Re Jane (20 page)

And I think Changhoon kind of got off on it.
“She's got
aegyo,
this one!”
he said, not disapprovingly.
Aegyo
—the word for the babyish act girls put on to look cute.
“Okay, Oppa will buy you one from Itaewon.”

“At least splurge for a real one!”
Monica squealed, knocking back the rest of her beer.

Then Rachel said something I didn't quite catch, and they all laughed.

I couldn't tell whether they were laughing with me or at me. By the time bottles of
soju
were magically summoned, poured into shot glasses, and dropped like bombs into our glasses of beer, I didn't much care.

They asked me for stories from America. I told them about Flushing. When they asked what my uncle did, I told them he owned a produce stand. (Sang always said it was better to downplay our business than to show off that we owned a grocery store.) I told them about the Mazer-Farleys, which made our circle break into yet another hearty round of laughs. I told them about Beth's hairy armpits, and her fateful Thanksgiving tempeh turkey, and how she once tried to pay for Sang's fruit. What started as a joke at her expense was now devolving into anger the more I thought about her, and that anger overrode any pangs of guilt I felt in offering up her life as fodder for this drunken evening. I couldn't believe
she
was the one who got to be with Ed. She was so lucky, yet so ungrateful.

“What about her husband? Surely he wasn't the same way, was he?”
Rachel asked. Her laughter, I'd noticed, was the thinnest of the bunch, as if she caught a whiff of something off.

“He was . . .”
I was not too drunk to stop myself. It would have made a hilarious story, I knew, to go on about the oldness and plainness and academic pretentiousness of Beth, contrasting them with the youthful, hunky Brooklynness of Ed.

I opened my mouth to speak.
“He was
‘whipped.'
”

* * *

Consider that night my farewell to Ed. I was officially moving on. During the subway ride home, I stared foggily at the kimchi-fridge ads, then out the windows. Frost coated the glass. Changhoon sat next to me. Rachel and Monica had spun home in the opposite direction.
“Girls can be so funny, don't you think?”
he said.

“Mm,”
I said, closing my eyes. Changhoon smelled of cigarette smoke and sweet cologne. I breathed in deeply, filling my lungs with his scent.

“Monica, she's nice and all, but she's just not my ‘
style
'”
he said. “Style” was Konglish for “type.”

I was drawing closer to that smell.
“Then who
is
your
‘style'
?”
My words slurred, my vision blurred. Changhoon's face loomed closer still.

“I think you know.”

“Yes?”

“Ee Jane is my ‘
style
.'”
Ee.
My Korean name, not its Western bastardization. Changhoon's arms circled me, pulling me toward him. I lifted my chin. Right there on the train, he was suddenly kissing me. I tasted the cigarettes. I tasted the garlic-smothered chicken. I tasted the beer and
soju
. I drank him in the whole ride home.

When I surfaced from that kiss, the frost on the subway windows had thawed into vapor.

And after that, reader, let me tell you: Changhoon and I were
on.

T
he spring brought a welcome shift in my responsibilities at Zenith Academy. I was in the break room with the other teachers, making some joke about Sang's banana-box filing system, when Principal Yoo passed by and said,
“What was that?”
I realized then why he had perked up during my interview when I'd mentioned working at my uncle's store. But at the time
nunchi
told me to steer the conversation away from the blue-collar toward my more “prestigious” work experience—if you could call helping a fifth-grader with her homework prestigious. Now, in flustered Korean, I rambled on about helping to manage the store's cash flow. Next thing I knew, Principal Yoo was swapping out my teaching sections for administrative work and the occasional private tutoring session. I was happy to be rid of the classroom—no more trembling at the dry-erase board in front of all those students. You would have thought I'd be daunted by Korean spreadsheets and financial statements. But the language of business—money in versus money out—is pretty much universal.

My new job set me on a more normal workday schedule, freeing up my evenings. Which left time for more dates with Changhoon.

And what dates they were! Changhoon threw himself into constructing elaborate itineraries—cable-car rides up to Namsan Tower, trips to Sinnara Amusement Park, walks around Seokchon Lake (
“Thirty years ago that lake didn't even exist,”
Big Uncle had told me)—followed by dinner, followed by coffee or drinks. He'd endlessly research which restaurants had the best “set menus,” and we'd join the rush of other young couples at that new Japanese curry joint near City Hall, or that Italian trattoria in Hongdae, or the Australian steak house in Gangnam (which turned out to be an American chain, but here their steaks cost almost thirty dollars a pop). Changhoon would always stop me from spearing my food so he could snap a picture with his digital camera first.
“I need to upload it on Cyworld,”
he'd say. I wasn't on Cyworld—it was some social-networking site that required a national ID to log in—but I took it as one big forum where you could boast to your friends about where you'd been and they hadn't.

After the meal we'd nestle into a plush couch at one of the Café Michelangelo branches, drinking green-tea lattes while watching illegally downloaded videos on his laptop computer. Changhoon's favorite was a sketch-comedy called
Gag Concert
. On weekends we'd cap off the night at the latest wine bar in the gallery district, where the sommelier would pour our bottle of wine into a glass carafe with extra flourish. Changhoon would also order a large platter of fruit
anju
. The server would set before us a pretty display of sliced pineapples, melons, pears, which we couldn't even touch because we were too stuffed from dinner. But ordering
anju
was what you were supposed to do. It always broke my heart to see that fruit go to waste.

His was an old-fashioned courtship—refusing my offers to split the check, endlessly holding doors open, carrying my bags. (
“You don't feel like a girl, holding my purse?”
I'd asked him once, but either he didn't hear me or he didn't get the joke.) Going out with Changhoon felt like a guilty indulgence—the rich food settling uneasily in my stomach each time the check arrived.

But wherever we went, the servers were always commenting on his stylishness, his height. Changhoon carried himself well; there was always an extra polish—both literal and figurative—to his clothes, his shoes, his hair. Around him I felt the need to “step up my game,” as Nina put it in one of her e-mails. Imagine if Emo had never taken me for a makeover, I'd think while rifling through my closet in the mornings. I'd stand in front of the mirror holding up one blouse or the other until resolving to buy a new one right before our date.

Beth would have labeled my behavior a “regression of feminism.” But in truth, what girl doesn't want to impress her new boyfriend? The fruits of Beth's mentoring were rotting away in the bottom crisper of my mind.

In the school's break room, I would gab about my dates with Monica, who was quickly becoming a good friend. How much it must have pained her to sit there and listen as I prattled on and on about Changhoon's romantic gestures! Yet—if I may say—she always seemed to pry for more details, as if she derived some vicarious thrill from hearing these accounts.

Monica was always the last one to leave the office and the first one to arrive. She conducted her work as if not only her
reputation but her mother's, her father's, her entire clan's were riding on it. “I don't want to be shame,” she'd say by way of explanation. One morning I found her at the office after having pulled an all-nighter.

“Don't you get tired this routine?”
I asked as I watched her splash cold water on her face.
“Maybe you should put your foot on the floor. You should say, I'm not gonna keep doing like this, Principal Yoo!”

Monica scrubbed away yesterday's makeup. She looked confused, as if she couldn't tell whether I was joking or not. I was and I wasn't.

Monica patted her cheeks dry. “Not so easy,” she said. It was at her behest that we each spoke our weaker language, for practice. “Oh, Principal Yoo? He ask me write memo? I make extra copy for you. I left in your desk.”

I watched her reapplying her makeup. Through the reflection in the mirror, she smiled—a placid, unreadable smile. I wasn't sure whether I was telling her what she already knew or if she simply could not understand my imperfect Korean.

* * *

When Emo learned of my relationship with Changhoon, she shook me up and down like a party favor.
“So exciting!”
she said.
“If all goes right, you'll stay in Korea forever!”
She began fussing about me with renewed energy. It reminded me of the way the grannies at Devon's Chinese school flocked to the children. Emo would smooth a smudge of foundation from my cheek or pull a loose thread from the hem of my skirt. Smudges and threads that up until that moment I hadn't even noticed, despite having studied myself carefully in the mirror.

I'd like to think Emo was happy for me. When I came home late, she'd still be up, waiting so I could regale her with details about my date. But after a while I started to grow self-conscious—surely she'd smell Changhoon's cologne, his cigarette smoke clinging to my clothes, my
breath
—and told her she no longer had to wait up for me. Emo took it as a slight. She resorted to leaving grease-stained notes under a plastic-wrapped plate of fish on the kitchen table. Maybe it was my limited Korean, but there always seemed to be a passive-aggressive tone beneath her bright words and smiley-faced emoticons.

Emo seemed to keep better track of the progress of my relationship with Changhoon than I did, and sometime in early May she left me the following memo:
“Your 100th-day anniversary is coming up! He better plan something special for our Jane. Or else he'll get in big trouble with your Emo.”

* * *

By the tail end of that spring, Seoul was a sea of red. Banners waved from storefronts. Flags flapped from streetlamps. Posters were plastered in the subways. That summer Korea was hosting the World Cup—well, cohosting, begrudgingly, with Japan, a point that Big Uncle was particularly sore about. The breakfast table conversation—once consumed with what felt like nonstop talk of
Don't Throw Me Away and Leave Me
—was suddenly soccer, soccer, soccer. New hybrid phrases—new for me, at least—circled the table:

Daehanminguk, Ha-i-ting!
Literal translation:
Land of the Great Han People, Fighting!
Figurative translation:
Go, Republic of Korea!

“Oh,
Pilseung
, Korea!”
Literal translation:
Oh, victory, Korea!
Figurative translation:
You're going to win, Korea!

“Be the Reds!” That slogan was in English, but it referred to the Korean fans, who called themselves the “Red Devils.”

One morning Big Uncle laid the newspaper flat on the table.
“That Coach Hiddink is really something. Whipping our boys into shape,”
he said.

Emo, who never struck me as the soccer type, pushed her brother's arm off the paper and began furiously scanning the picture of the national team.
“What are you doing?”
Big Uncle demanded. She was tracing a finger under each player's face, as though reading the lines of a book.
“Looking for my favorite.”

“Your favorite should
be Park Jisung. He's the one to watch.”
Big Uncle stabbed the chest of a player who was down on one knee in the front row. I'd seen that player before, in the posters on the subway. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Changhoon—both shared the same boyish, eager grin, their eyes crinkling into slivers, a smile that went all in.

Emo snatched the paper back from her brother.
“Park Jisung is only my favorite from the neck down.”

“What you don't know could fill the shelves of our national library,”
Big Uncle muttered.

Seeing Big Uncle and Emo banter sometimes made me wonder what my mother had been like around her siblings. Would she have joined in the back-and-forth? Or did she have that kind of rapport with Sang instead?

Emo's finger stopped at a young player with long hair and a delicate face. He looked like the frontman for a boy band.
“Ah, there he is! Our Ahn Junghwan!
The prince of the soccer pitch.”

Emo wasn't exaggerating—that was actually what Ahn Junghwan was called, as Monica would gush to me later at school.

Emo said,
“Jane, who's your favorite?”

I peered down at the picture of the team. I supposed the loyal thing to do would have been to choose Park Jisung. But instead my finger landed on a different face, with a square jaw and pronounced cheekbones. There was something about his face that was different from all his other teammates'. There was something about him that reminded me of the Korean guys I grew up with back in Queens.

“Who is he?”
I said.

“Cha Duri.”
Big Uncle shook his head.
“His father played for the Bundesliga. But I don't know, this little punk still has to prove himself.”

Emo shook her head, too.
“He's not my style
at all. His features are too harsh. You probably like him because he's a
gyopo
like you. But born and raised in Germany.”

That was why he looked familiar. It was funny how the same Korean faces managed to look different depending on where the person grew up. It was like how back in New York you could spot the FOBs (Fresh Off the Boaters) in the crowd—the genetics were the same, but the expressions they wore on their faces had a foreign, confused air.

“The first Korean match is in Busan,”
Big Uncle said.
“My company for a ticket.”
Then he sighed—a low, wistful sigh. He was staring not at the newspaper but across the room, out the glass of the terrace door, and past the courtyard. I recognized that sigh. It brought me right back to Flushing, and Food, and the 7 train.

For our hundredth, Changhoon was planning a surprise two-day trip for us. I was able to get the days off from school only because Monica had offered to cover for me. I promised I'd buy her a souvenir from wherever it was Changhoon was taking me. “Maybe he escorts you Jeju Island!” Monica mused in the break room. “Is where Pae Byun and Ahn Jaeni go their wedding honeymoon.”

The actors who'd portrayed the roles of Chulsu and Jihae, respectively, from
Don't Throw Me Away.
But when I told her what Emo had told me—that the show was “played out”—Monica looked chagrined. “But I still like.”

I was two minutes late meeting Changhoon in front of the ticket booth at Seoul Station. He was tapping on his watch.
“
Ya,
I kept calling you! Why didn't you pick up?”

Chuh!
'Cause I'd never hear the end of it from you,
I almost joked, remembering the words I'd overheard the first time in Café Michelangelo. But it was too early to joke. I fished my phone from my purse and saw six missed calls from him.
“Sorry,”
I said instead.

He gave me the once-over and told me I looked like a student backpacker.
“It's my only luggage,”
I explained. It was either that or packing my clothes, makeup, and hair products into plastic FamilyMart bags. It was the same nylon backpack I'd brought with me from New York but hadn't touched since. When I unzipped it to pack for the trip, the insides released, strangely enough, the smell of mahogany and wheatgrass. It brought me right back inside the Mazer-Farley house. But as Changhoon took the backpack from me and examined it, I began to see its shabbiness through his eyes. Despite its overall sturdiness, it was worn here and there. And it was a rather unbecoming shade of forest green. I grew self-conscious. Probably Emo never would have let me leave the house with it.

“So where is exactly this secret place?”
I asked.

“Well . . .”
Changhoon rubbed his hands together.
“I'm taking you back to your ancestral homeland. I thought you'd want to know where you came from.”

“We take the train to North Korea?”
I said with exaggerated effect.

I waited a beat for Changhoon to laugh along at the ridiculousness of my question. He didn't. Instead he stared back at me blankly.
“That's impossible,”
he said. He could be a very literal person.

But Changhoon was actually taking me to my mother's adopted home of Busan, the coastal city on the southern tip of the peninsula. As our train thundered southbound, I stared out the window. Large steel cranes dominated the plots of land, jaws gaping dumbfounded in the air. Wrecking balls were poised over low-rise buildings, ready to raze their old and tired façades. But then the scenery shifted, concrete giving way to farmland. Makeshift huts with plastic roofs dotted the fields. We passed trees bearing what looked like round bundles of paper. Later I would learn they were pears. Big Uncle said that was why they were so expensive—because of the labor of wrapping each individual fruit to protect it from the elements.