I took the job.
“Is it the language?” Bomi asks. “Are you having a hard time with your Korean? I thought your department was supposed to only speak English.”
Bomi also works at IF Group, and in close proximity to my mother. If I complain to Bomi about the work conditions, she’ll tell Choi Wansu, and then someone, or many someones, will be disciplined or fired. I do not want that. I agreed to work at IF Group to save jobs, not destroy them.
Bomi takes my silence as assent. She pats me on the shoulder. “The planet is round. If you keep walking, eventually you will arrive at your destination. Keep walking, Hara.”
I purse my lips. “What if I want to lie down?”
“This is not a country of people who lie down. This is a country of people who run,” Jules says.
An image of Chaeyoung jogging after Soyou springs to mind. I shove another pork ball into my mouth. Maybe I do love this food truck so much because it reminds me of Iowa, where people lie down all the time.
CHAPTER TWO
Fried pork, melted cheese, and venting to my friends lift my mood, but as I drag myself back to the IF Group, a tightness creeps up my spine. IF Group’s fourteen floors cast a dark shadow across the cement sidewalk. In the late August weather, I should be hot, but I find myself rubbing my arms for warmth as I wait for Soyou and Chaeyoung to return from the park. We need to walk in together to keep up the fiction that we shared lunch.
I tilt my head back and stare up at the top floor. Is Wansu up there in her white marble edifice staring down at me, wondering whether I inherited even a jot of her aptitude? The irony is that neither Yujun nor I are biologically connected to our mothers, yet we match them. Yujun is as admirable as Wansu. He speaks Korean, English, Japanese, and a smattering of Mandarin. He graduated with a degree from an Ivy League school. He’s making deals with businessmen in Singapore and Hong Kong and Tokyo and even LA. I’m a former copy editor for a home and garden magazine. My skill set includes the ability to make a decent apple pie, understanding the difference between perennials and annuals, and knowing the AP Stylebook by heart.
These skills haven’t been put to much use here in Seoul.
Before he was banished abroad by Wansu, Yujun took me out to a few places. People gravitate toward him, and not merely because he’s gorgeous, but because standing near him is like standing in a ray of sunshine—warm and welcoming. No matter where we went, whether it was a club or a shopping mall or a back-alley café, we invariably ran into someone who knew him. Not only knew him, but wanted to talk to him, be with him, bask in his smile.
“Seoul may seem big,” he’d once said, “but it’s actually small.”
I’m proof of that. I’d come to Seoul on a whim in search of my birth father. I’d arrived too late. He’d died two days before my flight landed, and my first activity in Seoul was his funeral. I hadn’t known him. We’d only exchanged a couple of emails after he’d gotten my contact information through a data breach at a DNA matching company for adoptees. I didn’t grieve when he died, but there are times, especially after my nightly call with Yujun ends and I can’t sleep, when a series of thoughts tumble through my head. What if Wansu hadn’t given me up for adoption? What if Lee Jonghyung had married Wansu? What if I’d never gone to America? What if I’d been raised in Korea?
When I’m not careful, the what-ifs can get away from me. I’m not exactly a catastrophizer. I prefer to say that I see the end more clearly than those around me. Jules and I are alike in that respect. We sense disaster, often the worst case, before it strikes. In most other ways, I’m like Bomi—quiet, introverted, measured. It strikes me that Yujun and I have a similar dynamic as Jules and Bomi. Could they be . . . My forehead scrunches together. Those pieces don’t fit. Jules is nursing a broken heart and Bomi has never indicated she has a preference, but then, I’d never asked. I don’t really know. What if— I stop myself. It’s none of my business, and besides, it’s time to get back to work. My coworkers pass by me on the sidewalk, and I fall into step behind them.
As we wait at the elevator banks, Chaeyoung says, “Did you have . . . dwaeji gogi for lunch?”
It takes me a moment to realize she’s talking to me and then another to translate her words into English. “Pork? Yes.”