21. Fall the Sword

“In the application of your principles you must be like the pancratiast, not like the gladiator; for the gladiator lets fall the sword which he uses and is killed; but the other always has his hand, and needs to do nothing else than use it.” —Marcus Aurelius

The white uniform, the crisp, starchy jacket, the floppy pants, the black belt—it reminded Jen of a karate movie. But she supposed that when Rob’s teacher was wearing it, it was a taekwondo uniform.

Even in this new set of clothes, Jen recognized the man easily enough, first because of his distinctive eyeglasses, and second because he was the only Asian person she had seen during the entire week she had spent in North Middleton, aside from a few students on the campus.

“Master Park,” said Rob. “This is Jen.”

“Nice to meet you formally,” said Master Park, extending his hand between the bars of the gate to shake hers.

“Do you mind if we watch the class?” Rob asked. “We’ll stay back here, so we don’t distract anybody.”

Jen wondered why the men would be distracted by Rob, but then remembered that it was she who would be the distraction. Despite her recent run-in with the paparazzi, she had felt invisible all day, her first day alone in a town where she didn’t know anybody at all. Even if people recognized her, none of them would notice if she had a heart attack in the house or drowned in the lake; no one would come looking for her. Not knowing anybody is like not existing, she thought.

“Anyone can watch through the gate,” said Master Park, turning his back. “No permission required.”

“Thanks,” Rob called after his teacher, who was already walking towards a group of students who Jen could hear conversing inside the courtyard, although they weren’t visible to her.

It was a decidedly poor vantage point. They could only see a few of the students at a time, easy to spot in their bright yellow jumpsuits, through the small break in the branches. Jen wished that she could have come inside the courtyard, where she could see the entire class at once. She was curious about how many people were in the class, and their ages, which she couldn’t discern at this distance, and most importantly, whether they were all, as it appeared from the small but ever-changing sample in her range of vision, men.

Rob narrated the class as they watched, their heads bowed close together, peering through the bars of the fence.

“First they stretch,” he said, and sure enough, the men were bending over one leg, the other leg, the center. In their sunny yellow outfits, the flexible men looked like graceful flowers, folding into themselves as though closing their petals for the night. Jen could see a couple of other men struggling to bend forward, looking more like rusty door hinges that didn’t want to bend.

“Do you wear that yellow thing?” asked Jen, wondering if it were some kind of taekwondo uniform. The bright color wouldn’t do much for his olive complexion, Jen thought disapprovingly.

“I used to,” he said.

“Oh,” said Jen, confused. She mustered up all of her limited martial arts knowledge. “Is it like a belt? Did you move up to a different color?” It made sense to force the beginning students to wear that horrible yellow, she thought; it would be a good incentive to improve. She wondered what color outfit he wore. Black, she supposed, since he had been doing it so long. That would look nice on him. Or maybe white, like the pants and jacket Master Park was wearing.

“What?” he asked, sounding startled. Then he laughed. “Oh, no, it’s not for taekwondo. Those are the Snail coveralls. Everyone in the plant wears them.”

“I didn’t see anyone else wearing them,” said Jen, feeling stupid now for her mistake.

“Anyone else where?” he asked. “Have you seen any other people around here?”

Come to think of it, she hadn’t. Both times she walked the grounds of the Snail Plant, it had been a barren ghost town. Within this courtyard, hidden behind rows of shrubs and tree branches and iron bars, was the only sign of human life she had encountered within miles of the plant, apart from the people she came here with. That’s what so creepy about this place, she realized, wondering why she hadn’t noticed it before—no one on the streets or sidewalks.

“No,” she said.

The men had finished stretching. Now they were doing what seemed to be an endless series of jumping jacks. Jen felt out of breath just watching them.

“There are tunnels between all the buildings, underground,” he said. “It keeps people from having to walk outside in the winter.”

“But it’s not…” said Jen. Rob interrupted her before she could point out the obvious: that it was a beautiful spring day, the kind of day that would motivate someone to take an extra-long walk outside for no good reason at all.

“You’re not allowed to wear the coveralls outside the plant,” he said. “So no one walks outside. Everybody enters at the employee parking garage, which is probably a mile from here, and then they get on moving walkways underground.”

“Why can’t they wear them outside?” Jen asked.

Rob didn’t answer her question; instead, he pointed his finger through the bars. The men were doing what looked like a violent little dance, stepping rhythmically and kicking in the air.

“Look,” he said. “Hyeong.”

“Huh?” she asked. The men were lined up and moving in formation now, like fighter jets. They walked to one side, punched, kicked, moved to the other side, punched and kicked again.

“Those are forms,” he said.

“Oh,” said Jen, who had no idea what he was talking about. It looked like some kind of practice fighting, like that stuff men did all alone in a field at sunrise in kung fu movies. Spartan, lean men with plain, functional clothing and ponytails; Jen could envision the scene exactly, although she couldn’t remember having actually watched a movie like that.

“Do any women do this?” Jen asked.

“Of course,” said Rob, his indignant tone suggesting that this was a ridiculous question. Then he suddenly seemed to recognize the motivation for her inquiry. As the students moved first left, then forward, then right, the leafy window revealed a few of the yellow jumpsuits at a time, and then a few more, and then a few more—all inhabited by men.

“Oh,” he said, as though conceding a point. “Well, mostly the young women do. There aren’t too many older women who keep up with it.”

Jen wrinkled her nose and let out a resentful harrumph, presuming that by “older,” he meant something around her own age, the age of adults who would work in a factory.

“You know what I mean,” he said. “They get married and have kids, and usually if anyone keeps training after that, it’s the husbands.”

Jen expressed her dissatisfaction with this attempted defense by remaining silent. The space between the trees was empty now, but Jen could still hear the men talking quietly. She wondered if class was over.

“It’s not just the women; a lot of the men quit, too. Anyway, not a lot of women work for Snail. The testosterone runs pretty high in there.”

As if to illustrate this point, two of the men came flying out into the clearing, one’s foot arching through the air, the other backing up so that the foot missed his nose by a few inches.

“Oh my god,” Jen gasped, startled.

“That’s not as bad as it looks,” said Rob quickly. “It’s just point sparring. They don’t kick very hard. The ground is concrete so you don’t want to fall on it.”

“No, I guess not,” said Jen, as the first two men moved out of her range of vision and two other men appeared, engaged in almost the same motions as the first two, the retreating man leaning back to avoid the advancing man’s foot.

“Do they just kick each other in the head?” Jen asked.

“No, in the stomach and legs,” said Rob matter-of-factly.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” Jen asked.

“No,” said Rob. “Worst case, you break your nose or your rib.”

Jen lowered a hand defensively to her own right rib, which was still tender if she poked at it. She remembered how easily it had snapped, without her even realizing what had happened. She wondered if the men’s ribs were much stronger than hers, or if they just didn’t actually get kicked very often. After all, of the two kicks she had seen so far in this class, neither one had reached its target.

Jen and Rob watched the men kicking each other in the head, and, as promised, in the stomach and legs as well for another fifteen minutes or so. She saw a few of the kicks actually connect with the men’s heads or stomachs, but, once they landed, Jen understood Rob’s point; the kicks that looked so aggressive flying through the air seemed to lose their power just at the moment of impact, bouncing cheerily off their targets like friendly slaps on the back. Maybe this wasn’t so scary, Jen thought, although she still wouldn’t want one of those kicks to hit her healing rib.

Finally Jen heard men’s voices joking and laughing all at once, and it appeared that the class was over. “Let’s wait for Master Park,” said Rob. The teacher appeared at the gate a moment later, now in jeans and a t-shirt, carrying a stuffed messenger bag strapped across his chest. He unlatched something that Jen couldn’t see inside of the gate and swung it open.

Rob let out a gasp. “You’re leaving by the gate?” he asked with exaggerated incredulity.

“Don’t tell,” Master Park replied, closing it quickly behind him. He turned to Jen, and said, “I can’t stand those stupid tunnels.” He turned back to look at Rob. “Tea?” he asked.

“I need to take Jen home,” said Rob, turning towards her. “Unless you want to come have some tea. Are you done here? I’m sorry, you didn’t get to see much at all.”

I saw exactly what I came to see, Jen thought, but she couldn’t say it aloud. “I’ll come back again,” she said. “I’ve got lots of time.”

Rob drove the three of them back into town, Jen sitting quietly in the back while the two men talked about classes and belts and fighting in the front seats. She had almost fallen asleep when they reached their destination, an ornate building near the university. It had the deep red walls and squat, bento-box shape that Jen associated with suburban Chinese restaurants.

“This is the only decent place to get tea in North Middleton,” said Rob, as he held open the tall, enameled door.

“Owned by my student,” said Master Park, walking into the dark, windowless room heavy with decorative linens and tapestries on the walls.

A cheerful-looking teenager was waiting to great them, but he was interrupted by a long-haired man with a blond beard and a Chinese-style suit who rushed from the back of the tea house to greet them with a small bow. “Master Park,” he said. “You want your regular table?”

“Thank you, Ken,” said Master Park, following the blond man towards the back of the restaurant, with Rob and Jen walking behind them.

Even though it was mid-afternoon, the restaurant was packed with students, identifiable not only by their youth but by the open textbooks and notepads that they had scattered across their tables. It seemed odd to Jen that they would come to a restaurant to study; then again, as she walked between the tables, she noticed that most of them held no food but only large pots of tea. A few of the students had snacks on their tables, small plates of dumplings or little Chinese tea cakes. Some were not studying but catching up with friends over their tea and food, speaking in rapid, over-caffeinated streams of words, as though they had far too much to cover during such a short event as a lunch date.

As Master Park walked by, all of the students looked up from their homework to greet him cheerfully. Choruses of “Hi Master Park” awaited him at each table from athletic-looking young adults. Master Park smiled and waved silently at each table, beaming down proudly at the students.

“All my students,” he said, as they arrived at a table at the very back of the restaurant, and Ken handed them each a menu. “So good, they study all the time.”

Jen wasn’t sure whether she should open the menu in her hand. She was starving after her long walk and minimal lunch; still, she didn’t want to be the one who suggested getting some food with their tea. She always felt nervous eating around men, especially ones she didn’t know very well. She looked hopefully at Rob and Master Park. If they ordered Chinese food, it would be served family style, and she could eat some without having to choose anything for herself. But if they put the menus down and just ordered tea, she would just have to eat later on; there was no way she was going to request food if they didn’t want any.

She was relieved to see both of the men open their menus. She opened her own menu and began to glance distractedly over the pages. She was too tired to focus well, and she wasn’t intending to order anything, but still, some vegetables would be nice.

She flipped through the pages, remembering that Chinese menus normally relegated the vegetarian dishes to the back. Something seemed strange about the menu; she didn’t recognize anything on it. She saw a page that seemed to be all Chinese words, written out in English letters: tie guan yin, shui xian, dahongpao.

She looked at the top of the page, which said “China.” What kind of menu is this, she wondered. She flipped to the front page of the menu, where the name of the restaurant read “Camellia Teahouse.”

So this wasn’t a restaurant at all, Jen thought, a little amused at her own disappointment; normally, when she wasn’t quite so famished, she liked tea places much more than restaurants, with their heavy, unhealthy food and everyone judging her order and appetite.

She wondered why she had thought it was a restaurant. It’s the building, she decided. A tea place in Los Angeles would never look like this. For starters, it would be called a tea bar, to show that it was a fun and hip place to be. Also, everything in the tea bar would be light-colored and translucent, lots of glass bricks and wide windows, the exact opposite of the dark wood and windowless walls surrounding her. A tea bar, she realized, catered to people just like her, people who wanted their food and drink to be light, airy, disembodied. That would make a pretty small customer base in the Midwest, Jen thought. Instead, this tea house seemed to cater to—she looked around at the patrons again—college-aged martial arts students.

This is a strange place, thought Jen. She had a lot to learn.

A young waiter, who looked like he had probably been culled from the regular clientele, appeared at the side of the table. “Hi Master Park!” he said, enthusiastically.

“Hi Chad,” said Master Park. Then he turned to look at Jen across the round table. “You like green tea?” he asked her.

“Sure,” said Jen. Actually she hadn’t drunk green tea in years. She remembered it tasting bitter, like raw leaves. She wasn’t about to argue, though. She had just been about to accept whatever food they ordered, so she could certainly accept their choice of tea. Still, she had been hoping for a nice, bracing cup of black tea; that would be perfect right now.

Master Park grabbed Rob’s menu from the table and lifted Jen’s from her hands. “Sencha,” he said to the waiter.

“Yes, Master Park” said the waiter. “Anything else?”

Jen waited, hoping he would order one of the snacks that she had seen on the other customers’ tables. She wondered where they were in the menu. She hadn’t seen anything listed that sounded like food.

”Not right now, thanks,” he replied, handing the menus to the waiter, who bowed and retreated back to the kitchen as Jen sat watching, helpless to stop this refusal of sustenance.

“So,” said Master Park, crossing his hands on the table in front of him. “How did you two meet?”

Relieved at the distraction from her hunger, Jen recounted the story of her afternoon. She felt shy, but she was happy to have something concrete to talk about. She described the reporters and photographers factually, without making any mention of why they were following her.

While she talked, the waiter returned with two teapots and three small cups. He placed a transparent glass pot on the table, then filled it with steaming water from a stainless steel one. Through the glass, Jen could see the water turning a pale celery color as it softened the tea leaves.

The most exuberant part of her narrative was Rob’s heroic deflection of the reporter in the produce section. “He just started walking towards the guy,” said Jen. “And the reporter just backed out of the store, like someone was pushing him.”

Master Park lifted the tea pot and poured tea into the three little cups. He passed one to Rob and another to Jen. He pulled his own cup close in front of him and wrapped both hands around it, as though warming them on a cold night.

“Robert is my top student,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice. Jen looked over at Rob, and thought that his face appeared a bit flushed, although it might have just been from the hot tea or the dim lighting.

“Everyone in this town is scared of him,” Master Park said. "People who don’t know him are scared of him, just from looking at him. They can feel his energy and they know not to mess with him.”

“Master Park,” said Rob, now clearly embarrassed and trying to interrupt him.

“Shush, shush,” said Master Park, waving his hand dismissively at Rob. “Your modesty is not necessary.”

Rob didn’t say anything, but Jen could hear him exhale loudly through his nose, like a secret sigh with no accompanying facial expression.

Then, perhaps to spare Rob any further embarrassment, Master Park changed the subject. “Are the yellow belts ready for Saturday?” he asked Rob.

“They seem pretty strong,” said Rob. He turned to Jen, and, by way of explanation, said, “Belt test.”

Jen tried to listen as they talked, quietly sipping her green tea. It actually tasted pretty good, she thought. Still like leaves, but in a clean, astringent way that reminded her of lemon even without lemon in it. It was hard to pay attention, with so many words she did not understand—in Korean, she guessed—and other words that were in English but meant nothing to her, words that seemed to describe kicks and punches.

She watched Rob make a punching gesture with his hand to demonstrate some move he was concerned about. What if he had turned out to be a kidnapper, she thought? He could have killed her with his bare hands without breaking a sweat. The most dangerous man in North Middleton, and she just hops in the car with him, no questions asked. She never would have taken a ride from a stranger in Los Angeles. Stupid, she chastised herself. Alone in this new town, with no one looking out for her, safety was more important than ever.

Master Park turned towards her suddenly. “You’re very quiet,” he said. “What are you thinking about?”

“I’d like to come to your school,” said Jen. Once again, she did not recognize her own intentions until she heard herself say them aloud. It was becoming a daily occurrence, and she wondered briefly what it meant, and why she was so lacking in self-knowledge.

Master Park took a small sip of his tea and held it in his mouth for a long moment before swallowing it. “Why?” he asked, bluntly, his question sounding more rhetorical than inquisitive.

Jen hesitated. So I can fight off kidnappers, she thought, but she didn’t want to say it that way in front of Rob, who she feared might take it personally.

“For your health?” asked Master Park, taking another sip of his tea.

Rather than try to explain her thoughts, Jen opted for the expected answer, her old habit for avoiding confrontation. She nodded passively in agreement.

“Humph,” growled the teacher, dismissively, slamming his empty cup decisively on the table. “That’s a bad reason. Taekwondo is terrible for your health.”

“Really?” Jen blurted out incredulously, surprised to be hearing this from the teacher. She looked over at Rob, who was rolling his eyes ever so subtly upward, as though he had heard some version of this conversation many times before.

“Of course,” said the teacher with a cynical, joyless chuckle. “You know people will be kicking you in the face, right?” He laughed again. “Look—broken nose. Broken wrist. Broken rib.” He pointed at the injured parts of his body as he named them. “Torn ACL. Two knee surgeries.” He tapped his head with one finger. “Four concussions.”

“Oh,” said Jen, unsure whether she was supposed to express some kind of sympathy or act impressed. “Well, I don’t know if I want to be fighting.” She had watched the men in the courtyard; most of what they were doing didn’t seem like it would cause her to break anything. She wasn’t sure what the next step up in intensity and danger would be after that, but she figured she’d stop before she reached it.

“Everybody fights,” said the teacher. “You’re not going to study and not fight.” Before Jen had a chance to respond, he said, “Now you know, you won’t do taekwondo for your health, okay?”

“Okay,” said Jen.

“So,” said the teacher, scanning his eyes over Jen’s body. “What are you doing for your health? You look very unhealthy.”

She wasn’t sure how to answer. She had actually felt exceptionally healthy during the last month since she had broken her rib. She had been eating more, putting on a little weight, getting lots of sunshine and fresh air. She knew she must look bedraggled at the moment, and perhaps a little sunburned, she thought, lifting her hand to the back of her neck, which was warm.

“You’re too skinny and pale. Somebody kicks you, you’re going to break in half.” He thought for a moment, putting his hand over his mouth and narrowing his eyes. “Hmm…You eat meat?” he asked.

Again, she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t prefer to eat meat, although she wasn’t technically a vegetarian. She avoided red meat in particular, which always made her feel like she had overeaten, even if she ate just a little bit of it. But she had been expecting Rob and Master Park to order Chinese food with meat, since that’s what men usually did, and she would have gladly eaten some, if only a very tiny portion.

“If you come to my class, you have to eat meat,” said Master Park. “No vegetarians allowed.”

He paused and squinted at something on the wall above Jen’s head. She turned and saw that the food specials for the day were posted on an erasable whiteboard above her head.

“I’m going to order food,” he said.

“Good, I’m starving,” said Rob. “Get noodles.”

Master Park called the waiter over and placed an order: noodles with spicy beef, pork dumplings, and crispy green onion pancakes. Jen saw steamed broccoli on the menu, her favorite, but she didn’t dare ask Master Park to order it.

”You’ll come to class tomorrow night,” he said to Jen, when the waiter had left. “Six thirty, beginner’s class.”

Tomorrow seemed awfully soon; she felt that she wouldn’t be ready yet, although she had no idea what she would need to be ready for exactly. Still, Master Park’s pronouncement sounded confrontational, like a challenge. It’s a dare, she thought, to see if I’m serious. He doesn’t think I’m actually going to show up.

She remembered her last month in Los Angeles, when she had gone to yoga classes twice each day, building the strength and flexibility to do all kinds of poses she never would have thought possible, despite the fact that she was barely eating anything at the time. I’m serious, she thought angrily. This guy has no idea how serious I am.

“Okay, sounds good,” she answered nonchalantly, but she stared confrontationally into Master Park’s eyes as she said it.

Her throat felt a little scratchy as she spoke, and she noticed that she was a little lightheaded. I’d better not get sick, she thought, because I’m going anyway. Even if she had pneumonia, there was no way she was going to miss that class.

Chapter 22:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2009/04/22-without-my-permission.html