Somebody's Daughter (23 page)

“Don't ever say ‘fag' out loud,” I said. “Someone is
definitely
going to take it the wrong way. And that other expression you asked me about, it's ‘nip it in the
bud
,' not ‘nip it in the butt'—maybe you should just skip saying it altogether, it's kind of old-fashioned.”

He sighed. “I know my family is going to be angry, but I quit KATUSA program.”

“Quit?”

“I thought being with Americans, it would be like being with you, but that was not so. Anyway, the Americans and Koreans, we kind of keep to ourselves,
uri kiri
, our own two groups, so I'm not learning that much Englishes anyway. I applied for transfer and was granted. I am coming back to Seoul to be in the riot police.”

“Riot police?”

“Yes, we keep order when there is, say, a demo.”

“Demo?” Demo records?

“Demo. Students with signs, making noise?”

“Oh, a demonstration.” I remembered seeing a bunch of men in Darth-Vaderish helmets carrying shields and clubs massed along the main gate of Chosun University one day—apparently Chosun Daehakyo was famous for having political firebrands for students, government officials were always urging the professors to give out more homework to keep them busy. But that time I had seen the demo, the police had just stood there, and I hadn't seen them on campus since.

Jun-Ho ate even that last little end-piece of Korean sushi with a toothpick, his little finger delicately raised as if we were at high tea at the Waldorf.

He checked his watch and said he needed to get back to see his parents around dinnertime. It was three o'clock.

“Will I be able to see you again before I leave?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I will be in my military duty for the next six months, no exits.”

“So this is our last meeting, this one day?”

He nodded. “My furlough is only three days, and my parents, I have a lot to do for respects for them.”

I was suddenly touched to know that he was spending his limited time with me.

“What would you like to do now?” he asked.

“I don't know.” I couldn't think, it was so crowded—people from the baseball game, shoppers, vendors. The sidewalk was narrow and people were shoving us aside like rag dolls, the bent-over senior citizens the most insistent.

Maybe I've finally become part of the many-legged Seoul organism, I was thinking, with equal parts resignation and amusement. Before, I used to shudder when a stranger in a crowd would touch me, as if my body was merely an extension of their own. Now I just took it in stride, being tossed about like anyone else, occasionally pushing back and being amazed that no one even glanced back, much less stopped and yelled, “You want a piece of me!?”

With Jun-Ho, in his green-speckled army uniform—a very common sight in Seoul—no one even seemed to notice we were speaking English.

“Is there a
yuhgwon
around here?” I asked him, suddenly.

His eyes opened wide.

“Excuse?”

I repeated myself.

“There is always
yuhgwon
around,” he said. He was staring at me, as if I were changing shape before his eyes.

“Let's find one then.” Old buddy, old pal. There was something about the thought of being with someone who was of my race, a mirror image of me, that had gripped me just then—and it was rapidly being translated into sexual desire.

In an ironic coincidence, the
yuhgwon
Jun-Ho chose was the Edelweiss, straight out of
The Sound of Music
, dark strips of wood hammered over the pollution-stained stucco in an admirable attempt to create an alpine chalet. Inside, it was the usual place, yellow linoleum floors, a pile of bedding with fraying covers in the corner, the free calendar.

We were out of our clothes in a few minutes flat. I had on a new bra, a Korean one I'd purchased at a department store. A regular nylon-and-lace jobbie, but it had a picture of a teddy bear in the middle. Everything in Korea, from drugs to gasoline, had to come with a cute mascot. I had been planning to wear it as a joke, for Doug. I hurled it to the floor.

Jun-Ho didn't seem surprised to see my body, but I was in awe of his—his torso was completely smooth, like a statue. He had a dusting of hair on his legs, even on his toes. But his chest was some kind of soapstone, lacking pores or follicles. When I leaned in, I smelled nothing, not a whiff of that rank animal odor I always smelled on men back in Minnesota. Smelling Jun-Ho was like smelling a rock.

Jun-Ho kissed me on the forehead, but didn't attempt to kiss me on the mouth. He even ignored my breasts and went straight to the sexual act, performing it as dutifully as he used to switch from English to Korean during our language exchanges.

I knew I should feel guilt or shame, knowing that I was also sleeping with Doug, who told me he loved me every time he reached orgasm.

When we were done, five minutes later, Jun-Ho put his uniform back on, including his hat, lacing and double-knotting his boots. I lay naked on the bedding, feeling a drop or two of his semen make its way to my thigh.

Am I fertile right now? I thought suddenly, counting back to the day of my last period. Shit.

“I will have to return to my parents' house soon,” he said. Outside, the shadows had shifted.

My clothes had been discarded in a heap, petals from a daisy. I gathered them up.

“You go, then,” I said, covering myself with the jumble: pants, shirt, bra, underwear. “I don't want you to be late. I'll just sit here for a while.”

He smiled his mischievous Jun-Ho grin.

“I cannot leave you, Sarah,” he said. “I must at least accompany you to the subway station, that is the Korean way. When I leave to the army, my mother says she accompany me as far as the front door, only, but then she was going out all the way to the front gate. And then she was going down the alley. I tell her to go back into the house, again and again, but she keeps coming out, farther and farther, until I think she will walk all the way to the base with me.”

We walked back out into the street.

“Now, you know your way around Seoul a little bit, Sarah?” Jun-Ho asked, as we wound our way around the vendors and their wares massed at the mouth of the station: pantyhose tied in bundles, penknives, a tiny toy that did somersaults. We stopped in front of the turnstiles.
“Chal ka,”
he said. Go in safety. There was a change in the tone and timbre of Jun-Ho's voice. Then I realized that during our weeks of language exchange, he had always used the formal-polite level of speaking. Now he was speaking in the intimate style, which had its own vocabulary, also dropped the formal sentence endings.
Chal ka yo
became
chal ka
. As if it were now understood that we could finish each other's thoughts.

From far away, the whine of an incoming train.

“Well,” Jun-Ho said. He looked at me, then he bowed. A gentle incline, not the P.T. Barnumesque flourish he had greeted me with that first day at the Balzac. I hesitated, then bowed back, mimicking his posture, the way his head bent first, followed by a slight rounding of the shoulders. Somehow, the gesture of bending toward each other, of exposing the tops of our heads seemed even more intimate than if we'd shared a tongue-smashing soul kiss as a goodbye.

Every time I turned back, he was still there standing, a rock in the river, as other commuters flowed around him. Even as I walked up the stairs, which would cut me off from his view, he remained. I was tempted to scoot back down and see if he was still there, but instead, I let the tide of people carry me up the stairs to the platform.

Five stations into my trip, I noticed that the station-numbers were decreasing. They were supposed to be going up. I was going in the wrong direction.

My first reaction was to panic. But then I remembered that the green line was one sinuous circle. If I stayed on long enough, I would get to where I was going.

At the next station, a man who looked to be about two hundred years old and partially mummified, entered. He was clad in a traditional vest, lavender pants tied at the ankle, and he held a cane as he tottered aboard. I offered my seat, as Koreans always seemed to do for the elderly. He grunted and settled into the sea-green velveteen seat, rested his gnarled hands atop the burled wood of his cane. An anachronism next to men in sharp-cut Western suits, women carrying designer handbags, the kind that would be too fancy even for Dayton's. But no one gave him a second look.

I held onto the pole and looked out the window—this part of the green line was above ground. I watched the tall buildings with twinkling lights, the red neon crosses atop church steeples just starting to glow in the dark, bowling alleys with gigantic bowling pins mounted on their roofs. Then the train rushed into the blackness of a tunnel.

Back in our subway car, no one was staring at me. I was a part of this scene, this Korean tableau. For the first time, I felt, even if fleetingly, like I belonged somewhere.

Seoul

1972

The foreigner's name was “David.” He was in Korea through an American group he called the “Peace Core” that was somehow supposed to help Koreans. This Peace Core had sent him to the countryside on the mountain seacoast to live for two years, but he hadn't liked it, so he had quit and come to Seoul to take an English-tutoring job with a wealthy family.

“I was planning on going back to America right away, but I'm glad stayed,” he said. “Otherwise I wouldn't have met you. Eventually I need to get back to America to go to graduate school—I deferred into an ethnomusicology program.”

“Ed-no—”

“Professor school,” he said. “In music.”

Then he said, “Why don't you come to America with me?”

Kyung-sook could only laugh at this man's audacity.

“Why not?”

“You stop kidding me, you honey,” Kyung-sook said.

“No, I'm serious,” he said. “In America, you could make a living playing your wonderful flute. If you would just wear your Korean kimono, put your hair up, people would eat you up. You could become famous. There was a group called the Kim Sisters who dressed up in their Korean kimonos and sang ‘Arirang' on the Ed Sullivan Show—apparently they were a riot.”

Kyung-sook had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

“Americans like all kinds of music,” he said. His voice became fast and excited. “Like the blues, which is a kind of music that has its roots in tribal Africa. It's secular music, derived from folk traditions—you know, it's like your Korean opera, where the woman sings and the man plays the drum.”

He was talking about p'ansori—long, lugubrious ballads sung by a lone singer with nothing to accompany her except the faraway sound of the changgo or the puk. Kyung-sook couldn't believe a foreigner could be so interested in her country's music.

“Is it true that in order to do that kind of opera, the singer has to sing until her throat bleeds?”

Kyung-sook knew very little about p'ansori, so she only nodded, to acknowledge that she had heard his question.

“That's fascinating—to be so dedicated to your art that you destroy your body. Now, let me play you a song of the people.”

He sang it in a different, mellifluous voice, in words of an English dialect he called “Spanish”:
I am a truthful man from the land where palms grow/I want to share these poems of my soul before I die./With the poor people of the earth I want to cast my lot …

How beautiful!

There was much she could learn from this man, Kyung-sook thought. How she wished that she could stop the hurtling movement of her life. But eventually, her parents would expect a return visit to the village when the school year ended in July. It was possible they might even have a match for her by then.

Her bright dreams—what had happened to them? She hadn't anticipated Seoulites' attitude toward traditional music: that it was unsophisticated and sentimental. To find other folk musicians, she had had to search out ratty bars, where men would raise their eyebrows at her, thinking she was a kisaeng girl. The musicians she found guffawed when she mentioned her dreams of playing solo improvisational pieces of hyang-ak, native music, in front of an audience.

They scoffed, “This isn't the Chosun Dynasty any more. Koreans want the operas of Verdi and Mozart played on their new electric gadgets. Even the teahouses play only Debussy waltzes these days.”

Just as the stone walls of the Western churches were beginning to edge out the wooden Red Arrow gates of Buddhist temples, Western music was beginning to take over the Korean consciousness. When Kyung-sook saw a place that advertised itself as a “music school,” she would see well-dressed children making their way up the stairs carrying sheets of music and Western violin cases.