by Matt Weiland
“The writer Theodore Dreiser is from Terre Haute,” I announced, as we headed west from Rolling Prairie to Michigan City, where we planned to turn south. “Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie was published in 1900, and was very controversial; he’s considered the ur-American Realist, which seems to mean that his work is depressing.” I was prepared to lecture like this for a while.
“Dreiser,” my father interrupted thoughtfully. “Your grandpa translated him into Korean. An American Tragedy. The one with Elizabeth Taylor.”
Although I’ve spent half my life pumping my father for information about my grandfather, a well-known literary scholar in Korea from the thirties through his death in the sixties, this was news to me. I’d only recently been astonished to learn that my grandfather was the first translator of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Japanese. “Was he a fan of Dreiser’s?”
“Oh, I think he just did it to make some quick money.”
I did the math. Dreiser’s An American Tragedy had been the basis for A Place in the Sun, the hugely successful 1951 movie starring Montgomery Clift, Shelley Winters, and Elizabeth Taylor. For that translation to have been lucrative, my grandfather must have done it after the movie’s release, and also probably after the Korean War ceasefire, in 1953. My father had left Korea in 1955, not to return in his father’s lifetime. I wondered if my grandfather had still been working on Dreiser when they said their good-byes.
But I didn’t really want to go to Terre Haute, which seemed to feel as scornful toward Dreiser as he’d felt toward it. There was no Dreiser House or Dreiser Museum. Instead I was headed for Brookston, where the writer William Gass lived very briefly, and to which he refers in the opening lines of In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. “Gass is a writer more important to writers than readers,” I claimed, probably inaccurately. Here was a place for my father to bring up my writing, but he was keen to hear all about Gass.
The road south from Michigan City to Brookston is Route 421, and on it we tumbled abruptly from strip malls to beauty. Our two lanes cleaved corn and soybeans. Our progress was interrupted almost metronomically by identically sized but distinct little towns. Later, when I looked at the map, I confirmed what I’d felt in my feet: Towns made me brake an average of every eight miles, as if four miles were the maximum distance all farmers are willing to go to replenish their needs at the general store. And yet, for their master-plan spacing, the towns were all different. Sometimes the road pierced the town like a string through a bead. Other times there was only an off-center junction, and then you glimpsed the town, like Wanatah, hiding itself on the far side of fields.
This was how Gass felt, I thought, when he wrote of Brookston,
So I have sailed the seas and come …
to B …
a small town fastened to afield in Indiana.
But by the time we were approaching Brookston the evenly spaced towns were shabbier and shabbier, and Brookston itself was so dreary we didn’t even stop. I’d imagined us eating our lunch in some shaded town square, but there was nothing like that in Brookston, not even the “library given by Carnegie” that Gass wrote about.
My father had picked me up at the airport at noon; now it was past three, and we were starving. The only patch of green the map showed in the region was eight miles down the road, at the Tippecanoe Battlefield Memorial, the site of the rout by William Henry Harrison of the forces of the Prophet, the brother of Tecumseh, in 1811. Apparently the battle was a fatal blow to the short-lived Indian Confederacy that attempted to beat back the white man; Harrison did so well for white men that when he ran for President with John Tyler in 1840 his campaign slogan was “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.”
I learned most of this from a couple of plaques, hot as cattle brands in the withering sun. In the relative cool of the Memorial’s gift shop I noticed, as I often notice at places commemorating the removal of the red man from his ancestral lands, a preponderance of dream-catchers and squaw dolls and stuffed wolves. I’d lost track of my father since using the rest room, but when I told the overweight white woman at the gift shop register that I was looking for an older gentleman, she let me know she wasn’t easily fooled: “I haven’t noticed anyone like THAT.” I spotted my father outside, wandering dazed from flagpole to commemorative rock, and rushed to intercept him. We ate the bologna and rye bread in the terrible heat beneath a gazebo, as wasps drifted overhead. Afterwards, driving through Lafayette, a truck passed us decorated with a bumper sticker explaining that “MARRIAGE = [a stick figure of a man] + [a stick figure of a woman].”
“I’d like to go to Crawfordsville,” my father announced, indicating its place on the map. “Ezra Pound lived there once.”
“Really? Pound lived there? How’d you learn that?”
“I just read it somewhere.”
In Crawfordsville we were both impressed by Wabash College, a cluster of jewels in a green velvet case. Handsome brick buildings faced one another across an oval driveway, beneath giant shade trees. Wabash College is all male, and one hundred years ago a young Ezra Pound was fired from his teaching position there for hosting “an actress” in his rooms. Pound proceeded to move to Europe, and grow fond of Mussolini, and eventually got himself returned to this country and indicted for treason. Leaving the College to rejoin Main Street, we saw a handsome building of caramel-colored stone: CARNEGIE LIBRARY.
“Hey!” I exclaimed. “Gass stole Crawfordsville’s library, and gave it to Brookston!” Creative license, I might have gone on to muse. For some reason I didn’t. Then we were quiet as we left the little town where Pound was once young and wild, before his disgrace.
Ever since I was in my mid-twenties—the same age as my father when he left Korea—and began writing seriously, I’ve been fixated on my father. I’ve been obsessed with his past and his soul, his misadventures and regrets. I’ve used him as a fiction cornucopia, which has meant, I’ve increasingly feared, that I’ve made him a mere object. But it’s equally true that he’s put himself into this role. Time and again, he’s let me “interview” him; when he’s read the results, distorted by “creative license,” he’s never complained. Even more, time and again, he’s broached the thorniest subjects himself. Noguchi and Pound; an Asian boy deprived of his father and a literary titan brought low by unpopular politics: There’s a reason the lives of these men cast a spell on my father. He keeps cracking open his Pandora’s box of unspeakable subjects, the same subjects that drove him from Korea a half-century back, and that stranded him here in the heart of the heart of the country.
My grandfather, the translator of Dreiser and Joyce, was also one of the most despised intellectuals Korea produced in the past century. I learned this not from my father, of course, but from other Koreans, and from professors of Korean literature, for whom my grandfather is a towering figure and a very big problem—Korea’s own Pound. Like Pound, my grandfather was a conspicuous apologist for a despicable regime, in his case, the occupying Japanese on the Korean peninsula. He either believed, or was believed to believe, that Koreans were racially inferior to Japanese. He either believed, or was believed to believe, that Korea’s best hopes for the future lay in subsuming herself to the Japanese empire.
The question of whether he really believed all these things is unanswerable, and perhaps this explains my father’s ambivalence toward both countries. I’ve heard my father speak Japanese, which he learned as a boy, and I’ve also heard him claim (untruthfully) he’s forgotten Korean. We trekked to Chicago for Japanese noodles when I was a kid, yet my father has called Japanese culture derivative. He assiduously avoided other Koreans my whole childhood, and then served as president of South Bend’s Korean Association in the late 1990s, once enough Koreans had arrived to associate. I’ve heard him say things about Koreans that could get him punched in the face.
And that evening in Bloomington, where we were staying the night, my father dithered in front of an Italian restaurant, a Greek restaurant, a Mexican restaurant, a Tha
i restaurant, and a Turkish restaurant before admitting that what he wanted was what he always wants, Japanese food. Once we arrived at what we were told was the best of Bloomington’s several Japanese restaurants, my father wanted some obscure item of traditional Korean home cooking that wouldn’t have been on the menu even if this had been a Korean restaurant. Not for the first time I asked myself: how had my father gotten by in Indiana for almost forty years? And how could he fight the old battle, between Japan and Korea, even here in the cornfed Midwest?
Of course the waitress in the Japanese place was Korean. She drew us a meticulous map to a Korean homestyle restaurant nearby where, miraculously, my father could get just the dish he was hankering for.
“We’ll go tomorrow,” my father decided.
My plan for the next day was simple. I wanted to drive down to the toe of Indiana to see a town called New Harmony, the site of serial utopian experiments of international renown. The WPA Guide puts it irresistibly when it calls New Harmony one of “the world aristocracy of villages that have made history.” The road we set out on from Bloomington was multilane and ugly, but with a distinction that has also made history: the creamy gray strata of Indiana limestone exposed by its roadcuts. Indiana limestone is some of the best in the world, cladding some of the most iconic buildings in the country, including the Pentagon and the Empire State Building. But soon we left that highway for US 50. Then we were winding through intimate countryside, in and out of dappled woods.
Rounding a bend I had to brake suddenly. An Amish wagon was moving slowly down the road, drawn by clop-clopping horses. Bearded patriarch, smooth-faced teenage boy, and a little boy, not more than eight. All in black pants and vests, and long shirtsleeves that weren’t white but a rich royal blue; golden straw hats on their heads. They stared at us with no emotion discernible on their breathtaking faces as we carefully passed them. For many minutes after I was transfixed by the memory of their uncommon physical beauty: the nut brown of their skin, their lean bodies, their royal blue shirtsleeves. My father was less impressed. “They lead healthy lives,” he pointed out.
It was on this pastoral, secretive road that we brought up my grandfather again—or, rather, my father’s family’s sufferings, which were caused by his father’s disgrace. “One time,” my father remembered, “when things were very bad,” he caught a glimpse of his mother undressed and realized she was starving. Not long after, my father’s oldest sister, who was nineteen or so, ran away, and my grandfather was shattered, and obsessed for the rest of his life with locating his daughter.
“But wouldn’t any parent be obsessed with finding any lost child?” I asked.
My father carried on, ignoring my question. “And I said, ‘Goddamn this situation!’ My sister showed the way,” he recalled. “I said, ‘I’ll follow her.’”
We had entered Martin County, famed for its beauty, and indeed it was beautiful, deeply forested, with dapples of sun making lace of the slow little road, but I could scarcely take it in because now my father was sobbing.
When he finally started speaking again, he skipped to the day at least fifteen years later, just after my parents had wed in Ann Arbor, when my grandfather called from Korea to say the sister was found. She, too, had wound up in the Midwest—in Manhattan, Kansas, the widow of a GI she’d met in Japan. When my father was reunited with her, she seemed sorry my mother existed: “I finally find my family,” my father quoted her saying, “and it turns out you’re married.”
What did that mean? I asked. But this question, like so many regarding his family, did not rate an answer. The atmosphere of revelation had dissolved. Even the road had lost charm. It had flattened and spread, become more of a highway, in response to the changing terrain. The horizon had gone far away, to accommodate mile after mile of soybeans and corn.
New Harmony was an enigma. Down its quaint nineteenth-century streets we passed storybook houses, all flawlessly preserved, and all bolted and locked. An empty parking lot at the margin of town was attached to a huge modern structure resembling a heap of ice-cube trays. The entrance was hidden in back; parts still seemed to be under construction. The building called itself the Athenaeum, promising learning to all, but demanded money—to see what?—if you wanted to get past its entirely average gift shop.
“What happens here?” I asked the overly made-up woman at the register.
“This is where the past meets the present,” she informed me, with scorn. “I mean, is this a library, or a museum, or something?” “This is the Athenaeum,” she seethed. “Designed by Richard Meier!” There wasn’t even a gazebo where we could eat lunch. Speeding back to Bloomington, we passed gigantic insectoid farm machines stalking over the fields like the invaders in War of the Worlds. The radio told us that in Princeton, which we’d passed through a few hours before, three coal miners had died in a shaft. A passing truck’s bumper sticker announced that IF MARY HAD BEEN PRO-CHOICE THERE WOULDN’T BE CHRISTMAS!
“You know,” my father said, “something interesting has happened. I was talking to the chair of our department, and he’s asked if I can commit to keep teaching another five years.”
“You’re seventy … something,” I objected.
“Well, of course, if I’m not feeling well or anything like that, it’s no hard obligation.”
“But you’d been thinking of retiring!” I reminded him. “Maybe coming East.”
“Oh, I still want to do that,” my father said vaguely. “Next time you visit you should bring Dexter,” he added after a moment, referring to my three-year-old son. “I’ve made a very nice garden at my house. I think he would like it.”
We found the Korean homestyle restaurant in a tiny, dilapidated strip mall, and almost from the instant we arrived things went south. The whole trip I’d expected some moment of static between my father and a more typical Indianan. Instead the moment came here, between my father and a ponytailed Korean-American girl. I’d just put our things on a table when my father wheeled away from the counter. “Let’s get out of here,” he snarled.
“What? Don’t they have what you want?”
The problem wasn’t that they lacked the dish we’d come for, but that they lacked beer. “I can’t serve liquor,” the girl explained, almost in tears. “I’m only sixteen.” Her mother, the cook, was partly visible through the door to a small bare-bones kitchen. A younger boy, perhaps ten, was perched at a back table, toiling over his homework.
I persuaded my father to stay, and we received our food on plastic trays from the wary girl. The food was the sort you can only get some place like that—authentic and good. But my father, swiftly clearing his plate, began to sound his theme about how all Koreans care for is money, opening restaurants and such to get rich.
“You think these people are rich?”
Then I added, more gently, “Dad, if you weren’t Korean yourself, some of the things that you say would be … really a problem.”
“I don’t mean badly,” he said, unperturbed.
The next day was the last of our trip, and I’d found the narrowest and most winding road yet. The corn came right up to the shoulder and loomed over the roof of the car. We turned constant right angles, as if along the borders of one patch of property after another. PRAY TO END ABORTION begged a sign in a well-tended yard. “So,” I began awkwardly. My father had unearthed the difficult subject, but it was up to me now to say more. That year he’d brought up yesterday—the year his sister was found, the first year of my parents’ tempestuous marriage—was the very same year I’d so freely portrayed in my book. The one time my mother ever confided in me about it she stopped herself midway and said, in horror, “You’re not going to write about this?” My father and I had never touched on these things. I’d never known if he knew what I knew.
“Honey,” he said before I could continue. “I’ve been wanting to say something to you. It’s about your new book.”
“Oh, Dad!” I said, about to weep, or beg forgiveness, or lecture him on the nature o
f fiction.
“It is a masterpiece,” he declared, in a tone of combat.
“You—”
“Please don’t argue! I mean to use this word. The book’s a goddamn masterpiece.”
My whole adult life all I’ve done is tell stories about my father—privately and publicly, in my mind and in print—and all I’ve done is to get him dead wrong. The stranger in a strange land: dead wrong. The private, prideful, prickly man who would fly off the handle when he read my portrayal: dead wrong. It occurred to me, for the very first time, that maybe he liked my work because I got him so wrong. Because I’ve peopled the world with so many inaccurate versions of him, and in a mischievous way, this feels to him like the freedom of living multiple lives. But even now I was probably getting him wrong yet again.
North of Indianapolis it was US 31—that desolate, ruler-straight highway—that took us back home. This was the dreary Indiana of my childhood. Four lanes splitting the fields. The occasional single light tossed on its wire by the wind, blinking yellow for caution. So I shouldn’t have been startled when my father turned on a side road just inside the South Bend city limits and I found myself plunged in the past.
Miami Trails: slightly shrunken but in most ways unchanged. My father drove past the incline where, learning to ride my bike, I lost control and smashed into a hedge. And then he drove us—slowly, but never touching the brake—past our old house, where we lived before he and my mother split up. There were all the once-spindly trees, the Douglas firs and dogwoods and poplars that my father put in, and beside which he used to photograph me, to see who would grow faster. The trees had won.
“Should I go back?” he asked, as we rounded a corner and the house slipped away.
“No,” I said. How could Indiana be so sleepy, or so socially conservative, or so economically depressed, or whatever the hell it was that let that house lurk there, unchanged apart from the trees, so that it could leap forth and bludgeon my heart? Of course, everything else had been transformed. A few miles south of South Bend, before my father had taken the wheel, we’d gone on another detour, through the farm town of Bremen. My father had remembered a favorite hard candy of his, a candy that all through my childhood was always in his coat pocket, or strewn in his otherwise empty desk drawers. He’d probably been reminded of it because I’d resurrected this very same candy for use in my book. I had it as “a particular off-brand hard peppermint, football-shaped with a red and green stripe.” “Exactly,” my father agreed. But I’d assumed they were a cruddy generic my father bought because they came cheaper than Starlight Mints. Now he told me they were in fact a local specialty, which he prized for their exceptional flavor. So I was dead wrong again.