Читать книгу Sad Peninsula - Mark Sampson - Страница 10
Chapter 4
ОглавлениеI stand at my whiteboard, glossy Basic 5 storybook in one hand, green marker in the other, uncapped and ready for business. This is me, pretending to know what I’m doing. My tiny classroom is packed — fifteen Korean students aged eight to eleven. Fourteen of them sit at their miniature desks, each one littered with storybook, homework book, grammar book, and pencil case. The fifteenth student, a troublemaker named “David,” stands facing the corner of the room, his back to the class, head arched downward in shame. This is his punishment from ten minutes ago when I caught him speaking, for the third time tonight, a quick burst of Korean to one of his buddies. The Canadian flag I’ve taped to my wall hangs just above his head.
“Get the ball,” I read to the class.
“Get the ball,” the class echoes.
“Now Billy has the ball,” I chant.
“Now Billy has the ball.”
“MichaelTeeee-chore!” David weeps from the corner, as if I’ve forgotten he’s there. I look over at his slouched frame and hesitate before speaking, allowing him to stew a moment longer in my feigned authority. “Okay, David, you can sit down.” He skulks shamefaced back to his desk.
We begin working through the storybook as if it’s Henry James. I get the kids to read lines aloud, correcting their pronunciation as they go, then begin to ask leading questions about what is happening in this soccer game, and they recite back exactly what I want to hear, exactly what the storybook says. I’m obligated to stay standing and write these insights on my whiteboard, lest the school’s director (Ms. Kim — confirmed Asian spinster, a hostile little touch-me-not) looks through my classroom-door window, fixes me in her angry little crosshairs, and confronts me at the end of the night for Not Following the Curriculum. Time is winding down, so I get the kids to close their books so I can hand out their nightly quiz. For the next five minutes, they will hunch over the test with great purpose, filling in blanks with nouns and verbs left out of the exact sentences we’ve just read. I take a slow walk up the aisle to inspect the kids’ progress, hoping my presence will hurry them along. Soon I have all the tests in my hand and with a few seconds to spare — which doesn’t feel right. I’m forgetting something.
“MichaelTeacher, homework?” asks “Jenny,” one of the older girls. They always seem to be named Jenny.
“Oh shit,” I mutter aloud, and the kids all gasp in horror. I hustle to my whiteboard and begin frantically jotting down workbook page numbers and grammar exercises, reciting them aloud for the kids as I do. Meanwhile, the class bombards Jenny with a Korean phrase, which I’m sure if I could translate would say, You stupid bitch, he nearly forgot!
“No Korean, please!” I shout with my back to them, still scribbling furiously. Then the bell does chime, an annoying rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and the kids burst from their chairs and pile toward the door. Some go gliding out on their Heelys— rollerskate wheels built right into the heels of their sneakers. I finish getting all the homework down and turn around. “Did you get that?” I yell. But I’m nearly alone, except for the last couple of kids squeezing into the noisy hallway, looking back over their book bags at me with a sense of vague pity.
I am not a teacher by trade. You don’t have to be to work here. Anybody with a university degree, in anything, can come to Korea and teach English in this hagwon system. Korean parents believe in education, as best as they understand it, and this involves sending their children to as many of these after-school academies as they can afford. Kids go to public school from 8:30 until 3:00, but after that they move through a long parade of extracurricular learning — math academy, science academy, English academy, taekwondo academy — that stretches well into the evening. ABC English Planet is one of the more reputable hagwons in this neighbourhood of Daechi: we boast a regimented curriculum, reading-writing-grammar-conversation, and a staff of native-speaking teachers from around the West. And I am now one of them.
How things got this far — with me falling into the chair at my desk to watch the next class of exhausted students pour in to my room — is a tale of minor tragedy, of personal failures and squandered opportunities. Many of my coworkers here are like the guy in the baseball cap from the club — in their early twenties, recent graduates with relatively useless university degrees, spilling out of planes at the mudflats of Incheon with unfathomable student debt and a misguided sense of adventure. By contrast: I am nearly thirty years old and with a fairly practical degree under my belt: journalism. Up until the spring of 2002 I had a career as a reporter for the Lifestyles section of The Halifax Daily News. For a long time, I treated that background like a godsend, the one clear way out of my chaotic family situation and into a life that would prove stable, reliable. And, for a while, it was.
Of course, my ex-fiancée Cora would tell you that I was never a good journalist, and I would have to agree with her. I was probably two years in to the job at the Daily News before I realized that I lacked the one quality essential to being a good reporter: extroversion. I could research the hell out of any topic, learn all there was to know about occupational health and safety, Black History Month, municipal budgeting, Goth fashion — but to actually pick up the phone and call a stranger or go knock on someone’s door filled me with a gumbo of paralysis. It was only through Cora’s positive influence that I forced myself to do the sort of harassing essential to my career. She and I met at J-school and she was, even from the first semester, already a journalist’s journalist. She got on with CBC Radio at the same time that I started at the paper, and she was always pressing me to get out there, get out on the streets of Halifax and “Talk to People.” It was probably her nagging that kept me from getting fired in those tough early years. So when she eventually left me for one of her radio colleagues, some French fucker named Denis (pronounced Din-ee, never Dennis) and transferred with him to CBC in Montreal, I had a sense that I was doomed in more ways than one.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The story of how I ended up slinging English like hamburgers in South Korea does not begin with Cora leaving me for another man, nor with the crippling introversion that eventually got me fired from the Daily News. No, the story starts much farther back than that.
I never knew my father. He died of a rare blood cancer when I was two and my sister Heidi was eight. What I know of him is based on the pedigree he left for me and on the photographs of him that my mother kept framed around the house, like totems to his memory. He was involved in Nova Scotia politics and worked as a speechwriter in the later years of the Robert Stanfield government. There was a photo of Dad that stood out in my childhood above all others, a picture that Mom kept on one of the crowded bookshelves in the living room. It had Stanfield in the foreground, mid-speech at a bouquet of microphones, fist raised and finger extended, and my dad in the background, arms folded loose across his chest and face full of a mirth that said I got him to say that. There were many who believed that, given time and proper mentoring, Dad would become Stanfield’s heir apparent and lead the Nova Scotia Conservatives throughout the eighties and nineties.
It was not meant to be. The cancer that arrived in the fall of 1975 took less than six weeks to kill him, or so I was told. There were generous obituaries in the papers and letters written to our family from MLAs on both sides of the aisle. My mother stored these in a shoebox she kept under her bed, and would take them out and reread them whenever she felt her grief was fading to unacceptable levels.
My mother, as winsome and as wise as she could often be, had a weakness for the drink even as a young woman, and, faced with the unfair, inexcusable death of the man she’d been infatuated with since high school, descended into an alcoholism that Heidi and I could only watch with a kind of perplexed horror. The rattle of empty beer bottles stacked in sagging cases in the kitchen, the chime of hidden gin and rum bottles that sounded each time we opened a linen closet, became the white noise of my childhood. Mom insisted that my father was worthy of such mourning. (I even got a sense of his reputation when, sixteen years after his death, I arrived at journalism school to discover that some of the older profs had known him, and thus anticipated great things from me.) And to imply that Mom needed to let go of her sense of injustice was the highest sin you could commit against her. I cannot tell you how many friendships she ruined in a drunken rage because someone had dared to suggest that she Move on with Her Life.
The truth is, Mom was unstable even before my father died; his death was merely the green light that her deepest-held insecurities had been waiting for. I will give Mom her due: I believe she was touched by genius. She could recite entire passages of Robert Browning from memory; she knew, down to the minutest physiological detail, the difference between a gecko and a salamander; she followed Ronald Reagan’s atrocities in Nicaragua with rabid condemnation. But she couldn’t find a way to channel all this undigested knowledge into the stability that our family needed so badly. And when, in 1984, seventeen-year-old Heidi fled our house after a marathon screaming session with her, never to return, my mother went off the rails completely. After that, the beer bottles disappeared. After that, she drank exclusively hard liquor. She drank it every day. And she drank it straight.
And Heidi? Oh, what can I tell you about Heidi. She has remained her mother’s daughter, only more so. In the last nineteen years, my big sister has left a half-dozen half-finished university degrees in her wake. She has slept on streets. She has hitchhiked across Canada. She has been a Wiccan, a vegan, a skinhead, a tattoo artist, an eco-terrorist, and through most of it, a single mother herself. As far as I know, she lives somewhere in British Columbia with her teenaged daughter, where she makes a not-very-good living selling her unimaginative folk art at farmers’ markets on the weekend. I have not seen Heidi since Mom’s funeral.
My mother died while I was in the middle of my journalism degree; I had not yet turned twenty-one. Funny, how hard it is to stop resenting somebody when you assume they’ll always be there. Thinking of her death reminds me of a line from Nora Zeale Hurston, something about what a waste it is when our mourning outlives our grief — and I think it doubly shameful that my mom failed to outlive either of hers. When she was gone, I refused to put the label of orphan on myself, even though that’s what I was. I think Cora’s presence in my life, then my girlfriend, soon to be my fiancée, had a lot to do with that. As long as she was by my side, I knew I was not alone. It took burying my mother for me to realize what it feels like to be in love.
And for a few years there, we got on with it. Graduated with good grades, got J-jobs right away, got engaged. You could find Cora traipsing the streets of Halifax on the hunt for the perfect sound bite, her jet-black hair pulled tight against her scalp. Meanwhile, I worked at the Daily News offices on the outskirts of town — researching topics, crafting sentences, interviewing people by phone when I had to. The Lifestyles section suited me because I could get away without asking tough questions if I didn’t want to. In the evenings, we’d reconvene in our small apartment on Shirley Street where we’d drink red wine and listen to Miles Davis, and Cora would lightly chide me about whatever risks I chose not to take that day. I believed, like a fool, that she not only tolerated my pathological shyness, but celebrated it as a part of who I was. Life was good. I felt like I had broken through a wall.
But then Denis-never-Dennis arrived in our lives and shut the whole show down. What a vertiginous feeling it is to watch the woman you love fall in love with somebody else. Denis-never-Dennis started out as just The New Guy at Work, described one night to me while we were doing the dishes. Soon Cora began referring to him as My Friend Denis. I wasn’t all that suspicious at first: the fact that he was ten years her senior provided me with a false sense of security, rather than a harbinger of the Nick Hornby-esque angst that I would experience later. Then came days when she’d mention that the two of them had spent a sunny lunch hour eating French fries together from Bud the Spud on the ledge outside the public library. She’d do so in passing, a peripheral detail to whatever she was talking about — as if I wouldn’t notice her subliminal subterfuge and call her on it. Then came the Friday nights where I’d come home and wait several hours alone in the apartment until Cora eventually arrived, obviously tipsy, and she’d say “Oh sorry, Denis and I just grabbed a glass of wine or two after work at the Argyle.”
Even when she started spending less and less time at home, she denied it. Even when the sex dried up, she denied it. I figure my relationship with Cora ended a full two months before I realized it. When she was ready to move out, she taped the small, pathetic engagement ring I had given her, all that I could afford, to a note left for me on the kitchen table. It read simply: I’m sorry, Michael. I truly am. But there is something in you that lacks.
And then sent her girlfriends over to get her stuff.
Was I enraged? Of course. Did that rage express itself through some vehicular vandalism in the CBC parking lot? Possibly. But more to the point: I was now ready to accept the labels I had been denying myself for years: orphan, rudderless, alone in the world.
In fact, with Cora gone I was free to descend into the charlatanism that I knew rested at the heart of my character. It began manifesting itself through my job, with me growing less fastidious about capturing accurate quotes from the people I interviewed. It sounds close enough to what they said, I would tell myself. Then I was making up entire quotes from interviews: they still came off like something my sources should have said, and I convinced myself that it was okay, that I could get away with such behaviour, because after all this was the Lifestyle section, with so little at stake.
I knew my negligence had taken a sharp turn when I found myself creating entire sources out of thin air. The topics of the stories were (at that point) still genuine, but when I couldn’t bother finding someone to say what I wanted, I made them up. By this point, I was addicted to the rush of not getting caught, day after day. And soon enough, I was in for a pound: I eventually fabricated entire stories — topic, news angle, sources, quotes, even the occasional post-publication letter to the editor from a fictitious interviewee.
I consider it a scathing indictment on modern journalism that my dalliances could go on for four years before I got busted. Like a serial killer or corporate criminal, I grew arrogant and reckless. The “story” that did me in involved a book club comprised of immigrant housewives from the Palestinian territories who read novels exclusively by Jewish writers as an act of cultural understanding. It wasn’t the story’s questionable premise that sent the red flags unfurling. It wasn’t even a single sentence within the story. It was a passing clause within a sentence, sandwiched between em-dashes and mentioning an organization that did not and could not exist — The Jewish Consortium for the Annihilation of Arab History — that finally raised the eyebrow of my managing editor and sent her digging. And digging. And digging.
The unearthing of (most of) my ruses took no time at all. Needless to say, the Daily News’s competition had a field day when they became public. The Herald ran several days’ worth of articles about my misdeeds and subsequent termination, column inches that went on and on, needlessly. (They even mentioned my father, his noble reputation and work with the province, a tsk-tsk sort of reference.) The Canadian Press picked up the story and ran it nationwide. I know the girl who wrote it — we had a one-night stand my first year at J-school before I started dating Cora.
I was, of course, done for. Let me remind you that this was the spring of 2002 and Google was just achieving critical mass. Plug “Michael Barrett” in a search engine and you’ll need to click through several pages of results before you find a link that doesn’t include the words “disgraced journalist.” So I took some time off to recalibrate. But before I knew it, “some” turned to “a lot”: spring became summer and summer became fall. Meanwhile I had student loans I was still paying off from ten years earlier; the banks would not give me relief. I was now taking cash out on my MasterCard to pay for essentials like rent and vodka. It was almost fun to be in this kind of free fall into hopelessness. Nobody would give me a job. The few friends I had weren’t speaking to me. I was drinking all day long. And watching month after month as I spiralled toward personal and financial Armageddon.
Cut to a foggy afternoon: I was on the waterfront drinking alone in the Nautical Pub when I ran into an acquaintance from my university days. Over dinner, he told me how he had gone on to do an expensive MFA and then paid off the student debt he incurred by teaching in South Korea. Had arrived in Seoul $35,000 in the red, but after three years of teaching returned to Canada $15,000 in the black. Said I could do the same. “But I don’t have a teaching degree,” I told him.
“Neither do I,” he replied. “You don’t need one. I wouldn’t even call what you do over there teaching. You just stand up in front of a bunch of Asian kids for eight hours a day and Be White, Be Western.” We parted company with him giving me the address for an online job board.
So I checked it out. And I applied for something. And I got a job offer right away. During the brief, perfunctory phone interview, Ms. Kim didn’t even question why my seven-year tenure at The Daily News had come to an abrupt end. Nor did she ask what I’d been doing with myself in the eight months since. All she needed was for me to Fed-Ex a package containing my valid passport, notarized confirmation of my university degree, and a photograph, a headshot of myself — which, I later learned, was to confirm that I was in fact white. It would take her a couple of weeks to process my E-1 visa. After she did, she confirmed my salary — 1.9 million won a month, virtually tax-free — and that upon my arrival I would move into a free apartment, albeit with a roommate. “His name is Justin,” she informed me. “He is from Nova Scotia, like you.” She could have added He is also emotionally damaged, like you, if she had known.
As my departure grew imminent, I gave notice on my apartment, sold off whatever shabby furniture I hadn’t hawked yet, cancelled my phone. But it didn’t feel like a new beginning, a chance for a fresh start. Not at all. Even before I stepped on Korean soil, I knew the truth about what I was doing. People don’t go to Asia to find themselves. They go there, for better or for worse, to run away from whatever they have been. And all I could hope for was to butt up against something, anything, to fill in the craters that resided within me.
It’s the photos of Justin’s kid that always get me. He has a collage of them tacked to the wooden headboard in his bedroom; I see them every time I go in there. This is what Justin has been — a father to a son who died in 2000. His name was Cody. Nearly six years old when he was killed in a freak accident while the family was vacationing in Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland. The photos on the headboard show the little guy in various states of little-guy animation. They overlook Justin as he sleeps.
It’s early on a Saturday afternoon and I’m just getting mobile. Freshly showered, I towel down the remnants of my hair and try to shake off my soju hangover from the night before. A crew of us had gone out after work for kalbi, Korean-style barbecue, and the liquor had been flowing; Justin and I didn’t get home until nearly dawn. Let me describe what I mean by home, this shoebox that ABC English Planet has provided. Imagine the smallest apartment you’ve ever seen and cut in half. It has the Korean-style floor heating, called ondol, a plastic simulacrum of hardwood that you never walk on with your shoes; you must leave your footwear in the small, sunken entryway by the door. Our kitchen is just a countertop with propane hotplate sitting below a row of cupboards, and with a small fridge to the right. We have no kitchen table. The living room is a leather couch parked in the centre of the apartment facing a tiny TV in the corner. We get a few English channels — CNN International and the Armed Forces Network. There are two bedrooms to this apartment. Justin’s is much bigger than mine. The benefits of seniority.
After I’ve dried off and dressed, I knock on Justin’s door and enter when he calls me. I find him on his bed reading a paperback. The photos of Cody hover all around his head.
“What did you say we should do today?” I ask him. “You mentioned it last night but I can’t remember.”
He laughs his deep laugh. “Wow, you really were drunk.” He sets his book aside. “Scrabble at the COEX.”
“Right. Scrabble at the COEX.” This had been our plan, to take Justin’s Scrabble board and play a game in the food court of the COEX shopping mall. He and Rob Cruise had done this once before, with humorous results — it had caused a growing and enthusiastic crowd of Korean passersby to stop and watch them. Koreans are generally fascinated by English, even if they don’t speak it; most know that access to English means access to power. Scrabble is especially captivating, since there can be no equivalent of it with their own alphabet. My students are always begging to play the game in class, but Ms. Kim frowns upon it.
Justin gets up and digs the Scrabble board out from under a pile of clothes. It’s an early version of the game — the maroon box is sagging and held together with an elastic band. “We’ll probably only have time for one game,” he says. “I have my private at four o’clock.”
“Fair enough,” I reply. By private, he means a private tutoring session, not exactly the most legal of activities in this country. In theory, you can be deported if you’re caught teaching English outside of the regular channels. But of course we all do it — the extra money is too good to pass up.
He stuffs the board and a dictionary into his backpack and then we head out the door. The COEX is a twenty-minute walk from our apartment, and by the time we get there, our hangovers have turned to hunger. We order a couple of bibimbap in the food court. As we set up the Scrabble board, I notice a few curious stares from other patrons, but that’s all.
While we eat and play, Justin tells me more about the private he’ll be teaching later in the afternoon. She’s a twelve-year-old named (of course!) “Jenny,” a former student at ABC English Planet whose parents pulled her out after they realized how preposterous the curriculum was. But Jenny loved Justin’s demeanour and teaching style, and so her mother approached him discreetly to ask if he could teach her privately on weekends at their home near Dogok Station. The family is loaded — Justin makes 160,000 won for four hours of work. Jenny’s dad is an executive with a big Korean company, putting in ninety hours a week, and Justin hardly ever sees him during the tutoring sessions. (“Hell, Jenny’s mom hardly ever sees him.”) Still, Justin has found kinship with both parents — they’re only in their mid-thirties, just a couple years older than he is.
“It’s like they’ve adopted me,” he says, putting DIAL on the board. “They feed me; they buy me gifts; they help me with my Korean. And of the dozen sessions I’ve done, only about five have taken place in their apartment. The rest of time, Jenny’s Mom —”
“What’s her name?”
“Sunkyoung — she doesn’t have an English name. The rest of the time Sunkyoung says ‘Let’s take Jenny to a museum today’ or ‘let’s take Jenny to an English movie.’ She’s so adamant that we get out and do things together. The three of us.”
“And you go?” I say, adding ET to TOIL for a triple word score.
“Of course I go,” he replies. “It doesn’t feel like work at all. It feels,” and he lowers his eyes, ostensibly to add my score, “it feels like being part of a family.”
As our game progresses a few passing Koreans throw us a glance. One nosy woman stops to inspect our board and points at the word RASCAL. “What means?” she asks. “A very bad man,” Justin deadpans. She covers her mouth as she titters and walks off. A few minutes later, an older gentleman approaches our table with an awkward smile. Does he attempt his own comment about the Scrabble board? No. Instead he points at my face, then points at his own and rubs his chin jealously.
“I like-uh your beard-uh,” he blurts out, but then scurries off, embarrassed.
I turn to Justin. “He liked my beard.”
He nods. “It’s an enviable beard. Korean men can’t grow one like that. They just get the Fu Man Chu thing going on.”
“I like your beard, too,” I hear someone say over my left shoulder. I turn in the swivel chair and am surprised to see the girl I met at Jokers Red a few weeks ago. Jin. The girl in the long coat and cashmere. Jin. Rob Cruise’s clandestine conquest. She stands holding a tray of food and wearing a black business suit, smart and well-tailored. It takes me a second to believe it’s her. Justin clears his throat.
Before I can even shove out a hello, she marches over to our table. “Why are you playing this silly game in a food court?”
Justin and I look at each other as if we’ve forgotten. “I guess it’s our way of offering free English lessons,” he jokes. “Do you want one?”
“My English is fine, thank you very much.” She seats herself next to me.
“Funny we’ve run into you here,” I say.
“I work in COEX Tower. I’m on my lunch break, finally.”
“You work Saturdays?”
“Of course. Most Koreans do. You ESL teachers have it easy — most of you get Saturdays off.” She hasn’t taken her eyes off the board. “So can you explain how this game works?”
We talk her through it as we play, elucidating on what the coloured areas mean and how to place the high-point letters on them strategically. She nods with growing comprehension and restrained delight. I’m very aware of her proximity to me, the way she leans across my arm to cast her curiosity over the board. I want to ensure that I win this game in front of her. I clinch the deal when I place my last letter, an X, on a triple-letter score with it buttressed by an A and an E for a total of fifty points.
Jin lets out a little laugh and claps. “Wow, all that with one letter?” She turns to me. “You’re good at scoring points with very little.”
Justin chuckles at this, perhaps thinking of our night at Jokers Red. “Well, that’s the game,” he says, getting up. “I have to go if I’m going to make my private on time. Do you mind taking the board back with you?”
“Sure,” I say. I almost expect Jin to leave, too, but instead she scoots over with her tray to take Justin’s seat after he’s gone. I notice she’s eating a hamburger and fries. When I start gathering up the slates, she stops me. “Hey, aren’t we going to play?”
“All right.”
I set up another game and offer her the bag to draw her seven letters; I feel her hand muscling around in my palm to dig them out. She places them gingerly on her slate and then stares at them with great concentration, as if they might contain a plot. We sit for a long while in focused silence. For the first few rounds, Jin can only play three-letter words — DOG and WIG and TOE — but does so with great deliberation. With each hefty strategizing thought, her bottom lip sticks out, hangs there between the two streaks of her black hair framing her face. She munches on her lunch and doesn’t look up from the board.
“So what do you do in COEX Tower?” I ask.
“I work for a clothing exporter. I do sales and marketing. In fact, I’m supposed to be in Beijing on business, but all this SARS nonsense made my employer keep me home.” She proudly puts her first four-letter word on the board, BENT, doing so with both hands, the letters pinched in her fingers. She goes on to explain how her fluency in four languages results in regular trips abroad — Shanghai and Paris and London. I learn a few other things as she rambles: Though twenty-seven and professionally successful, she still lives at home with her parents — the norm for young unmarried Korean women.
I try not to cream her too badly, but when the game ends I have twice her score. She checks the time on her cellphone. “Ugh. I should get back to my office,” she moans.
“Okay.”
“It was nice seeing you again, Michael.”
“Thanks.”
She hesitates, looks at me as if I’ve forgotten something. Forgotten my manners somehow, or to ask another question. Whatever it is, I don’t say or do it. She gets up curtly and leaves. I begin putting the tiles in the bag and packing up the slates. When I look up again, Jin has come stomping back to hover over the table.
“Hi there,” I say.
“So what, you don’t ask out girls?”
My mouth falls open a little. “I, I beg your pardon?”
“Oh come on, Michael.” She begins rhyming things off on her fingers. “I engage you about Kundera at the club; I ask you to dance; I write my handphone number on a piece of paper to give you, except you never ask for it before you leave; then today I tell you I like your beard, and stay behind to play Scrabble. What’s your problem? You would think by now you’d ask me to go on a date with you.”
My problem? My problem is you slept with Rob Cruise. My problem is I’m a fucking mess. “Jin, will you go on a date with me?”
She lowers her head. “No. You’re not my type.” I feel as if I’ve fallen through the floor to land on the floor below. “That was a joke,” she says, looking up. I laugh weakly. “Look, tell me something,” she goes on. “Did Rob Cruise take you back to Itaewon since the night we met?”
“Yes.”
“And did he take you to Hongdae yet?”
“He has.”
“And let me guess — you guys always go for kalbi at that dumpy restaurant near your apartments and drink soju until you can’t stand up straight.”
“We were there last night.”
“ Ugh. So predictable! You need to see the real Korea, Michael.” She takes out a pen and piece of paper from her purse and writes on it. “Meet me here, at Anguk Station. It’s near the top of the Orange Line on the subway. Tomorrow at two o’clock. Exit 3. Don’t be late.” She taps the paper before sliding it across the table at me. “And there’s my handphone number.”
Then she hurries off before I can say anything else.
S he was one of Rob’s conquests. She was. But she is not the same as the rest. She isn’t. She is … what?
The next day I dress in my least frumpy clothes and concern myself with remembering what Jin had said: two o’clock at Exit 3, or three o’clock at Exit 2? I’m certain I know the answer, but to be safe I arrive at Anguk Station by two and bring a book along in case I’m wrong or she’s late.
She is not late. She pushes her way through the turnstiles, a purse over her shoulder, and hustles over when she spots me leaning against the wall of the marble foyer with my book. Grabs me by the wrist without greeting. “Come here, Michael, I want to show you something,” she says.
She pulls me back to the turnstiles and nods at a Korean couple who have come through and are now stopped to gawk at a shop window full of Korean bells and masks and other knickknackery. The man and woman are, alarmingly, dressed in identical clothes — baby blue golf shirts with bright yellow collars, beige pants, and spotless white sneakers — and they’re gaping at the objects in the window with a hand in each other’s back pocket.
“Honeymooners.” Jin rolls her eyes. “So obnoxious. We have this silly tradition in Korea to dress in the same clothes as your spouse when you’re on your honeymoon. It’s supposed to be romantic but I think it looks ridiculous. Don’t you agree?”
“They do look a bit foolish.”
“Ugh. I’m embarrassed by how sentimental my country can be sometimes.” She looks at me with a flip of her hair. “What do Canadians do on their honeymoon?”
“I have no idea,” I answer honestly.
We ascend out of the subway stop and onto the sidewalk. We take a left onto a wide, long cobblestone street that’s been closed off to weekend traffic and turned into a massive marketplace for Korean artwork and crafts. “This is Insadong,” Jin tells me with relish as we stroll. “It’s the heart of cultural Seoul and my absolute favourite neighbourhood. This is the kind of place Rob Cruise and those guys would never take you.” I cringe at the sound of his name, but she’s right: there is an air of ancient artistry here that Rob would have little interest in. I notice the numerous alleys that stray off from the main drag of Insadong, alleys that look as though they suck you back to the Korea of five hundred years ago. We come across kiosks in the middle of the street selling jewellery and calligraphy brushes and rows of pottery. Jin speaks to each of the proprietors with clicks of Korean as she inspects their wares.
She’s so authoritative; I wonder how on earth someone like this could fall for one of Rob Cruise’s lines. While she’s busy, I look off to the side and see a crowd of people amassed in front of a large food stall with a man dressed entirely in white standing in its window. “What’s going on over there?” I ask and she turns to look. “Oh, Michael, you must see this.” She takes my arm and leads me over to join the crowd. We watch as the man in white raises up a large, thick roll of what looks like dough and begins spinning it wildly in his hands, playing it like an accordion.
“It’s almost hypnotizing,” I say. “What’s he making?”
“Pumpkin candy,” she exclaims. “Here, come with me.”
We push our way up to the front where chunks of the white candy are sitting on a sample tray. Jin hands me a piece and I place it in my mouth. The candy is hard and chewy, like taffy. It is sweet, with a mild, pleasant pumpkin flavour.
“It’s good, yes?”
“Very good.”
“I’m going to buy a box to take home to my father,” she says. “He’s addicted to this stuff.”
Her purchase comes in a small cardboard box quarter-folded at the top. She tucks it into her purse and we walk on.
“So what does your father do for a living?” I ask.
“He’s a project manager for Samsung,” she replies. “It’s about as glamorous as it sounds. Typical Korean businessman, he works all the time — about ninety hours a week. I hardly ever see him.”
I think of Justin and the father of his private, Jenny. “And your mother?” I ask. “What does she do?”
Jin snorts. “What does she do?” She flashes her fingers in derisive quote marks. “She’s a ‘homemaker.’ What to say — we are a traditional Korean family. My mother cooks and cleans and does the laundry, goes shopping for hours at a time, has lunch with her girlfriends just so she can gossip about me. Plus: she is always buying the latest household appliances and having unwholesome relationships with them.”
“Really?”
“Don’t laugh. I suspect she talks to the washing machine when we’re not there.”
“You’re making fun of your umma,” I chuckle.
“I am making fun of her. I probably shouldn’t. She’s the reason I speak four languages. When I was kid, she would — what do you say in English? — micromanage my education. Made sure I was in all the best hagwons and forced me to study very hard. I guess I owe her that.” She turns to me. “So what do your parents do?”
“My parents are dead.”
“Oh,” she says, lips forming a gentle little O of surprise. “Michael, you’re an orphan?”
“I am. I’ve been once since I was twenty.”
“You’re an orphan.” She nods, as if this explains so much about me.
We move along the cobblestone street, taking in Insadong’s atmosphere, until we come across a hole-in-the-wall shop that catches my interest. In its dark window there’s a display of old Asian coinage and paper money, ancient books, and tobacco paraphernalia. We go in and are greeted by an elderly Korean woman, an a’jumah. I bow a hello in her language, then take a respectful stroll through her shop. I leaf through a wooden box full of old South Korean money from just after the war. I pick up a bill inside a plastic sleeve and show Jin the ancient bearded face on it.
“King Sejong,” I say.
Jin smiles. “Yes. He created the Korean alphabet many hundreds of years ago. How do you know King Sejong?”
“My students talk about him sometimes — especially when arguing with me about why Korean is so much easier to learn than English.”
She moves on, begins browsing through a row of crumbling old books, and soon lets out a little yelp of delight. “Oh, see this one?” she says, pulling out a tome with a deteriorating green cover. “This is a very famous Chinese text, a collection of ancient folk tales. I read this in reprint when I was first learning Mandarin, but this looks like the original.”
She opens it carefully to show me the Chinese characters inside. They look daunting in their complexity, tracing down each page in intimidating columns. “You can actually read this?” I ask.
“Of course.” She shrugs. “I learned Mandarin before I learned English. The way the world is going, Michael, you may have to learn it one day.”
“Either that or Arabic.”
I grab another decrepit book out of the row at random, peel it open, and see an entirely different alphabet scorched onto its pages. “Can you read this one?” I joke.
She leans in to look and her face darkens instantly. “No. That’s Japanese.” Her voice is like a stone falling through water. She sets her book back and slides past me, moves in so close that I can practically smell her shampoo. “I refuse to learn Japanese,” she whispers, as if she doesn’t want the a’jumah at the counter to hear.
We decide to get something to eat. I suggest the Korean diner next to the Starbucks at the end of Insadong Row, but Jin just scoffs. “That’s for tourists,” she says. “Follow me.”
She leads me down one of the ancient alleys that branch off from the main drag, an alley that seems to narrow, cartoonishly, the farther we go. We arrive at a traditional Korean restaurant — pagoda roof and low walls — and enter to find the inner decor done entirely in cedar. There is traditional Korean music coming from the sound system, the melodic squeal of a gayageum that reminds me of weeping. The hostess seats us in a booth. I pick up one of the menus but frown when I see no English translation. The waitress comes. She’s about the same age as Jin, and just as pretty. They chat in Korean, nodding several times at the menu and a few times at me. After the waitress has collected the menus and left, Jin says: “I went ahead and ordered food and drinks for us. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
The waitress returns a few minutes later to set a large clay bowl with a ladle and two cups at our table. Inside the bowl is a milky white liquid, but it’s not milk: the smell of alcohol coming off it is strong. Jin thanks the waitress, then takes the ladle and transports some of the creamy liquid into the cups.
“This is dong dong ju,” she says, “a popular Korean beverage. Michael, it’s very potent so you should drink it slowly.”
“Hey, I can hold my liquor,” I say, lifting the cup and smelling its contents. “I come from a long line of alcoholics.” I take a full pull of the dong dong ju and something magical happens: I’m buzzing the instant it hits my stomach.
“You like it?” Jin asks, taking a girly, tentative sip from her own cup.
“Very much,” I reply. I take another generous pull, and then another. Pleasant summer campfires begin burning behind my eyes.
We chat for a bit and I try with questionable success to pace myself. Before long the waitress arrives with our food, a sizzling stone plate covered in what Jin informs me is pa’jun — Korean green onion pancake. It comes with little ceramic dishes of sesame oil for dipping. Jin chats with the waitress while she sets up a small armada of side dishes around our table, kimchi and bean sprouts and some kind of scrambled-egg concoction carved into a square. The two of them nod a few more times in my direction. When the waitress leaves, Jin throws me a tight little smile.
“She thinks you’re handsome.”
“Do you think I’m handsome?” I, or possibly the dong dong ju, ask in return.
She wrinkles her nose. “Maybe a little.”
“Do you think Rob Cruise is handsome?” I venture, realizing that he’s still preying on my mind.
“Ugh. Rob Cruise is not handsome. But he is —” and here she mulls around for the right idiom, “he is larger than life. Every Korean girl he meets thinks so. I certainly did.”
“So I’ve heard.”
Miraculously, she does not take offence. “Do you really want to talk about me and Rob?”
“We don’t have to.” But then find myself asking: “Are you two still friends?”
“I don’t know,” she huffs. “He can be so cruel, but you know, in a hilarious way. This one time, he accused me of being kong’ju’byung.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, it’s very hard to translate directly into English, but it means, like, a high-maintenance princess. That I suffer from the disease of being a high-maintenance princess!”
I laugh because this is exactly the kind of Korean phrase that Rob would insist he learn.
Jin thinks I’m laughing at her. “I am not kong’ju’bong!” she whines, slapping the table with her palm. “I am very, how you say, down to earth.”
“Hey, I believe you.” I grab the ladle and refill my cup.
“Anyway. Rob Cruise was a mistake. Try not to think about him.”
“I won’t if you won’t.”
A silence falls between us as we work our way through the pa’jun. It’s impossible to hide from Jin how useless I am with chopsticks; they fumble around my plate like paralyzed limbs. Without prompting, the waitress passes by to set a fork discreetly next to my plate.
“So tell me — what is the deal with your roommate, Justin, anyway,” Jin says. “He’s even more reserved than you are. What’s his story?”
“Justin’s stories are his stories,” I reply. “I’ll leave him to tell them.”
Jin refills her own cup and blinks at me a little. “Okay, so tell me your stories, Michael,” she says. “Why did you come to Korea?”
I have my stock answers prepared to unleash on her, the same answers I give anyone, Korean or waegookin, who asks: half-truths about lingering student loans needing to be paid off, the desire to see another part of the world and experience a different culture, blah, blah, blah. But the impatient tilt of Jin’s head tells me she’s heard it all before and won’t buy it. I’m feeling loose and fuzzy-headed, not at all like myself, and, consequently, embrace the truth.
“I got fired from my job in Canada.”
“Oh? Really?”
“Yes. In fact, you could say I got fired from my career in Canada.” I could leave it at that, sufficiently mysterious, but I find words coming out that I’d rather keep in a box. There is something in the angle of Jin’s chin, in her freakily beautiful double eyelids, in the restaurant’s shadowy light falling on her hair, which welcomes full disclosure from me. So I tell her everything — or almost everything. I at least have the good sense not to mention my ex-fiancée; this is a first date, after all. But I tell Jin about my father the politico and about my mother the lush. I tell her about my journalism in Halifax, such as it was, and how, orphaned and rudderless, I drifted into disgraceful acts of forgery and fiction. Soon I’ve gotten up some steam and tell her about getting caught and how my dishonourable deeds were broadcasted across Canada. I was fired and with no hope of finding other work in my field. I needed money and a break from myself, so I came to teach ESL to Korean kids, which has proven more palatable than suicide, which I also considered.
“I’m very ashamed,” I tell her, finishing off my cup and looking into the pot to find all the dong dong ju gone. “I’m very ashamed of what I did.”
Jin looks as if she might touch my hand lovingly, but doesn’t. “Michael, don’t be ridiculous. You’re in Korea.” Then she pauses. “You have no idea what real shame is.”
“What do you mean?”
But she shakes it off. There’s more there, I can tell, but she won’t say what it is; unlike me, she has control of her tongue. “Look, I’ve met many ESL teachers,” she says, “and sure, I’ve had relations with more than a few of them. But one thing I’ve noticed is that they’ve all come to my country because they’re running away from something in theirs. Maybe not as big as your something, but they’re running just the same. Except, they never admit it.” I think of Justin and Rob, the little bits of themselves they’ve shared with me. “You’re different than that,” she says. “You’re better than that.” She leans in. “Tell you what. Whatever you did before we met is none of my business, and I promise not to judge you for it. And whatever I did before we met is none of your business, and you promise not to judge me for it. Deal?”
“Deal,” I reply.
“Good.” She settles back again and flags down the waitress to order us, me, a pitcher of water.
Out on the street, away from Insadong, we’re standing in that awkward, absurd silence that comes at the end of a first date, where I feel the full weight and obligation of my gender crash down around my shoulders.
“You’re not taking the subway?” I ask, stalling.
“No. I have to go to a family event not far from here, so I’ll take a taxi.” Her face goes grim. “Ugh. My mother will not be pleased that I’m half drunk on dong dong ju.”
“Half drunk,” I snicker.
“Anyway, this was fun,” Jin says. “I want to see you again, Michael.”
“Okay.” So I lean in to do the unbearable, to take that one brave step. Big mistake. She pulls back from me at a forty-five degree angle as if forced by the wind. For the first and only time, her face looks ugly to me — all flat and slanty, muscles pulled back as if by wild dogs, and full of cultural indignation. It says, What are you doing ?
I fall back and she falls forward. “Call me,” she says, patting my shoulder.
I stand there as she disappears into a cab, disappears into the city. And I hate myself for the thoughts that plague me then. I blame the drink. What the fuck, Jin. It was just a kiss. What the fuck. You bloody well slept with Rob Cruise the first night you met him.