Chang-Rae Lee - Native Speaker

If she wanted, she could start trying for distance like Jenkins or maybe Sherrie, to get away from him now before it’s too late. A figure in scandal is like a heavy metal, the closer and longer you stay near, the more lasting the effects. Janice tells me this, thinking she’s warning me about a career I might want in politics.

She herself keeps calling the precinct house, the lawyers, the hospital, she will say anything to get information on the chances for the girl, what we should expect. She even puts me on the line to pretend I am a cousin. I have to speak choppy English to talk to a doctor but he keeps asking who I am and when I’ll come see her. I don’t have the heart and hang up.

I help her make calls into the evening. She has every bike messenger and private driver she knows looking for him. We phone the airlines and the buses. We know it’s useless. He’s probably in a soup monger’s somewhere in Flushing, sipping corn tea. Now we’re just waiting for the late news. In the meantime Janice is attempting to spirit him back. She lights blunt red sticks of Korean incense he gave her for Christmas and paces in circles, cutting slow butterflies in the smoke with her arms. She’s joking some, of course. But I can tell she is a little jumpy, she can’t hide all of her anxiousness. She doesn’t seem to realize how she keeps touching me, grabbing onto my forearm and my shoulder. She walks through her apartment inspecting things, picking up the same framed photographs of her family. She watches the wall clock.

She doesn’t want it to end. Not this one. It’s the job that showed her she could have a vocation. She grew up with him, found out how her eye could quickly level on a scene, instantly figure the possibilities, aggressively fight and broker the way they’d want to shoot him. She is a natural at being an anti-director, an anti-producer. Without her John would never have been safe.

She’s nervous so she wants to eat. She wants to order Chinese but her place can’t deliver tonight. She thinks they are saying that a few of their delivery boys have caught something and didn’t come in.

“I’d better just go,” she says. “I’ve got to go down there to order. He didn’t speak enough English. It’s ten blocks. I’ve got to burn something off before I eat anyway.”

“You’ve been burning all day.”

“You don’t know how many moo shus I can eat.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“Someone should stay near the phone.”

I tell her again that he’s not going to call.

“Come on, then, hurry,” she says, pulling on a light jacket. “I’m ravenous. The woman said it’s crazy down there tonight. There’s a huge line.”

We walk the night streets of Queens. It does not seem strange that we go hand in hand. Nothing meant. She takes my hand as we step out of her building and I leave it there because I know there is a true feeling of loneliness that comes from waiting together. It’s like two people still standing at a bus terminal after all the passengers have been met, the instant shared feeling almost enough to make them intimates.

We pass by newsstands. He is papering their displays, their walls. I wonder if he has seen his own face in the papers. Will the people see just another politician in trouble, just another scandal? Will they see an American there? I think of him wandering somewhere in the streets of this city. I know he hasn’t left. Where would he go? He is somewhere in Queens, I want to believe, lodged safely among any of those strangers whose names so people his mind. He’ll knock on a door and they will see him and cry out. Hustle him in. They will seat him at the head of their table. Listen as he blesses their children and their health.

But can you really make a family of thousands? One that will last? I know he never sought to be an ethnic politician. He didn’t want them to vote for him solely because he was colored or Asian. He knew he’d never win anything that way. There aren’t enough of our own. So you make them into a part of you. You remember every one of their names. You are the model by which they will work and live. You are their hope. And all this because you are such a natural American, first thing and last, if something other in between.

We now walk west. Always you end up going west. Janice picks up the pace. We’re on a broader street now, it runs straight into the distance, and you can see a few of the lights of Manhattan. There is a small crowd milling outside the Chinese takeout, which Janice says is the neighborhood’s best. People are waiting for their orders. It’s warm tonight, the warmest spring night so far, and no one seems to mind. Tomorrow’s Friday and work will stop. We go inside and give our order, get our slip. They’re out of scallops, also out of shrimp and squid, the girl at the register says. Some of their deliveries didn’t come today. We order twice-cooked pork and chow fun and steamed gailon , semi-bitter greens. I know I’m American because I order too much when I eat Chinese. We stand outside with everyone else, the crowd mixed, Jews and Hispanics, Asians and blacks. Everyone gets along. There’s cross-talking and joking. Easy laughs. It’s something enough, I suppose, when you know you will soon eat the same food.

It’s almost ten o’clock, and we’re one of the last orders they take. They actually have to send a cook to one of their stores a few miles away for ingredients. They say to customers sorry it’s so early, but they have to close sooner tonight. They didn’t get their cooking oil delivered either, other things as well. No more ginger, no more scallion. Very please you come back tomorrow. Thank you very much.

A brief rain pours down and the few of us still waiting come inside. There are a few chairs along the walls, the space not ten feet square. The kitchen is tiny. An old color TV is set high in a corner opposite the register. Everyone quiets for the final story of a weekly magazine show. They’re interviewing several of the men from the cargo ship that ran aground in Far Rockaway. The young men are in their twenties, rice-water skinny, unshaven. They wear light blue coveralls that the detention center has provided them. They have very white, bad teeth. They describe the conditions on the ship, the lack of plumbing, how some of the passengers died during the 12,000 mile voyage and were wrapped in plastic and cast into the ocean. They try to keep smiling and downplay the hardship.

I listen closely to what they say. Or at least, how they are translated by a woman who sounds Chinese American, her tones over-round and bulky like Sherrie’s. She imparts a formality and respect to their statements, and they seem to be interviewing for a position rather than telling their story, unceasingly nodding and bowing and grinning exuberantly with the joy of their good fortune. They keep repeating the words America and new life .

Luck, like most everything else, must be a Chinese invention. We Koreans have reinvented the idea of luck as mostly bad, and try to do everything we can to prevent it. We fear leaving anything to chance. So with John Kwang, in whatever he did. But how will he come back to the world now? A part of me doesn’t want him to show up again. Not only for the television, for the public, but for me and Janice and the rest. Whoever is left. It is not that I don’t wish to face him. I think we can both bear that burden. What I dread most is the feeling that might come out in him on his return, the expression of self-loss and self-doubt on a face that I have known as almost unblemished, resolute, magically unweathered by strife and time. For so long he was effortlessly Korean, effortlessly American. Now I don’t want him ever to lower his eyes. I don’t want to witness the submissive dip of his brow or the bend of his knee before me or anyone else. I didn’t — or don’t now — come to him for the occasion of looking upon this. I am here for the hope of his identity, which may also be mine, who he has been on a public scale when the rest of us wanted only security in the tiny dollar shops and churches of our lives.