Super Sad True Love Story (23 page)

I bowed from the waist in greeting, not low enough to caricature the custom, but enough to show her that I knew the tradition existed. I shook hands with Dr. Park, feeling immediately ashamed and inferior before him. His hands were strong, as was the rest of him. He was a singularly handsome man, the one who had obviously bequeathed to Eunice her beauty. He was dressed down—at least by comparison with the other parishioners—in an Arnold Palmer polo shirt, a jacket slung over one arm. He had a thick entrepreneurial neck, and skin that still bore the leather of the California sun. I had never seen a chin so firm and set, so unmistakably manly, and a lower body that contained such an endless amount of propulsion. He had partly dark lenses in his glasses, another incongruity or maybe even a hint of blasphemy, which he lowered just slightly to take me in. Despite his race, his eyes were almost as light as Jesus’s, and they regarded me with indifference. I sat down next to Sally Park, Eunice’s sister, who shyly shook my hand.

Sally was pretty, but she had taken more of her mother’s than her father’s looks; in a sense, she opened a window onto how lovely the mother must have been. The flatter face and bulkier shoulders made her stand apart from her sister’s easy glamour, at least as far as my own judgmental gaze was concerned, but the fact that she resembled her mother gave her an instant kindness. The shadows under her eyes spoke of studies undertaken, endless worry, and hard work. The imaginary parasitic creature that constrained her mother’s and her sister’s happiness had not burrowed beneath her neck. Eunice had told me Sally was the most tender and loving member of her family, and I could only believe this was true.

And yet Sally bothered me. Throughout the service, she and Eunice engaged in a dance of glances, like two divorced spouses who hadn’t seen each other in years and were now sizing each other up. On the few occasions when Eunice had talked to me about Sally, she had lowered her voice to a defeated, mumbling register, as opposed to the high and smirky one she used to lay siege to her parents. When she talked of her sister, Eunice appeared scattered and unsure. Sometimes Sally came across as rebellious, sometimes as religious, sometimes as political and involved, sometimes as detached, sometimes as budding with sexuality, and always as overweight, which was to Eunice the deepest of shames, the most self-evident loss of face imaginable. Upon first inspection, Sally might have been all of these things (except fat) and something else too. The dance of glances between the sisters—Sally’s thrusts and Eunice’s parries—revealed it all. She was hurt and alone. She was in love with her sister, but unable to breach the walls that made of Eunice a stern, pretty castle amidst a landscape laid to waste.

We sat there silently. The family was embarrassed to say anything; without alcohol, Koreans can be a timid people. I felt proud of myself. I had known Eunice for a little over a month, and already I was sitting next to her kin. I was pacifying her as surely as she had domesticated me. How my life had changed in such a short amount of time! With just a few morning kisses on my eyelids, unbidden, welcome kisses, Euny could transform me for the rest of the day into the opposite of Chekhov’s ugly Laptev. I would greet the food deliveryman in my boxer shorts, forgetting my usual timidity at showing my hairy legs, reveling in the idea that on the couch behind me this little girl was shopping, teening, watching a hated former classmate of hers scheme her way into new lines of credit on “American Spender,” fully ensconced within her digital reality but also within the walls of
my
apartment. I would hand the deliveryman his ten yuan-pegged with my chest thrust forward, with a Joshie-grade smile on my face, the smile of one of life’s easy champions.
I am a man, and this is my money, and here is my future wife, and this is my charmed life
.

The service began. A cellist, two oboists, several violinists, a pianist, and a small, adorable choir, the majority of them young women dressed in rather form-fitting gowns, mounted the stage and began to play a medley of songs that varied between the sacred and the bizarre. We got a Mahler violin concerto, then the stirring Korean pop anthem Alphaville’s “Forever Young” sung by some exhausted-looking teenagers in bad haircuts and tight jeans, which they followed with a power-rock tribute to Ephesians that left the older half of the congregation visibly confused. We ended with “Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling.” It was this last song that roused all the parishioners who began to sing loudly and with gusto as a kind of PowerPoint presentation appeared on a large screen in both Korean and English against a backdrop of orchids floating down streams and a very visible copyright sign, which seemed to soothe our law-abiding natures. Everyone sang in tune, even the older folks mouthing the English words with more competence than my father and mother trying to wail Sh’ma Yisroel (Listen Up, Israel) at their synagogue.

I was caught unawares by the line “Why should we tarry when Jesus is pleading? / Pleading for you and for me?” The English language was dying around us, Christianity was as unsatisfying and delusional an idea as it had ever been, but the effectiveness of the sentence—its clever mix of kitsch, guilt, and heartbreaking imagery, Jesus
pleading
for the attention and love of these put-upon Asian people—made me shudder. The awful things was: They were beautiful words. For the first time in my life, I felt sorry for Jesus. Sorry that the miracles ascribed to him hadn’t actually made a difference. Sorry that we were all alone in a universe where even our fathers would let us get nailed to a tree if they were so inclined, or cut our throats if so commanded—see under Isaac, another unfortunate Jewish shmuck.

I turned to Eunice, who was minding her conservative shoes, and then to Sally, who was earnestly trying to follow along, her mouth contorting to the words, staring at the screen, upon which more pastoral images appeared, an American deer leaping past two American birches. I could feel nothing but the mournful, hopeful waft of sound emerging from her mouth.

“O for the wonderful life He has promised / Promised for you and for me.”

Some of the older people had started weeping, the kind of hemorrhaging, deep-seated sound that can only bring relief to the sufferer. Were they crying for themselves, for their children, for the future? Or was this crying just a matter of course? Soon, to everyone’s dismay, the choir and the musicians left the stage, and Reverend Suk ascended the podium.

He was a dapper man with a deceptively kind face, broad shoulders filling out a dark-blue middle-class suit, and an innocent smile deployed after a harangue like a reward, like a father trying to recover his child’s love after taking away her toy. He seemed like the perfect preacher for citizens of an insecure, rapidly developing nation, a nation that Korea had recently been.

Reverend Suk and some of his younger ministers took turns yelling at us in English and Korean. I glanced at Dr. Park, sitting mutely, hands folded over his lap, his dark glasses off to reveal deep creases and a touch of submerged anger. I wouldn’t be surprised if he hated the Reverend, or thought himself more clever. Eunice had told me Dr. Park read the Scripture from four in the morning and boned up on the Koran and the Hindi texts as well. A smart man, she had said proudly, but then the dead smile came on, as if to say,
See how little “smart” means to me?

“Why are so many empty seats?” Reverend Suk yelled at us, accusingly, for we had not done our job, for we were failures in his eyes and the eyes of God. “So many people in the streets, but so many empty seats! This nation once was deep in the Gospel! Now where is everyone?”

At home, cowering, I wanted to tell him.

“Do not accept your thoughts!” the Reverend shouted, the copper orbs of his eyes alight with a painless flame. “Accept world of Christ, not your thoughts! You must throw away of yourself. Why? Because we are dirty and we are wicked!” The audience sat there—subdued, restrained, compliant. I don’t want to be literal here, but these immaculately coiffed and scrubbed women in their halo-like hairdos and shoulder pads sticking out like epaulets were the very opposite of dirty.

And yet even the antsy children, even the ones who couldn’t speak, realized that they were sinners and this was a crusade; that they had done something immeasurably wrong, had soiled themselves at an inopportune moment, would soon fail their poor, hardworking parents in many ways. One little girl started to cry, a kind of hiccupping, snot-clogged cry that made me want to reach out and comfort her.

Reverend Suk went for the kill. Three words formed the arrows in his quiver: “heart,” “burden,” and “shame.”

To wit, “My heart was very
burden
some.”

“I have this kind of heart. Geejush, help me throw it away!”

“If you find me in a shameful position”—this must have been a direct translation from the Korean, the last word pronounced with difficulty as “poh-jee-shun”—“fill my burdensome heart with Your grace! Because only Geejush’s grace will save you. Only Geejush’s grace will save this fallen country and protect from Aziz Army. Because you are lazy. Because you do not appreciate. Because you are prideful. Because you are unworthy of Christ.”

My eyes returned to the copyright sign below the screen imagery of bucking deer and floating orchids upon which key phrases from Reverend Suk’s sermon (“
THROW AWAY PRIDE
,” “
JESUS GRACE SAVE YOU
,” “
BIG SHAME
”) were superimposed in English and Korean. How comforting the copyright sign against the religious foreground. How assuring the idea that we were nominally a nation of laws.

I wondered if the young people manning the PowerPoint truly believed. I have always wished that I could better understand the Korean-Christian connection. A friend of mine from the Indian side of Post-Human Services, one of our best nanotechnologists and survivor of not one but two Korean Bible camps, once told me, “You have to realize that, compared with the Korean brand of Confucianism, Christianity is a walk in the park. Compared with what came before, Protestantism is almost a freaking liberation theology.”

I thought of Grace, whose intelligence was unquestioned, but whose piety troubled me. “It’s just a passing thing,” Vishnu had told me about his girlfriend’s beliefs. “It’s like their way of assimilating into the West. It’s like a social club. One more generation, it’ll be over.” I didn’t want to think of Grace’s deeply private experience, the heavily highlighted New Testament she once showed me, the weekly trips to an Episcopalian church full of Jamaicans, as just a form of assimilation, but I knew, instinctively, that the child she carried would not worship the Lord.

“Forget all the good you have done!” Reverend Suk was shouting. “If you pride the good, if you don’t throw away the good, you will never stand in front of God. Do not accept the good before God. Do not accept your thoughts!” I looked at Eunice. She was playing with the straps of her tan JuicyPussy purse, the purse nearly as big as the rest of her, running the straps up and down her fingers, making brief outlines of red and white on her chalky skin, until her mother grabbed her hand and sent a brief, powerful snorting sound her way.

I wanted to get up and address the audience. “You have nothing to be ashamed of,” I would say. “You are decent people. You are trying. Life is very difficult. If there is a burden on your heart, it will not be lifted here. Do not throw away the good. Take pride in the good. You are better than this angry man. You are better than Jesus Christ.”

And then I would add: “We Jews, we thought all this stuff up, we invented this Big Lie from which all Christianity, all Western civilization, has sprung, because we too were ashamed. So much shame. The shame of being overpowered by stronger nations. The endless martyrdom. The wailing at the ancestors’ graves. We could have done more for them! We let them down! The Second Temple burned. Korea burned. Our grandparents burned. So much shame! Get up off your knees. Do not throw away your heart. Keep your heart. Your heart is all that matters. Throw away your shame! Throw away your modesty! Throw away your ancestors! Throw away your fathers and the self-appointed fathers that claim to be stewards of God. Throw away your shyness and the anger that lies just a few inches beneath. Do not believe the Judeo-Christian lie! Accept your thoughts! Accept your desires! Accept the truth! And if there is more than one truth, then learn to do the difficult work—learn to choose. You are good enough, you are
human enough
, to choose!”

I was so deep in my own rage, a rage that might have been better summed up with the simple plea “Dr. Park, please do not hit your wife and daughters,” that I had not noticed that the worshippers around me had sprung to their feet and were belting out “The Rose of Sharon.” As it turned out, this was the last chapter of the Sinners’ Crusade. My gaze skirted that of a fellow Hebrew itching to make his way out of there, away from the in-laws, and into his honey’s arms. Tenderly, angrily, Jesus was pleading for our very souls, but we were too tired, too hungry, to hear him out, too hungry even to complete Reverend Suk’s quick sermon quiz (“Only for fun, not graded!”), which the young people in sashes were passing down the rows.

We bowed our way out of Madison Square Garden and adjourned nearby to a new restaurant on 35th Street that specialized in
nakji bokum
, an octopus-tentacle dish inflamed with pepper paste and chili powder, among many other forms of debilitating heat. “Maybe too spicy for you?” Eunice’s mother said, the usual question asked of the white.

“I’ve eaten this many times before,” I said. “It’s yummy.” Mrs. Park looked at me with great suspicion.

We were taken to an empty little room where we were to remove our shoes and cluster, cross-legged, around a table. I realized, with toilet-inducing horror, that one of my socks featured a giant bull’s-eye of a hole, through which my pale, milky flesh could be scrutinized by all. I turned to Eunice with a why-didn’t-you-tell-me look, but she was too scared by the collision of her two worlds to notice my urgent stare. She threw off her pointy church shoes and made herself uncomfortable by the table. The grown-ups were clustered around one side of the table; Eunice and Sally faced us meekly from the other. Mrs. Park began to order, but her husband stopped her, unleashing a series of grunts at a pimply young waiter with a slick parabola of hair. A bottle of
soju
, the Korean alcohol, was immediately presented to Eunice’s father. I tried to reach over and pour it for him, as the young are supposed to serve the old in this culture (as if the old are really any better than the rest of us, not merely closer to extinction), but he forcefully moved my hand away and did it himself. He picked up my glass, put it in front of him, and, with a precise, calibrated spill, topped me off. Then, with one index finger, he moved the glass in my direction. “Oh, thank you,” I said. I waved the bottle toward Eunice and Sally. “Anybody want some of this good stuff?” They averted their eyes. Dr. Park swallowed his medicine without a word.