will attend. I have made a booking at the Hotel of the Artists for next Monday at noon. So make sure…” He stops. I am waiting expectantly.
“Well, you know. Just be a good representative for this entire school,” he finishes lamely. He wants to drive home the crushing responsibility that rests on my shoulders.
“Is Miss Mari coming?” I ask. She is the other recipient of the fellowship. She creates digital installations depicting brain waves or something like that.
“No,” says the director. “Miss Mari is not…Let’s just say her work represents her better than she herself can.”
I smile sweetly and say I am honored. Mari, who is a good ten years older than me, is a bit of a wild card. She is near forty, divorced and overweight, which renders her entirely invisible in the eyes of Korean men of every generation. While I have been greatly entertained by her company the few times I have spoken with her at these mandatory events, she chooses her words according to shock value, and the director is clearly balking at the thought of placing her in the vicinity of a potential donor.
“You are the department’s mascot, don’t forget,” says the director, beaming once more now that I have said the right things in the right way. “We are featuring you on the poster for the exhibition! The photographer will be coming around in the next week or so. She will coordinate beforehand about what to wear, and hair and makeup.” I bow deeply and he stalks out, appeased.
It is an easy thing, keeping elders happy. All you have to do is smile wide and say hello and thank you and goodbye with deep earnestness.
This is something many of my generation—and my chosen vocation—do not understand.
* * *
—
IN THE EVENING, I meet Hanbin for dinner and I tell him about my upcoming parade in front of a line of donors.
“That’s amazing!” he says with delight, his tanned, handsome face breaking into a smile. Happiness, like a warm blanket, settles around my shoulders. We are eating grilled eel in the foodie street in front of school, because he says we both need energy recharging.
He is doubly happy for me because, in the past year, he has offered several times to introduce me to gallerists that he knows through his mother, and I have constantly refused. These offers do not come lightly from him, I know, because my accepting a favor like that would mean his family would then owe these people a favor, and his mother would hear of it and she would be, at the very least, wild with fury. I am trying to do this all on my own, and I know that is the way to actually keep him. He could buy all the art of all the graduate students in my department combined for half of what he paid for his car last year. It goes without saying that he could buy out all of my art in my upcoming solo show in May at the university’s gallery.
He is expertly grilling the pieces of eel and keeps placing them on my plate. I have not been able to tell him until now that I do not like eel because he already thinks I’m too picky.
Hoe, for instance. When I was growing up, we never had hoe, and every time he takes me to an expensive hoe restaurant, his eyes light up when the server brings us a beautifully arranged plate of paper-thin slices of raw white fish, topped off with sea cucumber or sea urchin. It takes singular effort to keep the queasiness from printing itself on my face. “The chef saved the best mackerel for us—I called the restaurant last week to tell them we were coming today,” he says to me, piling the translucent slivers high on my plate. “And guess what, he has set aside really high-quality pufferfish sashimi too, that he’ll be bringing out himself!”
Ruby, I think, suspected this about me. One of the wonderful things she did—without ever acknowledging it—was to stop trying to coax me to eat raw seafood. Or foie gras. Or lamb. Or rabbit. Or any sort of food I had never experienced