Re Jane (25 page)

“You think he'd do that for just anyone?” Nina said. “You should go to him.”

I knew that
nunchi
was why Nina insisted I stay out.
Nunchi
also told me I should renew my offer to go back home with her, but I didn't.

“He's crazy about you. You can tell just by the way he looks at you.” She turned toward the entrance. “Good night, Jane.”

I watched Nina disappear through the doors. I didn't follow her. Then I returned to Changhoon in the cab, and we drove into the night.

* * *

We soldiered on through rounds four and five without Nina. But all of us were flagging. At the folk-themed rice-wine bar, we slumped in our booth, our heads propped up by our arms, our gourds of
makgeolli
rice wine left untouched. At the club the pounding bass brought me right back to that night at Twine. After Changhoon and I said good-bye to Rachel and Monica, we popped into a motel that rented by the hour—it was usually how we ended our dates ever since our Busan trip. We were too drunk and Changhoon was too exhausted to perform, but we went through the motions all the same.

By the time I returned to the house, it was five in the morning and Emo was sitting cross-legged on the marble floor, awaiting my return.

W
hat did I say about not being a bad friend?”
Emo shouted as soon as I bowed hello. “
Did you think I was joking?”

My eyes were still adjusting to the glaring overhead lights.
“No, but—”

“Don't ‘No, but' me. How dare you leave your friend, your poor foreigner friend who traveled all the way from America to see you, by herself?”

When I told her that Changhoon had made all these plans and I felt responsible to him, Emo interrupted with,
“‘Responsible'? Don't bother me with ‘responsible'! Who on earth raised you in this manner? Did you receive no family education whatsoever?”

In that moment Emo could have been Hannah. She matched her tone for tone, and even the structure of her rhetorical questions was parallel—only some of the words were swapped. With Hannah it was, “Who on earth were you born to?”
or, “Do you want people to think you received no family education whatsoever?”

Then Emo went on, in a softer tone.
“It's not exactly the safest time for a foreigner to be traveling alone. With all that's going on . . .”

She was referring to the demonstrations downtown. During the World Cup, in a camp town just north of Seoul, two girls had been struck and killed while walking to a classmate's birthday party by a U.S. military tank “practicing routine drills.” The news was buried as the nation cheered our successive victories. Now that the soldiers driving the tank had been found not guilty, the story bounded into the spotlight once again.

“But that's beside the point.”
Emo's tone snapped back to its earlier harshness.
“You don't throw your friend away for a boy! She's like a sister to you.”

I fixed my eyes to the floor.
“I'm so sorry, Emo.”

She sighed.
“Go to bed.”

* * *

Nina waved away my apology later that morning. “Your aunt was still up when I got back. So we watched some soaps.”

“But still, that wasn't cool of me.”

“It's really
not a big deal—”

My phone bleeped; it was a text from Changhoon.

“Chandler wants to take you out for lunch today. To apologize for being late yesterday.”

Nina held up
Seoul for New Yorkers.
“I was just going to do my own thing today.”

“Come on, please? It'd mean a lot to me. I want you guys to get to know each other.”

“Sure, fine.”

It took me an hour to assemble myself while Nina waited impatiently. By the time we got to lunch, she'd decided she was going to be in a sulky mood. Every attempt to lure her into the conversation was rebuffed. Eventually Changhoon and I just resumed our Korean rapport.

When we left the restaurant, we walked through Gwanghwamun Square.
“Oh . . . we shouldn't have come this way,”
Changhoon said.
“I forgot the protests.”

But it was too late. We were already in the thick of thousands of people holding candles in paper cups. Changhoon took hold of Nina's arm and ordered me to take her other. He wore an embarrassed smile. “I'm so sorry!” he said to Nina. “Usually our country not like this. Usually so safe. Only because this accident make our people have so much . . .”

He trailed off, but I knew that the word he wished to say was utterly untranslatable.
Han.
A fiery anguish roiling in the blood, the result of being wronged.

Nina studied him. “I'd be pissed, too. Fucking military,” she said.

But as we steered Nina through the crowds, no one confronted us. Instead they looked at us—looked at Nina—and quickly parted, making way for our passage.

* * *

Through the course of the week, Nina and I diligently went to the other sights earmarked in her guidebook. But something felt a little off between us, like soda gone flat. The effervescent burst that Nina had swept in with her on arrival had dissipated.

On her last night, after a rather sullen dinner of fatty pork barbecue, we returned to the apartment, where that sullenness spread and filled the air. Nina began to fold clothes and stuff them into her bag with a quiet but tense efficiency. Then she looked up from her piles of clothes and souvenirs. “You sure you don't want to just . . . I don't know, hop on the plane back home with me?”

The forced lightness of her tone put me off. “Why would I? This is my home now.”

Nina returned to folding her clothes. “Whatever you say.”

“What's
that
supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, nothing,” she said, backpedaling. “I'm just worried about you.”

“Well, don't be. Things are going great for me here,” I said. “I've got terrific friends. I have Changhoon.”

Nina brushed lint off one of her shirts. She muttered, “Keep telling yourself that.”

“You got something you want to say to me?” I asked, staring straight into her eyes.

“Yeah, actually I do.” She put down the shirt she'd been folding and met my unwavering stare. “Chandler's all right, but I hate how you act around him. It's like . . . it's like you're on a job interview and you're afraid you'll blow it.”

Her words hit a nerve. She pressed on. “If you stay, you know you'll just end up like that femmebot Monica.”

“You mean Rachel,” I corrected.

Nina blinked. “Nah, Rachel's all right. At least the lights are on upstairs. I'm talking about the taller one. The fake-nice one who was all up on Chandler. You just know a girl like that's gonna snap one day.”

“Monica was
not
all up on Chandler. She's just a little eager to please,” I argued. I had a dim awareness that Monica had
some
feelings for Changhoon, but then again she was like that with everyone—tripping over herself in order to accommodate others.

“You know what I think? I think you're not really in love with Chandler. You're just grateful he loves you. I wish you'd stop acting like a phony and go back to being the Jane I know. The Jane I
knew.
”

Who did she think she was? Haranguing me as if she were the only one who'd ever experienced love and heartache.

“You nothing know.” My brain unexpectedly blipped, conflating English words with Korean syntax. If Nina noticed my slip, she didn't mention it.

I went on. “Just because
I
don't feel the need to gush endlessly about my feelings”—the way Nina always did, the way she was so unabashedly, embarrassingly
open
about everything—“that doesn't mean I don't feel passionate.”

“Please, Jane,” Nina scoffed. “I've seen you get more excited about cannoli than about Chandler. I know what love is. And what you've got with Chandler? It isn't it.”

“You're one to talk,” I said sharply. “Did you see
the way you acted around Joey—J.—whatever the hell his name is now?
You
were the phony! Meanwhile, anyone could see he was a total d-bag.”

Now
my
words hit a nerve. She stopped, blinked. Blinked furiously, as if she were trying to shut out the words but couldn't. “H-he was . . . my everything, Jane,” she whispered. “And turns out he's been hooking up with Angela this whole time.”

Nina had only found out about it after the fact, when Angela accused Nina of swooping in when she had “first dibs” on Joey. She somehow managed to turn the whole gang against Nina. And just like that, in the span of a few months, two decades of friendship—gone.

“Every time I run into Angela and Mrs. Fabbricari, they just stare past me like I don't even fucking exist. And not only have I lost him, I've lost my best friend from child—”

Suddenly Nina burst into a sob. It was a sob unlike any I'd heard before from her,
like a watermelon cracking in two, with a sweet, raw redness bursting forth.

I recognized that sob. It was the same sob I'd stifled in the PC bang more than a year ago as I struggled to force thoughts of Ed Farley and New York out of my head, my heart. And now Nina's cries threatened to unlock that pain again. I ached: for Ed, for Nina.
Push the pain away,
I wanted to tell her. The more you indulge those tears, the more that raw sweetness will spoil and seep into all parts of your waking life.

I opened my mouth to speak, but my brain became a confounded mix of Korean and English clichés:
There are bigger fish in the frying pan. Strike while the tree trunk's hot. The beloved who threw you away and left you will get no farther than ten blocks before he catches a foot disease.

I said nothing.

Nina's sobs began to taper off. “Anyway, sorry,” she said, hastily wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “I didn't mean to”—she hiccupped—“make this all about me.”

When she steadied her breath, she said, “Why'd you run away from New York, Jane?”

I went
pfft.
Tried to anyway. “I didn't run
away.
”

Nina studied my face. “Did something happen back there? With . . . Ed?”

“Wh-what makes you say that?”

“Just a feeling I got. From e-mails. Other things. Like the way you reacted the other night when I mentioned him.”

I struggled to control my face; abruptly I turned away. But how I longed to tell Nina! I'd free myself of this heavy burden, this feeling of
tap-tap-hae
weighing down my heart.

But what good would come of it? The relief would only be temporary. It wouldn't change what I'd done. And she would judge me
.
How could she not? I'd never be able to look her in the eyes the same way. If our roles were reversed, I would judge her as well.

“Jane, you don't have to keep trying here. You know you can just come back home.”

Nina was wrong; I had nothing to go back to. If I couldn't change the past, then the least I could do was bury it far behind me. I pressed one firm, final hand to my heart.

When I turned back around, Nina looked up at me with expectant eyes.

“You're being ridiculous,” I told her.

“Jane, I just poured my effing
guts
out to you right now—”

Her tears were starting up again. She reached for a tissue from the vanity table and blew her nose loudly. I cringed. That was a no-no here. When she blew again, her nose made a rude, squelching sound, like a fart. I almost laughed. Recognizing the humor of the moment, Nina almost did, too. If either one of us had broken out laughing in that moment, I suspect that things might have been salvaged on the spot.

But neither of us laughed. When she turned back to me, her eyes had gone dead. And that was when I knew: I had lost her.

Nina boarded the plane home to New York. Winter came rushing in. The condensation collecting on the subway windows grew hard and white, calcifying into frost.

I
n the heart of that winter, Changhoon began conversations, in earnest, about the future.
“You're not going to ditch me for America, are you?”
he said one day over sweet-potato lattes at Michelangelo. His tone was intentionally light—to save his pride, I knew. But even I had the
nunchi
to infer that he saw that future with me.

Other things were happening, too, that made staying more attractive. I got a promotion at work. Who would've thought that Food would help me become assistant CFO of Zenith Academy? It was an inflated job title, I knew, but still, it was my first promotion. Sang had never recognized me for all I did at Food. Any joy I took in my newfound success, however, came at a cost: Monica had been passed over. Success at Zenith was zero-sum; my gain was her loss. She'd been at the school for longer, and she certainly worked more hours than I did. Don't get me wrong—I took pride in my work and did it well, but I didn't
live
for it the way Monica seemed to. When the clock struck six-thirty, I shut down my computer and set off on yet another date with Changhoon. It was the classic principal-agent relationship theory, but having never been on the “agent” side, it didn't make sense to me beyond the theoretical until now. If you didn't have a stake in the business, then what incentive would you have to work harder than you had to? It was the reason Sang perennially complained about finding good workers at the store; with the exception of Hwan, he thought the rotating cast of stock boys and cashiers were all
nothing but the lazy
.

“You deserve this promotion more than me,”
I said to Monica in the break room.
“Principal Yoo should give to you.”

But Monica demurred, shaking her head rigorously. “No, Jane Teacher, you deserve. You speak perfect native English. Always make me so jealous!” She was really too modest for her own good.

* * *

At the end of that winter, Changhoon proposed to me. And, reader, I accepted. But Korean proposals were not treated with the same romantic fanfare as their American equivalents. There was no ceremonious brandishing of a diamond ring, for one. He did not get down on one knee. What he'd actually said was,
“My parents want to meet you. Want to come over to say hello?”
Emo had to decode that for me.
“That means he wants to
marry
you! But he's supposed to come to the girl's side first. Call him, quick! We'll set a date. What's his favorite dish? Never mind, we'll make him a ginseng chicken stew. . . .”
Then she sent herself into a tizzy.

When I told Monica the news, she said, “He wants you meeting his parents? You are so lucky!”

But there was something about the way she said it that felt off—the emphasis was on the “you.” I chalked it up to a snag in translation.
“Ya, he's the lucky one,”
I said.

But Monica did not match my joking tone. “You know who is Changhoon father, right?”

“I think he does something for Sinnara?”
I still didn't know exactly what his father did. I think I was mostly grateful he never pried about mine.

“But . . .” She lowered her voice. “They okay, who you are?”

My skin prickled at where this conversation was headed. I forced my voice to go light.
“If this is about my Choco Pie addiction, I swear I getting help. . . .”

Monica's face tightened. There was a flash of something—anger? annoyance? feeling
tap-tap-hae
?
—
before her expression became blank and unreadable. It reminded me of the way the hostess at Dosirak had sized up Sang and the rest of us disapprovingly.

This wasn't how I'd pictured our conversation. We were supposed to whoop about the engagement, the flowers, the dresses, the honeymoon. Wasn't that what friends did?

I switched to English. “There something you want to say to me?”

Immediately a different look darted across Monica's face—fear. Then it was gone. Her expression flooded with its usual friendliness. “Ah, nothing. I was just think—” She corrected herself. “Just think
ing,
maybe Jane Teacher needs some help planning. Anyway, I'm so happy for you!” She smiled. It was painfully forced.

Monica was right: I
was
lucky. But I was also right: Changhoon was lucky, too.

* * *

Sang, too, was not exactly thrilled with the news of my engagement to Changhoon. This was a blow, because I'd taken it as a given that Sang would approve of our union. I was getting married to a
Korean;
he wouldn't have to worry about me anymore. Instead he grew quiet. Thinking the phone line had gone dead, I called out “Hello, hello!” until Sang finally said, “How long you know him?” I told him a little more than a year. “Who he is?” he asked. “What kind of character he has?”

I gave Sang a rundown of Changhoon's
jogun
—conditions and qualifications. It read like a résumé:

•
He graduated from Yonsei—the Yale of Korea.

•
He worked for Sinnara—the combined GM/IBM/GE/ Walmart of Korea.

•
He came from an excellent family. (Apparently Emo, as well as Monica, had done some snooping.)

•
He was ambitious.

•
He was organized; he made prodigious use of spreadsheets.

•
He was smart.

•
He was kind.

•
He was age-appropriate.

•
Oh, and he was tall.

I added one more item, in my head:
He wasn't married.
As I ran through the
jogun,
I couldn't help but compile a second, simultaneous list. And by all objective measures, Ed Farley came up short.

“When your wedding gonna be?” Sang asked.

“I'm meeting his parents next week. Then, after that, I guess we'll figure out a date. Changhoon wants to get married before the spring.” As I spoke, I remembered Nina's comment about getting the job interview. I promptly dismissed it.

“So I guess you staying.”

“Looks like it.”

Sang cleared his throat. “Uncle probably should sending your stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“You forget already? Everything you leaving behind your old boss house in Brooklyn.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right. Sorry.”

“I thought no point Uncle sending because waste of money, when you just coming back home anyway,” he said. “But now you not.”

“No,” I said. “Now I'm not.”

Sang fell quiet again. The rhythms of our speech were off, out of sync.

When he started up again, he said, “They ask about you. I tell them you fine.”

“Who?”

“Lady boss and little Chinese girl. She getting big. The husband, he not there.”

I wondered if Ed was still in upstate New York, as Nina had mentioned. But I knew better than to ask Sang.

“That neighborhood, change a lot. More American people.”

I knew what he meant. American like Beth. Not American like Ed or Nina. And certainly not black.

“Uncle old store, Smith Street? Now sushi restaurant. Around the corner they building new construction.
Condos.
Who gonna buy when projects down the street?”

I was growing exasperated with my uncle's digressions. “I thought you'd be
happy
for me.”

“Happy? Why happy?” He sounded genuinely confused.

Finally I burst, “Uncle, I'm getting married!”

“Why I gonna be happy, when you make decision out of impulse?” And like that, Sang's tone snapped to impassioned, angry. “Better you take more time, think responsibility. But you doing only what your heart wants!”

Marrying Changhoon
is
the responsible thing!
I longed to shout back. Couldn't he see? That responsibility was the sole impetus behind every major decision I'd ever made: choosing Baruch over Columbia, double-majoring in accounting and finance, applying for a job at Lowood,
fleeing
Ed? If I had done only what my heart wanted, I would have chosen to be with Ed—consequences be damned. But my uncle knew nothing of my heart.

Sang went on. “You
always
like this, since you was the child. You say, ‘I want to run away, becoming baby-sitter! I want to run away, living Korea!' People not suppose to do like that. What you choose not gonna be easy for you. But anyway, is your life now.”

Sang seemed to have made up his mind about the kind of person I was. I knew that none of my actions—past, present, future—would ever change his perception of me. “You don't know anything about me,” I told him.

Sang let out a
chuh
of disbelief. “You, too.”

It was one of his classic comeback lines, his way of wedging in the last word. But whether he'd meant I knew nothing about him or that I, too, knew nothing of myself was unclear. At any rate there wasn't much left to say.

“Will you make it to the wedding?” I asked him.

“Maybe, maybe not. Timing not so good right now, Uncle business.”

“Well then . . . I guess we'll be in touch.”

And with that, Sang and I hung up.

“I just don't understand him!” I muttered on my way back to the kitchen, where Emo, squatting on her haunches, was pickling cabbage on the newspaper-lined floor. Ever since the proposal, she'd been intent on teaching me how to cook. She looked up at my sudden outburst, the intrusion of English.

“What's wrong?”
she said.

“It's just . . .
tap-tap-hae.
”
I relented.
“So sorry. I know it's not respectful to say.”

Emo said,
“I always felt a little sorry for American Uncle. Your grandfather was always so hard on him.”
Her eyes darted to the front door before continuing.
“Much harder on him than on Big Uncle, if you ask me.
I used to overhear fights between your grandfather and Big Uncle. Right after Big Uncle got married to that crazy fox-woman. He said, ‘Why don't you show
noryuk
like your younger brother? It should be the other way around.'”

Noryuk
. Effort. Diligence. Follow-through.
“American Uncle had gotten into Seoul National. He was all ready to go up to Seoul when your grandfather told him he was sending him to America instead. And not to study.”
I asked why.
“In case everything here went belly-up, I think. You never knew in those days.”

It could have been the language of business. Re Myungsun was hedging his bets or diversifying his investment portfolio. Which meant Sang had been his father's Plan B.

“And American Uncle, he never came back. Not until your grandfather's death.”
Emo shook her head with pity.
“He's been away for too long.”

I asked Emo why my grandfather had sent American Uncle away instead of Big Uncle. It didn't make sense to me. Why cast off the one you thought was better and had more follow-through? Why not keep that son beside you and send the son you thought less of far away?

“Didn't you hear a word I said to you?”

Emo was still crouched as she spoke. It always amazed me how long she could hold that pose—the kids at church called it the “kimchi squat”—without tiring. I couldn't stay on my haunches longer than a minute before pins and needles started shooting through my legs.

“It takes a certain kind of person to go through immigration. You get broken. Only the strongest can put themselves back together again. But even then . . .”
Emo, still balancing, pried open the leaves of a cabbage head and sprinkled them with fistfuls of salt.
“Even then you can never return to what you were before.”

I asked her what Sang had felt when my grandfather had ordered him away. Again Emo gave me a look like she thought I was a
babo. “What
could
he feel? That was the way things were back then. Parents ordered and children obeyed. No back talk, no questions asked
.
Not like this young generation, that only seems to do whatever they
want.”

She handed a cabbage head to me, and I followed suit: packing the salt into its tender leaves.

“But anyway! We shouldn't be talking about sad things,”
she said
. “We have much, much happier things to focus on. Like your proposal! Well, I guess it's not
official
-official until the parents give permission. Oh, Jane-ah! You know why I'm so happy, right?”

“Because you were scared I become ‘
Old Miss
' and now no more worry?”

“No, no, not that. I never worried about that. I'm happy because now I won't have to guard my heart anymore, thinking you'll up and leave me for America. I'm happy because you've returned home to Korea. For good.”

After the salt leached the excess water from the cabbage, I helped Emo drain the heavy bucket. Carefully we rinsed each wilted cabbage head three times. Her words were still sinking in. My heart was torn. Here, in Korea, I made a connection I had always felt was missing my whole life and had now found with Emo. She was the mother I'd never had. But I also knew that her
other
words also rang true: If I stayed here, I could never return to what I was before.

* * *

The next morning I got into my usual blouse, skirt, and stockings. I sat at my vanity table; the reflection in the mirror sighed back at me. I spun open a jar of cream foundation. Dipped my sponge in, but I was down to the last “schmear” (one of Beth's words). I'd have to borrow some of Emo's.

I reached for her vanity drawer, bracing myself for the jumble of chaos that was bound to be inside; Emo tended to hoard things, stashing them out of sight. (I learned this when I stumbled upon the bakery box of Nina's chocolate cookies in the linen closet, half nibbled and growing stale.) I pulled on the drawer but was met with resistance. I gave the drawer handle a firm yank, and instead of the
clack-clack
of glass or plastic bottles hitting wood, I heard a rustling, like the sound made by a wedged piece of paper. I got on my hands and knees and carefully removed the drawer from its tracks. Out tumbled a downpour of mostly empty tubes and bottles. They clattered to the floor, rolling off in all directions, but my attention was focused on the impediment: a crinkled envelope that had been taped to the outside of the back of the drawer. It had come loose, flapping free like a barn door.