Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners

by Y. Euny Hong

  “I’d better be pushing off,” I said, getting very depressed. Joshua wanted to see me home on the subway; I insisted on a cab, which I then had to pay for, yet again.

  “Wow. This yours?” he said when he saw the town house.

  “Just a room on the third floor. It’s really nice, though.”

  “Can I see?”

  “Truthfully, my landlady doesn’t allow me to have gentleman callers after six P.M.” I also had a bad stomachache, but ladies don’t admit things like that.

  Joshua nodded approvingly. “That’s adorable. I love that. Very chaste. I feel like I’m dating Nancy Drew or something.”

  “I’ve had a lovely time,” I said. “Thank you so much.” I saw that Joshua’s usual sanctimonious expression had given way to solemnity. He touched my upper arm. I braced myself for what would surely be a clumsy kiss.

  “Your arms are badly bruised,” he said, scrutinizing the three rosy contusions. “I must have done that in the cab when I was trying to restrain you.”

  Embarrassed at being reminded of my behavior, I pulled my arm away from him and lost my balance slightly. “Good night,” I said, anticlimactically. When I turned to enter the house, I caught my heel over the door frame and fell face-forward into the foyer, banging up my knee very painfully in the process. “I’m fine! Bye! Thanks for the bone!” I yelled, slithering indoors on my belly. I shut the door behind me, still prostrate. I slammed the door on my foot.

  As I walked up to my room, I pressed my hand down on my chest to stop my heart from pounding. How could I have completely lost my head over bone marrow?

  THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND, I met up with Yevgeny at a suite at the Royalton. We ordered up vichyssoise and oysters and champagne from room service and ate them in bed before the television. Though I shouldn’t have been drinking, really, as it had begun to give me horrific stomach cramps. Yevgeny had cut his finger on an oyster shell and was sucking sensually at the wound.

  I said, “Yevgeny, have you ever heard of someone leaving an opera at intermission because he thought it was over?”

  “No, but I have booed at operas because they were so awful there was no other way to respond. This production of La Bohème at the Met, for example. Saw it on Thursday. Simply dreadful.”

  I coughed; champagne bubbles went up my nose. “Booed?” I asked. “You actually stood and booed?”

  “The woman scheduled to sing the part of Mimì bowed out because, rumor has it, she claimed she was having her period and it was bloating her vocal cords. She was replaced by some ridiculously ugly cow who was the most unconvincing consumptive I’ve ever seen, not to mention completely unbelievable as a lovely young thing.”

  “Ugly cow? You can’t even see the players’ faces at the Met,” I said. “Particularly if someone steals your opera glasses.”

  “You can see everything from where I sit,” said Yevgeny proudly. “My wife has a well-situated, cozy box. Though not nearly as cozy as yours.” He put his hand between my legs and gave a squeeze. “Ow,” I said, thinking about Joshua’s objection to puns. Was this the sort of thing he was talking about?

  Yevgeny continued, “It’s our obligation as members of the upper class to vocalize dissatisfaction with a production, to boo if necessary. Noblesse oblige, my dear, doesn’t just mean helping out the unfortunate; it also means stamping out mediocrity. Each time a member of the nobility fails to boo at a bad production, he diminishes his role as patron of the arts. Once we stop taking our responsibility seriously, we might as well leave opera-going to the nouveau riche poseurs.”

  “Yes, yes!” I whispered gratefully, leaning toward Yevgeny and resting my head on his shoulder. How desperately I wished that it were Yevgeny who had accompanied me to the Met instead of Joshua. Yevgeny would have come to my defense against that woman with the stiletto heels. My feelings for Joshua had been conveniently chased out, a disastrous mésalliance averted.

  9

  Girls and the Families Who Are

  Indifferent to Them

  MY MOTHER’S BLOODLINE is perhaps even purer than my father’s, but it didn’t help her nearly as much as it helped him. The benefits of lineage require a patriarch, and my mother’s family had none. My maternal grandfather died before my mother was born, my great-grandfather died when my mother was three years old, and my grandmother’s five brothers had all died before the age of twenty. “Men are weak and superfluous,” their mother would say. “They know this; that’s what makes them so frightened.” It was exceedingly rare to find a household consisting of three generations of women. Their manless state put them outside the caste system, somewhat. They were still considered gentlewomen, but, being relieved of any civic or social responsibilities, they had very little engagement with the outside world.

  While my father’s family escaped the war in relative comfort, my mother’s family was stripped bare. She could express emotion only when talking about tragedy, so as a child I often asked her to tell stories about her childhood. Her misery became my lullaby.

  My mother was only six years old when the Korean War started on June 25, 1950. Her ancestors had been landowners and gentleman farmers, and they lived in sylvan splendor among their apple and pear orchards, two hours’ drive southwest of Seoul. Flocks of geese served as their alarm system, honking in unison whenever anyone approached the house. My mother drank fresh goat’s milk every morning.

  My mother remembers that when the war broke out, my grandmother started wearing a money belt under her clothes, and made her two daughters do the same. They had to burn down all their orchards, because of the possibility that enemy soldiers could take refuge in them. The danger had not yet reached the countryside, but one could never be too prepared. A good thing, too, because several weeks later, a neighbor came running into their kitchen to tell them that the Communist North Korean soldiers had been about the village, looking for my grandmother. They were rounding up all the decadent landowners and taking over their houses.

  When her mother — my grandmother — packed up baskets of food and took her children out of the house, she thought they were going on a picnic, until they started to pass by piles of corpses.

  They traveled on foot to hide in the countryside. After just a few days my grandmother decided that they might as well return home, since it seemed that families without men to recruit for soldiering were relatively safe. “So you see, it was lucky that all the men were dead,” my mother would say. Just like the farmer in the parable: bad news is actually good news, and vice versa, until they all whir into an indistinctly gray, listless life.

  When my mother’s family finally returned to their home, they found that it had been ransacked and everything had been stolen. But not by Communists — by their own neighbors, or at least that’s what they deduced when they spotted some of their china in a friend’s cupboard one day. Even the family photos were missing. My mother chiefly missed a newborn baby goat, adorable and precious even when he emerged, slicked with blood, from his mother’s womb. Before she had left home, the goat had just learned to walk without hobbling.

  Through the basement window of their house my mother watched the B-29 planes deposit bombs. She said that it looked as though a bird were laying eggs from the sky, four at a time. My mother returned to the same elementary school she had been attending, only by this time the Communists had occupied their village and they were being taught to sing patriotic North Korean songs.

  During this process of changing powers, many civilians were murdered by both armies. Among the people who lost their lives was a relative of ours, a very famous painter, a talent that would bring his doom. During the North Korean regime, he was forced to paint a poster denouncing the South Korean president. Later, when the South Korean army recaptured their town, the painter was shot without a trial because of this poster he had made under duress.

  Shortly after the Communists had reoccupied their village, they fled once more. They subsisted on tinned lima beans that had been provided by the U.S. Army. To
this day my mother can’t bear the sight of beans.

  AFTER THE WAR was over, my mother shared a room with her sister, mother, and grandmother. Long after they were asleep, my mother would study by candlelight, so as not to awaken them. She rarely went out with friends and never even had a birthday party, because her birthday always fell too close to midterm exams. When she was a teen, the local cinema had a special promotion, offering free entry to a Sandra Dee movie to any girl who had the same birthday as Sandra Dee, which my mother did. She desperately wanted to go, but she couldn’t spare even two hours from her studies. She once told me, in a moment of rare excitement, “My first day in America, I actually spotted Sandra Dee, walking a standard poodle in front of the Carlyle in New York. I assumed that I would see a movie star every day thenceforth, but it never happened again.”

  My mother turned down suitors who intended to live out their lives in Korea. She was fatalistic about this sacrifice; she said, “In those days, a woman could get a Ph.D., or she could get married, but not both.” In spite of her Dresden doll looks and good family background, she was considered unweddable.

  So when she met my father, a movie-star handsome, charming youth from a noble family, she could not believe her good fortune. My father wanted to see my mother constantly, and was utterly frustrated that he could not reach her by phone, as all the phone lines in her part of the city had been destroyed during the war and had never been repaired. What my father did to remedy the situation was positively Arthurian in its gallantry; he asked his father, a member of the Korean presidential cabinet, to have phone lines installed in my mother’s neighborhood.

  It is difficult for me to imagine my mother as happy, let alone amorous. These stories she told me of her past had the irreality of biblical parables.

  I happen to know that she never wanted children. But to be married and childless was unthinkable for her generation, so she put it off as long as she could, then succumbed.

  I once overheard my mother telling my aunt, “My whole marriage still runs on the afterglow of our first four years of marriage; after that, everything went irretrievably sour.”

  After their first four years of marriage, I was born.

  She began screaming at me almost immediately thereafter. She thought that children were supposed to be fully formed adults in miniature, and she couldn’t understand why she had to teach me things, be it multiplication tables or how often a person was supposed to bathe or why it was wrong to steal. The drawings I brought home from school were met with derision. When I was in first grade or so, when we were still living in Connecticut, the teacher had us do an “All About Me” booklet, wherein we were supposed to write about our hobbies and aspirations: a song of ourselves. My execution of the assignment resulted in my teacher calling my mother for an emergency meeting.

  In response to the question “How would you describe your personality?” I had written, “Irresponsible, Ungrateful, Lazy.” My teacher, Ms. Robertson — dear, dear woman — was greatly concerned. So was my mother, but for different reasons. My mother made me apologize for having embarrassed her in this fashion, and she ordered me to explain to Ms. Robertson that I just had a strange sense of humor. My teacher didn’t believe my explanation; I could see it in her eyes, and she paid special attention to me after that. She and I used to have lunch together once a week, alone in the classroom, but only for a month or so: my mother, unable to countenance her humiliation, put me in a different school. A few months ago, my mother sent me a parcel containing said “All About Me” book, as well as all the photo albums containing photos of me. The accompanying note said, “I don’t want these here. Please take them.”

  I had thought that my mother was just one of those women who couldn’t juggle a career and a family. But things between her and me got even worse when we moved back to Korea and she stopped working, at my father’s behest. I was ten. Her famous temper withered away, and she became just as cold as she had once been hot. Her life spirit was sapped. Unwavering, however, was her constant criticism, only now it became less aggressive, more underhanded and snide.

  I didn’t have the heart to fight with her anymore. Nor did I have the energy; I had entered the Korean school system, where the teachers thrashed me within an inch of my life on a regular basis, a fact that my mother met with equanimity.

  I ALWAYS ENVIED Jung and Key, assuming that bastards could never be disappointed with family. They were orphaned at a young age, their father (my grandfather) having died shortly before their birth, their mother having died a year after. The twins were separated and shuttled around to different members of their mother’s family for years; finally being settled upon one unhappy aunt.

  Only Key showed Jung kindness during this brief period they lived with their aunt. He was devoted to his sister. They were now five years old, and, having never known about Jung before, Key was past any notions of jealousy or sibling rivalry — an easy matter for him, since he was the clear favorite of the household. Jung’s unchecked early years had made her untamed and feral, like a female Heathcliff. The maid would chase after her with a comb, to no avail; Jung’s hair was so tangled and matted that it had to be cut to be manageable.

  Jung transformed under Key’s doting care. While most boys his age shunned their sisters from play, Key always included Jung during playtime with his friends. Constantly surrounded by boys, Jung dropped her rough-and-tumble defenses and evolved into a delightful hybrid of tomboy and coquette. She adored her brother, even though everyone’s golden-boy treatment of him would have given Jung every cause to hate him.

  This idyll was not to last, however. When the children turned nine, their late mother’s family separated the twins once more, for reasons unknown. The children were shipped off to different boarding schools — England, Switzerland, America. Aside from school holidays, the siblings were never in the same country at the same time, no matter how many times they got kicked out of one school and had to be sent to another. And so it remained until it came time to choose a university, when the siblings agreed that, by hook or by crook, they would both be in the same city. Key entered Harvard; Jung entered Wellesley, forty minutes’ drive from her brother. The two have been nearly inseparable ever since. They so esteem each other’s opinion that the slightest hint of disapproval from one will make the other drop what he or she is doing — be it a job, friend, or lover.

  Or even a spouse. For his junior year abroad at Harvard, Key went to France chasing after a rumor that Asian men were much sought-after sexual objects, after the release of L’Amant, the movie adaptation of that lugubrious Marguerite Duras novel of the same name. Key resembled Tony Leung, the handsome, fine-boned actor who played the wealthy Chinese merchant, and used the likeness to great advantage. My dear uncle wrote to his sister that he would not be returning to America, as he had married a lovely French girl just eleven days after meeting her. Jung was inconsolable. She missed her final exams at Wellesley to fly out to Montpellier, and returned to Boston three days later with her brother.

  Extricating himself from the marriage was no trouble at all; the couple had married in a church but it was never registered officially with the hôtel de ville: the girl was fifteen. Key never had a girlfriend after that, at least none I’ve met.

  Key was soft, which was a delightful trait when he was a child. But over time, his softness became mealy and fungal, until he seemed like a rotted-out, if stately, yacht. Jung, however, had started out hard, and this worked to her advantage — over time, she became shiny and polished like beach glass.

  When I was little, I would see Jung and Key at the odd family event, where they were treated with a dismissive, superficial acknowledgment. As the twins were provided for by their mother’s family (wealthier than our own), they never made claims on the dwindled Lee fortune, which is perhaps why the Lees tolerated them at all. The twins were always more preened than the rest of us, and observed all family rituals to the letter. I absolutely worshipped Jung and counted the days until some funeral
would allow me to be in her awesome presence. I think that part of what helped Jung survive her childhood, aside from the love of her brother, was the knowledge that she was descended from an important and illustrious family, particularly on her father’s side — my side, the Lee side. The fact of her illegitimacy only strengthened her fascination with her birthright. She and her brother seemed to shrug off the tacit scorn from the Lees, which made them seem all the more gracious in my eyes. They understood that love, while probably a very nice thing indeed, was not the glue that held families like ours together. The Lee name is stronger than love.

  This is what helped Jung get through those winter vacations at boarding school, when she would be stuck in the dorm with all the other kids whose parents didn’t want them home for Christmas. They were an assortment of Eurotrash and American tycoon scions who were banished by evil stepmothers. Jung became their ringleader, convincing them that to be disowned was a status symbol; it meant that your family was old enough and important enough to be concerned about your sullying the family name.

  During those isolated winters, those kids would form a small-scale Lord of the Flies–type microcosm, with the kinds of drugs and sex orgies and senseless persecution that would have made Caligula blush. One winter, at Jung’s school in New Hampshire, an Italian kid died accidentally during an erotic asphyxiation session. That particular academy mandated thenceforth that no students would be permitted to stay in the dormitory during winter break. Consequently, Jung’s maternal relatives made her change to a different boarding school that did stay open for Christmas. All that trouble just so they wouldn’t have to see her for three additional weeks of the year. She started up the same bacchanal at her new school, too, again as the ringleader of blue-blood decadence.