In the doctors' class, held at Dr. Lee's breakfast table, he brought up articles and political cartoons for discussions. Everything from the continuing menace of Saddam Husein, incursions into the demilitarized zone by North Korea, the Yonsei University student demonstrations, the convictions of the ex-presidents, and all of the most newsworthy of the world's unhappy events were there for the probing. But today, upon leaving, he remembered an article he had forgotten to bring to them: the Taliban's restraint of war ravaged widows from work. The doctors liked such things. As Dr. Lee had pointed out, even happenings in the most remote parts of the world often spread amuck like an oil spill in a global community. He remembered having forgotten this article when he was walking out the door and then it slid from and fell off his memory altogether. After walking to the Muguk bus depot he had second thoughts about going back to Chongju. He got in a taxicab. That was the easy part. He said, "Anyong Hashimnika?" and then probed his mind. "Odie ka?," (where you go?) asked the taxi driver sharply. The word, "kang," meant river and "mul" meant water. What, he thought to himself, was the word for lake? "Kun mul? (big water)...no, that would never work!" Somehow he found it and got out a coherent sentence. The taxi took him there leaving him on the shoulder of the road. He got out. The highway that was the main road of the town was sandwiched between a bluff and a lake reflecting the marginal space of the Korean landscape. There were no classes for a while and the day was there to celebrate like the disrobing and denuding of a goddess--or in his case, a god. Sang Huin pulled off his shirt and rolled up his slacks. He sat down under a small pavilion. Near it weeds grew. He plucked one and put it into his mouth. He chewed it and sprawled himself on the bench thinking himself as a more worldly version of Huckleberry Finn. Looking down at the waters and the small fishing crafts that were tied to a few docks at a distance, he thought about the Korean landscape in general images: the croaking of frogs in the irrigated rice fields near the apartment that he once had in Umsong; the farmers ("nongmin") who would insert each individual plant as painstakingly as a plastic surgeon grated each item of hair. In galoshes, they would trudge into the depths of mud to sow, reap, and thresh the rice. The moon above the empty Umsong stadium was a lambent glow over the rice and gave a slight visibility to the forest that interconnected a nearby field to the stadium. None of it was all that spectacular when compared to the variety and splendor of the vast country, America, that was and wasn't his country; but still it was new and he sometimes liked it.