One Thousand Chestnut Trees. Mira Stout

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СКАЧАТЬ footbridge before a pagoda, smiling confidently at the camera – roguishly handsome. I had looked forward to meeting him.

      But this full-colour, three dimensional stranger seemed jarringly unrelated to those glamorous photographs. For a start, he was here in our kitchen rather than safely there. He reminded me a bit of a prisoner then, hiding out in our isolated house in his geeky ironed denims, gazing out of the window as if contemplating an escape. But he had nowhere to go.

      During his visit, my mother became more enlivened and fluent than I had ever seen before. They would stay up late together drinking ginseng tea and talking excitedly. Sometimes they spoke with a raw, almost animal pain that frightened me. Gradually, the sound became less exclusive, and flowed generously, like water released from a dam. This awesome current bypassed me and my Boston-Irish father (who also spoke no Korean), but neither of us remarked upon it. I was content to pretend that they were discussing dull matters like jobs in Boston, where Hong-do was to attend university in the autumn. Korea was so much static to be tuned out of my consciousness.

      During those winter evenings, my father and I tactfully watched ice hockey on television, but neither of us could really concentrate. Although we were silent, I was acutely aware of Hong-do’s presence. I would sneak glances at him from the sofa as if he were a surprise package that had been delivered which I hoped someone else would open. While I had decided he was to be a marginal figure in my life, I kept a self-interested eye on him anyway during those first cold nights. I sensed, with some dread, that he contained secrets I might someday need to know.

      One morning after Hong-do had just arrived, we drove out through the snowbanked woods for an educational breakfast at the Timberline Restaurant on Route 9, renowned for its sixteen varieties of pancakes, and its tourist-pulling ‘Famous 100-Mile View’ over Massachusetts.

      Lavender-haired waitresses in white uniforms and orthopaedic shoes delivered the orgiastic fare with medical briskness; steaming cranberry and banana-dot pancakes, french toast piled with blueberries, waffles shining with melted butter and hot maple syrup, spice-scented sausage-patties, link-sausages, mouthwatering bacon, Canadian bacon, steak-and-eggs, eggs-any-style, oatmeal, homefries, toast and English muffins. MaryLou – as her name-tag announced – refilled your coffee cup instantly, and offered free second and third helpings like someone arriving to plough your driveway.

      That sunny morning, the dining room was crowded with skiers, bunched around the colonial wagon-wheel tables in pneumatic technicolour overalls. They roared with pre-sport gusto, clanking their cutlery uninhibitedly, as if their appetites might extend to the creamy blue mountains which beckoned beyond the plate glass windows like a majestic frozen dessert.

      At first my uncle looked overwhelmed, but soon glanced about delightedly, taking tiny, experimental sips from the coffee cup he held ceremoniously in both palms. People stared baldly at us, jaws momentarily disengaged. Orientals were rarely seen then in the Vermont hills. We ignored their dismay – led by my mother’s well-practised example – but I felt scalding embarrassment. Although we’d begun by speaking in English, my mother and Hong-do soon broke into voluble Korean as if my father and I were not there.

      At last our breakfast arrived. Still feeling unwell after his long journey, my uncle faced a modest fried egg and toast. He hesitated a moment, but with a final scowl of concentration seized the sides of the egg white with his fingers, and crammed the whole object in his mouth in one piece. Head bowed and cheeks bulging, he chewed the egg penitently, as if ridding his plate of an obstacle. My father and I froze in surprise. Never having seen an egg dispatched in this way, I began to laugh, but my mother’s eyes stopped me like a pair of bullets.

      

      The next week my mother urged Hong-do to look for a job in Starksboro – the nearest big town – in order to improve his English and relieve cabin fever. As his classes were not to begin for several months, he aquiesced, but found nothing. I suspect he was secretly relieved.

      In the mornings after a bit of coaching, my mother and I would drop him off in the icy parking lot off Main Street, the Starkboro Reformer help-wanted ads folded neatly inside his glove. Yet by noon Hong-do would be waiting for us dejectedly at the counter of Dunkin’ Donuts, attracting hostile stares from beery lumberjacks grimly chewing their jelly doughnuts, puddles forming on the pink linoleum beneath their snowmobile boots. After a week, his only offer had been a part-time window-washing shift in the sub-zero February winds. Dad said they must have thought he was an Eskimo.

      Struggle was foreign to my uncle. He was the pampered youngest son of an old, noble family, accustomed to a big house in town with servants, and estates in the country. My mother even claimed that Hong-do was renowned in Seoul as a ‘happy-go-lucky playboy’ inconceivable though it was to me, as I examined him critically through a gap in the car’s head-rest. Here, he was assumed to be a refugee.

      

      I saw Hong-do again at Easter. At home, snow still scabbed the fields, but the ground had thawed, and squelched underfoot. Wild gusts of fresh, sweet wind roared through the bare tree-tops. Unpacking my duffel bag, I resolved to be a bit kinder to my uncle – providing it was not too painful.

      But I had forgotten little things about him – like the way he chewed spearmint gum with smacking gusto, and sang corny songs in the car. And his sense of humour! I rarely saw him laughing, but when he did, it was a razor-edged alto giggle. Then, at moments of unanimous family mirth he would be isolated in a deaf silence. He thought most American food was disgusting, and I never saw him reading a newspaper or book in English.

      My uncle was like unconvertible currency; he refused to be tendered or melted down. There was no Western equivalent of his value. Sometimes I suspected he was simply saving himself so that he would not have to change again when he returned home.

      Yet in my absence there were surprising developments. One afternoon as I studied for exams, I looked out at the faithful view of sloping, scrubby fields, towering pines, and immense sky, and noticed something peculiar about the row of younger trees opposite. Their lower branches had been brutally pruned to resemble topiary, but their trunks looked disastrously bald, like shorn poodle shanks. When I protested to my mother she smiled, and insisted that they now looked more like Korean bonsai; an observation gratingly inaccurate, to my affronted sensibilities.

      Hong-do soon appeared back from Starksboro with a red and white striped parcel from Sam’s Army-Navy Store, and went off to his room. As I was reading, something caught my eye out of the window; there was my uncle, zipped into a new track suit, vigorously touching his toes in the fresh air. I smiled patronisingly at his strict precision, exercising in the waist-high weeds as if in an indoor gym.

      Then he stopped, approached a pine-bonsai, and playfully shook its slender trunk. After an interval of staring, bull-like, at the tree, he suddenly charged at it, yelling murderously and began raining deft side-kicks and karate chops upon the little tree.

      I rose from my chair. Had he gone mad? I heard my father’s chair scraping in his studio, and ran off to confer with him. He had left his easel, and stood at the window watching Hong-do. Without speaking, we observed him warily circling the tree like a shadow-boxer, delivering the odd kick-chop. Dad finally rapped on the window-pane, and my uncle twisted round, confused and red-faced with exertion and waved at us enthusiastically. We laughed and waved back, marvelling. From then on, my uncle performed his t’aekwondo exercises on the lawn without further interruptions.

      After this, the atmosphere was lighter between us. T’aekwondo tree-attacks seemed to relax Hong-do, he smiled more readily, and began to look quite as handsome as his photographs. This unexpected glimpse of him lent a wider circumference to my mean perception of his character.

      Still, an unnavigable distance separated СКАЧАТЬ