In an ironic coincidence, the yuhgwon Jun-Ho chose was the Edelweiss, straight out of The Sound of Music, dark strips of wood hammered over the pollution-stained stucco in an admirable attempt to create an alpine chalet. Inside, it was the usual place, yellow linoleum floors, a pile of bedding with fraying covers in the corner, the free calendar.
We were out of our clothes in a few minutes flat. I had on a new bra, a Korean one I’d purchased at a department store. A regular nylon-and-lace jobbie, but it had a picture of a teddy bear in the middle. Everything in Korea, from drugs to gasoline, had to come with a cute mascot. I had been planning to wear it as a joke, for Doug. I hurled it to the floor.
Jun-Ho didn’t seem surprised to see my body, but I was in awe of his—his torso was completely smooth, like a statue. He had a dusting of hair on his legs, even on his toes. But his chest was some kind of soapstone, lacking pores or follicles. When I leaned in, I smelled nothing, not a whiff of that rank animal odor I always smelled on men back in Minnesota. Smelling Jun-Ho was like smelling a rock.
Jun-Ho kissed me on the forehead, but didn’t attempt to kiss me on the mouth. He even ignored my breasts and went straight to the sexual act, performing it as dutifully as he used to switch from English to Korean during our language exchanges.
I knew I should feel guilt or shame, knowing that I was also sleeping with Doug, who told me he loved me every time he reached orgasm.
When we were done, five minutes later, Jun-Ho put his uniform back on, including his hat, lacing and double-knotting his boots. I lay naked on the bedding, feeling a drop or two of his semen make its way to my thigh.
Am I fertile right now? I thought suddenly, counting back to the day of my last period. Shit.
“I will have to return to my parents’ house soon,” he said. Outside, the shadows had shifted.
My clothes had been discarded in a heap, petals from a daisy. I gathered them up.
“You go, then,” I said, covering myself with the jumble: pants, shirt, bra, underwear. “I don’t want you to be late. I’ll just sit here for a while.”
He smiled his mischievous Jun-Ho grin.
“I cannot leave you, Sarah,” he said. “I must at least accompany you to the subway station, that is the Korean way. When I leave to the army, my mother says she accompany me as far as the front door, only, but then she was going out all the way to the front gate. And then she was going down the alley. I tell her to go back into the house, again and again, but she keeps coming out, farther and farther, until I think she will walk all the way to the base with me.”
We walked back out into the street.
“Now, you know your way around Seoul a little bit, Sarah?” Jun-Ho asked, as we wound our way around the vendors and their wares massed at the mouth of the station: pantyhose tied in bundles, penknives, a tiny toy that did somersaults. We stopped in front of the turnstiles. “Chal ka,” he said. Go in safety. There was a change in the tone and timbre of Jun-Ho’s voice. Then I realized that during our weeks of language exchange, he had always used the formal-polite level of speaking. Now he was speaking in the intimate style, which had its own vocabulary, also dropped the formal sentence endings. Chal ka yo became chal ka. As if it were now understood that we could finish each other’s thoughts.
From far away, the whine of an incoming train.
“Well,” Jun-Ho said. He looked at me, then he bowed. A gentle incline, not the P.T. Barnumesque flourish he had greeted me with that first day at the Balzac. I hesitated, then bowed back, mimicking his posture, the way his head bent first, followed by a slight rounding of the shoulders. Somehow, the gesture of bending toward each other, of exposing the tops of our heads seemed even more intimate than if we’d shared a tongue-smashing soul kiss as a goodbye.
Every time I turned back, he was still there standing, a rock in the river, as other commuters flowed around him. Even as I walked up the stairs, which would cut me off from his view, he remained. I was tempted to scoot back down and see if he was still there, but instead, I let the tide of people carry me up the stairs to the platform.
Five stations into my trip, I noticed that the station-numbers were decreasing. They were supposed to be going up. I was going in the wrong direction.
My first reaction was to panic. But then I remembered that the green line was one sinuous circle. If I stayed on long enough, I would get to where I was going.
At the next station, a man who looked to be about two hundred years old and partially mummified, entered. He was clad in a traditional vest, lavender pants tied at the ankle, and he held a cane as he tottered aboard. I offered my seat, as Koreans always seemed to do for the elderly. He grunted and settled into the sea-green velveteen seat, rested his gnarled hands atop the burled wood of his cane. An anachronism next to men in sharp-cut Western suits, women carrying designer handbags, the kind that would be too fancy even for Dayton’s. But no one gave him a second look.
I held onto the pole and looked out the window—this part of the green line was above ground. I watched the tall buildings with twinkling lights, the red neon crosses atop church steeples just starting to glow in the dark, bowling alleys with gigantic bowling pins mounted on their roofs. Then the train rushed into the blackness of a tunnel.
Back in our subway car, no one was staring at me. I was a part of this scene, this Korean tableau. For the first time, I felt, even if fleetingly, like I belonged somewhere.
KYUNG-SOOK
Seoul
1972
The foreigner’s name was “David.” He was in Korea through an American group he called the “Peace Core” that was somehow supposed to help Koreans. This Peace Core had sent him to the countryside on the mountain seacoast to live for two years, but he hadn’t liked it, so he had quit and come to Seoul to take an English-tutoring job with a wealthy family.
“I was planning on going back to America right away, but I’m glad stayed,” he said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have met you. Eventually I need to get back to America to go to graduate school—I deferred into an ethnomusicology program.”
“Ed-no—”
“Professor school,” he said. “In music.”
Then he said, “Why don’t you come to America with me?”
Kyung-sook could only laugh at this man’s audacity.
“Why not?”
“You stop kidding me, you honey,” Kyung-sook said.
“No, I’m serious,” he said. “In America, you could make a living playing your wonderful flute. If you would just wear your Korean kimono, put your hair up, people would eat you up. You could become famous. There was a group called the Kim Sisters who dressed up in their Korean kimonos and sang ‘Arirang’ on the Ed Sullivan Show—apparently they were a riot.”
Kyung-sook had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
“Americans like all kinds of music,” he said. His voice became fast and excited. “Like the blues, which is a kind of music that has its roots in tribal Africa. It’s secular music, derived from folk traditions—you know, it’s like your Korean opera, where the woman sings and the man plays the drum.”
He was talking about p’ansori—long, lugubrious ballads sung by a lone singer with nothing to accompany her except the faraway sound of the changgo or the puk. Kyung-sook couldn’t believe a foreigner could be so interested in her country’s music.
“Is it true that in order to do that kind of opera, the singer has to sing until her throat bleeds?”
Kyung-sook knew very little about p’ansori, so she only nodded, to acknowledge that she had heard his question.
“That’s fascinating—to be so dedicated to your art that you destroy your body. Now, let me play you a song of the people.”
Yo soy un hombre sincero,
de donde crece la palma.
Y antes de morirme quiero
echar mis versos del alma.
He sang it in a different, mellifluous voice, in words of an English dialect he called “Spanish”: I am a truthful man from th
e land where palms grow/I want to share these poems of my soul before I die./With the poor people of the earth I want to cast my lot …
How beautiful!
There was much she could learn from this man, Kyung-sook thought. How she wished that she could stop the hurtling movement of her life. But eventually, her parents would expect a return visit to the village when the school year ended in July. It was possible they might even have a match for her by then.
Her bright dreams—what had happened to them? She hadn’t anticipated Seoulites’ attitude toward traditional music: that it was unsophisticated and sentimental. To find other folk musicians, she had had to search out ratty bars, where men would raise their eyebrows at her, thinking she was a kisaeng girl. The musicians she found guffawed when she mentioned her dreams of playing solo improvisational pieces of hyang-ak, native music, in front of an audience.
They scoffed, “This isn’t the Chosun Dynasty any more. Koreans want the operas of Verdi and Mozart played on their new electric gadgets. Even the teahouses play only Debussy waltzes these days.”
Just as the stone walls of the Western churches were beginning to edge out the wooden Red Arrow gates of Buddhist temples, Western music was beginning to take over the Korean consciousness. When Kyung-sook saw a place that advertised itself as a “music school,” she would see well-dressed children making their way up the stairs carrying sheets of music and Western violin cases.
Sometimes, the traditional musicians invited Kyung-sook to their flats, where they lived four, five to a room. They ate only cheap fried noodles because that was all they could afford.
“And you have to learn popular tunes, so you can play at the rich people’s parties—to survive,” they told her morosely.
That Kyung-sook could not do. She couldn’t trap her music amidst the lines and stiff wires of this Western scale, submit them to the nasty-sounding conventions, “sharps” and “flats.” When she played a san-jo, she improvised what her spirit moved her to play, which was the very purpose of this kind of music—what in nature was scripted and bound by wires, broken down into a calculus of notes and measures?
“There’s nothing for you here,” the David man said, tugging her down toward his bedding, which he let sit on the floor all day. “Let me take you away from all this.”
Kyung-sook recalled the day she had defiantly sat herself down in front of Seoul Station with her taegum and begun to play. If people would just hear, she believed, they would be reminded of this ancient instrument’s power: how its music was so beautiful it had been said to stop wars and heal disease in the ancient dynasties.
A small, curious crowd had immediately gathered. The younger people stepped over her, huffing about her being in their way. The people who stayed exclaimed how they hadn’t heard that kind of music in a very long time. A granny even wiped her eyes and gave her a whole bag of just-roasted yams to take home. A bent-over old man donated all the coins his daughter-in-law had sent him off with that morning.
As the shadows grew long, people drifted away, and a police officer came up to her and told her there were laws against panhandling. The number of coins she’d received were barely enough for a trolley ride home.
“Better watch out, little sister,” he warned. “Bad things happen to people who are out at night, after the curfew.”
The man looked like he wanted a kiss-u, again.
Kyung-sook wanted to hear the song about the man from the land of green palm trees again. She lifted her flute to her lips and began to play. The man strummed his guitar, their notes weaving together as easily as two small rivers become a larger one. Kyung-sook at last began to relax, letting her mind become tangled in its own melodies, going to a place where there were no worries.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
“Why don’t we do something different?” I said to Doug. “Why don’t we try to find the Doksuri teahouse, the one they keep talking about in our textbook? It’s supposed to be the official teahouse of Chosun University.”
“Pabo-yah,” Bernie leaned in before Doug could answer. “Our textbook is obviously about a hundred years old—it has stuff like ‘don’t take me on a five-won plane ride.’ You couldn’t find a teahouse in this neighborhood if you looked for days. Everything is ka-peh, like the Balzac ka-peh where you go with your army guy.”
I sucked in my breath.
“I didn’t ask you,” I said, and added, knowing he hated his American name, “Ber-nard.”
At the Rainbow, I choked on guilt as well as noodles, so when Doug suggested going “somewhere,” I readily agreed, even though I had music class. To further assuage my guilt, I handed him a key to my room that I’d just had made by an ajuhshi who had a little tent-stand full of keys on the street. I thought he’d have a noisy vibrating machine, like the one at Ace Hardware, but instead, he glanced at my key, sat down, cross-legged and barefoot, took out a blank and began shaping it with a simple metal file, smoking a cigarette, looking as inattentive as if he were trimming his nails on a boring afternoon. But in short order, the key was done, and I went back to the room and tried it—it worked.
“Mi casa es tu casa,” I told Doug. “By the way, what does pabo-yah mean?”
“‘You fool.’”
I sighed. “Why does Bernie hate me so much?”
“He doesn’t hate you, he’s like the fifth grader who throws rocks at the girls he likes. He’s obviously attracted to you, your nice face, your double eyelids—”
“Double eyelids? I’m some kind of lizard?”
“The fold,” he explained. “Only a few Koreans naturally have that. Most people have to get surgery.”
Korean women—and some men—apparently had surgery to make their eyes look more “Western.” In the Korea Herald, I’d read an article about a famous young movie actress who had refused to get the surgery before playing Ch’un Hyang, a Korean folk heroine known for her beauty and steadfastness. The surgery had been mandated by her contract—“Whoever plays Ch’un Hyang has to have beautiful eyes,” a studio executive had been quoted as saying. The actress wasn’t working anymore.
“And your hair,” Doug went on. “I’ve never seen anyone with such thick hair.”
“My hair,” I snorted. “When I was in sixth grade, I wanted a Dorothy Hamill wedge like everyone had. It looked like the bottom of a broom after it was cut.”
Doug laughed.
“Why should you want to look like Dorothy Hamill? She’s not Korean.”
I smiled. The Fabulous Sarah Thorson thought she looked great in a wedge, the gold colors of her hair flowing in creamy waves. In reality, my hair would do only one thing: point to the ground. Even when soaking wet, each strand stayed true to itself, separate as sand. I found myself wishing for a snarl, a comb-stopper that would make me smirk and grimace as I tried to jerk it out, something that would give me a reason to use No More Tangles, like Amanda.
“You’re so strange,” he said. “It’s as if you can’t see yourself.”
Who can truly see themselves? Mirrors, film, only project in two dimensions. We live in a world with three. Maybe the closest was having someone else see you. I was thinking of the time I was caught digging in the cat box.
Christine had asked me to fetch something from the basement, and underneath the pegboard that held the fishing rods, cross-country skis, tennis rackets, I came upon a sand-filled tray. My fear of the dark had kept me out of the basement (four-year-old Amanda somehow used to be able to shut off the light and slam the door, trapping me in eternal darkness with spiders), but now the sand caught my eye with its minty color, how it was level, almost groomed, inviting as a pan of cool water. I stopped, plunged my hand in, liking the way the sand felt dry and granular, not gritty and creepily damp like sandbox sand.
First, I saw her feet. Slim, tanned ankles in white canvas Tretorn tennies, white cotton bootie socks with pom-poms sticking out over the edges.
Her hand pulled my collar as if it were a scruff.
“Dirty!” Christine’s chest reddened over the V-neck of her tennis whites. “Are you crazy? Did you learn that awful habit over there?”
The blue in her eyes, the white of the pearls circling the base of her neck. She looked improbably beautiful, even as she was screaming at me. How was I to know that the Persians peed and crapped into this box? I thought they were creatures that didn’t go at all; I saw no evidence of them going outside, like our neighbor’s black lab, Captain Midnight, who was always crouching around, tail in a question-mark, leaving cigar-shaped sticks all over our yard.
“Look at me,” she said, pulling us nose-to-nose. “You. Do. Not. Dig. In. The. Cat. Box.”
Her irises expanded and contracted, a camera’s shutter clicking. Flash-frozen in her gaze, I saw her seeing me: a dark, foreign object, denizen of the basement, defiler of the cat toilet.
“You hate me!” I wanted to scream.
Then she swept a strand of blond hair from her eyes. Her eyes their normal cerulean blue. Her lips curved up in a smile.
“Let’s go wash our hands, honey. Why, it’s almost time for lunch, isn’t it?” She paused to carefully enclose the round head of her tennis racket into a square, wooden press, even let me, slowly, fumblingly tighten the screws.
Doug unrolled the cotton yo piled in the corner and pulled me down on it as if it were a blanket on the beach.
“I called the TV station, Sejong Broadcasting, by the way,” he said, into my hair.
“You mean Missing Persons?” I yelped, sitting up.
“Yup. The show’s actually called The Search for Missing Persons—dramatic, eh?”
“What happened?”
“They’re very busy. So many people have someone missing in their lives.”
“Oh.”
“So I told them you’re American, only here until the end of the summer. I called and asked them again and again. Oh, maybe fifteen times in the last two days.”
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