I let George see that I was interested. Willingly he spoke more on the same subject.
“I don’t believe anybody in New York has gone around with more girls than I have. Still I have more to find out about them. I make a study of them. It’s the greatest line of research in the West. You know women are funny and different. And you have to treat them accordingly. They do not have the same psychology that we do. Sooner or later they will get mad. Watch out for that. That man who said he couldn’t get on without them or with them seems to have understood them, so that the best thing is to make the best out of them. Now pants are done.”
He asked me what I thought of the picture on his dressing table.
“All right. But the girl is very fat.”
George got into his pants. They fitted him to perfection. He was evidently very careful about his clothes. Yet he never looked stiff.
“That picture is the most deceiving thing in the world,” he said warmly, taking it up to examine. “She is much much better looking than that. I met her five years ago. In Washington, D.C.”
“When you were ambassador?”
“Washington!” George sighed. . . . “What a place for beautiful girls! The job alone counts. My! I was in love with her for two years. Now we write to each other, that is all. It’s sad. . . . If you don’t like her, I’ll change the picture.”
And he brought out the photo of a girl in cossack boots and Russian dancing dress.
2
I fell into a gentle slumber, exhausted by my efforts in reaching the real America at last. When I awoke, George was sitting at his desk. Beautiful note papers of various kinds were spread out before him. There was monogrammed paper with the initial of his last name very large and the initial of his first name very small inside, there was paper with his name written in gold in beautiful Chinese characters, and there was a third kind with the Korean national flower at the top in color.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Writing letters.”
“Very boring,” I said. “Letter writing has always seemed to me a waste of time. My! how I hate it!”
“That is because you have never been in love. Letter writing is very important in the art of love. Sometimes a letter can do more than actual meeting. Especially if the letter is a suggestive one. That’s where art comes in.”
“Confucius does not list love among the different branches of the arts and knowledge.”
“Does he list cooking? But isn’t cooking an art? And so is love. They are much the same. Each requires the highly skilled master, and each gives pleasure in its own way. Confucius, I admit, has nothing to teach on the subject of love. That’s where I leave him behind. For love is the beginning of a real, new and true life leading you into the Garden of Paradise, maybe Eden. It’s a pity that they in English say falling in love. It is not a falling, but it is a rising. If it is a falling action, you will have no more life. But because it is a rising action, you get more done. But maybe in English they have a more ironic attitude toward love than I have. . . .”
“Are you writing to that girl?” I asked idly, indicating the new photograph.
George thought a bit, then shook his head.
“What I have written is too good for her. Besides, it is in Korean.”
“What will you do with it, then?”
“I will save it. Very often I write what is too good to send right away.” He opened a drawer in his desk. “See. These are all kinds of love letters for various occasions. Some are finished, some roughly sketched, some only once revised. They are in English, Korean and Chinese. I write them as they come into my head. Then when I am in a hurry or need to act with sudden inspiration, I select from these.”
I saw he got this idea from the Orient where the village scribe used to keep on hand certain especially good letters for birthday greetings, or for partings or congratulations on the birth of a son. Then he rented them out as they were called for, always being careful to keep the copy.
“But what a pity that I have written this letter in Korean,” said George, shaking his head. “Not many beautiful Korean girls can get away from Korea to come over here. I don’t know any. They all get married too young when they are beautiful, now that the men are becoming civilized over there. But I will put it away for my Ideal!” And he told me he also had an ideal imaginary girl to whom he wrote regularly, posting her letters in a certain drawer.
“Why not translate?” I suggested, after reading George’s letter.
“All right.”
“And I will help you.”
When we got through, it ran in English something like this:
My dearest heart,
You left an everlasting image upon my soul. Every sinew of me bleeds and my lips shout your name, scattering it with the winds of the Hudson River. Ten thousands of tears and sighs have been accumulated upon my heart like New York dust, and engraved on it “I love you.” My heart’s restless sea, perpetually beating upon the shores, can never become a serene and calm lake sleeping in the eternal quietness until I have you in my arms. . . . Darling. I can’t say it except with a bunch of red roses—every dewdrop is my tear, every thorn is my anguish, every red petal utters love.
Yours, until I may have life and love,
GEORGE JUM.
“My Lord, you are a genius!” exclaimed George.
“Yours until” particularly pleased him. That had double meaning, he said. And he wrote it all out on monogrammed paper, using the greenest green of shallow sea ink. He had a neat and beautiful handwriting even in English, which can’t show much of the calligraphic art. “Chungpa, you know the written language better than I.”
“That is because I have read Shakespeare.”
George said he regretted at times that he had not had more education in the Western style. He had never been to a Western university and knew only what he had picked up.
“I can interpret Shakespeare to you,” I offered.
“Fine. And you can be my secretary from now on. I will pay you well for that.”
George went to look at the rice that was cooking, for it was approaching four o’clock. He now served a late lunch with the promise to read to me from one of his Korean plays immediately afterwards.
George had tossed off a number of Korean plays, but his English was not adequate to translate them. The dialogue was witty, but obscene. It had early been his ambition, George explained, to become thoroughly Westernized, not just Christianized (which is often the direct opposite). He was the son of one of the earliest Christian converts in Korea.
“My first years were spent in a church school associated with my father’s Methodist church,” George said. “But I could never prove an acceptable Christian. Later my father sent me to the Christian academy in Seoul. But I hated it like the devil. And they said I was a devil. Everybody knew from the start I was a bad egg. It was hopeless to beat it. Such eggs never make decent omelet. Still, my school days in Korea were not unfruitful. I learned enough Chinese literature to make me classic (if not a classical scholar), and I made friends with my equals to lead them in games, and my superiors took me to winehouses. My first experience in love was with a young girl at a famous winehouse, where she was the daughter of the landlord. Confucius, Christ, Buddha, I found all were wrong. There is more meaning of life in woman’s arms than in all the written words about the soul’s paradise. I was forced to separate from her because of Christian parents. And later, she died, young. But I have been true to first love and what it taught me. Life lies with women, not with the classics or the ancestors.”
As George read me one of the scenes from his play, I pointed out to him that though it might have two actors, it could not have an audience.
“Oh, well,” said George. “You’re right as usual. We hasten on then to the soliloquy.”
The last scene showed the hero speaking ec
statically:
“Wonderful woman! wonderful life! wonderful love!”
“I consider that,” said George, “almost Shakespearean.”
3
It grew dark outside, and the blue-black wind curled about the sparkling street lamps, lifting the tinselled papers; it was time to go downtown and try our luck at the Chinese lottery. George put away his love letters and his plays with affectionate hands. Now, he said, he would show me how to dress.
“First, your underwear. It will have to be cut down.” It was Korean underwear, long-legged and long-sleeved.
“But the wind is cold.”
“That can’t be helped.” And he got scissors at once and cut it down while it was still on me. “Now. Get dressed. I’ll keep these pieces to dust out my desk with.”
When I was dressed, George looked me over again, shaking his head. He said he liked me all right, except for my hatless head, my shirtless condition, my dirty shoes, my schoolboy suit, and my minister’s overcoat. From his own supplies he gave me a long white shirt of very good quality, a necktie of black and gray and mild red combined, gray socks, garters, a hat, a short coat to match my trousers as nearly as possible. He said he would have my shoes shined on the sidewalk.
“No,” interposed George. “That isn’t the way to tie a tie. It must be tight.” And he tied it for me. “And your socks. Remember. Tight. If you want to give a good impression with girls, always be tight. Even in a kiss, it should be tight. Many Western marriages are broken up because the man is not tight.”
“In dress I fear I can never be tight, any more than my poet uncle—”
“Then you will lose your opportunity. Don’t you know that whenever you are with girls, they look first at your necktie, then at your socks, then at your shirt, then at your shoes, then at your cuff buttons? When they like all these things, then they will like you. I remember the impression I made once with my cuff buttons. She noticed them at once. ‘Oh, these are not ten cent ones!’ ‘They aren’t!’ and she was just delighted. Don’t take a chance. Girls may be very beautiful. You don’t want to lose them. One of the easiest things is to be well dressed. Maybe two girls in a million won’t care. But even with these two, it cannot hinder if it does not help.”
We went downtown on the subway and that was my first experience underground. “My wild ride with God.” Everybody in New York seemed to be right there with us. It looked like a fight going on. George instructed me how to get into the car.
“The best way to get in there is to walk back and then come forward.”
I did this and it worked very well.
“You have to push and force in, to get anything in New York,” said George. “Nobody has any pity. Nobody cares what you are doing. Nobody sees. It makes people unconscious. They wouldn’t care if you had two heads and three eyes. In this they are different from the people of Boston, who look at you though you have only one head, if that head is Oriental.”
We went down into a large basement. There were about fifty Chinese and a singing noise of the Chinese language, Cantonese dialect. Here was a big lottery headquarters. George paid one dollar for me and another for himself. For that we received slips of paper with certain characters. The characters read: “Autumn harvest in the vast universe,” and “Winter heaping under mystery moon.”
“I like the looks of these,” said George.
But the mystic picture words did not work as much as George wished. We got nothing at all. Again we picked and punched and waited around.
“Do you play this game often?” I asked.
“Yes,” said George. “And never win. If I ever get that highest reward, I will spend one half on a scholarship for my brother.”
Then he got much excited. “Good Lord, we almost got $2000, the highest reward.”
Quickly he spent another dollar in my name. On that I got ten dollars. It seemed like a fortune, and I was as delighted as if it had been $2000, almost. George said it was all mine; it had been won on my luck, not his. I paid back the two dollars George had spent for me on the lottery. We went to that restaurant where I had a bill. I ordered a feast, big lobster with meat sauce, and beancakes with pieces of red steak and Chinese greens, and a soup of chicken giblets cut in the form of flowers. My bill for the entire ten days of soup was under two dollars, and after paying it completely and for our dinner that night too, I had enough left to pay my room rent, which was not high.
George was well satisfied with this restaurant, as the cooking was good, yet he warned me never to bring a girl here. Wasted advice, as I was not much Westernized.
“It is a favorite place with me though,” he said. “I often come here, but always alone. It has no atmosphere. You see, here the Chinese wear those black Chinese coats like pajamas and their Chinese slippers like bedroom ones have no heels. Girls may think this place is not clean—especially if they come from Washington, D.C.”
Next we went to my room, to liquidate things there. George examined the few effects I had brought with me from the homeland. He himself packed for me, while I read to him from Shakespeare. I read him the love scenes between Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet’s soliloquies. “That’s the stuff!” And right off George liked Shakespeare. But we differed on which characters we liked. I said I preferred Hamlet’s part to Romeo’s.
“Well, I like Romeo,” said George. “Anyhow, Juliet is great. ‘Give me my sin again.’ If I could only find a woman as artistic as that, I could do better than Romeo.”
And as we passed through a bit of the park to get to George’s house, he pointed out two young lovers seated on a park bench in each other’s arms. George said, “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt.” Combining Romeo and Hamlet, so to speak.
4
There was a Korean Institute in New York, where students and the other exiles met. George took me here.
“It is easiest to find the first job through a Korean. Besides, if you are going to college, you will surely want to meet the Reverend Ok.” (There was a demure look in Jum’s eye.) “He is the most famous student that I know. At least in length of time. He has been going to college now for sixteen years!”
The Korean Institute was in the Chelsea district, a grimy old-fashioned brick building that had seen better days. The section was very dirty, noisy, and plebeian, but the house inside was quiet and dignified. The most attractive feature was the community dining room in the basement, where real Korean food was prepared and served. Up on the ground floor were some rather bare clubrooms for playing games, and a hall for the Christian Koreans to sing hymns in. The rest of the house was given over to bedrooms, occupied by certain well-known students at small cost.
It was a center for all kinds, bad atheists like George, good Methodists like Ok, communists, capitalists, and all other categories, rich and poor. Of the rich, of course, not many. Koreans were generally ruined by this time, by the Japanese occupation: besides, those counted as rich men in Korea were poor men in New York, where incomes dwindled to one third by the exchange. But not a few belonged to old and distinguished families in the homeland. There were several princes. Now they could only get along by doing housework; royalty had been ruined more than the barons or the rich men.
As the men were standing around waiting for dinner, and George was playing pool, an old and gray-haired gentleman, looking very refined and distinguished, came up and shook hands with me. He had known both my uncles through their reputation, the uncle who was a lunatic poet, and the eldest, most aristocratic uncle who was the paksa, the most famous scholar of our family. We began to talk on classical poetry. We even got rhymes and practised. Both of us seemed to get intoxicated. The Koreans here were not so modern as George, but here proved to be a man of two generations behind the others, not only in age, but also in spirit. His calligraphy was very beautiful. It reminded me of the poem written by Han Yu:
The years deepen, but how these pictures
avoid cracks!
One sticks a scaly monster like a writhing knife;
The phoenix pair wings; numberless genii hover;
Coral and jade trees interlace their branches;
Golden thread and iron cable knot in powerful clasp;
An ancient tripod is plunged in water;
Back and forth the soaring dragons weave.
The old gentleman proved to be a real scholar, and in fact had several literary degrees from the old Korean government.
“I am greatly surprised to find that you have studied so much in the classics,” he said at last. Saying it, he sighed. I knew what that sigh meant. Alas, what good would it do me? More harm than good.
“I study no more of that now, but only the Western literature. Shakespeare,” I murmured in a subdued voice.
He looked with caution all around, then said, low and whisperingly: “I have read many English writers, but I have never found anything in them that could be compared to the classical poetry.” But he dared not say it aloud before these young fellows who had studied in the West and now saw nothing except the new writers.
East Goes West Page 8