"Kims and Parks", a story by Robert Wexelblatt

                                            

Back in middle school I had a rascally friend.  Lee Tae was a troublemaker.  One afternoon he and I took a stroll down Hongdae Shopping Street.  I walked right by the outdoor display racks, but Tae stopped and fingered the jeans, jackets, and shirts like a connoisseur.  We hadn’t gone to Hongdae to buy but to see what was cool.  We walked from one store to another, passing lots of small shops named for their owners.  Tae started to complain about how poor Korea is in family names. 

“I keep meeting people named Lee and I don’t know if we’re related or not.  What if I fell for a girl named Lee who was my cousin and we got married and had children born without ears or chins?”  He got quite worked up.  “It’s absurd. Something ought to be done.  We need more names! ”  

I calmly granted that, while there might be some, I personally had never heard of anybody having children born without chins and ears.

“That so?” scoffed Tae with the wicked gleam in his eye.  I had seen that gleam before, whenever he was about to pull some stunt.  He had the same look when, during recess, he maneuvered Choi Yunghee over the ventilation grate so it blew her skirt all the way up to her waist.  She burst into tears and ran off.  His round face wore the same expression on the morning that he stuffed a garden snake into the drawer of our teacher’s desk.

We came to the corner just beyond the big Playground store.

“Watch this,” said Tae.  He halted, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted down one way, “Hey, Mr. Kim!”  Then turned around and screeched, “Hey, Mrs. Lee!”

Scores of people stopped and stared our way.  Others turned around, craning their necks to look for whoever had called them.

Tae crossed his arms.  “See?” he said with a smirk and a complacent shrug.

It is true that we have few family names; and if every name is a story, then we share our stories with millions.  Nevertheless, there are plenty of personal names by which we distinguish ourselves, at least in part.

Misunderstandings are bound to arise in our capital with its population of ten million.  A big city is like one of those epic novels that start off with a list of characters with all their family trees that runs for pages.  This is presumably to help readers keep everything straight, but it seldom works.  No more can the life of a city be made smooth and predictable by laying out its streets in a grid and publishing a comprehensive telephone directory.  The relationships among a city’s inhabitants will never be as rational as the directory or the street map.  No matter how sharp the corners, how accurate the listings, how legible the signs, there will still be surprises, muddles, accidents.

During my last year at Seoul National, I dated Park Ara, an attractive math major with good manners, a fine figure, and an affectionate nature.  Ara had many virtues; in fact, looking back, her only real fault was an excessive devotion to her female friends.  She was forever texting with them, inserting herself into their lives, updating them about herself and each other, broadcasting gossip.  Ara felt a compulsion to know her friends’ plans, their feelings, how they were getting on with their families and, above all, their love lives.  One of these friends was Kim Chaelin, a third-year student from the south majoring in business.  She might have imagined a brief career, but it would be followed by a future as a wife and mother. Ara said Chaelin knew whom she would marry and whose children she would bear because she had a longtime boyfriend.  When this boyfriend suddenly broke things off, Chaelin was devastated.  She dyed her hair green then purple, neglected her studies, even her hygiene.  She lost weight and never laughed or smiled.  In a voice thick with empathetic sorrow, Ara told me Chaelin spent hours alone in her room listening to the saddest songs of the time like Sook’s “Summer Scent Serenade” and “No Matter How Many Times We Part” by Yoon Gun.  That year there were five suicides at the University. 

Ara was determined to do something.  She begged me to fix one of my unattached friends up with Chaelin. “If losing her boyfriend has nearly destroyed her,” she said, “isn’t the cure obvious?  Think of somebody.”

       

I thought of Kim Hoon, a music major with whom I had played badminton a couple of times.  I didn’t know him well, but I considered him a good sort, courteous, a hard-working and ambitious student. He twice turned down my invitations for a game because he spent most of his free time playing the pianos in the University’s practice rooms.  I hesitated.  Chaelin was evidently the emotional type; but Hoon, from what I’d observed, was either short on feelings or held on to them the way a sober poker player hides his cards.  But then I considered the principle from physics that opposites attract.  It might work out, I rationalized.  My chief consideration was to stop my girlfriend whining about her friend and pestering me.

Anticipating resistance, I didn’t text or phone Hoon.  I tracked him down in the practice rooms and broached the matter face to face.  He did need persuading.  I warned him sententiously that too much practicing was as bad as too little and that his youth would be over before he knew it.  I said that people were concerned about his isolating himself, being all work and no play.  I told him that Chaelin was pretty and clever but didn’t mention her depression.

Meanwhile, Ara asked her friend if she would be open to seeing somebody and that she had somebody in mind.  Chaelin put up some resistance that Ara described as “half-hearted,” but Ara argued that a blind date was better than dying her hair pink.  Ara said that when Chaelin gave in she even smiled a little.

Thrilled and energized to be arranging the lives of others, Ara insisted I instruct Hoon that he should meet Chaelin at the most romantic spot in the city.  I asked what that was. 

“Silly, man,” she said touching my nose.  “The pavilion in Namsan Mountain Park.”         

“The Palgokjeong Pavilion?  The octagonal one?”

She nodded.  “From up there, the whole city’s spread out like a picnic blanket.”  Then she rattled off the names of three restaurants to which she would approve of my friend taking hers.

The Palgokjeong Pavilion embodies some of the recent history of our country.  It was originally built in 1959 to honor the dishonorable Rhee Syngman.  A year later, the April 19 Movement forced Rhee out and demolished his pavilion.  Eight years after that, it was rebuilt and renamed.  Ever since, it has been a favorite spot with locals and tourists, also the site of the New Year’s Sunrise Festival.

Ara was, of course, anxious that the date should go well for her friend.  She twice mentioned the five student suicides.  She would have liked to spy on Chaelin and Hoon, to watch everything.  She even asked if we could join them, make it a double date.  I explained why this was a bad idea and dissuaded her by saying that Hoon was so shy he would clam up if we horned in.

    

The couple was to meet on the steps of the pavilion at five-thirty on a Saturday afternoon.  Ara worried about the weather.  “What if it’s pouring rain, or there’s fog?”  But as it turned out, the sky was clear that day, the air not too humid.  Ara rejoiced that the couple would see the sun setting picturesquely just as the city fired up its neon signs.  She insisted that we meet at the same time and spend the evening together.  We met at five-thirty and it was all I could do to keep her from texting Chaelin minutes later.  Then she said we should go to the restaurant Hoon had chosen.  “We could sit somewhere where they can’t see us.”  Instead of pointing out that this was another bad idea, I told Ara I didn’t know which place Hoon had picked or it if was one of the three she prescribed.  She pouted.  We went for a walk then ate at a local restaurant, praised for its kimchi soup.  Ara was on edge the whole time, checking her phone every few minutes.  It was exasperating.  At last, she got a text from Chaelin, squealed like a schoolgirl, and read it to me triumphantly, read it to me three times.

Hoon best medicine.  Dinner a joy.  Can’t thank you enough.  Talk tomorrow.

The following afternoon I got a call from Hoon thanking me as well.  He said Chaelin was charming; that they had a lot more in common than I’d suggested, and that they would be seeing each other again that night.  I told him I was glad to hear it.  I was also surprised.

A week later, Ara phoned Chaelin and arranged the double date for which she had been itching.  We were to meet at a new barbecue restaurant that had gotten top reviews online.

We met.  Chaelin and Hoon glowed with an almost extravagant happiness.

There was only one problem.  Hoon was not Hoon; that is, not my Hoon.

The vast city is like a novel of which Ara would have like to be the author.  Her favorite writer was Jane Austen.  But, of course, our teeming city is not at all like an Austen novel.  It is too complicated, its plots more like those of Charles Dickens, sprawling, inconclusive, prone to unpredictability, improvisation, loose ends, and improbable coincidences.  Seoul has more than one Hoon, more than a single Chaelin.

It didn’t take long to figure things out.  There was another Park Chaelin, a second-year piano student at Dankook University School of Music.  There was another Kim Hoon, a recent economics graduate from our own SNU.  There was even another Ara—though this one’s name was Yunghi—who also liked bringing couples together, who also deemed the octagonal pavilion at Namsam Park the ideal spot for a couple to meet at sunset.  It wasn’t hard to picture how it must have gone, two Chaelins and two Hoons on opposite sides of the pavilion, eyeing each other uncertainly, giving their names, shaking hands, watching the sun set, going off to eat.

All that happened almost ten years ago.  Ara and I broke up right after we graduated.  We married other people but are still occasionally in touch.  That’s how I know that “her” Chaelin wed the “wrong” Hoon and that they divorced three years later.  According to Ara, this was because Chaelin wanted a child and Hoon didn’t, because Hoon wanted to emigrate and Chaelin refused.  I suspect it might also have been because they had become bored with one another and each had compiled a catalogue of imperfections and irritating habits they had discovered in one another—small protuberances but rubbed against every day.

“My” Hoon did not marry the other Chaelin, the one from Dankook University.  They married other people yet formed a union that turned out to be durable.  I still remember Hoon telling me the story.  On their second date, he took the Dankook Chaelin to his favorite place, the Music School’s basement practice rooms.  They played for each other.  Then they played together.  Apparently, their first duet was Milhaud’s exuberant Scaramouche. 

These days, as you may know, the celebrated Park-Kim Piano Duo tours the world.