Saturday Morning

In elementary school, I learned how to knit in a closet-like room every weekend with five or six other girls. On the first day, I grabbed a corner of the space for myself, wedged between the door and the wall, as the others sat shoulder to shoulder around a low wooden table. A large window let in a square of white sunlight that roamed over our hands. Our teachers loomed behind us. I remember them as pale shadows, smelling faintly of dried peppers and cooking oil.

Everyone in that room spoke in a language I should have understood. I sat there quietly, pretending that I did. I got very good at staring at my fingers. Back straight, eyes downturned, unmoving, unnoticed.

This embroidery class was one of many electives I could have chosen at the beginning of the season. We’d gathered in the lobby of the rented church as older students paraded their talents before us. Red-cheeked boys in tae kwon do uniforms tumbled and leaped after each other, and children wielding flower pots and spades followed closely behind. Even more students held paintings in their arms and songs in their throats; the procession continued with similar displays of clamor and color. I didn’t pay attention to the rest of it. I just wanted to go home.

The summer before, I had chosen calligraphy, intrigued by the dense blocks of ink and long scrolls of indecipherable text. I loved the wet, earthy smell of parchment as it dried and warped beneath my eyes, but we weren’t allowed to take an elective more than once. So this time, resigned to another summer of ruined weekends, I marked my class sheet at random — and ended up with needles, not brushes, in my hands.

I didn’t recognize any of the other students sitting around me, their fingers moving with a surprising, unbridled fury. We were all in different grades, and I was the only one who didn’t know what was being said. Everyone knew English, but chose only to speak in Korean. I only knew English, and chose not to speak at all.

I hoped everyone there thought I was Chinese or Japanese, that they assumed I was somehow placed in the wrong weekend school. I knew it was silly, but I didn’t want to explain I was, in fact, as Korean as everyone else. I just didn’t know how to act like it.

At home, I would eat ten types of kimchi, grown and fermented in the garden behind our house. Pork dumplings, steamed eggs, sweet potatoes slipping from their skin. Ox bone soup, seafood pancakes, pan-fried tofu, red bean buns, sugared rice water. I could have lived off of dried seaweed and rice. And I did. I loved eating my grandma’s food every day of my life, after school, for dinner, first thing in the morning. I grew up and into these flavors and textures, and in this I felt my culture wholly. I internalized my roots just as easily as I internalized more sinister thoughts. I couldn’t express these emotions in what I felt should have been my mother tongue. I could barely even express them in English.

After a few weeks of wrestling with my yarn, it eventually morphed into a wavering, unfinished rectangle, too short and thin to be called a scarf. I wadded it into my bag, eager to move on to my next project: a cross-stitched bird sitting on a flowering branch. At least this pattern knew what it was supposed to become.

As I threaded light blue string through my needle, one of the pale shadows looked over my shoulder, cooing in what sounded like complimentary tones, and my lips thinned into a tight smile. I overcame my initial moment of frozen panic and decided to attempt a garbled "thank you," but by then she had already moved on.