The courtyard of Gangnam Sinnara Apartments had looked particularly impressive from the late Re Myungsun’s terrace on the eighteenth floor. The well-groomed lawns formed tidy square rows. A large fountain stood at the center, shooting tall peaks of water. Stone sculptures dotted the lawn, and a babbling brook coursed through the grounds. But up close the greenery looked no less man-made than the gray towers surrounding it. I threaded my way through the perfect squares of Astroturf and took a seat on a wooden bench, opposite a miniature waterfall.
My grandfather had left me one hundred thousand dollars in his will. After we returned from our McMeal, Hannah all the while complaining about how she could feel the back of her head throbbing from the MSG, my uncles and Emo called me into one of the spare bedrooms that had served as the late Re Myungsun’s office. They told me he had left money in the will for each of us, and I was given my late mother’s share.
Share, not shame. As my mother’s siblings dissected the will, I couldn’t help but recall a memory from the past: a fight Sang and Hannah had when I was maybe no older than kindergarten age.
“Why’s he need our hard-earned money for?” Hannah had said. “What about your lazy big brother?”
“Big Brother’s attending to his own hardships right now, with his wife. . . .” Sang had trailed off; then, with a renewed firmness, he said, “He’s my father. It’s our duty.”
After that, my uncle had gone away for four days. I was terrified that Hannah had kicked him out and he was never coming back. While Sang was far from benevolent to me, even then I knew that my connection to him was the only thing keeping me under that roof.
It was now clear: Sang had given Grandfather the money to invest in Gangnam.
But all this—the apartment, the right to enjoy these grounds—belonged to Big Uncle now. Across the street was a FamilyMart convenience store. I watched the apartment dwellers streaming out. Men with bottles of soju or beer. Schoolgirls tearing open bags of shrimp chips. And then two young boys who looked like brothers eating ice-cream cones, their mother trailing behind them. The boys wore socks with plastic slippers, and their legs were so skinny you might have thought the children were war-stricken, if not for the fact that each had his own ice cream and their mother wore high heels and had an expensive-looking handbag hanging from her shoulder. The brothers chattered on animatedly, stopping only to take licks from their cones, and I wondered if they would have been as happy if there were only one cone to share between them. Would the older brother have offered his younger brother the first bite, the way Sang and Hannah had always made me share with my younger cousins? Most likely they would have squabbled. People were hardly as generous when the resources between them grew scarce.
“There you are,” Emo said, taking the seat beside me. “I was looking all over for you.”
“So sorry. I inconvenience,” I said, because it seemed to be the thing to say. The truth was, I was glad she had found me. Being around Emo felt the way it had that first night in the funeral home—like warm blankets and spittle. I felt a connection with her I had never felt with any of my other relatives or, indeed, anyone else before. It was a different comfortable feeling from what I felt around Ed. Was this jung? Even though I was only an infant when Emo had taken care of me, perhaps some sensory memory, far buried in the recesses of my mind, could still recall the feel of her touch. Beth might’ve called it Freudian, but Beth hated Freud.
“You’ve gone through a lot these last few days, haven’t you?” Emo said, sinking into the seat next to me.
You don’t know the half of it, I thought. Aloud, I said, “You, too.”
Emo took my hand between her hands, as if we were schoolgirls playing a slapping game. “It must not have been easy for you, over there.”
I listened to the rushing sounds of the fake waterfall. It sprayed a cooling mist on my face. Silently I shook my head.
“I always tell your uncle to lighten up! The air around him is so heavy and stern. But he’s like a typical Busan man. And you know what they say: ‘Men from Busan don’t emote.’”
“The meaning, what is?” I asked her.
“You never heard that?” Emo said, her hands clapping excitedly over mine. “Then Emo will tell you a joke. What are the three things a Busan man says to his wife when he comes home each night?”
She looked at me with bright eyes, as if she fully expected me to know the answer.
“No idea.”
“‘Bapjwo. Ahnun? Jaja.’”
Give me food. And the kids? Let’s go to bed.
Emo let out a girlish trill of laughter; I followed suit. “Emo, so fun you are.”
She gave my hand a tight squeeze. “We need to work on your Korean. So you can learn Seoul standard.” She said I spoke Korean like an American—my sentence structure was reversed. “We have a saying: You have to listen all the way to the end to know what a person’s really talking about.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment. It was indeed the opposite of English, where you led with the most important thing. I would have so much more to learn.
Emo examined my face. “I had to fix my Korean, too, when we moved up to Seoul. Before that I had the thickest Busan dialect!” She laughed. “But now look: People even mistake me for a Seoulite. I never thought I’d see the day.”
But Big Uncle still spoke with a strong Busan accent. Sang and Hannah, too. As did all the adults at church.
“But only short time left,” I offered sadly. “Well, that’s the thing. . . .” Emo paused to look into the waterfall. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” she murmured. “It must feel like a waste, with only one day left. How do you like it here?”
I shook my head. “Not how I imagining inside my head. But like in good way.”
Emo nodded with approval. “American Uncle told us about your work situation back home. What a shame.”
My chest tightened, remembering what I’d done with Ed.
“Thank goodness you didn’t take that job.” Immediately it loosened. “I was thinking. Maybe you shouldn’t go back to America. Especially . . . after all that’s happened. You should stay here, with us. I read there’s a big demand for native English-speaking teachers.”
“But always American Uncle and Aunt say I not suppose to living here—” I stopped. I knew I was saying it all wrong.
Emo chose her words carefully. “They belong to a different generation. Times have changed since.”
“But . . . you so busy. I get in the way.” I was speaking Sang’s scripted words. “And what about Big Uncle?” I found him intimidating; he reminded me of Re Myungsun.
“To be honest, I think Big Uncle gets sick of me sometimes,” Emo said, chuckling. “He’d appreciate having someone else around. Now that Father is . . .” She fixed her eyes again on the waterfall, then changed course. “We’ll have so much fun together! I will take you shopping. The beauty salon. And I have so many jokes to share with you. Jokes and”—her tone grew wistful—“and stories.”
Stories. I was suddenly brought back to the Mazer-Farley kitchen table and the stories the family would tell. We never had that in Sang’s house. I knew almost nothing of his life in Korea.
Emo pulled an envelope from her pocket and opened it. Inside was a black-and-white photograph, yellowed with age. Two children, a boy and a girl, stood in front of a small house with a thatched roof. Both children were painfully skinny—skinnier than the boys I saw earlier with the ice cream. They were holding hands.
“I found this while going through some old things,” Emo said. “That’s your mother with American Uncle. And that’s our old house, in Busan. Not long after they fled the North. I wasn’t born yet.” She smiled wistfully. “Sometimes I think they had all the fun before I came around.”
I took the picture from her. Sang looked like his usual irritated self, even as a child, his mouth tilting down in its habitual frown. I focused on my mother’s half of the picture. Back in Flushing we had only one photo of her, where she was staring up at the sun. But there was something about her expression in this photo that was extremely unsettling. Even though she was a child, she wore the haunted face of someone much older. The dark shadows cast under her eyes gave her an air of grave maturity. I wondered if this was her natural disposition or the trauma of war.
Times have changed since. Suddenly I knew what I would do. Emo was offering me a new home, in Korea. What did I have to return to in New York?
* * *
Sang did not approve of my decision to stay. It didn’t matter that Emo had told him of the job opportunities in Seoul. He still said, “Better you come back home.”
“But there’s nothing for me back there,” I said. I thought of the Mazer-Farleys’, of that hooded bay window staring back at me. Homewrecker. It was a word whose literal meaning I’d never had reason to ponder before.
Sang frowned. “You find new job. Something else. Something better.”
“What, like work at Food?”
His frown deepened. “What the problem with—” But he stopped himself from saying more. “Maybe you right.” I was surprised by his loosened tone. “Maybe better you stay here. Safer. And Grandpa money worth more here anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“Anytime you taking something outside country, gonna lost its value,” he said. I don’t think I imagined the wistfulness etched in his voice. “And don’t forget taxes. Always there taxes. Worth maybe only half by the end.”
“I’m planning to find a job here. I’ll earn my own money,” I said.
“You better not stay here just for the fun time. Uncle hearing lot of story about gyopo who only going Itaewon nightclub.” Gyopo is the word for a Korean raised overseas—I’d never heard it used before arriving in Seoul. His eyes narrowed. “Never you dare go Itaewon.”
Itaewon had been shaped vividly in my consciousness, the handiwork of Hannah’s stories when I was growing up. She would paint tales of nice Korean girls wandering down the wrong alleys, only to be snatched up by loutish American men in army fatigues or equally loutish Korean men working in conjunction with them. These poor girls would get tarted up and be sold into prostitution, and soon you’d see them drowning in the cheap neon light of sordid bars, spreading wide their red-lipsticked mouths in exaggerated trills of laughter.
Sometimes Hannah switched her stories: A certain kind of Korean girl—wild, wanton—would deliberately seek out Itaewon’s carnal pleasures. Hannah used to curl her lip and stare into my eyes—as if she could see that budding wild wantonness. “Do you want to end up like that?” she’d warn, to which I’d vigorously shake my head and fix my penitent gaze on the floor.
Sang’s default mode was to assume the worst of me. And just like that—whatever tenderness was starting to form between us instantly dissipated. “Maybe it’s good I’m not going back.”
There was a moment when something flashed across his face, and I thought for sure he’d fly into his usual rage. Who you think you are? No back-talk! But when my uncle opened his mouth to speak, his voice wavered.
“You know when Uncle first coming to America? Around same time they starting construction for Twin Tower. Every time I walking by construction site, they building one more story. Just like Uncle building up the business, Smith Street. Always feel little bit like we growing up together.”
Before I could press my uncle to go on, he stopped himself. His tone resumed its usual roughness. “Anyway, here nothing like America.” He reached for his pocket. “You like burden to Emo and Big Uncle.”
My uncle handed me an envelope. His handouts were few and far between—I recognized the importance of the moment.
As I thanked him, his face turned red—an expression I normally would’ve written off as annoyance. Now I wondered if it wasn’t embarrassment. Quickly Sang left the room.
Inside the envelope was a thousand dollars in U.S. twenties, their edges tired and worn from use.
* * *
Sang and the rest of the family boarded the plane to New York, but I stayed. After they left, I studied the photo that Emo had given me with newfound eyes.
Sang seemed to be holding my mother’s hand not out of tenderness but exasperated obligation, as if keeping her from some impending danger—a mud puddle, a snarling dog. But I caught a glint of something in his black eyes that I had missed the first time. For all his inexpressiveness those black eyes seemed to shine at my mother with just the hint of a smile.