Offerings

by Michael ByungJu Kim

  They keep talking about the Son of Sam in the TV news. It makes me think of a famous book by Dr. Seuss I read. Son of Sam, Sam I am. They say he’s disturbed and did really terrible things. They tried and tried to catch him. When they finally did, they put him in the jail, for a long time. Poor guy. I think of him in jail going, I will not eat green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam I am. He should know sometimes no matter how bad it is, you just gotta close your eyes and eat it. Just like Umma says.

  I get my own room this summer. Away from my donseng finally. Independence day! I put up my first poster on bedroom wall, Farrah Fawcett in sexy red swimsuit. You can see through her swimsuit! No such thing as sexy in my old country. Farrah has blonde, wavy hair, not like Korean girls’ straight hair. And those white teeth, like my favorite gum Chiclets. Yeah, she’s the American fox.

  New York City is just across a dirty river from where we live. They call it the Big Apple, I don’t know why. Nobody explains things to newcomers in America. So much I don’t know but am curious about. I get “sunny-side up” on eggs, but what is “over easy”? Nowhere to find the answer, not even in a dictionary. Anyway, Big Apple is where the action lives. In Encyclopedia Americana, it says New York City is the money, media, and art capital of the world. It is also home of my Yankees, though it’s also where Son of Sam lives. Maybe you gotta have bad with the good. I’ve made up my mind I’m gonna live in Big Apple when I grow up. Sure better than Fort Lee.

  Last month they had a blackout in NYC. Didn’t know America, land of plenty, could run out of electricity, but they did. TV showed scenes of many unhappy people and big fires. Learned a new word, “looting.” Sounds like shooting, and hooting. Looting people carry TV sets out of stores, break windows. Black people throw things at white policemen. First time I see angry American people. News guys keep talking about race. They say it’s a big cause of the riots. Appa shakes his head. “Black, brown, white,” he says, “they’re all Americans. Don’t they know how good they have it?”

  Guess there’s anger in America, too. Not all sunshine and happy here. Lot of yelling and fighting. And looting. Maybe not so different after all.

  11

  Late January 1998

  A curl of smoke hangs over the microphone, rolling in the red and blue and yellow lights. “My Way” is crooned as it can only be by Asian businessmen at karaoke, lyrics mangled, refrains overly expanded: “I did it . . . MYYYYY waaaayyyyyy . . .”

  To my left someone with a familiar face is passed out, his torso lying perpendicular to his upright legs. On the table in front of me, a couple is entwined in a slow dance, trying mightily to keep their balance. They are the Mop PTFT members I’ve spent the last month with, but the serious, pinched masks they wear during the day are replaced by the goofy faces of the blissfully inebriated, abetted by the club agassi.

  They pass round after round of poktanju, “bomb shots,” and insist I keep up. “All for one,” they toast, in unison. My face feels flushed, and I feel a heaviness coming over me, but I announce my fineness, protest repeatedly for all to hear, “Really, I’m fine.”

  I ponder the enormous confluence of events that brought me here, to this room salon in the basement of a building in Gangnam, at this propitious point in the history of human civilization. Isn’t it remarkable, through the shiny miracle of chance that touches the universe, that I was born in Korea in the mid-1960s, that Korea achieved miraculous prosperity through the seventies, under the iron hand of a sunglasses-wearing dictator, that it then, at the cusp of a new millennium, blew it all by leveraging itself to the hilt with foreign debt? That the government got a bailout package from the IMF and brought Phipps and me in on a mission impossible? Cue music—dan dan dan dan dan da dan dan da da da—Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to rescue the homeland from complete and utter ruin. Good luck, Shane. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds . . . Nothing short of extraordinary, the series of happy accidents that allowed us to execute an exchange of bank loans for government-guaranteed bonds, the initial but critical gate in the ROK rescue program, that prompted the Mop officials to want to show us their appreciation for a job well done over drinks, in proper Korean style, in a hostess bar, drinking, singing, and, as everyone keeps saying, bonding.

  “Young Lee Yisa,” Director Suh says to me. “Round one done. Now just the bond offering to get new capital in. No problem, right?”

  “No problem, sir,” I say, with as much confidence as I can muster.

  “Fighting!” he shouts, raising a clenched fist as an exclamation point. “So, how you like Mirage? This agassi, your ‘partner,’ is investment-grade?”

  He guffaws, doesn’t wait for a response. “Here, you drink cyclone poktanju,” he says, giving the beer glass a deft spin of the wrist, inducing a swirl. He holds up his index finger: “One shot.”

  The director watches intently as I try to chug it, spilling half on my shirt, return the glass to him. He chortles, slaps me on the back.

  Suh then takes off his shoe and pours beer and whiskey into it. His colleagues watch, amused, the agassi, impressed. He hands the alcohol-sloshing shoe to a kwajang, orders, “One shot!” The subordinate takes the shoe gratefully, with two hands, and takes a large gulp. He says “Weeha-yuh!,” passes around the leaking brogue.

  You have to hand it to Korean men. Where else can middle-aged farts with quotidian day jobs become kings at night? Where aspiration morphs into reality, even if just for an evening. Young, nubile hostesses pour drinks for them, feed them pieces of fruit, call them Oppa (never Ajussi!) and tell them how virile they are. And what’s with these rooms behind closed doors? You wonder what lurid dramas are unfolding behind all the other doors in this establishment. Maybe a businessman drowning his marital sorrows in scotch and song. Or perhaps a lovers’ quarrel between a jaded hostess and a customer who thought it was about a romance. Secrets being shared, promises made. Narratives of desire and jealousy, disappointment and redemption. Maybe that’s what life is, a sum of people I’ll never meet but I know, of private dramas I’ll never see but am familiar with.

  “’Sup, little buddy!” Jack says, putting his arm over my shoulder.

  I don’t know what I’m annoyed by more, his unconscious equating of me with Gilligan or the oh-too-easy dropping of his arm over my shoulder in that casual domineering way tall people have.

  Jack pulls me closer, says, “Hey, DJ, how come your women so fine? And the men . . . I mean, you Korean guys are short, skinny, kind of . . . feminine.” Jack is six foot three, making him easily the tallest person in any setting in Korea. He was captain of the Princeton lacrosse team, a fact he manages to mention at every opportunity, and he has a born athlete’s easy way with women. “No offense—”

  The Mop kwajang thrusts two shot glasses in his face, and Jack says, “What, just a boilermaker.”

  Then the official takes a lighter and lights the glasses on fire, saying, “Firebombs!” Two flames of blue-yellow shoot up, dance in the dark. He drinks one and offers the other to Jack.

  “Whoa,” Jack says, eyes widening.

  “Investment banker,” says the agassi seated between us. “You guys, like, play with stocks and M&A and insider trading and all that stuff, right?”

  All that stuff, I nod.

  Jack is running his fingers though his partner’s long, straight hair. The Jack I know is a banker with a soul. His interests go beyond Wall Street; he’ll be the first to tell you his curiosity about Asian cultures dates back to his days as an East Asian Studies major at Princeton. He’s also a victim of the Western mythologizing of Asian feminine beauty. He starts singing, a cappella, “Oh, me so horny . . . me love you long time.”

  His partner giggles, hand over her mouth.

  Jack says, winking at me, “She wants me bad.”

  She turns to me, asks me to translate to him: Does he have chest hair?

  When Jack tears his shirt open, popping a button, to show his chest hair, the agassi around the table have a coll
ective giggle fit. They call him “hairy, big-nosed barbarian” and “AIDS carrier.” I don’t translate. One girl pulls at some chest hair, thinks it’s the funniest thing in the world.

  “Wonderful Tonight” blasts through the trash compactor–sized speakers on either side of our couch.

  “Can you smell it, kid?” Jack says, too loudly, pushing his face into mine.

  “Sweat and beer?” I say. “Cheap perfume?”

  “Possibility. The night is filled with fucking possibility.” He gives me a fist bump.

  They call me to the stage. I protest I don’t know any songs, but they’ll have none of it. I can’t think of any cheesy oldies befitting this environment, so I cue up Radiohead. “I’m a creep, I’m a weirdooooo . . .” I sing, a bit off but, I’m convinced, with feeling. The guitarist tries his best to keep up. “What the hell am I doing here . . . I don’t belong here . . .” I wail. “She run, run, run, run, run . . . RUUUUNNNNN.”

  I sit down to a stunned hush, then a smattering of polite applause. An agassi asks, “Oppa, what mean ‘creep’?”

  “Um, jjoda,” I say.

  She laughs, says I must be a kanchup from the North. Only North Korean spies would use that corny old expression.

  I notice her eyes are perfect coins. I look around the table—all the girls are pretty but in an eerily similar way. They have the same round eyes, the size of quarters, aquiline noses, white skin, incongruously bulbous breasts. They look . . . Western.

  “The power of cosmetic surgery,” Jun bellows. “A society that values beauty,” he continues, in a lower voice. “Even if medically enhanced. Hence the double-eyelid surgery, the breast implants—saline, not the fake-looking silicone stuff. Seoul has become the cosmetic surgery capital of the world.”

  “Just not natural,” I say.

  “So what,” Jack shouts. “Better than not being good to look at.”

  “They all go to the same cosmetic surgeons on Dongho-ro,” Jun says. “Beauty Alley, they call it. The madam here gets them a group discount.”

  My partner looks different from the others. She has short black hair and porcelain white skin. She has the regulation round eyes, but a hairline scar at the side of her mouth gives her a delicately damaged air. I ask her for her name, and she says, speaking in the honorific, “Yun Hwa yeyo.” She keeps her head bowed a touch, doesn’t look at me.

  Another man takes the stage, singing “It’s Now or Never,” unironically, and I can barely hear her.

  “Pretty name,” I blurt.

  “Not my real name,” she says, close to my ear.

  I ask what her real name is, and she just smiles, faintly. Her lips form a red bow.

  “I like Radiohead.” Of course she does.

  While everyone is turned to the man onstage, I see her look the other way, her eyes cast down. What I thought was serenity in her face is, more, sadness.

  “So, seeing anybody?” I say. “Outside of work, I mean.”

  “Love is a luxury in our line of work.” She downs her shot. “Can’t afford it.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s not sex we sell, you know,” she says. “It’s romance, or the illusion of romance. There’s a difference.”

  “But you sell.”

  “Don’t we all sell? Something or other?”

  Maybe she has a point. Except I don’t know if I’m a seller or buyer.

  “Look at those two,” an agassi yells from across the table. “Ask her for her number.”

  “Get a fucking room,” Jack says, guffawing. He cracks himself up.

  I feel a dizziness coming on. It may be the lack of sleep or the liquor catching up to me. I hold my breath, try to clear my head. Three and a half minutes on my watch this time. The old lungs aren’t letting me down.

  I open my eyes to see Yun Hwa casually brushing away a Mop guy’s hand grazing her thigh.

  I excuse myself to go to the bathroom, a tiny stall at the far end of the room. Closing the door, I bring my face close to the mirror, then pull away, then close again. I study objectively the face staring back at me. There’s a mop of unruly, ink-black hair surrounding a blotchy red face, the telltale Asian drinking affliction, bloodshot eyes. A smile sloppy but genuine. Stretch the smile, count the teeth. My, what big teeth you have. Is that joy I detect? From hopefulness, from homefulness? From a connection made with a pretty stranger, Yun Hwa, or whatever her real name is? Or is it Jee Yeon I’m thinking of? Who knows, maybe Jee Yeon is my soul mate. Why not? From a new sense of belonging? These are my band of brothers. Brethren in arms—we few, we happy few—shedding sweat and blood together. Is this what home feels like?

  I’m overcome by an urge to call Jee Yeon. Some unfinished business there, methinks.

  “Surprised?” I say, trying my damnedest not to slur my words, which seem to echo off the bathroom walls.

  Jee Yeon doesn’t seem surprised. I get the sense that’s the way she is, unperturbed, rarely surprised. “It’s late, isn’t it?” she says, quietly.

  “Not too,” I say, covering my other ear to hear better.

  “You’ve been drinking, I see.”

  “Not so much,” I say, suppressing a burp.

  “Turning Korean already.”

  Lighthearted banter! I’ve got her right where I want her. “So, I’ve been thinking . . . ,” I say and lose my train of thought.

  She waits, then laughs softly. She kindly helps me out. “My orchestra is giving a preview performance at the Seoul Performing Arts Center in two weeks . . . if you’d like to come.” And, she adds, if I don’t mind sitting with her family.

  “I don’t,” I say. “I mean, sure, why not? Love to come. Nothing I’d rather do.” And I’m surprised at how much I mean it.

  I want to tell her about my evening, my newfound brethren, maybe share some of my dreams with her, the good ones anyway. And hear about her life, and her dreams. But she says, “Good night then, Dae Joon-ssi.” She has a knack for leaving me hanging, wanting more. Still, the sound of my name rolling off her tongue leaves me with a goofy grin.

  By the time I come out of the bathroom, the party’s over and people are getting up. Only Jack remains seated, demanding some satisfaction from his partner.

  “Coming with, right?” Jack says to her, as she gets up to leave. “Right??”

  The men give one another big brotherly hugs. “Brothers in arms!” we shout, in English. Beu-rah-duh! The agassi bow, wish us a safe ride home.

  Yun Hwa and I shake hands, and I say I’ll see her soon. She whispers, Soon. I search her eyes, and she gives a slight nod.

  At the exit, we see Jack’s partner saying goodbye to another customer, hugging him, saying, in her breathy way, “Call me, Oppa.”

  “Traitorous bitch,” Jack says, slurring. He seems more befuddled than indignant.

  We spill out onto the street. The air is bracing, fresh and cold. A light snow begins to fall.

  “May the bridges we burn . . . light the way!” Jack shouts, spreading wide his arms. Snow falls on his upturned face and around him on the sidewalk. He struggles to keep his balance.

  I hail a taxi, the black kind for foreigners.

  “Where to, buddy?” Jack says, his eyes closing.

  “Home.” I fold his large frame into the back seat. “Off you go.” I tell the driver the hotel name and close the door over Jack’s protest, give it two taps to get going.

  I start heading back to Mirage when I see Yun Hwa coming out of the entrance. Puffs of white float in the air, land gently on her head and shoulders, and she shivers.

  Seeing me approach, she says, “I could use another drink.”

  “Sure, why not,” I say.

  As we get into a white taxi, there’s an old man on the street, his back bent at a forty-five-degree angle. He crooks a bony finger at me, says, “You don’t fool me.”

  “Neh?” I say.

  “You don’t fool me for a second,” he says, before turning away and stumbling into the cold night.

 
; *

  The place Yun Hwa takes us to is a pojang macha, a late-night street eatery. We step inside the vinyl tent, and the smoke and heat from a burning fire unexpectedly kindle an atavistic impulse in me, for hearth and home. The food being grilled and fried and boiled feels like a warm welcome home.

  Yun Hwa chooses for us a bench in front of the food counter. She has erased most of her makeup, and she wears large black glasses.

  “Blind as an owl,” she explains. But the glasses can’t hide her forlorn beauty. A face that could launch a thousand ballistic missiles.

  She orders two bottles of Jinro soju. I order ttukbokki and odeng. Dishes from my childhood. Steam rises in tendrils from the odeng broth. The first sip of the broth rings a bell on a long-forgotten door.

  She pours some soju in my glass, before catching herself. “Force of professional habit,” she says.

  I take the bottle, pour for her instead.

  “I know you probably judge,” she says, downing her drink.

  “Have wondered why. Why your line of work.”

  I know all about the long tradition of giseng, dating back to the Koryŏ Dynasty. They were artists, entertainers sanctioned by the court, trained for years in poetry and song to entertain the royalty and yangban. Some were courtesans, too, but they played a legitimate role in traditional society. But Yun Hwa hardly looks or acts like a courtesan.

  She shrugs her shoulders. “Rich guys come to get served by us,” she says. “And we serve them.” She takes a gulp. “People think they come to get drunk, abuse us, do obscene things. But mostly the guys come not to commit sins but to confess them. To us. Ends up more a confessional.”

  “That’d make you . . . a priestess?”

  She just drinks her soju. “I accept my life as is. Don’t expect someone like you to understand.”

  “Fair enough. But what if one of these guys gets, uh, aggressive with you?”

  “You know about eunjang-do?” she says. “In the Chŏsun days, young women would carry around a small silver knife inside their sleeves. It was to protect themselves from unwanted advances from a man, to preserve their honor.”