Confessions of a Cat-holic (163)

I first met Eddie in person outside of John Jay's dining hall. I was introduced to meet him officially through Jason. We were about to enter the cafeteria through the line. When we were waiting outside, we had a chat briefly, but I forgot what it was about already. All I could remember was that he said something funny, like ironically funny. He said something that made me laugh. So I said to him, "You are funny."

He said, "Your face is funny." Wow, he was a person who would fight back. He always said my face was funny looking, I didn't know why. Did I look funny to anyone? I grew up in Hong Kong and I always felt like the ugly duckling among my friends because I looked different from them. When I had no facial expressions, I could pass as a Cantonese. But as soon as I grinned, I started to look like You Haejin. I had only learned to understand that I had a Korean face after studying at Columbia. I saw a lot of Korean faces on campus, and they were very good looking too. Eddie showed me his mother's pictures on an album cover. He told me his mother was a celebrity in Korea, namely the Pearl Sisters. I figured I had that Korean facial feature which I believed was what Eddie called "the elf-looking face" when I grinned. I didn't know what he meant by looking like an elf. But he kept saying that I looked like an elf. In response to my ugly duckling hypothesis, he recommended me to read the book, The Black Swan.

I had a Korean friend, Sammy Yoon, who had a very good looking boyfriend. His name was Thomas Lee and he was a pre-med. He told me he went to a Catholic school all his life. I was kind of interested in him in freshman year but he transferred to NYU shortly after sophomore year. Sammy liked to introduce a lot of her Korean friends from West Point to me. To be honest, I knew quite early on that she had been having affairs with my boyfriend, Ed. She just wanted to see me break up with Ed. Just hold on, I would, I would totally break up with Ed, but I just had to wait for the right moment.

Sammy liked to take me out to drink, because I told everyone that I was allergic to alcohol at the beginning of the semester. But it was an outright lie. My family was the biggest producer of the beer industry in the world. How could I be allergic to alcohol? I told myself never let anyone know my weaknesses right? So I just made something up. And thanks to Sammy, my tolerance to alcohol gradually grew.

She liked to take me to those Korean karaoke bars, which were like 20 years behind Hong Kong's Neway. They had those shimmering disco lights and multiple karaoke machines which we had to enter a 5 digit number to choose a song on a paper printed menu. Even though the devices were kind of out-of-date, I still enjoyed my times with them. They had those Korean soju drinking games too. It was like learning about my own culture and race because I had grown up like Amigo Choi and DJ Donald who spoke no Korean in Hong Kong.

I didn't know anything about Korea before college. I just started to get curious after my first visit in that summer before college started. But to be honest, Korea was just as foreign as Japan to me. No, even more distant. At least I could eat sushi every day but I could not eat spicy kimchi at all. I watched some Korean drama before, like Soonpoong Clinic and My Sassy Girl. But that was it. I didn't know much about their conflicts with Japan until the tour guide told me so in Insa Dong.

Sammy and her Korean friends were singing Korean songs at the Korean karaoke bars and I just tagged along. There was no way I could understand what they were saying but there were some white Americans with them too so I didn't feel as embarrassed. And the funny thing was that they were all crazy about this band called H.O.T and they were dancing and swaying their bodies to their songs like they were the hottest guys on earth.

Then I figured out why Sammy was so obsessed with Ed. She must have thought that Ed was the Julian Cheung of Generation X, if not the Leon Lai of Yale. But no, in Hong Kong people's eyes, he was just Norman Cheung Lap Gei from ATV Hong Kong. I didn't want to break her heart by telling her the reality so I would keep her happy for now.