(no subject)
homecoming
hankyung-centric, pg-13, 2430ⓦ
Note: Lyrics from 愛情接力.
"Love," this English word: like other English words it has tense. "Loved" or "will love" or "have loved." All these specific tenses mean love is time-limited. Not infinite. It only exists in a particular period of time. In Chinese, love is "愛." It has no tense. No past and no future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.
If our love existed in Chinese tense, then it will last for ever. It will be infinite.
- 郭小櫓, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
A fitting word for Korea is bitter, like tea steeped for too long: everything tastes the same in his mouth. Korea is monotone, gochujang and odd syllables: an unfamiliar language heavy and blurred on his tongue, the one meal he's learned to order at the same restaurant masquerading as Chinese in a place where nobody save Han Geng seems to know any better.
The first thing he learns after "hello" is that his name has changed. After that, all he is is I'm sorry, I don't speak Korean well.
Korea is first, and Jaejoong is second. (First the worst, second the best, they say.) Jaejoong is an iceberg, cold and porcelain and unapproachable, all pale skin and glittering eyes. Jaejoong is just as much an island as he is, albeit self-imposed.
Jaejoong is the one that makes him believe in six impossible things before breakfast.
A few months in, he wakes up to find Jaejoong eyeing an egg in the kitchen like championship round in a staring contest. "Where do the extra calories come from," he demands. "A cooked egg has seven more calories than an uncooked egg."
"Um," Han Geng says, eloquently. Pop quizzes are not in my contract, he wants to say. "I don't know?"
Jaejoong regards him sternly. "Love," he says decisively, turning back to the stove. He beams at him, and simultaneously cracks the egg over the frying pan. "It's probably because I cook them with love."
"Your love is making me fat," Han Geng says, and spoons tea leaves into a strainer.
Kibum still means messy hair, awkward long limbs and baggy clothes when Han Geng meets him for the first time. Kibum's impossibly young, chasing down dreams on a whim, sure as anything on one day and making 180-degree decisions the next. Kibum changes daily: each time he wakes up, he's a little different, somehow still the same. By comparison, Han Geng is steadfast, an identical determination for the same few goals. It makes them polar opposites, Kibum running home from exile and Han Geng walking straight into it. But they have dreams, and it makes them the same: for all of Kibum's inconsistencies, he's die-hard.
They had made a promise, early on, to walk together, no matter how different their paths might become. So they linger in practice rooms, Kibum leaning against a mirrored wall with scripts in hand while Han Geng executes sharp dance movements. For them, Seoul never sleeps.
"I can't call it suffering," Han Geng shrugs, tilting his head and shaking out sore muscles. "It's my dream." It's easy for them to understand each other, when they don't need words to explain what both of them already know.
"Be careful what you wish for, right?" Kibum says, but he smiles. A thick script is lying in his lap, loose-leaf. Kibum, it seems, has perfected the art of smiling, brilliant and beautiful. Open happiness, to combat the way people pull into themselves like a hermit crab in unfamiliar territory.
"I was." Han Geng reaches out, and pulls Kibum to his feet.
His dreams and his phone calls are identical: the smell of his mother's hair, familiar cooking and jade decorations on the wall. Mornings used to mean jasmine tea; now they mean cold sweat and familiar muscle aches - arms, thighs, back, heart. He's finding that the longer he is away, the farther back his memories go. This time, it's elementary school, and he wakes up with the thought that soon he'll hit zero.
Heechul always finds him afterward. He rubs concentric circles into his back with his thumb, palm flat. He never asks questions, offers only an uncharacteristic silence. Han Geng feels like an earthquake, trembling and shaking and afraid. He leans into Heechul like the warmth and gravity will make him stop crying, stop hurting, stop feeling. Heechul outlasts the aftershocks, and teaches him to stand upright again.
"Do we have any cucumbers," Heechul says after a moment. He is sitting on the edge of the shower, by the shampoo bottles, watching Han Geng towel his face dry with a damp towel. Han Geng gives him a no, but you're crazy look through the mirror. It is like Heechul, he's discovered, to turn to non sequiturs: sudden, abrasive, strange. Characteristic, almost.
"You have bags under your eyes," Heechul explains. "The size of wristlets. You should put sequins on them."
"I don't understand you," Han Geng says patiently. He's beginning to think he should put a trademark on the phrase. But he smiles anyway, and Heechul seems relieved.
Four Seasons dies almost as quickly as it is conceived, explosive like a Catherine wheel, and then Jaejoong's debuting, this time for real. A few days before their first stage, Jaejoong gets drunk, Han Geng in tow. "This is real, right," Jaejoong says, searching for validation he shouldn't need but does. He's running his finger across the rim of the cup like a nervous tic. On his wrist is the bracelet he had bought in pairs, for the two of them.
The real problem is that neither of them are more than halfway drunk. "Yes," Han Geng supplies, in lieu of anything more than comfortably monosyllabic. Because it's Jaejoong, he half expects it when the other leans over and kisses him on the sly. Jaejoong tastes warm and golden under the alcohol. It reminds him of sunset, and he thinks, rather than says, you were always summer.
In China, family is everything. Father, son, brother, friend: everything comes down to kinship. Zhou Mi is like a decorated war veteran with all his singing awards and first place plaques, but it doesn't stop him from pulling full-stop 90-degree bows on Han Geng the first few times they see each other. "Are you calling me old," Han Geng says finally, in Mandarin. He tries and fails to sound bad-tempered.
"Yes, sunbaenim," Zhou Mi says, and bursts, helplessly, into laughter. It's the last time they use full names with each other.
Zhou Mi reminds him of a grasshopper, zha meng: all long legs and pointed features. It never occurs to Han Geng to question the fact: Zhou Mi is a part of spring.
Siwon is the poster boy for perfection, but Han Geng doesn't mind. At worst, with Jaejoong, hand signals and sheer earnestness tided them through; Heechul just complains that he should be more Korean before rattling off a dozen synonyms Han Geng doesn't know either. None of it is necessary with Siwon. Siwon's pronunciation is rough and ostensibly foreign, but there is a certain relief in being able to have a fragment of China in Seoul.
He takes more comfort in it than he should, the fact that Siwon calls him ge and doesn't mind when Han Geng starts sentences in Korean only to end them in Chinese. There aren't words to describe the reassurance he feels, but Siwon always smiles like he understands.
It's a few years of stumbling through broadcasts as the token Chinese boy with bad Korean that finally it doesn't matter at all. Super Junior M: it sounds comfortable in his mouth, the word China - not chung guk, but zhong guo - even more so. It's strange to suddenly be speaking Mandarin with three extra people; the days leading up to their first flight out are a hectic jumble, excitement running high. He ends up awake past midnight, folding clothes into his luggage last minute. Heechul makes flippant comments the entire time, as if by being humorous he can hide everything else he's feeling.
"Heechul," he finally says around his toothbrush, pausing in the bathroom doorframe. "Heechul, I-"
"What's wrong with you," Heechul frowns. He shifts, leaning against the wall with one shoulder, arms crossed. Despite his indifference, he's standing to one side, careful not to touch the box of smoked glass bottles of perfume sitting on the floor. "Don't bring that shirt," he says, without bothering to point.
"Okay," Han Geng says from inside the bathroom, muffled; the faucet runs for a moment, and then he steps back into the room, avoiding the open, half-packed luggage at the centre of the room.
"You're still Korean," Heechul says, tone bordering on belligerent. He's tried too hard to make Korea less foreign to Han Geng to lose it like this, now.
Han Geng studies the hard, stiff lines of Heechul's shoulders for a moment. He takes too long to answer, and Heechul pretends it's a concession. It's the first and last time they talk about it.
China loves Siwon, who is attractive and eager to please, good-natured and tall. They adore Ryeowook for his pretty face, Zhou Mi for the entertainment value, Kyuhyun for his voice and Henry for his violin solos and, of course, Donghae, who stays up late learning to say "baby." In China, they always choose to ask Han Geng about the early days, penniless when he touched down in Seoul and the dozen different masks he wore on stage to keep performing. More than once, stray cameras capture Siwon lined up shoulder to shoulder with Han Geng in a reminder, look how far we've come. It's always pride that keeps him smiling.
Everyone loves Donghae. It's almost just a matter of time: he's easy to talk to because there are no words, just movement; the language of dance. Donghae has a tendency to stick his tongue out of the corner of his mouth when he is concentrating. It makes him laugh, and Donghae never catches on. "Hyung," he whines, "What's so funny?" But Donghae is always content to laugh without knowing the punch line. Languages aren't universal, but laughter is. Loving Donghae is.
"Ge," Siwon says in a stage whisper, backstage. Han Geng can hear the smile in Siwon's voice even before he looks up from the cue cards he's shuffling through. "Donghae wants to know how to say 'loose women' in Chinese. What do I tell him?"
Han Geng stops flipping cards.
Homesickness hits Henry the hardest, because home isn't Korea or even China like it is for everyone else; no one speaks his real fall-back language and he's never really been able to tolerate spicy food. Diets and a premature bachelor lifestyle don't suit him well. His Korean is better than Han Geng thinks his will ever be, although they both still make mistakes on national television, only to laugh at them later; he doesn't have Han Geng's soft countryside accent.
Henry's easy to read but hard to protect. Donghae is the one who uses stumbling, head-over-heels English to make Henry feel at home; for Han Geng, food is tried and true. After long-distance phone calls, Han Geng boils water and makes oolong tea and ramen.
Henry's hair falls into his eyes when he sits down at the table. "Thanks," he says quietly. Sadness used to make people old, weary: now, Henry looks younger than ever. Tears are the common denominator between all of them. It is always family, home: a condensation nucleus, their one allowed quality of fallibility.
"It's kind of like - we used to play a game, in school," Henry says, running his finger along the side of the ramen bowl as it cooks. Han Geng is careful to get the brands that are popular in Canada; Henry never shows signs of noticing. "Where you link fingers and push the other person's fingers backward, until someone says 'mercy.' Then the person lets go. This is - I mean, it gets better, right?" He looks up, waiting.
He's no longer sure if Henry's talking about the backlash or missing home, or all of it. He doesn't want to lie. "It's better every time you go back," Han Geng says finally, a little evasive, and hands Henry a pair of chopsticks. Henry smiles a little.
"This is kind of silly, ge," Zhou Mi says, as gently as he knows how. He is sitting outside the bathroom door, long limbs sprawling in the hallway. He hears Han Geng get up, and sits up straight, a little hopeful. An ugly retching sound leaks out of the bathroom instead, and he winces, tries again: "Let me in."
Under the sound of the toilet flushing is a click as the door unlocks, and Zhou Mi edges in, shutting the door behind him. Han Geng leans over the sink and spits, a mess of blood and saliva. He lets the faucet run for a moment, and then lets Zhou Mi pull him down to rest against the bathroom tiles. Zhou Mi doesn't let go of his hand. (He knows how to keep secrets.)
Victoria reminds him of a bird, pretty wrist bones and flighty dancer curves. He'd found her without shoes on in a practice room after hours, practicing a Dai dance he knows like the back of his hand, from the lifted toe down to the fluid extensions of the arm, fingers splayed. "Not bad," he says, quiet Chinese syllables hoarse with disuse, when the song ends. She retracts her arm, startled, and smiles.
His best memories of Victoria are by Han River. It reminds him, sometimes, of Beijing: the glittering shine of a city that moves at the speed of light. Han River was a place for Victoria to clear her head, escape the tense airspace in the company buildings.
"Oh," she says. "Kissing bug."
"What?" Han Geng looks around. He doesn't see anything, but shifts away a little anyway.
"It works like mistletoe," she says, waving her hand a little. Her nails are long, painted pink today. "Trust me." She smiles the smile he likes best, secretive and pretty. He kisses it.
He can taste a hint of her lip gloss on his mouth, plastic and strawberry-scented, when he pulls away. "Go home, Qian," Han Geng says, shifting the watch on his wrist to check the time. Victoria laughs a little, running fingers through her hair so that it sweeps to one side. She doesn't.
If anything, he's learned that everything comes full circle; past, present and future. In the morning, the scent of jasmine tea mingles with the smell of herbal medicine. His mother says good morning just the way he's always remembered, but somehow knowing his surroundings are permanent changes things; for every hour he spends in peace, he can think of a dozen different ways he would be doing otherwise in Korea - Star King, radio shows, lives. Home, they say, is where the heart is: and here he is, where he has never been able to leave.
He still goes to sleep with the same heartsick feeling he had back in Korea, of missing people.
愛的磁性把兩顆心粘在一起 就算相隔千里 愛不離
The magnetism of of love keeps two hearts together
Even a thousand miles away, love doesn't leave.*
hankyung-centric, pg-13, 2430ⓦ
Note: Lyrics from 愛情接力.
"Love," this English word: like other English words it has tense. "Loved" or "will love" or "have loved." All these specific tenses mean love is time-limited. Not infinite. It only exists in a particular period of time. In Chinese, love is "愛." It has no tense. No past and no future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.
If our love existed in Chinese tense, then it will last for ever. It will be infinite.
- 郭小櫓, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
A fitting word for Korea is bitter, like tea steeped for too long: everything tastes the same in his mouth. Korea is monotone, gochujang and odd syllables: an unfamiliar language heavy and blurred on his tongue, the one meal he's learned to order at the same restaurant masquerading as Chinese in a place where nobody save Han Geng seems to know any better.
The first thing he learns after "hello" is that his name has changed. After that, all he is is I'm sorry, I don't speak Korean well.
Korea is first, and Jaejoong is second. (First the worst, second the best, they say.) Jaejoong is an iceberg, cold and porcelain and unapproachable, all pale skin and glittering eyes. Jaejoong is just as much an island as he is, albeit self-imposed.
Jaejoong is the one that makes him believe in six impossible things before breakfast.
A few months in, he wakes up to find Jaejoong eyeing an egg in the kitchen like championship round in a staring contest. "Where do the extra calories come from," he demands. "A cooked egg has seven more calories than an uncooked egg."
"Um," Han Geng says, eloquently. Pop quizzes are not in my contract, he wants to say. "I don't know?"
Jaejoong regards him sternly. "Love," he says decisively, turning back to the stove. He beams at him, and simultaneously cracks the egg over the frying pan. "It's probably because I cook them with love."
"Your love is making me fat," Han Geng says, and spoons tea leaves into a strainer.
Kibum still means messy hair, awkward long limbs and baggy clothes when Han Geng meets him for the first time. Kibum's impossibly young, chasing down dreams on a whim, sure as anything on one day and making 180-degree decisions the next. Kibum changes daily: each time he wakes up, he's a little different, somehow still the same. By comparison, Han Geng is steadfast, an identical determination for the same few goals. It makes them polar opposites, Kibum running home from exile and Han Geng walking straight into it. But they have dreams, and it makes them the same: for all of Kibum's inconsistencies, he's die-hard.
They had made a promise, early on, to walk together, no matter how different their paths might become. So they linger in practice rooms, Kibum leaning against a mirrored wall with scripts in hand while Han Geng executes sharp dance movements. For them, Seoul never sleeps.
"I can't call it suffering," Han Geng shrugs, tilting his head and shaking out sore muscles. "It's my dream." It's easy for them to understand each other, when they don't need words to explain what both of them already know.
"Be careful what you wish for, right?" Kibum says, but he smiles. A thick script is lying in his lap, loose-leaf. Kibum, it seems, has perfected the art of smiling, brilliant and beautiful. Open happiness, to combat the way people pull into themselves like a hermit crab in unfamiliar territory.
"I was." Han Geng reaches out, and pulls Kibum to his feet.
His dreams and his phone calls are identical: the smell of his mother's hair, familiar cooking and jade decorations on the wall. Mornings used to mean jasmine tea; now they mean cold sweat and familiar muscle aches - arms, thighs, back, heart. He's finding that the longer he is away, the farther back his memories go. This time, it's elementary school, and he wakes up with the thought that soon he'll hit zero.
Heechul always finds him afterward. He rubs concentric circles into his back with his thumb, palm flat. He never asks questions, offers only an uncharacteristic silence. Han Geng feels like an earthquake, trembling and shaking and afraid. He leans into Heechul like the warmth and gravity will make him stop crying, stop hurting, stop feeling. Heechul outlasts the aftershocks, and teaches him to stand upright again.
"Do we have any cucumbers," Heechul says after a moment. He is sitting on the edge of the shower, by the shampoo bottles, watching Han Geng towel his face dry with a damp towel. Han Geng gives him a no, but you're crazy look through the mirror. It is like Heechul, he's discovered, to turn to non sequiturs: sudden, abrasive, strange. Characteristic, almost.
"You have bags under your eyes," Heechul explains. "The size of wristlets. You should put sequins on them."
"I don't understand you," Han Geng says patiently. He's beginning to think he should put a trademark on the phrase. But he smiles anyway, and Heechul seems relieved.
Four Seasons dies almost as quickly as it is conceived, explosive like a Catherine wheel, and then Jaejoong's debuting, this time for real. A few days before their first stage, Jaejoong gets drunk, Han Geng in tow. "This is real, right," Jaejoong says, searching for validation he shouldn't need but does. He's running his finger across the rim of the cup like a nervous tic. On his wrist is the bracelet he had bought in pairs, for the two of them.
The real problem is that neither of them are more than halfway drunk. "Yes," Han Geng supplies, in lieu of anything more than comfortably monosyllabic. Because it's Jaejoong, he half expects it when the other leans over and kisses him on the sly. Jaejoong tastes warm and golden under the alcohol. It reminds him of sunset, and he thinks, rather than says, you were always summer.
In China, family is everything. Father, son, brother, friend: everything comes down to kinship. Zhou Mi is like a decorated war veteran with all his singing awards and first place plaques, but it doesn't stop him from pulling full-stop 90-degree bows on Han Geng the first few times they see each other. "Are you calling me old," Han Geng says finally, in Mandarin. He tries and fails to sound bad-tempered.
"Yes, sunbaenim," Zhou Mi says, and bursts, helplessly, into laughter. It's the last time they use full names with each other.
Zhou Mi reminds him of a grasshopper, zha meng: all long legs and pointed features. It never occurs to Han Geng to question the fact: Zhou Mi is a part of spring.
Siwon is the poster boy for perfection, but Han Geng doesn't mind. At worst, with Jaejoong, hand signals and sheer earnestness tided them through; Heechul just complains that he should be more Korean before rattling off a dozen synonyms Han Geng doesn't know either. None of it is necessary with Siwon. Siwon's pronunciation is rough and ostensibly foreign, but there is a certain relief in being able to have a fragment of China in Seoul.
He takes more comfort in it than he should, the fact that Siwon calls him ge and doesn't mind when Han Geng starts sentences in Korean only to end them in Chinese. There aren't words to describe the reassurance he feels, but Siwon always smiles like he understands.
It's a few years of stumbling through broadcasts as the token Chinese boy with bad Korean that finally it doesn't matter at all. Super Junior M: it sounds comfortable in his mouth, the word China - not chung guk, but zhong guo - even more so. It's strange to suddenly be speaking Mandarin with three extra people; the days leading up to their first flight out are a hectic jumble, excitement running high. He ends up awake past midnight, folding clothes into his luggage last minute. Heechul makes flippant comments the entire time, as if by being humorous he can hide everything else he's feeling.
"Heechul," he finally says around his toothbrush, pausing in the bathroom doorframe. "Heechul, I-"
"What's wrong with you," Heechul frowns. He shifts, leaning against the wall with one shoulder, arms crossed. Despite his indifference, he's standing to one side, careful not to touch the box of smoked glass bottles of perfume sitting on the floor. "Don't bring that shirt," he says, without bothering to point.
"Okay," Han Geng says from inside the bathroom, muffled; the faucet runs for a moment, and then he steps back into the room, avoiding the open, half-packed luggage at the centre of the room.
"You're still Korean," Heechul says, tone bordering on belligerent. He's tried too hard to make Korea less foreign to Han Geng to lose it like this, now.
Han Geng studies the hard, stiff lines of Heechul's shoulders for a moment. He takes too long to answer, and Heechul pretends it's a concession. It's the first and last time they talk about it.
China loves Siwon, who is attractive and eager to please, good-natured and tall. They adore Ryeowook for his pretty face, Zhou Mi for the entertainment value, Kyuhyun for his voice and Henry for his violin solos and, of course, Donghae, who stays up late learning to say "baby." In China, they always choose to ask Han Geng about the early days, penniless when he touched down in Seoul and the dozen different masks he wore on stage to keep performing. More than once, stray cameras capture Siwon lined up shoulder to shoulder with Han Geng in a reminder, look how far we've come. It's always pride that keeps him smiling.
Everyone loves Donghae. It's almost just a matter of time: he's easy to talk to because there are no words, just movement; the language of dance. Donghae has a tendency to stick his tongue out of the corner of his mouth when he is concentrating. It makes him laugh, and Donghae never catches on. "Hyung," he whines, "What's so funny?" But Donghae is always content to laugh without knowing the punch line. Languages aren't universal, but laughter is. Loving Donghae is.
"Ge," Siwon says in a stage whisper, backstage. Han Geng can hear the smile in Siwon's voice even before he looks up from the cue cards he's shuffling through. "Donghae wants to know how to say 'loose women' in Chinese. What do I tell him?"
Han Geng stops flipping cards.
Homesickness hits Henry the hardest, because home isn't Korea or even China like it is for everyone else; no one speaks his real fall-back language and he's never really been able to tolerate spicy food. Diets and a premature bachelor lifestyle don't suit him well. His Korean is better than Han Geng thinks his will ever be, although they both still make mistakes on national television, only to laugh at them later; he doesn't have Han Geng's soft countryside accent.
Henry's easy to read but hard to protect. Donghae is the one who uses stumbling, head-over-heels English to make Henry feel at home; for Han Geng, food is tried and true. After long-distance phone calls, Han Geng boils water and makes oolong tea and ramen.
Henry's hair falls into his eyes when he sits down at the table. "Thanks," he says quietly. Sadness used to make people old, weary: now, Henry looks younger than ever. Tears are the common denominator between all of them. It is always family, home: a condensation nucleus, their one allowed quality of fallibility.
"It's kind of like - we used to play a game, in school," Henry says, running his finger along the side of the ramen bowl as it cooks. Han Geng is careful to get the brands that are popular in Canada; Henry never shows signs of noticing. "Where you link fingers and push the other person's fingers backward, until someone says 'mercy.' Then the person lets go. This is - I mean, it gets better, right?" He looks up, waiting.
He's no longer sure if Henry's talking about the backlash or missing home, or all of it. He doesn't want to lie. "It's better every time you go back," Han Geng says finally, a little evasive, and hands Henry a pair of chopsticks. Henry smiles a little.
"This is kind of silly, ge," Zhou Mi says, as gently as he knows how. He is sitting outside the bathroom door, long limbs sprawling in the hallway. He hears Han Geng get up, and sits up straight, a little hopeful. An ugly retching sound leaks out of the bathroom instead, and he winces, tries again: "Let me in."
Under the sound of the toilet flushing is a click as the door unlocks, and Zhou Mi edges in, shutting the door behind him. Han Geng leans over the sink and spits, a mess of blood and saliva. He lets the faucet run for a moment, and then lets Zhou Mi pull him down to rest against the bathroom tiles. Zhou Mi doesn't let go of his hand. (He knows how to keep secrets.)
Victoria reminds him of a bird, pretty wrist bones and flighty dancer curves. He'd found her without shoes on in a practice room after hours, practicing a Dai dance he knows like the back of his hand, from the lifted toe down to the fluid extensions of the arm, fingers splayed. "Not bad," he says, quiet Chinese syllables hoarse with disuse, when the song ends. She retracts her arm, startled, and smiles.
His best memories of Victoria are by Han River. It reminds him, sometimes, of Beijing: the glittering shine of a city that moves at the speed of light. Han River was a place for Victoria to clear her head, escape the tense airspace in the company buildings.
"Oh," she says. "Kissing bug."
"What?" Han Geng looks around. He doesn't see anything, but shifts away a little anyway.
"It works like mistletoe," she says, waving her hand a little. Her nails are long, painted pink today. "Trust me." She smiles the smile he likes best, secretive and pretty. He kisses it.
He can taste a hint of her lip gloss on his mouth, plastic and strawberry-scented, when he pulls away. "Go home, Qian," Han Geng says, shifting the watch on his wrist to check the time. Victoria laughs a little, running fingers through her hair so that it sweeps to one side. She doesn't.
If anything, he's learned that everything comes full circle; past, present and future. In the morning, the scent of jasmine tea mingles with the smell of herbal medicine. His mother says good morning just the way he's always remembered, but somehow knowing his surroundings are permanent changes things; for every hour he spends in peace, he can think of a dozen different ways he would be doing otherwise in Korea - Star King, radio shows, lives. Home, they say, is where the heart is: and here he is, where he has never been able to leave.
He still goes to sleep with the same heartsick feeling he had back in Korea, of missing people.
愛的磁性把兩顆心粘在一起 就算相隔千里 愛不離
The magnetism of of love keeps two hearts together
Even a thousand miles away, love doesn't leave.*