One Thousand Chestnut Trees. Mira Stout
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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 us. I regarded him more as an exotic zoo tiger than as my only living uncle. It was safe to observe him through bars, to admire him wryly from the window, but I couldn’t begin to relinquish those barriers. The schoolyard bullies who had kicked me behind the apple trees with their pointy-toed cowboy boots might come running back through the years to punish me again for having oriental blood.
Hong-do’s foreignness might be contagious; I could be ostracised not only for harbouring an alien, but for becoming more of one myself. With my layers of sportswear and Celtic freckles I could pass for Caucasian, but my uncle’s incriminating features might give me away. It would be wiser to stay clear of him until my immunity was established. My secret Korean half was exiled to a remote inner gulag that even I was unable to find.
In the evenings, reading after supper, I sometimes caught Hong-do staring unhappily out of the window into the dark woods beyond his own cantilevered reflection. Only then did I regret not being a confidante. With the dumb instinct of a golden retriever, I itched to go out into the darkness and bring him back inside again, but just on the point of speaking to him, decided I was too small and unqualified for such a rescue. It was beyond me.
It was easier to pretend that he was not quite human. I don’t remember asking him much about our relations in Seoul, or why he had come to the West when life seemed to be so pleasing there.