There is a famous noraebang in Hongdae called Su. When my family lived in Korea, we went there together, sometime during my teens. My mom started singing, “You are my everything! 그대는 내 삶의 모든 것,” and something in me started laughing and laughing and singing too. My mom singing out in her high, melodic voice that song we had spent weeks on weeks singing along to in front of our TV after she borrowed DVDs of Secret Garden from the library—coming home with them like, “I found these at the base library?” We had missed the cultural moment somehow, hadn’t watched it when it first aired in 2009. We laughed at how nonsensical it was, yelled at the parts that didn’t age well. And we, too, were sucked into the moment. At least, I was. I got the hype. I fell in love a little too.
My secret was that “You Are My Everything” was actually one of my favorites off the soundtrack. The cheesiest, poppiest, girliest one. Sometimes I still have a hard time letting the Spotify algorithm know what I want to listen to, lest it affect my Wrapped results and my sidebar listening persona to my friends. But I like them, these clear, high, bubblegum tunes. There’s something uncomplicated about the world they sing about. Something even childlike about it. Maybe it’s that declarations of love are childlike in their bare honesty, their audacity, their defiant unknowing of the future but saying what they know to be true in the present anyway. I love you, yesterday and today and tomorrow. I wish you would stay with me forever. They’re embarrassing, cliche. Yet these songs—simple, upbeat, high-pitched and harmonically uncomplicated—were my guilty pleasure. They still are.
하루를 즐기는게 뭔가? 난 한 번도 하루를 그냥 즐겁게 살아봤나? 생각없이, 걱정없이, 핑계없이. 창피함없이.
겨울방학 어느 밤 이런 생각이 들었다. 잠이 잘 오지 않았다. 며칠 동안 이랬다. 혜원아, 근데, 생명은 벌이 아니야.
왜 계속 벌 받는 것처럼 살아?
The phantom looming over my personhood, demanding my continuous justification, has been and is my U.S. military identity. And perhaps it’s because I grew up so American—will never shed that voice of that story telling me don’t ever let people think they can take that away from you, you’re a military kid, that’s the most American thing you can be—that there is a kind of fear I get stricken with when I am enjoying a Korean thing. That I can only ever approximate being a caricature playing a Korean, the way that I am, perhaps, still grappling with a caricature of an American to prove a point. The point being justifying my right to exist. Somewhere along the way, my existence became something to justify. Not a given.
Since “leaving” the military community and, by way of my interests in ethnic studies and stance against social injustice, entering orbits of activism, especially demilitarizing activism, I found myself in another script: enforcing and wielding my military kid narrative by renouncing it. “I grew up this way, and it showed me how conditionally it regarded me and my dignity, and I saw how it hurts other people and violates and subjugates other nations and economies, and so here I am now, on your side.” Accept me. A U.S. military apostate. A professor once said in a class that the right wants converts and the left wants apostates. If this is true, then you’re given the impression that there are two options: adherence or rebellion. Rebellion itself is codified into a certain kind of script if you’re not careful. The limits of an imagination in which I am either us or them, or them or us.
In the quiet of my own solitude now, away from the pressures of other voices, I can now ask: Who/what was I doing it all for?
I learned what a 핑계 was through a Big Bang song. I was a high school freshman who entered Big Bang fandom through the gateway of my older cousin in Busan gifting me her old albums after my family arrived at the U.S. military bases in Daegu and Waegwan. I felt like I was catching up, in a way, on years of pop culture I had missed growing up in D.C. and South Carolina and Kansas, ashamed and unwilling to engage with pop culture people laughed at then and want to have a piece of now. So yeah. The story is that I was watching the “Bad Boy” music video, and T.O.P. said a word I didn’t know, so I wrote down what I thought it sounded like and took it to my mom and asked her, “What’s a pinggye?”
When was the first time I learned how to say 나 창피하다? Na changpihada. Na changpihae. I remember saying it as a kid. By the time I was old enough to articulate my own thoughts, I remember thinking it quite frequently: changpihada. Changpihae. I don’t want to wear that. I don’t want to do that. That’s too embarrassing. That’s humiliating. I’m embarrassed. I’m ashamed.
As a student, I used to struggle with the fear of taking the “wrong” notes. That is, I operated with the assumption that there was a “right” way of taking notes. A “right” way to record a meeting or an observation. In theatre, as an actor, I struggled with the desire to perform the “right” take. Some might attribute that to some form of racialized and/or religious conditioning. Suppose that’s true to an extent. There’s no point dwelling too much on it. What all of this reveals, anyway, is that there is much to learn about what I like and what I dislike, and most significantly how to like myself—how to see the exploration of form, expression, and communication as the never-ending point.
My friend told me recently that liturgy is not about doing it well. Say the words, just say them. The rest follows. I went to mass for a little while this winter. I was looking for a form through which to shape an environment for a safe spiritual encounter, without the pressure of the eyes of other people who think everything means something. Without feeling as though my faith was other people’s business. Unfortunately, I found, I am a praying person. Also unfortunately, though unsurprisingly, I found what I suspected: that the problems and hurts I have been observing and feeling are not particularly evangelical or Protestant issues, but fundamentally modern Christian ones. But I think that reordering of word and action was a significant unlearning of how I was formed in the cultures that raised me, where I had to mean everything I say. How exhausting. Say the words, just say them. The rest follows.
When my family was stationed at Yongsan, there was a coin-operated noraebang across the street from our apartment. I told a friend about this once, and I called it a ko-in-no-rae-bang.
“Unni,” laughed my friend, “no one says that. It’s kono, unni, kono.”
At age sixteen, in Seoul, in the kono across the street, I sang love songs I didn’t quite understand. The famous ones and the cliche ones, from melos and rocos and sageuks and everything in between. I recited the words over and over. I said them. I said them. In that cube-sized room, it didn’t matter how well-written the song was or how masterfully I emoted. I was a child who longed for a time before description. With the tools I had, I tried to make things make sense. I tried, I fell. I got frustrated at how mastery was never in my grasp. But I kept singing. I recited the words over and over. In that cube-sized room, no one was there who could make me feel changpihae. And maybe, just maybe, a few seconds or minutes at a time, the kono across the street was one place where I was learning to stop feeling ashamed of myself to my own self. A place, perhaps, where for even one second, I forgot to see myself as someone too unshapely, too awkward, too mean, too quiet, too uncool, too plain, too angry, too temperamental, too large, too small, too complicated, too crybaby, too pathetic, too ill-fitted and incorrect to deserve to want to be loved—and to dare to say so. I love you. I want you. I want you to love me too.
Nights in early January were spent unwinding on my couch in pajamas, watching 2019’s 동백꽃 필 무렵 with eager eyes and ears. Alongside SZA’s Lana (also on replay), I’ve been listening to the 동백꽃 soundtrack while I do literally everything, and I was doing my dishes or something, scrubbing a pan, and in the background was 그댄 나를 또 한 번 긴 꿈을 꾸게해, 안 다쳤던 어린 아이처럼, and I don’t know how to describe that catching, that start, the freshness of an “oh?” that just—happens when you’re struck with a resonance. Maybe it was the tenderness of all I am still nursing. What could it feel like to be an 안 다쳤던 어린 아이? 근데 내 인생에, 아무 인생에, 한 번도 안 다쳤던 시절이 있었나? 솔직히 생각하면—없잖아. 없어. 근데 왜 이런 생각이 날 유혹하나, 사람의 마음을 끌리게. 이게 그 제일 깊은 소원인가봐. 그 질문: “사람이 사람에게 기적이 될 수 있을까?”
There’s a footnote in the English-language version of I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by the translator, Anton Hur, explaining a word. I looked it up, pressed keys until I figured out the Hangul spelling: 잉여인간. And catharsis washed over me for a hot cool second, because I realized that’s the specter I had been shrinking under my whole life. That I am an 잉여인간, a surplus human, and everybody who had ever been around me at any point in my entire life also thought so.
And I think I write stories about people who, caught in the tension of multiple contradictory scripts, are rendered invisible in their trying to appease them all. They too feel like 잉여인간들: surplus humans, contradictory and inconsistent and uncomfortable and wasteful and unnecessary. Would life have been easier, they wonder, if I made more sense? Is this all in my head?
Modern scripts tell you that, whether by nature or nurture, there is something intrinsically irreversible about you, your essential something-ness, and that something-ness is tied to a state. American-ness, Asian-ness, Korean-ness, child-of-God-ness. These are the foundational predispositions, the rocks that “cannot be shaken.” When contested or challenged, you hold onto them and brandish them to your challengers, because the way to get respect is to assert that you were supposed to be here all along. Incorporate me. I am natural, I am normal. I am part of the body, the blood.
What begins to open when someone starts saying no? Say it, just say it. What follows?