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“That’s terrible.”
“I feel like a fraud now.” I wave my hand. “I hated all this stuff growing up. Mom would want to take me to things or she’d send me articles on Korea. She offered to take me to a Korean concert once. I refused. I wanted nothing to do with it.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. Remember Aunt Sue? She lives in a French country homeon the beach among all those ultramodern glass and concrete structures or the art deco ones. She wears Ralph Lauren constantly and smells like rose water. She never spoke Korean in the house and pretended she didn’t know it. She didn’t speak because she was embarrassed of her accent. We hardly talked at all when I first arrived. I couldn’t speak much English and she refused to speak Korean. Ironically, that’s why my English is so good. If she still eats kimchi, it would be outside or in the garage.”
I don’t know if he’s making this up to make me feel better, but I appreciate it if he is. There’s something really freeing about talking with someone who understands, who has had the same experiences. I don’t have to explain what it felt like to be othered. He knows all about the sensation of standing in a group and appearing so obviously different, of being asked questions that your friends are never asked. Where did you come from? What language do you speak? Do you speak ching chong chang? I inhale and let go of some of the guilt that’s wound itself around my lungs.
“What do you want to know about Korea? I’ll tell you as much as me and my phone know.”
I ask more questions about the time when my mother would’ve been pregnant. While I eat, he shares all sorts of details. There was no KTX train and the movie Train to Busan couldn’t have existed. He doesn’t know what the fashion was, but his father had worn the big tinted sunglasses in college that are popular in fashion magazines today. “It’s all a big circle,” Yujun declares. He puts down the box and moves the beer cans. “Let’s take a picture. Slide over.”
He raises the phone with one hand and waits. I don’t move. I like taking photographs, but I don’t like being in them.
He lowers his arm. “What is it?”
“I hate pictures.”
“Why?”
“Because . . .” I don’t want to admit it because it sounds like I’m both insecure and fishing for compliments, which, yes, I’m a bit insecure about what I look like but I’m not fishing for compliments. I’ve never enjoyed how my face looks in photos. It’s too round, for one. My eyes are too small. My nose is but a bump in the middle of my face.
“We can’t leave without a picture. It’s against the law.” He does the hand gesture again, his fingers pointing toward the ground, pulling me forward with the invisible strings he’s tying around my heart.
“What if I don’t like it?” I ask, sliding reluctantly over to his side.
“You’ll like it,” he says with the utter confidence that he has about everything.
“But if I don’t?” We’re like the North and South Poles—opposites in every way. I’d like an ounce of his surety.
“If you don’t, you can delete it. Say cheeseus.”
“Cheeseus,” I repeat dutifully. He takes a picture. Several of them. And then he holds out his phone in front of him so we can both see.
“See. The picture is perfect.” He stops at the second photo. The sun is setting and the red-orange globe dipping its toes into the Han River makes everything glow. “You have a beautiful eye smile.”
He taps the screen where my eyes are nearly closed and all that can be seen is a small crescent of black where my lashes fall over the dark brown of my pupils.
“My eyes are closed.”
He tilts his head, my flat tone catching him off guard. “Mine, too,” he points out.
I’m startled and examine the photo again. I was so focused on my own face that I didn’t realize that Yujun’s eyes had the same downward curve. In fact, his is more pronounced because his smile is bigger, the divots bracketing either side ocean-deep.
“Eye smiles are considered a very attractive feature.” He lets his lashes fall and his lips curve up. He pokes a finger into one of his dimples and says, “Isn’t mine cute?”
My throat closes up. In the picture, his eyes are like mine. They aren’t the exact same shape. His turn down slightly at the inner and outer corners, looking more like a slight paisley curve, while mine are crescents, like a true upside-down smile.
I glance away from the phone screen only to end up staring into a gaze that is so full of tender warmth, I would swear that the sun was rising instead of the moon. But it’s not the sun; it’s a man who is so sweet, so kind, so endearing that I do what any other person in my position would do. I kiss him.
