A journal of narrative writing.
Leaving the Vineyard

I.

Sometimes living in Portugal became dull for Grace, sitting alone on her apartment floor, picking dead skin from her fingernails, and ignoring the mound of laundry next to her. She pictured the bar where she worked—dingy floors and pale green walls by day, smoky and dark with blasting techno music by night. She didn’t want to go, but she didn’t want to stay here either. Grace hated her apartment. Her lone window was painted open a few inches, allowing the pelting rain to form a grimy puddle on her floor. Her front door was also off its hinges, and the cross draft rocked it back and forth against the doorway. Wedging a straw into the gap in her front teeth, Grace sipped her vodka and soda, savoring the carbonation that tickled her nose, and decided to open her mail instead. Not having checked it for days, it was in a pile, neatly stacked on her only table. The top letter was from her father, sent by regular mail, and conveyed in terse and unsentimental words that her mother had died last week. Grace took another drink, this time a full swallow.

Although Grace’s mother had been ill from cancer for the past year, Grace had never once returned home to America to see her. Not when her mother was originally diagnosed, not when she first underwent chemotherapy, not even when she fell into a brief coma a month ago. Grace’s reasoning, or at least what she told people, was that she had already purchased plane tickets for her annual winter jaunt across the globe—this time to Southeast Asia. When the trip ended, she claimed she needed to pay off the exorbitant debt she had amassed on her credit cards, returning to work at this popular seaside town in Portugal.

But there was always some other trip, some other debt, that prevented Grace from going home. The truth was she hated her mother, or at least she thought she did whenever she recalled their arguments. They would fight about where Grace lived, which was Portugal in the summer and God-knows-where in the winter; about her future, which her mother said she threw away despite having graduated from Yale; about her choice in men, which currently was a thirty-two year old Australian man that hated all things American except the movie Easy Rider; and about her rebelliousness: Grace should be more like other Korean women her age, not like the wild miguk sarams that were her friends. Her mother ended that argument by calling Grace a whore.

Grace loved her life too much to conform to her mother’s demands. Only thirty, Grace had traveled the world, touring a war museum in Vietnam, running with the bulls in Spain, swimming with sharks in Belize, and traveling the Australian outback. She wouldn’t trade these experiences for anything, she told herself again as she reread her father’s letter.

Now her mother was dead. “I need to go home,” she thought, more as a factual statement, like Lisbon is the capital of the Portugal, than as an affirmative course of action. Then she remembered her job. She would be the only one behind the bar tonight. There was also her laundry. She should finish that first, she reasoned, and placing her father’s letter back into its envelope, she began folding her underwear.

 

II.

“I have to go home,” thought Grace again. It was the Fourth of July, about a week later. A bonfire blazed on the beach, crackling over the waves slapping the rocky shore. Having taken two pills of Ecstasy a few hours earlier with a group of expatriate Americans living in town, Grace was experiencing its peak affects as she sat near the fire, her bony body still wet from swimming. Her jaw clenched and her pupils dilated, she dug her right foot into the cool sand and felt each grain nibble against her calloused sole.

Her boyfriend Paul emerged from the surf. Lean and tall, he had an underbite that accentuated the ring through his bottom lip and dirty blond hair that dangled over his shoulders, trickling water across the tigers and dragons tattooed on his chest. Unlike the others, Paul had not taken Ecstasy, having sworn off drugs and alcohol except for marijuana after visiting a Buddhist temple in Vietnam last winter with Grace. When he stood next to her, Grace hugged his shins.

“I have to go home, baby,” she said.

“No you don’t,” said Paul as he wrung his hair over her. Droplets of water splashed onto Grace’s back—still warm from the fire—sending ripples of pleasure along her spine.

“I do. For my daddy. He’s all alone.”

Paul mumbled his response—he often mumbled or else spoke Australian slang, which Grace couldn’t understand.

“What did you say, baby?”

In a slightly louder voice, Paul said, “He’s got other people there to take care of him. You said so yourself. Nieces and nephews.”

A firework launched into the air, hissing and crying, before it exploded in the sky.

“No, I miss him, baby. I really do.”

As another firework sprang into the air, the crowd of expatriates sang the “Star Spangled Banner.”

“That’s just the drugs talking, love. You’ll feel differently tomorrow.”

With tears welling in her eyes, Grace began to sing along with the crowd while more fireworks scattered red and white streaks like stripes on the U.S. flag. Suddenly, the group rushed into the water, chanting “U.S.A,” leaving Grace on the ground, her round, chubby face gazing up to Paul in awe as if she were staring at the Statue of Liberty for the first time.

She said, “Baby, what was I just talking about?”

Paul smiled and said, “Nothing, love. Nothing at all.”

 

III.

Grace didn’t leave Portugal until the end of September when the tourist season ended. With Paul’s help, she decided she was walking away from too much money. There was also her commitment to her boss. Grace wouldn’t want to jeopardize her job for next summer, would she? She spent her penultimate day in Portugal packing in her apartment. Although she had hated her place all summer, now she felt strangely attached to it. She also felt unsure about leaving. In years past, she would pack quickly because of her disdain for Portugal. Now, staring at her pile of clothes, toiletries, stuffed animals, pictures, and romance novels, her only motivation was to drink another vodka and soda—her fifth already—when two hands moved her front door aside. It was Paul.

“Christ, your place is a mess,” he said. Returning from the hostel where he worked, he was in an irritable mood. He picked up Grace’s half empty bottle of vodka and said, “No wonder. You know this stuff is poison to your system. Like all that beef you eat.” Paul had also denounced meat after visiting the Buddhist temple. Grace, on the other hand, ate beef in as many meals as possible while forgoing fruit and vegetables unless it was either canned corn or canned fruit cocktail.

“I don’t know what it is but I can’t seem to get motivated to pack,” she said.

“I know what’ll get your mind off going home,” said Paul. “Let’s fuck.”

Paul had already kicked off his sandals and removed his T-shirt before Grace consented. As he lay on the mattress, his arms tucked behind his head and his ribs protruding like rollers on a conveyor belt, Grace retrieved a fifty-pack of condoms from her suitcase. There were four left. She threw the box to the ground.

Afterwards, Grace felt strangely unsatisfied, as if she had just unknowingly eaten unsweetened cocoa. As she wrapped her Cinderella sheets tightly over her while Paul snored, the light in the hallway seeping past her unhinged door reminded her of Plato’s cave allegory. No one piece of writing had influenced Grace as much as this did, particularly after the death of her older sister, Hi-Jung, who had been walking back to her apartment after leaving the law library of the University of Maryland when a car struck her in an intersection. It was late; no one saw the car. The driver was never apprehended.

A picture of her sister materialized: taller, skinnier, bustier, with perfect teeth but imperfect eyes—hidden behind the glare of her oval glasses. She was myopic in more ways than one, thought Grace, and recalled chastising her a few months before her death while the two were home during Christmas break. Preparing to go out on a Saturday night, Grace couldn’t understand why Hi-Jung was reading law material for next semester.

“You’re the reason Asian Americans are stereotyped,” Grace said as she rolled deodorant across her armpit.

Hi-Jung replied, “At least I’m not wasting my life.”

Yet she had, thought Grace, and like the figure in Plato’s allegory, she vowed after Hi-Jung’s death to climb out of her Korean American cave, filled with Confucian shadows, and experience life for the first time. She heard her mother’s voice in her mind—a monotone drawl that never wavered in tone, only in pitch. She grew more overbearing after Hi-Jung died, scrutinizing every aspect of Grace’s life even before she left for Portugal: her weight, her hair, her clothes, her makeup, even the gap in her teeth! She had asked, then begged, then screamed for Grace to get braces because in Korean tradition good luck is lost through the gap in one’s teeth. But Grace would have none of her peasant nonsense. She liked her beauty blemish; she said it gave her otherwise pedestrian face character, individuality. Besides, she reasoned, people often said she looked like a famous singer. Her gap became such a bitter point of argument between them that even now, as Grace lay in bed, she trembled with anger.

 

IV.

Home was never one location for Grace. Her family moved into a larger house and more affluent neighborhood every four or five years, starting with a small apartment in a poor area in Washington, DC when the family first came to America. Like many other Korean immigrants, her father, Moo-Joon Choi, was a businessman. But he could never stay with one business too long. After making an enterprise successful, he would sell it for a profit and move to the next endeavor, including at various times grocery stores, dry cleaning stores, gas stations, office buildings, and apartment complexes. Now he owned a winery. It was a strange decision at the time. Grace’s father had been retired all of sixteen days when he read an article about the recent success of wineries in Virginia. Although he knew nothing about making wine and rarely ever drank it, he purchased a struggling winery near Manassas, home of the famous Battles of Bull Run, and hired a professional wine maker to oversee his operation.

He figured it would be a nice place to retire with his wife, away from the city in a piece of land that resembled Korea, at least with the Blue Ridge Mountains in the background. He soon became drawn to the work, inspecting his rows of Chardonnay, Vidal Blanc, Chambourcin, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot, at first to become familiar with the grapes, but soon to prune the vines and measure their ripeness, and in a few short years, Running Bull Winery became a critical and financial success.

Of all of Grace’s homes, she knew the winery the least. Her father had bought it after she had graduated from Yale—his retirement coinciding with his last tuition payment for her. In the years following college, Grace would spend several months at home, working during the fall and holiday season at various jobs before traveling at the start of the New Year. More recent years found her at home less, opting to stay with friends across the country, so that Grace was there for about a week during Christmas before leaving.

Being early afternoon, Grace instructed her Super Shuttle driver to drop her off at the winery instead of the house, which was a quarter-mile up the road. The winery was a modest, two-story white building with a deck overlooking a pond stocked with koi and wooden ducks. From the lily pads lining the shores emerged two Black Labradors, not barking at Grace but not running to her either. Her father had bought them—a mother and her son—a few years ago even though he hated dogs because, as he told Grace, every good winery had dogs.

Grace found her father with a young couple sampling wine in the tasting room as an Italian opera played in the background. Her father was stocky with a round face similar to Grace’s and grey hair that he had always dyed black. Waiting for him to acknowledge her, Grace stood near the door next to a gift table littered with wine openers, wine rings, and bumper stickers that read, “Napa makes auto parts. Virginia makes wine.” Glancing at her, he rambled about the wine process, the grapes, and the various flavors imbued in each glass. Only until after the couple paid for a case of Chardonnay did her father finally acknowledge Grace and say, “You look terrible.” Indeed, she did. She hadn’t slept well on the plane, feeling ill from her hangover.

Locking the door behind the customers, Grace’s father asked in English, “How long are you staying this time?”

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