Table for One, page 27
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Leslie Cheung’s lover.”
Mom really seemed to have accepted my homeroom teacher as Leslie Cheung. And in turn, the art teacher had become Anita Mui. Mom was really open-minded. If I just saw the art teacher and homeroom teacher walking together, my insides twisted, but Mom was turning our school into a little Hong Kong, filled with Cantonese actors.
“Timid types like your homeroom teacher need to date someone more outgoing. With the art teacher’s bluntness, she seemed like she’d be alright for him.”
Mom was, once again, explaining things like she was an expert. When I imagined the two teachers as Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui, for some strange reason I was even more unable to forgive my homeroom teacher. Whenever I saw him, I got worked up. And so I glared at him, secretly peeking through the window of the faculty room. One day, we made eye contact as I was glaring, and he asked me if I wanted some ice cream. Of course, I said. I had to take what I could get from my teacher, especially if it meant I could eat for free.
My teacher took us to McDonald’s, like a dork. McDonald’s was the store closest to the school gates. I grabbed my teacher’s shirt and said: “There’s nothing to eat here but burgers.”
My teacher asked if I didn’t like hamburgers. I answered without looking at him.
“Hamburgers are beside the point. Today you said you’d buy me ice cream.”
Distinguishing between hamburgers and ice cream reminded me of my art teacher pointing out the differences between landscape drawings and made-up drawings. Annoyance surged inside me. I pulled my teacher out of McDonald’s and took us to an organic ice cream store. Worried that Jinu might be following us, I hurried inside. I stared at him—no, glared at him—the whole time I was eating ice cream, observing my teacher’s fingers with a piercing gaze. He had no ring. Being in a relationship and not even wearing a couple ring to commemorate it is a crime. It’s small, but a crime nonetheless. Anyway, maybe what Mom had said was true: maybe my teacher was lacking something.
“Sir, do you have debt?” I asked him.
“Do I have a pet?” He had misheard.
“No, I’m wondering if you owe money.”
My homeroom teacher smiled like he was at a loss for words. In that moment, his face really did look like Leslie Cheung. I didn’t know how Leslie Cheung looked, but my teacher really resembled him. I stopped glaring at my teacher and continued my questions while staring at the pattern on my napkin.
“Sir, do you like Leslie Cheung?” I questioned.
“Leslie Cheung? Well, I did like him in the movie A Better Tomorrow. But, Hongdo, do you even know who Leslie Cheung is? Leslie Cheung is from my generation. A Better Tomorrow was the peak of his fame. Back then every middle schooler in the country was wearing a trench coat like Chow Yun-fat did in that movie.”
When my homeroom teacher said this, Leslie Cheung suddenly seemed like the most dislikable person in the world.
“I hate him,” I said. “My friend says he’s still alive. But obviously he died, and I hate it when people go around spreading rumors like that. People should always be clear. If someone died, they should act like they’re dead! If they’re married, they should act like they’re married!”
If they’re in a relationship, they should act like they’re in a relationship! I was going to say that, too, but I couldn’t.
“The cotton candy man—do you like him?” I asked.
“Cotton candy? Hmm. I don’t really like sweet things. Do you, Hongdo?”
“All kids like sweet things.”
“Well, cotton candy is a snack for kids. I bought it a lot, too, when I was younger. Cotton candy and sugar candy!”
“Oh! Those are the two things I hate more than anything. I like other food, but cotton candy and sugar candy are too cheap. I don’t know why people buy them.”
“Cheap?”
My homeroom teacher stared at me for a while. A few more of my questions flew at him like axes. When we’d finished the ice cream, my homeroom teacher threw a boomerang of a question back at me.
“Hongdo, are you mad at me for some reason?”
My teacher had a very pleasant expression on his face as he asked. The person asking wasn’t just a substitute teacher for the Shrew, or the boyfriend of our art teacher: he was Leslie Cheung, and only Leslie Cheung. I swiveled my head to the side like an idiot.
I couldn’t help it: after a few days, the truth about my hastily made-up taste in snacks came out. Jinu and I were eating sugar candy in front of the school when the homeroom teacher walked past. He passed by smiling, and I made a feeble excuse.
“We have to have something to eat outside school.”
The homeroom teacher briefly rubbed my head and then left. That action influenced my entire day. I didn’t hear any of Jinu’s chatter the entire way home. Jinu didn’t like being ignored, so he let me stroll a few steps ahead and then stopped walking completely.
“Hongdo!” he shouted. “Why are you being like this today?”
When I looked at Jinu with rounded eyes, he was bouncing up and down for some reason.
“I know why you’re upset. But don’t let it bother you. It’s because our teacher just rubbed your head, right?”
I was surprised and couldn’t say anything.
“I know you hate our teacher, but school is just like this sometimes.”
Jinu patted me on the back twice and then skipped off.
That guy still didn’t know anything about girls.
Even after I got home, I kept thinking about how our teacher had rubbed my head, twice. I made a resolution that tomorrow, as soon as school ended, I’d go straight to a hair salon and shave all my hair off. If only the teacher hadn’t complimented my hairpin the next day, I probably would have gone through with the plan. But our teacher saw the pink pins Mom had put in my hair and smiled as he said, “How pretty!” I returned home after school a complete wreck. I couldn’t control my feelings: I wanted to inject Botox or something into my emotions. So I could paralyze my feelings. I didn’t care if there were side effects. As long as something was different from now, that was all that mattered.
7. HANAM: GANGNAM STYLE
The classroom romance died. According to Mom, there was a time when North Korean planes had dropped flyers from the sky, declaring the DPRK’s greatness, and when the boys got whipped instead of the girls. I felt like I had been born in the wrong era. I should have attended school back when you could pick up flyers off the ground and exchange them for mechanical pencils, when the boys chivalrously stepped up to be punished instead of the girls. There were, of course, no longer any of the flyers Mom had described, but it wasn’t just that: nowadays, it was even hard to find kids willing to sacrifice themselves for others. Even if there was some romantic kid willing to be punished for someone else, there was no way that his probably fanatical mother would stay quiet about it. I didn’t need to go far to find proof. Jinu Kim was a typical case of someone who’d been overtaken by his mother’s fanaticism. When I mentioned how things had been in the past, Jinu’s answer was what I expected.
“I’m sorry. I want to be hit instead of you, but I should listen to my mom.”
Jinu said that if he got hit instead of someone else, his mom would be upset. Huh. I guess he was worried that people would think he didn’t care about his family. Jinu didn’t have much else to say today. After mixing three ladles of sugar candy in a row, Jinu finally opened his mouth again.
“My mom and dad are getting divorced.”
Jinu cooked the sugar until the ladle burned. Then he started to make his fourth candy disc.
“And starting next month, I have to go to another tutoring center. Maybe then I won’t have time to make sugar candy.”
Jinu threw the ladle aside as he stood up. He said: “I think there’s some connection between their divorce and tutoring. So I don’t really like it, how they’re getting divorced.”
I thought of what Mom had said, that Jinu’s mom’s boyfriend was a passing fancy. Mom was always saying things like this. She acted like she was an expert, but her men kept getting stolen by other women. Like Leslie Cheung, who was eventually abandoned by Anita Mui! I could hear the clacking noise of the art teacher’s shoes, so I hurried away from school.
“Gone to the weekend farm—Mom.”
That message was all she left for me at home. After joining the organic club—even though of course she said she’d joined it for me—Mom was way too busy. According to my calculations, Mom had been in love with Leslie Cheung when Anita Mui appeared. That broke her heart, but now she felt better. I don’t know, then, why she’d paid so much attention to the art teacher’s brooch. It was late when Mom returned.
“Why do you always just look at your land and not even do any actual farming?” I asked.
“Do you understand how wonderful dirt is?”
Mom opened the fridge as she said this. She didn’t say anything, even though I clearly hadn’t eaten what she’d prepared for me. It seemed like she hadn’t noticed.
Mom was leaving the house a lot. The field of grass that she’d prepared for dinner waited on the table. When the sun set, I would look out the window blankly, like I was the grubby flag hanging limp on the veranda. A few days later, I saw Mom outside with some man. They greeted each other, leaning forward at a ninety-degree angle like a new bride and groom bowing to each other. My heart pounded loudly. The man wasn’t my dead father, and it wasn’t my teacher, who was in a relationship. So it was a man I didn’t know. Could Mom have a boyfriend?
“Did you go see the land again?” I asked when she got home.
“What do you mean?” she said. “It’s called weekend farming for a reason.”
As Mom said that, she pulled out a bunch of tutoring flyers, for some reason. Since I was getting older, I needed to attend tutoring, she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“What do you mean, why? Everyone else has to study, and you’re the only one who gets to play? I’m not home much nowadays, and I need to make sure you study enough. If you don’t want to do Korean or English or math tutoring, let’s sign you up for art. Anyway, you have to go to tutoring.”
“Why are you sending me to tutoring all of a sudden?”
My head felt empty, and what Jinu had said earlier flew around inside me, buzzing like flies. The buzzing sound intensified at the end of my nose. I frowned, worried that I’d start crying. I purposefully coughed, loudly—until my irritated throat started to regurgitate food.
My homeroom teacher and Mom had ended their relationship before it even started, but that didn’t mean I wanted her to look for other men. When I thought about Mom getting into a relationship with someone else, I could hear that buzzing sound at the edge of my nose. I thought about my homeroom teacher with another woman—like the art teacher—and that made me feel just as suffocated. It was like I was stuck between my mom and my teacher, or maybe two people who didn’t know each other at all, but I was the one suffering from heartbreak.
After he started to attend more tutoring, Jinu didn’t hang out in front of school anymore. Even after being let out of prison, it felt like I was still in jail. The organic field of greens that Mom left on the table was waiting for me when I got home, but Mom wasn’t there. The tutoring flyers were spread out by subject. Just like Mom threw out the flyers for black bean noodles, spicy noodle soup, pizza, and fried chicken when they were stuck to our front entryway, I threw away the tutoring flyers. And when I grabbed a carton of milk from the fridge, I took out Mom’s soju as well. I stuck a straw in the bottle. I drank some, and my insides burned like I was drilling a manhole into my stomach. It hurt, like going down the waterfall on a log ride, but it wasn’t bad.
“Oh my god, my daughter is crazy!”
Those are the last words I remember hearing. Something flitted through my mind, and then I opened my eyes and it was morning. If my memories were correct, the day before, I’d stuck a straw in a bottle of soju and drunk it down to the last drop.
The morning after I drank alcohol for the first time, there was no dried pollack soup on the breakfast table, waiting for me as a hangover cure. There was no bean sprout soup, either. I just sat at the table, stomach full of grass as always, and if anything was different, it was that Mom gave me warm milk with honey. That was my hangover remedy. I drank it in one gulp and then sighed loudly like an old man. To be honest, my insides didn’t feel too weird. Since I’d gotten drunk so fast and sprawled out on the ground almost immediately, I didn’t even really remember the taste of the soju. I felt fine—I wasn’t sure I’d even drunk any soju. To sum up, I felt a little anxious.
The whole way to school, I kept thinking about ski lessons. Soju was like skiing. In my rush to make it down the slopes, I didn’t bother learning how to stop, so I’d tumbled down the mountain in a straight line, at a very fast pace. In my hurry to drink soju, I hadn’t learned how to enjoy it: I’d blacked out straightaway. It was a good metaphor, but when I told the story to Jinu, he suddenly said that I smelled like alcohol. It was strange that he’d had no response until then, although I didn’t hate what he’d said. The smell of alcohol was more intense than any perfume. It was the best perfume.
* * *
Since I liked art better than Korean, English, or math, I’d been drawing in art class with the intensity of someone writing their will. Several days later, the art teacher called me up to her desk.
“Hongdo,” she said. “Your drawing is good. The composition is great, and the colors are good, too. I’m thinking about making you the school representative for the next education department art competition, but there’s a problem.”
Was there ever not a problem?
“This isn’t our school. As you know, the prompt for the competition is to make a landscape drawing of your school.”
“It looks the same as the front gate, though.”
The fish jerky man was here, the hot dog man was there, the slushy man was there, the cotton candy man was here, the sugar candy man was here: I pointed to each vendor like I was looking for the answers to a hidden pictures puzzle. The art teacher tapped the glass on the desk with her pointer finger and said: “Well, that’s the problem. We decided in a faculty meeting that this isn’t what our school looks like.”
“Why?”
“If this picture is shown in the competition, it’s not just your talents being made public, Hongdo, it’s our school. The reason I don’t feel great about the way you drew the front of our school is because of our policy. Our school isn’t some cafeteria or flea market. The Gangnam schools aren’t like this.”
The more she talked, the more inscrutable her expression became.
“Aren’t we in Hanam?” I asked.
“Of course. But the principal wants to promote the Gangnam lifestyle, and there’s no reason why not. The words she said in the school meeting were, ‘This is a drawing that hasn’t adjusted to the time change.’ Or was it ‘a drawing that hadn’t adjusted to changing times’? Anyhow.”
This was the opinion made official in the school meeting: the fish man and the flasher, and the sugar candy man, were to be erased from fourth-grader Hongdo Park’s painting, replaced by flowers and trees.
“Like this.”
The art teacher pulled a sheet from a thick heap of drawing paper and showed me, but it didn’t look like she was sketching anything. There was really nothing in her drawing. The school gates were okay, and there was a fence, and in front of it, there were beautifully blooming flowers. Children were laughing with their heads turned to the side, and they were all the same height. I scrutinized this drawing with nothing in it for a while. I wanted to ask the same thing I did when Mom pushed a salad made of lettuce in a muddle of sauce at me. “What is this?”
Our homeroom teacher told us that he’d planned to get married next spring, but he was pushing the wedding date forward. Of course, he didn’t say that to us directly, it was information we had figured out. The news yielded interest, like all rumors do, and the story spread that his fiancée wasn’t really the art teacher: it was another woman. A little while later, rumors spread that the other woman was the Shrew. Apparently, our homeroom teacher was actually the Shrew’s fiancé.
“So soon the Shrew will come back. Since the kid’s been born, she’ll change places again with the substitute homeroom teacher.”
A rumbling sound came out of Jinu’s belly as he said that. He suffered from a hunger that couldn’t be satisfied with food. The bad snacks had disappeared from the front of our school, moving faster than rumors. They’d disappeared, then reappeared briefly, then disappeared again. Students calmed their snack withdrawal symptoms with rumors about our homeroom teacher. The words swirling around our school floated out the main gate and onto the streets, over several speed bumps.
8. A HOLE IN THE SKETCHBOOK
The fish fillet man disappeared. The next day,
The ice cream man disappeared. The day after that,
The hamburger man disappeared,
then we found him by the school’s side entrance. Next,
the sugar candy man disappeared,
but thankfully he survived. The criminal to blame
was organic.
The men who’d made the front of our school so sweet were essential ingredients in the lives of us kids, but to the adults, they were ingredients worthy of a blacklist. With black paint, I erased the problem people by ones and twos. From the fish fillet man to the sugar candy man: I flecked paint over these vanished people until their forms were unrecognizable. Finally, all that was left in my painting was murky blackness.
Before the paint could dry, I pierced a hole in my sketchbook. The inside of the hole was dark as the paint. The flasher, the cotton candy man, the kidnapper, the fish man: they were all melting into the murky smears. The men became one. They were like a face on a wanted sign, someone guilty of kidnapping. The kidnapper twirled sugar into cotton candy on a ladle from the sugar candy stand. The ladle was heated by the fish fillet man’s butane gas canister. The kidnapper held several sacks of ingredients and said: “The world’s actually round. That’s how it is, right?”
