The mood in the office was messianic. We felt like his guerrillas. Some weekends we’d come in for extra work, stay out all day Saturday and then have a big dinner with him at an all-night Korean restaurant, ten or fifteen of us sitting on the floor with him at the head, pouring for each other from double-sized bottles of Korean ale. He’d teach us old songs in Korean, drinking songs, school songs, whatever we could learn. I was usually the only Korean in a room of young Jews and Chinese and Hispanics.
Eduardo Fermin was his favorite. He would make him stand up and sing a Dominican island song, or a hymn. Eduardo would rise without a word. He’d sing beautifully, his high choirboy voice hitting every note like a bell. When he finished we’d all clap and hoot and then John would give him the business, all joking, bulling, asking if he’d ever learned anything from anyone besides the good Sisters of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
“What other schmaltz do you want me to sing?” Eduardo would yell back, and John would laugh and tell him the name of another song.
I tried to sit at the far end of the table, so that if he were in one of his high, manic moods he wouldn’t pick me out in front of the group. This way, too, I could observe the entire table, the faces, take the run of the evenings.
He seemed to understand this, and sometimes he would catch my eye from across the room when other people were heatedly talking or arguing and nod affirmingly. Only afterward, on the way out or in the street, would he take me aside — almost without exception — and ask how I was doing with the office work, and if my other work as a magazine writer wasn’t being compromised. Rarely did he pursue me in front of the others, and then only if he were in the foulest humor, sometimes asking in a dramatic voice for me to speak on behalf of Koreans everywhere. If we were talking about some thorny issue like welfare reform or affirmative action he would say like a reporter both unctuous and angling, “Mr. Park, if you would tell us the Korean American position on this please.” He liked to linger on the hyphenation. Then he’d deliver some below-the-belt follow-up: “Do you think a single black mother with six kids should be rewarded for having any more?”
I never had a good response, and neither did anyone else. In truth, I thought he couldn’t help but sometimes punish us with the same notions and language that daily confronted him. He might snap at you with a comment from the last press conference.
Some problems were dogging him. For months he had been talking to Chinese and Korean gang leaders, in an effort to halt their street extortion and violence, negotiate some kind of settlement. But the dialogues ceased after a surprise arrest by police immediately following the last meeting at Reverend Cho’s church, several weeks before. An arrested Korean gang chief named Han had been publicly threatening him, spreading the word on the street that Kwang had betrayed them.
With this first real trouble, I noticed that he was getting caught up in his moods. I began to see the whip of his temper. One afternoon I watched him shout at his wife, May, for what seemed ten straight minutes as they sat inside their white sedan. He was shaking his fist so close to her face, which had gone white. I was across the street in front of the office so I couldn’t hear him, but I was certain that he was yelling in both Korean and English. She sat perfectly still and took it all. Then he stepped from the car and spoke softly to her from the open door, shutting it gently before she drove off.
He usually treated me with genuine warmth. Perhaps to him I was someone he ought to look out for, a Korean American, well educated, solitary-looking, seemingly jobless. He often asked about my wife, freely offering his aid in finding her more speech work with the city. She could work in a Flushing district, he said, nodding to say that he could do that. What threw me most, however, was that he would sometimes misremember whether I had children — this seems improbable, given what I would learn about his amazing feats of memory — and while talking about child rearing he might refer to how I must know this thing or that, the way a child can be joyous and harrowing, ask of what I imagined in life for my daughter or my son. When he over-drank he wanted to see pictures. I had to tell him I didn’t carry any. He would open his wallet and show me snapshots of his own children, Peter and John Jr., in matching blue suits. He also carried a picture of May, though it dated to the sixties (her hair, her dress) and was nearly faded of all color.
I want to say that he was a family man, that being Korean and old-fashioned made him cherish and honor the institution, that his family was the basic unit of wealth in his life, everything paling and tarnished before it. But then I would be speaking only half of the truth, and the most accessible half at that, the part that had the least to do with him. Certainly, he loved his family. He loved May and he loved Peter and perhaps most he loved little John. Like any good father, I thought, he would have died for them, a thousand times.
But then he loved the pure idea of family as well, which in its most elemental version must have nothing to do with blood. It was how he saw all of us, and then by extension all those parts of Queens that he was now calling his. All day and all night we worked without stopping, knowing we’d get to be with him at the end of the day. Oo-rhee-jip, he’d say then, just before the eating and drinking, asking for our hands around the table, speaking oo-rhee-jip for Our house. Our new life.
Since the beginning I was writing down everything and thus committing — if I so wished — all of our movements to an official and secret memory. I had a long queue of files on a disk waiting to be wired to Hoagland’s terminal in Purchase. I was sending him various items, of course, brief profiles of Kwang at various events around the city. These were overly precious entries, and I knew they were written too much in the mode of a fanciful reporter-at-large: appraisals of Kwang from the back of a crowded room, the point of view through the glass of a fancy cocktail, my prose full of handsomeness and brio. Lively perhaps, but exactly what Hoagland couldn’t use, material any spy would read and crabbily say was inedible paper.
I seemed to be waiting for something to happen before I could send to Hoagland what he needed from me. In previous assignments, even the one with Luzan, I had always been able to follow through with my initial transmissions despite feeling a moment’s pang of remorse. Jack told me from the start that this would happen. The first incision is always the hardest. Only then can you get down to business, work yourself elbow deep. With John Kwang I wrote exemplary reports but I couldn’t accept the idea that Hoagland would be combing through them. It seemed like an unbearable encroachment. An exposure of a different order, as if I were offering a private fact about my father or mother to a complete stranger in one of our stores.
Perhaps this was because John Kwang constantly spoke of us as his own, of himself as a part of us. Though he rarely called you a brother, sister, son. He was prudent with his language. If anything, he called you friend. He said looking right into your eyes that he trusted you with his life. He said he loved you for what you did. He made it seem as if he couldn’t believe any of our devotion or duty.
Once I saw him drop to one knee before a young volunteer for having stayed an extra shift. He was seamless in the act, he made no show of it, and bent small like that he looked as if he had been that way all his life, bent before this half-terrified girl to lay a kiss on her hand. In horror the girl buckled and knelt down with him, and in answer he rose and lifted them both. I didn’t know then if I had witnessed the gravest humility or conceit. What does it matter which? He was a man who could do such a thing. But then John Kwang was also American. Maybe he simply wanted what any newcomer like him wanted and would will for himself, a broader foreground from which he might naturally emerge. Family that would make up events in the lore of his life. The girl he kneels to. Eduardo his boxer. Janice, keen Sherrie. Now a latecomer by the name of Henry Park. But I can imagine my father saying his no, no, it was clearly Kwang’s Confucian training at work, his secular religion of pure hierarchy, his belief that everyone is at once a noble and a servant and then just a man. Its adherents know no hubris. Instead this: you simply bow down before those who would honor you. You honor them back. For you are but ash to their fire. All spent of light.