Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing AmericaSills, Steven David Justin
General
Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America
Sills, Steven David Justin
Fiction
"Yang Lin or Antonio. Ku nun manhi irum ul cajigo isumnita. I sarem i
wanhamnita." He threw in both names that the little guy went by and the
telephone clicked off.
He called again.
"Yoboseyo."
"Yoboseyo. Yang--"
"What do you want with him?"
"I'd like to talk with your son. I am an acquaintance of his. He helped me to
get to Toksugum Palace. I want to thank him. I'd like to talk to him again."
Yang Lin had told him that his father suspected all male callers and that Sang
Huin would have to give a defense of his acquaintanceship but Sang Huin felt
awkward in his misrepresentation. Here he was playing with a man's reality
concerning his son. He did not feel good about himself.
"Well, he isn't here. He's never here!"
The telephone clicked off. Sang Huin felt hurt. He felt a morbid clarity behind
how people always left his life. He thought about what he "knew" of this
Chinese friend, Yang Lin, if he knew anything at all: he was adopted and lived
in America; that those parents died-- his mother first and then the father in a
drunk driving accident; that he was readopted by Korean parents; that his
father despised him and suspected his son was gay; and that Yang Lin felt that
his English level was the same as his Korean. Abstract ideas must not have
existed in his head at all. In short, he "knew " very little and the scanty but
pathetic information he received might, for what he knew, have been nothing but
a mendacity. Sang Huin had a great empathy; but now another friendship had just
bit the dust.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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