Somewhere Only We Know(31)
“You’re lucky to catch us on a cool day. The weather’s been hellish. Like, Florida on steroids,” Jack said as he swung the bag of buns and drinks between us.
“Humidity,” I said sagely. “The literal worst.”
“Literally.”
We laughed and in the quiet of the shaded road, I felt kind of shy. Aside from this morning in his apartment, we hadn’t really had a moment alone. “It was so hard for me to get used to humidity after living in LA. I was like, what is happening to my hair?”
He grinned. “Yeah. This summer almost killed me. But my skin looks great.”
I looked at him. Yeah, his skin and everything else looked pretty great. “Do you miss LA?”
“Do I miss the dry summers, you mean?” he said.
A cab passed by us, a streak of red against the green of the trees. I shook my head. “Yes and no. I mean, do you miss living there? Like, America?”
“Not that much,” Jack said. “I did at first, but … I don’t know. Hong Kong is cool.”
I waited for him to elaborate but he didn’t. I finished up the last of my bun. “It is cool here. But don’t you miss not being a foreigner?”
“That’s what’s cool about Hong Kong. A lot of us are foreigners. I don’t really stick out or anything.”
In Korea, when I was still an obscure K-pop trainee, I had loved how invisible I was, how easily I melted into Seoul. How it felt to be in a place where I was a part of the history.
But now? Now I stuck out.
“I get homesick,” I admitted, wiping my fingers on my jeans. I almost said, “I miss my family,” but caught myself quickly. Jack had no idea I didn’t live with my family. That would be weird.
But I did miss them. More than dry summers or easy communication in my native language. I missed fighting with my parents and sister over what we wanted to watch on Netflix—taking so long to pick something that it was inevitably bedtime when we finally came to a decision. I missed my mom yelling from the kitchen when she opened the fridge and food toppled out because my sister and I had shoved things in there haphazardly. I missed my dad not believing me when I said I’d checked the mail, watching him ramble down the driveway to double-check and then ignoring me as I gloated. I missed the fear of my sister’s fastidious wrath when I borrowed her clothes and got a stain on them—hiding out in my room when I heard the inevitable scream from hers.
But I couldn’t say all that. Instead, I said, “I miss In-N-Out.”
Jack smiled, a flash of white in the cool shadows. “Yeah, me too.” He walked alongside me in silence for a while, then asked, “When did you move to Korea?”
“When I was thirteen.”
“How was that? I mean, that’s a hard age.”
It was really hard. But I had moved because of my own desires, unlike kids who were uprooted by their parents. Like Jack. “It was hard at first, but … I was kept pretty busy, so. I didn’t have much time to get homesick.”
“That busy church choir life?” His voice was teasing and I cursed my past self for trapping myself into this church choir nonsense.
I let out a feeble laugh. “Kind of. I took a lot of music lessons, dance, all that. And then I joined the choir and it became … more serious. A time-consuming hobby.”
“So, you’ve been singing for a long time?” he asked as he hopped over a lumpy portion of sidewalk where massive tree roots had disturbed the concrete.
“Since forever.” I smiled, remembering the many home videos of me singing as a kid. At the dinner table, clutching a white plastic rice scooper in my small fists and closing my eyes as I crooned old Whitney Houston songs. In the bathtub as my toddler sister lolled around in the background, oblivious to my made-up love ballads.
Jack smiled, too. Almost as if he could see what I was remembering. “Do you want to do it, I don’t know, professionally one day?”
We were walking in a patch of sun and the heat made me uncomfortable. “Um, yeah. Maybe.” I glanced at him. “Am I being interviewed or something?”
“No,” he replied easily, stepping back into the shade. I followed. “I’m curious,” he said.
Something occurred to me then. “Hey, are you in college? Didn’t you say you graduated last spring?”
He shook his head. “No, I’m interning at my dad’s bank right now. Taking a gap year.”
“Oh, cool. Like, a break, right? Where do you want to go to college?”
This time he was the one to take a long pause before answering. “I don’t know yet.”
“To go into banking, though?” I asked.
He made a face. “God, no. It’s only to keep my parents off my back while I’m doing this gap year.”
I thought back to our earlier conversation, when he said he didn’t know what he wanted. “Well, if you had to pick right now, what would you want to do?” The question bothered him, I could tell. He crossed his arms, the bag of bao bumping into his thigh. “I don’t know what I want to do. I grew up in a suburb where everyone was on this path to achievement. And now that I’ve lived here? I don’t feel that pressure anymore. It’s like I can see clearly. And college seems so small.”
Path to achievement. I knew what he was talking about. My talents were discovered and nurtured from an early age, and my parents had done everything within their power to keep them flourishing. But that path was forged by me. My parents were happy to help because they recognized my drive and knew I wouldn’t be happy until I got to where I wanted to be.