Sarang

 February 2020

1st Place in Prose, 2020 Marguerite Rush Lerner Creative Writing & Art Contest

Sarang, which means love in Korean, is the name of my parents’ dog. She isn’t their first Sarang. The first one arrived home in my dad’s arms when I was in 5th grade. He was the first pet I had, if you didn’t count the yellow chicks they sold by the school gates and that died within a week. “Sarang” was the corny name my dad chose. A ferocious Maltese with an underbite, he barked at the mailmen and caused our neighbor to complain. For years, I thought all dogs had underbites.

When my youngest brother was born, dad gave Sarang away to one of his employees, claiming dogs were dangerous around babies. Several years later, he told me over the phone that Sarang had died in peace. I was in college in the states by then, in the midst of my first breakup, which at that time felt bigger than the Titanic, Chernobyl, and Katrina combined. I didn’t give Sarang a second thought.

The second Sarang was a purchase by my uncle. She was a female Maltese much prettier than the first, with a short snout and dark, sparkling eyes of a baby seal. My parents regularly volunteered to take care of her for weeks at a time, calling her Sarang instead of her given name, until it became no longer clear who owned the dog. She would invariably be home as a welcome gift for me during my summer and winter breaks, wagging her tail into a blur as I arrived red-eyed from my 12-hour flight from San Francisco.

I had walked Sarang fewer than five times in her life. More often, I’d put her on my lap while flipping through channels. I had flattering pictures of her on my phone to show whomever I was dating at the time (yes, I had moved on — don’t we all?). I could make her walk on two legs with beef jerky dangling from my hand. She’d roll over for me to rub her pink belly and run after me as soon as I got up. I can still hear the pattering of her claws on the wooden floor of our living room, chasing me like the first bursts of monsoon. She must have been 5 or 6 by then. Her fur glistened simply from licking herself.

One begrudgingly notes the ravages of time by looking at old photographs of oneself. The effect is seven-fold for a dog.

“Welcome home,” mom opened the door as I dragged in my luggage behind me.

I was almost 30 now and married, but felt like a kid stepping into the indescribable smell of my childhood — in this, we are no different from salmon that return from the great oceans to the shallow pools of their birth. Behind dad, his belly buoying up his unbuttoned pajama-top, I saw a hairless dog limping on her stiff legs.

“She’s so old now.” This was my first time in three years to see Sarang.

“She’s a granny in dog years,” dad said. He had told me a month ago that they had taken her to the vet and discovered her uterus full of pus. She had barely survived the hysterectomy. “She’s gotten better since coming here.”

“Look how she greets her oppa,” mom exclaimed.

I saw that her eyes were white with cataracts. I squatted and gave her my hand.

“Hey Sarang.”

She smelled my hand, smacked her lips, and went away.

“I’m going to cry when she dies,” mom said.

——— 

Living 7,000 miles away from home for most of my adult life, I was spared from the petty squabbles as well as the unexpected joys of family business. My marriage had only expanded this distance, and I arrived in Seoul each year like an interstellar traveler whose minutes have been centuries on Earth.

First on my To-Do list was to visit my grandparents — like many a Korean, this was a non-negotiable contract I was born into. Every weekend of my childhood was spent in a large gathering of my dad’s side of the family, whose Machiavellian matriarch was my grandmother. She parceled out love and money to her grandchildren based on our school grades, and I was more afraid of her than loved her, not to mention that she frequently made my mother cry.

Grandma, at age ninety, was a husk of the tiger she had been, though her chauffeur and housemaid still addressed her ‘Ms President’. In the fashion of all Korean women her age, her hair was permed like instant ramen, with a hint of red dye.

“Eat a lot of meat. A man needs meat for his strength. I heard meat is cheaper than vegetables in America,” she tapped the table-side grill with her chopsticks.

I stuffed two pieces of galbi in my mouth in the manner of a foie gras duck. This was the third time she had repeated this comment since we’d entered the restaurant. She groped at a piece of lettuce with her chopsticks then gave up and used her fingers.

“When are you leaving again?”

“On the 16th, grandma,” I answered.

“Is it October now?”

“It’s December, grandma.”

“Already?” she replied with surprise. “Eat a lot of meat. A man needs meat for his strength.”

“This is delicious, grandma.”

“Hey you,” she hailed a waitress. “Bring in more meat here.”

My wife was staying with her parents outside Seoul, and for the next few days, I woke up jet-lagged in the middle of the night, prowling the apartment like a prospective home buyer. I stared at the framed pictures that lined the walls, went through wallets filled with expired ID cards, browsed through a junkyard of MP3 players. I lay on my twin-sized bed and imagined that I was sixteen, home from boarding school for winter break.

“Grandmother’s in the ICU.” Mom shook me awake one morning. “Your dad’s with her.”

Despite, or due to the fact that her husband and three sons were doctors, grandma dabbled in concocting her own medications (“I should get an honorary M.D. degree,” she liked to tell her daughters-in-law). This time, one of her herbal medicines had caused an arrhythmia.

I wrote down my name at the entrance and entered the Cardiac ICU with a visitor badge around my neck. Being in medicine myself (i.e. a lowly medical student), I felt strangely out of place, as if some error had been made in assigning roles. I could tell that the residents behind the computers were just counting down the hours, knew by now that even death becomes banal when it is part of your job.

“Grandma, I’m here.”

She was on oxygen and monitor, with a central line by her neck. Her arms, bruised from needle sticks, were tied down in restraints. I did a 3-second survey of her vitals and urine output.

“Lift me up. My back hurts,” she groaned.

“Grandma, you need to stay still.” I held her hand. “It’s me, the one who studies in America.”

“How’s the food like in America? Eat a lot of meat. A man needs meat for his strength.”

“Do you know what year it is?” I asked her out of habit.

“Ninety-six,” she answered. “Lift me up. I want to get out of this place.”

“Here grandma.” I massaged her neck with my other hand. “Does that feel better?”

She grunted and closed her eyes. At the bed next to hers, a man was crying silently as he wiped the face of an intubated patient.

“Visitors, please get ready to exit,” a nurse announced at the head of the corridor. “Time is up.”

“I’ll be back grandma.”

“When are you leaving for America?” She raised her tied hand.

“On the 16th, grandma.” 

Grandma’s MRI showed multiple old frontal lobe strokes, and she was discharged home after a week in the hospital. A review of her bank account revealed that her savings had halved in the past couple years, and it was then that people began talking about her buying a new SUV that she had never used, as well as the generous bonuses to her chauffeur and housemaid. The movie Parasite on everyone’s mind, her children decided to take charge of her finances.

Grandma’s short-term memory never returned to baseline. She began calling people in the middle of the night. During the day, she lay in her bed with a wet cloth on her forehead, listening to old pop songs on the radio.

“I really wanted to buy you a new suit,” she said as she held my hand. For the past few days, she had been calling mom up to twenty times a day, telling her to meet her at the department store.

“It’s okay, grandma. I already have one. You should rest,” I squeezed her hand.

“Call me if you ever need money. I’ll send some right away.”

“It’s sad to see what aging does,” mom said as we drove home. “Your dad, he shows that he’s a last child.” Dad had cried during dinner, to everyone else’s embarrassment. “When I had to live with your grandma—you know how hard she was on me—I once wished that something bad would happen to her. Then I realized that your dad would suffer the most if that were to happen, so I stopped.”

I surveyed the demolition around Jamsil Station where they were tearing down apartment complexes built in the 80s. Lotte Tower, the sixth tallest building in the world, rose above the ruins like an extraterrestrial spaceship.

“Will you cry when I die?” mom asked. “You know, first-borns can be so cold-hearted sometimes.”

———

Sarang spent all her days sleeping inside her pillowed house. I couldn’t tell if she could see or hear, or even recognize me by smell. Some afternoons, I’d lay by the mouth of her house and watch her sleep. She had spent most of her life alone, being fed the same dog chow year after year to exist for human pleasure. Did she know loneliness?

“Sarang.”

I stroked her thinning hair and felt the tiny knobs of flesh on the folds of her skin. I touched her small skull.

She opened her cloudy eyes and turned her face away.

“Pity is not love,” a friend had told me confidently during college, in one of his vodka-inspired speeches. But as I got older, I had come to question the truth of this statement. Perhaps, we mistake love for pity as often as we mistake pity for love.

It came to my mind that it must have been years since someone had walked her. I dug through her box of toys and found a harness still in its original packaging.

“Let’s go, Sarang.”

I held her between my legs and struggled to fit her legs through the harness. She growled and bit my hand.

“Fine, forget it.”

These days, she dragged herself by her front legs rather than get up and walk, a sign of crippling arthritis.

In the evenings, I went on long walks with mom. She liked it a lot when I accompanied her, and I had come to realize that times like these do not repeat themselves. Recently, she had started to walk all the way to the river, an hour each way, and I discovered the reason for this when we arrived at our destination.

“Look, do you see it?” She pointed. “Just by the bank, under the bridge.”

I saw a white heron by the faded grass, browsing the water where a stream drained to the river.

“It’s always here at this time.” She leaned on the railing of the walkway. “Go sit down somewhere, if you want. I’m going to stretch here for a while.”

I found a bench by the tall, dead grass. The other bank of the river seemed farther away in the smog of Seoul. Bundled in her parka like an Eskimo girl, mom watched the river for ten minutes or so.

“You prayed, didn’t you?” I gibed when she returned.

“You should thank my prayers for how well you turned out,” she chirped back. “Be nice to your mother while she’s still alive.”

The walk back was colder. Fluorescent windows hovered in the darkness that were distant buildings. We passed by joggers with AirPods, older people with portable radios strapped to their waists.

“I used to wonder why they do that,” mom said. “Play their music for everyone to hear, I mean. But they do it because it’s scary to walk alone at night. I get scared too, you know,” she continued. “Sometimes I leave the TV on, not because I want to watch something, but because I don’t like it when the house is too quiet. It’s going to feel so quiet again when you leave, with your brothers gone too.”

We walked through the deserted park. My face numb from the cold, I opened the front door and turned on the lights. Dad was spending the night again at grandmother’s.

“Sarang,” I called.

“Is she asleep already?” mom asked as she unbundled herself.

“Sarang,” I stood in front of her house and called her. All I could see was a bundle of white fur.

“Check if she’s breathing. I’m so afraid these days.”

I lay down on my stomach and held my ear by her house.

I held my breath.