Sad Peninsula (11 page)

She stumbled over a metal box set near the steps, spilling a highway of shell casings noisily onto the ground. A rustling back in the building, the sound of people waking. Voices. Ignoring the mess she had made and the clatter coming from behind her, Meiko fluttered like a bird across the field, her legs scurrying through the dark until she had crossed into the copse and found herself at the base of a large gingko tree. It arched upward, spreading its knuckled branches into the sky. More voices behind her now, thickening in the house like batter. Meiko tucked the twine between her teeth before grabbing hold of the gingko's trunk with both arms. It seemed to take forever to scale up to the lowest branch, even though it was less than a dozen feet from the ground. She was finally able to hoist her thin backside onto its rough, sturdy bark. When she did, Meiko took the twine from her mouth and tied one end into a stiff knot around the branch's bulk. The other end she looped onto itself, narrowing it into a circle and securing it with a knot. Voices now outside the building, crossing the field towards the copse.
No time now. Too late now. How long would it take?
She snap-snap-snapped the twine to make sure it held to the branch before dropping the other end over her head and patting it around her throat like a necklace. Pulled it tight against the flesh under her chin. The beam of a flashlight ripped across her torso; she looked down and saw pale grey faces approaching the base of her tree.
Too late now. Too late now. But let's see if this works.

She slid off the branch without a second thought. The ground raced towards her and for a moment she believed she'd fumble back onto it, the twine's long slack unable to give way to tightness. But then it did — a horrendous wrench at her throat that seized her in the air and swung her like a pendulum. And suddenly Meiko was flying, lingering in space with tiny desperate kicks of her feet. The ground was still two or three feet off. She could not draw a breath through her cleft mouth — could not imagine ever drawing breath again. The pain ballooned in her head as she hanged in suspended animation. Meiko fought off the reflex to grab hold of the twine with both hands and plant her feet into the trunk. She waited for an ocean of silence, the noise of death, to flood her ears. But it didn't. Another sound came, one that made her want to weep.

Laughter.

“Ahh,
Chosunjin
, what do you think you're
doing
?”

“Cut her down!” From the back of the small crowd that had gathered. Yoshimi's voice. “Dammit, men, somebody cut her down right now.”

The shake of the twine as a fist took hold of it, and the touch of a blade that instantly released the tension. Meiko dropped into a heap at the gingko's base, down on all fours as if grovelling, choking on oxygen she didn't want. Someone loosened and then ripped the twine from her throat, grabbed her by the armpit, and yanked her to her feet. She was shoved through the small crowd like a naughty toddler, the soldiers' chuckles ringing in her ears. Meiko opened her eyes and saw Yoshimi at the edge of the crowd, trailing behind it. His face had sunken with a look of betrayal. Meiko turned her eyes away from him and waited for the men to throw her back toward the building. They were in the centre of the field and she wanted to collapse down into it, feel the soft grass on her thighs.

And then came the rattle of sniper fire, snapping open the night like kindling.

Meiko was shoved to the ground. Everyone was turning, diving, aiming their weapons at the far edge of the copse where starbursts danced across the darkness. Meiko hugged the grass, kept her body perfectly flat as soldiers fired and yelled all around her. She squeezed her eyes shut. It occurred to her only later that she should have stood up, tall and proud, an easy target for a sniper's bullet to chop her down, to finish this evening's botched task.

Silence fell then. The gunfire ended as quickly as it had begun.

Meiko opened her eyes and found Yoshimi's face at eye level with hers a few feet off, half his head hidden in the long grass. He lay prostrate in the field with the same sad, dismal stare he'd had at the base of the tree. He blinked once. Concentrated on Meiko so hard — so hard in fact that he was ignoring the black, syrupy hole that had taken ownership of his throat. He gulped and strong little waves of red spurted over the grass. His expression held a thousand regrets.
I ran to you, Meiko
, it said.
As soon as the firing started, I ran to you instead of diving to the ground like I should have. What is this thing I've done?

She closed her eyes, unable to watch the rest. Held an image in her mind of the sky opening up with a bright blare of sun shining down upon them. The sky was wide and filling with cranes, hundreds of wise cranes taking flight toward a world beyond this one.

L
ittle
Chin-ho, ten-year-old boy in the second row, has mastered the comparative tense, and the results are hilarious. It's a Thursday evening in my Junior 4 class and we've just finished a grammar module on irregular adjectives. Riveting stuff, really —
good
,
better
, and
the best
;
bad
,
worse,
and
the worst
. The other kids get it more or less, but Chin-ho — whose English name was “Harold” until two nights ago, when he decided he didn't
want
an English name — has latched on to the term
worse
and made it his own. Now, whenever something even remotely negative happens in class, he punctuates the air with a lispy, drawn-out “Worrrrrrrse!” It sends everybody — including me — into gales of laughter. When someone gives a wrong answer, or I drop a marker on the floor, or separate two girls for whispering, or even assign grammar exercises for homework, he's right there to chastise us all with his new favourite word. I know I should punish him for this ongoing disruption, but it's just too damn funny; a moment of levity in an otherwise frustrating class. These kids are supposedly at a Junior 4 level, but really they're only about a Basic 5. This, sadly, isn't an uncommon occurrence at ABC English Planet. Ms. Kim, in her pedagogical wisdom, will often race batches of students through several levels before they're ready. It astounds me that there are children here who can recite rules to fairly complex English grammar, things some native speakers wouldn't even know — how the subjunctive tense works, where to place the comma in a prepositional phrase — and yet cannot tell me what they did on the weekend. “I is goes over our grandmothers to visit Pusan …” or some other syntactical abomination. This school treats the kids like patrons at a fast-food joint, and my language is the burgers I sling at them just as fast as humanly possible. It's awful.

Except it isn't. Surprise surprise — I find this job rewarding at the oddest moments, times when I can cut through Ms. Kim's lunatic curriculum, this
hagwon
's assembly-line treatment of children, and get the kids to really
grasp
something. Tonight, we move on from comparatives to something I hope they'll enjoy a bit more: adverbs of frequency. I write the five most prominent ones — N
EVER …
R
ARELY …
S
OMETIMES …
U
SUALLY …
A
LWAYS
— across the length of my white board, explain what they mean, and then ask the kids to name habits or actions for each. Hands fly to the ceiling; everyone's eager to participate. The first few answers are predictably banal —
I always breathe; I sometimes cry
. Then things take a turn for the scatological: “I never eat d-d-o-n-g,” says Devon, cheekily.

“Worrrrrrrse!” Chin-ho exclaims.

Now the kids are getting into it, the personalization behind each answer.

“I usually call grandmother on Sundays,” Suzy says.

“I rarely play with my brother,” quips Karen.

“I always do my homework,” says Eddie.

“MichaelTeacher, Eddie
never
do his homework,” Erin grumbles. The kids all laugh. And me, I
get
it, finally — what all of this is supposed to be about. It's not just making them understand the concept. It's about watching those little lights turn on, about getting them to bend their brains creatively.

I
have forgotten what it feels like to fall in love with someone slowly. I don't remember it being so imperialistic, your emotions stalking the other person's attributes, claiming each of them in turn, the word love sneaking into your lexicon. “You know, I
love
this about you …” you find yourself saying; or she, apropos of nothing: “You know, I really
love
that about you …” And on it goes until there are no aspects left to claim, and you end up loving it all — the good, the ridiculous, and especially the parts you don't quite understand, the mysteries. You love it all. “I love
you
” becomes the natural next step.

For three more weeks, Jin and I make these concentric circles around each other, snatching up more and more characteristics as we go. I love the way she sticks out her bottom lip when she's thinking hard. She loves the way my brow furrows when I'm reading something good. I love the flutter of her eyes whenever I say something foolish. She loves my beard, its scruffy coarseness framing my jaw. I even love aspects of Jin that I would normally find untenable in a girl, like her total inability to accept a compliment at face value. She treats blandishments from me not so much with suspicion as with supreme exhaustion, like she's heard it all before. Is it weird that this causes a strange flush of yearning in me, a bubble of desire?

I even love the way she strings me along, keeps me guessing. One Friday night, we join a group of her girlfriends for dinner in Apujung, Seoul's ritziest, most celebrity-rich neighbourhood. The drinks flow and Jin is charming, running circles around these girls, all of whom are giggly, sweet, brittle, and not very fluent in English. I'm enamoured with the deference they pay to Jin, to all she has experienced, the envious curiosity they show over the fact that she has a
waegookin
boyfriend. By the time Jin and I head back to the subway together, I'm feeling brave. Mildly drunk and full of desire for her. “Do you want to come back to Daechi?” I venture.

“No, I have to work in the morning.”

“Yes, at the COEX,” I reply. Implication: a twenty-minute walk from my apartment.

She turns to me, her look inscrutable. “My mother is waiting at home,” is all she says. We descend the subway stairs, buy our tickets, and prepare to be triaged to opposite sides of the platform. “I'll see you next weekend, Michael,” she says lightly, then hustles off without so much as a goodnight peck on my cheek. Before I can even mount a protest, she already has her handphone out and open, her eyes narrowing over its screen as she sends out a text message, probably to her mother. I stand there, watching her go, full of a lust I've never felt before.

And there are attributes we love because we think we can change them, make them stronger. She detests the food I keep in the apartment fridge — can't understand my penchant for bland bags of white bread and sad cartons of skim milk, silvery bags of pre-made kimchi, and store-bought packages of dried seaweed for snacking. Every meal out with Jin becomes a matter of correcting my lazy tastes, with her explaining the intricacies of each dish with little jabs of her chopsticks. From my end, I begin probing the hang-ups she has about her family and stop hiding the fact that I want to meet them, to be introduced to this father who never sleeps and this dragon-like mother who still treats her like an adolescent. Jin gives no quarter on these queries, though mentioned in a moment of weakness that she has no desire to marry a Korean man. She longs to live aboard, like her younger brother “Carl,” who is away studying at a chef school in Los Angeles. Jin would love to move to an English-speaking country, maybe even Canada. She says this one day while squatting down in front of my open fridge to critique the contents of my vegetable crisper. She stands back up and swings around to face me, her hair a-flutter, her eyes falling into mine. “Yeah, I think living in Canada would not be too bad,” she flirts. “What do you think?”

I think:
Don't you dare fucking tease me.
I think:
I
love
the way you tease me.

T
hree weeks and then it happens. The Saturday starts in a swath of innocence. We've been invited to dinner at the home of a young married couple with whom Jin is close friends. “Jack” and “Mindy” live near Wolgok station in the far north end of Seoul. It's a horrendous subway ride from my place in Daechi, involving several transfers. Jin meets me after she finishes work so we can make the trek together. She has explained that Mindy is a literature professor at a nearby university and Jack edits a tourism magazine. “You'll love them, Michael. Fluent in English. Very literary and modern. They're your kind of people.” On the way, Jin asks me why she didn't see Justin in my apartment when she stopped by to get me.

“He's away this weekend,” I tell her. “He went to Seokcho to go hiking with the family he tutors.”

She nods. “He'll be going up Seorak Mountain, obviously,” she says. “Seokcho is very beautiful — right on the ocean.” She gives me a look I can't read. “When does he come back?”

“Not until Monday,” I answer. And she nods again.

We finally arrive in Wolgok and make our way to Jack and Mindy's condo building — a gleaming, silvery edifice standing over a mélange of more run-down apartment tenements. Jack and Mindy buzz us in and we ride the smooth, silent elevator up to their unit on the eighteenth floor. The smiling couple is already waiting for us at their threshold. They welcome us in to the first spacious Korean home I've ever seen. Full wraparound living room leading to an alcove dining area, a large galley kitchen, and a hallway leading down to bed and bath. The floor beneath our feet is not plastic
ondol
covering; it's actual hardwood with a nice cozy heat radiating up from it. There's a massive flat-screen TV on the wall in the living room, surrounded by shelves of neatly stacked books.

Jack and Mindy speak to us in unwavering English, which puts me immediately at ease. A glass of wine appears in my hand and we seat ourselves around their dining room table, with Mindy making occasional trips to the kitchen to tend to whatever food is making that delectable smell. They check in with Jin about her job before turning to ask me how I like teaching children at a
hagwon
. I put a polite spin on my days of slinging English at exhausted kids, and Jack and Mindy nod knowingly; like Jin, they too went through their
hagwon
paces as children, know the Sisyphean stress of it. Jin mentions to Jack that I had worked as a journalist back in Canada, and this allusion causes my spine to kink, that old reminder of a deliberately destroyed career. If he picks up on my discomfort, he doesn't let on; merely mentions that he works with a lot of journalists, though struggles to find good writers in English. Am I a good writer?

Over two more glasses of wine, I learn that Mindy teaches courses on Hemingway and Fitzgerald at the local university, but her true passion lies in what she calls the “linguistically ambitious”; she can draw a straight line from Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess up through Martin Amis and Will Self. “We grabbed each other over Milan Kundera,” Jin pipes up, and I nod in agreement. I'm in a stew of engagement here. Jack seems a little left out; he hasn't read nearly as much as the rest of us. Eventually, Mindy dresses the table with our meal — a rich pork-bone soup, Korean dumplings seared to perfection, and the freshest, spiciest kimchi I have ever tasted. It all goes down nicely with the wine, with the stories we tell and the jokes I make, the generous laughs all around.

After dinner, we move to the couches in the living room. Jack is glowing pleasantly from the wine, slurring his words, and nearly spilling his drink on the white upholstery beneath him. The rest of us playfully chide him about it. He responds by growing a touch more serious: he wants to talk about the news — specifically what's been happening in Iraq since the invasion started. He's impressed, he says, that the Americans took Baghdad so quickly, and they did excellent work rescuing that poor Jessica Lynch girl. Still, he's worried about the outbreaks of looting and violence that have started plaguing the city. I propose that these are not random acts, but rather the beginnings of an insurgency. Jack disagrees; chimes in perfunctorily about freedom, about the Americans yanking the Iraqi people out from under Saddam's thumb.

“Isn't
that
what this is really about?” he sloshes. “Won't all this be a liberation in the end, no matter what America's really there for?”

“No, Jack,” I say. “Every invasion is a rape.” As soon as the word leaves my mouth, there's a gasp in the room. It's Jin. I look at her, there on the other side of the couch, clutching her wine. Her mouth has gone slack and she's staring right into me. I swallow. Turn back to Jack. Continue tentatively. “I mean, maybe not every invasion, but this one certainly could be. I don't think it counts as a seduction if your victim is an unwilling participant. There are
always
consequences when you force violence on a different culture. Trust me, this won't be a simple seduction.” Jack opens his mouth, but then closes it again. Sips his wine.

I look back at Jin. Her gaze is locked into me, but not unpleasantly so. She says nothing while the rest of us natter on for a while longer. She turns to Mindy. “Can I use your washroom?” she asks.

“Of course,” her friend replies. Jin sets down her wine, gets up from the couch. But as she does, she digs out her handphone. Flips it open and dials a number, tucks the phone under her hair as she disappears into the hall. Who on earth is she calling from the bathroom?

It's very late, past midnight, before we finally call it a night. Jack and Mindy shake my hand at the door and tell me I'm welcome back any time. “He's
fascinating
,” Mindy tells Jin, but Jin just nods and looks at her toes. We say our goodbyes and then ride the elevator down to the lobby. When we hit the street heading to the subway, Jin takes my arm and pulls me close.

“Hey, you were pretty quiet there by the end,” I say. “Is everything okay? I didn't overstep my bounds with your friends, did I?”

“Of course not,” she replies. “I just love it when you're in
that
mode, Michael. I didn't want to interrupt you. I just wanted to
listen
. I love … I love
it
.”