Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America — John Shaqi
Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing AmericaSills, Steven David Justin
General
Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America
Sills, Steven David Justin
Fiction
In Kwang Sook's school, Sang Huin had asked the children to draw verbs next to
a series of words they found from his handout. When this was finished, he would
read sentences with those vocabulary words like "A tall boy hits a ball in the
air." "How many people are there?" "There is one person," they would say. "What
does he do?" "He hits?" "What does he hit?" "He hits a ball." "Where is the
ball?" "It is in the sky." "What does he look like?" "He is tall." The younger
ones were so competitive with each other in the games he devised for them as if
beating others in the game of survival were entrenched in human curiosities.
They had also done English exercises together on the roof where he had been the
military sergeant giving peremptory whims and they had to jump, run, go to the
right, go to the left, etc. at his command.
The boys had been especially fond of him chasing them around trying to eat them
on the roof as he sang, "This is the way we kill a pig, kill a pig, kill a pig.
This is the way we kill a pig so early in the morning." This play-acting and
making the brutal world seem as nothing but an innocuous frivolity caused them
to squeal like piglets. It was insignificant wrestling around with the children
in a job that did not take too much talent or knowledge but it was a silly
example of love. He wanted to give that spark of imagination and knowledge just
because it seemed right to give it. Weren't more altruistic connections really
what life was about? And yet if this were the true form of love, he often asked
himself, wouldn't it be so fulfilling that he would give himself to it
completely?
When he arrived at the express bus terminal, he took the subway to Chongno.
Near Pagoda Park, he went to Hardee's . The break from Hanguk food
(particularly kimchee) he found nourishing to his imagination that craved
variety. He wanted to be a vegetarian but at times he thought that he almost
lapped up the grease like a starving dog. When he finished, he found himself on
one of his first safaris to a gay sauna. He was still unsure how to get there
and so he looked down at the "chito" (map) a fellow hunter at the theatre had
drawn for him on the back cover of his "Expatriate In Korea" resource book one
time when he was at the theater.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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