. And in that smoky room, answers at the
ready, I would conspire with my father.

“Hyeseung-ah, what do you think of these products?” My father
would ask, pushing forward a stack of shiny catalogues.

I pulled up my metaphorical seat at my father’s metaphorical board table
and flipped through the books advertising wrought iron railing, doorbells
and knockers and other decorative wooden items.

I was his direct link to the American consumer psyche, his top consultant,
his chief strategist.

I was also seven.

Pointing his lit cigarette at me, he’d say earnestly, “I’ll need your help
on the sales calls.”

Puffed up, I’d reply, “Yes, Appah. I can help you sell these. I’ll
hold everything in my purse.”

And I thought about how we would dress up, where we would drive, the men we
would talk to, what the offices would look and smell like, and I knew I
would help my father with his pitch and his English and that I knew I could
do this well.

“Appah,” I’d begin my warning (not my first). “You need to make
sure you buy only a few of the best samples at first, and when we go talk
to customers, don’t ask for just a little, ask for what is fair.”

“Don’t beg because they always know when you are begging.”

Even at that young age, I knew that the business world was unstable,
dog-eat-dog, us-versus them, purifying even, that the worthy would rise to
the top and we were certainly worthwhile. But because I was still a child,
after a period of intense strategizing, our conversations would invariably
degrade into hilarity. My brother in diapers, seeing us laugh, would follow
us into it not knowing why, and my father’s chortling, wherein he would
call me ee-sseki, or little rascal, was an inconsistency in his
otherwise serious and severe demeanor which, because makes its appearance
so rarely, still fills me with tenderness, for it is also when I love him
most.

In the end, despite all our planning, my father and I never went on any
sales calls. The foot-tall wooden giraffes and cigar cases lined with red
felt became the castaways of his big dreams, enjoying second lives as props
in my plays or tchotchkes on the windowsill of my childhood room: Barbie,
Ken, animal carved from Kenyan wood.

My father’s business was, simply, opening new businesses. In the Sugar Land
years alone, there was the time he rented a stall in a huge warehouse
called “the Bazaar” and sold Seiko watches, lacy undergarments, and cotton
socks, of very good quality, with funny little cartoons and awkward English
phrases like “I Am the Fun” stitched around the ankles. Another time, he
peddled fake Guccis from a shack below a stretch of unpaved two-lane
farm-to-market road; two or three purses, a few Velcro wallets a day, and
then, if there was a sale before we’d had lunch, he’d take the cash, go out
to the road, and looking both ways, dash across the thoroughfare through
the honking Chevys to Granny’s Chicken on the other side. And yet another
time, my father started a recycling business, accumulating hundreds of
pounds of colored plastic shards and storing the heap in a garage-sized
unit in an outdoor storage facility. And of course there were more scrap
businesses than I could count, the backside of the poor family station
wagon never quite regaining its buoyancy after towing old transmissions all
around southern Texas.

Needless to say, my father’s businesses were seldom more than just
schemes—and short-lived ones at that. This isn’t to say he ever did
anything illegal; his business plans just didn’t seem, even then from my
young perspective, to be very business-like. As for my father’s ambition,
if he had been a Ponzi or running a pyramid scheme, he might have enjoyed
more success. How many times did we hear, think, say, or shout Success in our barely furnished house in Sugar Land? Success: so
easy to envision, but so hard to recognize when it might appear, as it
sometimes does, in a different guise. Now, near the end of my father’s
life, to end it with a bang—Success!—is the same as to end it with
a whimper: all those years of yearning and ambition were also years of our
collective sacrifice and failure. The dark side of perseverance is
awe-inducing thick-headedness: at best, there are wounds you inflict on
yourself; at worst, the damage you cause others, and perspective all
depends on how romantic poverty is to you. At our doorstep, anyway,
Hopelessness and her twin sister Pity were more frequent visitors than
their glitzier sister Success, who, frankly, was a withholding bitch.

And soon, my father’s low voice speaking strange words on the
phone—“aluminum fin tubes,” “scrap metal”—became the white noise of my
childhood, and I forged ahead with plans of my own, dressing up my brother
in a purple dress whereby he would transform into my more beloved sister
Stephanie, who didn’t mind playing Barbies: she was just happy to be around
me.

*

After the Bazaar and the fake Gucci watches and the plastic shards, there
was the factory. In an industrial park in West Houston out near Katy, my
father soon built a warehouse of steel, wood and concrete on a
one-and-a-half-acre plot of land among dozens of other sites just like it.

My father forgot to smoke when he began the factory: no time. He was
working fourteen-, fifteen-hour days, and when I left for school in the
morning, he would still be asleep in bed. Soon my mother took an earlier
shift at the hospital so she could be home in the evenings now that my
father was getting home close to dawn.

Never a good sleeper, I would awake from dark sleep as the unobliging
faucet in the utility room at the other end of the house turned
counterclockwise with a squeal. Hearing the subdued middle-of-the-night
tones of my parents’ voices, I’d get up and, bleary-eyed, pad to the living
room in my underwear. I would stand swaying a little against my mother and
blinking groggily, watch my father scrub his hands and arms with a scratchy
cake of green Lava soap, eyes closed, while he’d grouse, “the low prices of
aluminum,” “the lazy workers.”

And then one night the faucet groaned and I heard my mother’s frightened
screech when my father had arrived home with his chest torn up from
scalding water that had shot out of a fired aluminum fin tube when he’d
thrown it, like a javelin, into the bed of the truck.

“Hyeseung-ah, get me the Silvadene and gauze from Ummah’s
bathroom,” my mother called to me as she hunched over my father who lay
prostrate on the living room floor with his shirt off. His breaths were
ragged, and my mother worked quickly and with focus. A burn is pink at its
start, but my mother, the nurse, already saw in the skin the portents of
scars.

Right after the accident, my father had applied ice from the Igloo onto his
left pectoral and continued working for three more hours, at which point
his breath had gone completely ragged and there was no more energy to move
thirty-pound aluminum ingots, only strength enough to drop off the workers
after buying them Big Macs and Cokes at McDonald’s.

When my father bought the parcel of land, the park was covered in white
limestone rocks the size of oyster shells, and despite the cover they
provided, giant weeds sprung up with obstinacy from tiny crevices between
the rocks, and their hairy, cruciferous stems, thick as my legs, had to be
axed down. On the four corners of the site, near the wire fences, stood a
wall of heavy brush, an almost solid mass of closely intertwined branches
and leaves. In its cool darkness, thick-coiled snakes slept complacently on
their eggs as my father’s men, a few yards from them, doggedly toiled like
a chain-gang and without shade in the Texas sun for five dollars an hour.

Father Kowalski, the priest from our church, came by and called me “Swan
Neck” as he always did, and sprinkled holy water on the factory’s concrete
foundation which my father had poured by the determined strength of his own
hands and back. Beyond this Catholic assurance of success, we also had
positive feng shui: the entrance to the factory faced east—where
everything begins. In the pivot of the L-shaped warehouse, the steel
furnace stood, the workhorse of the whole venture and my father’s Minervan
mindspring. When alive, it sounded interminably of fire and efficiency. In
it, cans, tubes and other industrial scrap material high in aluminum
content were melted down at 4,000-degrees Fahrenheit until all was
transformed into silvery molten syrup which was then poured into
Toblerone-shaped molds. After the liquid had cooled on the rocks, the
workers would pick up the molds and lash them against the cement until
there was a dull pop as the ingot divorced the confines of the tray like a
frozen pound cake from its tin. Everyday, regardless of the heat, my father
and the men wore long pants and shirts to head off sparks, and when
chopping off the curly rogue tendrils which had formed when the hot syrup
was poured into the molds, two pairs of gloves.

And every night that he was at the factory, without exception, my mother
took my father a full Korean dinner. A bit before seven, after our own
dinner had been cleared away at home, my mother would take out the round pa chim, a dark lacquered serving tray which had been a wedding
gift years ago in Seoul, and arranged on it small covered dishes filled
with spinach, tofu, bean sprouts, kim chee, and oily mackerel, the same
we’d eaten for dinner except that my mother had put aside these portions
for my father before giving us any. His rice bowl, which had also been
filled before any of ours, was also waiting, topped with a stainless steel
lid and then wrapped with care in a thick yellow towel as if the small pot
were a Fabergé egg.

Once the dinner dishes were drying on the rack, my mother, my brother and I
would pile into the van, which my father had bought used some time before
in order to transport his business wares, and which had long replaced the
poor wagon. Because I was older than my brother, I sat in the back, where
there were no real seats, and had to grip random handles which stuck out
like bony elbows from dusty dark holes. My whole body would tense in
anticipation of the long ride during which the feast for my father would
lay precariously on my lap, there being no other place to wedge the pa chim. As my mother drove the highways and byways, I
instinctively grabbed the window handles as we rounded corners or stopped
short at lights. Only sometimes did any sauce or marinade drip out of a
covered dish and off the slick of the tray onto my shorts; I had become so
talented at this balancing routine that I could even fall half-asleep
sitting up while rotating the tray around on my lap, moving the cool bowls
to where the hot ones had been in a strategic dance so that my exposed
thighs wouldn’t get burned.

The crackling sound of the van’s tires on limestone rocks as we entered the
warehouse district would set me awake. There, the ground was brittle and
unsmooth, and both my brother and I had at some time or another suffered
shin splints from a long day of hide-and-seek. The chalky white dust of the
road wafted up from the ground, forcing us to roll up the windows and sit
in the close air of the van for a few minutes. Turning into the open gates,
the charcoal smoke of the furnace greeted us as it rose in salutatory waves
from the steel-corrugated roof into an even blacker sky. Through the dark
brush and trees, I could spy the workings of the factory, and the orange
fire of the black oven pulsed—strongly, then weakly, then strongly again—as
if communicating with the world in Morse Code.

My mother would park the van next to my father’s Ford 250-XLT Lariat, which
my parents had paid for by taking out a $25,000 loan from the bank (BMW
money for them and about a quarter of what they’d paid for our house in
Sugar Land). It sat asleep under the one big tree which had escaped my
father’s annihilation: a large magnolia, stately despite its mess of heavy
branches grazing the ground. As we disembarked from the van, a small yellow
light would appear low in the distance and tick back and forth, growing
steadily larger as it approached: my father’s lantern. From the aperture of
the fire, he would emerge with a mask of sweaty soot on his face and
clothes wet through with perspiration, looking like a dog who had been
thrown without warning into water for the first time and told to swim. He
would open the Igloo in the back of the Ford and pour the cold water which
had been the ice over his hands to wash them, and then take off his stained
shirt and use it as a rag to wipe his face, and back then, because these
were the kinds of thoughts which lived in my mind, I said to myself, as
Veronica wiped the face of Jesus on the road to Golgotha. At that moment of
his semi-nakedness, even in the half-light, I could see that my father’s
chest had darkened, no sign of the familiar intellectual white softness of
it remaining, and he appeared an exotic imposter to our family.

The four of us would sit in the truck bed under the lamp which my father
tied to a branch above us and whose orb attracted a host of mosquitoes, but
the light was necessary for my father to eat. My mother would make quiet
conversation as his sinewy arms methodically collected bits from plate to
mouth and plate to mouth with the silver chopsticks she had earlier
swaddled in a paper towel. I would watch my father’s black shadow move on
the greyish stones below us as it nodded up and down, betraying his
fatigue. While he ate, my brother and I would go round to one of the ice
buckets near the factory. There was always a lot of Big Red or some soda
which my mother didn’t let us drink at home, but we were in different
territory now and we hazarded surreptitious swigs from the heavy liter
bottles, the sweet red liquid going up our noses and dribbling down the
front of our throats in a long scarlet trail.

Having regained some strength thanks to the meal, my father would speak to
my brother and me, and if he were in a good mood, I’d call him Junkyard Dog. The disrespectful sobriquet made him laugh and curse
us laughingly—ee-sseki-ya, you little rascal—but my mother
resented my joking. By then, it would be time to leave: the bowls were
empty, and my father’s breath, which would never again smell like
cigarettes, flowered instead into clouds of garlic and bean paste. Now that
he’d eaten, it would be time to go to McDonald’s for José and Mike, and my
mother would nod, with prostration and acceptance which in those days she
did not hide well. My brother and I would pile back into the van, and I
knew he’d fall asleep the minute we were out of the gates of the park. As I
situated myself, bracing for the long trip back to Sugar Land, I would look
out the window, back at my father, the Vulcan in the darkness. Black and
anonymous, he stood in powerful akimbo, looking towards us and then back,
to his small world of fire and steel, as the van crackled away on the
rocks.