(no subject)

[muckefuck]

Last night, I had plans to meet a friend for dinner--or, at least, I thought I did. After a half-hour of waiting, I checked my phone messages and found he had called the day before to cancel. Oops.

I was relieved, frankly, since I was looking forward to an early bedtime. First, though, there was the matter of dinner. Sunday, I had wanted to stop by a nearby Japanese restaurant for noodle soup, but they were closed. I thought of going there and then it occurred to me: If all I wanted was a dinner of udon, why not see Nwunim and Hyengnim[*] in the process?

They are a Korean couple who run a Japanese restaurant on my walk home from the el. (Many "Japanese" restaurants in the States are actually owned and operated by Koreans; now, after years as serving as sushi sous-chefs, Mexicans are getting into the act, too.) Early in the year, I stopped in and used a little of my Korean on the chef. The next time I showed up--just after Chinese (and Korean) New Year--his wife sat next to me and talked my ear off. I try to stop in at least once a month to exercise my paltry Korean and get them to teach me minhwathwu, or "plain flower cards". Trouble is, they prefer "Go-Stop", whose arcane scoring conventions always seem to work to my disadvantage.

Then I thought, if I didn't really feel up to the strain of a dinner date in the first place, why was I going somewhere I'd be expected to chat--partly in a foreign language, no less--and hang out? My head was so muddled from this lingering head cold, I couldn't even remember the term of address for Hyengnim. (The meaning is "respected older sibling". One of the first things they did after we began talking in earnest was find out what my age was so they could settle on an appropriate relationship term; I thought they were close enough to my parents' ages to be "aunt" and "uncle", but they apparently don't agree. When I told a Korean-speaking friend what they had chosen, he said, "They must really like you!") But I know myself well enough to realise that, if I allow such excuses, I'll put off visiting them even longer and it had already been at least six weeks. Plus, I remembered that I had mooncakes in my bag from a trip to New Chinatown the day before. Gifting them one would help make up for my weeks of neglect.

When I got there, the place was deserted except for the waitress. She first asked if I was eating dinner or just coming to visit before handing me a menu. I sat down, ordered, and pulled the mooncakes out of my bag. Unfortunately, I hadn't had them in a box and they'd gotten deformed in transit. I looked through them and selected the least-damaged lotus paste one. When the server saw them, her eyes lit up. "We have them in my country, too!" I'd always assumed she was Japanese, but it turns out she's Thai, though of predominately Chinese descent (like many Thais from the Bangkok area). We chatted for several minutes, exchanged names, and I got a little of her story before Nwunim spotted me and alerted her husband.

They loved the mooncake so much, I was asked to write out directions to Chiu Quon Bakery on Argyle so they could buy their own the next day during the mid-afternoon break. I asked them what to call the filling in Korean, but then they asked me what it was, and the closest I could come was yenhwa, which means "lotus flower." It didn't seem to clarify matters for them. I was no longer the only customer, but they seemed more interested in talking to me than catering to them. Hyengnim teased me about my fingernails, I told him about welcomerain's love of Chilsung Cider and spookyfruit's fondness for "2% water", and then the inevitable topic was broached:

"Kyo Taymun-ssi, why aren't you married?"

I think this came up the second or third time we talked, after we had described our immediate families to each other. I had tried various tactics to deflect the discussion--I'm a man, so there's no hurry; my sister is going to take care of the child-bearing for our family; etc.--but it still crops up at least every other visit. This time, I complained that marriages are "too much work", said my salary wasn't enough for two, and that I didn't want anyone "telling me what to do". This led to some gentle teasing between the two of them, with Hyengnim telling me sotto voce it was better to stay single and Nunim pretending to slap him for it. Still, they persisted to the point of Hyengnim asking me for my business card to pass on to likely candidates.

Of course, I could put a stop to the questioning in an instant by saying, "Because I'm a BIG GAY-ASS FAGGOT." Or could I? There's a good chance this would just force a change of tack instead--or, if it ended the discussion, it would end it by ending all discussion. Still, I'm left with that nagging feeling I always have in situations like these that I'm somehow letting my side down. I'm a great believer in the power of coming out, but crucial to its effectiveness is certain intimacy with the people whose views you hope to alter. If someone is prejudiced and you spring this on them too soon, they're likely to pull back rather than risk being put in the position of trying to reconcile the fact that someone who they really like and seems like a great person is also one of those people. But the whole goal of coming out is to force them to confront this paradox.

So, am I really setting them up or am I just rationalising my reticence to jeopardise the developing friendship? I rather hope that there doesn't have to be a movie-of-the-week Dramatic Revelation down the road. I'm hoping that they'll eventually put twul and twul together to make neys. To further this along, I plan to bring my boyfriend there sometime, though I'm not sure that he'll find the whole situation as charming as I do. If that's the case, anyone want to come with me sometime and impersonate my boyfriend?



[*] For welcomerain's convenience, all Korean transcription will be given in Yale because of its one-to-one correspondence with Hankul. The vowels are the most divergent: /e/ represents the shwa, which is written /eo/, /u/ or /?/ in other systems.