I stay close to him, as Janice asks. Practically no one else sees him, sometimes Sherrie, though even she has begun to distance herself, drop away. More and more it is Janice who is directing the daily operations, actually there at the house urging the rest of us on. He has sent May and the boys and a helper to their other house, upstate. They don’t have a television up there, they don’t have a radio. They don’t need to see their father like this.
I think John Kwang would be a man to keep his boys close, keep May even closer, that he would collect the four of them in one shut-away room and have them sleep and eat and bathe all together until the tempests subsided. His move is more what my father would do, what I have learned, too, through all of my life. To send people away or else allow them to go, that what is most noble to me is the exquisite gift of silence. My mask of serenity and repose.
Tonight, while I’m working in the makeshift rooms of his basement, he comes down the stairs in his plaid pajamas and white robe, with his hair pressed to a funny shape by sleep, and sits in the corner armchair with two goblets and a bottle of scotch.
“Byong-ho,” he now calls me, his voice like a bassoon. And he says in satori-accented Korean, Hey you, arrogant youth, stop doing all that work and come drink with an elder.
I rise and wheel the desk chair to the corner, take my glass, let him pour. I don’t really drink, just let the liquor sting my tongue. I sit for him. His thick white robe is monogrammed, JK, in light blue stitched above his left breast, and for a moment, with the heavy drink in his hand, he almost looks like those men who lounge for hours in the locker room of a midtown university club and scratch their bared balls and watch FNN and pop cashews and snicker about black athletes and fool colleagues and all the fat-assed women they have loved. But John doesn’t feature the polished ivory potbelly, the connected nests of body hair, a booming pepper-grinder voice; he’ll sing instead. He always jury-rigs a folk song onto his stories. I don’t know any of his songs, but it’s the same register my mother used to hum while doing the housework, a languorous baritone, the most Korean range, low enough for our gut of sadness, high for the wonder of chance, good luck.
“Don’t you know any Korean songs?” he asks.
“The only one is Arirang,” I tell him. “Then only the tune, and the first few words.”
John nods, rocking ever gently.
“Listen to the melody,” he says. He hums a few bars, to the first refrain. The tune, somehow, is immediately wrenching, its measures plead in near arpeggios, and like any good folk song it makes the voice of its singer sound lost, or forlorn, incomplete. “Imagine,” he goes on, “that that could be the spirit of an entire country. You do it.”
I sing the words until the second stanza, when I can’t remember them.
Ah, yes, John intones, his Korean accent getting thicker and heavier. I have some trouble understanding him. He leans back now, his slippered feet bobbing, the drink maybe getting to him, and he says, You’ve almost got it, there, but something is still missing. You’re cheating its sweetness. Let me show you. A different song now. A very old one I know.
He sings with his eyes shut tight, the way I would see old Koreans praying in the front pews of Minister Cho’s huge church, their fearsome bouts of concentration on display, ferociously willing. His grace to wash over them. He sings about a young man who decides to leave his family’s farm and go to the city to make his fortune. He weeps as he sings, the whiskey and the late hour and the watery sound of his own voice taking him back to a place far from this one. He drinks deeply and tells me the full story of the song.
“The young man hates the tenant farming, you know, its dull work, the fact that they will always be poor. The young man’s mother begs him to stay—they have no other children—saying that his father will be heartbroken. But the father, prideful, refuses to speak to him, and the young man departs before sunrise. The young man arrives in the city after the full day’s journey and finds work at an old silk-weaver’s. He works hard for nine years and then buys the business, and in nine more years he becomes prosperous and wealthy. He has his own family. One day he overhears one of his clerks take an order for a death shroud and robe in his old village. He asks the buyer who needs these things, and is told the wife of old farmer Yee. His mother. The man breaks down and weeps, asks himself how he could have ignored them so, and decides to make the journey back, to deliver the death garments himself. Perhaps, he thinks, he will finally settle the difficulty with his father. When he arrives at the house, his mother’s body is being prepared by other relatives in one of the rooms. Old friends are there, talking and weeping quietly among themselves. But he can’t seem to find his father. He asks a girl where he is, and she bows to this rich silk dealer and leads him to the back of the house, where the fields begin.
Where is he? he asks, I don’t see him.
She points to the face of the cleared hill to the east. Up there, she says, where all the poor in the village are buried. Does the dead woman owe money to your family as well?
No, he answers after a moment. He asks, Do you know when the old man died?
Oh, no, she tells him, he must have passed ages ago, before I was even born.
I say to him, “Korean stories always work like that. Everybody dies but one. And the one has little to live for.”
“But somehow he lives,” John says. “The one goes on. We’re too stubborn.”
“I think we’re too brave and too blind,” I answer, drinking seriously now. “I read that Korean nationals are the most rescued people from the world’s mountaintops.”
“Is that true?”
“I’m not sure, but I believe it. We’re too willing to take risks before we’re fully prepared.”
“What about us Korean Americans?” he asks me.
I say, “We’re the most rescued from burning malls.”
We both half-snort at this, half-groan, and I can see we’re in the mood for talk that will only hurt and sting. Perhaps he’s actually thinking about Eduardo, as I suddenly am, the bitter sleep he must have had. But I look at Kwang now, hunched over in his robe, his posture softening.
Then, another idea suddenly hits me: that I am searching out the raw spots in him, the places where he appears open, where the wounds are still fresh. I can’t help myself. The last days have worn him down. It’s enough to see the frail line of his calf, bare old bone, to want to lean in a little.
I ask him how May and the boys are doing.
He stops his humming. He drinks stiffly and without looking at me, says, “What do you think?”
“I think they must miss their father.”
“Oh yes,” he says, pushing up the loose terry sleeves. The old boxer again. “What else, Park Byong-ho shih?”
“They must wonder if he’s all right,” I answer.
“Ah. And is he? What would you tell them? Is their father being himself?”
I don’t answer him.
“Well, come on! You sound like you want trouble tonight. Why don’t you ask me about Eduardo and his apartment? You are the only one left who hasn’t! Is it because you actually respect my grief or are just afraid of what you will hear?”
“I am not afraid of you.”
John cries, “You sound so formal! Even with a little hate you are so respectful and Korean.”
“What do you want me to sound like?”
He says, in a laughing Korean, Ah, you, I want it just like that!
“Aayeh!” I yell.
He yells. That’s much better, you! Why not yell at me? I’ll allow it. Don’t think of me as elder; come, strike out at me with your words, or something else. This is America, we can do this. Say it in English if you have to. Get it out in the open. You want this. I am not your father. I am not your friend. Come on, I will survive.
He steps toward me, his hands balled into fists. We’re not two feet apart. I don’t
move. Something in me wants to crush him but I don’t move. I think I can’t bear his inaction. His weeks of strange silence. I think I can bear silence from anyone but him. I want him to stand up and show his face and say something for Eduardo. And for a moment I feel that hot ore of my father’s rage, what would sometimes drive him like disease or madness to hack like a demon at wet sod in the backyard. I am still silent, but I know not for long. I think, let him come at me. I’ll shout him right down.
He says in Korean, Watch out, boy. Then he slowly backs away and sits down again. He pours more whiskey for himself and then puts down the bottle between us. I roll my chair forward, stretch out my arm, take it up. I can see that he is hurt, the instant hang in his expression. How his American life shows through so clearly. Another Korean man of his generation would not forgive the moment so quickly, if ever at all.
We sit for at least an hour saying nothing else. Yesterday, he canceled another news conference at the last minute—or rather, I canceled it for him.
Sherrie and Jenkins refuse to make the phone call to pull him out. They counsel fiercely against it. They practically shout at him while he sits mutely at his desk, moving a crystal paperweight inside a splash of light and then out again. Like everyone else, they want him to speak. They want him to go on television and eulogize his dead, to make a statement to the city with his best public face and deny any involvement with what Eduardo Fermin was allegedly doing after hours; that he had no idea of his running whatever’s been rumored, a pyramidal laundering scheme, a people’s lottery, an Asian numbers game. That he knew the boy and liked the boy but neither all that well. They want to get him some distance from the fire and bombing, from anything of that scenery which enforces the idea of John Kwang as a man losing control over his people, weak and vulnerable and somehow deserving.
Earlier, the news stations run competing evening stories profiling Eduardo, and in the hastily set-up video room we watch him painted as an overly ambitious student who was treated like a son by the councilman: he worked like a religious fanatic for the man, who in turn, according to the reporter, was steadily building an “empire” from his “ethnic base” in northern Queens. They show the ground-floor apartment the Fermin family inhabits, the lethal scene of the office, the procession of black cars rolling through the famous cemetery in Queens, the immense necropolis below the highway, distant spires of Manhattan against the stone monuments, the last one Eduardo’s.
“Perfect,” Janice screams at the monitor. “Drop a cherry on top.”
Next they get De Roos on videotape, saying with a straight face how much he has admired the councilman in recent years, how he wished he had some of that “amazing mystical energy” for himself, but adding, too, in response to the rumors, that “everyone in this town has to follow the rules.”
Kwang isn’t present for any of this. He remains at the top of the house until everyone has gone home. Then maybe, if she’s even here, Sherrie climbs up, stays for a while; I think I can hear the chant of their voices conducting through the iron pipes. Sometimes edgy laughter, raised voices. When she leaves through the side door of the kitchen, I know it’s just the two of us, two Korean men at opposite ends of a stately Victorian house.
The place feels borrowed to me, unlived in. There are no strange smells, no lingering aroma of cooking oils. The house is a showplace for the Kwangs’ many guests and visiting dignitaries, trimmed in heavy damask and chintz, with freshly cut flowers. There’s too much ornate woodwork here, and the precious layerings of molding and mullion and balustrade and apse, all those thousands of genteel decisions, the studied cuts, just unsettle me.
I prefer it here in the mostly unconsidered rooms of the basement, the stone walls rough-hewn, damp, ill lighted like any memory. Helda, on May’s orders, kept the Korean foodstuffs down here, the earthenware jars of pickled vegetables and meats, the fermented seasoning pastes and sauces, strips of dried seafood. All of it was scrupulously sealed and double-wrapped but it didn’t do any good. The smell is still Korean, irreparably so, cousin to that happy stink of my mother’s breath. When we moved here after the fire, I noticed that some staffers balked when they first reached the bottom of the stairs. Once I saw Jenkins suspiciously tap one of the jars with his size sixteen wingtip, checking for signs of life.
Now John finally rises to go upstairs, teetering a little, pulling his robe tightly around him. It’s almost four in the morning. He says to me stiffly, “You are done with your work?”
“Almost.”
“Finish up quickly. I’ll be back down in half an hour. You will drive me somewhere?”
I say I will.
* * *
He sits quietly in the back of the sedan. When I pull the car in front of his house, he immediately goes to the rear where the windows are tinted black. He says to drive to Manhattan by the bridge. I take us west down Northern Boulevard to the Queensboro. This late at night there’s no real traffic and the lights let us run almost all the way.
When we finally stop at a light a half mile from the bridge he says we’re going to the Upper East Side, on Park Avenue. In the mirror I see him gazing out at the shops and lots of the boulevard, the rows of bulb and neon stretching west before us like a luminous trail to the island. Manhattan was going to be the next stage, the next phase of his life. He wasn’t going to be just another ethnic pol from the outer boroughs, content and provincial; he was going to be somebody who counted, who would stand up like a first citizen of these lands in every quarter of the city, in Flushing and Brownsville and Spanish Harlem and Clinton. He would be the one to bring all the various peoples to the steps of Gracie Mansion, bear them with him not as trophies, or the subdued, but as the living voice of the city, which must always be renewed.
The place, he once told me, where no one can define you if you possess enough will. Where it doesn’t matter if no one affords you charity, or nostalgia for your memories. Where you know your family is the one thing without price. He has also spoken this in public, with fire and light in his eyes. He has sung whole love songs to the cynical crowds, told tall stories of courage and honor, doing all this without any mythic display, without savvy, almost embarrassing the urban throng. They would look up at him from their seats and see he was serious and then quietly make certain to themselves that this was still the country they grew up in. They had never imagined a man like him, an American like him. But no one ever left.
He was how I imagined a Korean would be, at least one living in any renown. He would stride the daises and the stages with his voice strong and clear, unafraid to speak the language like a Puritan and like a Chinaman and like every boat person in between. I found him most moving and beautiful in those moments. And whenever I hear the strains of a different English, I will still shatter a little inside. Within every echo from a city storefront or window, I can hear the old laments of my mother and my father, and mine as a confused schoolboy, and then even the fitful mumblings of our Ahjuhma, the instant American inventions of her tongue. They speak to me, as John Kwang could always, not simply in new accents or notes but in the ancient untold music of a newcomer’s heart, sonorous with longing and hope.
We cross the bridge to the city. The streets are empty. I drive uptown on Third and then cut across to Park. I ask him exactly where we’re going on the Avenue.
He tells me the address and street, then says low, “It’s Sherrie’s. Have you ever taken me there? I can’t remember now.”
“No,” I say.
We don’t talk after that. When we get there I go inside the marbled foyer of her building and have the night doorman ring up. It’s past three in the morning. The night man is a young Chino-Latino. He regards me another moment and then says into the receiver, “He here, ma’am.” He nods and then offers me the handset.
“John?” I hear her say.
“No.”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Henry.”
I tell her he’s in the car.
“Christ. Go outside then. Don’t let anyone see you. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
When she comes she rushes from the awning in a long slicker, her head covered with the hood. They don’t kiss. They don’t touch. They sit upright and John says to go to an after-hours club on lower Broadway, near all the Korean restaurants and shops. No one will trouble us there.
Some of the clubs are known as “stand” bars, where the bartenders are all women and will have a drink with you. The women aren’t prostitutes. They won’t have sex. They’ll hold your hand and flirt and maybe even kiss you if you show enough politeness. They’ll sing popular songs and tell racy Korean jokes. Nothing pornographic or even that vulgar. This is the club pretense, the etiquette. They are ready companions, and their job is to soothe the lonely feeling of these men for a woman and a homeland. The patrons are mostly businessmen from Korea, but there are others, some whites, and then some young Korean Americans dressed in conservative suits, speaking perfect English, red-faced, drunk. Investment bankers and lawyers. This is how I come to know these places, from the last stops of several bachelor parties I went to after college. After the fancy restaurants, the serious drinking, after the tall white strippers in a suite of a midtown hotel, we would arrive here arm in arm and weary with drink, sporting an almost sorrowful obedience, not even knowing that we were searching for a familiar face pale and wide and round.
We enter a second-floor “salon” bar, basically a stand bar but one with private rooms as well. I am here because in the street John insists that all of us go upstairs. Sherrie is too tired for arguments. She just winces; obviously, they’ve been here before. They haven’t said but a few words to each other. As he shepherds us inside, I think she’s expending whatever energy she has toward an idea of John Kwang in irretrievable fall. She stares off like she’s deciding on something, promising to herself that she’ll get out while she can. But she accedes to his wishes, as do I. As long as you can, you will please the father, the most holy and fragile animal.
Native Speaker Page 29
