one: Seoul, South Korea.
I learn to read the Korean script, known in the South as Hangul, one year before my first visit to the country, thanks to a particularly gripping obsession with Korean pop idols that predominated my teenage years. Hangul is a neat-looking script, smooth lines and circles evenly balanced against each other. After landing in Seoul, we take a train out of the airport, and I read the names of each station, carefully mouthing each syllable to myself as I decipher them. The short and precise strokes are as familiar as they are foreign.
Where spoken Korean is concerned, I prove to be less capable, my knowledge consisting of no more than “annyeonghaseyo” (hello!), “kamsahamnida” (thank you!), and “hwajangshil eodiyeyo” (where is the bathroom?). In the months leading up to the summer, my priorities were mostly elsewhere, with the final stretch of my senior year in high school looming above me like a specter.
Now, thoughts of ghosts are far and few between. I am eighteen years old, freshly graduated, and the furthest I have ever been away from my parents. The three-week trip to three countries in East Asia is the brainchild of my friend Emilie’s mother and her family from Hong Kong. Emilie and I, along with Mehak, the last third of our group, had become close in our senior year. Now, we are thousands of miles away from our teenage haunts.
The four days we spend in Seoul are packed like sardines. There is simply no time to miss home—I am too busy tearing open convenience store triangle kimbap in the mornings, slurping down black bean noodles for lunch, too busy spending money frivolously and laughing at things that no longer seem funny. At the Lush store in Myeongdong, a man holds my hand and strokes my hair, thick and tangled curls in a sea of elegance, and I leave with two different products that I don’t really need.
Seoul embodies revolution in my languishing mind. Its first tunes of freedom serenade me, dreamy as a siren’s song. Not for the first time, I grasp at the idea of running away. Nothing is left for me in my teenage haunts, nothing worth missing. Somewhere else in this world must be the place where I belong.
When I politely say “kamsahamnida” to the café employee, she just stares. I grab my coffee and hurry back to my friends.
South Korea is a largely homogenous country, and ethnic diversity sticks out like a sore thumb. Still, it perseveres. There are those of us who make a home anywhere; there are those of us who never find one. An abandoned linguistic hypothesis noted similarities in the vocabulary and grammar of Korean and the South Indian Dravidian languages, such as my mother tongue. No genetic or migratory link could be proved, but the resemblances make things easier. Learning Hangul is simple for me. The grammar and pronunciation feel natural. I imagine if this could be home one day.
I want to tell someone: for mother, we say “Eomma”, too. We say “Amma” too.
two: Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong.
Our Hong Kong hotel room is reminiscent of the typical Manhattan apartment—that is to say, it is very small. Most of the space is occupied by two twin beds; with Emilie spending the nights at her grandmother’s home, Mehak and I are left to our own devices. Suitcases crowd what little floor space there is, and the small table is strewn with half-finished snacks and packets of instant ramen. It’s not the most comfortable room to be stuck inside, but today, we have no other choice. Across the entire city, shops and businesses of every trade are calling a strike.
Even the 7-11 next door is closed, which is a tragedy for Mehak and I. We do not have nearly enough snacks to last the day. I spend the hours in and out of consciousness, skilled in the art of sleeping away my hunger. Mehak isn’t so lucky. When I finally wake up, late in the afternoon, she complains colorfully about how I’d let her starve. We order overpriced room service.
Outside our window, the road floods with waves of men and women in pitch-black dress. They are opposing a proposed extradition bill that would expose the essentially self-sustained city to the long and stringent arm of mainland China. The Hong Kong police do not take kindly to the protesters—many of them are college students and young adults, but the cops use violence and tear gas to keep the peace.
I sit cross-legged and stare through the glass, scrolling through the news on Twitter to glean any information that I can. This is modern history I am witnessing, after all.
In the last few days, a love for this city has blossomed inside me. Emilie’s family is kind beyond reason. At mid-morning dim sum, her grandmother uses her chopsticks to push leftovers onto my plate, even though I’m too full to breathe. Emilie is often too preoccupied with doubling over laughing to remember to translate their rapid-fire Cantonese.
Here, my skin and my hair still paint me different, but there are some faces like mine amongst the crowds. There are expats hurrying to their office buildings, women in the shopping mall wearing ethnic South Asian garb, a Pakistani man who sits next to me on the bus and gives awkward conversation until I can escape to an open seat closer to my friends.
And still, Emilie laughs when her uncle responds to a waitress, who motions towards me and Mehak and asks, “where did you get those two from?”
Jokingly, he replies, “Oh, we just picked them up off the street!”
Today, in the too-small hotel room, there is no one here but the two of us. Out loud, I read about the happenings across the city; it is dark outside, and the mood is somber. Between us, two foreigners to this land, there isn’t very much to be said at all.
three: Taipei, Taiwan.
The night market is so bright that it blots out the stars in the sky. Burning lanterns painted with Chinese characters hang on strings laced above our heads. The middle of the street is crowded with food vendors, making everything from black pepper buns to the quintessential stinky tofu. We choose fried squid impaled on wooden skewers, the perfect mix of crispy and chewy on my unrefined palate.
The street is lined with stores selling useless trinkets but we thumb through them anyway. I’ve never been one for window shopping, but I’ll try anything, once.
I am looking for a place to run away to, where I can get lost in the crowd, make myself anew. Emilie has family here, too; they coo over my badly-pronounced Cantonese. Luckily, food is a language that everyone speaks. I eat what I’m offered without complaint.
In the morning, we inhaled steaming soup dumplings from a hole-in-the-wall, and finished the meal with a classic milk tea. It’s sweet and sharp in its authenticity, so different from what we get in the States, simply better in every way.
When I make myself anew, simply better in every way, it might be here.
At the market, we attempt to win stuffed Pokémon in the obviously-rigged claw machines until losing begins to frustrate us. I’ve dressed and done my hair in a manner that makes me look like a child, so Emilie—six months older than me, freshly eighteen—leads the search to purchase two cans of pineapple beer, just for her and myself. (In Hong Kong, Mehak tried beer for the first time, and resoundingly hated it.) Emilie is proud when the storekeeper doesn’t card her. Inwardly, I don’t think it’s because Emilie looks any less of a child than I do.
We wait to crack them open until we’re back at the hotel. It’s been fun—the three of us in one room, like how we’d lived in Korea.
The beer isn’t really special, nor does it make me feel any different. We clink the cans together in cheers and drink. It feels like a finality, somehow.
four: New York City, USA.
Americans are ruder than I remember. I wonder what it is that makes us so impatient and intolerant of ineptitude. Immigration at JFK Airport doesn’t give the greatest impression upon coming back home.
Mehak’s mom picks us up at the airport and we haul our bags into the trunk of her van. The conversation starts spirited, a bright recollection of our adventures. I text my mom: on the way home. See you soon.
Like every summer, my grandmother is home. I wonder how I’ll explain this to her when everything is an interpretation—Korea/Hong Kong/Taiwan to the USA to India, like a convoluted Google Translate search. The worst part of memories is the recollection, when words aren’t enough, and the original moment is marred by them. I want to keep so much of this to my chest, let its flames smolder and die there.
It’s a two-hour drive back to South Jersey. Soon, Emilie leans her head back to feign sleep, and I noisily suck at the straw of my nearly empty coffee, more ice and water than anything of substance, in order to avoid conversation. Mehak’s mom, occupied behind the driver’s seat, passes her phone back to her daughter, requesting her to reply to a message. Long moments go by in silence.
Sitting between my friends in the back seat, I am the first to notice when Mehak begins to cry. I cannot prove how, but somewhere deep inside of me, I already know why. Somehow, I saw this coming.
Rather graceless when it comes to comfort, the most I know to do is hold her hand. I stroke over her knuckles with my thumb gently, just like I had on the flight to Taiwan, when we flew over a long and uncomfortable patch of turbulence. I’ve never experienced fear while in the air, but Mehak was shaking with it. So I held her hand tightly, and let her squeeze back.
To her mother, Mehak says, “Why didn’t you tell me? How could you not tell me?”
Over the last year, I’d watched her dog, Pepper, grow old before my eyes. She could no longer run like she used to, but she sat patiently while I pet her, and gave me sweet affection.
While we were away, she’d had to be put down. She’d been suffering. It was the merciful choice.
I struggle to decide whether it is better that Mehak hadn’t been there to see it, or worse that she hadn’t been with her friend as she passed. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Time moves forward at any cost, and either way, Pepper is already dead.
There are no words to chronicle this mourning, no way to translate that ache of leaving something behind. In my illusions of running away, my family searches for me as if I have simply lost my path. They search for a person that I am not, a person who no longer exists. Still, I never break the habit of looking over my shoulder, just to make sure someone is following me. I never cease to ache.
Nursing a faint ember of hope, I keep this truth to my chest, and let it die there.