Nina Hanee Jang

So I will throw Veteran’s Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.  

– Kurt Vonnegut Jr.  

 

 

 

We sit ourselves in a booth. Denny’s is an interesting place to dine at particularly on a Veteran’s day in America. It’s a place where you normally see a lot of people over the age of sixty, but on this particular U.S. holiday you can spot them more easily and with some fabricated markers indicating that they served in wars, including the one that people in this country do not like to talk about. Even when they do want to talk about it, it’s framed in a way to glorify their work for this tiny little country in the Far East Asia without mentioning the part that caused the war in the first place.  

Scott takes his veteran’s ID out of his wallet, and shows it to the server who just came by our booth. And the server with a genuine smile says, “Thank you for your service.”  

What baffles me even more than this annual salutation in this country itself is how genuine these people seem when they say it. What are they thanking him for? Coming to South Korea, living near the Korean Demilitarized Zone, and preparing for the potential threat of Communism spreading down to South Korea and more? 

What are they thanking the veterans who fought in the Korean War for? For fighting America’s fight against America’s own enemy in the country that was too weak to stand up for itself? Like I said, dining at Denny’s on a veteran’s day in America for me is always an interesting experience.  

I warm my hands on the coffee mug. Scott looks around the restaurant for a bit. He looks at the white men who are probably at least thirty years older than him, sitting with their family with a look of pride on their faces on this glorious day. His gaze returns to our table when our own reality is currently happening.  

“Guess what I saw on Facebook today,” he opens up. Derisiveness and sadness spread on his face at the same time as they do for him so often after his time in the army. It’s not because of what could have been on Facebook, but it’s his expression that engages me to know what he’s laughing at and being sad about at the same time.  

“I guess it’s been almost ten years now. There’s this guy I used to be friends with when we were stationed in New York and we called him Pérez. He died ten years ago and people were posting about him all over the Facebook today.”  

“What were they saying?” I ask while I lift the mug with a vibrant Denny’s logo on one side, and some cheerful catchphrase about coffee on the other side.  

“You know, rest in peace, …. Some memories with him and whatnot.” I can’t really tell if he sounds bitter or sad, or actually feels nothing at all. His face is now completely empty of emotions.  

He tells me that Pérez was a good guy, a funny guy who was nice to everyone. He was only about twenty-four when he died. One day, when Scott was serving in the military in South Korea, he got a phone call. Pérez came home one night and his roommate, Justin, took a knife, and stabbed Pérez and the other roommate to death and ran away. Scott was in South Korea then and Pérez’s body was in New York. So he couldn’t attend his funeral. 

“Why did he do that?” I ask, although I know that I will not get a clear answer for it.  

“I don’t know,” his response confirms my supposition. The news about the incident reported that there were signs on the killer’s Facebook in the posts where he talked about how he wanted to kill everyone, but nobody really paid attention to him. 

Scott continues with the bitterness in his voice, “You know, there are so many people in the army who’s fucked up in their heads. The military don’t do shit about it, though. And there’s ton of people who fake their medical shits. They say their back is fucked up or some shit like that, but they just try to get money from the government while people with real issues don’t get nothing whatsoever. You know, it’s just a whole shitshow.”  

The derisiveness and sadness returns to his face. And soon, he cracks and he can’t hide his fury anymore. I can’t stop imagining fumes coming out of his nostrils and bombs going off everywhere behind him.  

I observe his face for a while and carefully ask, “Did they ever catch him?”  

“Yeah, he was caught in Pennsylvania and went to jail. The crazy thing is, I used to know him. He was in my company and I saw him all the time.”  

“Did you see any signs?”  

“No, I didn’t really know him,” he contemplates for a while and drops his eyes down to the table.  

The server with the smile comes back with two plates of Grand Slam on his hands. “You wanted sunny side up, right?” says the server with the bubbly attitude. He seems about eighteen years old. The age that Scott left home to join the army and went straight to Iraq.  

“Sure,” Scott stares at his breakfast he got free-of-charge for serving the army. 

We stop talking while we try to attack our newly arrived food with the silverware.   

I think about the time Scott and I used to hang out  in Dongducheon in South Korea. Situated near the Demilitarized Zone and the army base, the city is full of Americans and American businesses. We used to go to the Army base — “Camp Casey” if I remember correctly — to get cheap liquors and American candies. The sense of foreign was exciting to me whenever we visited. The army base is basically a small replica of America inside Korea. Looking at all the foreign products, I was a small child in a candy shop. There’s something about foreign things that make me yearn.  

And I remember thinking about my grandmother in those shops. My grandmother who ran all the way from North Korea with a Catholic priest for her religious freedom and risking her entire life during the Korean War. She refused to believe in Kim Il-Sung for her heart was with Jesus Christ. She would have easily been shot right away if she had gotten caught during that run, but that was my grandmother. The woman who spent her childhood during the Japanese occupation of Korea. The woman who was forced to speak only Japanese through the entirety of her adolescence. The woman who was forced to give up her real name under the Japanese’ policy of Soshi-Kaimei. The woman who used Korean and Japanese words together even after the Japanese were long gone, and swore viciously at the “damn Japanese”. Freedom was more important to her than her life when the war came later, and it’s not hard for me to imagine why.  

Later in the war, my grandmother met my grandfather who was a soldier working with Americans in Busan. They got married and had five children. And soon my grandfather died of  Tuberculosis. In the 1960s in Korea, Tuberculosis was a serious deal. It’s funny how Tuberculosis outbreak happened right after the same outbreak in America, and after American army came to our country. Experts say that the Tuberculosis is truly a legacy of the Korean War. My father also suffered from it and spent his youth in a Catholic sanatorium, giving up going to college. And his little brother, my uncle, only has his one good lung left. Death and despair were common companions of our lives then.  

If it weren’t for my grandmother,  I could have been living in the Northern part of Korea right now and worshipping Kim Jong-Un, demonizing Americans and scoffing at pitiful Koreans living in the south with the fictional poverties and maladies, buying into the narrative that ignores such a thing called GDP measure and the fact that South Korea is now number ten in that list. Although, I might have done exactly what my grandmother did. Even to this day, many North Koreans somehow accidentally come across blackmarket copies of South Korean TV shows and decide to escape from their country, risking their life like my grandmother did. They go through China and Vietnam starving, dehydrated, exhausted, threatened, standing on the threshold of death, and make it to the southern part of the country that was once also theirs. Or sometimes, they never make it. Sometimes they are dragged back to the North, get shot to death for traveling outside of the country.  

When they do make it to South Korea, we ask what made them leave North Korea and come all the way here. Almost every time, they mention South Korean TV shows and say, “I didn’t know there was a different life out there. And when I knew there was, I couldn’t stay.” Whenever I hear something like that from these people, part of me dies inside. The life I have right now wasn’t just handed down to me. It was a matter of life and death. The life that many risk their lives for.  

There were so many more army bases back when my grandmother was raising her family, and so many more american products were imported for the American soldiers and their family. And of course, they were black-marketed for Koreans.  My mother used to tell me about this peach-scented lotion that her aunt used to get her from the army base when she was a kid. Every time she talks about this memory, her descriptions of it is so detailed and clear to this day even if it’s been over forty years now. Her memory of its scent, the shape of the bottle, and the texture, is so cherished and treasured.  It was the sense of foreign, I guess, that made that bottle of lotion so special to her. Whenever we go to a big market in Jongro where they sell a lot of American products, she still looks for that peach lotion, knowing that she will never find it again. Standing in front of the candy aisle in a little convenient store in Camp Casey, I felt the presence of my mother and my grandmother. And I thought about how I can’t ever exist in a place all on my own. Nothing I do is just me or just who I am. I am the product of culture and heritage. Once realizing it, I can’t exist without a culture anymore, anywhere.  

And here I was, in a small town called Bloomington in Illinois, dining with an American at a very American establishment on a Veteran’s day. This whole thing feels rather funny to me.  

The cheerful server comes back to our booth again, asking how our food is. We nod our heads in contentment since we have mouth full of food. The server smiles widely and continues, “Just to let you know, guys, your bills are taken care of and good to go. Let me know if you need anything else, and again, thank you for your service!”  

Scott nods and gives the usual, polite smile. “Thank you,” he says.  

“How do you feel when they say ‘thank you for your service’ ?” I ask with a genuine curiosity but I don’t expect his answer to be anything surprising. I’ve known him for a long time and I know how he feels about his years in the army.  

“Weird,” he cracks a laugh.  

“Do you think these people know or really think about the military life or the Korean War?” again, not expecting anything surprising.  

“I doubt it,” he simply answers and shrugs his shoulders.  

“Well, at least we have this sunny side-up free breakfast,” I say it half-mockingly and half-sincerely. It is a funny day to dine at Denny’s.  

On a Veteran’s day in America, I hear the phrase, “Thank you for your service,” everywhere and I can’t help but thinking about my family — especially my grandmother, and my country. 

Did we ever thank you, America, for protecting us from our own people?  

Should we?  

I don’t know.