Everything is so much bigger than you are, back home and right here

My brother and I are in Korea, it’s the summer after my freshman year, and we’re Americans in Seoul, soaking in the local culture, soft invisible particulates of tobacco smoke snowing lightly on us, carried by the wind. We watch a cloud of gray smoke rise into the air above the stone-paved corner of the park, both of us in awe of the casual consumption of dark tar cancerous growths sticky coughs by such a large group of random individuals. It's sickening. I feel great despite it. 

To say something, I offer a conclusion: “I guess that makes sense, a post-lunch time smoke break.” Total culture shock for the both of us, American-made puritans. Is it because of our health values? Or maybe it’s because we’re more scared of the idea of the taboo? Would it have been the same if it were just people drinking? I don’t know how to feel about the fact that it smells sweet and good, but the brain automatically links the dark tar cancer smoke gray air and I watch the smoke in the air replenish itself, getting thicker and thinner and flowing in between.

“That’s so crazy. Isn’t that crazy?” My brother shook his head.

Korea smells like cigarettes and carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide and exhaust and wet concrete. It smells like breathing in car smoke and ventilation air. When I’m little and my brother and I imagine that our home is really in Korea, even though we’ve lived in America almost our entire lives, we go and catch the smell of America behind certain apartment buildings where it’s dim and the outgasses cling to the brick walls and asphalt ground, sticking to the pores in the cool darkness. It makes me feel a little silly and wobbly. I think briefly about what the word home means. 

My dad is busy at work until 6pm, at which point he’ll probably go shut himself outside to smoke and then shut himself inside to work more. But my brother and I both count the time down anyway, silently counting the number of smoke clouds we see outside as we wander around on the large sidewalk blocks and metro stations, as lunch passes into late lunch into supper into early dinner.

I’ve never actually seen him do it, but I’ve always known that my dad smokes. His apologetic explanation always follows the smell itself, but it was always a sweet smell when he picked me up. I would cling to him like my life depended on it. I guess, in a way, my life did. 

My mom explained to me after he had gone and left that he would smoke near the dimly lit “basketball court” (asphalt with a single crooked basketball hoop) attached to the cul-de-sac we lived on by a set of large stairs made with mulch and square wooden frames, where I once felt my six-year-old feet unstoppably smush the unending flood of wooly bear caterpillars. I still see bugs and feel guilty. My six year old heart could not bear being a killer, but I'd hold my father's hand when the smell of smoke infiltrated my lungs. He coughed in pairs of two. 

I will never see him as he walks up the stairs covered in black goop. I can only imagine the image through my mom’s voice, that he would go all the way over there to smoke because he didn’t want to do it near us. Also, she said as if it was an aside, also, our next door neighbor wouldn’t let him smoke near her house. That's a good lady right there, a real good one. We thought so. 

The staircase was glowing faintly. I tiptoed down and saw my dad dimly lit by the tv through the grates of the staircase railing. I can’t smell him from over here.

“What are you doing up?” He was eating the snacks we had bought at Hmart. I didn’t know that he actually was the one eating all of those. My mom had said it and I thought of it as a mythology. I didn’t know that my dad ate snacks in general. It's a strange realization that we are both alive and human, but more so strange that he isn't some robot. Your father is your savior for as long as you both are alive. I never thought to ask if he liked chocolate. 

“I can’t sleep.” I looked at my dad through the grates of the staircase and imagined myself on the sofa. I wanted him to carry me to my bed and read me to sleep. 

“You should go back upstairs and try again.”

I went back up the stairs. The room next to mine, my brother’s, is silent.

My brother and I, most of our conversations happen passively, as if we breathed in and what came out happened to be words, since we were next to each other anyway. Never much further than that. The real version of my brother is hidden behind the perfect invisible barrier, an uncrossable ocean of privacy. Maybe he’s more comfortable that way. You keep the ones you love on a leash, a wall between the two of you. He never turns to look at me, never. 

We’re in the car in the two front seats. In the car, he’ll pull something up on the aux and ask me if I’d ever heard of it before. It’s MF DOOM. “I like his production,” I’ll say, knowing that I won’t be able to pull the criticism even though it’s what I’ve hated the most about my mom, her constant criticism about the music I’d show her, “but his lyrics aren’t great.” I wonder if that hurts him. I don’t know why I can’t just not say it. But the criticism comes out like carbon dioxide, the unstoppable consequence of pulling in breath. My chest rises and falls a few times, like all great empires. 

“I like Kendrick Lamar’s lyrics,” I say. I wonder how many of his friends know so much more about music than I know or ever will know. They're probably laughing.

“I just can’t get used to his voice,” he says.

“That makes sense,” I say, feeling stupid again. "You know the one that’s about being alright in the end? I like how his voice sounds in that one. You get used to it. He talks poetry, you know?" I wonder what my brother’s inherited inner critic is saying about me.

We drive onward, and more and more of my dad fades from my field of view. He is fading from the day that I smelled the stale cigarette smoke from his polo shirt in Korea, meeting my brother and I during my 4th grade, his 3rd grade summer visit, a surprise arrival, both my brother and I knowing that the consequences of his appearance would be a disappearance from the rest of our lives. Now all I see of him is images on Youtube and TV, images that are just surface projections of him, the PhD in economics he earned in the US that ruined him so much that he had to run from the US as a whole. 

Does he ever think of my brother when he makes these videos? Imagine the boy who asked my dad all of these questions about his job, my dad seeing this boy for the first time in four years because he refuses to visit us in the US, so this boy traveled miles and miles and spent thousands of dollars for his tickets and mine. Does he actually think about the boy who watched over me when we flew internationally for the first time, a 3rd and 4th grader trying to handle passports and tickets and baggage all by themselves, both of us maybe more scared for each other’s lives than for their own?

"Hey, dad smells bad, right? It brings back memories, doesn't it?"

He doesn't say anything at all.