Dear Chaemin

Dear Chaemin,

What does it mean that we were raised as sisters in South Korea? Chaemin, I always thought we were different.¹ We’ve had completely different wardrobes, MP3 playlists, bookmark bars, and secrets… I never explained why I left home when you were 13. This letter is for the in-betweens of now and then, and here and there.²

My oldest memory is of the Minnie Mouse bracelets. Do you remember? We wore child loss prevention bracelets with a flat pendant each engraved with our name and Resident Registration Number (RRN) until our wrists grew out of them.³

I was excited by the launch of Pinch a few years ago. I met words that I needed to hear and sentences with strength. It made me want to write, but that required my gender to be verified with RRN. Written by women. Written only by women.⁴ I closed the window. I only realized here that I took RRNs for granted, and also that the first person to be assigned one was Park Chung-hee. 110101-100001. Yuk Young-soo, the First Lady of the dictatorship, was assigned 110101-200002. The South Korean government divided all citizens into 1’s and 2’s since then.⁵

A nationalized living that is managed almost completely since the registered birth. (Hong 2007)⁶ To go to school, to open a bank account, to see a doctor, to make a mobile phone number, to get a passport, to vote last week, and to buy facemasks this week. Our grandma, uncles, and Suji changed their names online, but to cross over the boundaries (Stryker 2008) of 1 and 2 needs to be sterilized, go through surgery, get divorced, stay childless, find testifiers, write letters and wish luck with the judge. (조각보 2019)⁷ Jihyun decides to stay at home without facemasks.⁸

I think a lot of the protests that banned cameras and promised facemasks.⁹ Like Jihyun and I, People were done with checking screws and knobs of public bathrooms and covering holes with toilet paper. Thousands of people gathered in my neighborhood every other week. This protest only invites biological women.¹⁰ I remember the neighborhood cafe Jihyun and I had coffee in silence that day.  The bitter weight of living in Seoul was too heavy for me.¹¹

Peru and Panama introduced lockdown by gender. Women and men can go out on alternate days. The Interior Minister of Panama says it is the simplest mechanism. I’m dizzy.¹² Why do we need to know that Patient Seocho-36 is a woman? Would she have faced the same backlash for having been to Starbucks every day if not? Then Patient Yongin-66. I sighed out loud when I read on the case from clubs in Itaewon. They quarantined 10,905 people traced with mobile phone connection and debit/credit card records. Kukmin Daily reported an exclusive arguing Covid-19 can be contained when homosexual activities are traced.¹³ King Seoul’s Instagram account is gone and Trunk is private. Hoon told me, in Itaewon and Jongno, gay bars and restaurants are closed while the straight ones are bustling.¹⁴ Why should our citizenship be proved with our absence? (터울 2020)¹⁵

I had to take a break after writing this far. I headed out for the weekly groceries to face a stranger who yelled Corona at me. I rushed to Albert Heijn but kept hearing my heartbeat in my ears. I return to the same question: why should our health be proved with our absence? Sooyoung my classmate, Jimin my Instagram friend, and Soyeon in Berlin all left to Korea. I — We — should be, or decide to be, absent.¹⁶

I’m thinking of the quarantine app that will trace my GPS in our parents’ house in Cheongdo.¹⁷ That house never had our room. The journals from elementary school are stacked in a Korea Post box. The novel I transcribed when I was 18 is maybe in a potato box. What about the Minnie Mouse bracelets? Nobody knows which box is which. Chaemin, that was why I decided to remain here.¹⁸

It’s raining a lot here, but I guess Seoul is entering its summer.
Wishing you a peaceful summer without trouble,

Chaeyuen

Dear Chaemin,

From the speechlessness that I couldn’t name; the eyes, hands, and hugs from the girls’ school that I couldn’t enter if I arrived after the bell without being beaten by danso or back scratchers.¹ Next to the boarding school where teachers threw flowerpots and boys rated their classmates’ faces.

I’ve done my best to escape from then. Day after day, I stacked on life layer by layer. It is not much to say that my past was designed to let go of those times. (Park 2020)³

Facemasks: We were used to them. I wore them when the fine dust index was ‘dangerous,’ when I didn’t wear makeup, or going to protests or public bathrooms. They meant protection and peace.² I was smiling when I deleted the fine dust app at Seoul Incheon Airport and thought I no longer needed them.⁴ My cough got much better here. I smirked as I learned later that the air pollution, along with factories, has been outsourced to Asia.

Mom shipped me facemasks. Mom always asks me how my coughing is on the phone. My chronic cough is still here and my face is still Asian and I cannot leave home.⁵ While doing groceries this week, I had to hold my breath to stop coughing and almost cried in Albert Heijn. Whenever I step out, I sense eyes all the time on my body.

I ran away from Seoul because of the ten meters between the City Hall station and the Seoul Plaza, the taxi driver who asked me to go to karaoke with him, the professor who grabbed my shoulder and called me Miss Marlboro, and honestly the silence in Hyehwa where the two of us lived after ten years.⁶ It’s funny now, but I imagined that somewhere like this⁷ will help me breathe.

Then, on my way home after Pride,⁸ a stranger shouted Ni Hao. I met countless assholes like that,⁹ but that white, innocent smile stopped my world for a moment. We are just Asians holding hands now. That’s it. I cut my hair that day. I wouldn’t run away anymore.

We are walking in the heart of winter. Here, nobody ages and time does not count as days or years. (Choi 2017) I feel like I am the only one who is not aging or the only one who is. I must be the only one who forgot how to cycle. On the balcony across my window are white people welcoming summer with white music. I stared at them quite some time.

Suji is sick in London. The knowledge that young people die less did not help her. The experience was more brutal than the knowledge, keeping her on the bed with muscle pain, headache, and of all, tremendous fatigue. Eunah cannot lie down next to Suji any more. London promises to issue immunity passports, monitored by facial recognition software.¹⁰ When the pain passes and she gets one, Suji might be able to return to work. But what about Eunah? She cannot risk herself. When would Suji and Eunah look again into each other’s eyes? I think a lot about my loving friends.

The question of choice between privacy and health is wrong. (Harari 2020)¹¹ Suji didn’t apply for relief funds as it might have consequences for her visa. Eunah and I always laugh about our high school on the phone, but yesterday we held a silence thinking of how we grew weak during those years. The security camera that promised a safe school remembered the faces who missed the curfew. Eunah was kicked out of the dorm and had to move into a studio alone when she was 16. Was that CCTV for her security?¹²

When infrared cameras see through our skin, CCTVs on buses stare at facemasks, QR codes, mobile connection tracking, and transaction records are mapped, do we have access to that map?¹³  Black, Bangladeshi/Pakistani, Indian, Other ethnic groups, Chinese, Mixed/multiple ethnic groups, and white: They say it is in this order that you’re most likely to die from the pandemic.  Another says 35 out of 40 arrested in Brooklyn for violating social distancing were Black. When the choice is robbed and both privacy and security are lost, cui bono? (Lee 2020)¹⁴

While writing all this, perilla is growing fast. I guess the seasons here are changing, too. Make sure to wear masks. I’ll write to you soon.

Chaeyuen

Dear Chaemin,

Schools are open again, and the bar downstairs is full until late for Friday. This spring will be remembered long, but who gets to have their everyday to be recovered? Suji can taste and smell again, but Eunah decided to go back to Korea. Jihyun can now buy facemasks online, but she was fired.

Peru stopped the gendered lockdown.¹ The president’s words that the policy is not a pretext for homophobic conduct did not help trans and non-binary people, and domestic labor to visit supermarkets or pharmacies was disproportionately placed on women. They admitted the failure of measures, but then Colombia began their gendered lockdown.²

IBM admitted that facial recognition technologies operate on the bias based on race and gender. As I celebrate the small victory, the phrase general purpose³ catches my eyes. What are the other purposes? Then at the news Pinch will close its doors, I become more lonely.

Everyone’s talking about the new world,⁴ but there are still no flights, and I am in between my bed and table. It is still only the plants who count time in the new world where the healthy, safe, and suitable bodies are not mine, nor Suji’s, Eunah’s, nor Jihyun’s, nor workers at Coupang — nor Amazon — nor queer, nor Black, nor Asian.⁵

Imagining a better-than-now future, completely sanitized as virus-free, would be too romantic. I read Ruin’s writing over and over. Regardless of the hopes and aspirations for a linear improvement, life and movements flow. (루인 2019) I stay quite a while on the section’s title: Bearing the Worsening.⁶

Chaemin, I’m reading your letter over and over again. If we meet up at our current speed, at our sixth next time I will be 40. Is it too late to be sad about Damti where I didn’t pick up your call, about Sinchon where I left you in a cafe for Suji, and about Hyehwa where we never cooked together?  I wonder about your habits, thoughts, and cooking. When would we see each other again? By then, let’s pass the troubles and make eye contact.

I know this letter will live short, but I wrote for memory. Half of this was a confession, and the other half a novel. There were no lies.

Chaemin, promise me that you’ll stay safe. In any way that suits you, please don’t be sick.

Chaeyuen