by Y. Euny Hong
None of these pets was ever given a name. I don’t recall ever touching any of them.
And now, here is the story my mother told me.
“When I was little,” she said, “we had a dog called Betty, named after the blond girl in the Archie comics. She was very smart and I loved her a lot, a lot. Then one day we called her name and she didn’t come to us. We couldn’t find her anywhere. Later we found out from our neighbors that their dogs were gone, too. In Korea in those days this meant that the dogs had been kidnapped in the night to be sold for their meat. It was just after the war and people were really poor. Now you know why I wouldn’t let you get a dog. I’m so sorry.”
My first feeling was one of repulsion. All throughout university, during those overly frank late-night common-room chats, I fought off the claim that Koreans were dog eaters. Only the lower classes ate dog, I would argue lamely, and certainly no one I knew engaged in this foul practice. I posited that anyone who claimed otherwise was a racist. Now, hearing the story of my family’s close encounter with dog eaters brought out my classist indignation.
I remained stoic before my mother, but in my room that night I cried for my mother, for her dog, for my mother’s heartache that was so profound that she would not let such sorrow be visited on me.
I FELT BRAVE. There is nothing more fortifying than learning that your mother doesn’t hate you. I could work off my debt to Madame in some other way; I could even bare all to my mother and beg her to arrange a payment plan.
But as it turned out, I wouldn’t have to, for my dear auntie Jung asked to meet with me, and she bore tidings of great joy.
I met up with Jung in a bar near the Yonsei University campus, a student hangout with black decor and high chairs. George Michael’s greatest hits blasted over the stereo, while Eric Clapton played on the video screen, also at full volume.
Jung was heavily maquillaged, which, against her pallor of mourning, gave her the appearance of Evita Perón’s embalmed corpse. She wore a kerchief around her head.
“You look good,” I said.
“Who cares.” She sounded hoarse. “I asked you here to tell you something. Jude, I took care of your debt. Well, not me personally.”
I gasped — could it be? “Was it Yevgeny?”
“Don’t be daft. I’ve been conferring with Heike, who had a nice chat with her gay husband, Boswell. He and some guy named Chester raised the money for you somehow at that lounge where you were working; what’s it called, Tom Jones?”
“Maurice Hall,” I corrected.
“Whatever. Look, I can’t really stay too long, because my mother has to make some arrangements, but trust me; you’re out of danger now.”
“Don’t leave just yet,” I said. “How long are you staying in Korea? When are you going back to New York? Why don’t we fly back together?”
“I have to take care of some things here,” said Jung. “But I’ll join you in New York in a few weeks.”
“Oh, more postfuneral…stuff?”
Jung laughed nervously, then forbade herself to be jovial. “Sorry. No. It’s something else entirely. I know I should be really sad about Key, and of course I am. But I’m also sick with excitement. Emerson is coming to Seoul in a few weeks, and our families are going to meet. Well, the Lee side won’t be involved, of course. Most likely we will be planning a wedding. Our families know of one another somewhat, since his background is similar to ours.”
I certainly hope it’s not similar to ours, I thought.
“You’ll be the very best of wives,” I said.
“Don’t tell anyone yet,” she said, using her usual refrain. “The engagement’s not official. You know what the holdup is? When the groom’s family found out I was illegitimate, they said they wanted to hire one of those ancestor detectives to determine that we’re really both aristocrats. What a bunch of snobs.”
With my blood curdling, I said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea at all.” This was a fairly new and common practice among good families, precisely because of the preponderance of forgeries such as the one I had discovered. Not only might this jeopardize Jung’s chances of marriage, but it would only multiply her suffering if she knew that her brother had coerced her into incest with the false premise of our nobility.
Jung frenetically mashed the cream into her Vienna coffee, which she hadn’t sipped at all. Her eyes turned upward to me and she said, “I was thinking the same thing. I’m sick of lying. I’m going to tell my family the truth, and then they’ll see the services of a detective are superfluous.”
“What do you mean, ‘tell them the truth’?” I said, shocked out of my mind. Had she known about the wet nurse this whole time?
“Emerson can’t have babies of our own at all, so the authenticity of our bloodline doesn’t matter. Emerson is sterile, remember? From childhood chicken pox. I told you at the beginning; that’s why you were so surprised to find the condom wrapper on my bed.”
“Let’s not talk about that,” I said.
“That means Emerson’s family line is over, too, since he’s the only male scion. Funny, isn’t it, how our class self-selects for extinction?”
Just as I have maintained. Like the gods setting Valhalla on fire when they saw that their era had passed. I am almost always right.
I saw that her eyes were filling with tears. She said, “What’s wrong with our family, Jude?”
I put my hand over hers on the table. She bent her head over our clasped hands and began weeping loudly and viscerally. She said, “Is it all right for me to be happy now?”
For only the third time in my life — the first being when I greeted her at the airport, the second at her brother’s funeral — I embraced her.
WHEN I GOT HOME, I rang Heike on her mobile phone.
“It’s true, Judith,” she said. “Boswell and Chester made a plea to the boys at Maurice Hall, and they raised the funds.”
“Did they pass around a hat?”
“What hat? Oh, I see, no, he said they had one of their normal wagers and they agreed that the loser would pay off your debt.”
I remembered Meno and Pazzi’s fifty-thousand-dollar bet over the number of angel species.
“What manner of wager was it?”
“I think it was an all-night game of Botticelli, that role-playing parlor game. Your debt was cleared by someone named Mr. Robberbaron. It’s all been arranged. But, uh, you’re not off the hook completely. You’re to be an indentured servant at Maurice Hall.”
“Meaning?”
“For the purposes of keeping up appearances, Mr. Robberbaron didn’t issue you the loan directly. He issued it to Maurice Hall, and Maurice Hall paid Madame Tartakov. So technically you’re indebted to Maurice Hall. They’ll still pay you and all that, but your wages will be garnished to pay off Mr. Robberbaron. And you’re no longer salonnière: you’re to be their accountant instead, which is a much more pressing need. It will take five years to make yourself whole with them. But I assure you, Maurice Hall is a much more benign creditor than this Mr. Robberbaron.”
“Why, what does this Robberbaron do?” I asked.
“Boswell describes him as a corporate pirate,” said Heike. “Very ruthless, and famous even in my country. He brought down a corrupt organization there. They were called…Rumpelstiltskin? No, it was Struwwelpeter GmbH. Judith, why are you screaming?”
Sometime after, I learned how my release from bondage came about. After helping me with the translation of the Struwwelpeter memo, Joshua had reported its contents in an anonymous letter to someone at the Securities and Exchange Commission. So much for my belief that Americans can keep secrets.
Robberbaron, a high-ranking member of the SEC, looked into the matter and learned that Struwwelpeter was run by an archenemy of his who many years ago had chased Robberbaron out of Europe by reporting some corporate malfeasance for which Robberbaron may or may not have been responsible.
The paper trail led Robberbaron to the house on East Sixty-second Street
, where the girls were interrogated by a private investigator. This inquiry then led to me personally, and Robberbaron incorrectly credited me with having provided the leak that would crush his enemy. Robberbaron exacted revenge against the latter in his own way, rather than going through the proper SEC channels, which turned out very unhappily for the Struwwelpeter fellow.
In covering my debt, Robberbaron was rewarding the wrong person. Still, better to be in his debt than in that of — what did Joshua call her — that modern-day Fagin, Madame Tartakov.
But that is beyond the scope of this tale. At the moment that Heike made this revelation to me, I was simply stunned.
“Say something, Judith,” said Heike. “Are you happy, sad, what?”
“I’m going to be an accountant?” I said.
I heard some muffled conversation in the background; then Heike said, “Oh, Madame Tartakov is here. She wants a word with you.”
Before I could protest, Madame Tartakov was sending high-pitched shock waves through the receiver; her voice didn’t digitize well and it spiked over Heike’s mobile phone. She said, “JUDITH! I MISS YOU SO MUCH! You are free to go, my darling.” She had the exuberance of someone who had just received an envelope groaning with cash.
I said, “Why is Heike still at the Anthology of Pros — I mean, still living with you? Couldn’t she live with Boswell? Are you holding her against her will?”
“Heike is very happy here; she likes it, but this life is not for everyone. You be happy, too, dear. That Yevgeny is a cheap no-good. And speaking of violin, your funny boy Joshua is like violin with too-tight strings, but he is very much courage. I meet him only once, but I know men; I am never wrong about these things.”
“What? When did you ever meet him?” All my worlds were colliding now — Madame Tartakov, Joshua, Maurice Hall.
“He come by the house looking for you some weeks ago looking very sad. He beg me not tell you. Okay, I am lying; he didn’t say not tell you. I just didn’t to mention. You know, he looks exactly like chess player from my country, Garry Kasparov.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” I said.
“And Judith, one more thing. You listen?”
“You have my undivided attention,” I said. Maybe Stockholm Syndrome was afoot, but suddenly her voice seemed sweet and motherly to me.
She said, “Take care to no more get in debt, Judith. You read David Copperfield? In there is much advice. Here, I read to you.” She cleared her voice, then began: “ ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’”
35
A Cigarette, a Prayer,
a Valediction
A WEEK TO THE DAY after Joshua had arrived in Seoul, my father’s driver took my father, Joshua, and me to the airport.
My father curtly thanked Joshua for coming to Seoul with me. The ride was otherwise silent.
Outside the gate, my father blindsided me by saying, “Judith, have a cigarette with me.”
“I don’t smoke,” I sputtered. It was a falsehood more than thirteen years in the making. But one reflexively denies such things to one’s parents, I suppose.
“I’ll get in the line for check-in,” said Joshua. “Good-bye, Dr. Lee.” He bowed, Korean-style, to my father before disappearing behind the revolving door. My father grunted.
My father held out a pack of Mild Sevens. It was my cigarette brand, not his. How long had the old bastard known? Someone so quick on the uptake surely could not be in ignorance of the forgery surrounding his lineage. But I would conceal from him that I knew what I knew.
Reading my mind, my father said, “Not all who conceal are liars.”
I took a cigarette from the pack and my father lit it for me. We smoked in silence, dragging out the cigarettes for as long as they would last. I had never noticed before that my father smokes just as I do, flicking the filter with his thumbnail to loosen the ash off the burning tip. When the cigarettes had been smoked to the filter, we dropped the butts on the ground simultaneously. My father shook my hand silently, and left.
On the plane ride from Seoul to New York, Joshua said, “I hope you’re not too upset about having to be an accountant for Maurice Hall now. One form of slavery just supplants another; it’s no different from the rest of us. But now you’re going to be exactly what you hate — bourgeois. Can you stomach it?”
I used my teeth to open the wrapping from a deck of airline cards and said, “Can you?”
Joshua looked contemplative for a moment and said, “Are you serious about this conversion to Judaism thing?”
“I don’t know yet. I want to be in full command of the facts before embarking on any new endeavors.”
“I suppose I should try to be more supportive. I don’t think I was being very fair when I said your own people needed you more. You wouldn’t stand out that much, at any rate. You could pass in any synagogue as a Kazakh Jew, if there is such a thing, if that’s what you want.”
“Ugh, please do not link me to any republic of central Asia,” I said.
Joshua shook his head. “You are unchanged, Judith. You’re still the same little snot you were before you made this discovery in the archives. I find this strangely comforting.”
We then hit a worrisome spot of turbulence, and as the plane lurched, Joshua turned pale and held tightly the armrests. He then squeezed his eyes shut while muttering something under his breath.
“Are you speaking in tongues?” I asked.
He looked sheepish. “It’s a Hebrew prayer for travelers, to ensure safe passage. My grandmother, father’s side, taught it to me when I was little. It’s the only prayer I remember in full. I habitually recite it on planes.”
I said, mockingly, “Since when are you Jewish? Is this my influence?”
He clasped my hand and said, “You, Judith, would move anyone to want to find religion. And I mean that in the worst possible way.”
“So owing to me, you’re now a lapsed lapsed Jew? I’m so flattered.”
“Actually, you’ve helped me with something far greater than that. I’ve decided definitively on a dissertation topic at last. Inspired by you — or, as you and your snot set would say, grâce à toi. Do you know what the Kantian Sublime is?”
“Only that you’ve been studying it this whole time. I think we might have learned it at school but I probably wasn’t paying attention. I imagine it is meant to be something good?”
“Yes and no. The Sublime shows you that everything you know is wrong; on the other hand, it makes you a better person, you might say, capable of living a life of unforeseen richness. In aesthetic philosophy, the Sublime refers to a thing or an experience so astonishing that you can’t even recognize it. You don’t have the capacity to comprehend it with your normal faculties. You must completely recalibrate your faculties of understanding to take in the experience.”
“So in what way did I help you arrive at this dissertation topic?”
“Because the Sublime is the triumph of life over philosophy. Which I learned from you.”
“So you’re saying that I am the Sublime?” I asked.
“No, at least not now that you’re going to be an accountant.”
I play-thwacked him, but it came out a good deal more violently than I had intended; so much so that the flight attendant approached us. “She’s my girlfriend,” Joshua told him.
“Oh, that’s all right, then,” said the flight attendant, returning languidly to his jump seat.
The lights in the cabin turned off. “The movie’s starting,” I said.
“How about chess?” he said, producing a travel-size board from his carry-on bag.
We returned to New York. Never mind the details. As the Brothers Grimm say, “If we are not dead, then we are living there still.”
Acknowledgments
Kept exists because, and only because, of the unflagging encouragement of my editors Kerri Kolen and
Tara Parsons, and my literary agents: Lizzy Kremer in London, and Byrd Leavell in New York.
I need also mention Robert Thomson of The Times of London and Peter Beinart of The New Republic, two mentors who conduct their lives and careers with inimitable grace. They gave me my start in journalism and have helped me on innumerable occasions, knowing that I might never be in a position to return the favor.
Avec mes compliments.
— Valetta, Malta, December 30, 2005
About the Author
Y. EUNY HONG was the first-ever television columnist for the U.S. edition of the Financial Times. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal Europe, the International Herald Tribune, The New Republic, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and the Forward, among other periodicals. She studied philosophy at Yale University and was recently awarded a Fulbright Beginning Professional Journalism Award. She is fluent in French, German, and Korean. She wrote Kept on four continents. A sometime resident of Germany, South Korea, and the United States, she currently lives in Washington, D.C.
eBook Info
Title:Kept
Creator:Y. Euny Hong
Date:2006
Type:novel
Format:text/html
Identifier:ISBN 1-4165-3807-0
Source:PDF
Language:en
Relation:None
Coverage:None
Rights:Copyright © 2006 by Euny Hong