Re Jane

by Patricia Park

  I didn’t know what to say. I felt like the only person in the country who wasn’t following soccer. And now Changhoon wanted us to walk around matchy-matchy. It was a sweet gesture—it just wasn’t my style.

  But it was a gift. And I could see that it made Changhoon happy. I thanked him for his thoughtfulness, kissed him on the cheek, then, quickly, on the lips. I could feel the cabbie’s eyes in the rearview mirror, giving me nunchi.

  But it turned out the KOREA, FIGHTING! jersey hadn’t been the real surprise. Our cab was pulling up to what at first was an impenetrable ocean of red—Busanites wearing identical jerseys. When the crowd parted, I saw that we’d arrived at the World Cup Stadium.

  I slapped Changhoon on the arm. “No you didn’t!”

  If his smile when I put on the shirt was bright, it grew even brighter still. “I did,” he said. “I did!”

  My company for a ticket. It was Korea’s first match of the World Cup. “How on earth you getting tickets?”

  Changhoon shrugged. “My father might’ve called in a favor.”

  I didn’t actually know what Changhoon’s parents did—I always sensed he didn’t feel comfortable talking about it. Since it was a sentiment I shared about my own family, I’d never pressed him for details. Although the other Korean-Koreans never seemed to have the same qualms; all the teachers at school pressed first about my MIA father’s occupation until, after I offered up a few evasive answers, they redirected their pointed inquiries to the subject of my American uncle.

  As we got out of the taxi, I immediately admonished myself for my earlier disappointment about the couple-T. Why you act like baby? And beneath that there was another nagging question that managed to surface: Would Ed Farley have ever done this for me, constructing an elaborate day in my mother’s home city? No. He was too busy holding hands with Beth down Court Street. I had come to Korea to escape him, and I’d found Changhoon.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” I said, covering Changhoon’s face with kisses. Take that, Ed, I thought with each kiss.

  Changhoon laughed. “One thank-you is more than enough.”

  We grabbed hands and ran to the stadium entrance, becoming one with the sea of red fans.

  If you watched any of the news coverage for the World Cup that year, you would’ve seen images of the South Korean Red Devils fans everywhere—an overwhelming tide of red T-shirts and painted faces. The Western media praised the Red Devils for their good manners and lack of . . . well, hooliganism. (This praise, however, did not extend to the one superfan who doused himself in paint thinner before lighting a match, with the hopes of becoming the twelfth man, the “ghost player” on the field.) But what that media coverage could not capture was the collective energy that radiated in the air of the crowd. It was palpable and pulsing; the only word to describe it? Jung—that deep, shared sentiment coursing through the entirety of the stadium and bursting into the streets. Jung for our national team. Jung among the fellow fans. I witnessed that overflowing jung for myself. A second wind pumped through my body—the exhaustion from the travel and the peaks and troughs of the day’s emotions were ebbing away. The ripples of jung began when the Korean national anthem played and we solemnly placed our hands to our hearts and sang. Our notes soared from Baekdu Mountain to the Donghae Sea, just like the words to the song.

  And then Korea scored its first goal. The bleachers were alight with life. We cried out in triumph. The woman in the red jersey next to me caught my eye. There was no flicker of hesitation as she wrapped her arm fiercely around me.

  Suddenly we were all linking arms, swaying side to side and chanting cheers as one synchronized mass. Oh, Pilseung, Korea! I didn’t know the words, but I mouthed along all the same. I looked over at Changhoon: his lips were pinched together in a tight O, his eyes crinkled with joy. Changhoon’s arm was draped over my shoulders. “Thank you, again,” I said to him.

  “Ay, no need,” he said before turning back to the game.

  “Changhoon Oppa,” I whispered in his ear. “Saranghae.”

  I had never told anyone “I love you” in Korean. At first the word tasted . . . foreign, uncanny. It tumbled off my tongue and hit the warm ocean breeze. But its aftertaste was all freshness and familiarity. It felt like jung itself.

  There’s always a risk in being the first one to utter the L-word. In those fraught seconds before your beloved responds (or not), you’re left wide open and trembling. And it’s too late to snatch the word back, even if you wanted to.

  But that’s the thing with love, isn’t it? It’s not a venture for the risk-averse.

  Breaking from the human chain, Changhoon clasped me and lifted me into the air. “Jane!” he cried, with feeling. “I’ve wanted to tell you for so long. I love you. I love you. I love you.”

  I’d been holding my breath. Now I exhaled with relief. In the confusion of our embrace, the match, and the chanting crowds, the bag of ojinguh that Changhoon had been holding got tossed into the air. We spun round and round, drowning in dried squid confetti.

  * * *

  Korea beat Poland 2–0, and that night we celebrated on Haeundae Beach, in the red pocha tents that lined the shore. Curly-permed ladies served up slices of raw abalone, translucent strings of live octopus tentacles, and crab innards mixed with rice. Groups of friends pushed their plastic tables together and poured one another rounds of drinks. I remembered Sang once saying that the Haeundae pocha tents were where the gangpae, or gangsters, used to hang out. But those were the days long before ground was broken for the five-star resorts.

  Every now and again, someone would cry, “Daehanminguk!” or “Fighting!” and that whole table would erupt into whoops. Their voices rose and fell in that familiar Busan cadence. I let their rhythms wash over me. I remembered my early days in Korea, eavesdropping on all those conversations—each one had felt like a flaunted reminder that I would never belong.

  In the midst of the revelry, Changhoon teetered to his feet. It was clear he was about to make a public announcement.

  “What do you do?” I said, tugging on his arm. “Sit back down!”

  His cheeks were flushed and rosy. “Don’t worry,” he said before turning to command the room. “Attention, everyone!” he said. The room came to halt. And then, to my utter mortification, Changhoon began dragging me to my feet.

  “You embarrass me!” I whispered. But he was too strong; he pulled me up all the same, wrapping an arm tightly around my shoulders lest I wriggle away.

  “Don’t struggle so!” Changhoon whispered back. I could have been the escapist octopus from the fish market, writhing out of its too-tight box.

  Changhoon turned to the crowd again. “To our beautiful gyopo girlfriend, returning to our beautiful native Busan!” He was not from Busan—his family traced its roots back many generations to Seoul—but Koreans sometimes did that. Instead of emphasizing the individual “my” or “her,” they spoke in the collective possessive.

  Then, as one, his audience turned its eye to me.

  The crowd did not whoop and cheer, the way they had at their own private tables. They looked from him to me—I froze under that scrutiny—then back to Changhoon.

  “Okay, drunko!” someone shouted. With that, the crowd’s attention snapped; they all turned away and resumed their tableside chatter.

  Busan in that moment felt uncannily B&T.

  My cheeks were still burning red from Changhoon’s public outburst when the pocha lady weaved her way toward us. There was something in her purposeful gait that reminded me, for some reason, of Nina. “Here,” she said. She was addressing me. “Took you for a foreigner at first. I didn’t know you were one of us.” She lowered a Styrofoam plate of live octopus tentacles onto our table.

  She didn’t linger to hear our thank-yous but instead spun on her heel and stalked off. I told Changhoon that if she hadn’t just given us free anju, I would’ve though
t we had pissed her off.

  “Well, you know what they say about Busan ladies,” Changhoon said, reaching for his chopsticks. I thought of the women in the pink galoshes, calling out to us in soft voices in the fish market.

  “What, they’re mermaids of the ocean?”

  “No, they’re tough.” He lifted a still-squirming string, dipped it in a mixture of salt and sesame oil, and dangled it above my mouth. “Here, eat up.”

  The tentacle was curling itself around the tip of the chopstick. I was fascinated and repulsed at the same time. As I chewed tentatively, the octopus tentacle fought me furiously, suctioning the insides of my mouth. “Keep chewing!” Changhoon instructed. Finally it relented. It let out a salty burst of sea before giving up the fight.

  “That was a little grossing me out. But kinda cool. I guess I can now cross it out of my list,” I said, but Changhoon was turning around. A bottle of C1 soju arrived. It was sent by a man sitting at the next table. He looked about Sang’s age.

  “You’ll need a drink to go with that anju,” he said gruffly. We tried to thank him, but he was already turning away to quaff his own soju.

  Changhoon poured me a drink, and then I poured him one. We toasted—first to our magnificent victory, then to our magnificent national team. We drank to the magnificence of our Busan people. The jung that began in the bleachers of the stadium pulsed through the pocha tent. It filled my lungs and made me gasp with breathlessness.

  We finally stumbled back to the Grand Sinnara Hotel, to a suite that overlooked the Donghae Sea. Up to that point, Changhoon and I had never been intimate—like most Koreans we both lived at home, and the furthest we’d gone was the occasional make-out or grope at the movies or in his car before he dropped me off at home. We hadn’t even gone to one of the many love motels that rented rooms by the hour, a fact that shocked even Monica. You guys still haven’t done it? But I knew that our getaway trip came with the implicit promise of sex. And I was determined to give him the best sex of his life.

  But Changhoon passed out before I could do it.

  While he snored off the soju, I stared out the window. The pocha revelry had died down, and a stillness swept over Haeundae Beach. I slipped out of our suite and rode down in the elevator. Once I hit the outdoors, I pried off my heels and found myself half trotting, half tripping toward the ocean. My feet sank into the damp, soft sand and then the ocean itself, the ebbing waves licking my toes.

  A bridge stretching across that expanse of water glittered in the distance. Later I would learn that it wasn’t the old Yeongdo drawbridge, but in that moment I imagined it was. Just as I imagined I was staring out at the little cluster of shacks at the foot of that bridge, where my mother had once lived. And in all of my Korean sojourn, that moment was the closest sensation I’d ever felt to coming back home.

  * * *

  The next morning, eyes still blurry with sleep, I roused Changhoon, climbed on top of him. I closed my eyes, bracing myself for the waves of discomfort.

  But they never came. Changhoon flipped me so he was on top, perhaps to save me from doing all the work. The second I began to wince—sex wouldn’t start to feel enjoyable until much later, once we became accustomed and attuned to each other’s rhythms—he’d ease up with gentler movements.

  After he came, his face shone with sweat. Panting, he petted my hair. “Jane-ah,” he said. “Way to end things.”

  I started, then realized that my brain had blipped—it was doing that literal-translation thing again.

  What I think he’d actually meant was, That was out of this world.

  Chapter 19

  Seoul for New Yorkers: The Definitive Guide

  That summer our national team enjoyed a winning streak. Each victory—each draw, even—was met with an ever-escalating frenzy. We kept advancing until we lost to Germany. Our loss coincided with the anniversary of the Korean War—two tragedies twinned together, palpable in the very air of the streets. And just like that, the revelry ended, the waves of fans ebbing away.

  * * *

  The monsoon season came and went, followed by a thick, claustrophobic humidity that coated the city like a damp woolen blanket. But when summer reached its end, the oppressive heat lifted. As fall swept in on a cool, refreshing breeze, I received an e-mail from Nina. “So over everything here,” she wrote. “Is there a Gino’s in Seoul we could catch up at? That is, if your offer’s still on the table.”

  I didn’t think Nina would actually take me up on my offer to visit Korea, though it was one I renewed at the end of each e-mail. I’m ashamed to admit this, but I had dismissed Nina as too provincial. I could hardly picture her leaving the neighborhood to board the subway to Queens, let alone a plane to another country halfway around the world.

  “She’s your best friend. We must show her a good time,” Changhoon said over dinner one night, with the same dogged determination he mustered for his vocabulary logs and his daily calisthenics (something he did every morning since mandatory military service). He pulled out his phone and furiously punched keys.

  “Maybe not best friend—”

  “Oh! Just heard back from my army buddy Yongsu!” Changhoon scrolled through the message. “He just checked with his co-worker, who checked with his foreigner English-teacher friend, who knows all the hot spots. But that foreigner friend hasn’t gotten back to us yet.”

  “You just sent that text barely one minute ago.”

  Changhoon’s phone buzzed again, bearing messages from other friends. He’d gone through his entire social network in less time than it took me to compose a single text in Korean. Now I understood why Emo would get so impatient when I failed to respond to her immediately.

  “Everyone agrees: We should take her to Itaewon. She’ll probably feel more comfortable around other foreigners.”

  Itaewon. Where Sang had warned me not to go. Where my mother had met my father.

  “Why Nina will want to come to Korea only to see American faces—” I started to say when Changhoon’s cell vibrated once again.

  “Fi-nally! Yongsu’s co-worker’s foreigner friend got back to us.” Changhoon was working himself into a frenzy. I touched his arm. “No need to go obuh.”

  Obuh—presumably from the English “overboard”—was another adopted foreign word that had drifted its way into Korean. It shed its extraneous second half, its harsh Western contours. As it circulated from tongue to tongue, the word grew smooth and round, like a pebble washed up on shore. Now it made its home here, assimilated among its Korean counterparts. But the word was no longer recognizable from its native form.

  But Changhoon was pushing aside his bowl of rice, frenziedly typing notes on his phone with his thumbs. “Here’s where we should take her for round one. . . .”

  * * *

  Nina flew in on the red eye from New York, just as I had. But I had been at my lowest point then. And now I had a new home, a new city. A family. A boyfriend. I was nothing like the Jane I had left behind.

  “Jane-ah,” Emo said on the drive to Incheon Airport. “You know you’re responsible for everything while your friend’s here.”

  I knew what she meant: Don’t let Nina out of your sight.

  Emo took her eyes off the road to give me a stern look. “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  At the airport I almost didn’t recognize Nina when she came through the gate. She wore dark-rinse fitted jeans, a T-shirt with a printed design, and a pair of dark leather sneakers that looked like Sam Surati’s bowling shoes. The old Nina used to wear light blue flared jeans and chunky-heeled Steve Maddens during the day, spandex minidresses by night. That Nina also wore heavy makeup. But instead of the usual dark liner tracing her mouth, her lips were now nude. Gone, too, were the thick gold hoops that hung heavy from her earlobes. Her once iron-straightened hair now framed her face in loose waves.

  “What the . . . !�
�� I said, throwing my arms open to her.

  “Oh, God, please don’t say hipster,” Nina pleaded as we hugged tightly. “I was going more for Banana Republican.”

  When we broke apart, she looked me up and down. “Whoa, what’s with the makeup and heels at three in the morning, or whatever time it is over here?”

  I spun around. “How do I look?”

  “You look!” she said.

  I felt a little slighted that she didn’t actually offer a compliment, but Nina was already turning to greet Emo. She tucked her body stiffly into a bow as Emo held out her hand. Seeing Emo do this, Nina changed course and stuck out her hand as Emo retracted hers and tipped her head slightly into a bow. They laughed.

  “Nice to meet you, Ms. Re,” Nina said. I was surprised by the nervous tinge to her voice. “Thanks for letting me stay with you. I’m sorry you had to come get me in the middle of the night.”

  I wasn’t sure how much English Emo actually understood, but she had a wide smile plastered across her face. She kept nodding and saying, “No purobohlem! No purobohlem!”

  “Oh! Before I forget—” Nina reached into her backpack (Nina with a backpack instead of her usual fake black leather tote?) and pulled out a white pastry box tied with red-and-white string. It was from Gino’s. “They’re cookies. From a very famous bakery in my neighborhood,” she said in slowed-down speech.

  “You know the way to my aunt’s heart,” I told her.

  Emo accepted the box from Nina and took a whiff. “I diet!” she said, but she was smiling.

  “You? Nah!” Nina swatted the air. “You look like a woman.”