Green Frog
On the morning of the three-year anniversary of our mother’s death, my older sister Anne calls to tell me she’s two weeks late.
“I haven’t taken a test or anything yet, though,” she says, out of breath from power-walking down the avenues of Manhattan.
Anne is the kind of person who tracks her steps and sleep patterns and has had her entire life planned out since she was twelve, but she has terrible taste in men. She and her husband finally separated a few weeks ago, so this whole pregnancy thing couldn’t have come at a worse time, even though Anne has always wanted to be a mother, unlike me.
She asks me if I’m still in bed and I lie and say no. She tells me that I should call her coworker, someone named Nadia who’s looking for a roommate, because twenty-five is too old to be living at home with our father. That I have to start making healthier choices for myself.
I take down the number she rattles off to me, even though I am not all that interested in making healthier choices for myself. After I hang up, I get dressed while, out of habit, I avoid looking at the pile of discarded sketchbooks in the corner of my bedroom.
***
I dropped out of art school four years ago in my junior year, when my mother was first diagnosed with stomach cancer. I told everyone I was taking a leave of absence to take care of her, but the real reason I left was because I couldn’t stand being at that school, where everyone was so much more talented than me. What I mean is, I wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t very good. Then the dean’s office sent me a letter saying that I was going to lose my scholarship and that I would be put on academic probation. So I went back home. The whole four-hour bus ride from Massachusetts to New Jersey, I stared out the window, avoiding my reflection and thinking about how I would tell my mother that I’d fucked up again.
A year later, she was gone.
***
My father is sitting in the living room with his Bible when I emerge from my bedroom. The TV mutters a televangelist’s testimony.
“I thought we could pray today before we open the restaurant,” my father says.
“Why?” I say, not looking up as I pick through the piles of bills on our kitchen table.
“It’s important that we commemorate this day with prayer.”
I notice that he can’t even say the words “your mother,” and my nails bite into my palms.
“I have to go, Apa,” I say. I let the door slam shut behind me.
It’s pouring outside. My phone blares an alert: “Hurricane Warning this area till 9:00 PM EST. Avoid flood areas.” Small lakes are already forming in the streets. I’ve forgotten my umbrella, and within five minutes I’m soaked. A car drives past, the reflection of its headlights luminous on the wet pavement. It’s the kind of rain that reminds me of a Korean fairy tale Umma used to tell me when I was little.
She would begin the story in the same way each time. “A long, long time ago, there lived a green frog who always did the exact opposite of what his mother asked. If she asked him to go to the market to fetch rice, he’d go down to the valley and take a nap. If she told him to stay near the river, he would go up to the mountains.”
“Was he bad?” I’d ask.
“Yes, he was not a very good boy,” Umma would say, looking at me pointedly. “Driven to despair over her son, the frog’s mother eventually became very, very sick. When she knew her time had come, she called him to her and said, ‘When I die, bury me on the banks of our river.’ She did this thinking he would bury her in the mountains, where her body wouldn’t wash away.”
Sometimes Umma was so tired from working at the restaurant that she would fall asleep in the middle of the story. “But he didn’t do that?” I’d prompt her.
“No, he didn’t.” She’d rouse herself. “When his mother finally died, the green frog was filled with regret. He decided to do, for once in his life, the exact thing she had asked. Instead of burying her on higher ground, he buried her on the river bank. Every day, he worried that the river would overflow and wash his mother’s body away, and one day during monsoon season, it did. He cried and cried, and that is why frogs croak in the rain.”
Umma used to call me a green frog because, she said, she could never get me to listen to anything she said or do anything she asked. “Anne was never any trouble,” she used to say to customers at the restaurant. “But this one. She always has to do things the hard way.”
Umma said I came into the world fighting it. They had to induce my birth a week after my due date because I didn’t want to be born. “When you finally came out, your arm was thrown over your face, like you couldn’t even face the world,” Umma said.
Sometimes, when I was little, I would forget how to breathe and my lungs would feel hotter and thinner by the second, like balloons that were expanding too quickly. The only thing that helped was when Umma held my face in her hands and stroked my eyebrows, reminding me to slow down and count my breaths. “You’re here,” she’d say. “And I’m here.”
***
The year I started high school, my father left our family to be a missionary for four years, taking most of our savings with him. He told Umma he had heard the voice of God commanding him to travel the world and spread the word of His kingdom. They fought about it almost every night before he left. Anne and I dealt with it in our own ways—Anne by continuing to get excellent grades and throwing herself into ten new extracurriculars, and me by cutting class to smoke with my friends in the school parking lot or draw weird shit in the art room.
After Apa left, Umma took over managing the restaurant. She had me help with seating customers, taking orders, and cleaning the kitchen and bathrooms after we closed, but Anne was never expected to work at the restaurant because she was too busy with orchestra or debate team. “Your sister has to study,” my mother would say, as if Anne was the chosen kid, the one who would make all of Umma’s sacrifices worth it. I started doing everything sloppily and slowly, hoping Umma would notice and stop asking me to help.
One night, a difficult couple complained that their galbijjim was too salty. Instead of offering to send their dishes back, I said that if they had a problem with our food, they could just leave and not come back. “I should have known better than to ask you to help,” Umma said. She told me to stay at home.
***
During her last weeks in the hospital, Umma was high on painkillers all the time. I drew her hands, over and over again—in repose, resting on top of the covers as quietly as a doll’s; her fingers interlaced with one another; her upturned palms, worn as smooth as old paper. I made each sketch as big as I could, her hands taking up the whole page like a bird’s wingspan. I used charcoal, which left heavy smears on everything I touched, and I woke every morning with smudges like bruises all over my face and arms.
No one tells you how long dying takes. How much pain the body can endure before it finally shudders to a stop. How you can actually see, if you look closely enough, the breath of a soul leaving the body. I read somewhere that when someone dies you have to open the window so the soul can find its way out, but when I tried to open the window at the hospital, I found that it was sealed shut. For weeks, I had nightmares about windows and doors that I couldn’t open.
“Jenny-yah,” she said to me one night, near the end. Anne and my dad were asleep in the waiting room, and I was sitting alone by her bedside.
“Umma?”
Her lips were cracked. She moved them, but no words came out.
“Umma,” I said, my eyes filling. “I’m sorry I messed up. I’m going to get myself together, I promise. I’ll go back to school. I won’t let you down.”
“Green frog,” she said, her eyes wide open.
***
When I get to the restaurant, I see that our sous chef Thomas is already outside, locking up his bike. He nods at me, water angling its way down the brim of his cap. “Cancel your plans. Doesn’t look like anyone’s going anywhere tonight,” he says.
“What plans?” I try to roll my eyes, but I’m too busy trying not to blush. Thomas is somewhere in his 30s and has huge, sinewy arms, covered with tattoos and burns. He has deep-set, tired eyes and a voice like gravel that makes heat rise inside my body, from my stomach to my face. It’s a welcome distraction from the fact that nothing else is going on in my life.
My mother was the one who’d hired Thomas and all our kitchen and waitstaff, planned and updated menus, and haggled with vendors over prices. But she let my father decorate, which was a mistake. The first thing you see when you walk into the restaurant is a backlit photo of the Niagara Falls hanging above the register. The tablecloths are coral, so everything is tinged pink like a slow algae bloom. There’s a glowing fish tank by the register with a giant goldfish named Tubby. Umma won him in a church raffle a few years ago and fell in love.
I’m flipping the sign on the front door from “Closed” to “Open” when Tubby catapults himself out of his tank. He lands with a wet thunk on the floor and flip-flops across the tiles. I try to cup him in my hands, but it’s like trying to hold onto a bar of soap that panics when you pick it up. Thomas helps me trap him and carefully slides Tubby back into the water.
“I guess he’s gotten too big for that tank,” I say.
“Maybe he just needs a friend to keep him company. Or maybe he needs to get out more,” Thomas says.
“He’s a fish, Thomas.”
My phone buzzes with three texts from Anne. Three of the four messages are pictures of various pee sticks. The window on each test shows an unmistakable pink cross. The fourth message says, “Don’t tell Apa yet. I’m coming by after work.” To my surprise, I feel a soft flicker of something like excitement before I brush it aside to prep for lunch.
***
Almost all of our customers nowadays are people from my parents’ church who feel sorry for us. “It’s good to see children staying at home to take care of their parents,” they say, their smiles as bright and flimsy as tin foil. “What would your father do without you?”
There are so many things I’d like to say to that question. But I just thank them and stretch my lips across my face in my best approximation of a smile.
It’s 5 pm, when the restaurant is emptiest, when Mrs. Pak, who runs the flower shop next door, walks in. She has dyed rust-red hair, and when she laughs, she throws her head back so far you can see her gold fillings flashing. She’s been coming by with pounds of marinated, freezer-ready meat and saran-wrapped Tupperwares of stew since Umma’s funeral.
“Is your father in?” She never says hello. She hands me the bags she’s holding, and they are so heavy the plastic straps cut into my hands and around my wrists. “You’re a good girl to help him out. But shouldn’t you be working now, somewhere in the city like your sister?”
“I’m happy to help here, Mrs. Pak. Thank you for all this, you’re too kind.”
“Oh, it’s just some doenjang-jjigae and banchan I made the other day. You make sure to eat a lot too, so you can grow. You’ve always been so small, just like your mother.”
I ask her if I can bring her some tea, because she is already taking off her raincoat and shaking her umbrella dry. She asks me to bring her coffee instead. When I come back with her coffee, she is examining our plants. “You need to re-pot these,” she says. “I’ll do it for you tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to do that, Mrs. Pak.”
“Nonsense. Your father doesn’t know the first thing about plants and neither do you.” She sips her coffee and sighs, rolling her neck.
Mrs. Pak’s husband died about three years ago in a bad car accident on Route 17, and her son, who was about Anne’s age, died soon after of brain cancer. It spooks me to think about how many bad things can happen to one family, how much one person can lose in such a short amount of time. I remembered thinking after Umma died that the worst thing I could ever imagine happening had happened. I can’t imagine having it happen twice.
The door jingles, and we look up to see my father. “Mrs. Pak, you shouldn’t have come out in this weather,” he says.
“I’ve seen worse storms. But perhaps we can all have dinner together. I brought you some food,” she says, smiling at him.
I notice that he smiles back.
We’ve decided to close the restaurant since no customers are coming in this rain, when Anne walks in, drenched despite her umbrella and impossibly chic designer raincoat. I bring Mrs. Pak’s containers into the kitchen and Anne follows me.
“I didn’t realize Mrs. Pak was going to be here. Is she interested in Apa or something?”
I shrug.
She imitates me, slouching and shrugging, which annoys me. She laughs. “Relax, I’m just teasing. Did you call Nadia about the apartment?”
“I have to be here to help Apa out with the restaurant.”
“Apa is fine on his own. I think the only reason you’re here is because you’re scared to go anywhere else. Umma wouldn’t have wanted you to stay here forever.”
“Whatever,” I say.
“You could go back to school, or get a job doing something you’d actually like or be good at for a change,” Anne looks at me like all of this is so easy.
“I’m not like you, okay? The only thing I’m good at is disappointing people.” I unlid each container and breathe in the comforting smells of garlic and spice.
“Jenny, you dummy. The only person you need to worry about disappointing is yourself.”
We are not the kind of family that hugs. But when Anne wraps her arms around me—hesitantly, as though I am a wild animal with its leg caught in a trap—it doesn’t feel uncomfortable. I close my eyes. She smells like an expensive garden. I try not to think about what I must smell like, and just focus on the feeling of what it’s like to be held by my sister, to feel her arms anchoring me.
Later, after Anne has detached herself from me to go talk to Apa and Mrs. Pak, I watch the rain, its small hands drumming against the windows. It seems as though it will never stop raining. I lean over the sink and breathe on one of the windows. I draw a face with my finger. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth. I wonder what the baby will look like.
***
My father and I push a few tables together to make one large enough to seat all of us. Mrs. Pak heats up her doenjang-jjigae, and Anne plates the banchan—kimchi, tiny pickled anchovies, and acorn jelly with scallions and red pepper flakes spooned on top.
I watch Thomas make kimchi pancakes, pouring the batter into a sizzling pan and frying perfect golden discs that we’ll dip in soy sauce and vinegar. “The trick,” he tells me, “is to wait until you see evenly spaced bubbles in the batter, like this. See? That’s when you know it’s time to flip it.” He shows me how, doing it in one deft motion. “That’s how your mom used to do it,” he says. His hands, huge and knife-scarred and covered in stick-and-poke tattoos, look so different from Umma’s, which were small and slim-fingered, but Thomas once told me that he’d never seen anyone debone a chicken or clean and gut a fish as fast she could.
My father insists on praying over the food, so we join hands and bow our heads. He keeps it short, mercifully, and then we eat.
Mrs. Pak’s doenjang-jjigae doesn’t taste like my mother’s, but it’s earthy and comforting, with just the slightest hint of spice. I am ravenous, and I eat and eat until my belly grows swollen and tight and I have to unbutton the top button of my jeans. But I continue to eat.
I am here, I remind myself.
We all are.
Gina Chung (@ginathechung) is a Korean American writer from New Jersey currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She is the communications manager at PEN America and an MFA candidate in fiction at The New School. She holds a BA in literary studies from Williams College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in F(r)iction, the VIDA Review, Jellyfish Review, and LIT Magazine. She is currently working on a collection of short stories about family, memory, and myths and a novel about climate change, sea creatures, and loss. Find her at gina-chung.com.