Re Jane (36 page)

I was utterly floored. This woman had no reason to praise me. The last time we saw each other, she'd rightly chased me out of her house.

My uncle waved his hand. “She only okay. She not like Einshtein.”

“Well, there's only one Einshtein—I mean, Einstein.” They shared a laugh.

It was a little surreal: My uncle and Beth, chattering on like old friends? Never would I ever have imagined them sharing anything—not even the physical space of a car. I watched the trees lining the highway speed by and thought about just how far we'd come to reach this point.

Beth turned around in her seat to face me. “Jane, I never had the chance to say thank you.”

I shrugged. “It was my uncle who spotted you first.”

“No, I mean . . . for talking, with Devon.”

I should have been thanking her. For welcoming me into her home. For showing me a world beyond Flushing. I shrugged again, this time in shyness.

After a little lull, I said, “Beth, I want to say I'm so sorry. What I did, with Ed, it was—”

Beth's eyes darted up at me through the rearview mirror; shooting me
nunchi
. “I was sorry to hear it ended, Jane.” Her eyes now glanced over at Sang. I could tell he was pretending not to listen.

“It was for the best,” I managed to say.

But my uncle had heard it all. I should have feared his judgment—in the tight confines of his car, no less—but I couldn't keep apologizing to him for who I was.

Then he spoke. “Our Jane not so everyday. But people not always recognize. Should be grateful.”

Should be grateful.
I don't think I ever had a clearer picture of my uncle before that moment. I could have read his words as
I
should be grateful. Just as I'd spent a lifetime taking each of his rough-hewn words as insults. But perhaps they were simply veiled praises and he lacked the language to make them smooth and polished. I felt one word:
jung.
That warmhearted sensation, rushing over me.

Beth nodded. “Someday someone deserving will.”

We turned off the BQE and continued down Thirty-first Street. Sang and Beth talked on. About Brooklyn. Queens. Baseball, even. Beth commented on the metal bat rolling on the floor by her feet. Sang confessed to being “number one Mets fan” (a fact my uncle never once shared with me). From my perch in the backseat, I found the counterpoint between the two—Sang's blunt, awkward speech, Beth's overabundance of eloquent words—creating a surprising harmony. They still managed to thread their way across that divide.

We pulled up to 917 Helen Street. Nina was perched on an aluminum chair on the porch, fanning herself with a newspaper. When she saw me, she brightened. Sang and Beth waved good-bye before setting off, and I bounded up the steps to our house.

We toasted with Sang's beers. Later we ventured over to the bars, where pints flowed in a free stream—all of us celebrating the fact that it was
only
a blackout. The general tenor of the night was relief, followed by revelry. We all knew it could have been worse—a lot, lot worse. Eventually Nina and I returned to our porch. We talked about our days. We talked about work. We talked about how we each found our way during the blackout. Somewhere, in the distance far behind us, the Manhattan skyline was extinguished, cast in its own violet shadows. The rest of New York glowed in the moonlight.

It was good to be home.

Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.

—
E. B. White, “Here Is New York”

Q
ueens was never supposed to be the plan. I had spent so much of my earlier life riding the 7
away
from Flushing. I'd stare out the train windows at the city skyline, imagining the life that awaited me there. But even the best-laid plans get rerouted. So here I am, standing on the platform at Queensboro Plaza (wearing a gold-lamé dress, thanks to Eunice Oh), waiting to board the Flushing-bound 7. We're right at the base of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, and from the elevated platform you can see the interlaced roads—westbound, eastbound—just as the subway tracks dip up and down, each making way for the other. The Con Edison smokestacks stand tall and proud at the foot of the East River. And though you can't see it from up here, beside the power plant is a bright green baseball field, and I know at this time of day it is filled with picnicking families and men playing soccer. The 7 pulls in, and I step aboard; the train car lets forth its usual creaks and groans with the weight of all us passengers.

Then the train sets off. The city falls away behind us. Flushing blooms ahead.

I never did get that Wall Street job, but I am a CEO, of sorts. Nina and I run our own property-management business, which we officially started not long after the blackout but probably unofficially formed the night of the boeuf bourguignon dinner. The job is exactly that—we help landlords manage their properties. It's an extension of what we've already been doing all these years with Nina's great-uncle's house. I do the financials and act as the liaison between the owner and the tenants. I'm indebted to my early years at Food, which proved to be a good training ground for the now-endless calls and e-mails about late fees, bounced checks, puckering floor tiles, and plumbing problems. (Sometimes, when fielding complaints from the most persnickety of tenants, I think of Mrs. O'Gall shaking a head of iceberg at us. God rest her soul.) Nina drums up new business for us—all those happy-hour connections she made in our early twenties are now paying off—and is also the literal handyman of our operation. The buildings we manage are superless, so Nina is dispatched to the apartment units—tool belt and box in hand. We'd like to think we're younger, nimbler, as well as more tech-savvy (thanks to the influence of our friends in the neighborhood) than our competitors. Being a handy(wo)man is a decidedly unglamorous job, but Nina derives a certain high from it. It always seemed to me that Nina and Eunice shared a fascination with the inner workings of things. I often wondered if it was a trait passed down from their fathers—Mr. Scagliano being an electrician and Dr. Oh a cardiologist. What if Nina had had the same opportunities as Eunice, or vice versa? Maybe Nina would've been the one who'd headed off to MIT, poring over the digital and electrical innards of a computer. Or Eunice poised over how-to manuals, studying wiring and plumbing diagrams.

It's a little uncanny how our neighborhood has taken off. There is an inherent humility in the Queens identity—saying that's where you were from was something you uttered with a disclaimer. Watching these transplants now proudly embrace their adopted borough . . . I can't help but feel it's a little like a negation of everything I come from. Although Nina thinks I should accept this renaissance for what it is (after all, she's witnessed it with her home borough, now overrun with “Beth types”). And she assures me Queens is still plenty scruffy.

Though it looks like she's on her way to becoming an official Queensite: her great-uncle is putting our house on the market. She floated the idea of our going in on the house together. We'd stay on the top floor and continue to rent out the other two units. Eventually, when Nina and I start our own families, we could each take a floor and still have one income-producing unit. We've turned a tidy profit on our business—enough to cover the down payment but not enough for construction. Even though it'd probably be cheaper to do a demo and throw up one of those prefab aluminum-siding houses, Nina wants to keep the integrity of her great-uncle's home. Some things are just worth salvaging. Meanwhile, the inheritance my grandfather left me has been sitting untouched in a bank in Seoul, slowly accruing interest. I've talked it over with Uncle Sang. We ran the numbers, and he thinks I should go for it. It might make a good investment yet.

He is, I think, proud that I've started my own business (I know this because when I showed him our first paycheck, he offered a stiff pat on the back), but I also know he still wishes I were a larger part of Food.

As for my uncle—it turned out he used
his
inheritance to purchase Food's commercial property as well as the building next to it. George, of all people, has taken an interest in the family business. He keeps urging my uncle to tear down the property next door—currently rented to a
jjajangmyun
noodle restaurant—and expand Food. He's become something of a health nut—most recently he's been on a kale-juice kick—and he thinks the store should tap into the organic market. But Uncle Sang likes the predictability of his small-but-manageable margins. “Maybe I'm younger, I be more risky,” he says. “But I'm too old now.” It's an ongoing debate between the two of them. In truth, business at Food could be better. It's a tight grocery market, with a growing number of larger, fancier supermarkets cropping up all over. But the property value of Food has shot up. Uncle Sang has, however, fared far better than Daedong Fish Market, Kumgang Mountain Dry Cleaning, Chosun Dynasty Auto Body. None of his friends owned their own buildings. Their landlords did not renew their leases, and they've been forced farther up Northern. The Chinese, according to my uncle, have taken over Flushing.

My uncle has afforded the family a little indulgence, to the surprise of us all: the purchase of a second home. It's a small cottage on the North Fork of Long Island. My aunt and uncle drive out there after they close up shop, and wake to the sunrise. Uncle Sang doesn't say this, but I know it reminds him of that first home, the one he and my mother had abandoned long ago in the North. The house that smelled of wild rice and the Donghae Sea. The house on Long Island smells like wild wheat and the Sound.

And what, dear reader, of Ed Farley? According to Beth, he's still adjuncting at Queens College. She worries about his financial state—he only recently got health insurance, and she suspects he is still living off his “buyout” of the brownstone. Then, tentatively, she'll add, “He still asks about you, Jane.” Sometimes I think about what would have happened if Ed and I were still together. But how can I move forward if I'm consumed with memories of the past? I can only march on.

Devon also sees a lot of us. She comes over to watch Korean dramas with Nina. Those two are
obsessed
with them. They watch everything, from the fluffy soap operas to historical romances to the recent wave of dark indie thrillers. I walked in on a scene where a guy was holding a pair of bloodstained scissors to his tongue, and I had to walk right out. It's probably for the best that Beth's in the dark about this particular habit.

This summer Beth is taking Devon to China. Beth's had posters made to tape up in the village square where Devon was abandoned. The posters have pictures of Devon as a little girl and text in both English and Chinese:
“Dear China Mom, I just want you to know your little girl is okay. You must have worried all these years about your little one. We are so blessed. Love, America Mom.”
She'd gotten the idea from one of her adoptive-parenting listserves. Last week Beth proposed something to me: Would I consider coming along on their trip? “Devon would
really
appreciate the emotional support. And I just know it'll make the transition for her so much easier.”

“But I don't speak Chinese,” I said. What I really meant was,
But I have no idea what it'll feel like for Devon.
Beth squeezed my hand and said, “You'd know a little better than I would.” All week, while mulling over this trip to China, I've been thinking I should also pay my respects to Emo and Big Uncle in Korea. Emo, who wrote to tell me she's getting married. Married!
“What business does an
‘Old Miss'
like me have getting married?”
she said. Her fiancé is an older man, one of her father's former business associates. He's a divorcé with two grown-up kids. I think of Emo bustling about with wedding plans, cooking chicken ginseng stew. I hope her fiancé makes her happy. I hope he knows how grateful he should be.

Mary, too, lives in Seoul now. She works at my old language school. After graduation she landed a job in the subprime-mortgage market with J.P. Morgan. When things went bust, it threw all kinds of questions up in the air for her. A month after being laid off, she was on a plane to Korea. She tells me she can't quite keep pace with the hurry-hurry nature of things; the second she blinks, “at least three trends have gone by.” Which means all references I had from the time I was there are now hopelessly outdated. She also adds, “
Honhyol
celebrities like you are all the rage now. Daewon Hedley, Jason Oh-Smith, Tanya Reese . . . well, maybe Tanya Reese's already on her way out.” (It's something Nina keeps telling me, too: “You half-Asian girls are the new California blonds.”) “But anyway. You should come back for a visit. You probably wouldn't recognize the place.”

Speaking of Korea, I've reconnected with someone else from my time abroad. Not Changhoon, not Monica, but
Rachel.
She's here getting her M.B.A. at Columbia. Once a month we meet on Thirty-second Street for barbecue and
soju.
Rachel's much more relaxed out of the context of Seoul; she's even been known to leave the house barefaced and wearing sneakers. When she first reached out, she brought me news from Korea: Changhoon was married. To
Monica.
“
She's
thrilled, of course,”
Rachel said, leaning across the sizzling plate of fatty pork.
“But between you and me, I think he kind of thought, well, she's there, so why not?
” She'd attended their wedding right before she moved to New York, but she hasn't spoken to either of them since.
“It was a little
tap-tap-hae
being Monica's friend,”
Rachel said.
“That girl's content to be discontent.”

Speaking of weddings, I end this story with one. No, no, not mine. Three months ago Eunice's invitation came in the mail.
Eunice Eunhae Oh and Timothy Gould Mann request your presence in celebrating their matrimony on the twenty-fifth of May. . . .

And that was when I finally learned Threepio's real name.

Her father, however, will not be walking her down the aisle. Not because he doesn't want to, but because Eunice insists that a host of Stormtroopers escort her instead. I imagined the sadness with which Dr. Oh processed the news, his gentle eyes growing soft and cloudy.

I'm on my way to that wedding now—the ceremony will be at church, the reception in the basement. Eunice asked me to be one of her bridesmaids, which is why I'm wearing this ridiculous dress. (Threepio was pushing for gold bridesmaid bikinis, but that idea was quickly shot down. By me.) Eunice is seating me next to Threepio's best man and frat brother from MIT. “Much in common you and Artoo have,” she said. Apparently he, too, runs his own business—a housing Web site where people list their vacant apartments that rent by the day or the week, like an ad hoc B&B. “Hit it off you will.” Then Eunice fluttered her fingers at me.
Artoo:
I pictured a dorky Indian guy, most probably a Course VI like Eunice, and shrugged. “Sure, why not,” I said. I try to keep an open mind.

The 7 is doing its usual rickety-racket routine. I'll ride this train to its final destination, where Uncle Sang and Aunt Hannah will be waiting for me. My aunt will go tsk-tsk-tsk
at me for wearing my dress on the train—a
nunchi
-less move, no doubt. My uncle will be double-parked on the wrong corner of Roosevelt and Main, or
I
will be standing on the wrong corner of Roosevelt and Main, and we'll fight about it the whole ride over to church. It's high time that the MTA invested in some new train cars. But then I'd have to get to know a new train, and I'm certain some part of me would mourn the loss of the old, for all its flaws. After years of riding the 7, I've grown familiar with its herky-jerkiness, learning to accept its particular rhythms instead of fighting against them—or running away. And to realize, despite it all, that it has good intentions. I've begun to feel a comfort in its clumsy rocking. We've weathered so much together these past two-plus decades. You might even say we've developed a kind of
jung.