by Martin Limon
I never call Mr. Yi a houseboy to his face. He would consider that insulting, especially since he’s about a quarter-century older than me. And I don’t call him Ajosi—”Uncle”— which would be the normal form of address for a younger man to his elder. I call him Mr. Yi. The Western way. To Koreans it sounds neat and clean—businesslike—and doesn’t get us involved in their complex hierarchical relationships.
Koreans use different forms of address, and different verb endings, depending on what your relative status is to the person you are talking to. Status that is defined not by money but by the writings of Confucius. Don’t even try to get me to explain it to you. They say that, because of these status considerations, a foreigner can study for years and still never learn how to speak Korean properly. I’ve been trying—and I communicate—but I know they make a lot of allowances for me that wouldn’t apply if I didn’t have a Caucasian face.
In the mornings we hit the Yongsan Snack Bar, which I love. I love the shuffling feet, the tinkling porcelain cups and silverware, the incoherent mumblings, and the crinkling of newspapers being opened. Ernie and I never miss the morning edition of the Pacific Stars & Stripes. They fly it in from Tokyo. Unless there’s a typhoon or something, they airlift it all over the Pacific: Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Okinawa, and of course to Korea. It’s a real rag, with William F. Buckley, Jr., on the right and Art Buchwald on the left. So much for socialist leanings. But it’s good for a laugh and without my copy of the Stripes and a nasalcleansing cup of Snack Bar coffee, I just don’t feel right in the mornings.
For lunch we go over to the Lower Four Club and order the special, which usually runs under a buck and a half but sometimes they go hog-wild and put a bunch of beef on the plate and try to charge a dollar ninety-five—ice tea, rolls, and salad included.
My favorite waitress over there is Miss Lee. Everybody tries to tell me she’s a little sweet on me but she’s sort of old—I’ve heard thirty—and so I’ve never tried to get her alone. We call her the Titless Wonder, but her can is really great and she’s very pretty and tiny. Not petite. Tiny. Since I’m six foot four, two hundred and twenty pounds, I’m sure we would make a heck of a couple.
If you don’t want the special, you can drink your lunch in the cocktail lounge and watch the go-go girls or the stripper or whatever the club manager might have arranged for the noontime entertainment.
A lot of guys don’t get out much. Their Korean wives keep them at home after working hours and so lunchtime for them is their chance to kick out the jams and have a little fun. At Eighth Army Headquarters, beery breath always reminds me of afternoons. At night we hit the ville.
More often than not I run the ville with Ernie. We’ve gotten used to each other.
Ernie keeps his body pretty well saturated with liquor. He says it’s better than heroin. Besides, heroin is virtually impossible to get in Korea—not like Vietnam. And liquor is not only accepted but embraced by the U.S. Army.
Me, I’ve always been afraid to try any of the hard drugs. Marijuana, speed, a little acid once or twice, okay, but I doubt that I’d have the willpower to put down heroin like Ernie did.
I really admire him.
We call his girlfriend “the Nurse.” She’s a stout but shapely young Korean woman who dropped out of nursing school and now takes care of Ernie full time. When he shows up at their hooch, that is. They’ve had some pretty hellacious fights about him staying out all night. He always claims it’s an investigation, but she knows better.
Ernie enjoys the fights. Even the time she dropped their big folding Styrofoam mattress into the public well near their hooch. Ernie just heaved it out and took it, dripping, in a cab back to the compound. Later, after getting a few stitches in his hand from the butcher knife she took to him, he moved back into her hooch. But he kept the mattress in his barracks. Prudent guy, that Ernie.
When they’re not fighting they spend a lot of time talking about injections. It’s Ernie’s favorite word. The Nurse meticulously explains all the preparations necessary for giving an injection, even mimicking the hand movements, and then performs the act, keeping her face stonily serious, while Ernie watches the imaginary needle pop in his arm.
Every couple has to have a hobby.
Lately Ernie’s been seeing a lot of Miss So. She’s got long straight black hair and a serious expression—he’s got a thing for serious expressions. But one thing she has all over the Nurse is that she wears glasses.
Ernie wears glasses. Round, wire-rimmed jobs with thick lenses, and girls who wear glasses just about drive him mad. Miss So seems to have injected herself into his soul.
She’s one of those chicks who hang around Itaewon, wearing the latest stateside outfits, because she’s fascinated by the American GIs. She’s been watching American movies for so long and listening to the music and studying English in school that she’s got some sort of idea that all the wise, punk-ass, jitterbugging GIs hanging around the ville are actually worth a damn.
Anyway, she’s not a professional so she has to watch herself. Mainly she hangs out in the rock-and-roll clubs where fewer straight business girls work and a few more of the strays wander in from time to time. Her running partner is her sister, who’s a year or two younger than she is, taller, doesn’t wear glasses, and doesn’t look anything like her.
Ernie tried to set me up with her once but it didn’t work out. I think I’m too serious for her. She likes guys who are bubbling over with enthusiasm and can barely contain themselves over something indecipherable, like maybe just being alive. I get enthusiastic about books and things, or a particularly knotty investigation, or just getting laid.
Definitely not her type.
Not that I hold any grudges. There are plenty of other girls in Itaewon. Like Miss Oh, the cocktail waitress who works at the King Club.
She was a big help to me on my last investigation, after she got tired of bonging me on the head with her cocktail tray. She’s tall, slender, with flowing black hair, and a figure than can make grown men cry. At least she’s brought me to tears a couple of times.
I try not to push her too hard. I know she’s got something going with one or two of the guys who run the local Club Owners’ Association here. Got to pay her dues. So I just see her occasionally, when we both have time. If I wander into the King Club, have a drink, and she’s a little brusque with me, I get the message. If she lingers at my table and asks me to buy her a drink, then I know I’m in. But Miss Oh would have to wait until at least nightfall.
There would be nothing for us until then so Ernie and I decided to take advantage of the first sergeant’s loose reins. Ernie went over to South Post to do some jogging, and I rolled up my gi and made it to the twelve o’clock tae kwon do class.
Mr. Chong, our instructor, had been holding classes at the main gym on Yongsan Compound for the last couple of years, ever since he’d won the Korean national title in the tae kwon do middleweight division.
It’s the most competitive division, mainly because almost everyone in the country is a middleweight. He’s a calm man, with a sculpted body, extremely precise in his movements, and as quick as a cobra when he wants to be.
I’d no more want to meet him in a dark alley than walk through an impact area during a Second Infantry Division field exercise.
“You’re late again, George.”
We were in the locker room, changing into our white outfits.
“Yes, I’m sorry. They had me working.”
Mr. Chong finished tying his long black belt around his trim waist and walked over to me slowly, shuffling his plastic slippers.
“You could be a very good student, one of my best, if you’d only work harder.”
“I will try,” I said. “It’s this job.…”
The worst part about every tae kwon do workout is the stretching exercises at the beginning. My skeleton had set into a brittle knot years before I ever thought about taking up this stuff, and to get my head to my knees or my ankl
es behind my neck was perfect torture.
We had a couple of American girls in the class, mainly there to ogle Mr. Chong, and they went through the stretching exercises like eels through a net.
Later, when we finally got back on our feet and into the endless repetitions of our kicking and punching routines, I felt a lot better; the sweat flowing, air coming hard. And then the solid feeling of knuckle and instep smacking against the swinging heavy bag.
It was during the free fighting that Mr. Chong always got me.
“You defend yourself too much, George. You must open up. You must attack.”
That was difficult for me to do since I’d always thought that the best offense was a good defense. And I was about twice the size of most of the people in the class. How can you open up when you don’t really intend to hurt anyone?
After the cool-down exercises, more stretching and bending, we bowed to Mr. Chong, in unison, and were dismissed. I walked over to the weight room and, still in my gi, pumped iron for a couple of hours.
In the sauna room I thought about Miss Pak and her short career.
A lot of GIs, especially those just in from the States, are always hung up on whether a girl is a professional or not. As if there’s some sort of clear-cut, fluorescent line between a person who is evil and one who isn’t. I’ve done enough things in my life to be ashamed of that I don’t have much problem with a girl who lives alone in a drafty hovel, works for a salary of thirty dollars a month, sees a couple of boyfriends, and then asks me for a few bucks the morning after.
I’m a GI. I clear almost five hundred dollars—cash—a month.
And I’ve got a free place to live and free food to eat. Not to mention medical care if I get sick. I’m like a millionaire compared to Miss Oh.
To be honest, there are some totally straight girls around, ones who aren’t as desperate as Miss Oh. It’s sort of hard for a GI to meet them, though, especially if you’re like me and Ernie and spend all of your free time in the village of Itaewon.
I did once.
Ernie and I were pulling security, along with about eight thousand other guys for some big mucketymuck from the U.S. government who was visiting the Israeli Embassy in Seoul. Ernie was driving a big unmarked sedan and I rode shotgun. We spotted her leaving the embassy, walking towards the bus stop, so we slowed down and offered her a ride. At first she didn’t understand me but then I spoke Korean to her and everything was all right.
I took her to lunch at the Naija R&R Center downtown and then on a date where we walked through Duksoo Palace, and one afternoon I even went home and met her oldest sister. I don’t know what came over me. Just going along out of curiosity, I guess. Anyway, I took her to the Frontier Club after that on Yongsan South Post, let her listen to the live band, and bought her a Brandy Alexander. We spent the night together in a little yoguan I know in Samgakji. It was the first night she ever spent with a man.
I saw her a couple of times after that but then I got tired of it and I stood her up once and then I wouldn’t return her calls. Her brother-in-law, a Korean man of about forty, called me and in faltering English told me I couldn’t do that to her. I was hung over, in a bad mood, and I told him to go screw himself.
I’ve never seen her again. I’d be afraid to now. It’s things like that that have piled up in my life, that keep me aware that I’m no better than Miss Oh or any of the girls in Itaewon like her.
However, I’m not completely nonjudgmental and there is one thing I’m sure of—I’m better than that son of a bitch who murdered Miss Pak Ok-suk.
3
At the Lucky Seven Club we shoved some stools out of the way, leaned up against the bar, and ordered a couple of beers. We were the first customers in the joint. Most of the GIs had just gotten off work and hadn’t yet had time to eat chow, shower, shave, and get on down to the ville.
A couple of business girls scurried in and out, playing grabass, and only three or four of the waitresses were yet on duty. Ernie hit up the barmaid first.
“Where’s Kimiko?”
“Kimiko?”
“Yeah. Old woman. Long hair. Big jeejes.” He cupped two hands in front of his chest.
“You mean Ok-suk onni.” The barmaid thought about it for a minute and then shook her head and got back to washing glassware. “I no see her for a long time.”
Ok-suk onni meant the older sister of Ok-suk. If that’s what everyone called Kimiko, they must have been close.
The barmaid was a nice-looking gal, sturdy and squat, like maybe her ancestors had ridden in from the central plains of Asia, but she was shapely in all the right places. Her long black hair sat atop her round head, knotted by a single polished chopstick.
I waited until she finished her glasses and then I asked her name.
She looked up at me, surprised, the drying towel still in her hands.
“Mangnei,” she said, which wasn’t an answer because mangnei just means little sister. GIs wouldn’t know the difference, though.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Opa,” I said, which wasn’t an answer either because opa just means older brother.
Her eyes widened and she started to laugh. Soon we were speaking Korean together and I bought her a Coke. GIs walked in and she got busy but after the first flush of business there was a lull and she came back to us and I asked her about the woman named Pak Ok-suk.
I expected reticence, a closing of ranks against a foreigner. What I got was a girl who wouldn’t shut up, a girl who seemed proud that Itaewon had finally hit the Korean equivalent of the tabloids.
Everyone had heard about the murder and the manner in which it was done and “Mangnei” was as fascinated by the grotesquerie as anyone. Other girls walked over and started to add their embellishments and before long I had more information than I really wanted.
Pak Ok-suk had drifted into Itaewon from the countryside, cast off by a family that could no longer afford to keep her. Not that they couldn’t afford to feed her. They could manage that. What they couldn’t manage were her eccentricities—her demands for new clothes, her willfulness in going out at night with her friends, and her refusal to take her father’s word as law. The cramped quarters of the Korean rural home got tighter each day until the walls were about to explode and the family lashed out at her for being the source of their shame, for being a grown daughter yet unmarried.
The young men her age were in the Army, manning a fighting force almost as big as America’s in a country one-sixth the size. The country was crammed with armaments and soldiers that pushed up against the Demilitarized Zone, threatening to burst across.
Her choices included the textile mills and the factories, filled with white-bandannaed female automatons churning out hightech equipment for the world’s consumers. Or collecting tokens, sweeping out buses, jamming the passengers in the door, straddling the exit to keep anyone from falling out, shielding them with her body.
Instead she chose Itaewon.
At first she was just a barmaid’s helper, doing lowly work: the sweeping and the cleaning and the washing of the bar rags. She hid from the GIs but watched them with her big round eyes and, as time went by, she became more bold. She poured Cokes for them or popped open beers, saving the more complicated highballs for her wiser sisters. And she even went so far as to collect money from them and hand it over to the old crone who guarded the cashier’s box, receiving change from gnarled hands.
And she loved the music and the dancing and the clothes and the hairdos and she longed to have nice things of her own.
She slept in the bar, on chairs pulled together after the Lucky Seven Club closed for the evening, before the midnight curfew. And at first she couldn’t sleep because she was too wound up by all the things she had seen. And she listened to the young men who were the ushers by night and the janitors by day, as they crept from their rickety multilegged beds and crawled in with some of the older girls who rated soft vinyl-covered booths for their boudoirs. And she listened t
o their giggles and then their grunts, but none of the young men crawled in with her. There wasn’t room.
And she dreamed of home and how warm it had once been and how it would never exist for her again. When she met Kimiko, everything changed.
Kimiko hadn’t frequented the Lucky Seven Club much in the last few years. They hadn’t let her in since the spitting and scratching contest she’d had with a girl she found with one of her GI boyfriends. When she got through with the girl, she punched out the GI and two of the young ushers. Soon whistles were blowing and the Korean National Police joined the fray. Snarling and clawing and kicking, she had fought them off until one of the cops whipped out his baton and ended the altercation with one clean swipe to her head.
But time has a way of draining rancor, and Kimiko was eventually allowed back into the club again. All the young help had changed, maybe two or three times, and no one was too anxious to tell her to leave anyway. The old crone, hunched over the cash box, remembered her and kept an eye on her but didn’t say anything when she started a restrained and civil conversation with the young little Pak Ok-suk.
Kimiko was known to all the GIs of Itaewon and some of them called her Short Time, a reference to the way she financed her life.
She freelanced, strictly, rolling from bar to bar searching for GI prey, getting them to buy her drinks. Not those overpriced sweetheart drinks, with hardly any liquor in them, but beer and straight shots of bourbon. And she held her liquor well. But sometimes her heavy makeup would get smudged or her skintight dress would seem a little twisted, off center, and she would look like some demented doll that had been dressed by a clumsy child. Hemline riding high over spindly legs, neckline bursting with bosom.