To the White Woman Who Left a Voicemail on New Year’s Day

Lauren Kim '27

The white woman left a voicemail, January 1st, 2022, after work, and I walked to my car in the January cold, my heels clicking on black ice, my breath hanging in the air like evidence, my mother at home making tteokguk for New Year’s, the kitchen warm and steaming with broth,  and I pressed play in my car: Keep your Korean to yourself, I saved it, her voice cracks through the speaker. Then I think about the halmonis selling greens they hiked to pick, perilla leaves neatly packed in ziplock-sandwich-bags in cardboard boxes next to their curly perms, red lipstick, calling each other unnie, laughing so hard their small frames shake. Some perilla leaves are wilted, some so fresh that the scent lingers on your hands. I was at Assi Plaza once and a little girl tugged at her mom’s shirt, Umma, can we get banana milk? Choco-pie? and the fluorescent lights flicked in the snack aisle and I was wearing my finger-smeared glasses and the mismatched ankle socks and I saw someone from church and I wanted to sneak off to the food court. Then the land was sold twice and now it’s an LA Fitness, all shiny and the hum of treadmills where my mother used to kneel down in the condiment aisle sliding the bottles of sesame oil across cold metal. You say you don’t have an accent but have you seen 4-year-old me, reading Frozen in careful long syllables to sound American? Have you heard 10-year-old me saying I’m not Chinese I’m Korean, I’m not Japanese I’m Korean, I’m not North Korean, over and over until Korean was something I wasn’t confused for? When black boxes, scribbled and dotted with red ink, when I trace my fingers over Name, Age, Country of Citizenship, and I wonder what box perilla leaves, sesame oil, belong in. I wonder about the Know-Your-Rights sign in the bathroom, cockled, rippled, stained from wet hands

YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT

is that a right or a requirement? Then I keep my Koreanness to myself. I keep my halmonies and the little girl and the Choco-pie to myself. I keep perilla leaves and red lipstick and your idea of quiet approval. I keep it shut. I keep it until halmonie is gone. Until Assi plaza is a gym. Until the little girl grows up and stops asking for Choco-pies and my mother’s hands stop smelling like sesame oil and I lift my hands to my face. Nothing is there.