The Queen of Tears Read Free Page A

most celebrated actresses in Korea during the late fifties and early sixties. She had married a famous movie producer when she was seventeen, then after he died, she married a former Korean-American GI. The GI brought her to America with her two children. The second marriage had its ups and downs, and after the birth of their child, the actress found herself back in Korea, allegedly having an affair with a then-local politician and party leader, now one of the most powerful men in South Korea. The well-publicized affair had lasted only several months, then the actress returned to her American husband. In Korea they called this actress: “Noon Mul Ui Yau Wang.” The Queen of Tears. Won Ju called her: “amah.” Mother.
    Someone tapped Won Ju’s back. It was her fourteen-year-old son, Brandon. “Hey, Ma, I’m gonna go to the mall.”
    “Did you ask your father?” she asked, with her accented English.
    Her son’s dark face looked tired. “He’s sleeping.”
    “Well, I don’t know. You know your grandma just came in today. We were going to have dinner with her tonight.”
    “Don’t worry, I’ll be back home by six. There’s this computer game I wanna check out.”
    Another computer game. Her son spent so much time in front of his computer. “Maybe you should wait for your father to wake up.”
    “Ma!”
    “O.K., O.K. Do you need money?”
    Her son shrugged. She walked to her purse and gave Brandon forty dollars. Before his tall, spindly body left the living room, she asked, “Wasn’t your grandmother pretty?”
    Without looking back, he said, “Yeah, I guess.”
    She looked back up at the poster. She wondered why she looked so different from her mother. Won Ju was a little taller, darker, and more voluptuous. Her face seemed to lack the ability to communicate profound conflict or deep feeling. She had a natural poker face, which many mistook as dullness or stupidity. In fact, during most of her waking moments, her head was like a can of soda that she couldn’t keep herself from shaking.
    Though her darker looks and natural curves had made many men salivate in the past, she still felt fat and ugly compared to her mother. Looking back up at the poster, she saw the porcelain skin, the petite body, and the face that could reflect three different emotions at the same time. Compared to this woman, and to the soap-opera life she’d lived, Won Ju did not feel very dynamic. She felt like a ten-dollar amusement-park teddy bear compared to a thousand-dollar porcelain doll. The Queen of Hugs, not The Queen of Tears.
    Won Ju turned around and walked to the kitchen. She had scrubbed the tiled floor and counters twice earlier in the day, but she felt like she needed to go over it again. She laughed. A forty-one-year-old woman still trying to please her mother. She shrugged, opened the cupboard under the kitchen sink, and took out the tile cleaner and rags. She got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the white tile, square by square. There were a couple of faint, beige stains on one tile square that, no matter how hard she scrubbed, would not come out.
    When she was done, Won Ju put the tile cleaner and rags away, and decided to vacuum the carpet in the living room again. But before she started, she remembered that she needed to feed the fish. The rectangular thirty-gallon fish tank, which was her son’s birthday present from his father two years ago, had only three fish in it. There were two tiger oscars, one about ten inches long, the other about a half a foot long, and one clown loach, a striped bottom-feeder that kept the tank clean. Won Ju unscrewed the cap of the fish food and sprinkled the pellets into the water. The oscars immediately went for the small, floating spheres, especially the big one. The big, black lips of the big one broke the surface of the water.
    Won Ju didn’t like these fish. They were such pigs. The oscars, dull, black fish with orange blotches on their sides, had voracious appetites.