* * *
The Kwang job was different. Nobody in the office was a cherry. This was street-level urban politics, conducted house by house, block by block, the work sweaty and inglorious. You could get mugged or beaten up if you strayed down an alley, or knocked on the wrong door. Bravery didn’t matter. Nor raw smarts. You had to be tactical. Suspicious. Ready to admit your losses. Careful with the tongue.
And as Hoagland always said, “Brave like the gazelle.”
In truth the setup was perfect for me. I had to agree with Dennis on that one. I didn’t have to manufacture the circumstances in which I could ask questions that would get worthwhile answers. I didn’t have to push too hard. Each day brought scores of regular people and visitors through the offices, and with all the lesser meetings and speeches Kwang attended to weekly, the countless minor moments, I witnessed what ertswhile observers — anthropologists and pundits alike — might have called his natural state.
His human clues. I’d sit in one corner of his office during the three hours on Wednesdays that he opened his door to speak with “walk-ins,” the sundry visitors and neighborhood groups. By noon they’d be lined up in skeins outside the building, all kinds of people, people holding bags and children, people in suits, in smocks.
I sat in on the meetings with him and took notes. He wanted a record of each person and his or her concerns, and afterward I had to quickly interview them myself for their personal and biographical information. The office kept an electronic database of every voter and potential voter we encountered, and then those who it reached through regular mailers. With this body of files we could sift and sort through the population of the district by gender, race, ethnicity, party affiliation, occupation. We had names and birth dates of their children and relatives. Data on weekly income, what they paid in rent, in utilities, if they were on public assistance, how long. If they had been victims of crime. Their houses of worship. The languages they spoke, in rank of proficiency. The list always growing, profligate. Almost biblical.
On Fridays, John Kwang took home a stack of double-wide green-and-white printouts to commit to memory. It was something you eventually learned when you worked here: John Kwang was a devotee of memory. I thought it strange, first on the obvious level of why a busy and ambitious politician would devote any amount of time to memorizing lists of people he’d never need to know. Then I wondered if he wasn’t simply odd, nervous. An uptight Korean man. What I eventually saw was that he never intended to know each live body in the district, his purpose wasn’t statistical mastery, although that certainly happened. The memorizing was more a discipline for him, like a serious craft or martial art, a chosen kind of suffering involving hours of practice and concentration by which you gradually came to know yourself.
Late in the afternoon one Friday I was printing out the newest records in the war room. Kwang must have heard the whine of the machine and looked in. He caught me scanning the sheets. I was always good at memory games, and as a boy I annoyed my father by beating him if he slipped just once. But now, serene with Hoagland’s method, my memory is fantastic, near diabolic. It arrests whatever appears before my eyes. I don’t memorize anymore. I simply see.
When the printing was done I folded the sheaf in half so it would fit inside his briefcase. He took it graciously. He said nothing as I helped him with his light overcoat. I was ready for him to ask me what my interest in the printout was but instead he said if I wasn’t busy he would like me to come have drink and good food with him. That was how he said it, drink and good food. Certain things he still expressed with a foreigner’s simplicity. May and the boys were upstate for the week at their house on Cayuga Lake, and he said he wasn’t in the mood to eat by himself. It was a strange thing to hear from a Korean man, and I wondered what circumstance would have had to arise for my father to profess openly a feeling like that.
“Learning the business, I see,” John finally said, affably. We were walking outside. “In past times, a person’s education was a matter of what he could remember. It still is in Korea and Japan. I must assume in China as well. Americans like to believe this is the great failing of Asia. Why the Japanese are good at copying and not inventing, which is no longer really true, if it ever was. I had a teacher who made us memorize scores of classical Chinese and Korean poems. We had to recite any one of them on command. He was hoping to give us knowledge, but what he actually impressed upon us was a legacy. He would smack the top of your head if you hadn’t perfectly prepared the assignment, but then later in the class he could be overcome after reading a poem aloud.”
He stopped to unlock the door for me. He drove a new Lincoln Continental. I noticed that he drove several different cars as well, and then only American models; a politician, especially an Asian American one, doesn’t have a choice in the matter. He had interests in car dealerships and a local chain of electronics stores, in addition to his core business of selling high-end dry-cleaning equipment.
“Young Master Lim,” he said. “He was becoming a respected writer when the war broke out. We later heard that he was killed in the fighting. Sometime before the school was closed he said it was our solemn duty to act as vessels for our country and civilization, that we must give ourselves over to what had come before us, as much to literature as we did to our parents and ancestors. You look like him, I think. Around the eyes. Thick lidded.”
“My mother’s,” I said.
“Ah. You know, Henry, why they’re so? They’re thick to keep the spirit warm and contented.”
“I don’t know if my mother would have said they worked,” I told him.
“How about for you?” he asked.
I laughed a little bit and said, “They work perfectly.”
We joked a little more, I thought like regular American men, faking, dipping, juking. I found myself listening to us. For despite how well he spoke, how perfectly he moved through the sounds of his words, I kept listening for the errant tone, the flag, the minor mistake that would tell of his original race. Although I had seen hours of him on videotape, there was something that I still couldn’t abide in his speech. I couldn’t help but think there was a mysterious dubbing going on, the very idea I wouldn’t give quarter to when I would speak to strangers, the checkout girl, the mechanic, the professor, their faces dully awaiting my real speech, my truer talk and voice. When I was young I’d look in the mirror and address it, as if daring the boy there; I would say something dead and normal, like, “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” and I could barely convince myself that it was I who was talking.
We hit the Friday night street traffic on 39th Avenue going west toward Corona. The restaurant was a dozen or so blocks farther than that, near Elmhurst, a new Korean barbecue house. He talked steadily through the stop and go, freely using his hands to punctuate his speech, the movements subtle but stylized, what I recognized as Anglo. The boycotts of Korean grocers were spreading from Brooklyn to other parts of the city, to black neighborhoods in the Bronx and even in his home borough, in the Williamsburg section, and then also in upper Manhattan. Though he wasn’t having trouble in his own neighborhoods, he was being hounded by the media for statements and opinions on the mayor’s handling of them, particularly the first riot in Brownsville, where a mostly black crowd, watched over by a handful of police, looted and arsoned a Korean-owned grocery.