by Y. Euny Hong
After the ceremony my parents took me to dinner at a seafood restaurant in Old Saybrook, where people could bring their boats right up to the dock and come in for oysters that had been hickory-smoked under a layer of wet seaweed. My parents are very fond of Yankee restaurants.
We ate in silence. My mother took the videocassette out of the camcorder and gasped.
“Aie, I taped your graduation over the video head cleaner. I didn’t realize it was in there. It’s not going to come out at all.”
“It’s not important,” my father said gruffly.
We stayed at a hotel that night. The next morning, my parents packed to fly back to Seoul. My father handed me an envelope, telling me not to look at it until after they left.
Later, in the hotel room, I opened the envelope, expecting to find a check, and instead found a hand-drawn line graph.
My dear Judith,
As shown above, I have charted your realized potential over time. You are (far) below your real capabilities. As you see, the line has stagnated for some time, and now, it has reached an ebb.
Some observations:
1. If you had studied rational choice theory you would know that people (or markets) do not behave stupidly. All markets are efficient. In other words, that the world has not awarded your achievements is not the world’s fault, but rather your own.
2. To put it more simply, in a way that your crass American friends might understand, do not sell your stock at a low price. You were too impatient to wait for it to come around to the right price.
3. A few months ago Korean television broadcast a BBC documentary called 7-Up. Do you know it? It is worth seeing. What you will learn from this program is that aristocrats in the West share many traits with us.
In the documentary, the difference between the upper-class children and the lower-class children is that the former group followed precisely the plan they had laid out at age seven. The public-school boy who sits with his legs crossed says that he intends to enter Trinity at Cambridge, and indeed he does. Meanwhile, the lower-class children either wholly missed their mark or exceeded their expectations admirably. The lesson to be learned is this: for our sort, your destiny, your telos [the word telos was written in Greek] is to become what you already are. It is no more complicated than that.
You are not expected to surpass your parents; that is the difference between us and the lower classes. Be grateful that you do not bear this burden. Achieve equilibrium, but don’t drag us all down.
Regards,
Your father
I had trouble sleeping that night. I consumed a whole sheet of sleeping pills, probably eight or ten in all, and drank all the liquor from the minibar. I didn’t do it all at once; just a little at a time, while watching television, all the episodes blurring into one montage as I faded in and out. The next day, the chambermaid found me lying unconscious, and I was sent to the emergency room.
The hotel called my parents in Seoul, having traced their phone number through their credit-card records. My mother called me at the hospital.
“Well?” she said.
“I think I slept through checkout time,” I said. “Did the hotel charge us for an extra day?”
“I was so embarrassed when the hotel called. I’m sure they are laughing at us.”
“Also, you should refuse to pay for the drinks I took from the minibar. Some of them had been opened already.” I couldn’t let her know that my heart was breaking.
“Are you crazy or something?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for years,” I said.
“What you did was very inconsiderate,” said my mother, hanging up.
In disbelief, I continued to hold the receiver to my ear long after the phone recording warned that the phone was off the hook. I clutched the phone to my chest and wailed. I was so dehydrated that no tears would fall.
I do understand why my mother would use the word inconsiderate to describe someone who has almost topped herself.
When I was in the sixth grade, puttering around my uncle’s house in Seoul, I looked through my grandmother’s photo albums and found a recurring image of a girl whom I could not identify, though she was the spitting image of my grandmother.
When I asked who the girl was, my grandmother slammed the book shut and said, “I imagine she’s a friend of the family.”
I asked my mother about this. She smiled wickedly and said, “That must be your aunt Yong-Ja.” I could tell from my mother’s expression that this was a story that would not portray her husband’s family in a flattering light. She cautioned, “Don’t tell anyone I told you this, particularly your father.”
Yong-Ja, my mother proceeded to tell me, was the tallest and prettiest girl in the neighborhood, as dead girls always are. Disobeying her father’s orders, she went to America at age eighteen, following some seedy American diplomat whom she had met in Seoul. She bore a son. After divorcing her husband, she tried to reconcile with her family, with results that proved unsatisfactory to all parties. While still in her thirties, she died under unexplained circumstances. Having ceased communications with her family long before, quite some time elapsed before anyone learned of her death. No one seemed to have a clear understanding of the details.
In Korea, for a child to die while her parents still live is the ultimate act of rebellion. Such a child is known ever after as an ungrateful child. It is the most grievous social crime a person can commit.
After my aunt’s death, her family embarked on a Stalinist purging of her effects — her childhood violin, her books, every picture she had drawn, every letter she had written them. They never attempted to contact her son, whom none of us has ever met.
She was not given a headstone in the family cemetery. Proof of her existence remained only in those photos in which other family members also appeared, and even then only when she couldn’t be cropped out.
That’s how my family treated a woman who died accidentally. You can only imagine what they think of someone like me.
MY FATHER asked me to meet him at Remson’s Steak House, a wood-paneled joint for alpha males who lunch. It was just the sort of impersonal setting he would choose. One would only ever go to Remson’s for professional transactions. I felt like a secretary meeting her boss for lunch.
I looked over my outfit to make sure that my lapels were straight and that my blouse was tucked in, then entered the restaurant. The maître d’ seated me with my father.
Dad was wearing a blue blazer over a hideous ensemble, most commonly associated with old WASPs and Korean golfers: plaid trousers, V-neck plaid sweater vest, and white turtleneck. I flushed with anticipation and relief; family was family. I bowed in greeting to my father.
My father was unresponsive. The first thing he said to me was: “Paul Castellano was shot here.” People who are accustomed to having everyone’s undivided attention, regardless of what they say, develop autistic speech patterns.
“Who?” I asked, dejectedly.
“Castellano, the head of the Gambino crime family. John Gotti shot him down in front of this restaurant.”
“Poor him,” I said.
Continuing his dialogue built on non sequiturs, he gestured at my blouse and asked, “Do you mind telling me what color that’s supposed to be?”
I looked down at my shirt. “It’s…mustard yellow, I guess.”
“Is that what people are wearing these days? You look like a phone book.”
It was true that I was deliberately wearing my frumpiest outfit. Nonetheless, I could not believe I was hearing this from the man who raids Arnold Palmer’s wardrobe.
The waiter arrived, pulling along a cart with sample cuts of meat on it, wrapped in cellophane. He said, “I’d like to show you some of the cuts we have available today.” He picked up a large slab of meat and held it before us. “Are either of you in training? Because if you are, we have a forty-eight-ounce porterhouse —”
My father interrupted, “Do you mean to tell me that I a
m selecting my steak from this cart?”
“Well, no, sir, you wouldn’t want that. This is just for display. It’s been sitting out all day.”
“Precisely. Why are you showing me rotting meat? When did this restaurant begin this practice? You don’t bring a cart to the table unless your intention is for us to select the specific item we wish to eat. Unless you have the cows here, this is senseless.”
The waiter retreated. There was some whispering in the kitchen, then a different waiter emerged and approached our table. Face flushed, he explained that he would be taking over our table, as the previous waiter was indisposed.
“You shouldn’t be so rude to people,” I said once we were alone again. Clearly this was Joshua’s influence. How strange that I should take Joshua’s role when speaking with my father.
“If we show too much pity for our inferiors, they will take things away from us. They already have. This is not our world anymore. All the ease has gone out of it.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
My father responded by dusting imaginary lint off his sleeve.
I don’t know what his agenda was, but I had my own. Gathering strength, I said, “Hey, Dad, you know how you’ve always been harassing me about using your connections, like the guy at the World Bank, or the one at the UN? Do you think you could give them a call and see if they need someone?”
He said, “We must speak of other things first. Your cousin Min-Joon is very ill, I’m sure you’ve heard. Stomach cancer.” Min-Joon is the cousin I mentioned at the beginning of this tale, the one whose first wife set herself aflame. He moved back to Korea some ten years ago, remarried, and now had two daughters.
“No, I hadn’t heard.”
“Yes, you have. I told you.” When delivering bad news, my father would insist that he was merely repeating what you already knew.
“No, you didn’t tell me.”
“Life is nasty, brutish, and short,” he said. “My candidate lost.”
“Your candidate?”
“You know. Pay attention.”
I looked down at my lap. What were we talking about now?
Our food arrived; we had each ordered a rib-eye, both prepared bleu. My father continued, “My high school classmate who ran for president. He just lost the election. He was going to make me a cabinet minister.” He looked down at his plate.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, surprised. I had never seen him so disappointed.
“You know why my friend lost? He’s too obviously aristocratic. Too privileged. No one likes that anymore, not even in Korea. So this simpering fool won instead, this peasant, this illiterate. He’s going to destroy us. He wants to restructure my alma mater, on the grounds that it fosters elitism.”
“That’s horrible,” I said, recalling how very proud he was of his schooling. How strange it was that this man, whom I so ill understood and who understood me just as poorly, was in fact my strongest ally in my struggle to preserve our way of life.
“For our sort, it will all go downhill from now on. Not just in Korea, but in the world at large.”
“Father, what do you mean by ‘from now on’? I can’t think of any time in history or any place in the world where you could make people do your bidding just by being supercilious and rude to them.”
My father used a piece of bread to sop up the beef blood on his plate. “You’re mistaken. Democracy is destroying us. Everyone thinks they can be successful if they try; they don’t have a sense of their limits. And it’s completely disruptive to the fabric of society.”
Stifling a laugh, I said, “I’m sorry.” What was comical was that he was expressing my beliefs exactly. But it sounded ridiculous when he said it.
My father said, “What I’m trying to say is I can’t help you; not with contacts, not with anything. This means you have to learn a trade.”
I felt a panic attack coming on. “A trade? Like blacksmithing?” The words stuck like a big pill in my throat.
“And I was wrong about one thing: you do have to let them see the dark circles under your eyes. Modern society resents those for whom things come easy. For our sort, our proverbial goose is cooked, as they say.”
He spent the remainder of lunch regaling me with the history of the Gambino crime syndicate, apparently some new interest of his. As he waved his fork around, blood from his steak dripped all over his plaid golfing vest.
When the waiter brought the check, I peeked over to see what my father was writing on the credit-card slip, and said, “Father, you can’t leave a tip like that. It’s too low. It’s embarrassing.”
“The tip should be on a sliding scale,” argued my father, the man who lends money to underdeveloped nations. “If you have a cup of coffee, you leave a fifty percent tip, right? So therefore for a one-hundred-fifty-dollar meal you leave one percent.”
My father was eyeing a kerosene lamp on the table, in the shape of a pewter pig. Without so much as a nod or wink, he removed it from the table and placed it in his horsehair-weave briefcase.
“Father!” I hissed. I looked around; the staff was studiously pretending not to have noticed. “Why would you covet such an item?” I asked, though I already knew the answer: his kleptomania was one of his silent gestures of contempt for those around him.
My father covered his mouth as he picked at his teeth with a toothpick.
As we got up to leave the restaurant, I discreetly slipped some cash into the waiter’s hand to supplement my father’s meager tip. Outside the restaurant’s entrance, at the very spot where Paul Castellano was shot, my father and I shook hands. He does that only when we are in the West; never in Korea. He passed me an envelope. “Read this at home,” he said.
“Why do you always give me letters when you see me?” I asked. “I never get letters from you in the post. Only when I’m physically right in front of you.”
“What’s wrong with my giving you letters?”
“To an onlooker it might appear as if you had trouble communicating with me.”
“I’m your father. We don’t have trouble communicating.”
January 15
My dear Judith,
The news of your cousin’s fatal illness has affected all of us deeply. I am writing this letter because I wish to clarify some things about which you have perhaps been ignorant.
Several years ago, I expressed perhaps too much condemnation of your being an utter mediocrity as a student at Yale. Now I must explain myself, not to apologize, mind you, but rather to demonstrate that I know that of which I speak.
I am a failure, too. But unlike you, I have chosen to settle in an environment wherein, until recently, my failures could be masked.
In Korea, as everywhere, aristocrats aren’t really supposed to show effort. In America I think they call it the “Gentleman’s C,” but in Korea, it was more like the “Gentleman’s F.” In fact, two failing grades (which is what I had achieved) were called a double-holster, a sign of machismo and joie de vivre. So you and I have much in common.
But in America, your worth is measured by your performance — on what you do, not on who you are. So you understand now why I behaved as I did when you failed to graduate on time.
You had an aunt called Yong-Ja; I never told you about her. She was blessed with all the beauty and potential in the family. She ran away to America, seduced by the promise that she could create herself anew. But no one can really create oneself anew, Judith, and your aunt became deeply confused in the attempt. She became a showcase wife to an unfortunate sort of man, and when that marriage ended, she became a hermit from the shame of it. She died brokenhearted and alone.
I reiterate: in a foreign country, you lose your ability to judge people correctly. This miscalibration can be very costly. My dear Judith, leave that accursed country with all possible haste.
Regards,
Your father
P.S. Enclosed is a check. Buy yourself a proper shirt.
15
Zeynep Escapes
/> THAT EVENING Jung asked, very peculiarly, whether she could spend the night in my room, on an air mattress on the floor. Madame didn’t have any restrictions on female overnight guests, so I agreed. I anticipated a pajama party for Heike, Jung, and me. But Jung stretched herself out on the air mattress and said wearily, “I really, truly, honestly just want to sleep. Please.”
“Oh, that’s not fun,” I said. “Why’d you want to come over, anyhow?”
“I felt unsafe in my apartment.”
“Oh?” said Heike. “Don’t you live on Fifth Avenue?”
“Yeah, but…it’s nothing,” said Jung. “I’m in a new relationship, and…it starts all over again.”
“What starts all over again?” asked Heike, leaning over the side of her bed to talk to Jung.
Jung said, “I just want to sleep, okay?” She lifted up the bedskirt and looked under my bed. “Hey, what’s with all these Maison du Chocolat boxes? There must be thirty, forty of them here.”
I rolled over on my tummy and leaned over the bed to see what Jung was doing. I said, “Oh. Those are all from Yevgeny. I never had the heart to tell him I hate chocolate. So now he keeps giving them to me.”
Jung pulled out some of the boxes and examined the contents, finally settling on a white square-shaped bonbon and popping it into her mouth. “I guess it’s like faking orgasm,” she said. “Once you start doing it, you have to keep doing it. It’s better to be honest about these things at the beginning.”
I said, “I never took you for someone who regarded honesty as paramount.”
She said, “Whatever. Can I finish off the dipped almonds? There are only two in the box.”
“Take the whole lot,” I said. “Why do men want so badly for their girls to like chocolate?”
I fell asleep to the sound of Jung licking chocolate from her fingers.
By the time Heike and I awoke the next morning, Jung was gone. But the heavy-heartedness she had brought with her lingered in the air, clashing with the incongruously sweet smell of chocolate.