Author's note: In the Fall of 1996, Evan Carl
Hunsicker was detained for two months as a spy in North Korea.
Hunsicker entered the communist state after having swum across the
Yalu River from China while intoxicated. It was originally
reported that Hunsicker, a born again Christian, had been on an
evangelical mission. In an interview on CNN after his release,
Hunsicker said he had gone to visit the homeland of his mother.
When it was pointed out to him by the CNN anchor that his mother
was born in South Korea and not North Korea, Hunsicker replied,
"They used to be together, you know." A week after being released
by North Korea, Hunsicker committed suicide in Alaska.
If, as William Carlos Williams
prophesized, the pure
products
of America really do go crazy,
then what chance the
impure?
Take two couples:
One, say, an Afro-American
with a dash
of Cherokee married
to a third-generation Puerto Rican,
another, a lapsed Mormon
of Scottish ancestry
living with
an Iranian
immigrant. Whether they
live in Silicon Valley or
Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, both
raise
their kids with Barney and Play Station
in duplicate
electronic fortresses.
Yes, normal means everything
to nobody any more, but
then
those blood-mixing taboos surface
to mock modern
sensibilities.
In the Long Island
neighborhood of my childhood,
my
integrated neighbors
called the Jew and black woman
in the corner house the Zebras
because we knew their
story:
An undeniable love had muffled
the voices of
ancestors. As if
anything could be more American,
they were respected, but
none
could not forgive the sentence
passed on the
children,
destined to a confusion we
knew was somehow more
acute
and intractable than our own.
Mulatto. Yeah right.
Mixed-blood.
Mongrel. Now we say biracial.
It implies membership
in
two groups, not a lonely
half-caste, but also two cultures,
two languages, two selves,
with one body to settle
accounts.
Biracial means when a young
man swims drunk, naked
and evangelistic
into Stalin's obscene
gesture from beyond the grave
and
his image satellites East to West,
the conversation in living
rooms
in Seoul and Anchorage may
properly center on who
owns
the light coffee tint of his hair
and who the
insanity,
the Asian mother or Anglo father.
Evan Carl Hunsicker, I
imagine
the North Koreans must
have butchered your name.
"Han-shick-ah" they shouted,
in the ultra-impolite
tense,
handed you a glass of water
with one hand, asked: Are
you
married? How about
them Seoul women? (Were a
few
interrogations only a pretense for
apparatchiks to
practice English?)
To them you were American,
pure as Harry Truman, and this
was
the only cruelty they inflicted,
the after-effects more
insidious
than anything sodium pentathol
and hypnosis could
produce.
Evan Carl,
I am sorry I called you an idiot
to the young Koreans
in my bi-national office.
My Michael
Fey comparison was
bullshit. Fey was a pure product,
a silly chapter in the history of
whiteboys come to Asia
with
more appetite than brains. But
why didn't you thank
Jesus
on CNN after America claimed you,
paid your ridiculous
Pyongyang
hotel bill? Your final duality:
A suicide that was
petty revenge
and transcendence. Maybe that's why
Jesus got snubbed,
couldn't have
a monotheistic ending.
The congressman bucking
for Secretary
of State who got you out
thought he had the right to
deliver
your epitaph. The moron said
you were after world
peace.
I am not sorry, Evan,
for not believing him. That
sunless
Alaska afternoon, alone
in your hotel room, as
you
placed the 357 Magnum to your
ear, you just wanted to
extend
your travels, to go someplace
off limits to the
one-sided.