On Loving Men in Silence - Bora Hah

Due to our physical distance, I call and check in with my mother every two or three days. Our conversation sounds pretty much the same each time: she asks if I had a meal, and I ask if she needed anything. I refrain from revealing my private concerns, knowing there’s little she could do about them. Yet the other day I couldn’t contain my excitement and told her about a man I’d been seeing.
 
She liked the idea of him. He checked off all boxes of her ideal spouse list: a Korean, American, Christian, competent, tall, and charming. I liked him too, except he was too shy: it took him three dates to face me without avoiding my stare and minimum thirty minutes to answer my text. But my mother liked even that side of him. Whereas I didn’t. I was growing impatient, so much that I told her I might just ask him out this time. It was that precise moment when the air turned cold.
 
“Wait,” she said in a calm voice. “Wait until he makes a move. A good girl should always wait.” Her voice fell deep. I could almost see a sour look blooming over her face.
 
My heart sank. I bit my lower lip and looked around — my desk was crowded with so much clutter: manila envelopes folded in half, random flyers, USB cables, a pack of push pins, a bag of Sun Chips.
 
“Do not show your emotions,” she warned again. “No man likes a woman who opens up too much.”
 
My reaction was automatic: I nodded at the receiver, like a respectful student before a teacher and answered, “Yes, umma,” then quickly ended the call.
 
Immediately I was awash in shame. It felt as if someone struck me where I was bruised already. I knew exactly what it was called: guilt. It was guilt, something we Koreans consider our third sibling. I should not have wanted my wants. I should have kept my love silenced. Like a good Korean girl.
 
When I date, I become conscious of my ambivalence: American part of me wants to confront, speak, act, and not regret. Deep inside, though, my very Korean self wants to clam up, wait and wonder. Both sound compelling, right, and wrong.
 
One time when I was in middle school, I heard boys gossiping over an actress who was on a K-drama that was trending at the time. It was a historical-fantasy drama set in the Joseon Dynasty, a love story between a handsome, lonely prince and a beautiful, poor shaman girl.
 
“She’s really pretty,” one boy said, “but her quiet stare look freaks me out; she’s like a flower without scent.”
 
At this several boys burst out laughing. In the corner, I saw one girl laughing with them, her small pale hand covering her mouth.
 
When Mom warned me that a woman should not show her emotions and stay silent, that only a man should make decisions, I thought of that impeccably good-looking actress, her rosy silk gown and pale skin that made her appear like a lotus flower in a pond. She seemed like the woman who would smile but would not laugh. The woman who would nod but would not speak. The woman who would wait, and would never, ever leave her man even when he did.
 
The image of her jolted me. I did not want to be a lotus. I did not want to be a rose. I did not want to be a flower. All I wanted to be was my best beautiful self.
 
Later in the evening I did ask the man out. He took four days of silence, then rejected at last. I called up my friend that afternoon, mourned the rejection, and cooked a meal together.
 
On my way home, I told myself that it will be alright, that this is all practice, that a path to sound relationships require heartbreaks and strong will to constantly learn how to love better — both myself and others. All these, I figured, cannot be done in silence. And guilt will still rush in. But somehow it did not concern me too much.

Bora Hah is a novelist, essayist, and screenwriter who speaks and writes in Korean and English. Her work, which focuses on painting raw human portraits of Koreans, was a winner of the Kim Yong Literature Award, and a runner up for the Viet Thanh Nguyen Writing Contest. Currently she lives in Seoul, writing South Korean dramas.