The spring brought a welcome shift in my responsibilities at Zenith Academy. I was in the break room with the other teachers, making some joke about Sang’s banana-box filing system, when Principal Yoo passed by and said, “What was that?” I realized then why he had perked up during my interview when I’d mentioned working at my uncle’s store. But at the time nunchi told me to steer the conversation away from the blue-collar toward my more “prestigious” work experience—if you could call helping a fifth-grader with her homework prestigious. Now, in flustered Korean, I rambled on about helping to manage the store’s cash flow. Next thing I knew, Principal Yoo was swapping out my teaching sections for administrative work and the occasional private tutoring session. I was happy to be rid of the classroom—no more trembling at the dry-erase board in front of all those students. You would have thought I’d be daunted by Korean spreadsheets and financial statements. But the language of business—money in versus money out—is pretty much universal.
My new job set me on a more normal workday schedule, freeing up my evenings. Which left time for more dates with Changhoon.
And what dates they were! Changhoon threw himself into constructing elaborate itineraries—cable-car rides up to Namsan Tower, trips to Sinnara Amusement Park, walks around Seokchon Lake (“Thirty years ago that lake didn’t even exist,” Big Uncle had told me)—followed by dinner, followed by coffee or drinks. He’d endlessly research which restaurants had the best “set menus,” and we’d join the rush of other young couples at that new Japanese curry joint near City Hall, or that Italian trattoria in Hongdae, or the Australian steak house in Gangnam (which turned out to be an American chain, but here their steaks cost almost thirty dollars a pop). Changhoon would always stop me from spearing my food so he could snap a picture with his digital camera first. “I need to upload it on Cyworld,” he’d say. I wasn’t on Cyworld—it was some social-networking site that required a national ID to log in—but I took it as one big forum where you could boast to your friends about where you’d been and they hadn’t.
After the meal we’d nestle into a plush couch at one of the Café Michelangelo branches, drinking green-tea lattes while watching illegally downloaded videos on his laptop computer. Changhoon’s favorite was a sketch-comedy called Gag Concert. On weekends we’d cap off the night at the latest wine bar in the gallery district, where the sommelier would pour our bottle of wine into a glass carafe with extra flourish. Changhoon would also order a large platter of fruit anju. The server would set before us a pretty display of sliced pineapples, melons, pears, which we couldn’t even touch because we were too stuffed from dinner. But ordering anju was what you were supposed to do. It always broke my heart to see that fruit go to waste.
His was an old-fashioned courtship—refusing my offers to split the check, endlessly holding doors open, carrying my bags. (“You don’t feel like a girl, holding my purse?” I’d asked him once, but either he didn’t hear me or he didn’t get the joke.) Going out with Changhoon felt like a guilty indulgence—the rich food settling uneasily in my stomach each time the check arrived.
But wherever we went, the servers were always commenting on his stylishness, his height. Changhoon carried himself well; there was always an extra polish—both literal and figurative—to his clothes, his shoes, his hair. Around him I felt the need to “step up my game,” as Nina put it in one of her e-mails. Imagine if Emo had never taken me for a makeover, I’d think while rifling through my closet in the mornings. I’d stand in front of the mirror holding up one blouse or the other until resolving to buy a new one right before our date.
Beth would have labeled my behavior a “regression of feminism.” But in truth, what girl doesn’t want to impress her new boyfriend? The fruits of Beth’s mentoring were rotting away in the bottom crisper of my mind.
In the school’s break room, I would gab about my dates with Monica, who was quickly becoming a good friend. How much it must have pained her to sit there and listen as I prattled on and on about Changhoon’s romantic gestures! Yet—if I may say—she always seemed to pry for more details, as if she derived some vicarious thrill from hearing these accounts.
Monica was always the last one to leave the office and the first one to arrive. She conducted her work as if not only her reputation but her mother’s, her father’s, her entire clan’s were riding on it. “I don’t want to be shame,” she’d say by way of explanation. One morning I found her at the office after having pulled an all-nighter.
“Don’t you get tired this routine?” I asked as I watched her splash cold water on her face. “Maybe you should put your foot on the floor. You should say, I’m not gonna keep doing like this, Principal Yoo!”
Monica scrubbed away yesterday’s makeup. She looked confused, as if she couldn’t tell whether I was joking or not. I was and I wasn’t.
Monica patted her cheeks dry. “Not so easy,” she said. It was at her behest that we each spoke our weaker language, for practice. “Oh, Principal Yoo? He ask me write memo? I make extra copy for you. I left in your desk.”
I watched her reapplying her makeup. Through the reflection in the mirror, she smiled—a placid, unreadable smile. I wasn’t sure whether I was telling her what she already knew or if she simply could not understand my imperfect Korean.
* * *
When Emo learned of my relationship with Changhoon, she shook me up and down like a party favor. “So exciting!” she said. “If all goes right, you’ll stay in Korea forever!” She began fussing about me with renewed energy. It reminded me of the way the grannies at Devon’s Chinese school flocked to the children. Emo would smooth a smudge of foundation from my cheek or pull a loose thread from the hem of my skirt. Smudges and threads that up until that moment I hadn’t even noticed, despite having studied myself carefully in the mirror.
I’d like to think Emo was happy for me. When I came home late, she’d still be up, waiting so I could regale her with details about my date. But after a while I started to grow self-conscious—surely she’d smell Changhoon’s cologne, his cigarette smoke clinging to my clothes, my breath—and told her she no longer had to wait up for me. Emo took it as a slight. She resorted to leaving grease-stained notes under a plastic-wrapped plate of fish on the kitchen table. Maybe it was my limited Korean, but there always seemed to be a passive-aggressive tone beneath her bright words and smiley-faced emoticons.
Emo seemed to keep better track of the progress of my relationship with Changhoon than I did, and sometime in early May she left me the following memo: “Your 100th-day anniversary is coming up! He better plan something special for our Jane. Or else he’ll get in big trouble with your Emo.”
* * *
By the tail end of that spring, Seoul was a sea of red. Banners waved from storefronts. Flags flapped from streetlamps. Posters were plastered in the subways. That summer Korea was hosting the World Cup—well, cohosting, begrudgingly, with Japan, a point that Big Uncle was particularly sore about. The breakfast table conversation—once consumed with what felt like nonstop talk of Don’t Throw Me Away and Leave Me—was suddenly soccer, soccer, soccer. New hybrid phrases—new for me, at least—circled the table:
Daehanminguk, Ha-i-ting! Literal translation: Land of the Great Han People, Fighting! Figurative translation: Go, Republic of Korea!
“Oh, Pilseung, Korea!” Literal translation: Oh, victory, Korea! Figurative translation: You’re going to win, Korea!
“Be the Reds!” That slogan was in English, but it referred to the Korean fans, who called themselves the “Red Devils.”
One morning Big Uncle laid the newspaper flat on the table. “That Coach Hiddink is really something. Whipping our boys into shape,” he said.
Emo, who never struck me as the soccer type, pushed her brother’s arm off the paper and began furiously scanning the picture of the national team. “What are you doing?” Big Uncle demanded. She was tracing a finger under each player’s face, as though reading the lines of a book. “Looking for my favorite.”
“Your favorite should be Park Jisung. He’s the one to watch.” Big Uncle stabbed the chest of a player who was down on one knee in the front row. I’d seen that player before, in the posters on the subway. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Changhoon—both shared the same boyish, eager grin, their eyes crinkling into slivers, a smile that went all in.
Emo snatched the paper back from her brother. “Park Jisung is only my favorite from the neck down.”
“What you don’t know could fill the shelves of our national library,” Big Uncle muttered.
Seeing Big Uncle and Emo banter sometimes made me wonder what my mother had been like around her siblings. Would she have joined in the back-and-forth? Or did she have that kind of rapport with Sang instead?
Emo’s finger stopped at a young player with long hair and a delicate face. He looked like the frontman for a boy band. “Ah, there he is! Our Ahn Junghwan! The prince of the soccer pitch.”
Emo wasn’t exaggerating—that was actually what Ahn Junghwan was called, as Monica would gush to me later at school.
Emo said, “Jane, who’s your favorite?”
I peered down at the picture of the team. I supposed the loyal thing to do would have been to choose Park Jisung. But instead my finger landed on a different face, with a square jaw and pronounced cheekbones. There was something about his face that was different from all his other teammates’. There was something about him that reminded me of the Korean guys I grew up with back in Queens.
“Who is he?” I said.
“Cha Duri.” Big Uncle shook his head. “His father played for the Bundesliga. But I don’t know, this little punk still has to prove himself.”
Emo shook her head, too. “He’s not my style at all. His features are too harsh. You probably like him because he’s a gyopo like you. But born and raised in Germany.”
That was why he looked familiar. It was funny how the same Korean faces managed to look different depending on where the person grew up. It was like how back in New York you could spot the FOBs (Fresh Off the Boaters) in the crowd—the genetics were the same, but the expressions they wore on their faces had a foreign, confused air.
“The first Korean match is in Busan,” Big Uncle said. “My company for a ticket.” Then he sighed—a low, wistful sigh. He was staring not at the newspaper but across the room, out the glass of the terrace door, and past the courtyard. I recognized that sigh. It brought me right back to Flushing, and Food, and the 7 train.
For our hundredth, Changhoon was planning a surprise two-day trip for us. I was able to get the days off from school only because Monica had offered to cover for me. I promised I’d buy her a souvenir from wherever it was Changhoon was taking me. “Maybe he escorts you Jeju Island!” Monica mused in the break room. “Is where Pae Byun and Ahn Jaeni go their wedding honeymoon.”
The actors who’d portrayed the roles of Chulsu and Jihae, respectively, from Don’t Throw Me Away. But when I told her what Emo had told me—that the show was “played out”—Monica looked chagrined. “But I still like.”
I was two minutes late meeting Changhoon in front of the ticket booth at Seoul Station. He was tapping on his watch. “Ya, I kept calling you! Why didn’t you pick up?”
Chuh! ’Cause I’d never hear the end of it from you, I almost joked, remembering the words I’d overheard the first time in Café Michelangelo. But it was too early to joke. I fished my phone from my purse and saw six missed calls from him. “Sorry,” I said instead.
He gave me the once-over and told me I looked like a student backpacker. “It’s my only luggage,” I explained. It was either that or packing my clothes, makeup, and hair products into plastic FamilyMart bags. It was the same nylon backpack I’d brought with me from New York but hadn’t touched since. When I unzipped it to pack for the trip, the insides released, strangely enough, the smell of mahogany and wheatgrass. It brought me right back inside the Mazer-Farley house. But as Changhoon took the backpack from me and examined it, I began to see its shabbiness through his eyes. Despite its overall sturdiness, it was worn here and there. And it was a rather unbecoming shade of forest green. I grew self-conscious. Probably Emo never would have let me leave the house with it.
“So where is exactly this secret place?” I asked.
“Well . . .” Changhoon rubbed his hands together. “I’m taking you back to your ancestral homeland. I thought you’d want to know where you came from.”
“We take the train to North Korea?” I said with exaggerated effect.
I waited a beat for Changhoon to laugh along at the ridiculousness of my question. He didn’t. Instead he stared back at me blankly. “That’s impossible,” he said. He could be a very literal person.
But Changhoon was actually taking me to my mother’s adopted home of Busan, the coastal city on the southern tip of the peninsula. As our train thundered southbound, I stared out the window. Large steel cranes dominated the plots of land, jaws gaping dumbfounded in the air. Wrecking balls were poised over low-rise buildings, ready to raze their old and tired façades. But then the scenery shifted, concrete giving way to farmland. Makeshift huts with plastic roofs dotted the fields. We passed trees bearing what looked like round bundles of paper. Later I would learn they were pears. Big Uncle said that was why they were so expensive—because of the labor of wrapping each individual fruit to protect it from the elements.
My mother had once made a similar journey southbound to Busan, during the family’s wartime flight from the North. But she had been only a child. Sang, too. The few details Sang had offered up were characteristically sparse: Train inside full. No choice but riding on top. It was little bit tap-tap-hae. Then his tone would grow dismissive. But those days what isn’t little bit tap-tap-hae?
Emo was the one to fill in the blanks, even though she herself had not yet been born. It was my grandfather who’d ordered the family to flee south as war broke out. “We’ll meet in Busan,” he’d said, before the Communists came and conscripted him into their army. But all southbound trains were already bursting with women and children clutching cloth-wrapped bundles. My mother and her family had been forced to ride on top of the roof of the train car. Sang and my mother sat toward the middle while Big Uncle and their mother sat to the outer ends, their hands encircling the smaller children as if playing a game of ring-around-the-rosy. At each stop more passengers got on, but no one got off, the cars groaning with the burden of too many people. Sometimes the train stalled for days at a time. Their journey took more than a month. What the family’s livelihood had been in those early years in Busan was uncertain—my grandmother had probably peddled rolls of homemade kimbap; the boys ran odd jobs for the neighbors. It had been a dark stretch of the family history. They were finally reunited with Re Myungsun when he was able to escape from the Northern army. He started running south and never looked back.
I gazed out the window. Our train was approaching a tunnel burrowed into the face of a mountain. The train rushed through—the whoosh of wind causing the cars to rattle—and the lights flickered off. In that darkness it felt more than just a “little bit tap-tap-hae.” It felt as if we were being swallowed whole.
When we emerged from the tunnel, Changhoon pulled my hand away from myself. I’d been rubbing my chest. “Everything okay?” he asked. “You look pale.”
“It’s just . . . I wonder if my mother’s family took this same train from Wonsan. During the war.”
“That’s not really possible,” Changhoon said. “Unless they transferred trains in Pyongyang or Seoul.”
Sometimes I wished Changhoon would just indulge me. “Ay, I’m not talking real-life train schedules. Only imagining.”
“Don’t say it like that,” Changhoon told me. I felt chastised. Maybe talking about the war was a no-no.
But he was referring to my Korean itself. “Your cadence. It goes up and down too much.” His finger drew a zigzag through the air. When I asked if he meant my accent, he shook his head and said that was fine but that my cadence was “a dead giveaway you’re a foreigner.”
Changhoon took his hand from me and ran his fingers through his windblown hair. “Here’s what you sound like: ‘The TIger GOBbled UP the BOY and GIRL.’”
He smiled, triumphant in his ability to diagnose the problem with my Korean. “We Seoulites stay neutral when we talk. Listen: ‘The tiGER gobbled uh-UPP the boy and gir-RUL.’”
“But you go up and down, too!” I pointed out. I thought this would make Changhoon laugh, just as I couldn’t help but laugh sheepishly with Devon about the Italian ices.
But Changhoon bristled at my comment. “No I don’t.”
I trained my ears on the conversations surrounding us. The other passengers’ animated chatter rose and fell like lapping waves. The Busan cadence had a distinct, familiar rhythm. If I closed my eyes, I would be right back in our church basement. It felt quite different from the Korean spoken in the capital. It was only in hearing the contrast at that moment, on the train, that I realized that Seoul Korean felt unfamiliar, sterile.
“I like Busan-speak. It sounds like music.” Like a lullaby, I thought.
“But that’s not how you’re supposed to speak Seoul standard Korean.” He said it as if it were no big deal to ask me to fix the very rhythms of my speech.
I probably should just have left the conversation there. Why rock the boat when we could have enjoyed the rest of the train ride holding hands and watching Gag Concert on his laptop? Except I didn’t.
“Your cadence isn’t perfect and flat either,” I said. “What about when you say ‘why’?”
“What about when I say ‘why’?”
“Here’s Changhoon Oppa’s sound.” I unlaced my fingers from his. “‘Wah-ai-AI-yai!’” I slashed a line in the air. It spiked like a series of murmurs on a heart monitor.
Changhoon looked nonplussed.
“I do again: ‘Wah-ai-AI-yai!’ Kind of like when Valley Girls say, ‘Oh-miGAWahd!’”
He continued looking at me blankly.
“You can dish it out, but you’re not so good to take it, huh?” I said, poking him gently in the ribs to try to lighten the mood.
“Oppa is just trying to help you,” he said. I thought his tone would soften, but it remained resolute. “If all you want to do is make jokes, how will you ever improve?”
* * *
We did spend the rest of the ride watching videos. But there was an uncomfortable silence between us. This had been the closest we’d come to having a tiff, and by Changhoon’s stiffened jaw I could tell he was still upset. His words, too, continued to rattle uneasily within me. It felt a bit as if he’d posed a test. As if my ability to correct my cadence—or not—was like some last linguistic hurdle to surmount before achieving full assimilation.
But when we arrived in Busan, that tension was immediately defused. Perhaps it was the energy of the city—so different from the frenetic, competitive pace of Seoul. Here the air itself was alive with freshness and tasted almost salt-licked. Again we were subsumed in a sea of red: World Cup paraphernalia was draped from every post and storefront.
“Big Uncle told me the first Korea match happens here today,” I said. “If only we had tickets to see it.”
“That would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it?” Changhoon said.
“But even more than that, I want to see the ocean. Can you take me? I feel and smell and hear it, but it is so tap-tap-hae that I cannot see.”
The last time I remembered seeing the ocean was through the window of the plane as we lifted off from JFK. Queens, Brooklyn, the city—all became indistinguishable specks surrounded by water. Seoul, despite the Han River splitting the city in two, was otherwise landlocked.
“You sure you’re not bada-chulsin?” Changhoon said, taking my hand once more. Ocean-born. It sounded less corny in the Korean. “You really are a Busan girl.”
“And a New York one, too,” I added, wagging my finger from side to side, the way Devon and Alla used to do with each other. And don’t you forget it, I almost added. But I was certain the expression did not translate from the English.
In a matter of minutes, there was water, water everywhere. “There’s your ocean,” he said, pointing out the window of our cab to the stretch of beach. I tugged his arm, making my voice light like a buoy, dripping with aegyo. “Can we stop? Pretty please?” I hoped it would coax him into ordering the cabbie to pull over. I wanted nothing more than to pry off my heels and sink my feet into the cool water.
But of course there wasn’t time. We drove on, smelling and hearing and seeing the sea through the windows of the cab, until it gave way to high-rise buildings and receded from view.
Changhoon had hired the taxi for the day—we’d stopped quickly at the Grand Sinnara Hotel, on the shores of Haeundae Beach, to drop off our luggage, before he crammed all the city’s sights into the short span of the morning: Dalmaji Hill, Dongbaek Island, the famous “Forty Steps” staircase. But probably the most memorable was Jagalchi Fish Market. Alley after alley, stall after stall, sea creatures of all kinds writhed and wriggled in buckets and tanks. There were rows upon rows of red fish, blue fish, big fish, small fish. Prickly sea urchins, long ropes of eel, abalone on the half shell, translucent baby octopuses and their larger, purple, opaque cousins. We laughed as one particularly feisty octopus attempted mutiny, sliding out of its Styrofoam box and across the floor. It was a successful three feet into its escape before the vendor noticed and dumped it back into the box. The air was hot with notes of early summer and cool with the clean smell of fresh fish.
We ate a late breakfast in one of the restaurants lining an alley of the fish market. Women in pink galoshes and matching pink gloves scooped treasures from their fish tanks out front. “Dine with us, brother and sister, dine with us,” they chanted. Their voices gathered in a chorus—cadences scaling up and down, like sirens of the Donghae Sea. “Rest your legs here. Scallion pancakes, on the house.” We were lured into the one that called out to Changhoon, “Handsome bachelor, come in! Come in!” The woman was old enough to be his mother.
When we were back in the cab, Changhoon squeezed my hand. “I have a surprise for you. I thought . . . well, you might want to see where your mother grew up.”
Living in Seoul, sometimes I found myself forgetting there was a whole country beyond the capital’s concrete limits. But Busan, still the second-largest city in the country, had a different persona altogether—it was suffused with a fresh energy and rhythm. To think that my mother had wandered these streets from the time she was a little girl. To think I was breathing in the same ocean air as she had all those years ago. This was the closest thing to my mother’s true homeland—not Seoul.
I squeezed Changhoon’s hand back. “You’re right. I was so curious. Now, thanks to you, I know.”
“No, I mean where she actually grew up.” Changhoon pulled a sheet of paper from his bag. It was a printout of a map. “You said your mother lived in one of those refugee villages in Busan.”
That had been on one of our dates—at a sake bar in Gangnam—where I’d rambled on with one of Emo’s stories. After a few thimblefuls of sake, I could barely recall what exactly I’d divulged to Changhoon.
“Well—I think I found it.”
“You what!” English flew out of my mouth.
I had formed a picture of the whole neighborhood in my mind. A stretch of shantytown shacks lining the Donghae coast. The dull tin luster of corrugated metal roofs contrasting with the bright salted blue of the sea. But an abstract curiosity about a place harbored in your mind was very different from arriving at that actual place in a matter of minutes.
When the cab pulled up, however, a gaping construction site stared back at us. Whatever had been there before was gone.
“No, that can’t be right,” Changhoon said, scanning his printout furiously. “It’s definitely supposed to be here. . . .”
We stared at the empty dirt lot. To one side lay neat piles of wood and steel beams, primed for construction. There were the bones of a building being erected, and the hollow spaces between the framework exposed the horizon line, where blue sky met blue-green ocean. The view was both like and unlike the view from the 7 train.
A man in a hard hat and an orange vest stepped out of a truck parked on the site. Changhoon ran over to him, waving for me to follow. I was tripping on the gravel but right at his heels all the same. “Sir! Sir!” Changhoon called out. When he finally caught up to the man, he asked what had happened to the village that had been there before.
“How’m I supposed to know?” the man said, turning away. “I just work here.”
“Sir, please!”
The urgency in Changhoon’s tone must have made the man soften, if just a notch. “Yeah, there used to be villages like that around here.” He paused to go hraaack! before launching a spit wad onto the ground. Big Uncle always did the same thing. “But they could also be anywhere.”
Changhoon looked dejected.
“Sorry, kid. That’s all I know.”
This quest had stirred in me a longing that up to this point had been dim and hazy and inarticulate. But now that we were this close, it suddenly asserted itself, grew sharp in my chest. To give up now would have felt worse than never having tried at all.
I punched Emo’s speed-dial number on my phone. I heard Changhoon ask the construction man what they were building and the man’s gruff response: “Take a wild guess. High-rise condos.” Emo picked up on the first ring. I had called her before, when we’d first arrived in Busan, and she’d launched into an endless stream of questions—until Changhoon had pointed to the phone with a Hurry-hurry, wrap it up motion. This time I was spared the long-winded exchange of pleasantries, and I asked immediately for the location of the house.
“Oh, that was so long ago! I just remember how down the road the carp-cakes man had his stall set up and American Uncle would sneak off to—”
“Emo! We try to find it now. Tell me where it is. Please. If you can.”
Emo at first bristled. I knew it was rude to cut her off. Yet she complied. “We lived at the foot of the old drawbridge. Follow the coastline. It was the first alley to the left. Pass the carp-bread— Pass the corner. That was always my route home from school.”
“But . . . you don’t have any more details?” I asked, trying to mask my impatience when I really longed to yell, Just give me the exact address!
“Hold on,” Emo said. I heard her shouting over to Big Uncle, and I heard him shout back a variation of the same imprecise directions, peppered with a few more details. Changhoon looked at me expectantly. I cupped the phone and repeated them to him. He stared at the map in his hands and shook his head. “Then this is it.”
I don’t think Emo quite understood how much it meant to me in that moment to find my mother’s childhood home; it was a sensation that was new even to me. “Have a great time!” she said breezily, and clicked off.
It would have proved impossible to retrieve her imprecise childhood recollections—the exact location of the family home would be forever buried in the hazy recesses of memory.
Either that, or my mother’s girlhood shantytown had been razed and was now resurrected as luxury condos.
When I got off the phone, Changhoon took my hand and led me back to the car. “I didn’t mean to put a damper on the day,” he said. “I just thought it’d be a nice idea.”
It had been disappointing, though; it was the pinprick deflating an otherwise perfect morning. But it wasn’t Changhoon’s fault. “Good,” he said when I shook my head and put on a bright smile. “Because I have another surprise for you.”
Back in the taxi, Changhoon pulled something out of his bag. It was a package wrapped in pink paper and pinched at the ends, like a giant Tootsie Roll. “Happy hundredth,” he said, kissing me on the cheek.
When I took the package from him, it was soft to the touch. I held it to my ear and shook it with exaggerated effect.
“What are you doing?” he asked, puzzled.
“It’s just . . .” A joke. “Never mind.” I undid the ribbons; a rolled-up red cloth popped out of the paper. It was a red jersey that read, in English, KOREA, FIGHTING!
“Put it on!” Changhoon said, undoing the buttons of his short-sleeved shirt.
“What are you, Superman?” I said as he revealed what was beneath his shirt. He was wearing the exact same red jersey. Then he helped me put mine on. He straightened the shoulders and then stared proudly at his handiwork. “Couple-T’s!” he said, pointing from his matching shirt to mine. “Couple-T” was the phenomenon of couples wearing matching outfits—on purpose. Monica had had to explain it to me when a gossip magazine in the break room was opened to a photo of Pae Byun and Ahn Jaeni dressed identically from head to toe: pink polo shirts tucked into the same pale blue jeans and shiny black loafers. The photo was snapped just as they’d stepped off the plane on Jeju Island for their honeymoon.
I didn’t know what to say. I felt like the only person in the country who wasn’t following soccer. And now Changhoon wanted us to walk around matchy-matchy. It was a sweet gesture—it just wasn’t my style.
But it was a gift. And I could see that it made Changhoon happy. I thanked him for his thoughtfulness, kissed him on the cheek, then, quickly, on the lips. I could feel the cabbie’s eyes in the rearview mirror, giving me nunchi.
But it turned out the KOREA, FIGHTING! jersey hadn’t been the real surprise. Our cab was pulling up to what at first was an impenetrable ocean of red—Busanites wearing identical jerseys. When the crowd parted, I saw that we’d arrived at the World Cup Stadium.
I slapped Changhoon on the arm. “No you didn’t!”
If his smile when I put on the shirt was bright, it grew even brighter still. “I did,” he said. “I did!”
My company for a ticket. It was Korea’s first match of the World Cup. “How on earth you getting tickets?”
Changhoon shrugged. “My father might’ve called in a favor.”
I didn’t actually know what Changhoon’s parents did—I always sensed he didn’t feel comfortable talking about it. Since it was a sentiment I shared about my own family, I’d never pressed him for details. Although the other Korean-Koreans never seemed to have the same qualms; all the teachers at school pressed first about my MIA father’s occupation until, after I offered up a few evasive answers, they redirected their pointed inquiries to the subject of my American uncle.
As we got out of the taxi, I immediately admonished myself for my earlier disappointment about the couple-T. Why you act like baby? And beneath that there was another nagging question that managed to surface: Would Ed Farley have ever done this for me, constructing an elaborate day in my mother’s home city? No. He was too busy holding hands with Beth down Court Street. I had come to Korea to escape him, and I’d found Changhoon.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” I said, covering Changhoon’s face with kisses. Take that, Ed, I thought with each kiss.
Changhoon laughed. “One thank-you is more than enough.”
We grabbed hands and ran to the stadium entrance, becoming one with the sea of red fans.
If you watched any of the news coverage for the World Cup that year, you would’ve seen images of the South Korean Red Devils fans everywhere—an overwhelming tide of red T-shirts and painted faces. The Western media praised the Red Devils for their good manners and lack of . . . well, hooliganism. (This praise, however, did not extend to the one superfan who doused himself in paint thinner before lighting a match, with the hopes of becoming the twelfth man, the “ghost player” on the field.) But what that media coverage could not capture was the collective energy that radiated in the air of the crowd. It was palpable and pulsing; the only word to describe it? Jung—that deep, shared sentiment coursing through the entirety of the stadium and bursting into the streets. Jung for our national team. Jung among the fellow fans. I witnessed that overflowing jung for myself. A second wind pumped through my body—the exhaustion from the travel and the peaks and troughs of the day’s emotions were ebbing away. The ripples of jung began when the Korean national anthem played and we solemnly placed our hands to our hearts and sang. Our notes soared from Baekdu Mountain to the Donghae Sea, just like the words to the song.
And then Korea scored its first goal. The bleachers were alight with life. We cried out in triumph. The woman in the red jersey next to me caught my eye. There was no flicker of hesitation as she wrapped her arm fiercely around me.
Suddenly we were all linking arms, swaying side to side and chanting cheers as one synchronized mass. Oh, Pilseung, Korea! I didn’t know the words, but I mouthed along all the same. I looked over at Changhoon: his lips were pinched together in a tight O, his eyes crinkled with joy. Changhoon’s arm was draped over my shoulders. “Thank you, again,” I said to him.
“Ay, no need,” he said before turning back to the game.
“Changhoon Oppa,” I whispered in his ear. “Saranghae.”
I had never told anyone “I love you” in Korean. At first the word tasted . . . foreign, uncanny. It tumbled off my tongue and hit the warm ocean breeze. But its aftertaste was all freshness and familiarity. It felt like jung itself.
There’s always a risk in being the first one to utter the L-word. In those fraught seconds before your beloved responds (or not), you’re left wide open and trembling. And it’s too late to snatch the word back, even if you wanted to.
But that’s the thing with love, isn’t it? It’s not a venture for the risk-averse.
Breaking from the human chain, Changhoon clasped me and lifted me into the air. “Jane!” he cried, with feeling. “I’ve wanted to tell you for so long. I love you. I love you. I love you.”
I’d been holding my breath. Now I exhaled with relief. In the confusion of our embrace, the match, and the chanting crowds, the bag of ojinguh that Changhoon had been holding got tossed into the air. We spun round and round, drowning in dried squid confetti.
* * *
Korea beat Poland 2–0, and that night we celebrated on Haeundae Beach, in the red pocha tents that lined the shore. Curly-permed ladies served up slices of raw abalone, translucent strings of live octopus tentacles, and crab innards mixed with rice. Groups of friends pushed their plastic tables together and poured one another rounds of drinks. I remembered Sang once saying that the Haeundae pocha tents were where the gangpae, or gangsters, used to hang out. But those were the days long before ground was broken for the five-star resorts.
Every now and again, someone would cry, “Daehanminguk!” or “Fighting!” and that whole table would erupt into whoops. Their voices rose and fell in that familiar Busan cadence. I let their rhythms wash over me. I remembered my early days in Korea, eavesdropping on all those conversations—each one had felt like a flaunted reminder that I would never belong.
In the midst of the revelry, Changhoon teetered to his feet. It was clear he was about to make a public announcement.
“What do you do?” I said, tugging on his arm. “Sit back down!”
His cheeks were flushed and rosy. “Don’t worry,” he said before turning to command the room. “Attention, everyone!” he said. The room came to halt. And then, to my utter mortification, Changhoon began dragging me to my feet.
“You embarrass me!” I whispered. But he was too strong; he pulled me up all the same, wrapping an arm tightly around my shoulders lest I wriggle away.
“Don’t struggle so!” Changhoon whispered back. I could have been the escapist octopus from the fish market, writhing out of its too-tight box.
Changhoon turned to the crowd again. “To our beautiful gyopo girlfriend, returning to our beautiful native Busan!” He was not from Busan—his family traced its roots back many generations to Seoul—but Koreans sometimes did that. Instead of emphasizing the individual “my” or “her,” they spoke in the collective possessive.
Then, as one, his audience turned its eye to me.
The crowd did not whoop and cheer, the way they had at their own private tables. They looked from him to me—I froze under that scrutiny—then back to Changhoon.
“Okay, drunko!” someone shouted. With that, the crowd’s attention snapped; they all turned away and resumed their tableside chatter.
Busan in that moment felt uncannily B&T.
My cheeks were still burning red from Changhoon’s public outburst when the pocha lady weaved her way toward us. There was something in her purposeful gait that reminded me, for some reason, of Nina. “Here,” she said. She was addressing me. “Took you for a foreigner at first. I didn’t know you were one of us.” She lowered a Styrofoam plate of live octopus tentacles onto our table.
She didn’t linger to hear our thank-yous but instead spun on her heel and stalked off. I told Changhoon that if she hadn’t just given us free anju, I would’ve thought we had pissed her off.
“Well, you know what they say about Busan ladies,” Changhoon said, reaching for his chopsticks. I thought of the women in the pink galoshes, calling out to us in soft voices in the fish market.
“What, they’re mermaids of the ocean?”
“No, they’re tough.” He lifted a still-squirming string, dipped it in a mixture of salt and sesame oil, and dangled it above my mouth. “Here, eat up.”
The tentacle was curling itself around the tip of the chopstick. I was fascinated and repulsed at the same time. As I chewed tentatively, the octopus tentacle fought me furiously, suctioning the insides of my mouth. “Keep chewing!” Changhoon instructed. Finally it relented. It let out a salty burst of sea before giving up the fight.
“That was a little grossing me out. But kinda cool. I guess I can now cross it out of my list,” I said, but Changhoon was turning around. A bottle of C1 soju arrived. It was sent by a man sitting at the next table. He looked about Sang’s age.
“You’ll need a drink to go with that anju,” he said gruffly. We tried to thank him, but he was already turning away to quaff his own soju.
Changhoon poured me a drink, and then I poured him one. We toasted—first to our magnificent victory, then to our magnificent national team. We drank to the magnificence of our Busan people. The jung that began in the bleachers of the stadium pulsed through the pocha tent. It filled my lungs and made me gasp with breathlessness.
We finally stumbled back to the Grand Sinnara Hotel, to a suite that overlooked the Donghae Sea. Up to that point, Changhoon and I had never been intimate—like most Koreans we both lived at home, and the furthest we’d gone was the occasional make-out or grope at the movies or in his car before he dropped me off at home. We hadn’t even gone to one of the many love motels that rented rooms by the hour, a fact that shocked even Monica. You guys still haven’t done it? But I knew that our getaway trip came with the implicit promise of sex. And I was determined to give him the best sex of his life.
But Changhoon passed out before I could do it.
While he snored off the soju, I stared out the window. The pocha revelry had died down, and a stillness swept over Haeundae Beach. I slipped out of our suite and rode down in the elevator. Once I hit the outdoors, I pried off my heels and found myself half trotting, half tripping toward the ocean. My feet sank into the damp, soft sand and then the ocean itself, the ebbing waves licking my toes.
A bridge stretching across that expanse of water glittered in the distance. Later I would learn that it wasn’t the old Yeongdo drawbridge, but in that moment I imagined it was. Just as I imagined I was staring out at the little cluster of shacks at the foot of that bridge, where my mother had once lived. And in all of my Korean sojourn, that moment was the closest sensation I’d ever felt to coming back home.
* * *
The next morning, eyes still blurry with sleep, I roused Changhoon, climbed on top of him. I closed my eyes, bracing myself for the waves of discomfort.
But they never came. Changhoon flipped me so he was on top, perhaps to save me from doing all the work. The second I began to wince—sex wouldn’t start to feel enjoyable until much later, once we became accustomed and attuned to each other’s rhythms—he’d ease up with gentler movements.
After he came, his face shone with sweat. Panting, he petted my hair. “Jane-ah,” he said. “Way to end things.”
I started, then realized that my brain had blipped—it was doing that literal-translation thing again.
What I think he’d actually meant was, That was out of this world.