Frankly in Love (Frankly in Love, #1)(4)

Dad straps on a weight belt and muscles a hand truck loaded with boxes of malt liquor. He looks a bit like a Hobbit, stocky and strong and thick legged, with a box cutter on his belt instead of a velvet sachet of precious coins. He has all his hair still, even in his late forties. To think, he earned a bachelor’s degree in Seoul and wound up here. I wonder how many immigrants there are like him, working a blue-collar job while secretly owning a white-collar degree.

He slams his way out of the dark howling maw of the walk-in cooler.

“You eat,” he says.

“Okay, Dad,” I say.

“You go taco. Next door. Money, here.”

He hands me a twenty.

“Okay, Dad.”

I say Okay, Dad a lot to Dad. It doesn’t get much deeper than that for the most part. For the most part, it can’t. Dad’s English isn’t great, and my Korean is almost nonexistent. I grew up on video games and indie films, and Dad grew up on I-don’t-know-what.

I used to ask him about his childhood. Or about basic things, like how he was able to afford a luxury like college. He grew up poor, after all, poorer than poor. Both my parents did, before Korea’s economic supernova in the late eighties. Dad said he would go fishing for river crabs when food ran low. Lots of people in the sticks did.

“Tiny crabby, they all crawling inside my net,” he told me. “All crawling crawling crawling over each other, they stepping on each other face, try to get on top.”

“Okay,” I said.

“That’s Korea,” he said.

When I asked him what that meant, he just closed the conversation with:

“Anyway America better. Better you going college here, learn English. More opportunity.”

That’s his checkmate move for most conversations, even ones that start out innocently enough like, How come we never kept up with speaking Korean in the house? or Why do old Korean dudes worship Chivas Regal?

So for the most part, he and I have made a habit of leaving things at Okay, Dad.

“Okay, Dad,” I say.

I grab my phone and step into the even hotter heat outside. Corrido music is bombarding the empty parking lot from the carnicería next door. The music is meant to convey festivity, to entice customers inside. It’s not working.

?Party Today!

Buzz-buzz. It’s Q.

Pip pip, old chap, let’s go up to LA. It’s free museum night. Bunch of us are going.

Deepest regrets, old bean, I say. Got a Gathering.

I shall miss your companionship, fine sir, says Q.

And I yours, my good man.

Q knows what I mean when I say Gathering.

I’m talking about a gathering of five families, which sounds like a mafia thing but really is just Mom-n-Dad’s friends getting together for a rotating house dinner.

It’s an event that’s simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary: ordinary in that hey, it’s just dinner, but extraordinary in that all five couples met at university in Seoul, became friends, moved to Southern California together to start new lives, and have managed to see each other and their families every month literally for decades.

The day ends. Dad changes shirts, trading his shop owner persona for a more Gathering-appropriate one: a new heather-gray polo that exudes success and prosperity. We lock up, turn out the lights. Then we drive forty minutes to the Kims’.

It’s the Kim family’s turn to host the Gathering this time, and they’ve gone all out: a Brazilian barbecue carving station manned by real Brazilians drilling everyone on the word of the night (chu?rra?sca?ri?a), plus a wine-tasting station, plus a seventy-inch television in the great room with brand-new VR headsets for the little kids to play ocean explorer with.

It all screams: We’re doing great in America. How about you?

Included among these totems of success are the children themselves, especially us older kids. We were all born pretty much at the same time. We’re all in the same year in school. We are talked and talked about, like minor celebrities. So-and-so made academic pentathlon team captain. So-and-so got valedictorian.

Being a totem is a tiresome role, and so we hide away in the game room or wherever while outside, the littler kids run amok and the adults get drunk and sing twenty-year-old Korean pop songs that none of us understand. In this way we have gradually formed the strangest of friendships:


We only sit together like this for four hours once a month.





We never leave the room during this time, except for food.





We never hang out outside the Gatherings.





The Gatherings are a world unto themselves. Each one is a version of Korea forever trapped in a bubble of amber—the early-nineties Korea that Mom-n-Dad and the rest of their friends brought over to the States years ago after the bubble burst. Meanwhile, the Koreans in Korea have moved on, become more affluent, more savvy. Meanwhile, just outside the Kims’ front door, American kids are dance-gaming to K-pop on their big-screens.

But inside the Gathering, time freezes for a few hours. We children are here only because of our parents, after all. Would we normally hang out otherwise? Probably not. But we can’t exactly sit around ignoring each other, because that would be boring. So we jibber-jabber and philosophize until it’s time to leave. Then we are released back into the reality awaiting us outside the Gathering, where time unfreezes and resumes.