Re Jane (16 page)

Which was how we ended up in the basement food court, sitting in red plastic chairs and eating soggy burgers and fries at the McSinnara.

T
he courtyard of Gangnam Sinnara Apartments had looked particularly impressive from the late Re Myungsun's terrace on the eighteenth floor. The well-groomed lawns formed tidy square rows. A large fountain stood at the center, shooting tall peaks of water. Stone sculptures dotted the lawn, and a babbling brook coursed through the grounds. But up close the greenery looked no less man-made than the gray towers surrounding it. I threaded my way through the perfect squares of Astroturf and took a seat on a wooden bench, opposite a miniature waterfall.

My grandfather had left me one hundred thousand dollars in his will. After we returned from our McMeal, Hannah all the while complaining about how she could feel the back of her head throbbing from the MSG, my uncles and Emo called me into one of the spare bedrooms that had served as the late Re Myungsun's office. They told me he had left money in the will for each of us, and I was given my late mother's share.

Share,
not shame. As my mother's siblings dissected the will, I couldn't help but recall a memory from the past: a fight Sang and Hannah had when I was maybe no older than kindergarten age.

“Why's he need
our
hard-earned money for?
” Hannah had said.
“What about your lazy big brother?”

“Big Brother's attending to his own hardships right now, with his wife. . . .”
Sang had trailed off; then, with a renewed firmness, he said,
“He's my father. It's our duty.”

After that, my uncle had gone away for four days. I was terrified that Hannah had kicked him out and he was never coming back. While Sang was far from benevolent to me, even then I knew that my connection to him was the only thing keeping me under that roof.

It was now clear: Sang had given Grandfather the money to invest in Gangnam.

But all this—the apartment, the right to enjoy these grounds—belonged to Big Uncle now. Across the street was a FamilyMart convenience store. I watched the apartment dwellers streaming out. Men with bottles of
soju
or beer. Schoolgirls tearing open bags of shrimp chips. And then two young boys who looked like brothers eating ice-cream cones, their mother trailing behind them. The boys wore socks with plastic slippers, and their legs were so skinny you might have thought the children were war-stricken, if not for the fact that each had his own ice cream and their mother wore high heels and had an expensive-looking handbag hanging from her shoulder. The brothers chattered on animatedly, stopping only to take licks from their cones, and I wondered if they would have been as happy if there were only one cone to share between them. Would the older brother have offered his younger brother the first bite, the way Sang and Hannah had always made me share with my younger cousins? Most likely they would have squabbled. People were hardly as generous when the resources between them grew scarce.

“There you are,”
Emo said, taking the seat beside me.
“I was looking all over for you.”

“So sorry. I inconvenience,”
I said, because it seemed to be the thing to say. The truth was, I was glad she had found me. Being around Emo felt the way it had that first night in the funeral home—like warm blankets and spittle. I felt a connection with her I had never felt with any of my other relatives or, indeed, anyone else before. It was a different comfortable feeling from what I felt around Ed. Was this
jung
?
Even though I was only an infant when Emo had taken care of me, perhaps some sensory memory, far buried in the recesses of my mind, could still recall the feel of her touch. Beth might've called it Freudian, but Beth hated Freud.

“You've gone through a lot these last few days, haven't you?”
Emo said, sinking into the seat next to me.

You don't know the half of it,
I thought. Aloud, I said,
“You, too.”

Emo took my hand between her hands, as if we were schoolgirls playing a slapping game.
“It must not have been easy for you, over there.”

I listened to the rushing sounds of the fake waterfall. It sprayed a cooling mist on my face. Silently I shook my head.

“I always tell your uncle to lighten up! The air around him is so heavy and stern. But he's like a typical Busan man. And you know what they say: ‘Men from Busan don't emote.'”

“The meaning, what is?”
I asked her.

“You never heard that?”
Emo said, her hands clapping excitedly over mine.
“Then Emo will tell you a joke. What are the three things a Busan man says to his wife when he comes home each night?”

She looked at me with bright eyes, as if she fully expected me to know the answer.

“No idea.”

“‘Bapjwo. Ahnun? Jaja.'”

Give me food. And the kids? Let's go to bed.

Emo let out a girlish trill of laughter; I followed suit.
“Emo, so fun you are.”

She gave my hand a tight squeeze.
“We need to work on your Korean. So you can learn Seoul standard.”
She said I spoke Korean like an American—my sentence structure was reversed.
“We have a saying: You have to listen all the way to the end to know what a person's really talking about.”

“Oh,”
I said, trying to hide my disappointment. It was indeed the opposite of English, where you led with the most important thing. I would have so much more to learn.

Emo examined my face.
“I had to fix my Korean, too, when we moved up to Seoul. Before that I had the
thickest
Busan dialect!”
She laughed.
“But now look: People even mistake me for a Seoulite. I never thought I'd see the day.”

But Big Uncle still spoke with a strong Busan accent. Sang and Hannah, too. As did all the adults at church.

“But only short time left,”
I offered sadly.
“Well, that's the thing. . . .”
Emo paused to look into the waterfall.
“Beautiful, isn't it?”
she murmured.
“It must feel like a waste, with only one day left. How do you like it here?”

I shook my head.
“Not how I imagining inside my head. But like in good way.”

Emo nodded with approval.
“American Uncle told us about your work situation back home. What a shame.”

My chest tightened, remembering what I'd done with Ed.

“Thank goodness
you didn't take that job.”
Immediately it loosened.
“I was thinking. Maybe you shouldn't go back to America. Especially . . . after all that's happened. You should stay here, with us. I read there's a big demand for native English-speaking teachers.”

“But always American Uncle and Aunt say I not suppose to living here—”
I stopped. I knew I was saying it all wrong.

Emo chose her words carefully.
“They belong to a different generation. Times have changed since.”

“
But . . . you so busy. I get in the way.”
I was speaking Sang's scripted words.
“And what about Big Uncle?”
I found him intimidating; he reminded me of Re Myungsun.

“To be honest, I think Big Uncle gets sick of me sometimes,”
Emo said, chuckling. “
He'd appreciate having someone else around. Now that Father is . . .”
She fixed her eyes again on the waterfall, then changed course. “
We'll have so much fun together! I will take you shopping. The beauty salon. And I have so many jokes to share with you. Jokes and”—
her tone grew wistful—“
and stories.”

Stories.
I was suddenly brought back to the Mazer-Farley kitchen table and the stories the family would tell. We never had that in Sang's house. I knew almost nothing of his life in Korea.

Emo pulled an envelope from her pocket and opened it. Inside was a black-and-white photograph, yellowed with age. Two children, a boy and a girl, stood in front of a small house with a thatched roof. Both children were painfully skinny—skinnier than the boys I saw earlier with the ice cream. They were holding hands.

“I found this while going through some old things,”
Emo said
. “That's your mother with American Uncle. And that's our old house, in Busan. Not long after they fled the North. I wasn't born yet.”
She smiled wistfully.
“Sometimes I think they had all the fun before I came around.”

I took the picture from her. Sang looked like his usual irritated self, even as a child, his mouth tilting down in its habitual frown. I focused on my mother's half of the picture. Back in Flushing we had only one photo of her, where she was staring up at the sun. But there was something about her expression in this photo that was extremely unsettling. Even though she was a child, she wore the haunted face of someone much older. The dark shadows cast under her eyes gave her an air of grave maturity. I wondered if this was her natural disposition or the trauma of war.

Times have changed since.
Suddenly I knew what I would do. Emo was offering me a new home, in Korea. What did I have to return to in New York?

* * *

Sang did not approve of my decision to stay. It didn't matter that Emo had told him of the job opportunities in Seoul. He still said, “Better you come back home.”

“But there's nothing for me back there,” I said. I thought of the Mazer-Farleys', of that hooded bay window staring back at me.
Homewrecker.
It was a word whose literal meaning I'd never had reason to ponder before.

Sang frowned. “You find new job. Something else. Something better.”

“What, like work at Food?”

His frown deepened. “What the problem with—” But he stopped himself from saying more. “Maybe you right.” I was surprised by his loosened tone. “Maybe better you stay here. Safer. And Grandpa money worth more here anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“Anytime you taking something outside country, gonna lost its value,” he said. I don't think I imagined the wistfulness etched in his voice. “And don't forget taxes. Always there taxes. Worth maybe only half by the end.”

“I'm planning to find a job here. I'll earn my own money,” I said.

“You better not stay here just for the fun time. Uncle hearing lot of story about
gyopo
who only going Itaewon nightclub.”
Gyopo
is the word for a Korean raised overseas—I'd never heard it used before arriving in Seoul. His eyes narrowed. “
Never
you dare go Itaewon.”

Itaewon had been shaped vividly in my consciousness, the handiwork of Hannah's stories when I was growing up. She would paint tales of nice Korean girls wandering down the wrong alleys, only to be snatched up by loutish American men in army fatigues or equally loutish Korean men working in conjunction with them. These poor girls would get tarted up and be sold into prostitution, and soon you'd see them drowning in the cheap neon light of sordid bars, spreading wide their red-lipsticked mouths in exaggerated trills of laughter.

Sometimes Hannah switched her stories: A certain kind of Korean girl—wild, wanton—would deliberately seek out Itaewon's carnal pleasures. Hannah used to curl her lip and stare into my eyes—as if she could
see
that budding wild wantonness.
“Do you want to end up like that?”
she'd warn, to which I'd vigorously shake my head and fix my penitent gaze on the floor.

Sang's default mode was to assume the worst of me. And just like that—whatever tenderness was starting to form between us instantly dissipated. “Maybe it's good I'm not going back.”

There was a moment when something flashed across his face, and I thought for sure he'd fly into his usual rage.
Who you think you are? No back-talk!
But when my uncle opened his mouth to speak, his voice wavered.

“You know when Uncle first coming to America? Around same time they starting construction for Twin Tower. Every time I walking by construction site, they building one more story. Just like Uncle building up the business, Smith Street. Always feel little bit like we growing up together.”

Before I could press my uncle to go on, he stopped himself. His tone resumed its usual roughness. “Anyway, here nothing like America.” He reached for his pocket. “You like burden to Emo and Big Uncle.”

My uncle handed me an envelope. His handouts were few and far between—I recognized the importance of the moment.

As I thanked him, his face turned red—an expression I normally would've written off as annoyance. Now I wondered if it wasn't embarrassment. Quickly Sang left the room.

Inside the envelope was a thousand dollars in U.S. twenties, their edges tired and worn from use.

* * *

Sang and the rest of the family boarded the plane to New York, but I stayed. After they left, I studied the photo that Emo had given me with newfound eyes.

Sang seemed to be holding my mother's hand not out of tenderness but exasperated obligation, as if keeping her from some impending danger—a mud puddle, a snarling dog. But I caught a glint of something in his black eyes that I had missed the first time. For all his inexpressiveness those black eyes seemed to shine at my mother with just the hint of a smile.

E
a
t up! You have a big day ahead of you,”
Emo said, pushing a plate of mackerel toward me. It was my first breakfast alone with just Big Uncle and Emo. The three of us sat around a cream-colored marble table. No Sang to shoot me
nunchi
daggers. No splitting the fish carcass with Hannah, picking off the bits of flesh clinging to its thin bones. Here Big Uncle and I each got our own whole fish.

I was planning to spend the day at an Internet café applying for English-teaching jobs—Emo had given me a list of suggestions. Mary had mentioned that the Internet cafés here were called “PC bang”—a Konglishism marrying the English “PC” with the Korean
bang,
or “room.”

Big Uncle mentioned there was a PC bang nearby.
“From our apartment go through the South Gate. At the FamilyMart alley, go another hundred meters. It'll be on the left.”

“Wait—just one minute—”
I ran to get a pen and paper to catch everything Big Uncle had said.
“Please one more time repeating?”

“From the South Gate, go a hundred meters down the FamilyMart alley—”

“But, like, street names? Address number?”

Big Uncle looked at me blankly.
“No one here uses street addresses.”

Emo jumped in to explain.
“Here we usually go by famous landmarks or stores.”

As I would later learn, streets in Seoul were nothing like the streets back home, where grids were imposed on the landscape and even the shortest of streets was duly labeled. In Seoul, building numbers were assigned in the order they were built in that neighborhood. At that time a typical address might read, say, “Jung-gu, Sindang-dong 383.” That was like being handed an address that read “Manhattan, Upper East Side 383” and you were somehow supposed to find the 383rd building constructed anywhere between East Fifty-ninth and East Ninety-sixth Streets. People gave directions here, but they were always relative to your shifting orientation in space.

“But how a person suppose to finding the way here?”
I asked.

Big Uncle let out an annoyed chuff.
“Why do you have so many words?”

My brain sometimes did that: it computed the unfiltered, literal translation of the Korean spoken around me. What Big Uncle had
actually
meant was,
What's with all the questions?

He went on.
“A person should already know where he's supposed to go.”

Emo, perhaps impatient that I wasn't eating the fish quickly enough, dipped her chopsticks into its belly and deposited a hunk of meat into my bowl of rice. It was something Hannah used to do—still did, in fact—with George. I thanked her and took the piece. Before I was done swallowing, she'd already replaced it with a new piece of fish. Her own bowl was left untouched.

After the meal was over, Big Uncle said he wanted something to clear his palate, so I was sent to the fridge for some fruit. I came back to the table with a pear. Big Uncle watched me intently as I carved away the skin of the fruit. I hoped he knew I knew that pears weren't cheap and that I was cutting the fruit for all of us, not just selfishly for me. My fingers became unsteady; I could sense him growing
tap-tap-hae.

Finally Big Uncle shouted,
“You're hacking that thing into a hexagon!”
He pointed to the series of knife marks scoring the pale flesh, then to my pile of shavings. I relinquished the pear to him. He demonstrated, torquing his wrist in even, elegant motions.
“It's supposed to be round and smooth, like this. You see the difference between mine and yours?”
He held up a thick, wasteful peel. It looked nothing like Sang's.
“If you cut fruit like that, you'll never land a husband.”

This was the longest interaction I'd had with Big Uncle; I didn't know what to think. Was this a reprimand or an attempt at intimacy? Whatever it was, Big Uncle sent me to the fridge for more pears. He made me practice, over and over, until the marks scoring the flesh grew less pronounced, until soon there were no signs of knife work at all.

“There you go!”
Big Uncle said encouragingly. His tone, so didactic just moments earlier, turned almost gentle. He spread his hands wide on the table. His palms were as pale and smooth as the sliced pears. They looked nothing like Sang's callused ones.

* * *

After a few missed turns, eventually I found my way to the PC bang. I signed on to a computer and was met with a chorus—a cacophony—of e-mails, calling out from my in-box. I opened Eunice's first, because her e-mail offered the least possibility of trauma, despite its subject heading: “Dark Times These Are.”

Jane:

Greetings from 37.4250°N, 122.0956°W. Glad you must be you didn't get that job with Lowood: your whole office would've been obliterated.

E.O.

PS: Sorry to hear re your grandfather.

PPS: When you get back to NY, would you mind checking in on my mom? She's been kind of freaking out about everything.

I did not click on the link Eunice had included in the bottom of the e-mail (it was to some conspiracy-theory Web site). After responding to Eunice's message, I threw myself into the job search for the next couple of hours, ignoring Ed's and Beth's unread e-mails staring bold-faced from the screen. I didn't know how other people dealt with tragedies. In the movies people were always making grand displays of their anguish: sobbing into handkerchiefs, punching through walls. But for me, when something was out of sight, it was also out of mind. If it was not out of sight, then I'd force my eyes to go dead, before the violating images had the chance to sear their indelible impressions.

I found a Web site called Dan's ESL Coffeehouse that posted job openings for foreign English teachers. Most of the jobs did not require certification or previous teaching experience. In the forums a number of Americans and Canadians boasted instant success. “I didn't even have to open my mouth, they hired me on the spot,” said waegukin69. “I got so many offers I had to beat them off with a stick,” wrote yugiyo411. My confidence bolstered, I e-mailed out my résumés and was surprised by how quickly I heard back from the schools. Already I had two interviews lined up for the next day.

That task completed, I returned, reluctantly, to my e-mails. I clicked on Beth's first. She'd sent a number of messages, each one escalating in its level of alarm. I dreaded reliving her panic. Her first e-mail, sent before the attacks, was a long missive addressed to both Ed and me. She expounded on the conference she'd left early and her exhausting red-eye flight home, only to find the house “utterly devoid of the family I'd left the conference early to be with in the first place.” When you read between the lines, the e-mail was clearly a passive-aggressive censure at her not being informed of anyone's whereabouts.

Immediately after the attacks, however, the tenor changed. As she grew increasingly panicked, the lengths of her e-mails grew shorter and tighter, as if she functioned solely on instinct. “Forget everything said before. Water under the bridge. Just let me know you're okay?”

Her second-to-last message was like sharp staccato notes: “Jane. Are you alive? Please God. Answer.” All extraneous words fell away; her language was distilled to its bare essence.

Beth's final e-mail had been sent after I'd already landed in Seoul. The tone and length resumed their normal extra-wordiness.

After being informed by my daughter of your call, I am beyond relieved that you're safe. My deepest condolences are with you and your family in this difficult time (i.e., your grandfather's passing). I understand the delicacy of the situation, but I do ask that should (God forbid) some similar future event occur, you please keep us abreast of said developments as they're transpiring. Frankly, I find it a touch out of character that a responsible woman such as yourself would fly off without a word of notice.

What kind of notice could I possibly have left behind? “I'm sorry I slept with your husband and ruined your family's life—here's my flight number”? I made several stabs at a response to Beth, but I found myself continually hitting the
BACKSPACE
key, deleting strings of words that sounded like empty rhetoric. Sang hated when we tried to explain away our apologies. He much preferred that we stare contritely at the tops of our feet, at the linoleum. Later he would expect us to piece back together the lamp we'd broken in our recklessness or scrub out the offending stain from the juice spilled on the couch through our carelessness. In other words, taking action instead of offering false “I'm sorry”s.

And I'd taken action: I'd removed myself from the Mazer-Farleys. I couldn't hit
BACKSPACE
on what I'd already done, but I could make certain I'd never let it happen again.

I wrote the most perfunctory of e-mails, offering my resignation.

Then I braced myself for Ed's messages. There were two from the night I was supposed to meet him at the hotel. There was a third immediately after the Towers had been struck. But the fourth e-mail, his last, had been sent just twenty minutes ago:

Dear Jane,

Let's just get one thing clear first: I'm not mad at you for not showing up at that hotel room. I understand your sudden flight. At least I'm trying to make sense of it all.

The hours, the days drag on. Without you. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night. Swear I hear you in the kitchen. But when I rush down the stairs and flick on the light, all I see is that empty table. I just stand there for a moment, deluding myself into thinking you'll appear. But you never do.

Your absence is echoed by the utterly stricken state of this city, post-attacks. An oppressive something—sorrow? grief?—hangs in the air. It manifests itself in the black clouds of ash that coat the sky.

Sometimes I think I spot you on the streets. I call out your name. But when I draw near, you've vanished in the shadows. I feel and see and hear you everywhere.

Devon confirms that you're safe. They've reopened JFK. Jane—I keep hoping, praying, you'll find your way back to me.

In that PC bang, as the Koreans surrounding me were completely absorbed in Starcraft or whatever computer games they were banging away on, not one of them saw my hand shaking over the mouse as I read Ed's e-mail. Not one saw the tears that splashed onto the keyboard like hot drops of rain. Not one saw me raise the back of my trembling hand to my eyes as I pressed—hard—to blot them away.

Ed,

I've decided to stay on in Korea. I'm not coming back to New York.

You should be with your family now.

I'm so sorry.

Love,

Jane

Before I could overthink it, I hit
SEND
.

Just when I thought I was done, I saw that, buried all the way at the bottom of those e-mails, was a message from Nina. I opened it; a burst of freshness filled the air:

yeah thanks again for taking off to korea without telling me. but i'm really sorry about your grandfather. that's just . . . awful. i told my nonna and she's doing like five decades of the rosary for your fam.

all i know is they better catch those assholes responsible for this. YOU DON'T FUCKING MESS WITH NEW YORK.

hit me back with a joke, a story, anything to take my mind off stuff. it feels like everything's falling apart. i could use a good laugh.

I stopped crying, calmed my trembling hands. My fingers were poised over the keyboard, and I began to write.

If I have to explain a joke, then it probably defeats the purpose, but here goes: What are the three things a man from Busan says to his wife each night . . .

Just as I was about to log off, another e-mail popped into my in-box, from EduAcademy, one of the schools I had applied to earlier.

New teacher opening we have our school. Old foreign native English speaker teacher leave. Today afternoon for interview you can come? Our location is . . .

I hit
REPLY
. I made a copy of the e-mail with the directions to the school. As I logged off the computer, I resolved to shut out all thoughts of New York and the people I'd left behind.

* * *

EduAcademy was in the Jongno district—directly across the river from where we lived in Gangnam-gu. Dressed in the same black suit I wore to the Mazer-Farley interview (the one I'd smartly thought to pack, anticipating a funeral), with the same sneakers on my feet and the same dress heels tucked into the same black pleather tote bag, I headed over to the subway station.

According to the map on the station platform, the Number 2 train made a complete loop around the perimeter of Seoul. It spun in an uninterrupted circle, with no final destination. In New York there was no such thing as a subway that made a complete circle—there was always a finite start and end. Jongno was a straight shot north, but the only way to get to my destination—according to the map, anyhow—was to take this roundabout train route.

When I boarded, the subway was fairly empty, and I managed to get a seat before the surge of other passengers got on. There was an ad for an English-language after-school.
LEARN PERFECT ENVIABLE
NATIVE ENGLISH!
Another ad shouted,
BE
COME THE PERFECT BEA
UTY!
with side-by-side pictures of a woman's face. The one to the left was a broad, kind face with slivered-almond eyes and a small pug nose—she looked like Eunice. The picture on the right had big, round, double-lidded eyes, a prominent nose, and a pointy chin. There was something off about the gaze—something a little flat, a little dead in the eyes. It did not look like a Korean face at all. It took me a moment or two longer than it should have to realize that it was an ad for a plastic-surgery clinic.

I was so focused on these ads that I nearly missed my stop. I emerged from the subway and stared at the printout of the e-mail the school secretary had sent me. The directions, written in English, didn't make sense.
Go Exit 6 walk to Provence Bakery alley and left turn second Sinnara Bank alley to Brown Chicken Hof alley and 200m on the right side school location.
Why did they keep calling them alleys and not streets? I thought for sure something had been lost in translation. Amazingly, at Exit 6 there were three Provence Bakeries: one behind, one ahead, and the other across the way. I walked up to the one straight ahead and turned down the street. But I could not find a Sinnara Bank.