By William Shaw
Sitting on my desk is a paperback book. Its cover is dark blue, its pages a light, careworn yellow. The spine is cracked; there are white spots of wear on the front cover; the laminate is peeling away from the corners. This is my copy of I’m Waiting For You by Kim Bo-Young, translated from the Korean by Sophie Bowman and Sung Ryu. This is the book I purchased from the Forbidden Planet London Megastore in summer 2021, shortly after its publication. And this is the book I read, in the airport, on the plane, and in the dreary depths of an Upstate New York winter, as I migrated to the United States of America in January 2022.
I came to this country on a K-1, or ‘fiancé’ visa. I had met my now wife, Lubabah, in 2015 while we were both studying in the UK. We decided to get married in 2019, after three years of a long-distance relationship. We applied for my visa in April 2020, and were told to expect a wait. I ultimately spent a further two years living and working in London while Lubabah finished her PhD in Providence, waiting for Uncle Sam’s permission to continue our lives together.
I’m Waiting For You is a collection of four stories, but this essay is really about only two of them: the title story, “I’m Waiting For You,” and its companion, “On My Way To You,” both translated by Sophie Bowman. The first story takes the form of fifteen letters by a man from a future Korea who is waiting for his fiancée to return to Earth from Alpha Centauri. He buys a ticket for the so-called “Orbit of Waiting.” Thanks to relativistic time, a spaceship journey of four months for him will take four years of Earth time, so he can meet up with his partner in time for their wedding. As he says in his first letter, “Everyone on the ship is emigrating to a different time, not a different place.”
Unfortunately, things go wrong. Delays in both partners’ space flights, societal breakdown on Earth, and sheer dumb luck conspire to keep the couple apart. By the end of the story, a separation of a few months has grown into one of over a decade for the narrator and centuries for the Earth. Reading this story in a cramped seat in Heathrow Terminal 3 in 2022, I felt its sense of frustrated separation palpably. Rereading it in 2026, as I work through the process of applying for US citizenship, I am filled with the same melancholy once again. “I’m Waiting For You” is a story about doing your best in a situation beyond your control. As such, it speaks to my memories of trying to reach the US amidst the global polycrisis, and to my present context as an outsider in a country openly hostile to people like me.
In his review for Locus magazine, Gary K. Wolfe called these two stories “a haunting if sentimental portrait of star-crossed love.” While there is a certain backhandedness to Wolfe’s compliment, I can’t say I mind the book’s tone. These are unabashedly sentimental stories. Early in “I’m Waiting For You,” the narrator tells us that he and several “other grooms-to-be” have decided to share a cabin:
You won’t believe how cheesy these guys are... They hung ribbons and paper flowers around the cabin, and the ship attendants had to chase them around attaching everything to the walls with Velcro. One of the attendants explained that if the acceleration stops, we’ll lose gravity, and the room would be chaos.
It’s a poignant moment; one which foreshadows later developments. The narrator’s dream of crossing the stars for love turns into a yearslong waking nightmare, and any sense of camaraderie is worn down as he migrates to smaller and smaller space vessels. The attendants’ Velcro feels like an early sign of vulnerability for the narrator and his relationship.
And yet, despite the decorations’ foreshadowing, I find myself loving them anyway. Because there is something sentimental, not to say foolhardy, about migrating to be with the person you love. Certainly there were moments, as I sat alone in London waiting for an approval to materialise, when Lubabah and I were kept together by a wilful, childish romanticism. I remember a lot of remote watch parties in 2020 and 2021; the two of us would get on a VoIP call, too exhausted for in-depth conversation, and watch children’s cartoons. At a rate of about one episode a day, we got through all of Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Legend of Korra, and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power in the year before my interview at the US Embassy. There were a lot of jokes on Twitter back then about users regressing into teenage versions of themselves, and I was definitely not immune. A certain adolescent obstinacy crept into my thinking, manifesting in a sunshine-and-rainbows kind of romance. I wanted those paper flowers, even knowing the chaos that came along with them.
Of course, there was a larger incentive to tell a cheesy romantic story about ourselves. As part of the K-1 visa process, couples are required to submit ‘bona fides’ — documents which testify to the closeness of their relationship — to US Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS). These documents range from the dull (utility bills in both partners’ names), to the inconvenient (photos of the couple with other people present as witnesses), to the downright invasive (Lubabah and I had to turn over every email and text from the first five years of our relationship). Couples must also provide written testimony of their history together. When we discussed this aspect of the application with our lawyer, we were told to write ‘the 1950s romance version’ of our relationship. When I tell US citizens about this process, they are usually shocked at the amount of information we were expected to hand over. K-1 visa applicants and their partners are required to enact a sanitised, photogenic version of their love, a love which is then subject to government approval.
Sitting on my own in a London flat, with every screen pouring out images of mass death, I found my mind rebelling. I wanted out of this mediated, incomplete version of my relationship. I wanted to be with Lubabah, in body as well as spirit. I wanted, in fact, to emigrate to a different time. But every conversation, every document signed, every desultory email to our lawyer asking for updates, returned the same answer: Not Yet.
By the halfway point of “I’m Waiting For You,” the narrator is not a well man. Having repeatedly arrived back on Earth to find his fiancée further delayed, he is travelling alone in a spaceship “the size of a small room,” making repeated trips away from and back to Earth in hopes of catching up to her. In his ninth letter he describes a kind of dirty protest:
One day I pissed onto the walls of the ship. I left the drops of urine in the air, floating around, as they went into my nose and mouth and seeped into all the gaps in the machinery. I was completely powerless, like a cancer patient in their final days.
It’s one hell of a science fiction image, literalising the all-pervading wrongness of the protagonist’s wait with disgusting efficiency. While I never quite descended to this level, I can sympathise with the narrator here. There were days in 2021 when I wanted to throw my phone against a wall, to rip my supporting documents to shreds, to sit in the wreckage of my life and cry. I remember late December that year, mere days before I was set to leave for the US, standing in the freezing cold for several hours waiting for a booster shot and thinking, surely this is as bad as it gets.
In his famed text The Collective Memory, compiled in 1950 and translated into English in 1980, renowned French psychologist and philosopher Maurice Halbwachs argues that “every collective memory unfolds within a spatial framework.” He states that “It is difficult to know just what space would be like for a genuinely isolated man who had never belonged to any society.” Place and space, in Halbwachs’ framework, do not exist outside of social relations. In “I’m Waiting For You,” we have something like the scenario Halbwachs describes, as the narrator’s confinement drives him into psychosis. At one point he contemplates smashing the window of his spaceship to let air in, and when he eventually “[comes] to [his] senses”, he describes an auditory hallucination: “I heard you say, ‘I’m here. I’m waiting for you.’” Again, I sympathise; there were times when it felt like the sound of Lubabah’s voice was the only thing keeping me going. But the analogy with Halbwachs’ speculations is an imperfect one. However isolated I or the narrator became, we always existed in a wider social context.
It is February 2026, and I am sitting in a café with a friend from my graduate programme. Like me, she is an international student. While she studies here in the US, her partner is living and working in the United Arab Emirates. Like me, she has sustained a loving relationship over multiple years and thousands of miles. Last year, I lent her I’m Waiting For You; she returned it a few months later, and told me she loved it.
We are talking about the people murdered in Minneapolis. Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two private citizens we likely never would have heard of otherwise, are household names. Before meeting my friend for coffee, I watched a video where Nick Shirley — the YouTuber whose racist pseudo-documentary is credited with helping direct the federal government’s attention to Minnesota — defends the man who shot an innocent woman before calling her a bitch. “She shouldn’t have put herself in that position,” Shirley mumbles. “She knew what she was doing. She was impeding a federal law enforcement investigation.” A little after, I read an Associated Press report about Alex Pretti’s altercation with federal immigration agents days before his murder. The report quotes a sarcastic tweet from Donald Trump Jr.: “Just a peaceful legal observer [thinking emoji].” In both cases, the implication is clear: because they obstructed the Trump administration in its attempts at ethnic cleansing, these people deserved to die.
I look up at my friend from my empty coffee cup.
‘I hope they don’t come here next,’ she says.
‘Me too,’ I reply.
I am partway through the process of applying for US citizenship. I have been told it will be at least three months before my civics test.
The companion story to “I’m Waiting For You” is “On My Way To You.” It takes the form of fifteen letters by the previous narrator’s bride-to-be, essentially forming the second half of their correspondence. In her Author’s Notes, Kim describes an early decision regarding the story: “while the man’s hardship was a lack of other people, the woman’s hardship would be because of other people.” Where the previous narrator descends into delusional isolation, the narrator of “On My Way To You” is persistently at the mercy of social forces.
About halfway through “On My Way To You,” the narrator is rescued from a devastated Earth by an overcrowded passenger ship. The ship’s captain is a man who “constantly needs some kind of show: some new evidence of the fact that he’s become superhuman, the savior of humanity.” As the ship grows more crowded and resources are stretched thinner, the captain starts giving speeches “for three hours or more, [saying] something different each time.” The narrator finds herself an object of suspicion, as the passengers who have been there longer begin to say that “all the refugees should be made to disembark,” and that “they can only protect the rights and interests of the proper passengers by taking away the rights of free riders like us.”
I will not insult your intelligence by dwelling on why I found these passages so chilling as I reread them in 2026. I will say, however, that they reminded me of something that happened to me the previous year. In early 2025, with the news full of stories of international travellers denied entry to the US, my university held a Zoom briefing for international graduate students. The university officials made very concerned faces. They promised to find summer work for those unable to leave the country. They warned us not to participate in political protests. And they told us that, if any of us did leave the country, and ended up trapped, unable to return, the university could not (or would not) do anything to help us.
And so the Zoom call ended, and all of us free riders got back to our seven-day work weeks teaching undergraduate classes for the proper passengers.
In October 2025, USCIS instituted a new civics test for US citizenship. Previously, prospective citizens were asked ten questions from a pool of one hundred, and had to answer six correctly. Now, they are asked twenty questions from a pool of one hundred and twenty-eight, and must answer twelve correctly. The questions have been made longer and more complicated, and thus harder for non-native English speakers to answer. This is the civics test I am waiting to take.
Question seventy-three on the new civics test reads: “The colonists came to America for many reasons. Name one.” The list of acceptable answers reads:
• Freedom
• Political liberty
• Religious freedom
• Economic opportunity
• Escape persecution
I am conscious, as I write this, that I am extremely lucky. I will be taking this test as a white British man who has spoken English all his life. I am a middle-class white-collar worker, far less likely to be arrested at my immigration appointment or detained without trial than a working-class Latina woman or a Somali American daycare worker. For all the precarity I feel, I know I feel a lot less than many, many others. It is an expression of privilege even to write this essay. All the same:
I look at this list of answers, and all I can do is laugh.
In her book In The Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), Christina Sharpe discusses the ways black Americans live ‘in the wake’ of chattel slavery. For Sharpe, ‘wake’ is a purposefully polysemous term, referring (among other things) to the aftermath of a disaster, the ceremony following a death, and the trail of a ship through the ocean. Again, I do not wish to draw a direct equivalence between my own experiences and those of other minoritised people in the USA. But reading In The Wake around the same time I reread I’m Waiting For You, one passage struck me in particular. Sharpe describes the work her mother did to raise her, to create “livable moments, spaces, and places in the midst of all that was unlivable.” Sharpe states that “even as we experienced, recognized, and lived subjection, we did not simply or only live in subjection and as the subjected.”
The phrase ‘life goes on’ can mask a thousand cruelties; nonetheless, it does go on. I have been living in the USA for over four years now. There’s been a lot of good. Lubabah and I have been very happy together; I got into a competitive graduate programme; I have written a lot more. The wait — for a visa, for citizenship, for an end to the senseless violence of the state — has been devastating. But that is not all it has been.
“I’m Waiting For You” and “On My Way To You” both end with the central couple still separated. In the first story, the man finds his way to the church where he and his fiancée were to marry, which is still, improbably, standing. As he walks in, he spots several “faded bits of paper stuck up on the wall behind the altar.” The reader turns the page, and sees an illustration of dozens of sticky notes saying:
“I’m waiting”; “I’m still here”; “I’m waiting for you.”
The man despairs, until he realises that one of the notes is still yellow.
The fact that the color remained meant it hadn’t been bleached out by the sunlight coming in through the windows. […]
Could it have been stuck there last year? A month ago? Yesterday?
Just now?
His fiancée is still out there. The final words of the story read: “I’m right here / I’m waiting.”
In “On My Way To You,” the woman is stranded on the coast of what was once Korea. She swims out to the remnants of a spaceship being reclaimed by the sea, and finds a black box recording:
There was no video, but a man’s voice played out.
I knew that voice straightaway.
It was you.
Swept back to shore, the woman sees a set of human footprints:
As though a little while ago, someone had escaped that smashed-up spaceship and managed to swim ashore. […]
They looked like the footprints of an exhausted walk, the walk of someone pounded by all the knocks of life, but there was still life, vitality in the gait. Whipping up white foam, the tide surged in, washing away the footprints on the beach.
I got up. […]
I sprinted, kicking up sand behind me.
I’M RIGHT HERE.
Wait for me.
I’m on my way.
What strikes me about both these passages, besides the fact they reliably move me to tears, is the ephemerality of the communication. The woman’s paper notes are already crumbling; the man’s footprints are washing away. Their star-crossing love is not eternal or invincible. It is vulnerable, limited, and contingent.
Migration will always be a painful memory for me. The mere fact of when and how I chose to do it guarantees that. But it was a choice which emerged from, and is sustained by, a profound love: for my wife, for my community, for everyone and everything that was there for me all these years.
I’m still here. I’m waiting.
I’m on my way.
William Shaw is a writer from Sheffield, currently living in the USA. His writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and The Georgia Review. You can find his website at https://williamshawwriter.wordpress.com and his Bluesky at @williamshaw.bsky.social.