East Goes West

by Younghill Kang

  An American orchestra played constantly at that time, competing with the clatter of dishes and the roar of Broadway outside; then the place became like Grand Central Station with people hurrying from four quarters to catch trains. All sorts and conditions of people came to be fed on our hybrid food. To the dim booths lighted with Chinese lanterns came young fellows with strange girls to court—(He: “What’s your name?”—and she: “Call me Dot”)—Corner-nook tables were more popular with them. They asked us no questions and no questions were asked. In ceaseless procession . . . missionaries from China, businessmen from Malay, Harlem gangsters, Broadway actors, fat Irish policemen, country ladies from Indiana on a visit, traveling salesmen, shyster lawyers, Bronx family parties including the littlest member. When chorus girls came in groups—blond or platinum or auburn-haired, with astoundingly made-up faces, laughing and free-mannered, wearing their light-blue or yellow or red ensembles—the waiters ran faster to wait on their tables than elsewhere. They were good sports. They ate well and tipped well. And they were pleasant. They were probably making good money.

  Once in a while people who wonderfully impressed did not tip well. This matter of a tip, of course, was very absorbing. Who could avoid being glad at finding a fifty-cent piece or even a dollar on the table, like picking gold up from the street or fishing for it in the sea? At first you feel ashamed to take it. Then you take it with boredom as a matter of course. Then you get caught up to speculate to yourself. Then you talk to others about it, and by and by, the first thing you look for is the tip under the soiled plate. Sometimes it is large, sometimes it is small, occasionally nothing is there. You can never calculate—unless you are very clever, like some who had their rules by which a good tipper could be recognized, or one more than usually tight. The tip has nothing to do with the amount of service rendered, it is all in the luck—like shooting craps, or playing the Chinese lottery. But it makes you size up all people in terms of the tip they will bestow.

  “It is all learned from commercialized America,” said Chu, the painter, in contempt. “Chinese never had these ideas before. Look at them now.”

  Certainly the boys made tip-getting a matter of fact. So anybody who did not tip well had to be marked. Anybody who did tip well also got marked . . . just as on a dean’s list. That was the rule. He who does not, will not get attention, he will get his ice put in hot water. His bill will be added with good measure. One of the waiters did this on a Jewish gentleman with two very fat ladies in fur coats. Since he had been known to undertip, his waiter privately added something for the secret service. That is, he made two checks, one accurate, to give to the cashier with the customer’s money, the other larger, to favor himself.

  Waiting was really very hard work. And you had to have a gift for it. During rush hours it was like a combination of skating and juggling. Some could carry four or five glasses in one hand and a heavy tray in the other . . . with these running zk! crookedly through all the aisles made by the chairs. I did not have the gift for doing this, although I thought at the time it looked easy. I had been a good dancer at my uncle’s birthday party in Song-Dune-Chi. But now when I tried to carry only two things in one hand, water and a plate of soup, some of the soup slipped into a red-haired lady’s lap. But she was not a chorus girl, to laugh it off. She talked very loud, almost crying. I said nothing.

  “He doesn’t understand English,” said her brunette friend. “Get the boss.”

  Yes, I understood what she said all right, but one says not much when embarrassed. “I’m sorry” is not enough.

  The boss came over. Both women repeated at once what I had done. Her green satin dress had a big spot. She pointed it out, over and over again. The boss looked at it through his spectacles. In the end, she was to charge the restaurant what it would cost to have this dress dry-cleaned. Peace was made, and she calmed her temper down.

  But I was fired for that. It was not my first offense. I had broken a few dishes before, too, and I had read Shakespeare and talked too much Chinese poetry. Without saying more the boss paid me off and told me I need not come tomorrow. I did not dislike him for that. He was a good man. Business is business, not charity. And he was not unfair to withhold my wages, as Sung had done. Certainly that Chinese at the cashbox never talked much. He didn’t even tell me why I was fired. But I understood I did not square with American efficiency.

  5

  It was nearing the 1st of September. New York was still hot, close. However, without a job, and with collegiate ambitions, it was plain I must make plans for the winter. So far I had failed in everything undertaken in America. Housework, clerking, waiting, in nothing was I good. It remained to be seen if I could remedy this by education.

  While working for Hsun, with leisure on my hands, I had written to several New England colleges asking for a scholarship. My inquiries met with no success. But I heard from Mr. Luther, the Canadian missionary who had brought me over. Away up in Canada, he had busied himself in my behalf. A scholarship in Maritime University, his own college in Nova Scotia, was open to me. I had just about enough money to get up there; the biggest portion of my funds having come from Hsun, for my services before he went bankrupt.

  6

  For a week I stayed on, paying farewell calls to Doctor Ko and others at the Korean Institute, saying good-bye to Hsun (who was working on some vague project for a restaurant) and to the boys who used to be his salesmen. My going-away shopping was for nothing more than a few ten-cent store socks, since I had no money for any college outfit; and my packing could be done in fifteen minutes.

  I said good-bye to Fifth Avenue, and my favorite walk through Central Park. How many languages you heard in Central Park between the couples walking there for pleasure! Sometimes you saw distinguished-looking people! Men with brows of thought looking like Western scholars. Girls, too, of the new Western type, bareheaded, bobbed waving chestnut hair cut in a casual tumbled style, and wearing boyish-looking Western suits; sometimes they carried soft felt hats in hand, and something—the roll of their shirtwaist collars, cut of lapel, their well-turned silken ankles, or trim brogues—bespoke sophistication and New York, in spite of those loose sport clothes proper to campus. And all this world was a closed book to me.

  I said good-bye to Chinatown with its ancient ties to all I had forsaken in the East. And I cannot leave this period of my first introductory months in the New Time of America, without mentioning a trifling incident which foreshadowed later events and emotions for me. Oriental exiles in New York are always to be found in Chinese restaurants, coming back again and again. So it is not strange that even so early I encountered for a moment, and without speaking, one who was destined to take lasting place in my memories of America, to acquire almost symbolic significance for me. It was a beautiful evening, sharp, cool, worn, an evening of premature autumn and old monotone, of city mist and semi-rain blurring the lampposts, the early lights and bedraggled city corners of Manhattan. Dampness blended all odors and made the lanes of Chinatown mysterious and poignant. The muffled foghorns blew again and again. Having been for a walk across Brooklyn Bridge, I turned somewhat early into that Chinese restaurant which had been my first refuge. It was emptier than usual, for six o’clock is very early for the Chinese. Indeed, there was only one other customer in the restaurant besides myself.

  He sat on the other side of the restaurant, almost across from me, before him a luxurious feast of broiled pigeons and some rare soup; but he was not eating. He was drinking, an expensive Chinese wine, it seemed, not hurriedly, but sipping. His complexion was of a faint clear olive, and quite unscored, though he must have been in the early thirties, my senior by fifteen years. His was not a typical Oriental face, impassive, static. He suggested to me that flowing, seething life reserved in Oriental painting for demoniac faces (not necessarily evil, but super-human, being allied to nature and the elements). The so-called Oriental peace he lacked. His brooding eyes of a greenish black color, unusuall
y wide and glinting, their rippling Oriental lids, might be those of poet, prophet, or madman; but they were held in check by the gentlemanly reserve of his mouth, which was youthfully scrolled and bland. Altogether, a handsome Easterner with nameless elegance. His clothes, which by no means determine Asiatic gentlemanliness, were of an excellent texture and workmanship. This curt, harsh Western dress sat on him, too, with ease, and to it he seemed long accustomed. An Asian evidently who had been long abroad. About him I sensed the unknown thought and subtleties of knowledge I longed to make my own.

  As I looked at him, so he looked at me. Perhaps he saw in me his green and hopeful self of long ago. Even after my soup came and I was busily engaged, I was conscious of his eyes upon me from time to time. The waiter removed his cup of wine and brought the rice bowl. He was being served in conventional Chinese style. But he did not lift his rice bowl to the mouth which is the Chinese custom, and he handled his chopsticks unlike a Japanese. I wondered if he could be a fellow-countryman.

  While I was pursuing this line of thought, trying to pigeonhole this Eastern wanderer, who seemed a part of the cool and pensive and many-worlds-wise evening, a Korean student wandered in with whose face I was familiar. He seated himself beside me and we spoke in Korean. I glanced again at the object of my interest and curiosity, but he was preparing to take his leave. I half-waited for him to stop and speak to us. If he were a Korean surely he would. Koreans always speak when they recognize a countryman in foreign ports. But he did not. And passed out, in his raincoat and soft slouched hat. And I did not see him again for a long time.

  New York, with the returning autumn, was shot through and through with vague intimations of fabulous, delicate worlds beyond my bounds of thought, of life reaching out and up in a scope unrestricted, north and south to the Poles, east, west, to a meeting place of divided hemispheres . . . life coiling and spiralling, intellectually rather than physically . . . broad, cosmopolitan, fresh, a rich spiritual emanation from material wealth. But I left by the Boston Canadian steamship line, the same route over which I had come. As I watched the skyline fade away, those vigorous spires seemed virgin-like as ever; and for all the promise of that magic enchantress, queen and gamine at the same time, harlot and little child, I was taking nothing from her away with me but endless fascination. I could point to no victory. I came away with no gain, except some poor Korean friends who had pulled me out of an outcast’s starvation. And it seemed to me I had not yet known New York, or penetrated beyond the merest outskirts of her impregnable treasure, her fuller expanding life of the Machine Age.

  PART 2

  BOOK ONE

  1

  TRAVELING, STILL TRAVELING . . . not only in space but in time . . . until I had come to a small Canadian village, where the houses were thinly scattered and many of the streets unpaved, and there was still a rough new pioneer spirit on the land. There were few cars—dusty-looking flivvers many seasons old, jumping up and down on narrow tires. Plainly the machine had not yet conquered all in Scottsborough, Nova Scotia. Not many miles from here was Maritime University, the college I had left the United States to attend.

  In the Scottsborough depot, I was met by Mr. Luther, accompanied by his brother-in-law, with horse and buggy. My missionary friend was a large, stocky farmerlike man with a little nose, and a fringe of reddish hair around the back of his head. He greeted me in his grave, pleasant way, in words of an excellent Korean. More than my exiled countrymen, he reminded me of the country I had left. Mr. Luther would return long before the rest of us. His life, for the most part, had been spent in Korea, and he had recently buried his Canadian missionary-wife on Korean soil. The remote peace of quiet Asia mingled with the steadfast faith of the Christian missionary on Mr. Luther’s brow. He was just the same, yesterday, today, and forever. The world of Canadian missionaries—like that of the Chinese in Chinatown—never changes, not for the East or the West. My teacher was a reflective, educated man, but neither Matthew Arnold nor Thomas Huxley of the nineteenth century had left any perceptible traces of their toilsome gigantic problems and doubts on him; and certainly he had never entered the century of the grandson, Aldous Huxley, and had no desire to do so. The climate of New York was not for him.

  Our friendship dated back some years. Mr. Luther had been the American principal of a Korean school where I had taken some postgraduate high school courses. He became interested in me and in my desire to be educated in America—particularly after I made a debate on the subject “Does the hero make the time or does the time make the hero?” I spoke in Korean, a beautiful language for oratory, rolling down and foaming all around like mountain streams, and being a Korean boy I still believed ardently in heroes. I had no inklings of the twentieth-century nonsense of such words as:

  I am the master of my fate,

  I am the captain of my soul.

  Such enthusiasm appealed to Mr. Luther, too. He was judge in the debate and he immediately singled me out as the best speaker. Afterwards he invited both debating teams to his house for tea, served in Canadian style. There were little Canadian tea cakes, which tasted to us awfully good, for Koreans eat very little sweets, none at all made out of refined white sugar with all the glutinous dark substances removed. We piled them in, and afterwards were sick. An older boy, who had read about American manners in a book, kept frowning at us, whispering, “Don’t make those noises when you drink!” We were trying to show our appreciation of the tea by smacking the lips, one of the politest noises at a meal a guest can make in the Orient.

  Mr. Mathews, the brother of Mr. Luther’s dead wife, was a straight, silent man with a ruddy face, clean-shaven, dignified, but a person of simplicity. He was reticent and did not attempt to talk much, though he wished to put me at my ease as much as possible. My main impression was—“How different from a New York Y.M.C.A. man!”—And I felt much better with Mr. Mathews.

  His house was a large new white one with a high porch. It was set in the midst of a big potato garden, a little distance out of Scottsborough. Outside and in, this house was plain and substantial. It had been built only recently, yet there was not much feel of newness about it . . . comfortable, old-fashioned, familylike furniture suggesting unpretentious British standards, ample space for books and potted flowers. The house was full of children. Mr. Luther and his four were visiting, and the Mathewses had several too. I was treated as one of “the children,” being classed with Mr. Luther’s oldest boy of twelve and Mr. Mathews’ son aged fourteen. A boy of nineteen, of course, was not supposed to have reached majority, and nothing, as I remember, was talked of my ardent baptism in the tumultuous modern stream of New York. Neither the Luthers nor the Mathewses had any interest whatsoever in New York. Instead we talked a good deal about Korea. No doubt the fervent new birth of Christianity in my poor distraught and suffering country was a source of strength and inspiration to this missionary clan far away in Canada. Korea has proved far more receptive than either China or Japan to Christian proselytizing. Mr. Luther, the young Luthers, and myself—we were the Koreans, and the Mathews family were never tired of hearing about the faraway Asian continent.

  I had been invited to visit the Luthers, or rather the Mathewses, until my college scholarship should begin. It was my first stay as guest with an American family in the West, and I wanted to be very goody and very nice. In the morning there was a sort of orderly crowding for the bathroom—a bathroom not outside and around the corner like that of many of the houses of Scottsborough—but on the second floor, centrally. Every one was given his allotted span there before the punctual eight o’clock breakfast. The first morning, escorted to the door of the bathroom by Mr. Mathews in his bathrobe, I parted from him with a bow. After that I took out my jackknife with which I always shaved. It was a big knife, but rather dull, and a certain flat stone I carried with me was an absolute essential. I would spit on the stone and rub my knife there hard. For finishing touch, I would stroke it gently on the palm of my hand. T
hen I would take the longest lock of hair on my head and cut off the very end to see if the knife were sharp enough yet to shave with. But this morning I could not find my stone. I looked and looked. Either I had forgotten to pack it, or it had dropped out on the way. I wasted many moments looking for my stone, and some more time trying to sharpen the jackknife on soap dishes and various other places. No good. It wouldn’t work. Then on a convenient shelf, I saw a long straight razor very bright and shining. Just what whiskers want. But Mr. Mathews was already knocking on the door to see if I was ready to come out. I didn’t want to take more than my time. Then, remembering that I had already a washstand and pitcher, I thought I would convey this razor into my own room for a moment. I slipped out unseen, bearing the long shiny blade. I was soon ready. So was everybody, except Mr. Mathews. At eight o’clock sharp we sat down to table. But Mr. Mathews was late. We had our porridge and milk. And still Mr. Mathews didn’t appear. We went on to the scrambled eggs and bacon, toast, stewed apples, orange marmalade, and tea. At the very end, Mr. Mathews slipped quietly into that empty place at the head of the table—and Mrs. Mathews said in a surprised voice: “Daddy, you didn’t shave this morning!”