—Verbal Kint, in The Usual Suspects, 1995
Parishioners believed he could heal them with his hands. As a kid, I knew my father was different, and it had nothing to do with the fact that he was a preacher. His legs were shriveled down to bone and he walked funny, sometimes with a cane. His face beamed. He forgot to eat. He liked Maine, because the rocky terrain reminded him of home. He and my mother came to the U.S. from Korea after the war. At first, there were four of us, and then there were five: my father, my mother, my brother, my sister, and me in the middle. My older brother and I fought mean and hard, locked in a death match from the day I was born. Oblivious to the slugfest, my baby sister sat back and let the adults admire her. She was the pretty one, and could never figure out why I was so furious all the time. She was born with grace. Predictably, her Korean name, Young-Mi, means “flower.” Mine is Young-Nan. It means “egg.”
Together, the three of us practiced our musical instruments, spoke English at home, and got straight A’s in school. We grew up ringing church bells every Sunday, pulling down the ropes and flying up into the belfry. My sister and I sang in the choir as my brother pummeled toccatas and fugues out of the organ. There was Sunday school, bible study, and neighborly visits to the nursing home, but the part I liked about church was Christmas, and the fancy food.
I could cook before I could read. I could read before I was four, because I was mad that my older brother was Sacred Cow Oldest Number One Son, and he got to do everything first. From birth, I knew the weight of karmic injustice, and I knew what that meant thanks to those theological discussions at dinner. Not only would I never be older than him, he would always be smarter. And a boy. His Korean name began with “Ho,” which in English means “Great.” Humph. What’s so great about him? “How come he gets to be a Ho?” I would howl, a pudgy ball of rage stamping angrily on tabletops. “It’s not fair! I want to be a Ho!” Sure, he could make electric generators out of Tinker Toy sets, but I could make layer cakes, and I had friends. So there. Cakes win.
With “Auntie” Ima the babysitter, I baked coffee cakes and apple pies. With my mother, I made mondu (dumplings) and nangmyun (noodles). The church ladies taught me how to knead dough and whip cream. I didn’t eat the goodies that I made. Nothing about me was sweet, including my teeth. My great food love was meat, the kind of meat that demands a sharp knife and a taste for blood. We never seemed to have much. I suppose we were dirt poor, but so was everyone else. Poor was normal. Poverty was too. Instead of plastic reindeer glowing on front yards, winter meant gutted deer hanging off porch roofs, hovering lightly in the blue air, black noses sniffing the ground. I’d extend a searching hand, flicking away flakes, and stick my nose in where it didn’t belong. Like magic, the deer’s length and heft became food and it was Good, the body and blood of Amen, a serving of flesh tying the community together through the violence of hunger.
Deer and hunter walked the same paths through the woods. I wanted to follow them.
Sunday dinners at the parsonage, guests would discard the gristle, the cartilage, the marrow, and the rind, all the stuff that pale priests and thickening colonels refused to touch in mixed company. I’d serve and clear the table, acting the perfect hostess as my baby sister sat quietly, basking in her cuteness, and my savant brother played young Christ before the Elders. Back in the kitchen where no one would see me, I’d grab bones off dirtied plates and gnaw off that bulbous white knob at the end, my favorite part, a tasty tidbit that only appeared after the commonplace had been excavated. Lollipops for carnivores. It wasn’t meat that I really craved. I loved liver and heart, along with the tangled tissues that connected the big sheets of muscle together. The offal fed to animals was the stuff I wanted to chew, because I was more contrary than Mary, not Mary mother of God but the stubborn one that ruled Scotland before she lost her head.
So, Mistress Mary, how does your garden grow?
Oh, very well, thanks to the corpse of my murdered husband fertilizing the marigolds.
Nursery rhymes mask vicious politics. So does a well-cooked meal.
A giblet was a meat pacifier, rubbery and melting at the same time. It resisted. It put up a fight. I cherished its toughness as I gnawed and glowered in the kitchen, a fat feral gnome surrounded by the aromas of love and yeast and holy ghosts I did not believe in.
“It does not matter if you believe in God,” my father said with infuriating patience. “Because God believes in you.”
“But I’m an iconoclast,” I protested loudly, trying out my interesting new word.
“So was Martin Luther,” my father responded placidly. “You’re a Protestant through and through.”
“No, I’m not!”
“Yes, you are.”
And so I was boxed into a corner.
At bedtime, my mom tucked me and my sister into our respective twin beds with matching quilts that she and the quilting bee ladies had made. Then she’d make me say my prayers. “Dear God,” I’d start obediently. And stop. Patiently, my mother waited while I struggled to free my arms from the leaden weight of white sheets so I could clasp my hands in the correct form, shaping them into a steeple pointing toward heaven. “Dear God,” I’d start again, with a heavy sigh. “Thank you for my mom, my dad, my baby sister,”—at which point, my baby sister would look like she just won a puppy—“and my brother who is the worst brother ever but I’m not supposed to say that so I’M NOT, and thank you for the really good turkey that we had for dinner tonight. Amen.” Satisfied, my mother would return my struggling arms back under the covers and re-tuck the sheets so tightly that I felt like a PEZ dispenser ready to poop out little turds of peppermint candy. Carefully, she’d turn out the light, plunging the room into darkness, and close the bedroom door behind her as she left to repeat the ritual with my brother, who got his own room, just like he got his own bike and his own underwear. Clutching her beloved stuffed animal to her chest, my sister would immediately close her eyes, fall asleep, and start drooling, not necessarily in that order. I would wait one, two, three seconds for her adenoids to be fully charged, and then I’d struggle free of my swaddling, grab the flashlight hidden beneath my pillow, reach for the books I’d stashed under my bed, duck under the covers, and start reading.
I slept on books too. To this day, I prefer a very hard mattress.
After regular services at our church, we’d sometimes drive out to visit the Bahá’ís because it was the neighborly thing to do. Who were the Bahá’ís? In 1900, a Maine woman named Sarah Jane Farmer had gone to Palestine by herself. When she returned, she established a religious retreat in Eliot, Maine, for the Bahá’í Faith. It’s the religious equivalent of cricket, the most popular professional sport in the world, but one that most Americans have never heard of and have no idea how to play. Bahá’ís believe in God, but their version has no gender. It’s basically what Christianity would look like if the Vatican hadn’t taken over the God business. Sarah Jane’s childhood home in Eliot, Maine, had been a mecca for the most progressive minds of the period, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and Sojourner Truth. Her father, Moses Farmer, invented the fire box pull and 99 other useful things including a useless toy called the “light bulb.” Along came this other guy named Thomas Edison, who had a genius for taking lame inventions and tweaking them so they could be mass produced and sold for a profit. This is what Edison did with the incandescent bulb, and he died a very rich man. Farmer believed that his gifts were God-given, and thus it was a sin to profit from them. Today, nobody’s heard of him.
What do we learn from this? Successful businessmen believe they are God’s gift to the world. They are correct.
To the great disappointment of my four-year-old self, the Bahá’í Faith congregation was made up of nice white folks with heavy Maine accents, same as the people who went to the Methodist church where my dad preached every Sunday. The grounds of the Bahá’í Faith retreat were magically beautiful, leading me to think that “Bahá’í” was the secret code word for “Narnia.” I