Sad Peninsula (17 page)

Greg puckers his freckled face and spits as he talks: “Bah, he knew what I
meant
.”

I turn to a grinning Rob. “Can we get this thing started?”

“No. Where the hell's Justin?” He looks at his watch.

“Rob, he's with his private tonight. He said he'd be late.”

“Fine, we'll start without him.” He reaches down to pull his satchel off the floor, opens it and takes out glossy brochures and business cards that he and Greg have had printed up. He lays them out on the table and Jon Hung takes one up. “The Queen's English,” he reads. “Holiday Camps for Kids.” He shrugs. “This is the dumbest idea I've ever heard.”

“Look, would you give us a chance?” Rob straightens up in his chair. “We all know Korean parents force their kids to study even harder when they're on vacation. They send them to English camps anyway. Why not one owned, organized, and run by native speakers? It only makes sense.”

“So you guys are quitting twelve hours a week at the university for
this
?” I ask. “Rob, I don't think you grasp how much work this would be.”

“It's a
summer camp
. Even with all the prep, it'd only amount to about four months of work a year. We can charge millions of won per kid, and with hundreds of kids signed up we'd make a killing.”

“I think you've confused gross with net,” Jon says.

“Exactly.” I nod. “I mean, where are you going to hold this camp? What are the kids going to eat? Where are the books coming from?”

“Look, irregardless of the expenses, I still think —”

“
Irregardless
?” I laugh at him. “Rob, dude, if you're going to name your company The Queen's English, you should at least learn to speak it.”

“See, this is why I need you on staff, Michael. You have a journalism degree — you're like fucking grammar god!”

“Where's the start-up money coming from?” Jon asks.

“Well, that's what we need from you,” Greg pipes up, stroking his unfortunate mustache. “We're each going to invest 2.5 million won up front.”

“Oh, you
are
out of your fucking mind,” I say to Rob.

“Look, we got tons of teachers around Itaewon interested in this,” Rob says. “But you are my
boys
. I want to get you in on the ground floor.”

I'm about to respond, but just then Justin lumbers through the door, his shoulders slouched, his head down. He pulls a chair up to our table. Looking into his face, I can immediately tell that something is wrong. He doesn't make eye contact at us.
“Yogi yo,”
he calls to the waiter and orders a beer.

“You're late,” Rob says.

He still won't look at us.

“You had a private with Jenny?” I ask. “On a Saturday night? That seems strange.”

“I
thought
I had a private,” he replies.

“It wasn't a private?”

“No. Turns out Jenny and her dad are down in Kjungju for some festival. It was her mom, Sunkyoung, who invited me over. For dinner.” He swallows very slowly. “Dinner — and a proposition.”

Rob and Jon's eyes light up like Menorahs. “I
knew
it.” Rob beams. “I fucking well knew it!”

“Rob, shut up,” Justin says with a point of his finger. “I swear to God, if you say one fucking word I'm going to rip your asshole out and feed it to you.”

Rob just cackles. Cackles at the wit of it.

“What happened?” I ask.

Justin's beer comes and he takes a pull. “I got there to find that Jenny and her dad were nowhere around. Sunkyoung had the table all set, just for the two of us. Kept plying me with red wine all night long. And then asked, in this weird matter-of-fact way, if I would consider being her
boyfriend
.”

“You must have an inkling that this could happen.”

“I suppose. She's only a few years older than me, and her —”

“Is she hot?” Greg Carey asks.

Justin sighs. “Yeah she's hot, as Korean moms go.” We all can't help but laugh. “Look, this is serious. I've been tutoring Jenny for over a year. This family has practically adopted me.”

“Look, this is no big deal,” Jon Hung tries to assure him. “Tons of Korean housewives keep boyfriends on the side. You were telling us that Sunkyoung's husband works, like, ninety hours a week. She's probably not getting
any
at all. I say shag her. She'll probably feel guilty after a few times and break things off. Sure you'll lose the private, but there's tons of other work out there.”

“But I
like
tutoring Jenny. She's a good kid. And I like her family. It, it reminds me of …” But he trails off.

“Did anything actually happen tonight?” I ask.

“Well, we polished off two bottles of Merlot, and the next I know she was sitting in my lap.”

“What can I tell ya?” Greg chuckles. “Never underestimate what loneliness and red wine will do to a woman in her thirties.”

“I'm sorry, who the fuck are you?” Justin snaps. But Greg merely grins at him. “Anyway, I just pushed her off me and fled. I felt bad, but didn't know what else to do.”

“Man, you're a fucking chickenshit,” Rob finally says.

“Yeah, Rob, I'm a chickenshit.” Justin drains his beer, sets the glass down, puts five thousand won on the table and stands up.

“Hey where are you going? I didn't tell you about my —”

Justin glances at the brochures and business cards. “Yeah, whatever it is, Rob, I'm not interested. Have fun in Itaewon, boys.” And then shambles back out the door.

I'm not sure why, but I sit there for a bit longer, chewing on what happened. I'm not even listening as Rob goes up and down his plans again. Finally, I stand up, too.

“Hey, where do you think
you're
going?”

“I'm going to check on him.”

“Please. He's
fine
. What the hell?”

“Rob, do you even know why Justin's in Korea in the first place?”

“Oh, fuck off, Michael.” He folds his arms. “Whatever.”

Back at the apartment, I find Justin in his room cast in the faint light of a single lamp. He's on his bed with his shoulders against the headboard and his big feet dangling over the edge. He looks almost angry, resentful in his solitude, but when he sees me at his door he softens.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey. No Itaewon tonight?”

“No. I changed my mind.”

“Is Jin not around?” he asks, looking at the wall.

“No, she's in Shanghai for the week. She's back on Tuesday.” I swallow. “I kind of wish she was here tonight.”

“Oh yeah? Why's that?”

“Because today is the ten-year anniversary of my mother's death.”

He turns to stare absently at the photos of his son Cody, forever frozen at age six, taped to his headboard. That look of resentment comes back to his face.

“You know it's okay to admit,” I say, “that this thing with Sunkyoung has a lot to do with Cody.”

He looks at me. “I can't remember how much I told you, Michael.”

“A little,” I reply.

This is what I know: By age twenty-three, Justin had earned his education degree, had married his university sweetheart Kathy, and was teaching at a high school in Halifax. A year later, their son Cody was born. In the year 2000, the three of them took their first big family vacation together — a hiking trip to Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland. Negligent, perhaps, to take a six-year-old on such a difficult trek. Distracted by the majesty of those gorges and mountains, they allowed the little guy to get away from them for a few seconds. The seventeen-metre drop beyond a safety rail killed him instantly. Within a year, Justin and Kathy had split up, and within a year of that Justin was in Korea, teaching at the
hagwon
.

“Did I ever tell why Kathy and I got divorced?”

“I've had my hunches.”

“It's because I had an affair.” He sits up. “It happened about four months after Cody died. It was so fucked up, what I did.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It was so stupid,” he says, running his fingers through his hair. “It happened with another teacher at the school. This brief but really intense …
fling
. That's all it was. But that's all it needed to be. I look back now and can't believe the lack of control I showed. I just dove into that opportunity, you know? I needed to do something really destructive, so I could feel like I had power over myself again. That I wasn't just a man who let his son die. You know? I mean, I never realized how destructive sex could be. And the ironic thing is —
the sex was so good
. Like, ridiculously good. The kind of fucking that will cost you a damage deposit.” He laughs but his eyes have gone shiny. “I mean, that woman, the other teacher, made noises with me that Kathy never made in our eleven years together. And the whole time I'm thinking,
You're wrecking everything. This is going to destroy Kathy
. And now look at me, Michael: I'm teaching in fucking Korea, and
everything
here is sex. Itaewon, Hooker Hill, Hongdae. It's all sex, sex, sex. But I don't want to leave, because I don't want to go back to Halifax and face my people. I don't want to face the fact that I willfully destroyed my life.”

“So Kathy found out?”

“Of course she found out. We all taught at the same school. Shit gets around. I tried to protect her — she'd already been through so much over Cody — but she
wanted
me to tell her everything, every fucking fleshy detail. It was as if hearing about me fuck another woman made her grief complete, girded her for what she needed to do. And what she needed to do, she went about so clinically. The lawyer, the dividing up of our stuff, the taking back of her maiden name, all the rest. It was so
amicable
, only because she had closed the door to the idea of not doing it. I thought divorces took forever, but it didn't feel like forever: it felt like one day she was my wife and the next day she wasn't. She was just so
clinical
about it.” He takes a deep breath. “And that's what I saw tonight with Sunkyoung, too. She had that same detached approach when she solicited me, as if asking if I'd help put down new tile in their bathroom or something. Her English isn't great; I thought I'd misheard her. But, no. She was proposing that I become her, her …”

“Her gigolo.”

He laughs. Thankfully, he laughs. “Yeah, her gigolo. And I'm not gonna lie: I am attracted to Sunkyoung. She's sexy, you know, in that Asian way. In that way that Jin is sexy. But I …”

He looks back at his headboard. In the photos, Cody looks so alive, so bursting with little-boy energy. I think he and Sunkyoung's daughter, Jenny, would be roughly the same age.

He turns back to me. “I'm not going to break up another family. I'm not going to allow
sex
to break up another family.”

“Then don't,” I say.

He nods. Looks up at me. “Michael, I'm sorry to hear you're marking such a grim anniversary tonight.”

“It's all right,” I reply. Lost for a moment in my thoughts, I find myself frowning. “Did I ever tell you,” I ask him, “that I showed up drunk at my mother's funeral?”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I've been feeling bad about that all day.”

He chuckles. “In the grand scheme of things, that doesn't seem so awful.”

“Yeah, I know. Still. I wish Jin were around tonight. I could really use her company.”

He nods again. “So you've signed up for another year at the
hagwan
?”

“I have,” I shrug. “Ms. Kim offered and I accepted. I was telling Rob, I like it. I sorta think I'm becoming a proper teacher.”

“So one more year of slinging English like hamburgers, eh? And then after that?”

“I dunno. I have to give it some thought.” I scratch my nose. “I suppose
Jin and I
have to give that some thought.”

S
he
fell from the anonymous role of a cleaning girl and into the anonymous role of a cook in a greasy Pusan diner. The proprietor took one look at the scar on Eun-young's face and refused to let her serve customers — the ROKA and UN soldiers and the few Pusan civilians allowed to mingle with them. “You'll scare them off with that wound,” the madam said. She sensed something unwholesome in this girl who came begging for a job, something that would need to been hidden away from Korean eyes. So she put Eun-young in the kitchen to work in perfect anonymity over the long row of cast-iron stoves, chopping vegetables, cooking rice, setting stews to boil. The only contact Eun-young had with the dining public was when she set completed dishes on the window counter for the madam to carry off to customers. Each time she did, Eun-young would steal a glance over the tables of soldiers, trying to spot a single face that had been in the diner before. There never seemed to be any. These soldiers ate and then moved northward to join the fray. It made her think of the men in the rape camps, enjoying a moment of peaceful pleasure before disappearing, and most likely dying, in the throes of battle.

When the South took back Seoul for the final time, Eun-young resumed her letter-writing to Ji-young. Even if the mail service between their two cities was working, she had no faith that her notes would get through. For the longest time no response came, and Eun-young feared the worst. But eventually a letter did arrive at the rooming house where she was living, the address written in Ji-young's florid scrawl. The war had changed very little about her sister's obsessions. She was eighteen now — and finally engaged. “His name is Chung Hee and he's an army mechanic,” she wrote. “He's got flat feet so he can't be a soldier proper. But he's a genius when it comes to the modern engine and
he's very good with his hands
.” She underlined this part with a teenager's glee. “He promises to marry me as soon as this war is over. I hope he survives!” Eun-young frowned at the note.
All out civil war, death, and destruction, Seoul being blown to bits, and she's still fixated on finding a husband
.

In her next letter, Ji-young raised the inevitable question: “And what about you, dear sister? You are still a marriageable age. Please write and tell me you've found your own man to love and take care of you.” Eun-young tore this letter into little pieces.
You know nothing
, she wanted to write back.
Haven't you figured out yet what I was, Ji-young? You have no clue how lucky you are, to have been born five years after me and not have this disgrace written all over you.

Her anger carried itself over to her work in the diner. She often looked out from the kitchen to the bowed heads of soldiers eating, who never once looked up at her or smiled or asked her name. To them, she was but a mere shadow moving pots and pans around the kitchen. She looked out over them and thought:
Eat your dinners, and then go meet your deaths already.

E
vidence of the armistice came almost immediately. Within a couple weeks of the conflict's end, Eun-young noticed that customers
had
started to become familiar faces, had begun returning to the diner on a regular basis. At first these men continued to wear their army fatigues, but before long they began showing up in civilian clothes — just regular customers happy about their return to Pusan and the passage into shaky peace with the North.

To celebrate the armistice, the madam bought the building next door and knocked out the wall between it and the diner in order to turn the new space into a singing room. Eun-young continued working for her, putting in even longer hours. (She didn't even ask for time off when the letter came announcing Ji-young's wedding date; Chung Hee was free of the army and kept his promise to marry her right away.) The restaurant got so busy that the madam even began allowing Eun-young to interact with customers, letting her clear dirty dishes from the tables. Eun-young was happy for these moments of freedom from the sweltering stoves in the back. She kept her head low as she cleaned up after patrons, her hair over her face. She even refused to look up when one of the regulars, a young man, a boy really, tossed a curious smile her way. What does
he
want? What's
he
smiling at? She ignored him. Ignored how the boy's eyes would follow her whenever she limped back to the kitchen with her heavy tray of dishes propped on her shoulder.

The construction of the singing room disrupted things for several weeks. The drilling, the hammering, the thin mist of dust hanging in the air annoyed the regulars constantly. The sudden blast of banging would break conversations in mid sentence, send the patrons into a sea of silence until it stopped. Every day the regulars threatened not to come back until the work was done and every day Eun-young mumbled that they should take their complaints up with the madam who owned the place.

One night, just before close, the madam was in the other room arguing about something with the builders, and Eun-young was left alone in the kitchen to wash up for the night. She stood at the metal sink scrubbing down the wide cast-iron woks before drying and hanging them on hooks on the wall. She moved to the cupboard to fetch a fresh drying towel, and discovered with a start that one of the regulars had wandered back into the kitchen. It was the boy she had noticed staring at her, the one who had attempted smiling. He stood in front of the curtain over the doorway, his cap in his hands. He had a podgy face, as if full of baby fat, but his hair was still carved into the crew cut of a brutal soldier.

“Excuse me,” she barked from behind her hair, “but you're not allowed back here.”

“I have a question.”

“If you have a grievance, take it up with the madam.”

“I don't have a grievance,” he said. “I have a question.”

Eun-young just kept her head bowed.

“Do you sing?” he asked.

Her surprise caught in her throat. She nearly looked up, but didn't.

“When the room next door is finished,” he went on, “will you be singing in it?”

Her hand moved to rub absently at her neck. “No. I don't
sing
.” A mumble so low she wondered if he heard it.

He lowered his head a little, trying to catch her eyes. “What's your name?”

She said nothing. Felt her
han
swell and squeeze her. Felt that familiar flush of shame on her skin. He waited, but she wouldn't answer.

“Mine is Po,” he said. “Don't let the haircut fool you — I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm moving into construction work. I'm very fascinated by what they're doing next door.” He shifted his cap in his hands. “What's your name?” he asked again, and took a step closer.

The rush of
han
overtook her. Eun-young did raise her face then, threw back her hair so this Po fellow could get a good look at the scar that cleft her lip. “You're not allowed — in
here
,” she spat, giving him a full view of her ugliness.

She waited, but his eyes wouldn't fall to the scar, not for a second. And his smile wouldn't slip away. “Okay,” he said pleasantly enough, and nodded at the curtain over the door. “Maybe I'll talk to you out there, then.”

A
nd talk to her he did. Po was in three or four evenings a week, usually with friends, and he would always break free of their banter to speak to Eun-young whenever she was out clearing tables. She in turn refused to acknowledge him. He learned her name only when the madam yelled at her after she accidentally dropped a stone pot on the tiled floor, drawing noisy attention to herself. One day, as Eun-young was wiping down a table near where Po was sitting, she thought she heard one of his young friends chuckle at him: “Why do you keep staring at her? What do you see in that
old hag
anyway?” She returned to the kitchen in a fume of humiliation, tossing her dish cloth into the corner.
Old hag? I'm twenty-five. I'm not a
hag.
I'm … I'm …
What was the phrase that Ji-young kept using in her letters?
A marriageable age. I am still a marriageable age.
She wanted to go back out and scream that at Po's friends, yell it right in their faces.

That night, a letter from Ji-young arrived at the rooming house. Eun-young opened it to find a wedding photograph included inside. The black-and-white image showed Ji-young and Chung Hee dressed in traditional wedding garb — thick robes of silk and elaborate headgear — and sitting on a small, plush couch. They were barely touching and their faces held a stony Korean austerity. Yet Eun-young sensed a sweet mystery sweeping under her sister's chastity. A riptide of triumph.

T
he alcohol was flowing on opening night of the singing room. There were to be four performers — Po included — and a master of ceremonies, a hulking former army sergeant, to introduce each of them. But the MC had been drinking
baekseju
since the early afternoon, one golden bottle after another, and by the time the crowd had filled the singing room in the evening, he was barely able to get up from the table in the diner. The audience, seated in wooden chairs in front of the stage in the next room, was growing impatient. Finally the MC rose from the table and wobbled his bulk through the adjoining door. He took the stage and began slurring into the microphone, welcoming everyone and blathering about how grateful he was that this city, this country, had achieved enough peace to allow a night like this to happen. Eun-young moved among the audience with her tray on her hip, passing out bottles of beer and
soju
and
baekseju
as the first singer took to the stage. He strapped on the guitar that was waiting for him and stood under the stage's bright, colourful lights.

He was horrible. He introduced his three Korean folk songs with lengthy, disjointed preambles that lasted longer than the songs themselves. His voice was shrill and out of tune as he sang ancient tales of their ancestors fighting off foreign invaders. The second singer was just as bad. He clearly didn't know his selection of tunes well enough and kept restarting them each time he flubbed on the guitar. The third performer opted to belt out an off-key medley of American jazz tunes, stuttering through the English.

By the time Po took the stage, the audience was agitated. Eun-young stopped serving and found a darkened corner of the room to stand and watch him, away from the madam's vigilant gaze. Eun-young's eyes followed Po as he jogged up to microphone. He strapped on the guitar, tuned it gently, nodded once, and then launched into a fitful but competent instrumental piece. It started with a slow, methodical tempo but then climbed in its pace. When he finished the tune, the audience members set down their various bottles and applauded loudly. Po played three more short tunes, singing out lyrics that echoed over the room. But then he set the guitar aside and began climbing back down from the stage without so much as a bow. The drunken MC dashed to his feet from his place in the front row, applauding until he could get a hold of Po's arm and pull him back up. “Play another!” he sloshed. “Play another!” And so Po did, bashfully. And then tried to leave the stage again. The audience joined in the MC's chorus. “Play another!” So Po played another, and then another, and then was finally allowed to sit.

It wasn't that he had stolen the show. His playing had been merely competent, not extraordinary. But it was what Eun-young saw Po do afterwards as she resumed her serving, manoeuvering around chairs and tables, that caused her to pause. She watched as he mingled with the other singers and bowed to audience members who came up to greet them. When one of them became profuse in his praise, Po would not relish it or puff up his chest, even a little. Instead, he paid a magnanimous but unnecessary deference to the
lesser
singers. He was doing this, she saw, out of a sense of genuine civility, a deep well of kindness that nourished his every action.
He is the rarest of men
, she realized as she watched him.
He is decent — more decent than even he realizes.

Whenever Eun-young passed by with her tray, Po would look up from where he was chatting and throw a tight, knowing smile her way. And when he did, Eun-young would look at the floor and grit her teeth, suffocating under the weight of a new sensation that she could not name.
Oh my dear sister
, she heard Ji-young's voice ring in her head.
What you're feeling
does
have a name. It's called desire.

And so just once, she did look up into Po's plump face and return his smile, wondering:
Is it possible for a soldier to be this gentle?

H
e asked her to go for a walk with him on her day off, and she agreed.

It was a Sunday morning and they strolled together through the busy fish markets of Pusan harbour. As they walked along the wooden wharfs and past the long metal fences that opened out to the sea, the two of them watched the morning's chaos unfold around them. Fishermen just coming off their late-night boats lugged ship-to-shore boxes teeming with their catches; and the women working the markets stood ready to haggle with them in great animation. It was like a symphony of wheeling and dealing, a vibrancy that put Po at ease. They would have stayed and soaked it in all morning, except they were shooed away by a grouchy fishmonger when it became apparent they weren't going to buy anything.

Po and Eun-young stopped at a small restaurant just beyond the market's edge for a late breakfast of king crab and rice. They sat on the floor at a low table and manoeuvered their chopsticks around the food, Po stopping to break up the crab shells for Eun-young without asking. As he did, he said: “I never noticed before, Eun-young, but you have a Seoul accent.”

She nodded. “Yes. I am from Seoul.” She explained about her job with the provisional regime and how it had meant fleeing south to Pusan like so many other Seoulites once the North rolled in.