food and drinks for us. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
The waitress returns a few minutes later to set a large clay bowl with a ladle and two cups at our table. Inside the bowl is a milky white liquid, but it’s not milk: the smell of alcohol coming off it is strong. Jin thanks the waitress, then takes the ladle and transports some of the creamy liquid into the cups.
“This is dong dong ju,” she says, “a popular Korean beverage. Michael, it’s very potent so you should drink it slowly.”
“Hey, I can hold my liquor,” I say, lifting the cup and smelling its contents. “I come from a long line of alcoholics.” I take a full pull of the dong dong ju and something magical happens: I’m buzzing the instant it hits my stomach.
“You like it?” Jin asks, taking a girly, tentative sip from her own cup.
“Very much,” I reply. I take another generous pull, and then another. Pleasant summer campfires begin burning behind my eyes.
We chat for a bit and I try with questionable success to pace myself. Before long the waitress arrives with our food, a sizzling stone plate covered in what Jin informs me is pa’jun — Korean green onion pancake. It comes with little ceramic dishes of sesame oil for dipping. Jin chats with the waitress while she sets up a small armada of side dishes around our table, kimchi and bean sprouts and some kind of scrambled-egg concoction carved into a square. The two of them nod a few more times in my direction. When the waitress leaves, Jin throws me a tight little smile.
“She thinks you’re handsome.”
“Do you think I’m handsome?” I, or possibly the dong dong ju, ask in return.
She wrinkles her nose. “Maybe a little.”
“Do you think Rob Cruise is handsome?” I venture, realizing that he’s still preying on my mind.
“Ugh. Rob Cruise is not handsome. But he is —” and here she mulls around for the right idiom, “he is larger than life. Every Korean girl he meets thinks so. I certainly did.”
“So I’ve heard.”
Miraculously, she does not take offence. “Do you really want to talk about me and Rob?”
“We don’t have to.” But then find myself asking: “Are you two still friends?”
“I don’t know,” she huffs. “He can be so cruel, but you know, in a hilarious way. This one time, he accused me of being kong’ju’byung.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, it’s very hard to translate directly into English, but it means, like, a high-maintenance princess. That I suffer from the disease of being a high-maintenance princess!”
I laugh because this is exactly the kind of Korean phrase that Rob would insist he learn.
Jin thinks I’m laughing at her. “I am not kong’ju’bong!” she whines, slapping the table with her palm. “I am very, how you say, down to earth.”
“Hey, I believe you.” I grab the ladle and refill my cup.
“Anyway. Rob Cruise was a mistake. Try not to think about him.”
“I won’t if you won’t.”
A silence falls between us as we work our way through the pa’jun. It’s impossible to hide from Jin how useless I am with chopsticks; they fumble around my plate like paralyzed limbs. Without prompting, the waitress passes by to set a fork discreetly next to my plate.
“So tell me — what is the deal with your roommate, Justin, anyway,” Jin says. “He’s even more reserved than you are. What’s his story?”
“Justin’s stories are his stories,” I reply. “I’ll leave him to tell them.”
Jin refills her own cup and blinks at me a little. “Okay, so tell me your stories, Michael,” she says. “Why did you come to Korea?”
I have my stock answers prepared to unleash on her, the same answers I give anyone, Korean or waegookin, who asks: half-truths about lingering student loans needing to be paid off, the desire to see another part of the world and experience a different culture, blah, blah, blah. But the impatient tilt of Jin’s head tells me she’s heard it all before and won’t buy it. I’m feeling loose and fuzzy-headed, not at all like myself, and, consequently, embrace the truth.
“I got fired from my job in Canada.”
“Oh? Really?”
“Yes. In fact, you could say I got fired from my career in Canada.” I could leave it at that, sufficiently mysterious, but I find words coming out that I’d rather keep in a box. There is something in the angle of Jin’s chin, in her freakily beautiful double eyelids, in the restaurant’s shadowy light falling on her hair, which welcomes full disclosure from me. So I tell her everything — or almost everything. I at least have the good sense not to mention my ex-fiancée; this is a first date, after all. But I tell Jin about my father the politico and about my mother the lush. I tell her about my journalism in Halifax, such as it was, and how, orphaned and rudderless, I drifted into disgraceful acts of forgery and fiction. Soon I’ve gotten up some steam and tell her about getting caught and how my dishonourable deeds were broadcasted across Canada. I was fired and with no hope of finding other work in my field. I needed money and a break from myself, so I came to teach ESL to Korean kids, which has proven more palatable than suicide, which I also considered.
“I’m very ashamed,” I tell her, finishing off my cup and looking into the pot to find all the dong dong ju gone. “I’m very ashamed of what I did.”
Jin looks as if she might touch my hand lovingly, but doesn’t. “Michael, don’t be ridiculous. You’re in Korea.” Then she pauses. “You have no idea what real shame is.”
“What do you mean?”
But she shakes it off. There’s more there, I can tell, but she won’t say what it is; unlike me, she has control of her tongue. “Look, I’ve met many ESL teachers,” she says, “and sure, I’ve had relations with more than a few of them. But one thing I’ve noticed is that they’ve all come to my country because they’re running away from something in theirs. Maybe not as big as your something, but they’re running just the same. Except, they never admit it.” I think of Justin and Rob, the little bits of themselves they’ve shared with me. “You’re different than that,” she says. “You’re better than that.” She leans in. “Tell you what. Whatever you did before we met is none of my business, and I promise not to judge you for it. And whatever I did before we met is none of your business, and you promise not to judge me for it. Deal?”
“Deal,” I reply.
“Good.” She settles back again and flags down the waitress to order us, me, a pitcher of water.
Out on the street, away from Insadong, we’re standing in that awkward, absurd silence that comes at the end of a first date, where I feel the full weight and obligation of my gender crash down around my shoulders.
“You’re not taking the subway?” I ask, stalling.
“No.
