Cultural Milk
by J. A. Pak
Cultural milk. When you’re
six, new to a country, morphed into this thing called “foreigner”, you don’t
know what culture is, just that everything you do is wrong and everything that
was once so easy and comfortable only brings pain and embarrassment. At birth,
culture is family (mine was one of indulgent love). Then you’re uprooted and
there’s the schoolyard, of teachers who mostly don’t care, of children who have
no skills at compassion — they’re trying so hard themselves, to understand, to
fit in. In school — that’s when I begin to fall more and more into an anxious
state of observation.
At first I think it’s
language, that if I could speak the language I’d understand. Language is
culture abbreviated. There are other things that make up culture, like gestures
and toys. Friends, or lack of. Religion, television, housing, supermarkets,
games, street signs, the way you say ‘I love you’. Six years of culture is
harder to make up than six years of language.
Now I’m eight and there’s a
girl at school — she’s new. At first she pursues my friendship. And then she
destroys it and becomes my occasional tormentor. She finds me exasperating. And
I can understand that now. I was never a child who liked to play with other
children. I preferred to sit and listen, to a friend’s older brother reading a
story out loud, to my mother and her friends gossiping. I liked sounds, the
lenticular vowels and the jumping consonants shadow-puppeting human life. The
girl thought I was a know-it-all, but I only nodded and agreed to things I
didn’t understand because, even though I sounded native, my vocabulary was
limited. She’d had eight years. I’d had two. Two years of not understanding, of
not being understood (nodding was like sleeping, an acceptance of numbing
fatigue).
This too. I was born into a
culture where little girls were bossy, where hierarchy was severe: the first
thing you asked a stranger was how old they were because age is hermetic; the
older you are, even if by a day, the more your right to tyranny. I can’t
remember now who was older. But I do remember we were both firstborns and maybe
that was part of the trouble. Two bright little girls used to being boss.
Always stinks of trouble. Even without cultural difficulties, we were probably
destined for rivalry.
Time-traveling through your
mind is a precarious expedition. Momentum ricochets you from ghost to ghost,
tendrilled eyes looking you up and down. Now I’m remembering this girl’s
mother, a woman whose gentle kindness always distracted me into a state of
bemusement, then warmth, the kind in which all self disappears and there’s only warmth (which
anxiety had displaced so it was hardly recognizable). The mother was a child of
Italian immigrants. I saw the Italian grandmother once. At the girl’s birthday
party, hiding in the kitchen making meatball pizzas (my first — the meatballs
were tiny and soft and I thought it was odd, even wrong, meatballs on pizza).
That scene, the old woman, cultural milk so painfully familiar — a misplacement
like my submerging culture, slowly becoming as foreign to me as she was to her
own granddaughter. A grandmother I must meet again inside myself.
* * * * *
A recipient of a Glass Woman Prize, J.A. Pak’s work has been published
in a variety of publications, including Olentangy Review, Luna Luna, Thrice
Fiction, Atticus Review, Quarterly West, The Smoking Poet and Art/Life.
Cultural Milk was first
published in Luna Luna Magazine and in Medium.com/Triple Eight Palace of Dreams & Happiness,
https://medium.com/triple-eight-palace-of-dreams-happiness/cultural-milk-6e926c9f0072#.86y40vxs0
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