On the morning of January 25, 2007, a frail eight-year-old boy was brought into a Queens courtroom in a wheelchair. He had been the victim of a violent crime, in which three-quarters of his brain was destroyed. He wore a bandanna around his neck, to catch his drool. He would never be able to use his right arm. His feet were bound to the chair, because he could not control his legs. He was almost blind.
The boy’s presence was controversial. The defense lawyer feared that it would compromise the jury’s objectivity. The judge disagreed. “There’s nothing grotesque or inflammatory about it,” he said. “It’s simply a little boy sitting in a wheelchair.” At the time, the boy’s father, Sung Hak An, told a reporter, “I just want to see justice. He lost his life.”
The boy sat before the jury as a neurologist described his injuries: he suffered from seizures, could not respond to his name, and would never be able to eat or use the bathroom by himself. Afterward, the judge warned the jurors not to surrender to sympathy. Yet the effect on the courtroom was clear. The boy’s brief appearance was enough to bring at least one person in court to tears—the defendant, my mother.
The jury later found that in March, 1999, eight years earlier, Yoon Zapana had injured eight-month-old Rew An so brutally that nerve fibres and blood vessels in his skull snapped, resulting in a condition known as shaken-baby syndrome. On February 7, 2007, the jury unanimously convicted my mother, and the police took her into custody and transported her to a holding cell in the Rose M. Singer Center, a detainment facility on Rikers Island.
I was a senior at Stuyvesant High School, and that night, when I returned to our two-story red brick house in Astoria, I heard whispering in the living room. I’d been hanging out with friends in Manhattan when, an hour earlier, Papá called and asked that I immediately come home to Queens. The request terrified me. It reminded me of a call he’d made four years earlier, shortly before he told me that he was going to be deployed to Iraq. I walked up the steps to our living room, on the second floor, and saw my grandmother, my aunts, and Papá sitting in a tight row on the leather couch, their heads bowed.
I asked what had happened, but no one looked up. Then I noticed that my mother wasn’t there.
Papá said, “We didn’t want to tell you, because we thought we were going to win, and then you wouldn’t need to know.”
Know what?
“Mom has lost a criminal case,” he said. “She’s going to jail.”
What criminal case?
“Mom didn’t want to make you worried,” Papá said. “She wanted to protect you. Everything is going to be all right.”
The verdict made no sense, Papá continued. She had told him she didn’t do it. He knew she didn’t do it. Calling collect from Rikers a few days later, my mother told me, sobbing, that she was innocent. Feigning composure, I told her that I loved her and hoped to see her soon. I couldn’t bear to say that I didn’t believe her. The question of her guilt was bound up for me in a larger betrayal: the very fact that the trial was taking place had been kept from me. Maybe she’d wanted to protect me, but it felt like an act of deception, a family conspiracy. How could I believe her?
That skepticism strangled me for years. But so did another thought. I was her son. How could I not believe her?
My parents were separated by a common language. My father spoke Spanish, my mother Korean. They made do with a fragmentary and haphazard English.
Papá moved to lower Manhattan from the barrios of Lima, Peru, in the early nineteen-eighties. After learning that he could become a U.S. citizen by joining the military, he headed to an Army recruiting office. During his first tour, in South Korea, Papá met my mother, a trainee accountant with a slender figure and silky hair, at a club in downtown Seoul. A year later, they moved to New York and got married. Soon my mother was pregnant. For my birth, she travelled back to Korea, where her family could take care of her.
We lived in a one-bedroom flat on Mott Street that smelled of garlic and roasted sesame seeds. Papá took a job as a subway token clerk, doing double shifts at the West Fourth Street station so that my mother, whom I called Umma (Korean for “Mama”), would not have to work.
When I was four, I started preschool. Umma had heard that the nuns of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, half a block from our apartment, were running a pre-kindergarten program, and she jumped at the chance to begin my education early. I wanted to stay home and watch “Power Rangers.” After dinner on the night she told me, I started to whimper. She knelt close to me and said—this is how I remember it—“It go all right. It be all right.” I could smell the baby powder on her skin and see her brilliant-red lipstick. As I raised my hands in the air, she took them and placed them around her torso. I felt the softness of her stomach and then her arms around me. I was too heavy to be picked up, but at that moment I felt as if I’d been lifted off the floor. I could do it. I would go to school.
Umma woke early each day to fry Spam and eggs or toast Eggo waffles for Papá and me. She picked me up from school, and prepared dinner in time for Papá’s arrival—lomo saltado, arroz con frijoles, or another of his favorite Peruvian dishes. She added her Asian touch: Botan short-grain rice instead of long grain, Ajinomoto MSG instead of salt. As she cooked, she sometimes watched Korean soap operas. __
Umma kept a notebook with my immunization dates and my doctors’ visits. She scheduled my annual checkups. When my first-grade teacher discovered that I could understand fifth-grade math, Umma bought workbooks from a store in Koreatown so that I could practice my decimals. On weekends, she took me to Flushing to attend hagwon, a Korean academic cram camp.
Another memory: Umma scribbling lists of English words in a small notebook. I was in middle school at the time, and we had moved to Astoria. She lay in bed, jotting translations from her crimson leather-bound Korean-English dictionary. A few months and hundreds of words later, she headed to the basement of an Astoria library to take English classes. For years, I thought she was doing this to impress me. I later understood that she wanted to prepare herself for the day when I was old enough to walk alone to school and she could get a job as a babysitter.
As I grew older, Umma complained whenever I didn’t finish my hagwon exercises or neglected piano practice. She’d raise her voice, and so would I, and soon neighbors would hear the mingled screeches from our living room. As soon as Papá returned from work, he’d calmly intervene, listening to our grievances. Before long, we’d reach a détente.
For years, Papá and Umma fit a stereotype that sociologists call the Confucian family. The father is the breadwinner; the mother, the guardian of the home. Umma spent hours wiping the dinette table, the sink, the windowsills. Papá rarely picked up a dishrag. He never worried about groceries, and when he admitted during the trial that he didn’t know my pediatrician’s name it surprised even the prosecutor.
My parents hoped that I’d become a doctor; for a long time, so did I. They expected me to lead a happy, prosperous American life. They believed that I could make millions, have a beautiful family, and pay for their retirement. In the Confucian family, the son repays his parents’ care with loyalty and support. “We never finished college, so you’re on your own to figure it out,” my father said later. “We trust you.”
In April, 2007, the judge sentenced my mother to fifteen years in prison. Although she was a first-time offender, he said, her crime was too heinous for a shorter sentence. She had shown no remorse throughout the trial. She needed to learn compassion behind bars.
I tried not to think about what was happening. I was two months from graduating, and I had been accepted at Yale. I wrote articles for the school newspaper. I stayed out late, reluctant to go home. I didn’t tell my friends about my mother.
One day in school, a friend who worked as an editor at the paper asked whether I had a relative who had been on trial. He said that the editors had been talking about stories for the next issue, and had come across an item in the Daily News. Someone mentioned that the defendant’s last name was the same as mine, and that she lived in Astoria.
I could feel my cheeks turning red.
“Do you know anything about it?” he asked. “Are you O.K.?”
“I’m fine. I would hope you guys don’t bring it up or talk about it.”
He took a step back. “Well, we weren’t going to write something on it, anyway,” he stuttered. “It happened outside the school. We won’t mention it again.”
I’d missed the Daily News article. I was more interested in getting rid of acne and hanging out with friends than in reading the New York tabloids, and it hadn’t occurred to me that a big-circulation newspaper would take notice of my mother’s trial. I began to look up other press coverage: the article in the local Korea Daily, a brief in the Times. Much of it was crude, one-sided. Another Daily News story included a photograph of Rew on the day that he appeared in court. The article ran during the trial, and though it qualified statements with “alleged” and “allegedly,” the lead suggested little doubt about my mother’s guilt. “Because he is blind, eight-year-old Rew An could not see the baby-sitter on trial for shaking him like a rag doll. Because he cannot control his legs, Rew could not walk over and confront the woman who allegedly made his brain bleed when he was a baby. Because Rew cannot speak, he could not ask her, ‘Why?’ ”
The News’ half-million readers learned that Rew, whose name in Korean means “the sound of wind in the deep forest,” was once the “perfect baby.” They learned that my mother was a “stoic” Korean native, an assailant who “had no words of remorse.” He could not ask her, “Why?” But Sung Hak An could. “Was it hard to baby-sit him?” Rew’s father asked my mother rhetorically, in another article. “You should not have gotten mad and shook my son.”
The pleas of Rew’s father stirred the blogosphere. Online commentators cited my mother as an example of why no parent should hire a nanny. (In fact, parents and other family members are responsible for nearly eighty per cent of cases involving shaken-baby syndrome.) Some of the posts were evocative: “Not only is that child’s life irreparably damaged, but those parents were sentenced to life as well.” Some were racist: “How did this savage mistake a baby for a kimchi pot?” The online coverage of the story made me anxious. Zapana is not a common last name. I didn’t want it associated with nanny-nightmare Web sites, child-abuse forums, or the Daily News crime desk.
Four months after my mother was sent to prison, I arrived in New Haven. With my college roommates, I avoided talking about my mother, and, when I had to, I lied. I started to worry about what my friends would find if they searched my name online. So I joined the school newspaper, and wrote story after story—each one appearing not only in print but also online, giving me the chance to drown out her name with mine. During the summers, I took internships at national newspapers. I dropped my premed courses; I no longer wanted to be a doctor.
Journalism became a habit, then a way of coping: no free time, no thoughts of Umma. It didn’t always work. Sometimes, when the thoughts wouldn’t go away, I rented a car and drove to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, where Umma was held. We met in a white room that smelled of pine air freshener and industrial-strength bleach. Female prisoners in bright-orange jumpsuits sat here and there at rows of wooden tables. Guards were stationed throughout the room, some inattentive, some surly and forbidding.
As Umma approached, I tried to ignore her jumpsuit and focus on the roundness of her double chin, the result of years of baked goods, Big Macs, and bulgogi, Korean-style barbecued beef. I asked her how she was doing. Sometimes I got a full response. The bed hurts. The doctor has given her medicine whose name she doesn’t know. She misses fresh kimchi and golbaengi, a type of sea snail. No one speaks Korean. She doesn’t want to make friends. She wants to leave.
Invariably, Umma asked me about school, which was her way of deflecting my questions about prison life. I told her about chemistry, psychology, poetry. She asked me whether I was taking the right classes for medical school. In response, I asked whether she was hungry—my own deflection.
After a few visits, I wanted to ask her what had happened in March, 1999. But I couldn’t bring myself to confront her there. He could not ask her, “Why?” She said once that she couldn’t trust anyone in the room; one of the other inmates might listen in, warp details of the conversation, and strike a deal with the authorities for a shorter prison sentence. So I hid my thoughts, and she hid hers, and, by the end of each visit, we’d arrived at the same faulty conclusion: both of us were doing fine. Soon enough, I returned to New Haven and started reporting a new story.
After three years of college, I began to feel that I wasn’t being fair to my mother. A sense of betrayal was giving way to a sense of my own treachery. I hadn’t seen what happened. I’d read only the news stories and blog posts, and I hadn’t spent much time even with these: looking at them made me physically sick. I had examined neither the court transcripts nor the medical files. It was time to figure out the truth. I needed to vindicate her, or condemn her. One day, I asked Papá for the white box containing a copy of the first set of court filings. It sat in my dorm room for three months before I had the courage to open it.
These were the facts on which the defense and the Queens County District Attorney agreed. The incident that damaged Rew’s brain occurred on March 3, 1999. Around eight-thirty that morning, his father, Sung Hak An, and his mother, Soyoung Park, drove their son to my family’s house in Astoria. By then, the drop-off was routine. My mother had been babysitting the boy for five months, ever since she responded to an ad in a local Korean-language newspaper.
That morning, Rew and my mother were alone. My father was at work, and I was on a fourth-grade field trip. Around quarter past one that afternoon, she called Park, a graphic designer who worked ten minutes from our house, and asked her to pick up the child. It took a second call, fifteen minutes later, for Park to heed her plea. When she arrived, my mother told her that the boy’s left hand had started to shake and urged her to hurry to the hospital. Rew’s father was notified, and hailed a cab back to Queens from downtown Manhattan. Park took Rew home and waited for her husband.
An hour or so later, An, a graduate student in audio engineering, drove his family to the Queens branch of New York Hospital. Soon doctors, social workers, and detectives were barraging him and his wife with questions: How did the baby get so ill? Who was with him? Did you touch him? Did you shake him?
The hospital staff was not equipped to treat the boy, who was by then comatose, and, around eight that evening, an ambulance took Rew and his parents to Weill Cornell Medical College, on the Upper East Side. Later that night, as radiologists took CAT scans of Rew’s brain, detectives appeared at our house to question my mother.
I called my father, who was at my grandmother’s house, to tell him about the policemen in our living room; I was nine years old. After rushing home, he was told to drive his wife to the 112th Precinct, in Forest Hills. The police interviewed my father for twenty minutes and my mother for about two hours. I was there, I’m told, but I have no memory of it. My mother said in court that all I did at the precinct was cry. We headed home, and around midnight a detective came to our house to take photographs of the baby’s toys and to warn my father not to go near Rew’s family.
During the next few days, a team of pediatricians, neurologists, radiologists, ophthalmologists, and nurses checked on Rew. MRI scans were ordered to determine how much bleeding had occurred within his skull and whether his brain was swelling. The medical staff checked his eyes for torn arteries and veins, and found massive retinal bleeding. They prodded his arms and legs to test his reflexes, but the limbs were unresponsive. They drained the blood from his right eye by piercing it with a needle. They inserted a plastic tube down his windpipe to help him breathe.
An and Park sat by his bed day and night, waiting for his eyes to open. Rew awoke on the third day, and only then did his parents leave, in shifts, to shower and change clothes. During the second week, when it became clear that he would survive, they sat him on their laps and talked to him, hoping that he would understand.
Rew left Weill Cornell on March 17, 1999. His brainstem hadn’t shut down, so he did not need intravenous nutrition after his release. But his parents would have to feed him. He also needed physical and occupational therapy, to help him move; speech therapy, to help him say his name; and special education, to help him use his mind. Phenobarbital was prescribed to prevent seizures, though it did not always work. His parents learned to restrain him as he convulsed in his bed, sometimes ten to twenty times a day, and to take measures to prevent him from biting his tongue, or choking from a blocked airway.
The day that Rew entered the hospital, An phoned my mother. Detectives had requested that he ask her, without mentioning police involvement, whether the baby had fallen. She said no: Rew had just started to move strangely. Perhaps he’d had a seizure. She knew the word—“see-jur”—because I’d had one as a child and she had taken me to the hospital.
The conversation between An and my mother was brief. Before he hung up, my mother asked if An would call her back when Rew was better. An agreed, and hung up. My mother did not learn what had happened to Rew until eight years later, when she appeared in court.
After an investigation by a Queens County assistant D.A., a court ruled that prosecutors had enough evidence to suggest that injury had caused Rew’s brain damage, and that my mother was responsible. For a while, however, it seemed as though the trial would be postponed indefinitely. First, the judge ruled that Michael Dowd, the defense lawyer, who had the flu, was too ill to continue. Then, in late 2000, the An family moved to South Korea, and the prosecution was unwilling to proceed without its most important witnesses. In 2004, the family returned to America, but my father, another key witness, was serving in Iraq. It wasn’t until January, 2007, that the trial was able to go ahead.
The prosecutors pressed the jury to convict on at least two charges: endangering the welfare of a child and assault. That meant convincing the jury that Rew had been shaken, that my mother had shaken him, and that, in doing so, she had shown an extreme disregard for human life. It was on those last two points that the defense and the prosecution disagreed.
The prosecution was represented by Leigh Bishop, an assistant D.A. for Queens County. Bishop called to the stand a number of medical experts, many of whom testified that an immense force would have been required to cause the injuries that Rew had suffered. Through questioning, Bishop suggested that Rew could not have sustained his injuries before he arrived at our house: his symptoms would have been immediately apparent. Later, Bishop pointed out that my mother had not called 911, even though the signs of injury were visible. My mother told the jury that she was simply following the orders of Rew’s parents: Call them in an emergency. Knowing Umma, I could see that she would have followed those instructions to the letter, but to the jury that must have sounded irrational.
Michael Dowd was a stout Queens native who had been arguing cases for more than three decades. His retainer was fifty thousand dollars, and my father took out a second mortgage on our house to come up with it. Dowd had assured my family that the jury would be swayed by his argument: that Rew An had been shaken by his own mother. In court, Dowd tried to portray Park as an unsettled, overworked parent. He got her to reveal that she hadn’t slept deeply since Rew’s birth and that, around four that March morning, she awoke to the baby crying. This was unusual for Rew, and to calm him she fed him a bottle. Wasn’t it possible, Dowd later argued, that during the feeding she could have damaged her infant?
Still, Dowd needed to prove that there had been a lag between the injury and the symptoms, so he called to the stand his expert witness, Rami Grossmann, a specialist in pediatric neurology, whose testimony cost my family five thousand dollars. Grossmann claimed that, based on his analysis of the initial CAT scans, taken around 4:30 P.M. on the first day of Rew’s hospitalization, the child’s injury must have occurred at least twelve hours earlier. Thus, he argued, my mother could not have shaken Rew. Rather, Rew had been shaken around four that morning, when he was in Park’s care. Grossmann’s argument seemed reasonable: my mother had testified that Rew seemed sluggish that morning.
Once Bishop started her cross-examination, however, Grossmann floundered. He was forced to admit that he was not an expert on shaken-baby syndrome, child abuse, or brain scans; that he had taken the CAT scans, which were blurry because Rew had not lain still during the procedure, to be adequate evidence for a legal argument; and that he had not looked at the MRI scans performed on the second day of Rew’s hospital stay or read the doctors’ notes. When shown these documents, Grossmann said that he needed to change his opinion. The injury could have occurred when my mother had Rew. He stressed that the damage might have occurred earlier, but by then his testimony seemed close to useless.
Finally, Dowd argued that the police had mishandled the investigation and forced my mother to sign a waiver of her Miranda rights, even though she had insisted that she did not understand what she was signing. Bishop pointed out that my mother didn’t need a translator to answer questions at the trial. Her English must have been adequate. How else could she have communicated with my father, given that neither spoke the other’s first language? (I could have answered that: in half thoughts, mangled clichés, fragments lacking prepositions.) Bishop went further. The defendant’s own son had been accepted at Yale. His twenty-page application was in English, no? Surely my mother had helped me with it? My mother denied that she had. That was true: I’d simply told my parents where to sign. But I was not there to testify, and Bishop remained skeptical.
Bishop and Dowd delivered their final statements on February 5th. The judge sent the jurors to the back room to deliberate, and two days later they found my mother guilty of endangering the welfare of a child and committing first-degree assault. The Daily News article the next day said that she “showed no emotion” during the verdict.
As I read and reread the transcripts, I always came to the same conclusion: Bishop’s arguments were better than Dowd’s. My mother did not call 911. The baby was in her hands. She must have done it.
After two years at Bedford Hills, Umma was transferred to the Taconic Correctional Facility, a medium-security complex across the street. During a visit there with my father, I finally told them that I wanted to be a journalist, not a doctor. My summer internships were not distractions. I had stopped taking premed courses. The announcement brought Umma to tears. Papá said, “I have failed as a father.”
Neither Papá nor Umma failed as a parent. They never hurt me; they taught me Korean and Spanish; they fed me fish heads (“They make your brain smart,” Umma often said); they drove me home from parties when I was drunk.
Has Papá failed as a husband? He has not been a truthful one. During the phone call he has with Umma every Sunday, he tells her that he is doing well. In reality, his deployment in Iraq has left him with insomnia, anxiety, and flashbacks—symptoms, he has learned since the verdict, of post-traumatic-stress disorder. During my sophomore year in college, he was ordered to return to Iraq for a year. Since coming home, he has kept to himself. He dislikes his jobs as a night-shift subway supervisor and an on-call Army reservist. He prunes the garden and, nearly every day, he drives a mile to my grandmother’s house to have lunch. He washes clothes and dusts the family photographs hanging in the living room. He eats Chinese takeout and Honey Nut Cheerios for dinner. Sometimes I wish I could return to Astoria more often and serve him Umma’s kimchi jigae, but I find it hard to see him in his haggard state, to look at the bags under his eyes.
And perhaps I have failed as a son. During my four years at college, I often avoided visiting Umma. If I don’t go, I thought, I can pretend she’s still in Astoria with Papá, and that I no longer have to feel guilty for leaving home and growing up. For harboring doubts about her innocence. For wanting to ask her, “Why?”
Shortly after I opened Papá’s white box, the perplexities of shaken-baby syndrome began to receive national attention. A Times opinion piece, published in September, 2010, argued that scientists do not yet fully understand how shaken-baby syndrome works and that innocent people could be condemned to prison. In February, 2011, the Times Magazine published a story about how “innocence projects”—law clinics created to exonerate wrongfully convicted felons—are working to overturn rulings in at least two dozen S.B.S. cases.
Both pieces mentioned the “lucid interval” defense. Usually, the shaking causes severe symptoms, such as a coma, immediately. But on occasion the symptoms do not appear for hours, or even days, during which the victim may seem lucid. Medical technology is currently unable to distinguish between the two scenarios. If the lucid-interval defense becomes generally accepted, it could transform the way S.B.S. cases are prosecuted. Conviction would require evidence other than the symptoms, such as a witness or a history of child abuse. Otherwise, the defense could credibly argue that it was impossible to time the injury and assign blame to a specific caretaker.
I had known about the lucid-interval defense before reading the two articles. It appeared in the testimony of my mother’s trial. Rami Grossmann, the five-thousand-dollar medical expert, tried to use it, and failed. Among the most publicized S.B.S. convictions overturned by the lucid-interval defense was that of Audrey Edmunds, a young mother who ran a day-care center in her home, near Madison, Wisconsin, and who had received a twelve-year sentence in the death of a six-month-old girl she watched. The sentence was thrown out in 2008, after the state Court of Appeals called for a retrial. The appellate judges heard testimony from six doctors who supported the lucid-interval defense—including a forensic pathologist who recanted testimony that had helped to convict Edmunds.
Still, the new research only opens possibilities. It might establish reasonable doubt, but for a son craving certainty it proves neither guilt nor innocence. Nor does it make up for a prisoner’s unanswered calls and letters.
A few weeks after the sentencing, my parents appealed, with a new set of lawyers (and a new set of loans, from my aunts). Michael Dowd wanted another chance; my family wouldn’t give him one. Recently, he told me that he has not taken another S.B.S.-related case, and that he never will, unless the defendant has “unlimited resources” to pay for attorney’s fees and medical witnesses.
The appellate lawyers succeeded in getting the sentence reduced, to seven years. My parents decided not to pursue further litigation. They could not afford another round of briefs and legal fees. Besides, the lawyers told us it was unlikely that my mother would get a better ruling. We reconciled ourselves to the idea of my mother serving out the rest of her prison term.
One of Umma’s favorite activities during our visits is playing dominoes. I pick up a box from the children’s room, where she is forbidden to go: no guard would permit a convicted child abuser near toddlers. Often unintentionally, she and I gang up against Papá. A master strategist, Umma blocks every one of his moves. “Having trouble, yobo?” she says, with a giggle. Yobo is the only Korean word he understands. It means “sweetheart.” We take breaks when she gets hungry, and I prepare her microwavable chicken wings and Cup Noodles, which we pretend is ramyeon, the Korean word for “ramen.”
The domino games allow us to imagine that we’re at home. In our minds, we hang a flat-screen TV and photographs of our family on the white walls. The vending machines become our kitchen, with its rice cooker and green marble countertops, while the tables surrounding us merge with ours, forming an oak dinette table. The children’s-room attendant becomes a butler. The prison guards become nothing at all.
At Bedford Hills, Umma kept to herself, refusing to talk to other inmates. But in Taconic she started to wave and smile at several Latinas. She continued to learn English. She checked out novels and memoirs from the prison library. I’ve sent her two thrillers, in English, as birthday presents. Her writing skills are improving. During my sophomore year, she replied to a birthday card I’d sent a few days late: “I belive you are doing right things for your life. I am thinking about you every moment and sorry about I couldn’t be with you at home, but you are my life.”
Umma is scheduled for conditional release this February. When she gets out, she hopes to abandon our old life. She has said that she wants to sell our Astoria house: returning to it would force her to remember the trial. Papá told me that, with the money from the house sale, he hopes to take her on an extended vacation.
I wish I could move on as well, but reading the testimony has forced me to recognize that I may never know what happened on March 3, 1999. All I have are memories, secondhand reports, guesses. Occasionally, I consider the possibility that Umma was wronged. She made mistakes that day. But had Papá gone to college, or had we been able to afford a better lawyer, or had I been called to testify, or had Umma spoken better English, the jury might have come to a different decision.
On Christmas Day, 2010, five months before I graduated from Yale and moved to Washington, D.C., to take a reporting job, Papá and I went to see Umma at Taconic. We waited a long time before she finally trudged into the visiting room, wearing a green sweater, khaki pants, and a pair of floral-patterned boots. Her double chin had receded, but her cheeks had puffed up. Her whitening hair was straightened (with a curling iron, she later said, that has left her with slight facial burns). Her oily skin, covered in state-approved lotion, shimmered in the over-lit visiting room. I leaned down and buried my face in her sweater. After a few seconds, she let go and said, “Looks like you didn’t clean yourself. Go shave.”
I laughed hesitantly, and we headed to the vending machines. We nuked a plastic-wrapped hamburger, I picked up a box of dominoes, and we began a game. During the fourth or fifth round, I reached for my coffee and spilled it. I jumped up, huddled over the growing spill, and wiped it with napkins that Papá brought from the guard’s desk.
“Don’t do that,” Umma said sternly. “Leave it on the floor. You never listen to me.” I stared at her incredulously as she continued, “They looking at us. They don’t know what you doing. They think you put something on chair.” She stumbled through the English: switching to Korean would rouse suspicion. “They will ask me question after,” she said. I imagined a thickset guard giving her a fine for misconduct, or heckling her, or sending her to solitary.
I sat down and focussed on the dominoes. Umma placed her last tile on the table. She had won. She hooted, scrunched up her face, and raised her hands to the ceiling.
Her expression at moments like that reminds me of the Umma who comforted me in our Mott Street apartment, who tried to teach herself English by scribbling down word after word. It reminds me of the framed photograph of her in my Astoria bedroom. I have it before me now. It is the morning of my uncle’s first wedding. Umma stands next to Papá among stalks of mint in my grandmother’s garden, a secluded plot in Long Island City. Umma’s nails are painted, and her lipstick is bright red. She wears a frilly scarlet crinoline dress. She is grinning.
I am in the picture, too, wearing a rented tuxedo. My mushroom haircut overwhelms my face, and my cheeks, like Rew An’s, are chubby. Struggling to stand taller than Umma’s legs, I cling to her crinoline skirt. I am laughing. I am refusing to let go. ♦