A Cab Called Reliable by Patti Kim

long division.
    With my fingertip, I traced numbers on the wall of my father’s truck, divided forty-five into one hundred and five, then traced letters, words, phrases:
    Ahn Joo was here. BB + AJC together forever.
    Then I wrote the next five lines of my story that would win first place:
    Korea is divided into two nations at the thirty-eighth parallel, and the nation of South Korea is known as the land of the morning calm. Its capital city is Seoul, but I was born in a village near Pusan. My parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were born there as well. The village is called the One-Hundred-Year-Old Mountain and is known for its saltwater fish, anchovy, and herring.
    â€œJoo-yah, get out of there. You’ll get sick. Take a walk. Eat something,” my father said. “At least sit up. Go sit up there. You can push the seat back.” I told him I was fine. “Aren’t you hungry? Do you want a hot dog?” I was hungry, so I told him I would take one with mustard. I sat up to eat the hot dog and asked my father, “What’s herring?”
    â€œWhat’s the spelling?” he asked.
    â€œH-E-R-R-I-N-G.”
    The World Book in school had told me Pusan was known for its saltwater fish, anchovy, and herring. It also told me that Korea was known for strong family ties. Families lived in small villages, worked on farms, and remained loyal to each other. The family was more important than the individual or the nation. Grandparents, parents, sons, unmarried daughters, the sons’ wives and their children all lived happily together. To illustrate this, there was a photograph of a family of twelve or more members sitting on a porch eating supper. In the center of the photograph sat a girl my age, with hair cropped above her earlobes, listening to someone who had been cut out of the picture. Her sisters and brothers were looking in that direction as well. I think they were having anchovies and herring for dinner.
    My father turned his left ear up as if listening for distant music, repeated the letters in order, and looked for his Korean-English dictionary in the front of the truck. As he fingered through the pocket dictionary, he asked himself what herring might be, what could it possibly mean? When he found the word, he pointed at it, and without lifting his eyes from the page, he said, “You’re talking about Chung uh. ”
    â€œHerring,” I said and stood up to get a drink.
    â€œChung uh is very expensive fish,” he said. Pointing his fingers at his chest, he continued, “It’s blue. It has very many tiny bones. You can eat them, the bones, that is. We caught some at … where was it? Was it in Woodbridge? Was it in Octon River? Acton? Octon? They’re this thin. Remember we caught so many that we threw some away? But they weren’t the real kind. They’re good fried. They’re called Chung uh because they’re very blue, as blue as the ocean.”
    I told him I didn’t remember fishing for herring.
    â€œThat’s right. You didn’t go,” he said. He tucked the dictionary under his armpit and took my soda bottle to twist open the top. Dropping a straw through the opening, he returned the bottle to me.
    â€œIsn’t there a lot of herring in Pusan?” I asked.
    â€œThere’s plenty of herring in Pusan. But Pusan’s known for its belt fish,” he said.
    My mother had fried us belt fish once in America, but after finding white, pebblelike growths on them, she never bought or fried another.
    â€œAre you sure it’s belt fish?” I asked, not remembering the World Book ever telling me anything about belt fish in Pusan.
    With outstretched arms, he said they grew as long as belts that could hold up the pants belonging to a fat man. Holding his middle finger up at me, he said that his sister used to cut the fish into pieces about this long. I laughed at my father because he did not know he was