My earliest memories of America have to do with moving. We’d move from apartment to apartment, always in search for lower rent. I’d go to my elementary school and ask any new friend what they paid for rent, so I could come home and tell my mom about a place with lower rent somewhere. Most of them would not know what rent was.

One day when I was in 9th grade my dad found an abandoned house a few blocks from where we were living. The place had broken windows, and the large yard was fenced off and full of various potted plants. It turned out that the man who owned the property had a nursery, and he stored his inventory of plants on that yard. We got him to agree to rent us the 4 bedroom house for $200 a month! But we had to fix it up ourselves, he told us. These were days when I went to the bathroom with the lights off so we could save on electricity, so it really was going to be literally ourselves--me and my dad—who were going to do all the fixing for this “fixer-upper.”

The house was actually one of those handsome old homes with a lot of built in cabinets and shelves, with hardwood floor throughout. But it had been abandoned, so it was pretty awful inside. When my dad and I went to take a look for the first time, there were melted candles on the floor, and strange graffiti on the walls, also written with melted candle wax. But things got even stranger when we turned into one of the bedrooms. There were dead bees piled up on the floor covering about half the room, with dead bees about 5 inches deep against the wall, and tapering off steadily to about the midpoint of the room. We figured the bees came from the outside, and went out the back, and turned toward the narrow side yard where that room was. I still remember the sound of the bees when we turned that corner. It was more than buzzing. I actually felt pressure on my eardrums. The small piece of sky above the sideyard was darkened by the crisscrossing of a thousand bees. The ground was scattered with dead bee bodies. I vaguely remembered hearing that bees execute wayward members of their colony—a factoid that turned out not to be true—and that room full of dead bees seemed downright sinister.

Well, obviously we were not about to be deterred from our new $200-a-month house because of these bees. So, my dad had me put on a thick sweatshirt in the summer and a hat. (He always had me do things; all of the do-it-yourself projects we did consisted of him telling me to do things, and standing around half concerned and half frustrated as I did them, because he was not very handy, but he was very frugal). Then, we taped up all the openings—the pant legs, the sleeves—and got some window screen material and draped it over the hat, and taped it down onto my sweatshirt. Thus armored against the bees, looking somewhat like a space man, I slowly mounted the ladder with my can of Raid toward the crack in the wood shingles on the exterior wall where the bees seemed to be flying in and out. As I got closer, I could actually hear the bees getting angry. The sound of the bees, which had been an intimidating, palpable low buzz became a higher pitched whizzing sound as thousands of bees flew furiously around me. I pointed the nozzle of the spray against the crack in the shingle and sprayed away. Bees came out by the hundreds and immediately fell, either poisoned by the insecticide or just knocked out of the sky by the force of the spray.

My dad, at a safe distance away, directed the action from the ground, and while backing up stumbled and fell, but as he put out his hand to break his fall, got stung by one of the dead bees on the ground who, I guess, had its stinger pointing up. I didn’t laugh though. I was tense from all the carnage, and plagued with thoughts of bees penetrating my sweatshirt, screen and tape defenses.

I guess the idea was that if we bothered them enough, they would leave. But the next day, the bees were there again in full force. My dad remembered hearing about beekeepers using smoke to subdue bees, so we put some rags in an empty metal paint can, and set the rags on fire next to the wall. But the smoke just wafted upward in rather random fashion, and we realized that we probably needed to somehow direct the smoke. But while we were nudging the can in vain attempts to get the smoke to zero in on the opening in the shingles, the fire department came and rebuked us and left.

That weekend, we got our uncle to come over. Our uncle was omnipotent. He had been to Vietnam as a diesel engine mechanic, and he could fix anything around the house. After the usual scorn and contempt over our ineptitude, he actually began removing the shingles from the wall, exposing the stud frame underneath. There, across several studs, were neatly stacked horizontal shelves of beehives, some white and fresh, others a bit more brown and dry, full of honey. Suddenly, the theme changed from “lets get these bees out of here so we can move in,” to “wow, here’s wild honey not even available at stores!” That’s when the ladies got involved. My mom and aunt brought out large Kimchee jars, and we started to gingerly remove these flat white loafs, heavy with honey, with thousands of octagonal shaped cells perfectly arranged, many of them with the end of a dead bee sticking out of them. I don’t know how many jars we filled with the honey, but I do remember bee body parts at the bottom of them, like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. I also remember how hot the honey felt going down my throat, and how chunks of beehive felt like chewing gum when you chewed on it. We gave some of the honey to our pastor, and some relatives.

The bees left after that. I saw the bees, in a large clump, many layers deep, flying away eerily slow, looking like some strange comet. They looked majestic, in a way, and I remember feeling a tinge of guilt, having displaced them like that. But the house was $200 a month.

There’s a saying my dad would often repeat that goes something like: “Suffering—you can’t even buy it with money.” It was that valuable, in other words. I used to think that it was one of those parent-isms used to keep us kids from complaining. But, looking back on it, that little bit of “suffering” was one of a kind.