During breaks the students would cluster by country. Initially the Koreans looked at Teresa’s face and parted their circle; when she opened her mouth and infantile Korean poured out, their circle closed again. A huddle of Hispanic students referred to Teresa as china in the Spanish they thought she could not understand; she told them in her perfect porteño accent, “I’d rather be a ‘chink’ than an indígena.” A fight might have broken out if the students hadn’t been called back to class. From then on they stopped calling her china and started calling her bicha arrogante.
After each class Teresa took a graffiti-covered subway to the Upper West Side diner where she worked off the books, peddling fare like “bagels and lox,” “pastrami on rye” and “coffee regular.” Waiting tables served as a better primer for the English language—in all its uses and misuses—than any of her college classes. After work she would return to the room she shared with two girls from Sri Lanka and China, exchanging no more than a laboured “Hello” and “Goodbye.”
Argentina had fallen on hard times. Coming to America during the fat Reagan years had been her father’s idea, despite Teresa’s protests. Her life was plenty rich in Buenos Aires—she never wanted for friends, boyfriends. At the airport in Ezeiza, her father had kissed her forehead and said, “Better to suffer now while you’re still young. Not when it’s too late like Mamá and Papá.” Her mother had far more practical words: “Don’t get yourself into any trouble.”
For the scores of Koreans who arrived por barco at the port of Buenos Aires, Argentina was only supposed to be a pit-stop to Miguk—literally Land of the Beautiful. They set up shop in Once’s garment district and never left. But for the majority of porteños, the tens of thousands of Korean immigrants and their native-born children were always, simplemente, los chinos.
Three months into her American sojourn, Teresa experienced her first northern winter. This is criminal, she thought each morning as she wound a scarf around her neck and bundled into her too-thin coat. As she stepped outside to face the frost and snow, she tried not to torment herself by imagining the hot summer Buenos Aires was currently enjoying.
Teresa could not find Argentine food in New York, and on one such winter morning she sought out the next best thing: the Korean market in the Queens neighbourhood of Flushing. Growing up, she didn’t care for her mother’s Korean cooking; like every other Argentine kid she favoured milanesas and sándwiches de miga and dulce de leche dripping from everything. Now, picking through the aisles of red pepper flakes and dandelion roots and Napa cabbage, she was so lost in her thoughts that she did not acknowledge the shopkeeper when he addressed her. He had the same hangdog look as her father: cheeks and jowls drooping, as if defeated by gravity. Finally he snapped, “¿Jánguk maldo motjaña?” Can’t you even speak Korean?
Teresa bowed her head and shuffled to the door without replying. In Buenos Aires when the shopkeepers on Avenida Carabobo—the main drag of commerce near the Korean churches—would comment on her terrible Korean, she used to quip back in Spanish: Learn some castellano! But here when she tried to speak, her mouth grew numb. Her only options were bad Korean, bad English, or the perfect Spanish no one would understand.
Tere, you’ve grown soft, she thought to herself. Blinking back tears, she nearly collided with a woman who had a baby strapped to her chest and a little boy clinging to her legs. To Teresa’s astonishment—she knew so few people in New York—she recognised her: it was Yuna Kim, a girl she knew through their church back home but had not seen since.
“Yuna!” she cried, pressing her lips to the woman’s cheek. As she pulled away from the embrace Teresa realised her mistake: she’d forgotten to call her by the term of respect for girls older than herself. “Oni,” she added hastily, and Yuna relaxed her pursed mouth.
In her rush to greet someone—anyone—she knew from back home, Teresa had also forgotten that Yuna used to have that effect on her, as though she were being admonished. It was the way her face—fleshier now, as if Yuna had eaten something rich and salty the night before—would reflect its displeasure with a subtle pinch of eyebrow and mouth. “Santa Yuna,” the kids used to whisper behind her back.
Yuna’s family had not fared so well in their Argentine sojourn. According to the rumours that had circulated in the church courtyard, the Kims’ business went belly-up and they were forced to rely on what few connections they had in the States. The story buzzing below that was how Yuna had been hastily patched up in a marriage to a man—older, newly naturalised—who provided the family’s passage to New York.
“You got skinnier,” Yuna remarked. Her own mid-section bulged, straining the waistband of her Jordache jeans. She used to be flaca in Buenos Aires. “You must be homesick to death. Come to my house for dinner.”
Teresa was a girl who preferred the certainty of her own solitude to the intrusion of others’ bad company. She was arrogant that way, her mother used to chastise her. You think you’re better than everyone else.
But living alone in a foreign country was humbling; you weren’t in a position to choose your companions. It made you long for the familiar. Latching on to the thought of a home-cooked meal, Teresa heartily accepted Yuna’s invitation.
In the living room of Yuna’s home in Queens, a man was standing on the toy-strewn plush carpet, lifting a little boy up in the air. He effortlessly hoisted the squealing child once, twice, thrice, as if he weighed no more than a paper bag. It was only when he set the boy on the ground to scamper down the hall to his mother that Teresa recognised the man as Yuna’s brother, Juan.
In Sunday School Juan had been a small, soft-spoken boy who sat hunched in the corner. In the intervening years he’d grown barrel-chested and developed the compact, stocky build of a soccer player. As Teresa entered, Juan froze—it was clear he hadn’t expected to see her. He turned red; shyness shrouded him. Dutifully he brushed his lips across her cheek in greeting. When they broke away, the first word that came to Teresa’s mind was carabobo: idiot-face.
Carabobo was the nickname kids called each other whenever anyone did something stupid, or anything at all. Juan Kim did not have the face of an idiot, but he had an intense way of fixing his eyes on his subject that suggested autism, or maybe genius. Either way, Teresa had found him rather dull and paid him little attention from the first day of Sunday School until Juan moved to the United States when they were still in high school.
“Where do you go to college?” she asked now.
“I don’t,” he said, shifting his gaze to his hands; they looked rough to the touch. She was saved from the embarrassment of her blunder when Yuna called them to eat.
To Teresa’s disappointment, the meal was not Argentine but Korean—and a far cry from her mother’s home cooking at that. Yuna’s bulgogi was dry and tough. Her kimchi was a quick pickle—young leaves tossed in peppery vinegar, lacking the robust-to-the-point-of-funky tones Teresa’s mother achieved by fermenting the cabbage in an earthenware jar on the balcón.
“Aren’t you lucky to be studying here,” Yuna said, passing Teresa a platter of mandu. To be polite, she took a dumpling from the top but was met with gelatinous resistance as it clung to the one beneath it. If she pried the mandu free, its thin, gummy skin would tear and spill its innards. She sensed a mess would only annoy Yuna more. Reluctantly she took both and set them on her plate. “Guess your parents are doing well . . .” Here Yuna trailed off, as if bringing up Teresa’s parents’ success would call attention to her own family’s failure. While Teresa’s family business had fared better before the Kims left Argentina, times had changed. Every day buttons and bolts of cloth and coils of elastic for waistbands climbed in price. Sending Teresa to the States was an expense the family could hardly afford, and she had nothing to show for her studies.
She lifted her chin. “I guess I am lucky.”
Juan was irritatingly quiet during the meal, offering no respite from Yuna’s invasive questions about Teresa’s classes, her tuition, her living situation, her parents
’ health. In truth the answer to all of them was “Not good.” Instead Teresa answered, “Great. Everything’s great.”
Her eyes fell on the wedding portrait framed on the wall: a doll-sized Yuna all dressed in white, coupled with a pudgy man who had a face that could have been thirty, or fifty. He rested a fat, proprietary hand on her shoulder. She looked like a child bride.
“It’s a shame you don’t know anybody who could use some extra work,” Yuna was saying. “My husband’s opening his second dry cleaner’s and—”
Teresa nodded at the portrait. “Will your husband be joining us tonight?”
“He’s working late,” Yuna said curtly, scraping her chair against the floor to attend to her crying baby.
The conjoined mandu still sat untouched on her plate. Teresa sighed.
“You don’t have to eat that,” Juan said. She looked up in surprise; he hadn’t spoken since the meal began. His eyes met hers, and this time she did not look away. It felt like the first genuine thing any of them had said all night.
While Yuna put the children to bed, Teresa washed and sliced the frutillas she had brought as a gift. Juan lingered in the doorway of the kitchen. “How do you like it here?” he ventured with more confidence.
Teresa hesitated. Her mother, always conscious of social niceties, used to warn her against airing grievances. We all have problems, Mamá would say. Not just you. But she was here and her mother was there. And there was something in Juan’s expression that made her feel she could be honest.
“Every day they’re judging me,” she said. “The yanquis. The Koreans. The other hispanohablantes.”
“We don’t fit in. Not here, not there.”
“Every day I feel like—”
“A fool?”
She nodded. “Exactly.”
“It’s a luxury to care about what they think. You know you—we—don’t matter to them.”
He was making her complicit in his we. “You sound so defeatist.”
“It gets easier that way,” he said. “The sooner you stop caring so much, the sooner you can start to live.”
Fragments of memory were coming back to her of the time Juan performed a violin solo at a church wedding. Initially he’d bitten his lip and rounded his shoulders. But as he began playing the opening bars, his face had taken on the same look of fierce concentration she was seeing now. Perhaps he was not so unmemorable as she had thought.
“I can help, if you’d like,” he said.
Teresa understood the imposition of foisting your helplessness on to someone else. But she was overwhelmed by the kindness of Juan’s offer. Since her arrival in this country, such gestures were few and far between.
In her effortless castellano she replied, “I’d like that very much.”
To Teresa New York seemed unconquerable, but Juan demonstrated an enviable fluency with the city’s main streets and back roads, its usos y costumbres. He did not hem and haw as Teresa did each time they emerged from the subway, unsure of which way was east or west. Juan spoke a fluid street English, free of the textbook parameters and fears of rule-breaking that plagued her own.
They lunched at a parrilla in a corner of Queens that Teresa had never been to and doubted she could ever find by herself. Over platters of grilled meat, she asked, “Do you miss Buenos Aires?” The barbecue fumes were mixing with Teresa’s floral perfume.
Juan breathed deeply. “Every single day of my life.”
“But I thought things were supposed to get better with time.”
“You find little comforts where you can. Like this.” He lifted his fork. “You learn to savour them.”
She followed suit: she lifted her fork to her mouth; she swallowed. “It’s good,” she said. She did not point out the toughness of the meat, its aggressive seasoning. The meal was not the best parrillada ever, but since her arrival it was the closest approximation she had tasted to the flavours of home.
They quickly became an island of two. Together they weathered the remainder of the winter, her first New York spring, the hot flush of summer. What they were exactly—it fell into that nebulous region of grey. For Teresa, Juan had taken away her homesickness. When she was with him, her tongue lapped in the familiar waters of castellano. This was the first time she truly understood the word her parents used whenever they spoke nostalgically of Korea: jiangsu-biong. Aroma-disease. With Juan at her side, she felt the sweet breeze from back home.
Whatever she was to him, Teresa sensed (in truth, more than sensed) that he wanted more. Though appealingly boyish, Juan had none of the flash of her previous boyfriends: Diego, Rafael, Sergio. She knew her friends from Argentina would think she could do better. Most days she tried to shut those voices out. It was much easier to push away the imaginary disapproval of your peers when they were thousands of miles away.
One autumn afternoon, over coffee and facturas at a Uruguayan bakery (the confiterías of their neighbours across the river were “good enough” at a pinch), she asked Juan if he still played music.
“I quit that years ago.”
“Couldn’t you play just once? For me?”
“I don’t even own a violin any more.”
“But you were so good.”
“I know I was so good,” he shot back. Teresa was surprised by the sudden roughness of his tone, his jolt of angry confidence. “But what’s the point? It doesn’t mean anything here.”
“OK, Mr. Positive. Forget I ever asked.”
Juan closed his eyes and shook his head, as if he were trying to shut out the world. “Please, Térea.”
Térea. Juan had slipped into a cariñoso diminutive she hadn’t heard in a long time. These days it was only her father who called her that, his voice sounding tinny and weak in their all-too-brief monthly calls from the communal phone in the hallway.
There was something perversely alluring about seeing Juan rise to anger—to any emotion at all. She was starting to see him in a new light. He had the maturity of a man who had endured.
It was through that same tinny hallway phone one winter day that Teresa’s mother, always sensible and collected, called with the news about Papá. “Your father is in the hospital.” But then something choked up—her mother’s voice? the staticky international wires?—and the phone was quickly passed to one of her elder sisters. “Papá had a heart attack.”
Teresa slumped against the wall. “Oh my God. Papá—is he OK?”
“He’s stabilised now.” The sister’s tone was clipped. “But I don’t know what we’re going to do in the meantime. Every day the price of everything goes up. You need a suitcase full of bills just to buy a bag of rice at the store. We’re all doing what we can to help, but we’re barely scraping by ourselves.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“To tell you there’s no money for you to fly home to see him.”
Teresa called Juan immediately after, her voice shaking; he came straight to her. She was racked with guilt. The burden of an overseas education had taken its toll on her father. She told Juan she was done with this godforsaken country. The next morning she would plead her case to the bursar’s office, beg for her tuition money back, and hop on the next plane to Argentina, never to return. Miguk was a land that had brought her more harm than good, and life is difficult enough as it is, thank you.
As she spoke, Juan walked to the window and pressed his head against the pane. Cold air seeped in through the cracked-open window. “What is it?” Teresa asked, touching his shoulder.
When Juan turned around, the light struck his profile in a way she had never noticed before, highlighting not the boyishness of his cheeks, but their hard, beautiful edges.
To her astonishment, he let out a little laugh. “Do I even mean anything to you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, knowing it was not the answer he was looking for.
Juan’s brow deepened—with anger, with frustration, or maybe some combination of both. In that moment he looked almost like Yuna. “So y
ou’re just going to go, like that,” he said. “And you’re not coming back.”
“My father’s sick,” she said. “Sorry for not making this about you.” But she knew it was more than just that.
As Juan stared at her with that carabobo face, she thought back to the first day they had met in New York. She was alone in Miguk and he had taken away her loneliness. But still it did not change what she felt deep down: she did not love him.
It was Juan who broke their gaze. Snapping the strap of his bag, he hoisted it over his shoulder and was out of the door before she could speak.
That night as Teresa was drifting off to sleep, she heard a rustling outside, and an envelope was slipped under the door. The note inside read:
I feel like a fool about before. I’m sorry. I love you.
But I think you already know that.
Go be with your father and your family. I’m selfishly hoping you’ll return. But if you do . . . we can’t go back to how things used to be. I just couldn’t bear it.
I’d rather lose you completely than stay to become nothing to you.
The paper was wrapped around a round-trip ticket to Buenos Aires, departing in the morning, with an open return. She had already taken advantage of too much of his kindness; she knew she shouldn’t accept this generous, loaded offering if she could not offer her heart along with it.
But when she opened the door, Juan was already gone.
Teresa’s guilt at taking Juan’s ticket dwindled on the flight back to Argentina, and all but vanished by the time she touched down at Ezeiza. The Buenos Aires air was hot and languid, nothing like New York’s icy chill and frantic energy. Everything was so easy here, so relaxed. There was no linguistic struggle at the quiosco for a pack of cigarettes, no more patronising looks because of her awkward English. Already America seemed so far away—she could not imagine ever going back.
Teresa and her mother took turns tending to both the store and her father. Her sisters popped by on occasion, but they had their own families to look after. Papá was weakened from his attack but he still managed to squeeze her hand when she sat at his bedside. On the days he mustered the energy to speak, he would tell her, “You should go back to your studies,” his voice cracking into a hoarse whisper. Again and again it broke Teresa’s heart.