Part II of the special episode starts with the Korean warning emphatically that “the first step is most important.”  He points with the handle of his steel-pitched racket at the girl with a Mickey Mouse bow before proceeding to pronounce Shaggy’s critical part in his elegantly simple scheme.

My father-in-law dozes off before the first commercial break in the program, his snoring inhabiting the cheap wood beneath the thin carpeting of our apartment. I reach the first commercial break but not much after, awakened only by the sounds of an early morning Japanese cartoon. An old man with a large gun is chasing a girl with a smiling face who manages to retreat to a normally peaceful green dragon who, nevertheless, manages to eviscerate the villain before giving the girl a daisy and snoring once again.

My father-in-law is already at work, checking out my trap.  The steel bar above the Red V has been licked clean.  The mouse has somehow figured out a way to digest the peanut butter that had been ground into delicate grains at the natural food store while avoiding having his or her neck lopped off by the thin steel bar.

My father-in-law speaks to Li in a voice that again reminds me of a barker on a circus stage. I drive him to the liquor store, convinced that I have not been paranoid and that I have indeed been typecast as one of the stupid Westerners on the Korean’s legal team. 

My father-in-law finds a bottle of translucent rice wine that is called Mao-Tai, having a picture of a fat Anglo keeled over on the floor with cheerful red lettering below stating that “this wine can knock off the socks of  any white man,” the emphasis the manufacturer’s.

I expect him afterwards to take the lead. But my father-in-law lets me set down the trap alone.  This time, I give up the possibility of a midnight snack and use the rich havarti with peppercorn for bait. He starts working quietly on his Goubuli dumplings, which he prepares with a professional efficacy, scratching out a mix comprised of pork and scallions while rolling the dough flat and pinching the edges together so that the dumplings all have evenly shaped mouths.

It takes him nearly three hours to complete our meal by which time the two of us are so hungry that we devour the complete tray and share none of it with the mouse or with the city of mice that live somewhere between the back kitchen wall and the long fields of off-colored grass stretching leisurely to the edges of my university.  My father-in-law and I retreat to our different positions in the living room: he on the comfortable sofa seat, me on the couch with the cushions that sag into the springs.  A sports announcer with thick-rimmed glasses is speaking animatedly to the guy with the Sumo-sized arms.

Tiger Woods is playing in the Masters and is trying to come from behind in the final phase of the tournament.  Though the Tiger has won innumerable times, he has not yet come from behind in the closing round. This tournament is no different.  He bogeys 13, makes par on 14. The announcer with the thick-rimmed glasses comments in a hush as though from a studio in Taipei, the young broadcaster has gathered the clout to disrupt the Tiger’s concentration.

My father-in-law grabs the Mao-Tai that has been carefully cloistered in the cabinet above our kitchen counter--fills his tall drinking glass, directing me with his right index finger to take a similarly sized swig.  He declares in his typically sharp-edged voice, “Gombei,” meaning in Chinese “down the hatch.”  I empty my glass, repeating his toast, trying, as best I can, to capture his firecracker cadence.

My father-in-law is pleased at my efforts to mimic his Chinese, however imperfectly. He smiles the same way that the Professor on Harvard Law smiles at the Koreans who can speak precise English and fluent Mandarin but who never speak in their native tongue.

The trap in the kitchen by the Wonder Bread and the Frito Lays goes snap, but I am too blurry eyed to examine our success until the following morning when the two of us find the steel trap glimmering in the midday sun. 

The mouse and the rich havarti with peppercorn in its middle are not there, so I figure we’ll have to finish another bottle of Mao-Tai—maybe several over the next few evenings or weeks.