Dabdabhae is the official Romanized spelling of 답답해, another instance of a Korean word not spelled out in English as it sounds. Take my word for it, my unofficial spelling hits the clipped syllables of 답답해 on the nose: to say dop dop — two short intakes of breath — is to act out what the word means.
I’m so frustrated, I can hardly breathe.
“Stop Asian Hate” seems to be the slogan sticking to the Asian protest movement now, but am I the only one who laments the reflexive wording of our outcry? “Stop Asian Hate” makes it sound like Asians are the ones doing the hating, or worse, that there is an Asian variety or way to hate, which Koreans in particular have been accused of in their fraught relation to the Black community, certainly not an intended meaning. For a group historically silenced and insulted for botching English, “Stop Asian Hate” just stinks. Why not simply “Stop Hating Asians”? Too direct, too demanding?
Dop dop heh.
I visited my mother last weekend at Leisure World, a senior retirement community just south of Los Angeles recently in the news, but that story hadn't broken yet when I went to see her. The current events raging in my mind last Sunday were the Atlanta shooting targeting Asian massage workers and the attacks on elderly Asians. My mother is 93 and has managed to weather the isolation of the past year with incredible patience and resiliency (living through a war has its uses). Yet in the past few months, my siblings and I have noticed her mind and spirit dimming. She’s replaced her twice daily rounds of table tennis (she’s one of the oldest in her group of players and won’t let you forget it) during the pandemic with a slow half hour walk on the paths that hug the neighboring townhomes. These daily walks have become the highlight of her days during lockdown, these thirty minutes giving shape to the other 1410 minutes of her day.
When I accompanied her on her walk, which she normally takes by herself leaning on a rolling walker, I remembered the bunny rabbits that overpopulate the lawns of Leisure World and used to thrill my kids on their visits when they were little. I hoped to come across some of these bunnies bouncing and hopping around during our walk, a welcome distraction from the heavy sense of dread I’ve been carrying around lately. Instead, what popped into view as we took our winding path around my mother’s neighbors’ homes were a number of Trump election signs stubbornly claiming their patches of lawn months after the election. As we turned onto a deserted cul-de-sac dotted with more Trump signs, I started to feel sick and worried thinking of my mother walking every day through this minefield, alone. What happened to all the goddamn bunny rabbits?
A day later, the news came out about the anonymous hate letter sent by a neighbor to the widow of Byong Choi, a Korean American resident of Leisure World, on the day of his funeral. Written by hand (palsied?) in an antiquated Cold War-era cursive, the letter celebrated “one less Asian to put up with,” a message that read to me like a perverted racist twist on“thoughts and prayers,” a phrase that itself has curdled into a curse when I hear it now.
I thought of what happened the day before as I was leaving my mother’s house after our walk. I heard a man’s voice call out, “How’s your mom doing?” I turned around and it was a white middle-age guy in a baseball cap, unloading his white F-150 pickup. Was he being friendly or threatening? I couldn’t tell. I hate stereotypes and stereotyping, but at this moment, I feared this white man was going to reach into the cab of his truck for a gun and shoot us.
There was my mother, all 4’10” of her, standing on her front lawn waiting for me to get in my car, closer to him than to me.
“Omma, get in the house. Please go inside now.”
My Korean is terrible and her hearing is worse. She stands unmoved waving to me, and I know she won’t go inside and shut the door until I am inside my car and drive away. It’s the Korean custom of saying good-bye, which I’ve adopted too: stand outside the front door and wait for visitors to leave and disappear from sight. Then and only then is the goodbye complete. When it’s my kids leaving, I stand in the driveway or sometimes follow the car pulling out to the street.
“She’s doing pretty well,” I reply to the man.
“Good of you to visit.”
I realize I’ve been holding my breath. I breathe.
It’s okay, I think. Everything’s okay. He’s not a mass murdering fuck.
Still, I take my time getting into my car and watch him in my rearview mirror. He shuts his truck and carries some boxes toward another unit.
I wave goodbye to my mother, wishing with all my heart she would go inside her house and shut the door, so I don’t have to see her in the rearview mirror as I drive away, waving to me, getting smaller and smaller in the distance.
Photo by Miss Koreant