I found a Web site called Dan’s ESL Coffeehouse that posted job openings for foreign English teachers. Most of the jobs did not require certification or previous teaching experience. In the forums a number of Americans and Canadians boasted instant success. “I didn’t even have to open my mouth, they hired me on the spot,” said waegukin69. “I got so many offers I had to beat them off with a stick,” wrote yugiyo411. My confidence bolstered, I e-mailed out my résumés and was surprised by how quickly I heard back from the schools. Already I had two interviews lined up for the next day.
That task completed, I returned, reluctantly, to my e-mails. I clicked on Beth’s first. She’d sent a number of messages, each one escalating in its level of alarm. I dreaded reliving her panic. Her first e-mail, sent before the attacks, was a long missive addressed to both Ed and me. She expounded on the conference she’d left early and her exhausting red-eye flight home, only to find the house “utterly devoid of the family I’d left the conference early to be with in the first place.” When you read between the lines, the e-mail was clearly a passive-aggressive censure at her not being informed of anyone’s whereabouts.
Immediately after the attacks, however, the tenor changed. As she grew increasingly panicked, the lengths of her e-mails grew shorter and tighter, as if she functioned solely on instinct. “Forget everything said before. Water under the bridge. Just let me know you’re okay?”
Her second-to-last message was like sharp staccato notes: “Jane. Are you alive? Please God. Answer.” All extraneous words fell away; her language was distilled to its bare essence.
Beth’s final e-mail had been sent after I’d already landed in Seoul. The tone and length resumed their normal extra-wordiness.
After being informed by my daughter of your call, I am beyond relieved that you’re safe. My deepest condolences are with you and your family in this difficult time (i.e., your grandfather’s passing). I understand the delicacy of the situation, but I do ask that should (God forbid) some similar future event occur, you please keep us abreast of said developments as they’re transpiring. Frankly, I find it a touch out of character that a responsible woman such as yourself would fly off without a word of notice.
What kind of notice could I possibly have left behind? “I’m sorry I slept with your husband and ruined your family’s life—here’s my flight number”? I made several stabs at a response to Beth, but I found myself continually hitting the BACKSPACE key, deleting strings of words that sounded like empty rhetoric. Sang hated when we tried to explain away our apologies. He much preferred that we stare contritely at the tops of our feet, at the linoleum. Later he would expect us to piece back together the lamp we’d broken in our recklessness or scrub out the offending stain from the juice spilled on the couch through our carelessness. In other words, taking action instead of offering false “I’m sorry”s.
And I’d taken action: I’d removed myself from the Mazer-Farleys. I couldn’t hit BACKSPACE on what I’d already done, but I could make certain I’d never let it happen again.
I wrote the most perfunctory of e-mails, offering my resignation.
Then I braced myself for Ed’s messages. There were two from the night I was supposed to meet him at the hotel. There was a third immediately after the Towers had been struck. But the fourth e-mail, his last, had been sent just twenty minutes ago:
Dear Jane,
Let’s just get one thing clear first: I’m not mad at you for not showing up at that hotel room. I understand your sudden flight. At least I’m trying to make sense of it all.
The hours, the days drag on. Without you. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night. Swear I hear you in the kitchen. But when I rush down the stairs and flick on the light, all I see is that empty table. I just stand there for a moment, deluding myself into thinking you’ll appear. But you never do.
Your absence is echoed by the utterly stricken state of this city, post-attacks. An oppressive something—sorrow? grief?—hangs in the air. It manifests itself in the black clouds of ash that coat the sky.
Sometimes I think I spot you on the streets. I call out your name. But when I draw near, you’ve vanished in the shadows. I feel and see and hear you everywhere.
Devon confirms that you’re safe. They’ve reopened JFK. Jane—I keep hoping, praying, you’ll find your way back to me.
In that PC bang, as the Koreans surrounding me were completely absorbed in Starcraft or whatever computer games they were banging away on, not one of them saw my hand shaking over the mouse as I read Ed’s e-mail. Not one saw the tears that splashed onto the keyboard like hot drops of rain. Not one saw me raise the back of my trembling hand to my eyes as I pressed—hard—to blot them away.
Ed,
I’ve decided to stay on in Korea. I’m not coming back to New York.
You should be with your family now.
I’m so sorry.
Love,
Jane
Before I could overthink it, I hit SEND.
Just when I thought I was done, I saw that, buried all the way at the bottom of those e-mails, was a message from Nina. I opened it; a burst of freshness filled the air:
yeah thanks again for taking off to korea without telling me. but i’m really sorry about your grandfather. that’s just . . . awful. i told my nonna and she’s doing like five decades of the rosary for your fam.
all i know is they better catch those assholes responsible for this. YOU DON’T FUCKING MESS WITH NEW YORK.
hit me back with a joke, a story, anything to take my mind off stuff. it feels like everything’s falling apart. i could use a good laugh.
I stopped crying, calmed my trembling hands. My fingers were poised over the keyboard, and I began to write.
If I have to explain a joke, then it probably defeats the purpose, but here goes: What are the three things a man from Busan says to his wife each night . . .
Just as I was about to log off, another e-mail popped into my in-box, from EduAcademy, one of the schools I had applied to earlier.
New teacher opening we have our school. Old foreign native English speaker teacher leave. Today afternoon for interview you can come? Our location is . . .
I hit REPLY. I made a copy of the e-mail with the directions to the school. As I logged off the computer, I resolved to shut out all thoughts of New York and the people I’d left behind.
* * *
EduAcademy was in the Jongno district—directly across the river from where we lived in Gangnam-gu. Dressed in the same black suit I wore to the Mazer-Farley interview (the one I’d smartly thought to pack, anticipating a funeral), with the same sneakers on my feet and the same dress heels tucked into the same black pleather tote bag, I headed over to the subway station.
According to the map on the station platform, the Number 2 train made a complete loop around the perimeter of Seoul. It spun in an uninterrupted circle, with no final destination. In New York there was no such thing as a subway that made a complete circle—there was always a finite start and end. Jongno was a straight shot north, but the only way to get to my destination—according to the map, anyhow—was to take this roundabout train route.
When I boarded, the subway was fairly empty, and I managed to get a seat before the surge of other passengers got on. There was an ad for an English-language after-school. LEARN PERFECT ENVIABLE NATIVE ENGLISH! Another ad shouted, BECOME THE PERFECT BEAUTY! with side-by-side pictures of a woman’s face. The one to the left was a broad, kind face with slivered-almond eyes and a small pug nose—she looked like Eunice. The picture on the right had big, round, double-lidded eyes, a prominent nose, and a pointy chin. There was something off about the gaze—something a little flat, a little dead in the eyes. It did not look like a Korean face at all. It took me a moment or two longer than it should have to realize that it was an ad for a plastic-surgery clinic.
I was so focused on these ads that I nearly missed my s
top. I emerged from the subway and stared at the printout of the e-mail the school secretary had sent me. The directions, written in English, didn’t make sense. Go Exit 6 walk to Provence Bakery alley and left turn second Sinnara Bank alley to Brown Chicken Hof alley and 200m on the right side school location. Why did they keep calling them alleys and not streets? I thought for sure something had been lost in translation. Amazingly, at Exit 6 there were three Provence Bakeries: one behind, one ahead, and the other across the way. I walked up to the one straight ahead and turned down the street. But I could not find a Sinnara Bank.
I huffed and puffed up narrow hilly streets, thankful I was still wearing my sneakers. I realized that finding your way around here was just as Big Uncle had said: A person should already know where he’s supposed to go. And if you didn’t already know where you were supposed to go, you had to rely on someone who did to guide you.
The quiet back alleys offered glimpses into what I imagined was a Korea of the past. Old men carried flattened cardboard in large wheelbarrows. Grannies squatted on their haunches, selling handmade rice cakes on makeshift Styrofoam tables.
After asking around for directions and being pointed up and down the wrong alleys, I eventually found my way to EduAcademy. I was sweating, and my hair was pulled back into a flustered ponytail that stuck to the back of my neck. I, who’d always prided myself on getting to places early, was five minutes—and counting—late for the interview.
On the elevator ride up, I hastily changed my shoes. I was still balancing against the wall—one foot shod in a heel, the other in a sneaker—when the doors dinged open. An older woman passing through the hallway stopped in her tracks and stared at me.
“Can I help you?” she said, in a tone that made it clear she did not really wish to.
“Here I am. For the job meeting,” I said. I didn’t know the Korean word for “interview.”
“You’re not . . . the foreigner candidate, are you?” the woman said, studying me.
“I am Jane Re.” Maybe she didn’t recognize Re as Korean. I told her I wasn’t a foreigner.
The woman hesitated for a moment before saying, “Follow me.” She led me to her office. She took a seat at a sleek white desk and gestured for me to sit opposite her.
“What are you? Gyopo? Or one of our people?”
Weren’t they one and the same? I paused, not sure I had claims to either word.
“And how long have you lived in the States? Were you born there?”
“No, I born here.”
“Here!” She looked up suddenly, surprised. “But how old were you when you left?”
“When I was a baby.”
The woman turned her attention to my résumé. “You went to college . . . at Baruch? I never heard of it.”
It never heard of you either, I thought.
She asked a few wrap-up questions before handing my résumé back to me. “We’ll be in touch.”
“In touch?” The same as Ed Farley’s words to me.
The woman busied herself with a stack of papers. “I have some work to attend to, so if you will please . . .”
The elevator ejected me onto the street. The woman wouldn’t have brought me into her office for an interview if the school weren’t truly hiring. Something about me had put her off. I shuffled into the bustling masses. Pedestrians scurrying behind me pressed sharp elbows into my back, forcing me out of their way. Dejected, I leaned against the side of a high-rise, pried off my heels, and shoved my tired feet back into my running sneakers. What choice did I have but to trudge on?
Just then I saw a withered, hunchbacked granny, struggling to open the door of the building. She was as shriveled as Mrs. O’Gall. In one hand she carried a cloth-wrapped bundle, in the other a cane. When I held the door open for her, she looked at me with kind, grateful eyes before slowly passing through. I was about to let go of the door and continue on my way when four curly-permed ajumma—middle-aged women—rushed through without a word of acknowledgment. Back in New York, people at least nodded or offered a curt “Thanks.” Not here. The women were immediately followed by three middle-aged men in hiking clothes, two twenty-something men in business suits, and a girl in a miniskirt chattering into her cell phone. I could have stood there for hours; it was impossible to stop the endless gush of people. It would have been comical—“How many Seoulites can squeeze through one door?”—if it hadn’t been so soulless; each person after the old woman regarded me with cold indifference, as if I were no more human than a door wedge. Then a brigade of preteen girls in school uniforms trundled in. Where was their nunchi? I was their Big Sister; they should have held that door open for me.
I released the door and watched with perverse delight as it bounced off the shoulder of the last girl. Momentarily disoriented at being on the wrong side of the glass partition, the girl gathered her strength and yanked at the door. But she fell backward, weighed down by her large, turtle-shell-like backpack. She could have been Devon. Her friends on the other side pointed, laughing. Flooded with guilt, I hurried away.
* * *
By the time I boarded the subway back home, it was rush hour and the trains were packed. The first thing that struck me was how every single face on that train was Korean. You’d think that, coming from Flushing, I’d be used to being around all Koreans. But I kept expecting other ethnic faces to pepper the masses, the way they did on the 7 train. Here there were none.
Standing near the door, I stepped momentarily off the train to let the other passengers out. Back home the unspoken rule was that I’d have first dibs reboarding. But here the rules were different. The new passengers waiting on the platform behind me pushed me aside to make sure they boarded first. They came in endless waves, and I was rocked farther and farther away from the doors—a lone raft drifting from shore. As I fought my way back to the train I’d just stepped off, the doors slid shut. In New York one karate chop to the subway doors would have forced them back open; here the heavy doors looked like they would clamp over your arm and drag you away. I let them close and waited for the next train. But when it arrived, I again fought unsuccessfully against the current. I couldn’t breathe.
I gave up and scrambled out of the station. I was at Sinchon, near Yonsei University, my mother’s alma mater. But after a few minutes of walking, I did not see the campus. Exhausted and thirsty, I popped into a coffee shop called Café Michelangelo.
I bowed at the barista behind the counter—just as I’d bow to all the shopkeepers back home—and ordered a bottle of water. “Your total is three thousand won, Client,” she said in a robotic voice, not acknowledging my bow. I asked to use the restrooms, and she stared back at me with the kind of funny face we reserved for fanny-packed tourists clogging the city sidewalks.
I tried again. “You know, the byunso.”
“. . .”
“Where . . .” I felt like I was reduced to a four-year-old’s speech. “Where you doing shee-shee and ddong.”
“You mean ‘hwajangsil’!” The barista burst into giggles. In Sang’s house we’d always used the word byunso. Later I would learn that the word connoted an outhouse. “You are very awkward-sounding!” she told me.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You must not be one of our people,” she added. I snatched the keys from her, and when I got to the hwajangsil, I found a porcelain hole in the ground.
I returned to the main café area and took a seat toward the back. The chairs were leather, the tables a rich, gleaming wood. At the table next to me was a group of girls around my age and all dressed in black. Back home the girls also dressed in black, but there was something different about the Seoul girls’ polish. They were hyperfeminine, like the rhinestones that sparkled from their collars and cuffs. Their shiny black hair was fastened with ribbons or a headband. Despite the early-September heat, these girls wore pantyhose, in shades of beige, coffee, or black. Their black p
atent-leather shoes had silver buckles. I wondered if they carried a change of shoes, the way New York women did. But their leather purses, which were draped on the backs of their chairs—something you wouldn’t do at home unless you wanted to get your bag stolen—were too tiny to fit anything. I wondered whether Beth would have accused these women of pandering to the male gaze. Or maybe they just dressed up for themselves.
I wished I had brought a book, a newspaper—anything so I wouldn’t look like I was staring at them conspicuously. I pulled out my cell—Emo had given me her old one—and pretended to be engrossed in the phone’s golf game.
They were soon joined by a stamping of high-heeled feet; a girl carrying a blue cake box limped toward them, panting heavily. She was met with a chorus of:
“Ya, you’re like ten minutes late!”
“Ya, why didn’t you pick up your ‘handy’?”
To which she retorted, “Chuh! Like I was gonna pick up. I’d never hear the end of it from you guys.”
The girls spoke in a kind of Korean I had never heard before: young, female, modern. It was both high-pitched and slurred; it rose and fell in different waves from the Korean that the adults spoke back in Flushing. Their laughter, too, was also high-pitched, peals ringing out like the electronic chime of Emo’s front door. When Nina and I laughed, we’d toss our heads back and let out deep, unseemly rumbles. Nina would sometimes slap a hand on the table. Devon and Alla laughed like us, too—clutching their stomachs and gasping for air.
“Excuse me, by any chance . . .” a voice said.
I looked up. One of the girls from the table was standing before me. I straightened my shoulders, ran my fingers through my half bun, half ponytail.
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