FICTION

O-Lan, You Are the Earth

By Jihoon Park     VOLUME 57 No. 4

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I

The enormous head fell from the sky and crushed a small Baptist church near the outskirts of an Arkansas mountain town. There was only one person inside at the time, an elderly organ tuner named Sadie Bennett. Her body was found among the wreckage, pinned underneath the altar’s crucifix.

The head was that of Hollywood star Anna May Wong, and it was difficult to say otherwise. It had her iconic look. The thin solid brows, the sharp eyeliner, the chic hair with flat bangs. The giant head even wore her red lipstick.

Like everyone else, I first heard about the head on the radio that morning. The television broadcasts followed soon after. All manner of people were being interviewed, from local residents to atmospheric scientists and religious leaders. Here in Los Angeles, our focus was on Anna May Wong herself, who had been on the set of The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong. DuMont Television put the project on hold as soon as they got word of the “giant oriental head,” as the newsmen were calling it, and she was escorted back to her house in Santa Monica. Security kept watch as a mob began to form outside the house. Some members of the mob were from the Los Angeles United Baptists, who accused Anna May Wong of being a Soviet Communist she-devil who summoned the head to destroy the Christian foundation of the country. A year had passed since Mao Zedong signed the peace treaty with Joseph Stalin, and anti-Asian sentiments were rising. But even the tamest members of the mob still wanted a statement from Anna May Wong. It was, after all, her head that had fallen out of the sky.



In the newsroom, we had a staff meeting to discuss how we might spin the story.

“I’ll talk to Herb at DuMont,” Mr. Leal said. “Maybe we can get someone through security and get an exclusive with Anna. For now, we’ll keep rotating reporters by her house for any updates. Kim, pass the ashtray.” I slid the ashtray across the table. Mr. Leal ashed his cigarette and lit a new one. Everyone at the magazine called me by my last name because they thought my first name was too difficult to pronounce. I had to get used to it. Mother and Father even thought it would be better for my career, since it sounded like an American name. “Meanwhile, Gary will take a trip down south for in-field reporting. We should have the phone and telegram information soon.”

Afterward, I was cleaning up the darkroom when Gary came in.

“You can’t smoke in here,” I said. “Chemicals.”

“Right.” Gary put the cigarette he was about to light back in his pack. “Up for a trip?”

“Not taking Robbie?”

“His camerawork’s been awful lately. Besides, I figured you’d have an interest in this one, seeing as you like that Anna May so much.”

I sighed. “Don’t like her any more or less than Hepburn or Hayworth. I just like the flicks. They’re all good.”

“Either way, I’ve been noticing your camerawork. I want you to—”

“I’ll go,” I said, beating Gary to the punch. I didn’t want him feeling he had any say in what assignments I took, even though technically he did as a senior reporter. I already knew my photographs were good.

Later at home, Mother told me to be careful in Arkansas. It would be the first time anyone in our family left California since moving to Los Angeles from Ulsan.

“There are no Koreans there,” she said, “and watch out for the rape. Pastor Chong says everyone in the South is a raper. Like Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“Everyone can’t be a raper,” Father said, clipping his toenails. “If everyone is raping, who’s making the buildings and growing the corn and serving the beer?”

“They can still do all that.”

“Fuck,” Yunha said, fiddling with the radio. “Fucking thing’s broke.”

“Where’d you learn to say that?” Father smacked her over the head with a rolled-up Los Angeles Times.

“Molly Smithers. She’s my only fucking friend at school.”

“Make better friends. Go help your mother in the kitchen.” He smacked her again and then turned to me and unrolled the paper. He pointed at the front-page photo. President Truman speaking at The Biltmore about the new hydrogen bomb. The fall of Communism was imminent, supposedly. “See, this is the kind of work you should be doing, not that Hollywood tabloid crap.”

“Those jobs are competitive,” I said. “I need to build my portfolio first.”

“Gah, how can my son be so stupid? Haven’t you figured it out yet? In America, it’s not about the work you do, it’s about who you know. You need to make better friends too. Go help your mother in the kitchen. And see if you can bring back some of that okra for cheap. We can try making kimchi with it. If it’s good, we’ll sell it at the store.”



I couldn’t fall asleep on the plane. I found myself thinking about The Good Earth, which I had first read in school, and then again in the original English when we moved to California, going back and forth between the Korean and English to practice the words I didn’t know. In my head, Anna May Wong had always played O-Lan, Wang Lung’s wife, perfectly portraying her resourcefulness in lifting the family from poverty to prosperity. When I read that MGM had passed her over for the part of O-Lan in the movie adaptation, instead giving it to Luise Rainer, I felt almost as devastated as she had been. She was instead offered the role of Lotus the concubine, which she refused. I still watched the movie, and Luise Rainer was good as O-Lan, but when I returned to the novel, Rainer had replaced Anna May Wong in my head and the book became unreadable.



The head stood with monumental proportions, six or seven meters tall. Looking up at it felt like meeting Anna May Wong for the first time. Most of the debris from the church had already been cleared away, but the pieces of wood and rubble wedged underneath the head, along with the expression of calm satisfaction on the head itself, suggested the sense of a job well done. It was the first time I had seen such an expression on an Asian face in America.

Gary began interviewing one of the local policemen about the details of the impact. I took photos from the edge of the line of officers keeping the curious crowd at bay, where there was still a bit of good sunset light coming through the treetops.

A young boy was the first to sneak past the officers and make contact with the head. He quickly climbed up the upper lip and the bridge of her nose, and then pulled himself up by the strands of hair. People cheered as the boy took his place at the top of the head, assuming a Superman stance. More people followed after the boy, ignoring the officers’ increasingly fruitless requests to step back.

Children climbed the face, sticking their heads inside the nostrils. Two girls took turns swinging from a lock of hair. A group of teenagers threw punches against the head’s lower jaw, but none were able to leave a bruise. A group of elderly people circled the head a few times, grazing their hands against the flat, pristine patch of flesh where the neck should have been. Seeing the enormous head surrounded by people, so small in comparison, made her seem more alive to me, as if at any moment those unshifting eyes would blink and Anna May Wong would thrash the people off of her face and bite those closest to her mouth.

“Hold this will you?” Gary said, handing me his notepad, which I tossed on the ground. He climbed onto the upper lip and pulled on one of the nose hairs sticking out, falling back with it when it finally came loose. The nose hair was around two feet long and as thick as a wooden dowel. “A souvenir,” he said. “For the kids.”

As for me, I kept some distance from the head, mainly observing it through the viewfinder. The face had a familiar gaze of stern authority I found difficult to confront, one I had never felt from Anna May Wong’s own face on the theater screens. Later that night while checking in at the hotel, I realized it was because the gaze had reminded me of my late grandmother.

The small dingy hotel was filled to the brim with scientists and newsmen that had flown in from all over the country. Gary immediately got in line to send a telegram. In my hotel room, I set up a darkroom and developed the day’s film. While organizing the negatives onto contact sheets, I felt satisfied doing my work for the first time I could remember. Maybe it was the southern humidity reminding me of Korea’s summers, but I felt that same warmth I used to feel while organizing family photo albums. I had the urge to put the negative strips not in the company binder, but in my own pockets.

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JIHOON PARK’s writing appears in journals such as Washington Square Review, The Columbia Review, and Quarterly West. His novel Stickman is forthcoming from 7.13 Books. He is currently a PhD student at UC Santa Cruz.


VOLUME 57 No. 4