by Mark Sampson
Jin lets out a little laugh and claps. “Wow, all that with one letter?” She turns to me. “You’re good at scoring points with very little.”
Justin chuckles at this, perhaps thinking of our night at Jokers Red. “Well, that’s the game,” he says, getting up. “I have to go if I’m going to make my private on time. Do you mind taking the board back with you?”
“Sure,” I say. I almost expect Jin to leave, too, but instead she scoots over with her tray to take Justin’s seat after he’s gone. I notice she’s eating a hamburger and fries. When I start gathering up the slates, she stops me. “Hey, aren’t we going to play?”
“All right.”
I set up another game and offer her the bag to draw her seven letters; I feel her hand muscling around in my palm to dig them out. She places them gingerly on her slate and then stares at them with great concentration, as if they might contain a plot. We sit for a long while in focused silence. For the first few rounds, Jin can only play three-letter words — DOG and WIG and TOE — but does so with great deliberation. With each hefty strategizing thought, her bottom lip sticks out, hangs there between the two streaks of her black hair framing her face. She munches on her lunch and doesn’t look up from the board.
“So what do you do in COEX Tower?” I ask.
“I work for a clothing exporter. I do sales and marketing. In fact, I’m supposed to be in Beijing on business, but all this SARS nonsense made my employer keep me home.” She proudly puts her first four-letter word on the board, BENT, doing so with both hands, the letters pinched in her fingers. She goes on to explain how her fluency in four languages results in regular trips abroad — Shanghai and Paris and London. I learn a few other things as she rambles: Though twenty-seven and professionally successful, she still lives at home with her parents — the norm for young unmarried Korean women.
I try not to cream her too badly, but when the game ends I have twice her score. She checks the time on her cellphone. “Ugh. I should get back to my office,” she moans.
“Okay.”
“It was nice seeing you again, Michael.”
“Thanks.”
She hesitates, looks at me as if I’ve forgotten something. Forgotten my manners somehow, or to ask another question. Whatever it is, I don’t say or do it. She gets up curtly and leaves. I begin putting the tiles in the bag and packing up the slates. When I look up again, Jin has come stomping back to hover over the table.
“Hi there,” I say.
“So what, you don’t ask out girls?”
My mouth falls open a little. “I, I beg your pardon?”
“Oh come on, Michael.” She begins rhyming things off on her fingers. “I engage you about Kundera at the club; I ask you to dance; I write my handphone number on a piece of paper to give you, except you never ask for it before you leave; then today I tell you I like your beard, and stay behind to play Scrabble. What’s your problem? You would think by now you’d ask me to go on a date with you.”
My problem? My problem is you slept with Rob Cruise. My problem is I’m a fucking mess. “Jin, will you go on a date with me?”
She lowers her head. “No. You’re not my type.” I feel as if I’ve fallen through the floor to land on the floor below. “That was a joke,” she says, looking up. I laugh weakly. “Look, tell me something,” she goes on. “Did Rob Cruise take you back to Itaewon since the night we met?”
“Yes.”
“And did he take you to Hongdae yet?”
“He has.”
“And let me guess — you guys always go for kalbi at that dumpy restaurant near your apartments and drink soju until you can’t stand up straight.”
“We were there last night.”
“ Ugh. So predictable! You need to see the real Korea, Michael.” She takes out a pen and piece of paper from her purse and writes on it. “Meet me here, at Anguk Station. It’s near the top of the Orange Line on the subway. Tomorrow at two o’clock. Exit 3. Don’t be late.” She taps the paper before sliding it across the table at me. “And there’s my handphone number.”
Then she hurries off before I can say anything else.
S he was one of Rob’s conquests. She was. But she is not the same as the rest. She isn’t. She is … what?
The next day I dress in my least frumpy clothes and concern myself with remembering what Jin had said: two o’clock at Exit 3, or three o’clock at Exit 2? I’m certain I know the answer, but to be safe I arrive at Anguk Station by two and bring a book along in case I’m wrong or she’s late.
She is not late. She pushes her way through the turnstiles, a purse over her shoulder, and hustles over when she spots me leaning against the wall of the marble foyer with my book. Grabs me by the wrist without greeting. “Come here, Michael, I want to show you something,” she says.
She pulls me back to the turnstiles and nods at a Korean couple who have come through and are now stopped to gawk at a shop window full of Korean bells and masks and other knickknackery. The man and woman are, alarmingly, dressed in identical clothes — baby blue golf shirts with bright yellow collars, beige pants, and spotless white sneakers — and they’re gaping at the objects in the window with a hand in each other’s back pocket.
“Honeymooners.” Jin rolls her eyes. “So obnoxious. We have this silly tradition in Korea to dress in the same clothes as your spouse when you’re on your honeymoon. It’s supposed to be romantic but I think it looks ridiculous. Don’t you agree?”
“They do look a bit foolish.”
“Ugh. I’m embarrassed by how sentimental my country can be sometimes.” She looks at me with a flip of her hair. “What do Canadians do on their honeymoon?”
“I have no idea,” I answer honestly.
We ascend out of the subway stop and onto the sidewalk. We take a left onto a wide, long cobblestone street that’s been closed off to weekend traffic and turned into a massive marketplace for Korean artwork and crafts. “This is Insadong,” Jin tells me with relish as we stroll. “It’s the heart of cultural Seoul and my absolute favourite neighbourhood. This is the kind of place Rob Cruise and those guys would never take you.” I cringe at the sound of his name, but she’s right: there is an air of ancient artistry here that Rob would have little interest in. I notice the numerous alleys that stray off from the main drag of Insadong, alleys that look as though they suck you back to the Korea of five hundred years ago. We come across kiosks in the middle of the street selling jewellery and calligraphy brushes and rows of pottery. Jin speaks to each of the proprietors with clicks of Korean as she inspects their wares.
She’s so authoritative; I wonder how on earth someone like this could fall for one of Rob Cruise’s lines. While she’s busy, I look off to the side and see a crowd of people amassed in front of a large food stall with a man dressed entirely in white standing in its window. “What’s going on over there?” I ask and she turns to look. “Oh, Michael, you must see this.” She takes my arm and leads me over to join the crowd. We watch as the man in white raises up a large, thick roll of what looks like dough and begins spinning it wildly in his hands, playing it like an accordion.
“It’s almost hypnotizing,” I say. “What’s he making?”
“Pumpkin candy,” she exclaims. “Here, come with me.”
We push our way up to the front where chunks of the white candy are sitting on a sample tray. Jin hands me a piece and I place it in my mouth. The candy is hard and chewy, like taffy. It is sweet, with a mild, pleasant pumpkin flavour.
“It’s good, yes?”
“Very good.”
“I’m going to buy a box to take home to my father,” she says. “He’s addicted to this stuff.”
Her purchase comes in a small cardboard box quarter-folded at the top. She tucks it into her purse and we walk on.
“So what does your father do for a living?” I ask.
“He’s a project manager for Samsung,” she replies. “It’s about as glamorous as it sounds. Typical Korean businessman, he works
all the time — about ninety hours a week. I hardly ever see him.”
I think of Justin and the father of his private, Jenny. “And your mother?” I ask. “What does she do?”
Jin snorts. “What does she do?” She flashes her fingers in derisive quote marks. “She’s a ‘homemaker.’ What to say — we are a traditional Korean family. My mother cooks and cleans and does the laundry, goes shopping for hours at a time, has lunch with her girlfriends just so she can gossip about me. Plus: she is always buying the latest household appliances and having unwholesome relationships with them.”
“Really?”
“Don’t laugh. I suspect she talks to the washing machine when we’re not there.”
“You’re making fun of your umma,” I chuckle.
“I am making fun of her. I probably shouldn’t. She’s the reason I speak four languages. When I was kid, she would — what do you say in English? — micromanage my education. Made sure I was in all the best hagwons and forced me to study very hard. I guess I owe her that.” She turns to me. “So what do your parents do?”
“My parents are dead.”
“Oh,” she says, lips forming a gentle little O of surprise. “Michael, you’re an orphan?”
“I am. I’ve been once since I was twenty.”
“You’re an orphan.” She nods, as if this explains so much about me.
We move along the cobblestone street, taking in Insadong’s atmosphere, until we come across a hole-in-the-wall shop that catches my interest. In its dark window there’s a display of old Asian coinage and paper money, ancient books, and tobacco paraphernalia. We go in and are greeted by an elderly Korean woman, an a’jumah. I bow a hello in her language, then take a respectful stroll through her shop. I leaf through a wooden box full of old South Korean money from just after the war. I pick up a bill inside a plastic sleeve and show Jin the ancient bearded face on it.
“King Sejong,” I say.
Jin smiles. “Yes. He created the Korean alphabet many hundreds of years ago. How do you know King Sejong?”
“My students talk about him sometimes — especially when arguing with me about why Korean is so much easier to learn than English.”
She moves on, begins browsing through a row of crumbling old books, and soon lets out a little yelp of delight. “Oh, see this one?” she says, pulling out a tome with a deteriorating green cover. “This is a very famous Chinese text, a collection of ancient folk tales. I read this in reprint when I was first learning Mandarin, but this looks like the original.”
She opens it carefully to show me the Chinese characters inside. They look daunting in their complexity, tracing down each page in intimidating columns. “You can actually read this?” I ask.
“Of course.” She shrugs. “I learned Mandarin before I learned English. The way the world is going, Michael, you may have to learn it one day.”
“Either that or Arabic.”
I grab another decrepit book out of the row at random, peel it open, and see an entirely different alphabet scorched onto its pages. “Can you read this one?” I joke.
She leans in to look and her face darkens instantly. “No. That’s Japanese.” Her voice is like a stone falling through water. She sets her book back and slides past me, moves in so close that I can practically smell her shampoo. “I refuse to learn Japanese,” she whispers, as if she doesn’t want the a’jumah at the counter to hear.
We decide to get something to eat. I suggest the Korean diner next to the Starbucks at the end of Insadong Row, but Jin just scoffs. “That’s for tourists,” she says. “Follow me.”
She leads me down one of the ancient alleys that branch off from the main drag, an alley that seems to narrow, cartoonishly, the farther we go. We arrive at a traditional Korean restaurant — pagoda roof and low walls — and enter to find the inner decor done entirely in cedar. There is traditional Korean music coming from the sound system, the melodic squeal of a gayageum that reminds me of weeping. The hostess seats us in a booth. I pick up one of the menus but frown when I see no English translation. The waitress comes. She’s about the same age as Jin, and just as pretty. They chat in Korean, nodding several times at the menu and a few times at me. After the waitress has collected the menus and left, Jin says: “I went ahead and ordered food and drinks for us. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
The waitress returns a few minutes later to set a large clay bowl with a ladle and two cups at our table. Inside the bowl is a milky white liquid, but it’s not milk: the smell of alcohol coming off it is strong. Jin thanks the waitress, then takes the ladle and transports some of the creamy liquid into the cups.
“This is dong dong ju,” she says, “a popular Korean beverage. Michael, it’s very potent so you should drink it slowly.”
“Hey, I can hold my liquor,” I say, lifting the cup and smelling its contents. “I come from a long line of alcoholics.” I take a full pull of the dong dong ju and something magical happens: I’m buzzing the instant it hits my stomach.
“You like it?” Jin asks, taking a girly, tentative sip from her own cup.
“Very much,” I reply. I take another generous pull, and then another. Pleasant summer campfires begin burning behind my eyes.
We chat for a bit and I try with questionable success to pace myself. Before long the waitress arrives with our food, a sizzling stone plate covered in what Jin informs me is pa’jun — Korean green onion pancake. It comes with little ceramic dishes of sesame oil for dipping. Jin chats with the waitress while she sets up a small armada of side dishes around our table, kimchi and bean sprouts and some kind of scrambled-egg concoction carved into a square. The two of them nod a few more times in my direction. When the waitress leaves, Jin throws me a tight little smile.
“She thinks you’re handsome.”
“Do you think I’m handsome?” I, or possibly the dong dong ju, ask in return.
She wrinkles her nose. “Maybe a little.”
“Do you think Rob Cruise is handsome?” I venture, realizing that he’s still preying on my mind.
“Ugh. Rob Cruise is not handsome. But he is —” and here she mulls around for the right idiom, “he is larger than life. Every Korean girl he meets thinks so. I certainly did.”
“So I’ve heard.”
Miraculously, she does not take offence. “Do you really want to talk about me and Rob?”
“We don’t have to.” But then find myself asking: “Are you two still friends?”
“I don’t know,” she huffs. “He can be so cruel, but you know, in a hilarious way. This one time, he accused me of being kong’ju’byung.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, it’s very hard to translate directly into English, but it means, like, a high-maintenance princess. That I suffer from the disease of being a high-maintenance princess!”
I laugh because this is exactly the kind of Korean phrase that Rob would insist he learn.
Jin thinks I’m laughing at her. “I am not kong’ju’bong!” she whines, slapping the table with her palm. “I am very, how you say, down to earth.”
“Hey, I believe you.” I grab the ladle and refill my cup.
“Anyway. Rob Cruise was a mistake. Try not to think about him.”
“I won’t if you won’t.”
A silence falls between us as we work our way through the pa’jun. It’s impossible to hide from Jin how useless I am with chopsticks; they fumble around my plate like paralyzed limbs. Without prompting, the waitress passes by to set a fork discreetly next to my plate.
“So tell me — what is the deal with your roommate, Justin, anyway,” Jin says. “He’s even more reserved than you are. What’s his story?”
“Justin’s stories are his stories,” I reply. “I’ll leave him to tell them.”
Jin refills her own cup and blinks at me a little. “Okay, so tell me your stories, Michael,” she says. “Why did you come to Korea?”
I have my stock answers prepared to unleash
on her, the same answers I give anyone, Korean or waegookin, who asks: half-truths about lingering student loans needing to be paid off, the desire to see another part of the world and experience a different culture, blah, blah, blah. But the impatient tilt of Jin’s head tells me she’s heard it all before and won’t buy it. I’m feeling loose and fuzzy-headed, not at all like myself, and, consequently, embrace the truth.
“I got fired from my job in Canada.”
“Oh? Really?”
“Yes. In fact, you could say I got fired from my career in Canada.” I could leave it at that, sufficiently mysterious, but I find words coming out that I’d rather keep in a box. There is something in the angle of Jin’s chin, in her freakily beautiful double eyelids, in the restaurant’s shadowy light falling on her hair, which welcomes full disclosure from me. So I tell her everything — or almost everything. I at least have the good sense not to mention my ex-fiancée; this is a first date, after all. But I tell Jin about my father the politico and about my mother the lush. I tell her about my journalism in Halifax, such as it was, and how, orphaned and rudderless, I drifted into disgraceful acts of forgery and fiction. Soon I’ve gotten up some steam and tell her about getting caught and how my dishonourable deeds were broadcasted across Canada. I was fired and with no hope of finding other work in my field. I needed money and a break from myself, so I came to teach ESL to Korean kids, which has proven more palatable than suicide, which I also considered.
“I’m very ashamed,” I tell her, finishing off my cup and looking into the pot to find all the dong dong ju gone. “I’m very ashamed of what I did.”
Jin looks as if she might touch my hand lovingly, but doesn’t. “Michael, don’t be ridiculous. You’re in Korea.” Then she pauses. “You have no idea what real shame is.”
“What do you mean?”
But she shakes it off. There’s more there, I can tell, but she won’t say what it is; unlike me, she has control of her tongue. “Look, I’ve met many ESL teachers,” she says, “and sure, I’ve had relations with more than a few of them. But one thing I’ve noticed is that they’ve all come to my country because they’re running away from something in theirs. Maybe not as big as your something, but they’re running just the same. Except, they never admit it.” I think of Justin and Rob, the little bits of themselves they’ve shared with me. “You’re different than that,” she says. “You’re better than that.” She leans in. “Tell you what. Whatever you did before we met is none of my business, and I promise not to judge you for it. And whatever I did before we met is none of your business, and you promise not to judge me for it. Deal?”
