Poster Child (22 page)

Shortly after my conversation with Mr. Adams, I attended the Lutheran church in Seoul. I wept through the entire liturgy and each one of the hymns. During the service, I kept imagining my father at the front of his church. I saw his hands rise to give the benediction; I heard his voice sing the blessing. A soldier dressed in full uniform who was seated in front of me handed me a handkerchief and touched my hand gently, but apart from that, nobody paid any special attention to my weeping, and I was thankful for it.

At the coffee hour following the service, I met Heather, a young Canadian who was working at a
hogwan,
or "cramming school," where many of my students went after regular class.

Heather and I made plans to have drinks in Itaewon, the mostly English-speaking section of Seoul near the Yongsan Garrison, site of the U.S. Army headquarters. "Itaewon has great sports bars," Heather said. I hated sports bars, but I would have gone anywhere with her. I was lonely, and I thought maybe I could convince her to crash on the floor of my room later. If there was a living, breathing body in the room, I thought I'd feel safe and be able to sleep.

The streets of Itaewon were lined with stalls selling cheap Nike shoes, Armani knockoff suits, and Coach bags at half price. The sidewalks rippled with rainbow colors from the neon signs overhead. Most of the American men traveled in packs of five or six, and many of the groups were accompanied by several Korean women who were dressed in short skirts and skimpy tops. The men strutted down the sidewalks confidently; the women clicked along carefully in their high-heeled shoes.

The air was thick with aftershave and sexual tension—the soldiers who did not have dates were looking at us openly, sizing us up. "I love a guy in uniform," Heather said, skipping up the hill. Heather and I were both wearing jeans and tight tank tops. I had a sweater tied around my waist because buildings were overly air conditioned during the hot months. I felt uncomfortable in a way that was strangely energizing. The soldiers' lusty eyes made me nervous, but I also liked being looked at; I liked being the object of a man's attention.

At the Free Willy Bar, a mechanical neon whale moved up and down over the door. The interior was lit with red lights; the smoky air throbbed with techno music. While we ordered mai tais at the bar, two soldiers dressed in green fatigue pants and tight black T-shirts approached us. Heather immediately started chatting with one of them, batting her eyes and flinging her blond hair over her shoulders. I put on my sweater while the other guy told me how lonely he was. Then he reported that he was Mark from Alabama, had graduated from high school last year, and hated Korea.

"This place is fucking backward." He did a tequila shot at the bar and ordered a beer. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm a teacher," I said, and sipped my drink.

"Right." He looked at my breasts, which, thankfully, were mostly hidden now by the loose sweater.

"Most of the guys here like the Koreans," he said, and waved his hand in the direction of a corner table. Dressed in garter belts, skimpy underwear, and bras, three Korean girls who didn't look a day older than my students were draped over the laps of red-faced men in uniform, who were drunk and loud. "But I like your kind." He wrapped his huge fingers around my wrist. "I like you." So much for preliminaries.

"Excuse me," I said, removing my hand from his grip. I walked to the bathroom, looking for Heather. I found her wedged into a corner booth, necking with the other soldier, whose hand moved beneath her shirt. Two Korean girls, dressed in scanty leather outfits, gave me the once-over. I wanted to say something to these girls, but what? I could make no bridge to their world. I thought of the bar we had gone to as a group in ChunCheon, where young women in bras and panties danced in cages that moved up and down under strobe lights.

Back at the bar, Mark put his hands around my waist and pulled me between his legs, which looked as wide as tree trunks. "Hey," I said, trying to unwind his arm from around my back, "I need to go." I looked at my watch. "Yep. I'm supposed to be meeting someone."

He nuzzled my neck. His lips were warm and wet. "You don't want to stay here with me, Amy?"

"Emily."

"Right." He released me and took a long swig of beer. "Could I at least have your number?"

On a napkin, I wrote down the first seven numbers that came to me and handed it back to him. I turned around before I stepped out the door to see if he was watching me. He wasn't.

Outside, the street surged with a ring of soldiers and civilians three rows thick. The hot breath and loud voices of inebriated people made the air seem liquid, viscous. Someone threw a beer bottle in the middle of a writhing circle to shouts and encouraging cries. "What's going on?" I asked a woman dressed in green fatigues and black boots who was chugging a can of Obi lager a few feet from the outer ring of the crowd.

"It's a chicken fight!" she screamed at me. She grabbed my arm and cut a path for both of us to the center ring. There, encircled by screaming men, was an American soldier and a Korean man.

The soldier danced lightly on his feet like a boxer. His green pants were rolled up to his knees, and the muscles of his calves were flexed and defined. The thick ropes of his arm muscles moved when he stabbed a fat fist in the air. He said, "C'mon, c'mon," and threw a flurry of punches. He tilted his head from left to right, loosening up. He made eye contact with the crowd, nodding and yelling.

The Korean man moved when the soldier moved; his eyes never left the soldier's hands. A diagonal scar ran from his shoulder to the center of his pale, hairless chest. He wore jersey shorts, and his legs from feet to knees were black with dirt. One of his eyes was swollen shut, and he swiped at it every few seconds. His lean, steady body was calm and watchful, while the soldier's bounced and shook with aggression and excitement.

Both men were shirtless and sweating and covered with blood—their own? each other's? I didn't ask. Their bare feet kicked up dust as they circled each other; the black dirt settled on their skin, their hair.

The woman shouted something else and then looked at me, waiting for a response.

"What?" I screamed.

She put her mouth up to my ear. "They fight until the death. It's a betting fight. Do you want to bet?" She held out a stack of
won
wrapped with a rubber band. The noise felt huge; it seemed to absorb the air. When I looked around, all I could see were big fists pumping the air and stretched, screaming mouths. I barreled back through the crowd alone and walked as quickly as I could down the steep hill.

At the bottom of the hill, I tried to hail a taxi for fifteen minutes. I wanted out of the neighborhood as quickly as possible. I wanted to be lifted out of there, whisked away. The sounds from up the street swelled, and my stomach lurched. An eerie silence followed and was broken by a chorus of cheers splitting the air. I imagined the soldier's fists making contact with the small man's chest; I envisioned the Korean man scratching at the soldier's eyes as the big soldier sank his teeth into the Korean man's thin arm. I started walking, waving frantically at every taxi that passed me by. A fight until death? I was sweating heavily, but my heart was a cold stone rocking inside my chest.

I finally ran after a taxi until it stopped. I forced myself into the backseat with three other people, flashing a wad of money as proof that I would pay everyone's fare if they'd just let me share the taxi with them.

When I returned to my room, there was a message on the answering machine from Mr. Adams. I was to move in with a host family in two days. I took a hot shower and lay on my back for a long time, blinking up at the ceiling.

The next night, my last night of nocturnal exercise, I did my kicking and punching routine, stretched out on the floor, and wept with relief.

I had my own room in Mrs. Park's third-floor apartment on a steep side street about a ten-minute walk from the school. My host mother was a thin woman—all angles and cheekbones—who wore thick eye makeup and red blush in an almost perfect circle on each of her cheeks. Her husband, a short, thick man, never cracked a smile or appeared without a beer or a cigarette in one hand. Mrs. Park's daughter, whom I was told to call Jane, was a timid, round-faced seven-year-old who, although not exactly pleased about giving up her bedroom for a strange American teacher, was curious about me nonetheless. She followed me around the house for the first few days.

I expressed daily gratitude to my host family by eating multiple helpings of the food prepared for me: different kinds of
kim'chi,
small fried fish, sticky rice scooped up with dry, cut seaweed,
pul go
gi
(marinated barbecued beef wrapped in lettuce leaves with garlic and hot sauce),
bi bim bap
(rice and vegetables topped with a fried egg), and sweet bean paste drizzled over ice. My family took me out for
makguksu
(buckwheat vermicelli noodles topped with slivered cucumbers, a hard-boiled egg, and hot red sauce that is served cool and mixed together before eaten) and sometimes for
ttakgalbi,
a meat dish I'd enjoyed in ChunCheon, a city rumored to have the best restaurants for this specialty.

Although I tried to explain to Mrs. Park that she was not responsible for my lunch and I could eat in the cafeteria with the other teachers, she still prepared ten peanut-butter sandwiches for me every day and left them in a tinfoil tower on the kitchen table. I could not eat them all, and I threw the leftovers in the garbage can at the far end of the gym, near the room where I used to live.

At my host family's, my sleep was often long and delicious, but I still had nightmares. When I had the recurring dream, I'd wake up and sit near my window, where I could look over Seoul's red rooftops, which stretched out in an endless checkerboard pattern, with a tangle of electrical wires—like a complicated and dangerous trapeze—strung between them. Tiny squares of light were illuminated all across the city. The lit cityscape, however chaotic, calmed and charmed me. How could I feel truly alone when I was surrounded by so much life?

At night I tucked my prosthesis underneath my bed, and each morning I woke up a half hour before anyone else, so that when Jane came to wake me I would be assembled.

One night at Mrs. Park's I awoke from a rare, untroubled sleep to the sound of a loud argument. A loud shout. The front door slammed shut, rattling the apartment walls slightly. Silence and shuffling feet. What was going on? I heard Jane and Mrs. Park talking, then silence. I was up all night, listening to Mrs. Park cry in the bedroom next door. Although I was sure she tried to muffle them, the sobs ripped through the wall. I wanted to go to her, but what could I tell her? What could I say?

That week, I recited the girls' first English test over the school's PA system. I knew they were nervous, so I spoke slowly, leaving an impossible amount of time between questions. Ms. Kim stood behind me, saying, "Go, they should know answer now."

Looking out the window, I watched a detention session: The girls ran up and down the grass field with their backpacks lifted above their heads while a teacher shouted out orders. A few did push-ups until they fell on their faces. Those along the fence stood with their book-filled bags hoisted, straight armed, in the air. They wept and wailed, but they did it. I thought of being alone in the basement and kicking into the air; those movements—like those I witnessed now—seemed to be exercises in futility as well as expressions of loneliness and a kind of triumphant despair.

I waited before I recited the next question. Ms. Kim could sweat it out a little bit.

Sleep remained an enormous difficulty In my journal I wrote, "I am floating somewhere," and it was about to get worse.

I had my first panic attack in the classroom while I was writing "lice" and "rice" on the board, pointing to the words one at a time and exaggerating the correct pronunciation of both. Suddenly the chalky words began to blend. I saw pops and flashes at the corners of my vision. It was as if someone had reached inside my skull and set my brain spinning. I felt myself losing equilibrium at an alarming rate. I clutched the board for a few long moments. When I turned around, the girls in the front row were crying. I smiled and dismissed the class, but they watched me suspiciously, glancing back to see if I'd crumpled into a heap. A few days later, a new rumor was circulating: American
sung sang nim
is dying.

The panic attacks increased: two per day, then five, ten, fifteen, sometimes every ten minutes. I had them on the subway crossing the Han River—in the middle of rush hour, I'd claw through people to get out of the car and into different air. I stayed seated for most of my lessons and tried to keep smiling when the world started to spin. I had attacks in the middle of the night at my host family's; I woke up and wrote letters, read through my lesson plans, burned incense. Nothing seemed to help. I felt as though panic were peeling my skin back, leaving me completely exposed.

Rattled, I made an appointment to see Dr. Pavlovich, the English-speaking doctor. His office was surrounded by palm trees that reminded me of the army base. There, once you walked past the beggars and homeless children—all of them skinny and hungry, and many of them limbless—and stepped through the gates, you were greeted with a gleaming building that featured expensive shops, a TGI Friday's, and a man-made waterfall. Around it were clusters of quaint houses with well-tended flower beds and tiny swing sets perched in the yards. The hospital appeared equally sleek and tidy.