That summer our national team enjoyed a winning streak. Each victory—each draw, even—was met with an ever-escalating frenzy. We kept advancing until we lost to Germany. Our loss coincided with the anniversary of the Korean War—two tragedies twinned together, palpable in the very air of the streets. And just like that, the revelry ended, the waves of fans ebbing away.
* * *
The monsoon season came and went, followed by a thick, claustrophobic humidity that coated the city like a damp woolen blanket. But when summer reached its end, the oppressive heat lifted. As fall swept in on a cool, refreshing breeze, I received an e-mail from Nina. “So over everything here,” she wrote. “Is there a Gino’s in Seoul we could catch up at? That is, if your offer’s still on the table.”
I didn’t think Nina would actually take me up on my offer to visit Korea, though it was one I renewed at the end of each e-mail. I’m ashamed to admit this, but I had dismissed Nina as too provincial. I could hardly picture her leaving the neighborhood to board the subway to Queens, let alone a plane to another country halfway around the world.
“She’s your best friend. We must show her a good time,” Changhoon said over dinner one night, with the same dogged determination he mustered for his vocabulary logs and his daily calisthenics (something he did every morning since mandatory military service). He pulled out his phone and furiously punched keys.
“Maybe not best friend—”
“Oh! Just heard back from my army buddy Yongsu!” Changhoon scrolled through the message. “He just checked with his co-worker, who checked with his foreigner English-teacher friend, who knows all the hot spots. But that foreigner friend hasn’t gotten back to us yet.”
“You just sent that text barely one minute ago.”
Changhoon’s phone buzzed again, bearing messages from other friends. He’d gone through his entire social network in less time than it took me to compose a single text in Korean. Now I understood why Emo would get so impatient when I failed to respond to her immediately.
“Everyone agrees: We should take her to Itaewon. She’ll probably feel more comfortable around other foreigners.”
Itaewon. Where Sang had warned me not to go. Where my mother had met my father.
“Why Nina will want to come to Korea only to see American faces—” I started to say when Changhoon’s cell vibrated once again.
“Fi-nally! Yongsu’s co-worker’s foreigner friend got back to us.” Changhoon was working himself into a frenzy. I touched his arm. “No need to go obuh.”
Obuh—presumably from the English “overboard”—was another adopted foreign word that had drifted its way into Korean. It shed its extraneous second half, its harsh Western contours. As it circulated from tongue to tongue, the word grew smooth and round, like a pebble washed up on shore. Now it made its home here, assimilated among its Korean counterparts. But the word was no longer recognizable from its native form.
But Changhoon was pushing aside his bowl of rice, frenziedly typing notes on his phone with his thumbs. “Here’s where we should take her for round one. . . .”
* * *
Nina flew in on the red eye from New York, just as I had. But I had been at my lowest point then. And now I had a new home, a new city. A family. A boyfriend. I was nothing like the Jane I had left behind.
“Jane-ah,” Emo said on the drive to Incheon Airport. “You know you’re responsible for everything while your friend’s here.”
I knew what she meant: Don’t let Nina out of your sight.
Emo took her eyes off the road to give me a stern look. “Did you hear me?”
“Yes,” I answered.
At the airport I almost didn’t recognize Nina when she came through the gate. She wore dark-rinse fitted jeans, a T-shirt with a printed design, and a pair of dark leather sneakers that looked like Sam Surati’s bowling shoes. The old Nina used to wear light blue flared jeans and chunky-heeled Steve Maddens during the day, spandex minidresses by night. That Nina also wore heavy makeup. But instead of the usual dark liner tracing her mouth, her lips were now nude. Gone, too, were the thick gold hoops that hung heavy from her earlobes. Her once iron-straightened hair now framed her face in loose waves.
“What the . . . !” I said, throwing my arms open to her.
“Oh, God, please don’t say hipster,” Nina pleaded as we hugged tightly. “I was going more for Banana Republican.”
When we broke apart, she looked me up and down. “Whoa, what’s with the makeup and heels at three in the morning, or whatever time it is over here?”
I spun around. “How do I look?”
“You look!” she said.
I felt a little slighted that she didn’t actually offer a compliment, but Nina was already turning to greet Emo. She tucked her body stiffly into a bow as Emo held out her hand. Seeing Emo do this, Nina changed course and stuck out her hand as Emo retracted hers and tipped her head slightly into a bow. They laughed.
“Nice to meet you, Ms. Re,” Nina said. I was surprised by the nervous tinge to her voice. “Thanks for letting me stay with you. I’m sorry you had to come get me in the middle of the night.”
I wasn’t sure how much English Emo actually understood, but she had a wide smile plastered across her face. She kept nodding and saying, “No purobohlem! No purobohlem!”
“Oh! Before I forget—” Nina reached into her backpack (Nina with a backpack instead of her usual fake black leather tote?) and pulled out a white pastry box tied with red-and-white string. It was from Gino’s. “They’re cookies. From a very famous bakery in my neighborhood,” she said in slowed-down speech.
“You know the way to my aunt’s heart,” I told her.
Emo accepted the box from Nina and took a whiff. “I diet!” she said, but she was smiling.
“You? Nah!” Nina swatted the air. “You look like a woman.”
Emo said to me, “Your friend, even though she’s a foreigner, you can tell she had a good family education.”
I pointed to the Gino’s box. “There better be cannolis in there,” I said to Nina. My tongue found its natural footing in English—I’d forgotten how much it had atrophied during my time in Korea.
She rolled her eyes in mock exasperation. “First off, Jane, it’s ‘cannoli,’ no s. Second, smuggling cannoli fourteen hours out of Brooklyn? That’s just . . . wrong.”
“Man!” I feigned annoyance. “That’s the only reason I invited you.”
“I ain’t your cannoli mule,” Nina said, index finger swaggering through the air.
I jerked my thumb at the loudspeaker. “You hear that? That’s them calling your return flight.”
Nina and I both broke into laughter—deep, rumbling laughs. We hugged again.
“I missed you!” she said.
“Me, too!” But when I looked over at Emo, she was shaking her head at me. I didn’t know what I’d done exactly that she disapproved of, but I could read her expression. And it said, You, on the other hand, did not receive a good family education.
* * *
When we arrived at the apartment, Emo insisted on heating up some fish stew. Nina politely finished the whole bowl. After she unpacked her things and freshened up, I took her to Café Michelangelo.
“I still can’t believe you’re here,” I said over our cups of caffe latte. “You’ve changed.”
“Look who’s talking,” she said, fluttering a hand at me. “Jane, it’s just me. You didn’t need to get all dolled up.”
“Like I did it for you,” I said at first. Then, glancing around, I lowered my voice. “Honestly, though—people here expect you to dress up more.”
Nina’s eyes swept the room. “But that girl’s not. And that one. And that one.”
I knew what Emo would have said: Those girls aren’t making the most of their potential.
I made my voice light and airy and changed the subject. “So what do you want to do? Get some sleep so you don’t crash later? Or power through the day? Or . . .”
Nina fished out a book from her bag. A million little Post-its fluttered in the wind. Its cover read Seoul for New Yorkers: The Definitive Guide. A picture of Namsan Tower was sandwiched between the Twin Towers.
“What an awful cover,” I told her.
“It came out right around 9/11,” she said, shaking her head with pity. “What could they do? Retract the thousands of copies after the fact? You can’t help but feel bad for whoever published it.”
“So you bought it anyway.”
She pointed to the orange price sticker. “It was in the bargain bin,” she said. Then she let out a laugh; it sounded bitter. “Speaking of bins: Joey Cammareri and me split up last month.”
“What!” Nina’s last e-mail—the one before she wrote about flying over to Korea—had gushed about him. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I wanted to tell you in person.”
So that was why she had come. Not to see me but to run away from her ex-boyfriend. Nina looked from my face to the book down on the table.
“So . . . what happened?” I asked.
She scraped away the price tag with her fingernail. “Whatever, it doesn’t matter anymore.” Abruptly she opened her book again. “Anyway, these are the neighborhoods I want to go check out.”
I flipped through Nina’s flagged pages, marveling at her organization. Here were her marked entries:
MYEONGDONG:
A toss-up between Times Square and Rockefeller Center, this shopping mecca is packed with more Japanese tourists than a Hello Kitty store. Stop for lunch at Myeongdong Kalguksu for its famed knife-cut noodle soup . . . but you’ll have as much luck finding the “original” as you will Ray’s Famous.
INSADONG:
Combine Greenwich Avenue’s quaint nod to the Motherland (think: Tea and Sympathy, Myers & Keswick) with Montague Street’s landmarked charm and you get Insadong Road. Come here for the traditional teahouses, where one thimbleful of persimmon-and herb-infused cha will set you back eight bucks.
SAMCHEONGDONG:
Sleek SoHo galleries mingle with ye olde hanok architecture in a surprising East-meets-West, yin-yang harmony.
HONGDAE:
Pratt types and Chelsea club kids alike hang in this wannabe East Village hood (read: Williamsburg). Strut down Gutgosipungil, aka The Street You Want to Walk Down. (Really.) You’ll get some serious Astor Place déjà vu.
DONGDAEMUN MARKET:
Buyer beware: Four-for-a-dollar socks and China-made trinkets galore await in this ginormous flea market.
“So,” Nina said, rubbing her hands together. “I can’t wait to meet your new man! What’s he like?”
“Changhoon’s great,” I said. “He’s planned a huge night out for you featuring not one, not two, but five rounds of funnery! Spreadsheets may or may not have been involved.” I threw my hands up in the air for added flourish. I was laying it on thick—deliberately—and Nina knew it.
“God, you’re such a cornball,” she said. “At least that hasn’t changed.”
Nina knew that about me, and I realized how refreshing it was to talk to someone with whom I had a shared history. “But seriously, Changhoon—well, you can call him Chandler—might’ve gone a tiny bit obuh—overboard—but it’s all good.”
“Who knew having fun would be this much work?” Nina said. “But . . . it’s all stuff you want to do, too, right?”
I shrugged. “I’m up for whatever.”
“Okay, but I’m warning you—not sure how much steam I’ve got left in me.” She downed the last of her cup. “Coffee here’s expensive.” They had cost six dollars apiece. “This stuff better last me all day.”
* * *
That evening, after Nina and I checked out some of the tourist sites marked in her book, we made our way to Itaewon. I had yet to check out the neighborhood, and not just because I was dutifully heeding Sang’s warnings. The truth was, after my trip down south with Changhoon, I’d started to create a more forgiving portrait of my mother. Busan had been a time of her innocence, and I didn’t want to sully that image. So I kept putting it off, putting it off, the way Devon used to push her Chinese textbooks to the bottom of her homework stack.
Here was what Seoul for New Yorkers had to say about Itaewon:
This “foreigner-friendly” nabe is now chockablock with the latest fusion lounges, clubs, and restaurants more multi than a Benetton ad. Recently spotted: Pae Byun and Ahn Jaeni (the Korean Brad Pitt + Jennifer Aniston) canoodling at JJ’s. Duck into the back alleys for your fake Prada fix or bootleg K-dramarama videos.
And then, as a postscript:
Those seeking carnal pleasures, worry not: Hooker Hill can still be found in the back alley across from the Hamilton Hotel.
When Nina and I emerged from the 6 train station, here was what Itaewon actually looked like: pops of white and black and brown faces, mixed into the sea of Korean. Here and there soldiers in camouflage sprinkled the crowds—rough-necked, clean-shorn, and impossibly young. African men in suits spoke softly into their cell phones. It was the first time since my arrival that I saw anything other than a steady stream of Korean people. The low, squat cement buildings were smudged with smog, and their old tarp awnings bore a mixture of Korean and English writing. The wooden stalls selling decorative fans, chopsticks, and leftover World Cup paraphernalia spilled onto the sidewalks. The occasional sleek coffee shop or bistro dotted the stretch of tired façades. There was a familiar grittiness in the air. I could have been emerging straight from the 7 train station: Itaewon looked just like Main Street, Flushing.
That moment marked something new for me. It was the moment I bundled up the very last of Sang and Hannah’s words on all matters Korean and tossed them in the wastebasket. They had taught me a lifetime of misinformation. It was all, to put it in Sang’s own words, nothing but the wrong.
We were supposed to meet Changhoon and Monica at a place called Irish Pub, which was said to have the best burgers in all of Seoul. Round two would take us to Pose, a cocktail bar where the bartenders made an elaborate show of tossing bottles in the air and setting drinks on fire. Round three: a luxury karaoke bar. Round four: a minsokjujeom—a folk-themed bar that served scallion pancakes and milky makgeolli rice wine in hollowed-out gourd shells. And finally we’d cap off the night at JJ’s, a club.
After a few wrong turns, we arrived at Irish Pub. Monica texted to say she was already there. She showed up ten minutes early to everything. Changhoon was held up at work but would be there shortly. Inside, the air was thick with cigarette smoke. The bar was crowded with young Western faces, mostly men. Their eyes went straight for us. “Who are all these white guys?” Nina whispered to me. “Army?”
“No idea,” I whispered back.
The walk to the back of Irish Pub felt endless. There were dozens of men staring at us or beckoning us over to their tables. “I could maybe get used to this,” Nina said.
Monica waved at me from a table in the back. To my disappointment, she’d brought Rachel along. Before I could introduce Nina to them, she was already doing the honors. “I’m Nina. Good to meet you,” she said, sticking her hand out at them with her usual assertiveness.
Right away something felt off between us. In general, Rachel and Monica tended toward the hyperfeminine, and they seemed a little taken aback by how easily—and perhaps presumptuously—Nina had inserted herself into the group. Where I always hemmed and hawed, never quite assured in social settings, Nina assumed familiarity with everyone. But that was what I loved most about her.
The girls offered limp hands in return.
Just as we settled into our seats and poured drinks from the pitcher of beer that Monica and Rachel had already ordered, we were surrounded by three men. They draped their torsos over the empty chairs. “Hel-lo, ladies!” they said. “Mind if we join you?”
Nina sized them up. They were tall, lanky, and fair, probably about our age. “Hello yourself,” Nina said before turning back to me. She was not into skinny blond guys; she preferred her men dark and muscled. But Rachel and Monica tucked in their shoulders and giggled—actually giggled—and nodded demurely at the empty seats. The men sat down and introduced themselves. They were English teachers from the middle of America. Since Nina wasn’t interested in the guys and I had a boyfriend, there wasn’t much point in talking with them. While they focused their attention on Rachel and Monica, Nina filled me in on all that I’d missed out on in New York.
“I swear,” she was saying, “all of a sudden every guy on the F train’s wearing these dumb-looking trucker hats.”
“Trucker hats,” I repeated back. “What’s that even mean?”
Monica’s high-pitched trill cut through the air; she was laughing—it sounded forced—at something one of the guys was saying. She always tried too hard. Nina glanced over at Monica and shook her head before turning back to me.
“You know, like they’re driving a John Deere tractor or something, wearing it all like”—Nina demonstrated. “What, do they think they’re farming for corn in the middle of Brook—”
“Hey, ladies,” one of the guys interrupted. “What’s so funny over there?”
Nina ignored him and continued with her story.
But the guy persisted. He had the boyish air and dress of someone in his mid-twenties, combined with the hard-worn, bloated face of a forty-year-old man. “No, come on. Tell us,” he said, his arm grazing mine.
“We were in the middle of a joke,” I said, pulling my arm closer to me. I didn’t want to encourage him.
But the guy did a double take, regarding me in a new light. “Wow, you speak English real good!” He proceeded patronizingly slowly. “How many years you been studying—”
“She’s American,” Nina interrupted, rolling her eyes. “And she obviously speaks it better than you.”
The men, realizing they had overstayed their welcome, stood up and left the table. Rachel and Monica exchanged another look.
It was going to be a long night.
An hour and a half later, Changhoon finally arrived. He smelled of his usual cigarettes and sweet cologne, but as I stood up to greet him, he also reeked of barbecued-meat fumes, and alcohol coated his breath. I was furious; he was late to the very evening he had planned himself. “Where you were? Why so late?” I demanded. I was like Sang, my already tenuous grasp of the language deteriorating with my rising emotion.
“Ay, I told you I was running behind,” Changhoon said, patting me to sit down.
“But only ten minutes!” He’d texted, in ten-minute increments, each time to say he’d be ten minutes late. “Why you not right away say you one hour late?”
Monica and Rachel exchanged another look; I was being unseemly. “Hwesik,” Changhoon told them. Company dinner. They knew—and I should have known—that these things were sprung suddenly, and attendance was not optional. They nodded understandingly.
Evening out my tone, I introduced him to Nina. He shook her hand enthusiastically and apologized for his lateness. “Nice to meet Jane’s best American friend!”
I was immediately embarrassed. She was my best friend from America, but I wasn’t hers. She had a whole crew waiting for her back home. Though Nina took it in good stride.
Monica jumped in. “Changhoon Oppa—I mean, Chandler is hungry? Thirsty? What I can get for you?” She began fussing about—frantically flagging down the waiter for a menu and another glass.
Changhoon glanced about the table and said, in a loud voice, “Tonight style is all-American! We take American friend to American Irish Pub.” It was the same line he’d once used on me.
Nina didn’t hear him, didn’t understand him, or didn’t think it was funny, because she did not laugh. Changhoon’s comment hung in the air and was falling fast, so to keep it buoyant I let out a long string of laughter. “Ah-ha-ha-ha!” I said. Nunchi.
Nina shot me a look.
“So who is superior English speaker: Jane or Jane friend?” Monica asked Nina.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand your question.” Nina looked at me in confusion.
“I think she wants to know which one of us speaks English better.”
“Yeah, I got that, but her question still doesn’t make sense.”
Changhoon, perhaps out of nunchi-ful obligation to Monica, jumped in. “Only because Jane is like Korean and you are real American.”
Real American. Like “real Chinese.” As opposed to fake.
Nina said, “I’ve got a New York accent, but Jane doesn’t. Jane talks like people from the news. I talk like people from Goodfellas.”
They countered with blank faces.
Nina puffed out air. “Forget about it.” She took a swig of beer, and Rachel and Monica exchanged another look I didn’t understand. When Nina put down her drink, she said, “Actually, Jane’s also got a much bigger vocabulary than me. She picked up a lot of new words working for her last boss.” Nina caught my eye, and we both laughed.
“What does it mean?” Monica said.
Nina explained. How Beth would foist her academic, feminist readings on me. As she talked, I was brought right back to the Mazer-Farleys’—to that dusty top-floor office. Beth’s smell worked its way through the stale beer and cigarette smoke.
“‘Nor can we discourse on the feminist movement—in all its wrought history—without first discoursing on the problematic tradition of desire and the male gaze,’” Nina said.
“I can’t believe you remember that!”
Nina was a fucking genius.
She turned to the group. “This Jane you see before you now? A year ago she was nothing like this. No makeup, no heels, no nothing. T-shirt and sneakers every single day. Beth would never recognize you now!”
Nina also had no fucking nunchi.
“Really!” Changhoon said. “I cannot picture.”
I’d hoped his reaction would be different, that he would be able to picture it—or at least accept it.
“It is because she lives with crazy feminine boss?” Monica asked. “Jane told us stories of her. She is with too much . . .” Monica fluttered her fingers under her armpits.
Rachel said, “And Jane tells us her husband is whip.”
“Ed was whipped.” Nina turned to me. “I guess he got so tired of it that he ran away to upstate New York.”
“What!” I couldn’t help the gasp that escaped from my lips.
“I thought I told you. Ed’s left Brooklyn. He took a job at one of the SUNYs up there.”
“Ed’s . . . gone?”
A thousand questions swirled. Did Beth follow him? Were they still together, or did that mean they were now separated? And what about Devon?
“What he looks like?” Rachel asked Nina.
“Blond, blue-eyed, pretty built. Personally, Ed’s a little too fair for my taste, but compared to his wife he was way hotter. She looked like a troll. Jane didn’t tell you?”
I was turning red, redder by the minute. I looked down at my beer glass, feeling Rachel’s eyes on me. “Hotter than Chandler?” she said.
How could I answer that? My face would give me away. But Nina was slapping Changhoon on the arm. “He couldn’t hold a candle to you, Chandler.”
Changhoon laughed. But based on the confused tone to his laughter, I knew he had no idea what the expression meant.
* * *
And so the evening proceeded, on to the next round and the round after that. But just as we were leaving Irish Pub, the plumes of fresh smoke gave way to a staler stench, of decades’ worth of cigarettes and spilled whiskey and something else: a heavy, downtrodden spirit hanging in the air. I hadn’t noticed them before, but a huddle of middle-aged Western patrons sat propped on stools at the bar. Something about their faces gave me pause. Their features sagged toward the pilled carpet on the floor, as though defeated by gravity. I stared into their dull, disillusioned eyes—all yearning and hope had long ago been extinguished from them. Had their eyes ever shone with youthful luster? Had one of these men, in his younger incarnation, once gazed at my mother with desire?
Hurry up, hurry up . . . I heard Changhoon and Rachel and Monica chanting behind me. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. I studied each face, dreading a connection linking someone’s features to my own. But I found none. I told myself I was never coming back to Itaewon.
At the end of round three in the luxury karaoke bar where we mouthed along the words to English and Korean songs, Nina let out a not-so-subtle yawn. “Jane, come with me to the bathroom?”
At the sink she stared into the mirror, prodding the bags under her eyes. “I’m completely wiped out. Mind if we cut the night short?”
“But we only have two more rounds to go.” I thought of all the effort Changhoon had put into planning the night. “You sure you can’t rally?”
“Honestly, Jane? Your friends are kind of wearing me out. Your boy Chandler’s way too hyper. So’s that girl Monica. I just can’t deal right now.”
“Yeah, no, fine.”
“Jane.” Nina’s tone was pleading. “I just flew in this morning. I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours. I’ll have more energy tomorrow.”
Nina was right. I relented. “I’ll explain to Changhoon.” I fluffed my hair in the mirror, then stared back at our reflections. Nina did look exhausted. We both were. “Let’s head home.”
We rejoined the others outside. The streets were teeming with groups of young Seoulites in various rounds of revelry. Middle-aged women worked food carts selling rice cakes smothered in red-pepper sauce and deep-fried battered vegetables. The air smelled of cooking oil and wisps of girls’ perfume and car exhaust.
“So sorry, but I think we should go home now,” I told Changhoon.
“But we still have two rounds left. . . .” Changhoon trailed off when he saw Nina looking at us.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m the one being lame.”
“What it means?” Changhoon asked.
Nina shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
Changhoon insisted on escorting us home, while Monica and Rachel went ahead to round four.
When our taxi pulled up to Sinnara Apartments, Nina and I got out. Changhoon was waiting in the cab, to make sure we made it safely inside.
“I owe you one,” she said. “Well, technically two: that time I dragged you from Twine when you were making out with what’s-his-face.”
“Still holding a grudge. I might’ve married what’s-his-face,” I said. “Forget Seoul. You’d be visiting us in the suburbs instead. Two-point-five kids, Labradoodle, white picket fence.”
“As long as it wasn’t in Jersey.” She let out a comical shudder. Then, “Look, I’m sorry I dragged you away from your friends.”
“No biggie,” I said, shrugging. But I knew that Changhoon was disappointed. He’d just been too polite to show it.
Nina studied me. “You know you can go. You don’t have to come in with me.”
You are responsible for everything for your friend. “I should.”
“You should do what you want.” She nodded at the cab. “So go.”
“He did pull in a favor to get us on the list at JJ’s. . . .” I started.
“You think he’d do that for just anyone?” Nina said. “You should go to him.”
I knew that nunchi was why Nina insisted I stay out. Nunchi also told me I should renew my offer to go back home with her, but I didn’t.
“He’s crazy about you. You can tell just by the way he looks at you.” She turned toward the entrance. “Good night, Jane.”
I watched Nina disappear through the doors. I didn’t follow her. Then I returned to Changhoon in the cab, and we drove into the night.
* * *
We soldiered on through rounds four and five without Nina. But all of us were flagging. At the folk-themed rice-wine bar, we slumped in our booth, our heads propped up by our arms, our gourds of makgeolli rice wine left untouched. At the club the pounding bass brought me right back to that night at Twine. After Changhoon and I said good-bye to Rachel and Monica, we popped into a motel that rented by the hour—it was usually how we ended our dates ever since our Busan trip. We were too drunk and Changhoon was too exhausted to perform, but we went through the motions all the same.
By the time I returned to the house, it was five in the morning and Emo was sitting cross-legged on the marble floor, awaiting my return.