Chapter Two
He dressed himself. As he put on his socks, he did it with the mentality of a small child who still felt newness in the sensation. Sexual glutton of adult games, introvert, a man perpetually weakened and wary in ways unbecoming to a man, he still was a little wiser than most on a couple issues. He was cognizant that as an effect of adolescent awakenings an adult often was so obsessed with being in the company of others that finding any degree of happiness could not occur without them. He was a lot different in that respect: influences by hormones to sociability were thwarted by his wariness that gave him back his childhood innocence. Although he was an adult he could still play alone albeit uneasily. Also they, the unwary ones, were so fixated on gaining bigger and more complex pleasures in their gross gluttony to have everything before death that the marvel of air rushing into one's lungs or the feel of a spring breeze brushing against one's face was lost to them entirely. He wanted the remnant of early childhood—the memories of strong aromas, sights, and sounds as his senses depicted them— to live in him and not be the cause of mourning. He wanted to find the traces of deceased family in those early days and be able to glance back onto those tenuous decaying remnants of memory with a sense of happiness at what was once there. Still, even with the earliest and most benign memories furthest removed from the tragic end, such a feat was difficult to master. Everything in the mind of a 5-year-old from the smells of greased telephone polls to the sounds of the school bus that picked up his older 7-year-old sister, and everything in the mind of a 10-year-old from getting his first b-b gun to spending his first time away from family at a summer camp was like walking barefoot on sharp gravel. This, however, was better than having his entrails hacked out of him in that shock of finding his father dangling from a noose in the workroom of his basement. Thinking that early memories were even more benign than the present, he knew that it was only his thinking that made them painful. He judged that he was the source of his misery and with application he would find a way to plant himself in their fecund topsoil and burgeon into the future. His childhood memories were mostly American in origin although it was difficult to isolate the Korean episodes from that of the latter. After the school bus would rush in front of a road near the trailer park and whisk his sister away, his mother would pursue her early morning exercises in front of the television and he would emulate her movements. He remembered loving the thought of catching lightning bugs like his sister and the neighbor children and his repulsion towards it when his mother stated that they were "God's little creatures." He remembered getting lost in a store, feeling tiny among lady mannequins, and being nearly hit by a car as he played in the street. A man yelled at his mother for letting her child run around unrestrained in the streets. Humiliated, she sent him to the bedroom of the trailer. The radio on the mantle of the bed was playing "Raindrops keep falling on my head" and other lugubrious folk melodies. He listened. He cried on her white blanket as if she had banished him forever. He remembered that his father came home on that occasion and took him to the Orbit Inn for a coca cola. He twirled around on a stool restored to his euphoria as his father strutted his work talk to men his age seated on other stools.
Walking from the mokotong he thought of a story that he often read to the children in Kwang Sook's kindergarten in Chongju, a place where he often worked for a few hours each week. But his mind distorted it as the benign and innocuous innocence of childhood is mutilated and the mutilation calcified by experience. Seoul Tiger gets on a plane. He waves goodbye to his mother and father from the window. He feels the plane move and rise in the air. He shuts his eyes briefly. Then he opens them widely in amazement. Seoul Tiger looks through the window. He sees a valley of clouds below him. Then he looks down further and he sees Sri Lanka. The plane lands. Seoul Tiger gets out of the plane. He gives the deferential slight bow and says hello to Tamil Tiger. Tamil Tiger picks up his suitcase and takes it to a car. Tamil Tiger's mother is in the car. She says, 'Hello' to Seoul Tiger. They all go to the home of Tamil Tiger's family. Tamil Tiger's mother slaughters a pig and boils it in her stew while her husband brandishes a machete playfully. Then they all eat at the table. 'Do you eat rice?' asks Seoul Tiger. 'No, I eat unleavened bread,' says Tamil Tiger. 'Here are some Rotis.' Tamil Tiger passes him the plate. The plate has rotis on it. Seoul Tiger holds the unleavened bread in his palm wondering how to eat it. Then a stew, called a curry, is put upon his plate. 'Do you eat kimchee?' asks Tamil Tiger. 'What is kimchee?" asks Tamil Tiger.
Again he was bouncing around in a bus without time to rush back to the yangwam, the room he rented outside of an old woman's home. He questioned himself on why he had agreed to give private lessons in various places outside of Chongju. He answered to himself that the strung out schedule and the long rides matched his disorganized, wayward thoughts. It felt comfortable to bounce around in the similar movements of his circumambulatory personal life. He hoped that the bus would arrive in time so that he could eat a meal before going into those lessons. People in these small towns would not acknowledge his handicap of linguistic ignorance. They demanded more than his short, concrete, and ungrammatical utterances. If he had been an Anglo-Saxon he would have been served in restaurants with simple statements like "Chop che bop, chushipshio" (chop che bop, please). But in small towns even a waitress who had experienced him before would come forth with entire paragraphs to serve onto him and then would stand there bewildered that paragraphs of reciprocal eloquence would not be returned by someone clearly of her nationality. At last she would go away and the dinner would come for the retard. This time, as always, he ate quickly and then waited for some woman's children to get him at the bus terminal. He did not know the woman's name even though he taught there and she gave him money and he did not know her children's names even though he taught them. They were just his "little tongmuls" (little animals). Sang Huin did not like the difficulty of memorizing Korean names so he did it seldom.
Inside the bus station he changed to a different bench. A two or three year old girl, chastised by her mother, sought refuge between his legs and would not come out. She closed the legs like an iron gate. The mother did not seem to demand that she leave the fortress; and he enjoyed the fact that she seemed to gain comfort from his presence even though his face expressed the awkwardness of having her there.
He missed childhood. Surely all people did. Was it so awful to admit this? No one that he had ever known had spoken of his or her loss. Granted, one could not stay comatose in innocence—the delight of pulling some trivial plastic or paper objects from cereal boxes; Halloween costumes; or the Christmas togetherness. The newness of running around trying to beat the clouds or run barefoot after balls in the ecstasy of just being alive ended quickly to girl chases, obligations, family, and all of such dead weight. He couldn't have stayed with his mother forever. If he could have remained steady on the American continent he would have needed more than just her; and so alone, with a sense that he would never find family or closeness again, he had ventured here to another continent that was and wasn't his home, and where he did not speak a language that was and wasn't his. Still, coming here was not entirely bereft of positive notions. Being an innocent, a childish perspective prevailed.
He wanted to once again hold something tenuous and fragile in the palm of his hand as a child would a tinctured caterpillar, the butterfly. He wanted to be there with it innocuously in awe of something that really had no use to him. He loathed this interaction, this anathema of the soul so intertwined in insatiable and wanton selfishness. He wanted to be Seoul Tiger once again but such was not in the survivalist impulses of man. Such was not destiny. Hadn't there been numerous times when as a boy he would sit hours with a stray dog that was needing to claim a gentle master, scared to take it home and yet, like a true friend, sensitive most to creatures that could not articulate themselves in any other way than in the eyes. The eyes, that dilated neediness to be in the presence of a friend in a hostile world where being born was not a sanction to live well or live long. One's innocence ran by like a shell-shocked soldier; circumventing normal sexual drive by being gay would not free him to an innocence that was forlorn. Now there was just the wistful need for family, children he helped to say small things, and his strange obsession with empty physical connections he could depart from easily. He preferred young students because they did not make him uncomfortable by pressing the issue that a man in his early twenties should be planning to have a family. His private domain consisted of a blessed, taciturn instrument called a cello that required no words to say something deep. He had dragged it on the plane and had paid an astronomical fee to get it onto the airlines. What a burden it had been to him lugging the thing around and yet, dilettante that he was, he needed some beauty to exude out of his hardened mud. He needed reverberating notes to sink into the plaster cast around his mind, which had the signature of the world as an evil place upon it , and caress his soft and lonely brain.
Finally, the two or three-year-old parted one of the kneecaps and the mother pushed candy bribes before her nose to keep her quiet and contained. Soon they bought a ticket in the Chinchon station and boarded a bus. All bus terminals in cities under a million people had cement floors and were dark and dirty like a cellar. Just like he had seen in myriad other terminals, here a man came along with a plastic watering bucket with a nozzle used for watering plants. He rinsed the floor with the water contained in it but did not follow that with either a mop or a broom. A few minutes later, two boys came into the terminal. One had a basketball in his hands. The other one stood a few feet behind him. He looked bored and fat.
"Anyong Haseyo" (Peace you do)
"Anyong Hashimnika, Sonsaeng nim," (Peace you do, teacher), said the one with the basketball.
"Uri-tul nun taxi ul sayang hata?" (We taxi to use?) He knew it was as ungrammatical as a pig. He knew that again there would be no taxi. Again they would be walking. Still it was his way of saying something. The one with the basketball who could figure it out shook his head.
They walked down the sidewalks. The two boys lead the way. Sang Huin felt that the roles had been inverted and he felt a twinge of resentment that he was a child or a retard in his own native country and that children were dragging him about. The three of them moved down sidewalks like window-shopping loiterers looking into every mom and pop store along the way. "Ilchik tangshin-tul rul basketball ul hayoshimnita kachi?" (Early you basketball did?) The fat boy nodded his head silently. The boy knew his genius in interpretive skills. A sense of pride exuded over his face in a white light but the flush of expression was extremely ephemeral. It came upon him and vanished in just a few seconds.
"Who won?" asked Sang Huin in English.
The fat boy pointed to himself with his thumb. He even smiled for a second in a sort of bored way.
Then they opened a gate and they went into what looked like a house only it was separated into two apartments.
Sang Huin used his photograph cards like magic tricks to get them to practice tenses and syntax. He liked seeing their tiny house and thinking how his life might have been—for better or for worse—within the childhood of his race. He loved English as he loved music; and sometimes he combined the two in such classes, but with a small feeling of resentment (to which his smile and gentle nature gave no indication) as if his time was sodden in musical doggerel that defiled him like a solecism when he might well be playing Haydn and Boccherini.
He wondered about the girl dressed in the dumpy blue skirt of her school uniform, and the boys in jeans. Were they content to be Koreans or did they yearn for bigger and better things seduced by the American culture that came to them through the cinema and the music and through his presence as well as the English that they studied. If they weren't content, he thought, it wasn't for him to say they were wrong. It was a globalized world and America was the power and the standard that was the impetus for its formation. That was why he was here with his English. He couldn't have gotten any other job in Korea when he couldn't master the simplest of sentences in the native language. He didn't like the sour perceptions that he had of America. It was home. It was still home.
In Umsong, during those times he had waited in the office of the kindergarten for his class to begin, the children would always see him through the window. They knew at that point that he didn't speak Korean and wasn't one of them and for that reason they were attracted to him. They would bang and climb on the window in their eagerness to be near him; and some, using a runny nose as an excuse, would be permitted to go into the hall. To the side of a fish aquarium hung a roll of toilet tissue. They would wipe their noses and peak into the office. They would squeal. He liked it. He liked being an American—sometimes.
He looked more intensely at these Chinchon students. Who would they become? As they begin to feel hormones, the adrenaline of the four-year high called love, and the frenzy of sex luring them into steady relationships and accompanying obligations, would they have moments where they too yearned to be in a hammock under their Grandma Lee's cherry trees? In his case he could recall the image of a photograph of a neighbor his family had labeled as "Grandma" Vera with her black dress rustling in the wind carrying him in her arms. Would they think upon theirs-something similar to Vera frying hamburgers on the grill as the scents of angel-food cakes came from the windows of her kitchen? He chastised himself. He told himself that only broken people looked back on childish irrelevance. The rest looked to the future in their insatiable hungers for bigger pleasures and their present connections that they might use to secure their hedonistic whims. But he was a "broken" person and the thought of Vera returned to him. When he thought of her intensely the image emblazoned in memory shook him and it was hard to think that it could not make her alive again. And yet to have had a connection (and the most unfortunate of lives surely have had many) would justify everything. A personal contact in the past or when the wind…or the sun…or the rain touched him, that alone would justify a life of barren prospects.
"Unto us a child is born. Unto us a child is given." He thought of the words of the composer, Handel. Yes, he thought, he had done a horrible thing by encouraging his girlfriend to abort their child. It was wrong to have robbed a being of life and any connections the fetus might have had beyond its own cell divisions. Secondly, this cynicism that a woman, spellbound in romance, robbed a man of his sperm to produce a baby by which to devote herself and obtain a purpose in life while thrusting him into the financial maintenance of this prize had caused him to abort major connections in his own life. Now, apart from his mother, there were no connections. There were only phantoms of people flitting through ethereal consciousness, and by coming here to find his land he had parted from her. When his sister was murdered, he was just beginning his studies at the university. When his father committed suicide, Sang Huin's cadaverous numbness was on fire and he felt that any trace of himself was being incinerated. Mentally, he was running to and fro in the hope of retarding the flames that were eating him for their fuel. Back then the thought of his father dangling from the noose recurred to him every few moments. At that time he wanted to check himself into a hospital for he felt a loss of sanity. His world was three dimensional but totally impersonal and wobbling. After months of virtual silence and the icy stares of his mother through the most enervated and perfunctory movements of planting flowers and trees no different than what she had or stripping wallpaper and putting up patterns that were nearly identical to the old ones, he spent a month in Galveston. A month watching waves dash against the shore was enough to make him see that being one of a billion waves dashed into the sands was a pattern engrained into life that he must not take personally; and so he returned to school. By will and discipline in reigning in his thoughts he made it through college and a year of graduate school. But he could not take the stagnation that scholarly pursuits forced him to endure and became the animated billiard ball being shot from one area of the table to the next—one part of the country to the next—falling homeless into dark holes.
Sadness punched him in the stomach. It was enough—"nomu" (too much). He frowned. He didn't care. Six or seven minutes early—who would mark the time especially when he traveled such a distance to give them these lessons. He told them that the session had ended and they got an envelope of money from their mother, which they brought to him. The session didn't seem as if it had begun. It all was a vacuum—a void. He untied the double knots that were contained on his shoes and put them on. Korean people were so quick at slipping on shoes, and he assumed that anytime someone waited for him to leave it was a complete aggravation for them. His mother had spent so much time teaching him to tie and then double-tie. He had been such an ignorant and inept child. The habit was deeply engrained in his psyche. The students stared and waited at his childish wrestling with his shoes. He knew that he needed slip-ons that would foster a quick exodus after he had taken them off at the door.
He stepped out over the crevice of a yard. A light sprinkling or heavy mist was falling upon him. Past the gate and into the street the generalized memories of a hundred such days with a hundred similar rains came to him. Rain was for him only a baptism of emancipation. From a glance up at the clouds he was compelled to acknowledge realities outside his own thoughts—and indeed Sang Huin needed the rain of Noah to get out of his own ruminations. Yet, a foreigner's experience was indeed like no others' and he was an introverted being traumatized by the great chasm of the murder of a sibling and finding the blue dangling body of his father. At 24, any man's boyhood was buried under only a shallow layer of dirt and for one with maimed manhood the clay was never solid, was partially washed away, and boyhood often resurfaced. He was a runaway from the American experience and his thoughts, when not able to do it in deeds, almost always ran to Seoul. The rural areas where he worked and at one time had lived gave him the solitude and the meditative power to think his weird thoughts as he tried to reconstruct his manhood but the problem was that he did it too much. Seoul was felicity, the exhilarating movements, the museums, the symphonies, and the sexual bliss. Within it the hurt was diffused and boyhood was gagged and he was rarely cognizant of its screams. At the bus station it began to rain heavily. A few years ago, he thought, the sun had droned on with the days of the trial and the rare rain had been his only comfort.
In an hour's time, during the bus ride, each of these students would be completely gone from his mind exuded like the entangling conundrums of feeling, ideas, and senses in sleep. If all people were shadows of this realm in the flickering of light, what solid entity cast the shadow? Was it God? Was there a god? If the shadows were more concrete than the light, what would this say about life? He decided to stop thinking such things. Myriad complex and morbid thoughts, profound or inane, would not raise him to a wiser man. They would just get him stuck in their muddy ruts.
Back in a bus, he thought about how much of his life was dragged about in transportation here and there for a Korean buck. He didn't know anybody in Chongju but a simple advertisement in the paper would have been enough to solve his dilemma in providing him with private lessons near his home for needed South Korean Won. Still, if his whole life was spent in these bus rides, fate was not bad. He could be a starving North Korean or one of the dead soldiers who got their submarine trapped on a reef in the South Korean jurisdiction of the ocean and had been hunted down by the South Korean soldiers. He had a South Korean passport and an American residency. He was single and free to see the world. He didn't do that much and had lots of time and some money to spend.
He had little mastery over his thinking. Since he was a creative person it often went running wild through meadows with the gods. He knew there was genius to be gained in the company of deities so wild. He had left his mother's home and his mother country to find manhood- perverse, greedy, manhood with its insatiable wants, its selfish calculating plans, and its grandiose desire to find its own unique adventures and habits. She, his mother, would meanwhile be re-planning and redecorating rooms. He loved her deeply but she was not everything. He needed more connections to keep himself from rising like a balloon and going adrift; and lacking them, looking onto his life from the clouds, he could see the obvious: that this mortal would not be there when he became much older. For all of his life there was only one claim to be made and that was upon himself. In this respect he was quite American.