Will Han

 

It’s a bright, warm Saturday morning in July—an unusual occurrence for San Francisco—and my friend Will is patiently waiting for me in his white Honda while I scramble to get ready for my day with him. We’re going to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in Embarcadero to grab a bite and to do what Will does best, which is to simply go somewhere without any plans and take it from there. A Bay Area native, Will likes to come to the farmer market on the weekends because, in a way, it has morphed into a family heirloom for him. His uncle and cousin used to come here a lot when he was a kid.

“I haven’t been around a lot of people lately,” he tells me as we drive up on Market Street. It’s his self-imposed pause from the unspoken social expectations that creep up in late twenties: going to weddings, going to bachelor parties, visiting friends in other cities for reunions, traveling for work, and not having enough time to be alone. “I’m trying to love the city again,” he adds. “I get stuck in my default mode of working, staying at home, going out, going on dates. I want to re-experience the city. I really do love San Francisco.”

The first time Will and I officially met was early 2019. I was only three months into my new job, San Francisco at the time seemed like the place where everybody wanted to be and where there were too many events happening to keep track of, which really meant I had found myself at a crowded coworker’s house party on a rainy Saturday night, trying to find a quiet corner so that I could take a break from everyone.

It was then that I recognized another coworker, whom I kept seeing around the office but never talked to. Tall, muscular guy wearing a simple black tee and light-blue jeans, leaning against the doorframe of one of the bedrooms, drinking from a red solo cup, and silently observing the party crowd with a smirk. This image of Will to this day still remains the best encapsulation of his vibe: the enigmatic jock who’s too thoughtful to be the resident frat bro and yet somehow too cool to be the weird outcast. The following week at work, he sat next to me at the company’s all-hands and waved to another coworker, “Come meet Denis. I met him at the party this weekend.”

This duality, as it turns out, has been a result of Will’s own unmet desire to belong. “Growing up, a lot of my friends were fair-weather friends,” he tells me as we sip our coffees on the Embarcadero docks. “I liked the community aspect of growing up in Alameda, but I never felt super close to anyone.”

There were several reasons why he felt this way, but a big one was his mixed-race background. Will is half-Asian, half-White. In the Bay Area, unlike in other parts of the country, the Asian community has been a huge piece of the social fabric for a very long time. “As I’ve met people from different parts of the country, I realized how uncommon being Asian is in the rest of the country,” he says. “I mean, I remember school as a kid in the Bay Area, and we had Black kids, Hispanic kids, Asian kids, White kids. I always felt like I belonged in that sense.”

The nuance though is that he has always been too Korean for his White half-identity, and too White for his Korean half-identity. Speaking of this fluidity, he mentions that, in college, he actually identified more as a White person. “The college scene was more segmented, I was surrounded by more White people, so I guess that’s how it happened,” he adds. “Later on, after college, I think I started to identify more as Asian again.”

In the post-college dating scene, the mixed identity turned out to be a double-edge sword. “You’d meet girls and they’d go ‘Wow, you’re so cute, are you mixed?’,” he says and then pauses before bursting into laughter, “but, then we start talking about Asian or Korean culture, and all of a sudden, they’re like ‘Yeah, but, you’re not really Asian.’”

While this was occasionally frustrating for him, it taught him how to be a chameleon and how to effortlessly switch between different identities, which he admits has been a highly useful skill. I realize that it’s exactly the camouflaging that inherently comes with being a chameleon that makes Will so paradoxical, and therefore unpredictable and therefore exciting. One moment, he’s making fun of my life choices as we peruse the farmer’s market, and then the next, he’s splitting a fresh plain baguette with me that he just bought at one of the stands.

We’re in the car again, and this time, we’re driving to Palm City in the Sunset. Will has always wanted to try out this wine bar and the Sunset has a special place in his heart—it’s where he first lived after moving to San Francisco. I am trying to get him to eat the absurdly tasty chocolate muffins that I bought just before we got into the car, but Will is uninterested. He instead wants to talk about his closest friend, David.

“I guess,” he notes pensively, “if there is someone I’ve felt close to my whole life, it would be David. We’ve been friends since we were three. We have such a deep-rooted history. We went to church together as kids, we smoked weed for the first time together, we did the Inca trail in Peru together, we lay in aching pain from food poisoning together in El Salvador. He’s really like my brother. We’re intertwined.”

One of the main reasons Will thinks the two of them established their tight bond early on is David’s race: he’s half-Indian, half-White. He adds, “I joke with him about being a weirdo, and he calls me a boring techie.” Case in point, David comes from a family of academics, Will’s parents work in real estate and retail. David works in art, Will works in tech sales. I write “something about this” in bold letters next to Will’s quotes about David in my notepad, and I feel triumphant because I realize that his friendship with David is yet another evidence of Will’s disposition for the paradoxical, for traits that seemingly don’t work together but, in his life, they somehow do. I wonder whether he realizes that but I don’t say anything.

At Palm City, it’s a mix of couples on dates and small groups boozing on afternoon wine. Will and I are eating spectacularly massive sandwiches, and I feel it’s only natural to talk about his physique because I don’t understand how someone who loves food so much (he’s a self-proclaimed meat master) can look so good.

I mean it—Will is fit and he is strong. If anything, he looks like one of those guys in high school who would have protected me from getting bullied. It’s not just a result of his physique, there is also something about the fright that his confidence gives off.

Will Han walking and putting on his jacket in San Francisco, CA.

Two months before our interview, I asked Will if he wanted to see Fever Ray perform at the Fox Theater in Oakland with me. Most friends would have said no after seeing snippets of the live show, but Will of course had no issues coming along.

About six to seven songs in, a guy who was clearly on either molly or coke appeared in front of us, cheering and shouting and falling over other people. My usual approach in these situations is to find a new spot and forget about these types of idiots, but I would lie if I said I didn’t light up with glee that night knowing that Will was with me. Will remained in place, unbothered, staring intently at the guy as he performed his antics, until the guy picked up on Will’s energy and slowly moved away from us.

But things weren’t always like this for Will.

“My grandma practically raised me and my brother,” he says of his childhood, “and, like all Asian grandparents, grandma just… fed us.” What that meant was that Will grew up chubby, which got him bullied in middle school, and which led to a sustained interest in the body and in learning how the body works.

He started playing football in high school (“I always wanted to be a big guy,” he says) and doing weight training, which continued into college, where he studied physiology and neurology. During the pandemic, when the world shut down, Will doubled down on fitness and got his personal trainer certification. One day, he entered SF Fitness and asked whether he could work part time as a trainer at the gym, to which one of the employees said unenthusiastically, “Sure, you have veiny arms.”

As he talks about his evolution of love for training, I start wondering whether his childhood chubbiness was one of the reasons he never became the asshole jock. He knew how it felt to be rejected, how it felt to feel othered.

“I met a lot of cool people during that time,” he then says about his experience working as a personal trainer, “and, I would say the through-line with all of my clients was that we became very close. One client knew pretty much everything about me. One client even had me come to his place to just hang out. Training is really like a combo of physical exercise and therapy.”

I say that’s a fair observation, but that I wonder how much of that is a result of Will’s unabashed openness. In the few years that I’ve known him, Will has always been an open book. I ask him how this trait has served him at his full-time job, in the corporate setting.

“I guess I am disappointed,” he answers, “I don’t know how to do the corporate personality. There is no guesswork as to how I am outside of work. Maybe things could have gone better in my career if I had always done the corporate thing: getting work done and minding my own business. So, I maybe need to lean into that more. I don’t think you can ever be fully successful in a corporate setting if you are fully yourself.”

When I ask him what it’s like to work in sales as an introvert, he shrugs off the question as worn out. “It’s a misconception that introverts are not good at socializing. As an introvert, I have been uniquely equipped to listen. That approach with prospects and clients lets me be curious, which comes through at work.” Once again, I excitedly highlight this quote in my notepad and smile at the apparent paradox, but I don’t get to ask more questions because it’s time to go.

We’re driving up north toward Lands End, overseeing the Ocean Beach to our left, and all I keep thinking about is how I feel like we’re characters in a California-based TV show. It’s time to ask Will about stuff that he and I usually talk about when we hang out, but that we didn’t yet get to talk about—relationships. Will ended a 13-month relationship last year, which was the most serious one he’s had so far. It took some time for him to grieve the breakup, and these days he feels that he has a more objective understanding of himself as a partner.

The view of the Pacific Ocean from Lands End in San Francisco, CA.

“She made me feel like I could achieve things no one else thought I could,” he says about his ex-girlfriend. “She treated me with genuine care, was selfless, and knew how to communicate what she wanted. That relationship was a great introduction to what partnership looks like.” At the same time, he has also learned that he hasn’t been truly himself in the last few years, and that he still has to learn how to be Will and how to do the things he actually enjoys, as opposed to being on autopilot: dating, going out, and partying.

I ask him why he thinks the autopilot is not good. “No, I do enjoy it,” he says. “There is a ceremonial act about getting drinks with someone and getting to know them, which I really like. But, what does that look like in practice? It looks like a lot of fucking dates. But the dates are just a symptom of, I guess, the root values that I crave. Trust and intimacy.”

We find ourselves by the Steep Coastal Trail Stars in Lands End. We hear some voices coming from the Coastal Trail Overlook below, but for the most part, it’s a tranquil harmony of the Pacific Ocean waves and the San Francisco winds. Will is telling me about Daoism and the effortless way of being, a philosophy that he is becoming increasingly interested in. “For me, it’s spending more time outside. More time being alone. Having weekends of no plans and just going with the flow,” he adds, “doing what we’re doing today.”

I ask him what his ideal life would look like. He pauses for a moment, and I start worrying that I am forcing the end of our conversation to be unnecessarily deep, but he then replies with remarked assurance. “Building community through food. The same way my parents have found their tribe by getting involved with church, I want to build mine with cooking. Not sure yet how though.”

“I think that’s very doable, and a great idea,” I add. “Maybe you can start organizing cookouts with people, something like BBQ competitions. Like a guys thing, maybe.”

Will nods but doesn’t say much, and I know it’s because it’s usually other people organizing things and reaching out to him, not the other way around.

“You just have to be more proactive about it. You know, start slow, by initiating things and not worrying whether it will be a failure or not.”

He agrees that what I said is a true statement, and this I know is his way of processing something that he thinks is valuable but maybe unfamiliar. I let him be, and about a month after our interview, I get a text from him asking if we can hang out, saying that the text is “him proactively reaching out, as we discussed.”

We will meet up a few weeks after this text, on a Friday to be precise, and when we do meet, he will bring me a can of Diet Coke as a little gift. I will learn that he had been more proactive in reaching out to people. He will have met Leanne by then, a girl that he had gone out on a few dates with but mutually decided that a friendship would be a more suitable option instead. And, in a typical Will fashion, he will want to keep hanging out with Leanne because she will have challenged his way of thinking already.

But, the day of the text, I mess with him because he can only do lunch—he’s already made dinner plans that far out.

“Mr. ‘I am so lonely’,” I say in my text.

“Lmao,” he replies. “Shut up.”

 
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Neha Patki