Dear Boyoung,

I miss you so much.

Sorry for the delay. I couldn’t write letters for a while. I didn’t write at all.

I was feeling out of it. I don’t look in the mirror when I’m not feeling like myself. I can’t look. Maybe for me, writing letters is like peering into a mirror. It took me ages to crack open my notebook.

During my evening walk, I thought about rats and soap. There are a lot of rats in Harlem, and these rats are hardy and hardened. One of the rats I saw was dragging a whole upturned pizza with all its might. And somehow, impossibly, the entire pizza fit inside the rat hole. I was watching all of this happen and walking in a daze when I kicked something with my foot—another rat, of course. That snapped me out of my stupor. I knew it was time to write you back, Boyoung.

I loved your story about Ulsan. Can you tell me more? About what your friends are like and what you were trying to build together, whether you eventually caught the rat…

Meanwhile, I attended an academic conference and even managed to conduct archival research. For the conference, I traveled to Virginia, famous for its peanuts, and for the archive, I traveled to sunny California. Cali was cold, and I didn’t see a single peanut in Virginia. I was woefully unprepared. When I asked a friend what Virgina was famous for, they said, “Peanuts?” So I told myself, Okay, Virginia is known for peanuts. And for California, I only knew it as a destination for movie protagonists who go west to escape their busy New York City lives and meet a happy, carefree ending. I had only packed tank tops—the first thing I bought when I landed was a sweatshirt.

The traveling took a toll on me. I also need to spend at least a few days alone at home to maintain my daily routine, but when you travel, you have to fall into a different rhythm. I’m usually pretty maladroit, but my lack of direction is impossible to hide when I travel. I don’t know where to look, and it would make anyone think, Ah, they’re not from around here. But I’m not always like that. For example, one evening, after we were done with our work for the day, my friend Y and I mosied over to a club. The music of Sam Smith flowed out from the club doors, and from the moment we arrived, our shoulders moved to the rhythm. Soon, we had captivated everyone’s attention with our fabulous dance moves and waacking. And after an hour or so, Y and I were dangling from the poles on stage, panting, as the crowd cheered on, “Korea! Korea!”

Ha, if it’s going to be this kind of letter, then I could write on and on. Boyoung, I’m sitting in front of the computer, giggling alone. While the summers here are much too hot, it’s night now, and I still have a lot of energy from my long evening walk. The energy to spin you a tall tale… I was a mess at the club. I wanted to dance to the beat, but why did my legs and hips feel so heavy? On top of that, I was at a loss for how to coordinate my two arms. I spent a couple of hours on the dancefloor—alone and flapping my limbs like someone anxiously waiting in line for the bathroom—before I headed back. Even then, I was so exhausted that I had to call a cab. In the back seat, my forehead pressed against the window, I thought about how fun the club was. So far, the crowds at most of the clubs I’ve been to were in their twenties or thirties, but the club in San Francisco featured a multi-generational crowd—people in their teens through people in their sixties and beyond—with each person dancing their own dance. I was drunk on two gin and tonics, but the folks who were moving to the beat were drunk on dancing. I’m sure of it.

I read selections from Crying in H Mart this summer. I’ll probably include excerpts from the book in the syllabus for the undergraduate English Comp course I’m teaching next semester. It’ll be a good example for writing about hunger or place. Hunger references the desire to eat something, but it also references other desires—the desire to see someone, the desire to go somewhere, the desire to live or die. I think Michelle Zauner, the author of Crying in H Mart, is someone who knows her own hunger and knows how to console it. That hunger sharpens when she goes to H Mart, then spreads out into other emotions and memories. I want to share these aspects of her writing with my students.

I also noticed that class was trending as a topic on Korean Twitter. My guess is that people are discussing class because social mobility has gone from being difficult to near impossible these days. I saw that the conversations focused on Zauner’s maternal grandmother’s wealth. To be honest, the discussions about class on Twitter didn’t interest me that much. But they did make me think this: that Zauner has both the ability and the space to write about feeling hunger.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about time, and whether your socioeconomic background or class would also change your relationship to time. I’ve gone through phases when writing felt like a luxury—especially on days filled with endless hours of work. I’d force myself to sit at my desk to write, but I’d be in no state to write. I even remember feeling scared and sobbing at the thought that time was slipping by swiftly only for me.

As I always say, sometimes I wish I could live in a bubble, like a prince or a princess…

Yours,

Ju Ly