Sad Peninsula

SAD PENINSULA

MARK SAMPSON

Dedicated to 2LT Gerald Arthur Moore

T
his
is a work of fiction. Any rendering of actual people — living or dead — is coincidental or done strictly for the purposes of fiction. Astute readers may notice I have taken certain liberties with Korean naming conventions. Some may also know that Koreans measure their ages differently than we do here in the West; but I have transmuted those measurements into the Western standard so as not to confuse English-speaking readers.

“When you look into a Korean woman's eyes/ you want to stare/ at something far back/ dark,/ older even than the whole, sad peninsula.”

— Tom Crawford, from the poem “Stones,” published in
The Temple on Monday

“A man's sexual aim … is to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature that is the opposite of these; to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.”

— Kingsley Amis, from
One Fat Englishman

Same Same, but Different

O
n
an afternoon in August, Meiko lay on her mat straining to hear the sound of girls being raped all around her — and when she couldn't, convinced herself that she had finally died.

Meiko had been waiting to die for months now, for death to burst through the thin rug that covered her stall door and rescue her with the chivalry of an older brother. Death, she imagined, would not enter this cubicle like the soldiers did, day after day. Death would be tender. It would lift her softly into the air, float her like a piece of chaff on the wind, out and over the camp, above the burning hillsides of Manchuguo, and carry her away, as if on a river, to a place of incomparable silence.

But now, soundlessness had betrayed her. At this point in the day, the camp should have been full of the noise that she had come to refer to as The Arguments. That's what the soldiers' visits to the girls on the left and right of her always sounded like. Listening to them through the plywood walls of her cubicle, Meiko likened it to fierce arguing between a man and a woman. The Arguments would begin with harsh words from both parties, each trying to convince the other of something through shouting. But soon the man's voice would win over, growing louder and more intense. The girl's voice would try for a while to match that ferocity, to fight against whatever position the man was taking. But soon his grunts and his bellows drowned her out, growing impossibly loud in the small cubicle, crashing against its thin walls with the bluntness of a mallet. Soon Meiko could barely hear the girl's voice at all — just a whiff of pleading lost under the soldier's screams of aimless defiance. His hollers would build to some inevitable crescendo, rising and rising, and then at last peak with pride, a scream of triumphant conquest. And then, just as soon as it began, the noise would grind back down again, like a motor cut off. Next came silence that wasn't quite silent. Just the sound, barely audible, of the girl weeping to herself in shame, having lost yet another Argument. Scant moments to wallow in that disgrace before the gruff flap of her curtain, another soldier entering, another Argument beginning as the last one had.

Meiko sat up on her tatami mat. Oh, she was
not
dead. She could hear that familiar symphony inside her body, the wail of infection that started in her swollen genitals and burned all the way up to her sinuses. Thirsty, she reached for the jug of water sitting on the low table next to her mat, tucked its spout beneath her split lip. A mere tickle of water fell into her throat. Meiko cradled the empty vessel and stared blandly past the table to the paper box on the floor beyond it, wilted by the August heat and brimming with unopened condoms. She could see their familiar brand name gleaming in Japanese on the tinfoil — Assault No. 1. Next to the box was a ceramic dish the size of a shaving bowl full of cloudy grey water: the disinfectant that the soldiers were suppose to use after they had put on the Assault. But it had been months since the men had bothered with condoms or cleanser, and months since she had the strength to insist. Another box sat next to it, partially hidden under a blanket. It was stuffed with
Gyumpo
bills, the Japanese military currency, wrinkled and adorned with pictures of violent birds. Her tips from the more guilt-ridden soldiers.

Meiko couldn't handle the quiet any longer. She forced herself to her feet with one awkward thrust, and was nearly sucked back down by the rip tide of her fever. She picked up a faded orange shirt off her floor and put it on, pulling it down as far as it would go, to the middle of her bare thighs, which had scars and cigarette burns on them. One step and she was at her curtain; a second and she was outside of it, standing in the wooden hallway. Up one end and down the other, curtain after tattered curtain hung over cubicles exactly like hers. She spotted one of them rustle suddenly, down at the far end. A face peeped out, belonging to a girl named Hiromi. She stared at Meiko in terrified confusion. Meiko placed a finger to her split lip to keep the child silent. When she did, the girl vanished back behind her curtain, leaving Meiko to face whatever punishment awaited her for being in the hallway.

And that punishment could come at any moment, now that she was drifting up the mud-caked planks toward the common room. It would come as a scream from the camp manager. Or a soldier rushing over, followed by the quick flare of pain as the butt of a rifle cracked her in the jaw. But Meiko staggered into the common room to find it empty.
Empty
. In the months since the Japanese had moved them here from the last camp, she had never seen this room without people in it. The manager's podium stood like an abandoned sentry guarding the hallway. Resting behind its tall lip was the metal box of red tickets that the manager gave the soldiers after they coughed up their
Gyumpo
for the privilege of going into the hall and choosing a cubicle. Meiko moved deeper into the wide common room. On the dining tables in the middle, she found plates caked with half-finished rice balls, limp miso noodles, and jaundiced bits of cooked radish — remnants of a meal interrupted. She strolled over, brazen as a newcomer, and helped herself to the food, stuffing the stale, soggy chunks into her mouth with thrusts of her hand.

And that's when the unnatural heat of the room hit her. Despite the August temperatures, someone had lit the camp's charcoal furnace on the far side of the room for the first time since late spring; she looked over to see a shimmer of orange pulsing out of its iron cage. Meiko weaved over on unsteady legs to take a closer look, the heat intensifying the nearer she got. She stooped and looked through the grate, then grabbed the wrought-iron handle and pulled the door open. The thick cardboard-covered books had been stuffed in there haphazardly and were now curdling under the flames' snap and spittle. The ledgers. The manager's ledgers. The camp's history, the transactions that occurred and what the girls were owed, were vanishing into smoke.

A noise wafted over her then from the front entry beyond the stove. No mistaking it: the grind and rumble of army trucks. Meiko shuffled toward the opened doors. One stiff step after another and she was through the threshold and descending the stone blocks that led to the muddied ground. There in the courtyard, she waited for her eyes to adjust to the August sunshine. When they did, she saw dozens of Japanese soldiers, the anonymous faces that had visited her over and over in her stall, piling into army trucks at a pace that left her baffled. These men were not hopping into the back or onto the rails with the haste of warriors going into battle. They were instead climbing into the trucks languidly, their faces sunken and bodies limp with sadness. When each truck was full, it pulled away from the camp with no urgency beneath its wheels and joined the slow line of other trucks heading toward the Manchurian hills on the horizon. Men drifted past her with their packs and their helmets, but no one paid her any attention. It was like she had finally become the ghost that she had longed to be.

She turned to her left. There were two soldiers down at the far end of the building, sitting with their backs against the wall. Nestled in the muddy grass between them was a portable radio, its antenna angled at the sky. Fearless now, Meiko sauntered toward them so she could hear what they were listening to. These hardened men, in their filthy fatigues and broken boots, were
weeping
like little boys, their eyes marinating in hot, uninhibited tears. There was Japanese crackling loudly out of the radio, a staccato voice speaking with authority. Meiko listened closely, muscled her way through the grammar, hunting for context, wanting to know who the speaker was. Her breath was yanked from her lungs when she finally figured it out.

Emperor Hirohito.

His Majesty spoke quickly, faster than she could entirely follow. But there was one word that he repeated, one word that hung like an ornament on this speech. And Meiko, much to her surprise, found herself translating that word into her native tongue, a language she had not dared to even dream in for so long. That Korean word was soft and playful compared to its Japanese equivalent. She let it bounce through her mind like a ball.
Pok'tan … pok'tan …

A bomb. These men were weeping about a bomb. A big one.

She burst into laughter. She couldn't help it. And when she did the men startled, saw her standing over them, and blinked at her as if jarred from sleep. In that moment, Meiko knew her death was imminent, that one of them would yank out his side pistol and cut her down where she stood. But neither did. They just looked up at her, and, not caring who she was or
what
she was, pleaded with their wet frowns for an emotion that she could not fathom. These men, who had urinated on her, who had burned her legs with hot pokers, who had smeared their semen in her eyes, were begging Meiko for a small shred of sympathy.

She couldn't help it. She laughed all the harder.

T
he
pound and rush of alien traffic, long shiny streams of
Hyundai Hyundai Hyundai
racing through the blink and blare of this February Friday, and it took coming to Korea for me to realize that enduring friendships are built on a foundation of mutual envy. I am friends with Rob Cruise because part of me wants to be him. Let's get that straight, right off the bat. He and Justin Ford, my roommate, have been in this country for two years. Their existence here in Seoul seems like a neverending epilogue to tales already climaxed, lives back in Canada full of shut doors and embarrassing tragedies. I can relate to that.

The three of us stand upon the two words that will ensure I find my way home tonight —
Daechi Sa Guh Rhee
. “Commit to memory,” they've told me, “in case we get separated. It means Daechi Intersection. Say it to a cabbie just like that —
Daechi Sa Guh Rhee
— and he'll take you right back here.” This first week in, I've been thinking these men have adopted me, looking out for my safety in this city of 11 million people, but now I'm wondering if they're having fun at my expense. It's clear they've misled me about tonight's activities. They said “bar” and I heard “pub” (
hof
they call them here, just like in Germany) but these guys are obviously dolled up for something else and I'm dressed like a frump by comparison. We're not going to a pub, I've now learned. We're going to a club, a
dance
club. Thumping techno and bright spinning lights and boys with boners in their cargo pants — some of my least favourite things. Rob Cruise, who is wearing cargo pants below his winter jacket, has begun dancing already, standing at the
Sa Guh Rhee
with knees pumping like he needs to pee, cigarette making hurried trips to his lips. We'll hop in a cab as soon as Jon Hung shows up. Oh wait, there he is, descending the grimy stairs of a PC Room on the other side of the street.

“Look at the white boys standing on the corner!” he shouts as he crosses the intersection.

“Whatever you say, chink!” Rob smiles as he flicks his cigarette to the gutter.

Jon Hung is not a chink. He is a
kyopo
— dad's Korean, mom's American — and he possesses the Hawaiian good looks and designer clothes that scream to the world
I have half an MBA and will go get the other half just as soon as I'm done with this ridiculous antisabbatical.
Despite his heritage, he speaks less Korean than I do, and I've been in this country exactly eight days.

“You're going to have fun, so relax,” he says to me, spotting my body language. “Is that what you're wearing?”

“Don't listen to him,” Rob Cruise tells me. “The club we're going to, most girls won't care what you're
wearing
.”

Justin, who says nothing, steps off the curb to hail us a taxi. One pulls up within seconds, winking out its dome light. The four of us pile in, Rob Cruise presuming shotgun, and then we're off, joining the long, shiny streams of
Hyundai Hyundai Hyundai
.

Y
ou don't so much see Seoul's neon as you taste it, like bright hard Christmas candy, reds and greens sprayed out across the city as if fired from a cannon. As our cab races northward toward the lugubrious Han River, I figure I'll never get used to this nonstop showcase of luminance. A landscape choked with discos and Starbucks outlets and soju tents on the sidewalks, with street-side barbecues and 7-Elevens that will let you drink beer on plastic furniture set up out front. As we settle in for the ride, Rob Cruise begins his complaining. He's been a flame thrower at the urinal for several weeks now. The nurses at the clinic near our school have started recognizing him when he walks in; the pharmacist doesn't even need to see the slip anymore to fetch him the right antibiotics.

“Dude, why don't you wear a fucking condom?” Jon Hung asks.

Rob laughs at this. “A lot of Korean girls don't like them. They got the whole rhythm method going on.” Voguing his hands to show rhythm.

When I find it funny that he finds it funny, I don't recognize myself. I should be ashamed that his insouciance ignites a profound ache in me. Deflated, I lean back and try to look out the cab's window, but Justin's head blocks my view as he stares into the night.

Rob Cruise catches my sinking mood in the cabbie's mirror and twists around to face the backseat. This is where the envy is supposed to kick in, where he imbues the air of the cab with his raunchy wisdom. Is he really thirty-three years old? The guys have heard all this stuff before, but it doesn't matter because I'm the target. Rob begins telling me about life as a successful player, about how the best moments come when the serial seducer becomes the seduced. On those special nights, the girl he's with will seize the lead with needs that nearly scare him. He loses control of the situation, and that's his favourite part. Rob makes even the worries afterward, the insipient burn at the urinal that comes later, sound like an adventure unto itself. He details the inner rawness, the unwelcome discharge, the swelling that weighs on him like guilt.

“It sounds like the clap,” I sniff.

“It's more than the clap,” he replies, adjusting his groin. “It's like a fucking standing ovation!”

And we roar, loud enough to startle the Korean cabbie. Even Justin joins in, forsaking his stare out the window, laughing his deep bell-like laugh, perhaps forgetting for an instant that he once had a kid in Nova Scotia who died.

O
ur cab flies over a bridge crossing the Han, makes the turnoff, and then grinds to a near halt as we join the constipated line of other cabs oozing into Itaewon. Finally we make it to the strip, pay the cabbie, and get out. The street is an open-air party, a festival of boozy expat teachers, of Korean beauties, of U.S. army guys on the hunt for love and war. This is Itaewon, the foreign quarter, adjacent to Yongsan Garrison, the largest U.S. army base in the country. I will come to know this place as a hive of sexual hysteria with a neon glint of violence.

“It's this way,” Rob says.

On the hike up the hill and through bewildering side streets I spot at least three
hofs
and nearly beg us to stop. But these men are on a mission — even Justin seems keen. We finally land in a lineup outside a two-storey club called Jokers Red, its sign a splay of cards and an evil clown face. The Korean girls lined up to get in are not dressed for February. They are shivering sticks in miniskirts and tube tops, more concerned with looking hot than being warm. Rob is nearly bursting. At the door, I'm burglarized for a cover charge, follow the men inside, and then get smacked with the
thumpthumpthump
and the epilepsy of strobe lights. It's then that I realize how far I have fallen: to be nearly thirty and spending Friday night in the sort of club I had zero interest in when I was nineteen. I need to be drunk.

So off we go to the bar. We take drinks up some stairs to a booth with expansive benches that overlook the rail surrounding the dance floor like a cattle pen. Despite the crowd and its accumulated body heat, this club is as chilly as a meat locker: drafts waft in from poorly insulated walls and windows. Rob and Jon rendezvous with some familiar faces just coming off the dance floor. A shivering stick hugs Jon Hung as he slinks out of his coat and tosses it into the booth. She must be one of his girlfriends. She's wearing knee-high bitch boots and a miniskirt that barely reaches her groin.

Soon Rob Cruise leads a migration to the dance floor; everyone but me. I tell them I'll “hold down the booth.” I watch as they all congregate under the throbbing lights. Jon Hung moves like liquid, scoops into his miniskirted girlfriend as if she were a ball grounded deep into left field, leads her where he wants her, and then they grind into each other like turbines. Justin is a good dancer, too; his creepy stoicism complements rather than detracts from his moves. Of course, the star is Rob Cruise: the wind-chime swing of his hips defies his age, and, seemingly, gravity itself. Each sway proves he's got a profound sense of rhythm flowing through him. He's attracting moons to his orbit, girls curious and scantily clad. When he looks up to see me watching him, he begins shuffling over to the beat of the music with a wolf-like grin, dances his way up the stairs, grabs my arms, and attempts to drag me into participation. I refuse. I know that down there I would be like the decrepit grandfather attempting the Macarena at a wedding. When he gives up, I scoot off to the bar to see if they sell Scotch.

Soon they're done dancing and return to the table. More people the guys know come in from the cold to join us — a few more girls wearing virtually nothing, and one of our coworkers, a kid fresh off a B.A., his baseball cap turned around backwards. Rob has brought a raven-haired stranger with him, a heavily made-up girl with bare shoulders peppered with gooseflesh and gleaming a cold sweat. In fact, it's obvious that all the girls are freezing. Their tight, inscrutable faces try to hide it, but their hands keep rubbing absently at their exposed triceps. The absurdity of it makes me wish I had thick duvet to throw over everyone.

Funny how even under the walloping techno we're still able to conduct halfway decent conversations. It's like our ears have adjusted to the noise in the same way that eyes adjust to darkness. Listening to Rob with the bare-shouldered girl, I'm once again awash in envy. His flirting is flawless; he's working over her defences and guiding her through convoluted hallways, all of which lead to his bed. He even incorporates my presence into his act. I'll come to learn that this is one of the chief ways Rob gets a girl to trust him, by lobbing huge, exaggerated compliments at his male friends. “See this guy?” he points at me, grinning. “He's
amazing
. Been in Korea — eight days. Already speaks lotsa lotsa Korean.” He nods at me. “Go ahead, show her your Korean.” I sip my Scotch without smiling, then rhyme off the handful of phrases I've picked up since the flight over — hello/goodbye, do you speak English, I would like a beer, may I make some change please?, etc. etc. I expect the girl to applaud with a frantic little clap of her hands. Instead, she nods once and turns back to Rob. In fact, none of the shivering sticks are paying me any attention, and frankly I don't blame them. I come off like what I am: a dumpy, balding, bearded orphan who has crash-landed on this peninsula. I might as well be part of the furniture.

Justin, who had bowed out briefly from a conversation, is suddenly laughing, a heavy drum beat, seemingly to himself. He has spotted something over the lip of the booth.

“Hey Rob, check out who's here,” he says.

Rob twists to look and I look with him. Another Korean girl they know has just cleared the door and stepped into the club. She looks around briefly as if lost, as if she's not entirely sure she wants to be there. I notice that she's wearing a heavy winter coat that goes all the way to her knees.

“Ho-leee fuck!” Rob yells and begins waving madly in the air. “Hey, Jin! Jin! Come over here, would you?”

She turns to see our group in the booth, but then hesitates as if trying to gauge whether she wants to join us. She sighs, rolls her eyes, comes marching up the stairway, and arrives at our table, her face flushed from the cold.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Jon Hung clichés.

“Well, if it isn't my
waegookin
friends,” she replies, using the Korean word for foreigner. “Friday night and you're
drinking
, surprise surprise.”

“What are you doing here?” Rob asks, tucking an arm around the bare-shouldered girl.

“I came to hear the DJ. He played the Armada in Hongdae last weekend, but I missed him.”

“Are you going to join us?”

“I suppose.”

We all scrunch in to give her room to sit. Before she does, she opens her coat, but does not take it off. Underneath, she's wearing a white cashmere sweater and blue jeans.

“So I hardly recognized you without a cigarette in your mouth.” Rob grins at her. “What, did you quit?” The other girls guffaw, as if what Rob has said tells them everything they need to know about this Jin character. Despite Korea's rapid assent into modernity, smoking among women is still considered verboten. Jin simply stares at him. “And you grew your hair long again, thank God,” Rob goes on. “That bob you had was a disaster.” She tilts her head and stares even deeper into him. He realizes that he's probably jeopardizing her presence at the table, and he softens his tone. “So where you been, girl?”

“Working,” she replies. “I see you're still cruising, Mr. Cruise.” She turns then to the bare-shouldered girl and says with a sort of cheery, deadpan cattiness: “You know, he slept with nearly a
hundred
women last year — some of them
prostitutes
.” The girl laughs loudly but uneasily. Within a minute she gets up to go to the bathroom, or so she says, but then disappears into the crowd's pulsating throngs. Rob keeps looking for her over the rail as our small talk chirps around his head, and when it becomes clear he's lost her, he turns back to the table to seethe at Jin.

“Why don't you take off your coat,” he snipes at her.

“Because I'm fucking cold,” she yells over the music. “You guys can ogle me later.” I laugh at this, I can't help it, but nobody looks at me. “So who's going to buy me a drink?” she asks. As if by reflex, Jon, Justin, and the kid in the baseball cap all make intimations toward their wallets before stopping themselves as if they've been tricked. She just shakes her head. “Ugh. You
waegookins
are all the same.” And scoots up fast, faster than I can make an offer to get her a drink, and heads to the bar on her own, her lengthy winter coat ballooning like a cape around her.

A
ptly enough, the other Korean girls have yielded their place in the conversation to this Jin person: while they possess varying degrees of fluency, Jin's English is nearly flawless. It amazes me how even in a large group, it's always one or two people who become the focal point. Here it is Rob and Jin, riffing off each other with so much affectionate vitriol. He is a master of viciousness, of well-placed quips, but she is his equal — made more impressive by the fact that they aren't sparring in
her
native tongue. I drink silently; I have lost track of how many silent drinks I've had.