Re Jane (15 page)

I lifted myself from the floor and walked to the altar. My hand stretched toward the brass bowl. But before I could right the falling stick, I felt a gentle pressure on my back; it was Emo's hand, and it had the dual effect of offering me comfort and forcing me into a bow. By the way her hand hiccupped on my back, I could tell that her tears had tapered off. Reluctantly I succumbed to the pressure, but as I bent forward, I refused to meet my dead grandfather's disapproving gaze. Try as I might, I could not muster the same sorrow for the man who had sent both my mother and me away.

Sang was equally unemotional as we drove to the cemetery. Out of the city limits, the high-rises gave way to empty stretches of what was once farmland, littered with the skeletons of new buildings.

When we arrived, we saw burial plots cut into the side of a mountain like terraces. We unloaded mats and the funeral food from the trunk of the car. With these in hand, we ascended the mountain to Re Myungsun's spot at the top.

The men driving the hearse had beaten us to the grave; my grandfather's coffin lay beside his dug-up rectangle of dirt. The men stood off to the side, smoking cigarettes and speaking in hushed tones. I watched as Sang knelt on the mat and bent over into a bow, while the men lowered Re Myungsun's coffin into the ground. Suddenly a muffled sob escaped my uncle's chest; it made an ugly sound, like a terrified cat.
Mrkgnao!
Sang clamped his hand to his mouth, rose, and with a sweeping sidestep he took refuge behind a tree.

It was just that one, sharp, quick cry before it was drowned by the sounds of the wind rushing at the empty branches—the cherry blossoms were long past their bloom. When Sang rejoined the group, he was dry-eyed. As he brushed off his wife's attempts to soothe him, I caught a glimpse of a man racked with pain. But I couldn't distinguish between his anger and his grief.

G
angnam, whose name means literally “south of the river,” is on the southern banks of the Han, the river that splits the city in two. The family apartment was in Building 404, Unit 1801, of a large complex called Gangnam Sinnara Apartments. The front door was operated by a digital keypad lock. When you punched in the number combo, the bell tone chirped a synth version of the folk song “Arirang,” like a miniature karaoke machine.

According to Big Uncle, my grandfather had made a smart investment in the eighties—he bought a plot of undeveloped land in Gangnam right before the Gangnam market exploded. Everyone was scrambling to develop. Re Myungsun sold off a portion of his property and used the handsome profits to purchase more. And so on and so forth.

The first thing I noticed about the apartment was the floors—swirling white-and-caramel-colored marble. Our house in Flushing had cheap linoleum tiling. In the living room, an L-shaped white leather couch sat opposite a huge television set flanked by speakers that were as tall as Emo. A traditional low lacquer table sat beside the couch, and a terrace opened to a view of the manicured lawns below.

As Emo led us on a tour of the apartment, Sang kept shaking his head—he hated conspicuous displays of wealth. This fancy apartment had not always been the family home. When Sang had set sail for America, the family still lived in Busan. In fact, the family wasn't even originally from the South, but from the North; Sang and my mother were born in the coastal city of Wonsan. Sang, who seldom talked of the past, shared only one memory of their home in the North: that it smelled of wild rice and the sea. When war broke out, they were forced to abandon the house. They fled to the southern tip of the peninsula, to the port city of Busan where they lived in a small house—more hut than home—in a neighborhood among other
ibuk
pinanja
—Northern refugees.

Suddenly there was a squeal—“
Ee!”
—from the kitchen. It was Hannah. I thought for sure she'd seen a mouse. But when we all rushed in, we found her caressing a large, flower-printed appliance that looked like a freezer chest.

“It's a kimchi fridge!”
she said. But her excitement turned sour, then shrill. She slapped her husband's arm.
“I
told
you everyone's got one! How many times do I have to ask you for one?”

“One refrigerator's enough,”
Sang said dismissively.

Emo looked from Hannah to Sang. She pursed her lips. Then her tone went light and airy—girlish, even.
“Big Brother Number Two, I will say it does make fermenting kimchi so much easier,”
she said.

Sang shot a look at Emo before stomping out of the room.

Just a few minutes later, his voice echoed loudly from the bathroom.
“Aish!” Aish
was an annoyed exhalation, its meaning ranging from “darn”
to “damn,” depending on intonation. Looming back at us was a shiny white toilet with electronic buttons that lit up in pastel colors. It kept making a robotic chirp. Sang's turds floated in the toilet water.

“Mwuga irukhae bokjaphae?”
Sang muttered.
Why is this so complicated?

“Oh, Brother.”
Emo inserted herself between Sang and the toilet. She pointed to the manual buttons on top. I leaned in to look—they were labeled with Chinese characters. In Sang's scribbled memos, he sometimes used Chinese characters as a shorthand, like how Latin symbols littered most of Beth's Post-it notes. I recognized the characters from Devon's flashcards as those for “big” and “small.” I could hear Devon's voice explaining, “He's not doing a
cartwheel,
Jane. He's spreading out his arms to say, ‘Thi-i-i-s big!'”

Emo pointed to the other buttons.
“This one's to warm the seat. This one's to raise or lower it. This one squirts water after you—”

“Why can't they keep it simple?”
tutted Sang.
“All you need is one lever.”

Emo pursed her lips again, forming a tight, polite smile. It was an expression I never saw Sang or Hannah make. I was coming to see Emo's role in the family: She was the mediator. Any hint of conflict and she was there to defuse it.

“There's obviously a demand for it,”
Big Uncle said.
“You've been out of our country too long.”

My heart tightened when I saw Sang's humiliated expression. He had left Korea at a time when the night-soil man still made the rounds to each family's outhouse. Now, more than thirty years later, he'd returned to his native land—a place with talking toilets in sky-high condos.

* * *

When Big Uncle announced he would take us out to dinner at a restaurant called Dosirak, I pictured wooden tables and chairs and a casual bustle, a place like the Korean restaurants lining Northern Boulevard. The name Dosirak, which means “lunch box,” conjured up a humble affair. Taking a cue from Sang and Hannah, who wore their usual work clothes, I pulled on a T-shirt and my last pair of clean jeans—faded blue and fraying at the hems. Mary was dressed in her usual too-tight all-black, as if she were off to a nightclub. George wore cargo pants and a T-shirt that read
IF YOU CAN READ T
HIS, YOU'RE INVADING
MY PERSONAL SPACE
, with shrinking type sizes, like on an optometrist's chart. Besides Mary, Emo was the only one of us who was not dressed casually. She wore a black blouse and a long, sequined black skirt. The waistband pinched at her midsection. The collar of her top was studded with rhinestones. She literally sparkled all over. She teetered on black patent-leather platform shoes that looked like they were designed for someone Mary's age or younger. Her short bob was wound into tight, permed curls, and her round face was painted white, with red lipstick coating her thin lips.

Emo surveyed Sang.
“Big Brother Number Two, are you sure you'll be . . . comfortable in those clothes?”

He stared back at her as if she were an idiot.
“Of course I'm comfortable. Why would I wear something if it was uncomfortable?”

Emo pursed her lips.

The six of us squeezed into Emo's car. Big Uncle was at the lawyer's office and would meet us at the restaurant. We arrived at Sinnara Hotel, in the heart of Gangnam. We rode a glass-walled elevator up and up, a view of the Han River spreading below us.

The elevator doors opened to the top floor. On the wall opposite, the restaurant name—Dosirak—was written in both Korean and transliterated English in gold lettering. The words glinted down at us.

Sang charged his way to the front.
“Party of seven,”
he told the woman behind the podium.

She blinked back at him. Her face was a blank, ageless slate—she could have been twenty or forty-five. Her hair was pulled back into a stiff bun.
“But there are only six of you, Client,”
she said.

“The seventh is on his way.”
Big Uncle had phoned Emo to say he was running a few minutes late. Sang pushed up the sleeves of his plaid shirt. The same plaid shirt he always wore: a wrinkleproof cotton-nylon blend, breast pocket crammed with its usual assortment of Bic pens and old receipts used as scrap paper.

The woman's face remained expressionless, but I saw her eyes tilt ever so slightly downward, sweeping Sang from head to toe. They flickered into an almost imperceptible wince. But my uncle was turning away to say something to Emo and didn't see.

I fell in line behind Sang, fixing a glare on the woman. I crossed my arms over my chest. I heard Beth's voice:
Clothes shouldn't mark a person's character.
But the woman's eyes would not meet mine.

“So sorry. I cannot seat you until your whole party arrives,”
she said.

Sang did a quick sidestep toward the restaurant entrance, craning his neck to peer inside. The woman, alarmed, upset her reservation book; its pages flapped helplessly in the air before the book fell to the floor. She swished sideways with surprising speed, despite her tight pencil skirt and heels, just as Sang was sliding back into place. They looked like two figures on a foosball table.

“There's no one in there,”
Sang informed her.

“Client, you must not be . . . from here.”

“What did you say to me?”
Sang's eyebrows shot into a knot, the way they did when a subordinate was being insubordinate.

The woman went on.
“You have an air about you that is not—”

Emo, who'd been hanging back, jumped in.
“Our reservation is under Re Hoon.”
Then she added,
“They are visiting from America.”
The diamonds studding her earlobes caught the light of the chandeliers above.

When the woman confirmed our name in the reservation book—she glanced down a few times, as though she expected not to find it listed—she briskly gathered a stack of menus to her chest. We followed her down a narrow hallway. At the end there was a large and—as Sang had rightfully noted earlier—mostly empty main dining room. The walls were floor-to-ceiling windows. It reminded me of Windows on the World. Except Dosirak had private rooms that lined the hallway. We were led to a narrow, windowless room to the right.

“That woman has too many words,”
Sang said when the hostess had barely exited the room.

“Oh, Brother
,” said Emo.

Through the walls I could hear the flush of the toilets next door.

When Big Uncle finally arrived, red-faced in his shiny black suit, he was not at all pleased with the location of our table. He gave us a sour look before he pressed the electronic call button for the waitress.

“Miss,”
he said when a woman—similarly bunned, similarly ageless—arrived at our room.
“There's been a mistake. I reserved one of the rooms on the other side.”

When the woman said she would go check, Sang called out after her.
“Or the main dining room is fine, too.”
He tugged at the collar of his shirt.
“It's a little
tap-tap-hae
in here.”

In truth, it
was
pretty
tap-tap-hae—
the room was cramped and confining. There was not much clearance between our chairs and the walls behind us. It seemed that the more desirable rooms across the hallway were built at the sacrifice of these dark interior ones.

Big Uncle looked reproachfully at his younger brother. But Sang was too busy looking down at his menu.
“At these prices you'd think they'd treat you like a king.”

Big Uncle huffed.
“People treat you how they think you should be treated.”

Sang pursed his mouth, as though a retort were about to spring from his lips, but he seemed to think better of it. He fell silent.

The waitress returned, with the manager in tow. The manager wore a black suit with an iridescent sheen, like fish scales.
“Client, the other rooms are occupied. So sorry.”

“They looked empty to me,” George said, to nobody in particular. By the sudden flush of red flooding the cheeks of the manager and the nervous titter from the waitress, I could tell they understood English. Not Big Uncle; he was too focused on his anger—I don't think he understood English anyway—and was now winding back to release it.

“Do-you-know-who-I-am?”
The air blasted from his mouth and hit the waitress in the face. It was almost comical, the way her hair would have whipped behind her if it weren't already pulled back in a severe bun.

The manager lowered his head. He let out a little laugh of discomfort, exposing a gold incisor.
“So sorry. It's because we have a . . . situation in those other rooms.”
He did not elaborate on this “situation” before going on,
“But I hope, Client, you find this room suitable for your needs—”

“That's right, this room is completely suitable!”
Hannah jumped in, her first words of the night.
“We are so lucky to have such a fine room.”
She narrowed her eyes at me, then at Mary, and soon all three of us were also nodding in agreement with enthusiasm.
“So fancy-fancy!”
we added.

The manager and the waitress stared back helplessly at Big Uncle. To my surprise he threw Hannah, and not them, an angry look.
“Gaja,”
he said curtly, rising from the table. I didn't move; I wasn't sure if he was being serious.
“I said let's go!”

The urgency with which he'd barked the command
made me think he wished us all to scramble as quickly as possible. But then
he
would be the last to file out of the room. I hovered a few inches above my chair. When Big Uncle reached me, he made a reverse hissing sound—
hssst!
Immediately I scooted my seat in, just as he was pushing the back of my chair out of his way. The edge of the table sliced into my ribs, knocking the wind out of me.

The manager and the waitress did not stop us, and when we passed through the hallway again, I saw that the windowed rooms—those coveted rooms—were now filled with middle-aged men in suits.

On the elevator ride down, Sang said to Big Uncle,
“Did you really have to make a big scene? It was so embarrassing.”

Big Uncle scoffed.
“You want to talk about embarrassing? Just stay quiet if you don't know how things work,”
he said, shooting a look at Hannah, who was picking lint off her shoulder.

Sang's eyes flashed, but he said nothing.

I probably should have taken a perverse delight in watching Big Uncle chew out Sang. But in that cramped glass elevator, as we descended the many stories down, I thought about Thanksgiving dinner with the Mazer-Farleys. Watching Beth do the same thing to Ed at the dinner table had made me lose my appetite.

When we reached the bottom floor, George asked, “So . . . where're we going to eat now?”