14-7-1 Contest

Chapter Three

The South Korea airport was polite. The flight attendants were slender and beautiful and bowed too much. The toilet's mechanized voice said, "Thank you!" as it accepted her offering of solid waste. The vending machine played her a cute little song as it retrieved her water bottle. The water bottle's label featured a picture of a hamster with big googly eyes.

She ripped off the plastic label and waited for her cousin to pick her up. The time difference confused her; through the ceiling-to-floor window she could see that the sky was a dusky blue. She felt disorientated. The feeling only augmented when one of the two Remaining Cousins showed up and shook her hand awkwardly. He was in his mid-twenties. He had bleached his shaggy hair blonde and wore a shark tooth in his left ear. As they dragged her luggage to his car, a petite Hyundai, he didn't say a single word to her. Instead, he whipped out his cell phone and proceeded to whisper in breakneck-paced Korean. When they reached the car, he shifted the phone to his shoulder and put the luggage in the front seat.

She sat in the back and counted all the reasons why she hated Korea.

She had gotten to number sixteen (Even the boys straighten their hair) when the cousin turned his head toward her and said, in nonsensical English, "We not go my apart-a-ment now I need meet a - uh uh uh - friend."

She didn't understand until they pulled into a parking garage and walked up two flights of stairs, and she found herself in a smoky room punctuated by cranky bursts of sound that crackled over a rusty stereo system. A fuzzy flat screen T.V. displayed rolling pictures of Buddhist temples, flower fields and beaches. Next to that was a fuzzier screen which was playing an old James Bond movie. She hated karaoke and she hated to sing, even in the shower, so on principle, she hated the contraption known as noraebang -- karaoke bar.

Her cousin's friends turned out to be a homogeneous bunch, and in the beginning, the boys asked her questions. When they realized how terrible her Korean was, they asked slower and with smiles. The questions were inoffensive yet irritating, the types of things that only Korean boys would ask: What year were you born? and Is it okay if I don’t use the honorific? and What is America like? Are all your friends blonde?

The girls regarded her under their fake eyelids and did not introduce themselves. They were too skinny. They wore skinny jeans, which were only for skinny people. That was a cardinal rule that she had forgotten to write down in her notebook.

Her cousin had steadily drank his way through a bottle of soju and was now sprawled on one of the ugly upholstered seats with a skinny girl in his lap. He had forgotten about her, and for that she was happy. For a while, she listened to the shadowy figures sing an inane song about a first love story that included random butchered phrases of English: “You my love all sky like high and much” and “I are with you really forever”. Then she turned her attention to the Bond movie, but she soon tired of watching Pierce Brosnan shoot Russians with a plastic-looking pistol, and decided to instead continue her mental list of reasons why she hated Korea.

It had been easy to rationalize away her childhood discomforts and blame them on her family, the aunts who advised her to get plastic surgery before it was too late; the uncles who asked her parents when they’d have a son; the cousins who said nothing to her face and everything behind her back.

Her mom had said, They’re jealous because they wish they lived in the States.

Her father had said, It’s just Korean culture.

Her grandmother -- her grandmother who was resting peacefully in her suitcase -- had comforted her with an old mudang curse, a twisty little piece of witchcraft involving three sticks and a piece of red string. After completing the curse, she had said, They are bitter people who will die early. It is a shame.

Jinhee remembered her extended family's fate and touched the lucky sliver of jade around her neck. She thought of her own curse, the shivery and unfortunate PREMATURE DEATH. She took out her little blue diary and flipped it open to the first page, where she had pasted in the last sentence from the grandmother's diary, the last sentence the grandmother had ever written: Forgiveness is the final form of love. It was an utterly ridiculous line, and she suppressed the urge to laugh. Instead, Jinhee repeated the sentence again and again until the words melded into the grooves of her tongue and the karaoke bar faded into the sublime, into the quietness of her solitary mind.






Word Count: 768
Total Word Count: 490 + 826 + 748 = 2,084