He has not surfaced for nearly thirty-six hours since the accident. Then, the surprise dawn sweep by the INS. We hear rumors that he has been taken in for questioning by federal agents in Manhattan. That he will be here soon. One reporter seems able to confirm this, but no one else is certain. Janice, who arrived here early this morning, is now inside the house with May and the boys. May won’t let anyone else in. When I finally get through the busy line from a pay phone Janice says May is losing it. She keeps sending the boys away to play and right away asks where they are.
Janice figures there is no longer anything to do except stay with May and wait. She won’t draft a statement for him or make any more phone calls to confuse or delay the press. It is up to him to appear imminently and explain himself on all the counts. If he is alive and breathing he knows this.
She is afraid for him. Over the phone, she couldn’t say the word she was thinking. But I told her she was wrong. I know he is alive. Koreans don’t take their own lives. At least not from shame. My mother said to me once that suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better. If you bite your lip and understand that this is the only world, you will perhaps persist and endure. What she meant, too, was that we cannot change anything, that if a person wants things like money or comfort or respect he has to change himself to make them possible, because the world will always work to foil you.
I will hear her voice always: San konno san itta. Over the mountains there are mountains.
She would have called John Kwang a fool long before any scandal ever arose. She would never have understood why he needed more than the money he made selling dry-cleaning equipment. He had a good wife and strong boys. What did he want from this country? Didn’t he know he could only get so far with his face so different and broad? He should have had ambition for only his little family. In turn, she’d proudly hold up my father as the best example of our people: how he was able to discard his excellent Korean education and training, which were once his greatest pride, the very markings by which he had known himself, before he was able to set straight his mind and spirit and make a life for his family. This, she reminded me almost nightly, was his true courage and sacrifice.
And when I consider him, I see how my father had to retool his life to the ambitions his meager knowledge of the language and culture would allow, invent again the man he wanted to be. He came to know that the sky was never the limit, that the truer height for him was more like a handful of vegetable stores that would eventually run themselves, making him enough money that he could live in a majestic white house in Westchester and call himself a rich man.
I am his lone American son, blessed with every hope and quarter he could provide. And yet I am bestowed only with the meager effect of his hard-fought riches, that troubling awe and contempt and piety I still hold for his life. This, I am afraid, will endure. If he would forgive me now. For what I have done with my life is the darkest version of what he only dreamed of, to enter a place and tender the native language with body and tongue and have no one turn and point to the door.
I should have seen that Dennis never really wanted any other material. The monographs, the reports. The daily registers. For him it was all trivial prose. John Kwang, I can hear him saying with a pop in his voice, is not so important a man. At least not individually, as a single human possibility. No one is. If a client is interested at all it is because there is activity going on behind the man in question, because the man exercises an influence or maybe even grace on some greater slice of humanity. Or most simply, he is representative, easily drawn and iconic, the idea being if you know him you can know a whole people.
To Dennis, and to the reporters that are here, I could explain forever Kwang’s particular thinking, how the idea of the ggeh occurred as second nature to him. He didn’t know who was an “illegal” and who was not, for he would never come to see that fact as something vital. If anything, the ggeh was his one enduring vanity, a system paternal, how in the beginning people would come right to the house and ask for some money and his blessing. He wasn’t a warlord or a don, he had no real power over any of them save their trust in his wisdom. He was merely giving to them just the start, like other people get an inheritance, a hope chest of what they would work hard for in the rest of their lives.
When I listened to their requests for money, I wondered if I could ever desire as much from this land. My citizenship is an accident of birth, my mother delivering me on this end of a long plane ride from Seoul. In truth, she didn’t want me to be an American. She didn’t want any reasons to stay. By rights I am as American as anyone, as graced and flawed and righteous as any of these people chanting for fire in the heart of his house. And yet I can never stop considering the pitch and drift of their forlorn boats on the sea, the movements that must be endless, promising nothing to their numbers within, headlong voyages scaled in a lyric of search, like the great love of Solomon.
Yet, in the holds of those ships there is never any singing. The people only whisper and breathe low. Not one of them thinks these streets are paved with gold. This remains our own fancy. They know more about the guns and rapes and the riots than of millionaires. They have heard stories of bands of young men who will look for them to beat up or murder. They know they will come here and live eight or nine to a room and earn ten dollars a day, maybe save five. They can figure that math, how long it will take to send for their family, how much longer for a few carts of fruit to push, an old truck of wares, a small shop to sell the dumplings and cakes and sweet drinks of their old land.
* * *
Last night, I come right home after seeing the news with Janice. All the lights in the apartment are out, and Lelia is already in bed. I take off my clothes and sit beside her. I try to whisper to her, but she’s asleep. I put my hand on the rise of her hip. She moans, and I say I am here.
“You’re home,” she says, still half asleep.
“Yes.”
“Henry,” she says, suddenly waking up. “So many. They got so many.”
“Yes,” I whisper.
She turns on the lamp. She sits up, squinting at me. “Do you know them?”
“Only a few,” I say, my head in my hands.
“What’s going to happen now?”
I tell her, “They’ll each have a hearing. Most of them will probably be declined asylum, and there will be appeals, and it will take many months until in the end they’re sent back.”
She looks sick for me. “But you didn’t know this would happen.”
“What does it matter,” I answer. “Something bad was going to happen. I always knew that. All those years should have told me. Dennis has a use for everything. Even throwaways, like a list of immigrants. On the way home, I kept putting my father in their place.”
“No one would be sending your father anywhere,” Lelia says. “He would have slipped away.”
I say, “Maybe I would have found him.”
“If he let you,” she says.
I know Lelia is right. My father was a kind of trickster all his own. He’d keep me guessing with his storefront patois. Any moment I had him square in my sights, he’d surprise me with a dip, a shake, a move from the street that I’d never heard or seen.
I say to Lelia, “Imagine, though, if they told my father he really had to leave. If they put him inside a plane and it took off. Can you see his face? It would be a death for him. Or worse.”
“Nothing’s worse,” she says to me, her voice sad and low. “Nothing. You remember that, Henry. No matter what happens, damnit.”
“Okay.”
“It’s over,” Lelia now says. “You don’t work for Dennis anymore. You can help those people if you want.”