Byung Joon Lee

 



*“And oh..*



*Maybe mother told you true*



*And there'll always be somebody there for you*



*And you'll never be alone*



* *



*But maybe she's wrong*



*And maybe I'm right*



*And just maybe she's wrong…*



*and if so, here’s this song!” *



* *



*LCD Soundsystem, New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down.” *



* *



*“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death' or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” *



* *



*- Revelation 21:4 *



 



 



Between New England and the Tri-state area there exists a kind of no-man’s land, about three and a half hours of solid, uninterrupted, good old American highway punctuated only by tire stores and vegetation in varying states of decay. If there is an ideal for a highway - the highway as endless possibility, the highway as inter-state connectivity, the highway as a backdrop for a Subaru with zero down - then the I-93 would be a perversion of that ideal. The pavement is cracked, the guardrails are rusted and the landscape is dominated by Jiffy Lubes.



The word “godforsaken” comes to mind.



Presently, I am doing around 50 mph on this sorry excuse of a highway, freshly eighteen and freshly graduated from boarding school. I had spent the rainy ceremony alternating between thanking God for my blessed four years and replaying the beginning of Easy Rider in my head, looking forward to the journey that lay before me. As the car chugs along the broken pavement I try my best to block the scenery from defiling my memories of the ceremony.



I am also thinking about The Plan, which has been gestating for around three months in the back of my head. The Plan was simple: New Hampshire to New York City to LaGuardia Airport to Manchester, TN. At Manchester we would strike gold and find God. The Plan was intentionally loose, to allow ample time for detours and “just living, man.”



“Yo, what’s the name of that band you’re going on about?”



My best friend and travel companion Andrew asks me from the passenger’s side. (N.B. I asked him whether he wanted to be called Karlo Marx in the piece but he just told me to print his real name (“Who cares? We didn’t murder anyone.”))  



“What?”



“That band we’re going to see in Tennessee. LED Sound or whatever.”



“LCD Soundsystem.”



“I don’t know why we’re going all the way to fucking Tennessee just to see this band. It’s like you worship them or something.”



      



I have an obsession with the Second Coming. I guess it was something I absorbed, one of those qualities you take in from eight years of Christian school and fourteen years of methodist services. In sixth grade Bible class we used to read the Book of Revelation and I remember trying to picture what the day of reckoning would look like. For some reason I would always think about the ending to Independence Day where the alien spaceship fires a poorly-rendered CGI laser beam into the heart of Washington, D.C. This seemed like a rather blasphemous take on the whole affair, so I kept it stowed away, one of many guilty thoughts.



The other guilty thought I had was that I was afraid of heaven.



In sixth grade, my English teacher - one of many Good Christian Men in my life - gave us a monthly reminder about the horrors of hell.



“The scary thing about hell is that it lasts an eternity,” he said.



“Picture a bird with a tiny spoon tied to its leg that flies over a mountain range, scraping off tiny bits of rocks with it as it goes. You wait for that bird to level all of Mt. Everest and eternity hasn’t even begun.”



For my sixth grade self, this was a pretty effective sales pitch for waking up early on Sunday morning and getting to services on time. The thing was - and this was the unposed question that still sticks with me today - couldn’t the same logic be applied to heaven? Isn’t heaven also scary because it lasts forever?



When I was trying to get through sermons without nodding off as a kid I would mentally autopilot my life forward to its conclusion (where I was invariably an eighty-something, happily married ex-basketball player-slash-nuclear scientist) and imagine my own ascension into heaven. They would check ID there, and I would pass because I had gone to Sunday school and never killed anybody, not even that asshole Brian from kindergarten who picked on me during recess. When they let me in I would sit on a cloud in between M.L.K. and Mother Theresa and the realtor lady from California who died when I was six and wait for nothing much at all. That was the part that always got to me: the crushing absence of a future.



If I really wanted to scare myself good during sermon I would simulate the feeling of waking up every morning to the same scenery - clouds, angels, pearly gates and M.L.K. - forever and ever, like some ever-respawning video game character, until I got to day sixty-five or so and cold sweats would pool in my palms and I would secretly - in my heart of heart of hearts - wish that I could forgo heaven, that I could simply roll the end credits on my soul before it disintegrated into television static.



In that sense, it’s funny that The Plan began on a Easter Sunday and started with a second coming.



The apocalypse took the form of a two-line Facebook post at 2 AM.



“LCD Soundsystem will rise from the dead this Easter Sunday at Webster Hall.”



I don’t remember my exact reaction to the news, but I do recall it being physical, some awkward hybrid between a guttural shout and a high five to no one in particular.



LCD Soundsystem was one of many mid-2000s Brooklyn bands that enjoyed moderate mainstream success. Their sound was a bizarre mix of dance beats, hypnotic Krafterwkian synthesizer lines and frenetic punk vocals. The band only released three albums before abruptly breaking apart in 2011 with little in the way of explanation.  My father said they sounded a bit like the Talking Heads if no one knew how to play their instruments; my mother once referred to them as a headache. Both are fair assessments.



To me, however, LCD was my sonic adolescence. I discovered LCD Soundsystem on a fluke, during one of my many trips to the newsstand during the seventh grade. I had about four saved numbers on my phone during middle school and struggled to hold eye contact for more than forty seconds. Unsurprisingly, I was rarely invited to social gatherings, and as a result I spent an ungodly amount of time in seventh grade reading British music magazines cover to cover. This particular issue happened to contain a fairly in-depth story on LCD Soundsystem, a band I’d never heard before at the time. Within twenty minutes of Googling I was irreversibly hooked. I could spout the conventional music journalist jargon about “infectious grooves” and “eighties new-wave influence” but that would be taking away from the real reason I found LCD so irresistible: James Murphy.



James was many things: he was a rock frontman that looked like an overweight P.E. teacher. He made dance music for people who were too self-conscious to dance. He played the cowbell on stage and always seemed awkwardly unsure of what he was doing or verging on unnecessary emotional excess. I had found a kindred spirit. He was everything that I - a friendless kid stuck in South Korea who spent weekends churning out home-recorded songs - wanted to be: a New Yorker, a cowbell player, an unlikely symbol of cool.



I remember the first song that really sold me on James was “All My Friends.” At the climax of the song, James simply sings “where are your friends tonight” three times. It begins as a question that becomes an angry rebuke and finally a cathartic statement of purpose: at least we can be lonely together. “All My Friends” was James Murphy as the pied piper - he was going to round up the awkward, self-loathing misfits from New York to Seoul and lead them all to the promised land where they could all stare at their phones until the sun came up.



 



Never stay near Times Square if you’re in New York. The whole place is basically rats and souvenir shops and vape stores, with a few larger souvenir shops that have been elevated to the hallowed realm of the tourist attraction.



Andrew and I are here, however, because this was the cheapest place we could find for the night. It’s almost two in the morning, and we are sitting at a filthy slice shop somewhere on 46th Street. We’ve been sitting here for almost three hours now, reminiscing about the terrible time we had in high school.



Andrew - like most of my paternal family younger than fifty - is quasi-Catholic, which means every so often God would become a topic of conversation.



“You know what I think is annoying? The fact that religion was seen as this terrible thing at our school. Like spirituality became some kind of half-assed accessory you put on to make yourself more unique, like it was cool to say ‘yeah, I’m trying to find meaning and meditate and find God’  but that going to church on Sunday was the worst thing someone could do,” Andrew says.



“Everyone gets to have their opinion,” I say, trying my best to pull the plug on the topic altogether.



“I mean of course, but I don’t get why it’s hip to shit on the whole concept of religion.”



“I guess.”



“I mean, aren’t you also Christian?”



“I don’t really talk about that kind of stuff.”



We let the cabs go by for a few more minutes. Times Square is a few blocks to the east and all the puddles are bathed in garish billboard colors - blood reds and Gatorade blues.



“Are you going to that party?” Andrew asks.



“The graduation thing tomorrow?”



“Yeah.”



“Maybe.”



 



Solitude goes undetected in Seoul - it seeps into the water supply, it drones in the subway stations and hangs thick everywhere like some slow gas leak. Once you notice it, the whole city starts to resemble a continuous attempt to be less lonely: the day-drunk nine-to-fivers buying beer and anti-hangover drinks at convenience stores, the thousands of midnight eateries that only have tables for one, the nightclubs that don’t close until eight in the morning, when you start craving bacon and eggs and the constant barrage of “party all night!”s sound less like a rallying cry than a death sentence.



A brief example: one of the most popular types of online videos in South Korea is the so-called “muk-bang,” in which a host consumes an unconscionable quantity of food alone (usually in some dimly-lit bedroom) and live-streams the meal out to thousands of equally dim bedrooms. Muk-bangs are something of a massive in-joke in the country: everyone knows how absurdly depressing the concept is, but the collective laughter is muted by the tacit recognition that it’s better than eating alone.



I’ve seen this unique brand of South Korean-loneliness described as many things over the years by my fellow (usually inebriated) compatriots: The curse of a country that got bossed around all its life, an expendable Chicken McNugget-shaped bargaining chip in the Cold War that never got to decide anything for itself. A product of homogeneity and cultural inbreeding. A communist plot. Sexual frustration: we all need to start fuckin’ fucking more! A 21st century ailment (damn millennials on their damn phones). A cancer brought on by the information revolution. The lingering chokehold of Confucianist values. The refuse of a broken economic system. Whiny kids inventing problems to feel validated in the face of their elders, who actually had to do things like, y’know, run away from North Koreans and Soviets and all that.



But what matters, ultimately, is that loneliness is a phenomenon. It exists, and you - a well-adjusted adult - deal with it quietly and laugh about it and eat a lot of drunk breakfasts and grind on strangers for hours at nightclubs and go on virtual dinner-dates but you never acknowledge it.



When my cousin and I went off to boarding school at fourteen, my grandparents held a celebratory send-off dinner in our honor. I remember that after the meal, my grandmother -the most strong-willed person I’ve ever met - got up and daintily clinked her wineglass before delivering a speech about her own experience studying in America. Back in the fifties she had boarded a transatlantic plane to go to school in Virginia, knowing full well that she probably wouldn’t see her family for the whole four years and had to go to a college where East Asians were mostly viewed as subjects for anthropological research.



“I had to work in the local shopping mall in the summers to pay my way,” she recounted nostalgically. “They used to come from out of town to touch my hair and see me work. They'd never seen jet-black hair before.”



Apparently my grandmother never got to call her parents during her time at university. She wrote them a long letter a few months after she arrived, but due to some mix-up with the post service it was never delivered.



“I was really homesick. I had spent a lot of time on that letter, you know. I was hoping they would get to read it.”



Her words came slower now, and she caught herself halfway through a slight break in her voice, one which she hastily transformed into a labored laugh. After the address she returned to her seat and asked my older cousin about what his room would look like next year. I could tell in her mind she was still replaying the end of her speech, that there were still questions there to unpack, that maybe a part of her was still stranded somewhere in a shitty Virginia shopping mall desperate to call home. But of course, she changed the subject, because that’s what we were taught to do. After all, solitude goes undetected in Seoul.



A few of my great-grandparents lived until their late nineties, which meant I got to see four generations of my family - mostly quiet people who never kept diaries and stopped uncorking wine when the room got too honest - spill their guts to God and God alone. When my friends ask why Koreans are so hyper-Christian when other East Asian countries are known for being non-religious, that’s the answer I usually give: because when it’s Sunday morning and you find yourself squeezed in between two paunchy middle-aged men and the blasts of organ and choral music are just loud enough and everyone screams amen you can feel pleasantly lost in an excess of warmth and sound and outstretched arms.



After church, it was tradition for my family  to jam into three cars and  go to a tiny Italian restaurant for lunch.



“You know, this is something you’ll probably be grateful for when you’re older,” my mother always told me on our drive there.



It’s been about ten years since I’ve last been to  the restaurant. Like most significant endings, our final Sunday lunch appeared to be nothing more than a hiatus at the time. We’ll start doing this again when the kids are less busy with school. Then people moved away and died and drifted ways and stopped going to church.



I find it somewhat depressing that I can’t remember a single moment from any of those lunches - from the bits and pieces I can recall, the conversation was engineered to be as polite and as boring as possible, my cousins spent most of the time playing video games and I would always leave the table before dessert was served. We never told anything deeply personal at the table: those stories were for God and God alone.



 



“Dude I think this is like, what you’d call a fucking spiritual crisis, man.”



I can’t really make his face out - can’t make out to many faces at the moment (note to self: fuck Fireball) but I see he is wearing salmon shorts and is blending in seamlessly with the demo of this party.  I don’t really know the guy who’s throwing it but I asked a few guests about him and the word “trust fund” came up a lot. Anyway, Spiritual Crisis is smoking from a poorly-rolled joint and educating the occupants of the surrounding couches about the spiritual bankruptcy of 21st century America.



“We can’t like…what is it, we can’t believe in anything, trust in anything anymore. What’s the point? Everything has happened. The pioneers have come and gone.”



I need to consolidate my brain energy, so I decide to break down my immediate reality into a series of goals. 1. I need to find a bathroom to vomit in 2. I need to get away from this guy 3. I need air 4. I need to find a bathroom to vomit in 5. I need water.



To my horror, Spiritual Crisis turns and stares me in the eye.



“Hey you’re Joon, right?” he asks.



“Yeah,”



“What’s your take on the whole thing, my man?”



“On what, sorry?”



“Y’know. God. The afterlife. Where the fuck are we going? Like where are we headed?”



I try to give a thoughtful response but Spiritual Crisis is already making out with some girl from my Physics class.



The party lights and sea of red solo cups - or maybe this is just the heat of the Fireball churning in my stomach - gives the impression that the entire room is on fire, like everyone here is damned. Voice in my head now: it’s my sixth grade Bible teacher. “I ask a lot of people your age a question: were you ever closer to God then you were now? 99% of people tell me yes. Was there a time when you were closer, Joon?”



Yes. But the Old Testament still makes me scared. I am still deathly afraid of hell, even if sometimes I doubt if it exists. I am just better at ignoring guilt, or more accurately, living in spite of it.



I stumble into the bathroom and empty myself of the Fireball and try to rinse out the taste from my mouth. I think about the first time I ever tried alcohol - a tiny dip of communion wine at church in kindergarten. I was with my mother - the wine tasted terrible and I spat it out immediately. She wiped the dregs off my lips and laughed along with the rest of our pew. Soon I was laughing as well, and then it was time for the final hymn, which I made a big show of belting out all the words to, and after that it was time for cupcakes on the front lawn of the chapel.



It was a sunny day. I often wish I was back there.



 



Ever since it was established to me that bad people burn forever, my religious experience has always been marked by some degree of guilt. It didn’t help that I went through puberty in a hyper-evangelical middle school, a place where we were taught Intelligent Design in biology class and where teachers were surprisingly comfortable with the idea that the majority of the world’s population was destined for eternal suffering.



April was always reserved for something called Spiritual Emphasis Week - the school would invite some atrocious Christian rock group to campus and we would spend two to three hours a day talking about the war the world was waging for our souls. The Friday of every Spiritual Emphasis Week had a few hours blocked out for students to cry. That was not an official designation, of course, but it was common knowledge that Friday was crying day. They would gather the whole school into the auditorium, and someone would play somber music and ask us if we were finally willing to give our lives over to God. At which point we would say yes, and the whole school would come together in a cathartic moment of group prayer. Sorry, God, for getting into a fistfight with Jim and stealing pocket change from my mom’s handbag and sneaking a glance at Jessica's breasts during lunch. I want to be your servant forever and ever. I really mean it. Amen. and for the next four or five days even the most hardened classroom bullies would be seen reading the Bible in between classes and there would be a strange quiet in the hallways until we all inevitably spiraled back into spiritual decay.



It was easy to get addicted to the thrill of temporal surrender, of giving your life to God for a few days knowing you could still transition back to the person you were before, that you would make the same mistakes and find yourself caught in a cycle as old as time itself, that you were just a tourist, just visiting, just dipping your feet in transcendence.



As much as I deluded myself every year that this would be the moment I finally got right with the Lord for good, the fact was that I enjoyed the feeling of throwing myself into the open arms of some classmate and forcing myself to cry by replaying clips from “The Passion of the Christ” in my head. For someone who had spent his middle school career gawking from the fringes of social events, it felt good to have an excuse to feel connected.



During Spiritual Emphasis Week my eighth grade year, however, the stakes were a little higher. I had just gotten accepted to boarding school, a place where there would be no mandatory chapel services and no Bible classes. My teachers kept telling me things like “don’t lose your way” and “keep up your faith.” I felt especially guilty, because by this point I - like virtually everyone in my grade - had become deft at keeping up the appearance of being devout while secretly skipping church and spending Sundays playing basketball, watching Tarantino movies and listening to punk records.



Either way, I decided that this would be the year where I would finally pull the trigger and give my life over to God. It couldn’t hurt, after all. It would be like getting life insurance, just in case.



The auditorium was packed by the time we arrived for our crying hour on Friday. There were five chairs laid out at the front of the stage, and behind them the pastor was gently noodling a constant C-Em-Am-F progression on a guitar.



“So I want to be honest today,” the pastor began. “I know a lot of you have been in rooms like these before, you’ve been through it all haven’t you? You’ll go to church and live the “Christian life,” check all the boxes, volunteer and read the Bible. But I know that deep down a lot of you are still uncertain about things, that you’re still caught up in this world. Remember: we are not of this world. And you can’t have it both ways. I remember a friend always told me, there’s nothing worse than being lukewarm for God. If you faith is lukewarm, God will spit you out.”



There was a pause for these words to sink in.



“So, Yongsan International School, I’ve really come to love your school and the wonderful people you have here over my week, and it’s been an honor to lead this Spiritual Emphasis Week. At this time, I want to give you guys a chance to really reflect on where you are with God. I’ve laid out five chairs - one is for people who don’t believe in God, who haven’t started their journey yet. Two is for people who have started, but still want to know more. Three is for those people who want God to take a more active role in their lives. Five is for people who are fully committed to God and want to retain and further develop their relationship.”



At this, a few try-hards began flocking to the chair marked “five,” while a couple of degenerates reluctantly made their way to two and three. One was empty. To admit atheism or agnosticism of any variety at my school was like admitting to necrophilia. The pastor continued.



“And here’s the most important one: four. I suspect a lot of you are fours. Four is for those people who are sick and tired of committing to God only to be torn away from Him again. Four is for those people who want to ask God, once and for all, please enter my life.”



I joined the massive crowd of students migrating to the four chair. This was what I had been waiting for. Within minutes I found myself  sandwiched between a mess of bodies, all kneeling on the carpet with their hands to the ceiling. Soon, the lights dimmed, and the guitar crescendoed into triumphant strums. The pastor walked to each chair, praying for all the students who were there, thanking God and his powers of salvation. Eventually, he got to our chair.



“Lord, here I see many of your children. These students, Lord, are tired of being lukewarm. They want to be on fire for you, Father God. Thank you for giving them the courage…”



At this point, some girl a few bodies down from me drew first blood by breaking into tears. I was on the clock now.



“The courage to desire to be all in for you Lord. We’re tired of playing the Christian game….”



I was trying my very best to remember every tragic story from the Bible I could. When this failed, I tried picturing myself as the prodigal son, returning home after being lost for years. I still felt nothing.



“We want the blood of your salvation upon these young men and women today…”



I could already hear several people, including the six-foot-two, alpha-male center of the basketball team, bawling. I began to panic: when would my transcendent experience come? When would I feel the blood of salvation? When would the tears of catharsis come? I cheated a little by recalling the part in Bambi where the mother is shot. I could finally feel something resembling a tear in the corner of my left eye. Was it working?



“We pray for these students as they continue their journey…”



It soon dawned on me that I was one soul in an entanglement of souls desperate to be saved, desperate to get to heaven, desperate not to be spat out by God. That this community was motivated, if anything, by a deep sense of fear. That while you could hold hands and sing hymns together and hug each other all you wanted, you would still be alone on Judgement Day, salvation would still be a lonely path.



“In Jesus’ name…”



I was really running out of time now. I tried my best to focus on being transformed, on feeling different, on feeling liberated -



“we pray…”



- it wasn’t working -



“Amen.”



The amen fell over the room like the dull thud of a heavy door closing. Amen, the group responded. I said it as loud as I could, loud enough that I could forget where I was for a few moments.



When I first told my psychiatrist that I constantly felt guilty and deserving of divine punishment, he asked me why it is that so many people would follow God if God were such a destructive force. I told him I didn’t know. What mattered was that I had been taught that God was a disciplinarian, and that would probably be a lesson that stuck with me whatever I did. I would still have the image of the bird with the tiny spoon, of God spitting the lukewarm out. Most of my friends from middle school are now completely lapsed, and over drinks we would always laugh about how terrible our three years together were.



In between laughs, however, we could all sense the edges of an unanswered question materializing against our will. Maybe it didn’t have to be this way. Maybe our time at school had taught us a version of faith that set us up for loneliness. Perhaps this loneliness had been clawing at the corners of every church service, every Sunday dinner, every Spiritual Emphasis Week, every nighttime prayer I had ever been a part of. Perhaps being together meant finding a way to momentarily shut off this realization. The question, of course, went unposed. Solitude goes unnoticed in Seoul.



 



I have a habit of making of lists when I’m waiting for flights, and seeing as how I have now missed my original flight to Tennessee (mostly due to my hangover) and the LaGuardia gate staff is refusing to grant me even service-industry-manual kindness, it appears I now have at least two and a half hours on my hands to do just that. This is a hitch in The Plan. Andrew’s flight - which left earlier in the morning - has already landed in Tennessee, and I am supposed to be meeting him in Nashville in twenty minutes, Instead, I’m anxiously wasting time in the departures lounge, where the air smells like Clorox and Cinnabon wrappers.



Anyways, I decide to make a few lists to pass my time. Top 3 LCD Soundsystem songs? 1. All My Friends 2. Someone Great 3. Losing My Edge. Or maybe it should be Dance Yrself Clean. Top 4 best chain restaurants in the LaGuardia food court: 1. Panda Express 2. McDonald’s…..



Soon, I start making a list of everyone I hadn’t seen in a while and the last conversation I could recall having with them.



 



Ben from Hawaii: “Safe travels, Joon. Korea is a long way, isn’t it?”



John K.: “Yo, fucking pay me back for that cab ride.”



My psychiatrist: “You’ll get over this, and once you do, you’ll have the courage to get over any other fear you may have.”



My mother: “Give me a call during your trip. Stay safe, alright? God bless.”



The guy who worked at my high school cafeteria that I talked to all the time: “Yeah, I got a new job about twenty minutes from here, but I’ll visit often, don’t worry.”



Tess, who I had a crush on for like two years: “Uh, yeah, well I didn’t know you that well but I’m glad we had English together!”



Mr. Allen from eighth grade: “You’re one of my favorite students Joon. It’s good to see someone young with so much faith. You have a great time at high school, okay?”



Deb from eighth grade: “Heaven sounds fucking boring dude. I’ll take hell. Fuck it.”



 



At this point, I stop typing the list and close my computer. I put LCD Soundsystem on shuffle again and tap along the drum pattern on the side of my seat.



 



I guess I thought high school would be an escape of sorts. I could stop going to church, I didn’t have to memorize Bible verses for class, I could stop talking about religion and let people assume whatever they wanted about me. I spent my freshman year reinventing myself as a hip rebel and waited for the fear of damnation to slowly filter out of my body.



But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that it never really does. I still prayed before every meal, although I did it in secret. I still felt bad waking up late on Sundays, even though I no longer had a church to be late to. There was guilt that I would be punished, of course - the feeling that I was constantly evading rebuke and was therefore headed for some massive, impending reckoning down the road. I sometimes felt that every part of my spiritual being had been gutted and all I had left were the Pavlovian fear I had to sin, a fear I held on to lest I lost God altogether.



Or I would think about my grandmother, how for almost twenty years she would leave to go to church at 10:25 AM every Sunday, and how every week she would see my grandfather still in his pajamas on the couch watching the morning talk shows. How when she crossed the living room to leave the house, there would be a brief moment of expectation, the small, ever-lessening hope that this would be the week where my grandfather would come to his senses, that this would be the week where he would stop her and ask if he could come along. That this would be the week where he got to heaven. Or I would think about my mother, how every day without fail she would ask God to lead my father to church. Then there would be guilt: guilt that if I abandoned God I would be perpetuating this cycle of Sunday mornings spent in quiet desperation and continuous disappointment.



So I never got to let go of spirituality: if anything, it came to color how I thought of everything else in my life, including music. Perhaps that’s why LCD Soundsystem appealed to me so much - while the great majority of LCD Soundsystem’s songs are performed with James Murphy embodying the hyper-ironic, aloof Brooklynite caricature he has fashioned for himself over the years, their best songs come when this facade begins to break apart. Every truly great LCD Soundsystem track is a plea for transcendence, for redemption, for transformation and companionship. It’s music that is simultaneously too world-weary and freewheeling for faith and community but at the same time deeply nostalgic for it. It’s dance music that realizes that the act of dancing all night is usually nothing more than a distraction from some deep emptiness, yet quietly holds out the deluded hope that one perfect song, one perfect guitar solo or synthesizer crescendo can make everything make sense, can serve as a break from the cycle of self-conscious wisecracking and empty hedonism, can get you to heaven. You can hear it when James’ voice cracks as he begs to “give me just a little more time” on Dance Yrself Clean, or when the band swoops in to harmonize the lyric “it won’t get any better” on Home, or when Nancy Whang assures us that we can all normalize on “Get Innocuous” or when a decidedly cheesy guitar solo reluctantly introduces itself at the end of “New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down.”



I told my friend once that LCD Soundsystem is the sound of being in front of a bathroom mirror at a house party at five in the morning, watching the sun slowly rise and realizing you hate most of the guests when you’re sober and missing your childhood home while simultaneously realizing how stupidly precious you are being.



 



My shirt is soaked by the time J. Cole’s set is over.



“Wasn’t that fucking sick?” Andrew asks.



“Yeah.” I reply.



“I can’t believe we made it, man.”



“Uh-huh.” I don’t mind J. Cole, but at this point, my mind is elsewhere. All I can think about is when James Murphy will finally take the stage. Unlike a lot of festivals crowds, the audience for LCD’s set seems to be mostly be there by themselves or in small groups of two or three.



A frenzied snare roll announces the first song of the set, “Us Vs. Them.” I am nearly beside myself as I chant along to the opening lines.



“The time has come! The time has come! The time has come today!”



When the song ends I look around and realize that Andrew has left to watch the Chainsmokers set next door. Before I can try to find him, however, the band is off, and I scarcely have time to breathe. After nearly two hours of breakneck dance-punk, there is a slight pause. The air is humid and you can hear crickets in the distance as the entire crowd waits for the inevitable with bated breath. Then, it comes: Nancy Whang starts playing the piano riff to “All My Friends.” The drums and bass fill out, and soon James - whose voice is completely hoarse at this point - begins stumbling through the opening lines.



Everyone begins singing together, hands up to the sky, the pot-smokers desperately trying to catch their breaths in between choruses. The mood is not unlike a church, or that cramped auditorium in middle school. Several people around me are in tears. In the pit of my stomach, I feel that glowing catharsis I used to feel when I cried during Spiritual Emphasis Week - the suspicion that maybe I am changing, maybe this feeling of transcendence is permanent. Maybe everyone in this audience is learning to be together in their solitude, united by loneliness somehow, as crazy as that sounds. It took them three albums and a long hiatus and a second coming, but perhaps James has actually cracked the code: maybe there is a way out from crippling self-consciousness, maybe music can actually bring about a state of complete ecstasy, even though it’s 2016 and we’re all fucked and we’re in the middle of a farm in rural Tennessee…maybe it’s all about putting our hands up in surrender together and collectively asking where our friends are tonight, whether we will ever see them, whether we ever really did,maybe….



And with that, the song ends, as quickly as it began.



“Thank you!” James shouts. “Good night.”



The stage goes dark, and the crowd lingers on, desperate to sip the last dregs of the concert, desperate to keep the camaraderie alive for just a minute longer. Then, as if in agreement, everyone - myself included - stares down at the ground. The spell is broken. I text Andrew - wya man? I sigh and slowly make my way towards the bass rumblings of the Chainsmokers as the transcendent glow in my stomach begins to fade.



 



I had a pretty vivid dream once in eighth grade, right after LCD Soundsystem announced their breakup and played their final gig in Madison Square Garden. In many ways, I feel betrayed by James: I had somehow developed this delusion that every LCD release was intended for me, and I am devastated by the prospect of having to navigate high school alone. James was supposed to take me to the promised land - the breakup seemed like a copout with no discernible reason.



In my dream, I’m in my bedroom when a large bear-like figure suddenly blocks my doorframe. It’s James Murphy.



“Wake up, kid,” he tells me. “We’re gonna fly.”



I get up and get changed, and soon I am on a private jet with the whole band. Nancy Whang tosses me a bag of pretzels. It’s all I’ve ever dreamed of. The plane doesn’t seem to have a pilot, but I don’t mind - if the band is going down I’d go down with it.



I do have one question, though.



“Hey James?” I ask. “Will you, like, ever come back?”



He gives me one of those super self-aware grins and opens his mouth to say something but I wake up before I hear any reply.



It’s Sunday, so I get out of bed to the sound of the hymn CD my mother has put on every Sunday morning without fail for the past five years. I can sing the first three tracks - instrumental accompaniment and all - by heart. It’s a beautiful day outside, and for once Seoul is not the color of soot. I hear the sound of breakfast being served and see my father eating pancakes in his pajamas. My mother is already dressed and is furious when she sees that I have only just gotten up.



“Do you realize how late we are?” she demands.



I take my seat and leisurely unload a few pancakes onto my plate. My mother, needing a new target for her frustration, locks eyes with my father.



“You’re not going to church today, are you?” she asks, her voice piercing with sarcasm. I can tell, however, that part of her still holds on to the absurd belief that my father will say “actually I am,” that this would be the day that has made all her other days of prayer worth it. There is a split-second pause before my father gives his usual response. “Not today. You guys have a good time.” My mother gives her best I-knew-it face and rushes to grab her car keys. The hymn CD is on track three now, my favorite one.



I wonder if my father ever considers going to church as a favor to my mother. My mother would probably be aware that his attendance was not caused by a deep stirring within his soul, but she would probably play along, and either way it would be a useful delusion. The two could hold hands during hymns, and perhaps my mom would lock eyes with my father and wonder if he really had been transformed, and perhaps for a fleeting moment she could convince herself beyond reasonable doubt that he had. Then we could all go to lunch together and have polite conversations, and the Seoul skyline would look a little less barren and desolate. It wouldn’t be spiritual transcendence but it would be a pretty good imitation of it, and that might be the best we can hope for sometimes.



My father and I eat our breakfast in silence as my mother puts her shoes on, careful to leave some time for my father to change his mind.



 

“I’ll be shattered by then but now I’m not and can also picture white clouds ... faded sunlight falling across the picture ... I’ll go out for a drink with one of my demons tonight they are dry in Colorado 1980 spring snow.” - Ted Barrigan, A Certain Slant of Sunlight



8:53 PM



 



I didn’t really want to come down here, and I can tell that you didn’t either, judging from the semi-combative way you’re resting your drink on your knee, tapping the glass with your thumb over and over again, perhaps to signal boredom, perhaps to subconsciously establish and continually re-establish ownership over said drink like some version of territorial urination. I mean, I don’t blame you for that. New York is an exhausting place, because 1. the entire population is on foot and 2. the neat right angles and interlocking grids—a marvel of modern planning, I am frequently reminded—means you are almost always looking at someone dead in the face. Or at the very least trying very hard not to. After a few days of unwanted voyeurism, it’s only natural that you crave some personal space you can rightfully call your own.



I could give a litany of minor reasons why I thought this trip wasn’t worth it—the weather, the four subway transfers, the overpriced food, the fact that our hour of return necessitates hailing an Uber back to the apartment, an Uber which will be at least $27 and will inevitably be driven by some guy who enjoys regaling us with stories about his nephews. Or maybe Theoretical Uber Driver will be a political type (not an entirely unlikely scenario, this being Day 10 or so in Trump’s America after all) which will mean the conversation will be rife with sentences that begin with “in my day” and “if you really get to the root of it.” 



But the real reason I didn’t want to come is because I kind of hate Koreatown. The name itself denotes a false sense of grandeur; at least with Chinatown they had the decency to section off a few blocks, enough square feet to somewhat qualify it as a locality. Koreatown is basically an attempt to attach geographic signicance to a loose cluster of barbecue restaurants and karaoke bars.



If the intention behind Koreatown was to transplant Seoul to New York City, it can be classified as somewhat of a success, successful in the sense that if you position yourself just right on West 32nd Street and proceed to mentally block out all the yellow cabs and food trucks and construction barricades it is possible to attain—for a eeting split second—the odd sensation of being back in the motherland. But there is a nagging theatricality to the place, the feeling of being an unwitting walk-on in a collective attempt to condense an entire culture into two blocks. The way, for instance, that all the waiters and waitresses here wear name-tags with their name in Korean lettering, something that never happens back home. Or the fact that every store is attempting to blare K-Pop at ear-piercing volumes, to the point that one begins to realize that the version of Korea that Koreatown is attempting to evoke is a place that doesn’t exist.



Of course, once you get to the edges of the block, the illusion starts to fray—a Citi-bank here, a souvenir shop there. New York inserting itself back into the situation. I’ll bet that you, like most people I know, nd something pathetic in how self-consciously eager to please the entire place is, i.e. maybe if we bombard people with enough nostalgic stimuli we can trigger some sort of Proust-madeleine moment. Or maybe it’s just me.



My friends joke about how it is that New York is so massive, the self-proclaimed the center of the world after all, and that all the Korean yuhaksaengs (Koreans who are living abroad for school) still hang out in something like a four-minute radius from one another, flocking down 32nd Street in groups of five as if we’ve all formed some kind of bizarre mutual suicide pact, locked in the cell that is Koreatown. I mean, I guess there is kind of an old-fashioned nationalism to Koreatown, as is the case with any cultural neighborhood, that peculiar brand of patriotism that is halfway between comforting and conning. I suddenly recall how one of my grade-school teachers once lamented that patriotism was becoming passé in my generation. Like it was becoming deeply, irrevers- ibly uncool to be proud of one’s national identity. As I sat in the cab earlier, cruising past Koreatown as the in-ride television blared some report about a Trump cabinet pick, I realized I wasn’t so sure about that anymore.



9:38 PM



I guess I will stay a little longer, after all the conversation at our table is still relatively lively and I’ve denitely missed any window I had to make a quick undetected exit from the group anyway. Amidst the usual obsessive comparing of social networks and mutual friends, someone is talking about how the Oxford English Dictionary concluded last week that we are now in a “post-truth society. ” I always imagined the Oxford English Dictionary offices to be in the dungeons of some secluded castle, where people still write with quill and ink under the flickering lights of a torch. Or I imagine some massive conspiracy of linguists huddled around that massive roundtable from Dr. Strangelove. Which is funny, of course, because I know that in reality the “Word of the Year” was probably selected by a group of English B.A.s in a small conference room in a nondescript office park somewhere—no torches or missile launch systems in sight, just linty carpet and the smell of stale coffee and the interminable flickering of cheap fluorescent bulbs.



It annoys me that there has always been a cultural push to portray the previous generation as being a bastion of honesty, a symbol of simpler times that exposes how corrupt current society has become. To say post-truth is a 2016 word is to imply that every year before was somehow more reverent of the truth, which is complete bullshit.



Case in point: in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower worked with a New York marketing team and produced a bunch of advertisements called Eisenhower Answers America, in which he pretended to address the concerns of “real everyday Americans.” Except what actually happened was that Eisenhower recorded a bunch of short talking points on his own, which were edited together with footage of actors asking questions to ultimately produce the illusion that Eisenhower was talking to regular Americans one-on-one.



They shot a bunch of these ads about eight minutes from here, actually, in a downtown film studio that is now a chiropractor’s ofce. The whole strategy was the work of none other than Rosser Reeves, then golden child of the New York City advertising world.



In my imaginatory rendering of the scene, Eisenhower is in the backseat of a 1950 Cadillac, sitting upright, his limbs effortlessly arranged in a series of right angles thanks to years of military training. To his left is Rosser, slightly slouched, showing the bare minimum of required respect as he fiddles with his notebook and puffs a cigar—Cuban—out the window. Every time Rosser refers to Eisenhower he calls him “General,” although Dwight has told him it is okay to call him “Dwight” or “Ike” or even just “Mr. Eisenhower.” But Rosser calls him “General,” over-enunciating the vowels as if to mock how self-serious it is to be referred to by a title and how small-minded The Rest of AmericaTM is to attach such mythic qualities to military accomplishment.



“You’re from Kansas,”—pause as he puffs on the cigar—“right, General?” Rosser asks. “You can just call me Ike, Rosser.”

“Oh, no, please. General, we are such great fans of yours! Isn’t that right, Tom.” (this is the name I give Reeves’ hypothetical lackey, who is sitting in the passenger’s seat, eager for any and all opportunities to interject into the conversation and be noticed.)



“Such huge fans, General, couldn’t have scripted a better story if we tried.” 



“See, General, even Tom agrees. Least we can do is call you that.”



“Okay, then, ne.” Eisenhower states, arms up, a defeated man. Victorious in many respects, but in the icy, soot and piss-strewn streets of New York City perhaps not so much.



(At this point, the car hits one of the run-down areas of New York, and I imagine Rosser pulling down the blinds and the driver self-consciously speeding down the block to prevent any disturbing vistas of urban decay from unsettling the general.)



“See, General, we really want to play the whole Kansas thing up. Like what was it like there? What was the name of the town you were from again?”



“Abilene.”

“Abilene! Fantastic! Perfect name. Quaint, rustic.”

“Tri-syllabic,” adds Tom, who is promptly ignored.

“We really want to make Abilene a focal point of your campaign. The fact that you were from the Midwest and all. I’m thinking we make it a whole branding—”



“Excuse me, branding?” the General asks.

“Oh sorry, I don’t mean branding you! I mean, uh, branding your message. To make it stick to the average voter,” Reeves says “average voter” with a kind of disgust, the way one refers to an unpleasant coworker or a neighbor’s dog that always barks over the nine o’clock news. “Average voters will really, shall we say, connect with the narrative about a man rising up from the depths of Middle America. About people like us.”



Eisenhower probably cringed at the “us.” I’m sure Eisenhower hated Rosser. Or at least was put off by him. The very name Eisenhower—it meant iron miner in German—screamed blue collar. Papa Eisenhower had worked in a creamery to put his kids in a decent house. Reeves had made his first load of money after refusing to study for a chemistry final (this is true, by the way) and instead producing an essay called “Better Living Through Chemistry” which captured the attention of the DuPont marketing team. In fact, Rosser eventually got kicked out of UVA for driving under the influence. And now this asshole was trying to manufacture some sense of camaraderie our of thin air? And the way he talked about Abilene, every syllable dripping with something more than condescension, something approaching unfiltered contempt for the town and everything it stood for.



Yes! I am from fuckin’ Abilene, Eisenhower thinks, staring with contempt at Tom, who is desperately preparing another cigar for Rosser. Eisenhower probably imagined his face being projected, warped and grainy on a dozen shitty Kansas televisions, all across Abilene. A candidate for the highest office in the free world appearing in the same broadcasting block as cereal and Tide and Dove bars. An election of celluloid! The great future of democracy, as Rosser would say. But what would the people of Abilene think? Would they call him—perhaps rightfully—a sellout? When he was saying things like “getting back to an honest dollar” on air, wasn’t he cynically using his small-town roots to pawn off a false vision of Midwestern wholesomeness, creating nostalgia for an America—an America where people rise with the sun to do Honest Work and believe in Big Things—that never really existed outside of some collective imagination? But this had to be done, this was the new reality, after all. That was the what the military taught him: you don’t make the rules but you make sure you kick everyone’s ass playing by them.



The mental recreation kind of fizzles out after this moment. There are, of course, obvious flaws in my story. Maybe the two actually liked each other. Maybe they laughed and joked about football on the car-ride and smoked cigars together after they were done filming the advertisement. Maybe they talked about how ingenious it was that they made every viewer—yes you!—feel selected in the fulllment of a divine American destiny: moving past the war, buying a suburban home, starting a family. Returning America to the halcyon days, to the time before the wars, before the Depression.



Or maybe Eisenhower faced the camera alone that day, nobody around him save the imaginary presence of an imaginary citizen, a voice in the back of his head crying it’s all fake! like a street preacher on a subway, the ash atop the lens bright and unforgiving like an imitation of the sun shining over an imitation of Kansas.



11:15 PM



The sun sets kind of differently depending on where you are. And I don’t mean dramatic differences in location; the way the sun sets on 86th Street feels nothing like the way it sets in Brooklyn, and the way it sets in Pittsburgh is nothing like the way it sets in Philadelphia. I’ve always wondered if that has to do more with the way light refracts on different building materials or with changes in the weather and atmospheric conditions. Or perhaps the entire phenomenon is psychosomatic. Either way, the sun setting seems like one of those universal experiences that should be the same everywhere but never actually is.



In New Hampshire—where I attended boarding school for four years—the winter sun sets in a particularly striking way, as in it doesn’t disappear into the horizon as much as it is abruptly interrupted, consumed alive by a swarm of barren tree branches. By 4:30 it is almost completely dark, but the last dregs of sunlight reect onto the ice, creating an otherworldly afterglow that never seems to disappear until the rst pair of lonely I-93 headlights switch on in the distance.



Actually, because the sun set so quickly in New Hampshire there would always be ten or twenty cases of really bad seasonal depression every year at my school. I later learned that the antidote was something called a Verilux HappyLightTM, a small plastic obelisk that projects imitation sunlight and is advertised online alongside stock images of well-groomed people in their mid-thirties taking walks on an exceptionally photogenic beachin Florida. The cure for seasonal depression—according to the infirmary at my high school at least—involved staring idly at said Verilux HappyLightTM until you were no longer seasonally depressed.



A good portion of life at my boarding school was structured around these HappyLight-esque moments, moments that were supposed to give a passing resemblance to human warmth. This was possibly because it was in the best interest of the school to keep kids relatively sane, a tall order when you pack 535 teenagers into unkempt New Hampshire woodlands with shoddy WiFi connectivity.



For instance, at the beginning of every morning we had an assembly at the chapel, where we would often be forced to hear some incredibly mediocre piece of music performed by a freshman who was half-asleep at the piano bench. Except everyone would then proceed to give a standing ovation, because it felt good to believe that we all agreed about something, if only for a few seconds. Or take the fact that every year began with something called “Dropping Your Waterline.” Dropping one’s waterline involved a facilitator sitting a group of bored juniors and seniors around a conference table and asking them to uncover their “genuine selves.” This really meant that the room was forced to uncover increasingly uncomfortable pieces of personal information until one person nally stepped up and mentioned a fact that was deemed “sufficiently vulnerable and genuine.” This moment was then milked for maximum dramatic value, and the facilitator walked away, basking in a warm sense of fulfillment, blithely unaware of the fact that some asshole would probably spend the rest of the semester publicly humiliating the poor kid who was brave enough to speak up.



When I first tried the HappyLightTM for myself—one particularly dreary evening in January of my sophomore year—I think I laughed at what I then believed to be a tting and extremely clever metaphor for my boarding school experience. Except then I found myself disgusted at my own disgust, because this was exactly the kind of first-world, Holden Caulfieldian, conspiracy-of-phonies whining that I had tried my best to expunge from my system by age 14. So ultimately I just stared at the otherworldly Verilux glow in silence, wondering when the positive effects that punkybrewer from Amazon.com mentioned would kick in.



12:38 AM



Your friends have been dropping increasingly unsubtle suggestions that you leave with them for the past hour or so, and I have to agree that from a purely cost-benefit standpoint there is no point for you to stay here. We have reached that awkward impasse where half the table is drunk and the other half doesn’t drink or lacks the funds to order more drinks, which means we will simply continue the act of staring at one another and slowly coming to terms with the staggering lack of things to talk about (potential start-up idea: an app for your phone that suggests conversation starters based on personal data harvested from Facebook?).



Over the past hour or so, the bar’s youthful twenty-something optimism has settled into the rhythmic sounds of people settling for another disappointing night on the town. Even the conversation has worked itself into a corner:



Person 1: So I remember there was this one time back in Seoul, I think it was like July or something. It was super humid. Anyway, [Person 2] called me up at one in the morning and convinced me to come down to some crap bar in Hongdae and we got really trashed—



Person 2: I wasn’t that drunk, it was mostly you.



Person 1: Nah man, you were out of your mind. And then we met [Person 3] at Octagon.



Person 4: I do remember that. Actually, funny you should say that because, there was this time that [Person 3] and I decided to get really wasted.



And so on and so forth, a self-sustaining feedback loop of people talking about nights that were supposedly much better than the one we currently nd ourselves in, but which likely also consisted of people talking about other nights much better than the one they found themselves in. The small talk equivalent to the Droste effect. I momentarily consider joining in on the fun, reaching into my own dwindling reservoir of semi-listenable drinking stories. But then I stop.



You see, even though we’ve supposedly only met today, you’ve probably seen me before. Maybe at the immigration line at Incheon International Airport, or at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, or walking down the streets of Gangnam, or at the small ramen restaurant above the Kennedy Departures Terminal, or at the U.S. Consulate’s I-20 visa line. Chances are our paths have crossed. Chances are that we’ve spoken to each other before. Probably a short conversation. After all, I was just one of a million interchangeable Korean-American college students that you met, and you were one of a million interchangeable Korean-American college students that I met. And we had our standard-issue seventeen minute conversation—entirely superfluous but peppered with enough interesting personal factoids and anecdotes that it seemed more thoughtful than small talk. We probably spent these seventeen minutes pretending that our relationship was special, that our connection was unique, when in the back of our minds we knew there was something deeply disposable and expendable about one other. Which is just what’s happening at this table, isn’t it? Because, let’s face it, although right now we’re laughing and collecting Snapchat handles and Facebook friend requests the truth is that tonight is an unbearably unremarkable night. Best case scenario, we will go our separate ways, and perhaps in a few months - when we are sitting around a different table with different people drinking different beers - we will make cameo appearances in each others’ accounts of That One Time I Went to New York City and Got Drunk. 



So no, I decide not to share an anecdote, because at the end of the day, what’s the point? Isn’t taking part in the conversation making me complicit in our table’s collective self-delusion that we are actually getting to know one another? Not to mention the fact that I am already contributing to the broader collective self-delusion that is Koreatown. The world—especially this 2016 post-truth-according-to-some-person-at-the-Oxford-English-Dictionary version of the world—does not need more dishonesty coming from my end.



Or perhaps this is an exceedingly cruel assessment of the situation.



The more I think about it, it’s funny how I’ve spent almost three hours now imagining this massive one-sided conversation I want to have with you even though I have yet to speak a single word your way. It’s not even a conversation, really, considering that I haven’t even added in any spaces for you to pause or react or respond with anything more complex than a nod. And it’s also funny that I created an entire character for you (you are a shy, quiet 19 year old kid who enjoys Scrabble and Bob Dylan and hot tea) based wholly on a small subset of verbal habits and behaviors and conversation snippets that I observed today, observations that I amassed in an extremely unscientic manner and are probably nowhere near representative of who you actually are as a person. And funnier still is the fact that I formed an attachment to this projection to the point that I—maybe around 11:47 and drink five—actually began to think of ourselves as kindred spirits or something.



And even while I am thinking about talking to you what I am really doing is talking to some diluted-down, Ron Howard biopic version of you, a sort of faceless composite character I have cobbled together. Which is to say I am really talking to myself.



And maybe, just maybe, even though the conversation that everyone else is engaged in is shallow and deluded and more than likely pointless, at least it can be categorized as an attempt at some form of connection. Some approximation of friendship (could we really hope for more?). Maybe the people at our table aren’t going through some pre-congured set of socially-obligated niceties. Maybe they are holding onto some belief that—through the right sequence of hangover stories and ill-conceived jokes about their genitalia—this table can form a lasting bond that will stand the test of time. Because, if you get to the bottom of it, aren’t drinking games and lame personal anecdotes and corny political advertisements and dollar-store Korean patriotism and Lowering Your Waterline—as flawed and messy and disingenuous as they may be—still rooted in some basic optimism that one can get to know and connect with a fellow human being? After all, if we have really managed to render the truth irrelevant, isn’t the obsessive search for the “genuine” ultimately a self-defeating endeavor, nothing more than another source of paralyzing self-consciousness? And maybe my entire career of sitting quietly in the back of the room in smug self-satisfaction as I laugh at HappyLightTMs and lament the ultimate disintegration of truth and engage in made-up dialogues with cardboard cutout versions of Dwight Eisenhower—perhaps that’s an even deeper form of dishonesty, one that borders on cowardice—



oh, wait, Jim from Uber’s about two minutes away. I guess this means that we’ll have to start making arrangements for the check. I am hoping that keeping silent will solve the problem on its own. “It was nice meeting you, by the way,” I find myself saying. I see that someone from the neighboring table’s asking you to join them for a toast. He seems nice. You should go over; I’m sure you two will hit it off fine. 

*I’m playing a game with myself where I try to take the biggest steps that I can without collapsing onto my side like an aging racehorse. It suddenly occurs to me that he has been following me for some time. Perhaps, in my five-beer state, I am more interesting to the average bystander than I’d like to think. *



*I notice he’s staggering too. I almost want to let out a laugh or a high-five — the cheap instant bonding of the fellow inebriate. He’s about sixty, maybe even sixty-five, and he has the grizzled look of a veteran or any number of other professions that take sensitivity to be superfluous. In another world he could have been my grandfather. *



*The only lights are from the red and white Bank of America ATM and his face has an almost clown-like quality that I would have found distressing under normal circumstances. *



*Twenty more seconds. He’s still following me. He used to be way out in the middle of the road, but now he’s shifted course almost twenty degrees just to get closer. *



*“What’s up?” I offer.*



*“You.” There’s no greeting before the address, not even the implication of where one would go. His voice is alarmingly empty. He sounds like he’s talking to the TV, or to the epitaph of a distant relative who made too many unwarned visits and snored on the couch a lot. *



*“What’s up?” Once more, carbon copy of the last one. Good job, I tell myself. You sound like a natural. *



*His eyes now have the quality of a middle schooler who’s just been introduced to a microscope. *



*Take a look at the fly. Relax, it’s between two sheets of glass, it won’t bite you. See the wings? *



*“Where are you from?” he asks, same ghostly tone. *



*“I dunno man, round here.” *



*“Uh-huh?” *



*“Yeah.” I try not to make eye contact. I’m thinking about this speech my mom gave me on the phone after the election about watching out for white people. They have guns, she said. They shoot, like, anything that moves, she jokes. Alright, I said, letting myself chuckle a little before hanging up.*



*“Around here, you say?” still looking at me. By this point I had forgotten the chain of dialogue that produced the question. *



*“Yep!” *



*“No you’re not.” The first one’s kind of teasing almost. There is a hair-tussling quality to it, a c’mon, what the fuck are you talkin’ about, dude? That’s all gone by the second one. *



*“No you’re not.” *



*And then the elephant in the room:*



*“You don’t look it.”*



*“Well - “ I start stammering, feeling exposed. “I guess I’m not really -*



*He’s looking at me sideways with the microscope gaze again. I think about the time in fifth grade we dissected a rabbit and before the first incision our teacher forced us to take a moment of silent reflection for the poor animal’s dedication to our scientific edification. We need to respect all that we observe, he said. *



*I’m still thinking about rabbits when the first kick comes. And the second. *



*“Then why the fuck did you lie to me?” He keeps repeating with almost journalistic detachment as he pummels me. The kicks don’t hurt but by this point I’ve abandoned any attempt at trying to process my immediate surroundings as real, I’ve inserted a television Chiron around the bottom third and now I’m imagining I'm on my couch listening to a distinguished group of panelists break down the situation for the folks at home. He has an unmarked backpack and for a split second - I guess this still scares me - it occurs to me that there’s a passing chance I may get killed. I look around and then - and this scares me more - decide not to do too much about it.*



*I’m too scared to register the dark comedy of dying in front of an Insomnia Cookies, taunted by the odor of ice cream sandwiches. And then he’s gone. Amidst tears I manage to whimper out a soft “fuck you”; a garbage truck promptly swallows it. *



* *



I was in middle school when I first came across Borges’ “The Garden of the Forking Paths.” The story’s mystery centers on a Chinese man - Ts’ui Pen - who tries to construct a novel in which every possible narrative outcome coexists peacefully. While the story was, in many ways, nothing more than an illustration of the many-worlds theories that have formed the backbone of shoddy science fiction premises for years, there was an otherworldly comfort to the central conceit of the Garden - “in other possible pasts you are my enemy; in others my friend.”



As a risk-averse and deeply indecisive child I found something vindicating in Ts’ui Pen’s logic, although it was years before I could formulate why. Perhaps one could call it the Borgesian excuse. The premise of the Borgesian excuse was simple: any act of decision-making results in the potential alternatives to that decision becoming inaccessible. Choosing a path meant torching the others I had bypassed. But by simply forgoing choice, I could simulate something close to Ts’ui Pen’s garden - a state in which all possible outcomes exist simultaneously, each one on an equal plane of halfway reality. Borges had effectively given me a justification for my inability to commit to any course of action - not choosing allowed the hypothetical to take on the authority of the actual.



When I finally learned to verbalize the Borgesian Excuse - probably somewhere around the tenth grade - I was shocked at how much it had invaded my daily experience. I could miss a three-pointer and definitively out myself as a hack shooting-guard, or I could drift along the game undetected, thereby fanning the perception that I was potentially passable. I could verify my checking balance or run off from the ATM to reside in a reality in which I was potentially not broke.



The most effective application of the Borgesian excuse for passivity, however, came in cases of cowardice. If I never got in the way of aggression, I would never have to retaliate, and therefore would theoretically never have to part with the idea that I was someone who could retaliate. That response became a little harder when it came to cases of racial aggression, but I was lucky. My family could supply with me enough books and television that by age five, I was able to construct some median of the American home experience. I asked my parents to go to Target to buy sidewalk chalk and I drew hopscotch grids in the driveway not because I cared for it, but because it seemed like an obligatory childhood experience I could check off the bucket list. I had the resources to learn English to the point that I had no accent, and over the years I also learned how to speak Spanish with the slight Northeastern twinge that implied I had never learned a foreign tongue before and that by logical necessity I was unable to speak any Korean. I was lucky to afford to go to schools with diversity programs and live in neighborhoods that had independent movie theaters and Chinese restaurants without french fries on the menu.



My parents often told me that I should live proudly, because I was the son of pioneers after all, because my grandparents had moved to the United States back when oriental was still in the popular lexicon and never took shit from anyone. I had been lucky to freely construct the blandest American existence possible for myself, but I could simultaneously maintain the delusion that I was fueled by the blood of pioneers, that I could summon a certain inner strength and self-assuredness to fight back when the situation necessitated it. But in the meantime, the best course of action seemed to be to avoid trouble. And I was very good at avoiding trouble. Besides, I was Asian, which carried with it a certain expectation of docility.



 



*I’m playing a game with myself where I try to take the biggest steps that I can without collapsing onto my side like an aging racehorse. Out of the corner of my eye I can see him lumbering and instantly I am put on edge. There is something primal inside of me directing me towards his direction. Soon, I find that everything is falling into its predicted place like an instruction manual. Step 1: Wait for him to notice you are Asian. Step 2: Wait for that to trigger some reminder that his sense of The Real America has been corrupted beyond repair. Step 3: Wait for him to funnel the entirety of that nationalistic malaise towards your physical person - by this point you should be about 15 degrees to the right side of him. Step 4: Let him take the first swing, thus transferring legal culpability (you gotta keep that F-1 Visa intact, kiddo). Step 5: Boxing lessons every Sunday were in fact a good idea, you should thank your parents and remember how the gym-leader with a Napoleon complex taught you how to make a proper fist, A MAN’S FIST, not that sissy bullshit you made when you tried to fight that kid after basketball practice and then just made up, not because you’re a pacifist or any of that Mahatma Gandhi crap but because “peacemaker” is the most attractive synonym for “coward” in the English language, anyway, remember how to make that fist and go for it, you’ve covered your bases and this is the probably the only time you will have moral grounds (and legal, remember we already sorted that out) to pummel an old man. *



*When I’m done, he’s slumped off to his side and struggling to get some breaths in. I flip him onto his back so he’s looking at me the way one stares into the sun, and somehow this does not strike me as childishly megalomaniacal, and when I do so I also cock my fist up to let him know this isn’t over yet. *



*So say it, shithead, I tell him, such a receptacle of testosterone by this point that the Schwarzeneggerian quality of this retort is completely lost on me. *



*What? *



*I want you to say sorry. *



*The garbage truck honks past in the distance but it does so right as the man is coughing so as not to ruin the moment. *



*I’m sorry. *



*Good, I say, letting him go with a careless toss.*



 



“If he was so old, why didn’t you just beat the shit out of him?”



My friend barely looked up from his phone as he offered his rejoinder. This was the first time I had told the story to another Asian guy, and it wasn’t exactly the response I was expecting. I was hoping I would at least get a good party story out of this whole ordeal, and it’s obvious from the initial focus group response that I will not be.



Why didn’t I beat the shit out of him? I assume it’s the same reason why I never said anything when a Boston cop pulled over my parents before sending them off with a slit-eyed joke. Or the same reason why I found the need to apologize to the TSA agents who herded me like cattle across the immigration line of JFK airport. Or the same reason why I let out a nervous laugh when a waiter wondered aloud to himself whether Koreans ever ate at fine dining establishments.



“Fucking idiots,” I’d always mutter under my breath.



I remember a conversation I had with a Chinese friend just as Trump was winning his first few nods of mainstream acceptance and the center-left blogosphere erupted in a comforting drone of “but if you look at precedent” pieces. I had asked him whether he thought there should be some kind of Asian solidarity protest, if that was even possible.



“I don’t know, dude, that’s a pretty Americanized way of looking at things. Asians don’t march.”



Asians don’t march. It was true. That was the Confucianist way, after all: why try to plow through a rock like those litigious round-eyes when you could just walk around it? There were larger things to worry about: food on the table and family to share it with. In just about every Asian-American household I’d been to it seemed like social equality was something that was always put on temporary hold, something that kept getting outsourced down the generational chain.



Over the next few weeks — as I got better and better at telling my story, isolating the tantalizing details, setting the scene like a noir movie, banishing the garbage truck segment to the cutting room floor — I noticed a trend. While my non-Asian friends reacted with horror and dismay, for my Asian friends - especially men - it became something of a revenge fantasy. Had I spat in his face? Did I kick him in the balls?



It was always in the same tone, too - the pseudo-ironic California surfer thing, complete with generous deployment of “bro” and its many linguistic cousins (brah/bruh/brao). The tone was one I was familiar with - when I was in middle school in Seoul, the highest ideal of cool was always the stereotypical frat bro: tanned, tank-top, dubstep remixes. For a culture that was predicated upon quiet — if not seamless — integration, the endless pursuit of perfect camouflage, the male frat bro became an icon of rebellion. Being a “bro” meant, for the first time, that we could greedily hoard all the experiences we had been denied or denied ourselves our whole lives: alcohol and girls and fraternal acceptance. Asian guys don’t march, they rush.



The salmon Chubby-clad specter of the Asian fraternity brother followed me deep into high school, and it was an ever-present feature in the minds of Asian guys, a mutual fetish we were all equally embarrassed of. The Asian frat bro didn’t listen to Confucius, never kowtowed to anybody, impolitely ransacked life for all its experiences, never made compromises to death and never planned around its inevitable occurrence.



Perhaps more than anything, the AFB could award himself a pedestal upon which to view the lesser members of his tribe, the Chinese grocery store owners and Korean service industry professionals of the world who — in their minds at least — were weak souls that had simply never found the courage to escape servility.



Some people never grew out of the habit. I would meet them all the time, at get-togethers with distant family friends, at bars, in the line for nightclubs. They drove expensive SUVs and proudly smoked cigarettes, they asked for my thoughts on the Patriots (I had few), or they’d ask for my thoughts on golf (I had fewer). They voted for red-blooded Republicans who liked businesses and bootstraps. They spoke loud enough to make my parents uncomfortable and hiked up their pants and used old-school slang with a subtle desperation to be acknowledged, as if this was another marker of their Americanness that we should best appreciate. They spoke of their past lives as scrawny, accented Asian teenagers as if talking about a family tragedy or non-repented sin.



And they all had this one habit, almost a verbal tic: an inability to speak normally to non-Americanized Asians. Whenever they came across sushi chefs or Taiwanese cabdrivers they’d default to the same tone white guys use, where you speak really slowly and over-enunciate all your vowels and th sounds, not in the interest of comprehension but simply because you can. It was certainly one way to live. They certainly thought of themselves as pioneers, and maybe they were right: they had likely endured something bordering on agony in service of self-reinvention, something I have never been able to do. I could never be sure that some of my smug laughter at these adult AFBs wasn’t envy.



I remember talking about an all-Asian frat in Pennsylvania with a friend once, who was also Korean. Just a bunch of douchebags who try way too hard, she had told me.



I laughed and thought about this Damien Hirst sculpture my mom had forced me to look at when I was in grade school: a taxidermy shark in a glass tank, lunging right at the viewer but never getting to them. Not a savage beast of the waters as much as a pale copy of its corpse, a parody of one. The joke, I guess, was twofold: the dead shark acting the part of a real one, and the audience was acting the part of cynically detached observer when - deep down - they were just as afraid of one day ending up encased in formaldehyde. It was called The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.



 



*I’m playing a game with myself where I try to take the biggest steps that I can without collapsing onto my side like an aging racehorse. It suddenly occurs to me that he has been following me for some time. Perhaps, in my five-beer state, I am more interesting to the average bystander than I’d like to think. *



*I notice he’s staggering too. Maybe it’s because he’s drunk. Maybe this isn’t the first time he’s been this week, this day even. He might be homeless. Maybe he just got laid off from his job. Maybe he was born in a tiny milling town somewhere and always got beat up by neighborhood thugs, and maybe that’s why he’s always had to resort to violence as a kind of survival mechanism I had the good fortune to avoid developing. Maybe one of those thugs was - and I’m really grasping for narrative straws now - a Korean guy, let’s call him Dave Chang (Like the chef? Maybe a different name, something much more ominous and Stephen King-villain sounding, how about Chet). And Chet Chan and his posse of East Asian tough kids rolled around in their bicycles and stole Drunk Guy’s lunch money all the time. *



*Anyways, this is all going through my head as he beats me, and I notice that it doesn’t hurt too much and I’ll probably be fine and my not resisting is not so much an act of cowardice as it is of magnanimity, quiet courage, a social good. Like, if I get him to purge all this disgusting stuff inside maybe he won’t have these urges when he actually has a broken bottle in his hand. He watches me smile my martyr’s smile and he stops. *



*What's that all about, you insane or something?*



*In church back in Seoul we learned about turning the other cheek. *



*Are you finished? I ask calmly. *



*Yeah.*



*In church back in Seoul we learned about how Saint Stephen let the rocks hit him without protest. Would Saint Stephen have marched? *



*All out of your system?*



*Yes.*



*Okay.*



*We exchange numbers and make plans to get coffee. *



 



Of course, the ultimate tragedy of Ts’ui Pen’s “garden” is that it is nothing more than a novel. For Borges, the only setting in which the what-happened and what-could-have-been can coexist is in the realm of pure fiction. In Ts’ui Pen’s garden, the imaginative capabilities of a writer are not forces for shaping reality as much as they are useful means of retreating from it altogether.



In many ways, Borges was right. I wrote fiction all throughout middle school, mostly odd wish-fulfillment fantasies about 6’4 Korean guys who were very, very good at basketball. The climax of each tale, however, was invariably some heroic standoff with an interchangeable old white man - coach from an opposing team, maybe, or just some asshole down the street.



In high school, I wrote fiction somewhat out of necessity, after the negation of all alternatives. I couldn’t play sports or lift or talk convincingly about Coachella and I cared too much about staying in school to sneak vodka to class in water bottles and I hated the idea of withdrawing myself to a destiny of math clubs and Asian friends. I had always liked writing and indie music, so publishing poetry in the literary magazine and making pretentious comments about Jonathan Franzen became my ticket into mainstream society.



I remember in senior year I joined a creative writing workshop with about eight of my classmates. On the first day, we were told that what made fiction good was “stuff.” What’s stuff? Tuna cans in the pantry. Welcome mats with mustard stains on them. Dinner in the oven while your dad tries to fix the VCR. That’s stuff. Any questions?



But what if my stuff has to come italicized and romanized?I don’t have to explain what a potluck is the way I have to dedicate precious page space typing some stilted Wikipedia-cadence bullshit about what Chuseok is. Also, do you know aesthetically revolting Korean looks written out alphabetically? It seems your “stuff” doesn’t disrupt the Feng Shui of the paragraphs they are generously deployed into.



I never said any of this aloud, of course. I just grappled with the weird absurdity of Asian-American art, an entire group of people stereotyped into silence and suddenly forced to find a voice, through deception or force of will or sheer luck or some combination of the three.



I decided as a matter of principle, however, that I could never write about being Asian. Stories about generational discord and being embarrassed about kimchi weren’t cool, after all - they were bad pitches for middle school required reading at best. Cool stories, I was reminded daily, were about “stuff.”



I quickly fell into my default of deception. I wrote pieces about Tide and swordfish dinners and Greyhound trips and jazz music and crafted a lot of racially ambiguous protagonists and patted myself on the back for not deploying a single Korean word during the entire workshop.



At the risk of sounding insufferable, I guess there is something fundamentally post-modern about the Asian-American experience. I talk to a lot of friends about how weird it is that we got our entire cultural vocabulary from televised families, how we adopted their memories as our own. David Foster Wallace, Pynchon and DeLillo predicted - with equal parts aversion and morbid curiosity - a society in which diversionary acts of mass entertainment would become the only source of communal experience. For a lot of us, cross-referencing our odd Asian family reunions against Nickelodeon scripts for cultural accuracy was part of everyday life in grade school.



At times, I wondered what motivated me to mine the same tired tropes of Middle America for my stories, when there was such a vibrant canon of Asian-American literature I could be inspired by. I was certainly afraid of being viewed as someone who was exploiting the perceived exoticness of the Asian experience for literary acceptance, papering over poor prose with white guilt. But more importantly, I noticed that while my peers and teachers would certainly congratulate Asian students who wrote from a personal vantage point, the interest would never extend beyond the purely sociological. I think there’s something so unique about the familial dynamic you’re portraying. My uncle actually took a trip to Tokyo last spring, and he was able to sit in on this local family having dinner, etc. For all the carefully deployed, moderately liberal, New Yorker-informed praise I couldn’t help but think there was a sinister subtext to it all. Thank you for giving me this New And Challenging Culture to process. Thank you for expanding our collective horizons.



And of course, I’m glad you’re one of us now so that you can report on who you used to be - or, perish the thought, might have become if we hadn’t rescued you - with the adequate critical distance of the English speaker. Thank you.



I was certainly guilty of exploiting this mentality myself, usually for grades. I remember each year we would have to give a three-minute speech to the whole class, and I soon found that the easiest way to ensure a good grade would be to paint Korean society as some corrupt, quasi-totalitarian hellhole I had been lucky enough to escape through my good wits and democratic (both capital and lowercase d) values.



I had fun giving those speeches. For a few minutes I could feel the egotistic head rush I assume tour guides frequently experience, the pleasure of shepherding my politically-correct audience through foreign and hostile terrain. Sometimes I wondered if this truly was an alternative to hitting the gym and wearing Sperrys, that I had perhaps wandered into an even more subtle and insidious form of AFB-hood. And while I convinced myself that my Disneyification of East Asia was a purely utilitarian move on my part, whenever I called my family after those speeches I would feel the disgusting outlines of suppressed guilt, that my grandparents had risked a lot by coming to the United States and I was tacitly endorsing the degeneration of this journey into farce. Truly some pioneer I was.



There’s actually another layer of humor to the Damien Hirst piece, by the way: how easily lived experience can be counterfeited. False experiences, simulations and deceptions can - given enough years - take on the appearance of a life, cohere into a mock-organic whole.



Look at the shark, the way its gills seem right on the cusp of contracting. Is it dead, or simply plotting its next turn?



Maybe neither, maybe both.



 



*I’m playing a game with myself where I try to take the biggest steps that I can without collapsing onto my side like an aging racehorse. It suddenly occurs to me that he has been following me for some time. Perhaps, in my five-beer state, I am more interesting to the average bystander than I’d like to think. *



*He beats me. You heard this before. *



*In some ways, and this is probably the alcohol, I feel more honest as it happens. I feel like a spy relieved of duty. But some sick part of me wants him to acknowledge me, wants him to congratulate me for my years of service. The greatest imposter to ever live. If I hadn’t looked so Asian you would have thought of me as one of your own, you asshole. I’ve probably watched more Seinfeld episodes than you. Can you name the backup shooting guard for the Celtics back when they won in ’08? No you fucking can’t. It was Eddie House. Maybe I should be kicking you. *



*And then it’s over, like nothing ever happened. I start walking home thinking about whether lighting strikes twice. Could there be someone else around that corner? I decide to get some cookies instead. I grumble unintelligibly to the guy behind the counter about crazy people out on the streets. I laugh merrily about the particular crazy guy I’ve just run into, but there’s a weird quivering in my voice I can’t remove and the joke falls flat. *



*When I go back to my dorm I have an urge to punch something but my roommates are all asleep. I start passive-aggressively whispering to the man instead. It’s not fair that you ruined my joke. It’s not fair that you get to be unabashedly patriotic, simply because you probably have an over-inflated respect for all the adults in your life, because the adults in your life never had to struggle finding the right words to say to the police, and the adults in your life never had to look like fools when people started talking about sitcoms or sports and you didn’t have to go upstairs and lock yourself in your room to Wikipedia pop-culture relics so you would be extra sure that you’d never run out of stories to tell at dinners and that you’d make doubly fucking sure not a single fucking reference ever went over your head. Perhaps you suspected that the adults in your life were cowards, but it wasn’t fair that they never were put in situations where they could confirm it for you. And that’s not fair. It’s not fair that you got to confirm it for me. *



*It’s not fair that I won’t be able to walk around at night without staring back every two minutes, even now, even seven months later. It’s not fair that you’ll have nothing but a mediocre hangover in the morning but I’ll think about this nonstop for two weeks and intermittently for many more months and every time it comes up in conversation I’ll laugh and say “it was fucked up but whatever,” and it’s not fair that I’ll try and fail to write about this five different times but abandon it out of shame or guilt. And there are many ways in which I am more fortunate than you are, and perhaps from your perspective you are the victim. And it’s not fair that you and I both have our reasons and learned nothing will stay the same people, more or less. *



 



Someone told me once that being Asian-American was a serious anticlimaxes and learning to get used to them. That this was a destruction partially of our own doing, the natural conclusion of generations asymptotically striving for “passability.” Passable decoys of the white upper-middle class. Passable decoys of Americans. Passable decoys of not-yet-Americanized Asians when we went back home. Even when we were victims, we were simply passable victims: unidentified Chinese workers buried beneath the Gold Rush tracks, the interned Japanese valued only as rhetorical counterarguments that footnote the liberal triumph of FDR-ism, Koreans slaving away in sugar plantations in Honolulu (this article is a stub, you can help Wikipedia by expanding it).



In the days following my encounter with the man I often wondered if I was complicit in this legacy, simply because of how flat and devoid of catharsis the event had been. The kicks hadn’t even hurt. The man might have been crazy. In a weird sense I felt guilty of the half-assedness of the whole thing, and I would see the Damien Hurst piece again, as if I had somehow been mauled by a shark that was stuck in formaldehyde all along. Not a shark attack as much as a parody of one to be carefully dissected by detached criticism.



If there was one thing I did take away from the whole affair, it was that perhaps Ts’ui Pen was onto something that could explain why older Asian-Americans had been so socially passive.



If you never engage with society, you never have to confirm how terrible it truly is, how few options you really have at your disposal. That indigestible truth simply becomes one of many possible realities. Forever and ever.



When I was named the editor-in-chief of my newspaper in high school I remember my grandparents had bragged about it for weeks, how Joon had beaten all the white kids, how he had broken the putrid institution wide open. When I got into college they told me to go as a conqueror, to take and take everything the American university had falsely promised them when they flew to the East Coast so many years ago. I was the son of pioneers, after all, and I could speak perfect English, and I wrote things that even the whitest white kids liked to read, so what did I have to worry about?



I never told them about what happened in front of Insomnia Cookies. I told them about my dorm instead, or my roommates, or if I was in the mood I would give them a heavily sanitized account of a couple parties. I told them that I loved school and I was getting everything I wanted and I never answered to anybody and I never looked behind my back when I walked.