“When I planned this dinner, I thought it would be the four of us getting drunk together and maybe ending the night singing karaoke. I wanted to have an ordinary night of fun. Not this.” I crunch down into the wafer. It’s delicious, as is everything I’ve eaten here. Why Korean food is so good, I will never know.
“The notecards are very nice.” He pulls a box out of his pants pocket. “They’re very pretty. Yeppuh.”
I cock my head to see my gift in Yujun’s palm. Jules took me to a small but elegant craft store filled with delicately carved wood sculptures that had shockingly high prices but also a collection of smaller goods like the hand-painted notecards I bought for Yujun. Each card features a different part of Seoul. I recognized the river and Namsan Mountain but not the others. For Boyoung, I bought a key chain with an enameled cherry blossom and her initials KBY, which is useless now because that’s not even her name.
“Sangki-ah laughed very loudly when he opened his gift and then refused to tell me why.” Yujun sounds peeved.
“He was the hardest to buy for,” I admit. “I don’t know him very well, but Jules said it’s well-known he likes butter bread, so when I saw the small stuffed bread toy, it seemed fitting.”
“You’ll have to give me a plushie as well to be fair,” Yujun declares, tucking the box away.
I’m not sure if it’s a joke. His face gives nothing away. “I promise to buy you—”
“Wait. If you’re going to make promises, let’s negotiate. First, not only do you have to buy me a plushie, but Ahn Sangki can never receive more presents than me.” He holds up his pinky. “Second, for every note I send to you, you need to send me one in return. Third, you give us a chance.”
I stare at that pinky. It doesn’t seem wise given Wansu, the distance, the time. The path forward has more obstacles than a military training course.
“It’s just a chance. Nothing more.”
The pinky looks lonely and brave . . . I’m the first part, but I’d like to be the second part, too. I hook my own small finger with his. “A chance, then.”
He covers my hand and brings it to rest on the metal railing. While he eats the wafer, I stare at the water thinking of Wansu’s story of being poor and frightened and pregnant. I waited forty-two minutes. She received monthly reports.
All this time I thought I’d been abandoned, but she’d been secretly checking up on me. When her monthly reports stopped, she sent an employee all the way from South Korea with a fake identity and a fake story to find out how I was doing. She provided for me and I sat in her house and basically told her she was a terrible person. Then there’s Ellen. She raised me, loved me, cared for me, but she also harbored a huge lie. A cocktail of shame and anger swirls inside me, a cyclone of jumbled emotions. I hang on to the rail and the sensation of Yujun’s hand on mine like a life raft. I sift through the tangled web and find the one strand I need to unravel the most—the one where I admit my own complicity.
“Remember how I told you that I wanted to look in the mirror and know who I was? I came to the sad realization that the reason I hated seeing my reflection was because I didn’t like my Koreanness. I didn’t like the way my eyes were shaped or that my profile was so, well, nonexistent. I didn’t like the color of my skin and the way I could never find one shade of foundation that matched. I hated my jet-black hair and my dull brown eyes. I didn’t like to be around other Koreans or other Asians because it reinforced all the things I never liked. When I came here and everyone around me had the same things—the same hair color, the same eyes, the same delicate profile, the eye smiles, all of it, it reminded me of how I’d shunned my own culture. If I don’t belong, is that really anyone’s fault but my own?”
It’s easier to blame this all on Wansu or Ellen or Bomi, but none of them made me separate people into stripes and dots. I did that all on my own. I othered myself.
He threads his fingers through mine and squeezes, not judging, just accepting. Saying the words felt like a confession and I feel better. Good enough to go on, at least.
“After my dad died, after hearing that he didn’t feel like I was his real kid, I jumped on a plane and came running over here, thinking that I was going to find all the parental approval I didn’t get as a kid from the two people who abandoned me in the first place.”