Conclusion of Sang Huin
Beyond his dabbled research on the subject, Sang Huin did not know much about
Jakarta …th its Rupiah coins as light as a child's play money; female
mendicants ever so often dancing seductively into the open doors of tiny shack
restaurants as their partners carried speakers and collected the money that
only rarely was given for these dances of desperation and futility; guitar
mendicants (usually children or teenagers performing in stalled buses);
Suharto's penchant for small gardens of ostentatious statues to beautify
Jakarta still his legacy; women free to let their long hair flow or to
constrain it under hijabs and jilbabs; blue bird/ white bird/black bird taxis;
oblong orange tuc tucs swarming the streets like cockroaches; Wartel phone
cafes on every corner for those without phones; photocopy shops for so many
businesses without photocopy machines; green and white city buses as
uncomfortable as a back of a pickup truck; graffiti on doors of businesses such
as that of "Fuck The System" somewhere between the train station and Jalan
Jaksa (Jaksa Road); 40 percent unemployment with panhandlers, newspaper boys,
and money boys on every street; train personnel giving out free condoms to all
of its customers; trains going through the middle of Jakarta linking its
disparate groups to other cities of Java — each with its own provincial
language; the provincial languages, Javanese, and Indonesian all spoken in
Java; those calls to prayer from distant mosques reverberating sotto voce as
slightly discordant echoes of the nearby mosque; that orphic song of a nearby
mosque thundering its plaintive notes; commerce and human activity stunned and
mesmerized by wailing notes ubiquitous to the human heart and experience but
still continuous; and the cacophonous cries of competing street merchants and
entrepreneurs all amalgamated into one chorus.
Sang Huin was not quite sure whether or not he had written his conclusion. It
was an open question whether chapters on Gabriele's life in Jakarta would add
much to the book. Regardless of having finished it or not, he would no doubt be
writing on something or another in the immediate future if nothing but the
unpublished musical notes of chamber music for the cello. For not having
connections of family dwarf his imagination in financial and emotional
obligations, his world was less myopic and this play with ideas was still rich
within him. It seemed to him that the fecundity of homosexuals in the
meaningful production of ideas came about from not lodging a foundation of
family within the sturdy earth. Instead, homosexuals blew with the top soil and
ideas shifted along with this drifting in the pensive ponderings of the
ephemeral nature of reality. He thought that it was true enough but his reason
for formulating the idea was more from a wish to see a positive within this
solitary blowing that became him than a belief so much in its veracity.
The antithesis of this, a woman, was a summation of an obsession with stability
and the characteristics of prostitution that entailed. At least it seemed to
him as such. Each woman was slightly different but in general they married to
have that exhilaration of raising little children and property to put their
nests on. To have this they would do anything: live years of indifference to a
man and hide the rift in meretricious tree planting with him; overmedicate a
boy and tell him what to do in all things; ignore that boy's need for a father
to suffocate him in her own need to nurture little beings to feel useful and
loved; and then suddenly ignore him when it is clear that the years had.mutated
him into ugly opinionated manhood. Landscape obsessions were his mother's
substitute for lack of stimulating conversation with a spouse but she got some
satisfaction in her active sorority with a daughter. Still both were
exponentially more important to her than him and yet both were deceased.
It was with a sense of relief that one day he found actual content in a letter
that his mother sent to him which went beyond planting roses and water
aerobics. It was a need to reconnect and his heart warmed like a child being
given a Valentine's Day card. He bought a plane ticket to St. Louis, at his
mother's quasi-request, which would allow him to see her once again and to
escape the imbroglio that he currently found himself in with a girlfriend, a
boyfriend, and bafflement what to do with any of it. The only thing so far to
come out of these dates with the convenience store girl at coffee shops and
cinemas in Seoul were her suspicious looks for of all these months that he
would he not invite her to his apartment or introduce her to his friends; and
this incessant returning home late without any inclination to touch his
boyfriend exacerbated that one's suspicions of disloyalty and infidelity.
Absconding into a plane seemed a natural course.
He found it odd that after so many letters where she told him that she was fine
and did not want him to return (letters that became increasingly blunt to the
point where in the previous one she said, "Frankly, I don't need you. You need
to get on in the world alone — start your own family") that she should aver the
opposite now. In the long flight to America he was preoccupied with this
subject and in his preoccupation he would frequently drift in and out of sleep.
-- My cousin is always wondering about you — What? — Well, why you left our
mother in a foreign country all alone. He thinks that you are a bad person but
I tell him that you aren't really that…that you are more like damaged goods —
Yes, I am that. Not bad, just damaged. Damaged goods, as you say.
--For her and everyone. Let people come and go like breathing. It is unnatural
to give it conscious significance.—Okay, Gabriele, I won't worry so much.
Whether she hates me or not, you can't go home again.—That's right; and it
makes the issue irrelevant.—Are you okay in Jakarta? I sort of left you there
—You left me positing the possibility of going there but now I am in Bandung
Indonesia and planning to go deep into the jungles. My choice only, as always.
His mother, a tall broad woman once beautiful but made haggard from tragedy was
wearing a scarf to cover hair loss and a feigned smile to get through the day.
The smile's lack of warmth could be measured in the inconsistency of its
flickers — Glad you could come, she said disingenuously — Anyong hashimnika,
Mama — Is that all the Korean you've learned? — Yes, he chuckled, not a lot
more than this. How have you been? — As well as someone like me in my
circumstances can. Put up an ad for your father's John Deer riding lawnmower
but there haven't been many callers to take a look at it — Well maybe you
priced it too high — What would you know about it? — Nothing -- I finally threw
away your sister's music box. I didn't want to go on year after year fighting
the temptation to wind it up and listen….Who is this with the dog? — Mama, this
is Seong Seob, my special friend. Seong Seob, this is my mother — Anyong
haseyo. — Special friend? What is that? No, sir; not under my roof. He can find
a hotel or the two of you can go back to wherever you came from.
It was in a descent to the San Francisco airport, when the seatbelt light went
on and the captain's voice awakened him from these latter dreams, that he
suddenly had an epiphany that there had been no request at all — that it was
merely a begrudging acceptance that sooner or later they would inevitably meet.
He cancelled St. Louis and boarded a flight to San Diego.
There, with his backpack, he wandered the streets of downtown San Diego,
ecstatic to be a pedestrian in this great cosmopolitan medley and to see all
signs in English. He wandered in this honeymoon some hours until he came to a
queue of miserable morning mendicants mingled in the malaise of having to be
minions for morsels of a blended meat and vegetable mush that was scooped into
Styrofoam cups by badged and indifferent scoopers. Stepping into lines
demarcated by ropes within this parking lot at St. Vincent de Paul he saw that
only some of these eager but patiently waiting eaters were badged and that the
scoopers wore badges with stars.
"Excuse me. Who are they?" asked Sang Huin to an old man in front of him.
"Who? Oh. Same as us all but residents—badgers are all Vinceteers, living here.
The ones scooping with the stars on their badges are the helper pigs, the
preferred pigs. For being allowed to wander the streets one or two nights a
month without losing their beds and real food that real people eat instead of
this trough stuff they would do anything: tell on masturbators, them that goes
into the showers at the wrong times, having to take a runny shit at 2 AM when
not able to hold it—things like that which can get someone thrown out of here.
Ain't Catholicism and Christianity pretty? That's why I sleep in my own little
hut in the woods of Balboa Park."
Sang Huin nodded painfully as if in derision of all things that were of pig
stardom in deference to the pig before him. In so doing he imagined Nathaniel
going into such a place expending his gregarious energy with the right people,
becoming a head pig, and for two nights each month having sex under bushes in
patches of greenery between highways. Then he thought of a new character,
Guillermo. "Guillermo walked the streets of San Diego partially earnest to find
a job."
Sang Huin took his Styrofoam cup of mush and a muffin and ate with the rest of
the scrawny, chilled pigs who would hours later sizzle in the sun's
reverberations of the pavement during lunch. He felt as if being here without
activities of distraction he was in the thickets of life that most were
cognizant of from birth to death. Within purposelessness, disorientation, and
futility in life's wanderings his was the global experience of the majority.
After breakfast he continued to erode and blow off life's embankment but he was
sanguine for here he was once again in America, the country that made up so
many of his years. Insular capsule that it was under the current chauvinistic
and militant regime, it was more or less his land as one of its class that was
entitled to permanent residency. Still he could envision a more preferable
state. It would be a UN government of the world mandating human affairs without
any member countries having the right to veto. It would have the best hope of
bringing financial equity and justice to the world, halt excessive military
spending and wars, slow down environmental degradation, and allow for an extra
millennium of life; but such a thing did not exist. Such a thing could not be
sought by sensitive souls as a refuge for hope, optimism, and an ongoing
positive perspective of life. Here he was in the embrace of the bully, and he
told himself that here in America he would stay. But then he thought that it
really was not his country anyhow as proven by how he had been treated at the
airport. The immigration officers had put him through an inquisition suited to
potential terrorist cells all because of his tourist visas at Vientiane and
Kuala Lumpur prior to his arrival in South Korea. His treatment had not exactly
been a welcome home placard; and of course having lost his residency card, that
laminated summation of himself, had not helped.
Guillermo decided, as night approached, to take the trolley into San Ysidro to
make his exit into Tijuana. He was not about to stay in a shelter. Unlike many
Mexicans, he could reenter America another day. His was a mostly legal journey
having obtained a passport years earlier for his military service, which
enabled these sojourns. Still he did not have much money so at the tiny train
stop, feeling that his monetary worth was no different than muffin crumbs
sustaining pigeons at St. Vincent, he stared at the large ticket machine with
awe and bewilderment and then spontaneously leaped into the sudden emergence of
the trolley with the automatic opening of its doors.
The doors closed and then reopened at the next stop. He breathed out, wondering
if he should get out quickly. His ambivalent finger remained pendent over a
button that would keep the nearest door open if pressed. A man entering the
back of the car with his back shoving and parting those that clogged a door was
not a trolley cop. His leather coat was a lighter brown than trolley trolls and
his entrance came backwards. A woman entered with her face forward. The face
lacked animation apart from a visible twitching or throbbing in her left
temple. Both of them carried a stroller. Guillermo looked again. No one else
was entering from the other end of the car. He was safe.
His eyes returned to them. The black woman was pregnant and in her early
thirties. She slowly seated herself, careful not to disturb the infant that she
now had pressed against her. She did not look at it nor at the man that had
helped her raise it here. The raising of the stroller, the folding of it, and
the child himself were the only evidence of the marriage of these heavily
withdrawn strangers who were forced to sit next to each other. The man's size
13 shoe was in the aisle pointing toward two black women in the passage
interlinking an adjacent car who danced long inundating rhythms reminiscent of
tribal heritage and sang a beautiful threnody together. He thought to himself
that if all marriages were what he witnessed he was lucky that experience had
mutilated his normal proclivities. As he saw them he felt the reality of what
he construed to be their life together. His mind began to refine some
philosophy or perspective from the raw material of his feeling and his whole
body tilted in their direction when he suddenly lost what was his focus for the
doors again opened.
Have your tickets out!" the trolley troll spoke generically from another door
in the car. His words were rough. He turned his head to the right. The trolley
train troll saw a little child around the age of six putting her hands in the
greasy KFC bag and pulling out a KFC bird. He watched her eat the meat as the
trolley recording said, "I would like to remind all passengers that there is no
smoking, eating, or drinking in the trolley; and please, out of consideration
for other passengers, do not put your feet upon the seats. Thank you." For a
second it seemed that the saliva lurched around the lips of the trolley train
troll like a lasso. He snatched away the bird from the child's fingers and the
entirety of the KFC bag causing the girl to cry. Then to Guillermo he said,
"Get out your ticket!" Guillermo gave an affected display of a search. He
hesitated, contemplated his situation for some seconds, and spoke.
"Listen, I am trying to get a job in San Diego. I only have $20.00 but I didn't
deliberately set out to avoid buying a ticket. Without thinking about it I just
jumped in. Maybe subconsciously I wanted to save money but I didn't plan it
that way. You are a brother. Surely you understand desperate situations cause
desperate actions."
"I'm not your brother," spoke the trolley troll in Spanish.
"You know the language of the Mexican brothers and your skin says that you are
south of the border."
"All skin, as you put it, can be American. An American is from everywhere."
"I know English well, and I am Latino so I guess I'm American as apple pie."
"You seem to think we have it in for foreigners. You can be Mexican, American,
or Martian for what I care. When you board this trolley you have to have a
ticket."
"Do you really give citations regardless of circumstances? Why can't you just
take me out and force me to buy a ticket? Why does it have to be written down
as a fine and a court appearance if I want to contest the fine? I was seeking a
job. I could work for my family but I want a respectable job and I don't care
if it is flipping burgers or sweeping sidewalks. Okay, I did something I
shouldn't have. Have a little bit of compassion toward those in desperate
situations from a land that was once the land of your ancestors in a land, as
so much of America, that was an illegal acquisition stolen from the Mexicans."
"Quit the BS, la caca, and get out with me at the next stop. Then you buy your
ticket at the machine in front of my eyes."
"Muchas gracias," said Guillermo.
"De nada," said the trolley troll.
Guillermo put a dollar and seventy-five cents into the machine and got a sheet
of paper as long and double the width of his little finger. Both waited for
another trolley on its way from El Cajon to come down the tracks; and when it
came they entered. The trolley troll bounced his pad against his left palm.
Guillermo saw a hungry and lustful madness for giving out citations once again
seep into the eyes of the troll from within. He imagined the trolley troll
rabidly looking at all people both rich and poor and searching for individuals
who looked afraid. The trolley troll knew that being dressed in fine clothing
precluded no one. Ticketless people were often camouflaged in rich clothes.
Through a gray wall like the back of a building was this portal leading from
San Ysidro to Tijuana. Inside it was like a corridor and in this mire spray
painted in Spanish graffiti he ascended and descended on pavement wreaking of
the effluvium of evaporating urine. Then at a rotating gate Guillermo returned
to Mexico. "Downtown for three dollars. Hey amigo, wanna go downtown?" he heard
Mexican taxi drivers accost Caucasian Americans. He saw city buses in the
distance. The taxis were often crowded station wagons where people sat in what
was the trunk. He saw men balancing suitcases on their heads without the aid of
hands as they went toward the USA border. He saw a gray headed lady with a pony
tail sitting behind a table of novelties and an Anglo-Saxon Navy officer
knocking over some of the statuettes and plaques in his vehement, drunk
theatrics to get the price reduced to two dollars. "Two dollars," he said.
"Three dollar," she retorted without the "s." It was just more of the same in
this overgrown US military tavern that had sprawled into the city known as
Tijuana and it made him want to return to his hometown of Ensenada.
Sang Huin avoided the three-dollar taxi rides and walked through various
shopping plazas with their myriad pharmacies. He passed a bridge that went over
a dried up river polluted with tires and less visible debris. Then he followed
signs leading to Avenida Revolucion.
Sang Huin passed a Bankoro bank; an idle man who yelled out to him as to other
foreigners, "Taxi cab! Border line, Mister!"; mariachi singers; zebra wagons
for tourist photos; Burger King; stores with rectangular mirrors on parts of
their facades; hot dog grills part of mobile kiosks; taco restaurants; tamale
carts; corn on the cob carts—some which baked corn on charcoal and others that
steamed it; police cars and policemen; and pi-ata shops and pharmacies in
abundance. Tijuana, a sprawling 2 million with its myriad colonias, was like a
ghetto of San Diego. According to the guidebook the sooty playas (beaches) were
somewhat agreeable because of their adjacent bullfight arena and Spanish
architecture. The unbearable dust colonias (poor suburbs) with the maquiladoras
were to the south, and the central city, where Sang Huin was at, had some
museums and art galleries displaying Mexican culture and of course the American
red light district that had given birth to it all. He walked to Juarez Street.
He saw an empty lot of grass where some fruit drink vendors had been throwing
out orange peels for a long period of time. He saw mounds of dirt and trash
that were in this street.
Guillermo turned to a pay phone that was on a side street. Not finding any
coins in his pockets he pushed "O" for the operator" and made a collect call.
He placed a call to what had recently been his estranged uncle. "Uncle this is
Guillermo."
"Yes, good Guillermo. Are you here now?"
"Yes."
"It has taken you long enough."
"Yes, I guess so."
"Why did it take you so long to get back?"
"To be honest, I wanted to look one more day for work in San Ysidro or San
Diego."
"Find any?"
"No."
"Have you decided that family loyalties are a bit more important than dabbling
in petty jobs on the outside?"
"Maybe. I need a job. I need money."
"You are here but your cousin has not gotten here yet. You'll have to wait for
her."
"Oh, I thought she would be in Tijuana by now."
"She should be here soon."
"I was told to come here."
"She's a little delayed."
"Can I wait at your place? How would I get there?"
"Guillermo, it is private residence and it's a little risky for us to be that
conspicuous. It isn't easy to get to anyway and you would have difficulty
getting through the guards. I'll make sure that she comes to you when she gets
here. Do you have a hotel room?"
"A room? Well, yes I guess I should or else go back to Ensenada."
"You don't have a job in Ensenada. You need to align yourself with family. The
loyalty of family members is the greatest of Mexican virtues."
"When is she coming? I don't even know why she needs to be smuggled through the
border to begin with."
"Well, anytime. I don't know the details. I suppose it will happen when she
finishes packing. She said that sometime this week she will have the money to
buy a bus ticket. Her mother wants her to be responsible and save the little
she gets here and there."
"You have an estate and guards and she is supposed to be some type of a beggar.
I don't understand any of this. I don't know why my aunt wants her in the
states after so long. I don't understand how I'm supposed to get her over the
border. She just said, 'Do it!' and gave me some money to come here."
"Watch your mouth. Be careful what you say to everyone. No tiene sentido? Maybe
it has a sense not so obvious to you. Maybe it has sense or doesn't have sense.
You know women, Guillermo. My wife's reasoning for things is why I stay
separated from her. Maybe she's got good reason for sending her to the states.
I wouldn't know."
"I thought that she did not have a job and that this was the primary reason for
getting her to the US."
"She doesn't. She dabbles around from time to time, drinks, and runs around
with the wrong types. I don't know many of the details, Guillermo. Well, I've
got to get busy. Did you find the contact man, Ricardo, waiting for you at the
shelter?"
"I don't understand. Contact for what? If you are needing a smuggler to get her
across why isn't that done in Tijuana?"
"Enough. There is always more at work than meets the eye. You just need to get
her to Ricardo."
"A transient?"
"A transient as rich as the US Treasury."
Sang Huin's backpack felt increasingly heavy and so he obtained a motel room in
"Centro" T.J. It had a barren mattress without sheets or blankets. The window
was nailed shut and there was no ventilation outside of what came around the
cracks of the door and a draft that swept through a crack in the wall. There
was no dresser and no furniture at all beyond a wooden chair. Outside the room
at the far end of the hall were the water cooler and the shared bathroom. When
the night clerk showed him this it baffled him why, when he was not given a
key, that they needed to photocopy his passport and needed him to sign his name
in a guest book.
"No tienes un llave?" he asked the clerk; but the man just scoffed at this
Asian attempt at Spanish. "No key, hombre." Sang Huin stayed in his room for
fifteen minutes but he felt a loneliness suffocate him worse than the musty
air. He needed out; and so he picked up his bag and drifted into the night.
Instead of providing him with space and movement to shed his morbid thoughts,
the night just impaled him with a vast darkness that seemed like endless meat
hooks in the cold meat locker of the universe. A sun, he told himself, was a
temporary thing and all temporary things gave off the illusion of animation and
illumination. Only the darkness was real and he decided to lose himself within
it.
It only took an hour more and he was lost in the rains that set dry dirt roads
on hills into mud streams sweeping down into the center of the city and could
quickly cook a brain into a fever with cold inundations. The rains drenched him
and he began to cough deeply. He found the city park that earlier had couples
courting each other under the eyes of chirping and squawking birds that
fastened onto each limb as thick as leaves; but now no one was there but a man
who collected cans from the garbage. Still this Sang Huin, this Sean, strolled
around as if it were a sunny day. He examined each corner of the park as of
someone in daylight enjoying the fauna for he was hoping that some queers would
not care about the rain and like him would be obsessed with the possibility of
being impaled in promiscuous activity. An hour passed this way and yet no one
came.
Finally he managed to find his way back to his room. He lay there making a
puddle upon the mattress until what appeared to be the night manager came into
his room.
"You can speak the Spanish a little," said the man,
"Prefiero Ingles porque mi sabio de Espanol esta limitado y despues de viviendo
en Korea mis vocabulario esta una mezcla del lenguas."
"Where you from?"
It was such a simple question and yet he did not know the exact answer. "I'm
Korean but I've lived most of my life in the states."
"A gringo?"
"Mas or menos."
"Want a towel, amigo?" Sang Huin sat up in the bed and looked toward the man
that was animation and illumination in his doorway.
"How much?"
"Depends," he said. "Were you looking for Mexican pussy out there?"
"No."
"Are you a gay?"
"Yeah,"
"You suck my dick."
"Yeah, maybe."
"Towel is free, then." The man came in and closed the door. The sexual activity
was enjoyable for a while but then it changed to being impaled "bareback" from
his rear end. He did not know if it was rape. It hurt him as if it were rape,
he hated it, his attempts to extricate himself caused more resistance, and yet
he wanted it nonetheless. He had never had someone insert himself into him
before and the rhythms seemed to slap over his consciousness until somewhere
into the pain he fell asleep in it. Asleep, he dreamed that Guillermo was
stopped by the police officers at the park.
"Dinero. One hundred dollars or a night in jail."
"I'm not giving you anything," said Guillermo. "What have I done?"
"Are you stupid? You can't walk the streets with an open beer can in your
hand."
"I've seen others do it. I'm not paying."
"Suit yourself.
They put him into the car and chased other criminals throughout the night. When
they had a couple more rounded up, including Sang Huin himself, they took all
three of them to the police office for paperwork and then far away into the
dusty bluffs where there was a jail. The cells were underground and they were
wet and cold like a cellar. The bunks were just metal without any mattresses,
sheets, or blankets and the prison guards inserted sharp instruments into the
rectums of the alleged culprits.
When he woke from a coughing fit, he noticed that all of his things were gone
including the little case that had his passport and the pocket pc that
contained his novel about Gabriele. "Dear God, no!" he thought. Only bits of
previous drafts were on diskettes in Seoul. His only copy of Gabriele was in
that pocket pc. He felt as if he were living in a shadowy nightmare as sharp as
a migraine. He quickly dressed himself and went into the lobby. When he saw
that same night attendant sleeping on his chair it suddenly occurred to him
that it had not been this man who had entered his room but someone else of
similar but not identical looks. He wasn't sure who it had been—so greedy had
been his need for blind sex. He went back into his room and beat on his head in
self-flagellation. He felt lost and dizzy. He felt as a lost speck of dust
blowing about in space and time. He curled up in a fetal position on the bed
and wept. His head ached and he fell asleep once again. He dreamed that won,
pesos, and dollars were freefalling from the skies and striking animals and
humans within the rain of capitalism. Then he dreamed that he was
dematerializing from one country and materializing into another. No sooner
would he be memorizing buildings and mapping out familiarities in his mind when
he would suddenly be someplace else. People in each of these countries would
ask him who he was and where he came from. He had amnesia and could not tell
them anything and they just looked at him with deep sympathy.