"When we go to America, our
daughters will eat butter and cream
and their skin will be tan.
Everybody will say they are beautiful." -- Yi Hakkun
The dreamer lay unconscious on the side of the street in a pool of blood, his bicycle demolished, unaware of the traumatized driver of the car into which he had just ploughed. Earlier his wife taken the long bus to the bar where she knew she would find him. She had the letter they had been waiting for but she was anxious.
“How can we go? We don't have any money. We don't have anything!”
“Yawbo, don’t worry. Everything's going to be OK. You'll see. ”
“Come home with me.”
“No. You go. I’ll come later.”
“But I want you to come now.”
His exasperated look told her that she was wasting her breath. In anger and disgust, she turned and headed for the bus stop. “Give me some money for a taxi,”
he called after her.
“I don’t have any,”
she said through clenched teeth, never looking back.
“What's wrong with her?,”
he shrugged as he went back in to refill his glass.
“Oh beautiful, for spacious skies. She'll see. It will all be different once we’re in America."
Later, his pockets empty and his brain in a drunken haze, he stopped at a friend’s room near the bar to tell him the news and to borrow his bike for the long ride home.
“Let me give you some money for a cab.”
“To hell with a cab!”
He threw the money on the floor. Outside he climb onto the bike and was haltingly on his way.
Now he lay on the concrete his head swelling from the violent blow of the street and his dream slowing fading like a balloon tugging on a string slipping through the fingers of a young boy trying desperately not to let it get away.
It was not always like this. Once he was a crusader; his mind filled with plans and schemes to right the wrongs visited on those who had the mixed blood of the soldier and the woman who for whatever reason had offered her body. He would help these forgotten mistakes go to their father's country where they would finally be accepted and prosper.
His hopes soared when he saw the young woman on the bus and instantly fell in love. They would go to the Promised Land together and he would make her a princess. He would give her things she could never imagine. People would stop them on the street and tell them how beautiful their children were. They would have the house that over many months he had painstakingly drawn and annotated in his perfect Chinese.
As to be expected from someone in his position, there were temporary setbacks. It was hard for one without pure blood to get anything other than menial work. He tried selling coffee but there were no buyers. He deserved better so he would think and plan while he was waiting for the better to arrive. Alcohol helped him negotiate the stumbling blocks. It dulled his mind to the times when there was nothing to eat for the young woman now his wife and their three daughters born in close succession.
One morning before daylight he came home from a night of hard drinking. Without enough money to get even a bus, he had walked five miles through the snow. Having negotiated the five miles, he eventually made it as far as the front steps where he collapsed just outside the door. His wife eventually found him; one of his legs caked with ice, and brought him in.
He wore his strength and determination as a badge of honor. He was tough; quite a good boxer. And he had used his hands as an enforcer for a street gang in Pusan. A person of mixed blood in this country had to train himself to be strong.
And there was the early morning that he came home and once inside was too drunk to face the cold of the outhouse. Instead he opened the closet door and emptied his bladder on the floor. After getting him settled on the mat where they slept, the princess cleaned it up. There was the day that she, desperate to buy a little rice and a few vegetables so she could make something for their dinner, went to the hiding place where she kept the $20 her brother had given her months before. She had saved it for just such a time. It was gone.
"You bastard! You son-of-a-bitch!
You son-of-a-BITCH!"
She screamed in anguish every curse word she knew at her absent prince who at that moment was lubricating his brain with alcohol, the better to solve the problems of his world.
By the time the ambulance attendants put him on the stretcher, all traces of the letter that would deliver them from their tormented existence in this place where they weren't welcome and take them to the Garden of Eden, his father's homeland, were somewhere in the deepest parts of his mind.
Every day, his wife left the three young girls alone and took the 45-minute subway ride followed by a half hour walk to the hospital and sat by his side. She looked at his swollen and heavily bandaged head, his eyes closed, and her mind raced to the days of misery ahead for her and her daughters. She cried bitterly inside, "How can you leave me with all this? How can I take care of three children by myself with no job and no money? How can you die?"
And after three months, without ever having opened his eyes or ever having responded to her desperate pleas to come back, he was gone and so was his dream or so it seemed.
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