Super Sad True Love Story

by Gary Shteyngart

  I wanted to get up and address the audience. “You have nothing to be ashamed of,” I would say. “You are decent people. You are trying. Life is very difficult. If there is a burden on your heart, it will not be lifted here. Do not throw away the good. Take pride in the good. You are better than this angry man. You are better than Jesus Christ.”

  And then I would add: “We Jews, we thought all this stuff up, we invented this Big Lie from which all Christianity, all Western civilization, has sprung, because we too were ashamed. So much shame. The shame of being overpowered by stronger nations. The endless martyrdom. The wailing at the ancestors’ graves. We could have done more for them! We let them down! The Second Temple burned. Korea burned. Our grandparents burned. So much shame! Get up off your knees. Do not throw away your heart. Keep your heart. Your heart is all that matters. Throw away your shame! Throw away your modesty! Throw away your ancestors! Throw away your fathers and the self-appointed fathers that claim to be stewards of God. Throw away your shyness and the anger that lies just a few inches beneath. Do not believe the Judeo-Christian lie! Accept your thoughts! Accept your desires! Accept the truth! And if there is more than one truth, then learn to do the difficult work—learn to choose. You are good enough, you are human enough, to choose!”

  I was so deep in my own rage, a rage that might have been better summed up with the simple plea “Dr. Park, please do not hit your wife and daughters,” that I had not noticed that the worshippers around me had sprung to their feet and were belting out “The Rose of Sharon.” As it turned out, this was the last chapter of the Sinners’ Crusade. My gaze skirted that of a fellow Hebrew itching to make his way out of there, away from the in-laws, and into his honey’s arms. Tenderly, angrily, Jesus was pleading for our very souls, but we were too tired, too hungry, to hear him out, too hungry even to complete Reverend Suk’s quick sermon quiz (“Only for fun, not graded!”), which the young people in sashes were passing down the rows.

  We bowed our way out of Madison Square Garden and adjourned nearby to a new restaurant on 35th Street that specialized in nakji bokum, an octopus-tentacle dish inflamed with pepper paste and chili powder, among many other forms of debilitating heat. “Maybe too spicy for you?” Eunice’s mother said, the usual question asked of the white.

  “I’ve eaten this many times before,” I said. “It’s yummy.” Mrs. Park looked at me with great suspicion.

  We were taken to an empty little room where we were to remove our shoes and cluster, cross-legged, around a table. I realized, with toilet-inducing horror, that one of my socks featured a giant bull’s-eye of a hole, through which my pale, milky flesh could be scrutinized by all. I turned to Eunice with a why-didn’t-you-tell-me look, but she was too scared by the collision of her two worlds to notice my urgent stare. She threw off her pointy church shoes and made herself uncomfortable by the table. The grown-ups were clustered around one side of the table; Eunice and Sally faced us meekly from the other. Mrs. Park began to order, but her husband stopped her, unleashing a series of grunts at a pimply young waiter with a slick parabola of hair. A bottle of soju, the Korean alcohol, was immediately presented to Eunice’s father. I tried to reach over and pour it for him, as the young are supposed to serve the old in this culture (as if the old are really any better than the rest of us, not merely closer to extinction), but he forcefully moved my hand away and did it himself. He picked up my glass, put it in front of him, and, with a precise, calibrated spill, topped me off. Then, with one index finger, he moved the glass in my direction. “Oh, thank you,” I said. I waved the bottle toward Eunice and Sally. “Anybody want some of this good stuff?” They averted their eyes. Dr. Park swallowed his medicine without a word.

  “Well, then,” I said. “I’ve got to say, having Eunice as a roommate has been really great this past week, with all that’s been going—”

  “Hee-young!” Dr. Park ejaculated at Sally. “How are your studies?”

  Sally blushed. A cube of cool, white radish slipped out from between her chopsticks. “I,” she said. “I—”

  “I, I,” Dr. Park mimicked. He turned to me briefly as if I were his co-conspirator. I smiled at him, finding it impossible to ignore any gestures from this man, even if it meant siding with him against the innocent women at the table. That’s what tyrants can do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy. “All that money for Elderbird, for Barnard, and for what?” the doctor said. “They have nothing to say. This one protests, this one spends my money.” He spoke with the hint of a British accent, acquired during a residency in Manchester. The quality of his speech scared me all the more. He was a perfect little man, towering above us in his own special way.

  “Actually,” I said, “this is not a good time for speaking and writing. Younger people express themselves in different ways.”

  “Yes, yes.” Mrs. Park nodded at me, one tiny hand held up before her equally minuscule face, blushing like her daughters, the other hovering nervously over her rice. “It is time we live in,” she said. “These are final times.” And then to her daughters: “Daddy only want best. You listen to him.”

  I ignored the scary biblical reference and continued to praise the woman I loved. “It may surprise you to know that Eunice is actually a great speaker of sentences. Recently we discussed—”

  Dr. Park began to speak lowly, and in Korean, at Sally and Eunice. He spoke for twenty minutes from behind his dark glasses, stopping only to refill his glass and to knock it back within the space of a second. They sat there and blushed, looking at each other occasionally, each seeing how the other was taking her punishment. No one ate anything, except for me. I was hungry in a way I had never been, and felt myself growing faint, hypoglycemic. The waiters came, bearing immensities of smoking, steaming cuisine. A large pot of baby octopus came my way, hot and sweet, surrounded by ddok, a tubular rice cake that soaked up the spices like a sponge. I felt anxious with so much spice in my mouth, as words continued to spill out of Dr. Park’s. I reached for a plate of pickles and egg custard to cool me down; the flavors of the squid, the green onions, the chili peppers, the orange-streaked onions soaked in sesame oil built in intensity. I couldn’t stop eating. I tried to reach for the soju bottle, but Dr. Park swatted away my hand and poured my drink himself, while continuing to let loose at his tiny daughters across the wide wooden gulf of the table.

  I thought I heard the word hananim, which I know means “God” in Korean, and the deeply insulting term michi-nneyun, which made Eunice exhale in such a sad, hurt, elongated, final way, it made me wonder if she would ever be capable of replacing that breath. Mrs. Park’s hand continued to hover over her metallic rice bowl, occasionally touching its rim. In my experience, it was very unusual for Koreans to sit before food and not partake. I closed my eyes and let the lining of my mouth turn into pure heat. I floated over the table and out into the dense midtown air. I wished I were stronger and could help Eunice, or at least take my place in front of her and absorb some of the pain. I wanted to bury my face in the warmth of her hair, the musk and the oils of it, because it was home to me. Because I knew she was too small in body and spirit, too worshipful of her family and the idea of her family, to accept this kind of hurt alone. Was this why she had run off to Rome, learned Italian, found someone pliable and kind, if unbeautiful, to be her companion, tried to become a different person? But one can never outrun the Dr. Parks of the world. Joshie had asked us to keep a diary because the mechanicals of our brains were constantly changing and over time we were transforming into entirely different people. But that’s what I wanted for Eunice, for the synapses dedicated to responding to her father to wither and be reborn, to be rededicated to someone who loved her unconditionally.

  Something was drawing me back, a breath of coolness across my brow. When I opened my eyes, I saw Eunice looking at me, pleadingly, shyly, like the first time I saw her in Rome, talking to that ridiculous sculptor. How I loved her then, and how I loved her now. Rarely c
ould affection be both so instant and so deep. We locked eyes for a millisecond, but it was enough time to download a million bits of sympathy, for me to tell her, Soon you will be home and in my arms and the world will reconfigure itself around you and there will be enough compassion for you to feel scared by how much I care for you. Meanwhile, Dr. Park was landing the plane of his soliloquy. The fight was leaving his body. He spat a few more things, then became quiet, so quiet that he appeared to have deflated before my eyes, leaving behind only the dense, poisoned marrow of those whose entire lives are reduced to the acts of hurting and being hurt. Who had done what to him, I wondered, or was it just the usual neurotransmitters run amok? Dr. Park inhaled another glass of soju and then leaned into the octopus and began to push large amounts of it into his mouth. The girls and Mrs. Park started to eat as well, and within five intense moments all the food was gone.

  “So, Lenny,” Mrs. Park said, as if nothing had happened, “Eunice tell me you have good job science.”

  Dr. Park snorted.

  I wanted to build up my status with the Parks, but didn’t want to push my position at Post-Human Services too much, because I knew that devout Christians were not enamored of the concept of eternal life here on earth, which made their celestial dreams pitifully invalid.

  “I work for a division of Staatling-Wapachung,” I said. “You might have seen some of our buildings going up in New York. That’s Staatling Property. And then there’s Wapachung Contingency, which is a huge security firm. Property and security and life extension I guess are the three things that we do. All very important in a time of crisis.”

  I went on in that vein for a while, careful to be nonpolitical, hewing to my parents’ FoxLiberty-Prime conservatism. Sometimes when I spoke of Wapachung Contingency, Sally would look at me with ill-concealed annoyance, as if she was not overly enamored of my employer, but even in her displeasure she was graceful and mild, and I wanted to get rid of her parents and talk directly to her, debate her in a chummy, casual way. “Of course,” I was saying to her father, “I am not a doctor, a man of science, in the way that you are, sir. What I try to do is synthesize commerce and—”

  Dr. Park pointed his index finger at my foot, the white flesh peeking out from within the hole of my sock like a shameful bit of burlesque. “I see,” he said, “that you have either a tissue or bone growth at the base of your metatarsophalangeal joint. Maybe the beginning of a bunion. You should buy different footwear, shoes that don’t crowd the toes. This is a real pathology that you should take care of, because over time your only option will be surgery.” He turned toward Eunice, who nodded.

  “New shoes,” she said.

  “Take care of each other in difficult time,” Mrs. Park said. “Good roommates, okay?”

  “Thank you,” I said. I wanted to return to my career, to how I was going to help Eunice weather the uncertainty ahead, but the screen over the ticket window had just dropped shut. “Um.”

  Mrs. Park took out an old äppärät and set it on the table between a newly arrived dish of baby ferns and one of salted beef. “Look,” she said to Eunice and Sally. “Video of Myong-hee her mother just sent.” To me she said: “Cousin from Topanga.”

  An Asian girl of no more than three ran toward the camera against a crowded background of cheap Californian townhouses and an aquamarine pool. She was wearing a bathing suit festooned with rubber daisies and wore a profoundly genuine smile across her broad face. “Hi, Eunice Emo. Hi, Sally Emo,” she shouted at the screen. “I miss you, Eunice Emo,” the girl yelled, showing us the full array of her nubby teeth.

  “Look,” Mrs. Park said. “She has a little bit of rice on top her eye.” There was a grain of something above her brow. Everyone laughed, Dr. Park included, who said a few words in Korean, the first approving words of the evening, the first time his jaw had been unclenched, the war anthem silenced, the forward battalion called to barracks. Eunice was wiping her eyes, and I realized she wasn’t laughing. She uncrossed her legs, sprang from the table in one motion, and ran from the room in bare feet. I started to get up to follow her, but Mrs. Park only said: “She miss her cousin in California. Don’t worry.”

  But I knew it wasn’t just the cute girl on the screen that had made Eunice cry. It was her father laughing, being kind, the family momentarily loving and intact—a cruel side trip into the impossible, an alternate history. The dinner was over. The waiters were clearing the table with resignation and without a word. I knew that, according to tradition, I had to allow Dr. Park to pay for the meal, but I went into my äppärät and transferred him three hundred yuan, the total of the bill, out of an unnamed account. I did not want his money. Even if my dreams were realized and I would marry Eunice someday, Dr. Park would always remain to me a stranger. After thirty-nine years of being alive, I had forgiven my own parents for not knowing how to care for a child, but that was the depth of my forgiveness.

  I’LL LOVE HIM EVEN MORE

  FROM THE GLOBALTEENS ACCOUNT OF EUNICE PARK

  JULY 10

  EUNI-TARD TO CHUNG.WON.PARK

  Mom, you haven’t written me back in a while. Are you still mad about Lenny? Stop worrying about the Mystery, okay? Worry about Sally instead. You have to watch her weight. Don’t let her order “peejah.” Make only food with lots of vegetables. I’m going to buy her some nice summer shoes from FootsieGalore, the kind she can wear to interviews too.

  I’m too busy looking for Retail jobs to take the LSAT prep right now, but definately next summer. The miscellaneous charge on AlliedCVS must be this new “minimum aggregate APR” they’re charging these days. It means we’ll have to pay a little less for the monthly charge but we have to pay this new charge immediately or it gets tacked on to the principal, which then turns into a maximum aggregate, which will probably mean another six thousand or more in the next two billing cycles. I think it’s time to switch out of AlliedWaste anyway and LandOLakes is running some special promotional rates this month although you have to borrow an extra ten thousand just to “switch in.” I guess we should at least “do the math” and check it out.

  EUNI-TARD TO GRILLBITCH:

  Dear Precious Pony,

  Hello out there in TV land! Oy. I guess I’ve been streaming too many old shows with Lenny. Weird. So now my mom is mad at me too. Dinner with la famiglia was a disaster, as you rightfully predicted. Why on earth did Lenny think he could charm my parents? You know, he is so FULL of himself sometimes. He has this American white guy thing where life is always fair in the end, and nice guys are respected for being nice, and everything is just HONKY-dory (get it?). He went on and on about how I can form sentences and how I always talk about taking care of Sally, and meanwhile my father is just flexing his fist under the table. Believe me, that flexed fist was all Sally and I could think about while old Len went on his little dietribe.

  I know his heart is in the right place. It’s always in the right place. But after a while, who cares, right? How can he not understand me? It’s like he doesn’t take time to put two and two together. He promised he would read less and spend more time taking care of our apartment, but his head is all caught up in these texts. I looked up War and Peace and it’s about this guy Pierre who fights in France, and all this terrible stuff happens to him, but in the end because of his charm he gets to be with this girl he really loves, and who really loves him even though she cheated on him. That’s Lenny’s view on life in a nutshell, that in the end niceness and smartness always win.

  But the worst was my mother. She just went OFF on me. Like, yeh, nuh moo heh ta. You could do so much better. He’s old, he’s unattractive, his skin looks unhealthy, he’s got bad feet, he’s not as tall as you said he was, he makes 25,000 yuan a month. If you want to date someone older, there’s this gemologist from Palisades who makes close to a million a year and daddy says the Post Human place Lenny works for is a total scam and is going to fall apart completely. Mom kept teening me “Keep options open, keep options open.”

  I tried not to
be hurt, but it was impossible. It’s like in the same way Lenny doesn’t see me, they don’t see HIM. To them he’s just this unattractive, not-rich person with a hole in his sock (I thought I was honestly going to kill him for that).

  But then we went home and I got that sucky message from my mom and then I just started to feel like I loved Lenny even more. Like the more she detested him, the more I loved him. He was so tired from the dinner and the stupid church service, he just conked out and fell asleep on the couch and he even snored like he never does. He had obviously put so much of himself out there, my sweet, caring tuna-brain, he had tried so hard as he does to be nice to my parents and to defend me against my asswipe of a dad, and it had just taken everything out of him. And I thought, if someone can’t recognize what a good man he is then what good are they to me? I guess what I’m saying is I’m not as turned off by Lenny’s vulnerabilities anymore and I have my cuh-ragee mom to thank for that epiphany. That’s the thing with Lenny, if you spend time with him you realize he’s just very yamjanae. I think that’s a very Korean thing, to be able to sense someone so sweet and gentle and appreciate him for who he is.

  Sorry to blah blah blah for so long. Things are really pretty good overall. We’ve been hanging out and talking and doing lots of fun stuff together. We saw some Images in a gallery and had some okay burgers at bürgr in Bushwick (why can’t they have In-N-Out here in New York?). We had unprotected sex and he told me he could see us having a baby. I was like: WHAT??? But it kind of made sense. I WANT to have a baby with him, even if things are really bad in the world. I think I’d be the happiest fairy in the forest if we were a real family someday. Oh, and then we went to this Sri Lankan place for dinner and Lacy Twaät was sitting next to us. Remember she used to do all those gagging and ass-to-mouth porns when we were kids? She was wearing a size two Parakkeet blazer with pearls and sheer Onionskin jeans which she can totally pull off even at her age. Overall, a very classy, refined ass hookah look. And her date was this older Germanic-looking gentleman, very handsome.