by David Yoon
Joy leans over to kiss my cheek, my ear, my neck, and it is hands-down-at-ten-and-two the most erotic thing that has ever happened to me in the Consta or anywhere else.
We reach downtown Los Angeles in record time. But there’s a road closure, then another, then another. When Joy checks the map, it’s full of angry red lines.
“Crap,” she says. “There’s some kind of festival going on. It says another hour just to get around it.”
I refuse to let this bring me down—I’m in too good a mood. “Let’s roll with it, then,” I say. “To the festival?”
“To the festival,” says Joy, like Why not?
We get out of the car, skip like idiots on the sidewalk for a quarter mile, and reach the packed festival entrance thumping with music.
46TH ANNUAL
LOS ANGELES KOREAN WINTER STREET FESTIVAL
PRESENTED BY
AJU ELECTRONICS NORTH AMERICA
We stare agog at the throngs of people. K-pop pounds from towering black steles of speakers. Streamers crisscross the venue. On a rainbow-lit stage, little kids in white doboks warm up for an ultra-cute hapkido demonstration. Dancers in traditional dress float among the crowd, twirling ribbons affixed to their hats in long flowing swirls.
And the food. There’s barbecue, sure, kimchi, sure, but then there’s all the other stuff that most people never get to see—fiery red tteokbokki rice cakes, perfect pyramids of kimbap seaweed rice, patbingsu shaved ice with sweet rice bean, even mountains of freshly roasted beondegi.
Joy points at the beondegi stall. “You eat it,” she says.
“You eat it,” I say.
Beondegi are silkworm pupae. The stall owner beckons me in Korean, and I ask for a sample in English. It’s not bad—nutty, mushroomy, and with a fantastic crunch—and I immediately kiss Joy to let her taste it, too.
“Ew,” she says, licks her teeth in contemplation, then orders a paper-coneful.
We stroll along, and we stroll along, and there’s a samulnori percussion quartet banging out a frenzied brass whirlwind of beats, with one crazy old man dancing along and twin toddler girls holding their ears shut. I record it with my Tascam—these rhythms remade with electronic instruments would be a sick kind of mash-up.
We hop up and down. Joy’s hair flashes green and black, green and black. Above us garlands of cafe lights sparkle to life against a cool velvet sky. I guess the sun set without telling us.
Farther along is another little stage, fancier than the first, with an ensemble of samgo-mu dancers performing in ornate individual stalls lined with traditional barrel drums. They’re all women, all impeccably dressed in shimmering hanbok, all with deadly perfect timing as they strike drums to the left, right, and before them in unison with their sticks. At one point they bend way, way back and whack out a crescendo of unrelenting eighth notes on the booming drum skin, then the cracking rim, then back.
“Abs of steel,” yells Joy.
She kisses me as the drums thunder louder and louder to completion. Applause erupts. There is something happening here inside me. I look at Joy and can tell she can feel it too. The lights, the music, this great celebration of a culture that we supposedly belong to. Everyone here, looking like we do. The food, the drums, the kids in their white doboks. One of them looks like me when I was little.
Me and Joy grew up exposed to this world. We know all of its elements, even if we don’t always know their names in Korean. They’re not weird or exotic to us. They have the feeling of home.
If not for the skyline of Los Angeles in the background, I can fool myself into thinking I’m in Korea. Even better: I can fool myself into thinking that I am Korean.
Me and Joy move forth, skipping like idiots.
Joy stops in her tracks. She slowly points to a delicately fluttering pink-and-white booth decorated with hundreds of tiny soft pillows, each the size of a baby’s cheek.
“It’s those sweet rice cake thingies,” moans Joy.
Some of the cakes are plain; some are filled with sweet red bean paste, some with powdered sesame. The more exotic ones here have mango frosting and even chocolate.
I rack my brain for the word. Chalttok. Pretty sure these cakes are called chalttok.
Behind the booth smiles a gentle old woman in a simple country hanbok looking like she just stepped out of a fragile scroll painting.
“I want that sesame one,” says Joy, transfixed like a child with desire.
I begin working up an ember of courage. Because suddenly I find myself having this urge to order in Korean for my girl.
The food, the drums, the little kids in their white doboks.
I point and say, “I chalttok dugae jeom juseyo.” Two of these cakes, please.
The old woman’s smile fades to a flat line, then darkens to a scowl. She starts barking at me with the black crescent of her mouth. I can catch most of her words.
“Chalttok?” says the old woman. “I don’t know what this chalttok is. Maybe you should learn to speak Korean right.”
The food vanishes, the drums go mute, the white doboks collapse, suddenly empty of their children.
I got chalttok wrong. It’s chaltteok. The difference is small, like cheese versus jeez. But a person would never ask for extra jeez on their pizza.
A native person.
“You fucking kyopos are all stupid,” says the old woman. It’s like she’s deliberately using basic Korean to make sure I understand every word.
Kyopo is what they call a Korean person living abroad. I don’t know who they is. I don’t seem to know anything right at this moment. Except for the fact that my feet are leaving the ground again. You already know how they do that at moments like these. It is an alarming feeling, but also comforting, and I know that makes no sense.
“What is going on?” says Joy. “What did she just say?”
I look around. The K-pop pounding out of those speakers? Indecipherable. All this signage? Gibberish. The people? They look like me, but I know it is all some kind of elaborate visual trick. I could pass a hand right through them as though they were phantoms.
I fooled myself into believing I belonged. My brainlock is the best brainlock.
“Let’s go,” I say.
I pull her toward the festival exit and the gray, drab world beyond. I want to vanish like a ghost and pretend me and Joy never stumbled upon this place.
“Hey,” shouts a male voice. “Wait up.”
A hand touches my shoulder, and I turn. A young man, just a little older than me. He looks like me, knits his brows like me, frowns like me. Unlike me he wears a blue LA hat and a tank shirt and has muscular arms inscribed with fine geometric tattoos.
He offers me a fancy clear sealed bag containing four sesame rice cakes. I can’t bring myself to call them chaltteok right now. Rice cakes they will be.
“Dude, I’m so fucking goddamn sorry my grandma was such a dick to you just now,” he says. “Bitch can be such a bitch-ass, salty-ass bitch sometimes.”
This outpouring of heartfelt profanity fills my soul with warm orange light. It also cracks me up. I look at Joy: she’s covered her mouth to hold the chuckles in.
“That was your grandma?” says Joy.
“She calls me stupid all the time because my Korean fuckin’ sucks.”
I blink. My parents have their problems, but at least they’ve never called me stupid for not knowing Korean.
The guy jiggles the bag. “Take ’em. My way of saying sorry.”
He’s earnest, this guy. He really wants me to take the bag. So I take the bag.
“We’ll save these for dessert, I guess,” I say with a shrug. “Thanks.”
The guy gets an eager look in his eye. “Wait, you haven’t had dinner yet?”
“Uh,” says Joy.
“Follow me,” says the guy. When he sees our hesitation, he stomps his
foot and waves hard like he’s performing a party-people-get-down move on stage. “Come on, babo saekkidul,” he says with a happy twinkle.
“He just called us stupid fuckers,” says Joy.
“I like this guy,” I say. “Let’s go.”
He skates through the stalls and people, and me and Joy tap-dance single file to keep up with his nimble fat white sneakers. We pass the samulnori quartet, then a stage thundering with K-pop dancers, until we reach the far end of the festival grounds.
It’s not as fancy here. Just a ring of parked food trucks and folding tables filled with diners. This crazy corrido-cum-trap-beat mash-up vibrates the air with the steady tempo of a gangster stroll, overlaid with mouthy rap in both Korean and English. I’ve never heard shit like I’m hearing right now. It is sublime. I capture it all with my Tascam.
In doing so, I capture the guy’s name, too.
“I’m Roy Chang,” says Roy Chang, “and this is my whip right here.”
He gestures toward a red food truck emblazoned with the words ALL DAE EVERY DAY. The dae means big, and there’s a five-foot-tall 大 character in case you don’t get the pun.
Roy spots my Tascam. “You a musician?”
I nod sheepishly.
“Enrique’s a music nerd too,” says Roy. “I’ll introduce you.”
Roy pounds the truck. “Hey, yo, two express VIP orders, kimchi quesadilla hana, jidori gochujang chicken and waffles hana, tres cervezas, por favor!”
“Al gesseo,” says Enrique, as in roger that.
Roy seats us at a table, and the food follows in a flash.
“What’s in this?” I say, intrigued.
“Just eat, don’t think,” says Roy.
So we do. And once I start eating, I simply cannot stop. It is a perfect mix of all the comforts of my life: the kimchi of home, with the cheese and tortillas and pickled cactus I love from being a Californian, and finally waffles, because waffles.
“Gnughngh,” say me and Joy.
“They like it,” says Roy to Enrique, who’s come over to watch us gorge ourselves.
Enrique jabs a thumb at Roy. “They call this guy the future of American cuisine, ha.”
“How the fuck can I be the future if I’m already here and I’m already a grown-ass American?” says Roy.
Enrique asks to have a listen to my music—including “Song for Brit”—and he likes it so much that he gives me his email address so we can keep in touch. I give both him and Roy my email address too, without hesitation. Because I have this strange feeling that we’ve already somehow met, and it’s like we all graduated from the same school.
We finish up our food, drink our beers. We get up.
“Can we grab your seat if you’re leaving?” says a voice.
I turn. It’s me again, another guy who looks like me, except now way older: crow’s-feet at the eyes, receding hairline. He’s with his wife, who is black. Standing between them is their daughter, who looks about seven. She’s dressed like an elf.
“Absolutely,” I say.
“Your daughter’s so freaking beautiful,” says Joy.
“Say thank you, baby,” says the wife. They all seem used to such compliments.
“Thank you baby,” sings the daughter.
I want to give the family my email address, too. But that would be weird, and so me and Joy bid farewell to Roy and Enrique and stroll away slow.
I take out my phone and start typing.
“Who are you texting?” says Joy.
I show her: I miss you, big sister Hanna.
Joy smiles and touches Send. And right away, Hanna’s reply appears on the screen.
Miss you too Frankie
chapter 25
the best fart
It’s late. The freeway is a blank ribbon for us to travel upon. Orange streetlamps zip overhead like the sun rising and setting in looping time lapse.
We’re both quiet. Just processing the evening.
When we near Playa Mesa, Joy touches my hand.
“I don’t want to go home yet,” she says.
“Okay,” I instantly say. It’s eleven thirty. I want to watch the sun rise with Joy. Then I want to watch the sun set with Joy. Over and over.
She takes my phone and engages the parental management protocols, and once we receive the Have a fun confirmation, I guide the recalcitrant Consta to the one place I know we can be alone and free and private.
Westchester Mall, the biggest mall in Orange County, Southern California.
The parking lot is dead as a lava flow. I drive straight across acres of painted white herringbone and park right up front. We walk up the grand entrance ramp and enter.
It’s empty inside. All the luxury stores, shuttered. The notes of the world’s tiniest sonata drift down like dust from the top of the track-lit cavern. I love coming here because it makes me feel like I’m the last person on the planet, and ever since I was little, I’ve had a fantasy of being the last person on the planet.
I murmur this quietly to Joy, because this space around us feels holy and deserving of a soft voice.
Joy holds my hand and matches my step. “That sounds like it would be terrifying.”
“Oh, it would only be for like a year,” I say. “Like a temporary pause.”
“And then what?”
“And then one morning I would wake up and unpause, and everything would pick up right where it left off.”
“I guess that might be fun for a year,” says Joy, biting a dry spot on her lip. “A planet-pause. Although I’d be afraid of going insane.”
We pass by a great funnel carved from wood with two slots to accept coins, with the sign DONATE FOR SCHOOL SUPPLIES IN OUR DISTRICT: WATCH YOUR COINS SPIN AND SPIN!
“I think tonight I realized why I’ve always had that fantasy,” I say.
Joy does this move I like, where she releases my hand, slides her hand up my arm, squeezes once, then drops her hand back into mine again: catch.
“Okay, little boy Frankie, why?” says Joy.
I think about that mean old grandma, and Roy, and the food trucks.
“Because then I could just be whoever I wanted, and no one would be around to judge me.”
Joy smiles to our strolling feet. “That old woman was psycho, wasn’t she.”
We pass the food court. There’s Pretzel Wrestle, still wafting yeast and butter. There’s the shitty Italian place, shitty Asian fusion place, shitty Tex-Mex place, then three hamburger joints. A one-stop microcosm of mainstream white American cuisine.
“I feel really myself when I’m with you,” I say. “I think that’s why I wanted to come here.”
“To see us totally out of context?” says Joy.
I smile. Joy gets it. She gets all of it. “Come here.”
We kiss. To my surprise, she grabs my ass with both hands.
“I can’t believe I get to do this with you out in the open,” she says. “Great idea to come here, Frank Li.”
In the distance I hear a short radio squawk. Joy’s head bolts up.
“What was that?” she says.
“Probably Camille or Oscar,” I say, meaning the security guards.
“Should we go?” says Joy.
“No, they walk super slow and chitchat nonstop. Let’s stay as long as we can—come on.”
I lead Joy around a corner and head down a long dogleg toward the Nordstrom anchor store. Once we’re out of any possible line of sight, I slow down to our usual stroll.
We kiss and kiss. We kiss each other while walking. There’s no one around but us. We’re on planet-pause in our little abandoned paradise.
I lead Joy to a fountain in the Crystal Atrium. It is a low polished structure formed from simple modernist angles, surrounded by a stone ledge the color of chocolate.
“So much fo
r Lake Girlfriend,” I mutter.
“What’s Lake Girlfriend?” says Joy.
FOUNTAIN CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE:
DO NOT CLIMB
The fountain is drained of water, revealing a dusty calcified lake bed full of mesh and hoses and stained light fixtures.
It’s also full of coins.
Joy’s eyes are still twinkling. “Dude, there’s like a hundred bucks in there.”
“Dude,” I say.
Then I get an idea.
I jump into the fountain and begin collecting coins, using the front of my tee shirt like a basket as I squat.
“Come help me,” I say.
“You’re insane,” says Joy.
But she jumps into the fountain, too, and begins collecting coins alongside me. I bump her, almost spilling her take. She bumps me back. In a few minutes, we stand with our tee shirt bellies full of hundreds of coins, like grinning mutant marsupials.
There’s a radio squawk in the distance, followed by a shout.
“Hey!” says a voice.
“This way,” I say. Me and Joy step out of the fountain and run like hobbits with legs akimbo back up the length of the dogleg.
As we scamper along, Joy looks at me with realization. “I know what we’re doing!” she cries.
And she does, because she’s the first one to reach the great donation funnel carved out of wood. It must be six feet in diameter. We kneel at opposite ends, dump our tee shirt payloads onto the floor, and each hold our first coin in the slide slot.
“On three,” I say.
“One,” says Joy.
“Two,” I say.
“Three.”
We release. The two coins dance around in perfect graceful arcs until they reach the funnel bottom, where they accelerate in gravity-defying horizontal circles of perfect centripetal force. Finally they plink-plink into the treasure abyss below.
“Those two are me and you,” I say.
“You’re so cheesy,” says Joy. But I can tell she loves it.
“More coins,” says Joy.
“Faster,” I say.
We slot in coin after coin, and soon the wooden funnel thunders with a metallic wind. I pause to record a good length of it with my Tascam. It sounds like an endless flock of fighter jets soaring just overhead.