Roe Soup Dance
Flash Fiction Contest Second Runner-Up
My grandmother moves mannequins out of the way to get to the refrigerator. It’s a small fridge meant to store kimchi, hidden from customers’ eyes because she covers it with a plaid shawl.
Sorry ladies, but you’ll have to move, she tells the mannequins, and holds them by their slender waists, one by one, to drag them to the side.
The result: tunic-wearing sentinels that normally line the back wall of her store are now standing around the floor looking like customers browsing through clothes. They are white, faceless, and bald.
In front of me is a bowl of roe soup in a clay pot, still bubbling from the heat. There’s rice, Cheongyang peppers, egg, little anchovies as side dishes. The whole spread covers the small folding table my grandmother keeps behind the register. It’s meant to hold paper coffee cups when she entertains other shopkeepers in the plaza, but, because of my visit, my grandmother has ordered a special meal instead. She tells me to eat up.
The reason she’s reaching for her secret fridge is to give me something precious of hers: pickled radish and lotus root made with salt so expensive and pure that she can’t bear to tell me anything else about the recipe except that she saves it for special occasions only. She closes the door to the refrigerator with her foot, the pink lacy sock she’s wearing underneath her sandals reminiscent of a ballerina’s slipper. She places some radish on my spoon and stares at me expectantly.
I dislike roe soup. I don’t love the texture of fish eggs that crumble and separate and spread around the bowl. They’re salty. I don’t like pickled radish either, but most of all lotus root. It’s bitter and brown and makes a kack! sound when you chew. But my grandmother’s stare is so proud, so earnest, that I have no choice but to pretend. I put spoonful after spoonful of the soup and rice in my mouth, pausing to let her reach for another pickle with her chopsticks. I try not to breathe when I swallow; I fear I might gag if I do.
Yum, I tell her, and her eyes glitter.
How I’ve missed you, she says. How I’ve longed for this moment, when you would come home. If only this world weren’t so corrupt.
She goes on to tell me everything she thinks about the world. How the unification of the two Koreas will destroy us all. How she participates in weekly protests at Gwanghwamun holding the Taegukgi in one hand and the American flag in the other, to represent the both of us. When she mentions it was good that Trump became president, I cough and rice and soup spray everywhere.
Halmuni no, I say. You don’t mean that.
She puts the mannequins back, adjusting their arms and torsos and hands until they resume their original positions. They stay quiet. They’re the only ones here with us; not a single customer has come by the store.
It’s true, she says.
I put my spoon down. Tell me why, I demand.
She purses her lips and doesn’t tell me why. I don’t like the saltiness on my lips, the bitterness I can taste on the back of my tongue, near my tonsils. I know I’m finished eating.
I’ve missed you so, she repeats. So much has changed.
It’s true that I’ve changed. I’m taller now. There’s a stronger accent to my Korean. I’m not eight, but twenty-eight, and I’m getting married. We’re here to visit my side of the family, to ask for permission, although it’s pointless because we don’t need anyone’s permission to wed; we’re already married on paper. It’s the right thing to do, to pretend like you’ll ask your grandmother, my partner had suggested. So I am here with my grandmother, eating roe soup, pretending.
My grandmother’s store hasn’t changed and it looks exactly like I remember. Same traditional Suyuri marketplace, same building and floor layout. There are pictures of me taped near the register, and most of them are us together—I’m a newborn and she’s holding me, I’m five and she’s putting on my yellow kindergarten hat, I’m eight and we’re at the airport. The pictures that come next are just of me—my high school and college graduation.
Halmuni, come here, I tell her. I pull out my phone. Let’s take a picture together.
She ignores me. She clears the table, stacking the bowls on top of each other. She puts a piece of newspaper on top of the tray and then sets it on the floor for the restaurant worker to take back later. She screws the cap back on to her precious pickles and moves the mannequin in front of the fridge, just one this time, to crack the door open and put it back. She elbows the mannequin and it almost topples over. Alarmed, I stand up to catch it.
Ha! my grandmother says. She must want to dance.
I hold the mannequin by the shoulders. It’s wearing a long checkered shirt, paired with a gold necklace. It’s separated from its leg stand, but otherwise undamaged.
She’s safe, I say, but my grandmother shakes her head.
No one is safe. The world is corrupt. All we can do is dance.
She takes the mannequin from me and puts one arm on its back, the other in its outstretched hand. She hums and sways a little. She takes a step forward, then back, then forward again, then back.
Wait, I think about telling her. I want to tell you something. I came here to ask for your permission. But she’s still mid-dance, and I don’t have the heart to stop her. No one is safe. The world is corrupt. All we can do is dance.
I watch as my grandmother turns the mannequin around in the store, the moves of a wedding waltz, and I’m left to wonder.
Tammy Heejae Lee (@tammyheejae) is a Korean-American writer from San Francisco. She holds a BA from the University of California, Davis and an MFA from the University of San Francisco. Her writing has been supported by the Tin House Summer Workshop and Yale Writers Workshop. She is currently writing her first novel about expat culture in Seoul.