Olympic Boulevard

OLYMPIC BOULEVARD

Philip Onho Lee Translated by John Cha

OLYMPIC BOULEVARD Copyright @ Philip Onho Lee All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

Published in 2016 by Seoul Selection U.S.A., Inc. 4199 Campus Drive, Suite 550, Irvine, CA 92612 Phone: 949-509-6584 / Seoul office: 82-2-734-9567 Fax: 949-509-6599 / Seoul office: 82-2-734-9562 E-mail: publisher@seoulselection.com Website: www.seoulselection.com ISBN: 978-1-62412-070-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016943393 Printed in the Republic of Korea

This book was published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).

For my dear wife Serena, my daughter Christine, my son Austin, and my granddaughter Kat.

CONTENTS Author’s note

8

Hongdari

11

Hongdari and Helen

19

Sweatshop

32

Labyrinth

51

Blue Sky

67

Pigeons

86

The Kkwari Episode

105

Bachelor Party

131

Hongdari’s Blues

148

Stars over Wilderness

166

Going to Santa Monica

190

Woman by the Beach

217

A Brilliant White Path

240

Going Home

256

Author’s note

America was built by immigrants. In that sense, it belongs to all the people gathered here from every part of the world.

America has also been called the land of opportunity, and it remains to this day a place where people who can reap the benefits of their efforts. For evidence, we need look no further than the White House, whose current occupant stands as a symbol of progress amid the nation’s tragic legacy of racism. One day it may be our children, the children of immigrants, who assume that office.

Once upon a time in America, anyone could ride into a place, drive a stake into the ground, and claim it as his own.

The discovery of gold in California sparked a particularly energetic onrush of westbound settlers. They set out in covered wagons on roads of life and death, enduring many months of daily danger as well as terrible hardship. Over a century has passed since we joined this procession.

People everywhere continue to journey in search of better lives, some arriving and others being led farther on. Our companions on such paths are our families and neighbors. I wrote this story as a witness who has dwelt

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among such people in this way, sharing the best and worst of times, learning to comfort and to be comforted.

This is a story about people who make their living washing dirty clothes until they’re clean. I wrote it as a composite novel of fourteen short stories, each featuring a different episode. It brings together my thoughts about the human experience and the lives of immigrants as well as my musings on the kind of people who are able to transmute deep regret and bitter grief through humor.

For the English-language publication of this book, I owe many thanks to translator John Cha and to Hank Kim and the editorial staff at Seoul Selection.

Signal Hill, CA Greater Los Angeles Spring 2016

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Olympic Boulevard

Hongdari

MY LIFE IN America comprises a series of vignettes as complicated as America itself. After thirty years of living in America, I am still trying to make sense of it, what I am doing here, and why. I drink a lot of whisky in the process, hoping the heavenly juice will help me understand what life is all about. But I rather think it complicates things further.

In the end, though, my life story is about people, mainly—my family, friends, and the occasional stranger. I share my time with them, see myself through them, and as far as I know, they do the same with me.

First, let me tell you a little about Hongdari, my only friend in this world. We share just about everything together, mostly booze and stories concerning life and death. He’s an old classmate of mine from high school back in Korea.

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We weren’t good friends back then. Actually, he was a pain in the ass. I was a skinny kid, and he always made fun of me, calling me names like Myung Tay, or Dried-up Fish Head. Well, he was built like a grown man already, with square shoulders and muscular arms. He used to strut around the schoolyard like he owned the place, more like a soldier on the prowl than a high school student. When he saw me on campus, he’d come over and ask, “Hey, Myung Tay, you got a cig on you?” He knew I was a model student, not the smoking type, but he’d ask me for a cig just to bug me, and soon, he’d be asking for my bus ticket and lunchbox.

I don’t know how many books of bus tickets he absconded from me in all, but I will tell you that I walked home from school on many occasions. If I showed signs of resistance about sharing my lunch, he’d glare at me with his huge bullfrog eyes and say, “Let’s be fair and divide it in half.” And he would cut a bigger portion for himself. He would chomp on the rice and say “Don’t you know about sharing? It’s a ticket to heaven. The Bible says so. You like sharing, so you will go to heaven for sure.”

For him, sharing went beyond bus tickets and lunch. He once sat behind me during a test and copied my answers, and promptly got caught. I was hauled into the office as well, even though he was the one who’d done the cheating. He had the gall to tell the teacher that I had shown him my test paper and he’d had no choice but to look at it, as if I was the guilty one. The teacher was appalled at his explanation,

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and let me go. Hongdari was great at twisting things around, saying he was doing me a favor by letting me “share” with him. I can’t recall how many times I had to walk home or go hungry on account of him, but strangely, I didn’t harbor any ill feelings. I didn’t feel I had to get back at him or tell on him, probably because he won me over with his sweet talk about sharing, heaven, and God. Be that as it may, when we graduated from high school, we parted company, and I was happy to lose him. I felt relieved, as if I’d been cured of a bad toothache. But then he entered my life again here in America, twenty years later.

It was about two years after I immigrated to America, a time when I was struggling just to make it through the day.

On moonlit nights, I’d get nostalgic and teary eyed, looking at the moon and wondering about all the places I’d used to roam as a young man in Seoul. I’d ask myself why I was doing what I was doing—living in America, working as a janitor at a hospital on weekdays, selling accessories at swap meets on weekends, all thousands of miles away from home.

That fateful Saturday, I got to the swap meet at five in the morning, along with my daughter, Woni, a junior in high school then. It was early in the morning, but I couldn’t find a good place to spread out my wares—necklaces, earrings, bracelets, ladies’ belts and such. America went by the rule of first come, first served, a lesson I should have learned early on. Location is everything in the swap meet business, and old-timers had camped out in their cars the night before to

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get in line for the choice spots. So by the time I arrived at dawn, I was the last in line. All the best spots were gone by then, and I ended up with one way back in the corner, away from all the foot traffic. I was ready to accept the fact that it was going to be one of those unlucky days. At this rate, I’d be hard pressed even to recoup the rental fee for such a lousy spot.

What did I know about running a business? A swap meet business no less. I had no experience, no English. Need I say more? I heard some people made piles of money in the swap meet business, but I didn’t see how.

That day, too, some enterprising Korean vendors were “dumping” clothes and accessories they had acquired by the container, and selling them at prices lower than I could buy them through wholesalers. I couldn’t compete against people like that, and they were hawking their goods by the entrance that day.

Customers swarmed their stall like flies while their six employees tended the crowd. They even had a couple of guards to make sure nobody walked off with their goods.

Well, good for them, their bustling business would make them very rich in no time at all. But at the expense of others.

“Dad, those people are hogging all the business,” Woni protested. “They should think of others, too.”

“Maybe they’re liquidating their inventory.” I made up the story so she wouldn’t get a bad impression of other Koreans.

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“That’s not it, Dad. They don’t buy their inventory through wholesalers like we do, they buy container-loads at thirty thousand dollars each. They should be wholesalers, not retailers. Dad, don’t we have thirty thousand dollars?”

In those days, thirty thousand dollars was an astronomical sum of money. I simply said no.

Seeing Woni upset, I felt bad for dragging her out of bed to help me with this lousy business. Poor thing. I shouldn’t have gotten into it in the first place. I began singing at the top of my lungs.

“Ah, moonlit night of Silla, did I come here to laugh, did I come here to cry . . .”

I didn’t care what people thought about my singing.

That was how I greeted the morning sun that day. Shortly, people came by to check out our merchandise, even though it was more expensive. I wondered if they were blind, but I said, “Hi, how are you?” Woni was good at sales, and she was better than me at talking to the customers. When she went to work on a prospective buyer, I stood back, my hands clasped. As the day grew, more customers came by, and I tried to be helpful by wrapping their purchases.

A swap meet is a marvelous place for studying humanity.

You see all shapes and sizes—black, white, Hispanic, Asian, even Eskimos. When I wasn’t doing anything, I would go into a trance, fascinated by all the strangers strolling by. That was exactly what I was doing when I heard someone ask me a question in Korean.

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Olympic Boulevard

“Aren’t you . . . uh . . . Fish Head? I mean, Mr. Tay? Myung-ho Tay?” I turned and stared at the woman. A bit plump, and pleasant-looking. I didn’t recognize her, but I was happy to hear her speak Korean. Meeting Koreans wasn’t all that common then.

She clapped her hands together and said, “Yes, I’m sure I’m right. I was watching you for a while. You know Hongdari, right?”

“Hongdari?” I asked, surprised.

“He’s my husband. He has your picture up on our living room wall. He was always telling us about this friend who helped him out during his high school days, and that was you. He even put your picture in the newspaper hoping to find you, when we immigrated to America. He’ll be so happy to see you. We never imagined that we’d find you here. Oh, what a wonderful fate we weave! You look just like your picture.” She went on excitedly, holding onto my hand.

“I’ve aged ten years in just two years here in America,” I blurted casually, to this woman I’d never seen before.

Hearing Hongdari’s name, old memories rushed back, even making me choke up a bit. What was odd, I hadn’t even thought about Hongdari for years, yet I felt close to him and to the woman standing in front of me.

“I came by to find a cheap base for one of my flower pots.

Here’s our home number. Give me yours.” She spoke with the familiarity of an old friend. A bit too familiar, perhaps.

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Olympic Boulevard

The next minute, she shook her head and said, “Wait a minute, I can get your telephone number later. First, let’s go to our house. Isn’t it time to close up, anyway?”

I could tell she thought and talked just like her husband, fast and out of control. As she talked, she gripped my hand so hard my head started swimming from the pain that shot up my arm.

Woni, who had been watching all this take place, jumped in the conversation. “Who are you to tell us where to go?”

She spat out her words, cold and curt, as if to thwart my being seduced by a strange saloon madam.

So Hongdari’s wife, Helen, turned her attention to Woni and went over the details, explaining that she was the wife of my old classmate. That I had been a benefactor to Hongdari impressed my daughter. Although about that time I was at a point where I could use a benefactor myself. Like Hongdari long ago, I had no bus ticket and no lunchbox. I badly wanted to tell Helen that I doubted if I would make it in this dog-eat-dog world, but I didn’t say anything.

Suddenly, Helen started grabbing accessories off the table, saying, “These would make good gifts for my employees.”

She moved very quickly for a heavyset woman.

That night Hongdari came over to my house and gave me a rundown of his life in his usual crass way, both his struggles and successes. In short, he was doing terrific in the laundry business, with annual revenues in the six figures.

In a triumphant voice, he said, “Look, you shared your

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things with me in the old days, now I’ll share mine with you.

That way, I can make it to heaven too. Haha. We can walk through the pearly gates together, side by side. Wouldn’t that be great? Promise me that you will stay with me to the end. I never told you before, but I managed to survive every day because of the lunches you shared with me.” He went quiet for a while, his eyes moist. Helen dabbed at her eyes with a Kleenex.

Hongdari licked his tears and continued. “You’re my savior. If it wasn’t for you, I would have starved to death for sure.”

By this strange turn of events, I got involved in the drycleaning business, with Hongdari’s help. Two years later, he set up a dry-cleaning plant bigger than a house, equipped with German-made dry-cleaning machines. So began our lives together in America, and our families were inseparable for years to come.

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Hongdari and Helen

WE SPENT A lot of time together over the years, sharing good times and bad. One of the things that bothered me about Hongdari and Helen was that they had frequent fights. Whenever they fought, Helen would pack a bag and crash at our house, driving us crazy. Worse yet, Hongdari would follow her over, and they would continue their bouts for a second and third round.

Let me back up about ten years. By this time, my American dream had lost steam, flat as day-old beer. I was mired in the daily grind, laboring over piles of laundry in our shop. I was busy doing my chores one afternoon when Julie called out to me—“Yeobo, yeobo!”—frowning like a cat that’s slurped vinegar. A woman of a thousand smiles, she rarely frowned like that. I tensed up inside, concerned.

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Olympic Boulevard

About the Author Philip Onho Lee was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1940. He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in Korean Language and Literature at Sungkyunkwan University, after which he served as a professor at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. He immigrated to the United States in 1980 and currently resides in Signal Hill, California, where he continues to write.

Lee made his official literary debut in 1972, when he was awarded the Donga Ilbo Young Writers Award for his play Boiler Room People, and has gone on to author over 40 plays and novels, including Avocado Seed, Roller Coaster, Who Will Save Danae, and The Bullshitter. Award-winning works include Salt Merchant (Best Play, Korea Theater and Film Arts Awards) A Dish Called Q (Best Play, Korean Expatriate Literature Awards), The Picture Bride’s Love (Grand Prize, Korean Playwrights Association Award), Lives on the Road (PEN Korean Center USA Literary Prize), and Lantern Flower Dry Cleaners (English title Olympic Boulevard; Korean Catholic Writers’ Association USA Literary Prize).

John H. Cha lives and writes in Oakland, California. He has written several volumes of biographies about Korean and American leaders, including Willow Tree Shade: The Susan Ahn Cuddy Story, The Do Or Die Entrepreneur, Exit Emperor Kim Jong-il, and A Small Key Opens Big Doors.

Cha has won a number of awards for translating Korean literature into English.

credits Publisher Editor Copy Editor Proofreader Designers Cover Illustrator

Kim Hyunggeun Shin Yesol Christine Kwon Eileen Cahill Jung Hyoju, Jung Hyun-young Son Eunkyoung