"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.