Page 54 of A World Apart
I took a deep breath, deciding on how to put it.
“Before I was born, my mum travelled the world. She went to so many countries, honestly, I’m jealous,” I laughed softly, “and then she ended up in Japan. She loved it so much she tried to get a Visa to stay, but the only way she could do that was if she was working and had a sponsor.”
“She eventually found work as a foreign language teacher way out in the country. Nowhere near any cities, just this rural little town. She got to stay in Japan for a couple of years.”
“Eventually, she met a boy and, well, you can probably guess what happened.” I laughed again, embarrassed.
“But then she fell pregnant.” I sighed, feeling that odd and familiar pang that always accompanied this story.
“The boy didn’t want to be a father, and his family didn’t want to acknowledge her − or me, I suppose,” I shrugged. “The school she’d been working in didn’t want an unmarried, pregnant foreigner working for them, and without a sponsor, her Visa wasn’t valid. So, she had to leave. She moved back to England and had me.”
“When I was two, she met my dad and the rest is history. They got married, Ernest adopted me, and they lived happily ever after.”
I smiled. I always ended this story with the same words because, honestly, it’s true. My parents were so in love that sometimes it was hard to be in the same room as them. It wasn’t uncommon to come down to the kitchen for breakfast and find them slow dancing in front of the fridge. My dad built my mum a porch in the garden, just so she could sit outside on autumn mornings with a coffee and greet the day.
Theirs was a love I could only dream of.
Shaking my head, I brought myself back into the present.
“You love them very much.” Jihoon nodded, the statement a fact, not a question.
“Yes,” I said.
“They must miss you.”
I pulled my legs up to my chest and lay my head on my knees, so I was facing him. “I’m sure they do, but they have each other.” I let the silence fall into place between us as I watched him, watching the waves make their slow creep up the sand, ever closer but still plenty far enough away. For now.
“Is it weird for your parents?” I asked, and the question seemed to take him by surprise because he looked at me, a light crease forming between his brows before his face relaxed into an easy grin.
“I think they’re used to it now. I’ve lived away from home since I was eleven.”
“Eleven!” I exclaimed, lifting my head from my knees.
Jihoon nodded, letting his legs fall as he gracefully folded himself into a cross-legged seating position facing me. I mirrored his movements until we were facing each other, knees nearly touching.
“I lived with my imo and imobu − my aunt and uncle − in New York when I was eleven. I went to middle school there for three years while my parents travelled for work, and then when I was fourteen, I auditioned for ENT.” He was so matter of fact. I didn’t know how to feel about it. I couldn’t imagine moving away from my parents at such a young age. That must have been so hard.
“You didn’t move back home?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t have a home. My parents sold our house in Busan when my dad accepted the job abroad. I flew back to Korea in the summer I auditioned and moved into the trainee dorm. I started school in Seoul in August.”
“So fast,” I murmured. “That must have been so weird.”
Jihoon huffed and smiled. “It was, but we were so busy that we didn’t have time to think about it.”
“I’ve heard that idol training is intense,” I offered. It was well known how brutal training was for K-Pop idols. There were so many documentaries and accounts of idols being starved and worked so hard that they’d pass out.
Jihoon was silent for a moment, staring down at the empty bottle in his hands as he absentmindedly picked at the label.
“When you’re in school, it’s not so bad. You wake up, exercise, go to school. Then you train for a few hours. But you get that time off during the day to just be a kid, y’know?” He looked up at me, and I wanted to agree, but honestly, I couldn’t imagine his life.
“English lessons were the best though,” he cocked his head to the side, a small smile playing across his lips.
“Why?”
“Because I had three years of practice from living in New York. It was the one class I was better at than my hyungs.” He grinned. “My teachers were not so happy though; they had to spend a lot of time correcting the New York accent I’d picked up.” He said ‘New York’ in a way that reminded me of Joey from 'Friends', and I giggled.
“But because I spent so much of my day in school, I had to work extra hard after classes to make sure I wasn’t letting my trainers down.
