I watched his eyes as he scanned them. He skipped past Private Boltworks and the dark man, but his eyes lingered on the sketch of Yun Ai-ja, the smiling woman. Still staring at her, he shook his head.
“Her,” I said, pointing at the smiling woman’s sketch.
“You know her.”
“No,” he said, but his voice sounded weak. Indecisive.
A thought hit me. Improbable, but worth a try.
“Think about this,” I said. “What if her hair in this sketch was the same length but straighter, less wavy, and it was jet black.”
He stared at the sketch again.
“Imagine her skinny,” I said. “So skinny her cheeks were sunken in.”
I sucked my cheeks in to demonstrate, but Haggler Lee wasn’t watching. He stared intently at the sketch. As quietly as I could, I moved one of the candleholders closer. Suddenly, Haggler Lee gulped an involuntary intake of breath.
“Miss Yun,” he said.
Haggler Lee took the unusual step of leaving his warehouse, along with his bodyguards, and escorted Ernie and me down to the nightclub district of Itaewon. While we stood on a dark corner, his bodyguards reconnoitered the area until they found the man they were looking for: Jimmy. A slender, middle-aged Korean who rode his motor scooter to Itaewon every night. With a big flash camera hung over his neck, he wandered from club to club offering his services to the GIs and business girls who snuggled together in dark booths, snapping a photo and popping the hot flash bulb into his white-gloved hand.
It was a living-the type of hustle that everyone had to make to get by in post-war Korea.
Jimmy stood before me and Ernie and Haggler Lee, eyes wide, crooked smile showing amusement at the attention. He nodded to Lee, but not deeply, Jimmy being older.
Lee spoke to Jimmy so rapidly I could barely keep up- something to do with showing photographs to me and Ernie. Jimmy nodded, jumped on his motor bike, rolled up to one of the kimchee cabs that lined the streets of Itaewon, and gave the driver directions. Ernie and I hopped in the back of the cab. We followed Jimmy’s scooter through the winding roads of Seoul.
Finally, in the riverside district known as Dongbinggo, Jimmy stopped on the flag-stoned sidewalk of a busy thoroughfare. He motioned for the cab to pull over, and we climbed out. Pushing his motor bike, Jimmy trudged up a pedestrian pathway that ascended a steep hill. The path was lined with wood and brick walls, behind which squatted teeming small hovels. When we were almost to the top, the road leveled off, and Jimmy turned and stopped at a rickety wooden gate. He banged on it with his fist.
“Na ya!” he shouted. It’s me.
When the gate opened, two bright eyes shone out at us. A woman turned and shuffled off quickly, back to the hooch behind the wall. I helped Jimmy lift his scooter through the gate. We were in a small courtyard with the usual byonso on one side, earthen kimchee jars on the other. The kimchee jars flanked a cement-block building almost as large as the hooch. It seemed out of place in this Asian slum. Modern. Its red door and blue-tiled roof gleamed in the moonlight, and promised entry into another world.
Ernie inhaled the aroma of boiling red peppers wafting from the house the woman had disappeared into.
“Nice place you got here, Jimmy,” he said, and I knew he meant it.
Below, headlights streamed down Han Kang Ro, the Han River Road. On the other side of downtown, a three-quarters-full harvest moon illuminated craggy peaks. I could just make out the symmetrical stone battlements that had once protected this ancient city from invasion.
Jimmy pulled out a ring of keys and opened the red door. He flicked on a switch and the interior was bathed in red light. With his free arm, he motioned for us to enter.
When I was a kid in L.A., our grammar school once took a busload of us Chicano kids from the slums of Maravilla up to the scenic grandeur of Griffith Park Observatory. I was impressed with the granite monolith and the panoramic view of the Los Angeles Basin from its stone walkways. I was even more impressed by the show inside. We sat in comfortable chairs and the lights were turned lower and lower until, from horizon to horizon, the entire star-studded universe erupted from the darkness.
What I saw in Jimmy’s photo lab that night was not nearly as magnificent. But in some ways it was more beautiful. For what Jimmy had done during his years since the Korean War-years spent wandering from bar to bar with a camera-was to chronicle a way of life. GIs pulled from their homes and thrust into the harsh and lonely environment of the United States Army, facing a four thousand year old Asian culture that was on the ropes, a country halved and reeling from thirty-five years of Japanese occupation and three years of vicious civil war, followed by a wary peace. Overly made-up Korean girls filled shot after shot. Girls who only weeks or days before had been squatting in muddy rice paddies, trying to harvest enough grain and pick enough cabbage to survive through the long months of the Korean winter. If the survival of their families meant they had to sell their bodies to American GIs, they would.
Jimmy stored the photos in long narrow boxes, each marked with a letter written in hangul. Without asking questions, he located three boxes buried under a table, lifted them up, blew dust off, and plopped them on the tabletop. He deftly thumbed through the photos, each sheathed in a brown pulp envelope. When he found what he was looking for, he slapped it up on a plastic-backed wall board and switched on the fluorescent light. He slapped another photo up, and then another, and Ernie and I stared at the universe before us.
The uniforms are what I noticed first. Archaic. Stiff old-fashioned khaki. The GIs wore black ties and their trousers were bloused into brown combat boots. Styles have changed. The haircuts are shorter now. The Rock Revolution, begun a decade earlier, prompted the army to tighten its haircut restrictions, so anything longer than a crew cut is frowned upon. The GIs in these photos from the fifties sported hair that looked shaggy in comparison.
Still, they were young and fresh-faced. There were many different GIs in the pictures, but the woman was the same. The same Korean face. She looked very much like the smiling woman, except her hair was black instead of blond, and her cheekbones were higher. She was skinnier than the smiling woman. On the edge of each envelope was written a single Chinese character: Yun.
And still there were more. The parade of GIs sitting next to Miss Yun changed as rapidly as an old film in a nickelodeon. Each one younger and more wholesome than the one before. And all the while, the woman known as Miss Yun kept her smile cranked up to full velocity.
Some of the photos that Jimmy slapped up for us weren’t taken in nightclubs. Some showed Miss Yun outside the clubs, or on the shores of a lake, or standing with a Korean friend outside a bathhouse. I recognized one of her companions, the woman who was now the old hag known as the Uichon mama-san. And then a child: a toddler with straight blonde hair and a Korean face. As the child grew older and taller, a second child appeared. This one a boy. Dark. His hair curly, face scowling. Jimmy slapped another photo up and stopped.
“This her long time yobo,” he said. Her long time American boyfriend.
He was beefy, with large hands and a scorched-earth crew cut framing his bulging cheeks. He was homely, even in uniform, battle ribbons across his chest. Suspicious eyes glared out from behind thick Army-issue glasses. Miss Yun, although she was aging, was still much too beautiful for him.
Another photo. The booth was full. The beefy soldier took up most of the space. Sitting on either side of the couple were the children. The girl’s hair was a little darker-light brown- and looked more Asian. His hair was wavy, no longer in curls. They boy had a strong square jaw. He sat with a non-committal expression, the big GI’s paw resting on his shoulder. The GI’s other arm was looped all the way around behind Miss Yun. His hand rested on the girl’s head. His fingers were long, languid, fleshy. Possessive.
Miss Yun looked resigned.
The rank insignia on his khaki sleeve was SFC, Sergeant First Class. The name: Garner.
After that, the photos stopped. Except for one more that Jimmy found on the other side of his lab. It was from a much later date, because now both kids were teenagers, the boy maybe thirteen, the girl a couple of years older. Miss Yun stood between them, being held up. She seemed ancient now, skinnier than she had ever been, her face wrinkled, her eyes drooping as if exhausted from the effort of living. All stood in front of an ancient wooden gate. Above, three Chinese characters were slashed in red. Dirty snow lay in clumps at their feet.
“Where was this taken?” I asked Jimmy.
“At Buddhist temple in country. Called Hei-un Sa. The Temple of Cloud and Sea. Sometimes I go there pray.
