Yoon Choi
The Art of Losing
from New England Review
Watch the boy, she had said.
Or had she? Some things he knew for sure. His name was Han Mo-Sae. His wife was Han Young-Ja. They had been married forty years, possibly fifty. The wife would know. They had two children: Timothy and Christina. They would always be his children but they were no longer kids. He had to keep remembering that.
Tunes. He was good with tunes. He could retrieve from memory music he hadn’t heard in decades. “The Mountain Rabbit,” “Ich Liebe Dich,” Aretha Franklin’s “Operation Heartbreak,” which he had first heard in his twenties on the Armed Forces Network in Korea. He had a good singing voice. He had been Tenor 1 in the church choir; years before that, he had led off the morning exercise song in the schoolyard. These performances had given him an appetite for praise and notice, although no one, seeing the old man he had become, would know it.
His wife had no particular distinction—had had none, even in youth. How could she? Her childhood task had been survival. She was the oldest of three sisters who were orphaned as they fled south during the Korean War. In Busan, she had worked on the rubber processing line, removing trapped air from rolled products. She told him about it years later, in another country, sitting on a weedy patch of campus lawn. Once, she had snapped a dandelion stem, allowing the milk to run. Did he know that the sap of the dandelion was a form of natural rubber? Latex? It was one of the few things he learned from her and he never forgot it. It altered in a small and precise way his notice of trivial things: the soles of his shoes, the elastic in his waistband.
They had met in Philadelphia—when was this, the 1960s?—through the area’s one Korean church. He was working toward a master’s in mechanical engineering; she tailored and mended for a dry cleaner. At church, he was a star. His fine singing voice, the impressive school he attended. But at the university, he was struck dumb. Every morning, he would tear out a page from his English dictionary, memorize it, and eat it. Still, the language would not take. And things grew worse. He began to dread not only the classroom, but also the grocery store, the post office, the blank pages of his dissertation.
One night, he had gone to Young-Ja’s rented room. As he removed his shoes, he noticed a hole in the toe of his sock, which he made no attempt to hide. He was too good for her—that much was assumed. She made no argument for herself. She had not made herself up or even changed after work. Her hair was short, like a man’s. Her hands were rough. Her dark sweater showed snips of thread and lint from altering other people’s clothes. In a glance, he could see the perimeters of her life: the toothbrush in a cup that she brought to the communal bathroom, the single hot plate, the twin mattress on the floor.
Yet she brought to the low table a fermented bean curd stew still bubbling in its clay pot. How had she come up with such a thing in Philadelphia? That smell. It was the bean paste. Soybeans, charcoal, and honey placed in an earthenware vessel, buried deep in the frozen ground and over the seasons grown elemental. It stank of home.
They helped themselves from the same pot, bringing the silken onion or softly crumbling potato onto their plates of rice. They dipped again and again into the pot with their spoons. And then, stinking softly of garlic, he took hold of her wrist, drawing her down as she rose to clear the table. She showed no surprise.
Afterward, she asked for his sock, to mend it. The meek look of her bent head, her fluency with the needle, his deflated sock in her hand, had caused a movement in his pride that he didn’t know then—or perhaps ever—to call love. Still, he began to spend nights, which he had previously devoted to his studies, at Young-Ja’s place. And when he received news through an aerogram that his mother had died, when she was no longer around to be disappointed that her only, late-born son would not live up to his educator father, his thoughts turned to marriage.
Yes. That was how it had transpired.
Now, in later life, he began to see her with new fascination. That wife of his. She was always busy—cooking, cleaning, nagging, blindly pulling out of parking spaces without a rearview glance. Even now, she was bustling about on some mission that didn’t involve him. She emerged from the bathroom, having drawn on eyebrows and applied rouge. He noticed a new fullness to her hairdo that revealed itself, as she came into the natural light, as a hairpiece. He followed her into the kitchen, where she acquired keys, phone, and bag. It came to him, what she was doing. She was leaving.
This made him anxious. He realized that with her gone, he would be obligated to himself. To remember to eat. To remember that he had eaten. To turn things off after he had turned them on. To zip his fly. To occupy the present moment. Suddenly, he hated her. He watched her jam her feet into her shoes, then bend to recover the collapsed backs. He hated her right down to the wayfaring look of those shoes.
At the threshold, she turned back for a moment. A change came over her expression, and he wondered if she had intuited his anxiety. But no. Whatever she saw was behind him, further down the hall, and caused what was honest about her face to come into bloom. Be good! she cried to that vision. Then opened the door and walked through it.
Vanishment.
What to do next. He placed his hands in his pockets and took them out again. He straightened a neat stack of mail on the entryway table without a glancing interest at their contents. Looking down the hall, he noticed the boy. Of course, the boy. He took a closer look.
The child was small, definitely under five. There was something about him that didn’t seem perfectly Korean: some touch of dusk to his complexion and gold to his curls. The shirt he wore was yellow and read HAPPY. But the boy himself looked neither happy nor unhappy. He looked how he looked. Small. Temporary. Everything about him would change in another five years. In five minutes.
“Well,” said Mo-Sae, heartily.
Ignoring this, the boy turned toward the kitchen. Mo-Sae followed. “What you looking for?” he asked in English.
The boy braced to open the fridge and surveyed the contents. He didn’t seem interested in the child-size packs of yogurt or bendy sticks of cheese or even the various Korean side dishes in little containers. Instead, he pointed to a can of Coca-Cola on an upper shelf.
“This?” Mo-Sae asked, even as he took it down.
“Open, please.”
The can was so simple, so presumptuous, as was the child’s belief that an adult could open it. Mo-Sae held the cold, weighted shape in his hand, considering it. He felt his judgment was being tested. Was it wrong to give soda to the child? What would Young-Ja say? But at the thought of his wife and her little criticisms, he grew bullish. After all, he had had his first bracing metallic taste of cola as a boy. It reminded him of the K-16 Air Base in Seoul. The grinning GIs. As a boy, Mo-Sae had served as a kind of mascot for them. They would strap a helmet on his head, ask for a song, teach him to swear. How easily the memories came to him: Hershey’s Tropical Bars. “Good-Bye Maria, I’m Off to Korea.” He remembered how one soldier, a wondrously black man, could pop the cap off a cola bottle using only his strong white teeth. He wished he too had some entertaining way to open the can for the boy, to bring him to delight.
“Watch this,” he said, although he had no plan. He tried a twisting motion on the tab. Nothing. Perhaps, then, a countering motion. The tab began to loosen, then broke off. This filled him with a frustrated gall that automatically made him think of his wife. “Yeobo?” he shouted. “Yeobo!”