Offerings

by Michael ByungJu Kim

  “We’re always meeting in hotels,” I say.

  She smiles knowingly. Your wit doesn’t cover your insecurity, her expression seems to say.

  “My parents,” she says, in her soft, bird-like voice. “A bit ‘obah.’” Overdo things. As though she’s embarrassed by the hotel, the catering, all the congratulations.

  “Your father . . . a bit scary,” I say. “I mean, serious.”

  “Serious. I’ve heard that.”

  “Must’ve been a fun-filled childhood.”

  She tilts her head a touch. “Don’t we all pay for the sins of our fathers?”

  “Hm,” I manage to say. She seems to know more than she lets on. I decide to keep it light. “Mozart, I grew up hearing it. My father on the piano. Beautiful, a bit haunting.”

  “You mentioned,” she says. “Does he still play, piano?”

  “When he can.” Not an untrue statement. “He’s a musician at heart. Like you.”

  “Musicians at heart,” she agrees, with a half-sad, half-amused expression.

  I notice she has a new necklace. A thin silver chain with a small pendant that looks like a silver dagger. No, a sword. Sword of Damocles? A cosmic sign. Who needs fortune-tellers? “Eunjang-do?” I say, pointing.

  She gives a small laugh. “My, look who’s become steeped in Korean traditions,” she says.

  “Don’t Koreans say, ‘the arm bends inward’? Koreans should be Korean, be with others like them?”

  “The leg bends outward,” she says. “Besides, I don’t need a dagger to protect my virtue.”

  “A sword of Damocles then?” I venture.

  She looks down at her pendant. “Just a horn, I think,” she says. “Sorry you had to meet my parents this way.”

  “They seem like nice Korean parents. Serious but nice.”

  Jee Yeon smiles her Mona Lisa smile, neither confirming nor denying nor revealing. I’m learning to read her intentions by what she doesn’t say as much as what she says.

  “Ever feel like getting away from it all?” I blurt. I gesture toward the noisy, crowded banquet room. “I mean, all this—”

  Her eyes lock on mine, and before I can finish, she grabs my hand, whisks me toward the exit in the back. We make a beeline to the door, not daring to look back.

  The exit door opens to a small garden, which has a path to the streets, and we run, hands still clasped, she in her high heels, holding her bunched gown in her free hand. The cold air against our faces is bracing.

  “Freedom!” she shouts, breathless, and we share the giddy laugh of conspirators.

  Jee Yeon has on just her white gown, her arms bare. She stands there, rubbing her arms, and beauty reveals itself, slowly, like a flower blooming in spring. I take off my jacket, put it around her shoulders.

  We walk along a dimly lit side street, and she hooks her arm through mine.

  “Your father’s not going to be amused when he notices you missing,” I say. “He’ll think I’m a bad influence on you.”

  “We can be bad influences on each other,” she says.

  We come by a children’s playground. She sits in the swing and starts swaying back and forth. She looks joyful, like the carefree girl I imagine her to have been growing up. As she swings toward me, the faint moonlight catches a hint of sparkle in her eyes. Her subdued beauty, there the whole time. Could this woman be the yin to my yang that I’ve been looking for? I want to believe a boy and a girl can bridge cultural divides infinitely better than countries can. After all, isn’t that the metaphorical nature of love, making a connection of differences?

  “I need to leave soon,” I say. “After I finish some business with Wayne. You know, of Ilsung? Then I have to go to London, before going back to New Jersey to see—”

  “Wayne, of Ilsung?” Jee Yeon says. “Park Hyun Suk?”

  “Why,” I say, my voice catching, “you know him?”

  She lets out a sigh. “We all know each other. Small society.”

  “Know, how well?”

  “We went to CIC together when we were kids,” she says. “Children’s International Community, a silly gathering for kids from bourgeois families, mostly chaebol. We were at Vienna together one summer. That is, my parents sent me. Energetic kid, always looking for fun, and mischief. When we hit high school, several of the CIC kids’ mothers formed a kwaweh group, for private tutorials. Hyun Suk was one of the kids in our group.”

  “Huh. So you must’ve known him pretty well.”

  “Guess you could say that. In those days, private lessons were outlawed. President Chun’s lame attempt at showing a level playing field. Equal opportunity in education, rich or poor. Our mothers had different ideas, of course.”

  “Binik-bin booik-boo.” The poor get poorer, the rich richer.

  “Something like that. We did kwaweh in Yongpyeong, three hours out of Seoul, to escape detection. At Hyun Suk’s winter house there. Five of us, three girls, two boys. We did calculus and then English, rotating in the teachers. Hyun Suk was naturally smart but . . . casual about his studies. Rarely did his homework, but when we had problem sets in class, he’d be the first one done. And he’d make a show of getting up and doing other stuff, singing, watching TV, while the rest of us were sweating over our problems. The other two girls competed for his affections. It made for some amusing sessions.”

  “Sounds like the Wayne I know.”

  “To unwind after studies, we’d go skiing at Dragon Hill and once in a while go to the nightclub there, the Pointe, think it was called.” She shakes her head at the recollection. “One night there, this waiter, a bit older, started in with us, stirring up trouble. Kept saying under his breath, loud enough for us to hear, “Spoiled little brats. Think they own the world.” Just mad at the world, I guess. He decided to take it out on a bunch of wealthy-looking kids. We tried to ignore him, but I could tell Hyun Suk’s patience was wearing thin. Then the waiter leaned in on one of the girls and said, “What you need is a good spanking. You want me to give a spanking, gongju?” At that Hyun Suk rushed him, and they got into a scuffle. The other waiters joined in, must’ve been six on two. Hyun Suk and the other boy got beat up pretty bad. Bloody noses, bruises all over their faces.”

  “What then?”

  “We all got taken down to Yongpyong police station. We were scared out of our minds. Underage drinking, fighting, getting arrested. What’re our parents going to say? Hyun Suk stood up—he had this thin cone of reddened Kleenex sticking out his nostril—and announced to the police supervisor he had started the fight and he would take full responsibility. He told the cop to let the girls and the waiters go. We were relieved; the waiters were just stunned. He’d taken it all on himself. For the lot of us. That’s the Hyun Suk I remember. Anyway, think he went for yuhak shortly thereafter, to a boarding school in America.”

  Seeing me lost in thought, Jee Yeon asks, “Your problem, the gomin. Something to do with him?”

  “I shouldn’t really talk about it,” I say. “Need-to-know and all that. But I am caught between two choices.”

  “Scylla and Charybdis.”

  “Between someone who’s entrusted me with something important and some helpless people who desperately need my help.”

  She waits for me to continue.

  “Okay, you’ve probably guessed that someone is Wayne, uh, Hyun Suk. The other group is the laborers at his company, Ilsung Motors. Doing what Wayne wants may hurt the workers. But these workers . . . I saw them protesting, and it . . . I never saw anything like it . . . Like their life depended on it.

  “I’m not sure what they want, the workers, their labor union. Wish I knew more. To see if I can help them. It feels important.” I look up. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  “You’d be surprised,” she says. She lights a cigarette. “I might know someone. A sunbae from my student demonstration days.”

  “You used to be a protester?” I say, a bit more loudly than I meant to. “You marched and got teargassed and all th
at? Thought you went to Ewha to study the cello.”

  “My freshman year at Ewha, I won the Vienna Cello Concours, and I got a scholarship. I think you know there are no need-based grants in Korea. So I secretly turned over my grant money to my classmates who needed it. Umma was not amused when she found out.” She takes a puff. “Then . . . then I had a political awakening.”

  I pause to let her elaborate.

  “Not much to tell,” she says. “A sunbei, a senior, took me to a campus forum my sophomore year, at Seoul National. He said it was for some community service. It turned out to be a student activist gathering, where this SNU Law student Lee spoke.”

  I sense she has more to tell, wait for her to continue.

  “His words lit my body on fire,” she says, her voice changed. “He stood on a desk and railed against President Chun Doo Hwan, his authoritarian rule. The passion of Lee’s demand for individual rights and freedoms, basic human decency, I had never seen anything like it. That was the tinder. Others, too, they talked about real things. Important things. Real democracy, free and direct elections, free speech.

  “All of a sudden, my life, the mansion, the cello lessons, all of it, just seemed frivolous—”

  “That’s how I felt,” I interject, “when I saw the protesting laborers.”

  She nods. “I felt ashamed of my privilege. I renounced my background, joined the underground movement.”

  “I don’t think privilege,” I say, “is a cloak you can just take off.”

  She gives a long sigh. “Didn’t think in those terms then. It was a heady time, exhilarating. I felt like it was what I’d been searching for my teenage years, the answer to that ache I had. I stopped going to class. Marched in every demonstration I could. We were changing society. I only just escaped getting arrested on two occasions.”

  She stamps out her cigarette. We stay in silence.

  “This sunbae I know, he’s someone I used to trust with my life. I heard he’s now at Daehan NoChong, the nationwide umbrella organization for I believe the Machinists’ Union . . . Jung Ha hyung, Yoon Jung Ha. If it’s helpful, I can give you an introduction.”

  “It might,” I tell her. It just might be what I need.

  Her offer feels like a gesture of intimacy, reciprocating my deal-breaching confidence. I pull her close, breathe in her fragrance, try to fill my lungs with her essence.

  Jee Yeon’s mystery is opening up to me, a fiercely held fist slowly unclenching, one finger at a time. Our lips press, and desire tickles to life, delicious in its delicate growing touch.

  Gomin no more; I can see now. A picture of a future, together. With someone with grace, who sees the world as I do, even from a different perspective. I may be running out of time, but for the first time in a long while, I see the future.

  22

  December 1989

  Senior year, winter of my discontent. Four years spent mucking around in semiotics and epistemology, entelechy, eschatology. It feels now like so much suppurating academic dwenjang. All those late-night, weed-inspired debates about who had the greater influence on Marxism, Kant or Hegel, or which better captures the zeitgeist of our times, Bright Lights, Big City or Less Than Zero? A chthonic miasma of intellectual magma and smegma. Important events are happening outside of campus, out there in the real world. Life-changing, tectonic plate–shifting, historic shit! The tides of human history are changing. The outside world beckons.

  The Berlin Wall collapses, and people are celebrating the world over. Cold War over, Reagan’s triumph over the Evil Empire. Francis Fukuyama says it’s the “end of history.” The end point in man’s ideological evolution, American liberal democracy as the last form of government. Monarchy, bolshevism, fascism, socialism, all tried and failed, and now the final Hegelian synthesis. QED; tie a bow around it! Ironic, just a bit, that a scholar of Asian descent is so US-centric in his worldview.

  Does he and everyone else forget the Tiananmen Square Massacre that happened just a few months ago? Thousands of prodemocracy protesters, most students, killed by Chinese soldiers. Premier Deng Xiaoping might have a different view on reaching the historical end point. “It doesn’t matter if a cat be black or white, so long as it catches mice.” How about the Gwangju Massacre a few years back, when hundreds of prodemocracy protesters, most students, were killed by Korean soldiers? History certainly does rhyme. More Machiavelli at work than Hegel. Asia’s political evolution goes on.

  Asian leaders might have something to say about liberal democracy’s being the be-all and end-all. For them, for Asia, history is not over. It’s merely the pendulum of history swinging, back toward the East. Asia, led by China, reigned supreme a thousand years ago. Now it’s returning, driven by demographics, renewed economic might, and a unifying (nonreligious) Confucian ethic. Maybe American-style democracy and economic prosperity do not go hand in hand. Could be that freedom of speech and individual liberty are a by-product, not the cause, of economic prosperity. As Asian countries strive for prosperity, Chinese-style communism may prevail, or, more likely, the centralized political systems and planned economies of Japan/Korea/Singapore/Taiwan/Hong Kong become established as the model of success.

  If wars and conflicting ideologies are behind us, there looms still a clash of cultures. Asian culture, broadly defined, is not only different from but fundamentally at odds with Western culture. Civic order and economic development come first, before individual liberty. Blasphemy to Westerners, but Asians do not consider individual freedom paramount; group harmony and social order are deemed more important. That this belief may be a manifestation of what Engels calls “false consciousness” is beside the point; Asians believe in it. Americans comprehend the concept that liberty is not the ultimate ideal about as readily as Christians accept the possibility that God does not exist.

  Asian societies also draw their power from homogeneity in race and ethnicity, not diversity. Asian political systems may be more sustainable in the long term because, for the most part (an exception being Indonesia), they’re secular. Not separation of church and state; there is no prevailing church. Just the state and then family as the next binding societal unit. No religion to intermediate or to detract. America, like Christianity, is exceptionalist—City on a Hill?!—exclusionary (“with us or against us”), and proselytizing. Asia, as reflected in Buddhism, is inclusive and inward-looking. (Insofar as you’re able to look and don’t get reincarnated as a rock.)

  The imminent clash will lead not to military conflict or ideological confrontation but to trade battles and economic wars. That places the markets squarely as the next critical battleground. If you think about it, all the important events and developments in the post–World War II world have been economics-driven. From the rise of Communism across Eurasia and the advent of the OPEC cartel to the formation of the European Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet empire. Closer to home, the eighteen-year reign of terror of President Park Chung Hee in Korea, built on the shiny promise of prosperity. Economics is the new engine of history.

  The United States has played a dominant leadership role in this modern order. It has practiced economic as well as geopolitical hegemony, in the guise of a Pax Americana, in a newly unipolar world. Importantly, it has also exercised its powers from a multidimensional power base, which gives the United States a mandate unique among global leadership contenders, possibly even among historical global leaders. The country is not only an economic and military powerhouse, but also the leader in technology, sciences, arts, high and pop culture, sports, education, and, arguably, moral authority. Of these dimensions of influence, education may be the most important and of lasting consequence. America takes in the best and the brightest from around the world to its universities, the most advanced in the world, and teaches them the American way. Not just impart to the students how to build particle accelerators or run discounted cash flow analyses, but inculcate in them the values of a liberal democracy, an open society, and a laissez-faire economy. When
these leaders-in-training repatriate to their home countries, they spread the American gospel. This is the power of the United States today.

  Ergo, I decide: A) if the markets are the heart of the world order, then Wall Street is the epicenter, and that’s where I shall play. And B) I shall pursue finance as a means of bridging the yawning divide between the United States/West and Asia/East. My manifest destiny, crystallizing. For all the world, and Abuji, to see.

  23

  March 2, 1998

  The usual hum of the Sterling trading floor in London is amplified by a buzz of anticipation. It’s D-Day, pricing day for the ROK sovereign bond offering. People move differently when urgency is joined with purpose. The trading floor is the size of a baseball field. On row upon row of white Steelcase desks, computer terminals show multiple Bloomberg screens, colorful petals of the flower of capitalism in full bloom. We join the crowd of Mop, Phipps, and Sterling people around the fixed-income syndicate desk. Director Suh and his team, the Monkey, Gandalf are all here in the eye of the storm.

  We’re exhausted from a whirlwind marketing roadshow that took the team from Hong Kong, Tokyo to New York, Boston, LA to Frankfurt, Paris, and London. A ten-day Escher loop of hotel-limo-office-limo-Gulfstream-limo-hotel. Group luncheons and one-on-one meeting after meeting with major institutional accounts. All to drum up interest in the bond offering. At every stop, the Mop officials insisted on Korean food for breakfast and dinner. Jun’s main job as road manager was finding and booking restaurants named Shilla across three continents.

  We are about to discuss the final book of demand when an announcement comes over the office PA system. Sterling CEO Dillon Merrick is pleased to announce, in his posh Queen’s English, that Sterling Brothers has merged with the Umbrella Insurance Group. “A merger that will create a one-stop financial powerhouse and cause a sea change in the industry.”

  A heavy hush falls over the trading floor, like a tarp thrown over a baseball diamond. The Sterling employees are in shock. They freeze midphone conversation, cover their mouths with their hands. They rain down f-bombs, of the fuuuuuuccckk variety. It’s not clear whether Sterling is merging with or being acquired by Umbrella, but everyone feels the tectonic plates already moving beneath us.