He found it odd that after so many letters where she told him that she was fine and did not want him to return (letters that became increasingly blunt to the point where in the previous one she said, "Frankly, I don't need you. You need to get on in the world alone — start your own family") that she should aver the opposite now. In the long flight to America he was preoccupied with this subject and in his preoccupation he would frequently drift in and out of sleep.
— My cousin is always wondering about you — What? — Well, why you left our
mother in a foreign country all alone. He thinks that you are a bad person but
I tell him that you aren't really that…that you are more like damaged goods —
Yes, I am that. Not bad, just damaged. Damaged goods, as you say.
—For her and everyone. Let people come and go like breathing. It is unnatural to give it conscious significance.—Okay, Gabriele, I won't worry so much. Whether she hates me or not, you can't go home again.—That's right; and it makes the issue irrelevant.—Are you okay in Jakarta? I sort of left you there —You left me positing the possibility of going there but now I am in Bandung Indonesia and planning to go deep into the jungles. My choice only, as always.
His mother, a tall broad woman once beautiful but made haggard from tragedy was wearing a scarf to cover hair loss and a feigned smile to get through the day. The smile's lack of warmth could be measured in the inconsistency of its flickers — Glad you could come, she said disingenuously — Anyong hashimnika, Mama — Is that all the Korean you've learned? — Yes, he chuckled, not a lot more than this. How have you been? — As well as someone like me in my circumstances can. Put up an ad for your father's John Deer riding lawnmower but there haven't been many callers to take a look at it — Well maybe you priced it too high — What would you know about it? — Nothing — I finally threw away your sister's music box. I didn't want to go on year after year fighting the temptation to wind it up and listen….Who is this with the dog? — Mama, this is Seong Seob, my special friend. Seong Seob, this is my mother — Anyong haseyo. — Special friend? What is that? No, sir; not under my roof. He can find a hotel or the two of you can go back to wherever you came from.
It was in a descent to the San Francisco airport, when the seatbelt light went on and the captain's voice awakened him from these latter dreams, that he suddenly had an epiphany that there had been no request at all — that it was merely a begrudging acceptance that sooner or later they would inevitably meet. He cancelled St. Louis and boarded a flight to San Diego.
There, with his backpack, he wandered the streets of downtown San Diego, ecstatic to be a pedestrian in this great cosmopolitan medley and to see all signs in English. He wandered in this honeymoon some hours until he came to a queue of miserable morning mendicants mingled in the malaise of having to be minions for morsels of a blended meat and vegetable mush that was scooped into Styrofoam cups by badged and indifferent scoopers. Stepping into lines demarcated by ropes within this parking lot at St. Vincent de Paul he saw that only some of these eager but patiently waiting eaters were badged and that the scoopers wore badges with stars.
"Excuse me. Who are they?" asked Sang Huin to an old man in front of him.
"Who? Oh. Same as us all but residents—badgers are all Vinceteers, living here. The ones scooping with the stars on their badges are the helper pigs, the preferred pigs. For being allowed to wander the streets one or two nights a month without losing their beds and real food that real people eat instead of this trough stuff they would do anything: tell on masturbators, them that goes into the showers at the wrong times, having to take a runny shit at 2 AM when not able to hold it—things like that which can get someone thrown out of here. Ain't Catholicism and Christianity pretty? That's why I sleep in my own little hut in the woods of Balboa Park."
Sang Huin nodded painfully as if in derision of all things that were of pig stardom in deference to the pig before him. In so doing he imagined Nathaniel going into such a place expending his gregarious energy with the right people, becoming a head pig, and for two nights each month having sex under bushes in patches of greenery between highways. Then he thought of a new character, Guillermo. "Guillermo walked the streets of San Diego partially earnest to find a job."
Sang Huin took his Styrofoam cup of mush and a muffin and ate with the rest of the scrawny, chilled pigs who would hours later sizzle in the sun's reverberations of the pavement during lunch. He felt as if being here without activities of distraction he was in the thickets of life that most were cognizant of from birth to death. Within purposelessness, disorientation, and futility in life's wanderings his was the global experience of the majority.