Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America

Tokyo To Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America By Steven Sills

Book One: Sang Huin

"It is probable, then, that if a man should arrive in our city, so clever as to be able to assume any character and imitate any object, and should propose to make a public display of his talents and his productions, we shall pay him reverence as a sacred, admirable, and charming personage, but we shall tell him that in our state there is no one like him, and that our law excludes such characters, and we shall send him away to another city after pouring perfumed oil upon his head and crowning him with woolen fillets; but for ourselves, we shall employ, for the sake of our real good, that more austere and less fascinating poet and legend-writer, who will imitate for us the style of the virtuous man." Plato (Republic)

Chapter One

At Toksugum Palace in Chongno of Seoul Sang Huin (known by his friends in the states as Shawn) felt an empathy as deep as the gods; and the reconstructed walls of ancient buildings that he could see into and imagine long deceased emperors in coronation ceremonies or reading their mandates became irrelevant. Yang Lin, parting from their movement toward the steps that led toward the Royal Museum, began to walk to a distant place where a woman in a western wedding dress stood at a pond posing for a picture with her groom. Near earlier buildings Sang Huin had noticed him looking at them questioningly. He had seen a sad and innocent yearning in Yang Lin as if, after a long search, that creature had found his alter ego in the woman and would not let it go.

After five minutes of waiting alone, sitting on those steps and letting a cigarette dangle limp in a frown, Sang Huin realized that this new friend of his was not just straying off briefly, so he gradually went over there in a circuitous and jaunty stroll as if other things had gained his attention and only by accident was he moving there. Yang Lin told Sang Huin that he longed for her: longed for himself within her beautiful clothes, within her commitment, and within her sex. He had been so sincere. Sang Huin felt a worse form of compassion for him. It was sorrow, the enlightening, sweet venom, and it sank into him. It was deep empathy. It was God. It was definitely something that was not wanted. It stayed with him on the bus.

On a ride from the Nambu Bus Terminal to Chongju, Sang Huin's sleep was spastic like a nervous twitch that would every now and then startle him into wakefulness and he would wonder where he was: Muguk, Chongju, Seoul, or "Miguk." Sometimes at the primary school in Muguk he would ask, "Where are you from?" Then once, in a coaching effort for the pitch of a complete sentence, he had made the mistake of "Miguk…Miguk" ("America…America") and the class was in an uproar. He thought of this in one of his startled awakenings. He looked from the window to flat patches of skimpy forest that most Koreans thought of as so beautiful. The way was straight, south and barren and made him almost yearn for the tortuous roads that appeared near Umsong to be rid of scenery so bland. Although the bus traveled down the highway as a solid, jitterless mass, he jittered into more drowsiness. The contents of his head shook and his mother's voice cried out to him like locusts from the branches of trees. There was a hot sticky childish oozing within him. Within dreams his fortitude was like marshmallows when pulled off of sticks after roasting in a bonfire. He heard voices of he and his sister counting 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock rock. 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock, twelve o'clock rock - Ghosts won't find me. Ready or not we'll find you.

Then there were those macabre photographs, at the trial in Houston, of his grown sister's skeleton. The police had looked for his sister's body in the park but obviously not thoroughly in the ravine. In one year they had only searched that park once and in the meantime her body had decomposed. He dreamed of those photographs of skeletal remains and the other photographs of more than a few bones that had gone off from the rest. They were marred too but by the fangs of dogs or other beasts dragging them around before dumping them away from the rest of the remains. He dreamt of these photographs exactly as they appeared from the slide projector and in that sequence as one of those most godless days of that long trial when one's whole body trembled in continuum through bits of the hours with stolid, cadaverous expressions throughout the ordeal. He assumed his parents had also behaved the same. Before the real confirmation of her death, all three had been functioning with such dead but hopeful words and perfunctory gestures which were then ripped out of them as the program, memory, and energy cells can be pulled out of robots and soon they were thrust in their own personal black abyss with none of the three able to see outside of blackness and pain as much as they might have wanted to offer solace to each other.

Who could offer solace when the conclusion of life as an evil and godless place had solidified into consciousness like Death etching her name in wet cement? Back then, it had been obvious that the trial, a pantomime of the mute for justice, could never be allocated to the dead under the best circumstances, and this particular trial was going nowhere. The conclusiveness of the evidence and motive had been defaced with time that had entirely decomposed her form. There had been theories. Plenty of circumstantial evidence had been presented. Her employer had done it to her as conclusively as a feeling could testify. Then and now there was plenty of indication that she had been pregnant with his child. Twenty years ago Sang Huin (Shawn then) had swung a golf club into her eye and the blood had splattered everywhere. On that day, as a boy, he had thought nothing could happen worse than that; but back then there was blood and back then there was composition. He woke up and once again knew that even in sleep there wasn't always repose. Sometimes, without finding a way of sealing memories in tidy body bags, one's inner voice was as active in sleep. He said to himself that he shouldn't be surprised by such restlessness when life's conundrums were so horrific. The passage of a few years, and the passage through a thousand times of falling asleep could not even restore one's equilibrium in something so horrific. He shook off his sleep like a dog its wetness. He tried to think of Yang Lin whom he had left: that mild voice so slow and deliberate in its intensity, the morbid and thoughtful eyes like an ocean containing its ecosystem, the muscular young body that had an orange hue like a Chinamen who had sucked up too much sun.

After the revelation he had listened to him repeatedly talk about wishing that he had been born a woman; and except for once of saying, "Well…I understand, but" (and stopping not knowing what to throw in as the "but"), he had been silent with eyes of empathy. It was painful to see a perspective; and Sang Huin broke out of his skin like a reluctant and tortured snake but accepting the inevitability. He just stared at the fountain for many uncomfortable minutes hoping that the mouth of the fountain could articulate a statement that would solve the situation as well as ease his discomfort.

At the fountain, in silence, he had thought of rigid Texan horses and the lazy meditative cows of his home state in warm fields at mid- afternoon—creatures of the gods with no sense of the vile practicalities behind their domesticated state. During his times of stress long ago they had often seemed to Sang Huin as so aesthetic that one could wish to slip within them for an hour or a bit of the day; and surely after having done it one might instantaneously wish for the freedom of whatever was beyond the fence. Maybe, he had thought to himself, something like this was how Yang Lin felt.

He had suddenly blurted out, "You commented that the pigeons and the fountain in the pond are beautiful. Maybe they are." He had hesitated feebly. The coarse words and tone had surprised both of them. "I hear that doctors can now make a man half pigeon if he dares to have a mixture of pubic hairs and pubic feathers; or if you prefer a beautiful fountain-surgery a continual waterfall can come from your ass." Sang Huin had not known where the words came from. His gentle imagination had rarely formed such an aggressive flare of thoughts and yet he had felt that he could not let this stranger—this recent buddy— this someone he had slept with—save up money on the assumption that he could be made into a beautiful woman. Twenty years from now he did not want him to be made into a hybrid mess from a lifetime of painful surgeries… hormonal confusion…mutilations.

But had he not mutilated four months earlier? A video "pang" girl [the clerk at the video room where he had watched a movie with his friend, Yang Kwam] tracked down the friend's license number, and then the friend's telephone number, and began to inundate him with a flood of messages. It was quite flattering and Sang Huin finally returned the calls. He was curious. At that time he wanted a girlfriend. From an erection, a yearning, an ejaculation, and more than he wished, knowledge of his own virility by the conception, he proved the very essence of manhood. She aborted at his request but nature aborted and mutilated: still-death, genetic defects, and miscarriages. Human beings were rifted apart from each other by circumstances of separation and death despite love. The life of a being, itself, was nothing but different transparencies miscellaneously tossed onto an overhead projector. No, he thought, maybe that was just his own life. The transparencies of most humans were in order—the last of which would be old age and decay but what was written on them was meaningless. His transparency recently had been to prove his manhood by having sex with a woman and it had all gone awry.

Sang Huin sighed. He took off his shoes in the bus. He stroked his feet, in short white sports socks, across the vinyl of the back of the chair before him as if he were giving a massage to the person seated there. He needed sex. He needed to lose himself in a pleasure that would reduce his headache and release him from worries even if it was an illogical frenzy far removed from reality and only lasted for a few minutes.

He tried to rest comfortably in his seat, absorbing himself in Time and Newsweek. Then someone yelped at him in Korean, pushing him out of his sympathies toward the bondage of the Afghan population under the theocracy of the Taleban and the tattered infrastructure of the country. There was no way to catch even a word or two of it and this balding and middle aged man gave Sang Huin a look as if he had wasted his time talking to the world's biggest dummy. Sang Huin gave his typical defense of "Miguk sarem" ("American") which would bring on a confused and critical look—in this case, it was a closer examination of Sang Huin and a slanting of the man's face as if he were ready to give Sang Huin a big fat kiss. Sang Huin picked up his book bag on the spare seat near the window and sat there.

It was complicated, in a sense. If he had been less temerarious perhaps to not have the support system of this whole chain—family, city, state, nation, and racial identification— might have posed a problem. To have lived all but the first few years in America, and so existing as a Korean only by birth and race definitely made him American in every way but a legal one. Most persons under such a scenario would have clung to the country that had made up nearly all of his experience. At least that was what he told himself. Effrontery and cowardice were two sides of the same coin. He loved his mother and she was alone on the American continent as he was in Asia. They were indeed alone in the world.

Even though he cared about family (what was left of it with both his father and sister now dead) it did not deter him from leaving America. To be on a traveler's visa with his own Korean passport did, however, seem to be a bit strange but he could not think of a situation in life that was not confusing. Relationships were confusing although he had never possessed one for very long. When he had the ineluctable sympathy for another person, it deflated all the romance. He didn't mind that so much. To embark on a deep friendship with strong personal commitment and devoid of the bouts of infatuation and frenzy like seasickness seemed the right course; but all partners of the past seemed to him to have wanted only to cast a romantic aura around him as if scared to see the real person inside, and scared to look at beings that were also banal and in continual suffering. Reflexively jumping into pleasure like a lifebuoy, as a human did, what could one expect? One thing was sure: he had experienced a deep pain that his fellow humans wouldn't even give the briefest of stares if they could avoid it. Besides, no one wanted his enlightenment that the world was a bad place when each was trying as best as he could to find an entrance into Disneyland to which there where no security guards to force a departure.

He searched though his billfold for a calling card. He went to the front of this high-tech bus and made a call.

"Yoboseyo."

"Yoboseyo. Yang Lin bakwa chuseyo."

Silence.

"Yang Lin or Antonio. Ku nun manhi irum ul cajigo isumnita. I sarem i wanhamnita." He threw in both names that the little guy went by and the telephone clicked off.

He called again.

"Yoboseyo."

"Yoboseyo. Yang—"

"What do you want with him?"

"I'd like to talk with your son. I am an acquaintance of his. He helped me to get to Toksugum Palace. I want to thank him. I'd like to talk to him again." Yang Lin had told him that his father suspected all male callers and that Sang Huin would have to give a defense of his acquaintanceship but Sang Huin felt awkward in his misrepresentation. Here he was playing with a man's reality concerning his son. He did not feel good about himself.

"Well, he isn't here. He's never here!"

The telephone clicked off. Sang Huin felt hurt. He felt a morbid clarity behind how people always left his life. He thought about what he "knew" of this Chinese friend, Yang Lin, if he knew anything at all: he was adopted and lived in America; that those parents died— his mother first and then the father in a drunk driving accident; that he was readopted by Korean parents; that his father despised him and suspected his son was gay; and that Yang Lin felt that his English level was the same as his Korean. Abstract ideas must not have existed in his head at all. In short, he "knew " very little and the scanty but pathetic information he received might, for what he knew, have been nothing but a mendacity. Sang Huin had a great empathy; but now another friendship had just bit the dust.

Had it been a month ago that Sung Ki had left him. Sung Ki: even now the name sounded musical. After the video pang girl's attempt at marital entrapment, this neighbor boy had been most alluring in their nightly rendezvous of two months. The sister who fed him rice and Korean pizza and the father who wanted to introduce him to his native country by teaching him the sounds of Korean letters were glad to get the youngest child an English teacher. Little did they know of the pleasurable respites from pain Sang Huin was getting in the back bedroom. Homosexuality was so taboo there that nobody believed in its existence. In that respect, free of discrimination, one was free to be gay in Korea. Then the18 year-old boy was told to meet the masculine and the vicious just as his country dictated. Right after getting his letter from the military, Sung Ki laid out Sang Huin's blanket in a different room. He talked of needing a girlfriend. It hurt; but, Sang Huin rationalized it was what Sung Ki needed so why shouldn't he talk about it? Superiors in the military often beat a man if they felt that he didn't have a girlfriend evidenced when no letters and photographs were forthcoming. Then one day he was gone and soon thereafter Sang Huin lost the address book and key chain from the souvenir shop at the history museum Sung Ki had given to him. He lost both by leaving them in the locker at the mokotang (bathhouse ). "We lose our friends," thought Sang Huin, "and then we lose the things that our friends give to us." It felt less harsh to make the idea applicable for all mankind.

There had been no real reason for him to go to Seoul this time. There were no private lessons there. His reactions toward Umsong also did not have much of a rationale. Occasionally, even when there were no private lessons in that area he sometimes got up around 4 a.m nonetheless; took an hour long bus ride to that small town he had once lived in; walked near bowing rice and corn; crossed the bridge around a thin circular lake at a small park; and stared at the Korean moon bolted tightly against the Korean sky. He wanted for the night to capture him somehow—for a drunk motorcyclist or a lazy trucker to whisk a wild adventure and physical intimacies upon him and yet, in full wistful innocence, he equally wanted what he would always go there for: to hear nothing but birds and a whisk of wind in the tranquility of that sleepy town in one of its most tranquil hours. Nothing of the former ever happened and he would always come from the impulse to a feeling of loss. His impetus to go to Seoul this week had come from a dominant feeling of disconnection experienced by one who knew the extreme violence of the world, who knew the madness of hope for anyone, and felt being buried alive in that one perspective that the world was an evil place-a perspective that was not ethereal but solid as a coffin even if it did spill over into other things. A further disconnection of any significance would cause such an individual to let a numbness and deadening of the concept of self to take place. The day before his fleeing to Seoul, his platonic friendship with Kim Yang Kwam had gone awry and he found himself floundering in suffocating despair as that time years earlier at the trial. Yang Kwam was asleep with his hand in his underwear when Sang Huin awakened. Sang Huin touched him. It was the end of the closest Korean friendship that had been his life support in the six months he resided in this foreign country, South Korea, which was his birth home and the source of his nationality.

Now it was Kim Yang Kwam he kept thinking about in the bus. Sang Huin was labeled as dirty a few nights ago: the way he walked on the floor with his shoes instead of taking them off at the door; the half open window that allowed any insect an easy passage; the fact that he didn't have any rubbing alcohol to cleanse the mosquito bites that his friend gained while sleeping in Sang Huin's room; the fattening mess of pancakes with half burnt ridges in place of rice which Sang Huin prepared for him despite the criticism; and then came questions about the nature of his relationship with Sung Ki.

Glancing out of the window, he pulled out a pint of "ooyoo" (milk) from his sack. His throat was not dry or hurting but for some reason he felt the need to caress it with what he drank as well as with his fingertips. He drank his milk, attempted memorizing a few words of Korean, and then went back to sleep. He had a strange dream of some inconsequential happening in Seoul. The dream was not much different than reality. In the dream the subway (Orange Line, number three) stopped and he noticed a young blind man with a dog getting into one of the cars. Sang Huin quickly moved toward that door. Then he found himself walking through one car after another since the blind man and the dog passed through the inside doors. He woke up and thought of the dream in the context of himself. He was drawn to beauty and carnal activity but also to those captive in some imperfection for within them sensitivity, existential and knowledgeable of suffering, would be complete. He yearned for the deep intelligence that knew such things. His imagination swelled with the thought of this individual just as it had when he actually encountered him in Soul. Sang Huin was always traveling—especially when he was in the States. He was discontent and was seeing himself falling further and further away from the normal path. He had nothing but a college degree, no specialty, no ambition for money, he couldn't really think of a field or discipline for himself, family was a deep life altering wound that made the thought of gravitating himself around a wife and children unbearable, and even his hobby of playing a cello was as a musical dilettante. He looked out of the window and smoothed out his hair. The bus was becoming full now. Still, no one was standing.

Maybe, he thought, he should have been proud at the restaurant. Instead, when Yang Kwam said that he never wanted to see him again Sang Huin said, "I understand," but was thinking "Well, then why are we eating together?" Yang Kwam's eyes were stern. Indeed, it was the end. He felt stunned at that table: to lead a person to a restaurant so that he could not talk to him and then at the inquiry on if he was upset— Oh, what did it matter? Sang Huin's head hurt thinking about it. He put his hand on his forehead and looked out of the window. Sang Huin said nothing to the statement of "Don't ever call me." They both ate sparsely in thorough silence, Yang Kwam paid the bill, and then he was gone. Sang Huin's instinct was to follow his former friend to the ends of the earth on the public bus system and to harass him in the bus by making him feel miserable for his declaration that he was a dirty person. No, he told himself, he had handled the situation the best that he could. After sitting at the table for a while, he had withdrawn to his home passively. On what seemed like an eternal trip, cramped on a seat in the bus, disconnection was making his mind jittery, soft, and rolling like a ball away from him. He tried sleeping but his mind kept trying to imagine what really took place between his sister and her boss at the park if indeed it had been really him at all. The jury years ago had not thought of the evidence as being conclusive. In sentencing a man to a life of imprisonment it couldn't be done on a feeling.

He felt lost and loose. He still felt stunned. He remembered that he had only touched him by barely stroking his hair and his hand and then touching his underwear. It only lasted a minute and then he turned on his side away from him and his own instincts. It was an insignificant minute in one's life and he could not figure out why it became such evidence of the accuser that he was dirty-the charge of homosexuality not being directly stated. He asked himself why, even now, he was staring at moving forest and long stretches of road with this yearning for love. He opened another pint of milk. He sipped and then rested its opening to his bottom lip. Why did human beings end in such closure? Why did they gain worth and awareness of their being only in personal interactions? Was he nothing but the composite of other people's impressions of him? These impressions—these judgments— could not be real. They were based on brief outward gestures and the judges had nothing but their own usual experiences of their petty and selfish lives to compare others with. In Japan women who left their children locked up in hot cars were rarely accused of the crime of manslaughter; and in Korea the handicapped, he had seen, were left to crawl like worms, pushing their carts and singing their songs as traditional music blared forth. He died every time he saw one of them. He yearned for the love and the language where he could befriend someone who was handicapped and he chastised himself for only being able to lay money in some of their cans. Once he put his hand into the hair of such a man. He stroked the hair around his face. The gesture lasted only a couple seconds. The man screamed out something and a security guard began moving toward them. Sang Huin placed money in the can and went away. Then he began to question himself. Maybe it was loneliness that had compelled him to do that. After all, the action was undoubtedly bizarre in the sense that no one else did such things. He was not wearing a monk's robe. Another man's fate was none of his business. This type of action just was not done; and yet, he was not the same as others. Suffering the paralysis that would not allow him to make a full smile and finding the eyes x- rays that could go, for the most part, beyond pleasant countenances to a suffering innate in other beings, it was no wonder that he was peculiar. It was no wonder that at Christmas parties or barrooms he sat and drank in silence feeling like a buffoon for not acting like one. In ways he was a buffoon: his taciturn ways that thwarted the lighthearted frivolity of a world conceived out of motion was the substance that often caused contemptuous laughs.

What did it matter? What did any of his actions towards others matter? Everyone came and left him. He was dizzy on a merry-go-round.

"You must all eat," said Sung Ki as he poured water into the remaining rice in Sang Huin's bowl. He had heard it so many times. How they had carried on an affair with the sister staying there and the overnight visits of Sung Ki's father was a mystery.

They had met in the park in Umsong. Sang Huin was memorizing words in his textbook entitled Let's Speak Korean. Sung Ki spoke something to him in Korean. "Miguk Sarem imnidad" responded Sang Huin (I am an American). Sung Ki, accompanied by a high school friend, took him to eat kimbop (a Korean version of sushi). He spoke in English the entire time neglecting his school friend from the conversation. After visiting a couple museums, Sung Ki gave Sang Huin his beeper number. Sang Huin invited him to a Christmas party held for students at a language institute but stayed contained to his own students and his new friend, Sung Ki. That night they slept together; and the boy that had stroked Sang Huin's leg with his foot when they were eating kimbop wanted to hold hands while the two of them lay next to each other. Sung Ki, soon afterwards, began to plan out their time together. Sang Huin did what he requested: touring the Independence Museum; mountain climbing; free English lessons, and visits to his Buddhist temple and congregation. Soon Sang Huin was spending every night at Sung Ki's apartment and a month later their relationship was a sexual one.

Sang Huin thought about how Sung Ki cleaned the apartment by putting a wet towel under one of his bare feet and sliding across the floor with it; how he used to go into the bathroom with his newspaper and would not come out for over an hour; and that sentence he would always say, "you must all eat" meaning that every speck of rice left in the bowl should be mixed with hot water into a soup so that nothing was wasted. On the day that he learned that Sung Ki was going away he came to his apartment and asked if there was anything he could do or get him. There wasn't. He sat on the sofa, cold and pierced, as Sung Ki ignored him, cleaning one thing or another and then reading something or another. Sung Ki lit a cigarette and sat on a balcony that overlooked the mountains and rice patties of Umsong. After a few more moments of silence, Sang Huin went to him. His voice was shaky like a faltering foundation. He cried. It wasn't so much in reference to him as it was his sister. It was his first tears for her. It was in reference to non-ending perpetual loss. He knew that Sung Ki would construe it as solely for him. He felt embarrassed and the embarrassment increased as the two men hugged. Sung Ki began to cry. Sang Huin said, "I want to apologize. I'm sorry if I did something wrong. You wanted a girlfriend and my friendship and I made you have a boyfriend."

"It's okay. I liked the feeling then." That friendship had bit the dust.

Right before the bus came to a stop, he fell into a dream where there was a dust storm in Pyongyang. He ran through one dong (neighborhood) to another lost, looking for distinguishable signs, shapes in buildings, and widths of streets. Everything from the thin dust-sheathed roads to the hangul (Korean language) on the signs, looked as identical as the occasional mom and pop stores and it was all indistinguishable from what he saw minutes and hours earlier. He ran into no one since the streets were empty. Then he became careful of where he stepped. "The dust storm," he argued, "could have slid land mines up from the thirty eighth parallel." The more he thought about it the more nervous he became and the more hurried. When he became breathless, he sat on a rock and drank the last of his bottled water. The taste of sauerkraut and hot dogs was in his thoughts and the boiling, bubbling surge of his saliva but he would have eaten kimchee or someone's dog being as hungry as he was. It became fully dark and he would have known entire blackness were it not for the speckling of stars, the moon, and a fire at a distance. He walked over to the fire. He saw four whores seated around a bonfire. He recognized different buildings, and the curves of the street near a hard dirt tennis court. This was Ne Doc Dong. "Do you want me," said one, "or do you want another?" Sang Huin's face turned a bright red like it did with drinking a bottle of beer. He smiled and looked toward the sidewalk in his embarrassment. He said, "No, I wouldn't; but would you have a brother?"

When he arrived in Chongju from the desolation of what was in between Seoul and it, the population and activity of this small city recreated an insatiable yearning for Seoul, which to him was a storehouse of all extraordinary venues to the mind (encounters both sexual and cultural). Large buildings were like the small mountains of Umsong with a topping of cloud on a rainy day—monuments of beauty welcoming him to its domain that edified and exhilarated his appetites and his love. The mountains, until recently, transported his imagination to green blankets of waving rice, and from there to farmers' markets and rural parades celebrating the farmer, the daily appreciation of the faces he saw, and the monotonous sounds of "Hello" from children and high school students who knew of him. Those students always made him seem retarded when he couldn't communicate to their Korean rambling but when he spoke to them in English with the same stream of words they became giddy and the outcome was usually a positive one from his perspective. That was before he decided to sue his boss for the 10 million won that was owed to him. At that time he lost faith in the man's decency and began to find the countryside monotonous even though the continual exposure to greenery and remoteness had been healing to his soul.

He left the bus in Chongju (where he was more or less residing) and walked to the bathhouse called a mokotong. The day was fiercely hot and he wondered if it would be better to jump on a city bus since he had experienced heat exhaustion a week earlier and had to be put on an IV to replenish his system. He pulled out some bottled water and crackers for countering any remaining potassium deficiency. He needed a walk and was not willing to be impeded by a weakly cowardice in broken manhood that was contrary to his muscular form. He passed coffee shops, Samsung stores, a convenience store called Lawsons, and one called Best Store. Even though he could read some of the signs in Hangul he did not know what he was reading for the most part. He wished that his family had taught him his native language. Here he often felt like a handicapped moron. If he were an Anglo-Saxon, a blue-eyed Miguk sarem English teacher, spending 6 months in the host country without learning much of anything about the Korean language, it wouldn't have been even a minor offense. To most he was a retarded Hanguk sarem. He chuckled and then smiled at the faces he took in.

He waited at a red light with other pedestrians. He sifted out bodies and faces. For a few seconds he appreciated the old and the young whom he saw. It was an unselfish sensation. It was spiritual and he liked it. Then he lusted after the young men. He had hardly looked at them lustfully while in America. Occasionally Korean women also got his attention but not as much as American women. He had trouble believing that such predilections were a summary of a man. In fact they seemed to him a cathartic release of energy that blocked manhood if manhood was gaining equilibrium when coming up from the punches or finding a positive expression of himself and the world, and even a pride in both, within adversities. Since he quit his job following the suit and the loss of Sung Ki from his life he went to Seoul often more for sex than anything else. How easy it was. All he had to do was put his eyes on someone at a bar called "Trance," around Pagoda Park, or at the movie theatre behind it and off they went to his hotel room. What was it? A strong yearning for his native land and the man he might have been had he not been replanted in America, an over-identification with his own sex, or fragmentation from violence that had disgorged a close family and made him distrustful of those bindings and obligations that could go awry. He did not know. He did not know that it mattered. Anyhow, here his lusts were pursued cathartically in part and lovingly in that addictive clinging in part but always he was falling free and naked into their pools of sensation.

He did not think that he was all that bored. He had around fifteen hours of classes a week and was able, with that, to gain a salary commensurate to what he should have received monthly from his former employer. It turned out to be perfectly legal. After all, he was a Korean citizen, albeit one on a traveler's visa, and so he did not have to work for anyone but himself. He didn't have to do all that much but be able to speak English. He went to museums in Seoul on his free time even though the experience was a bit redundant since there weren't enough temporary exhibitions to entertain and enlighten him for long. The period after sex cloyed empty into the night like a finished game of solitaire. He knew that reality whenever he chose to engage in it and yet he did it nonetheless. He wanted an exchange of higher and lower energies (or at least thought he did), but men throughout the world were afraid of anything but the latter. Reality was as it dictated: and for the most part he did not want to make a seedy experience into something transformational by exchanging names and telephone numbers, and making subsequent calls although that was what he secretly wished-the tattered man that he was.

He entered the mokotong. He picked up a key, a toothbrush, and a razor at the counter. He took off his shoes and left them with the worker who deposited them into a small shoe locker; and then he went to his clothes locker. He took off all of his clothes except for his underwear. He locked them in. Then he went to the toilet. He put on the typical bathroom slippers made of plastic that were used in toilets because they were often wet and dirty. He went back, after urinating, and reopened his locker. He took off his underwear and deposited it there. He had become so socialized to the need of a beeper (not that he ever got any calls apart from students needing to re-change their hours of study) that he hated to keep it there suffocating under his socks. It was an inanimate object but, instrument that it was, it was a source for possible connectedness. Like a child, in his more subconscious thoughts, it was his friend. Still, Koreans, as addicted as they were to pagers and the new popularity of cellular telephones, could not easily dangle them from their penises at a mokotong. He locked the locker and felt "Honja" ("alone). Even among large groups of people he was alone. When he went to restaurants he was usually "honja," and had to declare it. When he studied Korean, read great literature, went to a museum, saw a video at the video pang, or went to a mokotang he was alone and often questioning how anything could be enjoyable in such remoteness. There was pain in it but like any adaptive mammal choosing one lesser pain to the greater one (in his case choosing the aloneness of his thoughts to the sociability of the masses) there were times when he wasn't even aware of how alone he really was. Everything was measured by its impact on others but the pre-adolescent, found buried deep in the man, could always play alone. When violence was really known and the world was conclusively bad in one's perspective one could go at it alone.

In the shower he used a type of dual washcloth connected together like a mitten. He put his hand inside of it and used its abrasive side to scour his body. He tried not to stare at all of the bodies doing the same. He spent just a few minutes in a whirlpool because of the intensity of the heat and then dived into the extremely cold waters of the pool. His heart raced and coldness tingled through his body. Koreans believed in the salubrious qualities of ginseng, dog meat, and sudden exposure to extreme heat and cold. Besides him, there were only two boys and a young man with a rubber ball within the cold pool, but only he swam circularly enjoying the solitude as much as one could. Every now and then, by his lack of focus, he swallowed water in his lust for a man or two lying on the edge of the pool where the heat of the whirlpools in the adjacent room entered and hypnotized them dozingly. He concentrated on the steam that rose above his head, exhausted itself on the mirrors, the waves that he had created which massaged his psyche in sight, feel and sound, and the three figures that enjoyed the water with him at a distance.

It had been disconnection that had brought him here to the mokotong, as it had to Seoul or even to South Korea itself. People had come and gone out of his life in such a storm, and he was in an existence floundering on something without a stable foundation. It was a miracle, to him, that he had been able to finish his studies at the University of Houston following his sister's death. Back then while students paraded themselves in the insouciance of sociable gestures reflecting their sexual rhythms he had dangled alone like a skeleton in a neurosurgeon's office. He liked the flexibility of his schedule here in Korea. He needed plenty of free time to think his weird thoughts and reconstruct himself as long as his thoughts did not collapse onto him, burying him alive.

At the least provocation, in late August, he began to come to her, his favorite city, lost and uncertain with eyes somewhat wild and fearful but yearning and believing in Seoul's power to provide him with experiences that would thrust him into a better knowledge of himself and the world. She would reflect onto him a more refined and loving being (or, at a lower stage, a loved one since he knew that it might be true that he was one of those tattered souls who weren't needing to learn how to be loving at this point but just needing to feel loved).

Four or five times around the pool were enough to tire him to a respite of ten minutes sitting on its edge and contemplating the movements of the people around him. Their forms transcribed into ideas concerning what he thought their lives might be like; and from there, feeling and the musical notes encroached from distant spaces within his imagination.

There had been a time when the whole world seemed to him full of connections. Perhaps that is what made his childhood memories so special: as a child he believed that their meaning would go on forever. The temporary nature of family marshmallow roasts and monopoly games with his father; tire swings and neighbor's tree houses; bicycle radios fastened to handlebars; selling snow cones to passing cars; bicycle routes; meatloaves, potatoes, and onion rings; bi bi bop and kimchi chige; that trip to Arkansas at a distant relative's house and how he and his sister had played in the snow with a "cousin" the whole day; his sister….

Oh, how painful! He didn't want to think of that ever. He wanted to find the beauty of the present moment. How good it was to stretch out into motion; to feel the power of his arms; and the embrace of water.

He thought about how on his walk here an ordinary happening had touched him without even then being aware of it. A young boy standing at a curb with other pedestrians waiting for the light to change rocked a metal, rectangular trash container, which swung back and forth on a hinge. Sang Huin put his hand on his head in passing; and the world could not have seemed more rich and connected by this impersonal incident than if Sung Ki's Buddha had manifested himself supplying answers to every question that Sang Huin had ever had in his head. This contentment and absorption in the poetic qualities of the present moment lasted only that long: a moment. He told himself that he continually wanted to be in the present moment as fully as this no matter how banal or what lonely patterns it consisted of. It was better than searching through memories of people long gone who had no capability of returning to him again.

He pulled his dangling legs from the pool. So much came and went. It was hideous in a way: he could not determine who or what was important. He wasn't even sure how much people were supposed to mean to him, if anything at all. Of his friend, Yang Kwam, what importance to the long- term aspect of his life did this man make? Disconnection ran amuck looting the benign corpses of good memories. After sitting himself on a bench in front of the pool, a sadness at the loss of his friendship with Yang Kwam made him feel age that he did not possess.

He watched a couple young men stretch out in motion. He watched their splashing, their excitement, and their frenzying limbs with the awareness that this tousling around had no higher significance. He got a vision in his mind. It was a feeling with musical notes. He got his underwear and his book bag from the locker and dressed himself marginally. In the dark sleeping room of the mokotang, where many businessmen got their only bit of relaxation from the week, he sat in a reclining chair near the window and began writing down notes but he felt that he was dabbling. He deluded himself that an ability to record notes on a staff would tranform him from an amateur cello performer and general musical dilettante to a composer. it was a dream for dreams meant that he was more than amarginally educated professionless clod kicked by circumstances to job, residence, and sexual orientation. Dreams meant that he was more than a mere carbon organism jilted around by electrical activity in the circuitry within the result of hornomal activity and the results of genetics. Dreams deluded him with a sense of purpose that would be mroe pleasant than reality.

One man's long and thick penis throbbed up and down on its own volition by the impetus of dreams. Sang Huin tried not to stare but he could not help it. His eyes, still getting over an eye virus, began to hurt and he felt tired. He put away his composition and then put his hands over his eyelids.

He went to sleep. He dreamed of a woman named Gabriele driving down a country road in Arkansas. She reached for a can of snuff that was on her dashboard. The roads she chose were random and she kept yearning to move southwest until she was out of America to that neighboring country of Mexico so different than the homogonous American model that was rife the world over. He saw into her mind and her hopes to cross over the Mexican border and veer off the main road through adobe hamlets, and cacti and past Mexican Indians.

When he woke from his epiphany he wasn't sure what to do with it so he returned to the pool only to find it had been drained. Seven streams of water gushed from spouts at the bottom of the pool and three young boys were running around in the collecting waters—one kicking water up to the lower parts of the mirror that covered the walls. It all reminded him of his mother blowing up a plastic pool for he and his sister and how she ran the hose over to the pool to fill it with water. He could remember how the two of them had splashed freely inside it for hours but were so prudishly careful that neighbors hosed off their grassy feet before entering with them. He remembered telling one neighbor boy to get out after he had disregarded the rule, soiling their clean waters, and when he, "Shawn," wouldn't leave he got out to tell his mother only to gain the enflaming sting of Texan fire ants on the souls of his feet. He could remember his screams more than the sting. He looked toward his reflection on the nearest part of the mirrored wall, but still steamed, it wasn't there.

His thoughts crumbled like Graham crackers and spilled like pints of milk that Mrs. Ghrame, the kindergarten teacher, had given to each class member as they watched Winnie the Pooh and Piglet on television before being made to sleep on mats for a nap. He felt lost childhood with so many forgotten memories sucking him into an invisible vortex of dust. He was running around with a cowboy hat, a play gun, and a holster. He was running around in his own wayward thoughts before adolescence created a hunger for beautiful bodies and a neediness that he would never be able to shake.

He jolted up and went where there was more light. He seated himself on a bench near a row of lockers believing that what he had was some story unrestrained by notes but when he put the pen to paper notes exuded there. He sensed the brilliance that came to him and felt awe toward the paper that could magically reflect the mood and full realm of his mind. He yearned to embrace his cello and to practice the notes of a Gabriele symphony that he was composing.

Chapter Two

He dressed himself. As he put on his socks, he did it with the mentality of a small child who still felt newness in the sensation. Sexual glutton of adult games, introvert, a man perpetually weakened and wary in ways unbecoming to a man, he still was a little wiser than most on a couple issues. He was cognizant that as an effect of adolescent awakenings an adult often was so obsessed with being in the company of others that finding any degree of happiness could not occur without them. He was a lot different in that respect: influences by hormones to sociability were thwarted by his wariness that gave him back his childhood innocence. Although he was an adult he could still play alone albeit uneasily. Also they, the unwary ones, were so fixated on gaining bigger and more complex pleasures in their gross gluttony to have everything before death that the marvel of air rushing into one's lungs or the feel of a spring breeze brushing against one's face was lost to them entirely. He wanted the remnant of early childhood—the memories of strong aromas, sights, and sounds as his senses depicted them— to live in him and not be the cause of mourning. He wanted to find the traces of deceased family in those early days and be able to glance back onto those tenuous decaying remnants of memory with a sense of happiness at what was once there. Still, even with the earliest and most benign memories furthest removed from the tragic end, such a feat was difficult to master. Everything in the mind of a 5-year-old from the smells of greased telephone polls to the sounds of the school bus that picked up his older 7-year-old sister, and everything in the mind of a 10-year-old from getting his first b-b gun to spending his first time away from family at a summer camp was like walking barefoot on sharp gravel. This, however, was better than having his entrails hacked out of him in that shock of finding his father dangling from a noose in the workroom of his basement. Thinking that early memories were even more benign than the present, he knew that it was only his thinking that made them painful. He judged that he was the source of his misery and with application he would find a way to plant himself in their fecund topsoil and burgeon into the future. His childhood memories were mostly American in origin although it was difficult to isolate the Korean episodes from that of the latter. After the school bus would rush in front of a road near the trailer park and whisk his sister away, his mother would pursue her early morning exercises in front of the television and he would emulate her movements. He remembered loving the thought of catching lightning bugs like his sister and the neighbor children and his repulsion towards it when his mother stated that they were "God's little creatures." He remembered getting lost in a store, feeling tiny among lady mannequins, and being nearly hit by a car as he played in the street. A man yelled at his mother for letting her child run around unrestrained in the streets. Humiliated, she sent him to the bedroom of the trailer. The radio on the mantle of the bed was playing "Raindrops keep falling on my head" and other lugubrious folk melodies. He listened. He cried on her white blanket as if she had banished him forever. He remembered that his father came home on that occasion and took him to the Orbit Inn for a coca cola. He twirled around on a stool restored to his euphoria as his father strutted his work talk to men his age seated on other stools.

Walking from the mokotong he thought of a story that he often read to the children in Kwang Sook's kindergarten in Chongju, a place where he often worked for a few hours each week. But his mind distorted it as the benign and innocuous innocence of childhood is mutilated and the mutilation calcified by experience. Seoul Tiger gets on a plane. He waves goodbye to his mother and father from the window. He feels the plane move and rise in the air. He shuts his eyes briefly. Then he opens them widely in amazement. Seoul Tiger looks through the window. He sees a valley of clouds below him. Then he looks down further and he sees Sri Lanka. The plane lands. Seoul Tiger gets out of the plane. He gives the deferential slight bow and says hello to Tamil Tiger. Tamil Tiger picks up his suitcase and takes it to a car. Tamil Tiger's mother is in the car. She says, 'Hello' to Seoul Tiger. They all go to the home of Tamil Tiger's family. Tamil Tiger's mother slaughters a pig and boils it in her stew while her husband brandishes a machete playfully. Then they all eat at the table. 'Do you eat rice?' asks Seoul Tiger. 'No, I eat unleavened bread,' says Tamil Tiger. 'Here are some Rotis.' Tamil Tiger passes him the plate. The plate has rotis on it. Seoul Tiger holds the unleavened bread in his palm wondering how to eat it. Then a stew, called a curry, is put upon his plate. 'Do you eat kimchee?' asks Tamil Tiger. 'What is kimchee?" asks Tamil Tiger.

Again he was bouncing around in a bus without time to rush back to the yangwam, the room he rented outside of an old woman's home. He questioned himself on why he had agreed to give private lessons in various places outside of Chongju. He answered to himself that the strung out schedule and the long rides matched his disorganized, wayward thoughts. It felt comfortable to bounce around in the similar movements of his circumambulatory personal life. He hoped that the bus would arrive in time so that he could eat a meal before going into those lessons. People in these small towns would not acknowledge his handicap of linguistic ignorance. They demanded more than his short, concrete, and ungrammatical utterances. If he had been an Anglo-Saxon he would have been served in restaurants with simple statements like "Chop che bop, chushipshio" (chop che bop, please). But in small towns even a waitress who had experienced him before would come forth with entire paragraphs to serve onto him and then would stand there bewildered that paragraphs of reciprocal eloquence would not be returned by someone clearly of her nationality. At last she would go away and the dinner would come for the retard. This time, as always, he ate quickly and then waited for some woman's children to get him at the bus terminal. He did not know the woman's name even though he taught there and she gave him money and he did not know her children's names even though he taught them. They were just his "little tongmuls" (little animals). Sang Huin did not like the difficulty of memorizing Korean names so he did it seldom.

Inside the bus station he changed to a different bench. A two or three year old girl, chastised by her mother, sought refuge between his legs and would not come out. She closed the legs like an iron gate. The mother did not seem to demand that she leave the fortress; and he enjoyed the fact that she seemed to gain comfort from his presence even though his face expressed the awkwardness of having her there.

He missed childhood. Surely all people did. Was it so awful to admit this? No one that he had ever known had spoken of his or her loss. Granted, one could not stay comatose in innocence—the delight of pulling some trivial plastic or paper objects from cereal boxes; Halloween costumes; or the Christmas togetherness. The newness of running around trying to beat the clouds or run barefoot after balls in the ecstasy of just being alive ended quickly to girl chases, obligations, family, and all of such dead weight. He couldn't have stayed with his mother forever. If he could have remained steady on the American continent he would have needed more than just her; and so alone, with a sense that he would never find family or closeness again, he had ventured here to another continent that was and wasn't his home, and where he did not speak a language that was and wasn't his. Still, coming here was not entirely bereft of positive notions. Being an innocent, a childish perspective prevailed.

He wanted to once again hold something tenuous and fragile in the palm of his hand as a child would a tinctured caterpillar, the butterfly. He wanted to be there with it innocuously in awe of something that really had no use to him. He loathed this interaction, this anathema of the soul so intertwined in insatiable and wanton selfishness. He wanted to be Seoul Tiger once again but such was not in the survivalist impulses of man. Such was not destiny. Hadn't there been numerous times when as a boy he would sit hours with a stray dog that was needing to claim a gentle master, scared to take it home and yet, like a true friend, sensitive most to creatures that could not articulate themselves in any other way than in the eyes. The eyes, that dilated neediness to be in the presence of a friend in a hostile world where being born was not a sanction to live well or live long. One's innocence ran by like a shell-shocked soldier; circumventing normal sexual drive by being gay would not free him to an innocence that was forlorn. Now there was just the wistful need for family, children he helped to say small things, and his strange obsession with empty physical connections he could depart from easily. He preferred young students because they did not make him uncomfortable by pressing the issue that a man in his early twenties should be planning to have a family. His private domain consisted of a blessed, taciturn instrument called a cello that required no words to say something deep. He had dragged it on the plane and had paid an astronomical fee to get it onto the airlines. What a burden it had been to him lugging the thing around and yet, dilettante that he was, he needed some beauty to exude out of his hardened mud. He needed reverberating notes to sink into the plaster cast around his mind, which had the signature of the world as an evil place upon it , and caress his soft and lonely brain.

Finally, the two or three-year-old parted one of the kneecaps and the mother pushed candy bribes before her nose to keep her quiet and contained. Soon they bought a ticket in the Chinchon station and boarded a bus. All bus terminals in cities under a million people had cement floors and were dark and dirty like a cellar. Just like he had seen in myriad other terminals, here a man came along with a plastic watering bucket with a nozzle used for watering plants. He rinsed the floor with the water contained in it but did not follow that with either a mop or a broom. A few minutes later, two boys came into the terminal. One had a basketball in his hands. The other one stood a few feet behind him. He looked bored and fat.

"Anyong Haseyo" (Peace you do)

"Anyong Hashimnika, Sonsaeng nim," (Peace you do, teacher), said the one with the basketball.

"Uri-tul nun taxi ul sayang hata?" (We taxi to use?) He knew it was as ungrammatical as a pig. He knew that again there would be no taxi. Again they would be walking. Still it was his way of saying something. The one with the basketball who could figure it out shook his head.

They walked down the sidewalks. The two boys lead the way. Sang Huin felt that the roles had been inverted and he felt a twinge of resentment that he was a child or a retard in his own native country and that children were dragging him about. The three of them moved down sidewalks like window-shopping loiterers looking into every mom and pop store along the way. "Ilchik tangshin-tul rul basketball ul hayoshimnita kachi?" (Early you basketball did?) The fat boy nodded his head silently. The boy knew his genius in interpretive skills. A sense of pride exuded over his face in a white light but the flush of expression was extremely ephemeral. It came upon him and vanished in just a few seconds.

"Who won?" asked Sang Huin in English.

The fat boy pointed to himself with his thumb. He even smiled for a second in a sort of bored way.

Then they opened a gate and they went into what looked like a house only it was separated into two apartments.

Sang Huin used his photograph cards like magic tricks to get them to practice tenses and syntax. He liked seeing their tiny house and thinking how his life might have been—for better or for worse—within the childhood of his race. He loved English as he loved music; and sometimes he combined the two in such classes, but with a small feeling of resentment (to which his smile and gentle nature gave no indication) as if his time was sodden in musical doggerel that defiled him like a solecism when he might well be playing Haydn and Boccherini.

He wondered about the girl dressed in the dumpy blue skirt of her school uniform, and the boys in jeans. Were they content to be Koreans or did they yearn for bigger and better things seduced by the American culture that came to them through the cinema and the music and through his presence as well as the English that they studied. If they weren't content, he thought, it wasn't for him to say they were wrong. It was a globalized world and America was the power and the standard that was the impetus for its formation. That was why he was here with his English. He couldn't have gotten any other job in Korea when he couldn't master the simplest of sentences in the native language. He didn't like the sour perceptions that he had of America. It was home. It was still home.

In Umsong, during those times he had waited in the office of the kindergarten for his class to begin, the children would always see him through the window. They knew at that point that he didn't speak Korean and wasn't one of them and for that reason they were attracted to him. They would bang and climb on the window in their eagerness to be near him; and some, using a runny nose as an excuse, would be permitted to go into the hall. To the side of a fish aquarium hung a roll of toilet tissue. They would wipe their noses and peak into the office. They would squeal. He liked it. He liked being an American—sometimes.

He looked more intensely at these Chinchon students. Who would they become? As they begin to feel hormones, the adrenaline of the four-year high called love, and the frenzy of sex luring them into steady relationships and accompanying obligations, would they have moments where they too yearned to be in a hammock under their Grandma Lee's cherry trees? In his case he could recall the image of a photograph of a neighbor his family had labeled as "Grandma" Vera with her black dress rustling in the wind carrying him in her arms. Would they think upon theirs-something similar to Vera frying hamburgers on the grill as the scents of angel-food cakes came from the windows of her kitchen? He chastised himself. He told himself that only broken people looked back on childish irrelevance. The rest looked to the future in their insatiable hungers for bigger pleasures and their present connections that they might use to secure their hedonistic whims. But he was a "broken" person and the thought of Vera returned to him. When he thought of her intensely the image emblazoned in memory shook him and it was hard to think that it could not make her alive again. And yet to have had a connection (and the most unfortunate of lives surely have had many) would justify everything. A personal contact in the past or when the wind…or the sun…or the rain touched him, that alone would justify a life of barren prospects.

"Unto us a child is born. Unto us a child is given." He thought of the words of the composer, Handel. Yes, he thought, he had done a horrible thing by encouraging his girlfriend to abort their child. It was wrong to have robbed a being of life and any connections the fetus might have had beyond its own cell divisions. Secondly, this cynicism that a woman, spellbound in romance, robbed a man of his sperm to produce a baby by which to devote herself and obtain a purpose in life while thrusting him into the financial maintenance of this prize had caused him to abort major connections in his own life. Now, apart from his mother, there were no connections. There were only phantoms of people flitting through ethereal consciousness, and by coming here to find his land he had parted from her. When his sister was murdered, he was just beginning his studies at the university. When his father committed suicide, Sang Huin's cadaverous numbness was on fire and he felt that any trace of himself was being incinerated. Mentally, he was running to and fro in the hope of retarding the flames that were eating him for their fuel. Back then the thought of his father dangling from the noose recurred to him every few moments. At that time he wanted to check himself into a hospital for he felt a loss of sanity. His world was three dimensional but totally impersonal and wobbling. After months of virtual silence and the icy stares of his mother through the most enervated and perfunctory movements of planting flowers and trees no different than what she had or stripping wallpaper and putting up patterns that were nearly identical to the old ones, he spent a month in Galveston. A month watching waves dash against the shore was enough to make him see that being one of a billion waves dashed into the sands was a pattern engrained into life that he must not take personally; and so he returned to school. By will and discipline in reigning in his thoughts he made it through college and a year of graduate school. But he could not take the stagnation that scholarly pursuits forced him to endure and became the animated billiard ball being shot from one area of the table to the next—one part of the country to the next—falling homeless into dark holes.

Sadness punched him in the stomach. It was enough—"nomu" (too much). He frowned. He didn't care. Six or seven minutes early—who would mark the time especially when he traveled such a distance to give them these lessons. He told them that the session had ended and they got an envelope of money from their mother, which they brought to him. The session didn't seem as if it had begun. It all was a vacuum—a void. He untied the double knots that were contained on his shoes and put them on. Korean people were so quick at slipping on shoes, and he assumed that anytime someone waited for him to leave it was a complete aggravation for them. His mother had spent so much time teaching him to tie and then double-tie. He had been such an ignorant and inept child. The habit was deeply engrained in his psyche. The students stared and waited at his childish wrestling with his shoes. He knew that he needed slip-ons that would foster a quick exodus after he had taken them off at the door.

He stepped out over the crevice of a yard. A light sprinkling or heavy mist was falling upon him. Past the gate and into the street the generalized memories of a hundred such days with a hundred similar rains came to him. Rain was for him only a baptism of emancipation. From a glance up at the clouds he was compelled to acknowledge realities outside his own thoughts—and indeed Sang Huin needed the rain of Noah to get out of his own ruminations. Yet, a foreigner's experience was indeed like no others' and he was an introverted being traumatized by the great chasm of the murder of a sibling and finding the blue dangling body of his father. At 24, any man's boyhood was buried under only a shallow layer of dirt and for one with maimed manhood the clay was never solid, was partially washed away, and boyhood often resurfaced. He was a runaway from the American experience and his thoughts, when not able to do it in deeds, almost always ran to Seoul. The rural areas where he worked and at one time had lived gave him the solitude and the meditative power to think his weird thoughts as he tried to reconstruct his manhood but the problem was that he did it too much. Seoul was felicity, the exhilarating movements, the museums, the symphonies, and the sexual bliss. Within it the hurt was diffused and boyhood was gagged and he was rarely cognizant of its screams. At the bus station it began to rain heavily. A few years ago, he thought, the sun had droned on with the days of the trial and the rare rain had been his only comfort.

In an hour's time, during the bus ride, each of these students would be completely gone from his mind exuded like the entangling conundrums of feeling, ideas, and senses in sleep. If all people were shadows of this realm in the flickering of light, what solid entity cast the shadow? Was it God? Was there a god? If the shadows were more concrete than the light, what would this say about life? He decided to stop thinking such things. Myriad complex and morbid thoughts, profound or inane, would not raise him to a wiser man. They would just get him stuck in their muddy ruts.

Back in a bus, he thought about how much of his life was dragged about in transportation here and there for a Korean buck. He didn't know anybody in Chongju but a simple advertisement in the paper would have been enough to solve his dilemma in providing him with private lessons near his home for needed South Korean Won. Still, if his whole life was spent in these bus rides, fate was not bad. He could be a starving North Korean or one of the dead soldiers who got their submarine trapped on a reef in the South Korean jurisdiction of the ocean and had been hunted down by the South Korean soldiers. He had a South Korean passport and an American residency. He was single and free to see the world. He didn't do that much and had lots of time and some money to spend.

He had little mastery over his thinking. Since he was a creative person it often went running wild through meadows with the gods. He knew there was genius to be gained in the company of deities so wild. He had left his mother's home and his mother country to find manhood- perverse, greedy, manhood with its insatiable wants, its selfish calculating plans, and its grandiose desire to find its own unique adventures and habits. She, his mother, would meanwhile be re-planning and redecorating rooms. He loved her deeply but she was not everything. He needed more connections to keep himself from rising like a balloon and going adrift; and lacking them, looking onto his life from the clouds, he could see the obvious: that this mortal would not be there when he became much older. For all of his life there was only one claim to be made and that was upon himself. In this respect he was quite American.