by Mark Sampson
The chamber is packed now with mourners — women on the left, men on the right, and Carl standing silently before us. As quiet, sombre conversatons swirl around me, my mind and eyes begin to wander. The dark partition that separates Tae’s casket from the mourners strikes me as odd. It’s not acceptable to see the coffin during this portion of the ceremony; her framed photo on its table is meant to stand in for it. The burning incense swirls and churns around the picture in thin, diaphanous plumes. The whole presentation creates a mystic sense of Tae’s spirit rising and saying goodbye. I look at Tae’s family and friends all around me. Some faces are stoic; some are leaking tears.
Yet, there is only one person here in the full paroxysm of grief. She is engaging in what Koreans call kok — a wail of unfathomable anguish for the departed, a howl not just of sadness, but of deep guilt for allowing a loved one to die. Her moaning nearly drowns people out. She stands across from me, here at the front of the room. At first I mistake her for Eun-young. How could I not? Her body is hooked over on itself, her elderly face pustular with mucus and fiery tears. She is inconsolable. But it isn’t Eun-young. It’s her sister, Ji-young. Of course it is. She stands there with her husband, Chung Hee, his face like trembling granite. They are here to bury their fifty-one-year-old daughter.
So then, where is Eun-young? Surely she would have come, too. I turn tactfully around to scan the crowd behind us. So many raven-haired heads bowed out of respect. But then I do spot her, far off in the corner. She is wearing a simple black frock buttoned to the neck, her thin grey hair pulled tight against her scalp.
I look closely. She is standing back there by herself. Utterly alone. Of course she is. I look again, and notice that her face is stone dry.
The next morning, I travel out by subway to the burial plot. The cemetery is a wide park of flowing hills adorned with short shrubby bushes and gingko trees. The headstones here are soft-edged stumps, stone cylinders jutting out of the ground. I find it remarkable how tightly packed the markers all are — barely enough room for a small child to move between them. The graveyard looks like a metropolis in miniature.
The casket has been moved onto the bands over the grave and Carl assumes his position at the head of it. Staying at Jin’s side, I watch as one of the funeral attendants turns the crank and the casket completes its final ritual: it lowers and then raises three times, as if bowing to the audience, then sinks slowly into the ground. Once this happens, Carl is finally allowed to speak. He gives a short speech. There is a slight trembling at the corner of his mouth: He’s held up so well in this sacred role of sangju, but as he nears the end of his responsibilities he’s ready to have his own moment of grief. Finally he finishes. Bows deeply in his hemp hat to his mother’s casket in its grave.
People mill around after the service is over. Jin asks whether I’ll be okay by myself if she goes and talks to people for a while. I nod: of course. I watch as she slinks around the headstones and makes a beeline to Eun-young, who is once again standing alone. Jin takes the old woman’s hands in her own, bows as she greets her. They talk for a bit, and Eun-young reaches up to caress the ribbons that Jin has tied in her hair. I wait to see if Jin will eventually go over to her grandmother, too. But she doesn’t. She leaves Ji-young to the comforts of others.
“Hello there, chief.”
I turn to see Jin’s father approaching me from behind with Carl. I reach out and take Minsu’s hand, squeeze it and bow to him as deeply as I can.
Carl shakes my hand when I finish. “It’s wonderful to finally meet you, Michael,” he says. I’m surprised: There is no whiff of a Korean accent to his English. Three years in Los Angeles have done him well.
“You have my deepest condolences, Carl,” I say to him. “You did a fantastic job today.”
“Did you understand any of it?”
“Not a bit. But I could tell you were being very brave for your mom.”
“Thank you.”
“Tell me, Carl: What is your Korean name?”
His lips pull away from his teeth as he smiles. “Don’t laugh,” he laughs, “but my Korean name is Bum Suk.”
I press my own lips together. “It’s very nice to meet you, Carl.”
Minsu smiles, too, but looks a bit left out of the conversation. His English isn’t nearly as good as his children’s. He turns to Carl suddenly, then seizes him by the arm in a manly way, jiggles it, and points at me. “This is the man who’s going to marry Jin,” he bursts out, apropos of nothing.
Carl’s eyebrows fly upwards. “Does she know this?” he smiles at me.
“I, I don’t think she does, no.”
Minsu looks proud of himself, like he’s pulled off a very good joke. A moment later Jin spots us standing together. She bows to Eun-young, raises a finger, as if to say she’ll be right back, and then comes over, steering through the headstones. She puts an arm around her brother’s waist, but addresses me. “What are the three of you talking about?”
“Nothing,” I say.
“Nothing,” Carl adds.
And Minsu just gives one of his cryptic thumbs-up.
Jin speaks to Carl in Korean, then says something to her father. He says something back, Jin interrupts him, but then Carl interrupts her. They laugh a little, together. I stand on the outskirts of their conversation waiting for either Jin or Carl to start translating. But they don’t. I half expect this to end much like my mother’s funeral ended. I anticipate Jin asking if she can follow me home — weary now of all this family sadness and needing the kind of solace that only I, as her boyfriend, can give. We’ve had no alone time in four days.
She looks over at me, stony-faced. “Michael, I’ve agreed to accompany Eun-young home on the subway. I trust you can find your own way back to Deachi from here.”
My eyes widen. “Yeah,” I stumble in a welter of disappointment. “Yeah, yeah, that’s fine.”
She gives Carl one last squeeze and he kisses the top of her head. Then she hurries back over to Eun-young. I watch them. I watch them as they leave. I watch as something confusing, horrendously confusing, happens. They leave without saying to goodbye to anyone.
What? Did Eun-young not say a word of condolence to her own sister, Ji-young, for the entire funeral?
It takes the school less than two weeks to find me a new roommate. I’m disappointed; I was so looking forward to being by myself in this apartment for a while — or more accurately, being alone with Jin. But it wasn’t meant to be. Any concerns I had about the new guy being another Rob Cruise are completely unfounded. His name is Paul. He is from New Zealand. And he is a born-again Christian. On the night he arrives, he moves uncomplainingly into the smaller bedroom and welcomes me in as he unpacks his suitcases. He even has gift for me: a T-shirt printed with the silver-fern logo of his nation’s beloved All Blacks rugby team. “I hope it fits,” he says as I examine it through its crinkling cellophane package. I watch Paul pull a floppy, leather-bound Bible and books by Rick Warren out of his suitcase and set them up on the small plastic bookshelf I left in the room for him. I feel compelled to mention then that I have a girlfriend, a Korean girlfriend, and that she sometimes spends the night.
He shrugs. “Makes no difference to me.”
Paul has never been to Korea before, so over the next while I show him the ropes. I take him to get his immigration papers stamped, explaining how the subway works on the way. I show him where the post office is, where the pharmacy is, how to order his dinner from the front-counter staff at the school when we’re on break. We find him an English-language church in the next neighbourhood over, Dogok, and we sign him up for Bible studies. He asks if I want to sign up, too. I mumble a no, and expect him to push me a little. Oddly, he doesn’t.
And yet. I notice things about Paul during those first couple of weeks. He’s often uninterested in chatting about mundane, everyday things — anything neutral that he can’t filter through the prism of Christ. He is also mistrustful of the word “luck” and makes a point of correcti
ng me whenever I use it: there is no such thing as being lucky, he says, only being blessed. And when I let him in on my plans for going back to school, he gets excited and uses his favourite word: purpose. “It’s so awesome that you’ve been given a purpose for next year, Michael.” (I catch the passive verb, but don’t need to ask, given by whom?) Paul is all about purpose. “What is the purpose of your life, Michael?” he asks me, challenges me in a variety of clandestine ways.
Jin and Carl invite me out to a bar. This hof is a gritty basement grotto off the main drag of Itaewon. There are U.S. soldiers here, boisterous in the corners, and the sound system plays an album by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I’m pleased that Jin picked this spot. She’s come wearing a brainy French beret and tight blue jeans, so much more like her usual self than the ribbons she had worn at the funeral. Carl, meanwhile, is in a pink golf shirt. It would look ridiculous on me, but as a Korean male he somehow pulls it off. This is our first time hanging out, just the three of us. Our chance to bond.
“That’s one thing I’ll never get about Western culture,” Carl is saying over the din. “Is it true — you actually see the corpse at the funeral?”
“Not at the funeral,” I tell him. “At the wake. It’s called ‘open casket.’”
“That’s disgusting,” Jin says.
“No, it’s not.”
“It is. What, people just line up to see the body?”
“Something like that.”
“Did you have an ‘open casket’ when your mother died?”
“We did.”
She crinkles her brow. “For what purpose?”
“It’s all about closure, I guess. It’s one last chance to say goodbye before the person’s sealed up for good.”
She gives a little shiver of revulsion. “Ugh. Such a morbid superstition.”
“What superstition?” I say. “Jin, you believe in fan death.”
It’s true. We’ve been together two summers now, and each time she sleeps over she insists that I not set up the fan in my room next to the bed to keep the summer heat and mosquitoes off our bodies. Many Koreans believe that you should never sleep with a running fan next to your bed. The idea is that, as you exhale carbon dioxide, the fan will blow it back in your face and you’ll suffocate in your sleep.
“Hey, fan death is real. It’s science. I have a coworker who lost a grandparent to fan death.”
Carl is chuckling. “I must admit, after three years in the States, I realize we Koreans pretty much take the cake on superstition. Especially when it comes to death. You know, in olden times when a Korean passed away, the family would treat the body immediately afterwards. They’d trim its fingernails and place uncooked rice in its mouth to ward off evil spirits.”
I turn to Jin. “And what, that’s not morbid?”
She sucks her teeth and wants to change the subject.
I ask Carl about Los Angeles, about chef school. He’s loving it despite all the trials of being a rookie — the constant burn marks up his arms, the minimum wage and surly head chefs at the restaurants where he apprentices. It’ll be all worth it when he moves home to Seoul, he says, and gets his pick of upscale restaurants to work at. In the meantime, he’s soaking up as much of America as he can. His English wasn’t great when he moved there — “Worse than Jin’s,” he jokes, giving her shoulder a loving bump with his own — but now considers himself fluent. He lives in an apartment outside Hollywood with a couple of other immigrants — a guy from Pakistan and another from Belarus — but they hardly speak at all. Carl’s main friends are white guys he’s met at the school. I ask if he’s ever encountered racism in the States. He says of course he has, but he takes it all with a sense of irony. He even owns a chef’s apron that reads: KISS THE GOOK.
“So when do you go back to L.A.?”
“Well, Chuseok is just around the corner, so I’m definitely sticking around for that.” The Korean Thanksgiving is the nation’s biggest holiday. It’s ancestral in nature and encompasses three full days. Carl goes on: “I’ll have to see how well my father holds up before I decide to leave. But I can’t afford to miss much more of school.”
I turn to Jin. “So about Chuseok,” I ask. “Did you want me to …”
“Michael, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” she says. “Listen. Chuseok is very sacred, very big for Korean families. And for our family, more so this year than ever. I don’t want to offend you. I mean, you can come if you really want to. But I was thinking, maybe this year … especially if we do go to Canada next year, and I miss Chuseok altogether … that maybe, you know …”
“I understand,” I say.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” But Carl gives her a look like he doesn’t understand.
“I’ll take lots of pictures. I promise!”
“Oh, speaking of which,” I say, and reach down to pull my digital camera out of my satchel. “Do you mind if I get a shot of you guys?”
“Not at all,” Carl says, and the two of them scoot in together.
I turn on the camera and aim. Jin and Carl appear in the centre of the viewfinder. I adjust the zoom and hold the camera a few inches from my nose. I’m just about to press the button when Jin does something I’ve never seen her do — not once, in all of the photos I’ve taken of her.
She flashes the “kimchi” V, her spread fingers popping up at her chin.
I look up from the camera, a bit shocked. She just looks back with a blank stare, her eyes a straight line below her French beret. I return to the viewfinder and snap the photo. She holds the V even after the flash has come and gone.
You did the whole “kimchi” V , Jin, I think. You always felt that was a bit daft. So what’s next? Are you going to start wearing hanbok now?
Chapter 19
Eun-young and her grandniece did not speak much on the trip back from the funeral. It was like the two of them, arm and arm, had slipped through time itself, fallen out of sequence with the ruckus of life around them — the crowded subway ride back, the walk up the main drag of Eun-young’s midtown neighbourhood, the turning down to her narrow side street. This little boulevard, with its orange bins of rotting kimchi and bleak 7-Eleven, held an aura of decay, of solitude, of people who minded their own business. Eun-young’s building was at the very end, small and squat with a dragon-scale roof and short wrought-iron gate. She lived in the basement suite by herself.
The two paused on the sidewalk out front and Eun-young hung her cane over her wrist. “Thank you for escorting me home, Jin-su,” she said. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I wanted to do that,” Jin-su replied. The fleshy mounds around her eyes were still swollen and red. “Here,” she said, “let me come in. I’ll make you some tea and help you get changed.”
Eun-young shook her head. “No. I’ll be fine. You should be with your family.”
“ You are my family,” her grandniece snapped. The anger, the vehemence, with which she spoke, was bottomless. “Eemo-halmoney, you are our family.”
Eun-young turned her liquid eyes up to her. Your mother never really thought so, did she. We’ve been through this so many times before, Jin-su. Her death this week alters nothing for me, even if it alters everything for you.
She ran her tongue over the scar above her lip, and looked to change the subject. “And what about your waegookin friend?” she asked. “Is he family now, too?”
Jin-su blinked at her, then looked away.
“He was staring at us at the graveside,” Eun-young went on. “He’s always staring at me, Jin-su. It’s like he’s got a throat full of questions he’d like to ask.”
Her grandniece said nothing.
“Tell me, Jin-su — is he a decent man?”
“Very much so.”
“Are you going to marry him?”
“ Eemo-halmoney.”
“Come now, you can tell me. One woman to another.”
Jin-su lowered her gaze. “He wants me to follow him back to Canada next
year.”
“ Canada?” Eun-young could not imagine such a place. “Are you going to do it?”
Jin-su tilted her head back and looked at the sky, her face scorched by sudden tears.
“I have so many things to think about,” she replied. “I believe I could live for a thousand years and still not have enough time to think about everything I need to think about.”
“I know exactly how that feels.”
Her grandniece looked at her once more. “Eemo-halmoney, please let me come in.”
“No. It’s okay. Your father needs you, and so does your brother, and your grandparents. You should be with them. It’s been a very hard day.”
Jin-su at last conceded with a nod. “I love you very much,” she said. “Call me if you need anything. Or if you just want some company.”
Eun-young patted her hands, but then turned away toward the gate. She didn’t look back as she climbed her way up to the building.
Inside and down the stairs — one-two, one-two-and-three — and Eun-young was at her door. Turned the key in the deadbolt and hobbled in. When she popped on the light, her dank basement apartment fluttered to life in fluorescent grimness. Eun-young began pottering about, changing her clothes and going into the bathroom to take her medication, two pink pills from a bottle in her medicine cabinet. She downed them with a glass of water at the rusted sink. They would settle the ache that ricocheted through her hips.
