Permanent Record

by Mary H.K. Choi

Shit. She knows I’m staring at her. Shit. She can see me. Shit.

Been there, my dude

Mom would have sent me to Korea if I’d done something like that. That was her favorite threat when I was growing up. As if sending me to a boarding school in a country with triple-fried honey chicken, where the Wi-Fi’s forty times faster, would be punishment. Never mind that me and Rain have been begging to go our entire lives. If anything, the fact that we’ve never visited Korea or Pakistan feels like a parental failing you could lodge with the embassy or some shit.

So here I am all through high school reading the admittance rates for good schools like, whatever, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and you can practically hear the laughter when you open the brochures.

Miggs and Dara usually go to bars with other comedians who you’d think were funny in a pack but they came over once and they’re boring depressives like normal people.

I hate this shit. As if I’m holding a pass that grants him permission with Team Brown People to play a racist caricature on TV. Besides, I don’t even know what hill I’m dying on. I’m not altogether comfortable caping for the totality of the Islamic diaspora and every Arab country because who the fuck knows what kind of basket case Ziad al-Abbasi is. But I can’t believe this is a conversation I have to have with my friends. My good friends.

“Word. Cultural appropriation,” says Wyn, as if he’s playing a lightning round of wokeness bingo.

You can tell it’s an entire building of immigrants because the hallways always smell of food. Polish food and Middle Eastern food and Chinese food and Korean food and Indian food battling for dominance. If it were only rich white residents it would smell of Tide PODS and vanilla.

Quora, unsurprisingly, is unhelpful. That’s always an accurate gauge for desperation. If I’m on the Quora part of the Internet, it’s a cry for help.

“What’ve you been up to?” “I have stood right here since you left. Contemplating mortality and the human condition. I power down when my shift’s over.”

“Don’t you wish you could throw a 404 error message up for the other person to look at while that shit happens?”

Okay. This is the moment I’d start screaming at the dumbass in the film to get the hell out because there’s a sunken place in his future or some Saw-type torture about to go down.

“People aren’t ever in the moment,” I chime in, imagining the hordes who travel trillions of miles only to lodge a screen between their eyes and the very thing they’ve crossed oceans to experience. “We have to plan and scheme and shop the best deal, and when we arrive, the first order of business is to collapse the experience and stuff it into our phones. Instant gratification isn’t good enough. We have to save it for later since we’re sooo busy.”

I can’t adult. Most days I can barely human.

While I ring up the customers one by one, I think about how much money each of them owes—schools, the IRS, the government in general, medical bills, credit cards, the whole thing. Even in this rich-ass neighborhood, I suspect we’re all pretty much fucked.

The rest of the afternoon passes in a crawl. It’s hard to sit inside of myself. I have secondhand embarrassment for me.