My Favorite Bang
Date: 1/28/2016,
Categories:
Interracial,
Author: JuneFernan
... was still early in the evening, the same couple of girls would be hanging out with them. I first learned her name was Minjoo when she showed me how to register a username on the kiosk, so that I could rent a computer as a member rather than pay guest prices. “Thank you!” I told her, unsure if she even understood me. “You,” she pointed at me. “Everyday.” She laughed. “Hey, not every day.” I wanted to talk to her more, but she didn’t understand anything I said beyond simple words. Also, her boyfriend was always standing nearby anytime we talked, and I wasn’t sure what he thought of me, though he usually smiled when I looked at him. She wasn’t the formal and studious type, which was the norm for young Koreans. She had a single red streak in her long black hair, to match the frames of her glasses, and she often wore sleeveless shirts that partially exposed a tattoo of a bird near her neck. By her culture’s standards, she was a rebellious outcast. By my standards, she was cool, mysterious, fun to attempt conversations with, and quickly becoming the most alluring aspect of my favorite PC bang. One time when I was about an hour into my gaming session she walked up to me at the computer—the first time she had ever tracked me down among the fifty PCs in the café—and she proceeded to show me that she had retouched the red highlight in her hair and had added one. With the help of a translation app on her phone, I was able to tell her it looked great. I figured she wanted to talk with ...
... me a lot so that she could practice her English. Her boyfriend seemed unconcerned, perhaps even a bit enthusiastic about us trying to communicate. But for me it was awkward, being the only white guy in the PC bang and drawing stares from the guys at nearby computers. Minjoo and her friend would often break into laughter after I said something, and I had no idea why. Was I strange to them, or hard to understand? Was Minjoo trying to flirt with me? Maybe the friend was the girl dating the owner, and Minjoo was just hanging around because she had nothing else to do. Both of the guys who ran the place seemed much older than the girls; maybe they were family. Maybe she didn’t start showing up so often until we first started talking—my memory of when I had started noticing her was quite blurry. Too many possibilities, and too many questions. If I could just talk to her normally, so many questions would have been easily answered. Instead, trying to talk to her started giving me anxiety attacks, so for the next few days I would enter the café, say a quick hello, then make my way to a computer. But Minjoo and her friend would track me down, English textbook in hand, and say to me between their giggling, “Tim—pronunciation, please,” and one of them would shove the book in my face with a word under her finger. She even started playing games of Starcraft with me, and she was decent at the game. I couldn’t avoid her anywhere in the PC bang, and I couldn’t help thinking she was the coolest ...