Pusanweb Writing Contest 2002 - Fiction
 
Travels, an elegy for Evan Carl Hunsicker
  by Ben Eller
November 21, 2002

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.

 

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