Chapter Text
Halabeogi and Ilya sat on the beach in their respective cabanas. It was the last day of their Hawaii stay; tomorrow, Shane and Ilya had to fly back to Ottawa for the camps. Yuna and David were going to leave a couple of days later; they wanted to spend as much time as they possibly could with Halmoni and Halabeogi.
On the bright, hot beach, Halabeogi had a huge sun hat, as well as some wrap around sunglasses. Yuna put him in an SPF long sleeved shirt, and Shane had set a cooler next to him in the sand, filled with bottles of water and cans of sodas amidst cold, cold ice. Ilya had his own cabana shade down, enjoying the sun and letting the rays dry him off from an earlier dip in the sea, while Halabeogi perched on the edge of his chair. Halmoni went with Yuna to do some shopping, and everyone else was snorkeling in the ocean nearby.
“Ah! Ilya-yah!” Halabeogi smiled broadly. Ilya grinned back. “Halabeogi!” he responded back, leaning towards him.
I really like hanging out with him. He’s fun to listen to, and he’s been giving a lot of interesting stories about his past. He also answers my questions without any hesitation. He’s truly an open book, or at least he is to me. Actually, there is something I wanted to ask.
“I have a question for you,” Ilya started. After Halabeogi’s nod, he continued. “I am happy that you and your family support Shane and me being together. I am surprised though. My own family are homophobic, and would have me be arrested. And Russia has anti gay laws. I thought Korea is not good for the queer movement. What makes you different?”
Halabeogi stared at the ocean for a moment before he replied. “It is a good question. In Korea, there is still a lot of homophobia. Laws also do not fully protect; it is legal to be gay, but gay marriages are illegal.” He sighed before he continued.
“When we lived in Montreal, I worked at the hospital when AIDS cases showed up. This was in the 1980s. Before then, I did not think of the gay movement. I was too busy working and taking care of Yuna and Yuna-umma. But we, both Yuna-umma and me, remember protests in Montreal for gay rights in late eighties? I think. So it is something we saw in news. But I didn’t think much other than ‘Let people live the way they live, life is hard enough as it is’.”
“In the hospital though, when AIDS patients came, that was when I directly interacted with other gays. It wasn’t much, because I was in the Emergency Department. Still, occasionally we would get an AIDS case and admit them and then I would not think of them again.”
He sighed again. “But there was one patient. I will make up a name, so let’s call him… Joe. He was so nice. He made lots of jokes. He didn’t mind me being his doctor.” He grimaced. “Many other patients asked for other doctors because they could not understand me, or they wanted a white doctor. There was nothing I could do and it was common. So when Joe was fine with me being his doctor and he did not make fun of my accent, I liked him more.”
“So I sent Joe up to in-patient. But I could not stop thinking of him. He was so kind and so funny.” Halabeogi continued, “Normally, I do not think of patients after I treat them. I can’t. If I get too involved with all my patients, I cannot do my job well. But I could not stop thinking of him.”
“After my shift, I visited him. This is after Montreal stopped using PPEs so I just visit him with gloves and a mask. Joe was surprised to see me. When I ask if his family or his friends visited, he said no.”
Halabeogi looked sad. “Joe said his family kicked him out and they did not want to see him anymore because he is gay. He said he did not have many friends. His partner died a year ago. So he was alone.”
“He was so lonely. I was sad for him. He was good guy, funny and kind. Who cares that he’s gay? I don’t care. He was a good person. So I visited him after shifts. We became friends. Even though he was so, so sick and dying and it became harder for him, he was still funny and kind to me.”
Halabeogi quietly murmured, “I was not there when he died. It was during my work shift so I could not be there anyway. But. I do not have many regrets in my life, but I wish I were there. I do not believe anyone should die alone.”
He sat up straighter as he said, “And then when we moved back to Korea, I treated many patients who are gay. During the 1990s, it was still illegal to be gay so they usually did not have good medical treatment. Usually if someone was gay in public, they were kicked out of family and they had nobody. Because my clinic focused on the poor and disenfranchised, I treated many gay patients.”
He looked at Ilya. “I am angry at those families that banish their gay children. Why? Why do that? That is stupid. Why do they let their children suffer?” He huffed out. “Maybe this is the Canadian side of me, but I do not understand why it must matter so much. As you hockey players would say, ‘It’s no fucking big deal’.”
Ilya inadvertently shouted out a surprised laugh. Holy shit, I don’t think I’ve ever heard him swear!
Halabeogi grinned at his reaction as he shrugged. “So when Shane married you, I did not care. Who cares that you both are both men! You treat him well, right? And he treats you well. That is most important. And if you want biological children, there is IVF and surrogate mothers. So it does not matter.” He shook his head.
Halabeogi added quietly, “Even though I live in Korea now, I am more Canadian than I think sometimes. It is funny because in Canada, I was too Korean. Now I am jumble of the two. Still, I am glad I moved back to Korea. I was so tired of being treated so badly in Canada. Yuna-umma was very, very tired of being treated like a stupid person. She is very smart, smarter than me. She graduated top of her class. She just could not speak English, even though she studied so hard for years. She understands English, but can’t speak it. And she was so tired of being treated like a fool.”
He nodded. “So even though we do not fit right in Korea, it is still better for us there than it is in Canada.”
Ilya looked blindly at the ocean. He saw so much in his life. Christ. The AIDS crisis, his work with the poor in Korea. That’s not including what he experienced as a child. He’s a living history book. No wonder he has so many stories to tell.
And Christ. We forget about the AIDS crisis now, but he saw how bad it was when it was a death sentence. He treated the early gay patients. He saw how bad it got. How lonely it was for the queers who had it and died alone. I can’t imagine. I really can’t imagine how difficult it was back then.
A couple of minutes went by as they sat watching people play in the waves. Halabeogi cleared his voice, interrupting Ilya’s introspection and curiously asked, “Would you ever move back to Russia? If Shane can go back with you, if there are no anti-gay laws, if you did not have to see bad relatives? Would you go back?”
Ilya leaned back and thought about the question. Would he move back? Go back to a place where he didn’t have to constantly translate, or be judged for a heavy accent and dropped articles, or be labeled as a cold, icy, harsh brute of a commie?
He thought of the place where he used to get piroshki near the rink he practiced. He remembered walking on streets, half listening to the Russian babblings and conversations drifting around. He relived the times he sat in a cafe, reading books in Cyrillic as he absorbed the concepts, memorized passages that moved him, without needing the interruption of a Russian-English dictionary to refer to words he couldn’t understand.
And then he thought of Shane. Shane, with his gentle and deliberate care on days when it was too difficult to get out of bed. Shane, as he nervously and gamely answered in heavily accented Russian during conversations with Sveta and the Russian crew, all of whom were determined to make Shane fluent. Shane, his warm heart. Shane, Shane, Shane.
“I would visit Russia for a couple of weeks, maybe a month, once a year? Not move back though.”
He thought some more. “I have a home in Canada. I play good hockey. I have the Irina Foundation. I have Russian friends, and go to local Russian grocery store where the owner and I talk to each other in Russian and he gives me too many free treats. Yuna and David will even cook Russian food sometimes for us, and David likes reading Russian books and we talk about them. Shane and I can mostly talk in Russian with each other. And mostly, I have Shane. Because I have Shane, I do not need Russia.”
He added quickly, “Yes, I miss Russia. Russia is… well, Russia. It is the Motherland. It was home for so long. It is all of my past. It is a large part of me. But I changed, too. I am not all Russian anymore. I love poutine. I say ‘eh’ too much. I spend more days speaking English than Russian. My dreams are in mostly English. I am a jumble of Russia and Canada now, too. And I have a Shane shape in my soul that fills up some of the empty Russian place in me.”
Shane’s grandfather peered at him. Then he nodded. “Ah,” he smiled sagely. “You love Shane. Shane loves you. So he is your home. You are his home. And that is enough for you.”
Yes, that is enough for me.