Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing AmericaSills, Steven David Justin
General
Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America
Sills, Steven David Justin
Fiction
Finally, the two or three-year-old parted one of the kneecaps and the mother
pushed candy bribes before her nose to keep her quiet and contained. Soon they
bought a ticket in the Chinchon station and boarded a bus. All bus terminals in
cities under a million people had cement floors and were dark and dirty like a
cellar. Just like he had seen in myriad other terminals, here a man came along
with a plastic watering bucket with a nozzle used for watering plants. He
rinsed the floor with the water contained in it but did not follow that with
either a mop or a broom. A few minutes later, two boys came into the terminal.
One had a basketball in his hands. The other one stood a few feet behind him.
He looked bored and fat.
"Anyong Haseyo" (Peace you do)
"Anyong Hashimnika, Sonsaeng nim," (Peace you do, teacher), said the one with
the basketball.
"Uri-tul nun taxi ul sayang hata?" (We taxi to use?) He knew it was as
ungrammatical as a pig. He knew that again there would be no taxi. Again they
would be walking. Still it was his way of saying something. The one with the
basketball who could figure it out shook his head.
They walked down the sidewalks. The two boys lead the way. Sang Huin felt that
the roles had been inverted and he felt a twinge of resentment that he was a
child or a retard in his own native country and that children were dragging him
about. The three of them moved down sidewalks like window-shopping loiterers
looking into every mom and pop store along the way. "Ilchik tangshin-tul rul
basketball ul hayoshimnita kachi?" (Early you basketball did?) The fat boy
nodded his head silently. The boy knew his genius in interpretive skills. A
sense of pride exuded over his face in a white light but the flush of
expression was extremely ephemeral. It came upon him and vanished in just a few
seconds.
"Who won?" asked Sang Huin in English.
The fat boy pointed to himself with his thumb. He even smiled for a second in a
sort of bored way.
Then they opened a gate and they went into what looked like a house only it was
separated into two apartments.
Sang Huin used his photograph cards like magic tricks to get them to practice
tenses and syntax. He liked seeing their tiny house and thinking how his life
might have been--for better or for worse--within the childhood of his race. He
loved English as he loved music; and sometimes he combined the two in such
classes, but with a small feeling of resentment (to which his smile and gentle
nature gave no indication) as if his time was sodden in musical doggerel that
defiled him like a solecism when he might well be playing Haydn and Boccherini.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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