From "Metronome"

“Everyone sit down on your behinds, both cheeks on the floor!”
Jin turned his attention to Ms. Weir, the first grade homeroom teacher, a woman whose eccentricities would never have been allowed to surface in Korea. She was fond of irksome euphemisms, such as “cheeks” and “wee wee’s”, and she dressed monochromatically: her shoes, her clothes, her tights.
“Can we say good morning to Mr. Kim?”
“Good morning, Mr. Kim!” Exclamation points everywhere, like many balloons, rising.
“Good morning,” he stood. “Are you ready to warm up?”
“Yes!!”
That year, the first grade was working on “Chim Chim Cher-ee” from Mary Poppins. Jin hadn’t played any part in the selection of this song, and he was more than grateful that this was the last year the first graders would be singing it.
The choice was problematic for a number of reasons. It was extremely difficult to get first graders to enunciate all of the “cher-ees” and “cher-oos” and the melody was haunting. How a group of parents soberly decided that The Sherman Brother’s bittersweet tune would make an appropriate send-off for the seniors was beyond him. After “Nature Boy”, it had to be the saddest song he’d ever heard in English.
“We’ll take it from the beginning?” The little children crossed right ankles over left, clapped hands together, reached out and poked their friends. Every day was a new beginning for them.
Their eyes opened wide as he played the first stanza- the ba, da-da-dum, ba da-da-dum like a whirling carrousel.

Chim chiminey, chim chiminey, Chim chim cher-ee!
A sweep is as lucky, as lucky can be.
Chim chiminey, chim chiminey, Chim chim cher-oo!
Good luck will rub off when I shake hands with you!

Their high-pitched, eager voices almost camouflaged the dark current, but the lyrics reinforced the downward-pulling irony of the relentless bass. Ba da-da-dum, ba da da da-da-dam…

Now, as the ladder of life has been strung
You might think a sweep's on the bottommost rung
Though I spend my time in the ashes and smoke
In this whole wide world there's no happier bloke.

Jin stopped. Some of the parents had complained. They were fairly certain that ‘bloke’ was a bad word, but they couldn’t come up with anything to replace it. ‘Rogue’ had been proposed, but that seemed just as bad. The real problem was that the children couldn’t manage the hard ‘k’.
“Remember what we said last week? We were going to cough?”
Jin retook the stanza and looked up at Ms. Weir. He loathed singing out loud, but she was more than happy to demonstrate the phrasing.
“In this whole world there’s no happier blow- KUH!”
“Shall we try it again?”
It was worthless, really. On the day of graduation, the children would be nervous and all of the words would run into each other like colored cereal in milk.
“In this whole world there’s no happier BLOKE. YAW!”
Jin smiled. A lot of these little boys would go home that evening and run around a kitchen island singing “Bloke-ha! Bloke-ha! Bloke-ha!” until their mothers hit them playfully with a dishtowel. Others would go home to quieter households where laughter was viewed as a vulgar display of affection, and it was for these children that Jin the lamented the endless repetition of the song.

From "Homemade"

She noticed that he stopped in the fiction section before heading towards the checkout. She sucked at her cheeks while she watched him choose. After flipping through the fiction rack, he moved to the table of bestsellers. She felt both relieved and saddened when he chose “Tuesdays with Morrie”. It made her sad to imagine a grown up reading a tale about a grown up and his mentor. But then again, most people bought it as a gift for their fathers, which struck her as an incredibly sad gift, indeed.

From "Homemade"

The parking lot of Bookends had recently been painted and the parking-space lines seemed particularly white and aggressive to her that day. Teresa took a deep breath before she pulled her car into her usual spot, considering the barbed snarl of potential disasters waiting inside.

From "Sunday in the Garden"

A snake in a forest. A broken yellow line running through a frost heave. The irremovable gold sticker from Oprah’s Book Club. The possession of a secret was an anchor in the noise. She looked out at the garden. She went to him, there.

The Car From "Notes on Mexico"

The art critic, who criticizes everything. The man who built a little house on an island so that no one could reach him. Who thinks that the size of Michelle Obama’s hips are indecent. Who takes coconut ice cream for desert instead of chocolate flan. He pulls me into a discourse about Mexican fiscal policy that I neither understand nor care about. Over a final glass of sparkling water, he explains how he recently ordered a car in much the same way one would order a pizza. He called up the company, gave them the model and his credit card number, and finally, his address. And they drove it out to him.

On the way out to my car, I see his. It is a raised white truck with painted flames along each side. This is not the car he had ordered like a pizza. He explains that it is his vehicule d’enti-enlevement. The car he drives around in so that he won’t be kidnapped.

From "Notes from Mexico"

On the way back from the restaurant, he says- he’s almost singing, really- how I hate the Parisians. Les Parisians, comment je peux les haiir. He has an incredible voice. He is purring. He says it is the same every time he arrives in Charles de Gaulle. Last time, he asked a man when he could expect his suitcase. As if I have time for such things! The man exclaimed. The Parisians. How I hate them. How I hate them sometimes.

From "Metronome"

For Jin, it didn’t hit him the way it did some boys. He’d always appreciated the intricate nature of a woman’s beauty, the delicate exactitude of a gesture, the way a woman could store entire sentences in her head only to pick them apart later, carefully, carefully, like so many petals.
It was an instinct, the attraction, sharp and all consuming, the smell of a man. The taste of his sweat and the nubby grit that held on to the ridges near an ankle. It was about the delicious loss of control that came from being opened.
Though he didn’t have a type, it was important that he could depend on the other person’s body. He didn’t like the feel of small or fragile things. The delicacy of sinews and pert bones repulsed him- he hated his own elbows, for example. There was a little knob that stuck out, the subcutaneous olecranon bursa. Bulbous and insistent, like a bottle cap poking out from underneath his skin.