“I’m sad for him, but things will balance out in the end,” he said.
The temperature had dropped on the mountain, and the tree branches threw long shards of shadow into the clearing. We began gathering our things. Umma was wont to say “Poor Tae Hyun,” but the man in front of me did not seek pity, either for himself or his child, despite being a divorced man in a culture where all roads lead to marriage. It struck me then that everyone I’d gravitated to during my time in Korea lived on the margins of the Confucian hierarchy. Tae Hyun. My cousin Kang Dae, with his disability. Jemi, who forged ahead in her career and resisted marriage and motherhood. Even my own mother, too, who had left the village.
Just then, the wind blew my hair. I shivered. It was still in that bob. Shaking my bangs out, I wondered what I was trying to belong to here.
The Monday after I returned from Onyang, I sat down with Dr. Nam. I didn’t call him “CEO” but simply “ajeossi,” as I would any male friend of my parents. I told him I would leave Korea in a few weeks; it was time to go back to school. When I said “school,” my voice cracked, like clay drying in the desert.
6.
ON MY LAST NIGHT IN Korea, I left Keun Umma and Keun Appa’s for the mountain path behind the apartment. I was on my way to meet my friend Sang Chul, with whom I was spending my final weeks in Seoul.
I felt pretty in the billowy dress and crocheted bolero I’d bought that afternoon at the outdoor market, and I skipped a little, enjoying the jingling of the coins in my pocket for the vending machine. I skipped because though tomorrow was my birthday, my twentieth, in some ways I was still a child.
The streetlamps shed yellow ovoids onto the pavement. On the right was a parking lot and on the left, the black sloping brush of the mountain. A hundred meters ahead, Sang Chul stepped out of his white Hyundai in his regular outfit of jeans and a light polo, his spectacles shading his eyes, which were small and gentle. As I approached, I skipped into a cone of light, then out again. As he came into focus, I saw something was not right about his gait—he was having trouble walking in a straight line and clunked one foot down almost diagonally in front of the other. Something more was off, but he passed in between lights now—blackness again—and I slowed my skipping, squinted, tried to locate his eyes behind the glasses, until I realized it was all wrong and the figure accelerated. In the final cone of light we collided, and the hollows of his eyes were scribbled out and it was not Sang Chul but someone else, and this someone else shoved me to the ground. The back of my head struck the asphalt with a crack, and suddenly he was on top of me, rending my bolero and the front of my dress, and I could not find my breath, time slowed, and it was probably only a second or two before I located my voice and what came out of my mouth was “No no no” and “Please.” The man with no eyes made no sounds, had been perfectly silent, and then just as fast as it had begun, he was off in the direction from which he came, flashing in and out of lights.
Clutching my ripped top, I rose. Painfully, I turned from the mountain toward the parking lot below, where I happened upon a group of people, a man and two women perhaps. I tried to explain but I was sobbing. Finally, they saw I was not drunk but that something bad had happened. They asked one another what could be done, kept asking me what exactly had happened, but I could not get ahold of myself. Never touching me, the group decided someone must be called, not the police but my family. I wept out the many digits and before I knew it, I was in the front yard of my aunt and uncle’s building, where Sang Chul stood—the real Sang Chul—as well as Keun Umma, Kang Dae, and my grandmother.
When my family went back upstairs, leaving me to become presentable, Sang Chul sat next to me while I cried. I did not think of myself and what I might have suffered. Instead, I thought how disgraceful it all was. Sang Chul, as if reading my mind, said, not meanly but matter-of-factly, “Yes, you should be humiliated.”
Once we said goodbye, I hobbled up the stairs, clutching the banister to steady myself. Keun Appa, it turned out, was having tea with a guest in the living room and had not bothered to come down. I went into Keun Umma’s bedroom, where she was cracking nuts and watching a Korean drama. I put my head in her lap and felt her cringe. She did not lay a hand to comfort me.
The next day, I was gone.
I spent my birthday on a flight out of Seoul. Aloft, I peered out the window into an arcadia of whiteness and considered many things. How in my homeland I had not found a small white room where I went in weak and came out strong. The experience of risk and bigness of life I’d initially desired when I left college but could not handle in reality. Sadness over losing my friendship with Jemi and the pain inflicted by men I’d called “oppa,” or “brother,” which I believed I had been complicit in inviting. The strategies work that had been hard and served as a daily reminder of how out of depth I was without school. School. In fact, living in Korea had been the opposite of living alone in the bee-loud glade.
Would I ever return again? I had tried to operate as a Korean in Korea, but attempting to fit into my native country, about which I had an abstract, mythical understanding, had only compromised me. The sexual violence Umma always feared had not occurred in America, but rather in the country that served as her moral compass.
As the plane traversed the sheet of ocean, I slowly oriented toward America with more kindness in my heart. Thanks to my experiences in Korea, there were aspects of America I would never hold cheap again. It was then I realized that during the evening encounter with the stranger with no eyes, what had come out of my mouth was a language I had not spoken in months.
It was in English I had uttered “Help,” and it was this that had saved me.
PART VI
PHILOSOPHY
1.
“HI,” A VOICE SAID.
I looked up from the keyhole of my dorm room on my first day back at Princeton to a boy standing next door. Well-built, he wore a white shirt tight at the biceps. We blushed.
“I’m Francis. Francis Park.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, and introduced myself.
“Are you a resident advisor?”
“No, I’m a sophomore.”
“Me, too, but I don’t recognize you from last year.”
“I was away. I should be a junior.”
Francis Park was visibly impressed. He told me he’d grown up in northern New Jersey, and I assumed he hailed from a town like Fort Lee with a large Korean population. “I’m thinking of majoring in economics,” he said. “Math track.”
I smiled. “Me, too.”
Suddenly, an impressive Korean lady with dark lipstick and an Hermès scarf popped out of his room. She squinted behind her oversized sunglasses and inspected me grandly. Francis and I immediately cut off our flirtation.
“Annyeonghasaeyo, ajumma,” I said, bowing.
But Francis’s mother, unimpressed by my short skirt, just “mmhmm” ’ed me. “Francis, come now. We need to finish your room,” she said, and disappeared inside.
I waved, slid my key into the lock, and rolled my bags into my room. I was back.
The first time Francis invited me over for Korean snacks, I still considered him a potential romantic interest. I’d never entertained a crush on a Korean American boy before, but I figured it would be useful to focus my fledgling Korean American identity on someone real.
“Remind me again why she’s dressed like a Catholic schoolgirl?” I asked. He was really into a new pop star named Britney Spears.
Unable to tear his eyes from the computer screen, Francis shushed me and pushed over some seaweed and microwaved rice. Britney didn’t seem that contrite when she sang, “Oops, I did it again.”
“She’s so hot!” He sighed and clicked play again.
I felt sorry for Francis because a blond chick like Britney would probably never be interested in someone like him, no matter how much time he spent repping at the gym. Even the Korean American guy who loved Korea and had plastered his dorm room with pictures of K-pop stars and Korean models still preferred the white girl to the Korean one right in front of him. I decided then it would be better if I viewed Francis benevolently, as a younger, naive cousin.
Like many second-generation Korean Americans, Francis took Korean as his foreign language, while I opted for French and Mandarin. He loved Korean music and culture, and ran with the Asian Invasion. Francis was my friend, but he was also a symbol. As a friend, Francis was three-dimensional. As a symbol, he incited the egoistic fear that I still felt around Korean Americans, and I held him at arm’s length, in favor of what I thought was my individuality, which needed space. Individuality was something Americans said America was famous for, but not every American was allowed a slice of the individuality pie. Some Americans, like us Asians, weren’t allowed to be special or individual, especially when we clustered together; we had to be happy being flattened.
2.
