*****
“Can Chad pronounce Choi?” I ask my wife in bed the morning of the assimilator’s arrival.
She sighs and stretches up. “I see you’re handling all of this really well. We can call off the meeting if you want.”
“There’s no problem if he can’t. I just wondered.”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
Looking inside the closet, my fingers glide over a Nirvana tee-shirt, its cheap worn fabric soft to feel, its fibers straining under the weight of my touch. Me, I know, American, casual, modern if not futuristic. But not the me this visit will need. Out comes a brown tweed vest I only wore for one holiday party ever to wear over a white button-down. Out comes ignorable beige slacks and tan leather shoes of ignorable quality. Time to fade from history.
Timothy for his part flings on a Seahawks shirt, one with a hole around the neck from some rough round of catch with his friends. “Timothy,” I say, “(shouldn’t you be wearing something nicer for this?)”
He tugs on his sleeves, scowling. “Dad, why do you keep doing that?”
So he finally notices. I swallow. “You’re meeting your father for the first time. Wear something nice for him.”
A deeper snarl. “What are you talking about? You’re my dad.” The first time he’s shown any emotion about this other than typical preteen nonchalance. But who wouldn’t want to meet their birth father? Clearly, he hid his eagerness to protect me, a fragile dish with a crack down the middle.
“Could you not make me look like a fuck-up?” At his step back from shock, I lick my lips and start again. “Please (just wear something nice.) I don’t…. (I just want you to be happy. Let us behave well, okay.)” A pressure from the back of my neck forces my head down. To raise it up again, I know, would somehow snap my spine, as if my head holds up a slab of ice.
He shows the same fear as his pudgy friend did. “Dad,” and his voice breaks with youth, “what’s happening to you?”
“You…“ English dances away from me, but I grapple for slices, for crumbs, anything to make him understand. “You want… see him… yes?”
“No.” He rubs his cheeks, and for the first time, I spot the sleeplessness in his sagging face. “It’s been twelve years. Why should I care now?”
I want to tell him that in ten years, he will. Maybe sooner. When a girlfriend, a coworker, or some fancied voice of god brings his attention to his confused blood, he’d respond with curiosity. Not like me, noticing my missing identity all too late. Timothy, I want to tell him, you’re going to do much better than me. And to do so, you’ll have to leave me behind. But I can’t. Even Korean escapes me.
A knock on the door.
My wife wears a demure burgundy pantsuit, betraying none of her mood. She answers the door scraped clean of expression. “Hi, Chad,” she says. “Have an easy time finding the place?”
On my doorstep, a squat man somehow shorter than me, with pudgy middle and a greasy light brown ponytail. His eyes, more squinty than mine, and closer together. He wears a black trench coat over a shirt showcasing some Korean drumming troupe. His sneakers need cleaning… well, replacing really. He makes me feel overdressed. He make me feel professorial comparatively.
I am more attractive than this man. No self-doubt can claim otherwise.
“Um,” and his voice comes out a nasal mumble, “no, it was fine.” He instinctually reaches for his pockets like one of my chastened students.
No one wants to be here.
I hold out my hand. “Hi. I’m Eric.” My smile, fake only in that it keeps from snickering.
He shrinks away, then pulls forward and weakly grips back in return. “Chad. Pleasure to meet you, Mister Choi.” Pronounced well enough, but here he is with Mister.
“Please, just Eric. And,” I gesture to a withdrawn Timothy several feet removed from all of us, his lips pursed, “this is,” and I nearly fumble out my son, but say, “Timothy.”
Chad blinks like a mouse pulled of its hole and whistles. “Wow.” He readjusts his coat. “You look so much like,” and he nods to my wife, “he looks so much like you, Amanda.”
He does. All I spot of this man’s code in Timothy is a narrower face and of course the telltale streaks of gold in the hair. But this man is no Nordic blond, imparted no athletic frame. Science dictates that a firstborn generally absorbs the best genes, and Timothy’s selection seems to have mostly rejected the paternal ones.
Timothy stays mum and frowning.
“Well,” my wife says, “I thought we could have some tea before dinner. An ice-breaker.” Her flatness slips incrementally away, with blush entering her cheeks. Her hands squirm at her waist.
Chad mutters something unintelligible in agreement.
We seat ourselves. With a bee’s wheezing drone, Chad details his sojourn for the past twelve years. He’d tried to forge his way in South Korea on a work visa in an attempt to, as he puts it, “learn the beauty of Gungdo.” The admission makes me raise an eyebrow. Archery? His fierce nodding. “I was looking for a master bowsmith so I could bring a crafting business to America.” He’d struggled away as a waiter in a foreign land all for the chance at some talent he could’ve gleaned from shop class. “Alas,” he sighs, and his tongue rolls out the word with pride in his sophistication, “many of the masters were too busy. To be expected. I mean,” and his eyes bulge with whimsy, “it’s federally a cultural treasure, after all.”
To craft bows.
And he’d had a girlfriend. “But...” and he gets lost for a moment before changing the subject. He labors at a comic store for now, hoping for a workshop apprenticeship soon or a return to community college or the funds to go back to Korea for presumably more rejection from “the great masters.”
I sneak looks at my wife. She clearly fights a cringe every few minutes. I want so badly to ask where they met, but mercy prevents me. I can imagine well enough. He, a bagger at a grocery store, a barista, and he gives me the ammo, “I just don’t want to go back to the post office.” Ah, so a relationship built on stamps and packing tape. He’d looked at her like an ivory idol, so different from my mandates of solitude so I could grade papers. He’d likely led with, “I was wondering if,” and she immediately said, “Yes.”
I’d taught dozens of Chads, of shy and smelly boys who’d doodle Japanese robots in their notes instead of details about the Spanish-American War. If prompted for answers in class, they’d whisper the wrong result and hide in their seat when reproved, their social limit exceeded. They wore shirts with cartoon characters, they poured pink dye in their hair, they netted C’s, and they went through middle school without even a chance of dating. Amanda would be a goddess to them in adulthood, certainly, yet a finicky one who’d reject their advances.
But she hadn’t. She scratches at her faces and slurps too fast on her tea, largely silent, but in that void of speech, we have our first real conversation since Timothy’s birth. She lays naked before me now. She’d been trapped in programming, trapped with me, sulking me, both of us too young for marriage, and all she wanted wasn’t the ecstasy of passion, but a look of adoration. Anything not to just be part of a “driven couple,” but be loved sans accomplishment, even on such insulting terms as ethnic background. No qualifiers. No thriftiness or self-reliance required. Only unconditional love.
So pathetic. But pathetic like me. Despite myself, I’m falling in love again.
And the interloper. “It’s so cool that you’re a teacher,” he gushes. No it’s not. But I have what he wants – an air of the exotic. A mystery I don’t really hold, of course, what with being an American, being someone whose Korean makes all listeners freeze in confusion. He thinks I naturally know how to hold a Korean bow, naturally know hapkido, naturally know how to make kimchi and naturally has Ban Ki-moon on speed dial. His gaze is low with sheepishness, not to the side with disdain. He didn’t sleep with my wife to put me in my place, but to pretend to be me, to pretend his K-pop tastes and love of ox bone soup were natural inst
ead of awkward. No assimilator, but instead a sycophant.
I can’t boast of meeting him with the same respect, continually wandering my attention away. Timothy sinks into his chair, unreadable. Is he disappointed in his birth father? Does he have a predetermined loathing of him in loyalty to me? Or does he just yearn for video games and sports and an escape from boring adults? His brightness departs and leaves behind some dour being whose motivations mystify me. Could he just say something? Anything?
Exhausted of chitchat, we depart for dinner, Chad in a Volkswagen clearly ready to die, the rest of us in our van pretending we have a bigger family than we do. Spirit of Seoul informs the sign with a new fluorescent garishness, changed since the last visit. Chad nods approvingly at it.
A step inside, though, leaves me bewildered. Gone is the Spartan whiteness of the interior design, Asiatic in its careful spacing of decorations. Instead, a pile of tropical plants greet me under dim mood lighting, feeling like a musty swamp or casino, possibly one emulating the other. Gone are the suited waiters stuttering out English, replaced by white collegiates in tee-shirts giving Chad the side-eye and me a smirk about my tweed. “Right this way, please.”
Amanda shoots me a confused look. I shrug and dig into the menu. Pasta. Mushroom sauce over steak. Sushi, of course. None of it remotely Korean. “They must have new management,” I whisper.
Chad snorts. “What Seoul are they talking about here?”
The one for business executives. The one for resort tourists. The one now to “class up” the block. The one replacing an erased identity.
Appetizers in the twenty dollar range. Amanda’s groan, her look of fear at me, that I’ll smile placidly and rip us all out of there in the name of budget. But the waiters pour our water, as if pouring concrete to ground the chains binding us here. When they leave, Timothy whines, “They don’t even have any hamburgers.”
“I’m sorry,” Amanda says to Chad. “This place wasn’t like this before.”
Chad’s shoulders twitch. His budget can’t take this hit. Neither can mine, even as a professional. But I ordered us here. I should shoulder the burden.
A tap on my side. I glance up to find Jon Garland, with a women who I assume to be his wife beside him. “I figured you’d be here,” he chuckles. “We just got done eating. Nice place.”
“Very nice.”
“But, uh,” and his tone lowers, “on the pricey side.”
“Well,” and for the first time I feel truly open to him, willing to show some of the dry bitterness inside me, “it’s not for us.”
I expect shock at my negative admission, but he nods. With solemnity he says, “You’ve got that right.” He tips his head at my family, hesitating at the sight of Chad, then scoots away. A nice place. He’ll never come back here again.
Calamari in spiced marinara. Basil soup. Pad Thai. Chad looks like he’s about to cry.
I survey them all, the whole table. Amanda, uncomfortable beyond relief, toying with her knife, stirring in her guilty, over prices, over sex, over gifting Timothy something he doesn’t care about, his rite of passage so carelessly evaded. Because Timothy is still a child and doesn’t care what church we go to or if he’s a bastard or if I deserve to be his father. To reject me would be to take attention away from the Seahawks. The ultimate in complacency, and I run no risk in losing him, but neither will he ever confess to me any confusion over being white or being Asian because he just doesn’t care. Son, I’ll have you know I’m an American, thank you very much. Not a cover, but an actual belief.
And Chad. The imagined seducer no more, but a figure somehow lonelier than I. Whose romanticization of Asia offends me on a level, as if Korea is a magical kingdom he visited and not a real place, but only so much as I stand guilty too. I can mock him all I want, but he gave me a son. As repulsed as he is by his surroundings, he keeps turning to Timothy, ready to pry, to cajole, to confess, and then he clams up. Same as me, in that respect. He reproduced, and it mystifies him more it did me when I saw newborn Timothy’s round eyes. Neither of us know how we got here.
I look around at this decadent idiocy. My uncle would love this place. A status symbol, after all. Safely secure from being too niche. But it is. It’s not for us. For really anyone. It’s a dehumanizing woodchipper that gobbles up dollars and considers that our language, the only tongue it needs to understand. It ignores English just as much as it does Korean. It doesn’t care about anyone in this dinner party.
But I do. I’ve found love for them all. For Timothy, of course. For Amanda, finally. And for Chad. Especially poor, mourning Chad.
I stand up and say, with a dutiful smile, “Let’s get the hell out of here.” And everyone sighs in relief.
ILE D’ORLEANS
Accept me for what I am
An incomplete grade
A sidewalk ending
Right when the city starts
I rest here, afraid of trees
My heart lies, not in roots, not in leaves
But on grassy knolls
A farm on an island
That my ancestral blood never forgets