Sad Peninsula Read online

  Soon Rob Cruise leads a migration to the dance floor; everyone but me. I tell them I’ll “hold down the booth.” I watch as they all congregate under the throbbing lights. Jon Hung moves like liquid, scoops into his miniskirted girlfriend as if she were a ball grounded deep into left field, leads her where he wants her, and then they grind into each other like turbines. Justin is a good dancer, too; his creepy stoicism complements rather than detracts from his moves. Of course, the star is Rob Cruise: the wind-chime swing of his hips defies his age, and, seemingly, gravity itself. Each sway proves he’s got a profound sense of rhythm flowing through him. He’s attracting moons to his orbit, girls curious and scantily clad. When he looks up to see me watching him, he begins shuffling over to the beat of the music with a wolf-like grin, dances his way up the stairs, grabs my arms, and attempts to drag me into participation. I refuse. I know that down there I would be like the decrepit grandfather attempting the Macarena at a wedding. When he gives up, I scoot off to the bar to see if they sell Scotch.

  Soon they’re done dancing and return to the table. More people the guys know come in from the cold to join us — a few more girls wearing virtually nothing, and one of our coworkers, a kid fresh off a B.A., his baseball cap turned around backwards. Rob has brought a raven-haired stranger with him, a heavily made-up girl with bare shoulders peppered with gooseflesh and gleaming a cold sweat. In fact, it’s obvious that all the girls are freezing. Their tight, inscrutable faces try to hide it, but their hands keep rubbing absently at their exposed triceps. The absurdity of it makes me wish I had thick duvet to throw over everyone.

  Funny how even under the walloping techno we’re still able to conduct halfway decent conversations. It’s like our ears have adjusted to the noise in the same way that eyes adjust to darkness. Listening to Rob with the bare-shouldered girl, I’m once again awash in envy. His flirting is flawless; he’s working over her defences and guiding her through convoluted hallways, all of which lead to his bed. He even incorporates my presence into his act. I’ll come to learn that this is one of the chief ways Rob gets a girl to trust him, by lobbing huge, exaggerated compliments at his male friends. “See this guy?” he points at me, grinning. “He’s amazing. Been in Korea — eight days. Already speaks lotsa lotsa Korean.” He nods at me. “Go ahead, show her your Korean.” I sip my Scotch without smiling, then rhyme off the handful of phrases I’ve picked up since the flight over — hello/goodbye, do you speak English, I would like a beer, may I make some change please?, etc. etc. I expect the girl to applaud with a frantic little clap of her hands. Instead, she nods once and turns back to Rob. In fact, none of the shivering sticks are paying me any attention, and frankly I don’t blame them. I come off like what I am: a dumpy, balding, bearded orphan who has crash-landed on this peninsula. I might as well be part of the furniture.

  Justin, who had bowed out briefly from a conversation, is suddenly laughing, a heavy drum beat, seemingly to himself. He has spotted something over the lip of the booth.

  “Hey Rob, check out who’s here,” he says.

  Rob twists to look and I look with him. Another Korean girl they know has just cleared the door and stepped into the club. She looks around briefly as if lost, as if she’s not entirely sure she wants to be there. I notice that she’s wearing a heavy winter coat that goes all the way to her knees.

  “Ho-leee fuck!” Rob yells and begins waving madly in the air. “Hey, Jin! Jin! Come over here, would you?”

  She turns to see our group in the booth, but then hesitates as if trying to gauge whether she wants to join us. She sighs, rolls her eyes, comes marching up the stairway, and arrives at our table, her face flushed from the cold.

  “Look what the cat dragged in,” Jon Hung clichés.

  “Well, if it isn’t my waegookin friends,” she replies, using the Korean word for foreigner. “Friday night and you’re drinking, surprise surprise.”

  “What are you doing here?” Rob asks, tucking an arm around the bare-shouldered girl.

  “I came to hear the DJ. He played the Armada in Hongdae last weekend, but I missed him.”

  “Are you going to join us?”

  “I suppose.”

  We all scrunch in to give her room to sit. Before she does, she opens her coat, but does not take it off. Underneath, she’s wearing a white cashmere sweater and blue jeans.

  “So I hardly recognized you without a cigarette in your mouth.” Rob grins at her. “What, did you quit?” The other girls guffaw, as if what Rob has said tells them everything they need to know about this Jin character. Despite Korea’s rapid assent into modernity, smoking among women is still considered verboten. Jin simply stares at him. “And you grew your hair long again, thank God,” Rob goes on. “That bob you had was a disaster.” She tilts her head and stares even deeper into him. He realizes that he’s probably jeopardizing her presence at the table, and he softens his tone. “So where you been, girl?”

  “Working,” she replies. “I see you’re still cruising, Mr. Cruise.” She turns then to the bare-shouldered girl and says with a sort of cheery, deadpan cattiness: “You know, he slept with nearly a hundred women last year — some of them prostitutes.” The girl laughs loudly but uneasily. Within a minute she gets up to go to the bathroom, or so she says, but then disappears into the crowd’s pulsating throngs. Rob keeps looking for her over the rail as our small talk chirps around his head, and when it becomes clear he’s lost her, he turns back to the table to seethe at Jin.

  “Why don’t you take off your coat,” he snipes at her.

  “Because I’m fucking cold,” she yells over the music. “You guys can ogle me later.” I laugh at this, I can’t help it, but nobody looks at me. “So who’s going to buy me a drink?” she asks. As if by reflex, Jon, Justin, and the kid in the baseball cap all make intimations toward their wallets before stopping themselves as if they’ve been tricked. She just shakes her head. “Ugh. You waegookins are all the same.” And scoots up fast, faster than I can make an offer to get her a drink, and heads to the bar on her own, her lengthy winter coat ballooning like a cape around her.

  Aptly enough, the other Korean girls have yielded their place in the conversation to this Jin person: while they possess varying degrees of fluency, Jin’s English is nearly flawless. It amazes me how even in a large group, it’s always one or two people who become the focal point. Here it is Rob and Jin, riffing off each other with so much affectionate vitriol. He is a master of viciousness, of well-placed quips, but she is his equal — made more impressive by the fact that they aren’t sparring in her native tongue. I drink silently; I have lost track of how many silent drinks I’ve had.

  Because there are far more women at our table than men, we soon attract some unwanted guests: a handful of GIs, toting large mugs of beer, have suddenly invaded our space. These young guys are gruffly sociable in their crewcuts and muscles, but their intentions are obvious. “Do you mind if we join you?” the leader of the pack hollers. Without waiting for an answer, they pull up chairs seemingly out of nowhere and surround our booth. Conversations recalibrate yet again. The shivering sticks ask where the boys are from. The soldiers mention American-sounding towns in American states. Rob, Justin, and I — all from the Maritimes in Canada — grow uneasy. One of us will need to pick a minor fight.

  “So tell me something,” Justin wades in, “is it true what they say about American soldiers in Korea?”

  “What’s that?” asks one of the marines.

  “That the only reason you’re here is because you’ve had disciplinary problems in other postings? That it’s a punishment to be here.”

  The leader just beams. “Hey man, we love Korea. We love the women.” The miniskirted girls cover their mouths as they laugh. I catch Jin rolling her eyes and I feel a tingle beneath my skin.

  Jon Hung pipes up next, mentioning that he’s the only American in our group — born in Hawaii, raised in Seattle. “So tell me,” he asks, “are we really going to war or what?”

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nbsp; The marines laugh again. It’s true — their subliterate commander-in-chief will be launching an unprovoked invasion in another month or so. These boys contradict themselves by saying they’d love to get reassigned off this peninsula that hasn’t seen real conflict in fifty years. The war would be their ticket to adventure.

  “But it’ll only be a three-month gig, man,” one of them says. “Get rid of Saddam, root out al-Qaeda, then back home by summer.”

  “There’s no al-Qaeda in Iraq,” I point out, but assume my mumbles are smothered under the dance music.

  “Yeah, man,” another marine goes on, “we’ll get in there and finish the job we started.”

  Rob Cruise, conspicuously quiet for several minutes, takes a long pull on his drink and says: “I served in the first Gulf War.”

  The table turns to face him. He takes another drink.

  “Did you really?” Jon Hung asks.

  “I did. Company C of the RCR, 1991. I took a break from university the year before and signed up. I was barely twenty.” He says this directly at the lead marine, who looks like he would’ve still been in elementary school in 1991.

  Jin tilts her head at Rob. “You never told me that.” The way she says it — the gentle, almost caring tone, the slight hurt that he would keep such a thing from her — floods me with a knowledge that should’ve been obvious from the start. Oh my God, I think, she was one of the one hundred.

  “So you’ve been over there?” the lead marine asks.

  “Yep.”

  “So what do you think? We up for a good fight?”

  Rob spits laughter at him. “What do I think? I think your D.O.D. has lost its fucking mind. First of all, Michael over here is right — al-Qaeda doesn’t have any connections to Iraq. Second of all, you guys have no idea what kind of hornets’ nest you’re about to stir up.”

  The marine shrugs. “That’s all part of the job, man. Army life’s full of excitement and danger — you’d know that.” He sips his own drink. “Of course, teaching ABCs to Korean kids must have its challenges, too.”

  Jin’s laughter bounces off the table. Rob and the other guys need to say something to keep the balance in check, but they’re struggling. I search for words that would get Jin’s attention back, to return the ball to our court, or at least relieve this sudden tension.

  I give up hope once the conversation becomes blatantly about sex. How could it not, with this kind of dynamic? The youngest-looking marine — maybe eighteen — kicks things off by lobbing a stereotype about Korean girls in bed, something about their aversion to oral sex. He meant for it to sound flirty and hilarious, but his joke sinks like a stone. It does, however, lead us to discuss other stereotypes — French lovers, American lovers, Canadian lovers. Jin, still in her coat, takes up the charge when we start imagining what kind of lovers certain people around the table would be. She deliberately skips over Rob as she does the rounds, but has a blast taking the piss out of Jon Hung (“You’d be such a businessman — you probably use a spreadsheet to keep track of your conquests”) and Justin (“You would have silent orgasms”) and one of the beefier marines (“Selfish brute — you have ‘closet rapist’ written all over you!”) Then her gaze, for the first time, falls on me.

  “And you?” she says, eyeing me up. It’s only then that I become painfully aware that I had put on a cardigan before leaving the apartment. “You’d probably make love like an intellectual.”

  I catch the reference right away but allow the boys their laugh — after all, I do look like someone who’d make love like an intellectual.

  “Kundera,” I say as she attempts to move on.

  She snaps back to look at me, her face sharp with surprise. “Excuse me?”

  “Milan Kundera,” I yell over the music. “That line about making love like an intellectual — you stole it from his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.”

  She blinks at me. “You’ve read Kundera?” It doesn’t come out as a question so much as a statement of intrigue.

  “What the hell are they talking about?” asks one of the marines.

  “Milan Kundera,” I say simply.

  “Who is she?” Rob Cruise asks.

  “It’s a he, idiot,” Jin snips without looking at him. “He’s only one of my favourite writers.” She holds my gaze as if goading me to go on.

  “I haven’t read everything of his,” I continue with a sigh. “ The Unbearable Lightness of Being, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “And The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Oh, and his new one, Ignorance, was one of the books I read on the flight over here. I didn’t like it.”

  For the first time tonight, she stammers. “Well — well I’ve read Kundera in English, French, Chinese, and Korean.”

  Deliberately, I shrug with indifference. I turn to the lead marine and say: “Kundera knows a thing or two about unprovoked invasions. You should read him.”

  Rob Cruise is glowing at me; this is where I hold up my end of the mutual envy. It’s as if he’s passing me a torch, giving me permission to fan the flames of my sudden stardom. He also seems mildly stunned that I’ve trumped him and the other men at the table, that I’ve touched Jin in a way that they couldn’t. “This is all too heady for me,” he yells at everyone, giving me a wink. “What do you say we dance?” He gets up from the bench, anxious to lead us like Moses down to the dance floor. The soldiers don’t hesitate; in the spirit of sexual rivalry, they rise en masse in time with Rob’s movements, each trying to claim one of the shivering sticks as they too stand, adjusting miniskirts and straightening tube tops. Jin gets up, as well, trying very hard not to look at me. She finally, finally takes off her coat and tosses it onto the bench.

  Oh my God.

  She notices that I’m staring but haven’t moved. “Are you coming?” she asks.

  “I don’t dance.”

  Her face flattens with disbelief. What, you think this is about dancing? The others can’t quite believe that I’m holding my ground, that I’m about to squander what I’ve earned. Jin waits, maybe thinking that if she stares at me long enough with that face, I’ll change my mind.

  Rob Cruise stands watching at the top of the stairwell, growing impatient. “Jin, baby, let’s go!”

  She’s waffling now — to leave and dance, or stay and talk? I refuse to give her an inch, and so she clucks her teeth at the air and races lithely to the stairs, her legs a rush of tendons and confidence. Rob has already begun descending, certain now that she’ll follow him. Meanwhile, Jon Hung’s girlfriend is pulling him to his feet. “Go on, baby, I’ll be right there,” he orders her. When she’s gone, he comes over to me.

  “What are you, lost?”

  “I don’t dance,” I repeat.

  He drains his drink and sets it noisily on the table. “Milan Kundera,” he shakes his head in mock disgust. “You are in the wrong fucking place, my friend.” He then motions to Justin, who is also still sitting. “Are you coming down?”

  “No, I’ll stay behind. Keep Captain Hopeless over here company.”

  Jon shakes his head at me again and then is gone. I slide over to the rail to watch them all on the dance floor. I find Jin right away. She stands out in the crowd not because of her cashmere and jeans but because her body in dance is an alluring twist and spiral to the mindless thump of music. GIs comes on to her, but she makes shoving them away look like just another of her moves. She looks up at me over the rail and holds my stare for a moment. At the end of a song, she hurries off the floor, trots up the stairs, and returns to the table to search for something in her coat. When she doesn’t find it, she races back down again, without so much as a glance at me, to join Rob and Jon under the spinning lights. I look at Justin, who is also watching them, also drinking his drink, also keeping his sad mysteries below the surface. On the dance floor, Rob Cruise has abandoned Jin like a crossword puzzle he will never solve and has begun grinding into another girl. For an instant, we make eye contact. It’s as if he holds my co
nscience in the same grip that he holds the girl. A stare that wants to liberate me from my principles. On a night other than this, he promises to seize my reticence and toss it with delight into Seoul’s great fevered flow. He will teach me to take what I want here. And we will better friends for it, sharing the sort of bond that two men can have only after they’ve been intimate with the same woman.

  Chapter 3

  Through years that fell like rain to join the flow of the Han River, she would learn that the only thing that kept her alive was the value her mother had instilled in her, the value of knowledge. Her umma had taught her, as early as the girl was old enough to absorb it, that it was better to know things than to not know them. Even girls need to know things, her mother would say when tucking her in at night, whispering it so that the girl’s father wouldn’t hear. Learn everything you can, my little crane. Even the hard things. Never be afraid of wisdom. And whenever she uttered these words, her mother called the girl by her true name and never the one her Japanese teachers had given her.

  In the years that fell like rain, the girl would learn just how much her mother had known about what was happening to their country, the fate that awaited the young girls in it, and learn that it was this knowledge that eventually pierced her mother’s heart and killed her. These thoughts always brought the girl back to the Han River, its churning acceptance of the rain that fell like years. She would ponder that Korean word that shared the river’s name, shared the name of their people, their language. Han. Which meant, among many other things, the long, constricting accumulation of a lifetime of sorrow.

  Despite her father’s fussing, the girl was allowed to go to school. This was not what he wanted when he brought his family of six from their ancestral farm to the growing capital of Seoul. That was in 1934, a year after the girl’s baby sister had been born. In the city, her father expected the boys, the two oldest, to study briefly before becoming labourers, and the girls, the two youngest, to stay home and help their mother in the small house that the Imperial government had allowed them. His plans were precarious at best, and the girl watched as her mother toppled them with a kind of quiet sedition, a restrained glee.