A faint glow of dawn appeared at the edge of the sky. Green-winged birds sang in the trees. On the athletic field, a group of silver-haired men and women followed the commands playing from a recorder as they did morning exercises.
“Ppalli is here.”
Someone said it, and everyone turned toward the parking lot. A man was walking toward us, swinging his arms as he came.
“Ppalli! Ppalli!” The whole field came alive. It was Old Jung, the Korean. He grinned and greeted everyone.
In Korean, ppalli means “quickly.” During our morning exercises, whenever someone was late, everyone would urge him, “Quick, quick!” After Old Jung joined our group, he learned this Chinese expression. We asked him how to say it in Korean. From then on, whenever we saw him coming, everyone called, “Ppalli, ppalli!” Before long, “Ppalli” had become his nickname.
Our exercise group included white Americans, Filipinos, Japanese, and Koreans. Among the Chinese were people from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and different provinces, as well as overseas Chinese from Burma and Indonesia. When one Chinese person spoke a dialect to another, outsiders felt awkward. When Chinese and foreigners tried to talk, it was even more like “a chicken talking to a duck.”
At first, when everyone used his or her own mother tongue, we communicated with facial expressions, gestures, and simple English words. As the days passed, the distance between us grew smaller and our hearts became connected. Even the “chicken” could talk with the “duck.”
If we use the Chinese zodiac, Old Jung really was a chicken. When we talked about our ages and zodiac signs, we discovered that Koreans believed in them too. He said he was born in the Year of the Chicken.
Wow! Our group had three chickens. Yours truly was the eldest chicken, and Korean Old Jung was the little chicken brother.
He had operated a general-goods store in the El Monte business district. Two years earlier he transferred the store to someone else, retired, and began enjoying his golden years. His backyard was very large. He grew cabbage, onions, squash, tomatoes, peppers, perilla leaves, cucumbers, as well as jujube and pear trees.
After morning exercise, friends went to visit and all exclaimed:
“Wow! You really know how to grow vegetables!”
He was not selfish either. He often shared his harvest with his guests.
On his birthday, he invited several of us old Chinese to his home. He prepared a great deal of Korean barbecue and Korean side dishes. What interested us most was the kimchi. There were many kinds: carrot, daikon, napa cabbage, chard, chives, cabbage, and more. They also made a soft cake from acorns, something like Jell-O and something like liangfen, seasoned with garlic and chili. It was wonderfully refreshing.
The old Chinese kept asking how to make the kimchi. Old Jung’s wife, the ajumma, tried her best to explain in whatever English she knew. We Chinese widened our eyes and pricked up our ears, nodding as though we understood, though we only half understood.
Finally she said, “Next time I make kimchi, you come.”
People of different nationalities and languages exercising together deepened our friendship and added endless pleasure to the evening years of our lives.
Originally published in the Americas Supplement of China Daily.