Each year in Korean class at my International school, I picked a new name: Yu-mi, Su-min, Ha-young. Each one a fresh-licked finger, flicking to a clean notebook sheet. Each name a prayer for new parts, different hair, darker eyes, a prayer to grow different lids. This year I’ll grow a new better tongue, I thought, but by the time summer was in its fullness, I’d already forgotten what the names meant, why I chose them. 

 

I could have been Shimmering Pearl, Girl-Next-Door, Gentle Person, Luxuriant River, Glory-to-God, but instead those stacks of rubber-banded vocab cards, words I’d walked around the apartment memorizing for hours, hundreds at a time, grew thin films of mildew, stuffed in the back of my desk drawer. 

 

All I was left with was, Where is the bathroom? How much is it? Can you take me to ______? My name is Kristina, I only speak a little, Excuse me, I’m sorry, Hello, Hi. The drawer and the cards warped in the late July heat. What was left: the shriek of a window track, a box fan balanced in the frame. 

 

Before our annual summer exit, departure, flight, arrival, the long summer road trip and perfunctory family visits to America where I’d sleep on couch after couch and make small talk with cousins I barely knew, for two weeks in Korea each spring, azalea flooded the university next door: fuschia-light, white, pale pink under the protest banner, the one I was just beginning to learn to read. 

 

Words popping up like blossoms: 아름다운, 꽃, 마음, 학생, 대학교, 이름. At the edges then: the pale moon-belly of the common hibiscus, rose-of-sharon, no, 무궁화, the flower that never ends. 

 

See the 외국인 walking home through the university under banners saying DOWN WITH THE WEST. See me pluck an azalea bloom, wring green from the furry bottom of the flower, sweet sucked in a whistle, sugar in a pinch. 

 

My face yellow in cold cathode, anonymous under the bulbs. Past the noraebang, stationary shop, piles of hair clips, pitchers of light foamy beer. One foot in front of the other to the subway stop , weaving like all the rest of the drunks, head trying to absorb it all, to remember it for later, the long walk home. 

 

I didn’t ask to come here, but felt like I owned the place. It was many years later until I understood how foolish that thought was. Third generation outsider, white face, white name, mush-tongue, liar to taxi drivers, good accent, inch deep understanding, tethered, and always seeking return. 

 

Night above the lighted city, the sky’s red neck. I would climb the mountain at dusk, the one behind the school’s campus. Imagine a neighborhood that used to be lined with ditches in rice patties. Imagine wood pressed into my back. Imagine a ship’s passage, my father wrapped and sleeping in a drawer. Imagine the aftermath of war.

 

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