Free The Queen of Tears by Chris Mckinney Page B

recently that the combination of these three things often create something toxic. It was like when she was a bartender. Chivas, Glenlivet, and Patron may be quality stuff on their own, but mixed together? Well, you got the stuff you squeeze out of a bar rag. When did she start hating her husband?
    She went to the fish tank to feed the fish. When she opened the lid, the larger oscar rushed the surface, and his fat black lips broke the surface of the water. He waited there. Won Ju closed the lid. Let them starve. She walked into the bedroom with the cylinder of fish food still in her hand. She was going to fight with her husband, and she needed something to throw at him.
    -3-
    Soong sat at the small circular table in the hotel room with Darian, missing Long Island. The air conditioner hummed as she put a coat on. She hated air conditioning, but in a hotel in Hawaii, you either left the thing on or sweated out a pound of water. Their conversation in Korean started. Though Darian could not write in Korean, her spoken Korean was eloquent. “So what’s this about leaving school,” Soong asked, “are you getting bad grades?”
    Darian stood up and looked into the mirror above the wooden dresser. “No Mom, my grades are good. I don’t know, maybe Dad’s death is finally getting to me.”
    It had been over a year since the stroke came that finally killed Soong’s second husband. It took four to kill the tough ex-army captain, but the years of cigars and Scotch whiskey had finally caught up to him. Strokes and stomach cancer. Soong missed him too. Despite everything, he had been the love of her life. Darian was the only one who’d flown to New York for the funeral. “He wouldn’t want you to use his death as an excuse.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say. Sometimes a cliché is all that’s left.
    “I know. But I don’t know, lately I’ve been feeling like what I study there, I don’t know, like it’s worthless. Like you’re spending thousands of dollars on nothing.”
    Darian walked back to the table and sat down. Soong looked at her daughter’s face. She was a very pretty girl. In fact, she looked like Soong when she was young, only more American. Soong did not know what this meant, and couldn’t pick out a physical trait which was not Asian but distinctly American, but to her Darian would always be her American child. “I told you to study something more practical.”
    Darian sighed. “I know. You know what’s funny? You know what I’m studying in the English Department at U.C. Berkeley? I’m studying you.”
    “I don’t understand,” Soong said.
    “I’m studying literature written by first-generation Asian-American immigrants. I’m reading the works of their children. I’m reading about us.”
    “And it seems worthless?”
    Darian stood up again. “It’s not that it’s worthless; it’s…” She paused and said in English, “Problematic.” Then she reverted back to Korean. “It’s a problem. Sometimes I feel like we’re studying ourselves with a kind of detachment that’s scary. I don’t know what they called it in Korea, but here we call these intellectual learning centers ‘ivory towers.’ It’s sad. A bunch of people who may have grown up Asian, saying their thoughts and experiences are the valid ones. Turning isolated experiences into rules of thumb for entire races. Feeling sorry for themselves because they think they’re second-class citizens.”
    Darian sat back down. “Kids like me, Mom. Second generation. Some can speak their ethnic language but not read or write it, like me. Some can’t speak, read or write. Only a few can do all of it. But we all pretend like we know what’s going on. But in truth, we’re just twenty-something-year-olds swapping sob stories and using ridiculously big words to rationalize our experiences. Ivory tower, Mom, looking down on the masses, isolated, out-of-it.”
    Soong frowned. “And what does your father’s death have to do with