On Burials

When it rains, I dig up the sand beneath the swingset at the elementary school playground two blocks away from my apartment. I find the remains of my friendship bracelet engraved “J & M,” the love letter I wrote to my first crush in third grade, and an empty bag of Famous Amos cookies with dead ants stuck to the plastic. The water beats down on these artifacts until their histories are eroded away. I look at the now mushy pile of junk and forget what it means to be kiddish and have hands full of objects still in need of burial. In need of remembrance.

In March, I watch my eomma’s tears rain down on my halmeoni’s cremated ashes. Burying my halmeoni requires all the water my eomma can exhaust from her body. In front of the funeral pyre, she burns her eyes with tears fiery like blooming flowers. Bul-kkot (불꽃), meaning flame in Korean, is made up of the words “fire” (불) and “flower” (꽃). In spring, flowers burn. My halmeoni’s favorite flower is camelia japonica or “Korean Fire.” Here, we are all burning.

I am mesmerized by the way spring burns. Eomma obsesses over the American reality TV series Fixer Upper and proclaims that we adopt the practice of spring cleaning. As we scrape away the ashes from the walls of our rented apartment and discard scraps of halmeoni’s old scarves and telephone books, we burn incense to erase the scent of her inhabitance. Whiffs of rosemary replace moxibustion. To burn, like to bury, is to conceal.

* * *

The day halmeoni died, it rained. Now, every time it rains, I am buried in the weight of inherited grief: a grief that pools in front of my doorstep like an expected guest on some days and slugs into my body like a ghost on others. On rainy days, I lay immobile in bed, closing my eyes from the monochrome world outside my bedroom window. Burials keep the body in paralysis.

If paralysis is preservation, I do not mind the stillness of my body.

I am forced to break out of my sedentary lifestyle. First, eomma purchases a pair of dumbbells for me, then a bike, then a treadmill.

“돈 주고라도 사야지, 니 체력은.” Even if it costs money, you need to buy your stamina, eomma insists to get me exercising.

Nightly, I run on my treadmill only to feel my body degrading. The more I run, I feel a weight bogging me down, pulsing through the body I barely own: my chest aching and burning.

Truth is, grief is a weight that cannot be burned away. Grief is a dominant trait, a language passed down from one generation to the next. It is my ancestors’ way of begging me to hold on to their remains after their burials. I carry this baggage with me, grief buried in my veins but not completely mine, instead the conglomeration of spring flowers and rain and lineage and lineage and lineage. My body is already the place for preservation.

My lungs struggle to contain everything the earth has to offer. I hold my breath when the city smog is saturated with the smell of mildew and wet nylon. My lungs also cannot bear the stickiness of the R&B songs coming from the new thrift store across the street. On the verge of bursting. At fifteen, the world feels like too much. Inflation crosses out my favorite box of red velvet cream cheese cupcakes from our monthly grocery list. Poetry becomes too political for the machine our world is. This universe I do not want to preserve.

So I bury the Earth under the swingset at the playground near my apartment and move away. Bury, emigrate, forget.

* * *

I completely forget about the bar of chocolate buried in my backpack until the papers in my bag come out brown and sticky.

“Dipping your homework in mud won’t give you the excuse not to do it,” my eighth-grade history teacher chastises me.

My history teacher holds my worksheet like an artifact, brandishing it in front of my classmates so that they can absorb my shame.

“It’s chocolate, actually,” I murmur.

At least the worksheet makes it out into the world. At least it has some history. The chocolate and its wrapper never escape my bag. Three days later, I find my backpack in the dumpster in our backyard, accompanied by a housefly reveling in its sugar-coated sweetness. The next day, that backpack disappears, replaced by another with a tropical leaf pattern.

Other things, none of which I can name, disappear from my memory until even their burials are unknown places.

I barely remember my halmeoni. She is a pencil-sketch chiaroscuro with half her body obscured by shadows. Her lineage is fading. My younger sister remembers halmeoni only through family photo albums and my younger brother has never seen her alive.

In freshman high school physics, I learn about the first law of thermodynamics: energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another. This is a scientific way of saying that my halmeoni has not truly died. In the funeral pyre, halmeoni is converted into thermal energy and repurposed by the universe.

In mid-December, we get an abnormally warm day—warm enough for us to go hiking up Griffith Park in short-sleeved T-shirts. “엄마, 이 따뜻함은 할머니야.” Eomma, this warmth is halmeoni. I crane my neck toward the sunlight, its photons ricocheting off my face the same way they had on my halmeoni. Even if I can’t recall her exact facial features, I recognize her warmth. It still lingers, as if it escaped its burial.

The body is an open system. We are always reaching for and reacting to our surroundings.

* * *

When my brother comes home with his first “F” on a reading comprehension test, eomma buries it under the pile of papers in her desk drawer. She then buries her face in her palms. In our house, we bury our failures until our place is pristine.

“This is why I don’t want to be buried,” I explain to a friend who is contemplating life after death. “I don’t want to be a failure.”

She laughs, “All humans are failures. We’re all mortal.”

In Korea, I am reminded of being modest. I should answer no, not really with a meek smile whenever a relative compliments my good grades or pretty eyes. I should make myself mortal. I become an object of imperfections. Koreans must like their girls to be flawed so that they can be buried with ease.

I lay in bed for hours, fully conscious, dreaming with my eyes open about a future when eomma would die. I crawl out of my bed and ghost-walk the hallways with a face covered in tears and hairs that get stuck to those tears. Eomma tucks me back into bed, spilling stories about her hometown in Seoul, how she grew up in a Korea filled with Koreans and not the I-barely-know-my-hangul immigrants she meets in California. Eomma giggles at her memory of the first time she saw The Little Mermaid in cinemas in 1992—her first time seeing a western film. I hope these memories are immortal.

When she’s certain I’m asleep, eomma leaves, silently crying after remembering halmeoni’s death. I am still awake, resenting mortality.

* * *

I dislike the food Koreans eat at funerals. Yukgaejang, meant to ward off the devils from the dead body, is always too oily or too spicy. Bossam, boiled pork belly meat served in masses on a platter, has too much grease and fat for my liking. The soju leaves all the men moderately drunk and angry at the gods. At my halmeoni’s funeral, I refuse to eat. Instead, I am sitting with my cousin drinking a bottle of vending machine Pocari Sweat, choking on the drink when she tells me that halmeoni will reincarnate as an apricot tree. Unlike halmeoni, I am not Buddhist: I don’t believe in samsara. But I promise, every time I see an apricot tree, I feel her softness.

Later, my family inhabits a small room next to the altar and falls asleep sprawled on the floor, eomma still crying and appa already snoring with a bloated belly.

Korean funerals are known to serve the living as much as the dead. The ahjussis play hwatu and I meet eomma’s distant friends who come all the way from Busan to pay their respects. It is a way of bringing people together. It has brought me to my grandmother, and also to my mother. It is actually a way of reincarnation.

After witnessing endless burials, I master its tactics. I bury my old pet fish, Lemony, that jumped out of his tank. I bury old calculus tests and crumpled loose-leaf notebook paper in my desk drawers. I bury the souvenirs and farewell letters from Korea: mementos of old friends and old places. Burying requires me to fill in the gaps of emptiness, to mount new memories on top of old ones. Now, my room is full of clutter, more things inhabiting my space. But I feel emptier. I lose through gaining.

Years later, I sit on the living room couch crying whenever I see a daughter at a funeral crying for their deceased mother in a Korean TV show. I feel a sense of closure, immobility, uncertainty, and displacement all crashing toward me. In the kitchen, eomma is making kimchi for the first time since we moved back to America, burying strips of cabbage in gochujang and jeotgal, her hands incessantly rubbing against their ruffled edges with her plastic gloves. She calls me over to taste the kimchi and I
grimace because it’s too salty, too sweet, and too spicy all at once. It’s never perfect. And yet, I understand more than anyone else that imperfection is a mother’s way of love.

* * *

I grew up burying my face in my hands whenever eomma calls my name in her Konglish accent in front of my friends when she picks me up in elementary school. Back then, we both spoke English poorly, both more accustomed to the muted and less dramatic phonetics of hangeul, softened at the edges. While I was able to mask my foreignness so perfectly in elementary school by rarely speaking, eomma was the opposite, hollering “제시카” (Jessica) with a wide grin. For the longest time, I resented her.

A decade later, I watch the third graders in my brother’s elementary school and their Korean moms waving from their car windows and holleingr “Andrew” or “Ye-jun” or “Daniel” with their tongues coated in hangeul. The boys don’t make eye contact with their moms, hanging their heads low and silently getting in the car. I glance at my own eomma, then back at the small children, waiting for them to unbury their faces. They never do.

I want to tell them to look up, to muster the courage to reply with a big “Eomma” and run to their eommas with arms wide open. I now do the same for my eomma when she drives out to LAX at two in the morning, still with that same grin and accented “Jessica.” I haven’t seen her in five months. I swallow back my tears, remembering she is still here, still warm and illuminated by light. “엄마 나 집에욌어요.” Eomma, I’m home.

Most nights when I’m back home from college, I sit at the dining table and talk to eomma for hours past midnight. Today, we are talking about death. Eomma begs me not to bury her: “I don’t want you to have to visit me every year, you’re always moving around anyway.”

Burials hinder motion. But the burier must move on from their pasts, situate themselves back in the earth that feels simultaneously so stagnant and full of momentum. Eomma, I want to remember you, to bury my small head in your chest and let the warmth trickle down on me. I am standing on a mountain, listening to the whistles the foxtails make in the wind. I am buried in my own spring and trinkets and body, always within something perpetually moving.

Eomma, do not fear permanence.