A Model Romance

As his grandson would do on an Asiana Airlines 777 sixty years later, Kai Lafferty’s grandfather landed at Incheon in 1950. He did so as an infantryman, and he returned to California from his tour of duty in Korea with a prosthetic hand and a young wife. Kai had inherited many more physical traits from his grandmother than had his father or either of his aunties, but like them, he had been raised in an atmosphere completely devoid of any reference to Korean culture. Otherwise Kai’s ancestry, back as far as these things could be traced, was hearty European peasant stock, and he came from a longer line of white farmers than had Old McDonald. As for his grandmother, she insisted on plowing through her life as if she couldn’t even point to Asia on a map, never exposing any of her children or grandchildren to so much as one word of Korean or one morsel of Korean food. Like many immigrants of her generation, she insisted on blending in at all costs. Her culinary specialties were her Tuna Surprise and spaghetti and meatballs. And even though she spoke English with a nearly indecipherable accent that never dissipated, Kai never heard her speak a word of Korean. Even after he had become fluent and tried to bait her into conversation, she acted as though she could scarcely understand the only language she had ever heard until she was nineteen.

Cast out from every other clique, group, or club in high school, the overly skinny, beauty queen-pretty, bangs-past-his-chin Kai had been warmly embraced by the drama club. He channeled his hunger to feel more comfortable in his own skin into a passionate yearning to discover and become his character; even the year he played Knikki in Grease and wore his dad’s old leather jacket to school every day for three months. The smartest kid in school by any standard of measurement, the teenaged Kai nevertheless internalized more of the teasing and queer-baiting than he knew he should, and his grades reflected it.

When many of his classmates were heading off to college, Kai, after an entire summer of mowing lawns between shouting matches with his father, packed up a duffle bag and a thousand dollars and went off to discover himself in Korea. His grandmother hadn’t relaxed her California Girl facade to the slightest degree, but his grandfather had been cajoled into revealing the name and approximate location of the small city from which she came.

Kai had been in country fewer than forty-eight hours, and was standing in line to buy his bus ticket to Masan, when he was approached and asked if he’d be interested in taking part in a photo shoot for a small, local wedding boutique. He had already noticed the peculiar penchant of Korean firms for using Western models in their print ads, so he was not surprised to see that the “bride” with whom he was to be photographed was a light-haired and somewhat big-boned Australian. A Qantas flight attendant, Jessica said she frequently had her picture taken on Seoul layovers, and confided in Kai that she supplemented her income quite nicely by doing so. She insisted that he take down her mobile phone number and when, after a couple of weeks, he got something of a kick out of seeing his face posted in the store windows and on a couple of subway trains, he called her to ask her more about how she went about arranging her shoots.

Jess was thrilled that he called, and insisted that he tag along with her on her next several jobs. Sometimes he sat on the sidelines, just glad to have an excuse to be out of the hostel, but more often he was invited to participate; sometimes gazing serenely off into the distance in the background, other times the center of attention in the latest tuxedo or modeling the latest eyeglass frames

Even as a milk-fed baby, Kai had been lean. And after a summer of mowing acre upon acre of Colma cemetery lawn, his muscles, while by no means bulging, were supple and defined. He became very popular in the Western modeling community in very short order. Before long, Jessica introduced him to some of her gay Australian mates in Seoul, and they dragged him out of the hostel and into their apartment. Mildly shy without being reclusive, soft-spoken without being timid, his cheeks and jaw chiseled to an extent that strained credulity, he was highly sought-after as an after-dinner companion. While deep in his heart he lusted for the burly jocks and overfed ball players from home—and for one especially overfed meat-head he’d gone to high school with in particular—he was happy to be making friends and rarely slept alone. He stayed in the apartment, where he lived in a frat-house atmosphere with over-shouldered male models, well after his career far outstripped even the most successful of the others.

It was never about the money for Kai. He never chased success for its own sake. Rather, he viewed his popularity as a way to extend his time in Korea; to let him get closer to a part of his soul that he felt his family had neglected to nourish. While he was always up for a hot-model-studded party with his Aussie housemates, he also took every opportunity to socialize with the Korean crews he met. The photographers, the make-up artists—he never passed up an opportunity to go out for drinks or for be bim bop. He delighted in being invited to Korean friends’ houses to learn Korean cooking. He took a calligraphy class and learned to write, and even took a series of classes on throwing celadon pottery, which was not his artistic strong point, it turned out. But he was admired for trying, and before long he was able to joke around and eventually hold forth in Korean, which is when his career really took off.