heartlines
seeing how it has been almost three months since v'day i thought i would post it up. yes i wrote the kyuha!!! and i didn't comment on it so it was super obvs that it was me!!
hahaha.
I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.
Sylvia Plath
“A good essay needs to be like the wind and a fallen leaf,” Kyuhyun remembers his professor saying once, “you need to be that gust of wind. Bring that leaf from a stop to movement, from movement to static. It is an endless cycle. An exciting, endless cycle.”
His professor had gone on to punctuation and stylization after that, but Kyuhyun curiously manages to remember that one, single piece of advice. Make your essay exciting. From movement to none. Vice versa. He never really gets to use that after graduating from college, but when it comes down to this, comes down to him thinking about how everything went wrong, it makes sense. It is the most logical explanation of the process of which they went through, loving each other and then not.
He hears her packing in their room: one, two, three luggage cases of clothes and books and trinkets and everything else. She did not mention who is going to pick her up. He tries to think that it will be Younjin, or Yubin, or maybe Sunye. The prospective list is long, because she has a lot of friends. Always female though. Never Hongki, or Jaejin, or any of the little boys she tutors. He doesn’t know why he still thinks this way. He looks at the silent television for a while more, before deciding that he should help her out.
This is their final day together.
____________
起 qi (the beginning) . Taipei
He signs up for the volunteering job, only because Henry makes him. “Come on, you can speak Korean! And international students are cute!” The boy eggs him on, and Kyuhyun is too lazy to say no, so he obliges. Henry takes care of all the logistics stuff while he plays Starcraft with people from the motherland.
They turn up for the first briefing pretty late. Henry listens and takes notes, while he nods and tries to pretend that he is paying attention. His Chinese has always been better than Henry’s, after all, and it is a travesty, considering how Henry is the kid with the real Chinese DNA and he is just the Korean one who has been living in Taiwan for a long time now. Henry likes to chalk it up to him being in Canada all the way until his high school graduation. Kyuhyun calls him out on it from time to time.
Henry picks up a copy of the student-assignment list on their way out. “Mine’s… this dude Zhou Mi from the mainland. And you… hey that’s not fair! You got a girl!” Henry punches him on the shoulder in disbelief. Kyuhyun peers at the list that he is holding out. It is a girl all right, from the motherland South Korea and studying English Literature at Seoul National. He vaguely remembers his cousin getting in there, and all the times his mother wistfully thought about what could have been, had he and his sister remained in Seoul instead. Ara’s in Austria now though, so Kyuhyun thinks that must count. Somehow.
Henry is still complaining about how he got a guy. Kyuhyun just tries to remember the name of his assigned student.
The international exchange students arrive on a Thursday. Henry is waiting for him outside the lecture hall where he has just had his last engineering lecture of the day. Kyuhyun initially wanted to study law, but decided against it in the end. It didn’t make sense, because his father kept reminding them that they were going back. Soon. Anytime. At the present moment he is still a student at National Taiwan University, but Kyuhyun likes to keep things safe. Leave a backup plan, some fallback option for himself. Things like that.
“You know that they call you my pseudo-girlfriend sometimes, right?” He asks Henry when they are walking towards the Arts building, where the international students are all converged. Henry looks scandalized, and almost trips.
“Do your classmates really say that?” Henry sputters, and Kyuhyun waits for thirty seconds before laughing out loud and clapping his roommate on the back. It is always good fun, teasing Henry. The lecture hall is teeming with students; Kyuhyun can’t really say that he can tell which ones are his schoolmates and which ones are not. Henry keeps hi-fiving the people he knows and meets along the way, and tries to make Kyuhyun do the same.
“Stop fooling around, and find your assigned student!” One of the committee members (and also Henry’s friend from the orchestra) hisses at them, and stuffs sticker nametags into their hands. Henry immediately bolts off to find Zhou Mi from the mainland. Kyuhyun just stands there, and wonders if it will be practical to try and guess who looks Korean and let everything fall into place from there. And then there is the possibility of the assigned student looking completely not like a Korean at all.
He picks at his nametag. Gui Xian. Ara has always laughed and said that it is one of the better sounding Korean names in Chinese. You’re about eighty percent Sinicized, she said. Kyuhyun more or less agrees with that opinion.
So Kyuhyun tries to look around for a while. He only knows her Korean name, romanized, he suddenly realizes. Everyone has their names written in Chinese characters, and he is just about to start thinking if he should make a run for it when someone taps on his shoulder. “Gui Xian?” It is a girl. She doesn’t sound native like he does, though. Kyuhyun turns around, and there she is, short and cute and black haired.
“Hi,” she says again, in curiously accented Chinese. It sounds like a blend of English and Korean pronunciation habits, rolled into one fluid accent that flows quite well off her tongue. Kyuhyun takes a look at her nametag. Run He. He tries to translate that in his head: Younha. A match for the name that he has got stamped into his memory. “Gui Xian, right?”
“I’m Run He,” she says, smiling again. He shakes her hand, the one extended and hanging in mid-air, and smiles back, trying to hope that his Korean doesn’t sound too bad.
“Kyuhyun. Welcome to Taipei.”
____________
It is okay, she tells him when he tries to help. I can do this by myself. So he watches her seal the boxes with rolls of mud coloured tape. The sound is horrific, the way it rips through the air every time she pulls at the roll. But there is nothing he can do, so he just watches. She finishes sealing the box with her clothes in it, and begins work on the second one. This box has books and report files and planners, and then he spots the seal of his college, all the way back on the island he grew up in. Taiwan.
“You still have that?” His voice sounds strangely strained, like it has been wound up and then let go, just a bit. She nods, and picks it up. It is the certificate the university gave her, when she finished the summer programme there.
He still has that photo taken on that day, when she was about to leave, and he was sulking, the entire day. Don’t be like this, she had said, we can still write each other! Her hand was cool in his, and he only moped around for a while more after that. Henry took the photograph for them, against the backdrop of the main school gate, with palm trees and a very bright sun. The palm trees and school gate and Henry are still there, in Taipei. They are not.
It is the things like this, little things that change and morph out of shape, that scares him. There is no control to be had over these things. You can only watch them deform themselves into a structure you cannot understand, cannot comprehend. And then you can only accept it. You can only choose to take it, because it is the only way out.
Sometimes Kyuhyun wonders if Younha is willingly accepting these things that fate throws her way. He tries to run against time now, but she sits serenely and lets it take her, float her down the river of life. He cannot catch up, she will not wait, and it is one of these things. Another one of them, and what you can do is only to understand that you have no other option because you reap what you sow.
____________
承 cheng (the good) . Taipei / New York
She writes him, like she promised at the end of her summer in Taipei. They exchange emails, almost everyday, and Kyuhyun periodically sends her some when he is bored in class, or at lunch, or during dinner, or when Henry is practicing his violin and he has nothing else to do. Starcraft usually takes a back seat when he is emailing Younha. It is funny, how one summer can change everything, he sometimes thinks. He did not expect to fall in love, but they did.
Younha is an uprooted Korean like he is. She grew up in New York, and did not move back to Korea until she was eighteen. Just in time to make it for the university application periods back home. “It was horrible when the SAT results were released,” she had told him once, when they were at Tamshui, sitting by the riverside and sharing a cone of ice cream just because, “there was nothing else on the news except for students fainting and parents threatening to sue the Ministry of Education. You’re a lucky kid, you know? So faraway from that sort of madness.”
Kyuhyun had nodded then, and finished the cone. She did not mind. Younha didn’t usually mind things like that. Even Henry got tired of his weird habits sometimes, like playing Starcraft deep into the night, or listening to music and not caring about the conversation, or eating too much of junk food, or stealing food from their shared pantry. But Younha really did not mind. She just laughed and let him be. “You’re interesting,” she had said. Interesting as in crazy interesting or what? Kyuhyun hadn’t asked. But he was not bothered either. Deep down, he knew that he was toning everything down just for her. It made him feel a bit warm and fuzzy inside, at least until Henry started noticing that he was staying on his Gmail page and clicking on the refresh button for way too long.
She attaches a photo of her in winter wear with her next email. My home in New York! He laughs at the caption, typed in a mish-mash of Chinese and Korean. Younha goes on to tell him about her holidays back in the States (“Turkey with my grandmother. She keeps insisting it’s chicken, I don’t know why”) and her future plans. I’m about to graduate, the second last line of her email reads, I think I might want to come back here.
Kyuhyun reads her email again as the ceiling fan clacks in the background. Winter in Taiwan isn’t a big deal - sometimes it is hot, sometimes it is cold. He is Korean, so most of the time it just feels slightly warm to him. Henry though, despite being ninety percent Canadian, always has to wrap himself up in two layers of shirts before he goes to bed. The prospectus package is lying on his table; his professor told him earlier, after the lecture, that he would like to recommend him for the Master’s programme scholarship dealt out by the school. You can choose where you want to go, his professor had said.
He tells his professor that he might consider it. And then he replies her this:
So, do you think I should join you?
When in New York:
They live together, in the apartment with the rickety doors and permanently spoilt elevator. They climb the stairs together, and she usually gets tired two floors below their room. He carries her piggyback up then, those times. They eat breakfast, she makes ddeokbokki with whatever she can find. Sometimes it is ketchup, sometimes it is chilli sauce, sometimes it is both. When she can get the real sauce, though, he finishes the entire pot. Their bed sheets are always either blue or white. He likes blue. She likes white. He changes them on Mondays, she does it on all the other days. But she kicks him to do it with her. And he does.
Their favourite place to go to is Central Park. She likes the birds, he likes the benches. They toss coins into every fountain they walk past. He laughs at her for it. I’m Korean, she replies, I believe in good luck. And he is Korean too, so he just holds her hand and steers her on. Except that maybe next time he throws one in too. Just for good luck. They eat at the Korean restaurant ten minutes away, mostly on Sundays after church service. Is this your husband, the ajumma there laughs at her every time. No, not yet, he always replies. She tries to not blush. Most of the time she cannot.
She plays the piano in church. He joins the choir, only because she and his mother make him. You keep him in church, his mother tells her during their nightly Skype calls. He shrugs and says that he will never lapse. Not when she is around. They meet a lot of other Koreans in their church. Sungmin and Yubin and the peculiarly named Sunday. Also, his classmate Ryeowook. They go out for beer sometimes, but she never drinks. Sungmin is a party animal, and they meet more and more and more and more people. American, Korean, Chinese, one Thai even. The girl called Sunye becomes one of her closer friends. He sticks to Sungmin, and Ryeowook, and sometimes Sunye’s husband Donghae. Koreans stick together, she once tells him jokingly. Because it’s easier to get ddeokbokki sauce that way.
He kisses her almost everyday. In the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Like a daily ritual of some sort. On her forehead, mostly in the mornings, but on the mouth every other time. I love you, he is never afraid to say this. She nods and smiles into his lips. Sometimes, he thinks about it. This. Right now. This is where her roots are, and he is holding on to her to keep safe, keep sane. She is his buoy. So he holds on as tight as he can, and promises himself that he will never let go. America is their home now. For now, at least. He keeps thinking that, and keeps holding on. She lets him.
____________
He trails behind her, as she walks in and out and in and out. There are five boxes in total. Five boxes worth of memories of this house, and then perhaps him and them. He finds it strange, because how can so much be put into so little? But then memories are not worth as much as feelings. There is no more between them, he thinks. It will be hard to find even a remnant of love in her eyes. Younha has always been quite consistent about that. No means no. Letting go means letting go. Leaving means leaving. So on and so forth.
She stacks the last box up, and looks at him like she is so tired. He wonders if he should- if he can touch her.
Then he hears a car pulling up, and begins to panic.
____________
轉 zhuan (the bad) . Seoul
Sometimes she dreams of their time in New York. It is vivid, and bright, and boldly coloured, like all dreams are. When she opens her eyes, she can almost see the green road-signs, seared into her irises. New York is her home, like how Taipei is his. She occasionally finds it funny, because they are all Korean and they are in Korea right now and they really should be at home, at ease. But it is not this way, and sometimes she thinks to fight it, to take flight, but she does not. Younha does not do things that way.
She works from home now, giving tuition to a few students, translating manuscripts, mostly. It pays quite a bit, and so they live in a small house just off Apgujeong. They have new money, Sunye laughs over the phone, over the Pacific Ocean, voice sometimes crackly, sometimes not. Her husband does research at some governmental organization. So Younha agrees. They do have new money, of some sort.
Kyuhyun and she decided to move back home three years after his parents did. They were already married by then, settled in NYC, planning to move to an apartment with a working elevator and not as many stairs. But then his mother took a fall, and her back was never quite the same after that. So Kyuhyun took the job the government had been dangling for a while - “I have no bond, it doesn’t matter,” he had said when she’d asked if it were really okay. So they made the move back. Home, but not really. She lived there for only four years before, and he not even two.
It scared Younha, in the beginning, because life was different when she was a student. She didn’t have to interact with older, ajumma neighbours, or know how to make kimchi, or memorize the names of everyone living within a kilometer’s radius of her home. Kyuhyun didn’t know that would happen too, because he completely had no idea what life in Korea was like. I was only two when we left for Taiwan, he told her one night during dinner (kimchi made by the ajumma next door). She nodded, and did not remind him that she was not even born here.
Younha works hard, because it is in her to do that. She never got any allowance unless she did chores, helped out with taking care of Younjin, washed her father’s car or the dishes. It was hard work, but she liked it. Builds character, her dad used to say. He still does.
The neighbours eagerly push their kids to be tutored by her in English, and so she immerses herself in that everyday. Conversations about what your name is, what your favourite hobby is, do you like Angelina Jolie? (Yes, me like, Hongki would say. And then Jaejin would say no, I more like Christina Aguilera) It makes her happy, kind of, to see her students go from parroting to actually being able to speak fluently. Tutoring keeps her occupied, but she still cooks dinner and calls her mother-in-law and tries to help out her father-in-law with his tuition centres. “Why don’t you ever go there to teach?” Kyuhyun asks her one night, like it is something scandalous.
“Well,” she pauses. “I’m not exactly good at Math.” Kyuhyun gives her a look, and then they laugh, but there is something about it that she cannot put her finger on. Younha tries to ignore it anyway. Gut feelings are not something she trusts.
He has to build up everything from scratch when he makes the move back to Korea. He has no contacts, no friends, nothing. Suddenly he misses Taipei and maybe the States, but when his mother calls and he overhears his wife talking to her on the phone, he knows that it is here that they must stay. So he resigns himself to pushing papers everyday, nine to five, doing lunch and dinner and drinks with his colleagues and bosses and subordinates. It goes on and on and on and it seems like he must have a perpetual hangover. Younha makes ginger tea every morning, and he takes it in a thermal flask to work, but sometimes he just looks at it, head swirling in pain, and does not drink.
“You know,” one day, a voice suddenly sounds above him, “you shouldn’t be drinking so much alcohol. People die young from doing that sort of thing.” He looks up from his thermal flask at her, the young lady in the white blouse and cream A-line skirt. Seo Joohyun, her nametag reads. His eyes are still watering, but he just nods and she puts a packet of medicine on his table. “Take this. Vitamin B6.” Then she walks off, and he watches until she turns and disappears into the lift lobby. His head still hurts, but Kyuhyun feels strangely better.
Kyuhyun does not know how he manages to make friends. Not when he is almost always perpetually drunk on soju. But make friends he does, and he finds himself having lunch more and more often with Seo Joohyun of the Human Resources department. When you are friends with Seo Joohyun you have to clean up your act. So he doesn’t get hungover as much now, and she doesn’t press that packet of Vitamin B6 into his hand anymore. She lectures him about the vices of coffee and alcohol and cigarettes and not sleeping early. “You will die young,” she warns him sternly, and he only laughs, but takes her advice anyway. Younha wonders aloud once why he doesn’t drink as much coffee as before - he does not tell her about Seo Joohyun.
Joohyun - he omits her surname now, after she says it’s okay to do that - reminds him of his wife, sometimes. Younha used to have long hair, like she did, but she cut it off until the shoulder when they moved from the States. “I don’t like it,” he told her after that, fingering the ends of her hair. Younha only shook her head and said, it is more practical this way. Both of them are pragmatic, he thinks. But Younha just leaves him alone, lets him do his thing. Joohyun does not. She plans and lists and makes him do things that will “save his health”. I will work for another ten years. Go on a holiday around the world. Try to make it to the UN. Write a book. Visit the Vatican, meet the Pope. These are things that are on Joohyun’s list. And, Kyuhyun realizes with a deadened feeling somewhere at the bottom of his chest, he has no idea what is on Younha’s.
It is one night, when she is talking about bad English and he about the lack of money in a few of the research projects at work, that he realizes they completely have no idea what the other is talking about. She listens to him, and he listens to her, but there is nothing that he understands at all. He does not understand why Hongki’s terrible syntax, or the way Jaejin curls his tongue excessively around the ‘r’ sound, or the horrible sentence structure of Seunghyun’s writing matters. He simply does not care. Nothing ever clicks, and so he continues to listen until she has finished talking.
And then they go to bed. It is quiet, then, and he falls into a dreamless sleep easily. This repeats, and repeats, and repeats, and then it becomes a habit.
“Do you have kids?” Joohyun asks him one day, when they are walking back to the office from lunch. No, we don’t, he tells her almost immediately, and then she nods like it is the most normal thing in the world. He doesn’t know why they don’t have kids. It is funny, because they love children. It just has not popped up yet, the issue, and when he remembers his wife and her smile and her hair - why did she cut it again, he hates hates hates it - he looks back at Joohyun and thinks, maybe it is good that they do not have any. Right now. The thought embeds itself into his head, and steadily grows.
“We’re just friends, right?” She comes to him for confirmation, solace of some sort. He looks at her, and Joohyun looks at him, and he almost wants to reach for her hand.
“Just friends. We’re not doing anything wrong.” Kyuhyun tells her like it is true, and then that is it.
“I forgot,” his voice is quiet over the phone. Younha tries not to sigh. It’s okay, she tells him. I’ll go buy it alone. She does not blame him, even if they have agreed on this trip out a long time ago. Sometimes Kyuhyun forgets things - he does that more often now, but she cannot find it in her to tell him off, to get angry, start a fight. It is tiring, draining to even think about it these days. So she doesn’t do all of that, and just drives to the furniture store instead.
The ajumma neighbour is the one who helps her with the new ottoman, when she returns from the store and is stuck at the driveway because it is too heavy. The ajumma asks her about her tuition while they move forward towards the door, is it going well, does she need more kimchi, does she want to learn how to make a new variety, how is her husband, would they like to come over for dinner some day? The words get stuck in Younha’s throat for a while. No, she finally says, he’s been busy for a while now. He has, but she has no idea with what and that notion, that thought makes her feel like they are so close together yet almost, always worlds apart.
She has always liked to think of their relationship as subtle, understated, maybe a little inconspicuous. There is this look that Kyuhyun will always have on his face, whenever they are together. She does not know how to describe it, but it is theirs. Hers. The way he holds her hand, the way their fingers tangle together - things like these are special to her, to them. Younha notices when he starts doing it less often, then suddenly more. On, off, on, off. It is odd, she thinks.
But nothing is as odd as her finding him in front of his office, talking to someone. Female, tall, longhaired. Maybe she is from his office, Younha thinks, as she stands ten paces away from them. He does not manage to spot her yet, but she sees the look. That look. Their look. Her fingertips feel cold, all of a sudden, and when he turns around with a smile she just stands there. Not moving, not saying anything, just standing in the space between the sun and the shade. She just stands there as he realizes it and walks towards her, so fast he could be running.
“Kyuhyun,” she says as his fingers curl around her wrist, “we need to talk.”
____________
“We need to talk.” It comes out almost painfully. The car is still backing up outside. Beep, beep, beep.
She closes her eyes slowly, and then opens them again. They are red-rimmed, and so are his. They both did not get much sleep yesterday. He was on the couch, looking at the ceiling and thinking, what went wrong? I did not sleep with her I did not betray you I did not do a great wrong I did not I did not I did not will you not leave me please will you not?
“I think,” she closes her eyes again, like she is in great pain. “I think that we both need time.”
The damned car finally finishes backing up the length of their driveway. She looks out of the window, near their door. He keeps using the possessive adjective in his head: their, their, their.
“Yubin is here,” she says after a long, long while. “I should go.”
____________
合 he (the end) . ?
We are all uprooted people. He tells her that, once, when it is a winter night in New York and they are in their apartment watching an old black-and-white movie. Have you ever seen people like us? She shakes her head, and laughs.
We’re pretty special, then.
Now, he would like to blame everything on it. Being uprooted, being unable to commit, being unable to adapt, being unable to make her stay. You don’t understand this, Kyuhyun, she says to him without a hint of malice, or anger, or hatred, or anything like that. Because she really isn’t like that. Younha just does not work that way. He keeps asking her, what? What do I not understand? I never slept with her, we’re colleagues, she’s just nice, we just talk, we only have coffee together, we’re not-
“Don’t,” she says again, sadly this time. “Please, Kyuhyun. Don’t.”
It is like standing in a room, with everything he could ever want. The Qing Dynasty vase he saw while in China with her, the contract with that elusive contractor, the out-of-print edition of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood in Japanese, the blue curtains from his childhood, their apartment in New York. It is everything he wants, it is everything he already can have, and it is everything that he is afraid of. He wants to run away from it, because too much is suffocating. Too much is as bad as too little. So he does it.
Talk to Joohyun every chance he can get. Compliment her on her nice, long hair. Have coffee with her every time there is a tea break. Smile at her more often. Almost hold her hand. Look at things, and think, this is for her. Not Younha, just Joohyun. Take off his wedding band at work, and put it back on when he reaches home. And then when he doesn’t even notice, give her that look. The look Younha calls “theirs”. He trends the line that he is not supposed to, Joohyun following slowly and carefully behind, cautious enough to not fall, but not vigilant enough to not wobble. It is a thin line they walk on, one singular long thread and then when they fall it takes such a long time to land. So long that he does not even know it when he is on the ground, awake, and then full of regret.
It is like stepping outside the room and expecting to find rolling hills and winding rivers. Instead he finds out that there is nothing. Just blank nothingness. And then when he wants to get inside, open that door again, it is locked. It is locked, and only Younha has the key, and she has thrown it away now. He cannot find it anymore, and there is nothing he can do about it. One of these things, the phrase rings in his head. It keeps repeating, and repeating, and repeating, and it paralyses him, forces his being into lead and then.
____________
He cannot move, so he only can watch as the car rolls out of sight from their doorway, further and further until it is an indistinguishable dot in the distance and then, no more.
hahaha.
I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.
Sylvia Plath
“A good essay needs to be like the wind and a fallen leaf,” Kyuhyun remembers his professor saying once, “you need to be that gust of wind. Bring that leaf from a stop to movement, from movement to static. It is an endless cycle. An exciting, endless cycle.”
His professor had gone on to punctuation and stylization after that, but Kyuhyun curiously manages to remember that one, single piece of advice. Make your essay exciting. From movement to none. Vice versa. He never really gets to use that after graduating from college, but when it comes down to this, comes down to him thinking about how everything went wrong, it makes sense. It is the most logical explanation of the process of which they went through, loving each other and then not.
He hears her packing in their room: one, two, three luggage cases of clothes and books and trinkets and everything else. She did not mention who is going to pick her up. He tries to think that it will be Younjin, or Yubin, or maybe Sunye. The prospective list is long, because she has a lot of friends. Always female though. Never Hongki, or Jaejin, or any of the little boys she tutors. He doesn’t know why he still thinks this way. He looks at the silent television for a while more, before deciding that he should help her out.
This is their final day together.
____________
起 qi (the beginning) . Taipei
He signs up for the volunteering job, only because Henry makes him. “Come on, you can speak Korean! And international students are cute!” The boy eggs him on, and Kyuhyun is too lazy to say no, so he obliges. Henry takes care of all the logistics stuff while he plays Starcraft with people from the motherland.
They turn up for the first briefing pretty late. Henry listens and takes notes, while he nods and tries to pretend that he is paying attention. His Chinese has always been better than Henry’s, after all, and it is a travesty, considering how Henry is the kid with the real Chinese DNA and he is just the Korean one who has been living in Taiwan for a long time now. Henry likes to chalk it up to him being in Canada all the way until his high school graduation. Kyuhyun calls him out on it from time to time.
Henry picks up a copy of the student-assignment list on their way out. “Mine’s… this dude Zhou Mi from the mainland. And you… hey that’s not fair! You got a girl!” Henry punches him on the shoulder in disbelief. Kyuhyun peers at the list that he is holding out. It is a girl all right, from the motherland South Korea and studying English Literature at Seoul National. He vaguely remembers his cousin getting in there, and all the times his mother wistfully thought about what could have been, had he and his sister remained in Seoul instead. Ara’s in Austria now though, so Kyuhyun thinks that must count. Somehow.
Henry is still complaining about how he got a guy. Kyuhyun just tries to remember the name of his assigned student.
The international exchange students arrive on a Thursday. Henry is waiting for him outside the lecture hall where he has just had his last engineering lecture of the day. Kyuhyun initially wanted to study law, but decided against it in the end. It didn’t make sense, because his father kept reminding them that they were going back. Soon. Anytime. At the present moment he is still a student at National Taiwan University, but Kyuhyun likes to keep things safe. Leave a backup plan, some fallback option for himself. Things like that.
“You know that they call you my pseudo-girlfriend sometimes, right?” He asks Henry when they are walking towards the Arts building, where the international students are all converged. Henry looks scandalized, and almost trips.
“Do your classmates really say that?” Henry sputters, and Kyuhyun waits for thirty seconds before laughing out loud and clapping his roommate on the back. It is always good fun, teasing Henry. The lecture hall is teeming with students; Kyuhyun can’t really say that he can tell which ones are his schoolmates and which ones are not. Henry keeps hi-fiving the people he knows and meets along the way, and tries to make Kyuhyun do the same.
“Stop fooling around, and find your assigned student!” One of the committee members (and also Henry’s friend from the orchestra) hisses at them, and stuffs sticker nametags into their hands. Henry immediately bolts off to find Zhou Mi from the mainland. Kyuhyun just stands there, and wonders if it will be practical to try and guess who looks Korean and let everything fall into place from there. And then there is the possibility of the assigned student looking completely not like a Korean at all.
He picks at his nametag. Gui Xian. Ara has always laughed and said that it is one of the better sounding Korean names in Chinese. You’re about eighty percent Sinicized, she said. Kyuhyun more or less agrees with that opinion.
So Kyuhyun tries to look around for a while. He only knows her Korean name, romanized, he suddenly realizes. Everyone has their names written in Chinese characters, and he is just about to start thinking if he should make a run for it when someone taps on his shoulder. “Gui Xian?” It is a girl. She doesn’t sound native like he does, though. Kyuhyun turns around, and there she is, short and cute and black haired.
“Hi,” she says again, in curiously accented Chinese. It sounds like a blend of English and Korean pronunciation habits, rolled into one fluid accent that flows quite well off her tongue. Kyuhyun takes a look at her nametag. Run He. He tries to translate that in his head: Younha. A match for the name that he has got stamped into his memory. “Gui Xian, right?”
“I’m Run He,” she says, smiling again. He shakes her hand, the one extended and hanging in mid-air, and smiles back, trying to hope that his Korean doesn’t sound too bad.
“Kyuhyun. Welcome to Taipei.”
____________
It is okay, she tells him when he tries to help. I can do this by myself. So he watches her seal the boxes with rolls of mud coloured tape. The sound is horrific, the way it rips through the air every time she pulls at the roll. But there is nothing he can do, so he just watches. She finishes sealing the box with her clothes in it, and begins work on the second one. This box has books and report files and planners, and then he spots the seal of his college, all the way back on the island he grew up in. Taiwan.
“You still have that?” His voice sounds strangely strained, like it has been wound up and then let go, just a bit. She nods, and picks it up. It is the certificate the university gave her, when she finished the summer programme there.
He still has that photo taken on that day, when she was about to leave, and he was sulking, the entire day. Don’t be like this, she had said, we can still write each other! Her hand was cool in his, and he only moped around for a while more after that. Henry took the photograph for them, against the backdrop of the main school gate, with palm trees and a very bright sun. The palm trees and school gate and Henry are still there, in Taipei. They are not.
It is the things like this, little things that change and morph out of shape, that scares him. There is no control to be had over these things. You can only watch them deform themselves into a structure you cannot understand, cannot comprehend. And then you can only accept it. You can only choose to take it, because it is the only way out.
Sometimes Kyuhyun wonders if Younha is willingly accepting these things that fate throws her way. He tries to run against time now, but she sits serenely and lets it take her, float her down the river of life. He cannot catch up, she will not wait, and it is one of these things. Another one of them, and what you can do is only to understand that you have no other option because you reap what you sow.
____________
承 cheng (the good) . Taipei / New York
She writes him, like she promised at the end of her summer in Taipei. They exchange emails, almost everyday, and Kyuhyun periodically sends her some when he is bored in class, or at lunch, or during dinner, or when Henry is practicing his violin and he has nothing else to do. Starcraft usually takes a back seat when he is emailing Younha. It is funny, how one summer can change everything, he sometimes thinks. He did not expect to fall in love, but they did.
Younha is an uprooted Korean like he is. She grew up in New York, and did not move back to Korea until she was eighteen. Just in time to make it for the university application periods back home. “It was horrible when the SAT results were released,” she had told him once, when they were at Tamshui, sitting by the riverside and sharing a cone of ice cream just because, “there was nothing else on the news except for students fainting and parents threatening to sue the Ministry of Education. You’re a lucky kid, you know? So faraway from that sort of madness.”
Kyuhyun had nodded then, and finished the cone. She did not mind. Younha didn’t usually mind things like that. Even Henry got tired of his weird habits sometimes, like playing Starcraft deep into the night, or listening to music and not caring about the conversation, or eating too much of junk food, or stealing food from their shared pantry. But Younha really did not mind. She just laughed and let him be. “You’re interesting,” she had said. Interesting as in crazy interesting or what? Kyuhyun hadn’t asked. But he was not bothered either. Deep down, he knew that he was toning everything down just for her. It made him feel a bit warm and fuzzy inside, at least until Henry started noticing that he was staying on his Gmail page and clicking on the refresh button for way too long.
She attaches a photo of her in winter wear with her next email. My home in New York! He laughs at the caption, typed in a mish-mash of Chinese and Korean. Younha goes on to tell him about her holidays back in the States (“Turkey with my grandmother. She keeps insisting it’s chicken, I don’t know why”) and her future plans. I’m about to graduate, the second last line of her email reads, I think I might want to come back here.
Kyuhyun reads her email again as the ceiling fan clacks in the background. Winter in Taiwan isn’t a big deal - sometimes it is hot, sometimes it is cold. He is Korean, so most of the time it just feels slightly warm to him. Henry though, despite being ninety percent Canadian, always has to wrap himself up in two layers of shirts before he goes to bed. The prospectus package is lying on his table; his professor told him earlier, after the lecture, that he would like to recommend him for the Master’s programme scholarship dealt out by the school. You can choose where you want to go, his professor had said.
He tells his professor that he might consider it. And then he replies her this:
So, do you think I should join you?
When in New York:
They live together, in the apartment with the rickety doors and permanently spoilt elevator. They climb the stairs together, and she usually gets tired two floors below their room. He carries her piggyback up then, those times. They eat breakfast, she makes ddeokbokki with whatever she can find. Sometimes it is ketchup, sometimes it is chilli sauce, sometimes it is both. When she can get the real sauce, though, he finishes the entire pot. Their bed sheets are always either blue or white. He likes blue. She likes white. He changes them on Mondays, she does it on all the other days. But she kicks him to do it with her. And he does.
Their favourite place to go to is Central Park. She likes the birds, he likes the benches. They toss coins into every fountain they walk past. He laughs at her for it. I’m Korean, she replies, I believe in good luck. And he is Korean too, so he just holds her hand and steers her on. Except that maybe next time he throws one in too. Just for good luck. They eat at the Korean restaurant ten minutes away, mostly on Sundays after church service. Is this your husband, the ajumma there laughs at her every time. No, not yet, he always replies. She tries to not blush. Most of the time she cannot.
She plays the piano in church. He joins the choir, only because she and his mother make him. You keep him in church, his mother tells her during their nightly Skype calls. He shrugs and says that he will never lapse. Not when she is around. They meet a lot of other Koreans in their church. Sungmin and Yubin and the peculiarly named Sunday. Also, his classmate Ryeowook. They go out for beer sometimes, but she never drinks. Sungmin is a party animal, and they meet more and more and more and more people. American, Korean, Chinese, one Thai even. The girl called Sunye becomes one of her closer friends. He sticks to Sungmin, and Ryeowook, and sometimes Sunye’s husband Donghae. Koreans stick together, she once tells him jokingly. Because it’s easier to get ddeokbokki sauce that way.
He kisses her almost everyday. In the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Like a daily ritual of some sort. On her forehead, mostly in the mornings, but on the mouth every other time. I love you, he is never afraid to say this. She nods and smiles into his lips. Sometimes, he thinks about it. This. Right now. This is where her roots are, and he is holding on to her to keep safe, keep sane. She is his buoy. So he holds on as tight as he can, and promises himself that he will never let go. America is their home now. For now, at least. He keeps thinking that, and keeps holding on. She lets him.
____________
He trails behind her, as she walks in and out and in and out. There are five boxes in total. Five boxes worth of memories of this house, and then perhaps him and them. He finds it strange, because how can so much be put into so little? But then memories are not worth as much as feelings. There is no more between them, he thinks. It will be hard to find even a remnant of love in her eyes. Younha has always been quite consistent about that. No means no. Letting go means letting go. Leaving means leaving. So on and so forth.
She stacks the last box up, and looks at him like she is so tired. He wonders if he should- if he can touch her.
Then he hears a car pulling up, and begins to panic.
____________
轉 zhuan (the bad) . Seoul
Sometimes she dreams of their time in New York. It is vivid, and bright, and boldly coloured, like all dreams are. When she opens her eyes, she can almost see the green road-signs, seared into her irises. New York is her home, like how Taipei is his. She occasionally finds it funny, because they are all Korean and they are in Korea right now and they really should be at home, at ease. But it is not this way, and sometimes she thinks to fight it, to take flight, but she does not. Younha does not do things that way.
She works from home now, giving tuition to a few students, translating manuscripts, mostly. It pays quite a bit, and so they live in a small house just off Apgujeong. They have new money, Sunye laughs over the phone, over the Pacific Ocean, voice sometimes crackly, sometimes not. Her husband does research at some governmental organization. So Younha agrees. They do have new money, of some sort.
Kyuhyun and she decided to move back home three years after his parents did. They were already married by then, settled in NYC, planning to move to an apartment with a working elevator and not as many stairs. But then his mother took a fall, and her back was never quite the same after that. So Kyuhyun took the job the government had been dangling for a while - “I have no bond, it doesn’t matter,” he had said when she’d asked if it were really okay. So they made the move back. Home, but not really. She lived there for only four years before, and he not even two.
It scared Younha, in the beginning, because life was different when she was a student. She didn’t have to interact with older, ajumma neighbours, or know how to make kimchi, or memorize the names of everyone living within a kilometer’s radius of her home. Kyuhyun didn’t know that would happen too, because he completely had no idea what life in Korea was like. I was only two when we left for Taiwan, he told her one night during dinner (kimchi made by the ajumma next door). She nodded, and did not remind him that she was not even born here.
Younha works hard, because it is in her to do that. She never got any allowance unless she did chores, helped out with taking care of Younjin, washed her father’s car or the dishes. It was hard work, but she liked it. Builds character, her dad used to say. He still does.
The neighbours eagerly push their kids to be tutored by her in English, and so she immerses herself in that everyday. Conversations about what your name is, what your favourite hobby is, do you like Angelina Jolie? (Yes, me like, Hongki would say. And then Jaejin would say no, I more like Christina Aguilera) It makes her happy, kind of, to see her students go from parroting to actually being able to speak fluently. Tutoring keeps her occupied, but she still cooks dinner and calls her mother-in-law and tries to help out her father-in-law with his tuition centres. “Why don’t you ever go there to teach?” Kyuhyun asks her one night, like it is something scandalous.
“Well,” she pauses. “I’m not exactly good at Math.” Kyuhyun gives her a look, and then they laugh, but there is something about it that she cannot put her finger on. Younha tries to ignore it anyway. Gut feelings are not something she trusts.
He has to build up everything from scratch when he makes the move back to Korea. He has no contacts, no friends, nothing. Suddenly he misses Taipei and maybe the States, but when his mother calls and he overhears his wife talking to her on the phone, he knows that it is here that they must stay. So he resigns himself to pushing papers everyday, nine to five, doing lunch and dinner and drinks with his colleagues and bosses and subordinates. It goes on and on and on and it seems like he must have a perpetual hangover. Younha makes ginger tea every morning, and he takes it in a thermal flask to work, but sometimes he just looks at it, head swirling in pain, and does not drink.
“You know,” one day, a voice suddenly sounds above him, “you shouldn’t be drinking so much alcohol. People die young from doing that sort of thing.” He looks up from his thermal flask at her, the young lady in the white blouse and cream A-line skirt. Seo Joohyun, her nametag reads. His eyes are still watering, but he just nods and she puts a packet of medicine on his table. “Take this. Vitamin B6.” Then she walks off, and he watches until she turns and disappears into the lift lobby. His head still hurts, but Kyuhyun feels strangely better.
Kyuhyun does not know how he manages to make friends. Not when he is almost always perpetually drunk on soju. But make friends he does, and he finds himself having lunch more and more often with Seo Joohyun of the Human Resources department. When you are friends with Seo Joohyun you have to clean up your act. So he doesn’t get hungover as much now, and she doesn’t press that packet of Vitamin B6 into his hand anymore. She lectures him about the vices of coffee and alcohol and cigarettes and not sleeping early. “You will die young,” she warns him sternly, and he only laughs, but takes her advice anyway. Younha wonders aloud once why he doesn’t drink as much coffee as before - he does not tell her about Seo Joohyun.
Joohyun - he omits her surname now, after she says it’s okay to do that - reminds him of his wife, sometimes. Younha used to have long hair, like she did, but she cut it off until the shoulder when they moved from the States. “I don’t like it,” he told her after that, fingering the ends of her hair. Younha only shook her head and said, it is more practical this way. Both of them are pragmatic, he thinks. But Younha just leaves him alone, lets him do his thing. Joohyun does not. She plans and lists and makes him do things that will “save his health”. I will work for another ten years. Go on a holiday around the world. Try to make it to the UN. Write a book. Visit the Vatican, meet the Pope. These are things that are on Joohyun’s list. And, Kyuhyun realizes with a deadened feeling somewhere at the bottom of his chest, he has no idea what is on Younha’s.
It is one night, when she is talking about bad English and he about the lack of money in a few of the research projects at work, that he realizes they completely have no idea what the other is talking about. She listens to him, and he listens to her, but there is nothing that he understands at all. He does not understand why Hongki’s terrible syntax, or the way Jaejin curls his tongue excessively around the ‘r’ sound, or the horrible sentence structure of Seunghyun’s writing matters. He simply does not care. Nothing ever clicks, and so he continues to listen until she has finished talking.
And then they go to bed. It is quiet, then, and he falls into a dreamless sleep easily. This repeats, and repeats, and repeats, and then it becomes a habit.
“Do you have kids?” Joohyun asks him one day, when they are walking back to the office from lunch. No, we don’t, he tells her almost immediately, and then she nods like it is the most normal thing in the world. He doesn’t know why they don’t have kids. It is funny, because they love children. It just has not popped up yet, the issue, and when he remembers his wife and her smile and her hair - why did she cut it again, he hates hates hates it - he looks back at Joohyun and thinks, maybe it is good that they do not have any. Right now. The thought embeds itself into his head, and steadily grows.
“We’re just friends, right?” She comes to him for confirmation, solace of some sort. He looks at her, and Joohyun looks at him, and he almost wants to reach for her hand.
“Just friends. We’re not doing anything wrong.” Kyuhyun tells her like it is true, and then that is it.
“I forgot,” his voice is quiet over the phone. Younha tries not to sigh. It’s okay, she tells him. I’ll go buy it alone. She does not blame him, even if they have agreed on this trip out a long time ago. Sometimes Kyuhyun forgets things - he does that more often now, but she cannot find it in her to tell him off, to get angry, start a fight. It is tiring, draining to even think about it these days. So she doesn’t do all of that, and just drives to the furniture store instead.
The ajumma neighbour is the one who helps her with the new ottoman, when she returns from the store and is stuck at the driveway because it is too heavy. The ajumma asks her about her tuition while they move forward towards the door, is it going well, does she need more kimchi, does she want to learn how to make a new variety, how is her husband, would they like to come over for dinner some day? The words get stuck in Younha’s throat for a while. No, she finally says, he’s been busy for a while now. He has, but she has no idea with what and that notion, that thought makes her feel like they are so close together yet almost, always worlds apart.
She has always liked to think of their relationship as subtle, understated, maybe a little inconspicuous. There is this look that Kyuhyun will always have on his face, whenever they are together. She does not know how to describe it, but it is theirs. Hers. The way he holds her hand, the way their fingers tangle together - things like these are special to her, to them. Younha notices when he starts doing it less often, then suddenly more. On, off, on, off. It is odd, she thinks.
But nothing is as odd as her finding him in front of his office, talking to someone. Female, tall, longhaired. Maybe she is from his office, Younha thinks, as she stands ten paces away from them. He does not manage to spot her yet, but she sees the look. That look. Their look. Her fingertips feel cold, all of a sudden, and when he turns around with a smile she just stands there. Not moving, not saying anything, just standing in the space between the sun and the shade. She just stands there as he realizes it and walks towards her, so fast he could be running.
“Kyuhyun,” she says as his fingers curl around her wrist, “we need to talk.”
____________
“We need to talk.” It comes out almost painfully. The car is still backing up outside. Beep, beep, beep.
She closes her eyes slowly, and then opens them again. They are red-rimmed, and so are his. They both did not get much sleep yesterday. He was on the couch, looking at the ceiling and thinking, what went wrong? I did not sleep with her I did not betray you I did not do a great wrong I did not I did not I did not will you not leave me please will you not?
“I think,” she closes her eyes again, like she is in great pain. “I think that we both need time.”
The damned car finally finishes backing up the length of their driveway. She looks out of the window, near their door. He keeps using the possessive adjective in his head: their, their, their.
“Yubin is here,” she says after a long, long while. “I should go.”
____________
合 he (the end) . ?
We are all uprooted people. He tells her that, once, when it is a winter night in New York and they are in their apartment watching an old black-and-white movie. Have you ever seen people like us? She shakes her head, and laughs.
We’re pretty special, then.
Now, he would like to blame everything on it. Being uprooted, being unable to commit, being unable to adapt, being unable to make her stay. You don’t understand this, Kyuhyun, she says to him without a hint of malice, or anger, or hatred, or anything like that. Because she really isn’t like that. Younha just does not work that way. He keeps asking her, what? What do I not understand? I never slept with her, we’re colleagues, she’s just nice, we just talk, we only have coffee together, we’re not-
“Don’t,” she says again, sadly this time. “Please, Kyuhyun. Don’t.”
It is like standing in a room, with everything he could ever want. The Qing Dynasty vase he saw while in China with her, the contract with that elusive contractor, the out-of-print edition of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood in Japanese, the blue curtains from his childhood, their apartment in New York. It is everything he wants, it is everything he already can have, and it is everything that he is afraid of. He wants to run away from it, because too much is suffocating. Too much is as bad as too little. So he does it.
Talk to Joohyun every chance he can get. Compliment her on her nice, long hair. Have coffee with her every time there is a tea break. Smile at her more often. Almost hold her hand. Look at things, and think, this is for her. Not Younha, just Joohyun. Take off his wedding band at work, and put it back on when he reaches home. And then when he doesn’t even notice, give her that look. The look Younha calls “theirs”. He trends the line that he is not supposed to, Joohyun following slowly and carefully behind, cautious enough to not fall, but not vigilant enough to not wobble. It is a thin line they walk on, one singular long thread and then when they fall it takes such a long time to land. So long that he does not even know it when he is on the ground, awake, and then full of regret.
It is like stepping outside the room and expecting to find rolling hills and winding rivers. Instead he finds out that there is nothing. Just blank nothingness. And then when he wants to get inside, open that door again, it is locked. It is locked, and only Younha has the key, and she has thrown it away now. He cannot find it anymore, and there is nothing he can do about it. One of these things, the phrase rings in his head. It keeps repeating, and repeating, and repeating, and it paralyses him, forces his being into lead and then.
____________
He cannot move, so he only can watch as the car rolls out of sight from their doorway, further and further until it is an indistinguishable dot in the distance and then, no more.