The stain of the sun:
as my eyes opened
the light struck the clock –
a little plastic thing
with a face, round and plain,
given for Christmas by my closest
friend.
I moaned a little. “Mmm—let me
sleep a little longer….” It said a
minute
or two, not enough, before
seven.
There was nothing special about
the clock:
small, functional, foldable, accurate,
it could be slipped into a pocket
and carried
easily enough
to the farthest ends of the small
blue planet.
It had a delicate but curiously
penetrating alarm.
My friend had bought it at a
little store
in Chinatown from a teenage
gamine-like girl
named Mary Chew, who had a mole
on her chin, perfectly shaped eyes,
and a stutter.
Usually she worked only weekends,
but
that day had been the first of
winter vacation,
and she wanted to earn some extra money
to buy a motorcycle base-layer
crew neck tee (a surprise)
for her 22-year-old boyfriend, Daniel
Chan,
whom no one in her family liked.
“His family is not from Guangzhou,”
her mother complained.
Mary’s employer, Charles “Charlie”
Wang,
was a little wiry man, all abrupt
manner
to his workers, all unctuous simpering
for his customers. He usually
paced
the back of the store looking at
all
the clocks, but could never
remember the time.
He had purchased the clock
as part of a consignment from a
saleswoman
named Kelly Smithfield, a tall,
big redhead,
born in Modesto, a graduate of
Davis,
who had brought it in a case of
samples
she showed him one day at the end
of October
on a cold call at the Golden Mountain
Happy Clock Store.
Kelly was twenty-seven, vaguely
desperate –
she waved her hands a lot and
laughed too often –
still on probation with the
company,
she hadn’t sold a single clock
since August,
and nearly fell over when Charlie
Wang
bought her entire case. When Charlie
invited her to lunch at the Dragon
Palace of Dim Sum –
“You will love their chicken feet!”
– well, how could she refuse?
Kelly had been given the clock
by her assistant, Amanda Clark,
at the home office in Sacramento.
Amanda was twenty-three,
petite, blond, scattered,
with two years of community
college
and aspirations to become a real
estate agent,
though she was afraid she may have
missed
the height of the market
by a decade or two.
Amanda had gotten the clock
in a case with other clocks –
small-traveling, silent-alarm, valedictory,
vanity-table,
of all shapes and designs, from
the plainest, like mine,
to luxury, to joke and variety
designs:
Dooby-Doo, Bart Simpson, Princess
Elsa, Shrek –
a case she had gotten
from the office delivery clerk,
Steve Butts,
a middle-aged man who had been
downsized
by a local insurance company at
the age of 55
and was taken in out of compassion
by the office manager, who knew
him
during his glory years as a claims
adjuster.
Steve had gotten the case from a
warehouse clerk,
José Parra, thirty-two,
prematurely balding,
undocumented, who lived in a
trailer park
with several men from his village
in Guatemala.
He sent half his minimum wage to
his family
and sold clocks he had filched
from the warehouse
late at night on eBay.
A young warehouse worker named
Minh Vuh,
a Vietnamese whose parents had
been boat people
when they were children, had
placed the clock
carefully in the case, with a
handful of confetti. Minh
was engaged to a sweet young Laotian
who lived three blocks from his
family home.
Their parents were not too happy
about that,
so they had to meet secretly after
school
and on his work breaks when she
was in the neighborhood.
It all felt very romantic. “Like
Romeo and Juliet!”
his girlfriend said, giggling.
Minh kissed her on her tiny nose.
Minh didn’t remember (he had no
reason to), but
he had put that very clock on the
second shelf from the top in
column 37 of aisle C
last September
after receiving it in a shipment
of similar clocks
off a truck driven by an ageing
Filipino
named “Jack” (he had rejected his
original name when a young man –
he said he wanted to be “100%
American!”
and that meant having a name like
Bob or Joe or Bill,
and he thought “Jack” sounded sexy
and macho).
Jack had picked up the shipment
from a Sacramento
wharf
where it had been unpacked from a
container
by a young African-American
named Obadiah Washington,
who was in fact a rap artist (the
day job was a secret)
and performed at local clubs at
night under the name
Dr. Sling.
The container had been hauled off
the ship Flower of Seoul
by Ted Anderson, of old Swedish
stock, on his last day
before retiring. The container was
his last but one.
When he hauled the final container
of his career,
his fellow longshoremen smashed a
champagne bottle against it
and made a party of it for the
next hour on the wharf.
The container with the clocks
inside got a splash of the champagne,
but was otherwise undamaged by the
festivities.
The Flower of Seoul had carried the container
across the Pacific the week
before.
The ship was manned by a small
crew,
most of them young Indonesians,
and piloted
by a Taiwanese captain named
Jiang-Ji Li,
forty-five, with a family of six
girls at home
and a nagging wife who made the
boredom of sea life
seem like an endless vacation by
contrast.
Getting his girls married,
however,
was another matter: the eldest
had been poisoned by “women’s
liberation”
(as he still called it) and wanted
to become a captain
like her father. Why couldn’t she
have been a boy?
These thoughts had made the
crossing
an onerous one for Captain Li,
especially the prospect of going
back:
the Flower of Seoul would be making a week-long stop,
after picking up timber in Portland,
at Taipei.
The clock had sat for the entire
trip,
unseen in its dark container,
its hands set at the traditional
10:10.
In the port city of Busan, South
Korea,
the container with my clock in it
(though, of course, it was not yet
my clock –
would it ever be, really? Is
ownership
of anything, let alone a clock,
time’s strict and impartial
measurer,
by a limited and mortal being like
man
even possible? That is a delicate
philosophical question
that we can not, alas, pursue
here),
that container had been placed on
the deck
of the Flower of Seoul
with two dozen other similar containers
of different colors and sidings –
some corrugated, some smooth –
with the result that the ship
looked like a father
so overburdened with packages
he was likely to fall down,
by a longshoreman named Kim
Dong-hyun,
twenty-eight (a little fat fellow
who loved dakon kim-chi so much
his mother gave him a case every
year
for Gujeong),
using a crane
to lift it from a semi driven by a
driver
named Kim Ji-hoon (no relation), a
tall, skinny fellow
of thirty-three,
who still lived with his parents
and played computer games on the
weekends,
driving his mother to despair
about ever having
grandchildren.
He had driven the truck
from a small factory outside Seoul,
where he had stopped by for the
clock consignment,
up near the border
(it was a long drive not helped
by the bad heat wave and the
endless traffic –
the highway was becoming a
continuous traffic jam,
but no one in Seoul wanted to pay for improvements,
so Ji-hoon just growled and
daydreamed about the next version
of WarCraft, supposed to be coming
out in August).
A young woman – a sixteen-year-old
named Song-hi
with long hair and fat cheeks and
a pert expression –
had packed the clock in the
consignment box
after taking it from the end of
the assembly line
where it had been checked for
quality by a grim matron
named Yun, who had a drunken
husband,
two ungrateful children and a
spoiled cat,
the only creature in the world she
felt understood her.
The clock had been assembled
by half a dozen other girls, all
wearing the same uniform.
Chimin, whose face was a perfectly
flat oval
and always rode her bike to work,
added the swivel stands to the
clocks.
Soyon, who was always sad
and never talked about her home
life,
put in the inner workings of the
clocks
and the battery receivers:
the little drawer that poked out
of
the clock’s plastic case.
Subin, who liked to clown and make
practical jokes,
attached the minute and hour
hands, and “sweeps”
(i.e., second hands), when they
had them, to the clocks.
Hayun, who was very tall and very
proud
(actually, her unusual height made
her painfully self-conscious),
added the white face to each
clock. Once,
she had been so distracted,
she had put the faces in upside
down
for more than 20 clocks.
Nobody down the line noticed until
Mrs. Yun, of quality control,
saw them and had a meltdown,
and threatened to fire everybody.
That was a bad day for Hayun!
Chi’u, who was so short she
disappeared under the assembly
line
when she stepped off her stool,
put in the oscillating mechanism
that ran the clock.
Hyechin, who, for some reason,
no one liked and everyone made fun
of,
put in the alarm.
The girls got the parts from the
other side of the factory,
where they were made by two men and
a woman:
Chunyong, fifty-five, who dyed his
hair,
was the lead craftsman
amd made the clock oscillators.
Songmin, his first assistant,
a stiff young man – the first of
his family
not to have to work in the fields –
crafted the cases.
Yuchin was the first woman in the
factory
to have made it into “craft”: she
had a small tattoo
of a periwinkle on her left inner wrist,
and was considered quite wild,
but that was all right by
Chunyong,
her manager,
because she was so talented.
She crafted the clock faces,
arms and sweeps,
based on her own designs.
(These were first OK’d by upper management,
of course –
that was one of the reasons they
had hired her:
design and craft in one person,
with only one salary!
The clocks sold consistently, especially
in the American market,
so “UM” was content.)
Songmin and Yuchin got the
polystyrene they used
from bins of plastic parts
that had been delivered by
Kwon Young-sik, who had only one
eye,
from a bad accident on his last
delivery job (it had not been his
fault;
he had left because he thought that
it would bring even worse bad luck,
after his accident, to stay).
The parts had been made in the big
National Plastic Co. Ltd. plant
on the other side of Seoul.
Much of the plastic was recycled
from toys, hardware tools, and
other clocks.
Chunyong had gotten the quartz for
the
oscillator crystal that runs my
clock
(I guess I can call it mine, now)
from a bin where the crystals were
packed
in small boxes
after delivery by Park Ye-jun,
a short, fiery man with bad breath
(he lived on garlic for breakfast,
lunch and dinner),
from the mines of Tae Wha,
near Chungju, half way between Seoul and Busan.
The quartz from which the
mechanism of my clock was made
had been mined from the earth
there
by a very young man named Ahn
Min-kyu,
eighteen years old, just out of
school.
His family had been fishermen from
time immemorial,
and he had planned on being a
fisherman too,
when the fish stocks of his
seashore village
disappeared one day –
it was thought because of
pollution from the North –
so he had to change plans and,
instead of probing the ocean
for a living, probed the earth, as
there were jobs
at the booming Tae Wha Mine.
So he left his village
and went to Chungju
and learned to dig the earth
for minerals. Then one day,
in a poorly lit tunnel,
smelling of sulfur and damp,
he dug out, with his pick
(the machinery was down, as so
often),
a clump of quartz – several
million years old,
formed by magma thrusting
from deep within the earth –
the mine was along the rim of fire
that followed
the edge of the northern Pacific
from America to Asia,
and made volcanoes erupt
and quakes shake the earth
(a smaller quake had woken me
not long after I was given the
clock) –
a clump of quartz that had been deposited
in milky white crystals
with other rocks, from fire and
river and wind,
in the dark earth.
He placed it, using his shovel,
into the cart,
and the cart rolled away to the
surface
and the sunlight,
then he turned back to the wall of
rock
with his pick, and swung.
And that is the list of people to
whom I am indebted
for the appearance on my bed table
of the little alarm clock.
The list could go on –
there is really no reason to stop
here:
What about the parents, and the
grandparents, on and on,
of all those people who at one
point or another
touched or handled or carried the
clock, or
what would later become the clock?
What about their siblings, uncles,
aunts,
cousins, teachers, friends?
What about the original inventor
of the very first clock?
And who, or what, invented him?
One could go on and on. And on and
on,
without end.
And that is just for the clock I
looked at
when I woke up that morning.
What if I had to do the same thing
for everything else in my life?
The mind suddenly flies off
like a flock of astonished crows,
shredding the air . . .
I woke.
It was the alarm
shrieking
“get up! get up! get up!”
