Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart

Author:Gary Shteyngart [Shteyngart, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

4

“The geh goes meong-meong, meong-meong!” Nat barked.

Karen clapped her hands and reached out to tickle her under her tough skinny little arms. Children really squealed when you tickled them—that was a fact. Would Nat remember these pleasures when she was older? Karen did not remember her own. It was all a mess of stolen television hours, cassette tapes clasped into Walkmen, computer programming classes her father made her take at the local Y (who but him knew they would pay off so handsomely?), and the private “Mongoose” language she had invented with Evelyn, snorts and grunts and clicks of the tongue their parents could not understand, its logics as intuitive to her as BASIC or C++. But had anyone ever tickled her? She crossed her arms and tried to tickle herself under the armpits. Maybe it only worked when someone else did it to you.

The child woke up earlier than her parents, so they got in a Korean lesson before Masha hauled her off to the joyless pursuit of Russian and third-grade math and the steady flow of practical therapies. (“Mommy, how long is today’s session with Dr. Sandra?”) For an entire hour Nat and Karen lived in a world where piggies did a properly piggy ggul-ggul-ggul, because on what planet could a fat pink-eared dwaegi possibly produce a mannered sound like oink? They focused on animals at first, since they were surrounded by them. A geh was both a dog and a crab. A neoguri was a raccoon dog, a curious citizen of East Asia, more akin to a fox. Steve, on the other hand, was clearly a mamo. (Every language should have almost as many vowels as consonants, ten to sixteen in the Hangul alphabet.)

She was in no way qualified to teach Korean, Karen knew, having herself been brought up in that embarrassing immigrant mix of being spoken to by her parents in the true language and replying in the shameful adopted one. Only Vinod and Senderovsky had held on to their respective tongues with flair, although Karen always thought it had made it harder for them to blend in, to accept that they were fully here and not there (witness Vinod’s persistent accent and Senderovsky’s bungalow madness).

But Karen loved hearing the sound of her own half-English, half-Korean garble, and it was hard to keep Nat from repeating it at the dinner table, where they could both see Masha’s hurt and surprise. “Many great writers spoke Russian,” Karen once told her over Ed’s scorching cod livornese, “like your dad.” But there was no Russian analogue to BTS, no J-Hope with his weird “acorn” pouch and perfect aegyo (performative cuteness), and certainly no sweet lovable Jin with his corny jokes and thick sculpted lips. It fascinated Karen how her original homeland was now open to the world, while Senderovsky’s did nothing but try to undermine the few good things about it. No wonder the child wanted one and not the other.

The walls of her bungalow were now transformed.

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