NJGPA Practice Test 13

from *The Mugwort Season* — a novel by Esperanza Laughlin

¹My grandmother had been in America for eleven days when she found the mugwort. I was supposed to be showing her the neighborhood—that was my mother's phrase, as if the neighborhood were a museum, as if there were anything in it besides a laundromat, two nail salons and the community garden behind the library, where retired men grew tomatoes the size of fists. It was the garden that undid me. Halmeoni walked past the tomato beds without a glance, stopped at the chain-link fence at the back, where nobody grew anything on purpose, and made a sound I had only ever heard her make at babies.

²"Ssuk," she said, and crouched.

³It looked like a weed. It was a weed, technically—gray-green and ragged-leaved, the kind of plant that grows in the cracks of parking lots. She pinched a leaf, rubbed it between her fingers and held it under my nose. It smelled sharp and clean, as if a cut lemon and a pine tree had argued and both won.

⁴"We make rice cake with this," she told me in Korean. "Soup, too. In spring, everybody's grandmother is out in the fields with a knife." Then she took a small folding knife out of her coat pocket and began to cut.

⁵I want to be honest about what I felt, because I think it matters. I did not feel curious. I did not feel proud. I felt the particular burning embarrassment of a fifteen-year-old whose grandmother is crouched in a public place, in a padded coat in April, harvesting weeds while a man in a sun hat watches from the zucchini. I looked at my sneakers. I said, in English, which she did not understand, "Halmeoni, please, can we just go?"

⁶She kept cutting. She hummed. She filled one plastic bag and opened another.

⁷The man in the sun hat came over. He was older than my father, with dirt on his knees and a laminated badge on a lanyard that said GARDEN COORDINATOR—LEOPOLD. I braced myself. I had already composed the apology: She's new here, she didn't know, I'm so sorry, we're leaving.

⁸"Is that mugwort?" he said. "Is she taking the mugwort?"

⁹"I'm sorry," I began. "She's—"

¹⁰"Oh, take all of it," he said. "Please. I've been pulling it for six years. It comes back every spring like it pays rent." He crouched beside my grandmother, his knees cracking, which I had not expected. "What does she do with it? Does she eat it?"

¹¹So I translated. I translated badly at first, because I did not know the English words for half of what she said and I did not know the Korean words for the other half. But Halmeoni was patient, and Leopold was patient, and somewhere around the part about the rice cakes I stopped being embarrassed long enough to be interested. She told him you must pick it young, before it turns bitter. She told him that her mother had gathered it in hard years when it was sometimes the only green thing to be had, and that now people in Seoul paid good money for it in fancy shops, which she found very funny. Leopold, who had grown up on a farm in Ohio, told her that his grandmother had brewed a tea from dandelion roots that tasted like dirt and had sworn it was good for the liver.

¹²"Every grandmother has a weed," he said, and when I translated it, Halmeoni laughed so hard she had to sit down on the grass.

¹³We walked home with three bags. That evening my grandmother stood at our stove and made a soup with the mugwort and soybean paste, and the apartment filled with that sharp, green, arguing smell. My mother came home from work, stopped in the doorway and stood very still for a long moment. Then she said, in Korean, "I haven't smelled that since I was your age," and sat down at the table without taking off her coat.

¹⁴I ate two bowls. I am not going to pretend it changed my life. But a week later, walking past the library, I noticed gray-green leaves pushing up through a crack in the sidewalk, and I stopped, and I knew what they were, and I realized that I had walked past them every day of my life without seeing them at all.