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A wonderfully strange and rich love story between a shellshocked Corean student and a ruined southern belle. Highly recommended. |
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GOLDSEA | ASIAN BOOKVIEW | FICTION
The Foreign Student
by Susan Choi
HarperPerennial, New York, 1999, 325 pp, $13
EXCERPT:
efore the war his family spent their summers at the country estate they had once lived on all year around, before his father's appointment to the university and their move to the city. Each May, as the sharp stench of the city emerged, he would see his mother roused from her long winter of homesickness and catapulted into action by the nearness of the day they would finally leave for the country. Their house in the city was violently cleaned. The furniture was haulted into the corridors and each room scoured until nothing remained but the sunlight entering the wide, high windows to point out the damp streaks on the floors. During this time the usual order of the house was suspended. His mother vanished into an apron and became indistinguishable from the servants, who shouted at her and at each other as much as his mother usually shouted at them. He became one of the anonymous children, evicted outdoors with the perishable food and told that they had to eat everything. And his father would be magically transformed, appearing with a feather duster bobbing in his hand, gliding toward the library end of the house. His father cleaned those rooms himself. Hidden behind doors that were generally closed upon rigorous silence he could be heard, if the doors were approached: a tender slap, slap of books removed from their shelves to the desk, a murmur of pleasure, turning leaves for a long interval, then finally the cover closed again and the nearly inaudible sound of a feather duster moving across wood. The scouring of the house took days but his father's languid progress through the library rooms often proceeded, its ardor disguised by the dignified lack of speed, for weeks. It began long before the other cleaning began and often ended well after the rest of the house had been transformed into a furniture morgue, phantom lumps in the center of every room, skirted by the immaculate floor.
[CONTINUED BELOW]
For the last few nights before their departure, mats were spread for sleeping in the small foyer, and the rest of the house was sealed as if against a plague. Messengers bearing the annual and ineffectual suicide threats from his father's students were blocked by a wall of packed trunks, stacked three deep, on the porch. He remembered the packing of the house and the leaving of the city as the most exhilirating occasions of his childhood. He would sit between his parents, each of them resting one hand idly on one of his knees, a traveling bag cramping his feet, his skin itching with longing to be exposed to the warm air it sensed through his jacket. Half a day's travel to the north, the other house was being roused from sleep, its servants rehearsing the gestures of servants, its furniture being rediscovered beneath sheets.
Now, leaving the city, he was headed south. By the time he ascended the steps from the basement office into the street a bruised color in the sky was all that was left of the sunset. The card in his breast pocket made a stiff place in the front of his shirt, a shirt that was otherwise depleted, soft from wear and stained with sweat beneath the arms and in an oval above his sternum. He had stolen everything in the office that he could lay his hands on bearing the emblem or a recognizable mark of the United States government: a regulation T-shirt, USIS letterhead, several pieces of official correspondence that were addressed to Peterfield, and a sheet of old news off the wire. At the last minute, he went back and took Peterfield's Underwood. The black case banged rhythmically against the outside of his knee.
He walked in the street, in the slim margin between the gutter and the slow-moving traffic. His glasses were sliding down his nose. He didn't stop them. He saw no one else walking. A ROKA soldier hanging by one hand off the side of the open-backed truck dropped the butt of a rifle before his face, and the truck, which had been barely moving, stopped. The soldier rode alone on the running board. He was wearing American-issue boots, which were far too large, and Republic of Korea Army fatigues.