CHAPTER FOUR:
MT. SURIBACHI
“I love you, honey baby.”
“I love you.”
“I miss you so much, honeybunch. I keep thinking about our evenings together, sitting on the porch listening to jazz, taking walks in the cemetery. I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you. You are so wonderful.”
“No, it’s you.”
“It’s you.”
“It’s you.”
“It’s you.”
Manny Lopes clutched the phone receiver to his ear and thought wildly, I’m going to die. I’m just going to die. He wanted to scream. He wanted to reach through the line, stretch his arm all the way across the Pacific Ocean and the Continental United States, all the way back to Providence, grab her by the shoulders and shout, I’m dying! Can’t you see I’m falling apart? Don’t you care at all about my suffering? I’m in Hell! But all he said was, “God, you’re beautiful.”
“You’re the one.”
“It’s you.”
“It’s you.”
“It’s you.”
“It’s you.”
Ruth and Manny were a cute couple, that was what his friends at work said. They looked at Manny’s wedding picture and said, “Awww! What a cute couple!” At first he accepted such compliments at face value, viewing the photos through the lens of his own pride, but as distance set in he began to realize that others were amused by the disparities between him and his wife. “Cute” referred not to their perfect harmony of spirit, but to their charmingly ridiculous physical contrasts: Ruth’s statuesque (or the word she herself preferred, “Rubenesque”) figure towering above him as if he were a lawn jockey. When Tech Sergeant Sue Budlick remarked, “Opposites attract,” she was making a joke. Manny’s pride soured; the cuteness curdled.
Manny never let on to Ruth how he was feeling, but as the months went by he sensed that something mechanical was creeping into their phone conversations. The lovey-dovey stuff was getting out of control, becoming filler to plug up the silences.
There was a long, unusual pause from Ruth’s end of the line. Manny could hear her breathing. “Ruth?” he said.
“Manny?” Ruth’s voice vibrated like a taut string. “God damn it. We need to talk.”
“I know,” he said.
≥≠≤
After speaking to Ruth, Manny still had to get ready for work. He went through the motions of his daily tae kwon do exercises, feeling numb. It was going to be another long day, as every day was here, an interminable battle with boredom and loneliness, ending in a fruitless trip to the APO. The only personal letters he ever got were from Ruth…and it looked like those would be drying up. So much for his big dream of going home at the end of his contract. What was there to go home to?
Manny, I can’t do this any more. I’m sorry.
There was no one left who understood him now. Not the military people, not the civilian personnel or spouses, not the local Koreans. In the sixteen months since Manny had arrived in Daegu, there were any number of people who had tried to get to know him, and he them, but it was always strained and uncomfortable, fizzling to nothing. He knew people thought he was weird with his retro hats, baggy suits, wingtip shoes, and pencil-thin mustache, something out of a Harlem nightclub in the ’40s, but it was a look he was comfortable with, and that was one of the few comforts left to him now. He put on the clothes as if girding himself in armor.
Manny just wasn’t a joiner, however much he tried. Prayer groups, bowling leagues, meet-and-greets—they just weren’t his thing. Until he came overseas, Manny had never realized how dependent he was on the cultural wealth of a big, cosmopolitan city: the foreign films, the ethnic restaurants, the underground music and nightlife, the sparkling art scene and tolerant, diverse population in which to blissfully lose himself. It provided the basis for his whole personality…or, he feared, perhaps camouflaged its absence.
Such reserve was all but unknown in the expatriate community in which Manny found himself, a Wal-Mart diaspora that mocked any possibility of transcendence. Here the only culture was a weird holdover from the fifties, a frozen slice of provincial Americana forever being reheated by the wisdom of Paul Harvey and Rush Limbaugh, all other interests forbidden except the time-honored ones of television, gambling, drinking, religion, shopping, sports scores, gossip, or adultery.
So Manny spent his days bitterly alone, buried in the guts of balky mainframes, spending his off-hours at the gym, doing the crossword in Stars & Stripes, watching crap on AFKN, or—when he could still muster up the energy—wandering off-base so that he didn’t become one of the slugs who were afraid to set foot outside their Little America housing compounds. That was how he met Karen Park.
≥≠≤
“You ready to go, Karen?” Manny asked, sitting on the edge of her desk with brittle insouciance.
“Give me two seconds to finish correcting.”
“How was your day?”
“It was good. What about yours?”
“Oh, you know…” Brushing aside his martyrdom, he said, “Don’t forget we have to meet Mr. Wang at four.”
“Yup.”
“I can’t wait for this weekend,” he said.
Karen Park didn’t look up from her grade-book. She was a teacher at the DoDDS school on Camp George, and Manny had been there many times to fix the computers. “I agree,” she said. “It’ll be good to get away from this place for a little while. I need a break.”
“It’ll be like a little honeymoon.”
Karen glanced curiously at him. “Oh yeah,” she smirked. “I bet.” Manny had never flirted with her before.
They had met on a USO tour to Chinhae during the cherry blossom festival, and were comfortable enough in each other’s presence to take several more group tours to the countryside. Their reason for doing this was that however lonely either one of them may have felt in Korea, they were rarely left alone, being objects of deep fascination to most Koreans.
As a foreigner, an American, and particularly a brown-pigmented American, anywhere Manny went he was treated like a celebrity…or a freak…by local nationals who apparently had never seen a black man in person, many of whom were eager to practice their halting English by comparing Manny to Barack Obama or some other high-profile black person. Considering the thousands of African-American military personnel who lived in Korea, Manny was surprised the novelty hadn’t worn off…but it hadn’t.
Thus he found it useful to have a traveling companion in Korea, someone to share the heat. Karen was unfailingly upbeat about it. Just smile and wave, she would say, to which Manny would wearily reply, I know, I know: Pretend you’re Michael Jackson.
Some locals were offended at the sight of a Korean-American woman in the company of a slight brown miguk and would scowl or make rude comments, while others pointed and laughed as unselfconsciously as Sunday zoo-goers. Karen was amused, but Manny often felt offended—he felt more like Michael Jackson’s chimp.
Fortunately, the majority of Koreans they met went to great lengths to demonstrate friendly acceptance, to welcome them, which could be the most exhausting of all. Children were endlessly impressed with Manny’s body hair, and would brazenly stroke his arms while chanting, “Mistah Monkey, Mistah Monkey.”
But none of this had deterred him from exploring the place. As challenging as it was, Manny still refused to become like so many of the Americans he knew: sedentary, contemptuous of the host country, hardly venturing out into what they dismissively referred to as “the economy” except to shop or get drunk. Following the lead of his fearless companion, Karen, Manny seized every opportunity to plumb this alien culture, even when he hated every minute of it.
They explored on foot, stepping over gobs of spit (“Land of the Morning Phlegm,” Karen would joke), dealing with mazes of unmarked streets, dodging maniacal traffic, risking death from indoor carbon-monoxide fumes and outdoor street vendors, holding their noses as they passed sewage-pumping “honey-wagons” and mosquito-fogger trucks, getting tear-gassed and nearly trampled during street rallies, and submitting to hostile interrogations by strangers about American foreign policy.
But they also made wonderful discoveries: The sinus-clearing joy of kimchi, the spicy national dish. The water-heated ondol floors under their stocking feet. The enormous brown pear-apples, and in springtime the lush roof-gardens that made bearable the grim concrete infrastructure of urban Daegu. Then there was always the unexpectedly excellent coffee, Lotte chocolate, garlicky bulgogi beef, the impeccable trains, the beauty of clay-tiled temples and villages, the broad cultivated valleys and stepped hillsides. The old folks playing Go on the sidewalk. The ever-present mugunghwa—rose of Sharon—which reminded Manny of Southern California.
He had come here because it was a chance to experience a foreign culture, damn it, not just a government job with free housing and benefits. Manny would survive if it killed him.
So there was nothing romantic about it; it was a partnership of convenience, and apart from such trips the two hardly spoke to one another. Karen knew that Manny and his wife Ruth were so lovey-dovey it was disgusting. And Karen was spoken for as well, engaged to a Japanese military liaison she had met on a MAC flight to Fukuoka.
It annoyed her a little bit that her fiancé, Yukio, was not as totally devoted to her as Manny obviously was to Ruth. Yukio had been so charming in the beginning, but ever since they’d become engaged he had started acting like a jerk. He hardly called anymore, and sounded put off when she phoned him in Japan. When she accused him of giving her the cold shoulder, he said, Karen, you just don’t understand Japanese culture. It’s not normal for a Japanese man to say “I love you” a hundred times a day, like Americans do. With us it’s more serious.
“No, I know,” Manny said to her now, disguising his awkwardness with a laugh. “Just kidding.”
Karen turned back to her grade book. The way she tuned him out so easily made Manny feel that he had disappeared altogether.
≥≠≤
Their plan for this weekend was to take a USO bus tour to a famous restaurant called the Moon Viewing House—a fancy bulgogi place with elaborate sculpture gardens—and then to avoid the long return trip by jumping off the bus in Busan, where they would spend the night at the Paradise Beach Hotel before returning to Daegu by train.
That was tomorrow. First they had to go with Mr. Wang and earn the money to pay for it all. Just as they were leaving school, Mr. Wang was driving up to the camp gate in his white Hundai luxury sedan with gold trim. At the sight of them, he tooted his horn.
“Annyo’ hashimnikka,” they chirped, getting in the car.
“Anno’ haseyo! Chossumnida,” said Mr. Wang. To Manny he offered his fist, saying, “What-up-dog?” Mr. Wang had dealings with many African-American service members, and prided himself on speaking their language.
Manny awkwardly met the proffered fist with his own. He had never been the least bit “ghetto”, and in fact scarcely thought of himself as black, since his mother had been white. He rejected all racial classification. “Yo,” he said. “Komupsumnida.”
“Chon’moneyo, G. Soddy to keep you waiting.”
“We just got here ourselves.”
“Good, good. Ready to go?”
“Yes.”
“Off-da-hook.” He pulled away from the gate, maneuvering the big car down narrow alleyways lined with shops. They merged onto a busy road and left the city, catching sight of green hills in the distance. “How are you liking Korea?” Mr. Wang asked, as they drove through the suburban Suseong-gu district.
“We love it.”
“What do you think of Korean peoples?”
“They’ve been very kind to us.”
Karen added, “Wonderful.”
“Korean peoples and American peoples very good friends.”
“That’s true.”
“Korea very small country; America very big. Some Koreans think America too big, but I love you very much.”
They nodded and smiled appreciatively. Mr. Wang had good reason to love Americans—he owned a lot of rental properties and was also heavily involved in the black-market sale of AAFES goods and pirate DVDs. They knew a few Americans who made a pretty penny off this trade as well.
Mr. Wang grinned at Karen in the rearview mirror, “You are very tall for a Korean woman.”
Karen laughed, “That’s what they tell me. I’m only half Korean.”
“Yes. At first I think you too tall, too much fat, but now I think you very beautiful.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Komupsumnida.”
“You and your husband together too much,” he chided.
Manny and Karen didn’t say anything. They both wore rings, and had gotten into the habit of allowing the locals to assume they were married; otherwise it would be considered unseemly for them to be together. The whole platonic thing didn’t fly here.
“Not good for man and woman to be always together so much. One of these days I take your husband fishing maybe.” To Manny he said, “Do you have fished before in the States?”
“Sure.”
“Very good fishing in Korea—Pohang. I show you best places.”
“Great.”
“Wife not allowed, just you.” He laughed.
Manny laughed along, feeling slightly peeved—he knew Mr. Wang’s friendly overture was actually a backhanded way of saying he was pussy-whipped, a well-meaning attempt to restore his manhood.
They arrived at the university, a large modern building with a mugunghwa hedge shaped like a Buddhist swastika. Mr. Wang led them upstairs to the language lab and introduced the couple to a team of young recording engineers who didn’t speak English. The crew sat Manny and Karen in a soundproof booth with thick scripts, headphones, and a microphone, then retreated to an editing console and signaled them to start.
The script was a series of simple dialogues—elementary stuff for Koreans learning English. Manny and Karen had been expecting that. What they hadn’t expected was that the script would be quite so long. This was supposed to be a fast fifty bucks, an hour’s work at most. Hoping to make short work of the thing, they threw themselves into it, reading as quickly as they could while still trying to imitate the perky cadence of NPR hosts. Once they found a voice and a rhythm, they began to enjoy themselves. For the first time that day, Manny was able to forget about his talk with Ruth.
About 45 minutes into it, just as their throats were getting dry, Mr. Wang stopped them.
“Too fast,” he said, his voice ringing in the headphones. “Slower, please.”
“Slower, got it,” Manny said. “Where do you want us to start from?”
“At the beginning, please.”
“The beginning of the page?”
“No. Start page one, okay? Go slow.”
Manny and Karen looked at each other. “We have to start again from the beginning?” They had read over eighty pages.
“Yes, please to start at the beginning. Numba one, okay.”
This time they read with painstaking care, but it was only a half-hour before Mr. Wang cut in again: “Sillyehamnida. Slower, please.”
“Slower?”
“Yes.”
“We go any slower, we’ll be going backwards.”
Mr. Wang exhibited no amusement. “Slow down,” he insisted patiently.
This time they were ultra-cautious, doggedly pronouncing each syllable as if speaking to the hard of hearing. Manny’s voice was almost shot, but Karen’s teacher pipes were holding steady, and they got through eighty pages, a hundred pages, a hundred and fifty pages, two hundred pages, and were closing in on the end when Manny came across a misprint that caught him off-guard. The sentence was supposed to read, “The Marines planted the flag on Mt. Suribachi,” but instead it read, “The Marines planted the flag on Mr. Suribachi.”
It was not the first misprint Manny had come across—the script was full of typos and minor grammatical errors that they caught and corrected along the way. But now he and Karen had been reading steadily for over three hours, and Manny was giddy with exhaustion and thirst. When he read, “The Marines planted the flag on Mr. Suribachi,” he was suddenly seized with a delirious image of tiny soldiers poking a toothpick-size flagpole into the scalp of a wincing giant…a giant who resembled Mr. Wang.
Manny choked, tried to stifle it, snorted and felt tears spring to his eyes. The tears were of pure grief—the last thing he wanted to do was laugh. But then he glanced at Karen and realized she was involved too, set off as much by the typo as his grimacing reaction to it. (She would later tell him, “You looked like steam was about to shoot out of your ears.”)
That was it: The two of them exploded, breaking down completely. They turned to rubber, sagged in their chairs, practically slid to the floor, their guffaws only exacerbated by the stony patience of the Koreans. For a few minutes Manny gave in to this blessed release, venting not only the stress of this evening, but all the frustrations of the past two years. He sobbed with laughter, and then just sobbed, thinking of Ruth’s brittle voice in his ear: Honey, I just can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry.
Finally, after a few relapses, Manny and Karen got hold of themselves and apologized to Mr. Wang, trying to explain just what they had found so funny. The grave-faced Korean man listened with clinical indifference, then leaned down to his mike and said, “Okay, start again, please.”