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Authors: Suki Kim

BOOK: The Interpreter
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For a second, Suzy notices Mrs. Choi’s fingers clutching the edge of the seat. Then a curt response: “I stabbed a girl.” Suzy hesitates before translating. She tries to think of a softer word for “stab” in English, but there is no such thing. Mrs. Choi did not mean it softly.
The lawyer seems frustrated by her response. He wants descriptions. Details. Whatever it would take to clarify the picture.
“Let me rephrase the question; please tell us the circumstances surrounding the incident in question.”
“She was a customer, and I stabbed her,” Mrs. Choi answers with not much feeling. And definitely no regret.
“I understand. But could you tell us how the situation specifically arose, or what exchange you had with this customer whom you claim to have stabbed?” He is losing patience. He knew that she would not be an easy witness. Legal Aid had warned him. Despite the language barrier, it is not hard to see that the woman has little interest in saving herself.
Suzy is also losing patience, adding at end of the lawyer’s question,
Please say more. This might be your last chance.
“I was making fruit cups and I saw the girl stealing.”
“And then what happened?”
“I stabbed her in her shoulder with the knife I was using to cut fruit.”
“Mrs. Choi, isn’t it true that the girl punched you repeatedly before you pulled out the knife?”
“Objection!” the INS attorney barks. “The counsel is leading the respondent. Besides, the respondent has already served her sentence. The respondent is not summoned to this court for her crime; she’s here because she is deportable!”
“Your Honor, it is very relevant. Her crime is exactly why she has been deemed deportable.”
“Overruled, but, Counsel, I will not allow these types of questions for much longer.” A warning. Judge Williams wants this show to be over with. Three more cases to go today: two asylum petitions, one status adjustment. Pardon them one year, detention centers get jammed tenfold in the following year. Is America up for grabs? Judge Williams adjusts his glasses, which slide down again almost immediately.
“Thank you, Your Honor. Mrs. Choi, did the girl you claimed to have stabbed provoke you in any way? Such as insulting you with racial slurs or attacking you physically?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Mrs. Choi, if you would please look at Exhibit A, in front of you, which is the transcript of your testimony from the criminal hearing that took place on January 30, 1998, you will find that you testified that the sixteen-year-old victim had stolen a six-pack of beer and a case of cherries and then called you ‘Fucking Chink’ several times, among other racial slurs, and then proceeded to punch you repeatedly in the face. Is that correct?”
It is then that Suzy remembers the headline from a few years back. “KOREAN WOMAN STABS BLACK TEENAGE GIRL FOR CHERRIES.” It was all over the papers. The girl was out of the hospital in a few weeks, but boycotts spread like wildfire against Korean fruit-and-vegetable stores in Harlem and the Bronx. The
New York Post
called it the “Return of Rodney King”; Reverend Al Sharpton exhorted his people to fight back; 1010-WINS updated the news every half-hour. Suzy remembers the photograph of the distraught woman surrounded by a mob of reporters. Is that why she seems familiar? Where are those reporters now? Do people forget so quickly?
“Mrs. Choi, your silence is not helping,” Judge Williams interrupts
finally. “You do realize that, in the case of a green-card holder, an aggravated felony is grounds for removal?”
Without a glance at the bench, Mrs. Choi responds, “I’ve served almost three years in jail. I’ve lost everything. My husband, my daughter, my store. If that didn’t kill me, nothing else will.” It is the most she’s spoken so far. But self-destructive. No use confessing her heart to a judge who never grants relief, or to the trial attorney sent by the INS. Yet Suzy has no choice but to translate.
Her lawyer then puts the cap back on his pen with an obvious look of irritation and fatigue. “I have no further questions,” he sighs. Pointless trying to establish her as the victim, as the one who’s lived here for a quarter of a century, whose husband and daughter are still very much alive in this country, for whom being removed permanently means being torn away from a home.
Then the INS attorney perks up, grabbing her notes: “I have a few questions.” Suzy winces as she translates her words—the trial attorney from the INS, the source of everything that had gone wrong with her parents. “Madam, where is your daughter?”
Mrs. Choi then raises her eyes for the very first time. Dead eyes. Nothing there, Suzy notices. Nothing left over.
“Isn’t it true that she ran away from home when she was seventeen?”
The question shoots out of nowhere and sticks. Suzy stumbles, as though it is her mother being examined, accused, sentenced.
Isn’t it true that your daughter abandoned you because she couldn’t stand you?
“Isn’t it also true that, before she left home, she had filed a complaint against your husband, Mr. Choi, for physical abuse, in which she alleged that he beat you as well?”
Mrs. Choi’s face reveals nothing. Theirs was not a happy home, obviously, which is exactly what the INS attorney wants Judge Williams to consider. No one’s breaking their home. They did that for themselves. Green cards were never meant for such undesirables.
“And isn’t it also true that you have not once seen your husband, Mr. Choi, since the day you stabbed the girl in your store, almost three years ago?” The INS attorney fixes her gaze on Mrs. Choi for a few seconds, and then turns to Judge Williams. “Your Honor, I have no further questions.”
The INS attorney spoke the truth on her cell phone earlier. Judge Williams’s ruling is only a formality. Relief was never a possibility. Deportation had begun the minute she stabbed that girl. She should’ve known better. Immigrants are not Americans. Permanent residency is never permanent. Anything can happen. A teenage thief on one unlucky night. A pair of INS informers eyeing your store. A secret murder that is not so secret anymore. And Suzy, sitting across from the INS attorney on the twelfth floor of the INS building, about to translate a deportation sentence for a Korean woman exactly her mother’s age.
When Judge Williams announces the removal date, Suzy chokes. Her voice is suddenly gone. She inhales deeply and then swallows once, twice. All faces are on her. Then she hears it again. The quiet murmur from Mrs. Choi.
Namuamitabul Kuansaeumbosal.
It’s the Buddhist chant Mom used to utter when Suzy got sick. It always made her feel better. A lullaby. A dead woman’s song.
“HELLO, this is the Interpreter Hotline Services.”
“Hello, this is a message for Korean interpreter Suzy Park.”
“Hello, Suzy Park, please report to Job Number 009.”
She presses “Delete” after each message. It is no longer possible. An interpreter cannot pick sides. Once she does, something slips, a certain fine cord that connects English to Korean and Korean to English without hesitation, or a hint of anger.
For the past three days, the phone kept ringing while she lay in bed. Michael, pleading into her machine. Even in her deepest dreams, she heard his sighs. He would fume, demand that she answer. Then, half an hour later, a softer, sweeter,
Suzy, please.
His calls stopped overnight, which could mean only one thing. He must be back in Connecticut. Even Michael would not dare calling his mistress during a Thanksgiving dinner.
A half-dozen messages have been left by Detective Lester. Suddenly he is eager to get to the bottom of the case. With each call, he seems increasingly confident that he is closing in, although
the three ex-KK suspects are still claiming that it was a setup. He has no doubt that he could convict the gang of firstdegree murder, although he seems unaware of their link to the Korean grocers. He never lets Suzy in on her parents’ backdealings with the INS, or with the police.
The girl from the accountant’s office has called more than once. “Grace is missing,” she squealed into the machine. “Grace still hasn’t come by to sign the papers. Please call us back as soon as possible.”
What is curious is how unmoved Suzy is, how unmotivated she is to pick up the phone. Instead, she is overcome by sleep. Her insomnia seems to have been miraculously cured. All she does now is sleep. No cigarette break. No water break. In between come those voices trailing off into the machine, voices from far away, voices belonging to dreams. The dream of the interpreter who no longer remembers her language.
“Hello, Miss Park?”
A woman, with a Jersey accent.
“Hi, this is Rose Goldman. I’m not sure if I have the right number.”
Ms. Goldman. The English teacher subbing for Grace. Suzy reaches for the receiver.
“I hope I’m not calling at a bad time. I thought I’d just leave a message. I was sure you’d be gone for Thanksgiving.” She must realize that Suzy, like Grace, has no family. “Oh, Koreans don’t celebrate our Thanksgiving, please pardon me. I have so many Korean students, I should know.” Ms. Goldman seems embarrassed at having been caught alone on Thanksgiving, although she is the one who called.
“Have you … heard from Grace?” Suzy asks, unable to shake off the persistent fatigue.
“No, not yet. But with Thanksgiving and all, the school’s out until next week anyway.”
Suzy is not sure why she is relieved. No news must be good news. Or is it?
“But yesterday, I remembered something. It’s really nothing, but it bothered me. I don’t know why, just a silly little thing.”
“Yes?”
“Do you remember how I told you that I found it odd that her boyfriend was in the music business?” Rose Goldman sounds almost bubbly now, like a suburban housewife flipping through her copy of
Redbook.
“I finally remembered why. I remembered some kids saying that he was missing a finger on his right hand. And being a musician—although, now that I think about it, he could be a producer or something—but a musician with a missing finger is a bit strange, don’t you think?”
They once each cut off their little fingers to honor their brotherhood, copying that crazy Yakuza ritual.
Closing her eyes, Suzy counts to three before firing the question: “Was it the little finger he was missing?”
“How did you know? Yes, that’s what the kids said, like those famous gangsters in Hong Kong movies!”
DJ.
The last member of the Fearsome Four.
The one who split on his own after the gang’s breakup.
The one smuggled into the country through the KK’s adoption fraud.
An orphan, with no ties in the world but for Grace.
DJ was supposed to have been deported in November 1995, right around the time of her parents’ shooting. Perfect timing, being sent back to Korea right after the crime. But, then, how is it possible that an ex-gang member who’d been deported reappears five years later, flaunting his BMW, picking up Grace after school? Why would Grace disappear with him? Why did Grace call Detective Lester out of the blue?
What was it that Detective Lester had said?
It’s got KK fingerprints
all over it. The way they do away with their enemies. The exactness of the shooting.
But the gang claimed that they were set up. They said that her parents were already dead when they arrived at the scene. According to Kim Yong Su, the grocers had never ordered KK to kill. If neither the ones who hired the gang nor the gang themselves had murder on their minds, is it possible that the murder might have been committed by someone else, with an entirely different motive? Someone intimate with the gang, who knew about their mission on that morning in 1995, who was not afraid to frame them? Yet who would have been clever enough to come up with such a plan?
The brave one. Someone so righteous that eliminating them would’ve been a necessity
.
Suzy recalls the other clever setup. Maria Sutpen and her daughter, Grace, and a doll, Suzie, a cozy family portrait in her parents’ final house. The little girl seemed happy, as neither Grace nor Suzy had ever been. It is an odd way for things to turn out. Their final house in America given away to a stranger. A half-blooded Korean woman, Dad would have balked.
Since when do you care about their wishes?
But what they had wanted was not Montauk, not Damian, not Michael, not mistress Suzy, not Christian Grace, definitely not a gang member with a missing finger.
Suzy begins pacing the floor. The cigarette smells of gasoline. She stubs it out instantly. She glances at the ashtray filled with barely smoked cigarettes. Then it comes back to her.
He won’t crawl back to her. Definitely a changed man.
Grabbing her bag from the kitchen table, she pulls out a thin volume of stapled sheets,
1.5 Generation,
the student magazine from Fort Lee High School. She flips the pages and finds the photo of the car that belongs to the “dude rich enough for Miss Park,” BMW M5, the same kind she’d seen parked outside Santos
Pizza this past Saturday. Running to the closet, she rifles through the coats on the rack. Which one did she wear on that rainy day? Then, in one of the pockets, her fingers close on a crumpled piece of paper. She beeps the number and waits by the phone. It takes no more than a few minutes. These women waste no time getting back to clients. Even on Thanksgiving Day, which means absolutely nothing to an aging Korean prostitute.
“Mina here, someone beep me?” Her voice sounds noticeably husky, which must be her professional tone.
“Hi, I met you the other day,” Suzy stammers.
“Hey,” the woman cajoles in a low whisper, “don’t be shy. We’ve got girls for all kinds of clients.”
“No, no, no, that’s not it.” Then, hesitantly, “This is … Maddog’s girl.”
“Who? Oh, I remember now.” Her voice sinks.
“Johnny …” Suzy says nervously. “When you said that he was a changed man, did he, by any chance, also change his name?”
“Jesus, is that why you beeped me?”
“Sorry, it’s important.”
“What does this have to do with you?” She sounds irritated, yawning loudly into the receiver before answering: “Of course Johnny’s not the real name, no one in this business uses a real name, you think ‘Maddog’ is real?”
The BMW. The gang connection. The room salon in Queens. She does not even have to ask the next question.
“Did he use to call himself DJ?”
“So why you bothering me if you know the answer?” She is about to hang up when Suzy jumps in.
“What did Johnny do to cross Maddog years ago?”
No response. Silence at the end.
“Did Johnny tip off the cops this time?”
Anything to provoke an answer.
“Where is he now? Did he run off with Mariana?”
“
Mariana with Johnny?
” The woman lunges. “She would never! That bitch treats him like a dog.” The woman is seething. She seems to have been holding back for years. Over a decade of unrequited love. “He wouldn’t dare go running off to her now. What more does he want? I give him the car, I give him his Armani suit. He’s a fucking fool. Always Mariana, Mariana, even after I packed him off to Korea to get him away from her. All he talks about is how she’s the victim, how she needs to be saved, how she’s all alone. But what about me? What does he think I’ve been doing all these years?”
Suzy stands motionless, feeling the blood suddenly draining from her face. She is still holding on to the receiver, long after the woman hangs up. It takes a while for her to walk to the futon and climb between the sheets, facing the wall.
DJ, or Johnny, whatever he calls himself.
Was it him? Was it all for Grace?
And Grace?
What did she know?
How much did she know?
Why did she run away with him?
 
 
“Fuck them,” her sister chortles from the top bunk, sucking on a Marlboro. She is terrified, watching the door through which Dad might storm in at any second. “They’ll never catch me, ’cause they don’t want to.” She wants to sneak one of her sister’s cigarettes too, but she is only fifteen, still the younger one, still the one who never breaks rules. “Do me a favor, empty this for me, would you?” Her sister pokes her head from above, carefully handing her the full ashtray. A black plastic ashtray, which, upon emptying, reveals a cluster of white dots on its bottom.
Seven stars in a circle. A secret code. A girl by the name of Mariana.
Through the metal window-guards is the rain, the relentless rain. And the red tip of the cigarette.
One day, if you find yourself alone, will you remember that I am too? Because you and I, we’re like twins.

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