The Foreign Student Read online

  The Foreign Student

  A Novel

  Susan Choi

  Contents

  One

  1955 The mountain at night was pitch dark. The twin… Two

  The autumn brought an end to accidental encounters and unexpected…

  Three

  They sped past the base of the drive to the…

  Four

  In September 1945 John Hodge arrived in Korea with the…

  Five

  At first nothing happened. The boy—his name was Courtlin,…

  Six

  When he had first arrived at Sewanee, Bower took him…

  Seven

  Curing himself of his attachment to Peterfield had not been…

  Eight

  After Inchon the front pushed north of Seoul and kept…

  Nine

  On New Year’s Eve afternoon Katherine had stepped into his…

  Ten

  He went to Bower and told him he wanted his…

  Eleven

  Katherine didn’t have the things to do that a normal…

  Twelve

  He left Chicago the way he’d arrived, sitting halfway down…

  Thirteen

  The freighter dropped anchor off an unsettled strip of Cheju’s…

  Fourteen

  When he was brave enough he prayed, more often than…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1950 Before 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 hauled 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 a 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.

  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 exhilarating 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 an 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.

  “Where are you going, to study hall?” the soldier asked. He didn’t answer. They watched each other expectantly. He wondered, the thought brief but terrorizing, if they could have been schoolmates. The truck’s bed held two benches, both full. The floor of the bed was also full. The twin rows of boys were seated so close together that their shoulders were forced to twist to one side. They sat facing each other over the heads of those packed between their feet. The soldier said, “Can you hear me?” Balancing the butt of his rifle, he made a light jab and knocked off Chuck’s glasses. In Chuck’s vision the road swam. Laughing, the soldier looked toward the driver, who was cleaning his nails. The faces in the bed were impossible to see.

  “I have ID,” he said. “I work for the wire service.”

  “You have papers?”

  “ID.” He shifted the Underwood to his left hand, casually, but he did not yet reach for his card. He squinted hard at the soldier. Could they have been schoolmates? “I translate. I have Special Status.”

  The soldier turned again toward the driver with a look of mock amazement. The driver was not watching them.

  “Then where are you going?” the soldier resumed. He yanked the black case from Chuck’s hand. Without turning the case on its side, he snapped open the clasp and the Underwood crashed to the street. The bright black carapace cracked open, spilling the carriage and throwing forward a cluster of type bars. The soldier had leaped away from the falling machine in panic, barely saving his shoes. One reel of the ribbon was dislodged and the inked strip of cloth unfurled into the street, the bright reel bouncing over the stones and then stopping abruptly when the whole had unspooled. Peterfield’s mail, the old sheet of news, and the blank letterhead all fluttered to the ground. The soldier stood waiting for him to gather the papers together. The driver had looked up in annoyance at the sound, and he spoke to the soldier now.

  “Put him in, we have to go.”

  The soldier looked at Chuck. “Get in,” he said. “You’re drafted.”

  “I have ID,” said Chuck.

  The soldier lifted his rifle and punched the muzzle into the center of Chuck’s sternum. He felt his lungs collapsing, and a seal closing over his throat. He fell against the curb. The driver slapped the side of his door and it made a large, hollow sound. “We have to go now,” he said.

  The soldier hesitated. He lifted the rifle and thoughtfully looked down its length. Chuck tasted blood, the champ of a bit. He gasped and then vomited. The soldier drew back, smirking, and kicked the typewriter. The platen flew f
ree and rolled to the gutter. When the truck began to move he caught hold and jumped onto the running board.

  After the truck had passed Chuck rolled to his stomach, and reached across the ground for his glasses. Then he sat wiping the lenses free of dust with the tails of his shirt. The acrid stain down his chest was pale pink on the gray cloth. His chin was wet, and the skin there burned. He pulled the T-shirt from its hidden place in the waist of his pants and filled his mouth with the taste of its cotton, biting down on the soft mass, soothing the terrible itch that the acid had made on his tongue and in the back of his throat. When the cotton was wet he sucked the cloth, and swallowed the liquid. He hadn’t eaten all day. He stood up again, wobbling.

  The car was waiting for him where his uncle had said it would be. A single pair of eyes, probably a child’s, blinked from a doorway.

  “I’m Lee’s nephew,” he told the driver. He knew he hadn’t been followed but he squatted next to the car nervously, pressing against its dark flank.

  “I knew who you were,” the driver said. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  The car’s backseat held fur coats, fine rugs, goosedown bedding. He burrowed into these things. “Careful,” said the driver. “Lie flat.” The driver came and unrolled a carpet over him. Darkness closed in, and then a soft crushing weight as the driver methodically buried him. He closed his eyes and fought for breath.

  When the car began to move he tried to imagine the streets as they drove, to visualize each building as it passed. He often did this when he couldn’t go to sleep. Choosing one street, he’d try to reconstruct it from the pavement to the rooftops. It was always surprising how little of the city he remembered, although he’d lived here all his life. He often wound up with just the litter around his feet, a storefront, the shape of the road.

  one

  1955 The mountain at night was pitch dark. The twin beams from the headlamps would advance a few feet and be annihilated, and only the motion of the bus striving upward indicated that you were not at sea, and only the dispersion of stars in the sky marked off what lay around you as a mass and not an infinite void. His first time up this road from Nashville the bus had put him off in the middle of nowhere and nothing and its tail lights winked out around a bend before the driver thought twice and backed up. The small lights reappeared. When the bus was alongside again the door swung open and the driver pointed into the featureless blackness. “That way,” he said. Chuck had still been standing at the side of the road with his suitcase hanging from one hand and his overcoat over one arm, and this was the petrified figure that Mrs. Reston, the vice chancellor’s housekeeper, found at the door to the vice chancellor’s house forty-five minutes later. You would not have known that the motionless person had just walked two miles straight uphill with a steady and terrified step and only the slight paleness of the gravel reflecting the stars to direct him. To Mrs. Reston he seemed to have dropped into the pool of porch light from outer space. She showed him inside and unclamped the hand from the suitcase’s handle and unbent the arm from beneath the drape of the overcoat, and gave him some tea in the kitchen.

  Mrs. Reston was annoyed with the bus driver for not having explained things more clearly. It would seem like a failure of hospitality, in her opinion, unless a person knew that the gravel drive up to the vice chancellor’s was too steep and shifty a purchase for the lumbering bus and even most cars. They’d go skittering right off the edge. As far as hospitality went, she was ready. She had been ready for his arrival for days and had been waiting with a pot of tea and her embroidery basket and a pile of Silver Screen back issues for hours.

  She gave him his tea in the kitchen, in order to impart the idea that he was not a guest, but a boy being welcomed home. This tactic, based on years of experience with free-floating, frightened young men, fell securely within the realm of which she was the mistress, and she would have done it even if the vice chancellor had not been away for the weekend. But she was glad that he was. “You must be tired after such a long trip,” she said. “I’m going to keep you down here a quick minute because I’ve been so anxious to meet you, but then I’ll take you right up to the guest room. There’s the one nice thing about the vice chancellor’s being away. You can sleep late. Otherwise I’m very sorry he’s gone. Oh, my goodness, you look so tired! Are you going to perish?”

  He shook his head and smiled. He was somehow not capable of speech.

  “How many hours was your trip?”

  He took a long time to answer this question, so long that although she was never quick to judge, and so unflaggingly optimistic in all situations that the vice chancellor had once complained to her about it, the horrible thought crossed her mind that he didn’t speak English at all, that he had faked his letters the way some boys faked their grades. And then he said, in a voice that snagged on its own exhaustion, “Eighteen hours and—” He wanted to add something, to answer her kindness as well as her question. “And we stop to take fuel in Alaska.”

  “Alaska! First time in this country and you’ve already been to Alaska. I don’t think I will ever see Alaska in my life. Was it beautiful?”

  This did not seem the word. It had been a gloaming, purple and vast. Past the end of the world. But he didn’t have these words, either. He nodded, and nodded again when she said, “You poor thing. Let me put you to bed.”

  It was a tidy but comfortable room, with a high bed and a lamp on the table that was already lit. Mrs. Reston turned the bed down and patted it briskly. He stood helplessly by. All the distance he’d plowed through, and her one simple gesture disabled him. He followed her back to the door.

  “Sleep late,” she said, turning away.

  He shut the door after her, and looked down at the knob. Then he opened and shut and reopened it. She was already far down the hall.

  “Excuse,” he called.

  “Yes dear?”

  “If I have to lock.” He twisted the knob.

  “But you don’t. It’s all right. We don’t lock our doors here.”

  “Ah. Thank you.”

  He shut the door again and sat on the bed. Then he lay back on top of the covers, and pushed off his shoes with his toes. The shoes were too large, like the suit and the coat.

  After a while he sat up, undid the knots in his shoelaces, and set the shoes beside each other on the floor. He lay down again and tried to find sleep. The thought of the door filled him with shame, because he could not accept the lack of precaution as a sign that he was safe.

  After a breakfast of poached eggs, fried ham, grits with butter, a half grapefruit, and a short stack of buttermilk pancakes, of which he ate only the grapefruit, he was sitting alone on the porch. The day was clear but the air was full of mist, and the broad clear slope in front of the house was slick with dew. It was so quiet he heard every sound: the faint scraping of pine boughs against each other, the creaking of top-heavy trees, birds calling, and from deep within the house the murmur of Mrs. Reston’s kitchen radio and the hiss of the tap as she cleared up the dishes. Then a roaring rose from nowhere and gained quickly in volume, and a tiny cream-colored convertible shot up the road and stopped dead right in front of the house. After a moment’s hesitation the sounds of the morning began to make themselves heard again. The car’s door opened and slammed shut and the car’s driver came striding up the walk with her gloves in one hand.

  Mrs. Reston had heard the engine and she came outside, drying her hands. “Oh, that car,” she said. “But it does handle well up this road. I imagine Katherine could drive it right up the side of a cliff.” Katherine came up the steps and put out her hand and Chuck found himself standing and shaking it. From a distance he had thought she was a very young woman, even a teenager, but as she approached he realized she was at least his own age, if not older. Katherine shifted her gloves from hand to hand. “Is that really your name?” she said. “Chuck?”

  “No.” When she nodded impatiently, interrogatively, he added, “Chang. Is my name.”

  “Somebody’
s changed your name from Chang to Chuck? Was the idea to make it easier to remember? Correct me if I’m wrong,” she said to Mrs. Reston, “but you’re not going to save any syllables going from ‘Chang’ to ‘Chuck.’ You’re not even going to save any letters, unless you transliterate the name as the French would. And I don’t see why you would want to do that. Have you fed him, Mrs. Reston?”

  “I tried,” said Mrs. Reston.

  “I guess our traditional Southern breakfasts are too austere even for a Buddhist. What did you give him? A ham-and-egg sandwich with strawberry jam and a side dish of hollandaise sauce?” Mrs. Reston laughed and wiped her eyes on her dish towel. Katherine laughed with her, but as she turned away he could see her expression reverting to one of angry watchfulness, as if she were waiting for a signal that she didn’t expect to receive.

  She had been enlisted to drive him to Strake House, where he was going to room for the year. Katherine was often to be found performing odd errands around Sewanee, driving faculty widows to shops or retrieving drunken young scholars from police stations, although nothing about her except perhaps her car, her idleness, and her failure to outright refuse seemed to qualify her for these missions. Among year-round residents her solitary peculiarity neither escaped notice nor was talked about much, anymore. She was twenty-eight years old, and unmarried.

  After they had left Mrs. Reston and were driving away he said, after several false starts, “I am not a Buddhist.”

  “I didn’t think you were. I’m glad to see you’re not a mute, either. You talk very little.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “Are you worried about your English? You probably read and write just as well as any of our home-grown scholars. They’re geniuses. Little Shakespeares. You’ll be quite amazed.”

  “Shakespeare,” he began.

  “It’s the talking that stumps you. Don’t worry. It’s the same way with everyone. Speaking English is far more difficult than reading it or writing it. One must be spontaneous, witty, and charming sans cesse. It’s a tall order even for those of us who were raised to do nothing but.”