Dream Coat

by Leona Sevick

I get to forty eight and stop counting. Laying each coat on the bed, shoulder to shoulder, they make a heaping, unruly camel’s back that could topple over at any moment. Again and again I return to the closet, lift out a different coat, search all the pockets, drop the hanger in the bag and spread it on the pile. My aunt and cousin are coming tomorrow to choose what they like; the rest will go to the Korean church where my aunt serves as deacon. My mother had every imaginable cut, color, and fabric of coat: red peacoats, puffy shin-length parkas, brown leather bombers, furry-hooded numbers, yellow waterproof slickers, trench coats, overcoats, duffels, ponchos—all clean and practically unworn. Like Doc Graham in Field of Dreams, who couldn’t pass up a new blue hat for his wife Alicia on his walk home from the office, my mother could not pass up a new coat, especially one on sale. Every year she would hand her sister and friends clothes she’d bought and worn once or not at all. Dead at seventy-six from the stroke she suffered during surgery to remove the cancer that had returned, painfully, to the roof of her mouth, my mother was more than just a keen shopper. I stopped counting her coats when I realized that the number made no difference to me; it told me nothing more than what I already knew about her.

That my mother was something of a mystery to me might surprise the people who knew her (or thought they knew her) best. A South Korean immigrant, she came to the United States with my soldier father in 1970. They had met and married in Korea, where my brother was born, and they were married still when she died two years ago. Our parents loved each other very much, and my father adored this tiny, beautiful woman who spit when she talked and who lost her temper easily, sometimes violently. In a fight, my mother threw lamps, ashtrays, heavy books, or really anything at hand. She was also preternaturally strong; years of working in a factory with her arms above her head knotted her biceps and shoulders in hard muscles. Once, in an argument with my then teenaged brother, she stabbed his hand with a metal nailfile, a story that my father continues to downplay if not outright deny. Still, we knew she loved us, even though most nights she retreated quickly to her bedroom after dinner and slept until she had to wake at 4 a.m. to go to the factory.

Today I recognize that my mother was depressed in those early years. Even after her mother and siblings joined her in America (a promise made and kept by her soldier husband), she was not happy. With limited English language skills, the only job she was able to get in the small, rural town where my father settled us was at a sewing factory that made brightly colored patches for uniforms. Battalions of marines, benches full of Chicago Cubs, and troop after troop of Boy Scouts passed through her fingers in the twenty-five years she worked there. For most of those years she was one of only two workers who was not white. While many of them came to accept and trust her over time, two of the women becoming lifelong friends, the work never got easier. It was this job that eventually killed her— the invisible, rainbow colored carcinogenic fibers floated through the air and lodged in the lungs, in the eye cavities, and in my mother’s case, in the adenoids. She had a dozen painful, disfiguring surgeries that ravaged her once strong body and marred her lovely face. Eventually the company packed up its machines and left our small town to return to China, and in its wake it left a trail of cancers, some common, hers quite rare. She worked long shifts standing on machines five feet above the ground with her arms moving above her head. The endless locomotive sounds of those mechanical looms were deafening, and the needles that periodically broke off and lodged in her hands necessitated a visit to old Doc Thompson, who extracted the needle pieces and sewed her up quickly so she didn’t miss too many piece work hours. It’s my mother’s hands I picture most often when I let myself think of her. They were ageless, smooth with deep nailbeds that curved into an almond shape. She cared for her nails like a professional, and I never saw them chipped or dirty or carelessly painted. When we were kids we once told our mother “You should be a hand model!” She laughed loudly, spitting and snorting and wondering, no doubt, just how a factory worker from Taneytown, Maryland would find herself a hand modeling job.

My mother raised me and my brother in ways that are typical of immigrant mothers, especially Asian ones. She tigered us along, sending us to Catholic grade and high schools and paying for piano and guitar lessons, urging us to sign up for clubs and other edifying activities. I know now that no one reveled in our successes more than she, and on days when we had an event or open house at school, she would take the day off from her job, losing a day’s pay, dress in her best clothes, make up her face expertly, and come to school to sit among the white, smiling parents listening to us recite or perform. I knew she hardly understood what was said, as she not only struggled with English but was deaf in one ear from untreated childhood mumps. We thought her the most beautiful mother in the room. Our teachers, the nuns, would always say so when she left. “Isn’t she beautiful?” they’d chirp, “Just like a China doll!”

No doubt my mother was lonely back then. I don’t know how old I was when my mother met her first real friend in America—another Korean immigrant who married a white man and moved to our small town. Sometime in my childhood, Yon Ok began coming to our home on Friday nights to play hwatu, the black, white, and red plastic cards slapping together on the homemade blanket they laid on the floor for this purpose. My grandmother, my halmoni, would join them, and together they would laugh and play and gossip. On those evenings, my mother seemed happy, and so the rest of us were happy, too. I was an adult before I heard the story of how Yon Ok came into our lives.  My father, now a state trooper, was driving in his cruiser along a deserted stretch of road just outside of town. He spotted Yon Ok walking along the road and turned around. She was terrified when he got out of the car, and then he spoke to her in his limited Korean. “Urdi manura hanguk sadam ee ay yoh.” “My wife is Korean.”  Yon Ok is from an island off of mainland Korea—Jeju—and looks and sounds different from other Koreans we know. I asked my father how he knew she was Korean, and he said he guessed. It saddens me now to think of how frightened she must have been when this tall, hazel-eyed police officer driving a loud Crown Vic rolled up on her. It makes me laugh thinking how terrible his Korean must have sounded to her!

I’m not sure if my mother would have stayed here in America if my father hadn’t found her a friend. I know she wouldn’t have taken my brother and me—two hapas—back to Korea with her; she loved us too much to subject us to the scrutiny and harassment we would have faced there. But maybe she thought about leaving us in the care of our more-than-capable father. In any case, we never had to find out, as Yon Ok became our auntie and my mother’s best friend for more than fifty years—a ballast with the open, giving heart of a true friend.

When I say that I didn’t really know my mother very well, I mean I suspect she had an interior life she did not share with me. In high school and college, when I became deeply interested in the interior lives of fictional characters, I talked about my mother so infrequently that many of my friends thought she was absent or dead. Might she have shared some of her private hopes and dreams, her disappointments and desires with my father? Or with her friends? Maybe. But with me she kept her own counsel, which is not to say that she was quiet about what she wanted me to do or to be. Like the speaker’s mother in Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” my mother issued commands like a boss. Here’s what she said (correcting for grammar, diction, and translating all the Korean words she’d grind into her sentences like coarse salt): “Don’t grow your fingernails long or paint your lips red.” “Don’t marry a man who is less educated than you.” “Don’t let people see you without your face on.” “Make your own money.” “Finish every grain of rice in your bowl.” “Don’t buy cheap shoes.” “Take care of your skin.” “Let the children eat whatever they want and as much as they want.” “Pull your shoulders back and stand up straight!”(this one well into my forties). I’m grateful that my mother never followed these commands with unnecessary explanations. These I provided for myself:  “Do not look like the whore you are not.” “A man who thinks you’re smarter than he is will fail you.” “Don’t let them know all of who you are.” “Money is freedom.” “Waste is a sin.” “You’re worth more than that.” “Take care of yourself, too.” “Be generous with the people who love you.” “Be proud of yourself and who you are.” She never said these things to me, but over time I came to understand that this is what she wanted me to know.

Amy Tan taught us that Asian mothers sandbag their children’s accomplishments and underplay their successes in public, secretly celebrating every win like a gold nugget under a shell. Right after college my friend and I went to see “The Joy Luck Club” together, and I exclaimed much too loudly in the middle of that theater, “See! This is exactly what my mother does!” It was a eureka moment, one that made me feel less isolated in a world where most of the people I knew had “normal” mothers who did not scold them so harshly and were outwardly proud of them.

Like many immigrants, my mother grew up in poverty. She was born in1945 in Nagoya, Japan, three months to the day before the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, an attack that killed 35,000 people, including two thousand Koreans. Her parents were ethnic Koreans living in Japan, chosen-jin, and my grandmother spoke Korean with, according to my mother, a “Japanese accent.” Details of how they came to live there or what their lives were like remain a mystery to me to this day; if my father knows, he’s not telling. The only thing my mother ever told me about Japan was that she remembered leaving the country in the dark by boat, her toddler fingers trailing in the water. I’m not even sure this is true. I’d wanted to talk with my grandmother about what her life was like in Japan, but my mother discouraged me from doing this. “She doesn’t want to talk about that,” she’d say, “Halmoni lives here now.”  My mind has traveled down a hundred paths of possibility, terrible imaginings stoked by graphic documentaries and fiction by writers like Chang-rae Lee and Kim Ronyoung. That my mother and grandmother talked about their lives in Korea—lives of hunger and personal tragedy—with nostalgia and fondness suggests that life in Japan must have been very bad indeed.

The stories my mother told me about growing up in Korea were fragmented and incomplete. Her way of telling us about her life was twisting and strange, and as a child and then a teenager I never had the patience to put her stories together into a coherent narrative. I was too busy burying myself in other people’s “well-crafted” stories. Growing up in a rural area, my brother and I must have read nearly every book in the small public library in town. We did not show sustained interest in our own family’s history. The only handholds I have on my mother’s life before she met my father are death stories: who died and how. My grandfather died when my mother was an adolescent; felled by infection after receiving some kind of wound; there was limited medical care in Korea after the war. The story of how he was injured (a bullet? a glass cut?) sometimes changed in her stories, and I could never corroborate these facts with my grandmother, who, we were again told, “didn’t want to remember.” I have seen one picture of him: a black and white photo of a stern-faced man in dark glasses that would be thought fashionable today; he has a long, angular jaw and thick black hair. He and my grandmother had six children, two of whom died of childhood diseases and one who drowned in a lake at seventeen. The little girls died before my mother was born, but the boy, my mother’s younger brother and the jewel of the family, died when she was nineteen.  According to my mother, our grandmother was institutionalized for a time after his death. I could never imagine my sweet, smiling halmoni in such a state, but when she herself died at ninety-two after a difficult gall bladder surgery, I saw my own mother lose her mind at the funeral, clawing after the coffin and calling out to her mother, her unseeing eyes enormous and glazed. I somehow knew this would be the case, and I was grateful I had decided to leave my children at home when my husband and I attended the funeral. After my mother died, my father told me that his only comfort was knowing that she’d never have to see another person she loved die, and I am comforted by this mercy, too.

From time to time I find myself thinking about all I didn’t know about my mother. We were not what most people today would call close when I was growing up; we did not confide in each other or spend hours together; we were not physically affectionate with one another, did not hug and kiss each other; we shared almost no interests outside of our love for clothes and shoes. I loved to read, to exercise, to try different kinds of foods; she loved to nap, to shop, to sing. Today I suspect my college-bound daughter would say the very same about me: like my mother, I keep my own counsel, and my interests are very different from hers. But after my son was born, my mother seemed to become, in a way that seems cliché, a completely different person. She became a doting, patient halmoni who carried my son around the house on her back wrapped in a blanket—Korean style—while I finished writing my dissertation in an upstairs bedroom. She and I would take my son on outings to shops and malls, pushing him in his stroller as his chubby feet bounced up and down. We would stop for lunch, and I never saw my mother happier than when she was feeding him, pushing fingerfuls of food between his greedy lips. She seemed incapable of denying him anything, her early years of privation undone with every bite she gave him, every toy she bought him, every kiss she gave him. My mother’s generosity was boundless, extending beyond this boy as she pressed into their hands whatever clothes or goods her friends or near strangers admired, insisting that things should be possessed by those who recognized their worth.

Some years ago my husband and I had a crisis in our marriage, the kind that also seems cliché. When I told my parents, my father’s response was just what I expected it to be: he told me he would help me no matter what I chose to do. My mother’s response surprised me. This boisterous, opinionated woman who had told me what to do my entire life in loud, colorful commands said nothing as she sat close beside me on the floor where I was organizing the plastic containers, the pots and pans, the spices in the lower cabinets, tears streaming down my face and sobs shaking my shoulders. We sat like that for a very long time. She slid close beside me each time I moved, pushing against me like a beloved dog. When I’d finished and stood, she stood and turned toward the door to go, and I asked her, “Well? Aren’t you going to tell me what to do?” “No.” she said, “You already know what to do,” and then she left. We never spoke of it again, and from that day she quietly accepted all of my decisions no matter how painful they must have been for her. When I packed up my family and took a job in a new state, she supported me. When I finally sold the house that stood next to hers, she said not a word.

Since her death I’ve done a few things that would have surprised her.  Although I’d been thinking about getting a tattoo for years, I waited until my mother died to mark my body in this way—a way she would have hated. I was never sure exactly why she hated tattoos, but I suspected she thought they were common, an emblem of the wearers’ lack of imagination or limited opportunity. But shortly after she died I made an appointment with a reputable tattoo artist in town. For more than an hour he scratched ink into the inside of my bicep with the Korean word for “mother,” another cliché.  I also had him scatter some Japanese cherry blossoms behind and around it to honor my grandmother. The work was slow and probably painful, given the thickness of the lettering, but I have as little memory of that experience as I do the pain of giving birth. I suppose I wanted some physical manifestation of the pain of losing her, which I had not come to terms with. As for the tattoo, I’d like to think she would have accepted this decision as well, although I’m doubtful. It’s more likely she would have scolded me for it.

I know what my mother wanted for me and my brother. She wanted us to be successful in our chosen careers and to be happy with our choices, and we have more or less achieved these things. Sometimes I find myself wondering what my mother’s dreams for herself were. She had a beautiful singing voice, and years ago my father bought her a karaoke machine that she set up in her sitting room. When she was well, she would sing along to the Korean songs that she loved. Some days she would watch Korean singing competitions on cable television, and I wondered if she pictured herself in these competitions, surprising the audience with her skills and winning all the prizes.

As I work through the third and final closet, I think about how my mother’s excesses might look to the outside world. I have friends who are nuns, or had been once, and all of their possessions would fit easily into a shower stall. From time to time I toy with the idea of taking a hiatus from my clothes buying. Ann Patchett’s 2017 essay “My Year of No Shopping” describes the gifts of this privileged austerity. While I don’t consider myself to be someone with an addictive personality, I do get the kind of dopamine rush gamblers must feel at a black jack table, the chips piled high and the dealer cool as pewter. Just after my mother died, I rid my house of every Garnet Hill, Talbots, and J.Crew catalog, unsubscribed from every website I used to buy her gifts from. I could not bear the thought of buying anything she couldn’t admire, fingering the fabric and asking how much I paid for it. Slowly I’ve worked my way back to buying, and while it may seem convenient to say it makes me feel closer to her, it does. I’ll also state the obvious point that my mother bought so many coats, clothes, and shoes because she had too little of these things when she was growing up.

One of the few stories she told me about her childhood took place when she was six or seven years old. My grandmother had made and sold handmade noodles for months to buy my mother a new wool coat, replacing a worn one she’d outgrown. She loved her new “dream coat,” clapping it on immediately and parading around the yard. But at school there was a younger girl who had no coat at all, and so my mother gave her the coat and returned home, shivering and blue. My grandmother was furious, taking her by the hand and marching her back to school to retrieve the coat. To comfort this child, who was worse off than they, my grandmother gave the girl some apples, which she gratefully accepted. Corroborating this tale, my grandmother laughed at my mother’s innocent disregard for her months of hard work, but she was clearly proud of the generosity that persisted in her oldest daughter. Acquisition made my mother feel safe, but giving away what she had made her happy.

Sorting through the final items, I find a clutch purse I’d never seen before and couldn’t imagine my mother using. In it is a wad of cash. As I hand the cash to my father, he laughs and says he has no idea why she put it in there. “Your mother was full of surprises,” he says, and I nod in agreement.

About the Author

Leona Sevick is the Press 53 Poetry Award Winner for her first full-length book of poems, Lion Brothers. Her work appears in Orion, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird, The Southern Review, and The Sun. She was a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Fellow for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and serves as advisory board member of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center. She is provost and professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature. Her new book of poems, The Bamboo Wife, is forthcoming in 2024 from Trio House Press.

Website: www.leonasevick.com

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