by David Yoon
Master bedroom
After thirty long seconds, Joy’s silhouette appears in the doorway.
“Dude,” I say.
“What?”
“I think we have to tell them.”
The birch yut nori sticks clink, and the parents all shout with glee.
“I can’t hear you.” Joy comes over and sits next to me on the bed.
“I said, we have to tell them,” I hiss in her ear.
“What? Why?” says Joy. But then she gives me a look: You’re right.
“If they knew, they’d think we’re crazy,” I say. “But I bet they would keep our secret if we asked them. I bet they would be cool like that. Except maybe John.”
“That fucker just wants to see the world burn,” says Joy.
“I know, right?”
“But you know John’s secretly in love with Ella, don’t you?”
“No.”
“Dummy, John likes every single thing Ella puts up. He pontificates forever in her comments, too. Every. Single. Post. Haven’t you noticed how at Gatherings he spends the whole time ignoring her?” Joy waggles her eyebrows.
I laugh as quietly as I can. “Ella would cut his heart out and sun-dry slices for her pasta salad.”
“Oh my god, Frank, that’s so gruesome.”
We grin at each other in the dark for just a second, then remember the task at hand.
“What I’m saying,” says Joy, “is that maybe John can be trusted with a secret since the boy has a little secret of his own, capiche?”
I imagine a mobster Joy blackmailing John into silence, and snort. “I think he’s cool,” I say. “I think they’re all cool. If anyone’s going to understand why we’re doing something this crazy, it’ll be other Limbos.”
“Good point.” Joy heaves a single breath in and out. “Okay. Let’s tell them.”
I stand, take Joy’s hand, and slingshot her off the bed.
When we return to Andrew’s room, I see John holding court before a rapt audience.
“And then I saw him vanish with her,” says John.
“That Brit Means girl,” says Ella.
“I can explain that,” I say, startling the room.
The Limbos stare at me, waiting.
“So here’s the thing,” I say.
“You and Joy have an open polyamorous relationship,” says Andrew.
“That’s exactly right, how did you know,” says Joy flatly.
“Let him talk,” says Ella.
“So,” I say. “Me and Joy have come to this agreement, whereupon the arising of certain occasions for socializing of a romantic nature between, say, myself and a certain member of the female population who might cause tension within a certain traditionally minded population of our shared ethnicity, uh.”
“We’re fake-dating,” says Joy.
“Ohhhh,” say the Limbos.
“So you can go out with Wu and as a bonus avoid confronting deeper issues of identity and family,” says Ella.
“Dang, Ella,” says Joy.
“And you’re with Brit Means,” says John.
I nod. I look at Joy. We shrug. We make shy little jazz hands.
“So can you keep a secret?” I say in a small voice.
Ella claps her hands to her temples and squeezes with joyful disbelief, breaking the silence. “I love it. You guys are pulling some crazy shit.”
Andrew punches the air. “Craziest! Shit! Ever!”
Ella gives me a sappy smile. “You look handsome in love, Frank.”
John bolts to attention at this. He tries to speak, but can only move his mouth like a speared fish gasping for water.
It’s too pathetic to watch. So I facepalm, but with the door frame. “I’m gonna pee.”
“Like, really pee?” says Ella, still holding her head. “Or just fake-pee?”
* * *
• • •
I pee for real. I slam the soap plunger, wash my hands, and dry them using the floral towel set out special for tonight’s Gathering. I notice my hands are shaking. Me and Joy just took a big risk and blew cover. Can the Limbos be trusted? Even with their promise of silence, they could still let something slip purely by accident.
Why does everything have to be so complicated?
For a brief flash, I think to myself, Fuck everything. I consider ending things with Brit. Spending senior year as a monk. Saving all my dating for college. The logistics will be easier then. Why bother with all this workaround life-hackery?
I step out into the hallway and my phone buzzes with Brit’s custom pattern—dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot, Morse code for SOS—and that bitter flash of fuck everything vanishes in a little green poof of shame. I could never simply forget Brit. She’s a book I just started reading, and I need to know where the story goes.
“Hey, you,” I say.
“Hi, Frankly,” says Brit. She’s in a quiet room somewhere, with the mic close to her mouth so that her voice sounds like it’s right in my head.
“That’s my nickname for you: Frankly,” she says. “Isn’t it convenient that your nickname is also your full name?”
“I’m calling you Britmeans, then,” I say. “Breans. Beans? Hey, Beans.”
She clicks with quiet laughter. “We can work on that one.”
The sounds of the party bark and babble around me, and I have to cup my phone to protect our conversation.
“Where are you?” says Brit.
“I’m at this Gathering thing,” I say. “It’s loud. Can I call you later?”
“What’s a Gathering?” says Brit with genuine curiosity.
A warm feeling comes over me. My forehead, which I’ve been holding tense this whole time, goes slack. Because I realize that for Brit, I am the book she just started reading, too.
“So,” I say, “my parents and their friends promised to keep in touch when they came to America, and every month we have these get-togethers. We’ve had them ever since I was a baby. Before, too.”
“That sounds incredible.”
“It kinda is,” I say, because Brit is right. It is incredible. Suddenly that game of yut nori downstairs clicks into place in the cosmic timeline: it’s not just a board game, but an ongoing celebration of sorts that says, We came all the way here. Look at us now. Look what we brought with us.
The roomful of Limbos suddenly becomes the most precious of life’s achievements: children who will never want for anything, who speak native English, who will go to the best schools in the world and never have to run an office furniture rental service (like Joy’s parents), a dry cleaner (Ella’s), a beauty supply (Andrew’s), a tourist gift shop (John’s), or a grocery store (mine).
These amazing children, the living proof of so much hard work and sacrifice in an alien land, now come blundering like idiot clowns out of Andrew’s room and spot me standing there with my phone cupped in my hands like a boy clearly talking to his girl.
“Who you talking to?” says Andrew. “Is that Brit?”
“Behold,” says John, as if witnessing a mystery revealed. “Frank Li in love.”
Ella rushes up to me, reads my phone screen, and turns her face to meet the mic. “Hi, Brit.”
“Hi, Brit,” say Andrew and Ella and John.
“Buzz, buzz, leave him alone,” says Joy. But then she, too, hoots cross-eyed into the mic. “Brit means it, mothafucka.”
Andrew’s mom screeches from downstairs: “Dinner ready!”
The Limbos go tumbling down, making faces at me the whole way. Joy gives me a stage wink before turning, hitting her elbow on a doorknob, and muttering, “Fuck.” I guess she had that beer all right.
“Who was that?” says Brit, laughing.
“Friends,” I say. “All us kids of the parents. They get buzzed off of one beer.”
“They sound so crazy. I wish I could see.”
“Eh, it’s boring,” I say. “I mean not boring, but not like fun-fun.”
“It’s family stuff.”
“Yeah.”
“I get it,” says Brit. “Still, I would love to see it. I would love to see you out of your usual context.”
Her words love and see you gently topple me so that I must lean on the wall.
“Like it would be so endearing to see what Frankly is like around his mom and dad and sister. How does he move? How does he talk?”
The mention of Hanna makes my heart clench.
I know I can’t both date Brit and prevent her from meeting my parents. Meeting family is not only inevitable, it’s normal: normal people date, things get serious, and then they start meeting the people most important to them. It’s just what happens. I’ve already met Brit’s parents, twice, and I liked it. I liked seeing her with them. I get what she’s saying about different contexts.
The idea of keeping worlds separate—the world of Frank-n-Brit and the world of Mom-n-Dad—sounds about as impossible as, oh, I don’t know, keeping the worlds of Korea and America apart here in Playa Mesa.
You can’t keep them separate for long.
I can hear what Brit is going to say next before she even says it.
“Maybe I could come over to your context this weekend?” she says. “See Frank Li in his natural habitat?”
“Oh yeah, totally, that would be sweet, sure,” I say, which translates to Think, dammit, think. My toes start to float off the ground. No way I could’ve said no to her. That would’ve been tremendously weird. But how do I deal with an actual visit?
“That would be amazing,” says Brit. “Sorry.”
“Why sorry?”
“I made a promise to myself to stop saying amazing so much. It’s a dead word.”
“That’s an amazing goal,” I say, to buy my brain more time to scramble up a plan.
“Stupid,” she says, with a smile in her voice.
Finally an idea hits me: safety in numbers.
“I could get my mom to cook up some Korean barbecue,” I say. “We could invite a bunch of Apeys and have a gathering of our own.”
“Oh,” says Brit.
I wince, because I know what she’d been picturing, and I know a big loud barbecue party was not it. I know she had an image of an intimate dinner with Mom-n-Dad, like how white kids do it in the movies. She wanted to be introduced.
There’s a pause, and I can feel Brit let that image dissolve away.
She brightens. “Yeah, that sounds amazing. Not amazing, um.”
“How about illuminating?” I say.
She can say amazing in every sentence for all I care. I exhale with relief. This way, in this party-type situation, Brit gets to meet Mom-n-Dad—like normal couples do—and I get to keep my ruse with Joy intact. I can kill two birds with one stone, to use an unnecessarily violent expression.
“Illuminating,” she says, and I can hear her smile again.
I realize I’m gripping the doorjamb, hanging on to her voice.
Mom screeches from below. “Frankie-ya! Dinner ready!”
“I gotta go.”
“I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you more.”
“Oh my god,” says Brit. “We’re becoming those people.”
We hang up. I stare at the small chandelier glowing above the staircase landing.
“Illuminating,” I say to the chandelier.
* * *
• • •
Dinner is a little bit of everything: Chinese-American beef with broccoli and fried rice, Japanese sashimi and miso, Korean chapchae and eun daegu jorim, and finally Italian-American lasagna.
Dad passes out more beer to us at the kids’ table, again to Mom’s protests. But everyone’s well into the party spirit, and she lets it go.
“It’s nice one,” says Dad. “So-called Belgian Trappist ale.”
“So you get these at a wholesale discount?” says Joy’s dad. His accent is there, but his English flow is light-years ahead of Dad’s.
“It’s most expensive one we selling,” says Dad.
“Then I’ll take three, Mr. Li,” says Joy’s dad, and pulls a hundred from his wallet. I want to roll my eyes and say, You’re rich, we get it. You’re the richest, smartest, most hard-working immigrant in American history, ever.
“Aigu, you put away money right now,” says Dad.
They laugh, and finally Joy’s dad accepts a bottle with both hands and says, “Well, thank you very much, my sunbae.”
“You welcome, hoobae.”
Sunbae—as in senior, mentor—is what Joy’s dad calls Dad, since Dad got to America first. Dad calls Joy’s dad hoobae—as in junior, understudy, noob. They’ve been calling each other this for decades, and now it’s become this little comedy routine they like to perform. I guess it’s funny because they’re both the same age?
I guess it’s funny because Joy’s dad has so clearly outgrown his mentor in every way?
Joy pours a glass. I eye her: You sure you should have another?
Something changes in Joy. She becomes almost coquettish. She hoists the bottle with both hands, aims it at my empty glass, and says loud and clear:
“Let me pour you a glass, yubs.”
The entire room dips for a second, then comes roaring back up with an Aaaaah.
Yubs is a Konglish (Korean-English American Casual) abbreviation of yeobo, which means honey. Not honey like beespit, but honey like what couples say to each other.
Impressive. I tilt my head to concede her brilliance, and slide my glass toward her like a player relinquishing his stack at poker. I lift the glass, then take a sip. It’s absolutely terrible. I can’t understand why anyone would drink water that has had hops and twigs and shit rotting in it for weeks.
The adults lose themselves in their own conversation, and we Limbos lean in close around the table.
“Dang, Joy,” howls Andrew. “You need to get into acting.”
Joy bats her lashes. Her face is getting nice and red from the booze.
“Not if it means doing this China doll crap all the time,” she says. She lets her face fall, and it becomes regular Joy again, complete with wry smile.
“So it really works,” says John. “I mean, why wouldn’t it work—it makes perfect sense.”
“Maybe we should all fake-date,” says Ella. “John, be my fake-date buddy.”
“Why, is it because, who do you like?” says John.
“You first,” says Ella.
“Nice try.”
Joy and I exchange eyebrows. Are they flirting?
I frame the air with my hands to grab the Limbos’ attention. “You guys. Just to reiterate, just so we’re absolutely clear, I need you to promise us that—”
Mom appears at the kids’ table. “Everybody have a fun?”
She of course gives me and Joy little back-and-forth glances, cha-cha-cha.
I need her to leave. Just for this next part. So I say, “Word.”
“What word?” says Mom.
Joy flashes me a look: she’s clued in. She says, “We have an all-in type conversating happening right here.”
“What?” says Mom, and leans back an inch.
The slang is working. Hanna and I used to do this, and I know the other Limbos can, too. If you ever need to hide sensitive conversations from your particular mom-n-dad, one of the easiest ways to do it is to start going heavy with the California Teen Tribal. Hides words right in plain sight.
Hanna and I used to do lots of things. Now she’s gone, and now check me out: master of my parental universe. I am behaving like Ideal Son in Mom-n-Dad’s eyes. I have cheated my way into their favor. Hanna, meanwhile, lives in exile.
What’s that called?
Survivor’s guilt?
I turn to the Limbos. “Before we get all ratchet up in this bitch, I need formal verbal confirmation from the entire squad to keep a certain setup on the DL. Don’t go posting on main. You feel me?”
Mom looks around and around, her brains nicely scrambled.
“I feel you hard, bro,” says Andrew.
“Hard AF,” says Ella.
“Spank you, guys, I mean it,” says Joy. “Hashtag Spanx.”
“Why spanking?” Mom furrows her brow and retreats, and our table of Limbos is left alone once more.
“Hashtag keep it one hundred YOLO swipe right,” says John, who is terrible with slang.
We all look at him for a moment until he settles down.
Andrew reaches out with both hands to clasp Joy’s shoulder and mine. “You have our word. You crazy kids.”
“Are they so crazy, though?” says Ella. “We all just want to love who we want to love.”
And with that, Ella has brought the table to a profound place. I can feel it. I know the others can, too, for whatever secret reasons they have in their hearts. It doesn’t so much matter what our specific secrets are. What matters more is the fact that we have to keep space for so many of them, all the time. We all sit and nod for a moment, letting Ella’s words float before us.
We all just want to love who we want to love.
chapter 13
thank you booleet
The next day I call Mom at The Store to ask if she wants to oh, you know, host a little barbecue party on Saturday, and without even saying yes she goes into Mom Mode: she’ll have to leave The Store early to get the meat, stay up a little later the night before preparing and marinating, get Dad to clean the grill, and so on. She’s so busy muttering her to-do list to herself that she literally hangs up on me.
She acts like it’s going to be this huge pain. But the truth is: Mom loves the chance to host my friends. Because she knows (a) they aren’t judgmental, (b) they’re American kids who will gush over every bite, and (c) she can be openly proud of her cooking without having to fake humility for once like she does with a Korean audience.
I pause, then tap away at my phone.