Sugar of Lead

By Almer John Davis

Be spun away to the Malibu coast of Southern         California's Pacific Rim and witness the harrowing tale of love, crime, and redemption that author Almer John Davis weaves in his gothic-gangster-surreal novel, Sugar of Lead. Meet thirty-year-old Michael "Sugar" Pierce, a Caucasian

• Language: English
• Publisher: ReadersMagnet LLC
• Release date: Dec 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781950947454

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Sugar of Lead

Almer John Davis

Published in the United States of America

ISBN eBook: 978-1-950947-45-4

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author except as provided by USA copyright law.

The opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of ReadersMagnet, LLC.

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For Jeanne Cavelos

That mighty enjoyment of consuming the breath of men’s nostrils, swallowing their faces like a saturn. A man among men knows how to murder.

—Saul Bellow

THE ROYAL TUNIC

Drawing by Allison Dailey

1

It was now lunch time and they sat under the radial wooden deck cover in tall canvas directors’ chairs not even bothering to pretend that nothing had happened.

Anybody want a Red Dog or Henry Adams? Kiki Rhee asked, running a hand through his bristly black hair. He tugged at his white tennis shirt and shifted in his seat. His bronzed legs, slen­der, though well formed, were nearly hairless.

Absolute with lemon, Pierce told him, looking over, glad someone had finally spoken. On ice.

I’ll have Absolute, too. A double, Kiki’s sister-in-law said. Her name was Katherine Song Rhee. She was the same age as Kiki, twenty-eight. They had grown up together.

The glassy-smooth infinity pool ahead merged with the Pa­cific Ocean out farther ahead, but they paid no attention to this sight. They mostly looked down the hill.

Yeah. That’s better, Kiki said. "Vodka on ice. Where’s Emo? She’s always hovering close. Emo."

After a moment, a short older woman appeared in the open French doors behind them. Her eroding face was blank, her dark eyes blanker. Her shortly cropped gray-black hair gripped her skull like a tight hand. She wore a dark loose fitting blouse and shape­less pants. Her pale feet were bare. She said nothing but just stood there watching with a pointed severity.

Feeling a presence over his shoulder, Kiki turned and spoke in Korean. Now Pierce did not listen. He was tired of hearing the language, of trying to follow it. He had stopped trying some time back. He had stopped speaking it for the most part, what little he actually knew. He still dreamed the language at times, understand-ing just as little. What he did understand he seemed to grasp as if the words were spoken not in Korean or in English but in an altogether more mysterious language.

The ajuma watched them a moment longer, then disappeared without acknowledging in any way that she had been spoken to.

What the heck? Kiki said. He looked to Katherine.

Katherine rose and turned toward the French doors. She spoke rapidly and in Korean and in a tone that could easily be called harsh. She stood there waiting but got no response.

Bitch, she said, in English. She’s not hovering now.

"Emo liked Simon, Kiki said. A lot."

Katherine’s expression shifted, softening some as she looked to Pierce. "I know. Everyone’s upset. Of course, Emo is, too. Still, she’s a bitch."

Pierce raised his eyebrows as if agreeing. He had smelled the clean fresh odor of her shampoo as soon as Katherine had gotten up, her very movement wafting it to him. Though her hair was no longer wet, the odor remained, and whenever Pierce smelled her shampoo or soap, he would think of islands. He would picture islands deep in the Pacific or in the Caribbean. He would hear an old Doors song his mother used to play over and over when he was a kid five or six. He would remember the tranced dreaming mood it had put him in almost instantly as a young boy as soon as he heard the first languid notes. It was a mood the notes still put him in whenever he heard them in his head as a grown adult.

Today was no different. Smelling her shampoo, watching Katy, he saw a sun blasted tropical island with dense vegetation and a white sand beach surrounded by an enormous deep body of blue-green water. He heard Indian Summer rising straight from the trees.

When he thought again of what lay inside the poolhouse to the right, images of the island and its music disappeared. So did the scrubbed odor of Katy’s hair.

The pavilion and tennis court sat below them and the massive stone retaining wall supporting the hill into which the concrete deck and pool were built. In two separate spots near the baseline closest to the house, the young men were still trying to scrub red blood stains off the court’s green concrete. Drops and swirls splat­tered one spot. Grimy oblong smears streaked the other.

The body had been removed and now lay, in a kind of parody of state, loosely wrapped in a royal blue plastic tarp on the coarse rust-colored carpet near the billiard table in the poolhouse.

The young men had carried it up on orders from Michael Sugar Pierce. Three of the five jin-do-kaes had followed the body as it was carried. The young men had swatted and kicked at the gold-white reddish dogs to get them away but the dogs had been undeterred. Two dogs were now parked like a pair of sphinxes on their bellies in the shade before the white poolhouse doors. Sam Sam and the other two jin-dos stood down on the court with the young men as they scrubbed at the blood. One would get too close, sniffing at the stains, and be shoed away.

Though the three on the deck gave periodic consideration to not watching the activity below, they really could do nothing else but watch. Just as they did not note the ocean today, they hardly noticed the cooling sea breeze, either, or the breathtaking slant of the nearly straight up fiery sun, so consumed were they by the splatters and smears of blood.

"But does Emo even know? Kiki asked. How could she know? Kath, she wasn’t out on the balcony with you. How does she know?"

Katherine stared at a spot of empty space ahead of her. She had not sat down again. It didn’t seem like she would.

People have been going in and out of the house for a half hour, Kiki. Probably someone told her. What do you think she’s been staring at, hovering behind us? Maybe she saw them carrying Simon to the poolhouse with the dogs trailing. Okay?

Yeah, yeah, you’re right, Kiki said. "But who’s going to make lunch if Emo won’t even make the drinks? Where’s Atomi?"

Now Katherine turned her firm slender height and her lean fine-boned face with its slender nose like her slender shapely hands with their unpainted nails and her sharply cut mahogany eyes fully on Kiki. The general tone of her gaze was one of calm assess­ment. When pressed or provoked that assessment would bloom quickly into something sardonic. The look in her eyes then would speak very loudly. When Katherine was not pleased with a person that person knew it without reservation. She stared coolly at Kiki at this point, still with the calm in her eyes.

It was the first time she had actually looked at him since he had come back out on the deck. Her thick, chestnut brown, sun-streaked hair was held in a rose colored scrunchee at the back of her head. Its ends touched a point on her back well below her shoulders. The long bangs were pulled back in a smooth arc along the crown of her high forehead. Dark rivulet trails of hair ran out from the points of her temples like tiny fingers.

You’re thinking about food? she asked. Now?

Kiki squirmed uncomfortably in his seat.

He said something but Pierce wasn’t listening again. He was too busy watching the commanding elegance of the person he loved more than anything in the world. As he gazed on Katherine Song Rhee, he again heard a fleeting echo of the song. He thought Katy an extremely handsome woman. A very smart one, too. It was her slender height, he mused, and her challenging presence that made her so attractive, even beautiful. The magnetic quiet in her dark-eyed probing gaze and the low inflection of her somewhat deep voice were what made her seem so astute.

He liked the tiny dark rivulets of her temples and her fine smooth jaw line. He liked the prominence of her clavicle, the way it rippled up in two sharp points at the base of her throat and the way it ran in straight lines into her shoulders and held her rib cage in place. What he really liked was for her hair to flow freely. Some­times seeing her hair loose like some presence unto itself, watching it swing or sway while she walked or turned her head—well, her hair would just give him pause.

Again, today was no different. The whole world stopped for Pierce as he gazed on Katherine standing there, even with her hair tied back. For it was the person herself, he knew, who so moved him. In that moment, he was more than glad for the ecstatic diver­sion, even if he knew it was only temporary.

Up until a half hour before, and for five years, Katherine had been married to the man who had so recently inhabited the body lying in the poolhouse, Simon Rhee. She had been raised with Simon like she was raised with Kiki and had known Simon since they were toddlers. They had had no children of their own. Stand­ing there now trying to ignore the savage and brutal finality of the condition of her husband’s corporeal form, she wore a rose colored blouse, rose colored shorts, a thin red belt adorned with glinting gold metal flecks, and red short heeled slip-on shoes with red soles and gold flowery embroidery. It was almost as if she had unwit­tingly chosen the rose colored outfit after her shower that morning as a complement for the blood that would soon flow.

The length of bone in her legs and arms, the firmly rounded bust, made her statuesque. Her skin was a rich chocolate brown, including her feet and toes. She tanned rapidly, even while wear­ing sunscreen, and she enjoyed sitting in the sun by the pool or lying down by the ocean. Her skin was smooth and moist, due to her pores’ natural oils, and also due to the lotion and oil she rubbed into her body on a daily basis. Her predilection for darkening, her intrinsic pigmentation had been a serious bone of contention with her former husband.

Simon had never liked dark skinned Asian women, preferring the pearl-white variety with its tinge of yellow and hair black as coal. Katherine’s chestnut gold-streaked brown had never pleased him, either. Michael Pierce, on the other hand, had decided years ago that he liked the lustrous dark elegance of Katherine’s skin as much as he liked her comely sun streaked hair, and looking on her now, he came to that same lovely absorbing conclusion again.

It’s Sunday, Katherine said, flatly. Atomi doesn’t work Sundays. Remember?

So? Kiki whined, squirming. He can still get off his ass and make a drink, can’t he? I mean, he lives here, too, doesn’t he? Why can’t he make us a drink? He’s done this whole Japanese superior-ity thing since we were kids. You can see it in his eyes looking down his nose at us all the time like he does. I hate it. I’m sick of it. I’d like to wipe it right off his face.

Kiki. Atomi was born and raised in Korea. And he doesn’t have to get up off his ass on Sunday just for us. Bad enough he has to do it the other six days of the week.

Oh, Kath, you’re always defending him. I don’t care if he was raised in Korea. He’s Japanese, and you always defend him.

Katherine looked to Pierce, then back at Kiki.

Well. He’s probably sleeping it off right now, anyway. You saw him when we got back last night. He wasn’t feeling any pain.

Yeah. Too much saki, once again, Kiki said. He’s either sleep­ing it off or down-loading porn from the internet. Either way he’s too busy to make us a goddamn drink. Or lunch.

Kiki sat in his white tennis shorts and shirt and white socks and white Nike Airliners. No blood stained him. No sweat. No powder burns stood out. His bristly hair rose on top like a block or squared mushroom and was shaved closely around the ears and the back of his head and neck. Michael Pierce knew traces of powder burn clung to at least his shirt. He wondered why Kiki hadn’t changed. Of course, why hadn’t he changed himself? He couldn’t say. He had seen Kiki washing his hands in the laundry room when he came out from his own bedroom and separate bath after washing his own hands and face.

He also knew that, unlike his older brother Simon, Kiki had no problem with Katherine’s skin or hair color because the two had discussed the issue many times. Kiki thought Katherine beau­tiful, just as he did, Pierce knew. Koreans, he thought, sitting there. He shook his head to himself. These Koreans and their ways.

Then he wondered why he would think this at all. Koreans and what ways? Were they any different from his? Besides, what else did he know other than Koreans and their ways?

I’m serious. Who’s going to make the drinks? Kiki asked. I will, Katherine said, going on into the house and pulling one of the doors behind her, though not shutting it.

A half hour before, Kiki had walked around the net from his tennis bag lying on the west side of the court toward the house and his older brother’s end and had raised the silenced Walther PPK semi-automatic pistol he had lifted from the bag and had shot Simon twice in the chest at very close range. Simon had fallen, graphite tennis racquet in hand, near the baseline on the hard green court. Michael Sugar Pierce had jumped up at once from a nearby table in the pavilion on the first shot. He had hardly be­lieved the sound, so faint to begin with, or the smoke gently waft­ing from the silencer before the second shot.

On more than one occasion, Kiki had stood before Simon with this same silenced pistol. Smaller but shaped something like an old U.S. Army Colt .45, it was an aged weapon, Pierce had thought, gazing on it at the time as if he were studying it between shots, nearly an antique. James Bond movies new and old were Kiki’s favorites. Pierce knew Kiki carried the Walther because he liked to confuse himself in his fantasies with the James Bond who used one. He also knew that in the past Kiki had held but had never before raised that same pistol on his brother, much less shot him. This time, Simon had stood looking at his little brother and the soft haze of gun smoke between shots with the same kind of dumb­founded gaze Pierce wore: disbelief, incomprehension, gloom. It was as if he had stumbled suddenly into some lightning dream from which he prayed he would just as suddenly awaken.

The young men at Pierce’s table and the two other tables in the pavilion bolted to their feet only an instant after Pierce. All stood watching, just as Pierce did, and Simon himself. Then came the second shot and Simon’s fall. Kiki turned to the others, to Pierce, then looked up. He stood only a few feet from Simon’s body, and he held the gun now as if he wanted no part of it.

From the music room balcony two levels above them, Katherine stared down in frozen silence. No one moved.

Simon lay on his back in red shorts, tennis shoes and a black golf shirt, one leg turned under. He didn’t move, either, and the blood ran from the open holes in his chest and shirt and down onto his red shorts and into the hard green pavement.

Michael, Katherine called from above. Michael!

And now Simon did move. He twitched, jerked. His open eyes, staring up into the cloudless sky, blinked once. He made a low gurgling groaning sound, a grunting that seemed to come from some deep place in his chest. He made the sound again, louder, longer, and Michael Pierce, standing only a few feet away, imagined the sound a wounded lion might make. This has been coming forever, he thought, staring at Simon as if suddenly lost in his own reverie.

Just forever. And now it’s right here.

2

Simon Rhee could be generous and fun loving, but also cruel and merciless, even with those he loved. Two years younger Kiki was usually the one to receive the brunt of his older brother’s mali­cious punishments and play, Pierce knew. It had been going on since they were very young, cruel Simon picking on hapless Kiki in pointed fashion, laughing about it all the way to his emotional bank, and nowhere ever for Kiki to go. It had continued as they got older, becoming more vicious and ugly, even with Katherine and Pierce there to intervene, so that more than once over the years Kiki had told Pierce and Katherine both, even Simon to his face, that one day he would kill him. Simon would snicker. Stron­ger, taller, more grandly untamed than Kiki, Simon would espe­cially laugh when Kiki stood before him with the lowered Walther.

He would casually take the gun from his little brother’s non­resistant hand, lay it on a nearby surface, spin as if in slow motion ballet, and deliver a brutal Tae Kwon Do smash to Kiki’s face with the side of his foot. Why Kiki ever brought the gun out, no one could say. If they were in the house, it would be Simon’s bare foot striking his face. The rest wore socks inside, only Simon and Emo went sockless, too, and when a fight would start between brothers, everyone would know that Simon’s bare foot was coming, that more feet would follow. Kiki certainly knew this. Sometimes he would fend off the kicks and fists with his own maneuvering, get­ting in a glancing blow or two of his own, but soon enough, he would go down in real pain.

Once his jaw was broken, and he never forgave Simon for it.

How can you ever kill me if you can’t even knock me down, Mr. James Bond? Simon would laugh, standing over him. He had stood over Kiki laughing the time he broke his jaw.

Simon’s hair was not closely shaved and it was looser and longer than Kiki’s and it had a natural part separating it right down the middle. Both Rhees were aristocratic looking, Simon, again, the finer of the two, with burnished hairless skin, finely carved fea­tures, full lips, and somewhat wide set brown eyes. Thirty year old Simon Rhee was patrician looking even now, tarp-wrapped and dead.

Michael, Katherine had called again. He’s still alive!

Pierce turned and looked up at her. He didn’t breathe a word. He didn’t make a sound. In that one long moment, he felt inca­pable of conjuring even a murmur.

Jesus Christ, Kiki said, listening to his brother grunt. He is. He’s still alive. The hell are we going to do?

Pierce turned again, staring at Simon grunting like a lion. For the life of him, just as he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t bring himself now to move, either. He wondered what invisible hand could so paralyze him in that moment in its steely grip.

Kiki was dead right, he thought, distantly. What in God’s name were they going to do?

The same age as Simon, Pierce wore his light brown hair tied back. Ruddy, craggy looking beyond his years, his facial features were nowhere near refined like the Rhees’. His blue eyes were quick and alert, though, and caught most things that passed before them. Sometimes in a certain light or in contrast to a certain color he wore, his eyes would change hue and appear blue-green, blue-gray, even a wolflike solid gray, a true chameleon’s eyes.

Medium height, solidly built, he walked heavily, his bulky shoulders sloping round inside his shirts, his legs long and well shaped. Pierce and Simon had gone to school together since they were seven and the Rhee brothers and Katherine Song had first come to America. Pierce had started living with the three at four­teen after his alcoholic ex-prize fighting father was killed by a guard in a Sunland bank robbery attempt. His mother, plunging into her own dipsomaniac collapse following the killing, abandoned him and his sister to a disinterested cousin. Simon suggested Pierce move in with them. He gratefully accepted and never looked back.

His mother and father had been divorced from each other once, remarried to each other a second time, then divorced again. For reasons unknown to Pierce, his mother had always burned a torch for the man, even after the second divorce. After the killing, Pierce and his sister Jamie saw little of their mother for the next two years and then nothing of her after Pierce, the elder of the two, had turned sixteen. Jamie was now married, living with her cowboy husband and three sons in Billings, Montana. Pierce talked to her on the phone every few months, and that was the extent of their contact. The cousin, still living, knew next to nothing about the whereabouts of her blood relative, their mother. Pierce had not spoken to the cousin in five years, and had not seen his mother in fourteen. He did not know if she was living or dead and he told himself he did not care.

What he did care about, from a very young age, was Katherine.

Why you marrying him? he had asked her five years earlier, in Korean, shortly before her wedding to Simon.

He was twenty-five at the time, she was twenty-three. They sat together in the upper floor music room on the exquisite green couch before the long wall of windows listening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and watching the mounting dusk swallow everything in sight below, including the tennis court, two guest houses, the red barn and corral, the boathouse and private dock beyond, even the ocean.

In English he said, I’m serious. You know how he is.

Hair unbound, Katherine turned her brown eyes on him. Who shall I marry, then? One of Simon’s ‘associates?’ Someone our fa­thers send over from Seoul? Kiki? It’s been coming forever, Michael. You should know that better than anyone. They betrothed us in blood before I was even born.

Pierce sat there. He tried very hard not to think these words, but they rose in his mind, anyway:

Marry me, Katy. Now. Right this minute.

He didn’t say this, of course, he did not say anything of the kind. What he did was ask, Why get married at all?

She laughed that resonant laugh of hers.

Why breathe? It’s the Korean way, Michael. You marry when the fathers tell you it’s time. Especially our fathers. They’re a lot more traditional, I’m afraid, than, say, a college professor or a com­puter manufacturer. Those two uphold General Yi’s old Choson ways. They expect us to uphold the same. It’s Choson or bust. Even though we live thousands of miles from them.

Pretty funny they’re so traditional.

Isn’t it? she asked. Believe me, General Yi is their man. He founded a ruling family dynasty that lasted from 1392 to 1910, when the Japanese forcibly took over Korea. General Yi is the one who named the country Choson. The fathers love that.

Do I have to remind you this isn’t Korea?

The air we breathe in this house is, she said. Even if it does have an American flavor.

"No. It smells like kim-chi."

She laughed again.

He’ll treat you like shit, Katy. He’ll try, especially at first because he does love you, but it doesn’t matter. He’ll turn mean without thinking. If you question or criticize him, he’ll really turn on you. Later, you’ll just be there, and he’ll stop thinking about you, even though he loves you.

She didn’t respond. They sat there, shoulders touching.

He’ll give up his girlfriends at first, but they’ll be back. Golf and drinking all night with friends and everything else he loves to do except be with you will be back, too. In fact, they won’t even change. And he’ll expect you to be loyaler than loyal to him. He’ll expect you to serve like a good wife must.

Yes, of course, she said. "Most Korean men, even those who grow up without mothers, are spoiled, babied, pampered. They’re taught to think they’re the best things on earth, and that any woman should feel lucky to have one of them, and that any woman lucky enough to get one of them would gladly serve all of her days and nights, too. Trust me. Emo taught Simon and Kiki well."

Momma’s boys. That’s what it’s called here, Pierce said.

Yes, I know.

Then marry me, Katy. Right now.

You’ll be lonely even though you’re with him.

She met Pierce’s gaze with that calm in her own. I’m lonely now. Except when I’m with you.

All right, he thought. All right, then, I’ll say it. I have to. And he felt the words moving from him. He heard the words ringing like the sound of a bell from his own mouth.

Marry me, Katherine Song, and you won’t be lonely again. To hell with Simon, Kiki, the fathers and all things Choson. This is not Korea. No ruling dynasty here. It’s a place where anything can happen. Where you, Korean born, can meet me, third genera­tion Irish, on brand new soil. I love you, Katy. More than all things Korean, Irish, or American. So your father is the big time Seoul gangster. Mine was a broken down drunk ex-pug bank robber. Same business, really, just a different level. I’m asking you. Will you marry me, Katy?

She looked out the bank of windows on the enveloping dusk a long moment. She thought about the old black and white film Pat and Mike. How many times had they watched that movie together? How many times had they sat together and laughed together and felt that special warmth moving back and forth between them and between them and the screen and the wonderful goodness of it? The Rhees laughed at them. The Rhees would make nothing but fun, of course. The Rhees hated black and white movies. They hated old movies, except James Bond movies, and would not watch them, ever.

In fact, Simon and Kiki hate anything old, period, she told herself. The operas I love. The classical music Michael will at least listen to with me. If it’s not now, current, hip, forget it. That’s the Rhees. Wanting so much to believe how cool they are. Gangster cool. It’s certainly not Michael. Or me. We’re too old fashioned for that. Right Simon? Right Kiki? How did we get like this when we’re all the same age? When we grew up in the same house? Isn’t that what you always say? Where did Michael and I come from? The moon? Andromeda?

When she looked back at Pierce, she said, If I did marry you, Simon, Kiki and both our fathers would come looking for us. They would keep looking for us until they found us no matter where we hid. Then blood would be paid. I don’t want you hurt.

Nobody has to get hurt, he said. We get lost on some Costa Rican jungle coast, you turn browner and browner from the sun, and me redder and redder. We both change color ’til we turn Indio, and they walk right by and don’t even see us.

Katherine smiled, and now Pierce did not know what else to say because he knew she had spoken the truth about the fathers, that the two older men would hunt them down wherever they went, and all he could do now was take her dark slender hand in his thick reddish one and hold it in silence.

She let him hold her hand, then said, I’ve known them as long as I can remember, Michael. Kiki and I were only five when we came on the plane with Simon. I love them. Both of them, in my own way. I can’t imagine life without them.

Yes, you can, he told her, looking straight ahead out the windows. But you won’t let yourself.

There is one thing, though. Two, she said.

After a moment, he turned to her and said, What’s that?

Her mahogany eyes looked straight into his blues.

I’ll never forget that you asked me to marry you. Because I love you, too. More than anything, Shug.

He kissed her then, on the forehead, on the cheek, on the eyes, on the lips. He kissed her, lingering on her mouth, which opened now to his. Tongues touching, mingling, neither stopped to worry who might be looking. He kissed her and he held her, he caressed her tenderly, and when he pulled away, they said no more, for what good, really, were words, now or ever? What good, he asked himself, were any words in any language in any world?

They sat holding hands on the exquisite green couch, Vivaldi filling their ears as surely as the dusk outside filled their eyes with its relentless obliteration of both land and sea.

3

It was Katherine, of course, who finally inspired Kiki to do what he’d waited and threatened for years to do. Not by anything she had explicitly done, not by any Lady Macbeth whisperings in his petulant ear, but simply by her presence in the two brothers’ lives. By the very fact she existed and breathed and had spoken day and night to them for as long as she had. For almost their whole lives, she had inhabited both brothers’ minds and hearts like some hal­lucinatory language all her own.

Kiki had been in love with her as a mother, sister, lover for as long as he could remember. She was the closest female to him from the time he was four and his own mother was shot dead on a Seoul street by a rival of his father in retaliation for Rhee Jin Yun’s phi­landering with the rival’s nineteen year old daughter. This taught the Rhees, elder and sons, and Katherine’s father, Song Yung Il, a lesson none would forget.

The killing of Kiki’s and Simon’s mother and not their dad changed the Rhee brothers’ and Katherine’s lives forever. Her fa­ther, in concert with his boss Rhee Jin Yun, agreed that Korea was no longer a safe place for children whose fathers were engaged in their line of endeavor, and a few months after Mrs. Rhee’s death, and against his own wife’s tearful protest, he placed his now five year old daughter and only child on a Korean Air jet bound for Los Angeles and a whole new life with Simon, Kiki and Emo. Known as parachute children, part of the first wave of their kind, they came to America under the guardianship of the ajuma, who had been older and childless even then.

Set up in a house in Canoga Park, California, the three were supported by monthly stipend, were regularly telephoned by their fathers and Katherine’s mother, were paid surprise visits by Rhee Jin Yun or by Katherine’s parents for two or three days at a time, were visited by Katherine’s grandparents for longer periods, were brought back to Seoul during school vacations, particularly when they were younger—all this so that the families could continue to influence their upbringing, even though such a gulf separated them. Yet despite the best efforts of the two fathers, and even in spite of their success at imbuing so much Korean tradition in the three, Katherine, Simon and Kiki were also reared, educated, and enculturated in ways uniquely American, mostly by themselves, by Michael Pierce, and by the other parachute children whom they discovered were so like themselves.

This created a major split in how they viewed themselves: they were Korean but American, American but Korean. They were both, they realized. The fathers knew this, too, and labored long and hard to eliminate the American influence. It did not work. It could not work. They were not reared in Korea. Even the fathers came grudgingly to acknowledge this. They might have brought them home for good had the danger and instability that marked their own lives improved. By the time this happened, the three were teenagers and in high school, protested any move back to Korea, and so it was thought best just to leave