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“Do you have room for dessert? I think there’s a good hotteok place a few stalls away from here.”
“I always have room for dessert!”
Hotteok are my favorite kind of dessert. They’re small pancakes filled with brown sugar, peanuts, honey, and cinnamon that melt in your mouth in a delicious, sugary way. The stall we go to sells them for cheap, so I buy two so I can give one to Minjee. The hotteok are nice and warm in my hands, which have started to get cold again from the frigid night air.
“You have pretty eyes!” the ahjumma taking my money says. “Are they real or did you get double eyelid surgery?”
The random, intrusive question would have been shocking to me when I first moved from the States, but today I just smile and answer with, “They’re one hundred percent natural.”
The ahjumma chuckles and turns away to tend to the next customer. Korean middle-aged women are so notorious for butting into everyone’s business that after over four years of living in Korea, I’m used to interactions like this.
When I hand Minjee her hotteok, she holds it up in appreciation. “Thanks! Don’t think this means I’ll go easy on you in the show, though.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything less. Just buy me something the next time we get food.”
“Definitely.” She laughs and takes a bite out of the hotteok, her teeth sinking into the chewy, deep-fried bun with a satisfying crunch.
“Oh my God,” she says between bites. Her breath fogs up in the cold night air as she says, “This is amazing.”
I laugh. “I last had this hotteok a year ago and I’ve had dreams about it ever since.”
“Well, thank you for introducing me to this heavenly food.”
“You’re welcome! I’m glad you like it.”
While we eat our hotteok, we continue walking down the market street, browsing the stalls. We pass by everything from barking toy robot dogs to dried nuts for sale. The shops we pass this timethankfullyaren’t blasting music by NOVA and instead are playing trot, a type of loud and folksy-soundingpop music that a lot of old people listen to. Trot gets its name from its very distinct and sometimes laughably obnoxious foxtrot beat, and Minjee and I bounce up and down to the music.
Minjee giggles as she dramatically points left and right while swinging her hips. I laugh and join in. Soon we’re both giggling and making complete fools of ourselves as we walk down the street.
While we dance, I realize this would have been the life Minjee and I could’ve had if we weren’t actresses. We’d wander around these streets with our friends from school, eating street food and chatting as we tried to forget about impending final exams. I feel a bittersweet pang in my heart at the thought, a kind of longing that isn’t a longing, not really, since it’s not like I actually wish my life were like that.
I like my life the way it is now, even with its dramatic ups and downs. But I also can’t deny that sometimes I wish it were a bit simpler. Then again, if I were a normal high school kid, I’d probably still be in the States right now, not in Korea.
I’m down to the last bite of my hotteok when I see the first flash. The bad thing about eating food is that we had to move our scarves down from our faces to do so. I thought it’d be fine since nothing happened at the food stall, but I was clearly wrong. The next thing I know, a few other people start taking pictures of us.
Minjee whispers, “They must have recognized us!”
All the peace I’d been feeling just moments before evaporates.
I look around for possible places to duck and hide, but I’m not familiar with this part of the market. There are just too many people around, and more and more of them turn around to whisper about us. It’s only a matter of time before it becomes a full-blown crowd.
“Hey, I have an idea,” Minjee says, her voice breaking through the haze of my panic. “Have you ever ridden a motorbike before?”
“Only for a show,” I say. “And I wasn’t driving it.”
“Good enough.”
Minjee grabs my arm, and we start running through the crowd.
“Park Minjee! Park Minjee!”
“Jin Hana!”
Shouts come from behind us. I glance back to see several people chasing us with their phones and cameras outstretched.
“Look where you’re going!” Minjee shouts.
I turn back around just in time to narrowly avoid running into a kid.
