“You both look so similar! brothers?” Chuckling, our waitress seats us.

I manage an awkward smile and reply no. This feels like a weird way to start a date – we had met just a minute ago. Admittedly, Johnathan and I do resemble one another (if only vaguely). Same height, similar build, medium-length black hair gelled to the side and faces holding on to the slightest hint of baby fat. We had both recently returned home to Texas from out-of-state colleges up north. I had finished my junior year and he had graduated. Both of us had been holed up in our houses, bored and looking to pass the time. After a Tinder match and some casual flirting, dinner plans fell into place.  

This is only my third date ever and the first time with someone also Korean. I had arrived ten minutes early to sit in my car and practice how I would greet him. A hug? No, that’s weird. Probably a hand-shake. What do people normally do?

Between spoonfuls of bibimbap, we quickly realize how our lives overlapped but never quite touched until now. Johnathan grew up in a Dallas suburb thirty minutes away from my own house and used to visit my high school for debate tournaments. We attended the same hagwon and art studios five minutes away from each other. He grew up with a Korean church nearby the one I grew up with, which both our parents dragged us out of bed for.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. As children of Korean immigrants groomed in quiet American towns, we all conformed to a tacit way of living. After all, our parents had abandoned their previous lives so that their children could flourish but that wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t follow the prescriptive rules they had set for us. He’s charismatic and talkative, with a bright laugh trailing his sentences. I enjoy listening to him. It feels good meeting someone from so close by who also had to navigate both a Korean heritage and queerness, unraveling the ways these two things ostensibly spat and hissed at each other.

We drive to a nearby mall outlet to continue talking. The sun begins to set but I don’t mind the darkness dampening the summer heat. Texas can be hot.

Johnathan seems to have noticed, too. He nudges me, “so what should we do?”

“You mean, like, right now?” 

“Well yeah, I want to spend more time with you.”

I smile and nudge him back, excited to let our evening together unexpectedly spill into the night. We stop by a noraebang -- a Korean karaoke bar -- and get a small private room. He orders a bottle of soju and once our heads feel fuzzy we kiss. Johnathan tells me he’s having a good time and I tell him the same.

Three hours after we had first met, I’m holding his hand with my right and the microphone in my left. Johnathan catches me by surprise and asks if I want to rent a hotel room for the night. No way we would dare bring each other over to our parents’ houses but neither of us want to go home. He jokes that we’d be like closeted men who escape their wives on the weekends to sleep together in hotels. I laugh at the ridiculousness of the idea – which part of my parents’ imagined life for me did this fit into?

We end the night snuggled in each other’s arms, buzzed and tired.

Two days later, Johnathan kisses me goodbye and promises to skype. I’m flying back to school in Boston for a summer job and he will be moving to New York for work. Neither of us would be back home until the holidays.  In the weeks following, we text each other intermittently but I notice he takes longer to respond each time. I’m not sure if he’s lost interest, but our first date together felt so genuine I could convince myself otherwise. I catch myself already imagining the next time I can be with him again.

It hasn’t even been a month since we first met when my phone lights up with a long message. It’s the usual stuff: he is emotionally unavailable but loved hanging out with me (I actually mean it! in parenthesis). Plus, the distance wasn’t feasible. I tell him I understand and thank you for the clarity. And like that, we stop talking as quickly as we had started.

I’m disappointed and slightly irritated. Maybe I should ask him to reconsider. Boston and New York are only three and a half hours apart. Why did he show so much interest in the first place? Besides, it’s not fair for you to look me right in the eyes to whisper, “I feel vulnerable around you” and ghost me two weeks later. Regardless, I let it go. The risk of a second rejection doesn’t seem worth losing the possibility, no matter how small, of seeing him again.

Eight months pass by and Johnathan still manages to linger on my mind more often than I’d like to admit. It wasn’t love, sure, but my connection with him felt more than just romantic: there was an implicit understanding of the struggles we endured growing up gay and Korean in Texas. To be honest, I wish I could tell Johnathan this.

I wish we could’ve talked more about growing up queer under a suburban house decorated with rice-cookers and a kimchi fridge. How we hated going to SAT tutoring on Saturdays and church on Sundays and listening to ajummas asking us about girlfriends. What it was like coming out to his parents, and the stilted Korean words I could wring out of my tongue when I come out to mine.

My English high school teacher used to complain to me that college students try too hard to be different from each other.

“What’s the point?” She would ask. “It’s lonely being different.”

In high school I was so textbook Asian you could overlook me in a crowd of one. I practiced violin on the weekends, skipped lunch to study biology and never spoke up in class. When thrown into college, I tried to re-package myself into anything more interesting than a bland high school stereotype. It wasn’t until this process of trying to rebrand a new identity for myself I realized how lonely I felt trying to fit in while gay and Korean in a conservative white town and an even more conservative Korean church. The ‘normal’ person I tried to internalize wasn’t enough to make me feel any less different. How do you even say “gay” in Korean?

Johnathan’s world crossed with mine for the slightest sliver of time and finally, I saw an authentic version of me in someone else. My high school self used to google “gay Koreans” before bed to make sure I wasn’t the only one. It sure felt like it as I laid there, hiding under the blanket and the dark. Little did I know that a couple of miles away was another queer Korean boy, himself tucked between the margins of a blinkered suburb.