It’s a cold, Saturday evening in October, and I’m passing time alone at a local burger joint, listening to the soulful music of Ricky Fanté to help uncover buried memories. Out here in this sleepy military town just outside of Fort Knox, I’m an hour’s drive south from Louisville, the nearest and only metropolitan city in Kentucky. If you’ve never been through these parts, and I’m guessing you haven’t, it’s not that bad. There are worse places for a Korean American to call home. Idaho. Mississippi. Prison. How I ended up here is a long story.

I read that director Cameron Crowe (“Jerry Maguire”) is making a movie about a guy from Los Angeles (played by Orlando Bloom) who gets dumped by his girlfriend and then moves back home to a small town in Kentucky called Elizabethtown (actual name of the town where I work) to deal with a family crisis. He eventually meets and falls in love with Kirsten Dunst. That, in a nutshell, is my life, except for the meeting and falling in love part. Not yet, at least.
I was in love once, in the most romantic city in the world … San Francisco, not Paris. Life was good then. Every so often, I’m sadly reminded of what I had and lost. She was beyond nice, which made letting go so much harder. I even flew over a thousand miles from Kentucky for one last-ditch effort to salvage the relationship. Things sort of went haywire when I saw her, as waves of tears and my sloppy, runny nose gushed out of control. I was so pathetic. I don’t remember much beyond that except for her last words, something about healing quickly so we could be friends again. I haven’t talked to her since.

Fanté is softly crooning in my ear that a man needs a woman’s touch (this song is killing me softly) as I dust off those memories. That was over two winters ago. Winter in Kentucky is a bad time to harbor a mangled heart. The hardest part was trying to convince myself that I was better off without her. There were many sleepless nights when I turned to red, red wine (yeah, just like the song). It was a long, dreadful winter. But somehow I survived. When spring finally arrived, the warm weather thawed my senses and brought me out of hibernation. I had been given a new lease on life.

With over 2 billion women on this planet, the odds were good that I would not go through life, or at least another winter, alone. Then reality settled in — I was in Kentucky, gateway to the South. Out here, Asian men rank just ahead of fat white guys but still lag behind obnoxious rednecks in the male food chain. The outlook was dim. I was confident, however, that any semi-decent guy, regardless of race, could keep his sanity and social life intact with the right amount of effort and luck.
My quest to find my soul mate in rural America began in the casual world of Internet chat rooms, an efficient and safe method for meeting women. Within minutes of entering “Hot Singles in Kentucky,” I was engaged in lively chats with multiple women. I made a connection with Amanda, who said that I was different from the other guys online. It wasn’t hard to do. The trick was to not act so desperately perverted. That never works in bars, and it was no different online. To my advantage, the social misfits here had no clue. A week after our chat, Amanda and I met up for a movie and dinner. I was immediately blown away by her beauty. With dark hair and thick, dark eyelashes, she had a young girl’s face. It wasn’t until dinner when she revealed her age. She was 17. As a 34-year-old, I nearly choked on my food and tried to recall the statutory age limit in Kentucky. Not worth the risk of prison. I opted out of a second date.