I WANTED TO BE A writer. I wanted to suffer loneliness and rejection till I became interesting enough to hold people’s attention. I wanted to create perfect sentences that would make people lean forward and listen. I wanted my sacrifices to be instantly rewarded with fame and money, and I wanted to look down on fame and money as if they were as natural as breathing. I wanted to eat dinner late at night at one of the downtown spots I read about in magazines where you had to be known to get a table. I had an anachronistic interest in Elaine’s, where Woody Allen went, not realizing it wasn’t a happening spot anymore. I wanted to go to parties at The Paris Review and feel as if I belonged, as if it weren’t a pretentious and self-conscious thing to do.
Anything to counteract the ocean of sadness that felt as if it would drown me.
The problem was that I didn’t know how to write, so I went to writing school to learn. On the first day, I found that the other students were extremely smart people who also, weirdly, looked like models. They had the best repartee in the world. The zingers shot through the air in the designated smoking room all day, which was thick with haze. They were always there and never seemed to go home; they sat all day in the exact same chairs in front of the ashtray, in postures of refined bemusement. But then when it was their turn to submit work to class they handed out stories of great beauty.
How was this possible? I would pull all the stories from the workshops and read them, burning with envy and confusion. I would go back to my apartment and lie in bed wondering what was wrong with me. And then I would sit in front of my clunky desktop computer with the green writing on the screen and wait for inspiration to strike, until the waiting became unbearable and I jumped up and began pacing the apartment.
It turned out that I would do anything to become a writer except write. Actually putting words on the page gave me a terrible feeling as if I had inadvertently, in a moment of forgetfulness, pressed a button that would destroy the world. I would have a seizure of terror, and then feel sad and guilty and intensely nostalgic for the time before I killed everyone. I would squeeze my eyes shut and then open them again to see the world still there, undestroyed. But even then the feeling didn’t go away; it just started over again with the next sentence.
The problem was that I was trying to write a novel about what happened to my father—to us. When my father, a criminal defense lawyer, went to jail, it had destroyed us. I remember wanting to exonerate him, justify him, remove his pain. I wanted to express my anger and love. But I felt guilty and ashamed for even mentioning it, and this crosscurrent made it impossible to say anything.
What I think I secretly wanted was to be the kind of person who could write, who wasn’t afraid of speaking. And I wanted to take this terrible experience and profit from it, make it something good.
It was just when the money was, in fact, running out, and my sense of panic was going from hypothetical to real, that I got a call from a Korean American woman I knew at college. Her father was a professor of Korean Buddhism, a former Buddhist monk, who wanted to start a publishing company to produce scholarly books on Korean religions. But he didn’t know anything about publishing and needed help. Was I interested in a job?
“I don’t know anything about publishing, either.”
“You’re a writer,” she said. “You lived in Japan. And you’re the only person I can think of who might possibly get along with my father.”
A few days later, Prof. Park picked me up outside of my apartment building in Manhattan and drove us to a Korean barbecue place somewhere deep in Queens, a large smoky hall where no English seemed to be spoken. We sat opposite each other, wearing bibs.
“Robert,” he said, with a wonderfully formal manner possessed only by foreign speakers who have mastered the language from outside and know it as a thing of elegance and beauty. “I have asked you here today because we are in a time of crisis.”
Crisis was something I definitely understood. I liked Prof. Park already: his sense of occasion, and the way he gave a slow snap to certain words, as if they were bones and he was breaking them open to eat the marrow.
“Korean religious studies in America are in the most extreme danger,” he continued. “A new generation of American scholars has completely misunderstood the fundamental nature of Korean Buddhism, and they are spreading their false views throughout the academy. They treat it as if it were a philosophy, a collection of clever ideas like structuralism or postmodernism, and not a religion. They do not understand that Buddhism is about salvation. He put down the spare rib in his hands and wiped his fingers on his bib. “Robert, the world needs salvation. That is why I must risk everything to save Korean Buddhist studies in America. But I can’t do it alone—I don’t have the strength.” He pantomimed exhaustion, slumping his shoulders as if under a great weight.
“How can I help?” I asked.
“I can’t communicate with most Americans so easily. But you’re different. You understand.”
I looked over at Prof. Park, across the table with its smoky brazier and many plates. He looked to be in his early fifties, about the age my father was when he first came under investigation and our world began to shift and crack beneath us. “I’ll take the job,” I said.
“I’m glad to hear that.” He reached into the old leather satchel on the floor by his chair and handed me a copy of his book, Buddhist Faith and Sudden Enlightenment. “Now we must begin your education.”
Back at home, I stayed up till dawn reading that beautiful little book, unable to put it down. Buddhist Faith is about the battle between faith and doubt, and the central role of faith in the Buddhist enlightenment process. As Prof. Park describes it, Korean Son Buddhism believes that Great Doubt, the beginner’s fear that he or she will never reach enlightenment, can’t simply be replaced with the standard tenet of Buddhist belief, the idea that “in fact there’s nothing to reach, because you are already a perfect Buddha.” There needs to be an intermediary step first, a bridge. That bridge is called “Patriarchal Faith,” meaning faith in the Patriarchs, the generations of practitioners who achieved enlightenment ahead of you. Son practitioners are taught to believe in the Patriarchs first, until the act of faith becomes so deeply rooted in them that it doesn’t need an explanation or object: it just is.
Though I’d studied Japanese literature and lived in Japan, I’d always had minimal tolerance for Buddhist theory: it was too dry for me, too abstract. Looking back, I think Prof. Park’s book just happened to map onto my current situation with uncanny precision: on the one hand, I absolutely had to write my novel; on the other hand, I absolutely had to not write it. I saw no way of leaping over that contradiction and had stopped believing that I ever would. All I could envision was continuing just as I was, writing and erasing, occasionally stopping by my parents’ apartment to see if my father was answering his office phone as himself rather than an imaginary secretary.
And that was the big difference between my world and the world described in Prof. Park’s book: I had no one to put my faith in. The closest thing I had to a Patriarch, my father, was a strange and melancholy disaster who sat at home much of the day, eating great quantities of leftovers and downing antidepressants.
Working for Prof. Park distracted me from my stuckness. In his office, I sat at a little desk next to his big one and wrote elaborate letters for him in his formal style, the sort of ornately polite correspondence not seen since the advent of the telephone. Most of those letters were written for other people, pawns in various schemes he was cooking up to save Korean religious studies. We wrote them for the president of the university to use, thanking one or another donor in Korea for his or her generous support. We wrote letters for those donors to send back to the president, reiterating their belief in the urgency of our mission and hinting at a desire to donate even more, if the university would only increase its support, too. We wrote letters for various Korean scholars to send to the donors and the president, expressing their belief that the Korean Studies Publication Project would change the direction of scholarship in the U.S. In each case, Prof. Park would put a copy of the letter in a file he was keeping, “for the record.” Someone reading that file would have thought there was a vast network of extremely ceremonious people out in the world, deeply worried about the fate of Korean religious studies, but also quietly hopeful, if only we act now.
When we ran out of letters to write, Prof. Park would lean back in his big chair and talk about Buddhism. These weren’t conversations so much as beautiful monologues, rhapsodies, incredibly fluent, passionate, grand. I would put down my pen, forgetting the manuscripts that still needed editing, feeling an odd sense of peace settle over me—completely unaware of how the moment recalled other moments, long gone, when I would sit in my father’s office and watch him entertain clients with stories about the criminal courts. I was too young to really understand those stories, which were twisty, dark, absurdist. But I had total faith in the message encoded in his voice, which seemed to imply that only he knew how to keep us all safe. The more complicated and bewildering the things he described, the safer I always felt.
As Prof. Park talked, the light from the big window behind him would start to drop, turning the room golden and melancholy, and I would give up on catching the five p.m. train back to the city. I had a sense that he was lonely and didn’t want to go home, and on some level that was okay with me, because the only thing waiting back in New York was my novel, with all its unfinished sentences.
And then one evening he called me up at home, where I was at the computer, painstakingly erasing lines from the novel. “Robert, I am afraid I need your help.” He explained that he had a paper due at the end of the week for a conference on interfaith dialogue and he hadn’t been able to get to it. “Sometimes I get so busy helping others that I forget to help myself.” He gave a pained laugh, and then launched immediately into a hyper-articulate discussion of Jesus and Buddha and how they were really one and the same. “Can you edit that for me?”
“Email me some text and I’ll whip it into shape.”
“There isn’t time. Just write it exactly as I said it.”
“Prof. Park, you forget that I don’t really know anything about Buddhism.”
“I trust you.” He hung up before I could properly object.
I hadn’t taken any notes, and the words now hovered in the silence, just out of reach of my memory. What remained was the resonance of his voice, the mixture of wonder and excitement and delight in his own smartness that was the essence of Prof. Park. I began to write, imagining that I was at the little desk in his office, and that he was at the big desk, dictating, as we did with the letters. And then, as I gained momentum, things blurred and I was sort of me and sort of him, speaking and listening, grabbing the words out of the stillness of the room, which is how I first became at least semi-aware that there might be some use to forgetting who held the pen.
ONE OF OUR AUTHORS, a Korean professor working at a university in the Washington area, was sending us chapters as he completed them, racing to finish the manuscript in time for tenure—when suddenly the chapters stopped coming, and Prof. Park told me, “You need to go down there and finish it for him.”
“But I can’t do that.” I had my own book to write. I didn’t want to lose the delicate sense of forward motion, of possibility.
“If he doesn’t finish, he won’t get tenure, and if he doesn’t get tenure, he’ll lose his job. We can’t let that happen.”
Prof. Park imagined himself the éminence grise of Korean religious studies in the U.S. He had a network of younger Korean academics whom he watched, prodded, nurtured. One thing the Korean Studies Publication Project did was publish their first books and help them get tenure.
I took Amtrak from Penn Station to somewhere in suburban Maryland, got off, and walked down the stairs to the parking lot, where the professor was supposed to be waiting for me. We’d never met before, but spotting him was easy because he was the only Asian around: A short, stocky Korean man in a raincoat buttoned to the neck, smoking a pipe.
“Robert Siegel?” he asked.
“That’s me.”
We drove to one of those magically odd subdivisions where a single house has replicated itself everywhere in slightly altered shapes, and thus seems to imply that you are not awake but dreaming. His wife met us at the door, a very small Korean woman dressed in surgical scrubs. She was an operating room nurse who assisted in ocular surgery, and she had the brisk, no-nonsense air of someone who handles tiny knives meant for eyeballs. I could tell right away that she was deeply irritated with the professor—irritated that he had fucked up and needed someone to rescue him. As if to drive the point home, she sat me down in the living room and had their little boy play Chopin on the piano. He was maybe ten years old, pear shaped, with a crew cut and complicated, intelligent eyes, and his small chubby fingers flew over the keys.
“Pretty good, no?” she said to me.
“Marvelous,” I answered.
“He practices every day.”
The professor seemed to feel their dual judgment acutely, and as a result his expression grew more and more pompous and dignified. He had a beard but no mustache; his upper lip was shaved and looked bare and vulnerable. It made him seem like an old-time ship’s captain out of Melville, the kind with vast knowledge of scripture and a tragic sense of the future.
“Come,” he said to me. “Let me show you to your room.”
He took me up to the attic, which had been renovated into a small guest room but still had the low, sloping ceiling that made you aware of the roof’s curvature, its roofiness.
“You’ll see I have an outline and notes for you to use,” he said, pointing to a thick folder on the desk by the bed. “And all the English sources I’ve been citing.” Beside the desk were two stacks of books bristling with Post-its.
“That’s great,” I said. “This should be no problem.”
“Writing in English was hard, but I thought I could make it to the end.” He looked distressed, which for him meant intensely dignified, but with an unhinged glint in the eyes.
“Well, you got most of the way,” I said, trying to reassure him. “That’s pretty awesome.”
“But then something happened. I sat for days, unable to write the next sentence. What do you call that, writer’s block?”
“Yes, writer’s block,” I said.
“Not even a single sentence,” he said, sounding bewildered.
I spent almost two weeks in that attic, writing the professor’s book for him. Mornings I would type as fast as I could, using his outline and notes and quotes from the volumes stacked by the desk. Afternoons, he and I would take long walks through the subdivision, discussing the material, which was full of complicated numerical schemata in keeping with neo-Confucian metaphysical commentary: the four elements and six principles, the nine essences and twelve signs. Most interesting to me was the view of language itself, the belief that it was a mystical force with the power to shape reality, something like a magic spell. Use the right words in the right way, and nations would become prosperous, families happy.
“What do you think of that?” I asked the professor.
He had his raincoat buttoned up to the neck as he trudged along, smoking his pipe. “They didn’t know about writer’s block back then.”
The midwinter light was falling, turning the street a dark shade of purple. Since the houses all looked more or less the same, we could have walked into any one of them and been home, for all I knew. The result was an inexplicable nostalgia that grew more intense each time we turned a corner, and somehow reminded me of a time in my boyhood when my family moved from one apartment building to another a few blocks away. Each time I passed our old building, I would get the same sort of overpowering feeling, and would have to force myself to keep walking to the place we now lived.
That evening, as always, I ate with the professor’s family and then listened to the little boy play the piano in the living room. The professor sat in an armchair, reading what I had produced that day and jotting down comments while the music flowed over us, a beautiful reproach. And then I headed upstairs to work through the night, cradled by the sloping ceiling and the pool of light around my desk, high above the rest of the world.
The truth was that I actually liked writing the professor’s book. Sitting at the desk, I would picture that grave, pompous, wounded face, and then pretend it was my face, that I was him, and suddenly, without effort, the sentences would start to unfurl.
My trip to Maryland came to a close. I finished the professor’s book and packed my bag. His wife and son were downstairs to say goodbye. I asked the boy to play something and he did, something complicated and fast, a torrent of exquisite notes coming from those tiny fingers.
The professor’s wife stuffed a thick wad of cash in my hand. “This is from me,” she said, looking friendly for the first time. “Something extra.”
I didn’t know what I thought about the money—a tip, essentially. Imitating a Korean neo-Confucianist was not at all like fixing the bathroom sink. But I liked the bulky heft of the bills in my palm.
“You’ll miss your train,” said the professor, picking up my bag and carrying it out to the car, his raincoat buttoned to the top, as always. I followed, the music flowing out the door behind me.
Back in New York, my novel started to go a little better. Maybe it was just the time away, but what stuck in my mind was the experience of pretending to be the professor. Sitting at the computer at home, I would imagine myself hovering above the ground, almost as if I were still in his attic, but this time so high up that my characters looked tiny, and their sorrow and stupidity nothing to be afraid of. Then I would imagine that my arms were incredibly long, miles long, reaching all the way down to my keyboard. Typing from so far above, it was almost as if I wasn’t typing at all. I started to finish my sentences.
ABOUT THIS TIME, I was pulled into a sort of side project, writing emails for yet another Korean professor, who was carrying on an affair with a woman in Queens. I’d met this other professor’s wife and little daughter, and I didn’t want to be a part of whatever process was working itself out. But when I tried to beg off, his face turned furious. “Don’t judge me, Robert,” he said.
Judgment? My father was an ex-con, and I was writing a book about him behind his back, detailing his greatest humiliations, and hoping to sell it to the public. I stared at my hands, feeling my face burn.
“It’s a lot more complicated than you think,” said this professor—I will call him Professor X. “I’m trying to figure out my future.”
Every couple of days, I’d sit at his computer with him, working out a reply to her latest—which was odd, since the woman was clearly Korean. What was the point of writing in English? And why did he need me to make his emails better, given that hers remained just the same as before, utterly sprawling and completely ungrammatical? I felt too conflicted to ask those sorts of questions, but the possibilities resonated as we strategized his answer in front of the screen, typing and erasing and retyping, printing out draft after draft before finally hitting send. The whole thing felt perilously fictional to me, by which I mean not unreal, but delicately and obsessively imagined, like Prof. Park’s campaign to save Korean religious studies—or like my novel.
“I’m thinking of telling her that I can’t leave my wife, after all,” said Professor X, his knee nervously bouncing up and down. “There’s my daughter to consider.”
“Excellent idea. Let me write that.”
“But I think it’s better to hint first, so she gets used to the idea. I don’t want to make her upset.”
“Okay, let me put in a subtle hint here.”
He stood up suddenly, as if he’d gotten an electric shock. “But Robert, what if I’m missing my one chance at happiness?”
“It’s incredibly complicated, I know.”
A part of me quite liked being Professor X on the Internet for a few hours in the afternoon, as the falling light slanted in and the sky began to darken. There was something about the idea that your feelings were urgent and important simply because they were your feelings, that your pleasure and happiness mattered more than anything—it left me wistful and a little dazed. Back at home, I was trying to work on the novel’s prison chapters, but the little mental trick of placing myself in the Maryland professor’s attic no longer helped get me past my own internal resistance. In real life, I’d been living in Japan when my father went to prison and I had completely missed that entire segment of his ordeal. The fragments my mother and siblings had described made it sound hideous: long train trips to Connecticut, followed by a special prison bus, full of anxious, hard-luck families with lots of crying children. Once inside, my father would shake them down for all the spare change they’d been able to collect during the week: he used it for the vending machines at the other side of the cafeteria. After gorging on whatever he could buy from the machines, he refused to talk to them. Sometimes he’d sit for a while, looking furious and strange; other times, he’d simply walk away. He never spoke about that period. If it came up, his face would become agitated and he’d fall silent.
It’s a novel, I told myself. Make it up. That’s what you’re supposed to do with novels. But somehow I just couldn’t. My father’s time in prison appeared to me like a box full of sorrow so overwhelming it could not be opened, a toxic mixture of all of our vanity and stupidity and pretension and naïveté and blindness. If I were to lift the lid, something unimaginable—by which I mean irrefutably true—would pour out and drown us all.
I couldn’t write a word, not even to erase it immediately after. The computer screen became a window onto darkness. I came down with a brain worm–like case of insomnia in which I went two days at a time without even closing my eyes, wandering around in a sort of endless shopping mall of wakefulness. I must have looked pretty bad, because one day at my parents’ apartment, my father asked me how the novel was coming.
“My novel?” I asked.
“Yes, how’s it going?”
“Not so good,” I said, and then maybe because we were sitting in his shabby little makeshift office, doing his billing, I began to complain that what I really needed was an office, that if only I had a dedicated, private space in which to write, I could finish the book.
My father nodded sympathetically, but when I came back a few days later, he mentioned in passing, “Hey, listen, don’t be mad, but you’ll probably be getting some calls about office space.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I had a free afternoon, so I stopped by a few buildings and talked to the management.”
“And you gave them my number?” It was ridiculous; I didn’t have the extra money to rent an office—didn’t have the extra money to rent a square foot of an office.
“Just one thing, don’t be surprised if they talk like they’ve met you already.” He gave an embarrassed little laugh. “Because I pretended I was you.”
Suddenly I had a vision of the entire city full of people pretending to be someone else, characters in novels of their own devising. “Why did you do that?” I asked, all irritation gone, only curious.
“I don’t know.” He looked genuinely perplexed for a moment, and then he said, “Your sister told me that your book has a prison chapter in it, and that you’re stuck.”
Of course, I shouldn’t have been so surprised. On some level, I’d always known that he understood the novel was about him; the idea that he couldn’t surmise that much was just plain stupid, a convenient fiction. And yet even now, I couldn’t let that fiction go. “A prison chapter is just one possibility I’m considering,” I said, feeling my heart begin to throb in my chest. “There are others.”
“Well, if you do decide to write it, I’ve been there and can tell you whatever you need, I don’t mind. Ask anything.”
His face was composed as he waited, with none of the panic he’d shown at other times when the subject came up. He had clearly thought this moment over, prepared himself. But now that I had my chance, I couldn’t ask anything: the questions were all buried too deep, under too many contradictory feelings. I stared down at the paperwork on the desk, listening to the blood pound through my head.
After a while he said, “Why don’t I just tell you a few details,” and then began with his first night at the prison camp in Danbury, Connecticut, how they put him in the infirmary because his blood pressure was explosive. He talked about the guards—screws, he called them—and how they harassed everyone all the time, strip-searching them for no reason, taking every chance to humiliate them. The screws would call them names, trying to get them to react so they could write them up for infractions. And yet the biggest problem was not the guards but the boredom. Some inmates kept busy, and others spent the entire time lying on their cots, staring at the ceiling. He got a job mowing the grass, and lost two hundred pounds. It helped that the food in the cafeteria was dreadful, and the vending machines took only coins. If you had cash, the guards would order Chinese takeout for you, for a fee, but he never had any money.
No, the worst thing wasn’t the boredom or the food; it was being locked up.
“Did anyone ever try to escape?” It was more a wish than a question.
“Nobody. We were all short-timers. We just had to sit tight and wait.”
I started to breathe again, slowly. Beyond anything else, it was listening to his voice, the fact that we were talking about the one thing I assumed we could never talk about and nothing cataclysmic was happening. It turned out that the box I was so frightened of opening contained only ordinary sorrow, the kind I was familiar with.
“You can use any of that,” my father said, once he finished talking. “You have my permission.”
His office had a glass door that led onto a long, barren balcony that no one had ever figured out how to decorate. I stepped outside, and then stood by an empty planter, letting the winter wind off the East River freeze me till the panic and the gratitude and the sense of stupidity all subsided. It was too early to wonder what this new kind of novel might look like, or who I would have to become in order to write it.