I caught a glimpse of the clock on the wall. It was past seven. I grabbed the check and said, “Let’s get something to eat.”
We went to the yakiniku place on Shinjuku 5-chome.
The restaurant took up the eighth through twelfth floors of a twelve-story building, and Jeong-il and I went up to the entrance on the eighth floor. It was dinnertime on a Sunday night, so the restaurant was packed. As we were jostled by the crowd of customers waiting for tables to open up, the hostess—an elegantly made-up woman wearing a chic black dress with her hair tied back—appeared.
“Reservation for two?”
Although we hadn’t made reservations, I answered the woman’s question with a nod. She led us to the elevator and got on with us. As soon as the door closed, I said, “You look like the mistress of some Chinese mafia boss.”
My mother smacked me on the side of the head. Jeong-il chuckled.
“Nice to see you again, Jeong-il,” my mother said.
Jeong-il gave her a proper bow and said, “You’re looking as pretty as ever.”
With a pleased smile, my mother said, “I have some delicious meat set aside for you, Jeong-il.”
The elevator opened on the twelfth floor. As we stepped off, I gave Jeong-il a kick in the stomach.
“Pervy bastard.”
My mother led us into a private room in the back with tatami floors, and left. The night view from the windows was beautiful. Naomi-san appeared with cups of tea and warm hand towels just as I had rolled over on my side on the tatami mat and groaned, “Damn, I’m hungry.”
She was wearing a really elegant navy kimono. I sprang upright and sat on my heels.
“Welcome. Nice to see you again.” The outer corners of her eyes turned slightly downward as she smiled flirtatiously. I nearly melted. I glanced at Jeong-il. His eyes were sagging dreamily at the corners, too. Pervy bastard.
Setting the tea and towels neatly in front of Jeong-il and me, she asked, “So how are my rising Zainichi stars? Studying hard?” Jeong-il and I simultaneously answered yes and nodded deeply. Another heart-melting smile appeared on her face.
Naomi-san and my mother were school friends. In high school, she had been known for her good looks. After graduating, she was chosen to be Miss Ice Cream, Miss Grape, and Miss Goldfish, and she went on to become a fashion model. Since both South Korean and North Korean citizenship got in the way of traveling overseas, she became a naturalized Japanese citizen. She quit modeling before she turned thirty-one. “It’s a long story,” she explained once when I asked her why she had quit. She looked kind of sexy when she said it. She ended up taking over her father’s business managing the yakiniku restaurant. By the way, Naomi wasn’t an alias or a stage name but her given name. She used to be bullied in North Korean school for having a Japanese name. My mother stepped in and defended her, and they became good friends.
“I hope you’re hungry,” Naomi-san said.
Jeong-il and I nodded.
“I’ll bring your food right out. Just give me a minute.”
Naomi-san left the room. With his eyes still sagging downward at the corners, Jeong-il, as if in a dream, said, “You know she’s single, right?” I grabbed one of his legs and put him in an ankle lock to awake him. Pervy bastard.
By the end of dinner, Jeong-il and I were blissfully stuffed. Naomi-san came back with some lime sherbet for dessert, and she sat down and made herself comfortable. In the most adorable way, she asked me, “Will you tell that story again?” It was a story I’d told many times before, but I just couldn’t say no to her.
In the fall after I started high school, my family went to South Korea. The purpose of the trip was to visit my grandparents’ grave on Jeju Island. For my father, it was a homecoming fifty years in the making. For my mother and me, it was the first time setting foot on South Korean soil. I went to the grave of my grandparents, who died before I’d ever met them, and laid down some flowers. To be honest, I didn’t really feel a whole lot of anything, looking at the grave. It was nothing more than a burial mound.
The incident occurred after we arrived on the mainland. We had dinner at a yakiniku place in Seoul, and afterward we got in a taxi. Actually I got in a taxi by myself. My parents shared a taxi with a middle-aged Japanese couple they got to know at the restaurant. The couple was staying in the same hotel as we were.
On the ride back to the hotel, the fortyish driver spoke to me.
“Are you Zainichi?”
When I answered in Korean that I was, he snorted and curled his lips into a sneer. Many Koreans believe that Zainichi live in Japan in blessed, hardship-free comfort, and some of them zealously take swipes at Zainichi. The taxi driver appeared to be that type.
During the entire ride, the driver kept asking stupid questions: “How old are you?” “What do you think of Korea?” “Can you eat kimchi?” And he snorted every time I answered, as if to mock my Korean pronunciation. The taxi meter steadily ticked higher and higher. So did my anger meter.
The taxi pulled up in front of the hotel. I checked the price on the meter and held out some bills. The driver took the bills from me and flipped the meter lever up. The display on the meter turned to zero. For several moments, I waited. The driver continued to look out the front windshield as if I didn’t exist. The taxis pulling into the driveway behind us began honking their horns. The hotel doorman was coming closer to investigate. I had no choice but to say something.
“Give me my change,” I said in Korean.
The driver turned slightly toward me and made this thoroughly repulsive face that seemed to say, Huh? and my anger meter shot straight to a hundred. I drilled the guy in the back of the head with a right corkscrew punch, yelling, “Die!” in Japanese. The driver’s body pitched forward, his face smashing against the steering wheel with a dull whack! Take that, you bastard. When he turned around, his face was crimson. The driver began to rant and rave in a deafeningly loud Korean I couldn’t understand. That’s the problem with Koreans—they’re so short-tempered.
The driver opened his door and got out. I got out and quickly readied myself for a rumble. The driver came at me with short, quick steps, his right fist cocked next to his face. He lunged toward me with his entire body, so I sidestepped to the left. His punch whiffed the air, leaving his outstretched body completely open. I landed a right hook to his liver. The driver let out a groan and crumpled to the ground.
Before I could bask in victory, the doorman snuck up on me from behind and got me in a full nelson. Just as I was going to break free, I heard a familiar voice at my back.
“What’s going on?”
It was my old man. I tried desperately to get free so I could explain the situation, but I couldn’t. My father asked the doorman with the viselike hold what happened. The doorman jabbered in Korean so fast that I couldn’t make out any of what he said. The doorman didn’t know what had gone on inside the taxi.
My father’s face went dark in an instant. His eyes shifted to the driver on the ground and then back to me. He seethed with murderous intent. This was bad. Figuring my first priority was to break out of this nelson hold the doorman had me in, I struggled with all my might—in that instant, the same person that taught me how to throw a liver hook landed a real good one with all his weight behind it.
The first thing I threw up was the grilled kalbi ribs. The doorman released my arms and let me fall to the ground. As I was throwing up the bibimbap from dinner, my mother’s voice floated above me. “Is something the matter?”
“He tried to get this taxi driver’s money and hit him,” I heard my father explain.
I managed to wobble to my feet so I could explain what really happened. A huge crowd had gathered around us. Taxi drivers, hotel staff, and patrons were all holding their breath, staring at the shitstorm that had come down on me. And then it got worse.
“You ungrateful boy!”
Along with this rebuke, my mother’s palm came flying at me. It connected with my chin at just the right an
gle to make my neck twist completely sideways, causing me to lose my equilibrium and fall down again—right onto the bibimbap that I’d just thrown up. As if that wasn’t enough, I was pelted by the thunderous applause that rained down on me. Somehow I managed to raise my head. The crowd clapped with big, sweeping arm motions like a concert audience after a maestro’s performance. The taxi driver was sobbing for joy on my father’s chest. Seeing this, the crowd became weepy-eyed. Some were shaking my mother’s hand. The applause continued. Now and then, I felt a stab of pain from the hostile stares of the crowd. Korea was a Confucian country.
And then I thought, I hate all you grown-ups. And Korea can go to hell.
While I was telling the story, some of the restaurant staff had trickled into the private room with bento boxes to take a late dinner break. And when my mother came in with tea for everyone just as I finished telling the story, the staff put down their chopsticks and clapped. Not knowing why, my mother blinked with a blank look on her face. When the clapping subsided, Naomi-san said quietly, “It’s such a good story no matter how many times I hear it.”
Really?
Soon after my mother set the tea down and left the room, a guy asked, “Do you have any new stories for us?” The restaurant workers were young—all around the same age—but they were ethnically diverse: there was a Zainichi North Korean, Zainichi South Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese. I don’t know what got into me, but I decided to talk about mitochondrial DNA.
“Okay. This story is a little different from the last one. Stay awake, if you can. Mitochondrial DNA is the DNA found in a special part of cells—the mitochondria. It’s different from the rest of your DNA. Because mitochondrial DNA mutates at a high rate, leaving behind markers where the mutation has occurred, mitochondrial DNA analysis is a really important way scientists search for the origins of humankind.”
Silence. The Japanese girl’s hand went up.
“You lost me when you started talking about mutations.”
“Basically we all have unique markers passed down from our ancestors, and they’ll likely continue to be passed down intact to our descendants. So if you use these markers to trace your roots, you can have one big family gathering.”
“What do you mean?” asked the Zainichi South Korean man.
“Well, you know that we were born at the very end of one of countless branches of the family tree. Our great-great-grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers gave birth to our great-grandfathers, and our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers gave birth to our grandfathers, and our grandfathers and grandmothers gave birth to our fathers, and then our fathers and mothers got busy, and we were born. If you’re really bored, you can go all the way back to your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. Anyway, our bodies are encoded with a tremendous variety of genetic data inherited from our ancestors and—”
The Chinese girl took it from there. “If we use these unique markers from mitochondrial DNA, we can trace our roots, right?”
I nodded. “I forgot to tell you before that when mitochondrial DNA is passed on to a child, only the mother’s is inherited. In other words, you only need to trace a simple line from mother to grandmother to great-grandmother without having to check the paternal side, so it’s easy. Until you finally trace your roots all the way back to a single woman.”
“You’re right. This story is different from the other one,” said Naomi-san.
“The reality is the descendants of this single woman—we’re scattered all over the world, and it could get really interesting if we were to all gather in one place. Like maybe you’d turn out to have the same mitochondrial DNA as the president of the United States.”
The Zainichi North Korean man said, “I have the same mitochondrial DNA as Brad Pitt. I’m sure of it.” Loud boos from the others.
I waited for the boos to die down. “They did this study using mitochondrial DNA and found out that about half of the Japanese living on the main island of Honshu have the mitochondrial DNA that’s common in Koreans and Chinese. Only five percent have the mitochondrial DNA found in Japanese.
“About two thousand years ago, a whole lot of these people—the Yayoi—came to Japan from the continent. And before the Japanese knew what was happening, they’d become minorities on the Honshu main island.”
“But a Japanese person who has the mitochondrial DNA of Koreans and Chinese is still Japanese,” the Japanese girl said.
“Sure, because they were born in Japan, raised in Japan, and have Japanese citizenship. But that’s all it is. Just like how if you were born in America, raised in America, and had American citizenship, you’d be an American.”
“Our roots aren’t bound by citizenship,” said Jeong-il.
“So how far back do you have to trace your roots?” the Japanese girl asked. “I mean, we don’t have a family tree lying around at home or anything.”
Jeong-il said, “Maybe just skip over the stuff in the middle and go straight to the single woman. Back when the single woman was alive, there were no distinctions like nationality or citizenship. Maybe we should think of ourselves as just descendants of that time.”
Everyone was deep in their own thoughts.
“Nationality isn’t much more than a lease to an apartment,” I said. “If you don’t like the apartment anymore, you break the lease and get out.”
“Can you really do that?” the Japanese girl asked.
“It’s written clearly in the Constitution of Japan, Article 22, Paragraph 2. ‘Freedom of all persons to move to a foreign country and to divest themselves of their nationality shall be inviolate.’ It’s my favorite article in the Constitution.”
“But,” began the Zainichi North Korean man, “even if we know all that stuff, isn’t it pointless if the people discriminating against you don’t?”
“What matters is that we know,” I said. “Those ignorant haters who discriminate based on nationality and ethnicity are pathetic. We need to educate ourselves and make ourselves stronger and forgive them. Not that I’m anywhere near that yet.”
We all laughed. My mother came into the room and announced, “Time to go back to work.”
We all promised to meet again soon, and the staff workers excused themselves. It was getting late, so Jeong-il and I decided to call it a night. Waiting for the elevator, we thanked Naomi-san for treating us to dinner, and she said, “Come back and tell us some more stories.” She smiled and gently caressed my cheek.
Thank God I’d studied that stuff. Knowledge is power, as they say. The moment the elevator door closed, I took a pretty serious punch in the ribs from the pervy bastard next to me.
Although it was already pretty late when I got home, I decided to stick to my daily routine.
I changed into my training clothes and went for a run. I ran six miles, shadowboxed for ten three-minute rounds with a minute interval in between, and finished with fifty push-ups and fifty sit-ups.
After doing some stretches to cool down, I took a shower. I admired the reflection of my abs in the mirror until I realized I was acting like a total narcissist.
I went back to my room and began practicing the guitar. I’d learned how to get all the fingers down to play the F chord recently. To finish off the ninety-minute practice, I listened to a CD of Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock. To protest the Vietnam War, where it seemed like only black and brown people were being sent to the front lines and dying, Hendrix played America’s national anthem on his guitar like this:
Scree scree screee screee screeee screeee
Waaah waaah grraaah grraahh
Squeee squeee squeee
Gagagaaah gagagaaah gaah gaah
It was an awesome sound no matter how many times I heard it. The voices of minority people had no way of reaching the top, so they had to find some way of making their voices louder. Someday I might want to play the national anthem of this country and shred like Hendrix did. I was practicing the guitar for precisely that mome
nt.
I sat down at my desk. After flipping through the Green Beret combat manual, I closed my eyes and simulated a combat situation in my head. Three enemies down.
I was pretty sleepy by then, but I decided to run through my nightly studies. I’d been reading up on the monoethnic myth that’s been tossed around in Japan for ages. The lessons were delightful. I learned about how scholars and politicians from back when the word “DNA” hadn’t even existed spouted off colorful lies to discriminate against other ethnic groups.
I read through the materials I’d gathered from the library, trying to understand how this monoethnic myth worked. Just the vocabulary and euphemisms made my head hurt:
Monolithic, discrimination, assimilation, expulsion, pure blood, mixed blood, foreign, homogeneity, crossbreed, Yamato people, barbarians, bloodline, Emishi, Kumaso, Ryukyu, national polity, nationality, exclusionism, purity, emperor-centered historiography, Japanese expansionism, unbroken Imperial line, Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, national prosperity and defense, universal brotherhood, Japan and Korea as one, Japan–Korea single ancestry, Japan–Korea annexation, Japanization, subjects, governor general, soshi-kaimei, territorial possession, empire, colonization, unification, invasion, subjugation, puppet, submission, oppression, control, subordination, isolation, segregation, miscegenation, mixed residence, mixing, indigenous, going to America, difference, prejudice, diversity, propagation, reproduction, alien race, inferior race, superior race, blood relative, expansion, territory, rule, exploitation, plunder, patriotism, eugenics, compatriot, class, heterogeneous, union, unity, collusion, antiforeign, exclusion, removal, massacre, extermination . . .
Screw it. I decided to become Norwegian.
I’d need money. I was banging around the room, trying to dig up anything worth selling, when my father opened the door.
“What time do you think it is?”
“Knock.”
“Don’t be a jerk.”
He sat down on the bed. I ignored him and went about my task.
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