Offerings

by Michael ByungJu Kim

  “I’d like to meet him. . . I feel like I know him already from all your stories.”

  “Soon, I hope.” Before it’s too late.

  “That was the start of real democracy in our country,” she says. “There were mass celebrations in the streets. I just broke down and cried. You know what it feels like to get something you fought for with your soul, risking jail and worse?”

  I admit I do not.

  “But that was it. We had our moment. After the June Uprising, I couldn’t deal with the violence anymore, all the anger and the hate. And the grubby politics. We got our democracy. I just didn’t feel it anymore. Is it strange that I missed my cello?”

  “Not at all. You are a musician. That’s what you are. In addition to bomb thrower.” A bomb thrower from inside the palace, the most courageous kind.

  She gives one of her soft laughs. “Ironic, no? The daughter of a bomb maker throwing bombs? And getting teargassed for it?” A long puff. “Feels like a long time ago. I still have dreams about those days. Bad nightmares. Of the riot police.” She takes a long puff. “I hope it wasn’t all in vain. That hard-won democracy . . . I pray we didn’t fight to gain our political freedom only to subject the people to economic tyranny.”

  “The chaebol . . .”

  “Chaebol oligarchs,” she says. “Yesterday’s dictators have been replaced by industrial oligarchs today. A handful of chaebol, people like my appa but worse, control Korean society, the economy, media, politics, education—all of it through their tentacles of corruption. And isn’t it a worse kind of oppression, more insidious, because the people—”

  “They’re not aware of it,” I add. “Engels’s ‘false consciousness.’ They live in the system, perpetuate it, in the name of prosperity.”

  “Unless someone does something about it,” she says, turning to look at me. “Fight for ‘economic democratization,’ so people may have economic freedom.”

  “Change is coming,” I say. “One deal, one company at a time.”

  “I knew there was a fighter in you,” she says, “the first time we met.” She squeezes my hand.

  Buddhists in the Goguryeo Dynasty believed in a human-like bird called Inmyeonjo that connected the sky and earth. Legend had it that only those with a pure heart could hear the bird’s song, the most beautiful voice in the heavens. I believe I can hear Jee Yeon’s voice, and it’s beautiful.

  “That makes one of us,” I say. Maybe returning home is regaining purity in your heart. “Still not sure.”

  Jee Yeon puts out her stub. “Filthy habit,” she says. “Picked it up in those days.”

  “I don’t mind the smell of cigarettes,” I say.

  It’s a reminder, for her and for me, of a time past.

  Love isn’t declared in Korean; it’s confessed, a kobak. As if love were a secret, to be kept hidden away until the right time. Then, and only then, do you let it out of the bag, confide your most personal story.

  “I need to go to New Jersey,” I confide to her. “I’ll be back in a week. Maybe we can go for that reading then? Our koonghap.”

  She nods, agrees it’s time.

  28

  I have a recurring dream. I’m in Sinchon, in the old part of Seoul, trying to find our old home. The small house built of red brick, with a dirt yard out front and the lone persimmon tree. I walk alone, and I know I know the way home. I cross a grove, now bare, with only a few well-trodden patches of brown-green, our old playing field where we used to kick around a soccer ball, then up a rolling hill. My feet follow the familiar topography. There’s a woman, a vaguely familiar face, with a baby strapped to her back. At the bottom of the hill, I come to a cluster of cottages.

  There are children, laughing and yelling, though their sound is muffled, chasing a small three-wheeled truck spraying disinfectant down the street. The truck billows contrails of white smoke, and the children dance deliriously in the fog, just as we used to.

  I make my way down an alleyway, brushing the cool concrete walls with my fingers. It’s such a familiar feel. I know from memory it’s a left, then a right. I pass houses I recognize. But when I make the turns, there are only more alleyways. The alleys are deserted. I go through what becomes a maze, turning left, and right, then randomly right and left. I start panicking, and I start running. But the faster I run, the more lost I get. I run out of breath. I cry out, but no one can hear me.

  Finally, I come to the end of an alley that looks familiar and where I know our home should be. It’s a dead end. I look left and right. No persimmon tree. There is only a forbidding gate of two bronze doors with intricate carvings.

  As I get closer, I can make out dozens of figures on what look like Rodin’s The Gates of Hell. The figures move, and they’re in varying stages of agony. Women writhe in pain, couples tear at each other’s faces, a man eats an infant. In the middle, a lone man sits, naked, still, contemplating the anguish and suffering around him.

  I back away and look behind me and around. Home is nowhere in sight, lost to me forever.

  29

  Mid–late March 1998

  The house in Fort Lee looks the same, but my memory moves over it like a great octopus, tentacles exploring every room, feeling about the front yard, trying to suck dried meaning out of every nook and space. My old room, where I first heard whispers of my destiny and charted my initial awkward steps out into the world. The cupboards in the kitchen where Dongseng would hide Abuji’s packs of Marlboros, always to be discovered. The swing set out back, where little Dongseng used to catapult high into the sky. The shrubbery around the side where I got stung by a bee and, in family lore, cried out, “It burns! It burns!” Our front yard, whence my mighty yellow stick sent Wiffle balls whistling over the fence, propelling Appa down the hill in panting pursuit to retrieve the missiles. The shriveled persimmon tree, a souvenir of our past life.

  All from a time when the world outside seemed impossibly huge, rumbling with obscure promise and magical, astonishing things to unfold before me. There was deep meaning to it all to be unfurled, I was sure, as from an ancient scroll. And my appa a giant astride the house, steeped in wisdom and possessing the power to impose some order on a baffling, mysterious world.

  Abuji has come back to the house from a month in the hospital. He’s returned a shrunken, fainter version of himself, one I barely recognize. Gone is the vividness, the coiled strength, the music. He lies in bed all day, tethered to a respirator. He mumbles and moans in his sleep, and when he’s awake, for brief stretches, his labored breathing allows just a few words from his always dry mouth. He has a tear lodged in the corner of his eyes, refusing yet to drop.

  Rage, I want desperately to tell him: rage against the dying of the light. Do not go gentle into that good night. Go on fighting it. As you always taught me. We’ll fight together.

  But in my heart I know it’s too late. The time to fight is over, behind my frail abuji. You can see it in his slumping form on the bed. Umma already knows. All we can ask for now is peace.

  I sit by the bed, hold his hand. I give him a shave, trim his week-old white stubble. He touches a fragile finger to my cheek. When he’s feeling better, I sit him up and feed him some chocolate Ensure through a straw. Dongseng comes in and out of the room, checking on the oxygen level, feeding him jook, porridge with bits of abalone.

  Umma keeps us company, tells us stories. Old tales of ghosts and spells and curses. Some dusted-off stories about our childhood, Abuji’s favorites. Abuji listens when he’s awake, sometimes smiles a distant smile in remembrance. She retells the story of my dol, the first anniversary of birth, the traditional rite of beginning life.

  “Nineteen sixty-eight, January twenty-first,” she says, her eyes coming alive. “All the relatives and friends gathered for your celebration . . . the same day the North Korean commandos came down and raided the Blue House. Can you imagine? Nearly succeeded in killing President Park Chung Hee.”

  Abuji interrupts to say, between breaths, “That Kim Il Sung,
even crazier than the Dictator.” He fills his lungs with pumped oxygen. “They deserve each other.”

  “We had all this food, several different kinds of ttuk. And everyone was just glued to TV,” Umma continues. “When the TV broadcast cut off, we listened to radio. We weren’t sure the president had survived. We thought, maybe beginning of another invasion from the North.”

  I remember Abuji first telling me the story when I was in elementary school. The special ops commandos from North Korea, thirty-one from the famed Unit 124, all handpicked by Kim Il Sung. They had been selected in their teens for their physical toughness, intelligence, and dedication to the Eternal Leader. Legend had it that the group started with over fifty soldiers, but nineteen were killed in a survival-of-the-fittest hand combat among themselves. The commandos’ mission, crisply articulated afterward by the lone captive, Kim Shin-Jo: “To cut the throat of Traitor Park.”

  The group crossed the border to the South under cover of night and trekked forty-eight kilometers on foot, running with thirty-kilogram gear over mountainous terrain. Disguised in ROK Army uniforms, they got past the heavily fortified militarized zone. But thirty-six hours into their trip, they ran into four men from a farming village. The Li brothers were out cutting wood. The commandos debated killing them but made the fateful decision to give them an ideological indoctrination on Communism and then release them. The Lis immediately raised the alarm; the hunt was on.

  An entire ROK Army division was unleashed on a manhunt across mountains and villages. But the superhuman commandos eluded them, outpacing the dragnet at every checkpoint. The assassins made it to the backyard of the Blue House. There they engaged in a furious firefight with the security forces. The North Koreans were wiped out; two who were about to be captured slit their own throats. Only one survived to tell the tale.

  “That’s how we celebrated your dol,” Umma says.

  “You began life with a bang,” Abuji adds.

  When Abuji told me this story, the North Korean commandos secretly captured my imagination for their audacity, even as he condemned them as the misguided foot soldiers of a Communist madman. They must have known they were going on a suicide mission, and yet they carried it out, roaring with white-hot fury.

  Umma leaves, and I’m alone with Abuji. I tell him about Project Thunderball. I’m not sure how much registers. “Getting Thunderball done would hurt the workers. But not doing it would mean turning my back on my friend Wayne, who entrusted this big project to me. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.”

  Abuji is quiet. I think he’s drifted off again, when he mutters, barely audibly, “What will happen . . . to workers?”

  “Some of them, probably many of them, will be restructured.”

  He stares blankly at me.

  “Laid off. Many will be laid off.”

  He closes his eyes.

  “Jee Yeon put me in touch with the labor leader, someone she knew. She thought I should hear from the workers’ side . . . so I can get the full picture.”

  “Wise girl,” he says. He inhales through the tubes. “You remember . . . story of . . . the peasant with the butterflies?”

  “The one about the man who could make butterflies out of thin air? Think you said Halabuji told you the story? You told it to me when I was little.”

  He nods.

  “How’s it go?” I reach back in my memory for the details. “There was a quiet, plain man, with no discernible gifts, but he’d take threads of silk in different colors, put them in his palm. And then he’d blow on it? No, he’d say a chant or something, and then when he’d open his hand, butterflies would fly out, float all around in the air.”

  “Beautiful butterflies . . . dazzling in their many colors.”

  In Abuji’s telling, the butterflies were always beautiful, dazzling. “Right, blue butterflies, and yellow and red and orange. How was he able to do that again?” I say. “By some magic?”

  “Taoists call it son-sul . . . They believe there are . . . invisible elements in the air, which can be controlled and summoned to be manifested . . . in various forms of life . . . foxes, birds, butterflies. By some people.”

  “Which people?”

  “People whose insides are light . . . so it’s same weight as air around you . . . By having an emptied conscience.”

  By doing the right thing.

  He gives me a wan smile, taps my hand. “My adeul . . .”

  What will I do when my abuji is not around to give me advice? Who knows me well enough and cares about me enough to tell me what I need to hear, to feel? Whom will I turn to for wisdom, and butterflies?

  I hold my father’s thin hand until he falls asleep, then go downstairs.

  Warm, familiar odors of Lemon-Gladed furniture and ripened kimchi greet me. The sweet-pungent smell of my past, my otherness, I’d tried so hard to leave behind in my schooldays. Old framed family photos sit on the mantel bearing still the image of false settledness.

  Pings from piano keys come from the family room. Donseng sits at the piano, where Abuji used to play Chopin, Mozart, Liszt. The black Yamaha has chipped corners, vestiges of wayward swings of my baseball bat.

  “Appa taught me to play on this piano,” she says. “We played ‘Chopsticks’ on it. It’s so out of tune now. Hasn’t been played in years.” She breaks down in tears, buries her face in her hands. Her shoulders heave, and, unable to find words of comfort, I just put my hand on her shoulder.

  Umma is in the kitchen, sitting at the breakfast table. A thick book is open in front of her.

  “He’s resting,” I tell her.

  She notices me looking at the book, a textbook titled Major Works in American Literature. “Studying for class,” she says, with a tired smile. “Test next week. Much harder than I remember it.”

  “Class?” I say. “Test?”

  “I’ve been going to school. Montclair State, studying English. Your father, he enrolled me there last term.”

  Umma’s taking college classes?

  “He wanted me to speak English well. Prepare me for life on my own, after he . . .” She can’t finish the sentence. With some effort, she tucks a wisp of gray hair behind her ear.

  Just like Abuji, to plan, and prepare her. To make sure she could survive on her own, as a widow. My insides feel hollowed out.

  “We’ll be around,” I say. “We’ll both help you manage.”

  “You’re busy with your life. And your little sister, she’s just getting started at the law firm.” She takes my hand, holds it in hers. “Adeul, when will you settle down? Abuji and I, we’ve waited so long for you to meet a good girl, from a good family. Someone like Jee Yeon. Are you making plans, to start your own family?” She doesn’t say, before it’s too late for your father.

  “I will, Umma,” I say. “Soon. I promise.” Then I excuse myself for a conference call. Business, important, I tell her.

  *

  As I go into the study, Abuji’s private sanctuary, I’m again the boy sneaking into his father’s forbidden sanctum sanctorum in Seoul. The awe of entering sacred space mingled with the thrill of trespassing. The mahogany shelves overflow with books, some stacked in piles. There are the books from his study back in Seoul, his classics of Western literature and history and philosophy. His prized calf leather–bound volumes of Shakespeare’s First Folio, spines crumbling, pages yellowed, but still full of beauty and sound and fury. There are more Korean authors than I remember. Yoon Dong Joo, Park Kyung Li, Hwang Suk Young, Cho Jung Rae. As though after a lifetime of reading Western works in Korea, now, in America, he’s gone back to Korean literature. In the center of the room, a lone wooden Nakashima Conoid chair. Abuji’s reading chair, where he would sit for hours and read the wisdom of the universe.

  I feel like I’m committing a sacrilege doing business in this temple. But duty calls. I need to conjure butterflies.

  The Daimler-Benz Corporate Strategy people have asked for a call on Thunderball on short notice. Just when Jack and I were debating reachi
ng out to them. In every deal, there comes a point when the art of M&A, what practitioners call tactics, trumps the science. You spend weeks, sometimes months, on quantitative analysis, parsing data, running financial models to arrive at a valuation, only to throw it out the window in favor of the “intangibles,” a fancy word for emotion and ego. And you justify the extra in price in the holy name of synergies from the combined operations. The art hinges on points of leverage—who has it in negotiations and when—and the leverage in the early part of a sale process is with the seller. This is when the buyer’s greed (“I want this accretive asset bad”) and fear (“Holy shit, I’m going to lose it to my competitor”) are at their peak. By asking for a call, Daimler has signaled its greed and fear.

  When I gave the head of our M&A Department a heads-up, Conway mistook it for a consultation and fed me all sorts of advice. He quoted Machiavelli: “War is never avoided; it is only postponed to someone’s advantage.” He cited Sun Tzu: “Know thyself, know thy enemy. The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” If Mammon is the god worshipped on Wall Street, Sun Tzu and Machiavelli are the apostles. And Tony Montana, with his little friend. They are quoted as scripture, the lines from Scarface with particular relish. “Remember,” Conway said, “your job is to make a wedding, not a funeral,” mixing metaphors and commingling clichés.

  I told Jack I’d take this conference call alone, and he skipped a beat before saying, Okay. His parting words of wisdom: “Just don’t fuck it up, Shane.” Wayne’s reaction to the scheduling of the call was “Got ’em right where we want ’em!”

  The Daimler people have a reputation as strategic acquirers with pricing discipline. They don’t use bankers or advisers—they don’t need to. I expect a fishing expedition by them and, if they sense weakness, possibly a lowball first offer.

  The Germans are, true to form, serious and direct. Their point man, a VP named Dr. Johannes Hesse—all German bankers I know have doctorates—gets on with a terse hello. He likes to be called Dr. Hesse.