Sublimation(3)

Okay, you would say. Harabeoji never told you anything interesting about the other Soyoung. You eventually stopped asking, because you had homework, field hockey practice, college applications.

This is what you remembered, when your instance told you that Harabeoji was dead. His silence about her. As if her existence was anathema to yours.

You picked your phone back up again and listened to your instance. She spoke to you in complete banmal, no formal suffixes for her other self. Grandfather’s dead. He wanted to see you before he died, but he died before we could ask you. Yes, we saw it coming.

You don’t have to come to the funeral, but he said he wanted you here.

Your instance said nothing about what she wanted, or why she was the one calling instead of an aunt or a cousin or your mother’s instance. She said nothing about how she felt about Harabeoji’s death, but you could guess her emotions based on the first ten years of being the same person. Maybe her sadness was like a foreign shore, which was how your sadness felt. You couldn’t imagine how she felt about talking to you.

“Okay,” you told your instance in the dark warmth of your bedroom. “I’ll be there when I can.”

You arranged plane tickets. You arranged time off from work. You arranged for your best friend to cat-sit. And now you’re in Seoul, in a basement ripped from your memories, and you wish you were a tourist instead.

But, well. The phone calls. You owe your grandfather … something. Maybe not what you’re giving him now. You should have owed him your presence when he was alive. But he had your instance, and your mother’s instance. He had your aunts and your uncles and cousins and the ghost of your grandmother, and you and your mom had been the only two people in the family to ever conclusively instance.

You have always comforted yourself about the distance from your Korean family by considering yourself something of a vestigial limb.



* * *



The distance between you and your instance is manufactured, not inherent. You know this. Your instance knows this. You both share in the creation of the space between the two of you, between yourself and your mother, between yourself and her-your Korean aunts and uncles, between her and her mother, between your mother and her mother. The only thing not your fault is the relationship between your mother and your-her grandfather.

Your instance and her mother get Korea, your-her aunts and uncles, your-her grandfather. They get the physical presence. They get Chuseok. They get your-her grandmother’s grave. They get stationery stores and Emart and clean public transit, they get the ahjumma selling ginkgo nuts and roasted chestnuts at the foot of the hiking trails.

You and your mother get America.

You could call this a fair trade. You could call this the inherent outcome of your mother’s feud with your grandfather, a wound not your own, which you never completely probed. You could have researched your instance—you know her name, her birthday, her school history until you left the country. You could have easily contacted her through your aunts. But you didn’t.

It’s not like you have anything against instances in the abstract. Your best friend from high school instanced nearly five years ago after transferring to the German branch of her company. She hadn’t expected to instantiate, but Clarissa’s heart apparently thought her future lay across the Atlantic.

You love both Clarissas. The last time the two of you spoke, German Clarissa told you she was planning on returning to America.

“It’s been fun,” she said to you. “But I’m ready to return. I think I want to reintegrate. Don’t tell Clarissa, yet.”

“She doesn’t know?” you said, cradling the phone between your shoulder and ear as you rinsed dishes in your sink.

“No,” German Clarissa said. “I haven’t told her, it’s not like we’re psychic.”

“You could extend your visa.”

“I have to declare that I want citizenship with the embassy, then. And I’ve been thinking about it a lot. But. I don’t know.”

You had hmm-ed encouragingly. This hadn’t been anything you had expected from Clarissa. You had assumed that she would naturalize because she had instanced. You had assumed she would seek citizenship overseas just from the blunt fact of her cleaving. But you supposed that she might have changed her mind, that the intervening years had made her feel differently. You guessed people could change.

“That’s kind of a big thing. Reintegration. We don’t know anyone who’s reintegrated, right?”

“It’s not a big thing in the States, yeah. People usually just … leave. And it’s going to be a pain in the ass, dealing with the embassy. That’s why I want to talk to her first.”

“Sure. Hey, it’ll be nice to see you again.”

“What are you talking about?” Clarissa said. “You see me all the time. You guys get brunch like, every Sunday.”



* * *



An instancing captures a static moment. A feeling in a specific time and place. The heart at the moment of stepping over a border. The mind when it knows it is leaving. A life is made of many static moments. What’s felt when walking up to the tarmac is a different thing from what is felt sitting in a park two weeks later. What’s felt when crossing a river with your belongings held above your head is a different thing from what is felt in the detention facility. What’s felt when your mother tells you that you’re leaving and puts you in your best coat is different from what you feel when you are twenty years older, sitting on the plane, returning. The only constant is that what people want will change, and the administrative state is there to log the outcomes.