Yolk(47)

He nods.

“So American.” Again I wonder what his childhood was like that he has gochujang and the good kind of Parmesan in his fridge.

He laughs.

“Wait, what do you call your grandmother?”

“Uh, halmoni?”

“Okay.” I take another bite of food, reassured.

“Why do you seem relieved by that?”

“I don’t know.” I cover my mouth, smiling. “I am though.”

I look down at my bowl. I’m mowing through it faster than I’d like. “So, Pops went to Berkeley, Mom’s a genius, but what are they like?”

“It’s weird,” he says. “For the longest time, I was totally incurious about them. They were just my parents. But going back to Korea was a game changer. Moving there for two years and seeing what they were like with their friends and family was wild. My mom is a different person in Korea. It’s fucked up, but I had no idea that she was funny until then. They weren’t people to me before. You’re going to think this is so dumb, but I could see that my parents were, like, popular.”

At the mention of popular, I don’t even know what to envision for my parents. I picture my mom smoking a cigarette like a little street urchin. I try to imagine her at a poetry reading, but now, in my head, she’s just wearing a beret. My archetypes for cool are astoundingly limited. There’re emoji with more depth than I’m willing to assign to my parents.

“I know nothing about my mom and dad,” I tell him. “Black boxes, both of them. And I want to know everything. I used to have this fantasy that I’d invent an app where we could talk to each other through a filter with translation and microexpressions and tone and all this stuff so we could properly communicate. But then I realized it wouldn’t make them want to talk to me. My dad’s family was wrecked by the banking crisis, so everything’s about money and success, and my mom’s from some tiny village, but I don’t even know what that means.”

I’ve never talked about my parents this frankly with anyone. Not even June.

He sets his fork down. “How’d they end up in Texas?”

“I don’t know. I’m beginning to think they didn’t even have a plan. It’s not as if we knew anyone out there.”

“You miss it?”

I shake my head. “You?”

“All the time,” he says. “Nobody in New York can make iced tea for shit.”

It’s true. It’s been an ongoing secret source of pain. “I keep ordering it at restaurants for, like, six bucks and getting so sad. Plus, they charge for refills.”

“Iced tea in New York is such a scam.”

“And it’s not like C-Town has Mrs Baird’s Texas Toast for French toast.”

“Brioche is pretty good for that.”

“Fuck outta here.” I shake my head. “You know, I’m going back this weekend.”

I hand him my half-eaten pasta and sit on the sofa.

“Oh yeah? How do you feel about that?”

I shrug. My leg’s fallen asleep. “I haven’t been since I got here. Where are your parents right now?”

“Korea,” he says. He eats like a boy. Wolfing.

“Do you ever look at your parents and wonder why they make their lives so hard?” I ask him.

“Okay,” he says, getting up on the sofa with me. “I guess we’re going in.”

“Sorry.” I bite my lip.

“No,” he says, and reaches over to touch my forearm. “I didn’t mean that. I just…” He shakes his head. “It’s like you said the exact thing I’ve been thinking for the past few years. It’s just a bit uncanny, I guess.”

He leans back. “As the kids of immigrants, we always have to think about that whole ‘I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams’ thing. I know my parents made sacrifices, but I also don’t understand their choices. Like, uprooting their lives three times for me and my sister’s schooling. And my dad gives so much money to his abusive brother, who we have to pretend isn’t a narcissist and psychopath because he’s the firstborn or some shit. There’s so much that goes into the collectivist mind-set, considering the good of the whole before prioritizing yourself, but sometimes it’s like, give it a rest already. Just set a boundary and break some patterns once in a while.”

I lean back with him. His shoulder’s warm against mine.

“Does your family have secrets that you don’t even know why you’re keeping?” I ask him.

“Yeah,” he says. “My uncle has a second family that we don’t talk about. What about you?”

I think about June. How we’re keeping her cancer from Mom. How she kept her job loss from me. “My mom left for three months when we were in high school and we don’t talk about it. We have no idea where she went, why she left, and when she came back, we all pretended it never happened.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Do you and June talk about it?”

I shake my head. “Not really. It’s crazy how lonely it is to be in a family. Even if the stuff with my mom didn’t happen, even if everyone was super evolved and therapized, I think just being in a family is what screws you up. I’m never going to fully understand them. And it’s fucked up because that means they’re never going to understand me. But who knows.” I shrug. “Maybe it’s designed that way for a reason. Families are such fucked-up tiny cults.”