SJ HAN
Koreans on the Rooftop
I hadn’t wanted to run into a three-decades-old picture of my grandfather on the front page of Reddit. Yet there he was, now a digital artifact on r/OldSchoolCool, a photo of a photo liked by tens of thousands of people – there he was, posing on the roof of our grocery store, holding the muzzle of his rifle like a walking stick and my younger brother like an offhand weapon, his lazily tucked peach polo crumpled at the hips, Los Angeles bleached in that shade of dim yellow that only ever existed in retrospect.
The post drew a thousand comments. I told myself I wouldn’t read any of them. Instead, I called my brother and asked him why he hadn’t asked before making our personal life public.
“You’re not in the frame,” he said, his voice filled with static.
“But our dead grandfather is.”
“And now his memory lives on.”
Though my brother was a short drive away, I stayed home. Later that night, my wife put on her glasses and scrunched her brows to study my phone screen. She didn’t ask about my brother, and I didn’t retort when she told me I had my grandfather’s eyes, even though I didn’t. Removing my hearing aids and placing them on the nightstand, I observed her as she observed a part of me, a miniature memory treading water in the hazel of her eyes. I took comfort in how hers didn’t remind me of anybody else’s.
When I thought of my childhood at the grocery store, I recalled sitting in the storage room with my grandfather. I could recall foldable chairs and disassembled boxes, chopped light breaking through the blinds and onto the wall across in perfect flaxen rectangles, the distant rustle of my father heaving boxes and stocking shelves, my grandfather hunched over the newspaper, occasionally meeting my eyes without lifting his head, keeping count of silence with slow breaths.
In the office the next day, I locked myself in a bathroom stall and read the comments on my grandfather’s photo. Most cracked jokes about how badass our grandfather must have been, seeming half-genuinely fascinated at what he represented – the funny yellow man with a geeky shirt and, surprisingly, a gun. Further down, some traded paragraphs over the relationship between the Korean American and the African American communities before and after Rodney King. I saw mention of Latasha Harlins, the 15-year-old black girl shot dead by a Korean shopkeeper, then I flicked the screen repeatedly, watching words flash by and bleed together.
The Sunday before our grocery store was trashed, I witnessed my grandfather fire a shot from the rooftop. My father was picking my brother up from daycare, and he thought my grandfather and I would be safer with each other on the roof. As daylight dwindled, a group of black teenagers checked both sides of the road before crossing towards our store. Through the scope of a rifle, my grandfather decided they were suspicious. I flinched as he yelled at them to back off, one eye pinched shut, the other glossed and inanimate like a marble. I watched as wide-eyed boys swiveled and searched empty streets for the coarse voice that called out to them. And though my version of events was that I was too young and slow to do anything but freeze, I could remember the stillness before I nearly fell backwards without warning, a muzzle flaring, the world paralyzed. I could see the boys leap then run, run without looking back, floppy sneakers slapping the asphalt like throbbing hearts before dissolving into the lingering hollow hum of a gunshot.
Minutes later, my grandfather made me promise that what happened would stay a secret. A family shouldn’t make one another worry, he claimed, the hands he perched on my shoulders still gently shaking.
“It’s not a matter of whether they’re black,” he decided aloud, his words growing distant as my eardrums continued ringing. “It’s a matter of whether they’re family or not.”
Returning to my cubicle, I tried to recreate in my mind’s ear the way his voice traveled from syllable to syllable. He passed away a few years later – before I could fully convince myself that the bullet he fired was a warning shot, or before I could wonder aloud if anything that happened to us was then ever a matter of whether we were Korean, and before I could remind him that in our version of events, we are all family to so, so few people.
By the time I came home, the post was gone. My wife had made a call. Lying in bed with my hearing aids still in, I petted her bristly arm and told her with my engorged voice why I loved her. In return, she told me why she loved me – and for the first time, I could hear her say out loud the reason why she could love me but not my brother, who had once ached for her, back when our hair was jet-black and a smile could stretch past the memory and then our gums, back when sleep could still race its passengers the quickest route possible to the next morning. It was because I knew how to stay still.
SJ Han is a bilingual writer from Seoul and a recent graduate of Georgetown University. His stories have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y Literary, AAWW’s The Margins, Hobart, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere. He has an author website at sjhanwrites.wordpress.com.