Sublimation(24)
Sometimes Soyoung speaks the words along with the presenter in her perfect American accent. But only in a whisper. Soyoung’s fiancé sleeps lightly.
* * *
An American passport holder is allowed to visit the Republic of Korea for tourism for up to ninety days, after obtaining a K-ETA from the Korean government. The K-ETA is an online application that takes fifteen minutes to complete, and is almost never rejected. The registrant must indicate their ethnicity, and if they are ethnically Korean, they must declare whether they are an instance of an existing Korean citizen, or if they are foreign-born. There is a third box that can be checked which states “other.” This is the box that reintegrated individuals must check, and then they have to explain their circumstances in the text field in under five hundred characters.
If the individual reintegrates while in the Republic of Korea, they are required to declare their new status through an online portal hosted by the Korean government and must choose a citizenship status within the next thirty days, the decision of which will be evaluated by a panel of cross-government officials. This is for those designated with “F” under “Sex.” Those with a designation “M,” under thirty years of age, fill out a near-identical form, except with the inclusion of a section describing military service. Korean male instances are required to complete military service by thirty, or else show naturalization in another country. This is five years earlier than non-instanced citizens, and has been criticized as discriminatory.
* * *
The English word “nostalgia” derives from the Ancient Greek “nostos,” which refers to a genre of epic literature involving safe homecoming by sea. “Nostos” is contrasted against “kleos,” the glory earned through great deeds. The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive—Odysseus’s nostos is his kleos. His return to his wife, meeting his son, and the acceptance of his instance are simultaneously his triumph against Poseidon, his wife’s suitors, and his own self-doubt.
In the narrative, Odysseus dislikes the man his instance became after he left for Troy—weak willed and unable to stand up to his wife’s suitors. Only by leaving, by fighting for ten years at Troy and spending another decade attempting to return to Ithaca, does Odysseus become a man he recognizes as himself. Yet it is the embrace of his own faults that allows him to finally return home, completely and wholly.
Odysseus’s story is an outlier—no other epic focuses so heavily on the relationship between instances, or creates the sort of conflict that Odysseus has between himselves.
YJ
“Do you want a distraction?” your other self says in English.
“Not really,” you say in Korean, popping the call to speakerphone so you can have your hands free to finish buttoning your shirt up. You have to concentrate. You’re going full corpo-formal today, you’re thinking about suit jackets. You thought perhaps a vest, but that’s a little too IB for you. You don’t want to look like one of the IB guys, you want to look competent and cool, NYC meets SF, but you’re not a technical lead, so no T-shirts. But a suit jacket could look like you’re trying too hard. You wish you were a code monkey. Then you could wear T-shirts every day of your life.
Thinking about your wardrobe is better than thinking about the meeting you’re dressing for. Thinking about your wardrobe is better than thinking about updating your résumé, reaching out to recruiters, saying goodbye to your H-1B1 status, starting all over from scratch.
“Hey, should I wear a suit jacket?”
“No, we look like an asshole when we wear a suit jacket. Calm down. You’re overthinking this.”
“I’m not overthinking this. You’re not the one getting fired today.”
“You’re not getting fired today.”
“I’m getting fired today. You ever get told we have a baby face?”
“No, but you work with—hey, what was the word for ‘baek-in’ again? Is there a specific term for them?”
You and your instance like to use your phone calls for language practice. You speak Korean regularly. He doesn’t use English except to watch American shows without subtitles.
“No, just say ‘white people,’” you say, in English. “Okay, so I’m going to wear the blazer.”
“Your funeral,” he says. “Look, you’ll be fine. You need a distraction. I’ll give you a distraction. Guess who I’ve been hanging out with?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. Do we have to do this now?”
Your instance makes an error noise with his mouth. You finish buttoning your shirt. You pull your nice blazer out of your closet, ignoring all the clothes on your floor. Someday you’ll be good about this sort of thing. But Petra moved out a week ago and the mess feels protective. When you clean everything up, you have sort of a suspicion that your loft is going to look too empty.
Besides, aren’t you allowed to have a bender after a breakup? Aren’t you allowed to lose your mind when you’re about to be fired? Not that you have time to lose your mind, because you’re in the middle of losing everything else in your life.
“Soyoung, you know, from high school.”
“Yeah, and? Don’t you guys hang out all the time?” you say. You don’t really think about Soyoung. She lives in the part of your brain that the rest of your childhood lives in. Soyoung is hagwon and ice cream bars and pretending really hard you don’t have a crush. Soyoung is the remembrance of getting rejected the first time you tried to ask a girl out. You don’t miss her, the same way you don’t miss the acne and the sweat and the cramming for exams. Someday, after you and your instance reintegrate, maybe she’ll mean something to you again.