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“Hyung,” Junhui says, touching Joshua’s back to get his attention. It’s unnecessary; his deep voice breaks through the exhibit hall’s chatter easily.
When Joshua looks up from the case of pottery he’s studying, Junhui tilts his head toward the hall’s entrance where a new surge of visitors is pouring in. It’s Children’s Day, so parents with young kids are visiting the National Folk Museum en masse. Joshua and Junhui aren’t the only non-family visitors, but they definitely stand out as a pair of teen guys.
No further explanation is needed. “Let’s go,” Joshua agrees, and they move to the next room, maneuvering through the crowd ahead. Junhui holds Joshua’s wrist so that they don’t get separated. It’s easy to locate Junhui in a crowd, tall as he is, but Joshua doesn’t shake Junhui off.
He knows it isn’t a date, but it feels like one.
Two boys visiting a tourist spot together can be totally platonic, of course—that’s just friend stuff. But Junhui isn’t a friend. He’s a fellow trainee, something between a coworker and a classmate, a competitor and a comrade in arms.
A fellow trainee who looks like Mikey Tung, the emo skateboarder classmate Joshua crushed on hard in ninth grade. They share the same tall, lanky build, square chin, and long hair that gets constantly brushed and shaken off the face. Junhui is quieter than Mikey, but Joshua can’t tell how much of his reserve is Junhui’s actual personality and how much is the language barrier.
The other trainees probably think Joshua is quiet too.
The next room is emptier, and Junhui drops Joshua’s wrist. His eyes light upon a glass cabinet near the entrance, and he beckons Joshua with the palm-down, finger-waving gesture that Joshua has been struggling to adopt.
“This one is my favorite,” Junhui tells him in Korean, pronouncing each word carefully.
He points out a wooden sculpture carved roughly into the form of a rather fat cat. It sits upright, its front paws pressed together and a thick tail wound around its bottom. Its eyes are closed in contentment, just two curved lines dug deep into the wood.
“Do you like cats?” Joshua asks.
It’s a simple enough question that he doesn’t have to think hard to form it. His Korean isn’t as accented as Junhui’s, thanks to growing up with his mother and the church uncles and aunties. But Junhui has lived in Korea longer, so he has the advantage of a wider vocabulary and fresh slang picked up from the trainees. All things considered, they are about equal, which is to say they are equally bad.
“Yes. This one...” Junhui trails off, putting together what he wants to say. “My cat in China. And this one. Same.”
Joshua studies the little sculpture more closely. “It’s cute.”
“Yes, cute.” Junhui takes a picture of the cat with his digital camera. “Do you have pet? In America?”
“No… Only me and my mother.”
He’s so distracted trying to remember how to say only that he remembers too late how strongly his mother cautioned against revealing exactly this.
“It’s taboo there,” she explained during one of her many lectures on how to avoid losing face in Korea. “Maybe things have changed with the younger generation, but it’s best if no one knows. The older adults will judge you.”
But Junhui just nods. “Me too. It is only me and my mother. Before. Now, new father, new brother.”
The smile he gives is a little awkward, but Joshua thinks he understands what Junhui doesn’t say.
Exploring Bukchon Hanok Village feels like stepping back in time. The pavement, the walls, the buildings, even the hanbok flashing through the crowd all look like scenery from the bootleg historical dramas his mother bought at the Korean grocer.
Like everywhere else they toured that morning, Junhui clearly has visited before. He takes them right to a stall that’s renting out hanbok. A sign explains the rental periods in several languages.
“Do you want?” Junhui asks.
“It’s kind of...” Joshua doesn’t know the Korean word for embarrassing, so he tries it in English instead. Junhui’s face remains blank, so Joshua just shakes his head. “No, thank you.”
They spend a couple of minutes sifting through the racks of hanbok anyway, admiring the different colors and patterns. When the stall owner starts giving them the stink eye, Junhui takes Joshua’s elbow gently and leads them away. Joshua flushes, but no one else takes note.
It’s not a date. Probably. But since their little day trip began, Junhui keeps guiding Joshua around. Back home, Joshua would’ve known Junhui was making moves on him. Teenage American guys just didn’t touch like that. Not straight ones, and not really gay ones either when so many other people are around.
But he’s on the other side of the world, and things are different. Junhui isn’t doing anything that Joshua hasn’t seen any of the other trainees do.
He’s been trying to re-calibrate his gaydar, but he doesn’t know yet what counts as signaling and flirting and what doesn’t. Or who’s straight and not. A couple of trainees that Joshua would’ve sworn were gay—not straight, not bi, gaaay—turned out to be secretly dating girls or complained about having to break up with their girlfriends to train.
They walk up the hill into the village proper, moving slowly to admire the traditional homes. It’s crazy to think people actually live in the buildings, especially with how many tourists stroll through the narrow streets. They pass several signs asking people to be quiet in Korean and English. Many young families are out here too, but there are more friend groups, couples, and solo travelers.
When they reach the top of a stone staircase, they find what must be a popular photo spot. Three women snap photos together while several other people wait in a loose line.
“Do you want?” Junhui asks again.
“Sure.”
His mother will like to see it. From his texts and emails, she’s gotten the impression that Pledis keeps them locked in the basement 24/7, so Joshua has been trying to reassure her that they do actually receive break time. (Even though most of their days do pass by in that godawful green space.)
They chat idly while they wait their turn. Junhui’s English is virtually non-existent, and Joshua’s Chinese is non-existent, so they are forced to converse with their limited Korean about simple subjects. The pleasant temperature. What to eat for lunch. How tired they still are from practice yesterday.
Before joining the company, Joshua only spoke Korean occasionally with his mother and at church. He understood things like Clean your room, and You’re so tall now! How old are you? and he could answer politely. Over the weeks, he’s improved a lot, but he still sucks. Speaking to the Korean trainees was often humiliating, especially when the younger ones unconsciously treated him like a child.
With Junhui, at least, he’s on equal ground. So even though their conversations sound ripped from the pages of a foreign language textbook, they both keep grinning at the silliness rather than turning self-conscious.
Their turn arrives. They take a picture together first, the digital camera held out by Junhui’s longer arm. Then Joshua shoots Junhui and swaps positions for his own photo. When Junhui shows him the preview in the gallery, he’s startled by how nice his picture looks—Junhui shifted angles slightly to capture the background more prettily, and he somehow made Joshua look several inches taller.
“You are good!” he tells Junhui.
Junhui shakes his head. “No, no. You are handsome,” he says. And before Joshua has a chance to begin processing the freely given compliment, he adds, “I know good restaurants here,” and begins walking back down the stone stairs, taking Joshua’s wrist again.
Joshua can only follow.
Lunch is at a tiny restaurant with an extensive array of cutlet dishes and little else. Junhui has clearly also been here before, so Joshua lets him take over the ordering. Junhui chats with the owners briefly, grinning wide. Joshua watches; never is Junhui more fluent in Korean than ordering at a restaurant, it seems.
When the owner departs with their orders, Joshua asks, “You come here how many?”
“Here?” Junhui asks, pressing a fingertip to their tabletop.
Joshua waves his hand in a tight but all-encompassing circle. “Here.”
“Oh. Three.” Junhui counts off on his hand. “One alone. Two Mingming. Three you.”
Mingming, the other Chinese trainee, stayed back at the dorm. Joshua felt kind of bad leaving him there, even though he didn’t know the guy well. Everyone else had gone to their family’s houses to enjoy the rare three-day weekend. Even Samuel, the fourth and final foreign trainee at the moment, went with Hansol to visit the Chwe family.
“Mingming today...why not come?”
Junhui frowns. “He misses home.”
It isn’t really an answer, but it also is. Joshua can only count his time in Korea in weeks, not months, but he misses home too. He wonders if Mingming is using the empty dorm to enjoy a long, uninterrupted phone call to his family. Or cry when no one will notice.
Their cutlets arrive, fried to a perfect crisp that their strictest trainers would disparage. There is a long list of foods they’re not supposed to eat, either because they are too fattening, or they will give them acne, or they will stop them from growing taller. One week into training, Joshua realized no one actually obeyed this list all the time. The true test, it seemed, was how well they could conceal forbidden activities.
Joshua highly doubted Pledis has spies seated in this random restaurant so many subway stops from the company, so he devours his cheese-stuffed pork cutlet, plus three bowls of rice and seconds of most of the banchan. Junhui also eats with gusto, head down and bangs covering most of his face. Every now and then, he uses his pinky to brush his hair behind his ears, but it falls back into place the next time he dips toward his dish.
“It’s really tasty,” Joshua tells him. “Today is nice, thank you.”
If Junhui hadn’t invited him to come out exploring, Joshua probably would have spent their free day practicing alone or napping at the dorm. Even if he summoned the courage to venture out by himself, he definitely would’ve gotten lost on the subway system and wasted time walking the wrong way down the narrow roads. It was much more fun to let Junhui show him around and enjoy the company of someone he didn’t feel like an idiot talking to. And Junhui is a good date, even if this isn’t a date.
“It’s fun,” Junhui says simply.
“You have a lot of ex-exp...experience?” Joshua asks, stumbling over the word he’s picked up from the trainees. Junhui just chews, face blank, so he elaborates. “Before, you have a girlfriend?”
Junhui nods, but then he says, “Not a girlfriend.”
Joshua’s chopsticks still in his rice bowl. He must be misunderstanding. Or Junhui misunderstood. “Not a girlfriend? You mean—you go with a friend?”
“No, boyfriend.”
Joshua’s chopsticks might as well be super-glued into the rice. Somehow, he manages to say, “Yeah?” without his voice cracking.
Junhui looks up, dark eyes filtered through his bangs. “Yeah. You?”
“No. I mean, I never...no boyfriend. But. Yes.”
Junhui nods again, and then the restaurant owner appears at Joshua’s elbow to drop off a fresh pitcher of water. She and Junhui start chatting, but Joshua can’t follow any of it over his heartbeat thundering in his ears.
Joshua’s mother prepared him for Korea as best as she could.
She shared all her memories, drilled him on the etiquette, and tried to cram as much Korean into him as she could in the weeks before his flight.
“It’s different there,” she warned him. “It can be hard. I left for a reason, so if you decide to leave too, that’s fine. Don’t stay if you don’t like it. And don’t...” She trailed off, brow furrowing. Slowly, she said, “Things that are fine here might not be fine there. Be careful.”
He heard what she wasn’t saying. It was the same subject she always talked around with him.
Joshua was out to his friends, sort of. Some of them he actually told, some of them heard it secondhand, others just assumed correctly from his conspicuous lack of girlfriend, his music tastes, how he spoke. He never felt the need to announce it further or really do anything about it. The most he’d ever done was make out with a guy while accompanying his friends to teen night at a gay club. Maybe, he thought, when he went away to college, he would try harder to meet guys. He was so busy with AP classes and church twice weekly and getting his volunteer hours for a silver cord anyway.
Guys could wait for when he didn’t live under the same roof as his mother. She loves him deeply and wants him to live his own life, just like she did. But some things are easier for both of them if they go unacknowledged.
Joshua wonders what Junhui’s mother is like. How the climate in southern China compares to southern California. How Junhui can speak so honestly.
After lunch, they explore some more, Junhui taking him to all the best sites that can be toured for free or cheaply. When the sun sets, they hop on the subway to return to the dorm. Holiday or not, they still have a curfew. Joshua is tired anyway; it’s been a while since he walked so much. He leans against the subway pole, smothering his thoughts about how many germs must be all over the metal.
Junhui calls Mingming during the ride, first talking to him in Korean to ask if he wants dinner and then, frowning, switching to Chinese. When he hangs up, he’s still frowning.
“Okay?” Joshua asks.
“I think...yes.” Junhui shakes his head. “Mingming left the dorm.”
“Curfew? He come back?”
“I don’t know.”
Dinner is wallet-friendly and Pledis-approved triangle kimbap from the convenience store near the dorm. When they walk in, plastic bags crinkling, Mingming is indeed nowhere in sight. Junhui doesn’t comment on this, so neither does Joshua. He just begins eating his tuna kimbap, while Junhui checks Wonwoo’s bunk and then Jihoon’s bunk before finding and claiming Wonwoo’s laptop. This cavalier attitude toward personal space and belongings shocked Joshua when he first arrived, having never shared a bedroom before. He had to adapt quickly.
Once the laptop boots up, Junhui plugs his digital camera into it and unwraps his own kimbap. “Photos,” he explains. “Email. My mom and your mom.”
Joshua nods, mouth full. He watches as Junhui clicks through the photos, deleting the ugly and blurred shots and moving the nicest ones into a folder, the only folder labeled with Chinese characters among all the Korean ones. Then Junhui creates a new folder and painstakingly types out joshua one letter at a time, glancing up at him to check the spelling.
Joshua swallows, empty kimbap wrapper still in hand, and nods. All of the other trainees call him Jisoo.
Junhui plucks the wrapper from Joshua’s hand and passes the laptop to him so he can transfer the pictures he wants. Joshua takes it, and Junhui goes to throw away the wrapper.
Photo thumbnails fill the screen; Junhui took more shots of him than he realized. Here’s Joshua’s back as they toured the palace near the museum, dwarfed by the wide-open scale of the property. Here’s Joshua leaned over a display at the museum. Here’s Joshua just barely looking over his shoulder, pointing at something out of frame.
The question he’s held back since lunch tumbles from his mouth.
“About me...how you know?”
“Know what?” Junhui asks. He’s standing over the trash can as he eats his triangle kimbap, cautious of crumbs in a way that most of the guys never bother to consider.
“About...” He lacks the vocabulary for this in Korean. He’s barely spoken about it in English. “What...how...I like guys. How you know?”
Junhui blinks slowly and then shrugs. “Not know.”
“But. You say me—”
“Guess, guess,” Junhui taps his head, giving Joshua the context he needs to figure out the word. Then he elaborates. “Your eyes.”
“My eyes?”
“You look. On, off, on, off.” Junhui holds out two fingers as if illustrating laser beams, pointing them at Joshua, then quickly at the wall, then at Joshua again, then away.
The blush spreads over Joshua’s face so quickly he feels light-headed. “Sorry. You—” He doesn’t know how to begin explaining Mikey Tung, so he stops there.
Junhui shrugs again. “It’s okay.”
“The guys?” Joshua asks, sweeping his hand at all the bunk beds. “They know? About me? You?”
“Some.”
Joshua wants names. Who does he need to be careful of? Who is safe? Is anyone else not straight? He’s been wondering since he arrived, but he didn’t know who would be okay to ask, never mind how to phrase it in Korean. He thought about asking Hansol, but asking a kid was too humiliating.
His mother prepared him for Korea as best she could, but she couldn’t help him with this. He learned by himself how to navigate the world as a gay kid back home. Coming here wasn’t quite starting over from square one, but it sure felt like it sometimes. Especially when a quiet guy he couldn’t get a read on announces he used to have a boyfriend. Especially when he thought that no one here would ever admit that to someone so easily.
He must look stressed because Junhui sits down next to him, pats his leg, and repeats, “It’s okay.”
“Yeah,” Joshua sighs, and he rubs his face. Yeah is not even close to what he really wants to say, but it is all he can say in Korean. “Yeah. I’m okay. I...email my mother.”
Junhui studies him for a moment, his dark eyes uncharacteristically intense. Then he nods and leaves Joshua, laying down on his own bunk with a soft grunt.
Joshua looks at the laptop screen again, the pictures they both took. Mostly Junhui, actually. He moves the best pictures into the joshua folder before going online and logging into his email account.
It’s not even morning yet back home. His mother must still be deep asleep. With the extreme time difference, it’s been difficult to call, so Joshua has been texting and emailing her more than ever before in his life. Usually, he doesn’t have much to report, just that he’s been working hard and learning a lot. If he says too much, he senses that he would end up writing that it’s too difficult and he wants to come home.
Finally, he has something else he can say.
Hi, Mom, he types. Today, my friend Junhui showed me around Seoul.