집에 간다

It was a summer of the hottest days I’d ever known, of great rains and thunder, of long nights and a great quiet that stretched through me. It was the summer I finally went home. Korea is my motherland, but she was a mother that did not always want this child. Time did not pass linearly there—I look back and all I can remember are vignettes: disparate moments that create the narrative of my life for that time. Joan Didion spoke of the moments that shimmer—these impressions that burn themselves into our minds are why we write. When I remember this time, I think of how I spent the summer grieving and found no solace for it. I was twenty years old; filled with a longing that could not, and would not be answered. I wrote this piece, then, to find the answers. To know. To let the images that echo through me find their resolution, and in that, find my own. 

***

I stand on the same university steps my grandmother had once stood on, wondering if she is proud of me. The air is thick and warm, and I can barely breathe against it. The pear trees are shaking, the wind blowing through them fast and frenzied. The heat makes me rotten inside, and I wonder if she can see it from wherever she is. I am her daughter’s daughter, but I am strange and half formed, broken somewhere deep. I speak her language now, but it’s no use now that she’s gone. The storm clouds are gathering, and I feel them like a physical weight against my body. I wonder if the people that pass by can see the open wound I carry. Whatever I was looking for, it’s not here.

Long days studying stretch into longer nights. I spend them on the streets, in the clubs, at the bars. My friends and I roam wild and free—a whole host of college-aged American born Korean kids, here for the summer, here to reclaim what never was. We eat tender pork belly, wash it down with raw garlic, fresh kimchi, and mild beer. We cheer, play games, and dance our hearts out until it is morning again. All the people do here is work, study, and drink. We follow suit. I grow more and more tired each day, but there is always something more to do, something that we have to make time for before we leave. I am sick with my desire to go home, but I am home. The best part of my night is the walk back, where I lose myself to my music and the dark blue sky, where the stray cats follow me home and I am finally alone. 

Jabez and I sit on the curb, awash in our hazed drunken states. Jabez was born in Portland too. We grew up under a canopy of clouds, watered daily by the rain, kept safe under the towering trees of the Pacific Northwest. Jabez is also Korean, just like I am, but he is the son of two Korean citizens, and cannot be here for more than three months or they will conscript him. Jabez is queer, just like I am, and we recognize the same heartbreak in each other’s eyes. But for now, we are here, it is summer, and we are so painfully young. The nights we spend in Itaewon on “Homo Hill” imprint themselves on my mind—the drag queens painted with glitter, the girls with their brightly colored hair, and the way we can feel the music’s vibrations resound in our hearts. 

It is raining but it always rains here. The temple glows by candlelight and a golden Buddha smiles down on us. It’s grandiose, all red pillars and gilded edges. We stand next to each other, strange and new, my sister on one side, my best friend from home on the other. A monk walks by and the length of our shorts feels sacrilegious. Lightning flashes but it does not deter those who have come to seek comfort amongst the deep red-blue-greens of the temple walls and the lanterns that flicker above. On the steps above us, they bow. The more bows, the more devout their wish. In each of our hands is a colorful votive carved with the animal zodiac from the year we were born. They beg us to write our wishes on them, but for a long moment we stand there frozen, too shy to respond to their calls. I hold the ram’s head in my hand, knowing exactly what is written on my heart. I hide it anyway and write down something paltry, a deformed wish about getting good grades. Still, I turn it away so they can’t see. 

My mother stares down at the steps that descend and then reach up to the sky. It’s been years since she’s returned to Korea and I know that it feels stranger and stranger each time she comes back. I know because I feel it too. The glass on either side of us reflects the blue of the sky and the building melts into the ground as it rises up beside us. It looks different, she says, than how I remember it. Then how it was when her mother was here. Do you think she would be proud? Despite what I am? I bite my tongue and the questions hang in the air like a loaded gun—one that I hold behind my mother’s back, out of sight. 

My sister and I grasp each other’s hands—the dancers have assembled, and the familiar notes of arirang 아리랑 cascade towards us. My beloved one. The tears flash hot and heavy, summoned by the song, living on memories that we thought had long faded. I meet her eyes and the devastation I feel is mirrored in them. Our halmoni 할머니 was beautiful here, and at her most brilliant. This was her holy ground, her site of prayer. The beat of the drum, the quick movement of the fans, the dancers’ bodies flowing together—the choreography that was her life’s work. I still remember that critical eye, piercing and pointed as it landed on everyone around her. Her red ballet shoes, her perfectly manicured nails, and her love of coffee with milk. Years have passed, and I hold onto these memories still, I carry them with me everywhere I go. I craved Korea for so long, but I am beginning to realize that I am craving the one from years ago—the one that still belonged to her. 

I sit at the temple once again, alone this time. A Buddha statue towers twenty feet tall above me. There is no god, but I need forgiveness. I need to know. I bow and I bow and I bow, but there is no answer to my prostrations. The Buddha does not bow back. Behind me is all of Seoul, sprawled across the Han River. At the peak, the blue of the sky swallows me up, and the longing that has been killing me finally shifts into something greater, something bright and new. I call to the quiet, and it doesn’t answer back. I leave something behind in that moment, but I am glad to see it go. 

The joy in Seoul Plaza is sharp and it cuts into me. Smiling faces everywhere, that look like my own. A foreign feeling made familiar. Rainbow flags waving, glittering paint on faces, hands that reach for me. The heat is still unbearable, but for now my happiness will shield me from it. In the periphery, I see protesters shouting about sinners, hell, and all that is damned. They fade away into obscurity next to the brazen colors of Pride, unable to compete with the wave of thousands descending upon the city. We will never be what we once were. I know this now. The grief remains, but the joy is born anew and I feel them both in every breath. The music is deafening, the crowd’s chorus all consuming. The sound fills my heart until it overflows. I grasp my sister’s hand. We allow the wave to swallow us, and we don’t come up for air.