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The truth is we can survive our lives, but not our skin. But you know this already.
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Hansol is four years old and he is learning what it means to be different. He does not yet know why he has two words for 엄마 and why his friends at school do not know what he means when he says them.
엄마, he explains, pointing at his own when she picks him up from daycare, and his friends ahh in understanding, pointing at their own as well, explaining mommy and 妈妈 and mamãe in turn.
=
Hansol is six years old and he is learning what it means to be different, again. Everything is the same but backwards, like the way that the sounds tumble out of his mouth, eo and o and ae slotted into the wrong places, shifting the meanings he's not yet sure of into something unrecognizable even to his own unpracticed ears.
In Hoboken, Hansol and his friends were all different. They had different words and different skin, all slightly not the same but in the same way. Halfie, he had learned, and mixed and American and Korean and Puerto Rican―his friends all of this and more.
Here, Hansol is still different. He has different words and different skin, but everyone else is the same and in the same way. They do not ahh, they do not understand. They are not his friends.
외쿡인, they point and mutter under their breath, words they don't know he understands all too well. After all, Hansol may be blood Korean, but it's not blood they see when they look at him on the streets.
=
Hansol is fourteen years old and someone is looking at him on the street. Someone is always looking at him on the street, but this time it’s different. He’s learned to tune out the stares, mix them way down into the white noise that soundtracks his life, but this look is inquisitive rather than incisive and it makes Hansol curious in a way that looks no longer do.
The man approaches him. His crisp suit is softened around the edges from hours in the office, but his eyes cut up and down dissecting Hansol like syntax. It seems he likes what he sees, because he smiles, surprisingly round, and hands Hansol a business card.
=
Hansol is sixteen years old and they tell him he needs a name. He tells them he already has one. Hansol. It’s right there, on his ID card, on his contract, on the little nametag that they make him wear for the cameras when he haunts the halls of the company building. No, not like that, they say, and at once he understands. A Western name. An export SKU. An olive branch.
He’ll think about it. But in the end, there’s only one other name he’s ever known, one other name that fits him like his skin (askance perhaps, wrong sometimes, but his) and so he gives that to them too.
=
Hansol is eighteen years old and everyone knows his name. Sometimes he turns corners and sees his own face and it takes him a second to recognize it without the blemishes and razor-missed hairs and oily sheen he’s used to seeing. He wonders when he gave them that too. He wonders how much he has left.
For a while, Hansol stops taking the English interviews. Now that they have their legs under them, they are getting by without the novelty of his image plastered on every preview, and anyway Joshua has always been the more eloquent one when put on the spot. After all, Joshua had learned English proper―had learned how to put sentences together and tear them apart to make something new, had been taught the language for something more than wanting a second helping or asking after his second cousin’s new baby.
Someone had once told him that being bilingual means losing yourself in two languages. He thinks, then, that perhaps being whatever he is means never having found something to lose to begin with.
He wonders if people will forget he speaks the language if he goes long enough without using it, the same way the words go static around the edges after so many days without a call from his mom. He wonders if people will start to think of him as Korean if his clothes grab more attention than his face.
He passes the mirror, pauses. Takes in his hair, his eyes, his skin, the same as they’ve always been, now an asset, a feature. A point of shame to a selling point. He blinks. So perhaps not; not in this industry where things were rarely more than skin deep, where they spent half their days being primped and polished and put on display.
But that’s ok, let them look.
He turns off the lights.
They were already looking anyway.
Closes the door to the studio.
At least now he can show them what he wants them to see.