Given the way you enter, Screaming Eagle doesn’t feel like a legitimate business, but instead like part of an underground economy where much goes on that is sketchy. Essentially, Walid is a middleman who dips his hand in the torrents of consumer goods flowing about the globe. Things like razor blades, teeth whitener, iPod headphones and batteries moving around peripatetically between the factories where they are made and the shelves where they are finally sold, and sometimes getting hijacked. Take baby formula, one of the most expensive items in a grocery store. The underground retail market loves almost nothing more than a twenty-five-dollar can of Enfamil because it has a constant worldwide demand and the price is consistently high. In fact, illicit sales of Similac and Enfamil are thought to reach hundreds of millions of dollars globally, and attract the likes of—yes—Al Qaeda and Hezbollah. It’s laughable but true, and though Screaming Eagle isn’t an outlet of the terrorist baby-formula-and-teeth-whitening market (every time government inspectors have raided our store, their stuff has checked out), lots of places just like it in Brooklyn are.
This is one reason I have the urge to leave—the feeling of being an intruder. Walid’s employees, who have the jumpy air of newly arrived immigrants, stop working so they can stare at us. Maybe they’re offended; after all, most of Screaming Eagle’s clients are Middle Eastern shopkeepers like old Salim, who got us into this place. There aren’t many mismatched couples like the clean-cut white guy and the Asian grandma wearing a skin-tight T-shirt and red lipstick, trailing cigarette smoke.
It testifies to Kay’s character, courage or whatever you want to call it that she appears to be the only woman to set foot into Jetro or Screaming Eagle. At first that struck me as odd, since you always see women at Korean delis. You see men too, but less frequently, and often just in their golf clothes at the beginning or the end of the day. At many Korean-owned businesses, a husband’s job is to bring money to and from the store and open the heavy steel shades (leading to the moniker “shutterman”) before heading off to the driving range. Many also pick out the store’s inventory at a place like Jetro or the Hunts Point produce market in the Bronx. However, with Edward running his own business, Kay does this part, too.
At Screaming Eagle she avidly sifts through the cardboard boxes. She’s in her element; this is her kind of shopping. It takes brass to come in here and a merchant’s steely eye to find the good stuff, and at the end Kay gets to jujitsu with Walid over prices. The discounts end up being worth it, but even if they weren’t I think Kay would come in here anyway. Afterward she always wants me to tell her what I know about Yemen and the Middle East, which isn’t much. It may look like Kay’s all business, but she’s curious, just like anyone else. Who are these people? What are they doing here? and What do they think of us? Which are, of course, the same questions I have about Kay.
GAB’S COUSIN JUNG comes over that Sunday for a barbecue, and while chatting with him in the backyard I confide my struggle to understand Kay. “Good luck,” he chuckles. “It’s a generational thing. Her generation is special. They don’t even understand themselves.”
“What do you mean?”
“Okay, I’ll give you an example.” Jung says he was watching Korean TV recently and saw a show about Korean housewives of approximately the same age as Kay undergoing therapy for what you might translate as “hyperadvancement syndrome.”
“These were women who grew up when Korea was barely even the Third World—it was almost the Fourth World,” he says. “I mean, we’re talking outhouses, drinking out of streams, livestock in the yard.” Since the 1960s, however, South Korea had developed from one of the poorest countries in the world into what many call the most technologically advanced nation in history, with its futuristic communications infrastructure and world-dominating tech firms like Samsung. Jung, who has just come back from visiting Seoul, says the country makes the United States look old and backward (“We’re ten years behind”), and those women experiencing “hyper-advancement syndrome” had, like all Koreans, seen their world change about as much as humanly possible in one lifetime. They were suffering from future shock.
Gab’s father is a good example. The rural village he comes from, called Dogae, was home to his ancestors for sixty generations, according to family lore. When Mongol hordes invaded Korea in the thirteenth century, Edward’s relatives were there. And when the Japanese first started marauding Korea three hundred years later, they were still there. And when the Russians and the Americans divvied up Korea after World War II, things were still more or less the same. But this last generation had been different. It had cut the cord. And when Edward left, he didn’t just wind up in a neighboring village or Seoul—he went to the other side of the world.
In Kay’s case, her background was more cosmopolitan; her parents were successful merchants from North Korea who imported goods from Manchuria. Their estate was supposedly so big that it had eight gates leading up the driveway. Even as Korea endured famine and foreign occupation (Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and held on to to it until the end of World War II), Kay’s siblings went to school in a chauffeured car, had a radio in their house and enjoyed other luxuries. However, when North Korea turned Communist in 1948, the family lost everything. Kay’s father, targeted for his fortune and his anti-Communist political activity, was arrested and sentenced to the gulag. His family won his freedom only by ransoming their estate and cashing in on a personal connection to the uncle of the future North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung, then fled to South Korea, where Kay was born.
Kay’s parents were educated; her siblings attended high school (a privilege reserved for the elite) and even college, but the family’s reduced circumstances in the south forced her to earn money instead. Blessed with that powerful voice, she joined a singing troupe that performed at weddings and baptisms, and while still a teenager she met Edward, who was serving in the South Korean navy.
Edward had also been affected by Korea’s tumult, but if dramatic ups and downs shaped Kay’s childhood, displacement shaped his. During World War II Edward’s parents went to Japan, where his father became a laborer in a tin mine and eventually died of lung poisoning. An only child, Edward was dealt another blow when, upon returning to Korea, his mother married a petty tyrant who made home life unbearable. As soon as he was eligible, Edward joined the navy and headed abroad. When he met Kay (she was working as a receptionist at a YMCA in Seoul) he was on shore leave, and immediately after their wedding he went back to sea, setting a pattern for the rest of their marriage.
Kay was left to live in the household of the tyrannical stepfather Edward couldn’t stand, serving her in-laws (as per Korean tradition) as a virtual slave. Their house, a former Japanese hospital that had been converted into a general store, was haunted by the stepfather, a cripple who began drinking every morning at ten, when the day’s shipment of makkali (unrefined rice wine, also known as “farmer liquor”) arrived. By lunchtime the tiled walls would ricochet with his hateful haranguing. Whenever Kay’s mother-in-law left on an errand, her father-in-law jotted down the time, and if she returned a minute later than promised, he would haul himself over to the doorway and sit there with his stunted legs folded beneath him muttering, “I’ll kill that woman someday” while beating his palm with a ball-peen hammer. Kay’s job was to cook, clean and mind the store. She cried herself to sleep each night, accompanied by the sound of hissing, the old man’s favorite meal being snake soup, which he forced Kay to prepare using live snakes caged outside her room.
“You think you have it bad living with my parents and working at a deli?” Gab says to me one windy afternoon during a rare walk we’re taking, alone, along Staten Island’s industrial shoreline. “At least no one makes you cook snake soup.”
Eventually Kay managed to get herself kicked out of her father-in-law’s house for disobedience. On the street, she was aided by customers from the store, who took up a collection, enabling her to move into a flat. Soon afterward Edward quit the military, having recently completed
an elite training program for engineers sponsored by the U.S. Navy, and from maintaining engines aboard destroyers he now attempted to shift to factory work. Kay went back to singing at weddings and baptisms, then got pregnant, and the two of them tried domestic life. However, within a year Edward went right back to sea, this time circling the planet for various commercial shipping companies. For the next decade he would be essentially absent, usually as far from South Korea as physically possible.
Kay decided she needed a more lucrative career than wedding singer. Although Edward sent home checks from Gdansk, Valparaiso and Seattle, she had little idea when they would come or how much they would be for. Luckily, her older sister Sook Ja had just opened a bakery in downtown Seoul and was finding herself unable to handle the job alone. Kay volunteered to help and soon was running the place.
Managing a bakery meant waking up at three in the morning every day, not the sort of work that fits well with raising young children. Fortunately, Kay had help—Edward’s stepfather had recently passed away, and Edward’s mother had moved into their apartment. With her babysitting, Kay was able to turn the bakery into one of the more popular eateries in Seoul.
The bustling bakery was in a trendy part of the city favored by South Korean celebrities. It had small coffee-shop tables and a large young staff, some of whom lived in what was becoming a sort of dormitory in Kay’s apartment. Within a few years it had become so successful that Kay decided to expand, so she bought a restaurant that specialized in tripe soup, which Koreans typically eat for lunch. And she bought a bigger apartment to accommodate all the workers she was taking care of, and a Hyundai Pony, which, according to Gab, made her very proud.
“She used to get in the Pony and open the window so people could see her at the wheel, then drive it one block to change parking spaces,” Gab once told me. At night she went out with friends wearing flashy jewelry and European shoes. Korea as a country was now fully immersed in hyperchange, the negative effects of which included abominable pollution and great political instability (coups, strikes, assassinations), but so far Kay was enjoying it all just fine, thank you very much. Twenty years earlier, she and Edward might have gone back to Dogae and settled into a thatch-roofed farmhouse, and Kay might have spent the rest of her life washing clothes in the river and growing her own food. Instead, she had a career and security for her family that she herself provided, plus the resources to indulge herself. What’s more, she had the satisfaction of making it up as she went along, of standing out. Her own mother had been a strong woman and a partner to her father’s businesses, but she was nothing like Kay. For what Kay was doing, there were no role models.
But then Edward had enough of shipping and came home, and everything changed. He would never have insisted on Kay staying in the kitchen—he was both worldlier and not nearly cruel enough. The question was more, How would he fit in? Where was his place now? What would he do? You have to feel for Edward—he’d spent the better part of a decade toiling in one of the world’s most dangerous professions, and upon his return he found his home filled with strangers, his country in the midst of an industrial revolution (not to mention a brief but severe recession at the end of the 1970s), and his own children barely able to recognize him. As he looked for ways to establish himself, his marriage with Kay began to fray.
For all the confidence Kay had earned as a single parent, this struck surprising terror into her. As a woman in a male-dominated society, Kay could never shake the feeling that by stepping into a “man’s role” she was violating some natural law of the universe. “My mother is a very complicated person,” Gab says. “On one hand she’s a sort of feminist, believing women ought to be assertive and independent. For instance, when I was growing up she used to tell me that the sort of woman she admired was an ‘inteli,’ which comes from the English word ‘intellectual’ but in Korea means an educated, independent, career person. However, she also believes that women should cook, clean and raise kids, and anything different from that freaks her out. In her mind a woman should stay at home, because anything else will eventually break up the family. It’s unnatural, she thinks. And since she’s also very superstitious, these things really bother her.”
So when Edward came home and found himself uncharacteristically idle, Kay decided she would give up her own independence in order to restore the “proper” marital balance. She came up with a plan. “My mother knew my dad would never be happy in Korea,” Gab explained, “so she offered to move to the U.S., because that was a country he knew.” (During his time in the U.S.-sponsored engineering program, Edward had been stationed for a few months on the West Coast.) Of course, the fact that Korea as a whole was experiencing a fit of migukpyong—America fever—nudged her along as well. Twenty years earlier, there had been almost no Korean immigration to the States, but since the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which ended the de facto policy of accepting only white immigrants, Korea had sent more émigrés here than any country except Mexico or the Philippines. Kay, who had never been outside Korea, had zero interest in America. She disliked the food, didn’t particularly care for the culture and had heard too many stories of Koreans in the United States who ended up working twice as hard for less money. (They used to say that at Kimpo Airport you could spot the immigrants coming home from America because they all looked like guh-ji—bums. Kay was also disturbed by the ubiquitous stories of immigrant parents being abandoned by their Americanized children.)
Approximately a million people of Korean ancestry now live in America, and the sheer size of the group is a factor contributing to its success. There are Korean radio stations, Korean newspapers and Korean business associations with considerable lobbying power in cities like New York and Los Angeles. Korean businesses tend to work with other Korean businesses and depend heavily on networks built around social organizations such as churches. However, Gab’s family always seemed to unconsciously avoid places with large Korean populations, starting out in Houston for a couple of years, then moving to rural Ohio, and finally in Staten Island (which at the time had fewer Korean residents than any other borough). This made the struggle of adapting to a new country even harder than it could have been. As Kay had feared, the family suffered a steep drop in its standard of living—everything they’d brought with them from Korea, all the proceeds from selling Kay’s businesses, went into founding a family-owned air-conditioning company, which, like all start-ups (particularly those in a country that the owner has just moved to), struggled at first and went through years of ups and downs. Until Edward became established, the Paks were forced to live in trailer parks and a brutal succession of blighted condominiums overlooking highways and cemeteries. Kay had no choice but to work in sweatshops and as a night cashier at stores, and meanwhile she still had to raise three kids and open her doors to an endless stream of visitors, including me and Gab. Despite her attempt to restore the “traditional” balance between a husband and wife, there was no switch from breadwinner to full-time housewife.
But of course there was a happy ending: the family stayed together. In that sense, things have worked out. And now, with the store getting on its feet, there is finally the potential to restore what had been lost.
On that day when I stand at the window watching Kay smoke in her tank top (never has the name for that particular shirt style suited its wearer more appropriately, by the way), it feels as if we are in some kind of golden moment, and it almost looks that way, too. For one thing, the sun is setting, and at six o’clock on a July day the light filtering through the industrial haze of New Jersey is nothing if not peachlike. (To my mind Brooklyn is always at its best during a long summer sunset, when it is still a city and still dense with neighborly interaction, but when the volume and pace are at a humane level and you don’t feel literally overshadowed by the sheer bulk of New York’s money and ambition.) For another, inside the store a few feet away from me, one of our new workers, an eagle-eyed college kid named Kevin, is meticulously unpacking a shipment of inventory in front o
f a startled frozen food deliveryman. After failing in our initial attempts to hire people other than Dwayne who don’t share TV time with us every night, in Kevin we’ve developed a competent, able-bodied employee who craves as many shifts as we can give him. Kevin has an especially useful talent: he makes a sport of sniffing out the deliverymen’s tricks and is essentially a one-man stop-loss squad, probably saving us hundreds of dollars a week. And with Emo making the morning shift into smooth sailing and Dwayne thwarting the narcs, it feels like we’re actually covering our bases for once, instead of constantly being caught out of position.
Meanwhile, a group of Mexican busboys stand in back, boisterously but not offensively getting smashed on cases of Corona Light sold to them at a special regulars’ discount. Residents of one of Chucho’s overcrowded rooming house–style apartments upstairs, they’ve been doing this now every Wednesday since the start of the summer. Other regulars—I’d say we currently know about a third of all people who come into the store by name—keep coming in and lingering by the checkout counter, some for a few hours. They bring their lizards and their dogs, their mothers in Nebraska (via cell phone, of course) and all their annoying habits, like the Russian limo driver who always starts shouting lottery numbers at me when I’m in the middle of talking or counting someone else’s change, or the woman in neon pink spandex who can never decide what sandwich to order and stands there at the counter slowing down the line. Some of the regulars have come back—Super Mario, Barry the half-blind cab driver, a soft-spoken Haitian waiter known as “the General” who stands in the snack section every night for two hours and doesn’t speak. I’m not sure why they’ve returned. At one point back in the spring I think we all realized how miserable we’d become, and it could be that since then we’ve made an effort to be friendlier. Surely success brightens one’s attitude.
My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store Page 19