Truth:

There is sacrifice in that smile. Isn’t that true? That you smile, and smile, and keep smiling every time I ask. There in the lift of a lip and printed across the pushed-up cheek is every beauty lost. I would have studied there, unspoken. In the late winter cold of New England, before my final interview held in the admissions building of a high school campus, you buy me hot chocolate and point to every Boston landmark you know. 

That’s the first pizza I had in America. I was so nervous for my audition but their pizza was too good for me to worry. 

There’s the conservatory where I applied, their stage was the most beautiful. 

Back then, I called your grandmother every day in this park. One week of the same phone call where I cried because English is harder than music.

Your sacrifice is subtitled in this montage of us, in its worn, mangled script(ure). Backdrop of piano keys I didn’t learn and one you barely play now. In the glitch of film: music plays. I listen only where your perfect pitch and graced fingertips don’t move on. You look to me in the downbeat. If there’s an up — 

I wanted to be a conductor. 

You could just tell me what you lost, Umma. 

Truth:

Next is what we are. Bound and split by the same sacrifice. We are every scrap of greed poured generational. 

You: Sunk dreams of a woman, made mother.

Me: Child dream in the making.

You were “daughter” once too, an image blurred double and run back. I trace easy the outline of your silhouette faced away; fall of dark curls half outgrown of a perm and shoulders set for a long-gone stage. “Daughter” born of the same kind of sacrifice, I know the shape of your ghost; where your fingers shadow a head of gray locked from the cold of a laboratory. I know, Umma. I know what you’re carrying. Is this you: unfulfillment drowned, left breathless?

You are a mother, and your own will tell me who you were. My halmoni will sit with me, halabong peel under our nails, and look at the piano when she says your name. Because before I called you Umma, she named you Yoon-Hee. She can’t face me when she speaks of photo albums and trophies and what used to glow under that dust. Is this her failure as a mother? Is it yours? Is it mine? 

You were a prodigy. You were a revolutionary. You were purpose and power and passion personified. You were a girl who beat boys with your shoes and never took no for an answer. You played piano until your calluses bled and wrapped them in cheap scotch tape to keep going. You were more tangible than dream, so I suppose that word is incorrect. 

What to call you….

…

What to call me, your successor in more than blood.

Lie:

It’s still worth it, you say. My life could be worth twice as much - space enough to fit what you were. What you are. Vivid and vehement, I have the strength to carry ghosts I’ve never met. Look, there is my mother (who would have been a pianist). Here, this is my grandmother (who could have been a scientist). 

You don’t resent me, even if this is where the credits don’t roll.

Dolls in a line. 5’4 and lost last name. Symmetric smiles of curved noses and long eyes. Sacrifice, sacrifice – 

How could I possibly make up for your lives in mine?