Article 8

“You’re very handsome,” he said and smiled. Most Korean friendships between men come off vaguely homoerotic despite the fact that most Koreans deny that homosexuality exists in Korea. “My whole life, I just wished that someone would tell me that—that I’m very handsome.”

“Alright, you’re very handsome,” I said. I’m pretty used to this stuff by now, doesn’t even faze me.

“Oh,” he said and smiled big, “then I’m buying dinner tonight.” He patted me on the shoulder and drove all the rest of the way to the restaurant with a smile on his face.

“I’m not a gangster,” he said out of no where. “Many people when the first meet me think that I’m a gangster, but I’m not.” Truth be told, I did think that maybe he was in the Korean Mafia. He’s a short, stocky Korean man with his short hair slicked and shining like patent leather. All he needed was a tattoo of a dragon, and he would have been set.

But then again, he was one of my students’ parents, and she always said that he taught English. He confirmed this for me.

“I teach English, but my speaking isn’t so good. I mostly work with kids on grammar.” His speaking was fine. During the course of the evening, I heard him speak Korean, English, Japanese, and Chinese. He was doing okay for himself language wise.

During dinner, he confessed. “I was a gangster for a few years. Not too long. Just while I was in high school. But I quit when I met my wife.” This was the first of three explanations of why he quit the Mafia. The other two were his mother and finding Buddhism.

“Are you good at drinking,” he asked when we left the restaurant.

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

“I hope you’re good at drinking.”

Milk Milk was the name of the bar. Korean bars often have weird names like that. When we pulled into the bar, he was hanging up from the first of many phone calls he got that evening.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m very busy.”

The hostess at the bar, which was very quiet for a Korean bar, seemed to recognize him when
we walked in and immediately escorted us to a private room at the back of the bar.
The room had a huge conference table and, oddly, a Karaoke machine.

“You have to sing,” he said. “In Korea, when a younger man meets an older man for the first time, he’s supposed to sing for him.” Again, it’s Korea.

I told him that I’d try to sing later and put it off as long as I could. I did eventually get roped into it a few hours later, but it took a lot of beer before I got to that point. This was after the point that he told me that I was, in fact, “good at drinking.”

The conversation was mostly about Buddhism at the bar. He was very happy to hear that I knew a lot about Buddhism and offered to take me to many temples.

“Do you know jang?” he asked for the second time that night. Jang is a Korean word that doesn’t really have an English equivalent, but essentially means friendship without expecting anything from the other person. “Unselfish friendship” I guess would be a close translation. Since he had already explained this to me earlier in the evening, I said yes, I knew.

“I have a lot of jang,” he said. “I have many friends. Many are very…what do you say in English?...they are very white collar. Judges, and lawyers, and doctors. But many of my friends are gangsters. I have many friends, but I have only three real friends. One is a doctor, and two are gangsters. I think that real friends are what is important.”

He ordered another round of drinks and invited some girls to drink with us. “Have you ever been to Jeju island?” he asked. I hadn’t. “I have a cottage there. You should come with me sometime.” He let me know that he had another cottage on another island a few minutes later. He was very well-off for an English teacher.

At about one in the morning, he invited me back to his house and showed me his artwork collection. He was quick to quote the prices quietly to me, as though it were a secret he was keeping from his wife in the other room—the only other person that could possibly be able to hear.

When I told him I had just bought some art, he said next time, ask him, and he’ll get me a discount. “You need art, you need food, if you’re lonely, if you need anything, you call me. You call me, and I can get you anything.”

I left his house at about two thirty after a very expensive evening. I had made a new friend.