Hurry up, hurry up . . . I heard Changhoon and Rachel and Monica chanting behind me. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. I studied each face, dreading a connection linking someone’s features to my own. But I found none. I told myself I was never coming back to Itaewon.
At the end of round three in the luxury karaoke bar where we mouthed along the words to English and Korean songs, Nina let out a not-so-subtle yawn. “Jane, come with me to the bathroom?”
At the sink she stared into the mirror, prodding the bags under her eyes. “I’m completely wiped out. Mind if we cut the night short?”
“But we only have two more rounds to go.” I thought of all the effort Changhoon had put into planning the night. “You sure you can’t rally?”
“Honestly, Jane? Your friends are kind of wearing me out. Your boy Chandler’s way too hyper. So’s that girl Monica. I just can’t deal right now.”
“Yeah, no, fine.”
“Jane.” Nina’s tone was pleading. “I just flew in this morning. I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours. I’ll have more energy tomorrow.”
Nina was right. I relented. “I’ll explain to Changhoon.” I fluffed my hair in the mirror, then stared back at our reflections. Nina did look exhausted. We both were. “Let’s head home.”
We rejoined the others outside. The streets were teeming with groups of young Seoulites in various rounds of revelry. Middle-aged women worked food carts selling rice cakes smothered in red-pepper sauce and deep-fried battered vegetables. The air smelled of cooking oil and wisps of girls’ perfume and car exhaust.
“So sorry, but I think we should go home now,” I told Changhoon.
“But we still have two rounds left. . . .” Changhoon trailed off when he saw Nina looking at us.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m the one being lame.”
“What it means?” Changhoon asked.
Nina shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
Changhoon insisted on escorting us home, while Monica and Rachel went ahead to round four.
When our taxi pulled up to Sinnara Apartments, Nina and I got out. Changhoon was waiting in the cab, to make sure we made it safely inside.
“I owe you one,” she said. “Well, technically two: that time I dragged you from Twine when you were making out with what’s-his-face.”
“Still holding a grudge. I might’ve married what’s-his-face,” I said. “Forget Seoul. You’d be visiting us in the suburbs instead. Two-point-five kids, Labradoodle, white picket fence.”
“As long as it wasn’t in Jersey.” She let out a comical shudder. Then, “Look, I’m sorry I dragged you away from your friends.”
“No biggie,” I said, shrugging. But I knew that Changhoon was disappointed. He’d just been too polite to show it.
Nina studied me. “You know you can go. You don’t have to come in with me.”
You are responsible for everything for your friend. “I should.”
“You should do what you want.” She nodded at the cab. “So go.”
“He did pull in a favor to get us on the list at JJ’s. . . .” I started.
“You think he’d do that for just anyone?” Nina said. “You should go to him.”
I knew that nunchi was why Nina insisted I stay out. Nunchi also told me I should renew my offer to go back home with her, but I didn’t.
“He’s crazy about you. You can tell just by the way he looks at you.” She turned toward the entrance. “Good night, Jane.”
I watched Nina disappear through the doors. I didn’t follow her. Then I returned to Changhoon in the cab, and we drove into the night.
* * *
We soldiered on through rounds four and five without Nina. But all of us were flagging. At the folk-themed rice-wine bar, we slumped in our booth, our heads propped up by our arms, our gourds of makgeolli rice wine left untouched. At the club the pounding bass brought me right back to that night at Twine. After Changhoon and I said good-bye to Rachel and Monica, we popped into a motel that rented by the hour—it was usually how we ended our dates ever since our Busan trip. We were too drunk and Changhoon was too exhausted to perform, but we went through the motions all the same.
By the time I returned to the house, it was five in the morning and Emo was sitting cross-legged on the marble floor, awaiting my return.
Chapter 20
A Good Family Education
What did I say about not being a bad friend?” Emo shouted as soon as I bowed hello. “Did you think I was joking?”
My eyes were still adjusting to the glaring overhead lights. “No, but—”
“Don’t ‘No, but’ me. How dare you leave your friend, your poor foreigner friend who traveled all the way from America to see you, by herself?”
When I told her that Changhoon had made all these plans and I felt responsible to him, Emo interrupted with, “‘Responsible’? Don’t bother me with ‘responsible’! Who on earth raised you in this manner? Did you receive no family education whatsoever?”
In that moment Emo could have been Hannah. She matched her tone for tone, and even the structure of her rhetorical questions was parallel—only some of the words were swapped. With Hannah it was, “Who on earth were you born to?” or, “Do you want people to think you received no family education whatsoever?”
Then Emo went on, in a softer tone. “It’s not exactly the safest time for a foreigner to be traveling alone. With all that’s going on . . .”
She was referring to the demonstrations downtown. During the World Cup, in a camp town just north of Seoul, two girls had been struck and killed while walking to a classmate’s birthday party by a U.S. military tank “practicing routine drills.” The news was buried as the nation cheered our successive victories. Now that the soldiers driving the tank had been found not guilty, the story bounded into the spotlight once again.
“But that’s beside the point.” Emo’s tone snapped back to its earlier harshness. “You don’t throw your friend away for a boy! She’s like a sister to you.”
I fixed my eyes to the floor. “I’m so sorry, Emo.”
She sighed. “Go to bed.”
* * *
Nina waved away my apology later that morning. “Your aunt was still up when I got back. So we watched some soaps.”
“But still, that wasn’t cool of me.”
“It’s really not a big deal—”
My phone bleeped; it was a text from Changhoon.
“Chandler wants to take you out for lunch today. To apologize for being late yesterday.”
Nina held up Seoul for New Yorkers. “I was just going to do my own thing today.”
“Come on, please? It’d mean a lot to me. I want you guys to get to know each other.”
“Sure, fine.”
It took me an hour to assemble myself while Nina waited impatiently. By the time we got to lunch, she’d decided she was going to be in a sulky mood. Every attempt to lure her into the conversation was rebuffed. Eventually Changhoon and I just resumed our Korean rapport.
When we left the restaurant, we walked through Gwanghwamun Square. “Oh . . . we shouldn’t have come this way,” Changhoon said. “I forgot the protests.”
But it was too late. We were already in the thick of thousands of people holding candles in paper cups. Changhoon took hold of Nina’s arm and ordered me to take her other. He wore an embarrassed smile. “I’m so sorry!” he said to Nina. “Usually our country not like this. Usually so safe. Only because this accident make our people have so much . . .”
He trailed off, but I knew that the word he wished to say was utterly untranslatable. Han. A fiery anguish roiling in the blood, the result of being wronged.
Nina studied him. “I’d be pissed, too. Fucking military,” she said.
But as we steered Nina through the crowds, no one confronted us. Instead they looked at us
—looked at Nina—and quickly parted, making way for our passage.
* * *
Through the course of the week, Nina and I diligently went to the other sights earmarked in her guidebook. But something felt a little off between us, like soda gone flat. The effervescent burst that Nina had swept in with her on arrival had dissipated.
On her last night, after a rather sullen dinner of fatty pork barbecue, we returned to the apartment, where that sullenness spread and filled the air. Nina began to fold clothes and stuff them into her bag with a quiet but tense efficiency. Then she looked up from her piles of clothes and souvenirs. “You sure you don’t want to just . . . I don’t know, hop on the plane back home with me?”
The forced lightness of her tone put me off. “Why would I? This is my home now.”
Nina returned to folding her clothes. “Whatever you say.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing, nothing,” she said, backpedaling. “I’m just worried about you.”
“Well, don’t be. Things are going great for me here,” I said. “I’ve got terrific friends. I have Changhoon.”
Nina brushed lint off one of her shirts. She muttered, “Keep telling yourself that.”
“You got something you want to say to me?” I asked, staring straight into her eyes.
“Yeah, actually I do.” She put down the shirt she’d been folding and met my unwavering stare. “Chandler’s all right, but I hate how you act around him. It’s like . . . it’s like you’re on a job interview and you’re afraid you’ll blow it.”
Her words hit a nerve. She pressed on. “If you stay, you know you’ll just end up like that femmebot Monica.”
“You mean Rachel,” I corrected.
Nina blinked. “Nah, Rachel’s all right. At least the lights are on upstairs. I’m talking about the taller one. The fake-nice one who was all up on Chandler. You just know a girl like that’s gonna snap one day.”
“Monica was not all up on Chandler. She’s just a little eager to please,” I argued. I had a dim awareness that Monica had some feelings for Changhoon, but then again she was like that with everyone—tripping over herself in order to accommodate others.
“You know what I think? I think you’re not really in love with Chandler. You’re just grateful he loves you. I wish you’d stop acting like a phony and go back to being the Jane I know. The Jane I knew.”
Who did she think she was? Haranguing me as if she were the only one who’d ever experienced love and heartache.
“You nothing know.” My brain unexpectedly blipped, conflating English words with Korean syntax. If Nina noticed my slip, she didn’t mention it.
I went on. “Just because I don’t feel the need to gush endlessly about my feelings”—the way Nina always did, the way she was so unabashedly, embarrassingly open about everything—“that doesn’t mean I don’t feel passionate.”
“Please, Jane,” Nina scoffed. “I’ve seen you get more excited about cannoli than about Chandler. I know what love is. And what you’ve got with Chandler? It isn’t it.”
“You’re one to talk,” I said sharply. “Did you see the way you acted around Joey—J.—whatever the hell his name is now? You were the phony! Meanwhile, anyone could see he was a total d-bag.”
Now my words hit a nerve. She stopped, blinked. Blinked furiously, as if she were trying to shut out the words but couldn’t. “H-he was . . . my everything, Jane,” she whispered. “And turns out he’s been hooking up with Angela this whole time.”
Nina had only found out about it after the fact, when Angela accused Nina of swooping in when she had “first dibs” on Joey. She somehow managed to turn the whole gang against Nina. And just like that, in the span of a few months, two decades of friendship—gone.
“Every time I run into Angela and Mrs. Fabbricari, they just stare past me like I don’t even fucking exist. And not only have I lost him, I’ve lost my best friend from child—”
Suddenly Nina burst into a sob. It was a sob unlike any I’d heard before from her, like a watermelon cracking in two, with a sweet, raw redness bursting forth.
I recognized that sob. It was the same sob I’d stifled in the PC bang more than a year ago as I struggled to force thoughts of Ed Farley and New York out of my head, my heart. And now Nina’s cries threatened to unlock that pain again. I ached: for Ed, for Nina. Push the pain away, I wanted to tell her. The more you indulge those tears, the more that raw sweetness will spoil and seep into all parts of your waking life.
I opened my mouth to speak, but my brain became a confounded mix of Korean and English clichés: There are bigger fish in the frying pan. Strike while the tree trunk’s hot. The beloved who threw you away and left you will get no farther than ten blocks before he catches a foot disease.
I said nothing.
Nina’s sobs began to taper off. “Anyway, sorry,” she said, hastily wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “I didn’t mean to”—she hiccupped—“make this all about me.”
When she steadied her breath, she said, “Why’d you run away from New York, Jane?”
I went pfft. Tried to anyway. “I didn’t run away.”
Nina studied my face. “Did something happen back there? With . . . Ed?”
“Wh-what makes you say that?”
“Just a feeling I got. From e-mails. Other things. Like the way you reacted the other night when I mentioned him.”
I struggled to control my face; abruptly I turned away. But how I longed to tell Nina! I’d free myself of this heavy burden, this feeling of tap-tap-hae weighing down my heart.
But what good would come of it? The relief would only be temporary. It wouldn’t change what I’d done. And she would judge me. How could she not? I’d never be able to look her in the eyes the same way. If our roles were reversed, I would judge her as well.
“Jane, you don’t have to keep trying here. You know you can just come back home.”
Nina was wrong; I had nothing to go back to. If I couldn’t change the past, then the least I could do was bury it far behind me. I pressed one firm, final hand to my heart.
When I turned back around, Nina looked up at me with expectant eyes.
“You’re being ridiculous,” I told her.
“Jane, I just poured my effing guts out to you right now—”
Her tears were starting up again. She reached for a tissue from the vanity table and blew her nose loudly. I cringed. That was a no-no here. When she blew again, her nose made a rude, squelching sound, like a fart. I almost laughed. Recognizing the humor of the moment, Nina almost did, too. If either one of us had broken out laughing in that moment, I suspect that things might have been salvaged on the spot.
But neither of us laughed. When she turned back to me, her eyes had gone dead. And that was when I knew: I had lost her.
Nina boarded the plane home to New York. Winter came rushing in. The condensation collecting on the subway windows grew hard and white, calcifying into frost.
Chapter 21
Cost-Benefit Analysis
In the heart of that winter, Changhoon began conversations, in earnest, about the future. “You’re not going to ditch me for America, are you?” he said one day over sweet-potato lattes at Michelangelo. His tone was intentionally light—to save his pride, I knew. But even I had the nunchi to infer that he saw that future with me.
Other things were happening, too, that made staying more attractive. I got a promotion at work. Who would’ve thought that Food would help me become assistant CFO of Zenith Academy? It was an inflated job title, I knew, but still, it was my first promotion. Sang had never recognized me for all I did at Food. Any joy I took in my newfound success, however, came at a cost: Monica had been passed over. Success at Zenith was zero-sum; my gain was her loss. She’d been at the school for longer, and she certainly worked more hours than I did. Don’t
get me wrong—I took pride in my work and did it well, but I didn’t live for it the way Monica seemed to. When the clock struck six-thirty, I shut down my computer and set off on yet another date with Changhoon. It was the classic principal-agent relationship theory, but having never been on the “agent” side, it didn’t make sense to me beyond the theoretical until now. If you didn’t have a stake in the business, then what incentive would you have to work harder than you had to? It was the reason Sang perennially complained about finding good workers at the store; with the exception of Hwan, he thought the rotating cast of stock boys and cashiers were all nothing but the lazy.
“You deserve this promotion more than me,” I said to Monica in the break room. “Principal Yoo should give to you.”
But Monica demurred, shaking her head rigorously. “No, Jane Teacher, you deserve. You speak perfect native English. Always make me so jealous!” She was really too modest for her own good.
* * *
At the end of that winter, Changhoon proposed to me. And, reader, I accepted. But Korean proposals were not treated with the same romantic fanfare as their American equivalents. There was no ceremonious brandishing of a diamond ring, for one. He did not get down on one knee. What he’d actually said was, “My parents want to meet you. Want to come over to say hello?” Emo had to decode that for me. “That means he wants to marry you! But he’s supposed to come to the girl’s side first. Call him, quick! We’ll set a date. What’s his favorite dish? Never mind, we’ll make him a ginseng chicken stew. . . .” Then she sent herself into a tizzy.
When I told Monica the news, she said, “He wants you meeting his parents? You are so lucky!”
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