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I close my eyes and try to picture a multicolored quilt in this contemporary shrine. “Black and white?”
“Pshaw. That’s so boring. Why don’t you go around and take some photos of the home and of her clothes. Whatever color she wears the most is her favorite.”
“Black and white. Sometimes red.” I yawn.
“What time is it there? I can never remember. Let me look at my phone. I added Seoul to my world clock.” Her voice gets more distant as she pulls the phone away from her mouth to check the time.
“It’s eleven.”
“Eleven!” Her face returns to the screen. “Go to bed, Hara. You look tired and you’ll be exhausted at work tomorrow.”
“It’s Friday.” And I’m waiting for Yujun to call.
“Still, you should be going to bed at a reasonable time and not sleeping in even on the weekends. I love you, darling. Good night!”
I hang up and place the phone on my pillow and wait for Yujun to call. The device is maddeningly silent. To make the time pass, I pick up a book that I’ve been reading to Yujun’s father, but that doesn’t hold my interest. I scroll through YouTube and watch street-food vendors make everything from chocolate-covered waffles to bread shaped like bears and filled with cream. I fall asleep hungry, the phone clutched in one hand and the jade duck in the other.
CHAPTER SEVEN
When I wake the next morning, I smell bacon, and suddenly I’m back in Iowa with Ellen cooking breakfast in the kitchen. I close my eyes and try to tug back that comfort space, but the sunlight bouncing off the marble wall opposite my bed brings me back to reality. My bedroom back in Iowa has white plaster walls with two small wildflower prints my mom and I made together my senior year. Mom had watched this home decorating show where two designers competed to have the homeowners stay or move. It was Mom’s favorite, and almost always the designer who renovated the existing home won due to some sentimental hook. In this particular episode, the designer pressed petals from the homeowner’s wedding bouquet onto a giant canvas and hung it over the mantel in their old home. The resulting work was an abstract depiction of a bird rising from a nest of flowers that looked as if it was exploding. The bride burst into tears and the groom bit his lip and stared at the ceiling for a good ten seconds, which does not seem like a long time, but is an eternity on television. I was really moved. Of course, the couple chose to keep their renovated home.
Watching that romantic moment didn’t stir any desire for marriage in me, but I did think that using flowers to create an abstract piece of art was brilliant. Mom agreed. The main problem was that we didn’t have a flower garden and buying blooms at the grocery store didn’t hold the same charm.
The next weekend, we trekked to Brown’s Woods, a forest preserve of almost five hundred acres, and picked wildflowers along the path. It’s illegal to do this, but Mom didn’t have the patience to grow plants and I was born with a brown, withering thumb. I killed a cactus and three succulents in college. Mom wasn’t much better, and after a few years of trying to nurture a rubber tree, which a local greenhouse said would survive even the most forgetful of owners, she finally gave up and bought semi-fake artificial plant decorations. We didn’t realize we were supposed to spray them with water once every couple of weeks until the leaves dried out and turned brown. In other words, we weren’t winning any horticulture awards at the state fair.
I’m not proud of my ineptness, but we agreed we were better off paying whatever fine for the wildflowers should we get caught than using the few weeds in our backyard as the centerpiece of our art project. We didn’t get in trouble but neither did our resulting works look anywhere as good as the designer’s piece on television. I guess it was karmic retribution or the fact that the designer had a special eye for design and my mom is a homemaker and I’m—or was—a copy editor for a magazine. More simply put, there’s a reason the designer had a television show that Mom and I watched from the sofa in our small brick two-bedroom home with its pale yellow walls and its half-country, half-rustic decor.
At that time, there wasn’t anything in my life that warranted a small- or big-screen adaptation. A few months ago, I was Hara Wilson, a twenty-five-year-old adopted Korean American living in Iowa with my mother, Ellen, while estranged from my father, Pat, who had been dipping his wick in the well of a woman not much older than me. He fathered a “real” kid and then died. For some reason, even though we hadn’t had much of a relationship since I was twelve or so, I had an identity crisis, which resulted in me running off to Seoul, South Korea, in search of my biological father. I landed in Korea two days after Lee Jonghyung died.
