Unnie,

Thanks so much for your reply. Your summer this year is strange too, I guess. In fact, ever since I sent you that letter, it’s been all dry here. (How embarrassing to have talked about rain like that!) In the past few weeks, it’s been scorching hot--it almost grills my skin--that I’ve been missing rain already. But then, what a coincidence! I just got an emergency text that says, “HEAVY RAIN WATCH!” I looked out the window full of signs for rain. May this letter be delivered to your box with these cooling drops!

I really appreciate your introducing me to your special month and special person. The night I got your letter, I too thought of my grandmother who took care of me when I was young. Do you have any special rituals around the 25th of July? My family is Catholic, so on the anniversary of her death we give a mass for the dead. I, who only attend mass on Christmas and Easter, sometimes look up at the sky when the anniversary is getting closer. Looking up, I try sniffing rain. The day my grandmother died was full of it.

I mean, once you get to play with your grandma as a kid, playing with kids can be boring, isn’t it? Grandmothers are seasoned talkers, right? They overshadow fledglings who just began to learn how to say things. “Eating fish makes you swim better!” I very much like your grandmother’s witty saying, and I want to believe it. I’m a fish ghost*, but I can’t swim. I’ll have a grilled mackerel for dinner today. And I’ll be practicing kicking with my back on the bed.

When I was young, it felt like a big deal--not swimming well. My mother used to be a professional swimmer/swimming coach. She was trying really hard to catch even one little possibility from my kicks and bubbles, but I was still afraid of water. I enjoyed being with her in the water, though. She scattered some go stones down at the bottom of the pool. Those ten stones, white and black. When I found them all, my mother would give me a big smile--wearing the black swimming cap and the black swimming goggles, like some alien from outer space.

Just like you said, my obsession with mothers when I read, watch films, and talk is to understand my mother better, I guess. I too have a library full of mothers. It looks like those scattered go stones, underwater. I plunge in, pick up one at a time. But then it becomes clearer and clearer: I wouldn’t be able to fully understand her no matter what I do. The fact--a hard one--may be that this desire of me wanting to understand her is not about her. That I’m always obsessed not with her, but rather with the relationship I have built with her.

Starting this year, I’ve collected writings of Korean writers of my age. I Become My Mother’s Face Whenever I Cry(2018), a comic/essay written by Seul-Ah Lee, begins with this introduction that says:

“We could not choose each other. / I was just born and there was this person called Bokhee, who was so generous and kind that I laughed and cried to the full during my whole youth.” (p. 4)

The author’s gaze at her mother seemed so lovely, that I thought this would be “another lovely story I know too well”; but it was so surprising to see the next page. I, a Catholic-Confucianist girl, thought about those lovely moments with my mother, but not really about her body per se. This author, however, talks about how sexual her mother’s body is, what kind of sex she must have had with her father, how she must have been looked at by other men, etc. She portrays her own body and her mother’s side by side, and also her concerns about her own body and her mother’s help about it. Yes, why not? I thought. Why put the body behind, when my history with my mother was built around that very body?

So I finished this sentence, and was standing in front of my closet for a while. A couple of my clothes used to be my mother’s. A yellow sweatshirt and a long denim jacket. My mother said she wore them when she was an undergrad. She really liked when she and I were the same size, ever since I was fifteen; it was so convenient to buy clothes, she said. But it’s never been that way: I’m a bit taller and more chubby. My mother always bought clothes “we” would wear, but those clothes were always a bit tight for me and a bit loose for her. We were always wearing “us.” It now strikes me that we never really knew our real body sizes.

*In Korea, there is a saying that goes, when you love something so much, you become the ghost of that something. Apple ghost, kiss ghost, for example.

July