Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (13 page)

When our unit would report to a noncommissioned officer in charge of a particular base beautification project, each of us, individually, would be required to sign his name on a duty roster. At noon, we’d break for lunch, after which there’d be a roll call to assure that every one of us had returned to work as ordered. At no point in this operation were IDs checked. So one morning I signed the roster not as Thomas E. Robbins but as “R. M. Rilke,” betting that not one of the authorities involved would have heard of the Austrian poet. After lunch, I slipped away to the base theater and watched a matinee.

The following day, at my unit’s early-morning formation, nobody noticed the twinkle in my eye when our own NCO ordered “Airman Rilke” to report to the orderly room, presumably to defend his unexcused absence from base beautification. Perfect! And the next time we future weathermen were assigned to a laborious beautification detail, I signed in as “Feodor Dostoyevsky.” After lunch, I traipsed over to the gym and shot baskets, knowing that I might have to bite my tongue to keep from snickering at the way our sergeant would pronounce “Dostoyevsky” the following morning. I only regretted that I couldn’t be privy to the consternation “Rilke” and “Dostoyevsky” surely must have caused in our orderly room.

Not wishing to arouse suspicion. I skipped a day or two now and then and returned to the shovel and the rake, but over the following weeks “Alexander Pope,” “Leo Tolstoy,” and “Oscar Wilde” were all cited for being AWOL from base beautification -- while I passed sweet afternoons seeing the latest Hollywood films and improving my jump shot. Who says a literary education doesn’t have practical applications?

Any American air force pilot, having been alerted in a weather briefing to the presence of a storm system in his flight path, would take pains to circumnavigate it. South Korean pilots, on the other hand, being fatalistic both by temperament and religious training, would just fly right into the storm.

At least that was the case in the 1950s. With that stoic approach to aviation prevalent in their officers, my students could be forgiven for caring no more about meteorology than kittens might care about string theory.

Nevertheless, we had to go through the motions, which we did in rotating eight-hour shifts: day, swing, and midnight (weather doesn’t sleep). The question soon became, “What to do,” my students and I, “to keep from boring each other to transcultural tears?” I’m unsure whose idea it was, but for a while -- in between recording and transmitting temperatures, dew points, and wind directions -- the locals amused themselves by teaching me to swear in Korean. More than a half century later, I still remember those naughty words, which is a trifle odd as I’ve had scant opportunity to put them into practice and have been known to criticize profanity as representing a paucity of vocabulary and destitution of wit.

Eventually, however, we discovered a diversion that was not only mutually satisfying but profitable. Moreover, it struck a symbolic blow against Cold War communism, being a working example of capitalistic principles on a democratically fundamental plane. We took up black marketing.

The PX at K-2 Air Force Base occupied a Quonset hut set on treeless, ever-brown land, presenting a rigidly militaristic demeanor to the world: no nonsense, no frills. Inside, though, it offered for sale at discount prices a fair number of the familiar items that average Americans considered essential to their pursuit of happiness if not their actual survival. These would include Camel, Pall Mall, Kool, and Marlboro cigarettes. Regulations permitted each airman on K-2 to purchase two cartons of cigarettes a month, a rule irrelevant in my case since I didn’t smoke. Well, one day a student named Kim (come to think of it, each and every one of my students was named Kim; in fact, I believe every man, woman, and child in Korea was named Kim in 1955, and that may still be the case for all I know); this particular Kim fellow came to me and very shyly suggested that were I to provide him with a carton of Marlboros, he would pay me more than twice the price charged by the PX.

Now, I’m not much of a businessman -- life is entirely too short to be used up in shallow pursuit of monetary favor -- but this transaction sounded easy enough and, hey, this Kim, though not uniquely christened, was a good-natured soul who’d giggled like a schoolgirl when instructing me how to say “motherfucker” in his native tongue.

Let’s not drag this out. Soon I was supplying Kim with not only my two monthly cartons but cigarettes I’d purchased at face value from other nonsmokers in my outfit. Before long, we were dealing in toilet articles as well. They, in fact, commanded a better price than the smokes. Bear in mind that South Korea at that time was an impoverished, war-torn country with nothing remotely resembling a modern manufacturing sector, and from its sheer volume, it was obvious that the stuff I sold to Kim was being resold to a third party or parties.

Conducting business at the weather station would have been risky for us both, so I’d conceal the merchandise in a laundry bag and schlep it to a rendezvous at a Korean civilian laundry located some twenty or thirty yards down the unpaved road that led in and out of K-2. Most of the airmen had their clothes washed there, and guards at the gate didn’t notice that I seemed to be soiling my duds at many times the rate of the average airman.

I suppose I should emphasize that this enterprise was wee potatoes. Bantam feed. A mafia don wouldn’t have wiped his wife’s poodle’s butt on it. But entertainment was cheap in those postwar years in Asia, and my illicit earnings, meager as they were, afforded me excellent sukiyaki dinners, Kabuki performances, and lovely female companionship when I would travel to Japan on leave. It wasn’t until near the end of my tour of duty that I learned that most of our contraband, especially the toilet articles, was ending up behind the bamboo curtain in what was then Red China. Brand me a traitor if you must, but I figure that for eight or nine months I was supplying Mao Zedong with his Colgate toothpaste.

In the weather observers’ barracks at K-2, a poker game was almost always in progress. One of the most ardent poker players was an affable, roughhewn Southern lad named Jody. Between weather station duty and incessantly chasing a royal flush, Jody hadn’t time for much else, including writing to his girlfriend back in North Carolina, so he offered me five bucks (his luck had been good that week) if I’d write to Sue Ellen in his stead.

Since my interest in cards has been pretty much limited to wild cards (figuratively speaking), I rarely sat at the poker table, preferring to spend my leisure hours at the service club, flirting with bargirls and drinking beer; or, when in the barracks, pursuing my newfound interest in Japanese aesthetics, including trying to understand and assimilate such concepts as
wabi-sabi
(the art of finding beauty in things that are imperfect, incomplete, humble, or unconventional), a practice, with its undertones of “crazy wisdom,” that continues to absorb me today. However, a young American male can only
wabi
so much
sabi,
and my rinky-dink black-market ring wasn’t time-consuming, so I consented to write to the fair Sue Ellen on Jody’s behalf -- on one condition: he must sign and post the epistle without reading it. He agreed.

Refraining from waxing so poetic as to arouse her suspicion, I told Sue Ellen how much I (Jody) loved and missed her, but that I (Jody) was proud to be serving my country so that American values might endure. Skipping any reference to poker, I included a few lines about the base and work, but they struck me as dull. I felt that the letter could use a bit of color, some tidbit to intrigue and delight.

Inspired, I added that I had recently captured a snake and was keeping it in my laundry bag as a pet. It was pretty, I wrote, a cousin of the North Carolina king snake, and that I fed it mice I trapped in a nearby rice paddy, as well as eggs pilfered from the mess hall. Then, as a final romantic touch, I wrote that I (again, Jody) had named the snake “Sue Ellen” in her honor.

He never heard from her again.

Although he whined a few times about a broken heart, Jody soon quickly lost himself -- and Sue Ellen -- in the shuffling and dealing; whereas I felt I’d done a good deed, saving a fellow airman perhaps from marriage to an unimaginative, not to mention unappreciative, wife.

For several weeks, I was detached to a joint armed forces communications center in downtown Taegu, third largest city in South Korea. It was a wonderful deployment in that I got to walk to work every morning through narrow streets paved with stone and raucous with life, a sensorium of undulating exotica. Everywhere there was the rattling of carts, some pulled by shaggy ponies, most by old bearded papa-sans in baggy white britches and stovepipe hats. Pushing aside rice-paper screens, extended families poured from single-story houses, the women in long, very high-waisted skirts and tight-fitting brocade jackets worn under a looser jacket of quilted cotton. (Bargirls and prostitutes, of which there were great numbers in Taegu, wore Western-style dresses -- usually gifts from GI boyfriends who ordered them from Sears catalogs -- but these larks of the night seldom ventured out before noon.)

My nose, even my eyes, filled with smoke from hibachi pots, with the pungent breath of kimchi crocks, and with the sweet-sour redolence of unidentifiable spices, lotions, tonics, oils, dyes, and bodily effluvia: strange smells to complement the strange language whose stick-figure letters jitterbugged on wooden and paper signs in every direction and whose intonations burst in the air around me like invisible cannonades.

Some mornings early on in my deployment, I’d get lost in the alleys and teeming jingle-jangle of it all, and not knowing how to ask directions, would wander in the multitudes until I saw a particular little bridge or an old car without wheels and realized that’s where I must turn left and climb the hill to the communications center. More often than not, I was late for work. As I said, it was wonderful.

On that assignment, I was quartered on an army post, there being no air force presence in the city, and commuting from K-2 would have been a hassle even though it was no more than ten or twelve miles away: too many pushcarts, bicycles, and pedestrians jamming the road. Nights, when I wasn’t on the futon of some cute bargirl, I slept in transit quarters, located on the second floor of a large, ugly, gray stone building, a relic of the Japanese occupation (1910–1945). I shared those temporary quarters -- a long, cold room with about thirty bunks, most of them empty -- with members of the U.S. Army all-Korea boxing team.

Having each won a Korean Command championship in his weight division, the boxers were training to fight the Japanese Command champs, the winners of those bouts then traveling to Germany to take on the top army pugilists in Europe. Trained by an Italian American with a Bronx accent as heavy as a subway car, these guys took their conditioning seriously, some of them perhaps dreaming of a professional prizefighting career once they were discharged from the army. They were good roommates, however, funny and friendly and always trying hard not to wake skinny, noncombatant me when they arose at 5
A.M.
to do their roadwork.

Sharing quarters with the military boxers made me feel as if I were living in the pages of
From Here to Eternity,
the monumental opus by James Jones that critics unfortunately and in some cases no doubt snobbishly never mention when listing contenders for the title of “Great American Novel.” But, then, writing fiction is not a boxing tournament, is it? Hemingway and Norman Mailer might have disagreed, but there is no heavyweight champion of literature.

Very late one night, well past the Cinderella curfew, our peaceful quarters were invaded by about ten young greenhorn privates, not long in the army and fresh off the troopship from the U.S. Somewhere in their journey from the port of Inchon to Taegu, they’d managed to consume a large quantity of beer, and they were as loud and stupid as nineteen-year-olds can be when inexperienced with the caprices of ethyl alcohol. Add to that the giddiness they surely felt at being left temporarily unsupervised in, for the first time in their lives, a foreign land, and you have a recipe for elevated levels of obnoxiousness. Their horselaughs, their drunken vulgarity, their banging about, their smartass retorts when asked politely to quiet down and switch off the lights, failed to enchant the awakened boxers, whose arduous workday on the road and in the gym would commence with the pink prickling of dawn.

As the juvenile jackassery continued, I, beneath my government-issue blankets, chuckled softly. One needn’t be prescient to know how this was going to end.

It ended quickly. With no wasted motion, boxers slipped out of bed, slowly crossed the room, and WHUMP! WHOOSH! SURPRISE! Single well-placed punches to the midsection let the air out of three or four of the raucous rookies with a sound like that of exploding tires. Deflated, the brats fell backward against their astounded comrades or onto their clattering bunks. Then, piñatas smashed, fiesta canceled, lights summarily extinguished, the newcomers briefly grumbled under their breath and passed out; while the boxers went back to dreaming of title fights, flashbulbs, tabloid headlines, and million-dollar purses, or at least how their fists were going to get them the hell out of Korea. And I, for the second time since arriving in Asia, laughed myself to sleep.

There was something else besides Sears catalog fashions that distinguished Taegu bargirls and set them apart from their more virtuous peers: namely their breath. These enterprising ladies, unlike their fellow countrymen young and old, one and all, did not eat kimchi. Their abstention was a dietary sacrifice of enormous proportions, yet entirely necessary if they wished to socialize with American servicemen, which is to say, if they wished to prosper financially.

Kimchi has been called the national condiment or side dish of Korea, but it’s considerably more than that. It’s a defining characteristic, more gastronomically representative of Korea than salsa is of Mexico or garlic of Italy. Though less so today than in past periods when money and meat were scarce, kimchi has been a Korean way of life.