Kitabı oku: «One Thousand Chestnut Trees»

PART ONE Daughter

CHAPTER ONE A Memory

It was winter in Vermont. Beyond my window, the pines would have bristled sparsely against the hushed white snow. The grey, swelling sky would have been as vast and lonely as a Northern sea. But I can’t recall Hong-do’s arrival. His presence was ghostly then, so tentative that he scarcely left an imprint. Yet now, years later, when I remember that emptiness, Hong-do’s face follows.

My uncle from Seoul came to stay with us when I was just fourteen, my first year of boarding school. His jet eyes, wide-boned pallor, and shock-hair gave him an outward boldness, but he was actually quite shy. Although I’d met my mother’s Korean friends, Hong-do was different, more foreign somehow; pungent and unfiltered.

Even gestures required translating; Hong-do’s sneeze was a violent ‘YA-shee’ rather than a tame, ‘Ker-CHOO’. And when he was in a hurry, he walked in Korean too, lightly trotting, arms stationary and body canted forward. He rather stuck out in our redneck town.

My mother must have looked equally oriental, but I noticed less – she was a mother, already a separate species. Besides, they didn’t look alike. My uncle’s face was paler, and round like a moon. There was something remote and masked about him, as if he were stranded in his skin.

Despite our kinship, I felt little for my new relation then. Though he was young enough to be a brother (I hadn’t any siblings), no reassuring sympathy for him welled up, and to my alarm, no rescuing tug of filial loyalty helped me to pretend otherwise. Hong-do was a spaceling to me. The rapid, guttural language of clucking, hacking noises that he and my mother spoke sounded ugly and comical to my teenage ears, separating us like barbed wire.

As a child, I had refused to learn Korean. I’d even blocked out most of my mother’s worn stories of Seoul, which were as unreal as fairy tales, but with tragic endings. The gilded family sagas ended in divided lands, ruined gold mines, betrayals and torture at the hands of Japanese invaders, even before the beginning of the catastrophic Korean War.

Hong-do had been born after my mother’s departure for America, so she was meeting him for the first time too. My mother had returned home just once in thirty years, so the narrative store could not be replenished. By default, the whole of Korea had shrunk to meaning little to me but my mother’s iron discipline, and eating dried squid after school instead of luscious Marshmallow Fluff.

Until now, I had only known my uncle from photographs in our album. In an old sepia-tinted family portrait, Hong-do was a small, doll-like boy in a sailor suit, shyly holding my grandmother’s hand. (She died before we could meet.) The family looked grave and distinguished; tall men in wire-rimmed spectacles, stiff collars and boutonnières, and women, fragile, but assured, wrapped in stiff silk han-boks, seated in a shadowy, peony-filled garden. My mother’s chubby-faced younger sister, Myung-hi, hair severely bobbed, stood protectively next to Hong-do.

I daydreamed secretly about them, especially about my great-uncle, Yong-lae, the wastrel poet, so vain that he would only be seen in public astride a white horse – which sometimes returned empty-saddled, its master having passed out in a ditch. In a later black-and-white image, dog-eared from handling, Hong-do was grown up, dressed in military uniform, leaning against a wooden footbridge before a pagoda, smiling confidently at the camera – roguishly handsome. I had looked forward to meeting him.

But this full-colour, three dimensional stranger seemed jarringly unrelated to those glamorous photographs. For a start, he was here in our kitchen rather than safely there. He reminded me a bit of a prisoner then, hiding out in our isolated house in his geeky ironed denims, gazing out of the window as if contemplating an escape. But he had nowhere to go.

During his visit, my mother became more enlivened and fluent than I had ever seen before. They would stay up late together drinking ginseng tea and talking excitedly. Sometimes they spoke with a raw, almost animal pain that frightened me. Gradually, the sound became less exclusive, and flowed generously, like water released from a dam. This awesome current bypassed me and my Boston-Irish father (who also spoke no Korean), but neither of us remarked upon it. I was content to pretend that they were discussing dull matters like jobs in Boston, where Hong-do was to attend university in the autumn. Korea was so much static to be tuned out of my consciousness.

During those winter evenings, my father and I tactfully watched ice hockey on television, but neither of us could really concentrate. Although we were silent, I was acutely aware of Hong-do’s presence. I would sneak glances at him from the sofa as if he were a surprise package that had been delivered which I hoped someone else would open. While I had decided he was to be a marginal figure in my life, I kept a self-interested eye on him anyway during those first cold nights. I sensed, with some dread, that he contained secrets I might someday need to know.

One morning after Hong-do had just arrived, we drove out through the snowbanked woods for an educational breakfast at the Timberline Restaurant on Route 9, renowned for its sixteen varieties of pancakes, and its tourist-pulling ‘Famous 100-Mile View’ over Massachusetts.

Lavender-haired waitresses in white uniforms and orthopaedic shoes delivered the orgiastic fare with medical briskness; steaming cranberry and banana-dot pancakes, french toast piled with blueberries, waffles shining with melted butter and hot maple syrup, spice-scented sausage-patties, link-sausages, mouthwatering bacon, Canadian bacon, steak-and-eggs, eggs-any-style, oatmeal, homefries, toast and English muffins. MaryLou – as her name-tag announced – refilled your coffee cup instantly, and offered free second and third helpings like someone arriving to plough your driveway.

That sunny morning, the dining room was crowded with skiers, bunched around the colonial wagon-wheel tables in pneumatic technicolour overalls. They roared with pre-sport gusto, clanking their cutlery uninhibitedly, as if their appetites might extend to the creamy blue mountains which beckoned beyond the plate glass windows like a majestic frozen dessert.

At first my uncle looked overwhelmed, but soon glanced about delightedly, taking tiny, experimental sips from the coffee cup he held ceremoniously in both palms. People stared baldly at us, jaws momentarily disengaged. Orientals were rarely seen then in the Vermont hills. We ignored their dismay – led by my mother’s well-practised example – but I felt scalding embarrassment. Although we’d begun by speaking in English, my mother and Hong-do soon broke into voluble Korean as if my father and I were not there.

At last our breakfast arrived. Still feeling unwell after his long journey, my uncle faced a modest fried egg and toast. He hesitated a moment, but with a final scowl of concentration seized the sides of the egg white with his fingers, and crammed the whole object in his mouth in one piece. Head bowed and cheeks bulging, he chewed the egg penitently, as if ridding his plate of an obstacle. My father and I froze in surprise. Never having seen an egg dispatched in this way, I began to laugh, but my mother’s eyes stopped me like a pair of bullets.

The next week my mother urged Hong-do to look for a job in Starksboro – the nearest big town – in order to improve his English and relieve cabin fever. As his classes were not to begin for several months, he aquiesced, but found nothing. I suspect he was secretly relieved.

In the mornings after a bit of coaching, my mother and I would drop him off in the icy parking lot off Main Street, the Starkboro Reformer help-wanted ads folded neatly inside his glove. Yet by noon Hong-do would be waiting for us dejectedly at the counter of Dunkin’ Donuts, attracting hostile stares from beery lumberjacks grimly chewing their jelly doughnuts, puddles forming on the pink linoleum beneath their snowmobile boots. After a week, his only offer had been a part-time window-washing shift in the sub-zero February winds. Dad said they must have thought he was an Eskimo.

Struggle was foreign to my uncle. He was the pampered youngest son of an old, noble family, accustomed to a big house in town with servants, and estates in the country. My mother even claimed that Hong-do was renowned in Seoul as a ‘happy-go-lucky playboy’ inconceivable though it was to me, as I examined him critically through a gap in the car’s head-rest. Here, he was assumed to be a refugee.

I saw Hong-do again at Easter. At home, snow still scabbed the fields, but the ground had thawed, and squelched underfoot. Wild gusts of fresh, sweet wind roared through the bare tree-tops. Unpacking my duffel bag, I resolved to be a bit kinder to my uncle – providing it was not too painful.

But I had forgotten little things about him – like the way he chewed spearmint gum with smacking gusto, and sang corny songs in the car. And his sense of humour! I rarely saw him laughing, but when he did, it was a razor-edged alto giggle. Then, at moments of unanimous family mirth he would be isolated in a deaf silence. He thought most American food was disgusting, and I never saw him reading a newspaper or book in English.

My uncle was like unconvertible currency; he refused to be tendered or melted down. There was no Western equivalent of his value. Sometimes I suspected he was simply saving himself so that he would not have to change again when he returned home.

Yet in my absence there were surprising developments. One afternoon as I studied for exams, I looked out at the faithful view of sloping, scrubby fields, towering pines, and immense sky, and noticed something peculiar about the row of younger trees opposite. Their lower branches had been brutally pruned to resemble topiary, but their trunks looked disastrously bald, like shorn poodle shanks. When I protested to my mother she smiled, and insisted that they now looked more like Korean bonsai; an observation gratingly inaccurate, to my affronted sensibilities.

Hong-do soon appeared back from Starksboro with a red and white striped parcel from Sam’s Army-Navy Store, and went off to his room. As I was reading, something caught my eye out of the window; there was my uncle, zipped into a new track suit, vigorously touching his toes in the fresh air. I smiled patronisingly at his strict precision, exercising in the waist-high weeds as if in an indoor gym.

Then he stopped, approached a pine-bonsai, and playfully shook its slender trunk. After an interval of staring, bull-like, at the tree, he suddenly charged at it, yelling murderously and began raining deft side-kicks and karate chops upon the little tree.

I rose from my chair. Had he gone mad? I heard my father’s chair scraping in his studio, and ran off to confer with him. He had left his easel, and stood at the window watching Hong-do. Without speaking, we observed him warily circling the tree like a shadow-boxer, delivering the odd kick-chop. Dad finally rapped on the window-pane, and my uncle twisted round, confused and red-faced with exertion and waved at us enthusiastically. We laughed and waved back, marvelling. From then on, my uncle performed his t’aekwondo exercises on the lawn without further interruptions.

After this, the atmosphere was lighter between us. T’aekwondo tree-attacks seemed to relax Hong-do, he smiled more readily, and began to look quite as handsome as his photographs. This unexpected glimpse of him lent a wider circumference to my mean perception of his character.

Still, an unnavigable distance separated us. I regarded him more as an exotic zoo tiger than as my only living uncle. It was safe to observe him through bars, to admire him wryly from the window, but I couldn’t begin to relinquish those barriers. The schoolyard bullies who had kicked me behind the apple trees with their pointy-toed cowboy boots might come running back through the years to punish me again for having oriental blood.

Hong-do’s foreignness might be contagious; I could be ostracised not only for harbouring an alien, but for becoming more of one myself. With my layers of sportswear and Celtic freckles I could pass for Caucasian, but my uncle’s incriminating features might give me away. It would be wiser to stay clear of him until my immunity was established. My secret Korean half was exiled to a remote inner gulag that even I was unable to find.

In the evenings, reading after supper, I sometimes caught Hong-do staring unhappily out of the window into the dark woods beyond his own cantilevered reflection. Only then did I regret not being a confidante. With the dumb instinct of a golden retriever, I itched to go out into the darkness and bring him back inside again, but just on the point of speaking to him, decided I was too small and unqualified for such a rescue. It was beyond me.

It was easier to pretend that he was not quite human. I don’t remember asking him much about our relations in Seoul, or why he had come to the West when life seemed to be so pleasing there. What was he thinking of when he was so quiet at the dinner table? What did he miss about Korea? Would he have liked to learn to ski? I allowed his elementary English to deter me from asking.

But my uncle, for his part, was maddeningly opaque. His eyes were so black that I couldn’t see his pupils. It was me that I saw squinting back irritably from those distant planets. His silences alone were new desert continents, exposing me as a mere water-dependent speck.

Yet Hong-do could be alarmingly vocal. Sometimes he would pluck away at Beatles chords on my old, badly-tuned guitar, yodelling ‘Yesterday’ plaintively from his room. To my distress, he and my mother also sang rapturous Korean songs together in the study, in a twangy, throbbing oriental vibrato which sounded surreal, and faintly sinister in the puritan Vermont woods. I was glad we had no neighbours.

Why did they wail like that?

‘Because we express han,’ said Hong-do good-naturedly.

And what on earth was han?

There was a long pause.

‘Han is sorrow and yearning and resentment; it lasts centuries, and never goes away. It is at the core of us,’ said my mother.

But what were the words?

Another pause.

‘Han is so deep, that it comes before language.’

I rolled my eyes at my father, hoping to enlist his support, but he looked away. Then I went to my room, and drowned out the han with the more familiar ululations of Neil Young.

I remember one final episode that Easter holiday. As I was studying one afternoon at my usual place by the window, Hong-do slipped into the kitchen to toast some seaweed. After offering me a warm, sulphurous black square – which I ate, grudgingly – he went outdoors to join my mother in the garden.

Then, I heard a yell, and saw Hong-do push my mother aside, his eyes locked to the ground. Running out to see what was wrong, I found Hong-do down on all fours, stabbing spasmodically at the earth with a trowel. Now quite inured to his unpredictable ways, I asked casually what he was doing.

‘A grass snake,’ said my mother.

‘But they’re harmless,’ I said, popping my eyes.

‘Maybe, but to him, serpents are a symbol of evil, and should be destroyed.’

My uncle had lost sight of the snake, and was shouting at my mother in Korean.

‘What’s he saying now?’ I piped.

‘He can’t believe that we allow snakes to pollute our land,’ she said neutrally, as if unsure of where she herself stood on the matter. Still muttering, Hong-do was crouched in a combat stance in the dead asparagus patch, gingerly parting weeds with his trowel. I wished him luck insincerely, and went back indoors. Minutes later, my parents left on an errand.

Hong-do came indoors, and began rummaging angrily through drawers and cupboards. Next, he changed into his new Wrangler jeans, my father’s too-big rubber boots and wood-chopping gloves. He’d even produced a fireman-style slicker from somewhere, cuffs rolled neatly. Then, he left without a word, carrying a long, fat stick he’d found beneath the porch.

‘Unbelievable,’ I muttered, looking around reflexively to see if anyone could confirm what I was seeing. Being alone, I shook my head and returned to the reassuring mental hygiene of my algebra book. But now and then I looked up at the field expectantly.

My mother and father returned from town with the groceries, and asked after Hong-do, smiling when they heard about his hunting preparations. We watched a muted sunset, and took tea and Chinese steam buns in the sitting room, half-listening to the news on the radio. I felt too ruffled by my uncle’s eccentric behaviour to concentrate.

Just then the front door opened, and Hong-do stamped in, displaying a small green snake by its tail as if it were a ten-foot swordfish. Dutifully, my parents admired his catch while I trained a skeptical eye on the pitiful reptile. Then, however, I caught a glimpse of my uncle’s expression, which shamed me. The pride brimming in his eyes was remarkable and disconcerting. His pride was so intense that I almost found myself wishing I could see the snake as he saw it. I stared at it hard, hoping for something magic to happen; but nothing did. My doubt remained and divided us.

Hong-do soon went back outdoors to dispose of his quarry. I watched from the window as he scaled the stone wall and stood there, surveying the darkening woods below. He whipped the snake around his head like a lasso, and cast it high into the air with a defiant shout.

For many years I carried that image with me; Hong-do, snake-slayer of Vermont, arm raised against the sky like a warrior throwing his sword into the spokes of the universe, hoping to arrest its wheels upon his victory. At least, that was what I wanted to see.

Now I recall it differently. The sun had set, and my uncle was mostly in shadow. After he’d flung away the snake he looked so small, and vulnerable, and alone out on the ledge that I could hardly bear to look at him.

Hong-do spent the following few years at university in Boston, one of ten thousand anonymous freshmen. News of Hong-do often came to me months after events had passed, subtly filtered by my mother’s own approval or disappointment, and slightly distorted by translation into English. Trying to follow uncle’s progress in Boston was like monitoring conditions on Jupiter through an unreliable satellite link. He was an abstract fuzz, composed of long shadows and receding footprints. Only his most dramatic actions survived the relay.

To my uncle’s surprise, he was not quite the star he had been in Seoul, though he had plenty of friends. My mother, able to make oracular judgements from several hundred miles away, pronounced him bright, but lackadaisical. He was lackadaisical, perhaps, but hardly lazy. Hong-do took a night job as a taxi driver, though he barely knew the streets beyond Copley Square. He was almost immediately robbed and beaten at gunpoint by two thugs on a midnight fare to Roxbury.

Next, he took on odd shifts as a waiter in Chinatown. He felt safer there. Although he studied business administration by day, on his free nights he gambled away his earnings and made extravagant bar-room loans to acquaintances much larger than himself.

My uncle then had a pretty Irish girlfriend called Mary. He was crazy for her.

‘The Irish and the Koreans are so alike; so sentimental,’ he told my mother over the phone. One day, Mary told him he was a worthless male chauvinist pig, and left him forever. Then he met a rich Korean girl, and drove all the way to California in his cab to escape her. Six months later they were married.

Hong-do set up a small shipping business in New York, and moved to a model home in Fort Lee, New Jersey, with his wife and two babies. Reportedly he now wore a gold Rolex watch, and drank impressive amounts of whisky with his golf cronies – all Korean. During my uncle’s Fort Lee tenure, we saw very little of him. He didn’t much care for the Vermont wilds, but preferred neon night-life and the siren call of near-fatal business schemes. Yet unexpectedly, when I moved to New York myself after university, I began to see Hong-do quite regularly.

We would always meet in a Korean restaurant off Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. Young Bin Kwan was his favourite. He was often outrageously late, but I didn’t mind. The mean-faced maître d’ would bring me a dish of exquisite grilled dumplings and boricha (barley tea), and, like a character from a spy thriller, I would bask there in the suspect glamour of floor-to-ceiling fish-tanks and Las Vegas chandeliers. Anticipation of the ritual feast ahead, and the fascinating denouements of my uncle’s family tales put me in a buoyant mood.

When Hong-do finally arrived, he transformed into the playboy, clapping imperiously for more Korean beer and kimchi and barking commands at the twirling, traditionally-robed waitresses with breathtaking, but good-natured arrogance. They served him adoringly, fleetly replacing empty celadon dishes with fresh bulgoki, and bearing smoking iron cauldrons of demonically spicy mae-un-tang. My uncle grinned, slurped and chewed with the confident abandon of the oriental business magnate.

Once, as I watched him stuff a rolled lettuce parcel into his mouth in one bite, distending his cheeks like a chipmunk’s, I suddenly recalled the fried egg incident at the Timberline all those years ago, and understood it.

‘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.

CHAPTER TWO Cardboard Boxes

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 in the lowly struggle for financial survival which had occupied my life before Hong-do’s departure. In my efforts to become a painter – and live in Manhattan – my life had become an undignified scramble for dry ground. I spent much of my time collecting cardboard boxes to move house with. Reasons for moving were various and unexciting: rent-hikes, lease-violations, buildings going co-op, and roommates like Ted, at West One Hundredth Street.

Ted was perhaps no better nor worse than you’d expect from a New York roommate. Ted had a honking Connecticut voice, and was a former Fly Club treasurer at Harvard, possessing the strange ability to bounce cheques selectively: rent and utilities cheques failing to clear, while extravagant entertainment and wardrobe bills found deep, instant funds. Ted stole your spaghetti sauce and lowered the tone of the bathroom with his depressing litres of bargain shampoo and generic deodorant. Pip, Alice and I were obliged to take numerous phone messages for Ted from The Hair Club for Men (where, at only twenty-four, he elected to go for weekly hair implants) and then struggle to pretend that we didn’t notice anything strange about the sudden presence of oddly-tinted brown hairs which appeared on his pate on alternate Thursdays. Unfortunately for us, this did not prevent him from attracting a girlfriend called Pierce; a law student with an aggressive laugh, who left items of clothing draped on the living-room furniture to signal her presence like a cat spraying its turf. But Ted’s most challenging habit was his nude sleepwalking. Fully clothed, Ted was irritating enough, but Ted entering my room late at night, buck naked, and climbing into my bed was pretty much the last straw. He would also make regular late-night sojourns into the kitchen when we were talking, and urinate into the refrigerator.

It was unfortunate that Ted’s name was on the lease. Although the unsolved murders of three young women on the rooftop of the building next-door cast an eerie menace over the block, and the peeling mustard-coloured paint, and tumbleweed dustballs in the corridor were slightly dispiriting, the apartment’s high ceilings, parquet floors, and wrought-iron balconies lent my existence a spurious graciousness that I appreciated very much at the time.

Sight unseen, I moved in to my next place on a searing August afternoon during a sanitation-workers’ strike, my belongings fitting into just two checker-cab trips. It was a sixth-floor walk-up on MacDougal Street, illegally sublet from a vacationing friend’s boyfriend. The strike was a bad omen: an almighty stench of food, cooked and rotting, hit me like a damp wall upon quitting the taxi; great banks of black plastic garbage bags were shored up generously on both sides of the street, shimmering in the heat. Up and down the block, an espresso bar, shish-kebab house, hot-dog-calzone-and-pizza stand, veggie-burger cart, sushi vendor and felafel emporium made MacDougal Street a sort of United Nations of fast food, whose dependence on the city’s sanitation workers was total.

I shared this apartment with Mona, a timid garment-district secretary from Belchertown, Massachusetts, her two neurotic long-haired cats, Mick and Mike, and a medical student, Ethan, who proudly told me on our first meeting that his father was the actor in the famous double-edged razor television commercials during the seventies.

The apartment’s subtly crippled appearance was owed to Delia’s vacationing boyfriend being something of an amateur carpenter. Interior walls were makeshift partitions he had enterprisingly nailed together late at night, apparently under the influence of hard drugs. The sturdiness of his carpentry was such that the cats could – and did – enter my bedroom by hurling themselves against the closed door at a gallop, whereupon they would lie down and moult on my pillow.

As it was summer, one didn’t mind that the frightening-looking gas stove was broken, but the bathroom arrangements were more testing. There was nothing as definite as a door to this bathroom; merely a friendly, cat-hairy, Indian bedspread thumbtacked to the doorframe, adding a certain anxiety to one’s activities therein. The superintendent had pledged to fix the plumbing, but in the meantime, toilet-flushing involved two trips to the kitchen tap with a bucket. Turning on the shower required the assistance of a pair of pliers. Once activated successfully, the exuberant shower-spray kept Mick and Mike’s kitty-litter tray in a continuous state of deliquescence.

When I think of MacDougal Street, I remember the inescapable melancholy of three ill-suited people sharing a small space, and the overwhelming smell of felafel. The airduct of the Middle Eastern restaurant downstairs expelled its kitchen fumes directly outside my bedroom window, which in August had to be permanently thrown open. I awoke in the mornings lightly coated in a dew of congealed felafel exhalation and cat-hair, provoking frequent bad-tempered battles with the shower-pliers.

That August it was too hot to paint in the studio, so sweltering free weekends were spent at friends’ summer places on Fisher’s Island and in Bridgehampton, or eating cherry Italian ices near the spray of the fountain in Washington Square Park, avoiding my flatmates. I spent many evenings at Laura’s, seated directly in the path of her electric fan, drinking cold beer and listening to the sound of other people’s stereos drifting in the stale night air.

I was grateful to my friend Delia for helping me out with a quick sublet, but having exhausted the charms of MacDougal Street, it was now time to move on. Laura, possessing a compassionate nature, agreed to split the rent with me, temporarily, on her studio apartment on Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue.

Our narrow, sooty tenement was positioned sensitively between a transvestite brothel and a funeral parlour. Laura had a bed in the living room, while I slept on a glorified shelf above a wardrobe, accessible by ladder. Being New York, it wasn’t even cheap. I also had to pay rent on a shared painting studio in the meat-packing district above the Hellfire Club, which I used on weekends and odd evenings. To keep up these two shelters, I held a full-time job uptown, with an antiquarian bookseller.

In the mornings at nine-fifteen I took the crowded subway uptown to Fifty-ninth and Lexington, stopped in at Frankie’s for my styrofoamed coffee and salt-bagel with cream cheese, and entered a modest doormanned building with my grease-spotted paper bag.

Through the bronze elevator doors awaited Oliver’s morocco-lined apartment, alias Cadogan Books, steaming with the force of three leather-preserving humidifiers. I let myself in with a key, and generally found Oliver, ruddy-faced, in a dark suit, tie, and half-lenses, sitting at the kitchen table sourly consuming a bowl of Frosted Flakes. He would be depressed about the uselessness of his life, occasioned by having spent another evening escorting a Mayflower matron to a dull gala at the Met.

Being a handsome, albeit impecunious Englishman of leisure, Oliver Flood was popular with various Pamelas, Aprils and Brookes. Although he felt himself well above being a walker, he was quite unable to refuse invitations, however repulsive he found them. Newly divorced, he was flattered by any reasonable attention, and admitted to being rather lonely.

After our usual morning banter, I would sit down at an elegant mahogany desk and attend first to the opening of Oliver’s mail, which he could not countenance without a human shock absorber. Sometimes plastic charge cards arrived snipped in two. Oliver confronted the arrival of credit card statements with the ritual of cowering in the kitchen doorway, half-lenses glinting, grunting softly, like an anxious primate. When the bill was very high, he hopped painfully from foot to foot, as if standing on hot coals.

Then began the grinding, circumlocutory task of updating the Cadogan Books mailing list and card catalogue. With a sense of hopelessness, I typed and retyped on index cards the names of cautious collectors, second-hand bookshop-owners, and changing department-heads of a number of universities and their often peevish and grand librarians (to whom I had already written) to try to sell off some rare volume, but Oliver’s books were usually too rare or too common to tempt the holders of these immensely fat-budgeted university funds. Meanwhile, Cadogan Books limped along, each day a little closer to bankruptcy.

Occasionally someone – Mrs Doris L. Vinehopper, for example, of 21 Mashpee Drive, Winnetka, Illinois 90987 – would mail-order two 1930’s editions of Omar Kháyyam’s Rubáiyát, and the fulfilment of Mrs Vinehopper’s desire would occupy the rest of the morning, dragged out with the aid of two further cups of coffee.

The ritual of preparing the books for their journey to 21 Mashpee Drive lent a sense of purpose to my otherwise aimless days at Cadogan Books, and kept the mind from wandering to the unpleasant reality that one was not doing any painting at all. The sheer beauty of the books made me lethargic; their gilded embossing, the satin feel of the calf book covers, and their pages’ mysterious, mushroomy smell.

But there was no slacking at Cadogan Books. Despite his considerable personal scattiness, Oliver was a stickler for book-wrapping formalities, hawkishly observing my erasure of extraneous pencil marks and smudges, the strategic insertion of a Cadogan Books compliments slip and invoice, cutting and snug taping of an underwear layer of sheet newsprint, followed by a vest of corrugated cardboard – Exact-O-knifed to precise cover dimensions – folded and taped to the tightest possible fit, and topped with a final overcoat of brown parcel paper, string reinforcement and sticky label: the book-wrapping equivalent of Jermyn Street winter tailoring.

Oliver himself went to the Post Office to mail the books; this being one of the more glamorous of the day’s activities, and a rare chance for people to know that he was wearing a suit. But oddly, if there was an auction to attend at Swann’s or Sotheby’s – dizzyingly social events for us – Oliver would insist that I do the bidding. At first it seemed that he was being generous, varying tasks to minimize staff boredom, but it became apparent, from arch comments he made about rival dealers Ephraim Pastov and John Speed, that he found the openly mercantile aspect of his profession a bit grubby.

While Oliver cut an enviable dash in the Post Office queue, selling books was one of his weaker points. His afternoons were generally spent attending art exhibitions, visiting the dry-cleaners’, lunching with potential clients, and sometimes listening to Puccini and Verdi, jotting down notes in an important hand for pedantic musical studies that he had been fine-tuning for years. Where such a desultory approach might be expected to yield limited results, Oliver was so annoyingly well-connected and clever that the books, however ordinary, and however long they might take to write, would be published by a decent house in England for quite a high fee, with no apparent negotiations undertaken.

One January morning after the arrival of a particularly emasculating credit card demand, Oliver took in the bad news with uncharacteristic silence. He eyed a priceless book of 18th century botanical illustrations with stupendous colour plates.

‘Susan Yankowitz-Miller,’ he said, melodramatically announcing his intended sales target.

‘Do you have to?’

He raised an eyebrow.

‘I suppose so,’ I said, glancing up from a new VISA statement. Perversely, Oliver appeared to hire his assistants for their flightiness and insubordination rather than their competence. My predecessor had been an London brewery heiress who dripped mayonnaise and nail polish onto the book covers, and conducted her intimidating social life on the phone in a particularly loud voice when introverted clients came to call.

Oliver went into the kitchen, and after the usual noise of cascading dirty crockery that accompanied most kitchen visits, emerged with a half-empty bottle of vodka, settled into a cracked brown leather armchair near the telephone, and crossed his legs.

‘What are you doing? It’s only ten-thirty.’ Ignoring this obvious remark, he struggled to remove the cap. ‘She’s terribly pretty, you know, half his age,’ he said, taking a tense swig from the bottle.

‘Who?’

‘Susan Yankowitz-Miller. Airline hostess emeritus; richest wife of the year. Said she might be interested in the book.’

‘Since when are you and Susan Miller having chats?’

‘Yankowitz-Miller. She insists. Saw her at Nonie Warburton’s ghastly bridge evening … If she does bite, that would be a ready eight thousand in the coffers. You’ve got to ring her up for me now.’

I protested.

‘You can. I pay you …’ Oliver handed me the bottle with a bland expression. I took an experimental pull. He passed me the number.

‘Meelair residence,’ said a distant Hispanic voice.

‘Hello, this is Mr Flood’s secretary calling for Mrs Miller.’

‘Mrs Meelair ees not home.’

‘May I please speak with her secretary?’

‘Chust a moment.’

Oliver mouthed something. I waved him away.

‘Avedon Buckley speaking, Mrs Yankowitz-Miller’s personal assistant, may I help you?’ said a lockjawed, blaring female, as if guarding access to one of the more important Pentagon generals. A protracted and farcical exchange of rude evasions (secretary) and slimy begging (me) ensued, and at last the mighty Mrs Yankowitz-Miller consented to come to the phone, despite having no recollection of having been interested in buying a ‘book’ – a word she pronounced with genuine surprise. Oliver, primed by the Smirnoff, sat on the edge of his chair, knees pressed together in a supplicatory pose, and injected into his voice an oily bonhomie for which he later loathed himself, and which instantly secured him an afternoon’s audience.

After a bloody three-week telephone campaign fought between Cadogan Books and Mrs Yankowitz-Miller’s manicurist, masseuse, hairdresser, chiropodist, colonic irrigator, fitness-trainer, voice-coach, personal shopper, florist, caterers, flamenco teacher, and the Save Tibet Foundation, Mrs Yankowitz-Miller duly bought the priceless book, and instructed Rodrigo, her decorator, to cut out the plates to hang in the baby’s bathroom. She also bought twenty-five yards of tooled leather books of no interest whatever to plump out her husband’s library. Cadogan Books was temporarily reprieved.

We celebrated by going to the movies at noon the following day to see Aliens II, and Oliver took me out for a late lunch at the Plaza afterwards. His jutting chin, diplomat-grey hair and dapper suit found an approving audience among the waiters and divorcees, who craned their necks with interest as he entered the room. The attention agreed with him, and he even bothered to pull in his stomach self-consciously as he got up to make a telephone call. As he turned, the vents of his suit seemed to flap deliberately, revealing a scarlet silk lining that flashed like mating plumage.

Oliver ordered an expensive bottle of Mercurey to impress the impudent sommelier, who had sized us up as illicit lovers, and although he was fairly merry at first, by the time coffee had arrived he was in quite a fragile state.

‘I’m thinking of packing it in, you know … Do you think I should pack it in? I’ve already had to sell some furniture.’

I was a bit shocked. ‘I don’t know … Maybe we should both pack it in,’ I said half-joking, emboldened by the wine and false security of multiple waiters.

‘Of course I’m grateful you gave me the job, Oliver, but it’s a bit tricky getting my own stuff done working for you full-time.’

Oliver eyed me critically, annoyed at my candour; he disliked being reminded that I had aspirations beyond Cadogan Books.

‘Come on, Ol. Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. What about going back to England?’

‘Clapped-out place. Truth is, I can’t. Too many enemies. Customs & Excise, solicitors, creditors, cheated colleagues, ex-wife nonsense …’

‘Where would you go? Would you stay here? You can’t. You’d turn into an old soak who dines off old ladies,’ I slurred. He looked up sharply.

‘Well, it’s settled then. I’m going. To Brazil … Why not Brazil?’

‘A bit melodramatic isn’t it? That’s where war criminals go. Besides, it’s so far away.’

Oliver looked far away already, quite alone with his misfortunes. Betrayed by his wife, business crashing, on the run from some past stain that made him jumpy and sour. But it wasn’t any good telling me these things, I was on the brink of telling him, I was just as derailed as he was.

‘The climate’s good in Brazil,’ he said, pathetically.

Sitting there overlooking Central Park amidst thick napery and gilt, it was hard to feel too sorry for Oliver. He looked so sturdy; a mature oak of a man, enjoying the deepest possible roots, but these he had severed long ago. Like most New Yorkers, he was a socio-geographic amputee, a handsome trunk, cut off at the knees.

I was saddened and mildly alarmed by this display of middle-aged vulnerability. But before I could offer any modest comfort, a wave of jadedness drowned the tender sprout of compassion. This is New York, pal, said the pre-emptive voice, Get a grip. Unnerved by his lost expression, I faltered, then remembered helpfully that people here came and went with every toilet flush. Oliver was a bubble on the effluvient foam of the East River; a wad of chewing gum on the city’s stiletto. You had to get used to people leaving New York. You reeled in the severed ties of friendship quickly. You learned to let go in advance.

Numbness set in as I realized that I was jobless. We parted in the freezing rain on the wide, optimistic steps of the Plaza. Oliver and his troubles were dwarfed standing there beneath the bright waving flags of Canada, America, France, and Guam. He forced a smile, and hunched his shoulders in farewell.

I would miss Oliver very much, despite his manifold obnoxiousnesses. In my heart’s psychiatric wing, he was almost like family. As with my uncle’s demise, there would be no Mayoral committee, no special envoy at the airport thanking him for his brave effort, nothing to soften his humiliation. Just a thirty-five dollar cab-ride.

It was odd thinking of my uncle and Oliver together. They met only once; not surprising given that Hong-do and I met only occasionally, but the two men were so different that they refused to share the same memory.

The one time Hong-do came to Cadogan Books was a tense occasion. Opening the door to Oliver’s apartment, I kissed my uncle’s cheek awkwardly, truly happy to see him. But a chilling moment followed, when I saw him through Oliver Flood’s eyes. After a perfunctory stab of courtesy, Oliver seemed only to notice my uncle’s awkward business-English, slightly inferior suit and rather dodgy shoes. These preliminary findings appeared to relieve him of further interest. It was also apparent from Hong-do’s sharp-eyed silence that he thought Oliver an arrogant, trivial man.

Seeing these two worlds standing side by side in the same room, yet failing to meet in any way, was painful. I was torn; insulted by Oliver’s flippant welcome to Hong-do, yet ashamed to be able to understand Oliver and his limitations better than I could follow my own uncle’s thoughts.

During those years in New York, Hong-do had remained in his own Korean enclave, and I stayed in my Western one. It was as if we had been moored in the same harbour on separate submarines. Although I invited him aboard my vessel, he never stayed long; he seemed to know about the leaks. I should have done better; made the necessary repairs to accommodate him.

I reflected on these failures walking down Fifth Avenue, past the unappetizing, superfluous luxuries behind shatterproof glass. I searched the faces streaming towards me with detached curiosity, with painter’s eye, but was soon numbed by the insistent drumming of impressions on the retinae. Infinitesimal variations on one eyes-nose-mouth theme, so many individual, snowflake faces in the blizzard of urban rush hour humanity. A face missing one quality was superseded by a face possessing that quality, and missing another. One race complemented another race. Perhaps the incomplete, jigsaw faces all added up to one consummate face, reflecting God’s obscured likeness.

It was getting dark. I ate a warm pretzel more for recreation than hunger, looked at my watch, and decided to go into St Thomas’ for evensong. Its choir was justly famous. Despite being Catholic, I preferred the intimacy of this church to the cavernous nave of St Patrick’s Cathedral across the street, with its dwarfing gothic stalagmites. I entered the dim church, and slid into a pew at the back, like a stray. A row of fur coats and blonde heads swivelled round in impious curiosity. Through the tracery of the altar screen and the rose window, the night glowed a rich cobalt blue.

The service had begun, and my eardrums were bathed in silky, sweet, golden music. The boys’ voices were arrows of piercing sound, bright as stars; still, chill, and distant. Aimed at the heavens, the notes were like austere fireworks, going so high and no further, bursting and falling gracefully, no less beautiful for their vain striving. I felt both pain and relief at the sound, as my selfish, jagged yearnings bled into insignificance. The voices sliced through my pretence at being happy, exposed my false footing. The discomfort was oddly strengthening. Often I sat there, coated with a light scum of petty dishonesties and rank thoughts, and by the end of the service would feel quite clean; spirits rinsed by the acid purity of the music, anxieties temporarily assuaged by the healing words of the prayers:

‘O God … give unto thy servant that peace which the world cannot give … Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ, Amen.’

Then I would slink out again into the lucre-grimed circus of Fifth Avenue, where the invisible particles of acquisition and struggle accumulated again within like a layer of plaque.

Now I sat still after the fur coats and cashmeres had filed out solemnly, and stayed behind to think. I had not taken communion, partly for tribal reasons. I would feel a fraud not being Anglican. Who were my ‘people’? Did one need a people? An artist was meant to be a pioneer, a pilgrim, yet a submerged need to belong surfaced at odd moments. The Catholic church was a spiritual family, but somehow the bond was obscure, impersonal, like St Patrick’s itself. One longed for a more acute, flesh-and-blood connection, smaller than God, and more enduring, more forgiving than a lover. A chill of doubt and wonder enveloped me in the church. Rueful thoughts came of my own small family, scattered by discord and continental drift. I had no siblings nor living relatives at all on my father’s side. I thought of my uncle Hong-do, and a tiny spark of warmth lightened the void. Clashes with my mother had prevented me from exploring the Korean side of my family. I wondered if it might be possible to try now, or if it was already too late. Had I the maturity to attempt such a radical reversal of the entrenched ostrich position that I’d assumed toward her culture?

Wriggling, I tried to calculate what it would cost to embrace the Orient. It could be restrictive. One might even lose one’s former identity. Besides, would one be acceptable to them, as a half-Westerner? A quasi-Oriental face would only go so far to reassure them. Inner qualities would be needed to bridge the gap. Did these qualities already exist in me, or could they be developed as one went along?

Strangely, Korea was the last destination I thought of travelling to. It was a world I accepted as being permanently and impossibly remote. In my warped thinking, I vaguely imagined it to be full of Korean mothers who would give me a hard time. Perhaps I wasn’t strong enough to face the sad endings of the fairy-tale past related to me as a child. Yet the prospect held out an undeniable sense of promise. Maybe it was the key to some locked door which needed opening. Although one shrank from becoming a race-bore, for the first time it seemed that there might be a middle way between exaggerating its importance, and denying it altogether. Perhaps it would be possible to go to Korea.

Full of nascent intentions, I took the express train downtown, somewhat sedated by evensong and the good wine from lunch. But after a few minutes under the cauterizing lights of the jolting carriage and the barbed stare of a drunk vagrant, my nerves were soon fraying again. Korea was pulled from my thoughts like an expensive scarf caught in the subway turnstile.

I slightly dreaded arriving at the Twenty-third Street exit. Wesley, the one-legged black Vietnam veteran on crutches might be there at the top of the stairs, bellowing ‘Marry me!’ to all the young women walking past. Much as I had a soft spot for Wesley, I couldn’t face him tonight, and to my relief, he was not there. Back out on the street, the air had grown colder and the wind had picked up. I checked the train entrance reflexively to make sure that I was not being followed by the drunk from the subway car, nodded a greeting to Jésus at the Ti Amo Cigar Stand on the corner, and let myself into the dark apartment building, the sleet cutting into my cheek, like a spray of crushed glass.

The apartment was empty. Laura was out at an uptown gallery opening with her married lover. Not hungry, I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. As I switched on the light the waterbugs startled me – and I them. Fat as dates, the bugs scrambled sluggishly out of the bathtub and filed into the large gaps in the tile-caulking that the landlord had promised to see to months ago.

I went to bed early, ascending the ladder to my carpeted shelf to read by the clip-on lamp. One could just about sit up without scraping one’s head. Without pleasure I drank the large glass of whisky I’d poured myself, feeling a sense of disgusted relief as the alcohol burned and seeped its way toxically around my bloodstream. In the semi-dark I drifted off – the marquee lights of the Coronet stayed on all night, bathing the curtainless apartment in ice-blue illumination. Since my small epiphany about Korea, I felt quite restless, unable to block out the usual nocturnal serenade. Traffic noise roared down Twenty-third Street. I was roused by the shout of a wino, the sound of a taxi honking. Around four am, someone’s newly discovered favourite song boomeranged around the building’s airshaft. The loud noise had a pointless, sad defiance to it, like a prisoner shaking the bars of his cell. It repeated three times more and abruptly stopped. Just before dawn, I slept.