Trips to H-Mart
by Eben Woo
It’s tucked away in a neighborhood a parkway and state line
from yours, in the same town as your church so Korean you shift
in your seat, guilty. This is the family pattern of Sundays and
shopping carts, you know how to balance your toes on their rattling rims,
their criss-cross skeletons of metal and plastic red, and scratched white letters
easily grasped under your small arms and forward stomach, all seatbelted safe
against your dad whose body is not yet skinny and old as he pushes
you along aisle tracks, his navigation mapped by your mom
who usually doesn’t like you wandering but here harbors
no need to look back. And at each slow lurch of the cart, your eyes
savor the rows of Korean food and Korean snacks, where, here,
aren’t strange, not yet sitting still at the bottom of paper-bagged lunches
but instead, are loved with secret giggles and hands that find each other,
fighting inside the silver foil bags for the last chip broken between
the three of you. Here, they sit proudly, the cart’s crown jewel.
The end is always the same: self-served cafeteria meals and tables full
of families who came from the same sunday service as ours, overdressed
with their carts brimming with plastic bags whose handles lift like waiting arms.