One Thousand Chestnut Trees

DEDICATION

FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER, AND THE KOH FAMILY.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

1 A Memory

2 Cardboard Boxes

3 Five Martinis

4 History

5 Et in Arcadia Ego

6 Father Goes Away

7 Mansei

8 School Days

9 A Radio Broadcast

10 Namsan Park

11 Fire on the Cliff

12 Ninety Thousand Troops

13 In Hiding

14 Airbase

15 Farewell

16 Kimpo Revisited

17 Going South

18 Going North

19 Filial Piety

20 Yangyang

21 One Thousand Chestnut Trees

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE A Memory

It was winter in Vermont. Beyond my window, the pines would have bristled sparsely against the hushed white snow. The grey, swelling sky would have been as vast and lonely as a Northern sea. But I can’t recall Hong-do’s arrival. His presence was ghostly then, so tentative that he scarcely left an imprint. Yet now, years later, when I remember that emptiness, Hong-do’s face follows.

My uncle from Seoul came to stay with us when I was just fourteen, my first year of boarding school. His jet eyes, wide-boned pallor, and shock-hair gave him an outward boldness, but he was actually quite shy. Although I’d met my mother’s Korean friends, Hong-do was different, more foreign somehow; pungent and unfiltered.

Even gestures required translating; Hong-do’s sneeze was a violent ‘YA-shee’ rather than a tame, ‘Ker-CHOO’. And when he was in a hurry, he walked in Korean too, lightly trotting, arms stationary and body canted forward. He rather stuck out in our redneck town.

My mother must have looked equally oriental, but I noticed less – she was a mother, already a separate species. Besides, they didn’t look alike. My uncle’s face was paler, and round like a moon. There was something remote and masked about him, as if he were stranded in his skin.

Despite our kinship, I felt little for my new relation then. Though he was young enough to be a brother (I hadn’t any siblings), no reassuring sympathy for him welled up, and to my alarm, no rescuing tug of filial loyalty helped me to pretend otherwise. Hong-do was a spaceling to me. The rapid, guttural language of clucking, hacking noises that he and my mother spoke sounded ugly and comical to my teenage ears, separating us like barbed wire.

As a child, I had refused to learn Korean. I’d even blocked out most of my mother’s worn stories of Seoul, which were as unreal as fairy tales, but with tragic endings. The gilded family sagas ended in divided lands, ruined gold mines, betrayals and torture at the hands of Japanese invaders, even before the beginning of the catastrophic Korean War.

Hong-do had been born after my mother’s departure for America, so she was meeting him for the first time too. My mother had returned home just once in thirty years, so the narrative store could not be replenished. By default, the whole of Korea had shrunk to meaning little to me but my mother’s iron discipline, and eating dried squid after school instead of luscious Marshmallow Fluff.

Until now, I had only known my uncle from photographs in our album. In an old sepia-tinted family portrait, Hong-do was a small, doll-like boy in a sailor suit, shyly holding my grandmother’s hand. (She died before we could meet.) The family looked grave and distinguished; tall men in wire-rimmed spectacles, stiff collars and boutonnières, and women, fragile, but assured, wrapped in stiff silk han-boks, seated in a shadowy, peony-filled garden. My mother’s chubby-faced younger sister, Myung-hi, hair severely bobbed, stood protectively next to Hong-do.

I daydreamed secretly about them, especially about my great-uncle, Yong-lae, the wastrel poet, so vain that he would only be seen in public astride a white horse – which sometimes returned empty-saddled, its master having passed out in a ditch. In a later black-and-white image, dog-eared from handling, Hong-do was grown up, dressed in military uniform, leaning against a wooden footbridge before a pagoda, smiling confidently at the camera – roguishly handsome. I had looked forward to meeting him.

But this full-colour, three dimensional stranger seemed jarringly unrelated to those glamorous photographs. For a start, he was here in our kitchen rather than safely there. He reminded me a bit of a prisoner then, hiding out in our isolated house in his geeky ironed denims, gazing out of the window as if contemplating an escape. But he had nowhere to go.

During his visit, my mother became more enlivened and fluent than I had ever seen before. They would stay up late together drinking ginseng tea and talking excitedly. Sometimes they spoke with a raw, almost animal pain that frightened me. Gradually, the sound became less exclusive, and flowed generously, like water released from a dam. This awesome current bypassed me and my Boston-Irish father (who also spoke no Korean), but neither of us remarked upon it. I was content to pretend that they were discussing dull matters like jobs in Boston, where Hong-do was to attend university in the autumn. Korea was so much static to be tuned out of my consciousness.

During those winter evenings, my father and I tactfully watched ice hockey on television, but neither of us could really concentrate. Although we were silent, I was acutely aware of Hong-do’s presence. I would sneak glances at him from the sofa as if he were a surprise package that had been delivered which I hoped someone else would open. While I had decided he was to be a marginal figure in my life, I kept a self-interested eye on him anyway during those first cold nights. I sensed, with some dread, that he contained secrets I might someday need to know.

One morning after Hong-do had just arrived, we drove out through the snowbanked woods for an educational breakfast at the Timberline Restaurant on Route 9, renowned for its sixteen varieties of pancakes, and its tourist-pulling ‘Famous 100-Mile View’ over Massachusetts.

Lavender-haired waitresses in white uniforms and orthopaedic shoes delivered the orgiastic fare with medical briskness; steaming cranberry and banana-dot pancakes, french toast piled with blueberries, waffles shining with melted butter and hot maple syrup, spice-scented sausage-patties, link-sausages, mouthwatering bacon, Canadian bacon, steak-and-eggs, eggs-any-style, oatmeal, homefries, toast and English muffins. MaryLou – as her name-tag announced – refilled your coffee cup instantly, and offered free second and third helpings like someone arriving to plough your driveway.

That sunny morning, the dining room was crowded with skiers, bunched around the colonial wagon-wheel tables in pneumatic technicolour overalls. They roared with pre-sport gusto, clanking their cutlery uninhibitedly, as if their appetites might extend to the creamy blue mountains which beckoned beyond the plate glass windows like a majestic frozen dessert.

At first my uncle looked overwhelmed, but soon glanced about delightedly, taking tiny, experimental sips from the coffee cup he held ceremoniously in both palms. People stared baldly at us, jaws momentarily disengaged. Orientals were rarely seen then in the Vermont hills. We ignored their dismay – led by my mother’s well-practised example – but I felt scalding embarrassment. Although we’d begun by speaking in English, my mother and Hong-do soon broke into voluble Korean as if my father and I were not there.

At last our breakfast arrived. Still feeling unwell after his long journey, my uncle faced a modest fried egg and toast. He hesitated a moment, but with a final scowl of concentration seized the sides of the egg white with his fingers, and crammed the whole object in his mouth in one piece. Head bowed and cheeks bulging, he chewed the egg penitently, as if ridding his plate of an obstacle. My father and I froze in surprise. Never having seen an egg dispatched in this way, I began to laugh, but my mother’s eyes stopped me like a pair of bullets.

The next week my mother urged Hong-do to look for a job in Starksboro – the nearest big town – in order to improve his English and relieve cabin fever. As his classes were not to begin for several months, he aquiesced, but found nothing. I suspect he was secretly relieved.

In the mornings after a bit of coaching, my mother and I would drop him off in the icy parking lot off Main Street, the Starkboro Reformer help-wanted ads folded neatly inside his glove. Yet by noon Hong-do would be waiting for us dejectedly at the counter of Dunkin’ Donuts, attracting hostile stares from beery lumberjacks grimly chewing their jelly doughnuts, puddles forming on the pink linoleum beneath their snowmobile boots. After a week, his only offer had been a part-time window-washing shift in the sub-zero February winds. Dad said they must have thought he was an Eskimo.

Struggle was foreign to my uncle. He was the pampered youngest son of an old, noble family, accustomed to a big house in town with servants, and estates in the country. My mother even claimed that Hong-do was renowned in Seoul as a ‘happy-go-lucky playboy’ inconceivable though it was to me, as I examined him critically through a gap in the car’s head-rest. Here, he was assumed to be a refugee.

I saw Hong-do again at Easter. At home, snow still scabbed the fields, but the ground had thawed, and squelched underfoot. Wild gusts of fresh, sweet wind roared through the bare tree-tops. Unpacking my duffel bag, I resolved to be a bit kinder to my uncle – providing it was not too painful.

But I had forgotten little things about him – like the way he chewed spearmint gum with smacking gusto, and sang corny songs in the car. And his sense of humour! I rarely saw him laughing, but when he did, it was a razor-edged alto giggle. Then, at moments of unanimous family mirth he would be isolated in a deaf silence. He thought most American food was disgusting, and I never saw him reading a newspaper or book in English.

My uncle was like unconvertible currency; he refused to be tendered or melted down. There was no Western equivalent of his value. Sometimes I suspected he was simply saving himself so that he would not have to change again when he returned home.

Yet in my absence there were surprising developments. One afternoon as I studied for exams, I looked out at the faithful view of sloping, scrubby fields, towering pines, and immense sky, and noticed something peculiar about the row of younger trees opposite. Their lower branches had been brutally pruned to resemble topiary, but their trunks looked disastrously bald, like shorn poodle shanks. When I protested to my mother she smiled, and insisted that they now looked more like Korean bonsai; an observation gratingly inaccurate, to my affronted sensibilities.

Hong-do soon appeared back from Starksboro with a red and white striped parcel from Sam’s Army-Navy Store, and went off to his room. As I was reading, something caught my eye out of the window; there was my uncle, zipped into a new track suit, vigorously touching his toes in the fresh air. I smiled patronisingly at his strict precision, exercising in the waist-high weeds as if in an indoor gym.

Then he stopped, approached a pine-bonsai, and playfully shook its slender trunk. After an interval of staring, bull-like, at the tree, he suddenly charged at it, yelling murderously and began raining deft side-kicks and karate chops upon the little tree.

I rose from my chair. Had he gone mad? I heard my father’s chair scraping in his studio, and ran off to confer with him. He had left his easel, and stood at the window watching Hong-do. Without speaking, we observed him warily circling the tree like a shadow-boxer, delivering the odd kick-chop. Dad finally rapped on the window-pane, and my uncle twisted round, confused and red-faced with exertion and waved at us enthusiastically. We laughed and waved back, marvelling. From then on, my uncle performed his t’aekwondo exercises on the lawn without further interruptions.

After this, the atmosphere was lighter between us. T’aekwondo tree-attacks seemed to relax Hong-do, he smiled more readily, and began to look quite as handsome as his photographs. This unexpected glimpse of him lent a wider circumference to my mean perception of his character.

Still, an unnavigable distance separated us. I regarded him more as an exotic zoo tiger than as my only living uncle. It was safe to observe him through bars, to admire him wryly from the window, but I couldn’t begin to relinquish those barriers. The schoolyard bullies who had kicked me behind the apple trees with their pointy-toed cowboy boots might come running back through the years to punish me again for having oriental blood.

Hong-do’s foreignness might be contagious; I could be ostracised not only for harbouring an alien, but for becoming more of one myself. With my layers of sportswear and Celtic freckles I could pass for Caucasian, but my uncle’s incriminating features might give me away. It would be wiser to stay clear of him until my immunity was established. My secret Korean half was exiled to a remote inner gulag that even I was unable to find.

In the evenings, reading after supper, I sometimes caught Hong-do staring unhappily out of the window into the dark woods beyond his own cantilevered reflection. Only then did I regret not being a confidante. With the dumb instinct of a golden retriever, I itched to go out into the darkness and bring him back inside again, but just on the point of speaking to him, decided I was too small and unqualified for such a rescue. It was beyond me.

It was easier to pretend that he was not quite human. I don’t remember asking him much about our relations in Seoul, or why he had come to the West when life seemed to be so pleasing there. What was he thinking of when he was so quiet at the dinner table? What did he miss about Korea? Would he have liked to learn to ski? I allowed his elementary English to deter me from asking.

But my uncle, for his part, was maddeningly opaque. His eyes were so black that I couldn’t see his pupils. It was me that I saw squinting back irritably from those distant planets. His silences alone were new desert continents, exposing me as a mere water-dependent speck.

Yet Hong-do could be alarmingly vocal. Sometimes he would pluck away at Beatles chords on my old, badly-tuned guitar, yodelling ‘Yesterday’ plaintively from his room. To my distress, he and my mother also sang rapturous Korean songs together in the study, in a twangy, throbbing oriental vibrato which sounded surreal, and faintly sinister in the puritan Vermont woods. I was glad we had no neighbours.

Why did they wail like that?

‘Because we express han,’ said Hong-do good-naturedly.

And what on earth was han?

There was a long pause.

‘Han is sorrow and yearning and resentment; it lasts centuries, and never goes away. It is at the core of us,’ said my mother.

But what were the words?

Another pause.

‘Han is so deep, that it comes before language.’

I rolled my eyes at my father, hoping to enlist his support, but he looked away. Then I went to my room, and drowned out the han with the more familiar ululations of Neil Young.

I remember one final episode that Easter holiday. As I was studying one afternoon at my usual place by the window, Hong-do slipped into the kitchen to toast some seaweed. After offering me a warm, sulphurous black square – which I ate, grudgingly – he went outdoors to join my mother in the garden.

Then, I heard a yell, and saw Hong-do push my mother aside, his eyes locked to the ground. Running out to see what was wrong, I found Hong-do down on all fours, stabbing spasmodically at the earth with a trowel. Now quite inured to his unpredictable ways, I asked casually what he was doing.

‘A grass snake,’ said my mother.

‘But they’re harmless,’ I said, popping my eyes.

‘Maybe, but to him, serpents are a symbol of evil, and should be destroyed.’

My uncle had lost sight of the snake, and was shouting at my mother in Korean.

‘What’s he saying now?’ I piped.

‘He can’t believe that we allow snakes to pollute our land,’ she said neutrally, as if unsure of where she herself stood on the matter. Still muttering, Hong-do was crouched in a combat stance in the dead asparagus patch, gingerly parting weeds with his trowel. I wished him luck insincerely, and went back indoors. Minutes later, my parents left on an errand.

Hong-do came indoors, and began rummaging angrily through drawers and cupboards. Next, he changed into his new Wrangler jeans, my father’s too-big rubber boots and wood-chopping gloves. He’d even produced a fireman-style slicker from somewhere, cuffs rolled neatly. Then, he left without a word, carrying a long, fat stick he’d found beneath the porch.

‘Unbelievable,’ I muttered, looking around reflexively to see if anyone could confirm what I was seeing. Being alone, I shook my head and returned to the reassuring mental hygiene of my algebra book. But now and then I looked up at the field expectantly.

My mother and father returned from town with the groceries, and asked after Hong-do, smiling when they heard about his hunting preparations. We watched a muted sunset, and took tea and Chinese steam buns in the sitting room, half-listening to the news on the radio. I felt too ruffled by my uncle’s eccentric behaviour to concentrate.

Just then the front door opened, and Hong-do stamped in, displaying a small green snake by its tail as if it were a ten-foot swordfish. Dutifully, my parents admired his catch while I trained a skeptical eye on the pitiful reptile. Then, however, I caught a glimpse of my uncle’s expression, which shamed me. The pride brimming in his eyes was remarkable and disconcerting. His pride was so intense that I almost found myself wishing I could see the snake as he saw it. I stared at it hard, hoping for something magic to happen; but nothing did. My doubt remained and divided us.

Hong-do soon went back outdoors to dispose of his quarry. I watched from the window as he scaled the stone wall and stood there, surveying the darkening woods below. He whipped the snake around his head like a lasso, and cast it high into the air with a defiant shout.

For many years I carried that image with me; Hong-do, snake-slayer of Vermont, arm raised against the sky like a warrior throwing his sword into the spokes of the universe, hoping to arrest its wheels upon his victory. At least, that was what I wanted to see.

Now I recall it differently. The sun had set, and my uncle was mostly in shadow. After he’d flung away the snake he looked so small, and vulnerable, and alone out on the ledge that I could hardly bear to look at him.

Hong-do spent the following few years at university in Boston, one of ten thousand anonymous freshmen. News of Hong-do often came to me months after events had passed, subtly filtered by my mother’s own approval or disappointment, and slightly distorted by translation into English. Trying to follow uncle’s progress in Boston was like monitoring conditions on Jupiter through an unreliable satellite link. He was an abstract fuzz, composed of long shadows and receding footprints. Only his most dramatic actions survived the relay.

To my uncle’s surprise, he was not quite the star he had been in Seoul, though he had plenty of friends. My mother, able to make oracular judgements from several hundred miles away, pronounced him bright, but lackadaisical. He was lackadaisical, perhaps, but hardly lazy. Hong-do took a night job as a taxi driver, though he barely knew the streets beyond Copley Square. He was almost immediately robbed and beaten at gunpoint by two thugs on a midnight fare to Roxbury.

Next, he took on odd shifts as a waiter in Chinatown. He felt safer there. Although he studied business administration by day, on his free nights he gambled away his earnings and made extravagant bar-room loans to acquaintances much larger than himself.

My uncle then had a pretty Irish girlfriend called Mary. He was crazy for her.

‘The Irish and the Koreans are so alike; so sentimental,’ he told my mother over the phone. One day, Mary told him he was a worthless male chauvinist pig, and left him forever. Then he met a rich Korean girl, and drove all the way to California in his cab to escape her. Six months later they were married.

Hong-do set up a small shipping business in New York, and moved to a model home in Fort Lee, New Jersey, with his wife and two babies. Reportedly he now wore a gold Rolex watch, and drank impressive amounts of whisky with his golf cronies – all Korean. During my uncle’s Fort Lee tenure, we saw very little of him. He didn’t much care for the Vermont wilds, but preferred neon night-life and the siren call of near-fatal business schemes. Yet unexpectedly, when I moved to New York myself after university, I began to see Hong-do quite regularly.

We would always meet in a Korean restaurant off Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. Young Bin Kwan was his favourite. He was often outrageously late, but I didn’t mind. The mean-faced maître d’ would bring me a dish of exquisite grilled dumplings and boricha (barley tea), and, like a character from a spy thriller, I would bask there in the suspect glamour of floor-to-ceiling fish-tanks and Las Vegas chandeliers. Anticipation of the ritual feast ahead, and the fascinating denouements of my uncle’s family tales put me in a buoyant mood.

When Hong-do finally arrived, he transformed into the playboy, clapping imperiously for more Korean beer and kimchi and barking commands at the twirling, traditionally-robed waitresses with breathtaking, but good-natured arrogance. They served him adoringly, fleetly replacing empty celadon dishes with fresh bulgoki, and bearing smoking iron cauldrons of demonically spicy mae-un-tang. My uncle grinned, slurped and chewed with the confident abandon of the oriental business magnate.

Once, as I watched him stuff a rolled lettuce parcel into his mouth in one bite, distending his cheeks like a chipmunk’s, I suddenly recalled the fried egg incident at the Timberline all those years ago, and understood it.

‘It’s the custom,’ he explained, motioning for me to do the same, ‘it is better manners; it doesn’t fall apart.’ When I’d packed the bulgoki into my straining jaws we both laughed achingly, my eyes swam with tears, and the juices exploded in my mouth and ran down my chin.