THE NIGHT I PLAYED GO-STOP

 Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing—‘Red’ Sanders

             I know almost nothing about my coworkers, including their names, often the most difficult part to remember. My fallback option is to call everybody Mr. or Ms. Kim, and where I work I’m right about half the time. When it turns out to be a ‘Lee’ or a ‘Choi’, I just smile and say, “Ms. Choi, how could I forget you!”

To which she replies, “Apparent Mr. Larsen it’s quite easy, as this is the fourth time today.”

At least once a semester, usually in the first week or two of the new term, all of the professors in the department get together for dinner and singing and building collegial kibun. We invariably go to the same samgyeopsal restaurant just outside the front gate of our campus, an eatery chosen for both its proximity and inexpensiveness.

That’s why I was surprised when an important staff meeting was called in December. There’d been some turmoil in the department related to revisions of the curriculum, so I assumed that the meeting was called because important decisions needed to be made and, collectively, we needed to hash out the details.

So I told one of my senior professors that, of course, I’d sign on. I’m a team player, a ‘yes’ man extraordinaire, and felt that it was important for me to be present to nod my head as others spoke about our collective future in a language I did not understand. Getting along in Korea, or anywhere for that matter, has always been a function of going along, a talent I eventually acquired after years of getting stung by far too many splinters from all-too-often going against the grain.

Based on previous experience, I also assumed that we’d be headed out the front gate to our usual dining spot for a quick bite to be followed by the normal roundtable discussion in which my seniors talk and I, halfheartedly, listen. Which was why I was doubly surprised when our crew was loaded into a van to travel far across the city to a secluded restaurant at the foot of Geumjeong Mountain just below Pusan’s famous Buddhist temple, Pomosa.

After arriving, I was surprised a third time to find out that the meeting was just another kibun-building exercise held for no apparent reason whatsoever.

Having spent my fair share of time on the peninsula, I’ve been to perhaps a hundred of these types of meetings, almost always with professors and other employees of academe, but occasionally with businessmen and other important or influential personages, both foreign and domestic, who make their homes here.

Although the meal is almost always barbecued pork and the entertainment almost always my butchering of that Korean classic Arirang at a neighboring noraebang, it never fails to surprise me how out of character most of the Koreans I take respite with act. Few are what you would call, even in the most exaggerated retelling, heavy drinkers. Most will accept a shot of soju, and then nurse it over the course of a meal. Oh, there are the one or two guys who pour and imbibe liberally, and these make up the group I find myself in toward the end of the evening, chain-smoking cigarettes and slurring through our attempts to communicate in each other’s languages.

But this night everybody, including myself, was drinking deeply of Korean lighter fluid and laughing and shouting like a group of middle-schoolers on glue. After eating, one of the professors left our private room and returned with a blanket, which he set neatly on the floor before imploring us to come and sit around it. Then he slapped down a tiny deck of red-backed cards and in English said, “Go-Stop!”

I’ve played this card game often, though irregularly, and each session requires another refresher course on the rules and strategies. Each time I’ve played with a different set of cardsharps, new rules are added and others subtracted, often in the middle of the game when I’m on the brink of winning a substantial pot. And though, like most people, I’m not a huge fan of losing, I try to take it all in stride as I have never been lucky in cards … or love.

Yes, gloom, despair, and agony on me.

The essential aspects of the game involve three players competing to acquire points. When a player has reached three points, he or she may yell ‘Stop!’ and collect money from the other two players. However, that same three-point player may continue for additional rounds to acquire larger numbers of points, and thus, more of the other players’ coin. The risk is that another player may reach the three-point threshold in the interim, nullifying the former leader’s greedy quest to empty pockets. From there, the rules get a little tricky.

The game is Japanese in origin, or so I’ve been told, and there it goes by the name of flower cards in reference to the brightly-colored pictures of flowers, though other cards are graced with animals and kings and what we Westerners might describe as Jokers.

During this particular night of gaming, Ms. Kim was cleaning up, taking not only all of my money, but also much of the money of the other Kims in our department. She tossed cards like a seasoned Atlantic City blackjack dealer, the whole time regaling us with tales of her shaman grandfather, who, she said, was able to get special help from the spirit world in all matters involving games of chance. At some point Mr. Kim, who was sitting on my right, leaned over and whispered to me that Ms. Kim’s grandfather had been a Jeolla pig farmer who’d died among the swine, penniless and in the throes of alcoholic madness, trying one last time to summon the spirits of Jinro. I found Mr. Kim’s conveyance of such information catty, though in me it summoned feelings of both melancholy and compassion. Feelings that were not to last.

As the long shadows of the evening swallowed up the day, many of us began to pull the pockets of our pants and skirts inside-out to indicate that Ms. Kim was rapidly running out of easy marks to roll. In succession, each professor waved off Ms. Kim’s pleas for one more game, and as you might have guessed, it was I, your humble narrator, who foolishly rose to the challenge.

            Now this is usually where the plot twists in the story and we find ourselves playing for our immortal souls or a night of passion or some other nonsense in which you lose by winning. Ghosts would be involved, and maybe a hideous scaly fishman from the local lagoon; certainly a couple of plucky scamps, and a serial killer who won’t die.

            But not this story. In this story, we played for money.

            A whole lotta money.

            In jest I said let’s play for a billion won, and a question mark emerged in the folds of her forehead, so I wrote down the number on a piece of paper.

            W1,000,000,000.

            She said, “Okay” and started dealing before I could at least intimate that my wager was not to be taken seriously.

            Well she drew a ‘bee’ from the pile and snapped it down on top of the King of Chrysanthemums, which is a rooster as I recall, scooped up the cards and tossed three kings down and said, “Stop! You owe me a billion won …chump.”

            “I … I … I …” was all I could say before smiling and shrugging my shoulders in what I’d hoped was the universal symbol for “Blood from a turnip.”

            “You do have it, yes?” she said, and it was not a question.

            “Ms. Kim, it was just a little joke, you see. Who has a billion won? Chaebol chairmen? Kim Jong-il? Maybe that androgynous singer ‘Rain’? But me? I don’t have a billion anything. What say tomorrow I take you out to lunch and—”

            “Then I will take your soul,” she said, and for a flash I would have sworn that the red fires of Hell filled the circles of her pupils.

            I giggled nervously, while my stone-faced colleagues scrambled braying out of the room. Ms. Kim quickly placed a hand upon my chest and a tiny tremor erupted in my heart and began to spread out to the tips of my fingers and toes and the ends of the receding hairs on my scalp. A brilliant white light enveloped me and the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor starring up at Ms. Kim’s broad grin.

            She helped me to my feet and said, “Come ‘round tomorrow and we’ll work out a payment plan. Until then, I own your sorry ass, Mr. Vegas.”

            So now there’s a fifty-year-old Korean professor who’s got her chalk-dusty hands on my immortal soul. She told me that she keeps it in a kimchi jar in her refrigerator. At 10,000 won a week, I’m praying that I live long enough before that soul will come in handy.

            In a related note, the other day I ran into an old girlfriend, and after chatting about this and that for a few minutes, she cocked her head to one side and said, “You know, you haven’t changed a bit.”

            And while the implication that I’d been a soulless bastard before was not lost on me, I did feel compelled to tell her that recently I had lost about 24 grams.