by Frances Cha
My aunt gave birth in the fall, five months after I had been deposited at the Loring Center, to a baby boy that they named Hwan. I did not know she was pregnant until one day she showed up at the Center and her shirt was stretched taut to bursting by her overlarge belly, unmistakably with child. I never met him, my boy cousin, because after he was born they didn’t come again. But by then, the Center was home to me. The girls I lived with became my sisters—the ones I covered for and complained to and swapped clothes with.
At the Center, my heart did not feel as if it was being shot with acid the way I felt whenever I saw my aunt and uncle worrying over money, or when Kyunghee tried to help me with my homework and would sigh, exasperated, when I couldn’t follow her explanations. No matter how much we fought among ourselves at the Center, we were an impenetrable unit, bristling at any hint of scorn or pity from the other children at school who had parents to go home to. We were brazen and confident in our unity and the teachers did not touch us because they could not predict what the consequences would be if they did. One time, Sujin slapped a girl in her class who said her mother was a beggar, and Miss Loring showed up, dressed purposefully in her floor-length mink coat and matching hat. The sight of Teacher Kil sweating as he tried to speak to her in English (and he was our English teacher!) had us screaming with laughter for days.
The only times I ever felt pain were right after my aunt and uncle’s visits, when I would see them walking away toward the bus stop, my aunt waddling as her stomach grew bigger every time I saw her.
She was alarmed, I know, by the disabled people who lived at the Center. There were several boys my age who lived in a separate building from us. Two of them looked all right, but one of them would hit people if he was in a bad mood and the other one could not look at one thing for very long. The other girls and I did not talk to them either—we were cruel with ignorance in those days—but we knew their families who visited, and we knew which tree-canopied benches they liked to sit on outside and what times they would come so that we could avoid them. My aunt and uncle did not say anything when the disabled and their caregivers would cross our path but my aunt would instinctively put her hand on her protruding stomach.
The last time my aunt came, she had to sit and take gulping breaths every few minutes. She said she could feel the baby on her pelvis and that his head was hitting her pelvic bones every time she took a step.
I had not known it would be the last time, but after they left, Miss Loring came to tell me that they had left me an envelope of money, entrusted to her for safekeeping, which they had not done before. When she showed me how much, I was shocked—it was more money than I had ever seen—or heard of—at one time. They must have borrowed it—I knew they had never had this kind of money.
But had I known it was their last visit, I would have been glad. I was grateful I never had to say goodbye to them again.
* * *
—
“I DON’T CARE what your aunt’s situation was,” said Ruby. “Who does that?” We had been eating at the izakaya for almost an hour but no one showed any sign of slowing down. The table was crammed with tiny dishes of grilled meats and vegetables while waiters frantically passed us by with orders from the other tables. As always, I thought of the bill, how much it would be with all of this meat. The tongue in particular was expensive. The endless pours of shochu would also drive up the bill, and I took care not to drink very much. It made me feel less bad when, inevitably, either Hanbin or Minwoo, but usually Hanbin, paid the check. Never once had I heard Ruby offer. When I had offered to chip in early on, when I first met them, Hanbin had just laughed and patted my head while Ruby looked on with amusement.
Ruby’s face was flushed and she shook off her camel-colored fur jacket, which slid down the seat and then onto the floor. I bent and picked it up gingerly and draped it back over her chair, my fingers lingering on the softness of the fur.
“So you never saw them again?” she asked, picking at a skewer of chicken hearts. “They never even called you? Do you know where they live now?” She held up the bottle of shochu and shook it, to show that it was empty. Minwoo called a waiter and asked for another bottle, then saw a friend at another table and went to talk to him.
“Maybe we should talk about something else if Miho is uncomfortable,” said Hanbin, reaching over to Ruby’s cup. It was half full and he picked it up and finished it, putting it down on his side of the table. “And I think you are drinking too fast,” he said to her. Looking at him, I thought how big his shoulders were. In his thick, ribbed turtleneck sweater, he looked as if he belonged in some New England catalog against a backdrop of a log house and snow-dusted fir trees. His face was mostly impassive—throughout my story he had not said a word. I noticed just a glint of disapproval, although at whom it was directed was unclear.
“Oh shut up,” said Ruby, rudely. “If she was uncomfortable, she wouldn’t be telling us in the first place. Don’t you want to hear more?” She wasn’t even looking at him as she said this.
If anything made me uncomfortable, it was the savage way Ruby talked to Hanbin. I looked down at my plate of food. I hoped they noticed that I wasn’t eating very much. I always ate several cups of yogurt or a slab of tofu with soy sauce from the Asian mart before meeting them, to fill myself up.
“Of course I want to hear more,” said Hanbin, looking at me. I stared at his hair, glinting under the lamp, to avoid meeting his eyes. “But not if it brings up bad memories. I’m really sorry to hear about all this. It must have been so hard for you.” The frown line on his forehead grew deeper.
I mumbled something, embarrassed. I did not want him to feel sorry for me and I regretted telling either of them this. I knew that hearing this story would change the way they treated me. Anxiety, like a dark bat, fluttered in my chest.
“The conclusion of the story is that it all turned out for the best,” said Ruby. Her voice was stubborn and triumphant. “She wouldn’t be here if she’d stayed with her aunt and uncle.”
* * *
—
WHAT RUBY SAID was true. I never would have had a chance to win an art scholarship to America because I did not have any idea such a thing existed. It was the Loring Foundation that had such connections, and it had been Miss Loring who made us practice English every week, saying that we would need it someday. She was also the one who left a specific budget for art supplies when she died abruptly, leaving all of her own money to the Center. All I needed to do was ask, and I was given the money to buy plaster and paint and paper and chisels and knives. Then came the big scandal a few years back about all the chaebol scholarships being granted exclusively to the children of politicians and prosecutors that the chaebol families wanted to keep in their pockets. Suddenly, the foundations had to scramble to find actual children in need to give their scholarships to, and an orphan from an orphanage was at the top of the list. And as the oldest and largest foundation, the Loring Center was at the top of the list of orphanages. When I met the members of the scholarship committee who were in charge of the exchange program at SVA, they were practically swooning with excitement as they introduced themselves. “We’ve read all about you!” they said. “We are elated to have someone like you receive the benefits of this program.” My story was the stuff of program brochures, of donor newsletters and feel-good newspaper profiles.
When I graduated and came back to Korea, I never tried to find my aunt and uncle. I would think of them sometimes with pale curiosity, of what they would say if they saw me now, if they would ask me to repay their money. I often wondered where Kyunghee had gone to college, whether she had made it to a SKY university, as had been her goal. She wanted to become a doctor, she said. But I think that’s because it was the only job we knew of at the time that made any money.
* * *
—
AFTER THE IZAKAYA, we headed to a party at one of Minwoo and Hanbin’s friends’ a
partments in SoHo. The music was loud even as we came out of the elevator at the end of the hall—a rapacious hip-hop beat which did not prepare me for what the apartment looked like inside. A dark hallway opened sharply into a soaring loft, with a ceiling that must have been five meters high. Sofas and chairs were all upholstered in teal velvet, contrasting sharply with an enormous chandelier dripping with red crystals. I was still not used to the interiors of this world—that of the wealthy Koreans in America. The strange, lavish use of colors in this apartment bewildered and overwhelmed me. Even the scent was heavy and unusual—like burnt roots mixed with flowers and spices. I had never smelled anything like it before, but it was expensive, I could divine that immediately.
A blond, uniformed bartender—the only non-Korean at the party—was in the kitchen mixing drinks on the marble-topped island. There were maybe ten other people there, some of them a lot older—in their early thirties at least. As Ruby and Hanbin and Minwoo said hello to their friends, I detached myself and went to find the bathroom—a dark cave of a room lit with ghostly orbs and stubby white designer candles—where I stared at myself in a gilt-framed mirror, washing my hands and worrying about how I was going to get through this evening. I couldn’t just stick near Ruby and not talk to anyone else because that would be even more awkward, I decided. I would venture out on my own for a few minutes and then circle back to Ruby and Hanbin later, when everyone was a little more drunk and no one would really pay attention to me.
When I finally emerged from the bathroom, I headed for the kitchen and asked the bartender for a cranberry cocktail.
“And an Old-Fashioned, thanks.”
I turned around to find a tall, thin boy in a leather jacket behind me. He had a sharp, triangular face, with sunken cheeks. I thought I recognized him from school.
“Don’t you go to SVA?” he asked, staring down at me. He smelled like American soap.
I nodded. “Do you?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m a sophomore.”
“First-year.”
The bartender held out our drinks and I took both, handing the boy his glass.
“How do you know Byung-joon?” he asked, tilting his head toward the living room, from where the lilt of excited voices trailed back to us.
“I don’t know anyone here,” I said. “Except for the friends I came with, I mean. Is that the person who lives here?”
“Yeah, this is Byung-joon’s apartment,” he said, taking a swig of his whiskey. “Who are you here with?”
“Ruby and Hanbin and Minwoo? I don’t know if you know them.”
“Yes, I know them,” he said. “I went to middle school with Minwoo and elementary with Hanbin. They’re dating again, right? Hanbin and Ruby?”
“Yes,” I said. “They’re dating again.” I stared into my drink and took a sip.
“They’re always on and off, those two,” he said, smiling, as if it was a joke between us. With that smile, his face suddenly looked warm—like that of an elegant vampire that had drunk his nightly fill.
“So, where did you go to high school?” he asked. My heart sank. It was probably the most common question I received when I met new Korean study-abroad kids in the city. There were only a handful of possible answers in their circles and the answer immediately established background and context for each other. While most of them had gone to boarding school on the East Coast, there were a few who had gone to the foreign-language high schools in Korea. The boarding school kids were much wealthier and spoke better English, while the foreign-language school kids were geekier. The boarding school kids tended to avoid the Korean school kids. I was neither, obviously.
I had two choices—telling them the name of my high school, which included the province I was from, would immediately label me as some gawk-worthy hick. I chose to go with a more vague answer.
“I went to a small arts school in Korea,” I said, hoping that would be enough. Not that I really cared what he thought of me, but I had come to dread the moment of the raised eyebrows, if not actual derision. Too late, I remembered that he went to SVA, so of course he would ask the name of the art school.
“Seoul Arts?” he asked knowingly.
“No,” I said, and then after a pause, “It was in Cheongju, actually.”
“Cheongju? Oh wow,” he said. “That’s so interesting! I’ve never met anyone from Cheongju. Apart from, you know, distant relatives or something.” He looked at me with great interest. “Cheongju,” he said again.
I smiled weakly.
“You don’t have, like, an accent or anything,” he said. “Actually, I have no idea if people from Cheongju have accents. Sorry, is that rude?” He smiled again and shook off his jacket, and from the redness of his neck I realized he had probably drunk a lot. The flush of his neck contrasted sharply with his white face.
“What’s your major?” I asked. Not fine arts, I was guessing.
“Design. But I’m taking a lot of film classes this semester actually. Wondering if I should switch. How did you end up here?”
“Hey, Jae, it’s been a long time.” The boy and I turned to see Hanbin sliding onto the barstool next to me. He nodded to Jae, who looked a bit surprised, then pleased.
“Hanbin! A really long time. At that poker game in Boston, right? That was the last time I saw you?”
“Yeah, man.” Hanbin gestured to the bartender and ordered a whiskey.
“I was just talking to your friend here, who turns out to be at SVA too,” said the boy. “I’m Jae Kong by the way.”
“I’m Miho,” I said.
“You know each other through Ruby?” he guessed. I nodded.
“Yes, Miho’s a really good friend of ours,” said Hanbin. I may have been imagining it, but his tone sounded like it had a steel edge to it. “She’s one of Ruby’s best friends, actually.”
“Oh wow,” said the boy, looking at me again. “Cool, man.”
Hanbin started talking to me about a Japanese movie we had seen at Ruby’s apartment the previous week. It was odd that he was talking about it—since it hadn’t been particularly interesting and he’d fallen asleep almost halfway through. After a few minutes of being ignored, Jae saw someone else he knew and sauntered off.
“I’m sorry if he was bothering you,” said Hanbin abruptly, swirling his whiskey. “He’s kind of annoying. I think Ruby went to school with him in Korea.”
I shook my head. “He wasn’t bothering me.”
“You know, even before I heard about the orphanage, I knew you were different,” he said, not looking at me. “I didn’t realize that was why, though. It must have been really hard, going through all that. It makes you think. Like, everyone I know is kind of the same—they’ve had the same sort of life growing up,” he said. “It’s different getting to know you, you know what I mean?” He ran his hand through his hair absentmindedly and I thought again how handsome he looked.
“You’re so normal too,” he added.
I frowned uncertainly. “What does that mean?” I asked. He sounded as if he wanted to be congratulated for this observation.
“I don’t know, I feel like I would be all kinds of messed up if I’d had to go through what you went through—no offense,” he said quickly.
I felt a hot embarrassment searing into my stomach and took a quick sip of my drink. But he was talking to me in a more intimate way than he ever had before, and for that I had no choice but to continue in this moment as if it were like any other.
Hanbin looked at me and reached over and touched my shoulder, letting his hand rest for a moment before he gave it a squeeze. I stood there, even after he dropped his arm back to his side.
“What I mean to say is, I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “And not somewhere else.”
* * *
—
THE TRUTH WAS, I did not know if I deserved to be there. The
luck of the timing of the chaebol scholarship scandal and my story had opened all my doors. I was unsure about my work.
In the beginning, when I first moved to New York and met Ruby and Hanbin and all of their friends, I had let them see my insecurity, my terror, simply because I had been drowning in a kind of panic in this alien world. They’d never seen anyone so raw before and they must have marveled at me. They cloaked themselves so well with assurance, smug and luminous.
“Thanks, I guess,” I replied to Hanbin, in my most bored voice. “I think Ruby is looking for you.” I could see her in the corner, gesturing toward us. Hanbin looked at me for a second and then turned and went to her, joining the group that had formed around her. It was not that she was talking—she was sipping her drink and appeared not to be listening to the conversation at all, but she was always the center of the universe. She made the party crackle to life just by standing there with her cherry-stained mouth and fur coat, her eyes glinting in mockery.
Taking my own drink, I turned around and looked for the boy who had been talking to me earlier. There was nothing better to do when you had no one to talk to at a party than appear to be looking for someone, that I knew. I walked around the first floor, listening carefully to the slices of conversations that I could overhear, then walked up to the second floor, where the walls were painted shades of magenta to contrast with the ebony light fixtures. I imagined how satisfying it would be to paint a wall this color and wondered if that was the perfect job for me, and how long it would take to become qualified. I would really enjoy that—slathering walls with deep colors, painting delicate, fantastical murals. I could see New Yorkers paying a lot of money for home murals.
