Re Jane (17 page)

I huffed and puffed up narrow hilly streets, thankful I was still wearing my sneakers. I realized that finding your way around here was just as Big Uncle had said:
A person should already know where he's supposed to go.
And if you didn't already know where you were supposed to go, you had to rely on someone who did to guide you.

The quiet back alleys offered glimpses into what I imagined was a Korea of the past. Old men carried flattened cardboard in large wheelbarrows. Grannies squatted on their haunches, selling handmade rice cakes on makeshift Styrofoam tables.

After asking around for directions and being pointed up and down the wrong alleys, I eventually found my way to EduAcademy. I was sweating, and my hair was pulled back into a flustered ponytail that stuck to the back of my neck. I, who'd always prided myself on getting to places early, was five minutes—and counting—late for the interview.

On the elevator ride up, I hastily changed my shoes. I was still balancing against the wall—one foot shod in a heel, the other in a sneaker—when the doors dinged open. An older woman passing through the hallway stopped in her tracks and stared at me.

“Can I help you?”
she said, in a tone that made it clear she did not really wish to.

“Here I am. For the job meeting,”
I said. I didn't know the Korean word for “interview.”

“You're not . . . the foreigner candidate, are you?”
the woman said, studying me.

“I am Jane Re.”
Maybe she didn't recognize Re as Korean. I told her I wasn't a foreigner.

The woman hesitated for a moment before saying,
“Follow me.”
She led me to her office. She took a seat at a sleek white desk and gestured for me to sit opposite her.

“What are you? Gyopo? Or one of our people?”

Weren't they one and the same?
I paused, not sure I had claims to either word.

“And how long have you lived in the States? Were you born there?”

“No, I born here.”

“
Here!”
She looked up suddenly, surprised. “
But how old were you when you left?”

“When I was a baby.”

The woman turned her attention to my résumé.
“You went to college . . . at Baruch? I never heard of it.”

It never heard of
you
either,
I thought.

She asked a few wrap-up questions before handing my résumé back to me.
“We'll be in touch.”

“In touch?”
The same as Ed Farley's words to me.

The woman
busied herself with a stack of papers.
“I have some work to attend to, so if you will please . . .”

The elevator ejected me onto the street. The woman wouldn't have brought me into her office for an interview if the school weren't truly hiring. Something about me had put her off. I shuffled into the bustling masses. Pedestrians scurrying behind me pressed sharp elbows into my back, forcing me out of their way. Dejected, I leaned against the side of a high-rise, pried off my heels, and shoved my tired feet back into my running sneakers. What choice did I have but to trudge on?

Just then I saw a withered, hunchbacked granny, struggling to open the door of the building. She was as shriveled as Mrs. O'Gall. In one hand she carried a cloth-wrapped bundle, in the other a cane. When I held the door open for her, she looked at me with kind, grateful eyes before slowly passing through. I was about to let go of the door and continue on my way when four curly-permed
ajumma—
middle-aged women—rushed through without a word of acknowledgment. Back in New York, people at least nodded or offered a curt “Thanks
.
”
Not here. The women were immediately followed by three middle-aged men in hiking clothes, two twenty-something men in business suits, and a girl in a miniskirt chattering into her cell phone. I could have stood there for hours; it was impossible to stop the endless gush of people. It would have been comical—“How many Seoulites can squeeze through one door?”—if it hadn't been so soulless; each person after the old woman regarded me with cold indifference, as if I were no more human than a door wedge. Then a brigade of preteen girls in school uniforms trundled in. Where was their
nunchi
?
I was their Big Sister; they should have held that door open for
me.

I released the door and watched with perverse delight as it bounced off the shoulder of the last girl. Momentarily disoriented at being on the wrong side of the glass partition, the girl gathered her strength and yanked at the door. But she fell backward, weighed down by her large, turtle-shell-like backpack. She could have been Devon. Her friends on the other side pointed, laughing. Flooded with guilt, I hurried away.

* * *

By the time I boarded the subway back home, it was rush hour and the trains were packed. The first thing that struck me was how every single face on that train was Korean. You'd think that, coming from Flushing, I'd be used to being around all Koreans. But I kept expecting other ethnic faces to pepper the masses, the way they did on the 7 train. Here there were none.

Standing near the door, I stepped momentarily off the train to let the other passengers out. Back home the unspoken rule was that I'd have first dibs reboarding. But here the rules were different. The new passengers waiting on the platform behind me pushed me aside to make sure they boarded first. They came in endless waves, and I was rocked farther and farther away from the doors—a lone raft drifting from shore. As I fought my way back to the train I'd just stepped off, the doors slid shut. In New York one karate chop to the subway doors would have forced them back open; here the heavy doors looked like they would clamp over your arm and drag you away. I let them close and waited for the next train. But when it arrived, I again fought unsuccessfully against the current. I couldn't breathe
.

I gave up and scrambled out of the station. I was at Sinchon, near Yonsei University, my mother's alma mater. But after a few minutes of walking, I did not see the campus. Exhausted and thirsty, I popped into a coffee shop called Café Michelangelo.

I bowed at the barista behind the counter—just as I'd bow to all the shopkeepers back home—and ordered a bottle of water.
“Your total is three thousand won, Client
,” she said in a robotic voice, not acknowledging my bow. I asked to use the restrooms, and she stared back at me with the kind of funny face we reserved for fanny-packed tourists clogging the city sidewalks.

I tried again.
“You know, the
byunso
.”

“. . .”

“Where . . .”
I felt like I was reduced to a four-year-old's speech.
“Where you doing
shee-shee
and
ddong.
”

“You mean ‘hwajangsil'!”
The barista burst into giggles.
In Sang's house we'd always used the word
byunso.
Later I would learn that the word connoted an outhouse.
“You are very awkward-sounding!”
she told me.

“Thank you,”
I said.

“You must not be one of our people,”
she added. I snatched the keys from her, and when I got to the
hwajangsil,
I found a porcelain hole in the ground.

I returned to the main café area and took a seat toward the back. The chairs were leather, the tables a rich, gleaming wood. At the table next to me was a group of girls around my age and all dressed in black. Back home the girls also dressed in black, but there was something different about the Seoul girls' polish. They were hyperfeminine, like the rhinestones that sparkled from their collars and cuffs. Their shiny black hair was fastened with ribbons or a headband. Despite the early-September heat, these girls wore pantyhose, in shades of beige, coffee, or black. Their black patent-leather shoes had silver buckles. I wondered if they carried a change of shoes, the way New York women did. But their leather purses, which were draped on the backs of their chairs—something you wouldn't do at home unless you wanted to get your bag stolen—were too tiny to fit anything. I wondered whether Beth would have accused these women of pandering to the male gaze. Or maybe they just dressed up for themselves.

I wished I had brought a book, a newspaper—anything so I wouldn't look like I was staring at them conspicuously. I pulled out my cell—Emo had given me her old one—and pretended to be engrossed in the phone's golf game.

They were soon joined by a stamping of high-heeled feet; a girl carrying a blue cake box limped toward them, panting heavily. She was met with a chorus of:

“
Ya,
you're like ten minutes late!”

“
Ya,
why didn't you pick up your
‘handy'
?
”

To which she retorted,
“
Chuh!
Like I was gonna pick up. I'd never hear the end of it from you guys.”

The girls spoke in a kind of Korean I had never heard before: young, female, modern. It was both high-pitched and slurred; it rose and fell in different waves from the Korean that the adults spoke back in Flushing. Their laughter, too, was also high-pitched, peals ringing out like the electronic chime of Emo's front door. When Nina and I laughed, we'd toss our heads back and let out deep, unseemly rumbles. Nina would sometimes slap a hand on the table. Devon and Alla laughed like us, too—clutching their stomachs and gasping for air.

“Excuse me, by any chance . . .”
a voice said.

I looked up. One of the girls from the table was standing before me. I straightened my shoulders, ran my fingers through my half bun, half ponytail.

She tapped her palm against the back of the chair opposite me; my sneakered feet were hooked on the bottom rung.
“Could I . . . ?”

At first I thought she was inviting me to join her group for cake. I lowered my feet from the rungs of the chair—I even offered to walk it over to their table. Then I saw the expressions that flashed on the girls' faces: the pinching of the eyebrows, the curling of the lips. It was almost too quick to catch.

I returned to my golf game.

When the girls weren't looking, I continued to sneak glances their way. They set about opening the cake. It was a group effort: one freed it from its box, another pried off an envelope taped to the side and plucked out candles and a matchstick. Together they poked the candles into the cake and lit them. Then they sang “Happy Birthday,” but with Korean lyrics. When the candles were blown out, the girls did not cut the cake. Instead they each reached for a silver fork and speared it directly into their mouths.

“Delish!”

“
Ya,
it's way too sweet. Didn't we decide on cheesecake?”

“
Ya,
you know how far that cheesecake place is? Next time
you
go get it.”

“
Ya,
it's not sweet, it's stale. They
totally
sold me yesterday's leftovers.”

Their chatter and
chyap-chyaps
filled the air. I envied their intimacy, their back-and-forth volley containing years' worth of inside jokes. As I watched them eat, I wondered whether I would have been part of a group like this, had my grandfather not sent me away.

But I knew the answer to that. Hannah's stories—the ones she'd let slip when she was angry with me for misbehaving—had made it clear to me. Had Re Myungsun not sent me away, I would have ended up in an orphanage. Then serving drinks at a bar, or clinging to the outer gates of the military base, calling out “Yoo-hoo!” in broken English to the passing soldiers.

Suddenly my cell phone rang; it was Emo.
“Where are you?”
she shouted into the phone. I told her.
“Good! I'm on an errand nearby. I'll come join you.”
She clicked off before I could say good-bye.

When Emo breezed in, her sturdy heels clipping behind her, she frowned. She looked me up and down.
“Why are you dressed like that?”

“Job meeting,”
I explained.

“Why didn't you tell me!”
she cried.
“I thought you were just hanging out at the PC bang all day.”
Thankfully, the girls next to us were too busy eating cake to pay attention to Emo's outburst. She studied me again.
“How did it go?”

“Not so good. The lady not liking me,”
I said, trying to mask my disappointment.

Emo pinched the fabric of my suit.
“It's worn,”
she said. But it was good-quality wool and a designer name at that—I knew because only part of the label had been cut away when I'd bought it at Filene's Basement.
“And your face,”
she went on.
“It's raw.”

“Raw?”
I repeated. Maybe I had misinterpreted the word. I stared down at my half-empty water bottle.

“Why would they give a job to someone who looks like she just rolled out of bed?”
It was a rhetorical question, so I didn't answer it.
“Gaja,”
she said.
Let's go.

Emo pulled in to the parking lot of Sinnara Department Store.
“You need new clothes,”
she informed me. When we entered, my sneakers squeaked conspicuously on the marbled floors. Then the salespeople were immediately on top of us. They shouted and shrieked; they held up blouses and sweaters and skirts at us. It was a frenzy—and Emo just grabbed, grabbed, grabbed. She steered us to the cash wrap before I could even try anything on. Emo waved away first my protests, then my offers to pay. As she lay down her credit card, I was too afraid to look at the register total.

Next it was on to the makeup counter, Emo once again refusing to take no for an answer. The saleswoman yelped as she took in my features.
“Her skin is so pale! I'm so jealous. She probably doesn't need this, but . . .”
She applied a cream to my face, and as she waited for my skin to absorb it, she turned again to Emo.
“Client, this is the best whitening cream on the market. I can give you a sample if you'd like to try—”