Logical Song (Please Tell Me Who I Am)

By Jean Giovanetti - February 2005

My father's family helped Mom with her English and Italian; soon she could wave her hands and curse along with the rest of the Italian ladies

When I was growing up in Cleveland during the 1970s, I often wondered why Mom and Dad never warned me that people would give me a hard time about my race. Then again, my parents never talked about race. They treated me like I was one of them. That is, Dad treated me like I was Italian, and Mom treated me like I was Korean. At the time I figured my parents just didn't realize that I was both.

Once when Mom was washing the kitchen floor, I asked her if Europeans were better than Asians. She threw the rag in the bucket and sat back on her haunches. She was mad. "Just remember," she said. "While your ancestors make art and music, theirs club each other with animal bone." Then she went back to washing the floor and we didn't talk about it anymore. But she didn't make me feel any better. According to her, I was still half barbarian.

I guess I realized there was something different about my family when I was about three-years-old. Every other week, Mom and Dad would take me to the Italian deli in our neighborhood. My thirteen-year-old brother and eleven-year-old sister didn't go with us. There was really no reason for them to come along because they were too old to be favored with free taste tests from the nice ladies who worked behind the counter. But I didn't want to miss a single opportunity to stuff myself with Genoa salami, Leona bologna and imported provolone cheese while I was still small and otherwise sample-eligible.

Dad often waited for us in the car because the place was always jammed on Saturday mornings so Mom would take my hand and together, we would charge toward the sweaty glass doors. Even in the winter I could smell the place long before we entered. Just seeing the long purple salamis that hung from white cords in the windows made my mouth water so much, I was sure my teeth would drown. Once inside, all my senses went into overload. The air was hot and filled with the smells of sharp imported goat cheese, red wine vinegar, spicy peppers and antipasti, and the voices of a dozen loud Italian conversations all going on at once. Bulky figures shuffled around me with loaves of bread tucked under their arms and yard-long torpedo sandwiches. I held fast to the sleeve of my mother's coat that I knew by the wad of clean white tissues that always peeked out of her pockets.

"Always bring clean tissues," Mom always said. "They good for everyt'ing."

Most of the women at the deli were twice my mother's size but that didn't faze her a bit. Mom was a barracuda in that place. She elbowed right past the hulking old women with black hand-crocheted shawls who were complaining loudly to each other in the aisles because mass at the local parish was no longer being given in Latin. Then she shoved around the carts brimming with massive cans of tomato sauce that some women had a tendency to leave stranded when they headed up to the counter for their sausages. No one could make it faster to that counter than my mom.

"Half pound Genoa salami," Mom yelled when it was her turn. She yelled partly because of the noise in the deli, partly because her head barely cleared the top of the counter, and partly because she just liked to yell. Then she held up her right hand with her thumb and forefinger pressed tightly together.

"Slice thin," she would demand.

In a lot of ways, my mother blended in with the deli crowd. She had dark hair like a lot of the other Italian women, except for the younger ones who bleached theirs in a weak attempt to look like Farrah Fawcett.

Mom lived with my father's family when she first came to the United States from Korea, and the recipes she learned from my father's mother were some of the finest from the old country. In fact, my father's family helped her with her English and Italian, and Mom could wave her hands and curse along with the rest of the Italian ladies when the checkout line was too slow. Yet there was something about my mom that was very different from the other mothers.

What was it?

"Hey, you want salami or what?" Mom asked, nudging me. She was eyeballing the scales while the woman behind the counter waved a tantalizing slice of imported heaven in the air.

I snapped my head up and down. She might as well have asked me if the Pope was Catholic. "Say 'thank you,'" Mom said as she handed me the slice.

"Graczie," I said to the nice lady behind the counter. I learned that word from my Korean mother.