Page 44 of Damian & Jun: Episodes 5-8
Damian rubbed his face. All the paperwork paled against the crime of denying Jun his basic birthright, the opportunity that his mother had chosen to give him.
“What do you mean?” Jun fingered the pieces of paper. “My father told me he’d changed everything. That my US identity was gone.”
“It doesn’t work that way. Parents can’t renounce your US citizenship. Especially a parent that’s not even on your US birth certificate.”
Jun’s eyes teared up as he looked at the pieces of paper. He picked the one up that had his mother’s name. “So this…this is still real?”
“I’ll call Pearson,” Richard murmured. “Checking a social security record isn’t hard. What name should he check?”
Jun grabbed a clean piece of paper and wrote out a name: Jun Rui River. He followed it with a birth date. Richard took the paper and got on the phone.
They all sat in silence. Jun didn’t seem to want to be touched, so Damian just kept his hand on the table.
A few minutes later, Richard came back. “Jun Rui River, born on that birth date, in that city, to a Mrs. Ma, is still on record. There’s no denaturalization, no death certificate.”
“That means you’re still a citizen, Jun,” Damian whispered.
Jun stared at the scraps of his birth certificate. “Bak knew. They had to have known. Him and my father. Every time we came to the US, Bak would ask me if it felt odd to me, coming back to a country I no longer belonged to anymore. He made sure I believed I didn’t have any legal standing here. He laughed about it.”
“They needed you to think you had nowhere to run,” Damian whispered.
Collin touched Jun’s hand and squeezed.
Jun squeezed back—just once—then stood up. “I need…I need space. Sorry. This is a lot. I’m going to go to the lounge, if that’s okay?”
“Do whatever you need to do,” Richard said.
Damian handed Jun his paper and his phone. Jun took it, almost as if he didn’t see it. He hit his knee on the table as he turned to go. He didn’t seem to realize it. Damian rounded the table and followed him to the hall, but he stopped there. Jun walked all the way to the other end of The Residency and entered the lounge. He closed the door behind him.
Damian let out a ragged sigh and leaned against the nearest wall. “Fuck.”
“I want to hurt his dad,” Collin whispered. “And Bak.”
“You and me both, bro. You and me both.”
Jun
It shouldn’t have hurt so much. He’d been kidnapped, held against his will, and arrested, not to mention what had happened the day he met his father, but this…
He felt it in his chest, like a burning skewer being driven deeper and deeper each time he rolled the revelation around his mind.
Why? What would it have mattered to have let him keep the citizenship his mother had wanted for him? There were quite a few K-pop stars who were foreigners, even US foreigners. It wouldn’t have stopped him entering the career his father had chosen for him.
It felt like it came down to spite. To control. Possession.
He paced the length of the lounge. Everything was too much, too loud. He found a corner and shoved himself into it, knees to his chest, arms around his legs, face pressed against his knees. But the noise was inside him. He couldn’t escape from it. It had to come out.
He wanted to scream, but he didn’t have words. Wanted to cry but couldn’t. Instead, he rocked back and forth, pressing the wall against his ribs again and again, forehead to his knees. Nothing from the past felt real, and he didn’t want to think about the future. It was just him, in this moment, rocking back and forth, breathing.
Slowly, he let a thin stream of thought from the past come in. Let himself examine the line of memories between himself and his father and himself and Bak. Spun it out like a ribbon of film on an old cassette and dissected it.
Words and music filled his head. The noise took on a form and shape that could actually be released. He crawled out of his corner and found the paper and his phone where he’d dropped them. He wrote, crouched on the floor, words ripping out of him. Angry, terrible words, wrapped in beautiful, broken minor chords.
I’m not your child
I’m your crime
I’m not your blood
