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I had been up since 8:00 in the morning, and it was close to 5:00 in the afternoon now. We had marched up and down the streets of Koreatown since about 10:30, and in spite of a lunch break, an hour of sitting in Yongin Jung restaurant eating, drinking, and singing, a 15-minute break while we took photographs, and this break, I felt as if I had been on the run the entire day. As the day wound to a close and the prospect of the last stop only minutes away, the adrenaline that had gotten me moving began to wane. Also, my hands had suffered much abuse and there were several bandages wrapped around the burst blisters. The jang-go at my hip that had banged at my pelvis throughout the day left a sizeable bruise.
In spite of the fact that I was exhausted physically, I felt strangely elated. Even after living in the United States for almost a decade, this was the first time that I had spent any significant amount of time in a Korean town, and it was definitely the first time I had been in the company of so many people of Korean descent for an entire day. I always fancied myself to be an “international” person and always looked at ethnic pride with suspicion and at times even with some derision. However, what I was feeling that day, sitting on the pavement, tired and sore, could not be described as anything else other than pride in being Korean and being among other people who shared my ethnic history.
The vans finally arrived, and we hurriedly stowed our instruments in the back and piled in. I ended up with three other people in the delivery truck that Dongseok-hyung drove for work. We sat on the flattened cardboard boxes squished against the instruments. My butt, the one part of my body that had not gotten a beating that day, finally got its fair share as we drove the 10 minutes to the Korean supermarket and mall.
The vans and cars parked side by side in the parking lot in the rear of the supermarket. Reluctantly, we climbed out of the vehicles and went in search of our instruments. For the final time that day, we smoothed out our minbok, retied our tti, and tied on our instruments securely on our bodies. As we waited for the last few stragglers, a couple of the smokers disappeared and soon reappeared eliciting disapproval from Yuna.