Non-Fiction
Skyscrapers / Esther Kim
Image courtesy of the author.
(1)
It was December when my sister picked me up from the airport and drove us home, past the docks, the gleaming sailboats in Manhasset Bay, the grass lawns, the American flags, and pulled into our driveway where the Japanese maple greeted us. March rolled around, and we all had travel plans. But the skies, which normally whistled and roared with planes overhead, were quiet.
It was a cold spring day when my father, a physician, shared his diagnosis with us in the height of the pandemic. I decided to plant some herbs from seed. I’d never grown anything from seed, but I felt a compulsion to grow something, a new life, even a sprout, in the face of death. With these little packets of basil and chive, I decided it was time to root myself into this land, sowing myself into soil.
Image courtesy of the author.
(2)
Our bodies knew 16-hour flights as children. I was nine-years-old when I took my first long flight to Incheon, with a stopover in Juno, Alaska for refueling. My father was seven when he flew with his parents from Gimpo airport, soon to exchange his South Korean birth citizenship for an American one. (“We took the plane from Gimpo to Tokyo, Tokyo to Seattle, Seattle to Chicago, Chicago to New York,” he laughed.) An object in motion stays in motion. Like many transpacific families, we criss-crossed the skies, clogging it with carbon.
Even on land, we drove everywhere. My earliest memories as a child are of staring out car windows, driving over the Verrazano bridge and the hazy Hudson River, en route to my grandpa’s photo developing and camera repair shop in the Bronx. And my family moved house often: we lived in five different rental apartments in four New York boroughs before I turned ten.
The house was new when we moved in in 2003. It wasn’t finished, but as my mom tells it, “I took one look at the circular window, saw the cross, and knew that God had answered our prayers.”
It’s been the family house for seventeen years, but to this day I feel like a guest.
I am better versed in the rituals of the airport and the airplane, memorizing the locations of bathrooms and water fountains in the terminals, and familiar with the insane, idiosyncratic whims of border security. I always carried a paperclip in my wallet, so I could quickly pop out my phone’s SIM card, change my number, and slip into my otherness.
Like me, it seemed my immigrant parents could not stay still. My parents drove eight hours north to settle in upstate New York, along the border of Canada, when a new hospital job opened up for my dad, and found themselves a small rental apartment.
Back here and gathered again in Port Washington, I found myself with my family, my father’s illness, and confronting this land.
–
I walk along the road to Guggenheim elementary school. It’s a short walk from our house to the red-brick school building and parking lot. Here is the familiar playground; the slides and swings are wrapped in yellow “Do Not Enter” tape to prevent children from spreading the coronavirus. I pass the basketball blacktop, and when I reach the manicured grass lawn, I marvel at the uninterrupted green below the clear, cloudless blue.
On my left, behind the chain-link fence is the exclusive Sands Point Golf Club. These school fields are large enough for one football pitch, two baseball diamonds and two childrens’ playgrounds.
Before the pandemic, in the soft rainy days, I would walk to the farthest corner of the field by myself, sneak into the golf course, and sit on the green to watch the sun glow amber, counting (and losing track of) the number of planes that would roar overhead every three minutes. And as the weather warmed up, the wild chive grew, the planes vanished, the birds racketed, then honeysuckle bloomed its heady scent, and my whole family began to join on my walks.
I found a gate by the goal posts that led into a clearing with children’s education benches in the woods.
After spending my twenties in densely populated cities, I still cannot believe how much open land we have out here. Where are all the bodies? I wonder. Here, there is only a man in a baseball cap walking his dog alone.
(3)
I stood in the empty kitchen and opened the cardboard box. It was the third day after the diagnosis. My hands felt tight with chemicals since my sister and I had spent the weekend disinfecting and scrubbing the house. My parents planned to drive down from upstate New York for treatment in Manhattan. Normally the south-facing kitchen allowed in a lot of light, but it was an overcast day.
I bathed the herb seeds in little dishes of warm water and left them overnight in the hope some would drop to the bottom. The sinkers would be the most fertile, said the booklet. The chives were ink-black tiny apostrophes. They refused to sink, so I frantically shook the shallow ceramic bowl—usually meant for our banchan—until a few did. It was a long process to remove the sinkers and return the floaters to their paper seed packets. While I left them to dry on a paper towel, I poured warm water slowly onto the soil discs and waited for them to crumble apart and rehydrate in the bowl.
As I loosened the soil and dug my hands in the warm, soupy earth, squeezing out the excess water, and tamping the dirt into a little pot, I found solace in soaking and using my hands. Earth medicine, a Buddhist friend called it.
My friends expressed their condolences, sending photos of cherry blossom buds, magnolias, cats, and “mundane things” at my request.
Each day I researched my father’s illness. I whispered encouragement to my herb seeds, invisible, buried under the darkest soil.
–
Image courtesy of the author.
We walk as a family down the street. Dad shuffles along slowly in his scrubs. Mom and Dad identify the startling yellow bushes along the sidewalk. “What’s that?” I point. Dad pauses, “I only know it by its Korean name, 개나리.” This is rare. He assimilated so young, so perfectly, he knows the English name for everything. I find this gap—an untranslated name for a plant from his childhood—precious. “It grows everywhere in Korea during spring.” Forsythia in the English doesn’t sound nearly as sweet. I send a photo of its leaves, duckling yellow against April’s blue skies, to friends.
Being near my mom, who immigrated to New York in her late-twenties, I am expanding my Korean vocabulary for illness and for wildness. At the kitchen table, she asks about Dad’s 치료, she complains about the 까매기 grackles, approves of the Black Lives Matter시위, and frets over our bulk delivery of 가지 from Baldor’s.
The cherry blossom tree 벗꽃 that my maternal grandmother planted is the first in our backyard to flower. It has been a long time since I’ve witnessed the seasons in one place. My mom likes to plant citrus trees—not meant for our temperate climate—in great optimism. The lemon trees and orange trees have died. (She blames the gardener.) Only the persimmon tree has lasted. As well as the grape, which miraculously will not die, and stretches its pale wood and its vines outward. These surround our back porch, which is painted lilac.
–
My father’s illness progresses, but we walk into the woods. He finally sees the walking trails for the first time. Cuckoos tap at the wood. I see blue jays and cardinals glide across the foliage. He pauses in front of a robin, startled and delighted at how it proudly perches on a branch above and its throat bursts into song. I try to point out the different plants and animals I know. Mom knows more. She loves the soil here. “It’s so rich!” She conspires to bring a wheelbarrow with her next time.
On one walk to the preserve as a family, my heart drops when I see that they’ve (who?) razed the wild plants that provided homes to the songbirds. Where there were vines taller than me, there are four naked birdhouses that stand 12-feet apart in the dried, dead grass. And I see countless birds hopping around, looking lost.
Mom, on the other hand, inhales deeply and exclaims, “Ah, this is so refreshing.”
–
One Thursday in April, Dad is in intolerable pain and rushed to urgent care. That Saturday, Mom—in her usual spontaneity—acts on a tip from her younger sister about a vegetable sale. The nearby Hanyang, a Korean grocery, has new stock of vegetable starts. She flies out of the house, so we can start our own vegetable garden on the porch. “We have to grow what we want to eat! Can’t depend on the groceries anymore!” she insists and returns with vegetables starts. Eggplant 가지, tomatoes, cucumbers 오이, zucchini호박, Korean green peppers, sesame leaves 깻잎. They join our rosemary, leek 대파, 파, cilantro, parsley, and chive. We also now have lettuce so we can eat 쌈 or wraps.
We open the garage door and find the shovels, watering cans, and gloves that my maternal grandmother, an avid gardener, left behind before she moved back to Korea. We transfer the starts into the large pots full of pebbles and soil, and leave them on the porch. Later I harvest the sesame leaves, which grow the fastest. My mom and sister deep fry them in glutinous rice flour or stuff them with tuna and sautee them in egg wash. Then comes the persimmon tree 감 and the hot pink roses 장미.
Earth medicine. For when Dad can come back home.
–
The days without him stretch to a week, the weeks into a month. I lift my face and plead, I’m not ready. Not yet. I stop and look up at the trees. Their limbs stretch upward, and their trunks are thick. The trees are so old. These woods contain 400 trees, such as oak, maple, apple, horse chestnut, walnut and locust. I often wonder what they have seen; what a tree’s perspective on human’s life is like. I think they must find us amusing, troubling. My favorite trees are the horse chestnuts, or conkers, which spread their generous shade across the walking path. Someone years ago fastened iron guards at the trunks to prevent people from sawing through them. Their trunks now merge with the iron. I hope that the trees will outlive us too.
Dad is still in the hospital when I walk out one sunny afternoon to the meadows: I find in place of the razed hay, the soil so rich that the greenery has sprung back. Like this earth, I hope, his bone marrow will also spring healthy cells.
Mom identified the wild mugwort in the fields. 쑥; their leaves are dark green and undersides a milky silver. I learn later these are a non-native invasive species to the meadow. But Koreans sea mothers rub this on their goggles to keep them from fogging underwater. They chew it to prevent nausea. It makes me happy when I learn that a plant common to the Korean peninsula is here; we grind it into fine powder and put it in our rice cakes—a bitter, earthy taste I never liked as a child. But this wild mugwort, now knee-high, makes me consider who belongs on this land.
(4)
“All the trees in South Korea are very young,” Uncle told me last autumn. I sat in the passenger seat as he drove us eastward through a tunnel that punctured Mount Jiri. He was bringing us to the easternmost point of the peninsula where Koreans gather to greet the new year’s sun. “The guerilla fighters used to hide within the crags and caves of the mountains. During the war, the UN and US planes dropped bombs, scorching these forests and trees.” Later I find black-and-white photographs of the mountaintops; they look scalped. Uncle explains, “All these trees you see outside, they were planted by hand after the war.”
During a time of hostility against Asians in the US, I am all the more aware of our dark hair and our masks marking us as a target. Images of people who could be my uncle with bloodied faces appear on my timelines. I walk faster past the homes with a pickup truck and an American flag. I walk faster past the Jeep with a Marines bumper sticker and the policeman’s home. When a passing stranger smiles ‘Hello’ and shouts that their dog ‘IS FRIENDLY’, or when a white mother and daughter cross to the other side of the street, I only feel relief.
But I keep walking. Few people enter the woods and meadows of the Preserve, choosing to stay on the grassy lawns.
–
Image courtesy of the author.
The land has been “unused,” the Port Washington Greens website says, from the time of the local Matinecock Indians—an Algonquin people—to the Dutch and English colonial settlers and farmers. The Matinecock Indians called it “Sint Sink” meaning “Place of Many Stones.” And the English renamed it “Cow’s Neck” after the common grazing pastures. And then it was called “Sands Point” by the Guggenheim family and was “in use” by these Gold Coast families of the 1920s. Today it is the property of the Port Washington school district.
–
Cross the wildflower meadow, Middle Neck Road, and walk about 30 minutes along the perimeter of the golf course, and you’ll find the entrance to the Sands Point Preserve. For $15, you can see the castle (completed in 1902) where we held our high school prom, and get a “glimpse into the grand lifestyle of the country’s industrial titans.”
Sands Point gets its name from sand mining days. Over 20,000 years ago, glaciers left behind the mounds of gravel and sand that form the cliffs of the Long Island Sound. During the turn of the century, its fine-grained sands were heavily mined, transported in barges, and used to form Manhattan island. The Guggenheims literally built their wealth on sand. The glinting skyscrapers of New York City and these families’ sky-high fortunes were from the labor of sand miners and this earth. Port’s sands were used to construct the sidewalks, skyscrapers, water tunnels, subway tunnels and infrastructure of New York City. Enough sand to cover the Empire State Building and extend from the East River to the Hudson River, and from 14th street to 59th.
This is the old-money East Egg. The Great Gatsby was set here. This is where Daisy and Tom Buchanan lived, and Fitzgerald partied. An area of American aspiration and tragedy. Here is where the green light and orgiastic future seduced Jay Gatsby from across the bay.
–
Unlike them, I want to slowly learn the names of the trees and plants in the wildflower meadow. I want to learn about the Matinecock Indians who lived here for hundreds of years before the so-called titans of industry. The meadow is home to at least 100 species of plants and wildflowers, native and non-native to our area. The most prominent native plant is the common milkweed and butterflyweed that support the Monarch butterflies. There are also goldenrods, purple flowering asters, little blue stem grass.
I hear there’s also dozens of edible and medicinal plants with interesting folklore, including wild grapes, sassafras, raspberries, blackberries, spicebush, dandelion, plantains, jewelweed, burdock, and chickweed. I spy hawks circling the woods and hear mourning doves and woodpeckers.
I watch as nature unfurls itself on our back porch. At first I can’t distinguish the cucumber and squash plants from each other in our garden. But their flowers teach me.
(5)
My father is back home. His body is weaker and betrays him often, but he keeps moving. Though it’s easy to curl inward in grief, the trees have taught me that we are not isolated in crisis. There is life in the midst of death.
When I cross the school fields again, the vast lawn crunches beneath my feet; it’s yellow for lack of water—the color of desert. Summer is here. My father’s former body is not. The birds are quieter these days with the roar of planes overhead.
Post script: January 2022. Through the miracles of science and medicine, my dad is alive and well. When I cut through the meadows, I see plane after plane soar across the sky. I am preparing now to move from Long Island to 대만, and I feel this uprooting more keenly than my past moves. Goodbye to these conker trees, the mugwort, the milkweed. East goes west, west goes east.