Midnight and the Meaning of Love (68 page)

Secretly we each gave the other copies of our room keys. This was the best way to raise the fewest suspicions in Korea, where everyone was interested in knowing what’s going on, and where people’s reactions showed up clearly on their faces.

After today’s fainting episode with Akemi’s aunt, I was suspecting that it was not only race being considered here in Busan, but our ages. Before collapsing in the hallway, the aunt had uttered
“Yeolyeosut,”
which I now knew meant “sixteen.”

With the urn locked in the safe in my room, I unloaded all our new purchases. Of course I got a Korean-English dictionary and a Korean phrase dictionary also from a huge bookstore named Kyobu Books. I must admit that even though I planned to learn some more Korean words than I already had from my travel book, after listening carefully all around town and in Akemi’s grandmother’s home, I was certain that it didn’t matter if a foreigner saw a Korean-language word printed out in the English alphabet. This language was distinct from Japanese and every other language I had ever heard or paid close attention to. Even if you knew the Korean vocabulary words, you needed to know how to sing each of them, seriously. It was the same as if you had the printed lyrics to some hot-ass song but didn’t know the melody or the rhythm. I flipped open to the
G
page in my new dictionary. It didn’t list the word
gongpay.

In the fabric districts of Busan, I had chosen and purchased the most elegant textiles for Umma and our company, Umma Designs. I thought the different textures and patterned cloths would open up a whole new arena of design for my mother.

On that tour through Seomyeon, I observed that Korea was try’na come up. Youth was rocking Guess Jeans, but their fitted and kicks was all bootleg. I saw an opportunity. My mind started thinking
international trade, international styling
. I got stopped on those streets more than a few times because of my style. One older sneaker store owner who spoke some English called me over and questioned me about my style. As he looked me over from head to toe, he had nothing but dollar signs in his eyes. I took his business card. It was the first in a series of business cards I had copped. Shit, I could show them how to rock it right, where to get it wholesale, and what to avoid. I could become that middleman from Brooklyn to Busan. While they tried to catch up with the New York and hood fashions and get it right, I would be steady stacking my paper. That way, when they got too cocky and figured they needed to cut me out of the moneymaking deals, I’d already be paid, laced and chillin’.

I had picked up a few patches from underground vendors lined up against the subway walls. I was pushing around some ideas of redesigning some already dope jeans. I would lay it out for Umma, and she would make it happen.

I had also selected seven silk scarves for my wife so that she could wrap up her beautiful hair. Now that she was back to wearing her bad-ass diamond and gold bangles and her diamond studs in her ears, I would make sure that everything else was concealed. While we were out walking, Akemi wanted to buy a diamond for her belly button, but I told her no in English,
anyo
in Korean, and
iie
in Japanese. She was carrying our babies. Her belly button belonged to us, and if she wanted to pierce it for my pleasure, she could, after she delivered my sons,
inshallah
.

The sun was beginning to set. I jumped out of my day clothes and into my black Nike sweat suit and kicks. I put my wallet and my valuables in the safe and locked it. I grabbed my wool hat and a white washcloth and hit the beach outside my motel door.

Running in the sand is more work than on stable, flat ground. The
traction requires more effort. It felt good though. The serene scenes of Busan offered a bunch of blessings that Brooklyn did not.

The sky faded from lavender to deep blue. The scent of the ocean was refreshing, the opposite of the smell of the ghetto. In fact, as I ran faster than a jog but slower than a sprint, I said to myself,
The ocean has a scent and a soul.
As the waves rushed into the shore slowly and without force, pulling back very little as it left, I could feel the ocean was alive and breathing. It even had a natural voice that filled the air and bounced and echoed between their greened mountains and silhouettes of mountains. The ocean was peaceful yet powerful. Unlike an emcee, the ocean didn’t need no mic. Unlike a deejay, the ocean didn’t need a sound system. Still, everyone from a great distance could hear its voice, and when they did, it caused them to pause.

The ocean made me
feel
something too. The great and deep moving body of water lay on my left side as I was running by, fasting and feeling thirsty.

Miles away from my starting point, from Haeundae Beach to Kwong An Li, I had reached an incredible Ferris wheel. It swung from the sky to the earth and around again. It made me think of my wife.

My tongue felt like sandpaper now. And my intestines felt dry like jerky. I bought four bottles of water from a beach vendor, along with two bananas. I stuffed my wool hat in my back pocket, dumped water over my head, cleaned my nose and my hands and my feet and praised Allah.

Slowly, I drank the three remaining bottles, my chest still heaving from the run. The sky was black now, jet black, and the unending line of lampposts lit up the gold sand. And the Ferris wheel tossed around green light and the boats set globs of yellow into the distance and over the blackened sea, and hundreds of red lights sparkled and outlined the far-off Haeundae Beach pier.

I followed the red lights home to my wife.

Akemi was seated on the boardwalk under a lamppost on the steps that led to the sand that led to the water. Oddly, she was wearing an all-black Nike sweat suit and black Chanel flip-flops, with her hair wrapped in a black silk scarf. Of course she had drawn a crowd who formed a semicircle around her as she sketched an elderly
Korean woman who held her pose still as she sat on a small wooden stool. I was surprised. I knew Akemi didn’t like poses. She normally liked to see and experience and feel something and then create from the images in her amazing memory. Glancing over shoulders, I saw my wife’s pencil can was stuffed with pencils of every color and a thick stack of Korean won. Less than seventy-two hours from docking on these shores and Akemi was already making money. Random youths in the crowd spoke to her. She answered back softly in what sounded like perfectly spoken, musical Korean. She aroused me.

In my room, I showered, dressed, prayed, and headed out. By then my wife was seated downstairs in the small Bada Ga lobby. As she saw me approaching, she stood and left. Outside the motel door, dressed now in a minidress over pants, with her hair wrapped nicely and her 100,000 yen heels, she looked up at me and smiled. “Time for eat,” she said in English.

We walked outdoors feeling familiar with our seaside surroundings. We mingled into the laidback evening beach crowd both relaxed and excited. I had a bunch of necessary Korean vocabulary words marching around my mind, mostly concerning foods. Even though Akemi is fluent, there were some things I had to know for myself. I was working overtime to separate the new Korean words from the recently learned Japanese words, from the well-known English and native Arabic words.

I knew I had to avoid pork completely and ask questions about noodles and soups that seemed vegetarian being stewed in pork fat or meats. The Koreans called pork
“dwaejigogi,”
which bugged me out to remember and was even crazier to recite. Chicken was
“dakgogi.”
The food I was most likely to eat was fish. They called that
“saengseonyori.”
I had to memorize these words since I hadn’t come up on a Halal food place yet.

Stick to the sea,
I told myself. We ate grilled fish and
“heukmi joomeokbap,”
which was black rice made with dates, walnuts, and chestnuts. We shared a salad and both bit off of the long red hot chili pepper they laid in a dish on each table, which made our already hot blood boil, and our young hearts catch more feelings.

We were smarter today than the day before. We took a train most of the way, and a taxi from the train station to Akemi’s grandmother’s apartment. We were both dressed sharply for Akemi’s homecoming, and there was no sense in making her hike hills in her heels, bringing on a sweat. I left the urn in the safe. Akemi had gestured for me not to bring it. I was not certain why, or what she had in mind specifically, but I cooperated.

I was carrying a nicely threaded cloth shopping bag marked
“Shinsegae.”
In it were gifts from Umma and me as well as gifts Akemi had wrapped for her family. It was from both of our cultures to present gifts this way when visiting new homes or friends and family.

There were many families outdoors sitting, talking, children playing in front of the building. It was night, but the place was well lit. As we eased out of the taxi, everyone noticed. In the lobby, teens were speaking joyfully. As we walked through the doors, they stopped talking. This was nothing, I thought. I had entered buildings in East New York and Harlem and Bed-Stuy and Castle Hill and Soundview and Queensbridge, where people were armed with way more than curiosity. As we got off on the eighth floor, there were already two ladies standing in the hallway. Akemi nodded to the two of them and they responded the same way. We rang the bell. I looked behind me; the peephole on the opposite door was blackened. I was sure that Grandpa had his eye glued there, observing.

When Akemi’s grandmother’s apartment door opened, there were several people seated on the floor. A quick count. Three older men, in around their thirties or forties, another male around maybe
twenty, two male teens, two older women in their early thirties, one teen female, and one girl toddler. The aunt was standing, holding the door and welcoming us in. We exchanged greetings in their language as we removed our shoes. Their low-to-the-floor table, much like the Sudanese table, was set with a feast. Each kind of food was set in its own dish. There were twenty-four separate dishes filled with an array of foods including steaming soups and fruits and rice with chestnuts and hot, spicy cabbage, which I had learned that they call kimchee, and sliced radishes, cucumbers, and carrots, boiled eggs, and grilled beef. There was a teapot, teacups, and bottled drinks, as well as a serving dish piled high with fried chicken. There were two big fresh green watermelons. Each place setting had a silver steel pair of chopsticks and a long-handled steel spoon. They all exchanged greetings, Akemi bowing often, except to the two teen boys, who must’ve been younger and who, when introduced, bowed to her. We sat down on the floor and joined them. Akemi was seated beside me and I was seated beside our shopping bag filled with gifts.

As my eyes moved around the room, sizing up the situation but not aggressively, I wondered who all these people were and I was certain that none of them was Akemi’s Korean grandmother. There was no real elderly woman present. More important, however, were the men in the room, who were therefore in the presence of my wife. The silence was only punctured by the ramblings of the two-year-old girl, yet everyone’s eyes were filled with both curiosity and emotion.

Akemi’s aunt, who was still standing, began speaking in Korean to everyone gathered and seated there. She began slowly, yet her voice was full and very expressive. As it rose and fell, she began to use her hands. Then her eyes and her hands and her mouth were all talking at the same time. Her talk created a strange feeling in me. I could not understand or translate even one of her words, yet my soul was stirring. It was only eighty or so seconds before tears began to well up in the aunt’s eyes. I had been so focused on her that only then did I realize that even the men’s eyes were coated with moisture. Then the females were all spilling tears, while the males were able to hold their tears back. My wife was weeping and intensely gazing toward her aunt, who I was certain reminded her too much of her mother. Looking more closely at my wife’s eyes, I believed that she somehow was seeing two women standing there, her aunt and her mother.

Meanwhile, the two-year-old was rocking side to side humming lightly, a kind of background singer-musician to the aunt’s moving storytelling. One of the men stood and went to the aunt’s side, laying his hands on her shoulders and caressing them even as she continued to speak. Then I knew. He was her husband. He wore a crisp, clean, pressed white business shirt, no tie, and quality blue slacks with a rough leather belt and dress socks. His presence must’ve soothed her. As the aunt’s voice wound down, he began speaking.

His voice was deep and expressive. The manner in which the Korean men maneuvered the musical melodies of their language was different than their women’s yet still captured my ear. His tones revealed a change in the topic, I thought. He began walking his wife to her sitting place at the table. Akemi, her hair covered in a yellow silk scarf, began wiping away her tears with her pretty fingers and newly polished nails. Her gold bangles jingled some. She was the only woman wearing jewelry.

When the husband sat, he said some more words to all and then was the first to pick up his chopsticks and pull from one of the food dishes. Once he began, everyone began eating. Each woman, including my wife, began skillfully using the chopsticks to choose and pick up bits of food from the serving dishes and place them into a dish for a male. The aunt did for her husband; another woman did for the man seated next to her. Akemi began preparing my dish as well. Yet one older man and the twenty-year-old didn’t have women. They and the two male teens served themselves. The two-year-young girl ran and tumbled and then pushed herself between the aunt and her husband. I assumed then that she was their daughter.

It was after the food was finished that the seals on the green bottles were opened. The liquid being poured into the glasses was clear, but I believed that it was alcohol. What had been soft talking between sets of people gathered became a much louder group conversation. During the drinks, we handed our gifts to Akemi’s aunt. The two-year-old and two of the teen boys were moving around the apartment doing their own things now, while the adults watched. The aunt unwrapped the gifts as though the paper and even the tape that it was wrapped with were precious. She folded the gift paper nicely into an odd shape and placed it aside before removing the box top and discovering a set of hair combs that Akemi had gifted her. She
lifted them from the cotton they lay on, and Akemi began to speak to her aunt softly. The aunt’s tears began to form once again. Then I had doubts about the gift that I had handed her, but it was already lying there on the table for opening. As she opened the second gift, she removed the box top and lifted one of the three books that I had given. She raised one up and looked at it carefully, examining the front cover and then the back. When she opened the inside flap and saw the photo of the author, Shiori Nakamura, her sister who was known to her as Joo Eun Lee, she cried out in a painful sound. I had thought she would be pleased to have something of her sister’s memory that perhaps she had not discovered or possessed here in Korea, but I was surely wrong. Her husband removed the book from her hands, which held on tightly. He peered into it. Then one of the other men removed it from his hands and he flipped to the photo also. He laid the book down on the table, dropped his head for some seconds, then stood up. The husband stood up and the aunt continued to weep.