Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America | Page 7

neglecting his school friend from the conversation. After visiting a couple
museums, Sung Ki gave Sang Huin his beeper number. Sang Huin invited him to a
Christmas party held for students at a language institute but stayed contained to his own
students and his new friend, Sung Ki. That night they slept together; and the boy that had
stroked Sang Huin's leg with his foot when they were eating kimbop wanted to hold
hands while the two of them lay next to each other. Sung Ki, soon afterwards, began to
plan out their time together. Sang Huin did what he requested: touring the Independence
Museum; mountain climbing; free English lessons, and visits to his Buddhist temple and
congregation. Soon Sang Huin was spending every night at Sung Ki's apartment and a
month later their relationship was a sexual one.
Sang Huin thought about how Sung Ki cleaned the apartment by putting a wet towel
under one of his bare feet and sliding across the floor with it; how he used to go into the
bathroom with his newspaper and would not come out for over an hour; and that sentence
he would always say, "you must all eat" meaning that every speck of rice left in the bowl
should be mixed with hot water into a soup so that nothing was wasted. On the day that
he learned that Sung Ki was going away he came to his apartment and asked if there was
anything he could do or get him. There wasn't. He sat on the sofa, cold and pierced, as
Sung Ki ignored him, cleaning one thing or another and then reading something or
another. Sung Ki lit a cigarette and sat on a balcony that overlooked the mountains and
rice patties of Umsong. After a few more moments of silence, Sang Huin went to him.
His voice was shaky like a faltering foundation. He cried. It wasn't so much in reference
to him as it was his sister. It was his first tears for her. It was in reference to non-ending
perpetual loss. He knew that Sung Ki would construe it as solely for him. He felt
embarrassed and the embarrassment increased as the two men hugged. Sung Ki began to
cry. Sang Huin said, "I want to apologize. I'm sorry if I did something wrong. You
wanted a girlfriend and my friendship and I made you have a boyfriend."
"It's okay. I liked the feeling then." That friendship had bit the dust.
Right before the bus came to a stop, he fell into a dream where there was a dust storm in
Pyongyang. He ran through one dong (neighborhood) to another lost, looking for

distinguishable signs, shapes in buildings, and widths of streets. Everything from the thin
dust-sheathed roads to the hangul (Korean language) on the signs, looked as identical as
the occasional mom and pop stores and it was all indistinguishable from what he saw
minutes and hours earlier. He ran into no one since the streets were empty. Then he
became careful of where he stepped. "The dust storm," he argued, "could have slid land
mines up from the thirty eighth parallel." The more he thought about it the more nervous
he became and the more hurried. When he became breathless, he sat on a rock and drank
the last of his bottled water. The taste of sauerkraut and hot dogs was in his thoughts and
the boiling, bubbling surge of his saliva but he would have eaten kimchee or someone's
dog being as hungry as he was. It became fully dark and he would have known entire
blackness were it not for the speckling of stars, the moon, and a fire at a distance. He
walked over to the fire. He saw four whores seated around a bonfire. He recognized
different buildings, and the curves of the street near a hard dirt tennis court. This was Ne
Doc Dong. "Do you want me," said one, "or do you want another?" Sang Huin's face
turned a bright red like it did with drinking a bottle of beer. He smiled and looked toward
the sidewalk in his embarrassment. He said, "No, I wouldn't; but would you have a
brother?"
When he arrived in Chongju from the desolation of what was in between Seoul and it, the
population and activity of this small city recreated an insatiable yearning for Seoul, which
to him was a storehouse of all extraordinary venues to the mind (encounters both sexual
and cultural). Large buildings were like the small mountains of Umsong with a topping of
cloud on a rainy day--monuments of beauty welcoming him to its domain that edified and
exhilarated his appetites and his love. The mountains, until recently, transported his
imagination to green blankets of waving rice, and from