Speaking in Tongues | Ayoung Kim
Her face hovered only inches above mine. Her rubbery lips parted, revealing wide white teeth. I smelled garlic and red chili. She inserted her fingers into my mouth, probed my buccals, and smeared kimchi residue along my gum line. This was before hygiene laws that required dentists to glove-up.
Her cat-eye glasses reflected my distorted twelve-year-old self, exaggerating my too-long-too-pointy chin. The dentist exhaled into my face. My eyes watered.
“Your teeth are crooked!”
She shook her hair, chopped in a straight line above her eyebrows and trimmed at the nape of her neck, and addressed my mother in rapid-fire Korean. I would need braces; they’d straighten my teeth and reduce my protruding chin. I hid my offending body part with the heel of my hand.
Patting my head she said, “Good girl. See you at church, ah?”
Dr. Kim was my dentist and the church deacon. She held a medical degree and had completed seminary. The Korean community hoisted her like their gold medal, representing the best of our race. To my mother, she was a god.
At church, she positioned herself at the entrance, draped in a white gown, appearing as a heavenly being. Then she opened her mouth. She bellowed like an army sergeant, directing parents, children, elders to correct classrooms. We hustled to obey her commands. Dr. Kim scanned for slow-movers or late-comers trying to sneak past. “Mr. and Mrs. Choi, tardy again!”
After the initial consultation, my mother dropped me off for my braces-tightening appointments, leaving me alone with Dr. Kim. I renamed her Dentist Kimchi. I dreaded her breath. I dreaded her naked fingers. She inserted fresh wires, stabbing my gums and cheeks. I jolted with the twist of each brace, shock waves of pain drilling into every nerve root.
“Grace just performed Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto 2. Grace is studying AP French. Grace was elected junior leader for Revival Christian Camp.”
Her daughter Grace and I were in the same Sunday school class. Dentist Kimchi knew I played the piano but hadn’t advanced past Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, or past French I, and she knew I wasn’t chosen to be a Revival leader. At the end of the appointment, I handed her a check from my mother.
I showed up for this oral torture once a month. I sat in her chair for three years; three years of lip-tearing braces that did nada, not one tooth straightened. She provided my mother with convincing updates, concluded with a laying-on-hands prayer. My mother bowed down.
By the age of fifteen, I had quit piano and stopped eating lunch with her daughter. I wore blue lipstick, painted my nails striped like zebras, teased and spiked my hair. Dentist Kimchi regarded me like a wild dog.
“Grace won the Chopin junior’s piano contest. Grace was waiting for you at lunch time.” She cranked a wire with a viscous twist, as if yanking me on a short leash. “Grace is leading a Bible study class this Saturday. She said she invited you.”
She started to raise my chair, but I popped up—a ghoul rising from the grave. My grotesque visage with a cyanosis mouth, my upper lip caught on some braces as if I was snarling. As if. Dentist Kimchi recoiled. She could no longer pat my head, and we both knew it.
“See you at church, ah?” I slipped out of the room. “Tell your mommy to come next time!”
The following appointment, I was her last patient. It was nearly 8:00 p.m. when Dentist Kimchi completed tightening my last brace and set me free. I sprang into the reception area.
“Let’s go home, I’m starving.”
My mother reached for her purse and stood up. At that moment, Dentist Kimchi strode into the lobby and locked the door. She got on the floor. She ordered my mother to do likewise. Planted on hands and knees, Dentist Kimchi demonstrated how to speak in tongues: ree-rur-ree-rur-rah-rah-rah. This was considered a high form of speaking to God? Or a performance to exorcise the evil out of me?
My stomach sank as I watched my mother intimidated into kneeling on all fours babbling ree-rur-ree-rur-rah-rah-rah for half an hour.
Dentist Kimchi shouted, “A-men!”
Her breath filled the entire clinic. She stood up, her eyes flicking over my face. I tapped my black and white nails on the chair’s armrest. Pfft. She turned away from me and helped my mother, who wobbled to her feet. She thanked Dentist Kimchi and pressed a check in her hands. I wanted to rip it up.
One month later, we discovered Dentist Kimchi had started an affair with the pastor, who was married with four children. In the ensuing scandal, the wife and children fled to a different state, and Dentist Kimchi’s husband retracted like a turtle in its shell. Grace transformed into a pale, brittle leaf. The congregation split with half supporting the new union, the other half drifting to other churches or faiths. My mother was so disillusioned she joined a white pastor’s congregation.
I found a new orthodontist—also named Dr. Kim, but male and not church-affiliated—who ripped off my braces, extracted four molars Your jaw is too narrow so that’s why your teeth are still crooked, and fitted me with a retainer which I tightened via a tiny tool every week in the comfort of my own home. My teeth straightened in less than one year. I could’ve knelt on my hands and knees to bow down to Dr. Kim. He’d freed me from the abuse of wires, from metal braces shredding the inside of my mouth. Even during the months I wore the retainer, my tongue continuously swished across my teeth, relishing the smooth sensation.
A boy liked my teeth. I liked his breath on my cheek, his opened lips over mine. He lunged and his front teeth clicked against mine. Maybe I was evil, maybe I was like Dentist Kimchi, maybe I liked to use my tongue to speak to God.
Bonus audio of Ayoung reading from her essay:
about the author:
Ayoung Kim is a writer and artist. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The ManifestStation, Khora, Defenestration Humor Magazine, and Best Travelers’ Tales, among others. She is originally from San Francisco, and her teeth are still crooked.