This work was all done by the end of the morning. Always my afternoons were free. Hsun himself fixed our lunch and dinner. He usually made something that was his own invention: it was a sort of Chinese chop-suey, Korean kimchi, Japanese skiyaki, Italian ravioli, and Hungarian goulash, all combined. To pour over this, he always kept some red-hot pepper sauce.
After lunch, I took a walk, or remained at my desk, reading, until the students who were Hsun’s salesmen thronged in from summer classes. In New York City alone, more than twenty boys were trying, off and on, to sell his tea. They peddled it from house to house. Harlem was a favorite selling ground. They did not get kicked out there. But it was found that incense was more profitable than tea in Harlem. Some Negroes have the superstition that burning incense in a house prevents disease and brings prosperity in business ventures, especially incense sold by Asiatics. Because of this and because the boys liked Harlem, Hsun had added incense to his stock, labelling it “Good-Luck Incense” and wrapping it about in golden paper.
5
One of the outside men who visited Hsun’s once or twice was Chinwan. The interesting, or rather, notorious gossip about Chinwan was that he was a Japanese consul, on leave of absence. This was not noised about at once, as Chinwan was very quiet and didn’t talk much.
It is a very rare thing for one of Korean birth to be in Japanese diplomatic work. But it would not be much of a surprise for any one who knew Chinwan’s past life. Chinwan was born in Fusan,3 the Korean seaport nearest to Japan. Now Fusan is the gateway to Korea, and the Japanese came over there first. For decades, nay centuries, there was a large Japanese colony in Fusan. The migration of the peoples moved both ways. Long before Japan took Korea, Chinwan had emigrated to Japan and he remained there. As a child, he had passed through the Japanese schools, and he had taken degrees from the Imperial University of Kyoto, and in all things he was pretty well Japanized. Many of his Japanese friends did not even know he was a Korean. But he spoke Korean and knew Korea well. And at present he wanted to associate with Koreans, perhaps because he had just married one.
Nanchun, his wife, was a modernistic artist of some reputation. She had lived for a long time in Paris and was one of the few Korean women in the emancipated realm. It was well known of Nanchun that before Chinwan married her, she had loved, married, and divorced, all in the Western passion. Indeed, it was said of her former husband that on the honeymoon she took him to the grave of her first lover and cried there all the day, while the newly married husband was left sitting by.
Chinwan had met Nanchun in Tokyo while he was studying law. A more paradoxical match than theirs would be hard to imagine. Chinwan had a radical wife, but he was not at all modernized. He had traveled for more than a year in Europe and now he was spending the rest of his time in New York, but he had no conception of the Western world. And he seems to have had little idea of the condition of Asiatic politics.
The Koreans thought that Chinwan was infamous, because he had a Japanese government position. But he was not in any sense a spy for the Japanese. He had shown himself too good a friend to Koreans for that. During diplomatic service in Manchuria, he had helped many revolutionary Koreans who were arrested carrying news and bombs from Siberia to Shanghai and from Moscow to Seoul; today many Koreans in Germany and France tell me that their heads would have been chopped off long ago if Chinwan had not befriended them. But neither was Chinwan a Korean spy. He was a good friend to the Japanese, too. He was just a lenient kindly man, not fitted to be a harsh official. On the other hand, he was the farthest possible from a revolutionist type.
A harmless man was Chinwan, thoroughly human, enjoying the good things of life, wearing good clothes, liking good times, always sociable. Whenever friends around him talked about things seriously, Chinwan kept quiet, as if he never thought about anything serious in his life. So there was never any argument. He just left all betwixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee. He was shapely in body and feature, healthy, vigorous, a good-looking average type, and through and through a peaceable Oriental. I saw him one Sunday in Central Park and we walked together, for I had missed him on his first visit to Hsun’s. He invited me to come and see him and Nanchun in their uptown apartment. He said the dean of my Korean college had told him to look for me when he came to America. He bought peanuts for the squirrels and the tamed pigeons, and showed a youthful, childlike gaiety in speech and actions.
Chinwan came to Hsun’s because of a few students who studied in Japan when Chinwan was studying at the Imperial University of Kyoto. That was before word got around that he was a diplomatic-service man. But after that, a Mr. Lin brandished his long cigarette-holder and said he had ordered a sword for Chinwan and soon he would get rid of him. I did not think he was serious. But one of Chinwan’s friends advised him not to come round there any more, saying Lin was a dangerous man.
One night about this time, there was a nationalist meeting in the Korean Institute. Naturally, all the Koreans who were interested presented themselves there. My, how they could gather in from all over the city, as well as from near-by places such as Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania! Most were passionate national patriots—and a few still more passionate communists, the latter being there to raise objections. As usual they all sang the Korean national hymn to the Auld Lang Syne tune and there was a speech or two delivered, but to any outsider, it would have seemed an innocent gathering. The little institute was well peopled and a great social activity was in the air. Amidst all was Chinwan the diplomat, sitting quietly as ever somewhere in the rear. His wife was in another section among the ladies, very original and serious, a strong personality (I knew from hearsay), except in looks, in which she resembled many a beautiful woman with a perennial smile and soft words. I admired her. I was thinking I would like very much to call on them. Meanwhile a certain Korean was making a long speech. Others beside myself moved restlessly; complaint could be seen about the speech being longwinded, too much repetition with afterthoughts. Nor did the speaker flame up the fire of enthusiasm. People wished for something more worthy of the occasion.
Suddenly Mr. Lin ran in from the side door with a sword in hand. It was the sword he had ordered and sharpened—a large butcher knife. He approached Chinwan and cried out in a loud voice:
“You son of devil, this is no place for you. Tonight I will send you to hell.”
There, before everybody, he stuck the dagger in the traitor’s neck. Blood spurted, blood was over all, women screamed, but it was not the accurate hit that Lin intended. Seeing life in Chinwan, he tried a second blow. Somebody grabbed his hand from behind. Friends of Chinwan hurried the wounded man to a hospital.
Promptly the Korean papers in America held up to praise Lin’s action, which was as heroic, they said, as you would want to see. Telegrams poured in from Europe, from all over Asia, even from South America, congratulating Lin. Lin became a hero and his name a household word. A few days after the affair, in an underground Chinatown barbershop, a group of Koreans were discussing it. I took part, and narrowly escaped death. I found it was dangerous to deny Lin’s act as heroic. You simply could not comment on it as being “narrow nationalism.” All discussion had to be centered on the side of Lin versus the Japanese.
My comments in Chinatown spread out and went to Lin. Lin came to me himself and asked me with gravity to go to dinner with him. It was not to a Chinese restaurant that he took me this time but to an expensive place in the Fifties. Conversation, I soon found out, was to be on Chinwan.
“Oh, why did I not better use that opportunity!” Mr. Lin bemoaned. “My best chance to serve the fatherland! I failed. I want to know the address of the hospital where he stays. Do you know that?”
(I knew from other sources that Lin had already tried very hard to find it out. But nobody knew where the hospital was, and New York is so big that one can easily keep oneself hidden in it anywhere, anywhen and anyhow.)
I was alone with Lin, but thou
ght I might as well try escaping death again. I preached in my turn.
“Nothing in the world could be done that way, Doctor Lin. You have to know what is barbaric and what is heroic.”
Lin stared at me a moment. He waved his long cigarette holder vigorously for silence. Then solemnly, he wanted to know if I understood why he did it.
“But why did you do it? Chinwan was a harmless man, nice to everybody, kind and friendly. One never could dislike him.”
“I like him very much,” insisted Lin. “There was nothing personal in my attack.”
“Then why? There was absolutely no spying on his part. He was just interested in what Koreans are doing. What gain could there be in taking this man’s life?
Mr. Lin continued to speak to me in a sad, beautifully sonorous Korean, and his motive was now clear in inviting me to dinner. He was preaching to me a long and solemn sermon, the gist of which was:
“I would not be a true Korean if I did not feel that what I did was right. You are going to hell and ruin. You forget your country, your country’s cause. But I—I am only sorry that it was unfinished and I could not give my life to get Chinwan.”
But it was as if I saw Korea receding farther and farther from me. Lin failed to arouse my patriotism; he merely italicized my loneliness and lack of nationalist passion, my sense of uncomfortable exile even among my fellow countrymen, where the homeland was constantly before my eyes. The rebellious individualist in me could not accept his Asian arguments for that bloody attack. It seemed to me not only savage, but futile. And yet I could thrill to the suicide of my countryman, the great Baron Lisangsul, before the Hague Tribunal, who scattered his blood throughout that conference chamber over all the diplomats seated there, that Korea’s lost cause might be remembered. That was heroism in the classical tradition. But not this attack on poor harmless Chinwan. Here in this cosmopolitan city I saw Lin as living in a narrow world, a small world in a large. No message came back and forth from the large world to the little nor from the little world to the large. The big world did not know the small world, nor the small world the big. That act of Lin’s went down on no police record, nor was Lin ever arrested. In his own group, he received no condemnation for that, only praise.
Later I heard the report that Chinwan was magnanimous, on coming out of the hospital. Of course he refused to prosecute, and he said:
“I am glad he did it, if it was for Korea. Because it was done for love of country, I am willing to accept it as punishment, and not as a crime on Mr. Lin’s part.”
He and Nanchun disappeared after that; they had to keep their stopping place secret from the Koreans. I lost my chance to make my call on Chinwan.
6
We floated insecurely, in the rootless groping fashion of men hung between two worlds. With Korean culture at a dying gasp, being throttled wherever possible by the Japanese, with conditions at home ever tragic and uncertain, life for us was tied by a slenderer thread to the homeland than for the Chinese. Still it was tied. Koreans thought of themselves as exiles, not as immigrants.
When we reached the West science was the thing: science, economics, social problems, and all the troublesome themes of the twentieth century. Literature was “out.” Korean students felt even less interested in literature than the modern Chinese, specializing in science, philosophy, economics, at Columbia (unlike the quieter conservatives of commercial Chinatown, who were thoroughly old-fashioned and not at all “up” on recent trends in thought). As I sat day after day in the sunny tea-fragrant office, teaching myself English by means of the Golden Treasury, a paper-backed edition I had bought in Yokohama, I was considered a funny fellow for my interest in either Eastern or Western poetry.
Summer was coming on, with one day like another for us all, at Hsun’s, marking time, never inching out of desperate poverty. Hsun’s business, while not good, kept on, so that we could win our daily bread and struggle to fight with Nanking bugs at night. His place remained the meeting place of the flock of homesick birds flying back from their classrooms, or from the scorned and unwelcomed labor from house to house. They felt they were coming home. Yet there was no home. There was no comfortable chair to sit on, yet still they came as if they had to be somewhere. Perhaps all they got was only the sound of a tongue that had been heard since the days of the cradle until they left their native land. Day after day, late afternoons and evenings, prisoners of the eternal time, waiting, waiting . . . for what . . . the Judgment Day?
BOOK FOUR
1
“MY, I’M GLAD to see you back!” I said to George when he appeared suddenly in Hsun’s office during the middle of July. “But the job? You’re not leaving Long Island, bathing beach and millionaires’ playground, just when summer is here!”
“Man, I am,” said George, with a jaunty pull at his new Panama hat, before carefully taking it off.
“I had nothing at all against the people I worked for,” he went on, “except that they could not afford my kind. At first I did the ordering, and as is my custom, ordered only the best. Then the lady complained that the bills were too large. She ordered herself. That is how we came into conflict. I could not bring myself to use the inferior onions and celery and other vegetables which she provided. The meat, too, was just a high grade of dog meat. Of course, I didn’t want the best in order to eat it myself. But it is not good for any artist to touch second-grade materials. Besides, she wanted too much to employ my spare time.”
George was so speedy that he could do work in one-fifth of the time that it would take anybody else. He was efficient in housework as I was not. So the lady set George to working in the garden to take care of his extra time and use his leisure moments.
“After that I threw up the job,” said George. “It was the only way to catch up on my reading and writing.”
George cooked dinner for Hsun and me that evening. He took me out with him to do the marketing, and like the lady of Long Island, I was horrified by George’s extravagance. He reassured me.
“An artist must have the best. But I know what I am getting and I am willing to pay the price. Always I know the difference between steak at one dollar a pound and steak at thirty cents. So don’t worry. In the same way, I know the difference between a suit for thirty-five dollars and one for one hundred and ten dollars, and I never get gypped, even when I buy the suit for one hundred and ten dollars. It’s hard to fool me on material. Quality pays in the long run.”
After dinner George spent the evening telling Hsun how to be a good business man. Hsun, he said, economized too much. “To think and plan on a large scale, that is one of the first things an Oriental must learn in America.” George was more sure of himself than ever. He gave full directions for running a large-scale tea business, and outlined some sensational advertising. Hsun never accepted his advice and it was wise not to. George had most expensive tastes. He wanted to make that office look like a Fifth Avenue one.
On the way back to Mrs. Flo’s, George stopped in at his favorite bookstore and ordered some books, among others the latest novel of Sinclair Lewis, the short stories of Sherwood Anderson, and a volume of O’Neill’s plays, these to be sent at once to his apartment. This was no gesture of scholarship, which George hated (with other Koreans, it might have been), but was done in token of his share in the contemporary American scene. A New Yorker must know something of everything.
A New Yorker, though, lives an expensive life. This was why George was mostly to be found in pajamas at this time. He had enough money not to work as a cook for a while, if, as he said, he economized by going to bed. In this way he needed to make very little expenditure. He would make himself coffee and toast. Mrs. Flo acted as a kind of nurse and often sent up things from her own kitchen. But two or three times a week, George got out of bed and came to Hsun’s to cook. Sometimes he would send Hsun out to do the marketing, with strict orders to shop only in the best places. Hsun hated to do that. Once Hsun t
ried to deceive him with very good meat but bought at some other place than the store where George had ordered him. George knew at once, and was so angry that he refused to cook that time.
When he cooked he made a feast for the whole crowd. All the boys at Hsun’s looked forward to George’s visit, because while many of them were good cooks, nobody could duplicate George as a chef. Unlike his status at the Korean Institute, George was popular with everybody at Hsun’s. He agreed with none, and did not reveal himself to them as he did to me. But it was easy to see that George enjoyed that incomparable privilege of being able to get on with others. He easily entered into the personality of a crowd, yet he never lost his own identity. He could be a shellfish by himself, but he could be a peacock before others; wherever he went, there was a chair waiting for him, and a gay audience.
2
Before long George became restless in his bedroom exile. This must herald (if I had known George better) a season of extravagance which would send him back very shortly to being a cook. He took me to the Chinese lottery several times, but we always lost even when we played in my name.
“Never mind,” said George airily, “I’m getting ready to be very lucky in love.”
One of the pleasures of a New Yorker, George explained to me, was to go to very expensive Broadway musical shows. He would treat me, he said, but for two reasons. One was, of course, that he was economizing, and the other was, that you must go to this kind of show alone, in order to practise winking at a favorite show-girl.
As a matter of fact, George’s interests at present were engaged not on Broadway, but up in Harlem. There was a dancer whom he admired very much . . . a boneless girl. Night after night he went and sat in the first row. Outside he had engaged a taximan to wait for him after the performance. Usually he went out with this boneless girl, who had finally been won by his winks, and then he expected the taximan to jump out with a deep bow and hold the door open. If respect were wanting, George would have been severe. But respect never was. George must have paid that taximan a regular salary, for afterwards he and this girl would drive around Harlem, visiting Harlem night clubs to which she had the pass.
East Goes West Page 11
