Asian American
Jan. 14th, 2011 11:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lanlanPairing: general, eventually yoosu, jaechun if you squint
Rating: pg
Summary: AU - DBSK members as Asian Americans living in a tight knit Asian community in a mostly white suburb in the Midwest.
warnings: I don't have a beta. Also, I'm only Asian not Korean and wrote it as a Korean community only because the members are Korean. So the descriptions of their environment is meant to be a generally Asian community that refuses to assimilate, not specifically Korean. So sorry Koreans if I messed up! :)
When Yunho first came to America, he was afraid to eat the food that was given to him so casually and gloriously on the soft, Styrofoam elementary school lunch tray, already soaking through in the middle, threatening to collapse. He doesn’t know whether it was the abundance or foreignness of the food that scared him, or the sideways, unsure way it was given to him, but remembers dumping the heavy tray of rubbery pancakes and syrupy canned peaches in a big, industrial trash can in an imitation of the other kids running out to recess.
Years later, he sits and picks at the kimchi and ddukbokki and other heavily sauced, nameless foods on his plate, still Styrofoam, and tries to look like he is eating. Yoohwan, Yoochun’s little brother, sits shyly across from him, slices of cheesy Costco pizza falling off him plate. Yoochun scoffs.
They are sitting in Junsu’s basement, pencil style, the way they were taught to sit in elementary school and subconsciously still sit, warming their toes against their thighs in the cold that invades basements in cold Decembers nights at a potluck dinner Junsu’s mom threw. It is Christmas Eve and everywhere else in the Midwestern suburb they live in pale faced families must be eating neatly decorated sugar cookies, singing Silent Night, and watching Charlie Brown.
As the Americans, as the tight knit circle of Koreans call everyone else white black or brown, do these things, those without families to gather on this side of the Pacific squeeze under one roof, usually Junsu’s or Yunho’s as they have the biggest houses and most social parents (Junsu’s mother is notorious for karaoke and Yunho’s for card games) to eat potluck, warm and spicy and pungent. The children, anyone from ages three to twenty five that keeps r’s and l’s distinct while speaking English, are banished to the basement with floppy plates filled with food.
Junsu is a spoiled brat who owns, in his spacious, finished basement that still smells of woodwork, a Gamecube, PS3, and Nintendo Wii. Since it’s an Asian party, he gets out the Wii and sets up Super Smash Bros Brawl, plugging in about eight controllers. No one but he and Changmin want to play. Yoohwan plays too in the end but as the lame younger brother, not friend, and ends up setting up his character as CPU as a joke no one laughs at.
“There’s a new kid up there,” Yoochun announces, bouncing down the stairs, plate piled high with food. No one pays him any attention, too busy watching Changmin run over Junsu’s Link with a tank. Junsu has six lives left. Yunho takes a bite of cellophane noodle.
“He just came from Korea,” Yoochun sits on the floor next to Yunho, puts his plate on the chair beside him. Yoochun looks excited about the newcomer, glancing up towards the stairs, waiting for him to come down. Yunho imagines some quiet, arrogant boy with rectangular glasses and decorated jeans, hair flying and frozen with hairspray.
Jaejoong is only half of that, overly confident and far too well groomed but missing the intellectual feel of those fresh from overseas. He gets dragged downstairs by a mother of one of the toddlers running around upstairs, bowing with introductions. The woman, smiling in her red sweater, must be intimidated by the gang of American teenagers buried in garlic aromas, Korean card games, and gossiping women. This is a world she herself has never experienced before that lays hidden inside her social circle, underneath its seasonal parties, a world her own children are destined to be a part of. She wonders if it is truly possible for her babies to become so alien to her.
She wonders how the boy she pulls downstairs will meld with this sort. The boy is of the sort who knows how to address his elders, dresses in real clothes, not those oversized sweatshirts with the colors of the high school here painted cheaply on, sold overpriced, but real clothes with folded collars and jeans with wrinkles in the right places, and knows what it is like to fight for a place in life, not like these ridiculous American teenagers who are given everything on a silver platter.
“Everybody, this is Jaejoong,” she smiles at the aliens with their game consoles. “Please treat him well.”
Junsu takes his attention off his game for a moment to look over Jaejoong. Changmin takes the opportunity to KO his character off and he curses, scrabbling back again. The new kid looked like a huge slut, Junsu thought and scoffs, indulgent smiles and intentionally fluttering lashes making the ajjumma who led him downstairs fall for him.
He thinks that he and Yoochun, who is also an ingratiating little whore sometimes, would get along well. He can see the two of them chasing girls at their school. Junsu glances over at Changmin and Yunho’s sisters who are gathering and giggling in the corner and sees then cut their glances toward Jaejoong furtively. He knows from the way Jaejoong walks that he sees them too.
Yoochun is trying to get Yunho, whose Korean is the best out of them all since he was born in Korea, to talk with Jaejoong by the time Junsu loses to Changmin, who does a little victory dance as he shoves half his plate in his mouth, shrill, fake voice floating and grating on Junsu’s nerves. Junsu thinks that Jaejoong talks like fakeass celebrity on T.V., preparing his sentences in his head and smiling in the right places and hates him. He hates how Yoochun, who plays piano passionately instead of being forced to and drives around in his beat up car listening to jazzy blues, laughs at Jaejoong’s jokes, stumbles over his sentences in Korean in an effort to communicate with him.
“Play again,” Changmin garbles over his thick mouthful of food, already choosing Snake and hitting enter and Junsu picks up his controller. He chooses Kirby and listens instead to the boys behind him.
If the Asian circle were a real family, Yoochun thinks that his family would be the black sheep of it. Not only do they raise loud, dirty dogs in their backyard, too full of energy and appetite, but they also raise two boys without a father. It’s no wonder that Yoochun, sixteen going on seventeen, who spends his time drawing and listening to music instead of calculus and stoichiometry quit the school orchestra recently and the debate team years back. No one’s noticed that he spends more time at the part time job at the supermarket near his house than in school these days because, full of shame, his mother goes the extra mile to keep in secret.
He and Yoohwan live in guilty fear of each other, Yoochun for the guilt of knowing their father longer and the botched attempt at becoming him and Yoohwan for being the baby of the family who gets to attend school clubs in the afternoon and practices piano in the evening. Yoohwan follows his older brother who he worships around in his fake careless ways and angry ways and Yoochun pushes his younger brother, or tries to anyway, the same way his mother is supposed to until all his guilt is given back and festering inside the younger one, turning the corners of his lips downward during Mathletes at 4’o’clock.
Yoohwan dislikes how excited the appearance of the new boy, Jaejoong, gets his brother. He dislikes Jaejoong not for his foreignness but his familiarity – all that is Korean about Yoohwan himself seems so obvious on this boy. He hates his brother for putting their frailness, the way their thoughts bend when not in English, on display, even though, not especially since, he walks around with slanted eyes and wispy black hair everyday.
Part of it is that Yoohwan was raised in a less-than-perfect family in a community of prying ajjummas that demand perfection, but most of it is that, ten years old and in the sixth grade, he finds himself lost of a sea of Caucasian faces that make him hate the differences he sees between himself and Them and ultimately himself. (Changmin’s sister is in his grade as well, but in another world of girls that is still forbidden and without interest to Yoohwan.)
They all understand why Yoohwan spends so much energy burying his differences, his Korean-ness, and his family, eating ordered pizza in place of rice and tofu, because they were the same way when they were ten years old. No one bothers to tell him that once he hits high school he will sicken so much of hating himself that he will begin to hate the Caucasian friends he tries so hard now to imitate. Once outgrown of the old childhood rebellion of his own race, Yoohwan will rebel against his schoolmates to fit the perfect Asian mold, wiggle himself into the shape of a clone stamp of a member of the model minority not because he has passion for mathematics or money but because his hate of the unreachable outgrows his hate for the unavoidable.
Yoochun, who is in the latter stages of this development, has no friends at school and knows all the tricks of lonely, only children. He talks to himself inside his head, narrates his actions, counts the rainbow colored dust particles on his cornea. He’s happy to meet Jaejoong who, he learns, will be starting in his grade on account of needing to catch up on learning English.
“Are you applying to colleges in the U.S.?” Yunho asks Jaejoong and Yoochun hates him for a second, bites his lips and eats his food. Yunho, a high school senior and the same age as Jaejoong suffers shining status in the eyes of all their mothers for his perfect standardized test scores and above perfect GPA. Yoochun, who plans to put off taking the ACT and SAT until it is too late, doesn’t know what his GPA is.
“Yeah, maybe,” Jaejoong smiles in accented English and Yoochun loves him.
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Date: 2015-10-24 02:22 am (UTC)i connect with this series SO SO much. yunho with the styrofoam trays and the food spilling out -- that image is so clear to me just because that was one of my earliest memories of being at school too and wondering how the hell i was supposed to eat the shit on that tray.
and super smash bros OMG. that was my childhood. whenever my family had gatherings, my cousins brought out the wii and we all played that.
and jaejoong!! ohhhh i love how you give each of them a different but similar asian american experience. like jaejoong being 1.5 gen!! and yoohwan dealing with the self-hate and all of them learning to connect with being korean american also.