YOON SHIK thought the sun shone brighter in Los Angeles than Korea. America gave him what became a perpetual squint, which exaggerated what westerners would consider beady eyes and encouraged his preference for working at night. Yoon Shik rarely basked under the broad blue California sky, or took his family to the shimmering beaches that served year-round as magnets for families on the West Coast. Since Yoon Shik was a night person he found employment working the graveyard shift, as a clerk in a small downtown convenience store a few blocks from the cramped one-bedroom Chinatown apartment he considered spacious enough for his wife and son. Before heading off to work each evening, he’d mutter a Latin phrase – ‘nova initia’ – he’d picked up in his classes on western literature during his university days. It meant ‘new beginning’. ‘Nova initia’ was what he’d tell himself as he sold liquor and snacks to poor blacks. His wife, Kyung Ah, worked for tips at a sushi restaurant. They set aside at the end of each week as much cash as could be spared for a down payment on their own little grocery. ‘Nova initia,’ he said each time he was screamed at by drunks a nickel or dime short of the price of a bottle of malt liquor, or mocked and taunted by arrogant, foul-mouthed youths twice his size, or as he listened to his tearful wife after sake-soaked Japanese suits and red-faced whites groped her as they held the tip money just out of reach. Nova initia. A thousand times ‘nova initia’ and thousands more until a bank could be persuaded to finance a store in South Central Los Angeles so they could properly begin their new beginning.

 

*   *   *

 

David had forgotten more than he remembered of his early childhood in Korea, which by his father’s telling was spent at a big fold-out table in a small apartment hunched over children’s books. David also had beady eyes, though not nearly as pronounced as his father’s. Yoon Shik readily praised his son’s academic achievements to anyone who would listen but was scornful of his son’s other interests, except when he noticed a skateboard left provocatively by the front door. He mostly forbade time-wasting activities that detracted from study or proper work. If the boy had time to spare, it should be put to good use in the shop, but Yoon Shik let the skateboard go, because he could not control his son twenty-four hours a day, and had to make a few concessions. Yoon Shik was disappointed that David was less and less able to answer the simplest questions in Korean, but learned to accept that this was not unusual in a country where only English mattered. In 1992, his son was accepted into Berkeley, the store was thriving, and Yoon Shik moved his family to a three-bedroom house in Fullerton. Nova initia.

 

*   *   *

 

David once calculated for his father that Kwangju was five thousand, nine hundred and fifty miles from Los Angeles and, if he could somehow walk across the Pacific Ocean, he could get there on foot in about a year. Yoon Shik couldn’t see the point of knowing such a thing. Why would anyone want to go back to Kwangju?

     In 1980, when Yoon Shik was a young father, he sold rice cakes in hot sauce from a street stand in a public square near the main gate of the Chonnam National University campus, where he studied part time; he wanted to become a high school teacher, or even a university instructor. His father was a barely literate farmer, as had been his father, and his father’s father. Yoon Shik was encouraged by his mother to believe that he needn’t live his father’s life knee-deep in mud and hostage to the rains. After Yoon Shik’s compulsory military service, she urged him not to return to the farm but to apply to the university. She had saved some money for him, and she would send him her prayers. The newly married Yoon Shik, his young wife already pregnant, promised he would graduate so that her grandson – he was sure it would be a boy – would have a new beginning. He worked hard in his classes and in the evenings extracted small change from the pockets of younger, richer, lighter-skinned students with his rice cakes. They called him ‘country trash’ when they thought they were far enough from his stand, but dug into the pockets of their American jeans to buy from him all the same. Yoon Shik, after a boyhood working in the paddies, was a compact bundle of leathery skin and wiry muscles; he could not hide his peasant heritage, but did not envy their smog-choked city of sullen concrete apartment complexes and wooden shanties. And not all of them put on airs of superiority. At the end of each night Yoon Shik would pack up his cart and count his takings into numerous small piles, trying each time to set some aside against the future.

     Yoon Shik knew the moods of the square and could sense the nights when business would be brisk, others when a book would be needed to while away the time. It was spring – demonstration season in Korea. On campus, there were rumblings of discontent. General Chun Doo-hwan had led the armed forces in a coup against the government, installing himself as president and imposing martial law throughout the country. Soldiers no older than Yoon Shik had been during his compulsory service could be seen in nervous and uncertain squads on the street corners of Kwangju. General Chun’s main concern was crushing dissent in Seoul. Kwangju would come later, Yoon Shik and everyone else knew, as they watched strident young men and women frequently gather in the square handing out leaflets that said ‘down with the dictatorship’ and ‘america supports a korean tyrant, not the korean people’.

     It was in Kwangju, almost fifty years earlier, that students began a nationwide uprising against the Japanese colonisers, so there was something inevitable about the events of that balmy spring when hundreds of young men and women in uniform button-downed white shirts poured into the square chanting anti-government and anti-American slogans. Yoon Shik had set up his stand on the edge of the square and watched as a mousey undergraduate he recognised as Oh from his English class took an American flag, doused it with kerosene, and set it alight. Yoon Shik was surprised; in class, he seemed docile and attentive and the last person he would think of as being a radical. He looked up at the decrepit multi-storey concrete buildings that lined the square and saw many faces watching, cameras too. On the streets, he saw men in blue uniforms with more cameras clicking away. The demonstration was noisy, punctuated by angry speeches and chanted slogans, and then slowly petered out. Yoon Shik saw Oh coming towards his stand as the students dispersed. Yoon Shik pulled his weathered cap down to his eyes and pretended not to notice Oh until he was in front of his stand.

     ‘Rice cakes?’ he asked.

     Oh handed him a pamphlet that said, ‘american imperialists: do koreans not deserve american democracy?’ The men in blue uniforms were now roaming the square, questioning the remnants of the demonstration, examining identity cards and writing down names.

     ‘I don’t want trouble,’ he said, handing back the pamphlet.

     ‘Elder Brother, don’t be afraid,’ Oh said. ‘You are poor, just like all but a few in our country.’

     ‘I’m not a radical.’

     Yoon Shik concerned himself as little as possible with politics. People who spoke too loudly tended to disappear. He asked his father once about the war that divided Korea into south and north. ‘Communists. Capitalists. Whoever feeds me is the team I’ll cheer.’ And he pointedly discouraged Yoon Shik from further questions.

     ‘Join us,’ Oh said. ‘We’re not scared.’

     Yoon Shik was scared for his wife and young son, and vigorously shook his head.

     ‘Americans can say what they want without fear; why can’t we?’

     ‘That’s nice for them. Do you want rice cakes?’

     ‘Americans are not persecuted by a dictator. We are. They give us their Coca-Cola, but not their freedom.’

     ‘If you don’t want rice cakes, please go away,’ Yoon Shik said, but Oh did not move. Yoon Shik snapped. ‘Get away from here. Maybe you want to die, but I don’t.’

     Over the next few days, the university closed by the military regime, Yoon Shik watched from his stand as the demonstrations grew larger and bolder, thousands of skinny boys and girls shouting for democracy, believing themselves united and powerful. Oh burned an American flag during each demonstration. When the police fired tear gas into the crowd, Yoon Shik closed his stand and spent the rest of the day lying on a mat with a wetted cloth over his eyes.

     As Kyung Ah knelt by his side and bathed his scorched eyes, she said, ‘They’re gonna get us all killed. The army will come and that will be the end of us all.’

     Yoon Shik heard from the older merchants at the cart garage that troops were massing outside the city. They agreed on the need for caution. When crowds of students began spilling from the square and into the surrounding streets, the situation became impossible. Kyung Ah pleaded with Yoon Shik to stay indoors, so they got supplies for their four-year-old boy and took refuge in their tiny one-room apartment, buried inside a filthy grey tower block only the poor would live in, and waited. Neighbours would gather and report what they had seen outside. Thousands of students had taken over the streets near the square and were planning on fighting the army with Molotov cocktails, a few carbines stolen from the police armoury, and stones.

     On the night of May 17, the shooting began in terrifying staccato; Yoon Shik recognised the distinctive sound of military issue M4s. His transistor radio played only happy Korean tunes set to western dance beats, while his black-and-white television with rabbit-ear antennas reported Korea’s economic progress. A neighbour who drove a cabbage truck around the city, the only man Yoon Shik knew brave enough to venture outside after the shooting started, came crying down the hallway during the night. He said that the army had come with tanks and jeeps, and killed so many that the square was covered with corpses.

     A few days later, afraid of the army, but out of cash and his son wailing with hunger, Yoon Shik ventured out to the square again with his rice cake stand and took his old spot. Other sellers were there, too, and the square was busy as always. It was as if the past week had been just a bad dream. After a few hours he had replenished his cash reserves and the day was looking profitable. The cabbage-truck driver must have been mistaken.

     He didn’t see the several men, peasants judging by their dark skin, in blue uniforms until they were almost upon him, one of them screaming in a thick country accent, ‘We know you’re friends with that Oh! We saw you talking to him!’

     Veins bulging from their foreheads, they pulled him into an alley and beat him with batons. ‘Where is Oh?’ they demanded.

     ‘I … don’t … know,’ he grunted as the batons thudded into his body. ‘I barely … know him.’

     They left him there in the alley, head bleeding, eyes swollen shut, rasping for breath. ‘He knows nothing,’ said their leader, as he released his grasp on Yoon Shik’s hair and spat in his face, his head hitting the pavement with a dull crack. They turned over Yoon Shik’s stand, and kicked and stomped its aluminium frame until it was mangled and useless. Then, they returned and pulled Yoon Shik to his knees, making him swear he would never support the students, and leaving him to crawl home, startled pedestrians stepping carefully around him. No one stopped to help him to his feet.

     Kyung Ah went to work with bandages, acupuncture needles and candles, beseeching, ‘What will we do? What will we do?’

     Over the next days, Yoon Shik decided on a simple plan. They would leave, go to America, raise their son somewhere safe, somewhere that he might have a future. Americans gorged on beef and lived free while Koreans like him were beaten and killed by a dictator armed with American weapons and made powerful by American money. America owed his family. If Koreans could not have justice, Yoon Shik was determined to put his family on the better side of injustice.

 

*   *   *

 

‘We don’t know anything, either,’ Yoon Shik shouted desperately into his kitchen phone, as he tried to reach anyone who might have an answer. All he had were rumours – the blacks were on the rampage, and they were burning the Korean businesses. ‘But why us? It makes no sense,’ he said to Kyung Ah, who was glued to the twenty-seven-inch colour TV in their living room for the latest news. The top story that spring evening was the acquittal of white cops over the video-taped beating of a young black man named King. That saga seemed to have nothing to do with Koreans, but that night, dozens of Koreans kept ringing Yoon Shik’s Fullerton home, saying they heard that angry black mobs were attacking Koreatown.

     Kyung Ah screamed when the TV screen showed a helicopter view of the block of old strip malls and cramped store-fronts where their little shop was located. Orange flames jutted out of just about every window with a Korean sign.

     Yoon Shik could smell smoke as he drove to his shop that night despite Kyung Ah’s pleas, refusing to stay shuttered in his home, as he had in Kwangju, while his livelihood was under attack.

     When he reached his store, he saw several Korean men huddled behind old sedans parked bumper-to-bumper in the middle of the road to barricade their little block from black youths roaming the streets. The Koreans held pistols in their hands, though behind them was nothing but charred, bombed-out remnants of a thriving merchant avenue. Yoon Shik ran to his store and was chilled by the sight of shattered windows and cinder-block walls blackened by smoke. With the power out, he carefully stepped in between broken glass shards in the dark and saw only trash scattered across the tile floor. Everything of value, including the cash register, was gone.

     Though heavily armed, the Koreans had arrived too late to stop the blacks who had gutted and burned store after store in the initial few hours of the riots. The Koreans held their line now, firing warning shots into the air, as armed young black men packed into cars drove near the makeshift barricade, testing the Koreans’ willingness to shoot. There were no police, and would not be until the next day.

     Yoon Shik was the only one who was unarmed. He was the only Korean business owner in that neighbourhood who had refused to buy a gun. A Christian, he hated firearms.

     ‘What did we do to you, you animals?’ he screamed out at the dark faces with eyes squinted in mockery of him. When he found Jesus, he swore he would never resort to violence, as it was the most damnable of sins, except to defend his family. But he was angry enough at that moment to rescind his promise to God, if he only had a gun in his hand.

     The Los Angeles riots of April 1992, called ‘Sa-I-Gu’ by Koreans, destroyed everything Yoon Shik had worked – sixteen hours a day, seven days a week – to build for his family in America. There was nothing to take stock of in the aftermath.

 

*   *   *

 

David’s mother and father were evangelicals, fanatics if David thought about it from the perspective of his middle-class agnostically ambivalent white friends, but about average by Korean standards. Yoon Shik and Kyung Ah were converts from the day Korean neighbours invited them to a tiny church run out of an abandoned warehouse shortly after they first immigrated in the early 1980s. It was perfect timing; they were thrilled by the chance to wash away the past and start life anew in God’s eyes. Kyung Ah went to the church in Buena Park every morning to pray before opening the grocery. Yoon Shik consulted the minister before making any major decisions, and was scrupulous and generous with his tithes, giving ten per cent of the gross profit, rather than the net. David, however, stepped inside the church only after he had exhausted all avenues of resistance.

     Yoon Shik took his family to church the Sunday after the riots. The minister hurt David’s ears as he bellowed in thundering Korean how so many in the pews that day had survived torture, war and hunger and would survive this tribulation, too. David saw his father cry for the first time. They weren’t angry tears, which David might have expected, but mournful, as if no suffering on earth could be compared with that of this moment.

     Yoon Shik had time on his hands, there being no store to open early each morning and close late each night. He would meet with other church members and they would share stories of their desperation. David came home from school and found on his bed a note in Yoon Shik’s hand: ‘John 15:18. Remember if the world hates you, that it has hated me before it hated you.’

     Yoon Shik and Kyung Ah were among the few to have insurance, not enough to make up for everything lost, but sufficient to save them from destitution. They could, with more hard work, start again. After much equivocation and religious consultation, they decided that a fresh start was to be made in New Jersey, where Yoon Shik’s sister lived. They could find a vacant space for a convenience store somewhere in New York City. David would be leaving for Berkeley in a month or so and starting his own future; for Yoon Shik and Kyung Ah, Los Angeles was now nothing more than a city of poisoned hopes.

 

*   *   *

 

‘We’re moving east,’ David said, pushing his skateboard back and forth with a dirty-sneakered foot and pulling a crumpled pack of Camel Lights from the back pocket of his cargo pants. His sweat-soaked black T-shirt clung to his narrow chest, accentuating his wiry build. Jenny, his girlfriend for the past year, took the lit cigarette from his mouth and started smoking it.

     ‘Why?’ she said with that nasal whine David found annoying but knew better than to try to correct. ‘You can’t find a new place here?’

     The day was scorching, so they ambled over to a solitary tree outside the apartment complex were Jenny lived with her single mom on the edge of the nicer side of Buena Park. Jenny, who was shorter than David and had bulbous breasts, hung out with the Korean and white skaters who acted cool but weren’t tough enough to be jocks. David had never told his parents about Jenny. ‘Just friends from school,’ he said when they asked where he was going, which he knew would be enough because they were too busy to find out more. Jenny, father unknown, curvaceous and Caucasian, opinionated and prone to run off at the mouth, was everything a Korean parent would hate. David liked her enough that he wanted to keep seeing her after he went off to school. The guys laughed at him for being ‘romantic’ and said it would never happen, that he’d be chasing Asian twigs by his third week.

     ‘They don’t want to start over again here, not after what happened,’ David said. ‘My dad thinks it’s time to start fresh. He keeps going on about this Latin thing – nova … something – about “beginnings”.’ David made finger quotes in the air. ‘I can’t believe this stupid shit is gonna make us leave.’

     ‘I’m sorry, David. Shit is stupid. They attacked Koreans when Koreans didn’t even do anything.’

     David pulled up the front of his T-shirt and mopped at his face. ‘You hear the Koreans marched down Wilshire?’

     ‘Yeah, I saw on TV. They held up signs that said “We Want Peace”,’ she said.

     ‘The signs shoulda said “Fuck You All!”.’

     ‘My mom was watching the news report with me. She was like, “Which one of them is your boyfriend?’’’

     David didn’t laugh. For the first time in his life, he felt under attack for what he was, rather than for something he’d done. Working hard to build a life seemed rather pointless when some worthless morons would tear it down just because he was Korean. ‘Time’s gonna come when someone needs something from us, and we should just say, “Fuck yourself. Where were you after the riots?’’’

     Jenny’s eyes widened. ‘Never seen you so angry. You’re all Korean-pride all of a sudden, like the FOB kids.’ David had never really thought of himself as ‘Korean’, like the ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ immigrants who hung out in tight circles at lunchtime, imitating effeminate Korean boy bands, instead of football players or American rock stars. After the riots, he’d been thinking about whether the term ‘Korean-American’ applied to him and if that meant he was an outsider in two worlds, looking like he belonged in one, but feeling more attuned with the other. David couldn’t speak Korean, like the FOB kids, and never saw the need to learn. He could barely understand his parents when they shouted Korean at him in anger or whispered it when discussing secrets they didn’t want him to hear. Only when Koreatown burned down did David realise that he shared one critical trait with all Koreans, he was looked down on.

     David spat without much effect because his mouth was dry and said, ‘Everything fucking sucks.’

     She put her little hand on his shoulder. ‘Come on. Not all of it sucks. You’re going to college. I’m staying here.’

     He threw his cigarette as far as he could. ‘I saw him cry.’

     ‘Who?’

     ‘My dad. It was in church. Never saw that before. Gonna make sure I never see that again.’

     Jenny put her arm around David’s thin waist, but he just stared out at nothing, trying to make himself numb, trying to shut down his brain.

     David called Jenny sometimes from Berkeley, usually when he was drunk, never making much sense, until she ended it, saying she wasn’t some long-distance phone sex service. His parents would ring every Sunday to remind him to go to church, which he never did, and he stopped answering the phone before noon, too hung-over to move.

 

*   *   *

 

Yoon Shik held the grand opening of the New Park One-Stop Store in New York in late August of 1992. David was at school then, but he was in New York during his Christmas vacation, which was anything but a break; Yoon Shik treated him like returned chattel. Helping out with the family business had always been a part of David’s life, though he loathed it so much he’d force himself to study, join clubs, take on extra-credit projects or even do volunteer work at the hospital to stay out of the shop. Avoiding the store got him into Berkeley, but now that he was there, he had no excuse not to help out during his vacations. He was given the choice of taking his mother’s place from five in the evening until eleven-thirty at night, when the store closed, or getting up early to open the store at seven and work through with his mother until half-past one. David rarely saw noon at the best of times, so he took the nightshift. It would be good, he reasoned, to give his mom a break.

     David had never been to the real New York City before he boarded the four-twenty bus out of Edgewater to the Port Authority Terminal carrying a bag with two Tupperware containers of kim-bop for dinner. From the bus window, it looked overwhelming, but emerging from the bus station, he was at a loss to find the scantest redeeming feature. What he saw was squalor; twenty-five-cent peep shows, hookers, kung-fu shops, the homeless, drunks, druggies and pushers, all in the same Polaroid snapshot. He did the two-block walk to the convenience store at a brisk step. Night shift in Hell’s Kitchen was a mistake.

     Normal people with normal clothes, normal jobs and normal lives were leaving as fast as they could as David arrived for work.

     The store was about the size of a classroom and along its three aisles could be found everything a New Yorker might need, from toilet paper to breath mints. The refrigerators along the back wall held six-packs of beer, a varicoloured range of sodas, juice and milk. Behind the counter, where David and his father stood side-by-side at the cash registers, were the easiest and most sought-after targets – the bottles of liquor, painkillers, condoms, and tabloid newspapers, one reporting the skyrocketing crime rate under the inky banner ‘Big Apple Is Rotting’ on David’s first day.

     By Christmas Eve, David knew that in Hell’s Kitchen he should expect to face a long line of misfits. He arrived for work in his good black trench coat, a baby-blue button-down shirt and khakis. After they closed, he would go with Yoon Shik to pick up his mom and head to midnight service at the Korean church in Leonia. They could easily have closed early, but that was not his father’s way of doing business, even if they only had just a trickle of Manhattan holiday orphans as customers that night.

     At about half past eight, a young, overweight blond man in a navy Armani suit walked up carrying a six-pack of Guinness. David guessed the man was a banker, maybe a lawyer. He held a brown paper package under his arm, so David guessed he was on his way home, stopping first at one of the nearby Pakistani-owned porn shops before stocking up on alcohol. David presumed he would take off the expensive suit, no doubt acquired after he received a substantial Christmas bonus that justified his sorry existence, before seeking holiday cheer from two paper bags; the ghost of Christmas future for half the kids in David’s classes at Berkeley. David smiled as he thought Merry Christmas, dipshit before saying, ‘That’ll be eight-ninety-nine, please.’

     A heavy-set, olive-skinned woman, so obviously a prostitute that she might as well have had a placard around her neck, planted a tub of skin lotion on the counter. The cheetah-patterned fake-fur coat and platinum wig were a nice touch, he thought. She had probably done her share of porn movies, though not the high-end ones with the taut and surgically enhanced bodies like the ones the last guy would get off on. No, she belonged in the low-budget ones, the girls sallow, spiritually drained, and doomed at the start for the clearance bin, four for twenty dollars. And you charge how much? And for what? A body that wouldn’t place in a prison beauty pageant?

     ‘Thank you. Come again,’ he said.

     ‘Good night, sweetie,’ she said with a wink.

     Shortly after nine he told his father he was taking a break. Yoon Shik grunted his assent. Down Eighth Avenue, he passed a string of porn shops, a small cadre of low-tier pimps and hookers, and vacant storefronts, until he hit Chelsea and a fanciful row of glowing bars and restaurants. He kept walking. David would need a flashier fashion sense and a taste for older white men harbouring house-boy fantasies to drink there.

     He found his place a few minutes further south, a dingy underground cave of a bar that looked like a hangout for dissolute middle-aged loners. David was only seventeen, but drinking was, in his freshman year, already part of his daily routine. When he drank, he was not haunted by the feelings the riots had triggered in him, fear for his parents’ livelihood and the brutal awareness of how different he seemed wherever he went.

     The bouncer ignored him. Inside was a scene of grim holiday reverie. David had to force his way through to the bar, where he ordered six shots of tequila; he pocketed his change and downed them one after the other. ‘Keep that up,’ the bartender smirked, ‘and you won’t live long enough to get chest hair.’

     ‘Are you drunk?’ Yoon Shik spat as he watched David return somewhat awkwardly to his register.

     ‘No! … I just had a couple of drinks to relax.’

     ‘David, I drank in college too, but I didn’t need to do it every day. Sit down over there and eat something.’ His father pointed him toward the small table at the entrance to the stock room. Kim-bop. Fourth night in a row. Yoon Shik was now silent, the way he got whenever David disappointed him.

     David watched a diminutive, elderly woman tiptoe her way to the medicine section. She came to the store almost every night. She wore bright suits that were probably fashionable decades ago when somebody might have noticed her. She had that petulant, crazed look that abandoned old women seemed to get in New York. David had learned she was a complainer and she would find some excuse to try to humiliate whoever was at the register. ‘Well, just don’t come back if you hate us,’ his dad would say in a restrained voice. And the next night she’d be back.

     ‘This isn’t supposed to cost so much,’ she squawked, waving a bottle of flu medicine. ‘That’s just stealing. That’s all you people know how to do is steal. It’s disgusting.’

     David felt for his father and stared daggers at the woman. Worthless old cunt. So you’re all alone on Christmas Eve. Not even a cat to keep you company. Why do you even bother with the pills? Take the whole damn bottle, and here’s another on the house, just to make sure. Like anyone gives a rat’s ass.

     The old woman was staring at him. She looked shrunken and aghast. Oh God, David thought, I said all that out loud.

     ‘What’s the matter? Am I talking too fast for your fucking hearing aid?’ said David, figuring he might as well finish what he’d started. ‘What part of “worthless old cunt” don’t you understand? Now get the fuck out of here.’

     The woman left, muttering something about the Better Business Bureau. David tried to steady his breathing. Yoon Shik was watching him.

     ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ he said quietly. ‘She was just an old lady.’

     ‘A mean old lady,’ David shot back.

     ‘I know she’s not nice, but she’s a good customer. She spends a lot of money here. It’s bad business to chase her away.’

     ‘It’s not that bad for business. She’s gonna die soon enough.’

     ‘David! You are really becoming terrible. You didn’t used to be like this.’ Yoon Shik was glowering at him now. ‘You used to go to church,’ he said, and refused to speak another word to him.

 

*   *   *

 

Yoon Shik’s move to New York meant another life change, another nova initia to be endured. It took a week or so to fit out and stock the store he had found; its location convenient for the Port Authority bus terminal and ripe with potential. He had heard about Hell’s Kitchen, but put much of what he’d been told down to local lore. Nonetheless, once the store was ready, he bought a handgun, a nine-millimetre Beretta 92F – like the one he had learned to use in the army – and taped it under the counter between the two registers. Yoon Shik prayed that he would never have to take a life, but New York was still strange to him and he had Kyung Ah’s safety to think about. He regularly cleaned and checked the weapon as he’d been taught, telling himself that he would only use it out of necessity, never in anger. Anger turned God’s blessings into poison.

 

*   *   *

 

Brooklyn was just two bus rides from New Jersey, but David rarely visited, not wanting to hear stories about the grown children of his parents’ Korean friends, who were all well-salaried professionals on their way to becoming cloying happy endings to immigrant fairy tales. After college, David had moved nine times in New York, forced out by the rising yuppie tide that, never with any warning, would reach his street and send the rent far beyond his meagre wage. Most years, he had struggled to stay sober and out of debt. David, now thirty-four, lived in an apartment share in a Vietnamese neighbourhood in Brooklyn, as far from the gentrification as he could get while still considering himself a New Yorker. He worked as an English teacher to immigrant kids, trying to gain respectability after years spent in a hand-to-mouth alcohol haze. He had been on a true downward spiral, as drinking helped him to forget who he’d become, but prevented him from becoming anything else.

     He had gone nowhere near his father’s store on Eighth Avenue between Thirty-Eighth and Thirty-Ninth in seventeen years, but his mother had told him it was closing for good and he felt he should see it one last time. He left a dive bar near Murray Hill a little past midnight, figuring the shop would be shut by the time he got there.

     David had heard that the neighbourhood had boomed in the late 1990s, but he was still stunned by its transformation. Crowds of white twenty-somethings minted from the best universities and dressed by glistening fashion magazines stumbled home from bar-hopping. Gone were the brown and yellow immigrants who had kept the neighbourhood going when none but the most hardened would venture there.

     The store lights were still on, the interior stark and empty save for bare splintering shelves. His father was there, emptying the contents of a closet at the back into a large cardboard box.

     ‘David, what are you doing here?’ Yoon Shik asked.

     ‘Mom told me you closed the store,’ David said.

     ‘The Italian is throwing me out. He wants another bar for rich white kids and won’t renew the lease.’ Ethnicity was always a factor whenever Yoon Shik felt wronged. David could hear only a trace of defiance in his father’s words, as if that was all he could muster. Though only in his fifties, Yoon Shik looked old.

     David took the cardboard box and walked with his father to an aged Buick parked around the corner on Thirty-Ninth Street. He looked inside the box through its unsecured top: a green toolbox, an old paper-roll calculator, some odds and ends, and the Beretta, worn with polishing, almost antique. David felt his father’s eyes on him and looked up.

 

*   *   *

 

After David’s tirade against the old lady, Yoon Shik cold-shouldered him for much of Christmas Eve. David resisted his growing need to ‘take a break’. At closing time, one unkempt red-headed customer was loitering in the back by the beer, as if unable to process the simple enough task of selecting the cheapest brand on the shelf. David watched him through the convex mirror that covered the register’s blind spot. The man was drug-addict skinny and wore a green winter coat that looked like it had been ravaged by piranhas. Hurry up, Wastoid, it’s not that hard. It’s the one with the littlest number at the start. Remember numbers? One, two, three, four …

     ‘You remember a man named Mr Oh from LA?’ his father asked. Yoon Shik was ready to be conciliatory. ‘He used to stop by our store sometimes?’ David nodded; a portly man, bald, thick glasses, looked like an Asian Mister Magoo. He owned a big house David remembered visiting as a little kid. Yoon Shik said, ‘He used to burn the American flag during protests in Korea.’

     ‘No! Really?’ David shook his head, his residual anger at his father evaporating with the revelation. Mr Oh? Overworked, passionless Mr Oh? A radical?

     ‘He burned many American flags. He was a student activist. He tried to get me to join the cause.’

     David remembered his father’s story about Kwangju. ‘Is he the reason they beat you? Why you came to America?’

     ‘It wasn’t Mr Oh’s fault. They just saw me with him and that was enough. But isn’t it funny that he came to America after burning American flags? He really hated the Americans. He blamed them for everything. I never told you that part.’

     David again shook his head.

     ‘Things got really complicated for him after school. No one would give him a job. He was starving. Then he found God, and came to America and got rich selling beauty products to Mexicans. I joked to him, “You, who burned the American flag, now fly one over your mansion”.’ Yoon Shik laughed quietly at his own joke.

     His father continued, ‘Mr Oh called me yesterday, to see how we were doing on the East Coast. I told him we were barely surviving, and you know what he told me?’

     ‘No,’ David said, half-listening, watching Wastoid at the back of the shop.

     ‘Oh said, “You’re the rich one. You have a good son.” His son’s been in trouble, no college, jail, drugs …’

     David’s suspicion grew as Wastoid continued to loiter. He looked like he was in a very heated argument with himself.

     ‘What I am trying to tell you, son, is someday, bad things will happen to you, too. But there’s always hope. I lost everything, but I still have you. Mr Oh is rich, but he envies me. I can’t stay angry if I know I have you.’

     David was uncomfortable with emotional interactions involving his father and didn’t even turn to acknowledge his words. Wastoid was pacing back and forth in front of the bank of refrigerators, muttering, and wringing his hands in their tattered black gloves. David stepped out from behind the counter and walked towards the back of the store.

     ‘We’re closing now. Could you please buy something or leave?’ he demanded.

     Wastoid turned sharply and met him with an impish face, greyish eyes and a belligerent manner. He was very skinny. David felt no physical threat.

     ‘I’ll leave when I’m ready.’

     ‘You have two more minutes,’ David replied pointing to his watch. Junkie trash, he thought, as he turned away. At least he didn’t smell nearly as bad as he looked, and he looked like a total failure, which, if you’re white, male, and bodily able is about as bad as it gets, as there’s no one to blame except yourself.

     ‘Turn around, asshole.’

     David stopped walking and turned. Wastoid held a Saturday Night Special, more likely to blow his hand off than hurt anyone else, but a threat not to be ignored, particularly when pointed directly between one’s eyes.

     ‘Get back to the counter. Walk backwards, real slow.’ Wastoid could see Yoon Shik now in the convex mirror. ‘And don’t you try anything either,’ he shouted, ‘or the boy’s dead.’

     Yoon Shik made no overt movement, his hand already on the pistol under the counter. His thumb flipped off the safety catch.

     ‘Show me both hands,’ he ordered Yoon Shik, who raised his hands to shoulder height. To David, breathing directly into his face, Wastoid said, ‘You think you’re better than me, you smug piece of slit-eyed shit? What do you think now?’ His gloved thumb cocked the hammer and David saw the bullets rotate by one chamber.

     ‘He doesn’t think he’s better than you,’ Yoon Shik said gently, trying to calm things down. ‘Tell him, David. Tell him you don’t think you’re better than him.’

     David said nothing, just kept stepping backward, trying not to slip or make any sudden movements as he inched towards his father.

     ‘Yeah, that’s right. Listen to him. Tell me I’m better,’ the junkie said.

     ‘Please, don’t shoot him,’ his father said. ‘Please, I will give you everything. Please, he is my only son.’

     ‘Say it, you piece of shit. Say I’m better.’ Wastoid made a move to hit David with the pistol, but instead he clipped the edge of a display stand of fifty-cent Lay’s potato chips with his hip. The chips cascaded to the floor. The metal frame of the stand entangled his legs as he tried to jerk clear of the falling chips, causing Wastoid to fall flat on his face. His Saturday Night Special skittered across the tile floor and stopped at David’s feet. He caught a glimpse of his father yanking the Beretta from under the counter, and taking a double-handed bead on Wastoid before pulling the trigger. One, two, three, four casings pinged off the floor. Yoon Shik came out from behind the counter, pointed the pistol at the writhing bloody body on the ground and fired twice more. Wastoid lay still. Yoon Shik expertly cleared the final four rounds into his hand and put the bullets and the gun on the countertop.

     David’s ears rang from the explosions of gunpowder, and the air stank with the acrid smell. Yoon Shik appeared calm. ‘Enough,’ David thought he heard his father say in Korean. ‘Enough.’ And then he turned and reached for the phone.

     ‘Dad, what are you doing?’

     ‘Calling nine-one-one.’

     ‘No. Stop. Wait.’

     David took the phone from his hand. He imagined Yoon Shik in an American prison. A convicted murderer. Those last two bullets had surely sealed his fate.

     ‘He tripped,’ David said slowly. ‘But he still had the gun. He got up, pointed it at me, said he would kill me. You shot him. He wasn’t dead, still pointing the gun at me like he was gonna shoot. You shot him again. Got it? He still had the gun the whole time. You had to kill him.’

 

*   *   *

 

When David was twelve, he found some old photo albums in a closet in the master bedroom. At the bottom of the stack of memories was one that creaked when opened. Inside were pictures of young men, boys really, one of them his father, the others his army buddies. His father looked good in his uniform. David thought he, too, would join the army someday. Near the back of the album was a loose, yellowing picture of three skinny men in light-coloured uniforms, not the dark ones his father and his buddies wore in the other photos, lying on the ground. Their eyes were wide open, but David could tell they weren’t looking at anything.

     He took the album into the family room where his father was watching Sunday afternoon golf. Yoon Shik was surprised by what was in his son’s hands. David held up the photograph. After a short pause, Yoon Shik told David that those were North Korean troops. They were trying to cross the border into South Korea. ‘They were our enemy then.’

     ‘Did you shoot them?’ David asked.

     ‘Put that back where you found it,’ his father said.

     David tried again. ‘Did you shoot them?’

     Kyung Ah entered from the kitchen, saw David holding the album, and shrieked as if an intruder had entered the house. ‘Why are you showing him that?’

     ‘He found it,’ his father said. ‘I didn’t show it to him.’ From the shiftiness in Yoon Shik’s voice, David could tell his father was scared of his mother at that moment.

     Yoon Shik and his platoon had been on duty at the DMZ at night, and readied their rifles when three shadowy figures moved across their outpost and into the thick pine woods on the southern side of the demarcation line. Their sergeant led Yoon Shik and several of the other conscripts in pursuit. His heart in his throat, Yoon Shik pointed his rifle wildly at every rustle as they tracked the northerners deep into the brush. About a half-hour into their pursuit, they were met with a sudden volley of rifle fire, which dropped one of his buddies from basic training, a quiet eighteen-year-old from a village outside of Pusan. Yoon Shik and the other soldiers shot wildly in the direction of the volley, nearly emptying their magazines, until their sergeant ordered them to stop. The woods went deathly quiet, and a lone scrawny boy in tan fatigues came forward out of some bushes, crying, his hands raised, his comrades dead in the shadows. Yoon Shik’s mind was a chaotic blur. Angry at the loss of his friend, shaking because this northerner had just tried to kill him a few seconds before, he pointed his M4 and fired at the North Korean boy as if he were a target at a shooting range.

     The other soldiers watched the boy drop, blood blooming over his heart. After shouting the basest Korean slurs imaginable, the sergeant calmed himself and said to Yoon Shik, ‘Find the boy’s rifle and put it next to him. Do it! Now!’

     ‘He … killed … killed my friend,’ Yoon Shik stuttered through tears and adrenaline.

     ‘Quit crying, you stupid boy. Keep your mouth shut and this won’t get any bigger than three kids who crossed on to our side.’

     The South Koreans posed three bodies side-by-side with their rifles beside them, and the sergeant ordered a soldier to get a Polaroid camera from the outpost to take pictures as evidence of the platoon’s heroism in the face of the North’s aggression.

     ‘A souvenir,’ the sergeant said as he handed Yoon Shik a picture of the bodies. Yoon Shik cringed at the sight of the boy he had shot dead.

     Over the years, Yoon Shik, no matter how many ways he rationalised his actions, could not shake the nightmares. Afraid of karma, he tried to live a good life, hoping to lessen the weight of his past wrongs. In Los Angeles, he found Christianity so appealing, because no matter what he’d done before, his first day with Christ was a new birth. The vision of that trembling boy with his hands up was no longer of any consequence after baptism, and Yoon Shik could finally think of himself as a clean man without blood on his hands. The picture of the dead soldiers became a reminder of how wretched he was before God, and how he was saved by a new beginning. Nova initia.

     ‘Those were bad North Koreans trying to get into the South to spy. We shot them because we had to,’ Yoon Shik told David.

     David could tell from his mother’s scream, and Yoon Shik’s downward eyes, that his father was not telling him the full truth. If that’s all there was to the story, why did they look so scared to tell him? He was old enough to know about death. For the first time in his life, he thought that his father might be more than a simple man with a past made of neat parables, each ending with a moral about why we must follow God. He was a man capable of lying and perhaps much more.

     The eyes of those dead soldiers lingered in the recesses of David’s memory as he grew up – was he being visited by the sins of the father? They flashed before him vividly, vapid and lifeless. He would be haunted by them in the years that followed, along with rioting black mobs in Los Angeles, and a lone dead junkie on the floor of the Hell’s Kitchen shop, until he’d reach the bottom of his last glass at some dingy bar.

 

*   *   *

 

‘Nine-one-one emergency?’ a woman’s voice said on the other end of the line. David explained there had been a shooting and gave the address of the shop and nearest cross-street. He heard sirens, said, ‘I can hear them now,’ and hung up the phone. David met the two cops in the open door, his father behind him, Wastoid’s body in clear view with blood pooling across the tile floor.

     ‘Anyone else?’ the older cop asked. When David shook his head, the cops took in the wider scene: the position of the body and its attire, the counter with the spent Beretta, the convex mirror, the gun on the floor, and the blood.

     ‘Holy … What happened here?’ the older cop asked. David took the question to be rhetorical.

     The younger cop held his fingers to the junkie’s neck. ‘No pulse.’

     David narrated what needed to have happened. ‘He was talking crazy. He kept saying he was gonna kill me. He tripped and when he got up, he was so mad, he was shaking. He raised the gun like he was gonna shoot me. That’s when my dad reached for our gun and shot him. He fell to the floor. He still had the gun and wasn’t dead. So my dad shot him again.’

     ‘Is that what happened?’ the older cop asked Yoon Shik.

     ‘My son is right. That is what happened.’

     The younger officer asked David if he had been drinking.

     ‘I had like two beers with dinner. This shit sucks so bad, I gotta get through somehow.’

     They didn’t ask any more questions about the alcohol, or much else. Detectives were summoned. Two tired men in suits listened to David’s story, took Yoon Shik aside and got the same, ‘My son is right.’ One of them sketched a broken line on the floor to show where David had been forced backwards to the counter, and an ‘X’ for the position of the body. The other detective, a sweaty, robust man, picked up the Beretta, looked at the magazine to check it was empty, saw the four unspent bullets and counted the shell casings.

     ‘Nice gun,’ he said. ‘Not the first time you’ve used it?’ he was looking at Yoon Shik.

     ‘I was in the army, the Korean army. I was a soldier. DMZ.’

     The detective nodded. ‘So, four shots, then two more shots. Then you disabled the weapon?’

     ‘Yes.’

     ‘A good soldier would have got him with the first four. Why shoot him again?’

     ‘He was not dead. I was not a good soldier, and that was over thirty years ago.’

     The two detectives conferred briefly in a corner. The uniformed cops, after helping themselves to coffee and a couple of candy bars, had taken up blocking positions in the doorway. Nightmarish faces gawked through the window. One of the detectives radioed that there’d be no need for an ambulance and to ‘send a meat wagon for the morgue’.

     ‘Once we body-bag this one,’ the detective pointed a thumb at the junkie, ‘we’ll need you to come down to the station and give us a formal statement. You said you were about to close? Why don’t you finish up with that and we can get going.’

     David’s mother, frantic, found them later at the police station. She was on the verge of hysteria when David saw her approach the sergeant’s desk. She flung her arms around him. ‘Your father?’ she asked.

     David responded, ‘He’s fine. Someone tried to rob the store. They’re just taking his statement now.’

     ‘Praise God!’

     They shared a long, hard wooden bench with prostitutes for whom the florescent lighting did no favours, gang boys wearing various colours and a couple of well-dressed, red-faced men who probably should have just picked up a six-pack and a porno and gone home for the night.

     Throughout, his mother cried. A female police officer brought them coffee and touched his mother’s shoulder and said, ‘It shouldn’t take too much longer; procedure.’

     David expected the ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine he’d seen on the TV, but instead the cops asked for the short version of his life story and his account of the shooting. Then came a series of softball questions requiring only a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. In courtroom dramas, the defence counsel would have been jumping up shouting, ‘Objection! Leading the witness.’

     ‘You folks have had a tough night,’ the senior detective said in the crowded waiting area. ‘Go easy on the drive back to Jersey. We may have a few loose ends to tie up, but I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Just procedure.’

     New Park One-Stop was closed for a couple of days. A few cops dropped by and helped themselves to coffee as they drew and photographed lines on the floor. A fingerprint check of the deceased turned up two priors, one for attempted murder, the other for armed robbery. A clear case of self-defence. The store was open for business within a week.

     ‘We’re lucky he wasn’t black; we might have had problems,’ David said when the cops left for the final time that Christmas break. Yoon Shik looked at his son and shook his head. They never spoke of the incident again.

 

*   *   *

 

Seventeen years later, David was nothing to be proud of, certainly not ‘the good son’ Korean parents hope for. He had tried and failed at writing and journalism. He got his parents to pay for a year of playing graduate student in literature and spent the money in bars, gathering material he called it, though he was also looking to exorcise ghosts of North Korean soldiers, the riots and a dead robber. He thought as he emptied each glass, once, his father had been willing to kill for him.

     ‘Are you still teaching?’ his father asked.

     ‘Yes,’ David nodded.

     ‘Teaching is an honourable profession,’ he said, taking the box from David and putting it in the back of the car.

     ‘Are you going to be okay, Dad? Are you going to be able to get by without the shop?’

     Any dutiful Korean son would have been gainfully employed in a lucrative profession that would have afforded his parents a comfortable retirement, repaying with filial loyalty their years of hard work. No one would ever call David a dutiful son, more a soul-crushing disappointment.

     ‘I don’t know what to do, son. I prayed to God yesterday, and thought maybe I’m being punished for something I did … or something I didn’t do.’

     ‘You have done nothing wrong, father,’ David said, surprising Yoon Shik because the words he heard were Korean. ‘You did what you had to do. You always did what you had to do.’

     His father shook his head. ‘Not always, son. I’ve been angry many times.’

     ‘I’ve been angry too.’ David said in stuttering Korean.

     ‘You haven’t done what I’ve done.’

     ‘I didn’t live through what you lived through.’ David looked intently at his father, ‘Remember what you used to say, that Latin thing.’

     His father smiled, impressed that his son remembered, ‘Nova initia.’

     ‘Yes.’

     ‘I was already born again. Started anew many times. I’m too old for another beginning.’

     ‘Never too old, father. Not till you’re dead.’

     Yoon Shik looked at his son, ‘You’re a lot younger than me. It’s not too late for you either, you know.’

     ‘I guess not.’ David did not quite believe his own words. People had already given him more chances than he could count, and he knew his own capacity for failure.

     ‘Why don’t you come home for once? Your mother would love to see you,’ Yoon Shik said as he walked to the driver-side of the Buick.

     David nodded and entered the passenger-side of the car, which started after some whimpering turns of the ignition. The musky smell of the worn leather interior reminded David of family drives, and the solace and promise of his childhood. For the first time in years, David wanted to go home.