The walk to and from the optometrist was surprisingly short. Jeon Sujin was grateful that she’d been able to find a clinic in the neighborhood, and one run by Koreans, too. Her husband had the cars most days, and public transport was a beast not yet conquered.
As they walked, Sujin held Carter’s right hand with her left. She looked down. She’d been so concentrated on finding the correct way home that she hadn’t noticed that her son was engaged in some deep study of his own.
Carter, using his free hand, covered one eye and walked a couple of paces, looking around as he did so. Left at the houses, mostly one-storey and made of dark, red-brown brick; right at the wide, uneven road with the occasional dawdling car; up at the blue sky hindered occasionally by a drooping, purple tree. Jacaranda, Sujin recalled.
After around half a minute, Carter shifted his hand to cover the other eye. His chubby hand clasped his face rather tightly, covering all the way from his forehead to halfway down his jaw on one side at a time. This exchange repeated several times before Sujin said something. “Why are you doing that?”
Carter looked up at her, his left hand still covering his right eye. His bad eye, the one that needed the eyepatch. “I’m testing,” he said.
“Testing?”
“Mm. I want to see which eye is weaker.”
“You don’t trust the eye doctor?”
Carter considered the question, and then shook his head vigorously. Wrong, Mum . His hair was getting too long, and it rippled restlessly around his eyeline as he moved. Sujin hadn’t been able to find a Korean hairdresser in the area yet, so she’d been putting off getting him a haircut.
“So you do trust the eye doctor?”
“I don’t kno-o-w.” Her son sang the last word, and jumped to avoid a crack in the pavement. It caught Sujin off guard, and his fingers almost ripped out of hers. The walkway was littered with jacaranda flowers, and they were starting to squelch and slide underfoot. Sujin panicked momentarily, thinking that Carter was going to fall. He landed perfectly safely. “I don’t know. Don’t know.”
He sang the song, melody and words unclear to everyone but himself, all the way to their apartment. Carter had to stand on tip-toes to press the button to the fifth floor. It was a Saturday afternoon, but Sujin’s husband was not home. He rarely was. That was what Sujin had liked about him when they were dating; he didn’t seem to like being home. He was always out: eating, walking, drinking, moving, with anyone and everyone who would be his friend. Sujin used to be one of the people who went out with him and spent time in his planet-sized glow, just one of the many asteroids near-colliding with him. No, that wasn’t fair - she’d been more constant than an asteroid. A moon, perhaps.
Of course, the drinking had stopped when she found out she was pregnant with Carter, who had been Chanwoo, back then. And then soon, the eating, the walking, even the moving, had all stopped.
“Mum, where’s the eyepatch?”
Sujin dug through her purse and brought out the eyepatch, which had been so tenderly tucked into a white envelope by the receptionist. She was Korean too - she’d spent even less time in Australia than them, by the looks of it. Her makeup, her sense of style - it was all exactly like the young women Sujin had seen in Hongdae or Apgujeong just six months ago.
“Be careful,” Sujin warned her son, as he took the eyepatch from her. “Do you need help putting it on?”
The optometrist had been apologetic, as she stooped down to explain to Carter at eye level. “It’s to train your right eye to be stronger. Right now, the left eye is doing more than he should, so we’re covering him up for a while. You don’t have to wear it until you get home,” she had added, embarrassed on his behalf.
Now, Carter stood in front of the mirror in the living room, holding the navy eyepatch up to his face. His left hand gripped the bottom of his shorts, crumpling up the crisp fabric. Sujin stepped up behind him, and guided the eyepatch onto his face, making sure the strap wasn’t too tight. Then she eased the fistful of fabric out of his fingers, and bent down to kiss the small, sweaty palm.
“I’m not sure about this, Mum,” Carter said.
“I know, baby.”
“Do you think I look alright?”
“I think you look handsome. Kind of like a pirate. Or some old, battle-hardened warlord.” “What’s a warlord?”
“Never mind.”
“Will it be off in time for my party?”
“No, I’m sorry. But you shouldn’t worry about that.”
Sujin reached over to stroke the fringe out her son’s eye. Carter’s eighth birthday was coming up, and Sujin had insisted they throw a big party for him. Her husband waved it away: do whatever you want. Carter himself seemed ambivalent about the idea at first. So Sujin spent a month harassing him about a theme - What do you like? What do you want? - until Carter had reluctantly admitted that, lately, he found animals fascinating. Lizards, reptiles, birds, that kind of thing.
Another month was spent tracking down venues. Sujin translated the word for “zoo” into English. And then she googled, “best zoos in Sydney.” Hundreds of search results bobbed in front of her, taunting her until she got a headache and had to turn it all off. She typed in, “zoo”, into her map app. So many red dots showed up that she didn’t bother looking at any of them at all.
Eventually, she braved it and asked the other mums at school what they thought.
“You should take the kids to Taronga! They have this whole cute birthday deal: discounts and balloons and the whole show. They’ll set up a little table for you at the end for the cake and everything.”
An afternoon calling the zoo, the name of which she had to write down on a piece of paper in her notebook. The boy on the other end of the line, who barely sounded old or bright enough to have finished high school, kept rudely asking her to repeat herself. Sujin did so. He asked again. She ended up yelling at the faceless voice in the phone, shouting that she-wanted-a-birthday-party-for-her-eight-year-old-son-and-was-that-possible. Thirty minutes later, yes, it was possible.
#
Carter picked up English in two months. Sujin had thought her son was a kind of genius at first, but the teachers at school had quickly clarified that it was a perfectly normal timeline - seven years old was actually the prime time, developmentally speaking, to learn a new language. Sujin remembered what it had been like at the beginning, when he had less than twenty words of the language, and was facing the open door of his Year 2 classroom.
Luckily, the school was diverse. The articles they’d read online said that this was a particularly Asian-friendly neighborhood, and that many schools, even the public ones, had successful language programs for ESL students. But other articles said that the educational gap between private and public schools in Australia was enormous, much worse than in Korea.
“This is non-negotiable,” she had said to her husband. “We’re sending Chanwoo to a private school.”
“I agree with you.”
“Will we be able to afford it?”
“He can take that scholarship test in Year 5. It says it here.”
The ESL teacher at this school was a young Chinese woman called Ju who spoke with an accent and wore kitten heels that were too small for her. Her nails were flashy and constantly bejeweled. Sujin took them in instantly, as well as the lumps of white flesh spilling out of the sides of her shoes.
When Sujin saw Carter bring home his first worksheets, with words and grammatical endings and pronunciations scrawled all over in the Chinese woman’s orange felt tip pen, she felt sick. Year 5 was only three years away. How could she expect Carter to take the test - to win his own scholarship - in this new language?
Three weeks later, Carter came home with his first English book.
“These are from a famous book series in Australia. They are called ‘Aussie Chomps’ books, see the bites on the side?” the ESL teacher explained, holding out the book. The right-top corner had been cut out to resemble big, jagged bites, like a dog had torn at it. “Very big words, very easy for children, even English language learners.” She flicked through the book, showing Sujin words as thick and big as her fingers. “And when it gets harder, it moves onto ‘Aussie Nibbles’. The bites are smaller.” She brought out another book from her basket. Sure enough, the bites were smaller and more curved. Caterpillar nibbles out of a leaf.
Their respective accents - and Sujin’s limited vocabulary - made the communication between the ESL teacher and Sujin near-impossible, until Sujin had the brainwave of holding out her phone between them. Whenever she heard an unfamiliar word, she either typed it in to the translator, or asked the ESL teacher to do it herself. In this way, everything took longer, but Sujin did not have to pretend she understood.
Two months in, Carter was zooming through even the Aussie Nibbles books. He would talk about them to Sujin sometimes, recalling the plot and the characters all out of place and at breakneck speed.
And then, “We believe Carter is ready to join the mainstream students. His language skills are obviously not perfect yet, but he’s very much ready to receive instruction in English. Congratulations!”
Carter had to return all of his Aussie Chomps and Aussie Nibbles books back to his ESL teacher. He came home that day with a big grin and a little green pencil case with Pororo on it. “Ju gave this to me as a present. It’s Pororo, see?”
Sujin blinked, surprised, at the smiling penguin. Pororo was one of the most popular children’s cartoon characters in Korea; the show had been on constantly in the background when Carter had been four or five.
“Ju said she got it when she was in Korea last year. She said she went with her boyfriend.” He wrinkled his nose, the idea of his beloved teacher with a boyfriend clearly unsavory to him. “She said she likes bibimbap.”
It was odd - Sujin hadn’t expected Australians to be so aware of Korea. At the beginning of the school year, when she was still surrounded in the shroud of mystery of being the newest mum to join the school, the other mothers had asked her all kinds of questions. Where are you from? What does your husband do? Oh, Korea? Are your parents still in Korea? Your family? Why did you come?
“My parents are dead,” she said. She knew that there was a more diplomatic way to say that someone had died in English - every language had its own way of tiptoeing around it - but she couldn’t, for the life of her, remember it. She only found out later when she typed it into her little translation app: passed away. My parents have passed away.
“Korea is just beautiful,” said one of the blonde Australian mums, who worked as an accountant at some firm in the CBD. She always overlined her lips with a plum-coloured lipstick, the way Sujin’s mother would have applied her makeup back in the 80s. If Sujin had overlined her lips like that at work, she would have been laughed out on her first day. “The hubbie and I took the kids three years ago, in the winter. The little ones were just so excited to see the snow! Me?” She rolled her eyes. “I was freezing. Couldn’t wait to get back to Sydney weather!”
“And it’s so advanced, technologically speaking,” another mum jumped in. “We just loved the subway - so efficient! Oh, and the streets were so clean. And the food!”
The food...Sujin did miss that. She expected she felt the same way about Korean food as the blonde woman did about this country’s weather.
#
Sujin stood by the gates, waiting to recognize her son amongst the crowd of children bursting out the school gates. It wasn’t hard - he was wearing an eyepatch. She put her hands on her hips. So he was wearing it now, was he?
When her son reached her, she raised her eyebrows at him. “Carter, do you have something to tell me?”
Carter’s face flashed with panic. Sujin could see him deciding between feigning confusion and innocence. When had he learned to lie like that?
“What, Mum?” he asked in English. This was something else Sujin was starting to notice, with some worry. Carter had always spoken Korean at home, because it had been easier and because that was the language she spoke to him. But nowadays, he seemed to slip in and out of English, sometimes even without really thinking about it.
“Don’t deny it, Chanwoo.” Chanwoo. It felt purposeful to call her son by his own name, somehow. When they first enrolled Carter in school and had to fill out the forms (“LEGAL NAME. PREFERRED NAME.”), she and her husband had decided to stick to Carter, at least for a while. They didn’t want to confuse their son. But now that he seemed to have a hold of English, wasn’t it time to switch back? She worried that if she didn’t use Chanwoo, it would cease to exist. Saying it was a magic spell that kept it alive.
She reached over and helped him off with his backpack, sliding it over her shoulder instead. It weighed nothing. Taking his right hand into her left, they started down the path. “I heard from Mrs Whitney that you took your eyepatch off at school today. She called me about it this afternoon.”
She had called ahead to the school, of course, the first Monday after Carter got his eyepatch. She wanted to make sure he wouldn’t take it off at school.
“Mrs Jeon? I just wanted to let you know that Carter wasn’t wearing his eyepatch in class today. I think he must have taken it off in the morning. I know you wanted to talk to him about it, so I didn’t say anything…”
Sujin’s grip had tightened on her cellphone. She was standing at the stove, stirring a pot of boiling kimchi jjigae. Her husband’s favorite. The only dialogue she and her husband had nowadays was through the three meals of the day. She cooked breakfast at the crack of dawn, packed a lunch, and went back to bed. Her husband ate the breakfast and took the lunch and left. She did the dishes from his breakfast and cooked dinner and left it out and went to bed again. He ate the dinner. When she woke up before the sun, the empty dishes were waiting for her. Sometimes, the only confirmation that her husband was still alive was found in the empty, dirty dishes.
“Yes, thank you, Mrs Whitney. I’ll talk to him today,” Sujin had said, ending the call.
Carter looked straight ahead as he walked, not responding.
Sujin squeezed his hand, to check that he was listening. “Carter,” she said. “The eyepatch is important, okay?”
“I know, Mum,” he mumbled. Korean this time. “I just think it looks sort of dumb.” His mother sighed, and it was louder than she’d intended it to be. “It’s only for two more weeks. Did the other kids make fun of you for it?”
“No.”
She was relieved. “See? There’s no need to be ashamed about it. Do you promise to keep it on tomorrow?”
Her son was still looking straight ahead. She waited.
Finally, he said, “Okay.”
A smile broke out across her face. “That’s my boy.”
The two of them walked in silence for a while. Carter covered his left eye with his free hand, and started to walk blind.
Sujin pulled at his hand. “Stop it. You’ll hurt yourself.”
“No I won’t. You’ll stop me if I’m about to walk into something.”
“Will I?” she teased.
Carter’s hand whipped away from his face, and he looked up at her, his eye opened wide. “Will you?”
They were in front of their apartment now. Letting go of her son’s hand and making a big show of charging on ahead, Sujin called over her shoulder. “I don't know, will I?” “Mum!”
The panicked, urgent voice, and the pitter-patter of his sneakers on the pavement, running towards her.
#
“We can always go back, you know.”
“Are you kidding me? Are you actually, really, kidding me?”
“It’s not working. We can go back.”
“After everything you put me through?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Forget it. Just - forget it.”
“So what do you want to do? Make up your mind! Don’t you want to go home? Isn’t that what you’ve been whining to me about for the past six months?”
Sujin’s phone pinged - an email notification.
Get excited! Confirming your upcoming booking at Taronga Zoo…
“We got forty RVSPs, you know. That’s what I was coming to tell you. I didn’t expect so many. We’re going to need a bigger cake.”
“What?” Her husband glared impatiently at her.
“Forty. That’s every person in Carter’s class. They all want to come.”
“What?”
“To his party. They all want to come to his birthday party.”
“What the hell do I care - ”
Sujin walked away, a serene smile spreading over her face.
#
“And with that...the eyepatch comes off!” The optometrist slipped off the eyepatch with a flourish. Carter glowed with happiness. Sujin thanked her.
Outside, the receptionist offered Carter a high-five as she waited for the computer to process their bill.
“It must have been hard for you, reminding him to keep it on all the time,” the young woman said in Korean. She was new; she’d only been in the country for six months. Her boyfriend had wanted to expand his business to Australia, and she’d followed him here. Her blush-coloured lip tint caught the white of the clinic’s ceiling light.
“It’s really hard getting him to do anything at this age,” Sujin laughed.
“I can imagine that. I have a brother around that age. A late addition to the family,” she explained, at Sujin’s momentarily confused look. “I guess my parents missed having a baby around.”
Sujin noddedd. “I know what you mean.”
She paused, and then she spoke again, and as she did, she felt more like herself than she’d felt in years.
THE END