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Gyeranbap (and orange juice)
Gaon wakes and for a brief moment doesn’t know where he is. The feel of the bed is unfamiliar, too soft and dimpled with his weight, and he could swear that something was wrong a moment ago, that Kang Yohan was in terrible danger -
He remembers, then, and exhales on a thin sigh. Kang Yohan is safe. Gaon made sure of it, at the expense of his own back and ribs. And as a reward for this selfless behavior, he has been stolen out of his own life and kept like an invalid in Kang Yohan’s house.
He gets up, even though the hour is pale and colorless and moving his body still hurts more than he expects it to.
The elevator is noisy, and although it’s early for anyone to be awake, he doesn’t want to chance getting sent back to his room for ‘exploring’, so Gaon takes the stairs, going at the glacial pace required by his injuries and his still-groggy head. He is sure the Kangs’ servant auntie is drugging him. Even when you’ve been a little exploded, it’s not normal to be this out of it.
The tile of the kitchen is cold under his feet. The whole house is cold, noticeably moreso down here on the lower level. Opening the refrigerator makes him wince. Then he winces again when he realizes how little there is to eat in here - a jar of store-brand kimchi, a half-empty bag of rice cakes, and what looks like a bunch of flavor packets from instant ramyun are all that grace the shelves in front of him. The door has a gochujang container, one bottle each of soy sauce and sesame oil, a bunch of little Yakult drinks, and, at least, he identifies with relief, a bottle of orange juice. He grabs the orange juice, and when a little hunting through the drawers reveals a half-carton of eggs, a plan begins to coalesce.
Is it rude to be going through Kang Yohan’s fridge? It can’t be ruder than Kang Yohan refusing to let Gaon leave the mansion or use his own phone, he thinks darkly. If Kang Yohan wanted privacy he should have taken Gaon to the hospital instead of his own house. If Gaon’s going to be trapped here, he might as well eat.
He finds a pan and heats up a little sesame oil, then goes through the cabinets with increasing disbelief at their bleak contents until he finally discovers instant rice containers, and, as a bonus, a pack of gim.
It’s only when the egg is in the pan and the rice is in the microwave and the whole kitchen has begun to smell like food that something in Gaon relaxes. It’s not that the juk he is currently brought three times a day is bad, it’s just that Gaon didn’t make it. It has nothing to do with him.
As he digs a spoon into his bowl, the egg steaming on his mediocre rice and dotted with jewel-like clusters of gim, he feels for the first time like a tiny part of him might belong in this gigantic, cold house. It’s just this bowl, this glass of juice, but it begins to dissipate the unsettled wrongness that he’s been feeling ever since he first woke up here, bruised and dizzy and wearing Kang Yohan’s clothes in an ocean of a bed.
How scary could the Kang mansion be? At least they drink orange juice here.
French toast
Gaon stops taking his pills. His oppressively grand prison begins to come into focus around him: the black wood and the wrought iron, the queasy autumnal golds and greens and silvers, everything smelling of polish and wax and cold. The sumptuous furnishings, half of them just silhouettes under their dusty canvas and plastic. The only rooms he’s seen with nothing covered up are the kitchen, the Kangs’ bedrooms, and what in another house might be called the living room but here is dominated by Yohan’s throne-like desk.
There is more than one story in this house. One of them might give him some insight into the politics of the man who also sits like a king at the head of Korea’s judiciary, with his camera-ready smile and his vicious, uncompromising temper. One of them might tell Gaon the information he’s meant to bring back to Min Jung Ho - proof of misdeeds, a basic disdain for the law, or maybe worse. But from his very first morning in that canvas-covered ghost of a room, the house has been trying to tell him another story.
When Gaon finds Kang Yohan sitting alone at the kitchen table in his shirtsleeves, slurping a bowl of microwave beef like it will be taken away from him, that story comes into focus for Gaon the same way the aggressive wallpaper did when he started hiding his medication. Elijah’s tearful scream of rage earlier that day is still fresh in his mind, her pure frustrated grief at finding him in her father’s shrouded room and being unable to send him out.
Gaon can tell at a glance when plants are being cared for correctly. He catches them out of the corner of his eye, now, if he’s walking down the street. They look different than the healthy plants in the windows of shops or kept in sill boxes, if you know what you’re looking for. If you’re watchful, and if plants matter to you, then you know the difference between good health and neglect.
When Kang Yohan says around a mouthful, “Do you have something you want to say?”, Gaon tells him, “No.” But what he thinks, with a cold anger that surprises him, is, This won’t do.
The next morning, he whips the last couple of eggs from the carton with some cinnamon and vanilla and a little water. With a clear head, it’s finally occurred to him to enlist the help of the AI butler, which knows where the servant auntie - Nanny, Kang Yohan called her - keeps the spices.
“Should I order another carton of eggs, juinnim?” The metal cone asks him while he’s pressing egg-soaked milk bread into the pan.
“Oh - I’m just a guest,” Gaon says, feeling immediately silly for talking to the robot and then actually registering what it said. “Uh, yes? And milk,” he remembers, having just had to substitute water for the egg mixture. “Is it okay for me to be ordering groceries?” he asks, half joking - surely it’s way too specific a question to be addressed to an AI.
“Anyone in this house may request grocery delivery, as per Kang-juinnim’s instructions,” the AI says implacably.
Gaon is startled, and then speculative. “In that case, add orange juice, too, please,” he says. “And real rice, not instant.”
“Yes, juinnim.”
“Don’t let Kang-juinnim hear you calling me that,” Gaon says under his breath as he slides Elijah’s French toast into a casserole dish and covers it.
He leaves it on the kitchen table, but he can’t help hanging around the second level to see if she will eat it. It’s apology food, the same thing he makes for Suhyeon whenever he passes a certain threshold of ‘oblivious asshole’ and can’t fix it with words. Elijah doesn’t know that context, of course, but Gaon is confident that it’s hard for anyone to stay mad when they have delicious French toast to eat.
Elijah eats the toast. And she isn’t exactly happy to learn that it was Gaon who made it for her, but she does, visibly, look less mad.
It’s progress.
Doenjang jjigae and bulgogi with banchan
Gaon wakes by degrees to a strange sound. At first, it’s in his dream, unsettling but far away, not urgent. Like a foreign birdcall. Then he becomes aware that it’s a sound from the waking world, and his shallowly sleeping mind says, Not a good one, and then he is fully awake and moving, because what he’s hearing are the sounds of human distress, and they are coming from Yohan’s room.
The Yohan he finds beyond the bedroom door is like an animal, stripped to the waist and shining with sweat, trembling all over with an agony that must have found him in sleep. He barely sees Gaon at all.
“Did you have a nightmare?” Gaon asks, moving toward him quickly. “I don’t think you’re feeling well.” He’s just talking, filling the air with something besides Kang Yohan’s terrible whimpers and gasps. “Are you feeling okay?” He reaches out to feel his forehead, but it’s a mistake. Yohan bats him away, quick as a cat, and Gaon’s lucky that’s all he does.
Gaon wants to press him, wants to force him to explain what’s going on so that Gaon can understand, so that Gaon can fix it, but then Elijah is in the doorway, because Yohan was loud enough to wake her too.
“Did I cluelessly interrupt you?” she asks innocently, and Gaon goes hot and prickly all over with shame, helplessly caught in the image that Elijah is seeing: himself, standing over Yohan’s bed; Yohan on hands and knees, undressed and agitated. It’s a million miles from what’s actually happening, and yet the instant Elijah says it, it feels heavy and present, in the room with them. Real.
When Yohan bites out, not quite looking at him, “What are you doing here?”, it’s like he can hear Gaon’s own thoughts. Gaon shouldn’t be here. What on earth made him come running to Yohan’s room like Yohan’s nightmares are any of his business? And now, with what he’s thinking - he needs to go.
Gaon makes some kind of excuse and slides past Elijah, relieved to see her wheeling further into the room out of the corner of his eye. It should always have been Elijah who went to comfort Yohan, of course. Not Gaon.
He keeps going, following a blind urge to be very far away from Yohan’s bedroom, until he realizes that his feet have taken him all the way to the kitchen. In the tiled silence he can hear his own breathing coming fast. He, too, is trembling.
He closes his eyes. Yohan crawling on the bed, nearly senseless with pain, flashes vividly in his mind. Yohan’s hand around his throat, his eyes flat with rage after Gaon accused him of killing his brother. Yohan laughing in the shark-infested waters of the SRF gala, lifting a glass of champagne he claims he cannot taste.
Gaon is angry again. It closes around his heart like a stone fist. He doesn’t know exactly where it’s coming from, but he knows this kind of anger, its dangerous directionlessness. If he doesn’t give it somewhere to go, it will turn on the people near him. Even if those people are who he’s angry for.
So what are you going to do about it, Kim Gaon?
“Butler,” he says.
“Yes, Gaon-juinnim?”
“Start a grocery list. Squash, potatoes, red chilis, tofu. Doenjang. Anchovy-kelp broth. Thin-cut ribeye. Carrots.” He breathes in and out, slow. Forces himself to think. “Pears. Peeled garlic, onions.”
“Pre-cut or whole onions, juinnim?”
“Whole,” he says. The fist around his heart begins to ease. “Green plum syrup. Mung bean sprouts. Flank steak. Spinach. Radish.” He thinks fleetingly of the homemade kimchi in his own fridge. He doesn’t know the next time he will be home, so for now, the store brand will have to do. “Do we still have sesame seeds?”
“The bottle is half-full, juinnim.”
“That’s fine, then,” Gaon says. “Oh, chicken powder, too.”
By the time Gaon has given the butler his full list and located and prepped all the cookware he will need, he feels somewhere close to normal. The plan is coming together in his mind. He has ordered enough food for about a week; if he goes home to get a few things, even longer. He’s already thinking about how he’ll extend the doenjang jjigae into gang doenjang when the Kangs have had enough of stew, something his father used to do at the restaurant.
He wonders what his parents would think of this beautiful, pristine kitchen, well-stocked in appliances and gold-rimmed tableware and totally devoid of actual food.
Well. He knows what they would think. But it won’t be that way anymore, not now that Gaon is here.
--
“But how will he know he’s supposed to eat this?” Gaon wonders aloud, looking down at the covered place setting, underneath which lies a traditional Korean meal worthy of any hansikjib. “Will he just eat it because it’s food and it’s there, like Elijah?” Like with Elijah, Gaon’s not planning on presenting this meal to Kang Yohan in person. The longer he stays with the Kangs, the clearer it becomes that they are exactly the same. Gaon’s just going to leave it in the kitchen like it happened to appear at Yohan’s dinnertime and let Yohan eat in lonely silence like he’s used to.
Butler lights up helpfully from the end of the dining room table. “Did you know? I can record, store, and play messages back at a predetermined time.”
Gaon blinks at the AI.
Butler glows again, like it might say something else, but then it dies down, like it’s waiting for Gaon’s message.
“Butler,” Gaon says, shaking an appreciative finger, “I don’t think they’re paying you enough.”
Perilla and spam kimbap (and orange juice)
Suggesting that he and Elijah go outside for Kkomi’s sake - “She’s a street cat, she must be wondering where the sky went” - is a transparent ploy, but Gaon is not above obvious deception, especially not in this house, where they are playing on a level that Gaon is just barely starting to comprehend.
Elijah doesn’t so much fall for it as she appears to welcome the plausible deniability. “I suppose cats need to exercise,” she agrees with blank innocence, her go-to move when what she’s thinking is completely different from what she’s saying. It doesn’t work as well as Yohan’s flawless poker face, but that’s clearly the model she’s working from.
They go outside to play.
Gaon has had a soft spot for Elijah ever since she told him that she didn’t like his face. He was a desperately unhappy teenager once, and he recognizes on a bone-deep level the ambivalence with which Elijah wields hurt. She doesn’t really want to fight with everyone around her the same way that Gaon didn’t really want to ride motorcycles too fast. He just wanted to be somewhere else, be feeling something else, as fast as he could make it happen. And Elijah just wants to be safe.
Gaon is a lot of things that he wishes he weren’t. Prolonged exposure to Suhyeon and Min Jung Ho has not stamped them out of him, despite his friend’s and teacher’s best efforts over the years. They would say they had succeeded, which is because Gaon has gotten better at lying.
But if Gaon is anything at all that he is actually proud of, it is safe. He has worked hard and long to become someone who cares for others instead of hurting them. He knows, as Elijah doesn’t yet, that he is safe for her to be around. To laugh with. He doesn’t mind that she is still so deeply suspicious of him - Gaon would be, too, in her place. He will just stay calmly by her side. The way you do with a street cat.
They troop inside, a little sweaty (both) and grass-stained (Gaon).
“I need a snack after all that exertion,” he says, playing it up by holding his chest and bending a little at the waist.
“You were just lying in the grass,” Elijah says, but she glances longingly at the kitchen doorway.
“Hard work,” he says solemnly, already imagining the contents of the fridge in his mind and forming a plan. “There’s a news special I want to watch, Elijah - can you turn it on?”
She wrinkles her nose. “No thanks. All you old men ever do is watch the news.”
“Yah!” he says on a laugh. “I’m in the flower of my youth, actually, unlike your wrinkled uncle. Fine, you pick the program.”
Saying “flower of my youth” is worth it for her extremely expressive eyeroll. She wheels away to put on the TV, and Gaon goes to the kitchen and gets out yesterday’s rice, sheets of gim, a pack of perilla leaves, and some spam.
With the spam and a little maple syrup sizzling away in a pan, his mind drifts to that moment, when they were outside - when he looked up and saw Kang Yohan watching them through a sliver of opened curtains. The way Yohan yanked the curtains closed so fast that it couldn’t have been on purpose. He had been - what? Embarrassed?
The beautiful watch on Gaon’s wrist feels strangely heavy as he tosses the rice with sesame oil. He’s worn it every day since Yohan gave it to him, partly out of a wild fear that he might ever lose something so insanely expensive. But partly for another reason.
If Elijah is a street cat, Yohan is a tiger in captivity. Gaon isn’t sure all the same tricks apply. He’s not even sure he wants to apply them; what do you gain by befriending a tiger? Gaon’s already gotten clawed several times.
But as he rolls the kimbap, rhythms so familiar his hands can do it by themselves, Gaon knows the answer. He knows them by now, these two. Elijah wants to be safe; Yohan doesn’t think safe is possible. And with an obstinate glow kindling in the center of his chest, Gaon thinks, I can show him that it is.
Elijah doesn’t look over when he sits down, which is probably for the best as he’s balancing a plate precariously against his chest and two glasses of orange juice pinched together in the other hand. He gets everything down without losing a single piece of kimbap and feels unreasonably accomplished.
“Elijah,” he calls, snapping his fingers to break the spell of the television. She looks over and he hands her a glass of orange juice.
She regards the glass, holding it between two fingers and thumb, like it might be dirty. “Why orange juice?” she asks, brows furrowed skeptically.
He shrugs and pops a piece of kimbap into his mouth. Salty and a little sweet, cut by the astringency of the perilla leaves. Perfect. “I like orange juice,” he says around his mouthful.
She shakes her head. “You’re weird, ajeossi.”
Gaon nods agreeably and then there is a silent stretch in which Elijah looks at the plate of kimbap approximately five times. “Go on, Elijah,” he finally says, just managing not to laugh out loud at her longing expression. “Did you think I would make food for myself and not for you?” He pushes the plate more obviously to the middle of the coffee table. “Eat, eat.”
Her expression is a mixture of relief, bashfulness, and annoyance, all of which melts away into pure pleasure as she eats her first piece. “It’s okay,” she tells him with attempted indifference.
Gaon once again manages not to laugh at her, but he does grin like a loon.
Sujebi
The case with the predatory actor, a knot that had seemed untangleable right up until the last minute, is spectacularly resolved, and it turns out the star of the show was Elijah.
“Who do you think went through all the prisons in the United States to find the right place and was talking to the State Department of Justice with a doctored voice?” Yohan asks him, and his face is playful and proud and easier than Gaon’s maybe ever seen it. It’s astonishing, and in another way, it’s completely unsurprising. Sixteen-year-old Stanford scholarship student and hacker Kang Elijah is well on her way to being as powerfully impressive as her uncle, and Gaon should have known that, just like Yohan, she has hidden depths.
“She’ll be hungry when she wakes up,” Gaon says, still smiling with the revelation of Elijah’s accomplishment, and he excuses himself from Yohan’s office to make her a well-earned meal. Even genius multilingual hackers need to eat.
Recently he had Butler get him some baking supplies, thinking about mandu and donkkaseu and other recipes he’d previously thought weren’t worth the extra time and supplies, seeing as how he would probably be leaving soon. Lately he’s had the urge to make it all anyway, and he’s even had the fleeting thought that perilla is an incredibly easy plant to grow, and how if he started the seeds now, they would flourish like crazy in the summer…
The anchovy-kelp broth is bubbling away and Gaon is halfway through kneading a large ball of dough when there is a shivery tingling sensation down his back. He felt this when he took his shirt off in Yohan’s walk-in closet, after Yohan said he’d give him his privacy and, for a long, slow few moments, didn’t. It’s also what made Gaon look up to the window when he and Elijah were playing outside. He takes in a shallow breath. “Do you need something in here, bujangnim?”
It takes Yohan a few moments to appear at the other end of the kitchen counter. Gaon thought he might be ashamed of lurking in the doorway and staring, but Yohan’s face is still suffused with the good humor he’s had since winning the court case.
“Coffee,” Yohan says, reaching for some instant packets and waggling them for emphasis.
“I don’t know how you drink those,” Gaon mutters.
“No, Chef Gaon would probably grow the beans himself first,” Yohan says amiably enough. “What are you making her? Sujebi?”
“Yes,” Gaon says, a little surprised that Yohan recognized it from its component parts. “My parents used to make it when I was sick or tired. It’s comfort food.”
The look Yohan gives him is so unexpectedly intense that Gaon momentarily loses the rhythm of kneading and has to reset: pull and fold over, press down and away.
“It was our rainy day food, too,” Gaon continues, looking down at the dough instead of at Yohan. “Not pajeon. My mom didn’t like the oil.” There is no reply, so Gaon keeps talking. “I would ask what you ate on rainy days as a child, but I guess I wouldn’t like the answers.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Yohan says, and his voice is so mild that Gaon looks up after all. Yohan is doing a little half-smile that Gaon has no idea how to interpret.
“All done,” Gaon says inanely, although it’s true; the dough has reached the springy glutinous consistency he’s looking for. He doesn’t know why he’s talking about his parents to Kang Yohan. Better to talk about the food he’s making now. “But I shouldn’t make the flakes until she’s awake,” he remembers. “Do you know if she’s still sleeping?”
Without taking his eyes from Gaon’s face, Yohan says, “Butler, is Elijah awake?”
“She woke up three minutes ago, juinnim. She is preparing to come downstairs.”
Even in this thick atmosphere between them, Gaon feels a spark of resigned outrage. “Do you check up on my sleeping patterns, too, bujangnim?”
“I don’t check up on you,” Yohan says with that little half-smile. His tone says, I definitely check up on you. “But what about you? Someone is certainly making sure that Elijah and I eat a square meal at least once a day.” He looks pointedly at the bubbling pot of soup. “And it’s not Nanny.”
Gaon swallows, knows that it’s obvious, and fumbles with the ball of dough before his fingers can correctly tear off a small piece and begin forming the dough flakes for the soup. He doesn’t know what to say. It feels too early to announce his plans to force-feed the Kangs into good health.
The coffee maker dings. Yohan takes his cup and lets the smell of his coffee and the afterimage of that smug little smile trail him out of the kitchen.
Family Meal
Whether it’s the right time or not, in the end, it’s Elijah who breaks him. When she glides into the kitchen and demands that Gaon make her instant ramyun at ten in the morning, Gaon has suddenly and comprehensively had enough.
These terrible Kangs and their terrible habits. He was going to dole out the bounty of Butler’s last grocery delivery slowly, over a few days, and he was going to do it in semi-unspoken half-secrecy, the way he has so far. But ramyun? At ten in the morning?
That’s it.
Gaon gets it all out. The salmon filets, the asparagus, the container of pork sloshing around in its spicy marinade, every single banchan that he’s made in the last two weeks. He mashes potatoes. He chops fresh chilies. He even whips up radish soup, sacrificing the radish he was going to use for quick kimchi tomorrow. The fact that Elijah doesn’t check on him while he’s “making her ramyun” makes him think she’s given up, until he emerges from his cooking whirlwind, sleeves rolled up and alive with pride at how the meal has turned out, to find her still lingering in the living room waiting for him. Poor Elijah, who thinks it could take an hour and a half to make ramyun. Well, no more of that, not while Gaon is here.
He calls in to Yohan, and he lays down the new law for Elijah: “I’m tired of this family. Let’s eat rice like normal human beings.” Gaon can’t remember the last time he felt this energized. It feels good to throw the canvas off his stealth campaign and let it breathe in the open air. Gaon is staying here, and people who stay with Gaon eat well. That’s how it’s going to be, whether these heathens like it or not.
The Kangs watch as he puts dish after dish in front of them with identically crossed arms and sour expressions. Gaon isn’t worried; he is the son of two restaurant owners and he is the rescuer of countless plants that looked all but dead when he found them and took them home. He knows how to cook and he knows how to nourish prickly things.
Plus, they were both happy enough to eat his meals when they didn’t have each other to bluff in front of.
They do put up a token resistance, which Gaon feels he has to grant them, but after that, the speed at which they fall on their dishes is gratifying. Gaon watches them, eating his own meal at the more normal pace of someone who has not been denying themselves Korean food for a decade. Elijah has five different things in her rice bowl, and Yohan is eating so fast he’s coughing.
A burst of fondness overtakes Gaon. He doesn’t know what will happen in court, or with the political tightrope that Yohan is walking and that he himself is edging farther out onto every day. He doesn’t know if the world will ever stop presenting him with reasons to be angry, or if he will ever manage to be the kind of person who can stop being angry on his own. Everything might be terrible, but this one thing is good, and special, and, he decides as he watches them eat, his.
This one thing is his.
“I’m surprised there’s no orange juice,” Elijah says, as withering as she can make it with a mouthful of eggs, and Gaon throws back his head and laughs.