The Foreign Student by Susan Choi

Author:Susan Choi
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

seven

Curing himself of his attachment to Peterfield had not been so simple as realizing that it was what he had to do to keep himself alive. His loyalty to Peterfield had become indistinguishable from his loyalty to himself. In the years after the war ended plenty of people would revise their shock from the days just after it began, and tell him that it had all been utterly predictable, and that any idiot could have seen how it would go. Viewed that way, all his actions were just as inevitable as the circumstances that provoked them. At every juncture he’d done the right thing. “Smart boy,” Langston had said. But he’d only been lucky. When the Americans had first arrived no one could have predicted how long they would stay, let alone how wise it would be to cast your lot with them. Dealing with them was one thing, and something that everyone did, but conspicuously trying to join them was entirely different. It hadn’t been his initial intention, while he was working for Hodge. His intention had been to deal with them, to do business, because this was the surest way he knew to clarify he wasn’t one of them. His father’s decision to camouflage himself inside an occupation government had been his downfall. Chang turned a coldly analytic gaze on his family’s catastrophe and declared it a strategic failure he intended to avoid.

It wasn’t long, though, before he realized that his understanding of his situation was flawed. The Americans went to great lengths to establish that they were not an occupation government at all, but a facilitating presence. A favorite word of theirs was “transition.” The Americans were to the brand-new republic as is the stake to which we tie the frail seedling, etc., etc. Sitting in the Ministry of Public Information devising puerile agricultural metaphors for the role of the U.S. toward South Korea he had realized that in avoiding an allegiance to the Americans he had overlooked his actual problem. No allegiance at all was an allegiance, by default, to the Republic of Korea, a government that only seemed to exist in order that it not be a Communist government, in the same way that his own recurrent desire to join the Communist party arose largely from his contempt for the republic’s regime. His father had been jailed. His family’s land north of the thirty-eighth parallel had been confiscated and redistributed by the Communists, but the land that fell south of the parallel, within the republic, had simply been confiscated for the sake of confiscation, and not put to any use. It occurred to him that his dislike of the southern government was a perfectly sufficient underpinning for whatever he might do. He could come up with philosophy later. His father had never been loyal to the Japanese, but he had recognized that they could be used. Chang felt that his recognition was the same: the Americans could be used, but the Republic of Korea was useless.

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