Native Speaker (15 page)

Kwang was certainly arresting to me. Not so much paternally, in that grim way my father always impressed himself on me, which eventually built up in my chest a resolve that told me I would never yield to him or surrender. I would come to share a different difficulty with John Kwang.

I suppose it was a question of imagination. What I was able to see. Before I knew of him, I had never even conceived of someone like him. A Korean man, of his age, as part of the vernacular. Not just a respectable grocer or dry cleaner or doctor, but a larger public figure who was willing to speak and act outside the tight sphere of his family. He displayed an ambition I didn't recognize, or more, one I hadn't yet envisioned as something a Korean man would find significant or worthy of energy and devotion; he didn't seem afraid like my mother and father, who were always wary of those who would try to shame us or mistreat us. When Hoagland first mentioned Kwang's name I only saw his ready image, what everyone else had at hand. In media photographs and video he appeared to me as an ambitious minority politician and what being one had always meant—the adjutant interest groups, the unwavering agenda, the stridency, the righteousness. A lover of the republic. An underdog champion. I thought I could peg him easily; were I an actor, I would have all the material I required for my beginning method. This is what Hoagland meant when he promised the assignment would be simple, that I'd just have to lurk close enough and witness the play of the story as we already knew it. For ours, finally, were just acts of verification. I would tick off each staging of the narrative, every known turn and counter-turn. The what and the what and the what.

I would tell a familiar story. The ones we recite in our sleep. I remember how Mitt liked to have the same book read to him each night for two or three weeks, how he would sit rapt with the tale and eventually murmur the words along with me, though on the first reading he would hardly listen and climb all over the bed and my shoulders and laugh frantically at the suspenseful moments, which for him began with the first
Once, long ago
. There is something universally chilling about a new plot. And I could see how my boy needed time and space for a story to bloom in his mind, because at any age what comes before sight is a conjuring. A trope, which is just a way to believe.

My necessary invention was John Kwang. This must sound funny, I know. He had always existed in his own right, and he lives at this very moment in a distant land that must seem to him like a great vessel of strangers. I do not know what he does now. I do not know the first or last iota of him. I do not know whether he has taken up a vocation or an art to pass the solemnity of the hours. I know only that I will never see him again, and that anything I can say or offer by way of his present life might well be taken as reductive and suspect. So be it. I intend no irony or special mode. The fact is I had him in my sights. I believed I had a grasp of his identity, not only the many things he was to the public and to his family and to his staff and to me, but who he was to himself, the man he beheld in his most private mirror.

I will say again that none of this was my duty. My job, which I executed faithfully, was never to spy out those moments of his self-regard, it was not to peer through the crack of the door and watch as he bore off each successive visage. My appointed plan was just to give a good scratch to the surface, come away with some spice or flavor under my nails. As Hoagland would half-joke, whatever grit of an ethnicity. But then all that is a sham. Through events both arbitrary and conceived it so happened that one of his faces fell away, and then another, and another, until he revealed to me a final level that would not strip off. The last mask. And what I saw in him I had not thought to seek, but will search out now for the long remainder of my days.

E
very morning Eduardo tipped his head to me and said in a convincing accent,
Ahn-young-ha-sae-yo
. I greeted him back in Spanish, but his accent was much better than mine. John Kwang had taught him the words so that he could properly greet the large number of Korean constituents and visitors to our Flushing office. Most everyone on the staff seemed to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of the language and customs, how to say
hello
and
goodbye
and
please wait a moment
, how to bow down low enough and speak in a tone of respect with eyes cast at a deferential angle. Sherrie and Janice conducted hit-and-run seminars on the practice, usually after a new crop of volunteers came on. We had to be careful not to speak Korean to every Asian person who arrived, and because I was Korean I was regularly stationed to work at the greeting desk.

All of northern Queens seemed to pass through that door. Although Kwang's power base was every last Korean vote in the district, and then most of the Chinese, he did exceedingly well with the newer immigrants, the Southeast Asians and Indians, the Central Americans, and blacks from the Caribbean and West Indies. Some Eastern Europeans. The native whites didn't seem to pay much attention to him, either way. African Americans didn't seem to trust him. He was a Democrat in name, in the party of Mayor De Roos, but he drew little from that machinery, the strong-arm cadres of unionized workers and tradespeople, white ethnic old New York.

Instead, he had made his the party of livery drivers and nannies and wok cooks and seamstresses and delivery boys, and his wealthiest patrons were the armies of small-business owners through whose coffers passed all of Queens, by the nickel and dime.

Before the last campaign he had voter-registered literally thousands. That's all his staff still did, and it was why John Kwang retained so many volunteers and such a large staff for just a city councilman, why he paid extra for their salaries and their lunches and their late-night call cars. He gave cash bonuses for the top five people registering the most voters each month, bonuses for pledged future votes, bonuses for signing up immigrants for naturalization. It was like a church drive but at all hours, the whole body of us spread through the district, jammed into cars and sent out to find them.

This his daily order: do the good duty, go out into the street, go into the stores, stop them in the alleyways. Just get in a word. In ten different languages you say
Kwang is like you. You will be an American
. You have a flyer with his fine picture and his life story beneath. Show them that. If you tell them the story of their lives they will listen. Peel a dollar from the stack that Jenkins gives each of us in the morning, the bill clipped to an envelope so they can send in their name and address and family and occupation.
Have a dollar so we can help you
.

The mood in the office was messianic. We felt like his guerrillas. Some weekends we'd come in for extra work, stay out all day Saturday and then have a big dinner with him at an all-night Korean restaurant, ten or fifteen of us sitting on the floor with him at the head, pouring for each other from double-sized bottles of Korean ale. He'd teach us old songs in Korean, drinking songs, school songs, whatever we could learn. I was usually the only Korean in a room of young Jews and Chinese and Hispanics.

Eduardo Fermin was his favorite. He would make him stand up and sing a Dominican island song, or a hymn. Eduardo would rise without a word. He'd sing beautifully, his high choirboy voice hitting every note like a bell. When he finished we'd all clap and hoot and then John would give him the business, all joking, bulling, asking if he'd ever learned anything from anyone besides the good Sisters of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

“What other schmaltz do you want me to sing?” Eduardo would yell back, and John would laugh and tell him the name of another song.

I tried to sit at the far end of the table, so that if he were in one of his high, manic moods he wouldn't pick me out in front of the group. This way, too, I could observe the entire table, the faces, take the run of the evenings.

He seemed to understand this, and sometimes he would catch my eye from across the room when other people were heatedly talking or arguing and nod affirmingly. Only afterward, on the way out or in the street, would he take me aside—almost without exception—and ask how I was doing with the office work, and if my other work as a magazine writer wasn't being compromised. Rarely did he pursue me in front of the others, and then only if he were in the foulest humor, sometimes asking in a dramatic voice for me to speak on behalf of
Koreans everywhere
. If we were talking about some thorny issue like welfare reform or affirmative action he would say like a reporter both unctuous and angling, “Mr. Park, if you would tell us the
Korean American
position on this please.” He liked to linger on the hyphenation. Then he'd deliver some below-the-belt follow-up: “Do you think a single black mother with six kids should be rewarded for having any more?”

I never had a good response, and neither did anyone else. In truth, I thought he couldn't help but sometimes punish us with the same notions and language that daily confronted him. He might snap at you with a comment from the last press conference.

Some problems were dogging him. For months he had been talking to Chinese and Korean gang leaders, in an effort to halt their street extortion and violence, negotiate some kind of settlement. But the dialogues ceased after a surprise arrest by police immediately following the last meeting at Reverend Cho's church, several weeks before. An arrested Korean gang chief named Han had been publicly threatening him, spreading the word on the street that Kwang had betrayed them.

With this first real trouble, I noticed that he was getting caught up in his moods. I began to see the whip of his temper. One afternoon I watched him shout at his wife, May, for what seemed ten straight minutes as they sat inside their white sedan. He was shaking his fist so close to her face, which had gone white. I was across the street in front of the office so I couldn't hear him, but I was certain that he was yelling in both Korean and English. She sat perfectly still and took it all. Then he stepped from the car and spoke softly to her from the open door, shutting it gently before she drove off.

He usually treated me with genuine warmth. Perhaps to him I was someone he ought to look out for, a Korean American, well educated, solitary-looking, seemingly jobless. He often asked about my wife, freely offering his aid in finding her more speech work with the city. She could work in a Flushing district, he said, nodding to say that he could do that. What threw me most, however, was that he would sometimes misremember whether I had children—this seems improbable, given what I would learn about his amazing feats of memory—and while talking about child rearing he might refer to how I must know this thing or that, the way a child can be joyous and harrowing, ask of what I imagined in life for my daughter or my son. When he over-drank he wanted to see pictures. I had to tell him I didn't carry any. He would open his wallet and show me snapshots of his own children, Peter and John Jr., in matching blue suits. He also carried a picture of May, though it dated to the sixties (her hair, her dress) and was nearly faded of all color.

I want to say that he was a family man, that being Korean and old-fashioned made him cherish and honor the institution, that his family was the basic unit of wealth in his life, everything paling and tarnished before it. But then I would be speaking only half of the truth, and the most accessible half at that, the part that had the least to do with him. Certainly, he loved his family. He loved May and he loved Peter and perhaps most he loved little John. Like any good father, I thought, he would have died for them, a thousand times.

But then he loved the pure idea of family as well, which in its most elemental version must have nothing to do with blood. It was how he saw all of us, and then by extension all those parts of Queens that he was now calling his. All day and all night we worked without stopping, knowing we'd get to be with him at the end of the day.
Oo-rhee-jip
, he'd say then, just before the eating and drinking, asking for our hands around the table, speaking
oo-rhee-jip
for
Our house
. Our new life.

Since the beginning I was writing down everything and thus committing—if I so wished—all of our movements to an official and secret memory. I had a long queue of files on a disk waiting to be wired to Hoagland's terminal in Purchase. I was sending him various items, of course, brief profiles of Kwang at various events around the city. These were overly precious entries, and I knew they were written too much in the mode of a fanciful reporter-at-large: appraisals of Kwang from the back of a crowded room, the point of view through the glass of a fancy cocktail, my prose full of handsomeness and brio. Lively perhaps, but exactly what Hoagland couldn't use, material any spy would read and crabbily say was
inedible paper
.

I seemed to be waiting for something to happen before I could send to Hoagland what he needed from me. In previous assignments, even the one with Luzan, I had always been able to follow through with my initial transmissions despite feeling a moment's pang of remorse. Jack told me from the start that this would happen. The first incision is always the hardest. Only then can you get down to business, work yourself elbow deep. With John Kwang I wrote exemplary reports but I couldn't accept the idea that Hoagland would be combing through them. It seemed like an unbearable encroachment. An exposure of a different order, as if I were offering a private fact about my father or mother to a complete stranger in one of our stores.

Perhaps this was because John Kwang constantly spoke of us as his own, of himself as a part of us. Though he rarely called you a brother, sister, son. He was prudent with his language. If anything, he called you friend. He said looking right into your eyes that he trusted you with his life. He said he loved you for what you did. He made it seem as if he couldn't believe any of our devotion or duty.

Once I saw him drop to one knee before a young volunteer for having stayed an extra shift. He was seamless in the act, he made no show of it, and bent small like that he looked as if he had been that way all his life, bent before this half-terrified girl to lay a kiss on her hand. In horror the girl buckled and knelt down with him, and in answer he rose and lifted them both. I didn't know then if I had witnessed the gravest humility or conceit. What does it matter which? He was a man who could do such a thing. But then John Kwang was also American. Maybe he simply wanted what any newcomer like him wanted and would will for himself, a broader foreground from which he might naturally emerge. Family that would make up events in the lore of his life. The girl he kneels to. Eduardo his boxer. Janice, keen Sherrie. Now a latecomer by the name of Henry Park. But I can imagine my father saying his no, no, it was clearly Kwang's Confucian training at work, his secular religion of pure hierarchy, his belief that everyone is at once a noble and a servant and then just a man. Its adherents know no hubris. Instead this: you simply bow down before those who would honor you. You honor them back. For you are but ash to their fire. All spent of light.

* * *

On the morning of his meeting with the black ministers, Eduardo and I drove out a few hours early to the site in Brooklyn and walked it through once again. We brought other volunteers to help us plan the movement of the principals on the street, the expected crowd, all the starts and stops where the press would have obvious positions for video. We held the procession. Janice reminded us that everything had to be perfect. She was trusting us. She and Sherrie were too busy dealing with the mayor, and would only arrive with him.

De Roos was on the offensive again, trying to spoil Kwang's show with the same questions about his role in the boycotts, suggesting that he was obstructing the efforts of the police and community groups. His hard line was also meant to draw attention from the more pointed talk of his alleged adultery with a woman whose name was now public, rumors he was saying were the work of certain political opportunists. Janice wasn't saying anything to anyone. She'd look at me hard if the subject came up in the office and casually draw a finger across her throat. The mayor would then want to talk about John Kwang and his methods of registering voters, the excessive use of street money and underage volunteers.

“This isn't the Third World,” De Roos said on the news, standing in the heart of downtown Flushing. “Americans make up their own minds.”

When Kwang's car arrived he got out and we immediately led him up the steps, inside the church. There would be a closed meeting between Kwang and the church leaders for the first hour, and then they would all speak before a gathering outside. The private talk would actually be more a negotiation, Janice told me the week before, about what everyone would be saying before the cameras. Sherrie would be sitting in then, though she was to leave unseen afterward, before they all stepped outside. Janice had convinced them both that having Sherrie in the shots would just confuse the viewers; they'd think she was his wife, or his girlfriend, and only make the story of the day more difficult to tell.

I waited in my position. I was nervous. I don't know why. The crowd was much larger than we'd expected, an even mix of Koreans, blacks, Hispanics. The press was there in force, but I sensed that they understood, too, that the occasion wasn't particularly momentous or crucial to the disposition of actual events, the real violence and tension, even if they would portray it as such on the evening programs.

I suppose I wanted to watch him work the crowd. I wanted to take in his every move among the people, to witness the telling presence that I'd seen glimpses of but on a much smaller scale, at the office, on building stoops, inside restaurants. I didn't know if he could tread with the same proportion here.