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woman who hung about the train station and seemed never to go anywhere else. He’d seen her there on the night of his arrival, and now whenever he ventured that way she’d run at him, shout wildly, and try to catch hold of his arm. The second time he saw her he hadn’t been quick enough and she’d torn his sleeve, so now, whenever he walked that way, he took the Goma along. The boy didn’t hesitate to roll at her knees. He had no mercy and would hiss like she did whenever the occasion arose.
    Though the teachers at school weren’t happy about it, Bobby and the Goma were becoming friends. At least with the Goma Bobby could be himself, not always on guard, feeling as though he were on stage. And the fact that the Goma, like himself, was truly alone in the world made the friendship seem natural. To be sure, Bobby enjoyed the idea of having his own sidekick walking the streets ahead of him, taking the crazy women out of his path, but it was more than that. Bobby thought of it as a Don Quixote kind of thing, for though the Goma acted the part of his servant, he continued to speak to Bobby as if he were an idiot, thus reversing what Koreans considered their proper roles to be.
    During his first days in Taechon, Bobby hadn’t been able to recognize the utter hopelessness of the Korean the Goma used, but as the weeks passed he studied hard, and he improved. Now he found new verbs everywhere, added complex-sentence structure daily, and he had nearly mastered the honorifics, those difficult verb endings that give the Korean language its sliding scale, allowing it to be gross or majestic, belittling or grand, turn and turn about. And all this time the Goma didn’t change the way he spoke a whit.
    â€œHey! You go school?” he would ask every morning. “Hey! Come go tearoom? Hot tea have yes?”
    His Korean was bereft of adjectives or prepositions, empty of such easy connectives as “but” or “because,” and generally contained nothing but robot directions. Do this. Do that. Go there. Eat this. And the odd thing was that he seemed instantly to have developed this stick-figure language of his upon meeting Bobby. Whenever the Goma was along Bobby could not speak to the real people of the town without him interpreting, shifting the language downward and blurting out obscenities. “Tell me,” the town druggist might ask, “have you found adjusting to Korean food difficult? Is our way of life causing you problems?” Before Bobby could absorb the questions and form intelligent answers using the learned Korean in his mind, the Goma would shout his own version into Bobby’s ear. “Korean food sticky-sticky? Korean life no good?,” and Bobby would somehow be forced to answer with nods and grunts, as if captured by the Goma’s way of speech and whisked away from the real thing.
    It was infuriating, but it drew Bobby to him nevertheless, and perhaps the reason was this: though the Goma was a bare-bones communicator he did have a way of seeing what the druggist, or anyone else, was really asking, and he translated the suspicion of cultural inferiority implicit in their questions, rather than the words they used.
    About six weeks after his arrival in Taechon, Bobby left the village for the first time, heading for a U.S. Army missile base, where he had been invited for Thanksgiving dinner. Thanksgiving had always been a big holiday with Bobby, and he had looked forward to it with what his grandmother justly called gluttony. Now, though, after six weeks of half-ration Korean food, he was beginning to feel a particular looseness in the way his trousers fit, and he rode the train northward in an unusual frame of mind. Would being with Americans again feel strange? Would they once again be repulsed by the way he looked, and would he once again take up the methods he had continually relied upon for getting by, namely facial tricks and a memory for jokes? Though he