“Gaen-cha-nah,” I mutter, chuckling, telling him it’s okay. I put out my hand. “Yuh-gi ahn-juh.” Come here and sit.
He comes around the desk and sits upright in the wing chair beside mine. His straight black hair is bowl-cut. The bridge of his nose hasn’t yet pushed out. The arms at attention, the eyes ever lowered, a venerating bend to his head. He waits for me to address him. From his earliest moments he knows to be like this before an elder.
He is so much like me when I was ten, so unlike our Mitt, whom Lelia and my father and I let raucously trample over all our custom and ceremony. Our Mitt, untethered. He’d tug at my father’s pant legs during church sermons, roam the shadows of restaurant tables, publicly address his mother by her given name: all these spoils of our American life. And despite Lelia’s insistence that he go to Korean school on the weekends, I knew our son would never learn the old language, this was never in question, and my hope was that he would grow up with a singular sense of his world, a life univocal, which might have offered him the authority and confidence that his broad half-yellow face could not. Of course, this is assimilist sentiment, part of my own ugly and half-blind romance with the land.
Peter and I possess a similar command of Korean, though perhaps his grasp is slightly better, his bah-rham or accent, or, literally, “breeze,” is more authentic, still deeply redolent of the old country. Perhaps in twenty years his Korean words will creep out like mine, the notes uncertain, tentative. When I step into a Korean dry cleaner, or a candy shop, I always feel I’m an audience member asked to stand up and sing with the diva, that I know every pitch and note but can no longer call them forth.
We talk baseball, the opening of the new season. The Yankees finally have some pitching. The Mets are sliding fast. We hate, hate Boston and St. Louis. Out of respect he tries to speak as much Korean as he can, and I don’t let him know his rapid speech is variously lost on me. I listen and keep nodding, and ask in English what position he likes to play. He says he plays second base. What do you want to play, is the question. He curls one foot behind the other, bites his lip, and whispers: shortstop.
“Ah,” I say, “why don’t you play it then? Someone isn’t better at it?”
“No way!” he answers stridently. “Dad wanted me to play second this year. The coach wanted me to be the shortstop but Dad said I had to learn how to play second base first. Next year I’ll be at shortstop.” His eyes concentrating. “You must learn how to be a good corporal before you can be a great general.”
“Sounds like good advice,” I say.
“Sure,” Peter says. “This season, I’m paying my dues.” He stands up.
I stand up with him. John walks in. He addresses his son by his Korean name and the boy leaps up and hugs him. His father kisses him on the temple and deep in the hair and says he wants him to fetch us some drink, some food. Mother will know. Peter turns but then stops and quickly bows to me before running downstairs.
He motions to my chair and we both sit. He wears a pressed white oxford shirt, new blue jeans, loafers. His hair is still wet from the shower, the silvery gray shining brightly through the black strands. His cheeks brushed red by steam and water. But he looks much older with his hair flat and matted, his head an orb more dully drawn, as if diminished. I see his posture as somehow broken, there’s not his familiar pliancy and spring at a public appearance, his steely poise among the crowds, the drive pooled up in his fists, the huge voice, the miracle forcefulness. I have witnessed him shake fifteen hundred hands in the space of a city block, Q & A for five hours with an assembly of greedy malcontents, kneel whole mornings in Reverend Cho’s cavernous church praying for a rookie cop shot up in Hunt’s Point. In the afternoons, when Eduardo and I escorted him from the office to the subway, which he sometimes liked to ride home, we heard him greet his citizens in Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin, Thai, Portuguese, him lilting forth with a perfection unborrowed and unstudied: Keep on, keep faith, we know how you feel, you are not alone.
“He’s not like his younger brother, you know,” he says, his head resting in the seam of the high chair-back. “Peter’s never been too aggressive. Not Johnny’s way. Johnny already gets into scuffles in nursery school, you know, he has trouble, he doesn’t talk too much yet. He prefers contact. For example, he loves those Ninjas.”
“Peter’s very thoughtful,” I say.
“Yes, very much,” he answers, almost beaming. His color seems to come back. “For some time I felt somewhat disappointed by this. I couldn’t understand why. The boy is sensitive and intelligent. Clearly there’s deep warmth in his heart, a deep compassion, even at his age. I watched him once in front of his school, his mother and I were waiting in the car to pick him up. Some older boys were calling him names, a fairy, whatever, and also making fun of me, saying his father wasn’t a ‘real chink’ like he was. Peter was quiet. I could tell this approach of theirs confused him a little. He had so much to respond to, and in different ways. He kept staring at them, though without malice. May wanted me to go and stop it but I admit I couldn’t. I didn’t want to. Sometimes you want to see what will happen with a boy on his own. I feared for him but I did nothing. Sometimes you must wait and see.”
“What happened?”
He remains hunched over. Now he closes his eyes to remember; it’s a habit of his, he’ll often shut them for three, four seconds, as he gathers what he’ll say.
“Suddenly, Peter punched the loud boy in the mouth. He knew tae kwon do. His blow drew blood right away, and the boy fell down. The others scattered and the boy was left there, below Peter, holding his bleeding lip. You could see he was a tough kid, or that he considered himself tough. He got up and swung wildly at Peter but kept missing. Peter would wait, he was well trained, and then strike out when there was an opening. It happened in a matter of seconds. May was getting very angry at me and I had to hold her elbow to keep her inside the car. Peter kept landing blows, and the boy, he must have been all of ten or eleven, finally fell down again and then completely broke. He wailed like his age. He was afraid. I went for them then. As I approached I watched Peter bend down on his knees and put his face in front of the boy’s. I heard him say, ‘Hit me back.’ But the boy couldn’t, or wouldn’t. He thought Peter was just baiting him. The teachers arrived and helped the boy get up. When we got back to the car May was silent, and then Peter began to cry. He didn’t stop for an hour. He wouldn’t look us in the face. He was sick in bed for two days afterwards. I let him stay sick, I understood this reaction, I accepted it.”
We hear patters ascending the steps. It’s John Jr., carrying in a tray of rice crackers wrapped in roasted nori, salted nuts, strips of dried squid. Peter follows him in with another, a bottle of Chivas and a small tin pail of ice. His father greets them heartily and takes the tray from Peter, who knows to retrieve glasses from the low shelf beneath the window. John Jr.’s got a crew cut, the thickest little hands. His head is still too big for him. He slaps his hands up and down to say he’s finished his work. He stares up at me and says to his father in Korean, What did uncle bring us?
Peter tells his little brother to be quiet. John Jr. asks again and I say I left the present at home and will bring it tomorrow, which I will. Peter grabs him by the back of the neck and veers him toward the door. John Kwang calls them to come to him first; he kisses them both, and smacks John Jr. hard on the rear, which makes the boy shriek with happiness.