Chapter 15

Michelangelo

Eat up! You have a big day ahead of you,” Emo said, pushing a plate of mackerel toward me. It was my first breakfast alone with just Big Uncle and Emo. The three of us sat around a cream-colored marble table. No Sang to shoot me nunchi daggers. No splitting the fish carcass with Hannah, picking off the bits of flesh clinging to its thin bones. Here Big Uncle and I each got our own whole fish.

I was planning to spend the day at an Internet café applying for English-teaching jobs—Emo had given me a list of suggestions. Mary had mentioned that the Internet cafés here were called “PC bang”—a Konglishism marrying the English “PC” with the Korean bang, or “room.”

Big Uncle mentioned there was a PC bang nearby. “From our apartment go through the South Gate. At the FamilyMart alley, go another hundred meters. It’ll be on the left.”

“Wait—just one minute—” I ran to get a pen and paper to catch everything Big Uncle had said. “Please one more time repeating?”

“From the South Gate, go a hundred meters down the FamilyMart alley—”

“But, like, street names? Address number?”

Big Uncle looked at me blankly. “No one here uses street addresses.”

Emo jumped in to explain. “Here we usually go by famous landmarks or stores.”

As I would later learn, streets in Seoul were nothing like the streets back home, where grids were imposed on the landscape and even the shortest of streets was duly labeled. In Seoul, building numbers were assigned in the order they were built in that neighborhood. At that time a typical address might read, say, “Jung-gu, Sindang-dong 383.” That was like being handed an address that read “Manhattan, Upper East Side 383” and you were somehow supposed to find the 383rd building constructed anywhere between East Fifty-ninth and East Ninety-sixth Streets. People gave directions here, but they were always relative to your shifting orientation in space.

“But how a person suppose to finding the way here?” I asked.

Big Uncle let out an annoyed chuff. “Why do you have so many words?”

My brain sometimes did that: it computed the unfiltered, literal translation of the Korean spoken around me. What Big Uncle had actually meant was, What’s with all the questions?

He went on. “A person should already know where he’s supposed to go.”

Emo, perhaps impatient that I wasn’t eating the fish quickly enough, dipped her chopsticks into its belly and deposited a hunk of meat into my bowl of rice. It was something Hannah used to do—still did, in fact—with George. I thanked her and took the piece. Before I was done swallowing, she’d already replaced it with a new piece of fish. Her own bowl was left untouched.

After the meal was over, Big Uncle said he wanted something to clear his palate, so I was sent to the fridge for some fruit. I came back to the table with a pear. Big Uncle watched me intently as I carved away the skin of the fruit. I hoped he knew I knew that pears weren’t cheap and that I was cutting the fruit for all of us, not just selfishly for me. My fingers became unsteady; I could sense him growing tap-tap-hae.

Finally Big Uncle shouted, “You’re hacking that thing into a hexagon!” He pointed to the series of knife marks scoring the pale flesh, then to my pile of shavings. I relinquished the pear to him. He demonstrated, torquing his wrist in even, elegant motions. “It’s supposed to be round and smooth, like this. You see the difference between mine and yours?” He held up a thick, wasteful peel. It looked nothing like Sang’s. “If you cut fruit like that, you’ll never land a husband.”

This was the longest interaction I’d had with Big Uncle; I didn’t know what to think. Was this a reprimand or an attempt at intimacy? Whatever it was, Big Uncle sent me to the fridge for more pears. He made me practice, over and over, until the marks scoring the flesh grew less pronounced, until soon there were no signs of knife work at all.

“There you go!” Big Uncle said encouragingly. His tone, so didactic just moments earlier, turned almost gentle. He spread his hands wide on the table. His palms were as pale and smooth as the sliced pears. They looked nothing like Sang’s callused ones.

* * *

After a few missed turns, eventually I found my way to the PC bang. I signed on to a computer and was met with a chorus—a cacophony—of e-mails, calling out from my in-box. I opened Eunice’s first, because her e-mail offered the least possibility of trauma, despite its subject heading: “Dark Times These Are.”

Jane:

Greetings from 37.4250°N, 122.0956°W. Glad you must be you didn’t get that job with Lowood: your whole office would’ve been obliterated.

E.O.

PS: Sorry to hear re your grandfather.

PPS: When you get back to NY, would you mind checking in on my mom? She’s been kind of freaking out about everything.

I did not click on the link Eunice had included in the bottom of the e-mail (it was to some conspiracy-theory Web site). After responding to Eunice’s message, I threw myself into the job search for the next couple of hours, ignoring Ed’s and Beth’s unread e-mails staring bold-faced from the screen. I didn’t know how other people dealt with tragedies. In the movies people were always making grand displays of their anguish: sobbing into handkerchiefs, punching through walls. But for me, when something was out of sight, it was also out of mind. If it was not out of sight, then I’d force my eyes to go dead, before the violating images had the chance to sear their indelible impressions.

I found a Web site called Dan’s ESL Coffeehouse that posted job openings for foreign English teachers. Most of the jobs did not require certification or previous teaching experience. In the forums a number of Americans and Canadians boasted instant success. “I didn’t even have to open my mouth, they hired me on the spot,” said waegukin69. “I got so many offers I had to beat them off with a stick,” wrote yugiyo411. My confidence bolstered, I e-mailed out my résumés and was surprised by how quickly I heard back from the schools. Already I had two interviews lined up for the next day.

That task completed, I returned, reluctantly, to my e-mails. I clicked on Beth’s first. She’d sent a number of messages, each one escalating in its level of alarm. I dreaded reliving her panic. Her first e-mail, sent before the attacks, was a long missive addressed to both Ed and me. She expounded on the conference she’d left early and her exhausting red-eye flight home, only to find the house “utterly devoid of the family I’d left the conference early to be with in the first place.” When you read between the lines, the e-mail was clearly a passive-aggressive censure at her not being informed of anyone’s whereabouts.

Immediately after the attacks, however, the tenor changed. As she grew increasingly panicked, the lengths of her e-mails grew shorter and tighter, as if she functioned solely on instinct. “Forget everything said before. Water under the bridge. Just let me know you’re okay?”

Her second-to-last message was like sharp staccato notes: “Jane. Are you alive? Please God. Answer.” All extraneous words fell away; her language was distilled to its bare essence.

Beth’s final e-mail had been sent after I’d already landed in Seoul. The tone and length resumed their normal extra-wordiness.

After being informed by my daughter of your call, I am beyond relieved that you’re safe. My deepest condolences are with you and your family in this difficult time (i.e., your grandfather’s passing). I understand the delicacy of the situation, but I do ask that should (God forbid) some similar future event occur, you please keep us abreast of said developments as they’re transpiring. Frankly, I find it a touch out of character that a responsible woman such as yourself would fly off without a word of notice.

What kind of notice could I possibly have left behind? “I’m sorry I slept with your husband and ruined your family’s life—here’s my flight number”? I made several stabs at a response to Beth, but I found myself continually hitting the BACKSPACE key, deleting strings of words that sounded like empty rhetoric. Sang hated when we tried to explain away our apologies. He much preferred that we stare contritely at the tops of our feet, at the linoleum. Later he would expect us to piece back together the lamp we’d broken in our recklessness or scrub out the offending stain from the juice spilled on the couch through our carelessness. In other words, taking action instead of offering false “I’m sorry”s.

And I’d taken action: I’d removed myself from the Mazer-Farleys. I couldn’t hit BACKSPACE on what I’d already done, but I could make certain I’d never let it happen again.

I wrote the most perfunctory of e-mails, offering my resignation.

Then I braced myself for Ed’s messages. There were two from the night I was supposed to meet him at the hotel. There was a third immediately after the Towers had been struck. But the fourth e-mail, his last, had been sent just twenty minutes ago:

Dear Jane,

Let’s just get one thing clear first: I’m not mad at you for not showing up at that hotel room. I understand your sudden flight. At least I’m trying to make sense of it all.

The hours, the days drag on. Without you. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night. Swear I hear you in the kitchen. But when I rush down the stairs and flick on the light, all I see is that empty table. I just stand there for a moment, deluding myself into thinking you’ll appear. But you never do.

Your absence is echoed by the utterly stricken state of this city, post-attacks. An oppressive something—sorrow? grief?—hangs in the air. It manifests itself in the black clouds of ash that coat the sky.

Sometimes I think I spot you on the streets. I call out your name. But when I draw near, you’ve vanished in the shadows. I feel and see and hear you everywhere.

Devon confirms that you’re safe. They’ve reopened JFK. Jane—I keep hoping, praying, you’ll find your way back to me.

In that PC bang, as the Koreans surrounding me were completely absorbed in Starcraft or whatever computer games they were banging away on, not one of them saw my hand shaking over the mouse as I read Ed’s e-mail. Not one saw the tears that splashed onto the keyboard like hot drops of rain. Not one saw me raise the back of my trembling hand to my eyes as I pressed—hard—to blot them away.

Ed,

I’ve decided to stay on in Korea. I’m not coming back to New York.

You should be with your family now.

I’m so sorry.

Love,

Jane

Before I could overthink it, I hit SEND.

Just when I thought I was done, I saw that, buried all the way at the bottom of those e-mails, was a message from Nina. I opened it; a burst of freshness filled the air:

yeah thanks again for taking off to korea without telling me. but i’m really sorry about your grandfather. that’s just . . . awful. i told my nonna and she’s doing like five decades of the rosary for your fam.

all i know is they better catch those assholes responsible for this. YOU DON’T FUCKING MESS WITH NEW YORK.

hit me back with a joke, a story, anything to take my mind off stuff. it feels like everything’s falling apart. i could use a good laugh.

I stopped crying, calmed my trembling hands. My fingers were poised over the keyboard, and I began to write.

If I have to explain a joke, then it probably defeats the purpose, but here goes: What are the three things a man from Busan says to his wife each night . . .

Just as I was about to log off, another e-mail popped into my in-box, from EduAcademy, one of the schools I had applied to earlier.

New teacher opening we have our school. Old foreign native English speaker teacher leave. Today afternoon for interview you can come? Our location is . . .

I hit REPLY. I made a copy of the e-mail with the directions to the school. As I logged off the computer, I resolved to shut out all thoughts of New York and the people I’d left behind.

* * *

EduAcademy was in the Jongno district—directly across the river from where we lived in Gangnam-gu. Dressed in the same black suit I wore to the Mazer-Farley interview (the one I’d smartly thought to pack, anticipating a funeral), with the same sneakers on my feet and the same dress heels tucked into the same black pleather tote bag, I headed over to the subway station.

According to the map on the station platform, the Number 2 train made a complete loop around the perimeter of Seoul. It spun in an uninterrupted circle, with no final destination. In New York there was no such thing as a subway that made a complete circle—there was always a finite start and end. Jongno was a straight shot north, but the only way to get to my destination—according to the map, anyhow—was to take this roundabout train route.

When I boarded, the subway was fairly empty, and I managed to get a seat before the surge of other passengers got on. There was an ad for an English-language after-school. LEARN PERFECT ENVIABLE NATIVE ENGLISH! Another ad shouted, BECOME THE PERFECT BEAUTY! with side-by-side pictures of a woman’s face. The one to the left was a broad, kind face with slivered-almond eyes and a small pug nose—she looked like Eunice. The picture on the right had big, round, double-lidded eyes, a prominent nose, and a pointy chin. There was something off about the gaze—something a little flat, a little dead in the eyes. It did not look like a Korean face at all. It took me a moment or two longer than it should have to realize that it was an ad for a plastic-surgery clinic.

I was so focused on these ads that I nearly missed my stop. I emerged from the subway and stared at the printout of the e-mail the school secretary had sent me. The directions, written in English, didn’t make sense. Go Exit 6 walk to Provence Bakery alley and left turn second Sinnara Bank alley to Brown Chicken Hof alley and 200m on the right side school location. Why did they keep calling them alleys and not streets? I thought for sure something had been lost in translation. Amazingly, at Exit 6 there were three Provence Bakeries: one behind, one ahead, and the other across the way. I walked up to the one straight ahead and turned down the street. But I could not find a Sinnara Bank.

I huffed and puffed up narrow hilly streets, thankful I was still wearing my sneakers. I realized that finding your way around here was just as Big Uncle had said: A person should already know where he’s supposed to go. And if you didn’t already know where you were supposed to go, you had to rely on someone who did to guide you.

The quiet back alleys offered glimpses into what I imagined was a Korea of the past. Old men carried flattened cardboard in large wheelbarrows. Grannies squatted on their haunches, selling handmade rice cakes on makeshift Styrofoam tables.

After asking around for directions and being pointed up and down the wrong alleys, I eventually found my way to EduAcademy. I was sweating, and my hair was pulled back into a flustered ponytail that stuck to the back of my neck. I, who’d always prided myself on getting to places early, was five minutes—and counting—late for the interview.

On the elevator ride up, I hastily changed my shoes. I was still balancing against the wall—one foot shod in a heel, the other in a sneaker—when the doors dinged open. An older woman passing through the hallway stopped in her tracks and stared at me.

“Can I help you?” she said, in a tone that made it clear she did not really wish to.

“Here I am. For the job meeting,” I said. I didn’t know the Korean word for “interview.”

“You’re not . . . the foreigner candidate, are you?” the woman said, studying me.

“I am Jane Re.” Maybe she didn’t recognize Re as Korean. I told her I wasn’t a foreigner.

The woman hesitated for a moment before saying, “Follow me.” She led me to her office. She took a seat at a sleek white desk and gestured for me to sit opposite her.

“What are you? Gyopo? Or one of our people?”

Weren’t they one and the same? I paused, not sure I had claims to either word.

“And how long have you lived in the States? Were you born there?”

“No, I born here.”

“Here!” She looked up suddenly, surprised. “But how old were you when you left?”

“When I was a baby.”

The woman turned her attention to my résumé. “You went to college . . . at Baruch? I never heard of it.”

It never heard of you either, I thought.

She asked a few wrap-up questions before handing my résumé back to me. “We’ll be in touch.”

“In touch?” The same as Ed Farley’s words to me.

The woman busied herself with a stack of papers. “I have some work to attend to, so if you will please . . .”

The elevator ejected me onto the street. The woman wouldn’t have brought me into her office for an interview if the school weren’t truly hiring. Something about me had put her off. I shuffled into the bustling masses. Pedestrians scurrying behind me pressed sharp elbows into my back, forcing me out of their way. Dejected, I leaned against the side of a high-rise, pried off my heels, and shoved my tired feet back into my running sneakers. What choice did I have but to trudge on?

Just then I saw a withered, hunchbacked granny, struggling to open the door of the building. She was as shriveled as Mrs. O’Gall. In one hand she carried a cloth-wrapped bundle, in the other a cane. When I held the door open for her, she looked at me with kind, grateful eyes before slowly passing through. I was about to let go of the door and continue on my way when four curly-permed ajumma—middle-aged women—rushed through without a word of acknowledgment. Back in New York, people at least nodded or offered a curt “Thanks.” Not here. The women were immediately followed by three middle-aged men in hiking clothes, two twenty-something men in business suits, and a girl in a miniskirt chattering into her cell phone. I could have stood there for hours; it was impossible to stop the endless gush of people. It would have been comical—“How many Seoulites can squeeze through one door?”—if it hadn’t been so soulless; each person after the old woman regarded me with cold indifference, as if I were no more human than a door wedge. Then a brigade of preteen girls in school uniforms trundled in. Where was their nunchi? I was their Big Sister; they should have held that door open for me.

I released the door and watched with perverse delight as it bounced off the shoulder of the last girl. Momentarily disoriented at being on the wrong side of the glass partition, the girl gathered her strength and yanked at the door. But she fell backward, weighed down by her large, turtle-shell-like backpack. She could have been Devon. Her friends on the other side pointed, laughing. Flooded with guilt, I hurried away.

* * *

By the time I boarded the subway back home, it was rush hour and the trains were packed. The first thing that struck me was how every single face on that train was Korean. You’d think that, coming from Flushing, I’d be used to being around all Koreans. But I kept expecting other ethnic faces to pepper the masses, the way they did on the 7 train. Here there were none.

Standing near the door, I stepped momentarily off the train to let the other passengers out. Back home the unspoken rule was that I’d have first dibs reboarding. But here the rules were different. The new passengers waiting on the platform behind me pushed me aside to make sure they boarded first. They came in endless waves, and I was rocked farther and farther away from the doors—a lone raft drifting from shore. As I fought my way back to the train I’d just stepped off, the doors slid shut. In New York one karate chop to the subway doors would have forced them back open; here the heavy doors looked like they would clamp over your arm and drag you away. I let them close and waited for the next train. But when it arrived, I again fought unsuccessfully against the current. I couldn’t breathe.

I gave up and scrambled out of the station. I was at Sinchon, near Yonsei University, my mother’s alma mater. But after a few minutes of walking, I did not see the campus. Exhausted and thirsty, I popped into a coffee shop called Café Michelangelo.

I bowed at the barista behind the counter—just as I’d bow to all the shopkeepers back home—and ordered a bottle of water. “Your total is three thousand won, Client,” she said in a robotic voice, not acknowledging my bow. I asked to use the restrooms, and she stared back at me with the kind of funny face we reserved for fanny-packed tourists clogging the city sidewalks.

I tried again. “You know, the byunso.”

“. . .”

“Where . . .” I felt like I was reduced to a four-year-old’s speech. “Where you doing shee-shee and ddong.”

“You mean ‘hwajangsil’!” The barista burst into giggles. In Sang’s house we’d always used the word byunso. Later I would learn that the word connoted an outhouse. “You are very awkward-sounding!” she told me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You must not be one of our people,” she added. I snatched the keys from her, and when I got to the hwajangsil, I found a porcelain hole in the ground.

I returned to the main café area and took a seat toward the back. The chairs were leather, the tables a rich, gleaming wood. At the table next to me was a group of girls around my age and all dressed in black. Back home the girls also dressed in black, but there was something different about the Seoul girls’ polish. They were hyperfeminine, like the rhinestones that sparkled from their collars and cuffs. Their shiny black hair was fastened with ribbons or a headband. Despite the early-September heat, these girls wore pantyhose, in shades of beige, coffee, or black. Their black patent-leather shoes had silver buckles. I wondered if they carried a change of shoes, the way New York women did. But their leather purses, which were draped on the backs of their chairs—something you wouldn’t do at home unless you wanted to get your bag stolen—were too tiny to fit anything. I wondered whether Beth would have accused these women of pandering to the male gaze. Or maybe they just dressed up for themselves.

I wished I had brought a book, a newspaper—anything so I wouldn’t look like I was staring at them conspicuously. I pulled out my cell—Emo had given me her old one—and pretended to be engrossed in the phone’s golf game.

They were soon joined by a stamping of high-heeled feet; a girl carrying a blue cake box limped toward them, panting heavily. She was met with a chorus of:

“Ya, you’re like ten minutes late!”

“Ya, why didn’t you pick up your ‘handy’?”

To which she retorted, “Chuh! Like I was gonna pick up. I’d never hear the end of it from you guys.”

The girls spoke in a kind of Korean I had never heard before: young, female, modern. It was both high-pitched and slurred; it rose and fell in different waves from the Korean that the adults spoke back in Flushing. Their laughter, too, was also high-pitched, peals ringing out like the electronic chime of Emo’s front door. When Nina and I laughed, we’d toss our heads back and let out deep, unseemly rumbles. Nina would sometimes slap a hand on the table. Devon and Alla laughed like us, too—clutching their stomachs and gasping for air.

“Excuse me, by any chance . . .” a voice said.

I looked up. One of the girls from the table was standing before me. I straightened my shoulders, ran my fingers through my half bun, half ponytail.

She tapped her palm against the back of the chair opposite me; my sneakered feet were hooked on the bottom rung. “Could I . . . ?”

At first I thought she was inviting me to join her group for cake. I lowered my feet from the rungs of the chair—I even offered to walk it over to their table. Then I saw the expressions that flashed on the girls’ faces: the pinching of the eyebrows, the curling of the lips. It was almost too quick to catch.

I returned to my golf game.

When the girls weren’t looking, I continued to sneak glances their way. They set about opening the cake. It was a group effort: one freed it from its box, another pried off an envelope taped to the side and plucked out candles and a matchstick. Together they poked the candles into the cake and lit them. Then they sang “Happy Birthday,” but with Korean lyrics. When the candles were blown out, the girls did not cut the cake. Instead they each reached for a silver fork and speared it directly into their mouths.

“Delish!”

“Ya, it’s way too sweet. Didn’t we decide on cheesecake?”

“Ya, you know how far that cheesecake place is? Next time you go get it.”

“Ya, it’s not sweet, it’s stale. They totally sold me yesterday’s leftovers.”

Their chatter and chyap-chyaps filled the air. I envied their intimacy, their back-and-forth volley containing years’ worth of inside jokes. As I watched them eat, I wondered whether I would have been part of a group like this, had my grandfather not sent me away.

But I knew the answer to that. Hannah’s stories—the ones she’d let slip when she was angry with me for misbehaving—had made it clear to me. Had Re Myungsun not sent me away, I would have ended up in an orphanage. Then serving drinks at a bar, or clinging to the outer gates of the military base, calling out “Yoo-hoo!” in broken English to the passing soldiers.

Suddenly my cell phone rang; it was Emo. “Where are you?” she shouted into the phone. I told her. “Good! I’m on an errand nearby. I’ll come join you.” She clicked off before I could say good-bye.

When Emo breezed in, her sturdy heels clipping behind her, she frowned. She looked me up and down. “Why are you dressed like that?”

“Job meeting,” I explained.

“Why didn’t you tell me!” she cried. “I thought you were just hanging out at the PC bang all day.” Thankfully, the girls next to us were too busy eating cake to pay attention to Emo’s outburst. She studied me again. “How did it go?”

“Not so good. The lady not liking me,” I said, trying to mask my disappointment.

Emo pinched the fabric of my suit. “It’s worn,” she said. But it was good-quality wool and a designer name at that—I knew because only part of the label had been cut away when I’d bought it at Filene’s Basement. “And your face,” she went on. “It’s raw.”

“Raw?” I repeated. Maybe I had misinterpreted the word. I stared down at my half-empty water bottle.

“Why would they give a job to someone who looks like she just rolled out of bed?” It was a rhetorical question, so I didn’t answer it. “Gaja,” she said. Let’s go.

Emo pulled in to the parking lot of Sinnara Department Store. “You need new clothes,” she informed me. When we entered, my sneakers squeaked conspicuously on the marbled floors. Then the salespeople were immediately on top of us. They shouted and shrieked; they held up blouses and sweaters and skirts at us. It was a frenzy—and Emo just grabbed, grabbed, grabbed. She steered us to the cash wrap before I could even try anything on. Emo waved away first my protests, then my offers to pay. As she lay down her credit card, I was too afraid to look at the register total.

Next it was on to the makeup counter, Emo once again refusing to take no for an answer. The saleswoman yelped as she took in my features. “Her skin is so pale! I’m so jealous. She probably doesn’t need this, but . . .” She applied a cream to my face, and as she waited for my skin to absorb it, she turned again to Emo. “Client, this is the best whitening cream on the market. I can give you a sample if you’d like to try—”

“I already have it,” Emo snapped.

The woman mixed different pastes and creams and spread them across my face. She showered me with a continual stream of compliments—my eyes were so big that she was skipping the eyeliner. My lashes were so thick that I could do without the fake extensions. My face—she held up a fist—was this tiny! (I didn’t see how that one was a compliment.) There were huge gaps in my Korean; the language of praise was one of them. The words felt strange. They rang hollow in my ears.

The saleswoman applied the final stroke to my face. “Older Sister, you look so pretty!” She called me Older Sister even though she looked at least ten years older than me.

“Emo, what you think?”

She nodded with approval. “You did a not-bad job on my niece,” she told the woman.

“Oh, you’re her emo! I was wondering . . .” the woman said. “She must take more after her father’s side.”

Emo squared her shoulders as the woman’s eyes glided up and down her. What had struck me more than anything about Emo’s face was that it exuded warmth. Before that point I had no reason to evaluate her for her prettiness. But now I found myself seeing my aunt through this woman’s scrutinizing gaze.

Emo’s face was a wide, flat, square plane, like a griddle pan. Foundation coated her skin like pancake batter. Her eyebrows were tattooed in blue-black ink, forming a harsh arc above her crescent-moon eyes, with eyelids sewn into double creases. (It didn’t look natural—Emo must have had work done.) The effect was that Emo looked a little too alert, as if she were taking in everything around her a little too greedily. Her bob, curled into a tight middle-aged-lady perm, was tinted—no doubt at the behest of her hairdresser—with a reddish orange dye. She was short and compact—Eunice would have described Emo as “hobbitlike” (though Eunice Oh was built not unlike a Tolkien hobbit herself).

Then the mirror was turned to me. Impenetrable foundation caked my face. My lips were painted an unnatural shade of pink. I knew that Sang would not have approved. He hated when Mary or Hannah left the house wearing makeup. What’s wrong what God give you? he’d demand. You not suppose to cover up! Once he told Mary she looked like a bar hostess. And of course Beth hated makeup, too—she’d once likened it to modern-day bound feet. Emo nodded with approval. Then, to me, “You see! You didn’t make the most of your potential. If your Emo looked like you, I’d be married by now.”

I don’t know what I would have thought just one day ago if the same face were staring back at me. But I was so far from New York and everyone now. As I stared, familiarizing myself with this new face, I let the praise from Emo and the saleswoman wash over me.

* * *

When we returned home, Emo made me parade my new clothes. She clapped with glee as I modeled one outfit after the other—“You look just like Ahn Jaeni!” she said, referring to some celebrity—and I couldn’t help but think she derived a little vicarious pleasure at watching me fit into clothes she herself could not (dared not?) wear. She ordered me to wash off my face and reapply the makeup so I could practice over and over, just as Big Uncle had made me repeat peeling pears that morning. “I hope you were paying attention when the woman did your makeup,” she said. “From now on, you have to look your best each time you leave the house.” Not wanting to disappoint Emo, I did as she said.

The new routine was uncomfortable at first. I had to rise an hour earlier and fix my face at the vanity table with unwavering concentration. I had to fight the urge to yank my hair up into a ponytail, even when it would stick to the back of my neck. I had to soften my New Yorker gait, because I could not move freely in my new clothes—my skirts would ride up and my pantyhose would dribble down.

Walking all day in my new shoes was difficult. The hard patent leather was unforgiving; it cut into my Achilles tendon and squished my feet into a narrow toe box. The heels made my arches ache. And there was no room in my purse to stash a change of shoes. After a few stops of standing on the crowded subway, the balls of my feet would begin to throb. My eyes continually scanned for an empty seat. But I could never seem to compete with the other young and middle-aged women who rushed for it when I found one.

Maybe I should just have given up the act.

But self-affirmation has an intoxicating quality. As the days passed, I could feel the world regarding me differently. Confidence radiates from within! Beth would tell Devon (and me) at the breakfast table. But for me it was the opposite post-makeover; the reactions of the people around me generated my inner confidence. I felt men’s eyes follow me as I walked down the street, and I saw women young and old frown at me with a hint of jealousy. I was getting high off the fumes of my newfound beauty. I began to understand how girls like Jessica Bae got “gassed in the head,” as we said back home.

But still the layer of foundation coating my face felt tap-tap-hae.

Each day I improved on my appearance, just as I worked on my Korean. Whenever my sentences threatened to revert back to their old syntax, I’d force my mind to reverse their order. I spoke all Korean, all the time. I learned that the Korean of Flushing was a holdover from the sixties and seventies; I had to replace each antiquated word or phrase in my existing vocabulary with its modern-day equivalent (outhouse restroom; apothecary pharmacy). Emo and Big Uncle were impressed with the rapid improvement to my language.

Sang had been right: Here was nothing like Flushing. How freeing it was! I did not have to go bow, bow, bow with each Korean face I passed. Here I was completely anonymous; no one knew my history.

In those early days, my thoughts involuntarily, invariably wandered back to Brooklyn. I’d do side-by-side comparisons between my old life there and my new one here. If I hadn’t done what I’d done with Ed, I’d still be walking Devon to school, sitting with Beth in her office, still laughing about her articles with Nina at Gino’s. But would I have spent my nights sitting across from Ed at the kitchen table?

No good had come of indulging my feelings for Ed.

But I’d come to Seoul to start anew. I was successfully doing as the Romans did, and for the first time since I’d arrived I felt I was falling into the rhythms of my new home. New York was becoming a distant memory. I nailed my next interview, for a job teaching adult conversational English. And it was there, at Zenith Academy, that I met Changhoon.