The traffic began getting bad at Hannam-dong. I hopped out in front of the CJ Building and ran the rest of the way to G--.

I screamed when I first read those two sentences, in pure delight of recognition. What club-going gay in Seoul hasn't done this: ridden a taxi into Itaewon, abandoned the taxi at this exact bottleneck in Hannam-dong, and ran the rest of the way to G--? As a Korean gay man in Seoul just a little bit older than Sang Young himself, I can even tell you the letters obscured by the em-dash in G--. The club has a different name now; in fact, I think G-- was several names ago.

Of all the sentences in this book, some were relatively easy to translate, while many presented a plethora of conundrums and points of discussion that could easily fill the limit I've been given for this note. But the sentences I most wanted to discuss were these two. They took hardly any time to translate, but I spent a few minutes fretting that no one would know how thrilling it was to see them in a novel, this wink to All the Gays of Seoul.

Because until I read these sentences--nay, until I read Sang Young Park--I had no idea how much I'd subconsciously craved for someone to put my experience of my world in my time into print, to give my brief life here and now the sacred consecration of literature.