Re Jane (21 page)

My mother had once made a similar journey southbound to Busan, during the family's wartime flight from the North. But she had been only a child. Sang, too. The few details Sang had offered up were characteristically sparse:
Train inside full. No choice but riding on top. It was little bit
tap-tap-hae.
Then his tone would grow dismissive.
But those days what isn't little bit
tap-tap-hae
?

Emo was the one to fill in the blanks, even though she herself had not yet been born. It was my grandfather who'd ordered the family to flee south as war broke out.
“We'll meet in Busan,”
he'd said, before the Communists came and conscripted him into their army. But all southbound trains were already bursting with women and children clutching cloth-wrapped bundles. My mother and her family had been forced to ride on top of the roof of the train car. Sang and my mother sat toward the middle while Big Uncle and their mother sat to the outer ends, their hands encircling the smaller children as if playing a game of ring-around-the-rosy. At each stop more passengers got on, but no one got off, the cars groaning with the burden of too many people. Sometimes the train stalled for days at a time. Their journey took more than a month. What the family's livelihood had been in those early years in Busan was uncertain—my grandmother had probably peddled rolls of homemade
kimbap;
the boys ran odd jobs for the neighbors. It had been a dark stretch of the family history. They were finally reunited with Re Myungsun when he was able to escape from the Northern army. He started running south and never looked back.

I gazed out the window. Our train was approaching a tunnel burrowed into the face of a mountain. The train rushed through—the whoosh
of wind causing the cars to rattle—and the lights flickered off. In that darkness it felt more than just a “little bit
tap-tap-hae.
”
It felt as if we were being swallowed whole.

When we emerged from the tunnel, Changhoon pulled my hand away from myself. I'd been rubbing my chest.
“Everything okay?”
he asked.
“You look pale.”

“It's just . . . I wonder if my mother's family took this same train from Wonsan. During the war.”

“That's not really possible,”
Changhoon said. “
Unless they transferred trains in Pyongyang or Seoul
.”

Sometimes I wished Changhoon would just indulge me.
“Ay, I'm not talking real-life train schedules. Only imagining.”

“Don't say it like that,”
Changhoon told me. I felt chastised. Maybe talking about the war was a no-no.

But he was referring to my Korean itself.
“Your cadence. It goes up and down too much.”
His finger drew a zigzag through the air. When I asked if he meant my accent, he shook his head and said that was fine but that my cadence was
“a dead giveaway you're a foreigner.”

Changhoon took his hand from me and ran his fingers through his windblown hair.
“Here's what you sound like: ‘The TIger GOBbled UP the BOY and GIRL.'”

He smiled, triumphant in his ability to diagnose the problem with my Korean.
“We Seoulites stay neutral when we talk. Listen: ‘The tiGER gobbled uh-UPP the boy and gir-RUL.'”

“
But you go up and down, too!”
I pointed out. I thought this would make Changhoon laugh, just as I couldn't help but laugh sheepishly with Devon about the Italian ices.

But Changhoon bristled at my comment.
“No I don't.”

I trained my ears on the conversations surrounding us. The other passengers' animated chatter rose and fell like lapping waves. The Busan cadence had a distinct, familiar rhythm. If I closed my eyes, I would be right back in our church basement. It felt quite different from the Korean spoken in the capital. It was only in hearing the contrast at that moment, on the train, that I realized that Seoul Korean felt unfamiliar, sterile.

“I like Busan-speak. It sounds like music.” Like a lullaby,
I thought
.

“But that's not how you're supposed to speak Seoul standard Korean.”
He said it as if it were no big deal to ask me to fix the very rhythms of my speech.

I probably should just have left the conversation there. Why rock the boat when we could have enjoyed the rest of the train ride holding hands and watching
Gag Concert
on his laptop? Except I didn't.

“Your cadence isn't perfect and flat either,”
I said.
“What about when you say ‘why'?”

“What
about
when I say ‘why'?”

“Here's Changhoon Oppa's sound.”
I unlaced my fingers from his.
“‘Wah-ai-AI-yai!'”
I slashed a line in the air. It spiked like a series of murmurs on a heart monitor.

Changhoon looked nonplussed.

“I do again: ‘Wah-ai-AI-yai!' Kind of like when Valley Girls
say,
‘Oh-miGAWahd!'”

He continued looking at me blankly.

“You can dish it out, but you're not so good to take it, huh?”
I said, poking him gently in the ribs to try to lighten the mood.

“Oppa is just trying to help you,”
he said. I thought his tone would soften, but it remained resolute.
“If all you want to do is make jokes, how will you ever improve?”

* * *

We did spend the rest of the ride watching videos. But there was an uncomfortable silence between us. This had been the closest we'd come to having a tiff, and by Changhoon's stiffened jaw I could tell he was still upset. His words, too, continued to rattle uneasily within me. It felt a bit as if he'd posed a test. As if my ability to correct my cadence—or not—was like some last linguistic hurdle to surmount before achieving full assimilation.

But when we arrived in Busan, that tension was immediately defused. Perhaps it was the energy of the city—so different from the frenetic, competitive pace of Seoul. Here the air itself was alive with freshness and tasted almost salt-licked. Again we were subsumed in a sea of red: World Cup paraphernalia was draped from every post and storefront.

“Big Uncle told me the first Korea match happens here today,”
I said
. “If only we had tickets to see it.”

“That would've been nice, wouldn't it?”
Changhoon said.

“But even more than that, I want to see the ocean. Can you take me? I feel and smell and hear it, but it is so
tap-tap-hae
that I cannot see.”

The last time I remembered seeing the ocean was through the window of the plane as we lifted off from JFK. Queens, Brooklyn, the city—all became indistinguishable specks surrounded by water. Seoul, despite the Han River splitting the city in two, was otherwise landlocked.

“You sure you're not
bada-chulsin
?”
Changhoon said, taking my hand once more.
Ocean-born
. It sounded less corny in the Korean.
“You really are a Busan girl.”

“And a New York one, too,”
I added, wagging my finger from side to side, the way Devon and Alla used to do with each other.
And don't you forget it,
I almost added. But I was certain the expression did not translate from the English.

In a matter of minutes, there was water, water everywhere.
“There's your ocean,”
he said, pointing out the window of our cab to the stretch of beach. I tugged his arm, making my voice light like a buoy, dripping with
aegyo. “Can we stop? Pretty please?”
I hoped it would coax him into ordering the cabbie to pull over. I wanted nothing more than to pry off my heels and sink my feet into the cool water.

But of course there wasn't time. We drove on, smelling and hearing and seeing the sea through the windows of the cab, until it gave way to high-rise buildings and receded from view.

Changhoon had hired the taxi for the day—we'd stopped quickly at the Grand Sinnara Hotel, on the shores of Haeundae Beach, to drop off our luggage, before he crammed all the city's sights into the short span of the morning: Dalmaji Hill, Dongbaek Island, the famous “Forty Steps” staircase. But probably the most memorable was Jagalchi Fish Market. Alley after alley, stall after stall, sea creatures of all kinds writhed and wriggled in buckets and tanks. There were rows upon rows of red fish, blue fish, big fish, small fish. Prickly sea urchins, long ropes of eel, abalone on the half shell, translucent baby octopuses and their larger, purple, opaque cousins. We laughed as one particularly feisty octopus attempted mutiny, sliding out of its Styrofoam box and across the floor. It was a successful three feet into its escape before the vendor noticed and dumped it back into the box. The air was hot with notes of early summer and cool with the clean smell of fresh fish.

We ate a late breakfast in one of the restaurants lining an alley of the fish market. Women in pink galoshes and matching pink gloves scooped treasures from their fish tanks out front.
“Dine with us, brother and sister, dine with us,”
they chanted. Their voices gathered in a chorus—cadences scaling up and down, like sirens of the Donghae Sea.
“Rest your legs here. Scallion pancakes, on the house.”
We were lured into the one that called out to Changhoon,
“Handsome bachelor, come in! Come in!”
The woman was old enough to be his mother.

When we were back in the cab, Changhoon squeezed my hand.
“I have a surprise for you. I thought . . . well, you might want to see where your mother grew up.”

Living in Seoul, sometimes I found myself forgetting there was a whole country beyond the capital's concrete limits. But Busan, still the second-largest city in the country, had a different persona altogether—it was suffused with a fresh energy and rhythm. To think that my mother had wandered these streets from the time she was a little girl. To think I was breathing in the same ocean air as she had all those years ago.
This
was the closest thing to my mother's true homeland—not Seoul.

I squeezed Changhoon's hand back.
“You're right. I was so curious. Now, thanks to you, I know.”

“No, I mean where she actually grew up.”
Changhoon pulled a sheet of paper from his bag. It was a printout of a map.
“You said your mother lived in one of those refugee villages in Busan.”

That had been on one of our dates—at a sake bar in Gangnam—where I'd rambled on with one of Emo's stories. After a few thimblefuls of sake, I could barely recall what exactly I'd divulged to Changhoon.

“Well—I think I found it.”

“You what!” English flew out of my mouth.

I had formed a picture of the whole neighborhood in my mind. A stretch of shantytown shacks lining the Donghae coast. The dull tin luster of corrugated metal roofs contrasting with the bright salted blue of the sea. But an abstract curiosity about a place harbored in your mind was very different from arriving at that actual place in a matter of minutes.

When the cab pulled up, however, a gaping construction site stared back at us. Whatever had been there before was gone.

“No, that can't be right,”
Changhoon said, scanning his printout furiously.
“It's definitely supposed to be here. . . .”

We stared at the empty dirt lot. To one side lay neat piles of wood and steel beams, primed for construction. There were the bones of a building being erected, and the hollow spaces between the framework exposed the horizon line, where blue sky met blue-green ocean. The view was both like and unlike the view from the 7 train.

A man in a hard hat and an orange vest stepped out of a truck parked on the site. Changhoon ran over to him, waving for me to follow. I was tripping on the gravel but right at his heels all the same.
“Sir! Sir!”
Changhoon called out. When he finally caught up to the man, he asked what had happened to the village that had been there before.

“How'm I supposed to know?”
the man said, turning away.
“I just work here.”

“Sir, please!”

The urgency in Changhoon's tone must have made the man soften, if just a notch.
“Yeah, there used to be villages like that around here.”
He paused to go
hraaack!
before launching a spit wad onto the ground. Big Uncle always did the same thing.
“But they could also be anywhere.”

Changhoon looked dejected.

“Sorry, kid. That's all I know.”

This quest had stirred in me a longing that up to this point had been dim and hazy and inarticulate. But now that we were
this close,
it suddenly asserted itself, grew sharp in my chest. To give up now would have felt worse than never having tried at all.

I punched Emo's speed-dial number on my phone. I heard Changhoon ask the construction man what they were building and the man's gruff response:
“Take a wild guess. High-rise condos.”
Emo picked up on the first ring. I had called her before, when we'd first arrived in Busan, and she'd launched into an endless stream of questions—until Changhoon had pointed to the phone with a
Hurry-hurry, wrap it up
motion. This time I was spared the long-winded exchange of pleasantries, and I asked immediately for the location of the house.

“Oh, that was so long ago! I just remember how down the road the carp-cakes man had his stall set up and American Uncle would sneak off to—”

“Emo! We try to find it now. Tell me where it is. Please. If you can.”

Emo at first bristled. I knew it was rude to cut her off. Yet she complied.
“We lived at the foot of the old drawbridge. Follow the coastline. It was the first alley to the left. Pass the carp-bread— Pass the corner. That was always my route home from school.”