Offerings

by Michael ByungJu Kim

  I can play baseball all day long. The smell of freshly mown grass and the sharp white lines painted on the diamond. The thump of the baseball hitting glove, the thwack of the bat crushing ball. The dirt and spit and leather, I love it all. Hit ’em where they ain’t! Let’s play two! A well-turned double play, poetic. A bang-bang play for a tag at the plate, You’re out!, beauteous. On the field, I’m not the Asian kid, just a shortstop and pitcher. Pitching’s my thing. Nothing more satisfying than blowing away big, goofy hitters with my heater, and then sneaking by a changeup, my specialty the circle change, making their knees buckle. When they least expect it.

  Coach D’Acamo is a pain in my royal ass. Always yelling we swing like bitches. Can’t hit the cutoff man to save our asses. Telling me to cover the goddamn base, stay off the inside fucking corner. Rides our assholes all the time. He’s a class-A bastard, truly. There was this away game, at Edison, when I was on the mound, and I heard kids on the opposing team chirping “Chinkee” from the dugout. Go back to China, they chanted. Coach D’Acamo went over to their dugout and had a word with the Edison coach. They stopped the name-calling, but, fuck it, I brushed back the next two batters with high tight ones anyway. Coach came to the mound, and he had a what-the-fuck-Shane expression. He didn’t even give me the usual pat on my ass as I walked off the mound.

  At the start of sophomore year I got a part-time job after school. Umma’s cousin, my imo, runs a twenty-four-hour grocery with her husband in midtown Manhattan, where Umma sometimes goes to help out. Twice a week after school I take the ferry from Edgewater to the Big City. I mop the floors, move some crates around, and shit. Imo has installed a salad bar because salads are “all margin.” So I prepare lettuce and cut tomatoes and cucumbers. I do the job for some spending money—Appa doesn’t believe in giving yongdon—but mostly it’s so I can put down some work experience when I apply to colleges. I am “Head Vegetable Preparer” in a “specialized gourmet food retailing establishment.” Umma is usually in the back storeroom chopping onions and scallions. Sometimes she comes out with tears in her eyes, from the onions, she says, and smells funky afterward.

  One Friday, Ms. Wirth, a newbie English teacher at FLH, shows up at the store. She sees me at the salad bar, and I look away. Then I think, Fuck it, and I go to the counter and say, “Hi, Ms. Wirth.” “Shane,” she says, her eyes widening, “I didn’t know . . . your family here.” She gives me a look I’ve seen many times before, like, Oh, what a hard life you must’ve had, a poor immigrant’s son, working all night to help the family. Working so hard to pursue the American Dream. And such a good student!

  From then on, in my English papers, I mix in some broken English, leave out articles or some other corny-ass shit, and she gives me As and A-minuses. She writes in her red ink, Your English is getting better and better—keep up the good work, Shane! Fuck me. I suppose we all deserve what we have coming to us.

  I don’t know who’s more fucking pathetic, Ms. Wirth or old Mr. Erdman, the head math teacher. My freshman year, I took calculus with juniors first term, blew through Mr. Erdman’s advanced differential calculus with seniors second term. Start of this year, he calls me in to his office to say they’ve run out of math courses for me at FLH. I can’t take my eyes off the tufts of white hair sprouting out of his ears. He suggests I take some courses at nearby Montclair State College, where, he says, “There’ll be plenty of other students like you.” Plenty of Asian kids, like me. Because fuck if all Asians aren’t good at math. I tell him I’ll do independent study instead. I don’t tell the parents.

  Appa definitely has a stick up his ass about education. Academic excellence runs in the family, Confucian scholar tradition, all that bullshit. Another word I like the sound of, BS for short. Americans and their abbreviations. Appa is always preaching, Excellence is a habit. Habit, my ass. When I get an 89 on a test in Honors Chem, he crumples up the test paper into a ball and throws it in my face. “We came to this country for this?!”

  Umma comes up to my room later and sits on the bed with me. “You have to understand your appa,” she says, in Korean. “He just wants the best for you. He sacrificed his life for you.”

  BS, I want to say. I didn’t ask him to bring me to this for-fucking-saken country. And he never gets off his ass to do anything. “You do all the work. All he does is play his piano all day long. His goddamn Chopin.” Umma just listens. She’s pretty good at that, I must admit.

  I point out Appa never gets on my dongseng’s case. He claps silly at her piano recitals. Every time she hides his cigarettes, he roars in delight and makes a big show of looking for them. He just gives her kisses, all the time. That’s not even Korean, by the way. Appa treats her like a princess, a goddamn gongju.

  “It’s different,” Umma says. You’re the jangnam of the family, eldest son. It’s your duty to carry on the family name. A sacred tradition.

  Duty, my asshole. Tradition, ditto. He and all the Lees before him can take a flying jump, for all I care. For fuck’s sake.

  17

  Early February 1998

  The squash court in the bowels of the Kukje Hotel health club is a private fortress. It’s an old-style court, with sturdy, wooden floors, and it’s off-limits to everyone but the Park family and their guests. It smells of wood and sweat and privilege. I’d taught Wayne squash at the Shad Center back at HBS. As a way to stay in shape after we both graduated from playing baseball. He had this court built in the basement of the hotel so he could duck down to play whenever he felt like it.

  We’re playing for a million dollars. On Project Thunderball, we’d quoted the low end of our standard fee range for a seller advisory, half a percent of enterprise value. Wayne insisted on a “family discount.” No way could he go over six million, he said. That left a million-dollar gap.

  His proposed solution: “One match, one million dollars, no tears.” To be settled on the squash court, as sporting men. He doesn’t understand the difference between traders and bankers; he’s always quoting from Wall Street and Liar’s Poker.

  “OK, my Gut Freund,” I said, being a sporting man.

  When I come down to the court, though, I see Wayne in his suit and tie. “I’m feeling a bit beneath the weather today,” he says, cheerfully. “But not to worry. Games shall go on.” Someone emerges from the stairs. “You remember Henry.”

  Why am I not surprised to see a ringer? Henry the Equerry. I always picture Henry holding the stirrups as the Prince gets on his horse. He was batterymates with Wayne on the St. Paul’s baseball team, catcher to Wayne’s pitcher. Henry was also a champion tennis player at Penn. He’s been at Wayne’s side in the Ilsung Group since graduation.

  I can back out, which may be what Wayne wants, or suck it up, go through with it. For the honor of it.

  I shake hands with Henry and step onto the court.

  “Les jeux sont faits!” Wayne says, rubbing his hands together, a boy with a lollipop.

  The first game is a probe of strokes, scribbled postcards home to see how you’re doing. Henry’s forehand shots are hammers. He hits rail after heavy rail. But his backhand has a topspin, and he runs after balls instead of lunging, a tennis habit that sends him crashing into walls. As the games progress, it becomes apparent he doesn’t understand the geometry of squash, the angles and especially the vectors of boast shots. He compensates with his athleticism, but it’s not a winning strategy.

  I win the first set, relying on boasts and some well-placed drop shots. I start wondering how Henry would feel if he lost this match. The cruelty of beating a ringer weighs on me.

  In the second set, though, Henry becomes John McEnroe at the net and starts cutting off my shots. He plants himself at the T, the critical intersection of the x and y axes that arbitrate the game, and swats my straights and cross-courts like so many flies. He makes me cover great tracts of wooden space, while he stands stubbornly on the red T, Colossus at Rhodes. I get fixated on getting him off the damn T. Moving him off it becomes my main goal, overriding
the imperative of the game score.

  I start making errant shots. I jostle him for position on the T, but Henry pushes his burly shoulders against mine, doesn’t give way. He guards his space jealously, and he refuses to give lets. He also has a habit of announcing the score after every point he wins. He’s winning the subterranean battle of nerves.

  As the squeak-squeak of our squash shoes gets more urgent, my unforced errors mount. My rails are no longer deep enough, my crosses fall short, dropping on the tin with a pathetic ping. Every opportunity, Henry hits overhead smashes. He hits them with unapologetic brute force. These shots elicit shouts from Wayne of “Ho, nice shot!” or “Too good!” followed by peals of his thunderous laughter.

  By the third set, I’m spent, out of breath and any hope of felicitous shot making. Lack of conditioning makes cowards of us all. After a particularly long rally, I bend over, try to inhale some extra air. As I wipe the sweat off my palm on the glass back wall, Wayne gives me a perky thumbs-up sign from outside. I go down in defeat, two sets to one.

  “Good match!” Wayne squeals, not even bothering to hide his glee. “Top notch!”

  It’s a spiritual defeat. If not exactly a loss of good to evil, a defeat of honest effort. I’m bowed. But I’m not dismayed, not as much as I should be. I figure Wayne needed the million dollars more than Phipps does. My mind turns to how to explain my poor fee-negotiation skills to my M&A bosses.

  “You must not be amused,” Henry says. “Me coming in to settle your bet, whatever it was.” He puts the used squash balls in a Harrow racket sleeve. “But you have to understand him.” He uses just the pronoun.

  “You see, he’s cursed with a life of privilege. People just see the companies he owns, the big houses, the parties. What they don’t see is how everybody wants something from him. He spends his entire day fielding favors, fending off requests. Someone he went to school with asking for a supply contract, someone’s relative asking for an investment, someone he doesn’t even know asking for a job at an Ilsung company for his son. He turns them down, he’s arrogant; accommodate, and he’s corrupt.

  “But I’ve seen him with these leeches. He cares. Not just for sang-bu sang-jo, I’ll scratch your back, whatever. He actually cares about these people. He believes it’s his destiny to help them.

  “When my mother came down with lung cancer,” he continues, “he took care of everything, unsolicited. He got her into Anderson and flew her to Houston. Put the best oncology specialists on her. Nearly saved her.” He throws his squash shoes in his tennis racket bag. “I owe him for life. I’d do anything for him.”

  Wayne pops his head in to say, “Hey, Pilgrim, you know I would’ve given you the million bucks. Could’ve just taken it out of the Fund.” He guffaws, Ha ha ha ho ho ho.

  *

  After the match, we repair to the sauna, a favorite meeting place of Wayne’s. We’re the only ones there.

  “Hae Sun says hi, by the way,” he says. “Gonna put her in our next movie.” I wait for more, but he launches into the topic at hand.

  “Prosecutors are circling,” he says, wiping the sweat off his brow. “And the labor unions want their kilogram of flesh. But a successful sale of Ilsung Motors, that’s the whole cake.” Whole ca-kee. Only shot to get the cash he needs. Otherwise, he loses control of the flagship companies to the creditors or, worse, to his ambitious brother, Kane.

  Wayne confirms what I’ve heard from Jun and others of rival factions forming among the group executives, some supporting Wayne and others lining up behind Kane. Kim Sil-jang, who has the chairman’s ear, has been positioned as the effective casting vote. Wayne says Kim Sil-jang’s fingerprints can be dusted into view in the development of the rivalry. Number Two knows he’s out once one of the brothers ascends to the throne. For now, he sits in the middle and plays the brothers off each other for his own gain. What Koreans call uh-bu ji-ri.

  The heat in the small sauna room is stifling, and there is a warm smell of ripening apples.

  The only way for Wayne to get Kim Sil-jang to support him is by raising several billion dollars in a sale of Motors. The proceeds will pay back the creditors, with plenty left for the slush fund, administered by Kim.

  I have my misgivings, but I’m not feeling morally heroic enough to question deeply my role in abetting Wayne in his dubious grand plan. Just giving a client strategic advice on a corporate divestiture, I tell myself.

  “The key is generating competitive tension among multiple potential acquirers,” I advise. “Daimler-Benz is the right buyer in strategic fit, but we have to get GM or even Renault interested. It takes two to make a party.

  “What we’ve got to do is strike the fear of God in GM and Renault: lose Ilsung Motors to Daimler, you lose Korea, and you can kiss the huge China market goodbye.” Wayne soaks it in. “All we need is one of them to be a stalking horse to Daimler,” I say. “Only way to get the acquisition price up. As it is, we’re concerned Daimler will hold out to pick up the asset on the cheap. At a fire-sale price.” Which would be not unreasonable, since it is a fire sale. “But, no matter what, we can’t look like a desperate seller.”

  Wayne nods vigorously; he’s excited to be privy to the dark arts of M&A. He offers to plant a story saying that creditors are firmly supportive of the Group in one of the local papers he’s “friendly” with. I tell him we need to leak the story to the Financial Journal, the influential international paper. We agree I will do it, since I know the Asia M&A beat reporter there.

  Wayne says, in case I didn’t get the message, “Pardner, my entire empire turns on this deal.”

  I nod.

  “Just hope you’re better at M&A tactics,” he says, “than you are at squash. Or with chicks.” He snickers. “You with your romances . . .”

  18

  Spring, summer 1984

  Ru, Ruth, Ruthie, light of my loins. My first, my one and only. Ru-thie. Two syllables that roll off the tongue and make my heart go, ba dum, ba dum. Ruthie has pale skin and golden hair, thin ropes of radiant sunshine, and eyebrows to match. She has wispy blonde hairs even on her arms! Not like Korean girls, who don’t have any hair on their arms, though I can’t really remember. She doesn’t walk, she glides, like she’s on ice skates. She’s a senior, a year ahead of me, and her boyfriend, Curt, is a running back on the Fort Lee goddamn football team, but she takes interest in me. Go figure.

  We’re in the same AP English class. We read The Great Gatsby together, Daisy and ol’ Sport. She tells me about the American way of reinventing yourself, how it’s really possible. It’s the American way. We read Emily Dickinson and recite Walt Whitman together, singing the songs of ourselves. I get a tingling sensation every time she talks of the body electric.

  One Christmas eve, right before school break, Ruthie comes up to me in the hallway and gives me a hug, saying, “Merry Christmas, Dae.” Right there in front of everyone, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. How downy she felt with her plump pillows in front. And Dae, not Shane. Not even Dae Joon, just my first syllable. The familiar bordering on the intimate, just between her and me. Like she knows the real me, underneath the American me. She writes her phone number, with her left hand—lots of lefties in America—on the inside flap of my Strunk & White. I stare at the flowery numerals, petals of what if? fancy, for days before calling her.

  On our first date, we go to the movies to see Against All Odds. Rachel Ward rolling around on the beach, while Phil Collins wails, “How can I just let you walk away . . . ?” In the darkness of the theater, I hold her hand in mine. We kiss, my first kiss, and she tastes like popcorn, lightly buttered and salted. I press my cupped palm against her chest, and she guides my hand to her heart, holds it there. She leans her head on my shoulder, and I sit there not daring to move my arm. Just take in the floral shampoo fragrance of her hair. The screen flickers. “Take a look at me nowwww.” Ruthie whispers I have beautiful eyes. Like almonds, she says.

  Ruthie teaches me to drive in her red Alfa Romeo. I
wanna get my driver’s license, and she’s my teacher. You’re not truly American until you start driving. In the school parking lot, she teaches me to reverse, to watch the blind spot, and, hardest, to parallel park. She says to go gently, always start slow. Think of the passenger, she says. Just tap the clutch, before caressing the accelerator. Build it up, keeping a steady rhythm, let the engine purr. Be attentive and be responsive to her, that’s the most important thing. Gentle, then hard. When you’re sure the engine is revving, step on it, thrust, thrust, and off we go, vrooom! Let her fly! We hit top speed, and we both yell at the top of our lungs. You’re learning, she tells me, satisfied. Gonna be a good driver someday. I think I might be a natural at it.

  After one English class, Ruthie tells me she has two tickets to Bruce—Bruce, never Bruce Springsteen—and Curt has an away football game. It’ll be fun, she assures me. The concert is crowded, packed with people who look like Ruthie, and they holler and smoke funny-looking cigarettes. The world has so many secrets yet to reveal to me. “The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves . . . ,” and Ruthie sways, like a vision.

  We drive back in her Alfa convertible, top down. She lets me take the steering wheel because she’s “wasted.” I keep one hand on the wheel and put the other behind her on the headrest, just like cool guys do in the movies. The wind blows back our hair, the stars streak across the liquid sky. She throws her arms up and shouts at the top of her lungs, “Baby, we were born to RUNNN . . .” And she looks . . . happy. The sight makes me happy, and my heart feels full, and I’m grateful in that moment to be alive.

  One day, on the school quad, I see Ruthie sitting and talking with an Indian boy, one year my junior. Her boyfriend and his buddy walk by, and the buddy says, “Look, Ruth’s minority case for the week.” He laughs, and I feel something crumple in my stomach. Just before I turn away, Curt looks at me and rolls his eyes. My friend is an idiot, he seems to say, and the two of us are in on the secret. Don’t worry about it. I like the way Americans roll their eyes. Only Americans do that. And wink. Asians don’t look right winking. Or shrugging shoulders. Especially accompanied by Why not?