Page 94 of When Worlds Collide
There was a scuffle on the phone, and then, “Eomma,” Jihoon’s tone softened, but he was breathing hard.
I got up. This was very much not my business. He was a grown man, and it was his family to deal with. He shot me a look, brows furrowed, mouth an unhappy line, and I blew him a kiss to show him I was fine. Hell, I didn’t even know what was going on.
I was slouched on the sofa, idly watching a Wallace and Gromit movie on BBC One by the time Jihoon was done with his family reunion call. He sighed and folded his body on the floor next to me, laying his head in my lap. I ran my hand through his hair.
“You okay, baby?” I asked, watching the way his shoulders rose with a deep inhale.
“Better now,” he grumbled, his voice muffled with his face pressed against my leg, and I laughed.
Silence lapsed as we watched the film, but I could tell neither of us was really paying attention. Finally, I gave in to the question that I had been trying not to ask.
“Joon?”
“Hmm?”
“What did your dad say?”
He turned his head to look up at me.
“You said my name,” I clarified, “and then he said something. I don’t know the words… oekuk, something? But it seemed to make you angry.”
Jihoon huffed, and looked away, and for a moment I didn’t think he was going to tell me, or would brush it off. But then-
“He was being an asshole.”
My mouth fell open.
Jihoon ran his hand through his hair, sighing, and then he got up to sit beside me on the sofa, pulling me back against him so I was lying on his chest, and where I couldn’t see his face.
“He called you a foreigner.”
Was that it? From his reaction, I had been expecting something a little… less accurate.
“I mean,” I started, “he’s not wrong. I am kind of foreign.”
Jihoon let out a little laugh, and ran his fingers up my arms. “He didn’t mean it like that.”
Oh.
“I take it that’s a bad thing?” I didn’t really know how to take it, but it was kind of hard to be insulted about something I didn’t understand the context of.
His arms tightened around me. “Not to me.”
The unspoken words, ‘But it is to them,’ felt like they were hanging in the air around us, like raindrops suspended in motion, waiting to fall.
I waited to see if he’d add anything to that, but he didn’t. So, I guess that was the end of that conversation.
Finally, we sat down to Christmas dinner.
Well, it was Christmas, and we ate dinner, so it was technically Christmas dinner. Pizza and beer, and we opted to watch a horror movie, just as a seasonal palette cleanser.
As I cuddled up to Jihoon, full of cheese and pepperoni, watching teenagers run around the woods away from a crazed axe murderer, I really thought this was the best Christmas I’d ever had.
But as I lay in bed later, Jihoon asleep beside me, the line from the conversation he’d had with his dad kept coming back to me. I still didn’t really understand the context, or rather, I didn’t understand the significance of how me being a foreigner was a bad thing. But I did understand that to Jihoon’s dad, it was.
The thought that came next was entirely unbidden, a spark of an idea so surprising that my eyes shot open as it ran through my head.
What if that had been the reaction my paternal grandparents had had? What if that was the reason my biological dad had rejected my mum, pregnant with me?
