* * *

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THAT EVENING my father took Seong Young and Nami back to the airport. Alone in the kitchen, I heard a knock at the front door, but by the time I opened it there was no one there. Left behind on the mat was a small paper shopping bag. Inside, wrapped carefully in tissue, was a jade-colored ceramic teapot, two cranes in flight painted on the side. I recognized it vaguely, a gift someone had given my mother that sat unused on the top shelf of the glassware cabinet. There was also a letter, written in English and printed on two sheets of paper. I put the teapot back in the bag and brought it inside, sat down at the kitchen island, and read.

To my lovely friend and student, Chongmi.

I still hear your laugh surround me when I am sitting and painting in my studio. One day, you walked into my studio for the first day of art class wearing a stylish dress and fancy sunglasses. Then, I thought to myself, Oh, that rich lady is going to stay in the class for about two months at best. However, you surprised me and you never missed a class for a year. I could see that not only were you so engaged in painting, you enjoyed it.

You, two ladies, and I had such a great and joyful time when we had a class. It was more like a Middle Age club than an art class. We had many things in common because we were all in the same age group. We drank coffee with a sweet loaf of bread that you always brought to class. We laughed at so many funny stories that we all told.

This went on for a year until you called absent to class. You said it was just a digestion problem, not a big deal. I said, “Just take it easy, sister.”

I still cannot believe that that was the last time you would hold a brush to paint. I prayed for you, keeping your Korean teapot which you had started drawing just before you got sick.

I had started to believe in a miracle. I could have returned the teapot to you right after you stopped coming to class, but I thought if I held on to it you would get better and be the happy lady you had always been.

The time came where I could not hold on to it anymore. I know that you are no longer suffering from pain, and are at peace in heaven. You are walking to my studio with a bright and cheerful laugh in my imagination when I am in there. But I have to see you are no longer sitting and painting in your favorite spot.

Chongmi, you are a beautiful, kind, and favorable lady and I love you so much.

From your friend Yunie.

November 2014.

Why hadn’t she waited for me to answer the door? Clearly, my mother’s art teacher knew she had passed, yet she kept this letter addressed to her. And if it was for my mother, I wondered, why hadn’t she written it in Korean? Had she translated it specifically for me? There was a part of me that felt, or maybe hoped, that after my mother died, I had absorbed her in some way, that she was a part of me now. I wondered if her art teacher felt this way, too, that I was the closest she could get to being heard.

I riffled through the bag where my mom kept her art supplies, a canvas tote with a black handle and a pattern of little Eiffel Towers. I thumbed through her sketch pads. In the smaller one were her early drawings. On the second page was the pencil sketch of Julia. The one where she looked like a tubular sausage with a face. I remembered her texting me a photo of it when she first started the classes, how proud of her I’d been, despite the rudimentary likeness, that she was trying something new.

I noted her progress from page to page. The smaller book was filled with pencil drawings of various objects from around the house, artifacts from her world. A pinecone plucked outside on the acreage. A decorative, miniature wooden clog Eunmi sent as a souvenir from her time in the Netherlands working for KLM. One of the short-stemmed glasses with the textured daisy motif from which she drank her white wine. Porcelain ballerinas, one in fifth position, one in third, my accidental maiming left unrendered. One of her Mary Engelbreit teapots that even without color I recognized as the first in her collection, its yellow base and purple paisley lid conjured instantly from the design I knew so well in pencil. On the last pages were three perfectly shaded eggs. I remembered a conversation we had on the phone about them, years before this whole nightmare started, when her main concern had been conquering their curvature.

In the larger sketchbook, the artwork became more impressive as my mother began to work with watercolors. Her use of color was vibrant and beautiful. She’d always been good at making things beautiful. Her subject matter progressed from household objects to more traditional themes like flowers and fruit. She began to sign and date her work, experimenting with different signatures as if each one were its own nom de plume. On a series of three charcoal drawings of bread and lemons done in May and June of 2013, she signed just her first name, Chongmi. In August 2013, on a painting of three green pears scattered flat beside a vase of coral chrysanthemums, she shortened it to Chong. In February 2014, on a pencil drawing of a bunch of bananas, she signed her name in Korean, but added a Z to the end. In March 2014, just two months before she discovered the cancer, on a watercolor of a whole green bell pepper and its halved orange cousin, she signed Chong Z in blue ballpoint pen.

Though I knew my mother had been taking art classes for the past year and I had even seen photos of a few sketches via text, I’d never seen the bulk of her work. The various signatures revealed something so endearingly dilettante. Now that she was gone, I began to study her like a stranger, rooting around her belongings in an attempt to rediscover her, trying to bring her back to life in any way that I could. In my grief I was desperate to construe the slightest thing as a sign.

It was comforting to hold her work in my hands, to envision my mother prior to pain and suffering, relaxing with a paintbrush in hand, surrounded by close friends. I wondered if making art had been therapeutic for her, helped her navigate the existential dread that came with Eunmi’s death. I wondered if the late bloom of her creative interests had shed light on my own artistic impulses. If my own creativity had come from her in the first place. If in another life, if circumstances had been different, she might have been an artist, too.

“Isn’t it nice how we actually enjoy talking to each other now?” I said to her once on a trip home from college, after the bulk of the damage done in my teenage years had been allayed.

“It is,” she said. “You know what I realized? I’ve just never met someone like you.”

I’ve just never met someone like you, as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.

15

My Heart Will Go On