Assistant Editor Emily Rose Cole: Kat Lewis’s “외계인 | Waygyein” is a heartbreaking meditation on the otherness inherent in being a Black American abroad. But at its heart, Lewis’s reflection on “the difference between an alien and a foreigner” extends beyond travelogue, since it’s not just the speaker’s foreignness that makes her strange but her Blackness in particular. How does an already othered body grow accustomed to the texture of a loneliness that “lives inside you lower than a snake belly in a wagon rut”? What does it mean, Lewis’s piece asks us, to be visibly strange—visibly alien—in a country you don’t call home?
To hear Kat read the story, click below:
외계인 | Waygyein
In the park near Daeheung Station, Oppa kept his face hidden in the half moon of a mise meonji mask. It was a face that everyone in Seoul would know, a face that you would know had you not been a waygyein, an alien. That’s what they call you in university hallways while they whisper a susurrus of your second language, while they stare at your Black skin as if it were loud like fireworks. Or, at least, that’s what you thought they said. There in the park, amid the snow of fallen beotkkot petals, he explained to you that it is not waygyein—alien—but waygookin: foreigner.
What is the difference between an alien and a foreigner? To be waygookin is to sit in that apartment in Gongdeok and hear no overhead footsteps, no voices through the walls, nothing but the quiet persistence of your own breathing. To be waygookin is to stay within those white speckled walls, lest you become a spectacle; to teach yourself to cook, to teach yourself to prefer bear-shaped grease burns over the zoo stares of ahjussis in restaurants, of children in strollers that point like a demand and say, Bwa! Heuk-in-iya. (Look! A Black person.) To be waygookin is to choke on the words you don’t know, the words you half remember, the words cheoncheonhi juseyo, the words you say to ask for one more chance before they give up on you in English. Yes, to be waygookin is to choke on your tongue and swallow it down into the lonely pit that lives inside you, lower than a snake belly in a wagon rut.
But when a famous oppa stops you in the park to treat you like a person, offer your voice to him like a flower, like the cherry blossoms fluttering around you.
Kat Lewis graduated from Johns Hopkins University, where she held the Saul Zaentz Fellowship. In 2018 she received a Fulbright Creative Arts grant in South Korea. Her work has appeared in PANK magazine, Maudlin House, and The Rumpus. She is currently an MFA student at the University of South Florida.
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