Sad Peninsula (16 page)

Eun-young went home, and followed the regimen that the doctor had prescribed. It took seven months, but eventually the worst of her symptoms subsided.

But then the war broke out.

T
here was no time to prepare. Her identification papers clearly marked her as an employee of the fleeing regime. As the tanks rolled in and the Communists took control, she would need to escape as well. Imprisonment or even death awaited her if she didn't.

No last letter to Ji-young; no final sojourn through the late-night streets to slip a note under the family door.
Father will not let you run. If I know him at all, he'll hold his ground even as the bombs fall and the killing begins. Stay safe, Ji-young. Stay out of school, stay in the cellar, stay underground with your diaries and your daydreams of boys for as long as you can.

Eun-young needed to pack whatever belongings she could and escape to the roads that led southward. She was not alone. Streams of refugees clogged the streets leading out of Seoul. People travelled any way they could — on foot, by bicycle, in cars or trucks — to stay ahead of the advancing North Korean army. In Suwon, Eun-young found an abandoned motorbike in a back alley next to a bakery. When its fuel tank ran dry just north of Kwangju, she hitched a ride with a family in a pick-up truck; they had just enough space for her to squat down in the back.

The long, sad streams of refugees were pushed south, and then farther south.
Will they shove us into the sea?
Eun-young thought.
What happens if we run out of land to flee to?
Within a few days she found herself back in Pusan, the last holdout of the Republic of Korea. Word spread that the Americans had made an audacious landing at Incheon, cutting off the North's supply chains southward.

I
n
retrospect, it was probably in poor taste to show up drunk at my mother's funeral after she had died of cirrhosis of the liver. There are regrets in a man's life that he feels less keenly than others — a mere sprain rather than something broken, something poorly set that never heals right. I remember thinking this as Cora and I staggered up the steps of St. George's church in Halifax on that slushy afternoon in January 1994.
I'm going to regret this later
, my mind had warbled,
but not much.
Thank God for Cora. She had not dissuaded me when I suggested we go down to the Nautical Pub when it opened at 11:00, giving us three and half hours of solid drinking before I was due at the church. She and I had been dating for about four months at this point and were still tentative with each other — not
sexually
mind you, but tentative in the sense that we wouldn't yet criticize the things that annoyed or alarmed us about the other. If she was worried by the sight of me pounding back a succession of pitchers in my jacket and tie there at the Nautical, she didn't let on. Just watched me with her silvery blue eyes and steeled herself against anything that might erupt from my sadness. I appreciated that, the way she allowed me to talk in bursts and then fall into long silences, did not grow impatient when I took lengthy stares out the window at the lazy grey harbour, at the container ships heading out to sea. Now, on the steps of St. George's, she felt compelled to parent me a little. Actually straightened my tie and patted down the cowlick I would lose to baldness years later.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

“Of course,” I replied. “You only get to bury your mother once.”

We moved through the narthex to stand before the rows of pews beneath the tall white dome. There, sitting in the front bench, was my older sister Heidi. She was surrounded by the minister, and the funeral director, and several altar boys. In the grips, she was, of one of her many fanatical outbursts of grief since we had pulled the sheet over Mom four days earlier. Her body was hunched, her shoulders bouncing, the minister kneeling in the aisle by her side with her hands in his, and Heidi's seven-year-old daughter, Soleil, sitting next to them and looking a bit stunned at the sight of her mother's grief. I stood there and watched Heidi in her performance. It had been ten years since she had run away from home, and I had seen her back in Halifax only a few times since and always at her worst, always at the apex of some personal catastrophe that she took out on Mom. I thought about all those arguments that had practically taken on a callisthenic property. And now here Heidi was, jiggling in regret like Jell-O. Not so much, I suspected, over the tragic end to our mother, but at the solipsistic remorse that her death kicked up like mud. And I blame the beer for what I thought then, for what I nearly hollered aloud down the empty pews:
You fucking fraud.

We walked up to face them. Heidi, at this point in her life, was at the peak of her tattoo phase: beneath her frilly black dress, I could see the shadow of eagle wings around her collarbones, the silhouette of a spider's web on her shoulder. Soleil gave a shy little wave when she saw us, her tired blond hair the colour of mashed bananas and falling all over her own black dress. When Heidi looked up, her face was a rosy red carnival of tears.

“Where have you
been
?” she barked at me. Looked at her watch. “Michael, it's nearly three. Could you not have gotten here sooner?”

“Sorry, I spent the morning …” and here had to choose my word carefully, “… thinking.”

The minister stood and looked to ease our tension with his hardened Anglican calm. He shook my hand and offered his condolences. “We have some business to take care of before your guests arrive,” he said. “Shall we go into the other room and say goodbye?” So off we went to see Mom one last time in her open casket, all tucked in and tarted up.

An hour later, the pews were barely peppered by the family and friends who bothered to show up; their scant numbers seemed even smaller in that massive house of worship. Throughout the service, I kept twisting with great drama around in my seat to cast a glare from one near-stranger to another, these benighted uncles and dim-eyed cousins who had stayed eternally on the sidelines while my mother destroyed herself.
Haven't seen you in five years … haven't seen you in two … I don't even know who that person is …
A dishevelled half-uncle of mine had shown up wearing a checkered lumberjack coat — a Cape Breton dinner jacket, we called it — and a crust of dried toothpaste around his mouth. The sight of him filled my eyes with tears. “Fucking asshole,” I slurred. “Could he not have shown her some respect?”

“Shh-shh,” Cora just said, patting my arm.

With rituals done, we made a slow procession over to Camp Hill Cemetery. One more quick prayer over the green brands and then we lowered Mom down into that rectangle carved in the slushy earth. An aunt offered to have everyone back to her place for coffee. Heidi trembled her acquiescence — she and Soleil still had a couple of hours before they were due at the airport for their flight back to the west coast. Gazes turned to me. Cora straightened me up from where I was leaning blasphemously against a gravestone, and I looked from face to face. Saw genuine welcome there: this paltry ensemble of my family were finally, after ten years, reaching out to help me. And maybe I do regret it, not accepting their rare offer of fellowship. But can you blame me? I was twenty going on twenty-one — hotheaded and stupid. Maybe if I
had
taken that olive branch, then other things,
the whole thing
, would have worked out differently — to have family around years later when my life really fell apart.

I shook my head.
No.

“
Michael
…”

No, Heidi. Who you turn to when your mother dies speaks volumes about where your heart is. And my heart wasn't with these people. I squeezed Cora's arm.
This
is where I am. Only here. And so we walked away, dispersing as if I were just another family acquaintance.

“What do you want to do?” Cora asked as we milled on the icy sidewalk outside Camp Hill.

“Let's go get a
drink
,” I said cheerily.

“I think you've had enough.”

I sighed. “Can we go back to your place?”

“That's more like it.”

So we crossed the road to her bachelor apartment on Summer St. I always loved walking into that delightfully feminine nest, so bursting with Cora's lovely smells and competent decor. After we settled in, she cooked me dinner and we watched the news, like the good journalism students we were. Afterwards, I allowed her lead me by the arms over to her bed. How quickly my disposition changed — limpid grief transformed into ferocious lust. And what of those milestones we achieved in bed that night? For the first time, we had sex without a condom. For the first time, I told her that I loved her – weeping out those words, in cliché fashion, at the explosive peak of my excitement. But she grew distant as we ramped down together. I think I may have apologized. “Hey, it's okay,” she said, kissing my wet face. “I'm on the Pill. Hey, hey. It's alright.” She disentangled herself from me and toddled off the bathroom as if trying to walk while holding a bar of soap between her legs. She returned a few minutes later to find me on my stomach. Eased herself onto my back and stretched her arms out over mine. “Of course I love you, too, Michael,” she whispered into my neck. “Of course I do.” Convincing herself, I suppose.

E
ven after five years together, I felt like I had bore witness to only a small portion of Cora's mysteries. Sometimes you learn things too late about a woman, about how her emotional response can be so tied to seemingly innocuous sensations. The colour of the seats on a bus, the smell of stale coffee, the feel of rough stone. They can set things off. Cause a churning.

I would love to know what sensation set off Cora's final conclusion:
I don't love Michael.
I imagine it a simple thing, happening as it does in some purple-prose short story: the texture of an undercooked pepper from some evening's pasta sauce, or maybe the sound of the newspaper hitting the landing in
just a certain way
. Whatever it was, it triggered a remorseless instant of emotional truth for her:
I don't love Michael. And I'll be ruined in a thousand little ways if I stay with him.
And I would love to know what sensory experience caused her to fall so completely in love with her Quebecois coworker, Denis-never-Dennis. Again, something very basic. The way he raised his wrists while typing up his radio stories, maybe, or the gleam of the gel in his hair under the newsroom's fluorescent lights. All I know is that she took him deeply inside her, made him the centrepiece castle in her busy emotional aquarium.
He is IT
, she realized one day with irrevocable certainty.
And I've got to have him.

At least, that's how I imagined it going down.

I
mark the ten-year anniversary of my mother's death in a
Jokki-Jokki
bar in Daechi with Rob Cruise and Jon Hung. We sit at a wooden table with glasses of beer and little rings of puffed rice set out in bowls in front of us. Asian lanterns hang everywhere and frantic K-pop jangles from the speaker above our heads. Rob has summoned us here for a “business proposition,” though he's being coy about what it is. He's holding off on details until Justin arrives, as well as a new friend that he's made at the university — a guy named Greg Carey. While we wait, I break the news to Rob that I've signed up for another twelve months at ABC English Planet. His reaction is predictably hysterical.

“Are you kidding me? Are you
fucking kidding me
?”

“No, I'm serious. I signed the contract yesterday. I've begun to like it, Rob. I mean Ms. Kim is still insane, but I like teaching the kids. I … I
really
like it.”

“Ah,
fuck me
, man!” He leans back against the wall, his shoulders taut with genuine disappointment. It gets to me. Even after a year of knowing Rob, of knowing
what he is
, I still feel that need to seek his approval. “You're a brilliant man, Michael,” he says almost to himself. “I can't believe you're going to rot away in that shithole for another year.”

“I can't believe you're quitting your university gig,” I counter. “It's twelve hours a week, Rob. What, you can't handle twelve hours a week?”

He leans back in, grabs his beer glass, eyes Jon and me both. “You guys think university gigs are the bomb, but it's a fucking lie. First of all, the pay is
crap
. When I'm not on campus, I'm hustling all over this city for privates. I work harder now than I ever did. Second of all, the students are
shite
. This country is so ass backwards: they work little kids to the bone all the way up through high school; they get to university and know they've made it, and don't want to do
fuck
all
. I'm sick of it, man.”

“You seem to get sick of a lot of things, and rather quickly,” Jon Hung points out. He himself left the
hagwon
a few months ago and now works for the KOSPI, doing some sort of English-based stock analysis. “Rob, you're like a seagull looking for a rock to land on, and crapping over everything as you go.”

“Hey, shut up, I definitely need you for this. You've got half an MBA. You're gonna run the business end of things.”

“Rob …” Jon sighs at him.

“Look, just hear me out. Trust me, this is an excellent idea. We're all going to make butt-loads of money. Where's your entrepreneurial spirit?”

Just then, the notorious Greg Carey comes through the door and joins our table when Rob waves him down. I say notorious because, though this is my first meeting with Greg, Rob has regaled us with tales about him since they met five months ago. They've already taken two holidays together to Puket, Thailand, and the priapic adventures that resulted are beyond anything I could imagine. This man has achieved a level of legend in my mind. He's in his late thirties, even older than Rob, and has been Korea for seven years. He worked in a succession of shitty
hagwons
, survived the IMF crisis, and has now become the epitome of everything Rob wishes
he
could be: an expat Canadian who works very little, makes obscene amounts of money under the table, and flees to the whorehouses of Southeast Asia at every opportunity.

“Have you told them our idea?” he says as he sidles up to our table.

“
My
idea,” Rob corrects him. “No, we're still waiting for one guy to show up.”

I eye Greg up and down as he slips out of his winter coat and drops it on a hook on the wall. He has fiery red hair, a face covered by a galaxy of freckles and an unfortunate mustache.

Before we can go on, Greg begins snapping his fingers in the air to summon our Korean waiter. “Hey!
Hey
!” he yells.

The guy comes over in his apron and smiles politely.

“Bring-ah me-ah some a beer-uhh,” Greg chimes at him. The waiter looks confused but continues to smile. “Some beeeer-uhhh,” Greg repeats. “Bring-ah me some a beer-uhh. Some beeer-uuhhhh.” The waiter, still smiling, blinks and looks to the rest of us for help. Rob has burst into braying laughter over this — I would expect nothing less of him — but shockingly, so has Jon Hung. Perhaps he's forgotten that he himself is half Korean.

“Jeo'ghee'yoh.”
I nod gently at the waiter.
“Maek'ju jusaeyoh. Cass. Oh'bec cee-cee, yo.”

He bows at me, still smiling.
“Neh, meak'ju, neh.”
And goes back to the bar to fetch it. Rob Cruise leers at me, oleaginous.
Ahh, I see Jin has trained you well.