One Thousand Chestnut Trees. Mira Stout
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about Korea? Would he have liked to learn to ski? I allowed his elementary English to deter me from asking.
But my uncle, for his part, was maddeningly opaque. His eyes were so black that I couldn’t see his pupils. It was me that I saw squinting back irritably from those distant planets. His silences alone were new desert continents, exposing me as a mere water-dependent speck.
Yet Hong-do could be alarmingly vocal. Sometimes he would pluck away at Beatles chords on my old, badly-tuned guitar, yodelling ‘Yesterday’ plaintively from his room. To my distress, he and my mother also sang rapturous Korean songs together in the study, in a twangy, throbbing oriental vibrato which sounded surreal, and faintly sinister in the puritan Vermont woods. I was glad we had no neighbours.
Why did they wail like that?
‘Because we express han,’ said Hong-do good-naturedly.
And what on earth was han?
There was a long pause.
‘Han is sorrow and yearning and resentment; it lasts centuries, and never goes away. It is at the core of us,’ said my mother.
But what were the words?
Another pause.
‘Han is so deep, that it comes before language.’
I rolled my eyes at my father, hoping to enlist his support, but he looked away. Then I went to my room, and drowned out the han with the more familiar ululations of Neil Young.
I remember one final episode that Easter holiday. As I was studying one afternoon at my usual place by the window, Hong-do slipped into the kitchen to toast some seaweed. After offering me a warm, sulphurous black square – which I ate, grudgingly – he went outdoors to join my mother in the garden.
Then, I heard a yell, and saw Hong-do push my mother aside, his eyes locked to the ground. Running out to see what was wrong, I found Hong-do down on all fours, stabbing spasmodically at the earth with a trowel. Now quite inured to his unpredictable ways, I asked casually what he was doing.
‘A grass snake,’ said my mother.
‘But they’re harmless,’ I said, popping my eyes.
‘Maybe, but to him, serpents are a symbol of evil, and should be destroyed.’
My uncle had lost sight of the snake, and was shouting at my mother in Korean.
‘What’s he saying now?’ I piped.
‘He can’t believe that we allow snakes to pollute our land,’ she said neutrally, as if unsure of where she herself stood on the matter. Still muttering, Hong-do was crouched in a combat stance in the dead asparagus patch, gingerly parting weeds with his trowel. I wished him luck insincerely, and went back indoors. Minutes later, my parents left on an errand.
Hong-do came indoors, and began rummaging angrily through drawers and cupboards. Next, he changed into his new Wrangler jeans, my father’s too-big rubber boots and wood-chopping gloves. He’d even produced a fireman-style slicker from somewhere, cuffs rolled neatly. Then, he left without a word, carrying a long, fat stick he’d found beneath the porch.
‘Unbelievable,’ I muttered, looking around reflexively to see if anyone could confirm what I was seeing. Being alone, I shook my head and returned to the reassuring mental hygiene of my algebra book. But now and then I looked up at the field expectantly.
My mother and father returned from town with the groceries, and asked after Hong-do, smiling when they heard about his hunting preparations. We watched a muted sunset, and took tea and Chinese steam buns in the sitting room, half-listening to the news on the radio. I felt too ruffled by my uncle’s eccentric behaviour to concentrate.
Just then the front door opened, and Hong-do stamped in, displaying a small green snake by its tail as if it were a ten-foot swordfish. Dutifully, my parents admired his catch while I trained a skeptical eye on the pitiful reptile. Then, however, I caught a glimpse of my uncle’s expression, which shamed me. The pride brimming in his eyes was remarkable and disconcerting. His pride was so intense that I almost found myself wishing I could see the snake as he saw it. I stared at it hard, hoping for something magic to happen; but nothing did. My doubt remained and divided us.
Hong-do soon went back outdoors to dispose of his quarry. I watched from the window as he scaled the stone wall and stood there, surveying the darkening woods below. He whipped the snake around his head like a lasso, and cast it high into the air with a defiant shout.
For many years I carried that image with me; Hong-do, snake-slayer of Vermont, arm raised against the sky like a warrior throwing his sword into the spokes of the universe, hoping to arrest its wheels upon his victory. At least, that was what I wanted to see.
Now I recall it differently. The sun had set, and my uncle was mostly in shadow. After he’d flung away the snake he looked so small, and vulnerable, and alone out on the ledge that I could hardly bear to look at him.
Hong-do spent the following few years at university in Boston, one of ten thousand anonymous freshmen. News of Hong-do often came to me months after events had passed, subtly filtered by my mother’s own approval or disappointment, and slightly distorted by translation into English. Trying to follow uncle’s progress in Boston was like monitoring conditions on Jupiter through an unreliable satellite link. He was an abstract fuzz, composed of long shadows and receding footprints. Only his most dramatic actions survived the relay.
To my uncle’s surprise, he was not quite the star he had been in Seoul, though he had plenty of friends. My mother, able to make oracular judgements from several hundred miles away, pronounced him bright, but lackadaisical. He was lackadaisical, perhaps, but hardly lazy. Hong-do took a night job as a taxi driver, though he barely knew the streets beyond Copley Square. He was almost immediately robbed and beaten at gunpoint by two thugs on a midnight fare to Roxbury.
Next, he took on odd shifts as a waiter in Chinatown. He felt safer there. Although he studied business administration by day, on his free nights he gambled away his earnings and made extravagant bar-room loans to acquaintances much larger than himself.
My uncle then had a pretty Irish girlfriend called Mary. He was crazy for her.
‘The Irish and the Koreans are so alike; so sentimental,’ he told my mother over the phone. One day, Mary told him he was a worthless male chauvinist pig, and left him forever. Then he met a rich Korean girl, and drove all the way to California in his cab to escape her. Six months later they were married.
Hong-do set up a small shipping business in New York, and moved to a model home in Fort Lee, New Jersey, with his wife and two babies. Reportedly he now wore a gold Rolex watch, and drank impressive amounts of whisky with his golf cronies – all Korean. During my uncle’s Fort Lee tenure, we saw very little of him. He didn’t much care for the Vermont wilds, but preferred neon night-life and the siren call of near-fatal business schemes. Yet unexpectedly, when I moved to New York myself after university, I began to see Hong-do quite regularly.
We would always meet in a Korean restaurant off Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. Young Bin Kwan was his favourite. He was often outrageously late, but I didn’t mind. The mean-faced maître d’ would bring me a dish of exquisite grilled dumplings and boricha (barley tea), and, like a character from a spy thriller, I would bask there in the suspect glamour of floor-to-ceiling fish-tanks and Las Vegas chandeliers. Anticipation of the ritual feast ahead, and the fascinating denouements of my uncle’s family tales put me in a buoyant mood.
When Hong-do finally arrived, he transformed into the playboy, clapping imperiously for more Korean beer and kimchi and barking commands at the twirling, traditionally-robed waitresses with breathtaking, but good-natured arrogance. They served him adoringly, fleetly replacing empty celadon dishes with fresh bulgoki, and bearing smoking iron cauldrons of demonically spicy mae-un-tang. My uncle grinned, slurped and chewed with the confident abandon of the oriental business magnate.
Once, as I watched him stuff a rolled