“(Please be quiet),” I say to a couple of my disruptive students. In the face of their confusion, I realize I’ve done it again and amend, “Just let me finish this lesson, okay?” The Korean shooting out of me like leaks in the dam, ever since that day with Timothy’s friend. A, “(Where do you sell your ties?)” to a department store employee. A, “Yeoboseyo,” answering the phone. A slipped, “(I’m trying to work here, could we talk later),” to Jon in the breakroom, which he meets with a laugh. “Come on, Eric, you know that’s all Greek to me.”
I can feel it coming, the assimilator. The English opium flooding into China. Commodore Perry sauntering into Tokyo Bay. And of course, my own homeland, piled upon by American soldiers who used our country up like a tissue for a sneeze. Who propped up the tyrants my family ran away from, ironically escaping into the States. Here I am, saluting the flag every morning with my pupils, but not enough. I must never have been anything other than American.
A visit with the uncle leads to him parading his wife’s new eye tuck in front of us. “Now we match,” she says with a grin. “All on the same page.” Spare me. At home alone with my wife and Timothy elsewhere, I stare at the bathroom mirror. I pull my eyes wide in Asian caricature, then can’t help but laugh. But I carry on for a full minute, volcanic ash erupting from my soul. Of course. Ching chong, ding dong, all of that.
The assimilator comes to steal away my son. No. To reclaim him. Reserved for me, only middle school snickering. The funny little Asian man even his wife can’t love. To her credit, she never questions my failing English. “(Who’s taking Timothy to baseball practice?)” A terse, “I’ll do it.”
A day before the arrival. Breakfast. “What should we change our last name to?” I ask, keeping my smile prim, not belying a joke.
A wrinkled nose. “What are you talking about?”
“No one can ever pronounce Choi.”
“Their problem, not ours.”
“You don’t really believe that.” A sip of orange juice. “Bad enough we’re not tucking our eyelids.”
A miffed, “We don’t need to.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
She crosses her arms, scowling. Too early for this conversation of course, but I don’t sleep much lately anyway, so why concern myself with time? “What makes you arbiter of my thoughts?”
I say nothing.
“Okay, Eric, what name should we take?”
“Eric is European. No one calls me Min-ho ever.”
“You’re not answering the question.”
“Ever wonder why that is? We never call Timothy Kun-woo either.”
“Eric, I need to go to work. Let’s discuss this tonight.”
Each class, I give a pop quiz instead of a lesson, a mandated essay about the importance of citizenship. Amidst the chorus of scurrying pencils, I meditate on my desk, the comforting bulwark it gives me against the world. Lunch, I skip for the classroom’s solitude, the uniformity of the seats, the contempt of the fluorescent lights. I don’t want to go home. It doesn’t belong to me anymore.