East Goes West

by Younghill Kang

  Late Sunday night, I would hear Laurenzo returning. Usually he was very quiet. But now he came, banging his way upstairs, tripping over steps, dragging after him some heavy object. It was that huge suitcase. I left my room to see what was happening. At the top of the stairs, Laurenzo set the suitcase down, very carefully, rubbed his hands together, chuckled to himself, and waited a moment to get his breath. As he picked up the suitcase again, a faint clink of glass responded from the inside. He put his ear down and listened with satisfaction, rolled his eyes at me, winked, and clapped me familiarly on the back, inviting me into his room. I followed him. He carefully shut the door, then tipsily opened the suitcase. It was completely full of slightly flattened bottles of a brown color, and others larger, full of white liquor. He uncorked one of the smaller bottles and handed it to me, telling me to sample it. I tasted. It was awfully strong. He himself took another, and let the drops flow down his throat with ecstasy. After that, he never noticed that I wasn’t drinking. He began to laugh for joy.

  “Ah, my God, now I’se happy!” he cried, and he took another stiff swallow. “Happy, O boy! And it’s because I’se drunk. O yes, I know I’se drunk, devil-drunk. I feel like a king. . . . Sh! She won’t like it,” and he pointed downstairs, to indicate Mrs. Schmitt. “No, she won’t like it. But a man has got to do something.” The next moment he was mopping his eyes. “It’s the only way for a niggerman in this world.”

  He began to walk up and down the room declaiming.

  “Do you see me? I’se a college man. I’se been to Williams College, and to Washington, and then I come up here to go to Harvard. I’se studied medicine four years. . . .” (I think Laurenzo was exaggerating a little.) “But how’s that going to help me? Here I am chockfull of education. Still a niggerman. . . . That old devil down there (he meant Mr. Schmitt), he got everything. What he know about medicine? But a niggerman’s only good to cook and wait, that’s all.”

  He continued on this subject for some time. Then he drew near to me and became confidential, dropping his voice and rolling his eyes. “I guess I’se good at something else. Women like me. I make all women wild. You wouldn’t believe it, how they like Laurenzo. Not in open. Uhnt! But in secret. Because I’se big and strong and black. I knows it. Street-cars, parks, anywhere . . . where I find ’em . . .” he gave a kind of singsong formula. “Smile, talk, hold hands, kiss ’em, do ’em, leave ’em. . . . I’se got some kind of secret, white man don’t know. . . .”

  “How is that, Laurenzo?”

  “White man don’t know nothing about his women. . . . But me, I got that secret. . . . I don’t bother going round with no nigger gals . . . not me! They don’t like me neither because of my education.” Here right after chuckle and leer, Laurenzo began to weep uncontrollably again, and to go on about how a colored man hadn’t a chance. He alternated self-pity with boasting and obscenity, and abuse of kind, dignified Mr. Schmitt: much of this was incoherent, but some at least sounded like the language of sincere hell coming out. At last he dropped down on his bed, weeping into the pillows. “Not good for anything much . . . that’s niggerman.” The next moment he was snoring heavily.

  In the morning, there was subdued confusion in the air. When Mr. Schmitt came downstairs to be kissed affectionately by Mrs. Schmitt, he found her almost in tears. And there was no breakfast waiting on the table. “Again?” said Mr. Schmitt.

  “Again.”

  “Laurenzo must go,” said Mr. Schmitt.

  “Laurenzo must go,” echoed Mrs. Schmitt.

  But as soon as Laurenzo sobered up, he was a changed man. He was not obscene any more. He wasn’t loud. He stepped aside for me when we met in the hall. I would hear him pleading down on the second floor, pleading with tears, with terror, remorse in his voice. “One last chance, Mrs. Schmitt. Just give me my last chance. I hate the stuff. I’ll never touch it again. No more, no more, no more . . .”

  He sounded so sincere in confessing, so earnest in promising, so abject in abasement, that Mrs. Schmitt would forgive. That was Mrs. Schmitt’s weakness, just like crying at the word vivisection. She would always forgive. Then I waited to see how well Laurenzo was going to reform. The Sunday after, he drank, but his job was on his mind. It took two or three week-ends before he forgot again. Then he came home drunk as before, and stumbled into my room noisily without knocking. “Hullo, hullo! Now I’m going to tell you something! Show you another thing, this nigger, he’s good for.” He drew me out on the landing and pointed to the regions below where the Schmitts were having a musical evening. Downstairs Mrs. Schmitt was playing the piano, and a lady guest was singing. “Listen. Can that woman sing? I ask you, can she sing?”

  “You don’t like her singing?”

  “Man, you don’t know! Look-a-here, I can sing!” He opened his mouth right then and there. I pushed him into my room. “Sh! Wait a moment, Laurenzo,” and I closed the door. But Laurenzo had already opened his mouth to sing. Volumes of sound rolled out. It was magnificent. He really could sing. I don’t know where he had learned, but he was, as he said, better than the lady guest downstairs. “Let me go down and show those people how to sing.” And I almost had to fight with Laurenzo to keep him upstairs with me. I followed him to his very door, where in spite of me he turned and yelled, “Listen to me, you white people down there. You ought to hear me sing Brahms. Lordy, Lordy! Hear that woman flat. I knows that song. Ought to get me down there, white woman. I knows how to sing.”

  Still Mrs. Schmitt didn’t fire him. Not that time. I think she hated to let him go because he was such a marvellous vegetarian cook whom she had got by special order, and besides she felt sorry for him. Mr. Schmitt said anyway he shouldn’t be coming there when drunk. And Mrs. Schmitt said yes, when drunk she was afraid of him. Next week-end they chained the inner door, so that it would open just a little, and Laurenzo could not get in Sunday night after twelve, unless he woke them up. They slept away the night in peace. Laurenzo did not ring the bell, nor make any noise outside to rouse anybody. Next morning he was found sprawled out on the doorstep, with moisture all around him and a strong smell of spirits. One arm was stretched out over that big suitcase. When he fell down on the home-step to sleep, he had set down the suitcase too hard, and some of the bottles had broken and the liquor had seeped out.

  Poor Laurenzo! And he was so nice when he wasn’t drunk! Too nice! With all his faults I got to know him better when intoxicated. He might utter the language of hell, but some of his true thoughts came out then. At other times, never. He may not have been very truthful even when drunk. Mrs. Schmitt said it wasn’t his nature to be truthful. But he was frank. He was ready to show the world then that he stood on his own two feet—but he couldn’t stand on them.

  2

  I did not hear from Kim. So I presumed he was still in America. About Christmas time I went down to New York to see how he was getting along and to have an interview with Mr. Brown’s friend about some more commercial advertising in Chinese translation. Then I found out what had occurred in Boston previously between Helen and Kim. Her family had been very nice to Kim, polite but distant. And he felt bitterly that they had not been honest with Helen about their inflexible stand. Helen had been sent off on a round-the-world cruise with the promise exacted that she defer her decision until after a long separation. But Helen had told Kim that she would never change. Nothing had been said about their not writing to each other. Yet not long after that, Kim got a letter from Helen’s father. “If you love her as we love her,” the letter said, “the only way you can show it is bravely to keep away. Barriers have been passed that were never meant to be broken.” The letter urged Kim not to write, not to force himself upon her “sisterly affection and Christian charity” in any way.

  “So many words,” said Kim, “to say in plain language, ‘No trespassing.’” It worried him that he had not heard much from Helen. He feared she had not been receiving his letters. Of course it was the ebb of the yea
r. I noticed that Kim seemed without a spark of youthful gaiety. He made soliloquy to his mirror in the hall: “Helen used to look into my mirror. And now there is no trace. I look. But nothing is there. Only an insane man in whose eyes is the image of Helen.” And again: “What becomes of the dreams dreamt, the hopes hoped, unrealized? Dreams are fools’ night fancies. The product of the idler’s imagination. For no one has entered the cloud castle through the rainbow gates of dreams. All are words, written on the fading memory book, where it sticks on the eyes’ visionary image, the mirror that lies. Everything, everything in this West, is said to be ‘hope so.’ Yes, hope hops here like a grasshopper? What is this hope, Western-manufactured? An invisible drug that keeps the sick man alive till tomorrow. Wait till the morning sun rises. So says hope. What does tomorrow bring? What can tomorrow bring? That same hope only. More hopes and tomorrow’s tomorrows will see that sun also rise. Yes, hope, and again hope—and always month after month, hope. . . . It is a fine consolation.”

  We walked the cold Manhattan streets and Kim told me how he had gone to Helen’s church in Boston, where her family had owned pews for many generations. It was a house of God but exclusive. People didn’t flatter or smile when you came out. They stared and whispered. Then his mind seemed attracted by the holly wreaths and Christmas trees in the windows we were passing. Kim pointed and said, “What is the meaning of all this pine, holly, spruce, mistletoe, ivy; this decoration of fragile balloons and lifeless glass birds; of ringless bells and imitation stars, and rich-colored baubles that break into dust when you touch them? What fantastic ritual! Well, man is a mythmaker and creator of superstition. You can make your own Christmas tree and be a child under it. What make-believe time of a week! What play-happiness. And twelve days later all to be burned in the fire. Well, that is life. But I do not care much for the Western Christmas tree.”

  I came back to Boston and had the flu. Everybody was having it just then. Even Laurenzo. He had been rushed to the hospital, and I was alone on the Schmitts’ fifth floor. No one knew I was sick. I lay on the bed too weak to move, without even the energy to walk down those five flights of stairs and enter the nearest cafeteria for food. Sometimes I slept and other times I couldn’t. My head ached. My throat ached. So did my chest with hard incessant painful coughing. I think I was partly delirious, and I kept seeing Kim, and imagining I was sailing with him on a bleak uncomfortable sea. Rocks were ahead and we seemed sure to be wrecked, and no one was with us. He and I were sailing entirely alone. Then the thought came into my head that I had the flu and was going to die up here on the Schmitts’ fifth floor. Nobody would know the moment when I died and nobody would care. Many Oriental students had died like this on foreign soil. I cried to myself in despair, then gave up in exhaustion. Hope and ambition seemed to have vanished from me. Only the tictock of the alarm clock in the room, the sound of the cold Boston wind whistling at the windowpane, the beating of my own heart, how I disliked to hear all these! I hated them so much that I dragged myself out of bed. I stuffed pencils and papers, towels, shirts into the window cracks, trying to shut out the snuffling of the wind, and tottering, I put the clock outside the door. But still I could hear my own heart beating, and that sound was unpleasant to me, there in my silent world that made no noises. Truly “I felt a funeral in my brain and mourners to and fro,” for I think I have never had such an attack of the nerves. All my senses, except that of the nose, were keener than senses ought to be. But my nose refused to aid me, either for smelling or breathing. All my handkerchiefs were soaked. Now I was beginning to use anything I could get. Shirts, socks, yes, anything. I lay like this for three days and without a morsel of food or of any liquid except water. That of course was one reason I felt so morbid and saw the earth only as my grave of death. I did not put anything into my stomach with which to fight off those germs. Just a bowl of soup—even just hot salt water—might have made the whole world brighter. At the end of that time, my will to live reasserted itself. I dressed myself feebly in anything that came to hand, lurched down those five flights and out into the street, seeking the nearest cafeteria for food.

  3

  By the middle of May that year, I was again installed with the doctors, since their families had left early for Marblehead. From this point on, the hardship of working my way through college was over for good. The next winter, I received a full scholarship, not from my college, but from an anonymous friend whose name I have never learned. I also studied during this summer and the next, in the graduate school, doing further studies. Professor Campbell and the president of the University both wrote me letters to the graduate school, letters in which I think I was five or ten times exaggerated. Anyhow my hard-luck days in the Boston environment were now behind me, and this easier time made me more sociable.

  I was no sooner established once more with Doctor Dimassi than I began to have visitors. Charles Evans of course came frequently. Often he stayed for dinner and cooked with me and the doctors. He was much liked by the doctors and such parties were a round of laughter and conversation. Afterwards the doctors went out for other engagements, and Charles and I read aloud together in the spacious living room, listened to chamber music on the victrola, discussed philosophy and other matters. Early twenty is an earnest age when philosophy much appeals. Charles came from liberal-minded Christian parents who never attempted to dogmatize with him, but even so their conceptions failed to satisfy him. A perfectly balanced, natively moral Yankee, he shared in the bewilderment of our generation—a bewilderment, I think, world-wide and not yet passed away—in a search for values with no values anywhere very obvious, intellectually speaking. The incredible Scopes trial in Tennessee must come to mind as a kind of landmark to this period in America. And in Boston, this friendship of Charles Evans for me was a subtler graft of the earthquaking needle, of the new age of broad communication, cross-fertilization, and the shaking of boundaries. Our combined efforts of East and West were unable to find an honest argument for God in our philosophical courses, though this was not the fault of our professor, a very kind gentleman with a great fund of knowledge, who interpreted everything ultimately in terms of Christian ideology and an ex-clergyman atmosphere, so that we made a neat sightseeing tour through philosophy and arrived right back at where we, or rather right-minded people, necessarily started from, a nice Christian monotheism. I think Charles was more avid in this search for God than I was. It was in his Yankee blood, whereas in the Orient mystery has always been accepted for what it is. The Western mind is more abstract, too, than the Oriental. Language has had much to do with that. Chinese philosophers even in their most abstruse moods write in picture characters, and use parables. I always insisted to Charles that I got more out of Western poetry than Western philosophy, in the study of Western thought, since one poet can do ten times as much as one philosopher, whether in conveying scepticism or mysticism. It can hardly be said that we two solved any problems during these long debates, since values are natural monuments upheaved by emotions and it is almost fruitless to build them with the intellectual chisel and bricks of air. But an Eastern and a Western mind came close together, and the mood we generally ended up in was that of a pragmatic Taoism, or a Taoistic pragmatism, if such a thing is conceivable.

  My Italian friend, Cortesi, often came to see me at Doctor Dimassi’s and sometimes he would spend the night. He enjoyed playing the large victrola and the radio, and sitting in the big comfortable chairs. But Cortesi always moved around on tiptoe here and a straw in the wind would make more noise than he. When he spent the night with me, he didn’t bring pyjamas. In fact, he never seemed to have any personal belongings except one suit, one shirt, one necktie, and one pair of shoes. In this he was like me. But on that suit, that shirt, that necktie, he had no spot—in this he was unlike me. He used his shirt for a pyjama, but it never seemed to get wrinkled like mine. As he was getting into bed, his necktie disappeared. I believe he put it under his pillow—for you could never see it until it came back
suddenly again next morning. One moment you looked at Cortesi without his necktie—the next moment, the tie was on, neatly tied. He was very circumspect in dressing and I never caught him at the moment of change. I don’t suppose he put the necktie on under the sheets, but he always managed to find that instant’s space when the roommate’s eyes were turned somewhere else. And never, never would he take off the trousers when anybody was looking—girls wouldn’t be so shy. He always watched the occasion when you were wiping your nose or were away off somewhere in the bathroom. Shoes, too. Magically they left Cortesi’s feet, tucking themselves away carefully under the bed. Magically they slipped back on when nobody was looking. I could never persuade Cortesi to stay on in the morning and have breakfast with the doctors. And he never seemed at home when Charles Evans was there.

  I saw a good deal of a Japanese at this time, Wadanabe. He was studying theology, but really it was for the purpose of investigating psychology and philosophy. By calling it in name, theology, he had the privilege of a good scholarship and a place in the theological dormitory. Wadanabe was both agreeable and intelligent. We got along very well in spite of the great political antagonism between my land and his. The average Japanese does not understand the Korean situation anyhow. Wadanabe did not seem to reason with the more ruthless nationalists, “Anything is right that’s for our country.” He had a good knowledge of classical Japanese Haiku and he wrote Haiku himself. He was a frail boy, hollow-chested and pale, and his teeth gave him a good deal of trouble. Since there was a bitter quarrel always between Japan and China, he liked to have me go with him to the Chinese restaurants on Tyler Street to do the ordering. But always he ate soup or more soft things like that, holding his hurting teeth. He attributed his dental disorders to Western food in the theological dormitory.