Re Jane (18 page)

“I already have it,”
Emo snapped.

The woman mixed different pastes and creams and spread them across my face. She showered me with a continual stream of compliments—my eyes were so big that she was skipping the eyeliner. My lashes were so thick that I could do without the fake extensions. My face—she held up a fist—was
this
tiny! (I didn't see how that one was a compliment.) There were huge gaps in my Korean; the language of praise was one of them. The words felt strange. They rang hollow in my ears.

The saleswoman applied the final stroke to my face.
“Older Sister, you look so pretty!”
She called me Older Sister even though she looked at least ten years older than me.

“Emo, what you think?”

She nodded with approval.
“You did a not-bad job on my niece,”
she told the woman.

“Oh, you're her emo! I was wondering . . .”
the woman said. “
She must take more after her father's side.”

Emo squared her shoulders as the woman's eyes glided up and down her. What had struck me more than anything about Emo's face was that it exuded warmth. Before that point I had no reason to evaluate her for her prettiness. But now I found myself seeing my aunt through this woman's scrutinizing gaze.

Emo's face was a wide, flat, square plane, like a griddle pan. Foundation coated her skin like pancake batter. Her eyebrows were tattooed in blue-black ink, forming a harsh arc above her crescent-moon eyes, with eyelids sewn into double creases. (It didn't look natural—Emo must have had work done.) The effect was that Emo looked a little
too
alert, as if she were taking in everything around her a little
too
greedily. Her bob, curled into a tight middle-aged-lady
perm, was tinted—no doubt at the behest of her hairdresser—with a reddish orange dye. She was short and compact—Eunice would have described Emo as “hobbitlike” (though Eunice Oh was built not unlike a Tolkien hobbit herself).

Then the mirror was turned to me. Impenetrable foundation caked my face. My lips were painted an unnatural shade of pink. I knew that Sang would not have approved. He
hated
when Mary or Hannah left the house wearing makeup.
What's wrong what God give you?
he'd demand.
You not suppose to cover up!
Once he told Mary she looked like a bar hostess. And of course Beth hated makeup, too—she'd once likened it to modern-day bound feet. Emo nodded with approval. Then, to me,
“You see! You didn't make the most of your potential. If your Emo looked like you, I'd be married by now.”

I don't know what I would have thought just one day ago if the same face were staring back at me. But I was so far from New York and everyone now. As I stared, familiarizing myself with this new face, I let the praise from Emo and the saleswoman wash over me.

* * *

When we returned home, Emo made me parade my new clothes. She clapped with glee as I modeled one outfit after the other—“
You look just like Ahn Jaeni!”
she said, referring to some celebrity—and I couldn't help but think she derived a little vicarious pleasure at watching me fit into clothes she herself could not (dared not?) wear. She ordered me to wash off my face and reapply the makeup so I could practice over and over, just as Big Uncle had made me repeat peeling pears that morning.
“I hope you were paying attention when the woman did your makeup,”
she said.
“From now on, you have to look your best each time you leave the house.”
Not wanting to disappoint Emo, I did as she said.

The new routine was uncomfortable at first. I had to rise an hour earlier and fix my face at the vanity table with unwavering concentration. I had to fight the urge to yank my hair up into a ponytail, even when it would stick to the back of my neck. I had to soften my New Yorker gait, because I could not move freely in my new clothes—my skirts would ride up and my pantyhose would dribble down.

Walking all day in my new shoes was difficult. The hard patent leather was unforgiving; it cut into my Achilles tendon and squished my feet into a narrow toe box. The heels made my arches ache. And there was no room in my purse to stash a change of shoes. After a few stops of standing on the crowded subway, the balls of my feet would begin to throb. My eyes continually scanned for an empty seat. But I could never seem to compete with the other young and middle-aged women who rushed for it when I found one.

Maybe I should just have given up the act.

But self-affirmation has an intoxicating quality. As the days passed, I could feel the world regarding me differently.
Confidence radiates from within!
Beth would tell Devon (and me) at the breakfast table. But for me it was the opposite post-makeover; the reactions of the people around me
generated
my inner confidence. I felt men's eyes follow me as I walked down the street, and I saw women young and old frown at me with a hint of jealousy. I was getting high off the fumes of my newfound beauty. I began to understand how girls like Jessica Bae got “gassed in the head,” as we said back home.

But still the layer of foundation coating my face felt
tap-tap-hae.

Each day I improved on my appearance, just as I worked on my Korean. Whenever my sentences threatened to revert back to their old syntax, I'd force my mind to reverse their order. I spoke all Korean, all the time. I learned that the Korean of Flushing was a holdover from the sixties and seventies; I had to replace each antiquated word or phrase in my existing vocabulary with its modern-day equivalent (
outhouse
restroom; apothecary
pharmacy
). Emo and Big Uncle were impressed with the rapid improvement to my language.

Sang had been right: Here was nothing like Flushing. How freeing it was! I did not have to go bow, bow, bow with each Korean face I passed. Here I was completely anonymous; no one knew my history.

In those early days, my thoughts involuntarily, invariably wandered back to Brooklyn. I'd do side-by-side comparisons between my old life there and my new one here. If I hadn't done what I'd done with Ed, I'd still be walking Devon to school, sitting with Beth in her office, still laughing about her articles with Nina at Gino's. But would I have spent my nights sitting across from Ed at the kitchen table?

No good had come of indulging my feelings for Ed.

But I'd come to Seoul to start anew. I was successfully doing as the Romans did, and for the first time since I'd arrived I felt I was falling into the rhythms of my new home. New York was becoming a distant memory. I nailed my next interview, for a job teaching adult conversational English. And it was there, at Zenith Academy, that I met Changhoon.

T
eaching can be a pretty thankless job. You never think to give credit to your teachers until you've had to stand in front of a classroom and do it yourself. On my first day, my legs shook, my fingers were unsteady as I wrote my name across the dry-erase board, and the simplest of facts slipped my mind under the spotlight of a dozen blinking sets of eyes. In those first few weeks I'd continually scan the room, afraid to land on any one pupil's face. No matter how many hours you spend doing lesson planning, you can never predict on the spot what direction the class will take. My energy would be shot after only a two-hour class. I'd run downstairs to Rice Dynasty and order two rolls of
kimbap,
which I'd swallow without chewing, the disks of rice-stuffed seaweed bulging in my throat on their way down. Then it was back upstairs to do it all over again.

The experience gave me a newfound respect for Ed. (I was less impressed with Beth, because she only taught seminars of two to five students, which she often held in her office.)

Public speaking did not come naturally to me—it's a skill that requires confidence and approachability. Ed possessed both, and I think this is where his Brooklyn accent worked in his favor. It lent him an air of authority, yet it also spoke of his humble roots (as opposed to the better-than-thou polished tones that Beth—and Sam Surati, for that matter—could not shake from her speech). I always imagined Ed as the kind of teacher whose good opinion you
wanted
to earn, with the implicit understanding that he was also someone you did not want to piss off.

Nina had it, too. She could command a room—or at least a tableful of her friends—and keep them engaged with what would otherwise have been a mundane anecdote. She was a natural saleswoman; she'd hit all her marks, had the crowd laughing along in all the right places.

There were always two friendly faces I searched for during each lesson. One belonged to Monica, another staff member at Zenith. She was taking my class at the behest of Principal Yoo, who told her she needed to work on her conversational English. Monica was a sweet, agreeable girl who sat ramrod straight at her desk—eyes alert, pink pencil scribbling furiously as I spoke. Her English was not strong, but she knew the most arcane rules of English grammar and had a memory that captured everything, like the strips of packing tape, weighed down by batteries, that dangled from the ceiling at the back of Food.

Unfortunately, Monica came as a pair with a haughty girl named Rachel. They were best friends from Ewha Womans University, where they'd both majored in business management. Rachel, who had the full checklist of prized beauty features, carried herself like she knew it; the sense of entitlement that came with that checklist made me ache with irritation. I could only imagine how it must have felt for Monica, who had to live in her shadow.

The second face smiling up at me each night belonged to a student who went by the English name Chandler. (He, along with the rest of my students, had named themselves after characters from the TV show
Friends
.) He had what was called “windblown hair”—a tousled, side-parted style favored by most of the young men I saw on the subway. Chandler came to class each evening in a slim-fitting black business suit and a crisp white dress shirt, carrying a patent-leather briefcase. He had the same lanky frame as the guys at church who played volleyball, but the tallest of them still capped out at five-ten. Chandler was easily six feet.

When Chandler first learned I was from New York, his whole face turned grave. “I feel so sympathy your whole country tragedy,” he said. After a sufficient moment of silence had passed, he added, “But also jealous! ‘Big pimpin' up in NYC.' I am Jay-Z
big
fan.” I recognized the line immediately—I'd once walked in on George rapping it to himself in front of the bathroom mirror.

Chandler possessed an impressive range of vocabulary. (He knew terms like “ROI,” “defibrillator,”
and even “hotboxing.”) Unfortunately, this knowledge was coupled with no grasp of connotation. As a result, his diction was an awkward pastiche of the
Wall Street Journal,
Hot 97, and
Clueless.

Monica spoke the same way. (Rachel not so much—she favored simple, unadorned prose and took few linguistic risks.) Monica asked endless questions about English grammar, seeking rules governing irregular forms. More often than not, I'd have to shrug and say, rather stupidly, “I don't know why, it just is.” English is a punishing language for foreigners—it has been tainted by so many outside influences that the one constant is that every rule has an exception.

Each week the students submitted their vocabulary log notebooks, and the first time I flipped through Chandler's, it felt eerily like stumbling around inside his mind. Each entry, in precise mechanical pencil print, had been cross-referenced three times: first giving its unwieldy English definition from the dictionary, then a slightly shorter translation into Korean, and finally its one-word Korean distillation. There was a column showing its phonetic pronunciation and another listing its part of speech, and the last contained three sample sentences using the English word or phrase. Take, for example, his entry for the slang word “whipped,” which I had taught them:

When wife whips at husband, we say she gives him hard time.

I am so low self-esteem because my girlfriend say I am hideous. I whipped.

Our army friend Yongsu, because he do whatever Mom say, we say he is whipped.

And so on.

Taped to the notebook's back pages were cutouts of newspaper articles in Korean and English, annual GDP tables from the World Bank, and a curiously named “Development of Myself Schedule”—a chart with a list of goals on one end and dates on the other. At the bottom of the chart were the culminating letters: CEO. I had a feeling that if Sang were peering down at these pages, he would have approved.

I had brought my grading home with me one night and was staring into Chandler's notebook at the kitchen table when I felt Emo peering over me.
“That student looks diligent,”
she said.
“Who is it?”

“A boy named Chandler,”
I said.

“Let me see that.”
She took the notebook from me. She was looking at the inside cover, where his business card was taped.
“Kang, Changhoon. He's a sales analyst for Sinnara Bank.”
Emo pursed her lips.
“How tall did you say he was?”

“Emo!”

“What? I'm just trying to look out for you.
Maybe our pretty Jane will snag his attention.”
Emo spoke with the gusto of the mothers from church scheming to marry off their sons and daughters. They'd run down the laundry list of desirable traits: academic pedigree, career pedigree, eugenics. In the end, though, it always came down to what families they were from.

“You don't know him, even,”
I pointed out to Emo.

Emo tapped her finger on Chandler's business card.
“It doesn't hurt to keep your eye on him.”

* * *

Emo and I were now on different schedules, and we overlapped for only a sliver of the mornings. She worked a pretty standard eight to six at her late father's office (from what I gathered, she was something of a glorified office manager), returning straight home to cook the evening meal for Big Uncle and herself. I taught in the afternoons and evenings, and when I came home at night, Emo was always waiting for me with a plate of food, eager for me to fill her in on all that had transpired during the course of my day.

And, as promised, Emo told me stories. There were stories of her childhood in Busan. Stories of her school days. And stories about my mother.
At first I could hardly stop myself—my questions came pouring out in an endless stream. What did my mother look like?
“She was beautiful!”
So she had natural double-folded eyelids?
“No . . . but she had the pretty kind that folded inward.”
(But I had thought that having the double fold was what Koreans considered pretty.) Was she tall?
“Yes, so tall! Well . . . maybe not as tall as you.”
What was her favorite subject in school?
“She was good at everything.”
But did she like one more than the other? Emo frowned.
“You know, I'm not so sure. . . .”
The more I pressed on, the more she was at a loss for answers.

Emo's stories read at first like the fairy tales passed around the Mazer-Farley breakfast table: beautiful, smart heroine, impoverished childhood. When you're starved for any taste of the past, you bolt down what little is rationed your way. But after a while Emo's stories started to taste tinny, like tuna sitting out too long in a can. Whenever I pressed her for more details, her face would go blank. My mother was but a hazy portrait: a composite of Emo's fuzzy adolescent reflections. She could have been anyone: the co-ed laughing with friends at Michelangelo. The schoolgirl sitting alone on the subway, spinning her way back home. After a certain point, your palate begins to long for something fresh. Eventually Emo's stories began to peter out—I stopped asking, and she stopped telling.

But the most interesting picture to emerge from all of Emo's tales was that of
Sang
. Before she had placed that photo of him as a child in my hands, I'd never had reason to ponder his own backstory.
“Your uncle used to be so funny,”
she said.
“Okay—maybe more like corny. Okay—maybe more like a troublemaker.”
Emo had spent much of her childhood skipping home from school only to find her big brother kneeling in front of the house, arms raised high in the air as punishment for his latest mischief. The time he and a friend had swiped melons from a local farmer's patch. Or when he was sent to the fish market for some fresh mackerel and blew all the money on
boong-uh-bbang,
toasted carp-shaped cakes filled with red bean paste, for all his friends. Or the time Sang made a quip about Re Myungsun's short-lived pompadour.

These stories had me bursting with laughter—Sang would make George, Mary, and me do the same raise-your-hands-in-the-air punishment when we were little. (We'd always lower our sore arms whenever Sang had his back turned.) Yet they formed a very different portrait of the Sang I knew: stern, militant. But what did we know of his childhood? There were no framed snapshots of him as a little boy back home—the literal film reel of his life began in New York. How was it possible for Emo to have such specific memories of Sang when the age gap between them was even wider than that between her and my mother?

When Emo wasn't telling me stories about the family, she was watching soap operas. She never spoke of her friends, and no other plans seemed to occupy her evenings. (Whereas Sang and Hannah were always darting off to some church function. Or
gye
gathering—a money-lending club they joined as an excuse to get together with their friends.) Emo
loved
soaps. Apparently Big Uncle did, too. One night we sat down to watch a new show, a Chosun-dynasty court romance called
Don't Throw Me Away and Leave Me.
The title came from a line from the folk song “Arirang”—
The beloved who threw me away and left me / Will get no farther than ten
ri
/ Before he injures his foot.
It was the same melody as the front-door chime
—
a cheerful tune with a spiteful message. Emo and I sat on floor cushions with our backs propped against the white leather couch. Big Uncle sat in a leather massage chair. We passed a bowl of squid-flavored rice crackers back and forth.

“The main lead is Eun. He was lowborn, but he studied his way into the scholar class,”
Emo explained between animated crunches.
“So the king arranges a marriage for him with a nobleman's daughter named Bora. She's an
‘Old Miss,'
just like your Emo.”
Emo
often used the Konglishism “Old Miss” to refer to herself—it meant spinster.
“That is, until he meets a beautiful young courtesan named Jihae!
”

I think she expected me to gasp, so I said,
“No he didn't!”

Big Uncle went
“Uh-uh-uh”
as the chair's tiny electric fingers jabbed his back and the undersides of his legs.

Emo ignored him.
“Do you see Eun's dilemma? Will he choose his duty? Or throw it all away for love?
”

The plot of this soap opera hit eerily close to home. I tried to change the subject.
“So yesterday in my class, that funny boy Chandler, he was saying—”

Big Uncle cut me off.
“You always focus on the wrong stuff,”
he said to Emo
. “The most important part is how our people will outsmart the Japanese. Those warmongering bastards. The highlight's gonna be the tale of Nongae.”

Emo explained. Nongae was a courtesan who lured a Japanese general onto a romantic boat ride in the Nam River. Then she threw her arms around him, fastened jade ring locks around her fingers, and tipped them both overboard. They drowned.

“Nongae is one of the finest ladies in our people's history,”
Big Uncle said.
“Now, what Japanese geisha would do
that
for her country?”

The mood between all of us was so relaxed that I ventured a joke.
“Very funny how Big Uncle's also enjoying soap operas, like middle-aged housewives,”
I said.

But Big Uncle didn't appreciate my joke.
“It's called ‘
drama,
'”
he corrected me, his tongue tripping over the English word and rendering it into three syllables:
duh-rah-mah.
It was one of the many foreign loan words that had become embedded into the language.
“And it's not just for the ajummas.”

The festive mood instantly dissipated.
“Sorry, Big Uncle,”
I said. I instantly focused on the television screen.