Essays 2024-25

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Prior Essays: Essays 2020-2021, Essays 2022-2023

ESSAYS - August 2024

Paul Hostovsky

LAST WORDS

When my mother learned that she would be acquiring a Deaf daughter-in-law, she tried to learn sign language, God bless her. But she had a hell of a time with the pronunciation, i.e. the manual dexterity involved in articulating the signs in ASL. She got her Ds and her Fs mixed up. She got her dominant and her non-dominant hand mixed up. And also her clockwise and her counterclockwise. Her palm orientation was, well, disoriented. And most frustrating of all was the fact that, as poor as her expressive skills were, her receptive skills were even worse: when it came to reading sign language she was downright dyslexic.

Nevertheless it came in handy in the end, when she was dying, when she was lying in the hospital after having been intubated because she couldn't breathe on her own. And she couldn't talk because of the big ventilator tube in her mouth and all the surgical tape keeping things in place. It had all happened so quickly--one day she was fine and power walking around the track at the JCC and eating organic and being healthier than thou, and the next day she was in the hospital dying of a pernicious infection that had somehow invaded her lungs and completely overwhelmed her system overnight. When she arrived at the emergency department, the doctors didn't yet know if it was a bacterial or a viral infection and within a few hours they had intubated her, and now they were pumping her full of meds and hoping one of them would do the trick and reverse the downward spiral. And all this within a matter of 24 hours. So while she was lying there in the hospital, surrounded by doctors and nurses and family, unable to speak for the breathing tube, she dragged her right forefinger up her left arm, from the wrist all the way up to the shoulder, then back down to the wrist, tapping it twice: “Long time.” Actually, a more accurate translation would be “Very long time,” because while “long” occurs on the forearm, the farther you extend the sign up the arm (i.e. to the elbow, the biceps, the shoulder) the longer the “long,” which is just one of many ways of modifying adjectives in ASL. So she signed: VERY LONG TIME, which may have meant: This is taking a really long time, how come I'm not getting better yet? Or maybe it meant: I've had a long life, time is an illusion, and I'm ready to go. Or maybe it meant: Long time no see, Uncle Hank, what are you doing here, I thought you were in Tel Aviv, thank you for coming to stand and watch at my deathbed while this nightmare keeps unfolding. Maybe it meant all these things. And more. Or less. They were her last words. She died a few hours later.

They say that fingerspelling, or the manual alphabet, was invented by Spanish monks in the 16th century. After taking a vow of silence, they used it for communicating with each other. And with God. I imagine them lying on their deathbeds, like my mother, too sick for words, holding up the first letter only of the prayer they wanted to recite but couldn’t. And those handshapes, each representing a whole passage, were lifted up to God and since God knew all the words by heart anyway and only needed a hand—a finger, really—to point Him in the direction of an intention, I guess He heard their prayers. And like the mythological Phoenix, those handshapes rose up like smoke from the burning sickbeds of the monks, up through the chimneys of the centuries, and have turned into the birds that build their nests in the hands of the Deaf, flitting and darting from sleeve to sleeve, where they sing to this day.

Sign language teachers will tell you that hearing people who like to dance, or who know how to play a musical instrument, have an easier time learning how to sign than those who don’t dance or play a musical instrument. Go figure. My mother never learned to play a musical instrument. And I have no memory of ever seeing her out on the dance floor. Except at my wedding (see above) when I married that Deaf daughter-in-law of hers. But she had always been good at languages. German was her first language, then Dutch, then English, then French (she spent her junior year abroad, and eventually became a high school French teacher), a little Czech, and a little Danish. But in her 60s, when her only child informed her that he was going to marry his sign language teacher, and she ended up with a Deaf daughter-in-law---and two years later, a Deaf granddaughter---she had a hell of a time learning ASL. To her credit, though, she gave it the old college try: She took an ASL class at a local college. She studied hard, did all the homework assignments, made pages and pages of notes, had perfect attendance. But when it came to remembering the signs and trying to produce them on her hands, she was all thumbs.

After she died, I found the notebook in which she kept a vocabulary list, approximating the signs with glosses and pithy little descriptions of the hand movements (“HAPPY: The 5 handshape tapping the chest upward in a circular motion. ANGRY: two bent 5 handshapes at the chest “ripping” up and away from each other; UNDERSTAND: The S handshape held up to the temple and opening into the G handshape, like a light bulb turning on.”)

I knew her ASL teacher, a Deaf guy named ALB. He’s a great guy, I told her. You’ll love him. But she didn’t love him. Because having been a French teacher all those years, she had some very definite opinions about how and how not to teach a language, and she did not approve of ALB’s teaching methods. As a matter of fact, she blamed him for her lack of progress with the language, saying all he ever did was stand in front of the class and sign to them, expecting them to learn it by osmosis. What’s wrong with osmosis? I asked her. Wasn’t it kind of like immersion? Wasn’t that how she herself learned French when she was living with a French family during her junior year abroad in Paris? She allowed that language immersion had its advantages, but she felt ALB was gearing the class toward the better, more fluent students and leaving the slower ones behind in the dust of their incomprehension. Plus, she said, she was the oldest student in the class at age 63 and her facility for learning new languages wasn’t quite what it once was. ASL, she said, felt like a magic trick or disappearing act. Now you see it, now you don’t. Voila! A sleight of hand that she couldn’t seem to get a handle on.

But within a year, when she was in the hospital, unable to speak, unable to breathe on her own, with all of us standing around watching helplessly as her life was rapidly, inexplicably slipping away, her last words to us were in sign language. And her pronunciation was absolutely perfect: one expertly modified adjective (right forefinger tracing a path all the way up the left arm to the shoulder) and one abstract noun (that same forefinger tapping an imaginary wristwatch on the left hand twice). VERY LONG TIME.

There was a tiny interfaith chapel off the main hallway of the hospital. No religious symbols or iconography in the room, just a simple tapestry on the wall with these words sewn into the fabric: Be still and know that I am God. It’s from Psalm 46, though I didn’t know that at the time. And I didn’t know how to pray but I prayed anyway. I like the first part of that quote better than the second part. Be still. I think that’s good advice. As for the second part--know that I am God—I don’t know anything about God. And neither does anyone. No one knows. Be still and know that you don’t know. That’s how I would have revised Psalm 46, if King David had asked me for some feedback on his psalm. I think there’s great comfort in knowing that we don’t know. That we don’t know anything. That we’re wrong about everything. The good news is not what we thought. The bad news is not what we thought. That’s the good news! And it’s greater than we know. And it’s greater than we can imagine. Because we can’t imagine being wrong about everything. Understanding is overrated. I don’t understand how or why my mother got that infection and died in less than 48 hours. And I don’t understand exactly what she meant by VERY LONG TIME. It broke her heart that she couldn’t understand ASL in spite of trying valiantly to learn it. And it breaks my heart to go back and reread those ASL vocabulary lists in a little notebook in her own hand. A hand that I’d recognize anywhere. A hand like a kind of face. The face of her writing. “UNDERSTAND: The S handshape held up to the temple and opening into the G handshape, like a light bulb turning on.”

Paul Hostovsky has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. His latest book of poems is PITCHING FOR THE APOSTATES (Kelsay, 2023). He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter.
Website: paulhostovsky.com

ESSAYS - February 2024

Okbi Han

Tenno Heika Banzai

       My maternal grandfather is a man who adds jazz and classical music to his iPod Nano. Listening to Rachmaninoff, he cuts up newspaper articles to make a scrapbook. He is a sweet old man who appreciates Frida Kahlo and tells me to become an artist like her, an artist to be remembered even after death. Once he discovered a strange tattoo on his granddaughter’s neck. He thought she loved Vegemil so much that she inscribed it into her body, and he decided to send her a box of Vegemil. The truth, however, is that I am such a big fan of Britney Spears and got a bottle of poison tattooed, not a bottle of soy milk.
       My grandfather loved his wife so much that he couldn't even set foot at her funeral. He is a war hero of the Korean War, and a burial site is reserved for him at the Memorial Hall in Seoul. After hearing that his wife could not be buried with him there because she had died before him, my grandfather was furious. He was literally jumping around the hall.
       In his military years, he used to be a trumpeter. His band played for the US Army. My grandfather would send me letters on my birthday and some short English phrases were included in them. I believe his years spent in the US Army base are the reason for those phrases.
       My grandfather is a Japanese collaborator, though.
       A few years ago, my whole family gathered for a Chuseok evening out. On the way back, my grandfather declared that he was a Japanese collaborator. My aunt, busy with driving, did not seem to care so much. She simply mumbled something like “yeah, sure” without understanding what he was actually saying.
       In his loud angry voice, my grandfather again declared that he was a Japanese collaborator. He attended a national people’s school when he was a boy. That was what the elementary school was called when Korea was under the colonial rule of Japan. Every morning at the school, he was forced to cry out “Tenno Heika Banzai!” Long live His Majesty the Emperor. He confessed that he screamed harder and louder than anyone else because he was afraid and did not want to get beaten up by the teachers. Sometimes he would also shout three times in a row, “Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”
       My grandfather concluded that there was no way he could be exempt from being a collaborator with such deeds and that he deserved to be purged. “I am no exception. It was never a right action, no?” He asked my aunt and umma in the car.
       I believe my grandfather wanted to hear back from us that it was not true. I told him that he was not a Japanese collaborator. The reply made in haste, however, did not leave my grandfather relieved. While the whole family went to a café to have coffee and dessert, he went home alone.
       Splitting a matcha macaron into halves for my nephew, I was still thinking about what my grandfather had said. Maybe I should have told him that a young child does not know anything, and he is unable to do something so bad. On the other hand, I thought there was something farcical about how he remembered his boyhood. Dessert time with a young nephew was not the best occasion to ponder on a colonial memory, nevertheless. The next moment, I was reminded that I prefer matcha from Japan, as Korean ones tend to taste bitter.

Okbi Han is a poet, painter, and video editor. She lives in Seoul and can be reached at [email protected]. She is also a professional french fries craver.