Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America | Page 4

see the real person
inside, and scared to look at beings that were also banal and in continual suffering.
Reflexively jumping into pleasure like a lifebuoy, as a human did, what could one expect?
One thing was sure: he had experienced a deep pain that his fellow humans wouldn't even
give the briefest of stares if they could avoid it. Besides, no one wanted his enlightenment
that the world was a bad place when each was trying as best as he could to find an
entrance into Disneyland to which there where no security guards to force a departure.
He searched though his billfold for a calling card. He went to the front of this high-tech
bus and made a call.
"Yoboseyo."
"Yoboseyo. Yang Lin bakwa chuseyo."
Silence.
"Yang Lin or Antonio. Ku nun manhi irum ul cajigo isumnita. I sarem i wanhamnita." He
threw in both names that the little guy went by and the telephone clicked off.
He called again.
"Yoboseyo."
"Yoboseyo. Yang--"
"What do you want with him?"

"I'd like to talk with your son. I am an acquaintance of his. He helped me to get to
Toksugum Palace. I want to thank him. I'd like to talk to him again." Yang Lin had told
him that his father suspected all male callers and that Sang Huin would have to give a
defense of his acquaintanceship but Sang Huin felt awkward in his misrepresentation.
Here he was playing with a man's reality concerning his son. He did not feel good about
himself.
"Well, he isn't here. He's never here!"
The telephone clicked off. Sang Huin felt hurt. He felt a morbid clarity behind how
people always left his life. He thought about what he "knew" of this Chinese friend, Yang
Lin, if he knew anything at all: he was adopted and lived in America; that those parents
died-- his mother first and then the father in a drunk driving accident; that he was
readopted by Korean parents; that his father despised him and suspected his son was gay;
and that Yang Lin felt that his English level was the same as his Korean. Abstract ideas
must not have existed in his head at all. In short, he "knew " very little and the scanty but
pathetic information he received might, for what he knew, have been nothing but a
mendacity. Sang Huin had a great empathy; but now another friendship had just bit the
dust.
Had it been a month ago that Sung Ki had left him. Sung Ki: even now the name sounded
musical. After the video pang girl's attempt at marital entrapment, this neighbor boy had
been most alluring in their nightly rendezvous of two months. The sister who fed him rice
and Korean pizza and the father who wanted to introduce him to his native country by
teaching him the sounds of Korean letters were glad to get the youngest child an English
teacher. Little did they know of the pleasurable respites from pain Sang Huin was getting
in the back bedroom. Homosexuality was so taboo there that nobody believed in its
existence. In that respect, free of discrimination, one was free to be gay in Korea. Then
the18 year-old boy was told to meet the masculine and the vicious just as his country
dictated. Right after getting his letter from the military, Sung Ki laid out Sang Huin's
blanket in a different room. He talked of needing a girlfriend. It hurt; but, Sang Huin
rationalized it was what Sung Ki needed so why shouldn't he talk about it? Superiors in
the military often beat a man if they felt that he didn't have a girlfriend evidenced when
no letters and photographs were forthcoming. Then one day he was gone and soon
thereafter Sang Huin lost the address book and key chain from the souvenir shop at the
history museum Sung Ki had given to him. He lost both by leaving them in the locker at
the mokotang (bathhouse ). "We lose our friends," thought Sang Huin, "and then we lose
the things that our friends give to us." It felt less harsh to make the idea applicable for all
mankind.
There had been no real reason for him to go to Seoul this time. There were no private
lessons there. His reactions toward Umsong also did not have much of a rationale.
Occasionally, even when there were no private lessons in that area he sometimes got up
around 4 a.m nonetheless; took an hour long bus ride to that small town he had once lived
in; walked near bowing rice and corn; crossed the bridge around a thin circular lake at a
small park; and stared at the Korean moon bolted tightly against the Korean sky. He
wanted for the night to capture him