The Magical Language of Others Read online

  “The Magical Language of Others is a beautifully crafted saga, and a testament to how the most complicated, often elusive truths and inheritances can shape us and reverberate across generations. Anyone who has ever wondered about their own family history, or sought to understand how it comes to bear on their most intimate relationships, will find much to ponder and relate to in E. J. Koh’s graceful, moving memoir.”

  NICOLE CHUNG,

  author of All You Can Ever Know

  “The Magical Language of Others is an exquisite, challenging, and stunning memoir. E. J. Koh intricately melds her personal story with a broader view of Korean history. Through these pages, you are asked to experience one family’s heartbreak, trauma, and complex love for each other. This memoir will pierce you.”

  CRYSTAL HANA KIM,

  author of If You Leave Me

  “This memoir broke my heart. The tragedies that filled the lives of Koh’s mother and grandmothers are woven into mythic, magic tales in Koh’s hands. Only by Koh’s grace and mastery are we not crushed by the stories within The Magical Language of Others. I could read this book a thousand times over.”

  SARAH BLAKE,

  author of Naamah

  “E. J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others grapples with intergenerational loss and love between mothers and daughters across time, war, and immigration. Koh’s painful journey is bridged by her mother’s letters, which she translates, unfolding the language of mothering and tenderness. Koh remarkably and beautifully translates the language of mothers as the language of survivors.”

  DON MEE CHOI,

  author of Hardly War

  “Indisputably brilliant. I read The Magical Language of Others in a single sitting—all the while never wanting it to end. With a formally daring structure and finely distilled sentences, Koh creates a densely layered, lyrical exploration of the bonds between generations of daughters and mothers.”

  JEANNIE VANASCO,

  author of Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl

  “E. J. Koh artfully wields both words and the spaces between them, and in the gaps between languages, generations, countries, and members of a family, she finds both bridges and achingly deep rifts. This is simultaneously a coming-of-age story, a family story, and a meditation on language and translation, with an emotional range to match: Koh movingly guides us through deep longing and loneliness towards forgiveness, understanding, and purposeful, tentative joy.”

  CAITLIN HORROCKS,

  author of The Vexations

  “In The Magical Language of Others, E. J. Koh writes of the boundary between anonymity and naming, between absence and abandonment, between cruelty and safety for four generations of mothers and daughters, each speaking with an occupied heart and crossing narrative borders between Korea, Japan, and America. As a reader, you give yourself over to her narrative territory and the resetting of the borders of lineage, language, and lives lost.”

  SHAWN WONG,

  author of Homebase and American Knees

  The Magical Language of Others

  The Magical Language of Others

  A Memoir

  E. J. Koh

  CONTENTS

  A NOTE ON TRANSLATION

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A NOTE ON TRANSLATION

  My mother opens her letters in Korean, Ahnyoung. This translates into Hi or Hello. I use both for the Korean greeting. Hi beams outward like the sun’s rays. The tone transports energy without expecting reciprocity. One may absorb Hi with a casual wave or respond with a smile. Hello boomerangs for a response. Over the phone, one says Hello to hear a voice calling through silence. Hello is an alteration of Hallo or Hollo from Old High German Halâ or Holâ, used to hail a ferryman. Hello comes as a question. Are you there? Hello fetches me across an expanse of water.

  Eun Ji is the name she gave me. Eun, as in mercy and kindness, closer to mercy than kindness. Eun falls between blessing and blessed. Ji lands at wisdom and knowing. Ji resides with judiciousness more than intelligence. Eun Ji does not echo willfulness or innocence. It resonates with softness and sensibility. Angela is my Catholic name, after Saint Angela Merici, a holy messenger. My mother calls me Angela when she speaks formally. Angela is proper for its foreignness—postured for the public. Eun Ji belongs to her. Angela, to everyone else. She calls my brother Chang Hyun, his Catholic name John, or your brother. For my father, your dad. For her, she is always Mommy.

  Mommy addresses a child, who remains one in her letters. This becomes clear when she switches to third person. When you feel a little better, if you want to talk to Mommy again, call me. Her third person is, in part, her mothering.

  Since my Korean was limited when I was a child, she uses kiddie diction. She stays mostly at a basic level. For advanced vocabulary, she transcribes the first definition in her English dictionary and notes it in parentheses in place of or next to the original vocabulary. Auntie must get jealous (envy) because I have my Eun Ji. Translating is problematic for her, but also a treat. The letters note, at times, the wrong English definition. In one, she means promise and next to promise, she writes confirm but misspells it as conform. She says, Promise (conform) and say it to yourself. Her error becomes a delight that cuts tension, or stalls grief. In another, she defines promotion as propaganda. She writes, I have to assert and promote myself (propaganda). Her language slips out of a perfect transcription and gives relief with its obfuscation and humor.

  Words she writes in English or changes into Korean English are italicized in the book, such as last of my life and God is fair, you know. Japanese words she writes in Korean are romanized: Nani ga hoshii desu ka?

  Korean phrases are a favorite. Aja, aja, fighting! Not a signpost that signals transition between parts, this translates into Let’s go, let’s go, fight! The phrase uses the English fight or fighting. Aja, aja is a sound of activity, quick-footed, rising from the gut. Together, they bolster fortitude.

  Readers may ask whether I wrote her back. Her letters are a one-way correspondence. The thought of writing her was unbearable. Korean was a language far from me. I never suspected I would come to it in the end.

  The letters are included in their original form and not all appear in chronological order. Some letters have dates for meetings that happened at different times.

  To my limits, I do not see my translations as complete. If her letters could go to sleep, my translations would be their dreams. The letters transport my mother to wherever I reside, so they may, in her place, become a constant dispensation of love.

  Forty-nine letters were discovered after an unknowable number had been trashed or forgotten. In Buddhist tradition, forty-nine is the number of days a soul wanders the earth for answers before the afterlife.

  1

  Dear Eun Ji.

  Hello, hello, hello, my Eun Ji.

  You said you’re doing well? We phoned yesterday, remember? Mommy got a little angry, but not at you. Mommy didn’t take good care of things and had thoughts like, “I’ve put you guys up in a very dirty place.” If you lived with Mommy, you wouldn’t raise a dog and Eun Ji wouldn’t be alone at the house in Davis every day, right? Then, without
asking, you guys bought a TV. Of course, you could’ve done that, but. Anyway, everything is fine. It’s fine. After some time passed, I realized, “They could’ve done that.” Still, if Aeson goes in and out of your room, the thought of my Eun Ji’s body, clothes, his dog hair sticking to everything, even now it makes my heart ache. You can understand, right? Oh, my friend Gwi Won’s daughter Jung Yeon (finally) got hired (pass) at KBS television studios. Starting next year, she will be an announcer and come on TV. Gwi Won was so hysterical she called me crying. Didn’t it turn out well? For a year and a half, you don’t know how many times Jung Yeon tested. It’s a big, big deal. I’ll have to thank God. Gwi Won had only been getting bad news as of late.

  God is fair, you know. My Eun Ji is tired and lonely now, but you’ll get good news too. You will go to the college you want, then graduate from college, get a job, and from here on, you’ll only get lots and lots of good news. Especially in college, a good boyfriend will appear. Mommy’s excited just thinking about it. Right?

  Looks like you have exactly a week left of tests. This letter will probably arrive either a day before you test or just after you tested. When you feel a little better, if you want to talk to Mommy again, call me. I’ll be waiting.

  Tomorrow, your dad’s second oldest brother’s wife said she’s coming over to play. We’re going to the bathhouse together. You want to go, don’t you? I know!

  You know the restaurant owner in the bathhouse? That woman said my Eun Ji is prettier than Jung Yeon. Mommy thinks so too.

  My pretty Eun Ji. You know to live all you can and always boldly, right? Eun Ji must be happy so Mommy can be happy. When I finish this letter, I’ll pray too. “God, always be with my Eun Ji and Chang Hyun. Please help my Eun Ji go to the college she wants.” Like this, you know. I’ll write again tomorrow. Bye. Be happy.

  Mom

  November 28, 2005

  2

  The present is the revenge of the past.

  There is a Korean belief that you are born the parent of the one you hurt most. I was revenge when I was born in 1988 at O’Connor Hospital in San Jose, California. I was the reincarnation of somebody wronged, and no wonder I took out a chunk of my mother’s body. It was late September. Not the average six pounder, I weighed ten pounds. The crown of my head split a fissure, and when my shoulders passed through, I nearly killed her. Broad, swathed in muscle and green veins, I was hairless except for the faint whiskers of eyebrows, and hungry, giving my mother and the doctor the impression of another boy.

  That same day, at the hospital, my mother wiped her ripped parts and bussed to her job at the dry cleaners across town, passing her home—a six-hundred-square-foot unit at Sunnyhills, crowded apartments in Milpitas near sewage treatment ponds. It was her first month at the dry cleaners. She could not tell anyone that the stitches on her parts had opened. She hid in the bathroom to cry. Since her own mother had died young, she had looked after her siblings until she married. She had come to this country, taking her son—my brother—and following her husband and his elderly mother a year ago. Only her two brothers and her sister back home could comfort her. As she reached down where it hurt, her eyes swelled shut like the glazed ducks with baked eyes they hung out on hooks at the Lion Market.

  When I was four, the doctor suspected I was a mute, a person who could not or would not speak, and no one could tell if I could read. Four and a half years and I had said nothing. Even so, at Berryessa flea market, at the Lion Market in Milpitas, at Yaohan Plaza in Fresno, my mother used my name like a fire poker to stoke me alive. The teacher urged her to put me in a school for children with learning disabilities. It was unthinkable to my mother, who chose to tutor me herself. She would have to stay home for longer. However, they needed extra money until my father graduated from school. In our apartment, she talked quietly since my father’s mother napped on the floor pad in the same room. “Epper.” Apple. She held it up. She took a bite of it. She drew a picture. A mother in pain may scold to the point of her own tears. When she had found out she was pregnant with me, my father and his mother urged her to lose the baby. She defied them for the chance that it might be a daughter. “Epper.” Four doctor’s visits, and she refused.

  In 1993, at Santa Clara University, I was five and my brother nine when my heart broke with love for my mother, who was herself again, on the grass lawn, under the palm trees—she wore a red three-piece suit with sharp notch lapels, hair blown dry with a round brush. She stood a prisoner of her own light. A year before, my father, the youngest of six brothers and one sister, hauled around a crimson brick called the Webster’s New World Dictionary. My father attended Santa Clara University for computer science and used the dictionary to learn English. My mother worked. He studied in the library. They decided together that his degree would be important one day. Six feet tall, 140 pounds, his shirts and pants were loose, yet he never complained. He said to me, in a calm voice shaped by his years in Korea’s compulsory military service, “Some believe that if we’re not smart like your mother and brother, we can’t accomplish things. But we can if we are: one, funny, and two, humble.” After he graduated and we took photographs under the palm trees, my father began to work, and my mother came home early—the resounding clamor of her unshackling. We moved out of Sunnyhills, fifteen miles to a house in Fremont, and my father fitted my mother with his class ring, 1993 engraved in gold, mounted with a red ruby.

  ~

  Our family met fortune in the mid to late nineties. My father worked at a garage-sized networking company in Silicon Valley. He was a first hire and never broke from the company when they offered mere stock. Overnight, his one-dollar stock shot up to $280. My parents, who had prayed for years, were prepared. They poured two cups of barley tea and sold the house.

  They bought a home atop a hill overlooking San Francisco Bay. They covered our kitchen in granite and marble, careful not to boast how the sun resided in our bay window, chandeliers above our dining table. Our tall cage where my parakeet, my mother’s surprise for me on my thirteenth birthday, preened her white feathers. Chrysanthemums nodded inside their black vases and perfumed the house. The emerald lawn watered itself with pop-up sprinklers, splashing over our slab walkway, our brick foundation. Through the valley, the wind perpetually traveled with good news to us from our future.

  I rushed to my parents’ bedroom to say that I was home from school. Through their doors, their bedsheets moved like there was a whale under there. My father rolled over and cursed. Her hair, then her hand appeared. If I had never seen my mother and father hurt each other, I might never have known how they loved each other. They were doing what happy parents do.

  ~

  If it was possible for my parents to be surprised, it happened when my father got a baffling job offer from an electronics company in Korea. I was fourteen years old. The company asked him to come to Seoul and head their advanced technology department. Maybe the company was exaggerating. Then they faxed him a three-year contract.

  My parents quibbled over the offer without telling our neighbors. It was the kind of opportunity others might envy or criticize. Some were not ambitious; others might have signed up for longer considering how the company would finance our lives. Both position and pay left a knot of amazement on my parents’ faces. They discussed the offer over sliced fruit, chewing seriously on yellow-ringed melons. The company would pay for college tuition. Two flights a year for visits. Should my parents move to Seoul, they would be sensible parents, well paid, confident with tall backs from splendored living. My father, a top-tier executive. My mother, reunited with her brothers and sister she had left behind seventeen years ago. Two luxury cars, a condo in a skyscraper, shopping sprees at the company-owned department store, new friends like themselves, could be theirs. They would have to live apart from their children, but only for three years. It was better to pay for your children than to stay with them. That was how it had always been. If the company had said four years, my parents would still have considered it. The ye
ars would pass quickly, unnoticeably. Their children could be proud of them. My parents could make new wrinkles around their eyes from smiling.

  The offer changed my father. Wearing a slim polo, he asked my mother if he ought to try a livelier color. My mother had her brothers and sister on her mind. She wanted to see my father in salmon. Paired with light pants, the color made him look softer. My mother read his face—an age-old tradition. My father had a large nose, which meant good luck, but narrow-set eyes. His future would be lavish, albeit lonely, and she must protect him. If she wanted a bigger house, she would stay here. By square feet, the condo in Korea was smaller, so it would be easier to wipe down, my mother said, rubbing her shoulders, sore at the mention of cleaning. She packed her books, winter coats, and photo albums.

  I would move in with my brother ninety-three miles north in Davis, on Oleander Place, a cul-de-sac off Covell Farms, in a one-story with a roof that sank slightly above the garage. The house was brown with white trim. The lawn, overgrown, midway to yellow. Two concrete steps led to a porch, a tin mailbox anchored by the door. From the driveway, the arch of a forty-foot ancient oak in the backyard, its knobby branches spread out, half covered the house in shade. The sidewalk dipped into a water ditch. The fire hydrant to the left was pure rust. The noise of traffic beyond a main road followed the signs of a college campus nearby. The house itself sat on a tilted stoop where it heaved forth a long-drawn-out sigh. They put me up to live with my brother and left the country in a hurry. My father flew with a briefcase so he could go to work as soon as he landed.

  ~

  My first day, at fifteen, I awoke inside my old blanket, fooled into thinking that I was home. The room had a wooden desk, my same bed pushed against the wall, under a window facing the yard. There was a stucco ceiling and a mirrored closet. I looked for her in every room. When I could not find her, I felt as if I would die. In the kitchen, on the refrigerator, there was a paper note with her number. Her handwriting was evenly spaced the way she might arrange herself standing in a crowd.