AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No. I haven’t made it to that part of Seoul yet.”
“Then I will put King Sejong’s statue on your tour list. Any other requests?”
“I’m going to leave it in your capable hands.” In between searching for the identities of the five women in my photos, I am going to spend as much time as possible with Yujun from Seoul.
He seems to like that. “Namsan, then, and the Seoul City Wall because those two have the best views of the city. Seoul Forest because it’s quiet and shady and full of trees.”
The right dimple, the deep one, makes a brief appearance before the waiter comes over and turns on the grill. Soon after, small bowls of what Yujun calls banchan are delivered.
“Cabbage kimchi, marinated soybeans, fish cakes, sweet potatoes, and scallion salad. The fish cakes are salty and don’t taste like fish,” he explains. “Every restaurant has their own banchan, a little like every restaurant in Italy serves their own limoncello.”
“I didn’t know that about banchan or limoncello,” I admit.
Yujun shrugs lightly. “Another thing for your to-do list. Seems like I’ll have to keep you around for a while.”
It’s a joke. I’m in Korea for only two weeks, but there’s nothing wrong with the fiction that Yujun is spinning as long as I don’t get caught up in the fantasy of this dinner being a regular occurrence.
He captures a piece of cabbage kimchi between his chopsticks and with one hand tucked under his elbow, he reaches across the table and places the food on the small plate in front of me. I wonder if I should do the same in return. Boyoung never covered dating rituals. I’m saved from asking these awkward questions when the waiter arrives with a huge platter of sliced meat. The waiter says something in Korean and Yujun replies, this time also in Korean.
“The waiter doesn’t speak English or I would have replied in English. I told him we would cook our meat ourselves.” He picks up a pair of tongs and starts laying strips of meat across the heated grill. My mouth waters as the kalbi and bulgogi start to sizzle.
“I used to live in America,” he volunteers as he finishes placing the first round of meat on the grill. “My mother died when I was four and my father thought I needed a mother’s influence, so he sent me to Aunt Sue. Her full name is Choi Soomin but she adopted the name Sue in America. It was easier, she explained, than having to say her name ten times before anyone caught on. She had this beautiful cottage close to Malibu Beach. I got brown as an acorn, running around on the shore, and I picked up the language quick. Kids do that,” he says, trying to explain away his own natural brilliance.
“Sounds like you had fun.”
“About as much fun as an Asian boy can have in a community that’s mostly Caucasian. There are pockets of Los Angeles that are thick with Asians, but not Malibu.”
Ah. We share a look of understanding. He knows what it’s like to be Asian in America. How it’s fine but also not fine. You aren’t followed around in the store. No one thinks you’re going to cause trouble, but for Yujun, it would mean that he wasn’t manly enough, and for me it meant that I was pretty for an Asian. A few years ago during parents’ weekend at college, a father of another student spent a good ten minutes trying to convince me to test out his hotel mattress. I reminded him that he was, well, old, and wearing a wedding ring. He’d replied that when you went to buy a new car at his age, you wanted an exotic, foreign model. At twenty-one I hadn’t had the ovaries to slap him. If I could do it again, I’d at least throw a beer in his face. But Asian girls were presumed to be subservient and exotic. I think guys believed I would pull out some wild sexual maneuver when all I really knew how to do was swivel my hips.
“So a carnival of fun,” I reply.
“I developed a bad stutter,” he admits.
“No.” I don’t want to believe it because it would’ve taken a lot of awful comments to make a child stutter, and that sounds like an actual crime.
“It’s true,” he says cheerfully, clearly over that childhood trauma. He flips the meat over. Grease makes a spitting noise and smoke is sucked up the vent flume resting a bare foot above the grill. “My appa came over for a visit and I stuttered so badly that we could barely have a conversation. That was the end of my stay in America. He brought me back to Korea and I’ve been here since. Well, I did go to college in the States, which helped develop my English-language skills.”
