In the mid-80s, my parents had a
drawn-out, slow-motion, frog-in-a-boiling-pot breakup. My father, ever too
cowardly for direct confrontation and therefore clean breaks, left our family a
little bit at a time, at first absent from our house the occasional night, then
a few days at a time, and then for a week, and so on and so forth until he just
stopped coming home entirely, as though the pattern of his absences were meant
to fit a Fibonacci sequence of ghosting us, a fractal divorce. (Astonishingly I
learned that although this departure began in my early teens, my parents’ legal
divorce was only formalized recently, in my mid-40s.)
My parents had immigrated from
South Korea during the 70s, shortly after my younger sister was born. We were
the beneficiaries of the Immigration Act, and for all of the hue and cry about
the way it changed America, that law is fascinating for the fact that it in
effect rewarded a great many people from Asian countries that had been involved
in the proxy wars that the U.S. waged against the commies in that region. My
father, who first arrived in Los Angeles as a low-level executive for Korean Airlines,
called for my mother, my sister, and me, and we made our home in LA, our family
growing with the birth of my younger brother, eventually moving out of our one-bedroom
apartment in the city to a house, a real house with separate bedrooms and
everything, which was when my father, perhaps restless now, began to leave.
The four of us, my mother, my
younger sister and brother, and I found ourselves marooned in a Southern
California suburb without our primary breadwinner, who would eventually have
another family, occupying a single-family dream home that we could no longer
afford, let alone keep essentials like the electricity and telephone and water
on. I’m not exactly sure how my mother had found herself a job that was 12
miles away three or four towns over, the networks adults make for themselves
opaque to us children, perhaps it was the Guatemalan woman who lived down the
hall when we lived in LA who’d put her in touch with people from the Korean
church down the street, that kind of thing, but somehow my mother, who barely
spoke English, much less German, landed minimum wage work at a franchise of the
Wienerschnitzel fast food chain in Glendora.
If you’re unfamiliar with
Wienerschnitzels it may be because you grew up outside of the western U.S.,
which is where most of these restaurants were located. Curiously, despite the
name they don’t actually serve schnitzel but rather the mid-century American
version of ethnic food, think the German version of Taco Bell, sausages or hot
dogs, really, with sauerkraut, LA standards like chili dogs, crowd-pleasers like
burgers and fries, etc., and even though I understand that they dropped the
definite article from their name some time ago for us locals it’ll always be
“Der Wienerschnitzel”.
My mother would come home from a
shift late in the evening that we children spent alone, unsupervised, somehow
still alive but deathly anxious with stranger-danger, this being the period of
time that the Night Stalker had been active. For some reason my mother drove a
maroon red Ford Mustang, the kind with sticky vinyl seats, not for reasons of
sportiness but rather automotive penury, my parents must have gotten it on the
cheap given the number of times it left us stranded on the side of various
dusty Southern California freeways, but the ‘Stang would get my mom home,
reeking of the fryolator.
The first few times she came home
from working at the Wienerschnitzel I noticed that her forearms were covered
with little black dots, like this German fast food restaurant had decided to sprinkle
toasted sesame seeds on all of the food and some had stuck on my mother’s arms.
It was only later that I realized that those tiny black dots were all actually
burns from splashing oil, charred bits of epidermis that would eventually fall
off leaving pink healing wounds the size of, well, a toasted sesame seed. When
it came to raising the children, our father took off, and it was our mother who
had the real skin in the game.
She would often bring home a
stained brown paper bag with the Wienerschnitzel logo on it, full of leftovers
from the restaurant, and at first the foreignness of eating, say, a hot dog
with a pickle spear or ‘kraut on it was a novel departure from whatever dreary
food-stamp provisioned stuff lining our cabinets that we’d usually have for
supper, but I began to associate the taste of these salty hot dogs with poverty
and absentee parenting, with the constant phone calls of bill collectors, with
the threat that the water would be shut off, followed by the electricity, or
the gas.
The thing of it is, the flavors of
Wienerschnitzel are also the taste of the water staying on, the electricity and
gas still in service, my mother’s desperate, minimum wage job kept these bills
paid and us children fed, the seed-sized burns on her forearms exchanged for
the coin of the land that we’d immigrated to. Somehow, even while working those
long hours, my mother enrolled in school to study early childhood education.
She’d graduated from a prestigious women’s university in Seoul with a degree in
sociology, my mom is a literate, educated woman and not the anti-immigration
strawman of the dirty, unskilled, layabout criminal, but life happened, as it
could to any of us, and she found herself abandoned by her husband with three
children, unable to speak the language, and despite her college education
without any other, more genteel means to provide. But she could work at
Wienerschnitzel.
The realities of the minimum wage
aren’t that of your high schooler looking for summer income (the heartwarming
ad campaign of McDonald’s and their “commitment to being America’s best first
job” notwithstanding). The facts are that the average minimum wage earner is 35
years old with a quarter of them parents, like my mother. (By the way, the
website minimumwage.com is fronted by Berman & Co. – even though it’s a top
hit on Google, it’s important to know that the site is run by a restaurant
industry PR firm that opposes increases to the minimum wage. It’s akin to
Googling “child labor” and having a top hit be kidsneedjobstoo.com.) Minimum
wage workers have to provide for themselves and their children, and since on
average they provide half of a family’s income, they’re the ones who keep the water
running and the lights and heat on.
The bitch of it is, you would think
that growing up hard would have made us close, my mother and me. But maybe in
the hard scrabble of keeping us fed, clothed, and sheltered we somehow became uneasy,
despite perhaps both of our best efforts, my mother’s need to be correct, to
meet her ideals, maybe her controllingness and need for control an attempt to
fix a broken past, means that I yell at her in front of my young daughter in
ways that I can only imagine I will regret, I tense when she puts an arm around
me, I am quick to conclude that her intent is self-serving rather than giving
her the chance to finish her sentence. I grew up likely abused, well, there you
have it, the fact that I have to couch it as likely abuse means that, yup, I
was abused, neglected, and yet somehow still alive.
Recently, at the conclusion of a
visit (she spends most of her time out of the country doing missions work with
her church) that was awkward as always she put her arms around me and looked me
in the face. I could feel my shoulders tense, wanting to pull away, but for a
second I imagined myself 40 years from now, my arms sagging with age, wrapped
around my daughter’s neck, gazing in to her eyes, and despite our history, I
softened a little.
“You know, I always loved you,” she
said. “From when you were a baby, I always loved you.”
I imagine my own arms covered with
little black sesame-seed burns, holding my daughter’s face near mine.
