“A joy here to follow the meandering path of this novel through the memories of its protagonist, a path that looks a lot like memory itself. All three of the novel excerpt finalists do interesting things with time. This excerpt collapses and expands time like an accordion finding its tune.” — Guest Judge Matthew Salesses
Jinhae, South Korea, 1960. Judith, born Sungmi.
Family story. It’s true, it’s not true, it’s true.
In fifth grade, Jo Sungmi is ten years old and too small for her uniform. She has always been slim and small for her age. The other girls in her class know that her father is sick, and they’ve stopped studying beside her. It’s fall already, and the school year started last March. Even then, it was like this with her former friends—distant, cold in a way that’s cruel on purpose. Isolating her when they know she needs them more than ever. The worst part is that she feels like she’s getting left behind by them, her former girlfriends.
Over and over, in the news, from adults, from her teachers, she hears that hers is meant to be the “Hangul Generation,” the first one able to freely and proudly use the Korean alphabet, the Korean language, in school since the student protest against the Japanese in 1919. Since the freedom fighters were slaughtered and some fled with their dictionaries and their memories and their self-made ideas of Korean democracy.
Yes, she wants to study to live up to this, the hope of this, the bleeding, open yearning for this. But it’s not only that. The wordless, penetrating ache for understanding. To just sit with someone at lunch.
The teachers know about how the other girls are bullying her but would rather not get involved. Sungmi has a tendency to clench her teeth in a way she isn’t aware of until her jaw starts to hurt. Her tongue wrestles itself in her mouth even when she sleeps. When she gets angry, so angry, that anger that’s been in her stomach since her dad went into the hospital last December, the teachers make her sit on her knees on the wooden platform next to the teacher’s dais. That’s how today went, too. Nobody had said anything in particular today to make her yell back at the teacher really. But she’s furious anyway, and there aren’t any words for it sometimes but to yell, “Who cares? I don’t know,” when the teacher asks a question.
It’s her job to take dinner to Dad in the hospital, and having to clean the chalkboard erasers after class is going to make her late today. Mom is busy with the little ones, a new brother and newer sister not yet a year old. Sungmi is the big sister now, and her responsibilities give her work to do so that she can do the right thing here and there. Dad had been going in and out of the hospital lately, this past year, and surely, he will come out again. She is happy to have something to contribute. But that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t walk heavy, as if something sits on her back, on her neck, on the way back home. His expressions, usually so full of curiosity and thought, blank and pale.
Inside the house, there’s nobody. Her older brother must be hanging out with friends around the market shops, or wandering around the pear orchard, the watermelon farm, the harbor watching boats. Who knows what he does. Ever since Dad went into the hospital this time, almost three months now, it’s not worth talking to her older brother, all defiance and cutting remarks. She calls out for her second brother, or for her mother and the babies if they’re out back. “I’m home,” waiting for a response. Nothing. For her father, she boxes up cold rice, kimchi, doenjang jiggae, oi muchim, and pulls a small hard candy out of her pocket to put in. Burnt rice flavor. Heads out.
In the stories she tells her future daughters about her father, there’s never anything about the hospital. She knows that. Why tell them? Why bring this into words? The way he looked or the way he’d changed. In her stories, she mentions sometimes that other people called her father “Yankee,” because of his long straight nose, high bridge, strong bone structure, those big, smiling eyes. Her hometown had never been fully colonized, by the Japanese, the Chinese, by anyone all down history, and she is proud of this. His looks, if you weren’t on base, they were as “Yankee” as things came in Jinhae before and just after the war, when resistance was her father studying Japanese and American ships, by eye, and blue-print drafting them for the government. Big, smiling eyes that were sharp to see all those details. Sure, steady hands that went on to specialize in building engines for those ships. He loved baseball, volleyball, and bringing candy home to his children when he had to be away for long stretches. His aspects made others feel assured in his presence, more confident. The strong bone structure which made him seem so indestructible and full and self-possessed. His freckles. His eye wrinkles from laughing. All this, she inherited. Some of this inheritance in face and carriage would reveal themselves later in her, as she grew into those features. Laughing? No, not until she got older. Self-possession? Yes. Always. In the stories to her children? There are the mentions of his languishing against a long illness that recurred and recurred until he was finally gone. But not of his voice, the one she loved, gone cracked and dry. He’d always taken her everywhere. To see his ships. To the private island off the coast where he conferred with generals and politicians and sometimes even real people of vision. When he was well, he always took her away with him to the docks. His helper. She was smart. Curious. Worshipped him.
She still remembers the feeling, an early memory perhaps around four years old, of wandering away once while Dad was talking to somebody, she could not have known, business partners or contractors or the provisionary president even down by the water. How she got lost and crouched alone on the low dock, not crying but speechless from not knowing how to get back, and the way it felt when Dad came around the corner and said, “There you are! What are you doing there?” The way she couldn’t find the words for that joy. The way she looked at him, as if she could hold him with her eyes. The smell of the sea. The tall pine trees. The mountains mountains mountains. His low laughter and strong, draftsman’s hands.
It was his heart.
Something with his heart.
This was the worst time in her memory. But the stories she tells over and over are not these. Her fear. How everything was changing then and she was starting to realize even at ten that nothing was going to get better about any of this, just worse, and that after that? After that? No. She would rather tell a story like this one, of this day. The ones full of ghosts, which she insists are raw and the truth. It’s the truth that’s important, that needs no insisting upon. The details that cannot be denied, that are infallible, that must be spoken and believed. Everything else, so full of grief and memory and that blurry vision of shame, love, and what came after. Those are the stories that are good in times of grief, solid ones.
It takes half an hour to walk to the hospital, and when she arrives, Dad says, “You wrapped it all up clean and neatly,” and he says, “leave it there.” She always wraps it neatly because Mom is always saying that her line comes from yangbans and Sungmi wouldn’t dare to mix the food together. Doesn’t matter that there’s no more meaning in yangbans for Mom, whose family had moved to Japan for opportunities a generation ago, and fled in the night before the tightening of restrictions in WWII rather than be told who they were and what they could be by the Japanese then. Came back poor, with nothing, just a good name and pride in a long lineage. But that’s not nothing to Mom. That’s important, so Sungmi wouldn’t even dare to shake her own aluminum lunchbox at school like her classmates do, let the food touch, after they warm it on the class stove. Afterall, does she even dare to approach the stove at lunchtime anymore? After she helps Dad eat, she sits for a while and strokes the back of his hand while he listens to the radio. There are no nurses in the navy hospital, which he only got into instead of the local one because of friends he’d made during his time working for the government. The same government which had abandoned him in his illness, but which he wouldn’t hear a word against. She helps him go to the bathroom. She washes his hair. She watches him eat what he can, but he can barely breathe because his heart doesn’t beat correctly, that’s all she knows. Listening to him gasp and try to eat the food she brought. Because he cannot talk much, she wants to fill the silence. To find something he will want to listen to. She has been doing well in her subjects despite her outbursts. She is trying to be better at holding her anger. But she knows he doesn’t want to hear about this. These are not the things that are important to him. Stories. Gentleness. Ingenuity. Those small things of nature that she wants to find the language for and tell him, things outside the hospital. How the leaves have fallen in the high winds this past week and how the red pines grow bent but never lose their vibrancy. But her tongue is wrestling itself in her mouth again. She is afraid of the hospital, and he is looking so blank and tired and says that he wants to sleep. He says go home, because it’s dangerous here after dark. On the same grounds as the hospital, up the hill, there is the mental institution, and he doesn’t want her scared by the inhabitants yelling and jeering at her walking out in the dark. So she says little, knows that he knows she loves him more than the world, and slips out while there is still daylight. But home is not her goal today.
Lately there is sort of a friend from school. This friend, Joonhui, she’s a little reluctant, but Joonhui’s grandmother is kind. Her grandmother understands. “Invite Sungmi over to study sometimes.” The grandmother wants to feed this little girl who is too small, whose skin has gone sallow and grey from the stress, whose hair is thin. Joonhui’s grandmother has seen Sungmi grow up in fits and starts, because she sells greens and vegetables and mushrooms in the market, and when times are hard, that’s where Sungmi’s mother can be found as well, and Sungmi tries to help when she can. Things are bad now, Joonhui’s grandmother knows, and anyone can see that Sungmi will be a beauty someday, which can bring its own trouble, too. Over time, meeting at Joonhui’s house comes to resemble something like a real friendship, and that’s not nothing. A warm meal, getting fussed over, chatting about music and snacks.
Sungmi starts her walk across the quiet roads, heading deeper into the countryside.
All this deep country is built up now. The village eaten up first by the town, then a district, then a city, and now a metroplex with an unfamiliar name. Fifty years after this story, when Sungmi comes back as Judith Wise to be with her mother while she passes, Sungmi will swear never to come back again. She will say out loud that she does not have any country but the country in the woods in Virginia and the man she married, Greg Wise, and there’s no “back” back in Korea. She recalls to her daughter, Jungmin, a vivid, searing moment of standing on the sidewalk by her own mother’s house utterly and completely lost in the place where she was born. Eight lanes of traffic in front of her mother’s tiny old blue-roof house, not sure of where she was fifty yards from home. She talks about the way her siblings fought over the rights to the land their mother’s house stood on, waiting for their mother to die. She spat it all out. Even the famous cherry blossoms weren’t there when the land was still familiar. All “home” is now, is a story. All of the words and conflicts she had in her mind, and the ground she walked on are still as vivid as the world that has left. She’s not one to forget a single detail or shade of nuance. So there’s nothing made up, and when her daughter Jungmin asks if it’s true, it is as real as if it happened that morning.
There was a creek on the way to her friend’s house that these days is dried up under the concrete, somewhere hidden among the tall buildings. She crossed it lit by twilight—the moon was up but there was light enough. It is important, she says, to remember that it was not full dark. In the full dark, you could mistake things. Mundane objects could transform into sinister shapes. But this was not that. She could see things clearly. Her knees ached from kneeling on the wooden platform in class. Her shoulders were sore from cleaning the erasers. Her head was ringing with grief.
Long grass. Gentle breeze. Stars just beginning to appear. Damn you could see so many stars back then. Not like now. She is crossing the creek and the water is getting into her shoes, and the cicadas should be going crazy but she realizes the silence only when it’s late to save herself.
Dark movement. A flicker above.
She knows what it is in the tree above. She looks.
It’s a long time that she stands there, looking up at the woman in the branches. Long black hair. Stillness. Her breath stops in her throat. Long enough to see the details of the ghost’s face, the sadness and the rage caught in that moment of meeting each other here, in the fading light, and the sound of the creek. Her livid skin. Her cheekbones. Her eyelashes.
Sungmi breaks the tension by running. She is good at running. She is good at any sport. The trees whip at her face with their bare branches, and she pounds on her friend’s front door. Too winded to cry, to explain to her friend’s grandmother who answers. Joonhui’s grandmother who says, “You saw her, didn’t you?”
It didn’t need words to make it real, for someone else to have seen it, known about it. But her friend’s grandmother does know. That woman who either committed suicide or was hung out there. A death that won’t die. An anger that lingers and lingers and eats everything around it. The grief that never leaves, of what could have been, of senseless loss. Her heart is pounding. She wakes up sometimes still with her heart pounding and thinks of standing there, the grandmother’s hands on her shoulders, and the weeping. For the woman? For herself? For her father? And the aching in her limbs, and the way it felt like her lungs were heavy, and her chest, and the blood pounding in her ears.
“The next day,” she tells her daughter, Jungmin, who was six years old the first time she heard it, “I had to walk home the same way.”
“Was she still there? In the tree?” Min asks, certain of it, and certain that it was true.
“No,” Sungmi says, who has been “Judith” now for decades, for the Judith who insisted that she was unafraid of slaying Holofernes, insisted so hard until it was true. Mom is so beautiful and elegant to Min, and mysterious. “Instead, there was a giant black snake.”
Sometimes, Judith says it was the snake’s skin. But it wasn’t. She insists, in most tellings, the snake was there.
It’s true, it’s not true, it’s true.
The ghost staring back in daylight, its tongue flickering out, smelling the air.
Where did it go after that?
In the same year, 1960, in Whitehead, Virginia, there were tomatoes growing for the canning factory. An industry that will have been long gone by the time she and Greg retire there.
In 1960, Greg Wise is in his second year at the University of North Carolina, reading a letter from a friend explaining that he has been blackballed from the big fraternities because he grew up without his father. The letter said, “Don’t keep trying, Greg, seriously, don’t keep embarrassing yourself. If you try to walk through the front door tomorrow, you know what’s going to happen, they’re going to tell you to go through the back.” There is no kindness in it.
The corn is getting high, and he is singing radio jingles in the nighttime, to calm his anxiety, only seventeen years old, two years out of the trailer in his grandmother’s backyard in Norfolk, tanned and tense from driving taxis all summer in Virginia Beach to pay for room and board. Once, a man had put a gun to the back of his neck to get out of paying the bill. More than once, he’d seen things he’d rather not have known about. But he knows about a lot of things already. And it’s better than working at the local carwash where he might run into someone he knows, or on campus, cleaning rooms for the same tired pieces of shit who don’t know anything about making your own way in the world and hoping like hell that there’s a place for you in it, somewhere. Walking through the back door, no. Never.
Softly. Royal Pudding. Condensed milk. Baby powder. Laundry soap. Jell-O.
The sound of cicadas outside his window, roaring.
Judith hears these stories from him years later, while they are dating, about what it meant not to have a father in school. Not to have a father, growing up in Norfolk, Virginia, a place with a naval base, on the water. Not unlike where she grew up, though of course, when he told her the stories, she wasn’t picturing an American city. He told her how, with something that sounded like pride in his voice, he would be put out by his mother to go play outside in the summertime, all day. If there was daylight, he was outside. That his feet were so calloused and hard by the end of the summer that he could step on a horse chestnut and not feel it.
See, there is a bond here. There are the unspoken things happening in a story like that. Things that other people don’t notice. The pride in self-preservation, in not needing other people, yes. But also, at the heart of it, the unspoken part. That he was put out by his mother because she was busy working, and that the boy, the sweet blond boy with the gawky stick-out ears and beautiful, ocean blue eyes did not have shoes.
Her father, getting better in 1967, age 46, wanted to put together a little volleyball club at the navy hospital. He loved to play, and he was tired of watching people play outside without him, but they wouldn’t let him play. So he put that team together himself. Judith was seventeen years old when she found out that her father had finally gone out to play his first game, on his own feet, laughing and happy. He dropped to the ground after his first jump, and never got up again.
Greg’s father? He volunteered before WWII to be a serviceman, from nowhere Kentucky, and ended up an officer by the end. He survived all that, all those years, and on the day he was discharged, he got hit by a garbage truck crossing the street in Washington DC. Greg was three, and it was because of that, losing a good man and growing up still sweet somehow after all that hardship, that those boys up at North Carolina wouldn’t let him walk through the front door.
Can you not see what there is to be angry about in the world?
* * *
Whitehead, Virginia, 2018. Jungmin.
Today.
Before Jungmin came home to Whitehead, there was a snake in her apartment that kept coming back. One night in the late spring, setting the phone’s handset back in the cradle, she was thinking she just didn’t know how to talk to anyone. She didn’t know how to talk to her mother, or John who was still living in the house they’d shared before the trial separation, or anybody. She was thinking herself in circles. The phone call with her mother had been mostly silent, but lasted some forty minutes. They didn’t have much to say to each other, but she could tell that her mother was lonely, and calling because there was no one else to call, and Min didn’t know what to do or say to help her. Can you really help anyone with words? Especially so far away and so full of everything else, arguments from the past and misunderstandings and that kind of respect on Min’s end, of knowing there’s so much on her mother’s mind that will never heal. Not just this, with Dad, but from the past, which has never been spoken. She was looking at the phone like it was hot in the cradle, at the wireless handset, thinking about the way that wired phones used to get tangled up with their plastic coils, and it gave your fingers something to do when anxious, when not knowing what to say.
In the silence, a strange rustling sound led her to go into the bathroom. She flipped the light on. The little snake was there again, maybe for the third time now, grey with a pale ribbed belly, small and fearful. She had been ignoring its presence, the first two times she saw it, because when left alone, it had disappeared on its own, but not this time. Thinking the black logo on the side of the white bathtub was a hole, it was trying to crawl in. Its head lolled back with the struggle, nearly flipping itself. A strange contorting as it suffered in the dust on the floor, confused, unable to hide from the light.
Deciding what to do, she’d watched it. Didn’t know anything about snakes. Didn’t know anything really. She got a Tupperware from under the sink, a thank you card she’d never sent to Bryan, her principal, who’d sent flowers when her dad was in the hospital briefly last year. Can’t let the snake resolve its situation on its own. Can’t walk away. The flipping and rolling is too much. Gently, she lowered the Tupperware over the garden snake, slid the greeting card underneath it hoping not to cut the snake’s skin. It weighed barely anything, but it struggled violently as it realized it was being handled, before settling down. She set the container on the coffee table, the snake quiet now, and opened the back door. She crouched, gently let it out into the dewy Texas grass. Hot already, humid already. Morning coming. When did it get to be this hour? The snake lay there on its back, white belly exposed, as if dead. Terrified, she knew. Go, she thought, a bird will see you so well.
Throughout, nothing. No feeling at all. Suddenly, somehow, eight hours later in the early evening, a sense of grief had come up through her throat, into her head, into her mouth, and she began packing a bag home. Home being Whitehead. It felt exactly like that helpless feeling of having run for hours on an empty stomach and dehydrated, that feeling of dry heaving that is going to take the last nourishment from your stomach that you had. What are these thoughts doing here? These memories in this moment? That kind of vomiting that makes your throat bleed. Sitting on the carpet, holding her head, feeling small. Throwing random pieces of clothing into a duffel bag. She left the bag there on the carpet, lay down with her head spinning on the floor in the bathroom because the tiles were cool on her skin.
When she woke up and looked out the kitchen window, the snake was gone. Instead of making her coffee, heading in to work, she bought a plane ticket home.
Here in Whitehead now, today, it is near the end of August and the tide has come in, high against the dock.
Inside the car it’s warm. Min sits completely still, watching the waves roll in.
She and Mom have been fighting. Not the first time since she’s been home, four months now. Min had found herself sputtering, “I expected to suffer. I expected to not know how to handle being here, and I thought I would learn how to deal with it. But I didn’t expect to have to deal with you, too!” Mom baring her teeth behind tight lips, looking like she wants to bite. What does Min look like when they fight? Playing the pathetic part.
There are small crabs fixed in place on the sand.
Round leaves, some yellow and others green, pick up a breeze around their edges.
She rests her head against the steering wheel.
Not a single eddy on the water. Slowly rolling waves, green, and jellyfish sliding beneath. There are always jellyfish here in late summer. At first, the grass is long and rain blows branches from the trees. Weeks go by too fast. Soon enough, the does with small fawns from the spring will emerge walking together. Snails will be gone from the low tide reeds, and there will be the smell of brine in cooler air.
What do they fight about? The failure of Min’s marriage. Min’s fear of driving on anything wider than a rural highway. Min’s being stuck at the same smalltime low-paying charter school job since she miraculously got it ten years ago. Her not knowing the tiny rules Mom has set up for self-preservation. Anything that can be picked out, torn up, used as a stick. It’s not really about any of it. Even when it’s happening, anyone could see how obvious it is that all the words are is terror. Terror about what’s happening. Terror at what else worse could happen any time.
Sweating. The radio chatters.
When she’s angry, everything seems so clear. She seems to know who she is, what she’s about. But it’s not true. Clarity in anger is not real clarity. There’s no kindness in it. No love. What can you be clear about, without that? But maybe, without that, at least there’s direction.
She shuts off the car.
Frogs in the saltwater inlet. Slow frogs calling to the coming rain.
No clouds.
“Min, I’m doing my best here,” her principal, Bryan Park, had said on the phone this morning, “but you’ve had a lot of time off, and the new term is starting in just a few weeks. Do you want to talk?”
The new school term. The fiscal new year. She hadn’t been picking up her phone so he’d called her emergency contact—her mother’s house.
“I need time, Bryan,” she said, heart pounding from something other than saying this out loud for the first time. The fear.
“You’re asking me to find a long-term sub,” he started.
“I’ll quit then,” she said. Mom listening from the next room, sitting by Dad’s bedside.
Min and Bryan have been friends for as long as she’s been a teacher. Friends since the interview, laughing over a tasteless salmon salad and cracking jokes about Super Smash Bros. They shared a deep love of Sandman and Alan Moore comics. They shared memories of waking up at 5am to watch Sailor Moon through television static. They both coveted Trapper Keepers as children, and had strong opinions about ballpoint pens. More than anything, he was a quiet person, a listening person, and she’d admired him for that. She’d promised to finish the Master’s degree she was supposed to have in hand for the job. Bryan signed on the dotted line because there was a teacher shortage. But it’s already been ten years, teaching at the charter school in Texas, and the degree never got finished. She works harder to compensate. Can’t believe it’s been ten years. Been through plenty with Bryan, with the school. He never let his end down. Not once. And until now, she’d never taken a single vacation day, despite his urging. He knew this could happen. Burn out. Fear and grief bludgeoning one of his best teachers all at once so that one day she just doesn’t show up and keeps not showing up. He’d warned her about it, but she knew as well as he did that she’d work herself into the ground rather than admit she was in pain.
“Think about it, won’t you?” Bryan had asked, so quietly.
“I’ll quit, Bryan.”
“OK,” he said. In a way, he understood. He’d lost his mother to early onset dementia when he was a child. Had the decency not to try to relate or give her advice about how to cope. Not yet, anyway. How do you help somebody who is about to go through that sort of pain? Min can hear the empathy in his voice, doesn’t want it yet, doesn’t know how to handle it. “I’ll get the sub, but I can’t pay both of you. You’ll be on leave.”
Fine.
He asked if she’d considered therapy. He hinted that she had no idea what was coming. That there is no preparing for a loss like this, no matter what you do. She hadn’t been able to find anything to say to him.
The fight with Mom had started not long after that. Mom coming out of the room saying how Min never does the dishes or vacuums, that this is a not a vacation place, and then about Min’s job, and then about the driving, and so on, and Min crying snotty tears because she really just doesn’t have the ability to listen silently or let it roll off her back. Not when there’s so much wrong already and she can’t find the words to talk about it. It was not the same when she was a child. Back then, she put her head down and crossed her arms, bull-headed but absorbing everything like a dirty sponge. What changed?
Far away across the water, the bridge over the river is newly painted blue. Construction drags on, road repaving. Long waits with vehicles stacked up at a stop for a quarter mile in either direction. Baking on the asphalt.
But from here there is not one car visible.
Then what was it, the fight got to a point where it was about how Min won’t talk to her brother, Jaeyoung, who needs to be kept updated on Dad. Whenever Mom calls Jaeyoung, they just end up arguing about money, and it throws the day off so bad that Min calling is, unbelievably, still the better option.
It’s not that she’s against it. Not against him. But why is it up to her to be pleasant to him? Sometimes, the whole thing feels so deeply bitter.
Mom says, “Forgive him. Leave the past behind. Then it’ll be easier for everybody.”
“Say that to me again.”
What is this reality that others imagine? If she would forgive Jaeyoung, or at least say so, or go back to work, or do anything that they want her to. It’s true that this kind of resentment is poison, that the anger and the unspoken bitternesses have seeped into unexpected parts of her life. Creeping into her self-doubt. Creeping into feelings of worth and whether or not she deserves what’s happening in her marriage, or working life. When she feels like there is nothing to stand on, there it is again, that space where forgiveness can’t enter, where her mouth doesn’t even know the shape of the word.
Low pressure makes her joints ache, her face hurt. Physical signs of tonight’s incoming late season storm. The sky yesterday was a whispery white color, overcast in a way rare for this season. Heavy rain in itself is normal for the region, even this time of year, but usually in the form of late afternoon thunderstorms that roll in and evaporate into humid evenings. These huge systems with wind and flooding rain which last all night. Is it her imagination or is this sort of new? It seems like every other week, the weatherman on TV is warning coastal Virginia to tie down lawn furniture or anything else that can blow around. Warning them that water-saturated earth cannot hold onto the roots of ancient trees. Usually, these systems skirt around the point of the peninsula and don’t hit so hard. But this time, her body is telling her the rain is coming. Her sore jaw, from TMJ, hurts.
Frogs in the inlet warn all who will hear about the rain, filling their bodies with swarthy late summer air and breathing out their misgivings. The brown frogs are territorial. When frightened away from their places on the water’s edge, they return always to the same spot after a time. They know their way about the place.
The green frogs are making little sound, hidden.
The passenger door wrenches open and Min sits up straight.
“Are you better now?” her mother asks. There is still some roughness in her voice, but not much. “Time to go back home.”
Min thinks about gathering a thought or two together to say something smart.
Mom, five foot two and wearing a white cloth bucket hat rolls down her passenger side window.
“Get going. No time for talking.”
A dragonfly clinging to the side mirror jumps away as Min starts the car.
Virginia Lee Wood is a Korean American writer who holds a Doctorate in Creative Writing from the University of North Texas, as well as an MFA from Hollins University. Her work appears in The Southern Review, Pleiades, Cutbank, PANK, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of English at West Chester University in West Chester, PA.