Halmoni

My grandmother spoke three languages and lied in all of them. She lied in Korean to her sisters in Busan, telling them her American life was a palace of appliances and deferential children. She lied in Japanese to the dentist, saying she did not smoke, which she did, and had for sixty-one years. She lied in English, her third and weakest language, almost exclusively to me.

She told me I was her favorite, which I believed for a long time because I wanted to, and then I stopped believing because I met my cousin Min, who had been told the same thing, in the same tone, with the same hand on the back of his neck. She told me I had my mother's eyes, which was a lie so unnecessary I have never understood why she told it. My mother is adopted.

She told me, the winter I was nineteen and had come home from college with a boyfriend my parents did not like, that her own mother had forbidden her to marry my grandfather, and that she had done it anyway, and that she had been right. This was the lie I remember most clearly. I remember it because she had not, in fact, disobeyed her mother. Her mother had been dead since 1952.

I only learned this at her funeral, from a cousin twice removed, who said it apologetically, the way you tell someone their childhood has been slightly rearranged without their permission.

But the lie my grandmother had told me, that winter — I see it now for what it was. She had looked at me and seen a girl about to do something foolish, and she had reached, across decades and an ocean, for a story that would give me permission. She had invented a braver version of herself, and she had given it to me, and she had asked nothing in return except that I be brave.

I was not brave, in the end. I broke up with the boy. I went to law school. I did the expected thing and then I did it again, and again, for the next seventeen years.

My grandmother died in the spring. She was ninety-two. At her funeral, my aunt read a list of her virtues, which was long and almost entirely false.

I have been thinking, since, about what I want to lie about. About the life I will invent, at ninety-two, to hand to someone younger than me, someone on the edge of a decision. I do not yet know what the lie will be. But I have begun to gather the materials.