“What the fuck is wrong with you, you asshole!”
He screamed at me, crying almost. The crowd watching us started to mutter. Hey, he’s gonna die, call the teacher! When a few voices stuck out from the murmuring, Gon turned to them.
“Who was that? Don’t talk behind my back, you cowards! Say it to my face. Assholes! Come on!”
Gon grabbed whatever was on the ground and started throwing things at them. An empty can, a wooden stick, an empty glass bottle flew across the air and crashed. The kids ran away, screaming. This was familiar. Granny. Mom. The people on the streets that day. It had to stop. Blood was spilling from my mouth. I spat it out.
“Stop. I can’t give you what you want.”
“What?” he asked in a huff.
“I have to act to give you what you want, and I can’t. It’s just impossible. So please stop now. Everyone’s acting like they’re scared of you, but they’re actually laughing at you.”
Gon looked around. A beat of dead silence, as if time had stopped. Gon’s back arched like a hostile cat.
“Fuck, go fuck yourselves!” He started screaming. Every word that came out of his mouth was obscene. Curses, swearwords, and sheer madness that those words couldn’t contain.
34
Gon’s real name was Leesu. It was his mother who gave him that name. But Gon said he never remembered being called by that name. He didn’t like the name because he thought it sounded weak. Out of the many other names he’d had, his favorite was Gon.
Gon’s earliest memory was of people who weren’t his parents speaking loudly in a strange language. He had no idea why he was there. Noises everywhere. He was with an elderly Chinese couple in a shabby ghetto town in Daerim-dong, where they called him Zhēyáng. For a few years, he never went out of his house. That was why there was no record of his early years.
Then the elderly couple disappeared after a sudden immigration inspection, sending Gon to one foster home after another before he settled at a children’s shelter. Because everyone in the town had thought Gon was the elderly couple’s grandchild, and there was no official record of the couple leaving for China, they were not able to make further investigations or find his biological parents.
After staying at the shelter for some time, Gon was sent to live with a childless couple. The couple called him Donggu. They weren’t well-off and in two years, when their own baby came along, they quickly gave Gon up for adoption. He went back to the shelter, where he got mixed up in some trouble that led him in and out of a youth detention center. It was at the Hope Center shelter that he fashioned the name Gon for himself.
“Do you have hanja letters for it?” I asked.
“No, I’m not into that complex shit. I just came up with it.” He smiled.
Classic Gon. Out of his many names—Zhēyáng, Donggu, and Leesu—I thought Gon was the most “Gon-like” name too.
*
The incinerator incident resulted in a weeklong suspension for Gon. Who knows what would’ve happened if the teacher hadn’t arrived just in time. Professor Yun was called in to school to meet with Dr. Shim. Dr. Shim got extremely angry in his low but fervent voice and regretted letting Professor Yun reach out to me in the first place. The school board warned Professor Yun that if Gon’s behavior remained the same after the suspension, they would have to transfer him to another school. Professor Yun hung his head.
*
A few days after, I found myself sitting in front of Gon at a pizzeria. Gon’s eyes were no longer glaring. Maybe because Professor Yun sat next to him. I later learned that Professor Yun beat Gon for the first time after hearing about the incinerator incident. Professor Yun was a gentleman, so all he did was hurl a cup he’d been holding at the wall and whip Gon on the calves a few times. But this left a mark on his long-standing self-image as an intellectual, driving him farther apart from his son.
I wonder what it means to get beaten by a father you’re reunited with for the first time in a dozen years. Before even having the chance to get to know each other.
According to Dr. Shim, Professor Yun was a man of principle. A man who absolutely hated causing others any trouble, so much so that he couldn’t bear his own flesh and blood completely going against his steadfast philosophy. Rather than feeling sorry for his son, he was more angry that the son he’d waited so long for had turned out to be such a mess. That was why Professor Yun chose to beat Gon and apologize to others time after time. He apologized to the teachers, to Gon’s classmates, and to me.