He read out loud, "He was troubled by that one idea which kept running through his mind days later: he had given to her a nominal token of Christmas (a contemptuous one, perhaps, but a present nonetheless)—a plastic bag full of tea towels, and yet she had not given him anything in return. Still he was pleased that he had not mentioned anything about it and that his attempts at indifference had not degenerated in weak sulking.
A day later, no longer caring to wonder, as he had, whether these entitlements would at last be begrudgingly given to him should the walls of hubris fall from the scaffolding of his eyes, he was tempted to inveigh her with his contempt and be at last free; but throughout, he succeeded in occasional smiles and benign albeit reticent exchanges of ideas when compelled to talk with these parents (parents, or at any rate imposters claiming to be married, and were for all he knew). If only, he told himself, he could continue to control those eyes that he subconsciously wanted to impale into his mother in a long and unequivocal stare of hate, then he would have self-mastery and power.
Without really thinking about all these specifics so much, he felt the need to restrain himself to multi-interpretable stares that would be doors of opaque translucency sealing off the fortress of his ideas while allowing shadows to permeate outward. Still, keeping the door shut was a hard thing to do."
Thoughts of his own mother kept intruding on Sang Huin's work: the mother/daughter sorority of Cathy and June (the American names that his mother and sister gave themselves); cacophonous, cryptic collusion of conversation that the two Korean sorority sisters had aside with each other in that damnable Hanguk-mal; the mother who valued her tree planting and property ownership with her husband as much as these feminine confidences with her daughter while he was supposed to be quiet as a mouse at home and especially in every public place so that she would not be ashamed of him; this woman who incessantly took him to one hospital after another seeking to have more than manageable ailments and who sat him on bleachers while the family went to June's basketball games.
"June" gave the Korean family a name, and the parents could now talk about their daughter and be part of the Caucasian club. But sick as he sometimes was, he gave them nothing and for it they relegated him to shadows — to shadows.
He thought of his childhood asthma. His father had the perception that the enervating condition of asthma emasculated the son to the point of making him "good for nothing." It was only a perception but no demon was harder to exorcise than perception. Philistines had feelings embedded harder than teeth: prejudices that were both intolerable and inextricable.
But then he checked himself and halted his thoughts about dead people and dead happenings. His thoughts focused on that journalist whom he had met weeks earlier at the sports stadium. "This guy could be the perfect one and yet I have brushed him aside—I don't know why." He pondered some more. "But I am involved with Saeng Seob and one doesn't just use someone until a better prospect arrives." This was his argument to himself made more to excuse his social ineptness than benevolence.
His queer relations were not affable and gay as withdrawn, anti- social, and hell bound in being bedazzled in shadows as he was. Ensconced cleanly from mixing thoughts with the physical realm it was shadows of texture he sought in saunas and the bathroom of the dirty movie theatre near Pagoda Park in Chongno Sam Ga. Clean of words, no hurt would ensue. The dirty movie theatre showed only normal R-rated films and sexual activity was restricted to bathroom stalls. Had it been otherwise it would have even seemed a major aberration to the queer folk there. The queer folk of Korea were Koreans too and no one was more conservative with cultural traditions than a Korean. The theatre people consciously acknowledged sex in the seats as illegal and morally repugnant albeit reprehensibly desired. "I could never do that to him." His thoughts were of course about Saeng Seob. "As long as he wants the relationship it will be there for him. I am many things but —" He was about to think, "but I don't hurt vulnerable people" but he checked his thoughts with the memory of his sister and how he had coerced his girlfriend into having an abortion. He told himself that to claim that he would always be there for the hurting and the vulnerable lacked veracity.
"He began to have a recurrent nightmare of sorts, replete in twisted skeletal boughs; and there he saw something like himself in adult form trying to glean movements of lissome shadows through the crevices around a board that went over one window. Boards were nailed over all windows and entrances in the condemned building that had been his home. Still, despite the sunrays of early morning impaling through the thickets of branches and into his eyes, he could see the copulative interlinking of shadows distinctly even though he could not see the forms projecting the shadows because they had long ago turned into wind. He shot a snowball and a sound of an owl screeching towards the woods flew past him if not the form of the bird itself. He noted how strange it was that the only snow was that on the tree and all other parts of his mother's acreage were part of the verdure of early summer.
'My little comrade,' said the man to the boy although he was not a man any longer but more like the murky translucency of a fog. As he flew near the tree what was left of the old leaves rustled and flattened. 'The Bolsheviks have won. You can go ahead and leave Petrograd and return home to your wives.'