Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America | Page 3

if you prefer a beautiful
fountain-surgery a continual waterfall can come from your ass." Sang Huin had not
known where the words came from. His gentle imagination had rarely formed such an
aggressive flare of thoughts and yet he had felt that he could not let this stranger--this
recent buddy-- this someone he had slept with--save up money on the assumption that he
could be made into a beautiful woman. Twenty years from now he did not want him to be
made into a hybrid mess from a lifetime of painful surgeries... hormonal
confusion...mutilations.
But had he not mutilated four months earlier? A video "pang" girl [the clerk at the video
room where he had watched a movie with his friend, Yang Kwam] tracked down the
friend's license number, and then the friend's telephone number, and began to inundate
him with a flood of messages. It was quite flattering and Sang Huin finally returned the
calls. He was curious. At that time he wanted a girlfriend. From an erection, a yearning,
an ejaculation, and more than he wished, knowledge of his own virility by the conception,
he proved the very essence of manhood. She aborted at his request but nature aborted and
mutilated: still-death, genetic defects, and miscarriages. Human beings were rifted apart
from each other by circumstances of separation and death despite love. The life of a being,
itself, was nothing but different transparencies miscellaneously tossed onto an overhead
projector. No, he thought, maybe that was just his own life. The transparencies of most
humans were in order--the last of which would be old age and decay but what was written
on them was meaningless. His transparency recently had been to prove his manhood by
having sex with a woman and it had all gone awry.
Sang Huin sighed. He took off his shoes in the bus. He stroked his feet, in short white
sports socks, across the vinyl of the back of the chair before him as if he were giving a
massage to the person seated there. He needed sex. He needed to lose himself in a
pleasure that would reduce his headache and release him from worries even if it was an
illogical frenzy far removed from reality and only lasted for a few minutes.
He tried to rest comfortably in his seat, absorbing himself in Time and Newsweek. Then
someone yelped at him in Korean, pushing him out of his sympathies toward the bondage
of the Afghan population under the theocracy of the Taleban and the tattered
infrastructure of the country. There was no way to catch even a word or two of it and this
balding and middle aged man gave Sang Huin a look as if he had wasted his time talking
to the world's biggest dummy. Sang Huin gave his typical defense of "Miguk sarem"
("American") which would bring on a confused and critical look--in this case, it was a
closer examination of Sang Huin and a slanting of the man's face as if he were ready to

give Sang Huin a big fat kiss. Sang Huin picked up his book bag on the spare seat near
the window and sat there.
It was complicated, in a sense. If he had been less temerarious perhaps to not have the
support system of this whole chain--family, city, state, nation, and racial identification--
might have posed a problem. To have lived all but the first few years in America, and so
existing as a Korean only by birth and race definitely made him American in every way
but a legal one. Most persons under such a scenario would have clung to the country that
had made up nearly all of his experience. At least that was what he told himself.
Effrontery and cowardice were two sides of the same coin. He loved his mother and she
was alone on the American continent as he was in Asia. They were indeed alone in the
world.
Even though he cared about family (what was left of it with both his father and sister now
dead) it did not deter him from leaving America. To be on a traveler's visa with his own
Korean passport did, however, seem to be a bit strange but he could not think of a
situation in life that was not confusing. Relationships were confusing although he had
never possessed one for very long. When he had the ineluctable sympathy for another
person, it deflated all the romance. He didn't mind that so much. To embark on a deep
friendship with strong personal commitment and devoid of the bouts of infatuation and
frenzy like seasickness seemed the right course; but all partners of the past seemed to him
to have wanted only to cast a romantic aura around him as if scared to