CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
There’s a small sushi bar near Yujun’s apartment. According to the Naver profile, it only seats ten. I reserve one table and send a text for Yujun to meet me there after work. I take a leaf out of Bomi’s book and arrive fifteen minutes in advance. As I wait for him to arrive, I am assailed by second thoughts. What if I’m being too impulsive? What if we end up arguing? There are other places that are less public. Maybe we should go to the river. That’s where we first kissed. Where I first cried in his arms. Where we had our first breakup. I stare at my phone screen.
Then he walks through the door.
I remember the first time I saw him at the Incheon Airport. He was standing to the side of the kiosk where I was leasing my internet modem. Dressed in a blue suit with one hand scrolling through his phone and the other stuck into his pocket, he looked more like a model for some expensive clothing brand than a traveler who had disembarked from an international flight. I had to fix my tongue against the roof of my mouth so it wouldn’t fall out. Tonight, I’m struck speechless again at his male beauty.
There are only two other people in this small restaurant—a couple, but they both turn and stare at him for longer than is polite. He’s that attractive. But Yujun has eyes for no one else. He never has, not since I’ve been with him. His face lights up when he spots me.
“Hara, have you been waiting long?”
“No. I just arrived.”
“You should’ve had the cab drop you off at my place. We could have walked over together.” He pulls out his chair and settles in.
“I wanted to make sure there was a table available.” I wonder if I should’ve brought a gift. Do people do that for breakups? And what is an appropriate breakup gift? A tie? A book? A journal? Before I decided to live in Seoul, I bought him hand-painted notecards to write to me. Conversely, what is the right present for a “stay with me even if I ruin your life” request?
“Should we order Set 1? It’s light but that leaves enough room for AeMangBing at the Shilla Hotel and a walk up along the fortress wall. It’s prettiest at night.”
He knows my weak spots. The Jeju Apple Mango Bingsu Shilla serves during the summer is one of my favorites, and since the fall is here, it will be out of season soon. And the view of the city from the old fortress wall is pretty at night. My gut clenches at the thought of Yujun hiking those trails with another girl’s hand in his.
“Set 1 is fine, although maybe we should go to the Shake Shack. It’s around the corner. We can order and take the food somewhere.”
“The Shake Shack? If that’s what you want, we can do that.” He studies the menu. “If you’re here to break up with me, then I will want my necklace back.”
“What?” My hand flies to my chest to cover the jade duck nestled under my sweater.
Without looking at me, he extends his hand, palm up, and repeats his demand. “The necklace. I gave it to you with the belief that we would be forever, but if you’re quitting on me now, you need to return it. Give it back.”
“I am not quitting on you.”
“Better not.” He sets the menu down. “I’ve been thinking.”
“Wait. Let me go first.”
He drums his fingers against the table. “I’m afraid to let you go first. You almost broke up with me.”
“I did not.” A moment of madness in my closet doesn’t count. “But, listen, we can’t abandon Wansu. She’s lonely, you know.”
Yujun’s face softens. He stretches out his hand and clasps mine. “This is why I love you. Or one of the reasons, Hara. You aren’t consumed with thoughts only of yourself.”
Gosh, if he only knew the truth of how selfish my thoughts have been.
“I know she is lonely,” he continues. “Father is . . . not in a good condition, and she should let him go, but I don’t have the heart to tell her. She will need to come to her own decision on that.”
So that’s why he’s not been broken up about his father or why he doesn’t visit often. He’s said his goodbyes to his father some time ago.
“I’ve been thinking that we should go to LA. We can live openly as a couple there with no one to question us. Eomma will not have to face awkward questions or suffer any loss of face with her friends.” He doesn’t see my growing horror. “We’d be helping IF Group expand and grow larger. You would have no problems, obviously, with the language.” He smiles, two dimples winking at me. “It’s really a perfect solution.” I shake my head in slow but real dismay. His smile fades. “How is it not perfect?”
“You don’t belong in LA, at least not to live. I don’t want you to go through what I go through with the constant low-grade insults about what you look like or how you speak or how your food smells funny or how your customs are weird until you turn out like your aunt Sue, who refuses to speak Korean and pretends she’s white so that she doesn’t feel like she’s a constant interloper in a country she’s lived in for over thirty years! You developed a stutter, for God’s sakes!” I slam my hands on the table before remembering we are not alone. I should’ve said to meet at the river. The other couple is staring at us and this time not because Yujun is gorgeous.
I don’t mean to make a scene but stepsiblings cannot marry legally, and even if it were legal, it would be a social death for Yujun. He would not be able to see his cousins. His friends would turn on him. I suspect that his business dealings would suffer. Going to America is not the answer, because doesn’t that mean he could never come home? He is not his aunt Sue, who prefers to live in Malibu pretending she’s white, never speaking Korean, never eating the food of her motherland, disassociating herself from all things Asian so as not to be tainted by otherness. I know Aunt Sue. I was her in Iowa and I don’t want that to happen to Yujun. Not my Yujun from Seoul.
“Thank you for reminding me as if I have forgotten,” he shoots back. “But I am not a child anymore, Hara, and the careless words of a few will not diminish me.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t. And it’s never a few words. It’s a thousand cuts, piled on top of you, until the wound is so deep it doesn’t heal. Instead, you contort into whatever box someone has defined for you and are utterly miserable, and you will hate me for it and that’s the last thing I want.” If Yujun thinks the only place we can be together happily is outside South Korea, that makes all his platitudes about things being fine into a lie.
We sit there in silence as the roads in the map of our future are slowly erased. Finally, Yujun speaks. “Hara, do you still feel like a striped dress in a polka-dotted country?”
“You remember that?” I’d told him once that being adopted in America felt like I was the only polka-dot-wearing person in a place where everyone wore stripes and that I’d foolishly thought if I came here, I’d fit in, but there’s something distinctively American about me—in my halting, accented Korean, in the makeup I wear, in the way I walk, smile, laugh, and so here I still feel other.