by Paul Yoon
“Even so, it is beautiful,” she said, and he responded, “Yes, we saw it before,” and she tilted her head, studying him. “We did,” she said. “Just as beautiful as then. That’s what I meant.”
That evening, he and Isun fought. They had decided to remain in the hotel room rather than go to a restaurant. They would rest, eat in. On the dresser was a celadon vase Isun had bought that afternoon from a potter in the town. It was slim, with a long neck, and incised with images of egrets in flight. “To match the other one,” she said, reminding him of their first purchase together those years ago when they first came here. He smiled in response. She turned on the television and they lay in bed watching a show about movie stars. But soon Taeho’s attention drifted and he stood and approached the window. His image and Isun’s on the bed was transposed onto the glass, which gave way to a view of the sea and the veranda below where the tourists were dining. And for the first time in many months he recalled the Thai waitress and what she had shared. He thought of the dead, of yearning. He thought of a photograph, the glimpse of a body beside a hotel window, of coastal roads and motorbikes, of watchmen along a high ridge, and the images came to him one after another with a sense of inevitability.
“You’re fidgeting,” Isun called.
“It isn’t very interesting,” he said.
“Neither are you,” she said.
He looked at her, stunned. She was sitting with her back against the headboard. She brought a pillow to her chest and hugged it, facing the television. She had meant it as a joke, she said. She rolled her eyes. He stared at her face and saw the age there, the weathering, what time did and what it had left to do. And then he, as though from a great distance, watched his body approach her and he heard his voice say, “Look at me.” He slammed his open palm against the mattress and he watched her jump and retreat to the wall, clutching the pillow. He cursed her. Cursed her and her body and her work and how dull she was and how it was all her fault and the more he spoke the more her face seemed to return to him, as if it had faded, and he recognized the woman he had known and then he fell silent.
He left her there and walked through a field that led to the woods and the coastal mountains, the hotel receding behind him. As he walked farther, he heard the constant push of water approaching land. He smelled the sea. The clouds were fluorescent. And when it was too cold he hurried back and watched the television in the lobby. A group of tourists from the mainland had gathered in front of the elevators, some of them tired, others drunk, stumbling, loud. Up above, the ceiling was painted to resemble the morning sky. He thought it unbearable. He did not know what had made him do such a thing. His chest closed, then, slowly, opened. He concentrated on his breathing.
He did not return until late, Isun already asleep. He lay beside her. She moved toward him, dreaming, and he held her and attempted to match his breathing with hers. In this way, he, too, slept.
They never spoke of it. They never would. He was forgiven when she took his arm the following day as they descended the elevator. She was forgiven when he helped her with her coat. They hired a guide who took them to Tamra Mountain. And upon their return at dusk they stood out on the veranda of the hotel. The winds were slow, colors fading. He looked at his wife. Seven years ago they had married. And through it he had chosen a life. Or one came to him. And there were others he had left and were now too far in the distance for him to see anymore. He could no longer remember what they were. But he was sure they had existed. Convinced of it.
They leaned against the stone wall, looking down at a golf course and the faraway mountains. Isun shivered and he asked whether they should return indoors. They could walk through the hotel and view the shops, he said, then head up to the room. He took her arm. “Come,” he said, but she would not move. Her face was brilliant against the deep light of the setting sun and he saw the beauty there, its freshness, like a stranger’s. There were many years ahead of them.
She spoke without looking at him. She said, “Do you think we ought to have gone to Phuket?”
It was their honeymoon she was referring to. And then her eyes welled and she held her gaze on the mountains and the sea, refusing to acknowledge the clear lines, like strips of glass, that fell down her cheeks.
“Isun,” he said, and brought his hand to her face but she waved it away and laughed quickly, as if she had been reminded of something and only now remembered. “I must be tired,” she said.
“You’ll catch a cold.” He wrapped his arm around her shoulder. How small her body was. How thin. And the beauty he saw a moment before was all of a sudden gone, replaced by a weariness. There was always what you expected, wasn’t there? he thought. There was always that. Even when you knew it was no longer there, it never went away, this feeling. That was faith.
“I’m sorry, Taeho,” she said. “It’s nice to get away. We seem very far from the city, don’t we? I am enjoying it. A little holiday. And I am sorry if I ruined it.” She smiled at him and placed her arms across her stomach. “I’m really all right,” she said. “I am now. Truly.”
“I do love you,” he told her, and believed it.
Indoors, they looked about the lobby, up at the painted sky and the looming chandeliers, dozens of them in a single row. “It’s a much prettier hotel,” she whispered to Taeho. “Much prettier than mine.” Behind the reception desk, the faces of clocks showed what time it was across the globe. It was five in the evening on the island. An hour had passed since his birthday. He had not realized it. Another year had gone.
In the time that followed their visit to the southern coast, Taeho remained late in the offices, his desire to return home diminishing. He grew less concerned with his work as well. Instead, he read the newspaper or a book on the couch. He listened to the building empty, the cleaners come in to vacuum. He took off his shoes. Sometimes he stood by the window and looked out at the speckled city and the blinking airplanes, growing larger as they descended. Fishermen returned to the coast. Just a few minutes, he would tell himself, but when he looked at his watch again an hour had passed.
It grew colder. Even so he walked to the harbor and waited for the sun to set and the lanterns under the arches to glow. He watched pedestrians and looked at their faces and thought of a story for each of them. He pictured them as ghosts, translucent and silent. He thought of his parents who were no longer living but had, in life, formed their own happiness, over time, and how much he had wept in their passing not only out of grief—he understood now—but because they took with them everything that was not told and shared, knowledge that he would never learn or discover. He considered the possibility that there were many kinds of love and as you experienced one, you felt the absence of all the others. He thought of a city perpetually opening onto the sea.
And it was on one of these nights that he saw, among the crowd on the boardwalk, the Thai waitress. Several months had gone by since he looked for her. It had snowed the previous evening, the first of that season, and it covered the city and spread out along the beach where a group of children were building miniature snowmen, an army of them, scattered about the coast. She leaned against a wooden arch and was watching them. She wore a long heavy coat and a scarf. Her hair was covered by a striped wool hat. She held a cup of ice cream, her breath blooming white. He approached her and stood beside her, looking out at the wharf and the moored boats. “It’s you,” he said.
She looked up at him casually, as though she had seen him every day. She appeared tired. She held up the cup, licking the spoon. “Pistachio,” she said. “My favorite.”
He listened to her voice and realized it sounded nothing like what he remembered. It was less clean, less fluid.
“I looked for you,” he said. “Months ago. I went back. They told me you had left.” He did not mention the money, although it seemed she knew what he meant, the way she shifted her weight from one leg to another and avoided his eyes. The steam from a vendor’s stall shrouded them for a moment before the wind took it away. “And
you’re well?” Taeho said, and did not know what more to say.
He tried to remember the questions he had for her. He wanted to know whether she had been in the accident, too. Or whether she had witnessed it. He wanted to know why she had, of all places, come here. Whether she had left or had run away. There were more. He tried to remember them all but was unable to. There seemed to be so many. And the more he attempted to recall them the less urgent they became. As though these weren’t the questions he wanted to ask at all, as though the one language he knew had now failed him.
He followed the passage of a distant boat on the horizon. The vessel moved fast, like a satellite, and he imagined everyone he had ever known and had yet to meet aboard it, forever circling this earth.
“Phuket,” he said. “I will go there.” He looked at the girl. She was just a child.
“But everyone’s coming here,” she said, smiling briefly. Dusk was settling and the lanterns began to light, fogged by the snow. The girl pointed up at them. “Where I am from,” she said, “we light a lantern for every missing sailor and hang it in front of our homes. For them to find us. And for them to know that we are waiting.”
She stepped closer to him. Her skin was as pale as he remembered. She raised her hand and touched his cheek. It lasted only for a moment. Her fingers were cold. She retreated and smiled again. “So strange,” she said.
Did you love him? he wanted to say. Was there at least that?
And no matter how much he did not want her to leave, she did, backing away and then turning. He stepped forward to follow her but did not go any farther. He stood beside the wooden arch and watched as the girl moved through the crowd, past the pedestrians and the merchants, the sea woman and the noodle maker, still bickering. He could still distinguish her hat. On occasion she lifted a spoonful of ice cream to her lips. Then she was gone. A wind came and raised the settled snow once more. The flakes glowed against the lights and on the shore they fell again upon all the children carrying their snowmen into the water.
When Taeho opened the door to his apartment he found the rooms dark and the curtains open. The city shone silver onto the wooden floor. Out the window the stars were clear and vast. Leaving the lights off, he crossed the room and sat down on the couch. Beside him, on a small table, lay the guidebook he had taken from the library. He had brought it home months ago and had forgotten about it. Under the city lights he examined the pictures again. He could no longer distinguish the body at the window, as if he had dreamt it. He closed the book and listened to the muted sound of an airplane ascending.
Against a wall, on a shelf, stood a pair of slim celadon vases, the ones he and Isun had bought, seven years apart. In that dark he studied their form and design, their long necks. He remembered that there had been a potter in his family, a distant relative. The man lived on the mainland and Taeho’s parents would, every year, receive a parcel from him. They let Taeho open the packages and he sifted through the straw to reveal a single dish or a bowl, trays and tea cups. Each one he dusted with a cloth and his father would carry him as he placed the gifts all throughout the house. And on nights when he could not sleep he spent the hours staring into the images depicted on their surfaces, the white willows, the curve of a river, a forest.
Taeho had not thought of the potter in many years. They had never met. One day, the parcels stopped coming. He was unaware if the man had children.
He heard the lock of the door twist. And then the room was flooded with the brightness of the hallway and the view from the window dimmed, replaced by a reflection of Isun’s silhouette. She gasped, startled. “Taeho?” she said. He raised his arm at her reflection and waved slightly. She shut the door. Her heels clicked against the floor as she approached him. For a moment she remained standing with her fingers on the armrest of the couch, and then she sat beside him and crossed her legs. He smelled liquor on her breath. “New coat?” he said.
She fingered its lapels. The coat was tweed, the color red. She said yes, then paused. It was as though she wanted to say more but could not.
He turned to her. He said, “If you ever go away, I will remember your face.”
“Taeho,” she said.
“And I will look for it.”
“Taeho, stop.”
“Among a thousand faces. There will be yours. And mine. And we will look for each other. We will be strong. We will be heroic.”
He said nothing more. They remained on the couch, facing the window, and listened to each other breathing. They were each waiting for the other to speak. In silence she reached for him and rested her head on his shoulder, and in this way they watched the passing of evening, the traffic on the roads, the faint shapes of bodies moving through rooms. Buildings faded. Everywhere there was snow. In the far distance the flash of a lighthouse swung across the sea and then stilled.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
“Once the Shore” was inspired by the tragedy involving the Japanese fishing vessel, Ehime Maru; certain details of this story were gathered from various sources pertaining to Cheju/Jeju Island. “Among the Wreckage” is based on the U.S. bombing that occurred in the vicinity of Dok Island (Dokdo) in the summer of 1948. Some of the details in “So That They Do Not Hear Us” were taken from a February 2005 New York Times article by Norimitsu Onishi. The tale of the farmer and the maiden in “The Woodcarver’s Daughter” is loosely derived from the story “The Woodcutter and the Heavenly Maiden” in Korean Folk and Fairy Tales, by Suzanne Crowder Han (Hollym, 1991); the cave of offerings is a variation on the village shrines depicted in Myths of Korea, by Seo Dae-seok and Peter H. Lee (Jimoondang Publishing Company, 2000). The last line of “The Hanging Lanterns of Ido” was inspired by the last line of the story “Island” by Alistair MacLeod in Island: The Complete Stories (Norton, 2001). Also indispensable was: Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History by Bruce Cumings (Norton, 1997).
Although I have used historical events and the descriptions of actual islands in South Korea to form Solla Island, I have altered history, geography, custom, and culture to suit the purposes of these fictions. The name of the island and some of the names of the characters are from my imagination. As for the spelling of Korean names and places, I have mostly used the McCune-Reischauer system and the revised Romanization system; in some instances I disregarded both.
I share this book with all my friends and teachers and colleagues throughout the years.
Thank you to the editors of the journals where these fictions were first published; to Ralph Sneeden at Phillips Exeter Academy and Anne Greene at Wesleyan University; to the Ledig House Writer’s Colony, where this book started, and to Bill Clegg; to PEN/New England, Grub Street, and the St. Botolph Club Foundation. To Yu Young-nan and Chi-Young Kim. To Russell Perreault, Reed Maroc, Nayon Cho, and Vintage Books; to Giulia Melucci and Harper’s Magazine; to Michael Collier, Jennifer Grotz, Noreen Cargill, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. To Percival Everett, Amy Hempel, Andrew Sean Greer, Alexander Chee, and Eliza Griswold. To Benjamin Percy, Bret Anthony Johnston, and Josh Weil. To Kevin Doane, Nick Singer, and Adam Sadler. To Susannah Geltman. To Melanie Rehak and Noah Isenberg. To Calder Gillin and Jaime Gross. And to Alexandra Smith.
I am especially grateful to Ann Patchett, Katrina Kenison, Andrea Barrett, Stacey Swann, Jill Meyers, Michael Lowenthal, Scott Heim, and Robin Lippincott.
To Mitchell Waters at Curtis Brown, Ltd. To Sarah Gorham, Kirby Gann, Nickole Brown, and Jennifer Woods at Sarabande Books.
To Don Lee for his generosity. To Hannah Tinti for taking a chance.
To my great friend Ethan Rutherford.
And to Laura van den Berg, who was beside me from the first word to the last.
PY
THE AUTHOR
Paul Yoon was born in New York City. His fiction has appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications. Once the Shore is his first book.
© 2009 by Paul Yoon
THIRD PRINTING
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No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to:Managing Editor
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yoon, Paul.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-932-51190-1
1. Korea—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3625.O54O53 2009
813′.6—dc22
2008019331
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This project is supported in part by an award from The National Endowment for the Arts.