The first time I met Refrigerator was at Sentosa, a Malaysian restaurant that has now gone out of business in Flushing where I grew up. Flushing: Chinese & Korean letters, narrow pathways flanked by street vendors, crabs crawling out of wooden baskets, Four Sides One Soup, Shiseido, Kimganae. For me and my friends, it was our city where we shopped for Christmas Gifts at the Morning Glory and Korean stationary stores, where I bought my Contraband Jeans where the pants fit tight and hit the right length at 5 feet 1, and get our bubble tea from Ten Ren’s tea shop where it smelled like oolong Jasmin tea and starchy tapioca balls.
I wore Hollister short shorts, frayed at the bottom and the left front pocket, the white cotton peeking through, and dangly cherry earrings from Claires I got in their $1 mystery bags. My legs and armpits shaved every three days, I liked to wear halter tops and bright yellow without regard for who looked at me. I enjoyed the newfound power attraction brought me.
My bible study teacher introduced me to Refrigerator since we would both be attending the same university. Over Roti Canai and Char Kway Teow, he said to my teacher: “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of her.” Refrigerator was 6 years my senior, which at 18 years old, felt like a lifetime. That he had lived so much more than me. How to describe him? Finding his place in life. His major was physics and he used to go to frat parties before everyone he knew graduated and cycled out of university life. He was like the Korean American boys around me growing up. They laughed and cried and endured hours at church every Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday with me. We spent afterschool in test prep basements, went on religious retreats that were our childhood playgrounds. We put our foreheads to the floor when we prayed and cried thinking of our mothers. We collected ants in a jar for a church group activity where the losing team must eat one. Dared each other to eat silkworm pupae bbundaegi from the opened cans. Spent hours on elaborate obstacle courses, human pretzel challenges, throwing water balloons to catch in groups of two until it popped on the ground. We were on the church volleyball teams and went to Alley Pond Park. We all saw our parents work in restaurants, autoshops, nail salons, delis, fish markets. He was like all the other boys in my neighborhood — harmless.
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Sometimes you think you know what you want and so you take it out and put it in the fridge. Late at night mindlessly, you take down the rice cakes or chicken or beef and think to yourself, I’ll make it tomorrow. Then tomorrow comes and you eat out or you decide to just eat some tinned fish and call it a day or you want soup or a friend asks if you want to come over and what you had in the fridge just sits there, day after day, softening, bruising, rotting, — perishing.
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College marked my emergence into real life after being molded, stored, monitored for 18 years. I started the ticking hourglass of the start of my real life, college. Olympic sized pools, a glass library, unlimited printing privileges, a dining pass that eliminated the need to think about how much a cup of mocha latte is. Neatly curated acres of grass, school buses that transported students to clubs. I was full of optimism, individualism, I was ready and on the right track.
This was the prize for spending almost every summer at a hagwon after all, thousands of dollars sunk in by my parents into the immigrant test prep industry. I didn’t realize this wasn’t the way other kids spent their summers, that for my parents, the Joongang Ilbo advertisements were the main way to understand the options available for additional extracurriculars, the price advertised in bold for the summer.
A Plus academy was where we would make Shin Kimchi Cup noodles almost everyday, folding the paper top into a cup to share with friends, filling it with noodles and sodium filled soup. We played Chinese jump rope in the basement. I was a self proclaimed expert. Starting at the ankles, knees, then waist, I would jump, leap. No waist high enough to deter me from jumping in. Out, side to side, in and out. We did mental math, the numbers tacked 12 lines high, no calculator, focusing for hours and then getting it checked by a teacher until it was time to go home. The rest of the time was spent exchanging papers from our diaries and passing love notes to each other, letting each other know how we adored each other. “Dear Julie, you are the best friend ever. You also have a pretty smile. I can’t wait until we can chill when it’s break time”. It was a given that our free time was imbued with work and improvement, and we accepted that.
Kappa Academy was a different environment. Militaristically strict, there were cameras installed everywhere. The first floor had a wall of TVs that captured our every move. We were frightened into silence and compliance even if it was mostly a threat. Sitting in class with 20 other students my age, our early teens and the male head teacher comes into the room. All of the sudden he chooses a young boy out of the room who did something wrong in his eyes. He is mad, a stack of papers rolled into a paddle, and he whacks whacks whacks him while we all looked on, speechless.
Each test prep center was not just about getting ahead on schoolwork and exams. It was a place to grow, presumably unscathed and untouched, wrapped in plastic. Some were held in church basements, low cost and affordable for families barely scraping by. Others were thousands of dollars with a wall of their successful Ivy League admits. It was an underground economy where snacks like shrimp crackers, instant ramen bowls, salted seaweed paper reigned supreme, Sanrio planner papers in exchange for stickers or just goodwill. Friendships were made and broken. It was more than test prep, it was culture, it was childcare, it was community, it was a way for immigrant parents to feel like they were doing the best they can with what they had. It was a way to try to control their feeling of out of control in a country where they couldn’t understand most things but they could understand a good test score, a good education. They could see that path to a good future. Without the luxury of understanding other options available, college was a good goal as any. A safe haven to deliver their children to, their work was complete here.
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A refrigerator. That was the pretext for our first meeting on campus. He told me he had a fridge he wasn’t using anymore and that he’d be happy to give it to me. I wrote on his Facebook wall:
hey i am currently in pitt
i was just wondering if you could hook me up with a fridge?? c:
hope to see you soon!!
He brought it over from his off-campus apartment which was just far enough that you needed a car to get there. I lived in the eco-friendly, new Stever Dorm on the top floor as part of a group of Science and Humanities Scholars. Shared a small room with a roommate, my bed lofted, the bathroom communal and you could see everyone’s feet between the space of the floor and the start of the bathroom door.
After he dropped off the fridge, we drove to Shadyside to eat at PF Changs. I still wasn’t used to eating out at restaurants and found it exciting. I spent most of my life eating the Korean food my mom would make for every meal with ban chan, miyeok geuk, kalguksu, minari and this was before I would realize how much of my life I would spend craving it. For the first time in my life, all 24 hours in a day were mine with no parents to tell me what to do. I didn’t think too hard about what I should do with that freedom. I only let things happen.
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Refrigerators represent the divide between the perishables and non perishables. The prolonging of life and material to be used at a later date. The kelp and anchovies frozen in the freezer for a savory broth at any moment, used as a base for noodle soups and stews. My mom had two fridges growing up, would pack the freezers with plastic bags full of weeds, herbs, and roots that were imported and hard to find. The other fridge filled mostly with kimchi at various fermented stages. “Remember to take out the meat and thaw it.” Once it’s taken out of the fridge, it’s prepared for immediate consumption, minutes or up to a few hours later.
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We went to his friend’s apartment afterwards, his two guy friends there too. Like slanted, grown up versions of the Korean boys I knew back home, they were older and drinking shots of vodka and Jameson. Polo shirts with athletic pants. They held boredom in their mouth but still stayed where they were, sitting, drinking, looking. I said no with a sense of morality, that morality cultivated by years of Sunday school and the memories of my mom refusing to let my dad drink even a single can of Budweiser at home. But I said no with also embarrassment because I knew I showed my naïveté.
“Can you stop trying to be cute?”, Refrigerator’s friend said. I was just about to take a shot of vodka without looking like I’ve never taken a shot before. Then I looked around, I was in a muddy looking apartment with three guys. Refrigerator and his two friends in clothes that blended with the grey carpet. Here’s a place for speculation. Why tell someone to stop trying to be cute? Is it because you find their act nauseating? Is it because it’s someone you can’t have? Is it because you are annoyed by their presence? What kind situation calls for this question? All of that I can only speculate because I don’t know but when I think about it now, my best guess that it was a way to knock my confidence down. Why was I, a freshman, full of dreams and excitement about being at college, in this room with them?
I smiled through my teeth. After a moment I stood up. “I have to go now.” I felt claustrophobic and Refrigerator led me out of the apartment and asked me what was wrong. “Your friends are losers”. His face of concern fell into a mixture of sadness and anger but I could only think of how much I wanted to leave and I didn’t care, not even a little bit, about his feelings. Perhaps I was also disappointed by this, thought that in college I’d be living what I saw on screens — rich white people, dark mahogany wall panels, preppy wear, parties, beer cans and vodka shots, people unlike the those that I grew up around.
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I had never been drunk before, the most I had was a sip of beer. Never smoked weed or done any drugs. I wanted to be a good girl — whether that was because it was my own nature or because I was scared into compliance, I’m not sure. My resistance was barely perceptible. It was following my own instincts, and it included the smallest of things. It included buying tampons for myself and trying them out, spending hours on AIM messaging boys and friends, changing my profile info for every fleeting mood I felt. It was going to the Queens Mall and letting a boy kiss me on the escalator going down from Hot Topic to the food court. It was lying about practicing piano and letting myself watch TV on the computer until the moment my mom got back from work, then flying into turning all the electronics off, my bible copying notebook out.
In middle school, my best friend Jen and I made up a test prep school for ourselves to motivate each other to tackle the plethora of practice standardized exams books, JJ ACADEMY (Julie + Jen), so obsessed we were about being smart girls, good girls. Stacks of SHSAT books, Kaplan, Barrons, Regents exam prep books, there seemed to be an endless amount of standardized exam books, all regurgitating the same problems slightly differently but still worth buying. The weight of the books on our backs, the hundreds of pages to go through, the sheer volume itself as concrete as the bible, to pass the only goal in sight. We lined up our various gel pens, ball points pens, pencils for the math section, and neon highlighters.
On Saturdays, Barnes and Nobles and their in-store Starbucks Cafe. Java Chip or Strawberry Frappuchino’s were my go-tos while I looked through test prep books, copying my answers into a notebook and checking the answers in the back. Afterwards, it was hitting up the Pac Sun for clearance jeans that made me feel cool with their wavy embroidery on the butt pockets, then my mom coming to pick me up and dinner at Boston Market. My brother and I and my mom would get 3 meals: 2 red and 1 black. Red means kids and black means adult, my brother eating the adult meal. The cornbread, yellow and crumbly. When your world is your neighborhood, as small as just a few blocks that you visit everyday, the future can feel like a narrow tunnel you need to force yourself through to get to the light.
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He would drop off 4 cupcakes from Dozens at my dorm room. He’d text me on Gchat even when I was on ‘invisible’ because he didn’t care to hide his attention, attraction. Or it meant he refused to have self control. I knew I would never want him or want to be with him but that didn’t mean I didn’t like him. He was 24 and finishing his undergrad degree, worked at the fish market during winter breaks to make money. I wasn’t attracted to anyone with vestiges of my own upbringing, I wanted new, different, better. He didn’t know if he would be able to find a job after graduating. He didn’t have a plan. I wanted to be in politics, be a foreign service officer, travel the world. The attention felt like power, an upper hand, an addictive taste. But it would be years before I found power in my own self, before I found feminism, before I had my own money.
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Late at night after hanging out, watching him play World of Warcraft, I asked if he could drive me home. “It’s late, why don’t you just sleepover and I’ll drive you in the morning’. The danger of someone driving you is that you don’t know how to walk back. So instead, I laid down on this queen mattress stiffly, unable to fall asleep because of a sense of vigilance that my subconscious provided for me. I made myself uncomfortable for what? His absentminded ask. I wish I was raised to be assertive instead. That I could more easily be contrarian, make myself unlikable, that I didn’t have the light layer of fear of being inconvenient floating around inside.
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Kimchi fried rice is one of my favorite foods. Mostly pantry staples, all you need is a cup of kimchi, the kimchi juices, sesame oil, red pepper paste, scallions. An egg to top it if you want. Refrigerator made it that night. His studio apartment was carpeted. His mattress wrapped in bedding on the floor. The sour wonderful stink of it sticking to the walls and sinking into the fabrics so quietly it’s impossible to detect until you leave the house with it on you. The oil crackling like a warning that you ignore. Him standing at the stove, while I laid on the floor on the bed, napping. My sleep cycle was off. I was a college freshman taking in freedom and churning out irregular sleep schedules, sleeping in till noon, missing my 8ams, 9ams, 11ams even. To be able to fall asleep anywhere like I would, on the subway, in class, on this mattress, I had trust. Trust in the world to be right and good and take care of me. I was buttered in naïveté.
I came from a world where people didn’t live alone. Nobody I knew lived alone — yet. I came from multi family homes, multigenerational apartments, always more people than rooms. Immigrants with their extended families, grandparents, babies in arms. I only ever saw people live alone on TV, bachelors, and real New Yorkers who had the means to rent an apartment. To achieve this would be a testament to my own success. What came with the lack of privacy simultaneously came with the safety I never thought about. His studio apartment was small, a single box, a black leather worn chair, two computer monitors. He had privacy.
“Are you just sleeping?” he asked me, turning the gas stove off. I was still half sleepy, my eyes closed. “I just finished making food for you”, he said with muted frustration that angered me.
I retorted, “Well I never asked you to make food for me.” It angered me because I didn’t want anything from him, yet I was there wasn’t I? Taking comfort, taking the feeling of being wanted, taking still even if I hadn’t asked. His bluff called, he was furious. He wanted me to be grateful for the food he made, he wanted most of all for me to be in love with him, appreciate his effort like a girl who wanted him would.
He came over to me on the mattress and took my arms and held me down. I struggled to move but not too hard, I think it was because I wasn’t actually afraid of him. He didn’t scare me. I remember duct tape put over my mouth. I felt a sense of disbelief that this was happening to me. I barely remember much. Just the duct tape because it felt like a detail from rough and violence porn.
Duct tape is flexible and can be used on rough and uneven surfaces that other adhesives might not hold like brick and plastic and it can even be used over a leak although only for a short while. How grey it is. How it looks kind of woven when you look close. How many uses it can have, so many I thought. Afterwards, he abruptly got up, went over to his desk with two monitors, and snorted a powder I couldn’t see.
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I cut off all contact with him afterwards. He sent me messages on Facebook. The first message was threatening, calling me a horrible person, then realizing his lack of leverage over me, he retreated to sweetness, “I promise we’ll only be friends like you wanted”. He made me realize that someone’s attraction to you is not power. Physical strength is power. Someone’s attraction to you does not make you powerful because it can be utilized to justify actions. So many think they are eligible to take your innocence, after all, doesn’t someone have to one day. I had wanted to lose my innocence too but on my own terms.
The magic of a freezer is that it halts time. Like when you buy a bag of frozen berries and it says: Frozen at its Peak Ripeness for you to Enjoy. Years later, I live abroad in China and then come back to New York. I move to Flushing for two years for cheap rent and proximity to my family. After living in other parts of New York for nearly 7 years, I remember that first day that I moved back, taking in the different but same stores, the pizzeria that was still there off the subway stop, the Chungmoo Kimbap on Union Street, the K-beauty make up stores and Busy Mall where I got my cartilage pierced. I saw her still, walking down Roosevelt Avenue among the sea of commuters, immigrants, street vendors, with the yellow halter top on, too short denim, her smile emanating strings of optimism.
She was still there.
