Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(3)
The boy walked over to where I was sitting. He squatted down until his scabbed knees reached his ears. I told him I wanted my toenails cut round, not square. He began filling the basin with water. “It’s too hot!” I said when I dipped my foot in. He slowly adjusted the temperature. I noticed he cut my toenails square, not round. I noticed he refused to look me in the eye. When he did, I detected a flicker of hostility. Did he feel aggrieved at spending all his after-school hours massaging the calves of Iowan soccer moms? Or did it just annoy him to serve someone who looked too much like him, someone who was young and Asian? Although I was twenty-four, I could pass for seventeen, and I looked boyish with my short choppy haircut. Still, I thought at the time, I am much older than you and you should respect me like you’re forced to respect those Iowan blond moms who come in here. Then he used the toenail nippers and pinched hard into the flesh of my big toe, hard enough to make me flinch.
“Can you please be softer?” I asked tartly. He mumbled an apology but pinched his nipper even harder into my skin.
“Can you be softer?”
He tore a cuticle off.
“Hey!”
He dug his nipper in harder.
“I said—”
He tore a cuticle off.
“softer—”
He dug his nipper in harder.
“That hurts!”
To be competent at this line of service, you have to be so good you are invisible, and this boy was incapable of making himself invisible! Maybe I was hallucinating this pain to justify my own rising irritation that his physical boy presence was distracting me from relaxing. He was so ungainly in that supplicant’s crouch, making me feel ungainly in my vibrating massage chair. It wasn’t fair.
The boy dug his nipper into my toe so hard I yelped out again. His father shouted at him in Vietnamese and the boy’s sharp ministrations finally softened by a smidge. I had had enough. I stood up, my two feet still in the basin’s soapy scum, and I refused to pay. My friend watched me, troubled by my behavior. I hoped the father would later punish him by withholding his paycheck. But the boy probably didn’t even get a paycheck.
* * *
—
We were like two negative ions repelling each other. He treated me badly because he hated himself. I treated him badly because I hated myself. But what evidence do I have that he hated himself? Why did I think his shame skunked the salon? I am an unreliable narrator, hypervigilant to the point of being paranoid, imposing all my own insecurities onto him. I can’t even recall if I actually felt that pain or imagined it, since I have rewritten this memory so many times I have mauled it down to nothing, erasing him down until he was a smudge of resentment while I was a smudge of entitlement until we both smudged into me. But he was nothing like me. I was so privileged I was acquiring the most useless graduate degree imaginable. What did I know about being a Vietnamese teenage boy who spent all his free hours working at a nail salon? I knew nothing.
* * *
—
When my father was growing up in the rural outskirts of Seoul, he was dirt poor. Everyone was poor after the war. My grandfather was a bootlegger of rice wine who couldn’t afford to feed his ten children, so my father supplemented his meager diet with sparrows he caught himself and smoked in a sand pit. My father was smart, enterprising. He won a nationwide essay contest at the age of ten and studied hard enough to be admitted into the second-best university in Korea. It took him nine years to graduate college because of mandatory military service and because he kept running out of money.
When the 1965 immigration ban was lifted by the United States, my father saw an opportunity. Back then, only select professionals from Asia were granted visas to the United States: doctors, engineers, and mechanics. This screening process, by the way, is how the whole model minority quackery began: the U.S. government only allowed the most educated and highly trained Asians in and then took all the credit for their success. See! Anyone can live the American Dream! they’d say about a doctor who came into the country already a doctor.
My father lied. He wrote down he had training as a mechanic. He, along with my young mother, was sent to the hinterlands of Erie, Pennsylvania, where he worked as an assistant mechanic for Ryder trucks. Despite lack of training, he got by, until a cracked stone in an air grinder came loose and shattered his leg so badly he was in a cast for six months. Ryder fired him instead of giving him workman’s comp because they knew he couldn’t do anything about it.
Then they moved to L.A., where my father found a job selling life insurance in Koreatown. He worked more than ten hours a day and was eventually promoted to manager. But years of selling life insurance were taking their toll. No matter how much he worked, he could never save enough. He drank heavily during those years and fought with my mother, who beat my sister and me with a fury intended for my father. Later, with bank loans, my father bought a warehouse that distributed dry-cleaning supplies in a desolate industrial section of L.A. With this business, my father became successful enough to fund my private high school and college educations.
* * *
—
On paper, my father is the so-called model immigrant. Upon meeting him, strangers have called my father a gentleman for his quiet charisma and kindness, a personality he cultivated from years of selling life insurance and dry-cleaning supplies to Americans of all manner of race and class. But like many model immigrants, he can be angry.