Eating Jajang

July 2019

At the age of seven, it is possible to look out at the rain and feel neither loneliness nor regret. It is possible to feel only the itch to run after a ball, simply for the sake of getting drunk on the wind, and for rain to remain a kind of weather that wets one’s socks, free from the associations one invariably learns from songs, movies, and the salt of one’s own tears.

When I was seven, my friends and I spent our afternoons playing soccer in a concrete-paved square sandwiched between our apartment buildings. The residential complex where we lived had been built two years before we were born, in 1988, to house the athletes and journalists for the Seoul Olympics. After the event, half of whose purpose was to flaunt the economic success of the U.S.-backed regime—North Korea boycotted the event, of course—the apartments were offered for public sale. With 5,539 units housed in 122 buildings, Olympic Apartments was the third largest residential complex in Seoul at its completion.

Despite their role in the Seoul Olympics, the gray, concrete buildings evoked the Brutalist architecture of the Eastern Bloc. Each building had a number written on its side, but the easier way to tell if you were in the right neighborhood was by looking at the public square around which the buildings clustered like boys around a dead bird. One had a grove of pine trees planted in its center like a Chinese ink-drawing; from one grew pink flowers that we sucked for their sweet sap. The one by my home was distinguished by its dullness. Save for the skinny trees planted in the corners, where, I confess, I often urinated, the square was empty like a Malevich painting, and this made it perfect for our purpose. Like all squares in the apartment complex, the square had an entrance on each side marked by two columns. These columns, we used as goal-posts.

A game would get started in the following way: a boy would stealthily put on his sneakers and say to his mother, “I’m going out to practice soccer” — hoping to guise the activity as an academic endeavor. If his mother was doing the dishes and could not hear him, then so be it. The escaped convict would then walk over to the next building and shout his friend’s name. A head would pop out the window, an identical exchange between a boy and his mother repeat itself inside, and the second boy come triumphantly running out the front door. Two were enough to set all future in motion. Hearing the thuds of the soccer ball, every kid within hearing distance would be dragged from his desk like Pavlov’s dog. A boy on his way home from an errand would stop in his tracks like a fly on spilt soda and, after a rash calculation between yielding himself to sin and getting spanked by his mother, toss his grocery bag on the bench by the square to join the ranks of the fallen.

Once ten boys or so had gathered, the two best players would play rock-paper-scissors to draft the teams. A final round of rock-paper-scissors determined the sides, for there was a slight incline to the square, and the game would begin. Half the game consisted in kicking the ball as hard as one could, and the ball would often get stuck under a car or bounce over the wall of a first floor unit. The bravest one of us would retrieve the ball to a round of applause from those who were afraid of heights. The game would go on.

It was during these moments that we would hear a screech of brakes, then the sputtering of a tired engine. A cheer would rise from the losing side, for here was the piece that would balance the game: Jajang.

Jajang was a delivery man for the Chinese restaurant in our neighborhood. We knew neither his age nor name, but we called him Jajang, after the name of the popular Korean-style noodle dish. He was a small, leathery-skinned man with sunken cheeks and a full head of brittle hair that was starting to gray. I forget his outfit, but remember that it hung loose on his thin frame, and I remember his black, rotting sneakers.

With a quick nod, Jajang would leap from his scooter and start playing for the losing team. His sinewy arms pushed against our cherubic bodies, and his shouting boomed over our prepubescent chatter. Looking back, I suspect that he suffered from some kind of illness, because he was soon sweating like all of us, struggling to catch his breath. We often forgot that he was an adult and scolded him for not passing the ball or failing to score. The only time we looked up him was then we’d ask him to officiate over whether the ball had crossed the goal line or not, for, unlike most of us, he was an honest judge. Then, in the midst of playing, he would look at his watch, run back to his scooter, and, despite our protests, drive off as suddenly as he had come.

We would play until dusk when our mothers leaned out of the windows and called our names. A boy pretended not to hear his mother until she would start cackling like a hen, give an ultimatum (“Your father will hear about this!”) and slam the window, at which point the boy dejectedly waved goodbye to his friends and, his feet dragging, walked back home. Though I envied those who could stay longer, only now do I realize the sorrow of the boy whose mother never called him back.

———

I prayed to see Jajang outside the door each time I ordered Chinese food, but my prayers were seldom answered. The dozen or so delivery men the restaurant employed were divided into two types. The first, more common type were high school dropouts with bleached hair who drove carelessly with one hand and kept a snooty silence when they entered your apartment. The second type were middle-aged men who used to work in construction — you could spot the severed finger or the limp if you looked carefully — who weren’t shy to compliment your mother’s looks.

Jajang belonged to neither type. In age — I would now guess he was in his early thirties — he was right between the two. All I could tell was that he was shy in presence of my mother. Without a word, he would kneel at the doorway, deftly open his aluminum crate, and take out the plastic wrapped plates. When I would hand him an orange 5000 won bill, he would pull out two blue 1000 won bills from his wad of crumpled bills, give me a knowing wink, my greatest reward, and disappear.

“Do you know that man?” My mother asked me one day, after seeing me bow to Jajang as he came in — after all, he was an adult.

“He plays soccer with us.”

“He plays soccer with you?”

“Yeah. He’s not that good though.”

“Be careful of strangers,” she said. “Even if they’re nice to you.” The biggest news of that summer of 1997 was the kidnapping and murdering of an eight year old girl. “And if anyone offers to buy you ice cream, don’t follow him.” My mother added.

Jajang had never offered to buy us anything, and in any case, I was sure that I could beat him in a fight.

We could not point to exactly when, but that fall, Jajang began to drive past us without stopping. Only on rare occasions would he play, and even then, only for a few minutes. We had many hypotheses: all variants of how we might have offended him by calling him Jajang. His tired face as he ignored our yells mirrored that of my father, who seemed to be worried about an impending doom the TV announcers kept talking about on the evening news.

The IMF Crisis, the largest financial crisis in South Korean history, would hit the nation a month later.

———

At a certain point, a child learns that his life is not meant to be lived for its own sake but as a means to an end, and it is at this moment that his life becomes unintelligible. The child moves along, taking cues from his parents and teachers, and only when he reaches their age does he realize that adults too are largely ignorant of the direction of their lives, that the procession of life is no different from the blind leading the blind, for the truth is that we walk backwards, our faces toward that glowing, growing stretch called the past.

At the end of 1998, the nation barely out of the jaws of bankruptcy, my father announced that our family was moving to the United States for two years. Though I now know the true reasons, what he told my brother and me at the time was that we were moving so that we could learn how to speak English. “You can also play soccer on grass,” he told us. “In America, there is grass everywhere.”

I arrived at a small town in Massachusetts to find out that American kids didn’t play soccer. Other than this, two facts surprised me: one, there was a dedicated period of play during school-time called “recess”, and two, American kids were terrible at math. All the kids at my new school lived far away, and in any case, in America, to play with a friend, a parent had to call the other kid’s parent to get permission: a task that was insurmountable to my mother who did not speak English. So I instead played soccer with my younger brother, posting him as a goalie against the door of our garage and banging the ball on the door until mother yelled at us.

The two years passed, and I returned to Korea, happy to find out that I had been put in the same fifth grade classroom as my friends from second grade. We were now old enough to use the dirt soccer field by our elementary school, and, to my mother’s dismay, I often returned home powdered with a thin layer of dust. The Chinese restaurant was still in business, but Jajang was nowhere to be seen. Most of the boys had already forgotten that he had existed, and I too forgot about him.

It was only a year until soccer ceased to be the center of our lives, and our futures began to diverge by minuscule angles that would forever separate us. There were boys who spent all their afternoons in PC-bangs playing Starcraft or Counter-Strike, the pranksters who shoplifted beer from the supermarket and drank it on the rooftop of the apartment buildings, their skinny legs dangling off the ledge, and finally, there were those of us who focused on school despite all temptations, driven by their mothers like horses with blinders attached to their eyes.

“You don’t want to end up like those delivery men,” my mother would say as I wolfed down my jajang noodles during the 10-minute break between my hagwon classes. “You need to study hard so you can become a doctor like your father. In this world, a single test question can make or ruin you.”

A child is aware of hierarchy—it exists even in the family—but it is years until he recognizes that hierarchy is an immutable law of nature. For the first time, I was able to suspect that the maid who cleaned our apartment twice a week did not do this out of goodwill but a relationship based on power. Friend groups at school morphed into a caste system where kids would ostracize weaker kids, most teachers condoning the fun like populist leaders. The lesson I learned from those years — and I would learn this again in the Korean military several years later — was that it was preferable to victimize than to be victimized. By the end of sixth grade, I learned to see Jajang as equivalent to that dumb, smelly kid who wore the same faded t-shirt to school because his family was too poor to buy him new clothes.

A friend’s father hanged himself before our graduation from elementary school. We entered middle school and put on our first uniform, the first in the series of uniforms, including the military uniform and the business suit, a Korean man must wear to his deathbed. Our voices deepened. Our bones thickened so that we hurt each other without meaning to. Gangster-type cliques modeled after comic-book equivalents began organizing themselves around bigger boys who grew stubbles. Soccer was seldom played outside of physical education class, and when a game was held between two classrooms, it took on a form close to warfare. We learned to swear and spit fashionably and to lower our heads when walking past upperclassmen. We acquired a whole vocabulary dedicated to a girl’s private parts.

A stray ball rolled towards me one day as I was walking home from school. I stopped the ball with my foot and passed it back to the younger kids who were playing soccer in the square. Turning away from them, I felt my first pang of nostalgia. That evening, my parents told me they were sending me to boarding school in America, “for a better opportunity”. I was thirteen.

———

Since then, I returned to Korea only during my school breaks, measuring my height against the concrete columns of the square. Most of my friends moved out of town after high school, and I lost touch with them as the years went by. My brief sojourns gave me just enough time to recollect the past but not to create memories, and I found myself in the same predicament as the distracted reader who reads the same paragraph over and over again. By my early twenties, I suffered from a condition known to all exiles: I had ceased to belong to either land.

The last time I visited home was at the end of 2018. I was now twenty-eight and married to a Korean girl I had met in medical school in America. Even after all these years, I had failed to call America home. Looking out the window of our apartment in New Haven, I often felt as if I were standing on a boat in the middle of an ocean. I dreamt about returning home someday, and although when that day would come was a mystery to me, I reserved that word for the concrete-paved stage of my childhood.

My wife and I were staying at a high-rise hotel in Gangnam. Looking out at the smog-covered metropolis, the cars crawling below like ants, I feared that I was becoming an island in and of itself.

“What are your plans today?” My wife asked as she put on make-up by the pale light of the winter morning.

“Nothing much. I might drop by home.”

“Aren’t your parents out of town today? What are you going to do for lunch?”

“I’ll figure it out.”

My parents hadn’t moved from Olympic Apartments. I surveyed the remains of my childhood from the cab with warmth in my chest. The dirt field by the elementary school was now covered with artificial grass, but I could see no children. I entered the empty apartment and sat on the couch in the living room. The chestnut trees on the street below had grown so that their tops reached our 5th floor landing. After flipping through some channels on the 60-inch TV, I picked up the phone and ordered a bowl of jajang noodles.

In ten minutes, a balding man in an orange vest was unloading a bowl of noodles at my doorstep. I carried the plates to the dining table and sat down at my usual seat. As I ate, I scanned yesterday’s newspaper on the dining table: “Fertility Rate for 2018 Expected to Fall Below 1”, “Wealth Disparity Continues to Widen”, “Youth Unemployment Sets Record”. A popular phrase in the media was “Hell-Chosun”, referring to the Kafkaesque hell young Korean adults found themselves in. It was not uncommon for a college graduate to spend several years applying for his first job. A column in the newspaper warned that South Korea was heading toward a second IMF Crisis.

I finished my jajang noodles and went for a walk. Two elderly men were loading their golf bags into a Mercedes. The price of the apartments had risen so much that no young couple could move into the neighborhood. Mother said that the number of classrooms at the elementary school had halved since my days. I stopped at the entrance of the square. The columns still stood, unscathed by time. The trees at the corners had grown to twice their height, fertilized by a generation of boys’ urine, the nitrogen once part of our muscles now part of the trunk somewhere, or in one of those branches.

Where had we scattered? Friendships cannot last because all relationships are unequal. Living in America had taught me this well – for to live in America is to implicitly sanction its racism, to be constantly playing in real life the internet game Fishy where you preyed on smaller fish until you were the biggest and could not be killed. Though I often felt disgusted by the food-chain that is life, I had never crossed the threshold of rebellion. That horizon always receded to tomorrow.

I entered the square. The soles of my shoes scraped against the same earth that had drawn blood from my knees and fed on my sweat, and I felt a long forgotten itch to run after a ball, for no purpose other than to feel free. For the first time in years, I remembered Jajang, his black, rotting sneakers, the puttering of his beat-up scooter. What was he thinking? Perhaps we had been his only ally in a world where all were predator or prey, though we would too grow up to eat or be eaten.

The difference that separated the two fates was not so great. Mother was right, a single test question could make or ruin you in this world. What was Jajang doing now? Was he alive? I stopped in the middle of the empty square, and it was then that I tasted his blood between my teeth.