“That’s a Bit …” by Clara Chow19 min read

The man at the memorial hall had a kind smile.

He swiveled in his chair behind the front desk as she came in, and looked at her over his reading glasses. She greeted him in Korean. It was hot outside, but she lacked the vocabulary to even comment on this. Only that her entire body gravitated towards the large standing air-conditioning unit in a corner of the room. She took off her hiking hat. Still smiling, he took in her shaved head. 

He said something back in Korean. She sheepishly bowed and said nothing in response.

“Where you from?” he asked.

“Singapore,” she said. 

He reminded her of a teacher she once had – a woman who taught chemistry and whistled every time she pronounced ‘S’ – except with impossibly smooth, almost-translucent skin. He got up from his chair and approached her. Up close, she could see the faint laugh lines radiating from his eyes. The way he wore his mask without quite covering his nose.

“How did you find out about this place?” His tone was genuinely curious. She didn’t imagine that he saw many visitors at four-thirty on a weekday afternoon, let alone foreigners.

“Internet,” she said.

“Ah,” he said. “I give you tour.”

They stood for a while, awkwardly, angling themselves at forty-five degrees so that they acknowledged each other, while also facing the dining room off to the right of reception. The brick house was well-constructed. Sturdy. Walls so thick that it was cool inside, despite the heatwave raging throughout central and western Busan. She didn’t want the tour. Was already starting to regret initiating the interaction (had it been her?). But it was too late.

“This house,” he said. “More than one hundred years old. The Japanese built it. For their governor during Chōsen colonial times.”

She spun around in the space. The dining room was not exactly big, but not small either. In the centre was a table that seated six. Chintz-stuffed straight-backed chairs in a mock-Tudor style. Western-style lattice windows and a fireplace. It felt like something out of a European fairy tale. 

“All the material imported from Japan to build this,” he said. “Because back then, Korea quality very low.” He pressed with both hands down, down. Suppressing the unseen.

“Is this table original?” she wanted to know.

“No,” he said. “No. Replica.”

She nodded.

“The Japanese. Very suspicious,” he added. “That’s why, all around, stone pebbles. So that when people come, they walk. Crunch, crunch.” 

He mimed his English words again with two hands: slowly advancing in the air, the footsteps of invisible but threatening intruders.

She nodded again.

Facts were now falling faster out of his mouth. The house built by the Japanese, from which the Eastern colonial masters had ruled the port city, was later used as the residence of the South Korean president during the Korean War, from which he attended to affairs of the provisional capital.

“This house. Very old,” he continued. “Many ghosts.”

They spun around. A doorway just off to the side led to a smaller room. Library, read the engraved maroon sign on the lintel. She startled when she saw the figure ensconced within. 

“President Rhee Syngman,” said the man, bowing formally. As though presenting her to an emperor. 

The president sat behind the desk. A wax effigy, slowly melting – surely – in the sunlight slanting in from the west. 

Some ghosts, she thought, are more solid than others.

“President Rhee,” her guide repeated proudly. “So handsome.”

He waved at an oil portrait of the president, hanging opposite the mannequin of the president. 

“Oh, so handsome!” he said. “So, so handsome.” 

She saw no other way out than to pump her chin slightly up and down; to agree. Yes, so handsome. Jane Austen once wrote of a heroine that she did not think a pompous dining companion deserved the compliment of being rationally disagreed with, or something along those lines. This was the opposite. It felt she had no leg to stand on in the face of her guide’s nice, gentle adoration. Even though her own feelings about the late politician were mixed. Mixed in a way that was confused and biased, from half-remembered badly-translated wall texts in other museums about the price he had paid for power or the company he kept. On his American allies and their parts they played in suppressing his countrymen in other places; a smaller island. In her past life, she had been a good enough historian to know that there were many sides to a story, and the story morphed depending on who was telling it, and changed again with each telling. Once, while wolfing down cai png in the college dining hall, she had overheard one of her political science-type colleagues saying: Of course, as Singaporeans, we should maintain a position of principled neutrality. The phrase principled neutrality had made her giggle and choke a little. Had stuck in her mind ever since, along with the feeling of rice lodged in one’s wind pipe like an unpalatable truth. Delectable in its impossibility.

But, then again, she wasn’t here to pass comments on male attractiveness, nor even to examine the figure positioned stiffly in his chair so that he seemed to be smiling, amused, up at the ceiling. Like a sex doll, she couldn’t help thinking. Then felt disrespectful and possibly lynched for even thinking.

To distract herself, she leaned over the waist-high plexiglass barrier that barred entry into the library, and concerned herself with snapping photos of the things on Rhee’s desk. An old, dusty typewriter – too modern to be period-appropriate, much less genuine. A clutch of fountain pens on a tray, vintage celluloid bodies slowly disintegrating as the years go by. A bakelite rotary phone. An adding machine. Some calligraphy brushes, hairs splayed beyond hope.

They moved deeper into the house.

“Many doors in the room,” said the man. “To confuse people who break in. The enemy.” 

For a moment, she felt that maybe he was having her on; making things up so she would feel like she was in some feudal castle where the architecture was deliberately maze-like to confound ninja assassins. But the house, or at least the first floor, was indeed full of entrances and exits; each room possessing two doors, from which one could easily escape without being cornered. It was a strange feeling, to be in a dwelling that seemed somehow both bigger and smaller than it looked from the outside. In fact, looking at it from the outside, squinting in the brilliant sunshine, it had been impossible to tell just how big it was. The Provisional Capital Memorial Hall, as it has been renamed, stood dwarfed by high-rises in the Seogu area. Like a person hunching and shrinking behind manicured pine trees – unwilling to be put on display, yet unable to hide its strikingness.

They inched along, their socked feet in rubber slide slippers echoing on the polished wooden floors. There had been row upon row of these slippers at the door, and she had understood immediately from being long enough in Korea that you had to exchange your footwear for a pair in order to enter. The stairs and the floor, he kept on talking, were purposely constructed to creak. So you would always know where anyone else is in the house. Making it impossible for anyone to sneak up on you.

The bedroom: decorated by mother-of-pearl furniture now, with two hanbok that had belonged to the first South-Korean presidential couple standing at attention on dummies in a corner. 

“Once Japanese style, now convert to Korean style,” he explained.

She went on nodding, her head on a string. She thought she understood on some level this sort of flip-flopping. The way things kept changing in a port city – her own included – flipping from one identity to the next. The way the people in power changed depending on which direction fortune’s wind blew. How you were the same one day, and then completely different the next. And how that required years, decades of forcible re-education to feel normal again.

“Are you okay?”

The man was studying her closely. 

Yes, I am, she wanted to say. 大丈夫です。 

She wanted to say it in Korean, to reassure him that she was fine. Except she had forgotten the words. 

…

괜찮아 

“It’s so hot,” he said, as though politely giving her an out.

Then, gesturing outside the window, he said: “Japanese house usually face north. But this house, the main entrance facing south. To confuse people.”

She blinked, the obedient ahhhh of understanding caught in her throat. Increasingly, in this house, she couldn’t get rid of the feeling of being bamboozled. Of being given short shrift of the facts. Of having her world turned topsy-turvy for fun.

He turned away and began flipping a bunch of switches concealed behind a pillar. Fluorescent strips blinked on. He motioned for her to enter a modest hall – the “living room” – and examine dioramas in glass cases there, each depicting the hardship of life during the Korean War: pupils learning hangul in tent schools; the makeshift chaos of Gukje market and its black-market goods; and so forth. 

A flurry of noise behind them. The house itself – its floors and confined echoes – advertised as promised the presence of a group of Korean tourists: an elderly couple, and a woman reining in a toddler in each hand. They began chatting with the man. Her ears picked out the words “Gyeongsangnam-do” from the newly arrived elderly man, and then “Singapo-ru chingu” from the man she had been following.

The latter phrase: Singapore friend.

She took the chance to trail further and further behind. Then, spotting a flight of narrow stairs, topped by a skylight, she fled up to the second storey. 

Upstairs, in contrast to the funhouse layout of the lower floor, was mostly one large hall. It reminded her of a dojo. She poked around, glad for the relative peace and quiet from the excited Korean visitors and their loud exclamations at break-neck speed. She felt secretly thrilled that it looked more Japanese, in its emptiness, than the Western décor and Korean-style remodelling below. Then she felt guilty for feeling thrilled. For she was aware of just what a contested site she was in – symbolic of the long and hard struggle the Koreans went through to gain independence from the Japanese, who had used them for trade and labour, and their homeland as a land-hold from which to access and threaten China.

Tomorrow, she told herself then. Her mind leaping from one thing wildly to another, like a climber on a sheer cliff face ignoring all hand holds – the way it did now. Like a drunk in the attic. She shook her head to try and clear it. Tomorrow, I will go to Busan harbour. To buy a ticket to Tsushima.

It was an idle thought, but she felt the inexorable pull across the sea. An island halfway between a peninsula and an archipelago. Two different nations. Tsushima: belonging for all intents and purposes to the prefecture of Nagasaki, but known as “the isle of facing horses” to the Koreans – tear-shaped promontory of two tribes standing off. 

A no man’s land of feeling and belonging, she imagined. Even hate had nuance, she knew.

For a while, she had the run of the house’s upper floor. She examined the doors at one end of the hall, wondering where they led to. Upon closer inspection, she noticed the little English tags posted on the handles: “Please don’t open the closet.”

That made her want to open the closet even more. 

Instead, she parked herself in a corner and sat on her hands. She watched two English-language videos about the history of Busan as provisional capital from 1950 to 1953, while troops retreated south of the peninsula. She was waiting for the sun to set, before venturing out again. She looked at her watch: half an hour to closing. She had time. More than enough time. She worried a little that the kind man from reception would be looking for her. But then she heard him conversing with the people coming in and out, the sliver of operating hours remaining suddenly seeing an uncharacteristic influx, and knew he was happy. That he had already forgotten about her.

The heat always made her sleepy. She nestled into a corner and leaned her head against the cool wall. Sometimes the scar behind her right ear still itched and throbbed. She resisted moving against the white plaster to scratch it. 

Footsteps were coming up the stairs. An old woman huffed and puffed her way up, gnarled hands clutching the banisters for dear life. Her eyes narrowed as she stared at the girl with almost no hair on the bench before the TV. What kind of person was that? A punk or a nun? Was she trying to scare the living daylights out of god-fearing folk by hulking like a goemul in dark corners?

Sensing the old woman’s disapproval, the younger one instinctively reached for her hat. But before she could put it on, even though she didn’t want to, she heard Suguru’s voice.

それはちょっと

(sore wa chotto)

That’s a bit…

She snorted.

That’s how you say ‘it’s impossible’, he had said. Back when he had been teaching her the rudimentary blocks of his language. We don’t say no, he said. We just put on a pained expression and trail off. 

Is that so?

She reached out and caught a lock of his long fringe between her fingers. Twirled it like someone picking up jellyfish with chopsticks. 

So.

He stopped her hand with his, a great mitt closing over her slowly balling fist. They had talked about it often, the old house in Akita he would buy. The furniture he would build himself, selecting the finest cypress wood from local forests, sanding it down until the pale planks gleamed like wheat. All those nights hiding in her futon in her dorm, when they exchanged their fantasies about the future. His eyes closing as he whispered all the names of the dogs he wanted to have. But at no point did he ever ask her to have them with him. Nor to even go to Akita with him.

It was, she knew instinctively, the way she knew she wanted him when they met – when her old thesis supervisor had introduced them in the tiny izakaya – that it was all a bit… 

So. He repeated the syllable, breathing it out – a cross between sigh and spell. Brought her fist to his lips. For a moment, she thought he was going to kiss it. But he merely rubbed it absent-mindedly against the stubble on his chin.

Then he leapt to his feet, out of bed. Struggling to be free of the warm quilt. The curtains were drawn against the rising sun; he threw wild shadows by the light of her bedside lamp. He did a ridiculous caper, his dick swinging this way and that, and began singing that Kenji Ozawa song: a man spells out for his lover how he wants to be loved. His rendition, deadpan.

The two of us spend time under the stars that drift across the night sky

We’ll be together for Valentine’s and Christmas, too!

That’s what my heart’s saying right now, and it’s not a lie, but, still…

 

Staring at me isn’t allowed! Getting married, that’s a little…

I don’t wanna make a decision! Of course we shouldn’t live together

Cause, for sure, I’m going to be selfish all the way through until I die

 

The old Korean woman decided she had had enough of the bald lunatic barking with laughter. To withdraw is to live to fight another day. Slowly, she backed her way down the steep steps. 엄마! 조심! her daughter cried out from below, in the way many Korean daughters do. Mom! Careful! Panicked concern, mixed with censure.

When she was done laughing in her corner, she harrumphed: Yeah, you were really selfish all the way through until you died. And that thought started her off all over again. 

For the first time in years, it felt like some kind of release. She dared to think of him, the wind whipping his hair so hard it stung her cheeks. Her hands stealing under his T-shirt, out of the cold. The sharp rotation of a valve, the taking of a hairpin bend, the kernel of one’s being in one’s mouth, as she spread her arms wide behind him, the roar of a four-stroke engine in her ears, its vibration and the inexorable way she cleaved to him shaking her to the core.

 

Five minutes to closing.

She made her way down the creaking stairs. Politely, the man did not look up – did not embarrass her with how badly the house was giving away her location – until she was standing before him.

사진?

He nodded. That same kind smile. Of course, go ahead. But then looked confused, and then alarmed, when he realised she meant she wanted them to take a photograph together.

At least she still owned this word, unambiguously. The word for photograph sounds similar in both Korean and Japanese. Not twins, but related. As though the technology had been invented when the Japanese had been colonising the peninsula, when the Korean language had been outlawed, so that there had been no need for separate sounds for light duplicating an image; for having one’s physical form frozen as though by cruel, thieving magic. Obliterating the need to remember. To memorise by heart.

To memorialise. A three-dimensional obligation to never forget.

The man acquiesced, mostly because she acted before he could object; twisting her arm so that the phone’s front camera clicked once, twice, in quick succession, capturing them in the same frame.

And then, because something in his accent, the way he spoke in a measured yet staccato rhythm. The pronunciation of certain words. She asked: “Are you Korean?”

He looked surprised. “Of course, I am.”

“From Busan?”

“Ah, no. From Gyeonggi-do. Up north. You know it?”

She shook her head.

“Near the border. DMZ. I was stationed there. Soldier.”

“You fought in the war?” Her eyes widened.

“War over by then,” he said. “But we had to guard.” He raised an imaginary rifle. Bit his lower lip in a show of tension. “My cousin. He caught a Northern Spy. He was promoted. Very high.”

There was another story here to excavate. Maybe some other time, she might have pulled out a beat-up brush to lovingly sweep the dust from an artifact of the human psyche. But she was tired. She was ready to make her exit. 

Shuffling out of the museum slippers, she began pulling on her battered Adidas sneakers held together by super glue. The ones she never had the heart to throw out. They had still been on her feet, by some miracle, after the accident in Atami.

Something in her compelled her to keep the conversation with the kind man going. Perhaps, having been on the road for three months, she was starting to despair of ever speaking English again. Perhaps the affluence of the port city, its strangely pragmatic vibe, its skyscrapers and bridges, and the oddly HDB-looking condominium enclaves that reminded her of home did a number on her, and she succumbed to the loneliness she kept running away from. Whatever. She pressed on.

“But you know Japanese?”

“Yes.” 

She had expected at least some kind of rancour from someone of his generation, growing up not long after the enforced acquisition of another culture’s language to erase his own. But he seemed to be blushing. “I learn. There are a lot of Japanese women married to Korean men here. Thirty per cent.” 

She was not sure of the source of his statistic or the veracity. Numbers, in any case, have always been meaningless to her. 

Something twisted in her. Japanese wife. She had – how to say – maybe almost been one, even though sore wa chotto…

Very sore wa chotto now. 

Now:

今

지금

 

Ima or jigeum, the difference in the two words; when one slipped out instead of another. As though she was travelling in the wrong country. Her concentration flagging. Her heart not in it. It was always mortifying when it happened. But the locals just corrected her, and she got on with it.

Still, she needed to confirm one fact: 

“And you learnt your Japanese from one of these Japanese wives?”

He nodded. His expression shy.

Later, when she was back in her hostel dormitory, dealing with a surfeit of her own ghosts, she would think back to this parting exchange. Would parse it for clues for some submerged drama to distract her from her own chittering depression. 

Who was this Japanese wife he had been learning from? It had not been his own – he had replied in the negative when she asked if he was married to a Japanese woman himself. 

She would never know for sure what those conversational lessons between the man and the Japanese wife had been like. In whose house, with what sort of innocent or illicit feelings lurking around? Had this second or third tongue inscribed itself so deeply into his soul that it had changed the way he spoke his native one forever? Even though it had been taken possession of him later. Even though, for possibly not very long. 

(That thing twisting like a knife – maybe – she – a Japanese wife – sore wa chotto…) 

A house has many doors. It confuses the heart. Keeps out some things, but also lets others in. A lover creeps about in tabi. A lover gives him or herself away. Always. Ima or jigeum. Eventually.

Her curiosity was in overdrive, but the sun was going down behind Gudeoksan. The memorial hall was closing. It was now closed.

The man bowed.

“Thank you for visiting us,” he said.

“No, no. Thank you,” she said. “For the tour.”

“My pleasure.”

She saw it in his eyes. The question, tracing the curve of the scar on her head. Had he asked, she would have told him. Gladly. After all the busybody probing she had done. The silly queries she had peppered him with. It was the least she could do. 

But he was polite to the end.

“Bye-bye,” she said, waving both arms in the way she had learnt from K-celebrities.

“Goodbye,” he concurred.

To the harbour then, she thought, as she stepped out into the coolness of the ebbing day. She checked her wrist: There was still time. She would pay for that ticket to Tsushima. She would get there.

 

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