In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Art of Losing
  • Yoon Choi (bio)

Watch the boy, she had said.

Or had she? Some things he knew for sure. His name was Han Mo-Sae. His wife was Han Young-Ja. They had been married forty years, possibly fifty. The wife would know. They had two children: Timothy and Christina. They would always be his children but they were no longer kids. He had to keep remembering that.

Tunes. He was good with tunes. He could retrieve from memory music he hadn't heard in decades. "The Mountain Rabbit," "Ich Liebe Dich," Aretha Franklin's "Operation Heartbreak," which he had first heard in his twenties on the Armed Forces Network in Korea. He had a good singing voice. He had been Tenor 1 in the church choir; years before that, he had led off the morning exercise song in the schoolyard. These performances had given him an appetite for praise and notice, although no one, seeing the old man he had become, would know it.

His wife had no particular distinction—had had none, even in youth. How could she? Her childhood task had been survival. She was the oldest of three sisters who were orphaned as they fled south during the Korean War. In Busan, she had worked on the rubber processing line, removing trapped air from rolled products. She told him about it years later, in another country, sitting on a weedy patch of campus lawn. Once, she had snapped a dandelion stem, allowing the milk to run. Did he know that the sap of the dandelion was a form of natural rubber? Latex? It was one of the few things he learned from her and he never forgot it. It altered in a small and precise way his notice of trivial things: the soles of his shoes, the elastic in his waistband.

They had met in Philadelphia—when was this, the 1960s?—through the area's one Korean church. He was working toward a master's in mechanical engineering; she tailored and mended for a dry cleaner. At church, he was a star. His fine singing voice, the impressive school he attended. But at the university, he was struck dumb. Every morning, he would tear out a page from his English dictionary, memorize it, and eat it. Still, the language would not take. And things grew worse. He began to dread not only the classroom, but also the grocery store, the post office, the blank pages of his dissertation.

One night, he had gone to Young-Ja's rented room. As he removed his shoes, he noticed a hole in the toe of his sock, which he made no attempt to hide. He was too good for her—that much was assumed. She made no argument for herself. She had not made herself up or even changed after work. Her hair [End Page 100] was short, like a man's. Her hands were rough. Her dark sweater showed snips of thread and lint from altering other people's clothes. In a glance, he could see the perimeters of her life: the toothbrush in a cup that she brought to the communal bathroom, the single hot plate, the twin mattress on the floor.

Yet she brought to the low table a fermented bean curd stew still bubbling in its clay pot. How had she come up with such a thing in Philadelphia? That smell. It was the bean paste. Soybeans, charcoal, and honey placed in an earthenware vessel, buried deep in the frozen ground and over the seasons grown elemental. It stank of home.

They helped themselves from the same pot, bringing the silken onion or softly crumbling potato onto their plates of rice. They dipped again and again into the pot with their spoons. And then, stinking softly of garlic, he took hold of her wrist, drawing her down as she rose to clear the table. She showed no surprise.

Afterward, she asked for his sock, to mend it. The meek look of her bent head, her fluency with the needle, his deflated sock in her hand, had caused a movement in his pride that he didn't know then—or perhaps ever...

pdf

Share