by Asia Olanna
An industrial smoke, the kind you might find in a factory of some sorts, an explosion maybe.
A huge bombing.
HENRIETTA
April 2nd would forever be remembered in world history as the bloodiest event in Korean history.
Okay, maybe not as big as some of the wars gone past.
But shit, there were hundreds of people who died in the bombing—what was called the Great Massacre later on.
From CNN to Fox News, you could see all of the figureheads talking and talking about the bloodiness, the ruthlessness, and the surprise.
No one expected a bombing in the middle of a concert anywhere. Especially Jong-soo’s, who had been a beloved popstar and singer for some time.
Whenever you turned on to the Korean channels, there were people crying, people clutching their children, people yelling about the travesty, “how anybody could do such a thing like this…”
In days that followed, a bunch of news article detailed the evidence of what had happened.
Who caused the bombing?
Speculation indicated terrorists of some sort. Terrorists from the Middle East, but that seemed like too easy a target.
Everyone in those days wanted to blame the Middle East for everything.
And it was unlikely.
The Far East did not have the same kind of social capital other countries like the United States did. It didn’t really make much sense to target Korea—what message would there be to spread? To send?
There wasn’t any.
Korea wasn’t even on the map for a terrorist’s mind. In other words: there was little to gain in Korea, politically or otherwise.
Then rumors swirled about a plot coming out of Malaysia or Indonesia, which could make more sense, if you really stretched the facts.
It had almost 0 tensions between any of those countries and Korea.
Really? Malaysia and Korea? Indonesia and Korea? Were people this ignorant in the West? Seriously, Korea and those countries had not much of history at all together.
At least not in the same vein like Japan and Korea, or China and Korea, or even the Philippines and Korea.
Some even speculated the people responsible for the Great Massacre were those who made Malaysia Airline planes disappear.
Which sounded plausible, but still ridiculous. No evidence had shown up from the Malaysia Airline planes, so how could we possibly say anything about the bombings and Korea? That didn’t makes sense one bit either.
Especially with all of the evidence laying around at the concert grounds. The wreckage of bombs and body parts. Gruesome but important: some of those body parts could be used to identify people. And those people could lead us back to identities.
Killers.
Within the weeks leading up to my departure, there came more gossip about diplomats plotting this and that, and how there wasn’t enough support from the Chinese and Japanese governments with respect to aid. Even the United States started feeling the heat.
In total, there were over eight-hundred deaths.
The actual number wasn’t found until several weeks later, until the very final week of my departure, somewhere in June. I remember sitting on my bed, clutching my phone, Googling all sorts of information. Trying to shore up my ignorance: what was the situation like now? I had all the major status updates on my iPhone, apps and other downloadables to guide me forward.
I wasn’t going to go abroad blindly.
Some people might’ve thought me reactionary, but I was just looking out for my own safety. What could I possibly do besides that? Eight hundred people? Could you even fathom that many? It was a huge number, a loss that would be felt for centuries to come. It would be on headlines for years, decades. People would write articles about it and speculate all the way to their graves.
I didn’t want to go there and end up 6 feet under.
Then again, I did feel ridiculous.
I mean, a country like Korea is supposed to be safe. It rose out of poverty, became a powerful nation in its own right, commanding wages higher than any of the neighboring nations.
They lifted their people out and up into one of the highest standards of living on planet earth. Wasn’t that something to be proud of! It was indeed.
And now I had to look at them seriously. And the news was not telling me good things.
In the countryside, violence was beginning to erupt.
A strange sort of reversal in their fortunes.
Political pundits blamed others for not being Christian enough. Others blamed the government for not enforcing their laws strictly—although I don’t know how much stricter they could be, considering Korea was already fairly similar to the United States.
When it finally came to light that there were rival gangs fighting one another, my heart sort of fluttered, did a somersault, and then died a little.
A gang? All of this bloodshed over a gang fight?
It turns out a couple of rival gangs were warring, fighting over their turf, their territories, and their grudges. Nothing out of the norm, except for the amount of bloodshed.
I did wonder if Jong-soo Jeup had made it out alive.
There were rumors that he was in hiding, although no one knew where. The police was in disarray, not exactly getting all of the prime information they needed to successfully track down missing persons. As time went on, the rumors grew in number. They proliferated across the Internet, going up on blogs, on message boards, and YouTube.
Even tumblr started having feuds between superfans about what had happened to Jong-soo.
Most of America remained silent as usual though. In only a couple of weeks, people for about what had happened.
Was I even going to meet him now? How was the entire ordeal with Higher Museum going to work? They contacted me in the weeks before my departure, but they still never talked to me over the phone.
I chalked it off to them being scared about using their English on me. I had heard about foreigners being shy when speaking to native Anglophones.
But still. Why hadn’t they called me?
And why would a popstar be involved in all of this? I didn’t understand what they had to gain by targeting him.
Was it for publicity?
Because if it was, they surely didn’t get any. Maybe they wanted street cred, an underground way of approval. From one network to the other, like a secret handshake, they could talk about the bombing at Jong-soo’s concert for years. Longer than the media would.
It disgusted me to think he was somewhere in a hospital, laying prone, hurt.
I thought about him and his chiseled body. His tank top and his muscles. The way his aquiline nose was so sharp and defined—ooh, girl, I wanted to play nurse immediately. Fly over there and find him and help him back onto his feet.
God, he surely would need help, wouldn’t he?
But then I wondered if there was even a point of going to Korea. I know it sounds selfish, but at the time I had to make plans and think about my own safety.
However, I had just quit my job and couldn’t go back to my dad and Latasha looking like a fool. And I had only so much savings left in the bank, in addition to a broken lease. There was no way I could go back to crawling to family and friend so ridiculously.
And unlike most people, I didn’t have a mother. She died when I was very young, during my birth. It was a freak accident, something that wasn’t supposed to happen. I wondered, if she were alive, if she would help me or not.
What would my hypothetical mother tell me to do?
Follow my dreams?
Run away to a different state and pretend not to know my dad and Latasha?
Start a new identity?
I had to make it happen in the end. This was my only recourse, my only way out. For a better future, and for my own soul.
I had to focus on myself. I had made it past all of the contest rounds to victory. First place! It was mine. Mine to enjoy, to savor.
So what if there was a freak accident o
n the other side of the world? These things happened, and I knew they did. I had experience.
Nothing was going to stop me. The longer I thought about going to Korea, the more I affirmed my reasoning behind going: uplifting myself, a change, a difference. This was going to be groundbreaking, and I wasn’t going to let gang members stop me from getting what I wanted.
Did a little tussle stop any of the previous black people in the United States from achieving what was necessary?
No way.
No way at all.
♦♦♦
The day before I left for Korea, Latasha and I met for lunch at a local restaurant. It served—guess!—Korean dishes, tons of kimchi and barbecue for us to eat. She wasn’t so much of a fan, but I couldn’t wait until actually landing in Seoul before having my fill.
“You are going to be so sick of this food when you get over there,” she said to me, fiddling with her chopsticks. She really was not an Asian aficionado. I think this was probably her first time ever picking up chopsticks before.
She had grown up in the projects of Lincoln, Nebraska. She and I lived parallel experiences: she had both of her parents, but they were both poor. I grew up in the suburbs, middle-class, but I had lost one. I think there was always a tension in the air because of that fact, that difference between us. We lived differently, and we could understand where both of us came from. But we couldn’t truly know.
Even when I hung around her before college. Drug dealers, prostitutes. Hell, she had it all going with the rough crowd and side of life. I didn’t want any of it, and I tried getting her out numerous times from that lifestyle. Fortunately for her, she came around, eventually. Although it was because of an incident you would least expect.
Maybe there was a little bit of jealousy on both sides. I of her mother and she of my worldliness.
“I swear,” I said, “you’re just like my dad. You’re supposed to fit them underneath your index finger and then—yeah, like that. No, no, no!”
Latasha dropped her chopsticks and they landed on the ground. She frowned. “These are really hard to use. I’m not going to lie, I’m going to have to get myself a spoon and fork instead.”
I shook my head and rolled my eyes. “I don’t think I’m ever going to get tired of this kind of food, like, ever. I don’t know how you can, girl. It’s so good!”
Latasha finally managed, although it took her what seemed like hours.
“My mama always tells me those Asian men don’t do it very well in bed,” Latasha said. She stuffed her mouth with noodles, I hope so that she could shut herself up.
“Girl! There are Asian people around us right now,” I said. Some of the waiters were staring at us—some of them being very tall and muscular Korean guys—and I felt immediately embarrassed. “You can’t say those things,” I whispered.
Latasha shrugged. “It’s like I said,” she said, “I support you. But I don’t exactly support the place that you’re going to.”
“That’s new. I don’t remember you saying that at all.”
She knitted her eyebrows together. After couple of chomps on her noodles, and swallowing them down with a loud gulp, she said, “I just always feel like they’re kind of racist to us. Like our communities don’t understand each other very well. Don’t you remember back in the 90s when there were riots in Los Angeles? And haven’t you heard about their parents? And I’ve heard some nasty things about—”
“If you don’t stop it right now,” I said, “then I’m just going to leave. This is ridiculous. You can’t be badmouthing people like that. It’s just very rude.”
I understood where she was coming from in terms of differences. But that was not the place to talk about Korean and black people politics. In public? I had never seen Latasha act up like that before. And she had only gotten worse over the weeks.
I figured my leaving her was affecting her more than I thought.
Maybe I was more valuable than she let on.
After all, I did mention that we were like sisters almost. Or that I felt a sisterhood with her.
I immediately hypothesized her reaction to be nothing more than a lashing out. A losing of friendship. She imagined and envisioned us not getting along anymore and not having anything to talk about.
Not ever connecting with one another on the level that we use to way back when we were at Nebraska State University.
♦♦♦
I remembered one night when both of us were together, out after a hard day of exams. Lincoln, Nebraska, is filled with nothing to do. So you have to make your own activities. Even the campus is kind of dead.
You don’t have the same kind of deals you get at the Ivy Leagues. The same kind of connections?
Please.
You have to hustle.
You have to try a thousand times more than the next kid if you want to have a shot at getting into a top ranked graduate school, work a job, a good internship.
Even something like summer work—you need those high-level connections.
It was Latasha’s idea to start up a nightly meeting for black folk, specifically for the development of businesses.
We wanted to uplift our community. Not that there was anything wrong with white or Asian or Hispanic. It’s just I wanted a place for us to succeed, you know? Latasha and I envisioned a bubble for us, a place where we could just hang out and learn about our own history. There were clubs for Irish and Chinese people, so why not us too?
We held our meetings at Woods Park, near the south side of Lincoln. It was a cold wintry day, closer to Christmas than anything else. Latasha wrapped her arm around my shoulder. We waited and waited for people to show up for our end-of-the-year events.
As cars pulled into the lot, we got out our foldable picnic tables. We placed for everyone else: jambalaya rice, mashed yams, chopped up ham.
Lots of delicious eats, good desserts like pineapples and sweet bread. Imagine it: smell it. Just think about the warmth of your aunt’s cooking or your brother’s homemade marmalade. If your family doesn’t cook, then just imagine mine cooking for you.
Because my dad cooked up a storm for that event. He was so happy about us being so active in our community.
“When I graduate,” Latasha said, opening up a pot of fresh rice. The steam swirled around her chin, and she smiled. “When I graduate, I’m going to have a shot at going to Harvard. I want to do investment banking. Go into IBM. Chase that paper, you know?” She laughed, smiling into the night.
“You can chase whatever you want. Go corporate and all. I’ll be with you all the way through.”
“You don’t sound so happy about me doing IBM.”
At the time, I wasn’t.
I felt jealous of Latasha. Her family. Even if they were diamonds in the rough. They stuck around together and were whole. Even the women owned their own “establishments,”— hair salons that were run out of their apartments.
They knew how to monetize their skills; they weren’t always legal, but still, they knew.
Prostitution, slinging crack, and pimping out their girls. Sure, they weren’t exactly business people per se. But they did know how to hustle. They went around town, gaming the system, getting that paper.
And Latasha studied hard. She studied harder than I did.
She had things going on in her life that sounded exciting to me—even cool. Going down to Broad Street, panties spilling to the floor. Come shots. One of her family members was a rapper, I heard.
You had to be quick and her world, hardcore, and a good studier. Knowing what a person’s weakness was invaluable to her. What is the competition doing? She had to know. She had to figure it out.
All together, they worked as a unit. As one. Solving their problems in the hood, making their world a (financially) better place (for themselves).
Latasha knew I was jealous of her. There had been a long-standing disagreement in the way our body language talked. Whenever I smiled at her, she stopped smiling herself. Whenever I talked about mys
elf, she tried to one-up me.
And then whenever someone made fun of me, she defended me.
Frenemies, as they say, our unique kind of relationship. More like a sisterhood than anything.
“It’s not that I’m not proud of you,” I said, turning the barbecue on the grill. Yes, we had brought a grill out. And I was cooking up a storm. We were going to have spicy chicken alongside a pair of lamb chops. And so much to grill, so much to eat.