by Mark Sampson
He shocked her by taking her hand in his. She quavered, nearly pulled away.
“It’s time to renew,” he said. “Eun-young, listen to me. The past, it cannot touch us. If we are strong and proud, we cannot be driven down by the marks that others have left on us. Do you understand? I want to renew myself — with you. Do you understand? The time has come to renew.”
She did weep then. Not because she had to say no, but because she knew she could not say no. Every pore in her skin thirsted for something as simple as this. The love of a decent man.
Eun-young leaned her head low, and Po took it as a sign of her chastity.
Chapter 13
So here is me in my classroom. After a year and a half of this teach-by-colours curriculum, I’ve pretty much gotten a handle on it. I’ve become a conscientious teacher, tacking student essays and drawings to the wall by the door, using the white board and coloured markers to great effect, standing more often than sitting, making grammar come to life with silly stories from my past, performing magic tricks and telling jokes that leave the kids giggling or groaning. All of this has helped put me in Ms Kim’s good books, which is why she offered me a second contract. She sees me as a “senior teacher” now, and as a result assigns me more than my fair share of upper-level courses. I love it. The big purple textbook I teach from has Hemingway short stories and excerpts from The Joy Luck Club and Roots. The kids in these classes are not necessarily older, but their English and critical-thinking skills are as strong as they come at a hagwon. I’m required to be tough on them, cruel even, but in my heart I admire each of these children so much. There’s one boy in particular, his English name is “Joe,” who brings to my Senior 5 class an unwavering meticulousness and a genuine joy for learning. Twelve years old and cursed with fish-bowl glasses, he is nonetheless imbued with confidence, an assuredness about what he wants to be when he grows up — an international diplomat. He happily puts himself through English grammar drills each night, and his essays teem with his unique interpretation of the world.
He’s also insatiably curious about everything.
“So as we can see in this paragraph,” I say, pacing in front of the kids with the textbook open on my arm, “Roland and Barbara are married, but do they love each other?”
“No!” the class chimes in unison.
“Exactly. They don’t love each other. So then why are they married?”
The kids ruminate on this for a bit. Joe raises his hand. “MichaelTeacher, I have a question.”
“Go ahead, Joe.”
“Are you marry?”
Am I merry? Oh wait, he’s confused by the adjective, that revealing mix of present and past tense in a single clause: Are you married.
“No, I’m not married,” I sigh.
“Do you have girlfriend?”
A few snickers chase their way around the class. I hesitate, chew on my smile. Big mistake.
“MichaelTeacher,” pipes up ten-year-old Tony, “are you a player?”
“RobTeacher was a player,” points out thirteen-year-old Jinny, as if she’d know.
“Alright, back to the story!” I say.
Nine-year-old Susan looks confused. “‘Player’? What’s mean? What’s mean ‘player’?”
One of the older, dimmer boys in the back, Dylan, begins answering her question in a litany of forbidden syllables.
“No Korean, please!” I bark, and the class snaps silent. I give Dylan the evil eye, then march over to the tray at my whiteboard, seize a marker, uncap it, and write Dylan’s name in the far right-hand corner of the board. There it sits for the whole class, and the closed circuit camera hanging in the corner (and thus possibly, eventually, his mother, whom he would fear worse than God) to see.
I turn to Susan. “A player is a guy with many, many girlfriends.”
Jinny hikes up a dainty elbow. “MichaelTeacher, can a girl be a player?”
“No. There’s a different word in English for a girl with many, many boyfriends.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t say in front of children. It’s a bad word.”
“Ugh! Bad word for girls, but not for guys? Ohhh, sa’ghee!” she says, using the Korean word for unfair.
“Jinny, no Korean!” I march over and write her name under Dylan’s, just to prove that I believe in equal wrongs as much as equal rights.
We finish examining the story and then I assign an essay topic and grammar exercises for homework. The kids fall over their notebooks to get it down, scribbling and scribbling. When they finish, there are still a few seconds left to the class.
“MichaelTeacher, do magic! Do magic!” the kids demand as they pack up.
This is a thing I’ve started: Based on my digital watch, I know the precise second when the bell is going to ring. Smiling, I float my right arm upward while keeping an eye on my watch, splay out my hand, twiddle my fingers, make a low, mysterious groan in my throat, and then, at exactly the right moment, I thrust my arm at the speaker in the ceiling and yell out “Pow!” Mary Had a Little Lamb chimes just then, and the kids cheer as they bolt for the door.
I pack up their workbooks and essays from the previous night and slip them into the plastic tray on my windowsill, glancing at Seoul’s nightly traffic as it moves through the street four storeys below. I wipe down my board and then go around the empty room, straightening chairs and looking for rogue pencil cases. Then, throwing my satchel over my shoulder, I saunter out to the school’s lobby where I find Jin already waiting for me.
“Hello there, Mr. Teacher Man,” she beams. We share the slightest of hugs, just a brief placing of a hand on a hip. But unfortunately there are a number of my students, including Joe, loitering together in the lobby. “Ohhhhh MichealTeee-chorrre!” they sing, and scrape one index finger over the other: tsk tsk …
Joe walks up to us. “MichaelTeacher, I have a question.”
I brace myself. “Go ahead, Joe.”
“Can I write you two essays this weekend?”
“Of course you can. But that’s a lot of extra work.”
“I know. But I want to write about my trip one month ago to Pusan to visit my grandmother. Can I? I will write your assignment, too, of course.” He looks up then at Jin. “Who is this?”
“This is Park Jin-su.”
“Anyeong,” she addresses him, but then cuts him off before he can pose his next obvious question. “So tell me, do you like attending this hagwon?”
Joe nods vigorously, his eyes undulating in their lenses like poached eggs.
“And what do you think of him?” she asks, tilting a chin at me.
Joe begins answering her in Korean, but she cuts him off. “No, say it in English.”
He squishes up his face in mock-annoyance. “Ohh, MichaelTeacher is very crazy — but also … super genius!”
She bursts out laughing. “Really?”
“Yes. He knows all about America, and Canada, and Michael Jackson! And he tells very good jokes about President Bush.”
She gives me an approving look.
“All right Joe,” I say, “I’ll see you on Monday. Have a good weekend.”
“You, too!” he croons at us. He starts to leave, but then hurries back and addresses Jin, measuring each word methodically. “By the way — What. Are. You. Eating. Under. There?”
“Under where?”
“You’re eating underwear?” Joe explodes into laughter, and jabs a finger at me. “He taught me that!” Jin and I watch him hustle out the glass doors with his backpack pulled tight on his shoulders, a little Sherpa ready to scale another mountain of weekend homework.
We just sort of grin at each other for a moment after he’s gone. “So what should we do now?” I ask.
Her eyes fall briefly to my mouth. “Let’s go back to your place … super genius.”
We need to have a discussion about what’s going to happen tomorrow night. I am to show up at the Park apartment at seven o’clock. I am to bring a gift — something small a
nd inexpensive, but it must be wrapped. I am not to take offence when her parents set the gift aside rather than open it in front of me — it’s not the Korean way. I am to keep in mind that her parents speak very limited English, and that Jin will translate when necessary. And I must also remember that they’re still coming to terms with their daughter dating a waegookin. It was difficult for them to hear the news, and more difficult to agree to have me over. Her father will be okay with it. He will be fine. Her mother’s a different story. The Korean term for what we’re doing is mool heurinda: “muddying the waters.”
Saturday night, and I sit with a book on the subway en route to Jin’s neighbourhood of Mangwon, listening to stop after stop go by, and hold the gift I’m bringing in my lap. It’s a small crystal bowl, good for candy or spare change, wrapped in rice paper and tucked inside a glittery gift bag with strings. When I arrive at Mangwon Station, I find Jin waiting for me outside the turnstiles. Her hug is cool, disinterested. I get the message loud and clear: we must suppress any and all signs of physical affection in front of her parents.
“My father is still at work,” she grumbles as we head outside.
“It’s seven o’clock on a Saturday night.”
“I know. Mother is not pleased with him. And neither am I.”
I’m not sure what I’m expecting from the Park apartment before we arrive. I imagine it huge, sprawling, glimmering hardwood floors and giant windows overlooking the busy Seoul skyline. When Jin welcomes me in after a twenty-two-storey ride in the elevator, I find something different. Her family home is not that dissimilar to the cramped apartment that Justin and I share: it’s a bit bigger, a bit nicer, and more lived-in, but still very Korean with its faux-wood flooring, wallpapered cement, and LG air conditioner hanging like a barge over the living room. There is a venerable forest of potted plants on the marble ledge overlooking their balcony. Off to the side, in an alcove, I see the glowing green digits of the washing machine that Jin has spoken so derisively about. The beast is enormous, and far more elaborate than the oversized bread maker that Justin and I do our laundry in. Jin and I take our shoes off in the entry and she calls to her mother: “ Umma! Umma! Come meet Michael.”
Jin’s mom comes out of the kitchen in a cloud of delicious smells. She wipes her hands on her apron and bows once to me.
“An’yon hashimnigga, ” I say carefully, addressing her in the more formal tongue, and hand her the gift. She barely looks at it before setting it down on a small table by the door. “Well come, well come,” she says, measuring her own words. She says something to Jin in Korean. Jin turns to me. “Dinner won’t be ready for nearly an hour. Father’s running very behind. Come. Let me give you the tour.”
Jin shows me the bathroom (they have a tub, I notice jealously), the kitchen (countertops lined with an armada of expensive appliances), her brother’s empty bedroom, and finally her own bedroom. She pops on the light as we step inside. “We won’t be able to stay in here long,” she says. “Mother will get nervous.”
“Of course.”
This space is still very much a teenager’s bedroom. The single bed against the wall has a bright purple duvet with a golden sun star embroidered on top. Her bureau and nightstand are littered with books and jewellery boxes. There is splay of girlish magazines on the floor — Cindy the Perky and Korean Vogue. On the walls, she’s hung an assortment of paintings. I walk over and take a look at the garishly colourful pictures. There’s one of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and another of a Korean rural scene — jagged mountains in fog, a Buddhist temple with its dragon-backed roof off in the distance. The compositions are a bit jumbled — the warped perspectives of Van Gogh mixed with the vagueness of Impressionism. The colours are so bright they practically hurt my eyes.
“You did these?” I ask.
“Yes. I told you I like to paint.”
Jin sits on the edge of the bed and I’m about to join her when I spot another picture. It’s hanging in the corner over her nightstand and is smaller than the others — no bigger than the size of a magazine cover. Unlike the others, it’s in black and white, a charcoal sketch. I walk over to it.
It’s of an old Korean woman.
“Michael —”
Jin comes up behind me as I take the drawing in. The old woman is dressed in traditional hanbok and hunched a little at the waist, a Quasimodo stance. Her hands are collected on the butt of a cane and her eyes are downcast in an incomparable sadness. I take a closer look and sense anger there, too — a tightness to her shoulders and the stare in her eyes that hides something so deep it frightens me a little. Jin has caught that hybrid essence of sorrow and fury with just a few hand strokes.
There is also what looks to be a scar running under the old woman’s nose.
“Your grandmother,” I say.
“No. That’s my eemo halmoney. My great-aunt. She’s my grandmother’s sister.”
I point at the line running above her lip. “How did she get that scar?”
“She got it in the war.”
I turn to her. “What, she was a soldier?”
“No, Michael, she wasn’t a soldier.” Jin’s looking at the floor. “She was a wianbu, a comfort woman.” She turns back up at me. “Michael, do you know what this means?”
I can do nothing but blink. It’s like a flower has opened up inside my mind.
“It means she was a sex slave for the Japanese during the w —”
“I know exactly what it means,” I say. I point at the sketch. “A member of your family?”
“Yes.”
“You wanted me to see this. It’s the real reason you brought me here, isn’t it.”
She hesitates, but then nods. “Yes.”
And suddenly I understand so many things that I didn’t before — things that happened, or didn’t, at the beginning of whatever it is that we have now, between us.
“What was her name?”
“ Is her name — she’s still alive. Her name is Eun-young. Though that’s not what they called her during the war. She had a Japanese name back then: Meiko. Everybody had a Japanese name back then.”
“Jin, why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard, figuring out when to mention something like that. I mean, at what point in a relationship do you say ‘I have this relative who was raped thirty-five times a day for two yea —” She cups her mouth in surprise. “You’re the first guy I’ve ever said that to. That was the first time I’ve ever expressed that in English.”
Tae is suddenly yelling from the kitchen: “Jin-su! Jin-su!” She rhymes off a big, complicated sentence.
“I have to go help her,” Jin sighs. “You should probably come and wait in the living room.”
“Of course.”
“And Michael, don’t say anything to my parents about —” and she nods at the sketch on the wall. “My mother would be very angry if she knew I told you about Eun-young. We don’t, we don’t … talk about her in this family.”
And the rose in my mind blooms even further. “I understand,” I say.
We go back out and Jin flutters off to the kitchen to take orders from Tae. I sit on the couch alone, trying to relax, trying not to relax, trying not to touch anything, upset anything. And trying very hard not to think about what Jin has just shared with me. After a bit, the front door opens and her father, Minsu, comes in. He’s wearing a full business suit, the tie not even loosened around his neck. He sees me on his couch as he slips off his shoes, and breaks into a smile. He comes over to pump my hand up and down and bow. “Hello, chief! Hello! Welcome to my home.” He points at my face and motions to his own. “Oh, Jin said you has a handsome beard.”
Minsu heads off to the master bedroom to change while the women set the table and begin adorning it with the savoury meal that Tae has prepared. I offer to help but Jin tells me to just sit. This table is in the traditional style — low to the floor and no chairs. Because I’m about as flexible as a two-by-four,
I’ve never been able to sit on the floor comfortably at a table like this. Koreans, on the other hand, do it as naturally as breathing. We all settle in and our chopsticks begin making the rounds, dipping into dishes and pulling towards our mouths the marinated beef strips, fried dumplings, spicy leaves of kimchi, pickled zucchini. Tae pours me some ice water, but I seem to be handling the spices well.
Jin’s parents begin asking me questions that reveal just how little they’ve been told about me, and Jin does the translating. “Where are you from in Canada?” The east coast — Halifax. “What did you do there?” I was a journalist. “Why did you come to Korea?” To pay off some loans and see a different part of the world. “Do you like Korea?” Yes, very much: I love the food, the language, and the people here are very nice. “Will you go back to Canada?” Yes, I think so — eventually. “ When will you back to Canada?” Jin hesitates before translating this one. After she does, we sort of look at each other. “Tell them I haven’t decided yet.” Her parents spot the awkward body language between us. Tae’s face is a forbidding calm.
Minsu gives her a stern look, then smiles at Jin and nods at me. “Hey, chief, Jin’s brother is went to America.” He gives a jiggling thumbs-up. “Very good! We proud. If Jin go somewhere, too, we … we …” He turns to Jin and finishes in a flurry of Korean.
“What did he say?” I ask.
“He says if I decide to move to Canada, they will support it.” I flash my eyes up at Tae — I can’t help it. Her face is bare of emotion. Her icy stillness speaks to her real position here, the true head of this household. I keep waiting for those words to appear in her eyes: I. Will. Not. Allow. This.
We eat and eat. I try to ask Tae thoughtful questions about the food with Jin as my proxy. Her answers come back polite, but abbreviated: she clearly doesn’t think I’d grasp the nuances of these culinary acts. I switch gears and ask Minsu about his job. He huffs and makes another earnest effort at English. “Oh, very hard. Every day long day. I will be old man soon.” He winks at Jin. “But important!” When the meal is done, we stand and begin collecting bowls and plates from the table. I limp around, my hips and thighs aching from sitting on the floor. Tae comes over and takes the dishes out of my hands, insisting that I not help. She turns up to me and speaks more English than I thought possible of her. “Michael — maybe you want go on balcony for cigarette with Jin.”
