Native Speaker (33 page)

Janice groans and sits back down.

Now another related report, an exclusive. There is hard evidence of a community money club that John Kwang oversees. The club is like a private bank that pays revolving interest and principal to its members, many of whom are Korean, lending activities that aren't registered with any banking commission and haven't reported to tax authorities. The information, oddly, originates from the regional director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

“What the fuck is he talking about?” Janice cries. “What the hell is going on?”

But I am silent.

They now hook the director in live.

He is an average-looking man sitting behind a wide gray desk. He is pale, severely balding, with a trimmed moustache and round wire-rim eyeglasses. He speaks from the back of his mouth; the sound of his talk is sticky. He rests his hand on a stack of papers. A good number of them, he says, touching the printouts, are not documented.

“How many exactly?” the news anchor asks.

He answers that the INS has no records of birth or entry or naturalization for nearly three dozen of them and their families. Maybe it's about a hundred total. The illegals are of all nationalities—some Koreans, of course, but mostly other Asians, West Indians, various Africans, and “most whatever else you can think of,” he says, adding that aliens are coming now from everywhere. He speaks all this without any outward alarm, unanimated, not unconcerned but as if the situation is already too far gone.

He says further that a check unrelated to this listing showed that the Korean girl involved in the accident with John Kwang is also an illegal.

“Isn't it unwise to air this information,” the anchor suggests, “given that these aliens might now go into hiding?”

“No, sir,” the director answers, matter-of-factly. He almost smiles. “Of course the girl is in serious condition and immobile. We'll talk to her if and when she is able. But we have hit all of the suspected illegals and their families at their residences early this morning. It should be pretty much over by now. We have them all.”

N
ow the people want him out. They march to his house down the middle of the street, impromptu parades of them, husbands and wives and crying toddlers on shoulders, angry white people and brown people and black people, and now even some yellow, a few faces I think I recognize from past rallies and events, yelling together for his ouster in the simple rhyme of the picket:
Hey, ho, Kwang must go!

It is past noon. Warm. You can't see the sun through the thin buffer of cloud cover but the light is fully diffused, almost too bright to see.

They surround the house in bands. Two, maybe three hundred people. I can see only a few police cars parked on the periphery, their number scattered about the crowd. One of the groups is made up of unemployed toy and light-metal workers. They are well organized, passing out pamphlets and addressing the crowd through bullhorns. Their literature asks how many of John Kwang's money club members have stolen their jobs. They curse him for helping them after they sneak into the country. They chant that they want to kick every last one of them back to where they came from, kick him back with them, let them drown in the ocean with “Smuggler Kwang.” Next to them, in front of his driveway, people stand behind two sewn-together sheets spray-painted with the words:
AMERICA FOR AMERICANS
. They are generally younger, white, male, mostly talking and laughing and pointing to the house. They are drinking. Several of them intermittently wave a huge flag. One of them raises his fist and jumps up and down and shouts, “We want our fucking future back.”

The rest of the throng are those of us hoping and waiting for Kwang to come back. There are enough of us to cause friction with the protesters. Someone keeps hollering over to us the question,
How many of you swam here?
Our numbers seem to hold them back from physical assaults, but more shouting matches are starting to break out along the border that is quickly forming. A few police stand in the buffer zone but not enough of them, it seems, if any real trouble flares up. Shouts of “white trash” and “Spanish niggers” and “greasy gooks” fly back and forth over their heads, though they don't seem to hear them.

He has not surfaced for nearly thirty-six hours since the accident. Then, the surprise dawn sweep by the INS. We hear rumors that he has been taken in for questioning by federal agents in Manhattan. That he will be here soon. One reporter seems able to confirm this, but no one else is certain. Janice, who arrived here early this morning, is now inside the house with May and the boys. May won't let anyone else in. When I finally get through the busy line from a pay phone Janice says May is losing it. She keeps sending the boys away to play and right away asks where they are.

Janice figures there is no longer anything to do except stay with May and wait. She won't draft a statement for him or make any more phone calls to confuse or delay the press. It is up to him to appear imminently and explain himself on all the counts. If he is alive and breathing he knows this.

She is afraid for him. Over the phone, she couldn't say the word she was thinking. But I told her she was wrong. I know he is alive. Koreans don't take their own lives. At least not from shame. My mother said to me once that suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better. If you bite your lip and understand that this is the only world, you will perhaps persist and endure. What she meant, too, was that we cannot change anything, that if a person wants things like money or comfort or respect he has to change himself to make them possible, because the world will always work to foil you.

I will hear her voice always:
San konno san itta
. Over the mountains there are mountains.

She would have called John Kwang a fool long before any scandal ever arose. She would never have understood why he needed more than the money he made selling dry-cleaning equipment. He had a good wife and strong boys. What did he want from this country? Didn't he know he could only get so far with his face so different and broad? He should have had ambition for only his little family. In turn, she'd proudly hold up my father as the best example of our people: how he was able to discard his excellent Korean education and training, which were once his greatest pride, the very markings by which he had known himself, before he was able to set straight his mind and spirit and make a life for his family. This, she reminded me almost nightly, was his true courage and sacrifice.

And when I consider him, I see how my father had to retool his life to the ambitions his meager knowledge of the language and culture would allow, invent again the man he wanted to be. He came to know that the sky was never the limit, that the truer height for him was more like a handful of vegetable stores that would eventually run themselves, making him enough money that he could live in a majestic white house in Westchester and call himself a rich man.

I am his lone American son, blessed with every hope and quarter he could provide. And yet I am bestowed only with the meager effect of his hard-fought riches, that troubling awe and contempt and piety I still hold for his life. This, I am afraid, will endure. If he would forgive me now. For what I have done with my life is the darkest version of what he only dreamed of, to enter a place and tender the native language with body and tongue and have no one turn and point to the door.

I should have seen that Dennis never really wanted any other material. The monographs, the reports. The daily registers. For him it was all trivial prose. John Kwang, I can hear him saying with a pop in his voice, is not so important a man. At least not individually, as a single human possibility. No one is. If a client is interested at all it is because there is activity going on behind the man in question, because the man exercises an influence or maybe even grace on some greater slice of humanity. Or most simply, he is representative, easily drawn and iconic, the idea being if you know him you can know a whole people.

To Dennis, and to the reporters that are here, I could explain forever Kwang's particular thinking, how the idea of the
ggeh
occurred as second nature to him. He didn't know who was an “illegal” and who was not, for he would never come to see that fact as something vital. If anything, the
ggeh
was his one enduring vanity, a system paternal, how in the beginning people would come right to the house and ask for some money and his blessing. He wasn't a warlord or a don, he had no real power over any of them save their trust in his wisdom. He was merely giving to them just the start, like other people get an inheritance, a hope chest of what they would work hard for in the rest of their lives.

When I listened to their requests for money, I wondered if I could ever desire as much from this land. My citizenship is an accident of birth, my mother delivering me on this end of a long plane ride from Seoul. In truth, she didn't want me to be an American. She didn't want any reasons to stay. By rights I am as American as anyone, as graced and flawed and righteous as any of these people chanting for fire in the heart of his house. And yet I can never stop considering the pitch and drift of their forlorn boats on the sea, the movements that must be endless, promising nothing to their numbers within, headlong voyages scaled in a lyric of search, like the great love of Solomon.

Yet, in the holds of those ships there is never any singing. The people only whisper and breathe low. Not one of them thinks these streets are paved with gold. This remains our own fancy. They know more about the guns and rapes and the riots than of millionaires. They have heard stories of bands of young men who will look for them to beat up or murder. They know they will come here and live eight or nine to a room and earn ten dollars a day, maybe save five. They can figure that math, how long it will take to send for their family, how much longer for a few carts of fruit to push, an old truck of wares, a small shop to sell the dumplings and cakes and sweet drinks of their old land.

* * *

Last night, I come right home after seeing the news with Janice. All the lights in the apartment are out, and Lelia is already in bed. I take off my clothes and sit beside her. I try to whisper to her, but she's asleep. I put my hand on the rise of her hip. She moans, and I say I am here.

“You're home,” she says, still half asleep.

“Yes.”

“Henry,” she says, suddenly waking up. “So many. They got so many.”

“Yes,” I whisper.

She turns on the lamp. She sits up, squinting at me. “Do you know them?”

“Only a few,” I say, my head in my hands.

“What's going to happen now?”

I tell her, “They'll each have a hearing. Most of them will probably be declined asylum, and there will be appeals, and it will take many months until in the end they're sent back.”

She looks sick for me. “But you didn't know this would happen.”

“What does it matter,” I answer. “Something bad was going to happen. I always knew that. All those years should have told me. Dennis has a use for everything. Even throwaways, like a list of immigrants. On the way home, I kept putting my father in their place.”

“No one would be sending your father anywhere,” Lelia says. “He would have slipped away.”

I say, “Maybe I would have found him.”

“If he let you,” she says.

I know Lelia is right. My father was a kind of trickster all his own. He'd keep me guessing with his storefront patois. Any moment I had him square in my sights, he'd surprise me with a dip, a shake, a move from the street that I'd never heard or seen.

I say to Lelia, “Imagine, though, if they told my father he really had to leave. If they put him inside a plane and it took off. Can you see his face? It would be a death for him. Or worse.”

“Nothing's worse,” she says to me, her voice sad and low. “Nothing. You remember that, Henry. No matter what happens, damnit.”

“Okay.”

“It's over,” Lelia now says. “You don't work for Dennis anymore. You can help those people if you want.”

“It's too late,” I say. “They need lawyers.”

“Then you can work here,” she says, taking me by the shoulders. “I have too many kids. I need another set of hands.”

“Another mouth,” I say.

She brushes my hair, gently kissing me now. “Yeah.”

We can't sleep. Instead, we sit for a long time in the open windows, looking down on the intersection. On the far corner is the all-night Korean deli; two workers, a Korean and a Hispanic, are sitting on crates and smoking cigarettes outside. There's no traffic, and when the wind is right, their voices filter up to us. We listen to the earnest attempts of their talk, the bits of their stilted English. I know I would have ridiculed them when I was young: I would cringe and grow ashamed and angry at those funny tones of my father and his workers, all that Konglish, Spanglish, Jive. Just talk right, I wanted to yell, just talk right for once in your sorry lives. But now, I think I would give most anything to hear my father's talk again, the crash and bang and stop of his language, always hurtling by. I will listen for him forever in the streets of this city. I want to hear the rest of them, too, especially the disbelieving cries and shouts of those who were taken away. I will bear whatever sentence they wish to rain on me, all the volleys of their prayers and curses.

In the morning, Lelia already knows where I am going. She wants to go with me but I ask her to stay home. One more trip to him, that is all. She looks sick, worried.

“Nothing will happen to me,” I promise.

“You better be right, Henry,” she says, her voice breaking a little. “Or I'll come find you and kill you, I swear.”

I have her snap all the bolts on the door. Don't answer the phone, don't answer the door.

I go out into the street and look for a cab. An old silver Pontiac pulls up. It's Jack's car.

“Let me give you a lift,” he says. “Come on, now.”

I get in. I say, “What, Jack, you want to go inspect the ruins?”

“No, Parky,” he says, pulling away. “I came to see you.”

We drive for a while without talking. He takes the tunnel, and when we come back out and pass the toll plaza he takes the first exit. He drives the smaller streets to the house in Woodside.

“Parky,” he says softly, “what is there to say?”

“Not much,” I answer. “You won. I guess this is my concession ride.”

“I won nothing,” he says firmly. “Dennis has, perhaps. But then he wins all the time.”

“You knew the play, didn't you, Jack?”

He shakes his head. “Dennis would never tell me that. He knows I would prefer not to lie to you.”

“You knew about Kwang and Eduardo.”

“I knew we were not responsible for the bombing. That was not us. I told you that from the start.”

“But the other matter.”

“Okay,” he says, not looking at me. “I did. But only after he was killed. I swear I did not know him. Dennis has other stations at his disposal, you know. He can bring in people when he wants. He was very angry that day of the bombing. Very angry. He let it slip. He wanted payback for his investment.”

“And I gave it to him.”

“It worked out that way, yes? Dennis put you in for your own sake. A refresher course. No one knew but him. Not even Eduardo. Each to his own world. But things changed, as they always do. You were in place. As Dennis says,
in situ
.”

“Eduardo was good,” I say, picturing him play-boxing with Kwang.

“He got caught,” Jack says. “Like you, he let himself get too close, but then he also got himself dead. In my book these are two big strikes against him.”

“So I have just one.”

Jack snorts. “You know, I would still take you on my team, Parky, any day of the week.”

He stops the car a block from the house. It's early, but there are already people milling about in the street in front of the house. “Maybe you should go home, Parky. I will take you back home now. This is pointless. You owe him nothing.”