‘It’s the custom,’ he explained, motioning for me to do the same, ‘it is better manners; it doesn’t fall apart.’ When I’d packed the bulgoki into my straining jaws we both laughed achingly, my eyes swam with tears, and the juices exploded in my mouth and ran down my chin.
Hong-do showed me how to hold my teacup deferentially in both hands, like a proper Korean lady, and taught me heatedly about Korean history and Confucian philosophy. Railing about the ignorance of the West, he would glare at me unforgivingly as if I were no longer his niece, or even anyone he knew, but a symbol of the entire ‘West’ and its calumny.
Back out on the street I felt chastened, subtly changed by our dinner. The chili of the kimchi and the fire of my uncle’s beliefs began to penetrate the cool skin of my habitual indifference. But I was daunted by what I began to discover. Identity, nationality comprised manifold layers, and I was only just exploring the crude outer surfaces, straining to detect the character of the invisible blood beneath.
One night, after several beers, Hong-do became pleasantly sentimental, and drew the yin-yang circle of the Taegukki – the Korean flag – for me on the tablecloth with his chopstick, explaining its symbolism of integrated opposites. Then, smiling cruelly, he drew a diagram of himself and me, comparing our closeness to two independent circles, overlapping only slightly at the farthest parameters.
I was stung. I wanted to protest that he was being harsh, and that there was more between us; but I could not. Perhaps it was true that only this segment of tablecloth had joined us; perhaps we had never before succeeded in meeting. But if we were not as intimate as some relations, we had come a long, painful way to our present distance. I clung to this small achievement.
Over melon and toothpicks Hong-do listened rapt, but uncomprehending, to my hopes and woes, then smacked my shoulder encouragingly when I’d finished. Perhaps he couldn’t follow the language or my way of seeing things, but somehow it didn’t matter. The smack made me laugh, deflating my worries.
Then my uncle paid the stiff bill grandly, and drove me home to unfashionable West One Hundredth Street in his plush blue Chevrolet Royale, with the amazing shock absorbers. During that nocturnal ride I felt a rare, childish joy; as if no danger or sadness could reach me within that safety of new-found blood kinship, padded vinyl, and electronic locks.
It was not to last.
A couple of months later Hong-do’s trusted business partner vanished in the middle of the night with all the firm’s assets. The investigators could not trace him. Ruined, Hong-do sold his house, and moved his family back to Seoul for good.
On our final evening together before my uncle’s departure I glanced over at him in the driver’s seat on the way home. Neon lights from the Broadway marquees washed over his tired face. He ignored the crowds and the limousines, and focused blankly on the red traffic light ahead. A ghostly feeling emanated from him. I recognized it from years ago when he first came; as if his body had landed but his spirit had remained behind in Korea. There was now a similar emptiness about him, as if his soul were in transit, and had already begun the long journey home.
I wondered if Hong-do had really dreamed of success in America, and if it grieved him to see it eluding him now. Perhaps he was glad to leave; I still had not learned how to read his face. There were many things I did not know about him, and it seemed now that I might never know them. It was too late to ask those questions.
The chance had arrived that winter, ten years ago, when he had come to stay, and I had not taken it. I had neither been kind nor unkind to my uncle, but had saved up knowing him for a future time, when it would be easier. I thought he would always be there to discover, like a locked family treasure chest, too substantial to be moved. I would surely inherit it one day, and be given the key. A sick, black feeling welled up in me, and I realised then that the key had been inside me all along, and I hadn’t known it was there.
The streets flowed quickly past the window, bringing our farewell closer. Through my uncle, Korea had grown nearly real to me. But I suspected that when he left, the floating embryo of coded dynasties, diagrams, religious precepts and war-dates might perish. Korea would exist only in the unfinished, idealized monument my mother’s memory had carved, in the rare, transient taste of kimchi and in random visits to greengrocer immigrants, whose faces, behind the bountiful rows of fruit, were closed with forgetting.
I didn’t see it then, but my uncle was a drawbridge to the destroyed homeland my mother had left. Through him I visited the mansion with the green gates where my mother was born, the Northern estates, and my great-grandfather’s temple on Mount Sorak surrounded by one thousand chestnut trees he had planted for longevity.
Although the Japanese had burned down these Northern estates, and the lands were now divided on the thirty-eighth parallel, I felt I had walked through these places, and breathed them. All of this still lived inside of him, intact, and beyond reach. The drawbridge was now closing.
I forget what we said when we parted. The glare of oncoming headlights numbed me. The car door slammed, a reflection of the street façade obscured his face, and he was gone.
Later, I stood in my apartment and looked down on the myriad changing signals and dim tail-lights below that formed an endless, sweeping canon of arrivals and departures. With pain, I imagined Hong-do at the window of his aeroplane back to Seoul, contemplating the same city.
What would he be thinking of as the brute streets of New York contracted into cool, glittering grids? What would he recall of his years with us? Eating fried egg with his fingers, an afternoon’s serpent-hunting? He’d probably want to forget all that. Perhaps a dinner at Young Bin Kwan.
These incidents were meagre, but I hoped he would remember them. I wanted to be there in the background, and to appear across the table from him, years later. But I couldn’t break into his memories. Too much flesh, and glass, and time sealed them. I had to be content just to picture him thinking, suspended somewhere over the Pacific.
I remember being seven years old and the smell of apples. A boy was twisting my arm behind my back just for fun.
‘Say “Uncle”!’ the boy taunted. A crowd gathered. For some reason, ‘Uncle’ was the word American bullies used then to torture you. I wouldn’t say. it He twisted my arm harder and harder until my shoulder was shooting with pain, and my face was red and sweating.
‘Uncle! Uncle!’ I cried in furious shame.
After my uncle’s return to Seoul, life in Manhattan resumed its former shape as if he had not been there at all. Buses and taxis ploughed up and down Broadway, the phone rang, mail arrived. Pedestrians poured over crosswalks like columns of ants. The physical vacuum my uncle left was refilled instantly. The hard pavements sealed over my few, precious memories of him with the finality of quicksand.
When I tried to picture Hong-do’s life in Seoul, I could not. Its city smells, noises, and moods were inconceivable to me. Besides, it was too draining to imagine a world beyond New York. It was like living on the floor of an enclosed glass tank with unscalable walls. Only occasional, chastising glimpses of clear blue sky, in the gaps between buildings, reminded me of a remote natural order greater than Manhattan, quite beyond reach.
When I sat down to think of things to tell my uncle – in the letter that I never wrote him – I began to notice how marginal my life was. Days were measured out in so many tea-bags, bus-transfers, tuna sandwiches, cash-withdrawals, and hangovers.
I attempted to keep alive a connection to Hong-do through the occasional trip to Thirty-fourth Street for a Korean meal with friends, but this rather indirect approach failed, and without him the experience felt somewhat hollow. As predicted, my flimsy template of Korean awareness dissolved quickly, and attentions were soon fully reabsorbed