For some reason, I was a target in church camp, where the Korean girls my age ostracized me out of their room, claiming all the beds, saying they were taken even if they were not, so I was forced to bunk with the younger girls in the next room. One early morning, I was betrayed by my beloved stationery. I opened up my Hello Kitty diary, which I’d left unlocked, and saw that someone had inscribed, on the first page, in neat cursive that must have been written with a mechanical pencil: Ketty, go home.

* * *

—

The Korean girls I knew were so moody they made Sylvia Plath seem as dull as C-SPAN. Some were from L.A.’s Koreatown, wore fake Juicy Couture, applied makeup like Cholas, and spoke in the regional creole accent of FOB, Gangsta, and Valley. “Bitch, what are you looking at? Are you a lesbo?” asked one girl named Grace when she caught me gawking at her white ghost lips outlined in black lip pencil. Later, I tried to look up lesbo in the dictionary and was relieved that I couldn’t find it.

Because I grew up around bad English, I was bad at English. I was born in L.A. but wasn’t fluent until the embarrassingly delayed age of six, maybe even seven. Matriculating at school was like moving to another country. Up until then, I was surrounded by Korean. The English heard in church, among friends and family in K-town, was short, barbed, and broken: subject and object nouns conjoined in odd marriages, verbs forever disagreeing, definite articles nowhere to be found. Teenagers vented by interjecting Korean with the ever-present fuck: “Fuck him! Opa’s an asshole.”

    The immigrant’s first real introduction to surviving in English is profanity. When my cousins came over to the United States, I immediately passed on a cache of curses to them to prepare for school. My uncle said he used to start and end all his sentences with “motherfucker” because he learned his English from his black customers when he was a clothing wholesaler in New York. My uncle, a profane and boisterous man, has since returned to Seoul and keeps up his English with me.

Uncle: What is the word? The word when you have lice down there.

Niece: Crabs?

Uncle: Yes! Crabs. I have learned a new English word—crabs! It is what I had once.

Niece: …

Uncle: It is not what you are thinking. I did not get it from a whore.

Niece: How’d you get it?

Uncle: Military service. It was so easy to get the crab. There were no bathrooms, only hole in the ground. We had to shave so we had no hair down there. A terrible time. Once we tied a man to a tree and left him there.

* * *

—

English was always borrowed, from hip-hop to Spanglish to The Simpsons. Early on, my father learned that in America, one must be emotionally demonstrative to succeed, so he has a habit of saying “I love you” indiscriminately, to his daughters, to his employees, to his customers, and to airline personnel. He must have observed a salesman affectionately slap another salesman on the back while saying, “Love ya, man, good to see you!” But because there is no fraternizing man or slap on the back, his usage has an indelicate intimacy, especially since he quietly unloads the endearment as a burning confession: “Thanks for getting those orders in,” he’ll say before hanging up the phone. “Oh, and Kirby, I love you.”

* * *

—

    I did not actually use my mechanical pencils so much as line them up to admire them. My mechanical pencils, in pistachio, plum, and cotton candy pink, were wands of sublime femininity that had to be saved for later. The longer I saved them, the more unbearable became my need to use them. But still I denied myself, because the exquisite pleasure was the mounting longing for them rather than the gratification of that longing. One has an overwhelming desire to eat what is cute, writes Sianne Ngai, and therefore cuteness is ideal for mass commodification because of its consumability. Cute objects are feminine, defenseless, and diminutive things, provoking our maternal desires to hold and nuzzle them as I had with my mouthless Sanrio erasers. But they can also unlock our sadistic desires to master and violate them, which is why I probably held off using my stationery in order to ward off my darker instincts.

Eventually, I gave in. I clicked the tip of my mechanical pencil, which snipped out a nib of lead. Because I had no interest in writing when I was young, I drew. I drew girls that looked nothing like me. I was at first a poor draftsman, outlining the U for the face, then filling in eyes that were lopsided dewdrops, then roofing the face with hair curls as coarse as bedsprings. But over the years, my technique became refined, and I could decently draw the anime girls I adored.

    I took pleasure in drawing the eyes because I, like everyone else, fetishized anime eyes, those bewitching orbs engorged with irises of snow-flecked sapphire and thatched over with the inkiest lashes. How huge and innocent those anime eyes, how meager my own slits. But the nose eluded me. I could not get that snubbed peck of a nose right, no matter how much I practiced drawing it. I had the misfortune of inheriting my father’s pronounced nose that in profile looked like a 6. When I complained about it, my mother protested it was a royal nose, but the kids in church called out the truth in their basic English.

“Why do you have such a big nose?”

“Big nose.”

I drew peck after peck on sheets of paper, wasting reams so I could pin down that perfect nose. Once I dreamed of anime girls soaring up and down on pogo sticks, their pigtails a nimbus of curls, their tartan skirts aswirl, their enormous eyes cracked with light. I looked up in time to see a girl arc up in the air and then rocket straight down for me—to pogo my nose down to a button.