Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(49)
The police spent hundreds of hours searching the Puck Building for Cha’s missing purse, boot, beret, and wedding ring, but they could not find anything. In December, a month after her murder, John, James, and Richard—fed up with the slow pace of the police—decided to search themselves. The police reported that the bloodhound barked like a “maniac” near the pump room, so they began there. The basement was a dark massive warren of rooms packed with old machinery and rusted sewer pipes. Using their flashlights, they swept the dirt with their feet, as if they could uncover a lost ring like a loose pebble. They came to a stairway that led to three white brick columns marked with the numbers 710, 711, and 713, which stopped John in his tracks. Recalling his mother’s and Bernadette’s dreams, John said they should search around there. They opened dead-end rooms until they came to a set of old double doors that they pushed open. The first thing John saw were her gloves.
“They looked alive,” John told me.
When I asked him to clarify, John said the gloves looked puffed up, as if there were invisible hands inside them, cupping the ground. There was also her hat, caked in blood, and her other boot. He was in shock. When the police arrived and the space was flooded with light, the gloves deflated back to their natural flat shape. Later, the memory of those gloves would haunt him for years and compel him to write his memoir. “They were her final art piece,” John said.
I was spellbound when he told me his account. But afterwards, I grappled with whether or not to include John’s story, since it cloaked Cha back in that shroud. Of course, his story could be explained away. Grief can trick the eye and bend our perceptions to reassure us that our lost loved ones are near. Of course, their minds will insist that she’s still present, leading them to the room, the energy of her hands still in the gloves, in their dreams, in Dictee, calling from the underworld. Of course, they must be reassured she’s still making art, that her spirit must endure beyond her ghastly death. On the same day they found the gloves, Artists Space had its opening and Cha’s photographs of hands were shown posthumously.
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There is one family portrait of just the five children, taken when they were living in Seoul. John writes about it in his memoir:
I am twelve in the picture; Elizabeth is nine; you are seven; James is four; and Bernadette on my lap is a little over one hundred days old. You have cropped hair, the same haircut every girl in Korea used to get, just a simple cut, no hint of shaping, its ends hanging straight and square. And you are wearing a slight frown.
A few times we used to look at the picture together well after we’d become adults, I’d asked you once why you were cranky that day. You laughed and said, “Oh my god, that hair, wouldn’t you be cranky with a haircut like that?”
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After nine minutes of Bernadette’s headshots in Permutations—her facing forward, her facing backward, her eyes closed, her eyes open, a few frames with her hair tucked back to reveal an ear adorned with a simple round stud—the subject changes. Cha snuck a headshot of herself in. The single frame of the older sister flashes onscreen for a second before switching back to the younger sister. Blink and you’ll miss the portrait of the artist. I rewind and freeze the frame. Same long hair, but squarer jawline, imperfect skin, slightly broader nose. Her eyes are present, alert, not haunted at all.
THE INDEBTED
NURSING MY DAUGHTER AT THE late blue hour when streetlights begin to pale, I saw a plane blinking across the sky. I wanted to be inside that plane, inside the white hush of a dimly lit cabin, white buds sunk into my ears, New York’s skyline fading from view until it was a baby’s breath of lights.
When I first became a mother, I resented how locked in I was to my local environs. No more traveling alone. No more taking off when I felt like it. Landlocked, I stole away to the Red Hook municipal pool as much as I could to swim a few laps by myself, because being underwater was freedom. I tried to write an essay about the pool, beginning with the Red Hook public pool as a genuine commons, massive as a football field, with space for every kind of kid, and gloriously free, with free sunblock that comes out of a dispenser.
And yet historically, the public pool was one of the most hotly contested spaces for desegregation. On the East Coast, urban planner Robert Moses built the WPA pools mostly on the white side of New York so they would be out of reach for black people. Southern towns filled their town pools in with concrete because they’d rather deprive everyone of the pool than share it with black people. I saw a photograph of one such concrete-filled pool, now part of a parking lot for a bus depot. The only evidence of it is a forlorn 4?? depth marker delineating the perimeters of where swimmers once splashed; it now looks like a grave marker. In Pittsburgh, when black swimmers entered a newly integrated pool, a mob of white swimmers threw rocks and tried to drown them. When desegregation was unavoidable, white Americans fled to the suburbs to build their own private pools.
The public pool is such a stark example of how much this country has been hell-bent on keeping black and white bodies apart that I became unsure if it was my history to retell. My interest was sparked by a childhood incident but it discomfited me to attach my experience to a history that, next to the black and white apartheid that has carved itself into the American infrastructure, felt anecdotal. I was thirteen. Deep in the pool I swam like a bottom feeder until I could no longer hold my breath. As I surfaced, I heard a grown-up voice boom “Get out!” Treading water, I squinted toward the source of that voice to a backlit man who sternly said the pool was for residents only. This was at my aunt’s apartment complex in Orange County. I told the man that my aunt and my little cousin, who was at the shallow end with my sister, lived here and I was babysitting. He didn’t let me finish and ordered us to leave. As I clicked the gate behind us, I heard him say, “They’re everywhere now.”