"Here?" asked Sang Huin.
"I don't know. Somewhere."
"My job here means that I have to live here alone."
"You have a college education from America. You shouldn't be wasting yourself working at a convenience store. Go back to what you were doing before. I can get you private lessons. It is Seoul. There is gold in them there hills."
Sang Huin laughed. He felt at home within this American Hillbilly colloquialism. "All right," he said; and so this was what they did. They stayed together that night and then looked for an apartment the next morning. And then a year passed in living together: Seong Seob finding jobs for him as one might find errands for schoolboys. There wasn't gold in the hills but there was plenty of silver and paper to come into such wealthy homes bringing to families and sometimes their businesses pure American English in the mouth of a Korean. And each morning, exuded from the little time not consumed in a personal life, a quasi-professional life, sleep, and various bodily mandates, he worked on Gabriele. He found it interesting that their two worlds were now converging in the respect that she was taking care of a baby at the time of the first Gulf War with Iraq and he seemed to be living at the inception of the second one that had even more of a chance of exploding into something quite large and horrid within the presence or ghost of Osama Bin Laden.
One day they went to visit a boy of one of those families, who also had the name of Seong Seob. He was suffering at Soul's Yonsei University Hospital. The boy's mother, who was in the hallway, grabbed Sang Huin's hand and enthusiastically took him into the room. The boy's legs and feet were in casts and elevated. His face, bored and withdrawn, brightened slightly as he said his first English word of the visit: "Toy." Sang Huin laughed as he walked further into the room presenting the board game to the boy. The hospital room looked almost the same as an American hospital room except that there were four beds; no curtain partitions; and cushioned benches next to each bed.
There were not many differences between American and Korean lifestyles from what he could see. Korea was like living in the Ozarks with high hills everywhere. He had lived in both Missouri and Texas depending on the needs of his father's work. They had homes in both places. Both countries seemed to be arrogant and fortified within their cultural expressions. One certainly could never part a Korean from his kimchee. Here women strapped babies behind their backs but even in a rural town like Umsong many carried cellular telephones in their purses. Pagers were only slowly becoming obsolete. Koreans' love of making their country into a high tech Mecca was only secondary to their continued devotion to their obsolete pagers. When a college student's pager vibrated with activity he or she would still run into a coffee shop to call his or her friend on the table phones and wait for that person there. There were video pangs (VCR rooms); table tennis rooms; noripangs (Karaoke singing rooms); outdoor vendors and restaurants; crippled singing beggars and vendors who crawled down pedestrian streets like worms as they pushed their carts that blared traditional music from small speakers, and sang into microphones; more mom and pop stores on each block than one could count; and tight department stores with small supermarkets underneath.
One could find in Chongju a McDonalds with an Internet caf? underneath, Pizza Hut, and Baskin-Robbins Ice cream shops. One could always find M&M chocolate candies and shirts displaying American university logos. One could find American and Hong Kong movies, which intrigued Koreans with their violence. Koreans lived under the insecurities of North Korea and their students always found a subject for protest but the country did not foment and fray in violence.
Sang Huin did not know why he was thinking this. He had always hated Chongju and Umsong in particular. And yet rural scenes (like the traveling markets in Umsong) were sort of sweet and real. The only vestige rural traditions in Seoul were the traditional weddings at the Korean Folk Village and traditional dancers no longer on the street corners but contained in a theatre.
He thought about once when he and Yang Kwam were shopping for clothes in Itaewan Dong of Seoul on that same street where he worked at a convenience store. It was raining and cold and his sickness was getting worse. Yang Kwam was wearing a shirt with the American flag on it. Dizzy and disoriented, Sang Huin had followed that American flag in subways, underground transfer corridors, exits, and sidewalks. He was acting the same way now only he wasn't sick. He was following Seong Seob into a relationship blindly to have concrete experiences and happiness that could only be obtained in shared experiences.