Page 41 of Rules for Rule Breaking
“Sort of. It’s the sound glasses make when they touch.” She knocked her fork against her cup. “See?Clink. Clink. Jjan. Jjan.It’s the same thing.”
He raised his napkin from his lap and dabbed his mouth. “It’s not the same thing.”
“Well, you can take it up with Korea.”
“I should. I hear the north part is particularly open to suggestions.”
“Bobby Bae, did you just make a joke?” Winter asked, hiding a smile behind her cup.
“You could be normal and laugh.”
“You’re not that funny.”
He shrugged and went back to surgically removing the insides of his crabs. Winter watched him until he caught her looking. He didn’t seem as tightly strung as usual. If he were one of her violin strings, he’d be only moderately sharp.
Winter readjusted in her seat. “Why didn’t you ever learn Korean anyway?”
Bobby’s smile faded. “I appreciate you trying to be nice, but don’t feel obligated to make conversation.”
Winter was taken aback, but he was right. Just because they’d been getting along for the last few hours didn’t mean they were friends. She had no right to pry. “I wasn’t aware I was being nice.”
Bobby leaned back, folded his arms, and looked out over the water. “I don’t like to talk about it. My parents never taught me, and it’s embarrassing.”
Winter put everything down so she could give him her full attention. “Why is it embarrassing? It’s not like there are a lot of Koreans around.”
“My parents never shared much of the culture with me, but I feel like the language is the one thing they could have. It’s, like, the key to the rest of it.”
“I mean, I only use it to speak to my grandmother, and my vocabulary is like a child’s.”
He turned to look at her. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
Winter felt she should back off, but she was genuinely curious. She had never heard Bobby express any dissatisfaction about how he was raised or mention wanting to know about their culture orlanguage. Her parents would have been more than happy to help, or even Halmeoni. Bobby volunteered at her senior center enough. All he’d have to do was sit with her and have a cup of tea. She would enjoy the company.
“Why didn’t your parents teach you?” she asked. She suspected it was the same reason her own parents didn’t put great effort into teaching her either. Halmeoni raised her children with English as their primary language in order to better her own language skills, and Umma carried on that pattern with Winter. If not for Halmeoni’s fear of losing the language after Harabeoji died, Winter would probably be in the same situation as Bobby.
“I don’t know for sure,” Bobby replied, pushing his hair back. “But they no longer speak to either of their families, and I think it has something to do with that.”
Winter stopped her mouth from falling open. As well as she thought she knew the Baes, she was clearly missing a lot of details. This explained why they held on so closely to the Parks. “Can I ask what happened?”
“They never really told me. This is just what I’ve gathered throughout the years,” he continued. Winter snorted. She knew what that was like. Her parents never volunteered much personal information. There could be an elephant the size of the universe in the room, and they’d never address it. “From what I understand, my dad’s parents owned a farmer’s market, and after they died, my dad inherited the store over his brother because of his business degree. My dad wasn’t able to keep up the store, and it caused a rift after he sold it. And since my grandparents had been very active in the church community, the church took my uncle’s side after the fallout. He was a big churchgoer at the time. Last I heard, Uncle Eugene bought the place back. But our families aren’t speaking.”
“So that’s why you moved from New Jersey,” Winter said.
“Yeah, I think so. I think it got pretty bad for them, handling my grandparents’ debts and everything.”
“And your mom’s family?” Winter asked.
“They still live in Korea. My mom was supposed to go back after college, but she never did. I’m not really sure what happened there either, but she doesn’t talk about them, so it’s like they don’t exist. Sometimes I wonder if they didn’t teach me anything because all this is so painful for them.”
Halmeoni had raised her family with plenty of hugs and affection, and they always made a point of having weekly calls with the cousins in Korea or on the West Coast, and visits whenever they got a chance. Even if Halmeoni and Appa were having a battle of wills at the moment, Winter considered her family exceptionally close. But she knew that wasn’t the case with every family. She’d asked Halmeoni once why that was, and the answer she got surprised her. She mostly talked about the Korean War. Halmeoni said it’d produced a culture of brokenness. But Koreans were very prideful, so they grinned and bore it, except without the grinning because happiness as Winter knew it was never the goal. Happiness to them was having a full stomach. That’s why the Korean way of sayingI love youwas to ask if you’d eaten. To feed someone was to literally give them life. Halmeoni said that generational pain was bound to produce a group of people who only wanted to avoid conflict, so they didn’t talk about things and never hashed things out if they felt slighted by a loved one. They punished them quietly by holding a grudge and pushing them out of their lives. And when you’ve held on to something for so long, it amplifies in the mind, and the distance only grows wider. Maybe that’s what it was like for Bobby’s family.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me you wanted to learn Korean?” Winter asked. “I would have helped you.”
“We both know that’s a lie.”
“Okay, fine. You’re right. But still... I can help you now,” she said. “I have a word for you.”
“You’re being serious?”
