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04.30.2024
Rituals
“I wanted to get to know the characters that I started putting down on the page. I had to mature to meet them, to allow them to exercise their own authority over the story and guide my hand and sensibilities.”
I must admit I am not the most… prolific writer around.
This story took several years of living and multiple drafts. But most importantly, it took writing with community to come to a place where the story feels more or less finished to me. Previous versions of this piece were workshopped in Jim Krusoe’s 30B writing workshop, with some members of the 2021 Periplus cohort I was part of, and of course Heung Coalition’s own writing workshop. Their feedback was vital to me.
My gut instinct is to destroy what I write or archive it somewhere. I don’t know if this problem stems from taking things too seriously or if it’s merely all due to a general dislike and discomfort with being perceived. Then, too, was the matter of platform and where this triptych would be at home.
Where better than Syzygy? I found my ideal readers through Heung and at Heung’s workshop, after all.
Though I don’t expect, feel entitled to, or possibly even desire a whole lot of eyes on whatever I make, I do feel thankful and, frankly, tickled when someone says they’ve spent time reading something I wrote with care and attention. If something about it speaks to them, moves them, makes them consider something anew—that is more than enough for me.
“Rituals” sprouted from a few scenes in my head—images like something out of a film. I wanted to get to know the characters that I started putting down on the page. I had to mature to meet them, to allow them to exercise their own authority over the story and guide my hand and sensibilities.
These past few years have tested and refined more of the reasons I can think of about what and why I want to write. Who do I write for?
While investigating these questions, I found I care not at all for institutions and other writers who prioritize profit/careerism and dispense milquetoast and intellectually/morally lazy both-sidesisms during a genocide.
To not consider/willfully ignore what it means that those of us in the imperial core are part of states that bankroll and have a direct hand in the murder and occupation of so many Palestinians—themselves artists, writers, poets, intellectuals, etc.
To believe that this has nothing to do with you.
On the contrary, I found I care a lot about banding together with like-minded people I share values and politics with and helping each other create despite all that crushes and oppresses the desire, will, means, and capacity to. It is in this vein I wish to write and create—according to my principles, thoughtfully, playfully, with my beloved friends/comrades.
Rituals
Trigger warnings: suicide, eating disorders
I. Yoonji
Yoonji brushed her teeth as she listened to her mother on the phone. “Have you eaten? Did you eat the things I made for you last week?’
“Yes. I’ll give the containers back to you this weekend.”
“Are you okay? You know it’s the anniversary for Eric’s—”
Yoonji stopped brushing, cleared her throat, and interrupted her mother. “Yes. I’m okay.”
Then there was a long silence. Yoonji braced herself.
“Yoonji, I know I asked you last time, but I need more. I’m short on rent.” The nerve of this woman. Today of all days.
“You know I can’t.”
“Or maybe you can borrow from your friends? I’ll pay you back. I promise!”
“You should have paid for rent with the money I sent you last time.”
Here it comes. Her mother would launch into a rant about how she was being a cruel daughter. Couldn’t she spare some money for the person who birthed her? And then Yoonji would tell her mother she had class or work and hang up.
But maybe because it was today, her mother was quiet for a moment. “Okay. Make sure you come with the containers. I’ll make your favorite yeongeun jorim.”
Yoonji stared at the boxes of Amway Glister toothpaste her mom sent her as an apology or perhaps because she had too many extra on hand. Yoonji zoned out as she brushed her teeth and thought about her mom. When she spat out to rinse, she saw trails of blood turning the spit pink. The color satisfied her.
In Yoonji’s dreams, Eric was always in his black turtleneck sweater, the thing he was wearing when she found him last. He would not speak. He would raise his hand in the air, gripping a knife. And then he would strike himself in the chest. Over and over. And she’d scream, she’d run to him and try to get him to stop. She’d place her hands over his heart. He’d sink the knife in through her hand and she’d feel nothing. This wasn’t what had happened, of course. Dreams had a way of rhyming.
Yoonji would do anything to go back, to not say those words. After all, he wasn’t the one she was angry at that day, when she stormed into the apartment they shared, frustrated by how gullible her mother was. How foolish, desperate, pathetic. But Yoonji said things she could not take back. She should have been more attentive. She should have seen something was wrong, that Eric was at his limits.
But she snapped and so did he, in his gentle, but shocking entropy.
Today she would see Mr. Namgoong, an elegant and taciturn Korean man in his fifties. It had been two years since Eric passed. Two years since Mr. Namgoong had lost his partner to a car accident. Yoonji couldn’t explain exactly how they fell into this arrangement. People found her by word of mouth, paid her what they could. A gilded hand mirror and sunflowers from Señora Marquez whose silver hair Yoonji went to brush every Sunday afternoon. A generous sum from Mr. Albrecht who was dying from stomach cancer alone in a hospital, whose hand Yoonji held as she read Rilke to him per his request. Venmo payments and boxes of themed snacks sent over to Yoonji’s P.O. Box from Tami, a shy musician who asked Yoonji to listen to them perform new pieces over Zoom.
But Mr. Namgoong was her first. Yoonji met him on the UCLA campus; his partner had been a professor in the English department. Mr. Namgoong had come to retrieve the rest of his partner’s belongings that day. Yoonji had found him in the parking structure sobbing, the contents of a box strewn about on the floor. She helped him pick up the books, saw a framed picture, recognized Professor Nate Tanaka’s face, and commented on how friendly he had been and how she had taken his Asian American literature class. Mr. Namgoong looked too dazed and worn out to drive. He started mumbling in Korean and when Yoonji answered him in kind, he asked her if she could drive him to his home. He apologized and asked her for help, that he didn’t think he could make it home. And just like that, she couldn’t turn him down—he was in her care now.
To thank her, Mr. Namgoong made a meal from a cookbook his partner had referenced extensively. Yoonji saw many dogeared pages. Mr. Namgoong told her Nate had always cooked for him. He then proposed an idea: he figured he would cook a meal from the cookbook each Monday evening they met. She would eat whatever Mr. Namgoong cooked, whether it turned out well or not. He would pay her for her time. They would meet like this until he had cooked everything in the cookbook. Mr. Namgoong spoke to her only in polite Korean, as if he couldn’t talk to her about the professor in any other way. In the beginning, he said nothing and stared at his plate. As the weeks passed, he began to eat with her and shared details and memories about Nate: how they had been in a short-lived punk band together, how their first kiss happened after a fight, how Nate’s parents were Zainichi Koreans. In turn, Yoonji spoke about Eric: how he carried canned cat food in case he came across strays, how he’d always stop her in her tracks to tie her shoelaces if they came untied, the grip of his hand when they were at her father’s funeral.
Yoonji glanced at the thick cookbook and saw that less than a quarter of the book’s recipes were left. Her stomach clenched in sadness; their time and this ritual, too, were coming to an end. Today’s meal was a creamy bacon carbonara. Mr. Namgoong had been zealous with the salt.
II. Soohyun
I could rely on the repetition of my days. I knew that tomorrow, I would rise slowly from a corpse-like sleep, dissociate in the shower, avoid my seven other sleeping housemates, and go to H Mart for work. Without fail, Mrs. Lee at checkout #2 would ask me if I wanted to come to church with her on Sunday, that I could find a girlfriend there among the many pretty women, that I should be friends with her son who was also twenty-five, and if nothing else, that there would be free lunch. I would answer that I had errands to run and smile, hoping it wouldn’t look to her like a grimace.
Every week, the same skinny girl would come in and spend a long time staring at various packaged foods. She had a habit of tugging at her bleached hair, bits of it breaking off. One of the ahjummas who worked at the kimbap corner offered the girl some kimbap, thinking she was homeless. But the girl shook her head, said something in English, and ran out. She left without buying anything. Maybe once she had bought some conditioner.
I could count on the manager, Mr. Kim, to react to the daily news, whether it was from The Chosun Ilbo, some local Korean radio channel, or conservative Korean YouTuber. The other day, Mr. Kim went on an angry tirade about the “sissy traitors” with “no conscience” who refused the mandatory military service. “Korea would not be what it is today without our soldiers!” Face turning red, he then thumped the chest of his green vest and barked about how he had been in the marines, how he came from a family of Vietnam war veterans, and demanded to know the other Korean men’s ranks, whether they were immigrants or not. Ysenia, my favorite co-worker, elbowed me gently. She rolled her eyes and whispered, “There he goes again with his boomer bullshit.” She shoved me away from checkout counter #4 with her hip and motioned to the freezer room with her head. I clasped my hands together in thanks and ducked away from Mr. Kim’s line of sight lest I cause his first stroke.
My day fell into a template: scarfing down my lunch, lugging boxes to and fro, putting things back from where customers carelessly left them, an occasional smoke break with Ysenia while she ranted about her angry Korean father or affectionately waxed poetic about her ASMRtist girlfriend, bagging the things people checked out (cold meat separate from produce when I could take my time), and then driving through traffic from the market to home where my housemates and I maintained a cold civility.
The night I met Yoonji, however, nothing went according to my expectations.
When I pulled up to the driveway from work, it was crowded with cars. Music blared from the two-story house I lived in with my housemates. I sighed and quietly cursed under my breath. I parked my car down the street and walked to the front door. The bodies of strangers writhed against each other to alien rhythms like maggots in a half-opened can of tuna. I couldn’t make out any of my housemates from the grotesque mass under the dim red lights. I quickly moved towards the stairs, dodging the bodies as best as I could, willing myself to become small and invisible.
I rushed into my room, shut the door behind me, and locked it. Light from the streetlamps spilled in through the open slats of the window. I looked around to make sure things were in general order: my laptop was still on the desk in the far corner, bed undisturbed, and yesterday’s clothes were on the floor in a heap just as I had left them. I switched on the lights.
There, beyond my bed, another pair of eyes. My unexpected guest slowly rose to full height. “Sorry. I couldn’t hear anything down there,” she said, her voice low. She told me she had come to find a friend—Irene. The woman had forgotten her house keys at home and was locked out. This Irene had the spares. Unable to find Irene, the woman said she had hidden in my room. The woman looked around the walls of my room, at its many posters, potted plants, string lights, and the star stickers on the ceiling which glowed when it was dark. She pointed to a poster of a K-Pop idol. “I like her, too,” she said, smiling. She began to hum the beginning notes of my favorite song. Then her eyes fell upon another smaller print of an image taped onto the wall. In it, a man was hung upside-down by one foot on a cross. His eyes were open and a bright halo surrounded his head.
“I know this image… The Hanged Man. Pittura infamante, punishment for traitors.”
The woman then turned to me and told me her name was Yoonji. She asked if I spoke Korean. When I nodded, she continued speaking in casual banmal. I replied in honorifics, though she looked like she could be younger than I was, a habit I could only break when I spoke in my stilted English.
Before I could answer, without turning her head, she stretched an arm out and pointed towards the window. “What’s that?” She asked. I glanced at the object of inquiry. “Inversion boots. They’re attached to a pull-up bar. For, um, exercise.” Exercise—ha!
“Can I try them on?”
“Sure.”
“You’ll have to help me.”
“Okay.”
I don’t know why I agreed. I didn’t like other people touching my stuff or coming into my space. She walked towards the pull-up bar. She didn’t ask for directions. Shoes already off, she bent her body, touching her palms to the carpet. Then she pushed off and swung her legs against the wall. I quickly reached to grab her ankles. I felt uncomfortable and hoped the moment of contact would be over soon as I helped her into the boots while she was upside-down. I had to lift her torso a bit with an arm while I fastened the boots with my free hand. Once secure, I stood back.
I hadn’t noticed that her tank top had come down over her face, exposing her stomach and bra. She was wearing jean shorts. Nauseous, I rubbed my hands on my pants and in a panic searched for some tape on my desk. I pinched a bit of her top and pulled it up, taping the end to her shorts and secured the other sides of the shirt. She did not respond, eyes shut. I retreated until my right calf hit the foot of my bed, fixating on Yoonji’s face. She hung, rigid, as if in an endless free fall, but her expression was one of utter peace. This must be what I looked like from the outside, or rather what I wished I looked like. My eyes fell on the print of The Hanged Man on the wall, his golden halo.
***
“Can you take me there, again?”
Yoonji called either late at night or at other odd hours, but I didn't mind, even on days I had work in the morning. Her requests grew in frequency. In her presence the nights seemed to stretch and I lost track of time. I would pick her up from the apartment she shared with Irene, whom I had yet to meet.
I drove up to her apartment, stifling a yawn. The clock read 3:40 AM. The lawn of the complex was balding in patches and the palm trees loomed with their backs hunched from the persistence of wind. I rubbed my eyes and wiped away some crust from my tear ducts with a knuckle. The headlights washed across Yoonji's form, straight and still, arms crossed. She squinted in the light for a moment and walked towards me after I waved a hand out the window. She was wearing a thick navy hoodie over what looked like a white dress. I noticed her shoes were mismatched, a checkered canvas sneaker, its laces untied, with only half of one foot inserted and a red patent leather flat on the other as if she had put them on in the dark in haste or carelessness.
Yoonji thanked me and sank into her seat. Then she apologized for making me lose sleep just because she couldn’t. Her arms remained unfolded and her hands lay inert on her lap, palms skyward. I told her not to worry and hit the gas pedal. I turned on the radio to a fuzzy channel that broadcasted Korean oldies. The soft steady cadence of the DJ’s voice fused with the thrum of the engine. Outside there were few other cars. Tall buildings stretched over the Los Angeles streets like sentries, looming over tents and makeshift shelters. Most restaurants and businesses were closed, although some convenience stores remained lit and the city's last stragglers gathered near the corner diner. A song that Yoonji recognized came on and she began humming along. I waited for her to speak. Sometimes, she didn’t want to, and that was fine, too. When she did, though, I felt like a sphinx gave me the key to her own riddle. At a red light, she flipped the sun visor down to use the mirror. Yoonji pulled out a golden tube of lipstick from the pocket of her hoodie and began applying it to her lips. A dusty rose shade. She faced me and pressed her lips together making that mmpah, mmpah sound. “Do you like the color?” Yoonji asked. I nodded shyly. She held out the tube toward me. “It’s yours.” I took the tube of lipstick in my right hand. It seemed to buzz with a strange warmth, like the impossibility of a secret returned. The light turned green.
Once I parked the car, my eyes fixated on the sea before me, the moon's reflection splintered on its surface. Day had not yet broken. The two of us walked out onto a mound of sand and sat. Her hand cupped my cheek. I flinched a bit from her touch.
“Are you cold?” she asked.
“Nope, I’m okay,” I had brought a spare jacket, but had left it in the car. I wouldn’t need it anyway, once we began. I’d stopped wearing my bulky men’s jackets when Yoonji told me I didn’t have to force things for her, but I felt uneasy, thinking about potential threats—men with ill intent or a cop concerned about us loitering. I knew how we must look and imagined the headlines: ILLEGAL ALIEN CAUGHT BURYING HIS GIRLFRIEND ALIVE. But they would be wrong. About who I was. About who we were to each other. About what we were doing.
“수현아...”
My chosen name. She gave me a look. I nodded and we began digging. The cool grains of sand slipped through my fingers. I looked up from time to time. Yoonji's long hair obscured her face and she worked mechanically, her arms moving in straight angles. I tried to match her working rhythm, to bend to her urgency. Once the pit was deep enough, I sat back and watched as Yoonji lowered her body in, and began scooping sand over her legs. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes as the weight accumulated. When I had finished pouring sand over her chest, I relaxed into a languid pace to pay close attention to her shoulders and neck so as not to get sand in her nose or mouth. Her face was like a shirt freshly pressed and ironed, everything smoothed out in anticipation of something. I stood up and began drawing a ring around her by dragging my foot, a series of rings that would radiate out. The creeping sun spread its light over the beach.
Each and every time felt new—I was of use.
III. Irene
Irene hated Yoonji. She hated Yoonji’s quietness, her thinness, and the way she wouldn’t greet Irene (even though Irene was fine not greeting Yoonji). She hated how the refrigerator was always full of Yoonji’s food, lovingly cooked side dishes packed neatly in glass containers by Yoonji’s mother. Even if Irene ate Yoonji’s food, Yoonji wouldn’t yell or call her a fucking thieving bitch. “You ate this,” Yoonji would say, holding up an empty container that once held cucumber kimchi and japchae with slices of beef and mushrooms. Irene would nod without the least bit of shame. Yoonji would look at her, not with anger, but with something close to pity and that made Irene hate her even more. And then all Yoonji would say was, “Good.”
Most of all, Irene hated how Yoonji looked like the kind of girl everyone from her mom to the neighborhood dog would compare her to. The kind of girl things came effortlessly to.
Irene couldn’t be more different from Yoonji. And yet here they were, living as roommates because Irene’s mother knew Yoonji’s mother from church. “Poor woman.” Irene, during a brief visit to her parents’ home, once overheard her mother on the phone gossiping with the other church ladies. “Lost her husband recently and then her whole savings to a pyramid scheme. But her daughter’s doing well, it seems—UCLA for psychiatry.” Irene would roll her eyes every time her mom would ask her, “넌 도대체 뭐가 되려고 그러니? Everyone else is doing well. What are you doing? How will you feed yourself with your poems?” Irene would laugh in response, a forceful series of gasps like an animal in pain, and her mother’s chest would heave a sigh as deep as the regret God must feel sometimes.
When frustrated, Irene went to the H Mart nearby. She didn’t go here for groceries. She would, instead, go on an empty stomach and test her will. At the fruits and vegetables section, she loved touching the tomatoes bright red on the vine, sniffing the strawberries through the vents in their plastic containers, and knocking on watermelons with her knuckles until she heard the full thump she liked. She watched the leafy greens glisten in the luxurious, neverending mist. She’d open the door in front of ice cream bars in their colorful packages and let the air chill her. Irene would squish the meat in their packages with mild disgust and then stare hungrily at the carb-heavy snacks: the Choco Pies in their dark glaze, the Nongshim shrimp crackers (the spicy version), the Haitai french pies bejeweled with a dollop of strawberry jam, honey butter chips which were once all the rage.
And when she went home—empty hands, empty stomach, empty empty empty—she felt like a fucking winner.
***
Irene found herself part of a familiar equation, a portion of a lock of limbs. She thought, “This time, I'll reach it. This time, I'll stay there.” She feared her hunger, a mouth without a vessel to contain. It was as if she and the other were treading seawater, close to drowning from exhaustion. Her arm was wrapped around his head. She found cruel the delineation of skin that separated her from another—how she would like to dissolve or turn into salt. She pushed his head against her chest as if to smother him in a phobic rush to be the sole survivor. But it was also to shut him up and stop him from saying anything more about how he found her so tiny, so petite, so exotic. In the morning, she stared at the face beside her in bed and found it loathsome, another strange body that pierced and hollowed hers.
When she got home, Irene was overcome with hunger and gnawing emptiness. She slumped down on the kitchen floor in front of the refrigerator. She ate whatever she could get her hands on, dipping into Yoonji's store precisely because she knew all would be forgiven, tolerated, ignored, and pitied. She smeared her lips with hummus, chewed mindlessly on leftover Chinese takeout, ate the beef and quail eggs Yoonji’s mother braised in soy sauce, and sprayed a long stream of whipped cream into her miserable pit of a mouth. She stuffed herself until everything felt like cotton and nausea crept up. Then she tightened into a knot on the couch. She felt a heaviness accumulating in her core and around this fullness she coiled herself.
For hours she slept until she felt cold fingers shaking her awake. A woman's voice called her name and asked if she was okay. Irene stirred and pulled herself up. She clutched the part of her chest where she felt plugged. Above her, Yoonji’s face came into focus. “I feel sick,” Irene said.
Yoonji told her to wait. She came back moments later and sat on the floor in front of the couch.
“Come down here,” she said.
Irene slunk down and crossed her legs. Yoonji took her right hand and pulled it towards her. She began pounding on the arm and squeezing down towards the fingers. Then she took Irene’s thumb and pricked the base of the fingernail with a sewing needle. Irene hissed as dark purple blood bubbled up.
“Why the fuck would you do that?”
“It’s something my mother did for me whenever I had trouble digesting.”
“Does it work?”
“Wait fifteen minutes and see.”
“Is there a science to this?”
Yoonji paused, and with a shrug, answered, “Bad blood.”
Irene felt something clog her throat at the sight of Yoonji focusing all of her attention on the bleeding thumb. With a feather-light touch, Yoonji pressed a tissue on the puncture and then moved onto Irene’s other arm with the pinching and pounding, and Irene was taken outside herself. Within this frozen moment, they looked almost like friends or a couple in the motions of a ritual before it became routine, tilting on an axis of tentative tenderness. She wished Yoonji would push the needle through her thumb, for the blood to stream on against the clot.
Kris Shin (they/she) is an unrepentant dilettante exploring fiction, hybrid genres, and the occult. They aspire to practice a politics guided by the desire for liberation, abolition, and care. Sometimes they write.