A staticky gap of intercontinental silence. “I can’t believe that, Lisa. Twenty years of friendship shouldn’t end because of one fight.”
The tears that were forming deep in my sinuses fizzed painfully up to my eyes. “We said some pretty harsh things. She told me to take an early flight home. That I wasn’t fit. To go with them. To meet her birth mother. It was so. Mean.” My sentences were fractured by the sobs I sought to swallow.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?”
I sighed unsteadily. Not really. No. “This guy I met invited us to this bar last night. We went and I… I got drunk and behaved pretty badly, I guess.”
“Give her a call. Apologize. She’ll forgive you. I mean, it doesn’t happen often, does it? That you get so drunk you embarrass yourself?”
“No,” I lied.
“No, of course not! This must be a stressful time for Mindy, so she probably overreacted. What she needs is your love and support, so even if it was her fault, you should be the bigger person and apologize. Don’t you think?”
This is why I called my mother. Even after all of my fuckups, the unending drama of my teenage years and the scare I gave her that time Mindy saved my life, she refused to even consider that I didn’t always behave with the same noble rectitude that she and any other normal, whole, moral, good-hearted person did. “Yeah, Mom. You’re right. We were both way stressed.”
“She’ll be so grateful to hear from you. She loves you, Lisa, and you love her.”
“Oh, Mom.” My sobs, which had faded, made a comeback. “I do love her, and I love you too. I miss you so much.”
“We miss you too, sweetheart.”
“I… I’ve been thinking,” I murmured hesitantly, as if just struck by the thought. “Maybe I’ll just come straight home from Korea. The news out of Fukushima is really freaking me out. They say the radiation is much worse than the Japanese government claims it is.”
Did I feel bad about using a devastating natural disaster and its potentially much more horrifying man-made consequences to my advantage? I did, but at this point it was but a minor infraction compared with some of my more despicable, self-serving, cowardly, and possibly felonious trespasses.
“And besides, all of a sudden I feel so homesick.”
“But, Lisa,” she said, and laughed, “isn’t your school expecting you back?” She thought it was just an offshoot of my spat with Mindy.
“Frankly, I don’t think they’ll care one way or the other. I was going to be a lame-duck instructor anyway, with only a couple months left on my contract.”
“Yes, but what about your apartment?” I was confusing her, and I imagined her running a strand of hair through her fingertips, which she did when distracted. “What about all your stuff?”
“There’s hardly anything there that I want or was going to bring home with me. Just my journals, which I’m getting mailed to your house. Let me know when they arrive?”
“You do what you feel best, Lisa,” my mother said, after a very long pause. It was past two A.M. in her world, and I knew she was barely awake. “I must admit, I have been a little worried about the radiation, but everything I’ve read and heard has said that you’re too far away to be affected. I still think…” Her words blurred with a yawn. “…that you should go back to Japan, but whatever you decide, we can’t wait to see you.”
“Mom?” I lay back on the mattress and pulled the comforter up to my nose. It smelled like it was fresh out of the plastic packaging, faintly reminiscent of a new Barbie or pleather upholstery in a car that’s been baking for hours in the sun.
“Mmm?”
“Do you ever feel, like, disappointed in me? That I haven’t made something of myself? That I’ve wasted the opportunities that you and Dad gave me?” I burrowed all the way under the comforter.
“Oh, Lisa, no! Your father and I, and Scott too—we understand. There are many different paths that people take through life. I mean, I did worry about you through those rough years.” A little nibbling pause, I pictured her pinching a corner off a loaf of her home-baked bread. “Not worry so much as I felt bad for you and what you were going through. Teen years are tough for everyone, parents and kids alike. But we made it through, and we couldn’t be happier with the adult that you’ve become.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to stanch the tears that once again welled up, in love, in sorrow, in guilt. “I love you, Mom. I can’t wait to see you again. I really need one of your hugs.”
“I love you too, Lisa,” she croaked, voice scratchy with exhaustion. “You just tell me your flight information and Scott and I will be there at the airport to pick you up.”
I reluctantly said good-bye. Why would I need another mother when the one that I had played the part so well?
Someone was in the room with me. I opened my eyes to see a pair of blistered and cracked hands reaching for my neck. Trying to cry out, I found I had no voice. The hands wrapped around my throat. And then my eyes opened to the very same room of my dream, but no murderous intruder. My head hurt, and I knew I had slept too long. Fumbling for my phone, I found it under my pillow, where I had dropped it after talking with my mother and crying myself to sleep. Seeing there was a text message, I quickly opened it, hoping it was from Mindy. It was from “Harrison,” sent shortly after he had left the apartment yesterday: “Hello Sleepy-head! Call me as soon as you wake up!!!”
As I took a shower in the cramped bathroom, so small that there wasn’t room for a shower curtain, the water splashing over the toilet and sink and onto my toothbrush and toilet kit, I wondered what Ji Hoon’s angle was. The only conclusion I could reach was that he was helping me so I would help him. Not with money, because he seemed to be doing all right in that department. Not for language skills, like all the pengyou I picked up in China, since his English was damn near better than mine. The only other obvious answer was a visa.
I waited until seven to call him, and even then I didn’t think he’d pick up, but he answered on the first ring. “Don’t move, I’m just on my way there.”
“Actually, can I meet you somewhere? I need to get online to send some emails and look for a plane ticket home. Is there a cyber café somewhere near?”
“Knock, knock!”
“What?”
“Knock, knock!”
“Uh, who’s there?”
“Me! I’m at your door!”
And indeed, I could hear his voice, in stereo, over the phone and coming from behind the door of the apartment. I said, opening the door, “That’s kind of creepy.”
“Good morning!” he trilled, marching in with a carton tray holding two coffees, a McDonald’s Happy Meal box dangling from a pinkie. “I thought you might want a little taste of home, so I got you some hot cakes.”
Reaching eagerly for the coffee, I said, “You can have the hot cakes. The only fast food I eat is Wendy’s.” Which was a lie, told because I felt uncomfortable accepting any more favors from this guy who had apparently been lurking in the hallway, just waiting for my phone call.
“Wendy’s?” Pursing his plump lips, he gently blew steam off his coffee. “What is that?”
“It’s a fast-food restaurant founded by a guy named Dave Thomas, who was adopted.”
His eyebrows wriggled in furry bemusement, as if he couldn’t figure out what that had to do with anything.
“Mindy and I keep a list of famous adopted people. He’s one of them.” It sounded stupid when I said it. It was stupid. I opened the Happy Meal to see what the toy was and ended up eating the hot cakes, dribbling syrup on my last clean shirt.
Stuck in traffic opposite a blocky behemoth of a building that could only have been a government ministry, we watched a large crowd of people as they milled about clutching colorful signs in hangul, wearing headbands emblazoned with the red-and-blue yin-yang circle of the Korean flag; some brandished megaphones into which they were screaming so ardently that the cords on their necks looked ready to burst. My interest caught, I lea
ned closer to the window. Black-helmeted policemen in riot gear stood in rows between the crowd and the building, frenzied protesters, faces clenched in a rictus of hate and foam practically dripping down their jaws, pushing up against their shields.
“What is going on here?” I asked, checking to see if the doors were locked.
Ji Hoon had been tapping his fingers along to Katy Perry. “What? Oh that.” He laughed. “Don’t pay any attention. Demonstrations like that happen all the time here.”
“What are they demonstrating against?”
One man was so enraged he was tearing his shirt off, rending the cloth with his bare hands. Another had wormed his way behind the line of plastic riot shields wedged together like a set of false teeth, and a knot of police was wrestling him to the ground.
Ji Hoon shook his head in mystification. “Who knows? US beef, the closing of an army base, the opening of an army base, a soccer match, Japan, China… you name it. We are a very passionate people, always looking for revenge.” He chuckled at his countrymen’s foibles and turned the radio up. “All I know is they are a nuisance. Everybody’s slowing down to have a good look, causing this traffic jam.”
The car in front of him started to crawl forward, and as I craned my neck to look back at the demonstration, a man dove into the police line headfirst with a powerful scissor kick, as if he would swim his way through the river of policemen. The last thing I saw was a wave of police surging toward the crowd, thumping their batons ominously against their plastic shields. And then they slipped from view and I looked out at a busy sidewalk swarming with industrious pedestrians, without a hint or a ripple of the violence that was happening a block away.
Ji Hoon laughed at me. “You have that Korean fire in you, don’t deny it. I see it in your eyes.” Behind his gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses, I imagined his eyes taking me in with a cool and appraising look. I imagined that he liked what he saw.
With a self-conscious laugh, I tucked a lock of hair behind my ears. “Curious that you would compare me with a Korean. Most Koreans, like Kyu Bok’s wife, don’t think of me as Korean. At least, that’s the way it seems to me every time I’m in Korea.”
“You’ve been to Korea before?” he asked in surprise, mercifully turning Taylor Swift down.
“This is my second time. Besides being born here, I mean. I spent a few weeks traveling around with Mindy after spending a year studying in China.”
“A year in China?” he echoed wonderingly, as if presented with a perplexing set of puzzles pieces. “It is very curious, Lisa, that you have spent a lot of time in both Japan and China, but almost none in Korea.”
“Mmm.” I did not agree or disagree. “I really don’t know much about this country at all. I think it’s a little fucked up, though. But I guess it’s only natural. It’s in a tough neighborhood, the weedy, runty kid in a playground full of bullies.” We had passed into a dreary section of apartment buildings and shops, and I let the streetscape blur by the window, no longer interested. “It’s not even a whole country, but has been cut into two like Solomon’s baby, or like a set of twins separated at birth.” I fingered the yin-yang pendant at my throat. “Two halves that need to be made whole.”
He nodded seriously. “Yes, we must reunite the two halves. That is the only way for peace and prosperity. We all feel it here”—he tapped a finger on the Tommy Hilfiger logo of his polo shirt—“a tear in our heart that can only be healed by reunification. Ah, finally we are here.”
Ji Hoon drove the car up onto a litter-strewn sidewalk, almost completely obstructing it so that a pedestrian would have to inch past or else get off the pavement and walk in the street. “Are you sure it’s OK to park here?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, perfectly all right here,” Ji Hoon assured me, leading me into the lobby of a shabby building that emitted a dank chill. After stabbing at the elevator button for some minutes, we walked up an uneven stairway to the fifth floor. A door with no identifying placard was opened by a stunted, pale wraith, and we stepped into a room crammed with office equipment: fax machines, desktop computers, printers, modems, telephones, laptops, monitors, TVs, and some electronics I couldn’t even identify. Two floor fans going full blast could not begin to mitigate the intense heat of the room. Yet the three office workers—as featureless and identical as button mushrooms, with the exact same blunt bowl haircut—wore thick, long-sleeved cotton shirts, collars and armpits stained with sweat, and heavy khaki pants. In unison, they bowed and bowed and bowed some more. We bowed back, Ji Hoon chatting amiably in Korean. One of them seemed to be the designated speaker and answered Ji Hoon’s banter with nervous little outbursts, followed by dry little coughs of laughter on all sides.
After the small talk was over, Ji Hoon ushered me to a swivel chair, foam swelling out from the ripped and stained nylon cushions. “You may use this computer,” he said. “The staff has made it ready for you.”
“What for?” I hung back, eyeing the fat coils of electric wiring draped with furry centipedes of dust entangled beneath the desk.
He laughed, but it was kind of tense, like the laughs he had shared with the office workers. Which one, I wondered, was his friend? “To use the email! Didn’t you tell me that is what you wanted to do?”
“Oh, yeah.” I sat gingerly on the dirty foam stuffing of the chair and looked at the laptop. It was a sleek, late-model Asus, very fast. “There’s a lot of equipment in this office,” I muttered as I brought up my email account. “Who knew travel agents needed so many electronics?”
“Oh, yes,” Ji Hoon explained knowledgeably. “International travel requires a lot of electronic equipment. While you do that, we will work on your ticket. When do you want to leave?”
“As soon as possible,” I said, tapping in my password.
“To Washington, DC?”
“Yeah, any of the airports.” There were thirty-seven new messages, but a quick scan showed that none of them was from Mindy. Fanning myself with my own shirt, I clicked through them. Most were from my friends in Fukuoka, writing to ask me if I was OK. Apparently the news about Kenji had gotten out.
“Miss? Miss?” a little voice was whispering in my ear.
Startled, I swung around to see one of the mushrooms offering me a cup of tea. Detecting small mounds under her shirt, I realized she was a woman, which would explain why they had sent her with the tea. I took the cup from the tray, wondering if one more heat-radiating thing would cause the whole room to melt into a pool of molten plastic and metal. “Thank you,” I said, and lifted my cheeks in a forced smile. She nodded gravely and scurried away.
Somebody had sent a link to a Japanese newspaper article, but the only thing I could read was my name in katakana and the name of my high school. At least there were no photos.
Ji Hoon approached with a mournful face. “I have some bad news. The earliest available flight to Washington, DC, is not until Friday.”
“Oh, that’s OK,” I mumbled, quickly exiting from the article. “What day is it today?”
“Monday.”
“Monday?” I brought my shoulder up to my cheek to wipe away a trickle of sweat. “You’re telling me there are no seats for four days? That’s crazy.”
“I know, right?” Ji Hoon shook his head in wonderment. “We don’t know why. They even checked for New York, and that is five days. LA is three days, but then you have to get across the country.”
Nibbling at the inside of my mouth, I looked up at a very faded and fly-specked poster of a girl in a white bikini frolicking in a smooth milky sea, with the word BAHAMAS smeared like dirty clouds on a sky of faintest blue. How many Koreans go to the Bahamas? I wondered distractedly.
“But I have some good news as well,” Ji Hoon said with an encouraging nod. “They have told me that they can get us a free vacation to Jeju Island. Did you ever hear of it? It is the most beautiful place in all Korea. They”—he indicated the drab trio, standing in a row behind him like prisoners lined up to be shot—“received a free promot
ional offer, including all transportation, from the Jeju Island Tourism Board. We can go tomorrow and then be back in Seoul in time for your flight on Saturday. It’s an almost perfect coincidence, no?”
“Uh…” My mind was stuck in neutral, still thinking about the emails from Fukuoka.
One of the travel agents cleared his throat. We all turned to look at him. “It is very ro-ro-romantic,” he stuttered, his face flaring crimson. “Fa-fa-famous for natural beauty.”
“Uh…” I took a contemplative sip of tea.
“It’s for free!” Ji Hoon emphasized. “A luxury hotel on the beach. We can hang out and drink soju all day long.”
Finally comprehending what was being proposed to me, I wondered, “Will it be all five of us?”
“Five?” Ji Hoon’s beautiful brow contracted in puzzlement. I nodded slightly to indicate Wynken, Blynken, and Nod lined up behind him. “Oh, no.” He laughed scornfully at the very idea of the travel agents traveling. “No, no. It is just for the two of us.” And he gave me such a tender, seductive smile that the part of me that was still unsweaty sloshed with a hot wave of desire.
“And we’ll be back in Seoul when?”
“Thursday. Then I will take you to the airport on Friday.”
What the hell? Up until now, every action I had taken was the wrong one, getting me deeper and deeper into trouble. Perhaps if I just did nothing and left it all up to fate, everything would work itself out. Besides, an image of Ji Hoon tenderly running his sensitive fingers over my naked body flashed unbidden, but not unwelcome, in my brain. I shrugged. “Why not?”
“Yes, OK?” Ji Hoon insisted on a more affirmative answer.
With a self-conscious little snort, I complied. “Yes.”
He turned triumphantly to the triumvirate and they all shuffled back to the other side of the room. I had just opened an email with the subject line “WTF Lisa?!?!” when Ji Hoon once again approached. “Sorry,” he whispered apologetically, “but how will you pay?”
Famous Adopted People Page 5