AA2

[lanlan]

Title: DBSK as Asian Americans
Pairing: 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! :)
 

In school, Junsu sings in choir and even does drama.  He smiles brightly at everybody.  Sometimes a friend from his drama club or mime club follows him, chatting and bickering, toward a meeting with Changmin or Yoochun and is shocked for the first time at the betrayal of finding himself one against many, a white boy raised in white bread America who is not only unused to not belonging but who has never experienced the feeling.  They always stay for several minutes too long, too afraid to leave, too afraid to stay.

 

 

Yoochun drives Changmin and Junsu home the days they don’t have after school activities, stops by the elementary school on the way to pick up Yoohwan.  On days they have Math club, Yunho drives them back.  Only occasionally does Changmin find himself getting driven back by an aged man in a baseball cap on a dirt-covered yellow school bus.

 

He plays games on his Nintendo DS, his phone, or his TI calculator in the car while Junsu hums along to the song on the radio.  There is no need for intentional conversation between them because they know their relations come more from the expected permanence of what their family is made of and not the deliberate construction of friendship.

 

Normally he and Junsu fight for shotgun but today, the seat is already taken on the long haired, pouty lipped boy he was introduced to during winter break as Jaejoong.

 

“Open the trunk!” Junsu yells through the back window at Yoochun, slapping the butt of the car impatiently.  They throw their backpacks and violins in when he does.

 

“Do you play instruments?” Jaejoong asks them when they get in the back, winter coats taking up the extra space between them.  It takes extra effort for the question to be asked in unfamiliar English so when Junsu doesn’t answer Changmin looks up from his game long enough to.

 

“We’re in orchestra.  Violin.”

 

“Ahh,” Jaejoong speaks like his mother.  “That’s cool.”

 

Junsu snickers.

 

 

 

The next day Yoochun tells Changmin to move over to make room for Jaejoong during lunch, which is done with Changmin even stopping in the motions of eating his sandwich.  They sit down in silence with their sloppy joes and baked beans while Yunho drinks his Vitamin Water and Junsu walks past them without a glance.

 

Changmin shoves his food down his throat and finishes the homework he didn’t do last night while Yunho types on his computer.

 

“I thought your apps were done,” Yoochun comments.

 

“Scholarships,” Yunho says, typing.

 

“Oh.”

 

“Fucking Junsu,” Changmin doesn’t know why he breaks the comfortable quiet, the silence.  Even Jaejoong looks up at him.

 

“Why.”  Yunho sounds tired.  He’s not looking at Changmin anymore and so Changmin shrugs before answering.

 

“He thinks he’s too good for us or something.”

 

“He’s just popular, that’s all.”  Yoochun isn’t defending Junsu, not really, but Yoohwan, who is just as popular as Junsu, in a elementary school sort of way.

 

“Don’t cuss,” Yunho tells Changmin and Yoochun snickers.  Changmin, who follows Yunho with his eyes and actions and treats the ground he walks on like its holy, doesn’t. 

 

 

 

“How do you like America?” Yunho asks Jaejoong the second day at lunch.  Yoochun is still in line but Changmin sits in his usual spot, playing his games.

 

“Ahh?” Jaejoong is wide eye confused, comical, facially illustrating confusion rather than letting it spill out.  Yunho asks again in Korean.  “Ahh, it’s fine,” Jaejoong says, smiling.  “Everything is bigger here.”

 

Changmin who understands Korean fine but doesn’t feel comfortable when forced to speak it stays silent and plays Mario.  He thinks that Yunho sounds weird in Korean that Jaejoong sounds worse because he sounds so natural in it, feels mildly embarrassed, than ashamed at the embarrassment. 

 

“Max, I need to see your answer for number four for chemistry,” Junsu’s body and scent push between he and Yunho, settling down in the narrow space.  Yunho moves over to let Junsu sit.

 

Changmin digs through his backpack, no one saying a word of yesterday.  He doesn’t feel afraid anyone will.  “Is that the buffer one?  It works out because oxygen is diatomic.  Double everything to do with oxygen in your ICE boxes.”

 

“Oh yeah,” Junsu says dully.

 

“Just copy mine,” Changmin hands the homework over, which Junsu takes with a singsong “Thank you”. 

 

“Cheating?” Yoochun teases, coming over to sit by Jaejoong now.

 

“I only cheat when I know the material already and just need to get through the work faster,” Junsu replies sweetly.  “I’m not like you.”

 

“Touché,” smirks Yunho and high fives Junsu.  Yoochun pouts.

 

When Yoochun pouts Junsu wants to kiss him and the revulsion he surprises himself with makes him turn his attention down to copying Changmin’s homework so he can get the hell away.

 

 

 

The way Junsu pines for Yoochun is the only way to want someone like Yoochun, openmouthed, wet, and hot.  Junsu, who is a virgin and sixteen, is both embarrassed by the idea of himself as a sexual being in general and completely horrified that he wants, in this way, Yoochun, who is also a boy.

 

It wouldn’t be such a problem if it weren’t Yoochun, Junsu, thinks because Yoochun knows his mother, calls her ajjumma and plays the piano at their church.  He practices scale instead of eating when they have potluck there and gave a cheap necklace with a heart shaped pendant to one of the younger girls who follow him around last year.  Yoochun is a mixture of inaccessibility and easiness that Junsu find hard to swallow.

 

Most days he doesn’t bother trying to because he takes Yoochun for granted as easily as he takes his mother for granted.  It’s not just that they might as well be related they’ve grown up together the same way but that Yoochun who has never thought of going to college or out of the state at all seems permanently stuck in their suburb.  Junsu can’t imagine him anywhere else and he is sure Yoochun himself has never tried to.

 

And it’s not his crush on Yoochun that bothers him, really, as crushes like this one will always pass, but how self conscious the crush makes him, attacks his formerly nonchalant, even apathetic stance toward himself.  Junsu spent his childhood, like most children, without a self image, happily and ungraciously.

 

“Unnatural” and “disgusting” are the words his mother, usual ones, describes homosexuals and Junsu was quite content to go along with it until he realized one day that the words, adjectives, could be quite easily applied to himself.  And along with these words, also applicable to himself were other adjectives.  “Hot”, “slut”, even “sissyboy” are words part of a vocabulary Junsu isn’t sure he wants part of his own, but used to describe boys who, as far as he could see, weren’t much different from himself.

 

As uncomfortable as the idea of being wanted by a man, which always seems to Junsu far more horrifyingly sexual than being wanted by a girl, Junsu is revolted by the idea of himself wanting another boy.  Never mind that he doesn’t want sex, not literally.  Junsu has sentenced himself to a label by falling in love with another boy that, as far as he could see, details sex.

 

Only when he is half asleep, eyes shut against himself under the covers, does Junsu think about holding hands and exchanging kisses with Yoochun, puppy dog romance scenes he thinks has no place in the real world.

 

 

 

Yoochun doesn’t have the habit of thinking through something before doing it and so he brings Jaejoong home with the intent to befriend him without knowing it even himself.  Jaejoong doesn’t seem to mind though.  He seems to lack the natural shyness most people have around strangers.

 

They sit in Yoochun’s backyard, smoking cigarettes and petting his dogs, Jaejoong speaking Korean and Yoochun replying in English.  This is the same way Yoochun talks with his mother and he is surprised Jaejoong picks it up so fast.

 

“So, what do you do around here?” Jaejoong asks, tapping his cigarette.

 

“There’s nothing much to do around here.  Work, school, sleep.”  Yoochun shrugs.

 

“No wonder you move to slowly,” Jaejoong laughs.  “You have to fill in the time between somehow.”  Yoochun laughs with him even though he is aware that Jaejoong, who talks fast and says much, is laughing more at him than with him.

 

“All the girls in Korea are fat because all they do is study and eat,” Jaejoong is saying.  Yoochun blushes and jokes feebly about coming to the right country then and America’s obesity rates.  Jaejoong laughs his polite laugh.  Yoochun asks him if he has a girlfriend in Korea.

 

“Not anymore,” Jaejoong shrugs.

 

“You broke up because of the move?” Yoochun asks.

 

“We broke up because she didn’t really like me,” Jaejoong says.  “Every time she broke up with a boyfriend I bought her a bouquet of flowers.  It had to be different every time.  Lilies, roses, whatever.  Anyway, I always bought twelve.  Like in a movie or something, you know?”  He sucks on his cigarette, inhales, exhales.  “Every time I bought her flowers she would let me fuck her.  It had to be when she broke up with her boyfriend though.  Like, right after.  It didn’t work otherwise.”

 

“Oh,” says Yoochun, thinking of his own collection of embarrassing movie dates and clumsy goodnight kisses with girls even younger than him.

 

“When I visit Korea this summer though, first place I’m going is a flower shop.”  Jaejoong stare straight ahead.  They sit and smoke.  They stare at the giant oak tree in Yoochun’s yard and the squirrel climbing up it.

 

“Your turn,” Jaejoong looks at Yoochun, a glance.  “Tell me about girls here.”

 

“Oh.  Ah, well.  Not many girls here.”  Yoochun takes out another cigarette.  He is at a loss of words, somehow, unable to communicate his reluctance to date white girls, especially blued eyed blonde haired ones, that is comes from the same stubbornness that keeps him from joining school clubs or sport teams or sitting anywhere during lunch besides by Changmin and Yunho.  Yoochun refuses to acknowledge the part of himself that regards this self containment as the act of a martyr.

 

“Not many Korean girls.”  Jaejoong implies the rest, catching on immediately.

 

“I dated an American girl before,” Yoochun says reluctantly.  Middle school, passing notes in the hallways, romance kept secret from his mother, Yoochun remembers.

 

“How was it?” Jaejoong asks.

 

“It was fine.”  Until she had gone beyond just trying to learn to hold chopstick properly, had taken too much offence at vague, accidental racial comments her peers made, with no intention to insult and often with no thought at all.  The way she took such a sudden and, what Yoochun assumes to be dishonest, interest in Asian culture and the way she took to heart racial slurs Yoochun himself didn’t process or mind in the first place divided them instead of brought them together and insulted Yoochun, as he was born in Ohio, not Seoul.  It made him feel used.  He broke up with her, as fourteen year olds tend to do, on the phone.

 

Yoochun keeps all this to himself and lets silence take over again.

 

“You’re right,” Jaejoong says after all while.  “Nothing goes on here.”

 

Yoochun kicks a pebble.

 

 

“I’ll have to start talking slower.  Maybe in English,” Jaejoong grins.  This time they do laugh together.

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