Scenes from a Brotherhood
James Song
There we were, in the red-light district. It was early afternoon, and the streets were packed with big and sweaty, pre-pandemic, Europe-touring summer crowds. People of all sort were there—families with children, older people perhaps reliving their youth vicariously, groups of consciously masculine young men.
Dozens of little rooms lined the blocks with glass doors and neon lights. Behind each door stood sex workers in solid-colored two-piece underwear, smiling and waving. A little crowd had formed, watching one particular lady behind a big glass wall on the second floor of a building, bending down with her behind toward the mesmerized onlookers.
Jon and I walked at a brisk pace. We didn’t talk about sex. We were taught not to have any until marriage, which I think is a good idea. That way, we might even end up with four boys, like our dad did. “Be fruitful and multiply,”1 the first words by God to Adam and Eve. Our dad took that seriously, as he does the rest of the Bible and taught us to. The “be fruitful and multiply” idea involves, or evolved to include, the taboo on sex outside of marriage, sex, for instance, with a sex worker. We were, or at least I was, uncomfortably surrounded by that. Jon seemed at ease weaving through the crowds.
Two older men were negotiating with a sex worker, who had one foot outside her door. “For feefty Euros, you can…” I didn’t catch what was worth feefty Euros. But her voice was beautiful.
More crowds. A young man of about twenty walked out of one of the rooms. He had a black backpack and a faded dark green hoodie. He put on his wired earphones and his hood, adjusted his hoodie by pulling it down, and made a beeline for his next destination, not looking sideways, soon disappearing into the crowd. Jon said something, but I didn’t catch it. A moral judgment, I think.
Some of the rooms had two women. One such couple smiled at us and waved. Jon waved back playfully and they giggled.
“I think they were touched by my humanity,” he said, a twinkle in his eye. Jon saw everything through humor. I was acquainted with it by this point and started to enjoy his company.
“Bro, we’re so human,” I said.
Normal people would have dropped the banter around there, but we kept at it. We shared a bent toward the buffoonish, a silliness, the light-hearted and optimistic part of us that came from our dad.
The sex worker behind the big glass wall was still there, on the second floor, still bending down. The crowd seemed bigger as night approached. I was out of gas.
The red-light district is not for brothers, let alone Korean Christian brothers.
We left soon after.
That summer in Europe was the first time we hung out together, just us two. In high school, he spent more time with his ex’s dog than with me. Before that, I played with Tim and neighborhood kids around our age, while Jon and Lance were off with the older kids. I hadn’t really hung out with Jon before. We were distant. Still, we were brothers. How could we be strangers?
In high school, he was the popular football player and track-and-field regional champion. I was, to quote him, a “nerd,” for which I after all these years remind him every chance I get that Chat GPT-4 is a better writer than UCLA grads like, and in particular, himself. Harvard undergrads write better prose than GPT-4, Harvard undergrads like, and in particular, myself.
To his credit, though, Jon knew how to navigate the world. Confidence oozed out his handsome high cheekbones, strong jaw, a sharp chin, big dark eyes with sparks of enthusiasm, angled brows, and the natural double eye-lids that Koreans find desirable. He rock-climbed and ran a couple of half marathons. He was beefy before his arm injuries left him with only running as his hobby. His thighs, I admit, are an awesome sight to behold.
Our parents got busy after marriage. Lance came first. A year under him is Jon. Younger than Jon by two enormous years is me. After me, my parents hoped to get a girl and prepared a name for the baby that would be my little sister. But out, two years later, came, at the turn of the century, Tim.
Four boys and a vasectomy. Dad had done his part to “be fruitful and multiply,” to “fill the earth and subdue it.”2 He is, after all, a Korean minister from the generation of Korean ministers that came of age in the hard eighties and have that Korean fire—han, it is called—in them. I wonder at his conviction. In my generation, I think, han is more of a smolder.
Dad’s dad, my grandpa, lived in a central province south of Seoul and worked in an American army base as a gym supervisor. I can count on one hand the number of times I talked to him, like the time I asked him how much money he had in his five-hundred-won coin collection in a green glass bottle which he gave me, and I proudly shared with my brothers. Or the time when, at five years old, I told him I walked six kilometers and he said that that was a lot for a little boy. I remember waiting for him, because of the hierarchy of Korean table-manners: the kids had to wait until the elders picked up their chopsticks. We always waited for grandpa to pick up his chopsticks.
And we knew he smoked a lot and had only recently quit. But it was too late.
One day, back in Seoul, when my brothers and I were in our blankets on the heated stone floor for the night, our dad came in, sat down, and didn’t, as usual, pray for us and sing—“the Lord takes care of me, and I am the Lord’s precious lamb”—until we fell asleep. Instead he sat down and said in his deep, measured voice, “grandpa died peacefully and he’s in heaven now.” And he went outside.
No one spoke. We didn’t know how to talk about these things. I was six at the time. I didn’t know that life was short and that it ends.
In the dark, I let out a few tears—what those tears meant I didn’t know. I only knew to hide them, but Jon somehow saw them.
“Are you crying?” Jon asked. He sounded ticked off.
You couldn’t be vulnerable around Jon. You had to be tough. You had to wipe your tears and go to sleep.
In sixth grade, I tried to emulate Jon, his gait and his style. He was already a cool eighth grader with always a flock of friends.
I used to sneak into his closet and wear his checkered button-up and his big blue Nikes, laces untied, with which he would drag his heels as he swaggered slowly with his gang. He even sagged his skinny jeans just the cool amount with a thick red belt. All day I would drag the Nikes, sag my pants apishly low, avoid being seen by him, and get home early so I could put back the shirt and the shoes. He had a Mohawk phase where he gelled the top of his long hair up into stiff spikes down the center. Naturally, I had a Mohawk phase. Of course, he would notice and told me to get lost and stop touching his things. Including the Moco de Gorilla Snot Gel.
I thought he hated me. He was always trying to get Lance’s attention, but never stooped to talk to me.
One day, when I was a sophomore, I was sitting down with Jon’s then girlfriend, Stephanie. Stephanie was very pretty, the daughter of one of the biggest music producers in Korea. They flew him out to Korea to meet the dad. (Of course, Jon had a rich hot girlfriend!) People thought they would get married.
Stephanie and I were sitting in a planter in front of the high school. She was waiting for Jon so they could make out or something, part of the reason I had to be careful not to cross paths with him at school. I spotted them once. They turned from smooching and stared with starry eyes as I pretended not to have seen them. But there was nowhere to run, no one around on campus except me and the two of them. We never really talked, so there was nothing to be awkward about, I guess. But it bothers you.
Stephanie opened up about their relationship.
“At first, when we were together, we didn’t really talk,” she said. “We just sat there. We needed other people to get us to start talking.” I didn’t know Jon could be quiet.
“So what do you guys talk about?” I asked.
“You,” she said softly. “All he talks about is you.”
Since the Europe trip, I gained his admiration bit by bit.
There was the time we went rock climbing and I could climber harder routes. “Your hands got strong,” he said. There was the time during the pandemic when I beat him at the video-game StarCraft. But I may have beat him too hard, because he quit playing after that match.
And when I took time off and worked in a professional kitchen, he was impressed with my skills and knowledge as a cook. We still go to Number 9 Park together, where the chef sends us snacks and Jon lights up the bar with his easy conversations with strangers. He loves talk to everybody. Once, at the bar, we were talking to a married couple in their late thirties. They were there for the wife’s birthday. He wanted to leave after the meal, but she, with her body turned towards him, could not get enough of “young and sarcastic” Jon.
He, I felt, got to see my way through the world. And I finally got to know him.
Every Uber we take, Jon chats up the driver about whatever is going on in the driver’s life. Every jog we went on together, back when I could keep up with him, he would smile big and wave at people passing by, which I found unusual to the point of being weird.
Jon is, in the words of a family friend pastor who is strangely otherworldly, “the chosen one.” Jon savored the title with a smile.
A few years ago, my maternal grandpa’s han was let loose. During a fiery tirade that followed, he told me that everything was fine with me, but that I shouldn’t ever think again about joining the military after graduating from “the school,” his term of respect for Harvard. It’s too dangerous. On the other hand, he said Jon could overcome whatever came his way.
“I remember in high school,” a friend of mine told me, “Jon had this confidence.”
“Where,” Lance would ask, “does he get his confidence?”
To Tim, Lance and I are mere clowns. Lance and I are the ones that pay attention to Tim’s brutally practical, clear-eyed life advice. But Jon gets his respect.
Jon graduated and got a job in New York City. I was in and out of school and found myself in Cambodia. “Don’t get married in Cambodia,” Jon had said. “Don’t be stupid.”
I was at a Christmas event for the school I would be teaching at and saw a beautiful girl I tried very hard not to stare at. “It must be fate!” the principal would say. We were together for six wonderful months. Then I had to go to back to college, back to the U.S. We decided to do long distance, but the relationship became more and more unlikely and I knew I was wasting her time. Her little sister, at twenty-two, was already married, which is not uncommon for Cambodian women.
We could barely finish our sentences when I told her in our last video call. It was happening. She didn’t stop me. We decided not to message each other.
Two days later, I got a message.
I called Jon.
He knew about the relationship and listened to what was happening and he listened to me like he never did before.
“You’re a continent and an ocean away,” he said finally. “It doesn’t work out sometimes.”
That was ridiculous. I should drop everything and go to her. She was hurt, and I needed to be with her. People like her don’t exist, I insisted, certainly not in America.
“Don’t underestimate other people,” he said.
I ran out of words. I was breathing heavily, heart torn from guilt, but I tried to control it.
“You’ll be fine,” he said.
“You remember Ellen?” he asked.
Ellen and Jon went out for a few weeks in high school. Growing up, the rest of the brothers would tease you nonstop for dating girls. Sometimes, mom and dad joined in, too. I guess we were brutal with Jon and Ellen. That was our culture, maybe a Korean thing. Being yourself had a cost.
“I didn’t really like her, but we were together. Anyway, you remember BurgerBros? We were getting fries at BurgerBros and I told her we had to break up. She asked me why, and I said I couldn’t tell her.
“I broke up with her because I got so much crap from you guys. It wasn’t worth it. But I wasn’t going to tell her that.
“Then dad came to pick me up. I got in the car—you guys were there—I said I broke up with Ellen, and everyone cheered.”
Tears rolled down my cheeks through my laughter. Poor Ellen!
“I haven’t thought about Ellen in a long time,” he said.
Silence again.
“You’ll be alright,” he said. “Throw her some clichés,” he added with a laugh.
With careers, Jon is conventionally-minded, the “personality hire” of a civil engineering firm, where he’s a member the most technical department. “Our family is not meant for STEM,” he’d say, along with a comment about how this job is not for him. “We’re more creative.” As he explains it, he liked architecture, anthropology, psychology, but Lance was pursuing music so that “if something were to happen to the family, we needed someone with a stable job.”
A family man.
The paradox is that that money now goes to funding his bluetooth-connected party lights, a coffee grinder, an espresso machine with a “cappuccino foamer”—“gotta have my coffee, big dawg!”—and his candle-lit wine nights with grapes, cheese, and crackers from Whole Foods in his 27th floor studio near Columbus Circle with a view of Billionaire’s Row and the Hudson River. First the Nikes; now this! Even dad, usually hands-off about our lives, offered his two cents: “That’s not how an immigrant should live.”
Now, Jon wants to strike out on his own, maybe go into photography, maybe settle down in Europe, maybe come back to L.A. to “catch the vibes, you know?” I see him struggle with uncertainty and hear from him more often the words, “I don’t know.”
In the parable of the prodigal son, the more worldly of a man’s two sons demands his share of the family inheritance and wastes that money in a faraway land. My brothers and I throw around that title among ourselves. It changes with time.
We thought it was Lance when he declared he would pursue music instead of following mom’s plan for him of becoming a doctor. But it surprised everyone when it turned out that the brother who calls himself “just a clown!” is very likable and very hard-working—though in true L.A. fashion he is careful to hide how hard he works—and very savvy in navigating the music scene.
Tim, on the other hand, was never a contender to be the prodigal son. He knows how to spend—his recent five-hundred-dollar projector being the most recent treat—but lives well below his means as an “aspiring educator.”
My adult life will now begin in earnest—“forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead.”3 But my days of being the prodigal son, of leaving home for a faraway land for my own pleasure, of searching for worth and meaning outside the house of the Father, are, I hope, behind me.
That leaves Jon.
Jon, the brother who seemed so certain and so confident, who is pushing thirty and who is so unsure of himself.
In the parable, the Father lets the son go and the son squanders everything. Still, the Father looks out onto the fields for any sign of the son who left Him, His eyes blind from squinting every hour, His voice hoarse from continually calling out the name of His precious son. The son returns to Him, and there is a celebration, full of joy, for the lost is found, the dead come back to life.
We need only let our words be few, return to Him, and sing, “He will my shield and portion be as long as life endures.”4
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