my H USE’S ghost

“I think my house is haunted.”

I can hear my sister’s quiet scoff through the phone speaker against my ear, even with the terrible wireless. “It’s not haunted, idiot. You’ve been watching too many horror movies. I should kick you off of my Netflix account.”

She doesn’t understand. I’ve told so many people, but they never understand. I’ve never believed in the paranormal, but living alone for the first time forces me to notice things. In the night I hear footsteps and scratching from downstairs. Sometimes there are slams and crashes, but no one is ever there. Every few days a mangled bird’s corpse appears on the deck.

When I invite my parents over, they seem sick minutes after stepping through the door. Jagged scars like lightning bolts decorate my furniture. When I tried to keep houseplants, I found them shredded within days.

For every example I provide to her, she argues. “You’re hearing things,” she says with disdain in her voice. “Plants just sort of die, they don’t need a reason.”

“No, but they were torn apart, that’s not—”

A crash like shattering glass erupts from the kitchen, cutting me off. Could it have come in through the window? “See! See, it’s weird, I told you!” I run to the kitchen, socks skidding on the wooden floorboards, and fling the door open.

On the floor, a wine glass lies in glittering shards. On the counter, my cat peers down at the red wine seeping into the floor.

My parents have lived such polarizing and different lives. My mom’s a true boricua, slang for a Puerto Rican person, with a thick accent and snow white skin contrasting her moreno skinned brothers and my uncles. My dad’s probably the most Korean a Korean could be; he is loud, abrasive, but caring and thoughtful most of the time. They share a love of spicy foods, a love of Korean television dramas, and an indomitable love for each other. Yet, in all my life, I have never understood their love. My mom is a patient woman, calm and does not talk back unless she is royally ticked off, who grew up on a small, humble farm in Puerto Rico with nothing much to do besides drive around in her grandparents old pickup truck. She was born in New York in July of 1964 but never had the chance to experience life in the concrete jungle before she was shipped away back to Puerto Rico. This might have caused her quiet and mostly subdued nature. Having to live on an island with little else than chickens and lizards would definitely make me a little shy. She made it back to the city that never sleeps though, eventually.

On the other side of the world, my dad was born in August in 1965. Kim Song-Hoon, eventually Alex Kim, was destined for greatness since the day he came out of the womb. He had to be. The only son of the great Kim Ill-Joon, my grandpa, he represented not only family, but especially his father. Plus, they were stupid rich and he was set to inherit their old Korean money. They had maids, heated blankets, and Bentleys when my mom had chickens, lizards, and an old pickup truck. And yet, I have always felt bad for my dad. My grandpa was a complicated man and he made my dad into a complicated man too. Then one day they packed it up and left, living in Paraguay for a year where my grandma bought a driver’s license while my dad got fat and learned Spanish. Eventually they landed in the states, and because of a mishap with their luggage, with only five dollars between my dad, grandparents, and my two aunts.

To be honest, how my mom survived all on her own in New York baffles me. She left Puerto Rico all on her own at sixteen, to one of the fastest growing cosmopolitan cities in the United States, and just lived on her own for years. Like, my mom can barely make her English sound like English now, after over four decades in America. I can’t imagine how bad her accent was when she first got here. And yet, there she was, the only white retail worker with a Spanish accent at Lord and Taylor.

Life in America was vastly different than in Seoul, South Korea for my dad. At twelve, he would translate Korean to English and vice versa for his family, at fourteen he would steal my grandpa’s worn out jalopy and drive it with his friends around the streets of Astoria, Queens, and at sixteen he worked with my grandpa at a dry cleaners. It was called George and Chris’ Dry Cleaners, and this rickety and musty laundromat would eventually be the most important part of both my mom’s and my dad’s lives. I have always imagined it like a movie. My mom, young and quiet, and my dad, young and rowdy, meet each other at the dry cleaner’s—the catalyst being when my mom had an angry red stain from some salsa on her white coat, she took it to a dry cleaners she heard was the best in town. Like love at first sight, she kept coming back again and again and eventually they started dating. And, it was basically just that, for the most part. My dad made my mom take risks and she in turn brought him down from his ivory pedestal.

Their story has always been so confusing to me. Or to be more specific, their love story. How could such different people find love with each other?

Such polarizing people. On one hand, my dad barely knows the concept of what an “inside voice” is and had everything given to him on a silver platter until he got to America. On the other hand, my mom barely talks about her love life before she met my dad, and he constantly boasts about the multitude of girls he had wrapped around his finger with the use of a symmetrical face and perfect hair.

How could she ever love a man so rowdy and callous when she could have had anyone she wanted?

Yet, I have seen my mom take care of my dad when he was at his lowest, bedridden and half dead. She has lost countless hours and nights in the hospital by his bed, making sure he could breathe and sit up after they sanded down the base of his spine. And while my mom has never been stuck on her deathbed, I can see the love in his eyes whenever he looks at her. How he lowers his voice for her when she has a headache or brings her favorite foods and sugary treats when she feels down. They spend hours upon hours of time watching poorly written Korean dramas night after night with each other even though they know they need to get up early in the morning for work.

I have never understood their love, but all I know is that they love each other.

That, I can understand.