“Why, it’s Mr. Han!” she had exclaimed, without waiting for me to introduce myself, “And here so early!”
The big room, the only room of the so-called apartment, occupied by three, had already lost the impress of Van’s personality, a tidy, scrupulous neatness, and had taken on the impress of Trip’s. There were the three beds as before, neatly made up, with their covers making them couches, but books lay around on the floor and a card-table was opened and spread with tumbling papers. Sunlight flooded the room, which appeared very comfortable.
It was an informal room. The manners of the girls were informal. Though Trip was rather silent and shy in her speech, she gave the impression of a person whose thoughts might become as involved and mixed up as her books and papers. So she had a certain helplessness, which was shot through sometimes by vigor. When she smiled, she looked rosy and pretty and natural. That rosy color over cheeks and short lips enhanced her feminine grace and seemed a half-shyness. . . . How gay, I thought, how innocent, hardly thinking she was a woman! In fact, she smiled continually when she looked at me, as if I were something amusing to think about.
Probably she was not thinking at all what I was thinking. Miranda, Rosalind, Imogene, all Western heroines, crowded to take their place behind the warm sweet face of my Western love, and the fanfare of all Western literature broke in my brain until she was like a mystic blossom set in the land of beauty forever. . . . But—to tell or not to tell?—I was realizing the great problem of the lover when he is struck. I decided reluctantly to conceal for the present. She would be frightened and shocked. Most practical of all, she might kick me out, so it would never do to reveal—for the present. Yet I kissed her a thousand times (I never did, I only imagined). . . . I gave her the Keatsian kiss that was never kissed, that’s why it is immortal.
I came to with a start. Trip was offering me a cigarette from a silver cigarette box which stood on the gate-legged table, under the Indian print against the fourth wall. She seemed baffled that her attempts at conversation were all going astray. I stood up when she stood up. But she waved me down with light, peremptory hand. I watched her pretty slender figure bowing with cigarettes, and it seemed to have rainbow penumbras, in the jolly sunlit room. Oh, could a blind man have a greater shock in recovering his long lost sight? . . . She took one and reseated herself, crossing her legs. Now she resigned herself as with waiting. Her glance traveled once to the abandoned manuscript table.
“You are busy? I am taking up time?”
“Oh, no. . . .”
And I feared desperately her attitude was a little like Miss Van’s. I cast hurriedly about the room for the most immediate, the most practical thing to say in this emergency. My eye fell on the typewriter, on the scrambled piles of papers.
“I want you to help me,” I said confidently, adopting the aggressive attitude of Mr. Lively in making a big sale. “I want to write a book. Would you help me to write a book?”
I had heard from Laura that Trip was engaged with writing a book as ghost for some one, which is partly what gave me this idea. But she looked much surprised. “You’re interested in writing—in English?”
“Oh, yes,” I said firmly. “A best seller. I don’t know English well yet. But I have all the ideas.”
That about the best seller made her get rosy and laugh, as if to herself, again. “I wouldn’t be much help!”
“But I’m sure you would. How about letting me take some of your things back to Philadelphia to read?” I went on with authority. “Whatever it is you’re doing.”
But she shook her head decidedly, almost as if in alarm. She frowned. “No. I’m not any good.”
“It looks as if you have written a lot,” I said, regarding the piles of papers on the table. Trip frowned again, and gathering them up unceremoniously, half-thudded, half-piled them under the table. After that, as if feeling better, she leaned her arms on the table and played with a pencil. “Do you know the kind of mind that lives upon paper?” she said. “Every day, all day long, trying to get out of paper, out of words. And never doing it. You have to come out of paper before you can write. I take a thought and change the words fifty times. The poor thing is still-born! (without having much will-to-live in the first place). . . . I seem to be lost. . . . Oh well, some day, I’ll find a real road, maybe. . . . What about you? What is your book, the best-selling one?”
“An autobiography!” I said promptly.
“Good. (Everything’s that.) Tell me something about it, Mr. Han.”
So I began to outline a book about my early life in Korea, spurred on by my need to interest her, fix her attention. It was something I’d thought on vaguely, of evenings in Philadelphia. Indeed, I’d read some biographies and travel books with that in mind. I had felt for a long time, I had much material to be shared with the West, in an ever-broadening, all-earth-embracing age, such as this we were in. And I was not going to write, like Kim, in classical Chinese; Asia, I knew, would be occupied for at least my lifetime with its throes of life or death. My moment seemed to have come now as I walked back and forth, swayed by the rhythms of prose and of public speaking. I told her of the land I was born in, its grassy, pine-covered mountains with great awesome stones, its sparkling clear air, which had never known factory smokes, the fields of tender green rice protected by devil scarecrows, the tiny houses with thatched roofs or roofs of bright green tile, decorously set within nature, nature worshipped with childlike awe just so for a thousand years. I told her of the people, those old-fashioned Korean scholars with tall hats, denying the earth was round and smoking their long pipes.
I touched the more personal note, she looked so gentle and persuasively smiling. “When I was born, it was a famine year,” I paused, dramatically. “I never had a mother. She died. And I missed her so much.”
However, Trip said, “That was probably a help. They don’t seem to get on well with their mothers over here.” And I was a little offended.
“But my father was no help,” I insisted indignantly. “He beat me for running off to attend Western schools. And he tried to make me marry, at sixteen, some girl I had never seen and did not love.”
Trip became interested. She marveled. She said she had known nothing about compulsory marriage for boys in the Orient at the age of fifteen and sixteen.
“My bride would have been some years older,” I explained.
“Still, marriage might have been good for you too,” she speculated, having got used to the idea. “A good way to learn, I should think. Better than prostitutes.”
“That wouldn’t be love,” I suggested. “Now I know you must fall in love.”
Just then the doorbell rang. Again Trip ignored the clicker. She ran down herself. She was gone quite a long time. She left the door open. I could hear murmurs below, and laughter. I walked restlessly around. I picked up a pair of tortoise-shell spectacles. I tried to look through them, but couldn’t see anything. On the floor the papers were sprawled out. Some seemed to be verse. By putting my head on one side like a bird, I could read one, which seemed somewhat in keeping with words Trip had just said.
My beds are feathered with down,
Lily-white, lettuce-sweet,
With huge puffs of silk and satin and wool
Warm at neck and feet.
My tables are laden with cheer,
I am the most comforting cook!
Come, hang your coat with its world dust outside,
Come and look.
Look—Yet stand off, stand far off!
Oh, my tried traveller, beware!
All are but words, merely painted,
I give but painted word-fare.
The voices ceased downstairs. Trip was coming back up. She came in, her eyes still shining from the gay conversation downstairs I had not heard, and very wide and innocent, because she was near-sighted.
“Oh, yes. Now let�
��s go on with the best-selling book.”
“But you must take notes,” I suggested.
“I wouldn’t make you self-conscious?” She laughed outright.
“No. I am never self-conscious. Now here is the pencil. Where is the clean sheet?”
So I went on talking, and she taking notes now and then. That is how I spent the first morning with Trip. I was elated. I did not see how I could fail to make her remember me now. But good times must come to an end. At last Trip gathered up the few scrambled notes, and said, “Here they are. You write the first chapters now. Do begin. I should like to see it. Most interesting!”
“I want to leave the notes with you. You must write it.”
But Trip was shaking her head very decidedly. “I don’t want to write with anybody. I’ve stopped that. I want to try my own things.” Then Trip ran to look at the clock. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said politely. “But it’s time to get Van’s lunch.”
“It can’t be time for lunch so soon?” I ejaculated.
“Not so soon. It’s twelve o’clock. Van has only a few minutes to eat in. I must always have everything ready when she comes home.”
I pleaded with Trip to come out to lunch with me. I had meant to ask her when I came in at ten o’clock, but so many things had distracted my mind. No, she said, she had to get Van’s lunch. “But I wanted Miss Van too,” I said sadly. “I must make full report to Miss Laura in Philadelphia.” No, Van wouldn’t have the time. She eats in an awful rush. Trip was already stirring briskly around. She shunted her papers under one of the beds, where already I saw there was a plethora of papers. Again she put my notes in my hands with that air, “Here is your hat.” But I would have none of them. I determinedly returned them. So they went after the rest. Now she was spreading the card-table with oilcloth, paper napkins. Setting it for just two. “I’d ask you to stay,” she apologized, “but really it is an awful rush, and isn’t much. A mere snack. We always have just tea and toast and marmalade. Did you know that’s very cheap?”
And I was wandering about the room restlessly like a disconsolate cat. Trip opened the cupboard doors of a little kitchenette. It was only a little stand with a sink and one burner. Below were some drawers. She was getting out sugar cubes now, slicing a lemon.
I examined the books in the bookcase. At first I couldn’t see a thing by Browning or Shelley or Keats or Ruskin or Tennyson or Carlyle. There were poems by Emily Dickinson in a fat green volume, and a Kraft-Ebbing side by side. There were many medical books, big as great dictionaries. There was Dorothy Parker, inevitable at this time. There was Arianne by Claude Anet, and the Birth of the Gods, Merejkowsky, and Albertine Disparue in French, and something by E. E. Cummings. Poems of the Brontës from the public library. Lots of books by Hawthorne. Elmer Gantry, of course. A volume of Eugene O’Neill’s earlier plays and several anthologies of modern verse. The Waste Land, which I had already encountered with Kim. And some Elinor Wylie. Finally at the far end, a small leather volume of Keats, very dusty on top, which I drew out, with the friendly feeling of meeting Trip in there. I opened it and found the signature of Miss Van across the flyleaf.
“Well, Van ought to be here in three minutes,” said Trip inexorably into the kitchenette, her back turned.
“You will go out to dinner with me tonight?” I said desperately. “I wanted to show you some Chinese foods. So I can tell Miss Laura.”
“All right,” agreed Trip hastily. “Now you’d better go out and get yourself a nice lunch,” she said with more coaxing smiles now. “Before Van comes in. She’ll be in an awful hurry.”
4
I had coffee around the corner, coffee and a doughnut—I didn’t feel like eating—and composed myself for waiting until it would be a decent hour to call for the dinner invitation, and to enter the courts of heaven again. For I was in the mood of early Christian fathers receiving miracles. Which is of course the proper approach for the Christian romantic love.
I was about twenty-four years old, the age when many young men in Korea have five-year-old sons, in a country where sex maturity and procreation are considered as unavoidable as Western long pants. By the old-fashioned way, before the semi-Christianized, romantic Georges, a youth’s first love meeting was carefully arranged by his parents, and it was no private matter, being initiated to the accompaniment of solemn family prayers for those time-traveling offspring which are seen as the main duty of organized life. Since a strict notion prevailed in the Orient that mistresses should be served second-hand rather than wives, all his subsequent meetings with the opposite sex might well be influenced by the equal bow exchanged with a veiled woman before society and her first right. Woman is approached realistically, and it may be gains in a certain amount of primitive physical respect, though this is not often granted by missionaries from the West. While love loses of course in the individual, romantic and spiritual aspect. One is not allowed to savor love, self-consciously, and individual growth itself by this is nipped. Degeneration of either society—Christian or Confucian—results in confusion, and it is probable that we are witnessing signs of both—in West as in East—during this strangely great age of disintegration and new combination.
But not for me, at such a moment, rationalistic reflection! Not for me, reason, to say I had been all along in the dawn of the Westernized Christianized ages, watching the livid borderline from which now the sun had just risen. True, by emotion I thought: for I thought, all my life I had felt stirrings and premonitions of this other light as much as a blind man might picture. Now it had come, for my love for Trip seemed sublimely natural, inevitable, born with me, carried from Asia, since the far moment when I set out to reach the West. Individuality, acute consciousness, consciousness of self and of other, which the love is, yes, these had been born in me like an unexposed roll of film, and with rapture they greeted the light. I hardly grasped yet that individuality is lonesome-minded. Indeed, my thoughts all turned vice versa. For me, here was sun with winter ended, and warmth and light and faith. I had asked for a sign from America and it had come. Having struggled rebelliously away from Nature, a child no longer cradled in her mystery and grand fatalistic control, I had been unconsciously miserable. Even while fascinated and committed mind and soul to the Western learning, I had been dismayed and alone. But now all nature took on an instant face, a face which was human, which could mirror my face and my thoughts, and the moon and the stars seen from Asia, Europe, America, Africa, Antarctica, anywhere I might turn, shone and twinkled to tell me, they had made in their enormous laboratory, Trip. Trip—as close to me as my own and as far away as the universe’s utmost border, a point to which my whole being strove to attain. So I shaded my face in a dark corner of a drugstore in mid-afternoon and cried stealthily because I had been sent unkissed away.
At last I rose and with fast strides walked the streets. And perhaps people thought I was drunk or a crazy man. For I murmured to myself and from time to time wiped my eyes. The great variety of life eddied about me, and was my great Greek chorus, though it was composed of neither old men nor captive women nor sea nymphs nor classical maidens, but of all kinds of men on the globe. How grateful I was to New York, my magnet of worlds, my spiritual port, my rich harbor! How the stone pavements and dusty stalactite buildings surrounded with rugged grandeur the treasure of a still withdrawn room, that room where Van studied medicine, where Trip sat, charmed, amidst papers, helpless and as if alone!
I meant to take Trip to Chinatown for dinner, to give her some novelty. I invited Van, too. But Van had a date with her medical tomes, and she thrust us both out with relief. I felt both solemn and light-headed to be again with Trip. I started to get a taxi, for I remembered the words of George, “When with a girl, always take a taxi.” But Trip wouldn’t let me and said, “We patronize els.” But when we got off at Mott Street, it was raining, so in a great bustle and hurry, I hailed a taxi after all. Since it was a new address I wanted to try, supposed t
o be more grand and suited to Americans, and I didn’t know where it was myself, I gave the address to the taximan. And he drove just around the corner and stopped, it was only a few feet. I felt in my pocket to pay the man and I had no change. The smallest I had was a two-dollar bill. Idiotically, I pressed it into his hand and ran after Trip, to get her in from the rain.
We went upstairs to a large ornate Chinese restaurant, but nobody else was here now. A band off in one corner was playing jazz very mournfully. Trip sat down shyly and dubiously, as far from the music as she could get. But the whole place was lovely to me, lovely the murmuring rain outside, lovely the enforced intimacy of this Chinatown solitude. I noticed now, though, that the merriment, which had come in Van’s apartment with Van before we left, had died out of Trip’s face. A passive and somber expression had taken its place. She made little effort to talk. She seemed to be wondering quietly to herself, just what she was doing in here with an Oriental, Chungpa Han. Or she seemed to be bored. I asked her if she would dance. George said you had to dance. And we went around the small deserted circle of the dancing floor once or twice quite gravely to the dismal sounds.
Obviously the place was not suited for giving a young lady a good time in the vein of George. The quietness and melancholy of this place were more suited to spiritual revelations. So I told her about Boshnack Brothers, and Miss Stein, and how unhappy I was there. “I find that Americans can be very unhappy,” I said.
“You have found that?” her chin lifted with interest. “I think that’s so.”
East Goes West Page 38
