I had been to Mullae once before, on the coldest night of the year, to go to the Mullae Arts Center and see what turned out to be an outstanding performance by drummer Kim So Ra. But I decided not to count that hustle through the darkened neighborhood as a full visit, and on a dusty Sunday I headed back.
Inside the subway station, there’s a spinning wheel — a mulle (물레), a cute little visual pun on the name of the neighborhood.
The most interesting section of Mullae is taken up with row upon row of grungy old machine shops, a kind of Dongdaemun Market for welders. As happens with these kinds of industrial zones, artists have begun to move in, finding cheap space where no one will mind if you’re hammering away at midnight or producing clouds of toxic fumes, because so are your neighbors, except they’re putting together storage racks while you’re making a space dinosaur. The area is still pretty run down and gritty, but punctuated now with hip little cafes and the occasional gallery, not to mention plenty of murals and street sculptures. Sunday afternoon is probably not the best time to go — a lot of places were closed — but we were still able to get sense of the area.
The Mullae Arts Village, which is still very much also the Mullae industrial zone, is actually a pretty small area, hemmed in by a school and a nice new park and a river to the south. Leaving Exit 7 and heading south along the main road, across the street from the park, you know you’re there when you see the Mullae Arts Village sign, the metal horse, and the giant welding mask.
The scale of the workshops, industrial and artistic, is also small. These are one-story DIY outfits, very different from the soaring and spacious commercial warehouses that artists took over in New York’s SoHo and DUMBO. There are places like this in New York — those strange mashed-up-car zones in Queens are probably the closest approximation — but so far artists haven’t moved into them. The result, in Mullae, is an area that lacks the visual grandeur of those New York artists’ districts, but that feels surprisingly intimate and handmade, with odd old boarded-up doorways and random openings.
Because the existing buildings are small and hinky, they’re not likely to get turned into fancy lofts. If the neighborhood goes residential, it’ll do it by tearing everything down and putting up beige apartment blocks. But I hope that doesn’t happen. Seoul should hang on to at least some of its grit and funk.
We lingered long enough for curries at Gyeongseong Curry (decent, sign only in Korean) and coffee at The Warrior Coffee Roasting Lab (tasty).
From there, we crossed the main street and wandered further south, passing one of the more interesting, and larger, buildings in the area, which is covered with murals and has the very appealing-looking Old Mullae brewpub inside.
From there, we headed back toward the station and a visit to Homeplus.
Girl with the thumbtack earring.
Home Minus
If you live in Korea, at some point you find yourself at Emart or Homeplus, much as anyone in America eventually winds up at Target or WalMart. The grocery sections of these big-box stores are still thriving, but the housewares are beginning to look a little threadbare. For small conveniences, people go to Daiso now — a branch of the Japanese chain is always nearby — while delivery websites like Coupang have cut into the business for big-ticket and bulky items.
I suppose that Emart and Homeplus have always been exhausting — my ex-wife used to get Emart headaches back in my earlier Korean life in 2001-2o02 — but they seem somehow worse than they once were. On the plus side, though, the girls who hawk candy and canned goods are no longer forced to dance in ridiculous outfits. In any case, my attempt to buy more stylish dishes than the ones Samsung gave me was thwarted by Homeplus’s near total lack of dishes. So I ordered some dishes from Coupang instead.
And thus ended Adventure #3. But for your viewing pleasure, I hereby offer you this stunning masterpiece of ajossi fashion from the subway ride home. Who says Korea’s got no style?
For my second Seoul Subway Randomizer Adventure, I stayed closer to home — so close, in fact, that I never actually rode the subway. On a holiday Wednesday, my Korean friend and I set out from Gangnam, which is home, and walked over to Brotherhood Kitchen for what they call “American Home Food” and I call soul food.
Now, I’m no expert on either soul food or Southern food, but what they cook up at Brotherhood is at least tasty. We had the fried chicken and waffles, which is salty and sweet and decadent, with a weird gooey cheese sauce on top. But I think I liked the roast chicken with chili and yellow rice better.
Chicken and waffles.Roast chicken with chili and yellow rice.
Little houses on a hill
We headed up the hill that starts behind Gangnamdae-ro, an area you’d think I’d know pretty well, but I don’t yet. It’s upscale, with stylish cafes, little shops, and here and there actual detached houses that look like they’ve been around for a while.
One of the most interesting of these houses, just past Eonju Station, is the Nonhyeon flagship store of Gentle Monster, whose sunglasses are amazing, and whose stores are more amazing than the sunglasses. The store in Nonhyeon has an actual ship attached to it, and the interior contains an astonishing array of strange art machines. And some sunglasses, including a line in partnership with Tilda Swinton and some glasses they did with Hood By Air, which is pretty impressively hip company to be keeping. I tried on many a pair, but I still haven’t found the Gentle Monster pair that calls to me. Someday, though, I will get a pair. Surprisingly, while they’re not cheap, they don’t cost any more than a pair of Ray Bans or Oakleys.
A little house.Get it? Flagship? Gentle Monster in Nonhyeon.Yes, that’s a pencil.
Saddles and chairs
Hakdong Station.
We made our way to Hakdong Station, and from there we followed Hakdong-no to Nonhyeon Station. The whole stretch is full of furniture stores on both sides — not the typical Korean places, but the sorts of places where you can get, say, hideous French-inspired kitsch for $10,000, or a coffee table by Jean-Paul Gaultier. There’s some good stuff in there too, and not all of it at insane prices, but it’s certainly high-end. Still, it’s considerably more stylish and diverse than the sort of stuff you find in the big department stores here.
If I had a lot of money to spend making a very large apartment look like a hip urban hotel, I would come here. Realistically, though, if I’m gonna spend a lot on furniture in Korea, it will probably be on very Korean furniture, like an antique chest of drawers or something. To me, that’s exciting and different. My Korean companion, though, was fascinated by a display that looked like something my Grandma Hannah or my Aunt Belle would’ve gone for, all flower prints and swoopy Victorian curlicues. She grew up in a house full of old Korean furniture, which doesn’t much interest her. What’s exotic, to her, is the sort of Western stuff she wasn’t around very much because no one under 90 decorates that way. She responds to American granny gear the way I respond to weird old statues and tombs here.
Furniture!
Maybe the oddest shop along this stretch is Balio, which is where you go if you want fancy horse-riding gear. Why is it here, in Gangnam? I have no idea, except that people must come here to buy stuff. I wonder if the Choi Soon-sil scandal’s equestrian connection has been bad for business?
Gear for the horsey set.
Fire and rain
With that, we headed back to my neighborhood. By evening, it had started to rain, so we decided to sit by some blazing coals in a neighborhood restaurant that offers unlimited beef barbecue (no more than two hours and a 5000-won charge for leftover meat). The initial course was something like six thin steaks and a big pile of chopped up rib meat, so we never even got around to asking for more. It was smoky and delicious and a fine way to end the day.
In feng shui (pungsu in Korean) the ideal location has a mountain to the north and water to the south, providing protection from Siberian winter winds and an open avenue for summer monsoon rains. That’s why both Gyeongbokgung Palace and the presidential Blue House sit at the southern foot of Inwangsan Mountain, facing Cheonggyechon Stream.
On the ass end of Inwangsan, out beyond the perimeter of the old city walls, is the opposite sort of place. Gaemi Maeul (개미마울) — The Ant Village — gets its name from the tenacity and hard work of its 400 or so residents, who’ve been crawling up and down the steep slope to their shantytown since the end of the Korean War. It’s also, perhaps, a statement about their relative importance in Seoul’s grander schemes.
The Ant Village from above.
Between a rock and a fast place
Starting out at Hongje Station.
I came to The Ant Village on my first Seoul Subway Randomizer adventure, which began at Hongje Station on Line 7. My goal was to go look around in parts of Seoul I wouldn’t otherwise be likely to see, and Hongje was an excellent place to start.
Sandwiched between Inwangsan to the south and a highway to the north, Hongje has either fended off or been overlooked by the developers who’ve converted much of the surrounding area into especially soul-crushing variants of Korea’s ubiquitous vast apartment blocks. Its narrow, winding streets are still lined with the small brick apartment houses that Koreans call villas, and it looks as if no one has updated much of anything in the past forty years. Buildings and signs have old spellings — 자전차 (jajeoncha), an old word for bicycle, or a sad old apartment building called 만숀 (manshyon) instead of the more modern 만션 (manshyeon), the Konglish term so absurd it’s almost an insult.
Faded bits of the past, with an old term for bicycle.Old apartments. The sign says Unjeon Mansion, or it used to anyway.An ancient restaurant.
My Korean friend and I made our way to Inwang Shijang, a traditional market that despite its typical array of Korean products — seafood, mystery twigs — had a torpid squalor that felt more like out-of-the-way markets in Vietnam or Myanmar than like anything I’ve seen before in Seoul. As we sat down for tteokbokki and fish cakes at one of the market stalls, my friend told me the place reminded her of her childhood in Daegu in the 1970s.
Inwang Market.Inside the market.Some tteokbokki and odeng.
Up the ant hill
As the road began to climb, we came to the first of the old houses, an uneven concrete slab with a roof of corrugated metal. It’s the sort of thing you see on the outskirts of cities in developing countries all over the world, or in their neglected pockets — down by the river in Hanoi, say — and I have a Vietnamese friend who grew up in something similar in Saigon in the 1980s. But it was jarring to find this sort of house still operating as a going concern in Seoul in 2017, especially after starting the day in the LED-lit hypermodernity of Gangnam.
An old house, still occupied.
I suppose, though, that I was just coming face-to-face with a concrete (pun intended) manifestation of the poverty I see every day and mostly ignore: the old woman who sits on the steps in Gangnam Station every day, selling gum when she’s not drifting off to sleep; the old folks limping along as they push their filthy old carts past the Porches and Rolls Royces, collecting garbage to recycle. Next to my posh Gangnam apartment complex is a dingy brick apartment house above a parking garage, junk piled up in the narrow verandas you can see from the street.
In Seoul, it’s the elderly who seem to end up destitute most often. In an economy that has modernized as quickly as South Korea’s, it’s inevitable that a good part of the older generation would be left behind. In what is now one of the best-educated and most technologically advanced countries in the world, those who grew up during the Korean War and its aftermath may not ever have gotten past sixth grade or developed the kinds of skills a modern economy demands. What’s not inevitable is South Korea’s minimal social spending, which is among the lowest of any developed country. The scandal and disarray engulfing Korea’s conservative party might be an opening for a new direction; for now, the ants are still part of Seoul society, scurrying along the margins and subsisting on scraps.
The Ant Village
The Ant Village proper is a peculiar hybrid. Built by people with nowhere else to go after the Korean War, the worst houses are old and poor and dangerous, makeshift and constructed to no code, heated with the old yeontancharcoal bricks that produce carbon monoxide and occasionally kill people in their sleep, as happened to one of my Korean friend’s high school classmates. (Draftiness could, I suppose, be a lifesaver.)
Yeontan, an old system of charcoal heating.
But the residents — some of them, anyway — haven’t wanted to leave, and they’ve kept developers at bay, all while updating some of the homes into fairly plausible structures. Around 2010, some art students from the area got the idea of painting murals on the walls, and the village is now something of a tourist attraction, though the flowers and puppies are fading. And the neighborhood has not just electricity and bus service, but solar-powered street lamps and a new pavilion and residents with smart phones, not to mention government-issued wayfaring signs for visitors. Down the hill, the newly built middle school is actually pretty grand.
Decorations on the Ant Village.Flowers on one of the sturdier houses.More flowers.Puppies!
As an outsider, it’s hard to know what to make of all this. What little information I have is gleaned from blogs. Who lives here now, and why? How poor are they? Is the ownership in dispute? What does the future hold? I have no idea, and I didn’t feel comfortable asking questions of the few residents we saw around. When you find yourself having a cheap holiday in other people’s misery, sometimes it’s better not to pry.
Tea at the temple
At its top, The Ant Village opens out onto the trails crisscrossing Inwangsan Mountain. Had we been feeling ambitious, we might have made the long hike up and over to the Jongno side of the mountain, descending into trendy Hyoja-dong. The sun and relative warmth were enticing, but it was already afternoon, and we decided instead to stick with our chosen neighborhood, walking through the woods, past an open view of Train Rock — it’s a big rectangular rock, basically — and down a long staircase to Hwanhuisa Temple.
Train Rock.A frozen stream.A temple in the mountains.
As we approached, a group of women of a certain age were gathered out front, along with a Buddhist nun, all talking and laughing. I said hello, and they all cooed at how well I spoke Korean, something that used to happen a lot when I lived in Anyang, outside Seoul, sixteen years ago, but rarely happens now until I’ve at least demonstrated something beyond annyeong haseyo. It was another throwback, and a reminder that foreigners probably don’t get out this way all that often.
My friend noted the feminine touches to the temple — Dalmatian figurines and the like — and decided it must be run by nuns. Soothing piano music played from outdoor speakers, mingling with sound of the Korean-style wind chimes. As we sat and rested on a small pavilion, a woman brought us a tray of tea and tteok with marmalade. Later, as we looked for somewhere to return the tray, we heard more women’s laughter coming from inside the main building. We set the tray down inside a doorway and continued on.
Tea at the temple.
A little further on we passed another small temple, then emerged from the mountain into one of those vast, dispiriting apartment complexes that dominate so much of the Korean landscape. Director Bong Joon-ho’s first film, Barking Dogs Never Bite, from 2000, centered on stunted lives in an apartment complex much like this one. It was, in material terms, a step up from the drafty, poorly built villas we’d seen earlier, but I could see how people might choose the human-scale lumpiness of life in The Ant Village, or down among the old brick villas, over this different sort of ant farm. Koreans seem to have recognized the grimness of life in these sorts of massive apartment blocks, and newer complexes tend to be made up of clusters of slender towers, with only a few apartments per floor and spaces in between the buildings.
One of Seoul’s soul-crushing apartment blocks.
At last we found our way back to the main street, after passing a small English school that made me feel sorry for whatever English teachers have ended up in this strange little corner of the city. We stopped in at a Paris Baguette for some coffee and a rest, watching the old woman squatting outside the window as she roasted sweet potatoes. Across the street was the district headquarters for the conservative party, emblazoned with a huge Korean flag that loomed above several fortune-telling shops marked by swastikas. A few blocks on, past more fortune tellers and glimpses of the old city wall at the top of Inwangsan, we came to Muakjae Station, where we boarded the train and headed back to Gangnam.
Think 2016 was bad? In 2004, George W. Bush was reelected on a platform of torture and war, 280,000 people died in a tsunami, and Ray Charles and Ol’ Dirty Bastard died. But you didn’t yet have Facebook to make it feel like all these things were part of your own personal social life.
So how was your actual 2016? The one you really lived?
My 2016
For me, 2016 was actually pretty amazing. It began on a wet, windy beach in Danang, and the first five months took me on adventures in Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Bali, Java, and Singapore: festivals and flings and love affairs, Phnom Penh rock and roll and Laotian chill, ancient temples and gleaming cities. Then it was back to the US for a few months to visit friends and family before returning to Asia: finally getting to visit Japan, attending a month of language school in Seoul, swinging one more time through Thailand, and finally starting a completely new phase of my life as an actual Seoul resident, with an apartment and a job.
I’ve made an extraordinary number of new friends. A lot of them I’ll probably never see again.
But more important that any of that was the safe, healthy arrival of two new people in the world: my sister had a baby, her first, and not long after my brother’s wife had her second child. I’ll be meeting my two new nieces early in the new year.
Your 2016
How’d the year go for you? I know some of my friends had it rough. Others had amazing things happen. Most of us, we had both. That’s how life is.
Our 2017
Here’s wishing you and me both a very happy New Year.
Here in Seoul, on the shortest day of the year, it’s a balmy 8 degrees (Celcius, not Farenheit), and rain is pouring down over the city, turning the uneven alleyways of Gangnam into alternating rivulets of rainwater and people.
At this time last year, I was in Georgetown, Malaysia, close to the equator and a little over a quarter of the way through my time in Southeast Asia. There was no winter there, of course. Here, winter is just arriving, though it feels like it’s already been here a while. It has its points. I like bundling up in a nice warm coat, or sitting inside sipping tea while the rain pelts the windows.
It’s been a tough couple weeks — work stress mostly, and I’ll get into that in some detail soon — but I’m starting to feel like I’m coming out the other side of it. As I have learned in another context, what feels like lifetimes and impossible distances ago, This too shall pass.
Holidays
In Korea, when a holiday falls on a weekend, you don’t get a day off. So I won’t have any time off work for Christmas or New Year’s. But other people are taking vacations, and things are slowing down a little. There’s a lot to get done, but it feels for the moment like the frantic, panicky vibe of the last few weeks is tapering off.
I’ll be having an open house on Saturday, for whoever wants to wander by. I went out to Itaewon over the weekend and visited the Chabad synagogue there, so I’ve got Chanukah candles, gelt and dreidels. I’m hoping to confuse some Korean friends with my own weird traditions for once.
And for the moment, I need to remember to go easy on myself. I have high expectations, but there’s a great deal about Korea and Korean culture — including work culture — that I still don’t understand. I’m learning. For tonight, I think the best thing I can do is not write the bigger blog post with the serious ideas. Instead, I’ll put some Stevie Wonder on the stereo, plop a Nature Republic mask on my face, fix a cup of hibiscus tea and watch the rain.
Things that matter most
Oh, I suppose this deserves a mention: my sister had a baby girl a couple weeks ago, and now my brother and his wife have had a baby girl too. (And so has my brother’s wife’s sister, while we’re at it.) And I’m going to visit Phoenix and meet my new nieces in about a month. So maybe that’s lifting my mood just a little.
And in case you’re wondering, I’m feeling all of Stevie’s classic period right now, but I’m especially feeling this.
A quiet evening, listening to soft jazz as the rain falls outside. After work, I went to the office gym. Then I took the shuttle bus to Yangje Station and walked home from there, a couple of kilometers, stopping to pick up dinner at Mos Burger on the way. It was cool but not cold, and not yet raining, and it felt good to stretch my legs.
At home, I called the dry cleaner to get some shirts picked up, and then I watched a couple of episodes of Archer on Netflix while I ate my burger. After that I had a long phone conversation with a well-known North Korean defector. We have a bunch of friends in common, but we only finally met in person last night, and tonight I was helping her to clarify her thoughts on the work she wants to do — reassuring her that she doesn’t have to do everything herself, suggesting that she focus intently on one or two things she wants to achieve while leaving some of the other tasks to others, and also reminding her that the point of freedom, for her and for all of us, is that it gives us the opportunity to pursue happiness. North Korean defectors often feel a heavy burden of obligation to do something for their compatriots, and they are certainly not raised in a culture that prioritizes personal fulfilment or happiness. I’ve wondered what contribution I might make to North Koreans now that I’m in Seoul, and maybe one thing I can do is just give people permission to feel joy and comfort and peace.
After we got off the phone, I took a bath and read the New Yorker for a bit, and then I studied some Korean.
I’m tired. It was a long day, and I suppose a good one. This is my life now. In a lot of ways it’s not all that different from my life in New York, where I might well have met with a North Korean defector or stopped off at my Korean cleaners on the way home before studying some Korean language and listening to some jazz. For all the ups and downs and waves of culture shock, sometimes what’s most startling is how normal all of this feels: going to work at a tech office, coming home to my apartment, sitting on the sofa and blogging.
And then other things are strange and different. My friendships here are new, and many of them, I know, will be fleeting, especially with my fellow foreigners, who come and go. I’m still just 85 days in, and there’s much to get used to, connections to make, roots to put down. But I’m here. Ella is singing to Joe Pass as the rain pelts the penthouse windows on a cool night in Seocho-gu.
At the end of college, I experienced a great failure of imagination. I was terrified that I would be chained to a desk for the next forty-odd years and that nothing interesting would happen. Of course, life didn’t turn out that way. It’s just that when I looked into the yawning blank future, I didn’t know what to fill it with.
Arriving in Korea is a bit like that. Here I am, living the expat life I’ve been preparing for, in one way or another, since 2003. And now that I have it, I find myself worrying that it will be nothing but what it is right now: get up, go to a corporate job, come home tired, repeat. Is that all there is to living abroad?
An interesting life
Of course, my life is already way more interesting than that. I’m dating, spending time with friends. I’ve thrown a party with eight nationalities in attendance, had Central Asian food in Dongdaemun with a new friend from Kyrgyzstan, seen paintings from the Musee D’Orsay and traditional Korean music performances, wandered the boutiques of Samcheondong with a real actual fashion consultant from Bergdorf’s in Manhattan. Tonight I’ll have Thanksgiving dinner of a sort: I’m throwing a party, and we’ll eat sandwiches made from the sliced turkey I found at the Emart Everyday near my office.
Life will inevitably have its future twists and turns, too, but I don’t know what shape they’ll take yet. I’m new here, so it’s hard to imagine. I did pull myself out of my funk a little bit by making a five-year plan, a habit of my grandfather’s (he got it, presumably, from the socialists he admired in his youth). By my birthday in 2021, I will have enough savings that I can go hang out in a cheap place — e.g., Laos, Phoenix — for more or less as long as I want without worrying about it. I will be fluent in Korean. I will have a long-term residency visa in Korea. And I’ll be married. (For those of you who’ve known me in my bachelor adventurer years, circa 2012-present, that last one might come as a surprise, but yes, I would like to make a long-term connection.)
You know, or not.
All of this is, like everything in life, subject to change. As my father is fond of saying, if something is more than three weeks away, don’t worry about it. You still have to plan, though. It’s just the worrying that you don’t get much value from.
Manager shoes
But you know what really lifted me out of my funk?
Shoes.
I’d noticed that the managers a couple of layers above me weren’t wearing dress shoes. Those, it turns out, are for lower-level guys who are trying to look serious. No, the managers wear what I think of as dress sneakers. And I wanted to start dressing like the managers.
It took me a while to find these shoes. I tramped all over Gangnam, Garosu-gil, Myeongdong, Hapjeong, to no avail. You don’t find them at ABC Mart or Folder, the chain shoe stores you find everywhere. But on Monday night I headed over to COEX Mall, and I found a little shop called Salt & Chocolate, and they had so many amazing shoes that I bought three pairs.
I acknowledge that this is a very Sex and the City way of dealing with existential dread and political despair. It’s not my usual thing. But you know what? It worked. And I’m somewhere very new, figuring out what works. There’s a shallowness to my current condition — an unbearable lightness, if you will — and maybe shallow responses are in order. It’s amazing what new shoes or a good Turkish dinner can do for my state of mind. And it wasn’t just the shoes either. It was finding the shoes: accomplishing a task, an effort of discovery, here in my new home.
Now I just need to figure out how to buy Bactine for the blisters.
Gratitude
Here in Seoul, the first snow is falling. It’s been a hard couple of weeks, but it’s Thanksgiving weekend back home, and it’s good to remember how much I have to be thankful for. I’m watching the snow from inside my warm home that will soon be filled with friends. I have a good job and a loving family and a brand new niece who was born on Halloween and is named Pumpkinella (her parents think her name is something else, but whatever). I have new shoes. I have new challenges to tackle and a new life to make my own. And there’s sliced turkey in the fridge.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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Seoul, Korea
I really, really wanted this Engrish to be on purpose, like those PLAN AHEAD signs you see where the ending is all squished. Alas, Designer Miss Kim confirmed that it was just a mistake. In fact, she was selling these notebooks at a discount because they were misprinted. (And let’s not even get into the alright issue.)
Somehow “EVERYTHIG IS ALRIGHT” is both more entertaining and more reassuring than a correctly spelled notebook would have been. Because everything is alright (or all right), even when it’s a little fucked up.
And besides, “EVERYTHIG IS ALRIGHT” is a pretty good approximation of the way I speak Korean.
So, like, hang lose. Purra vida. No wories. Its all good. 괸차나. 다 조아.
When I first went to Korea, in 2001, I knew next to nothing about it, and I didn’t speak the language at all. I’d given myself a crash course in the hangeul alphabet and knew a few basic phrases, and that was it. I was in those days too intimidated by the language to give it serious study, but I couldn’t help picking up words and phrases as I went along.
One word I heard constantly was 어떻게 (eotteoke). One day I asked one of the Korean teachers what it meant. Literally, she explained, it means “how,” but it’s much more than that. Koreans use the word kind of the way American English uses “what,” as an exclamation, a complaint, a rebuke, an expression of bafflement.
Early the next morning, I stepped out onto my little street of Pambat-gil (which I did not know until after I left Korea meant “Chestnut Grove Street”). Off in the distance was an ajumma. She stood in the middle of the street, arms spread wide. I could see that she was gripping a cell phone in one of her uplifted hands. And she was crying out, in the most mournful tone, with the final vowel long drawn out, “Eotteoke! Eotteoke!”
I felt a giddy sense of elation: I understood! Something was happening in Korea, and I got it. What I got, though, was that this poor woman was howling out her shock and sorrow in the middle of the street at 8 am. Whatever news had come through that cell phone, it wasn’t good.
I was reminded of that dissonance — of the thrill of understanding tempered by the sorrow of what’s understood — as I read a long Facebook post in Korean today. Usually I let those pass by unread. They’re still difficult. But I’d just yesterday finished reading the classic Korean short story 사랑방 손님과 어머니 (Mother and Her Guest), and I thought maybe I could manage the five paragraphs my friend had written.
I’m glad I did. I learned that my friend’s grandmother had passed away, an important event that I otherwise would have missed. She wrote beautifully about the way her grandmother had been a teacher to her, how at a difficult time in her life her grandmother had taken her in and taught her how to make dolls’ clothes, how the family sat together sharing memories and how each person’s memories were different, but they were all warm memories.
I’m sorry that my friend has lost a dear family member, but I’m also thrilled that — with much help from an online dictionary — I could share in my friend’s memories of her beloved grandmother, her sense of loss and sorrow. I’m pleased that words I learned from reading Mother and Her Guest helped me to understand what my friend had written. I am also grateful that I know enough Korean now to find out about my friend’s loss and express my condolences.
Inside the subway station, there’s a spinning wheel — a mulle (물레), a cute little visual pun on the name of the neighborhood.
If you live in Korea, at some point you find yourself at Emart or Homeplus, much as anyone in America eventually winds up at Target or WalMart. The grocery sections of these big-box stores are still thriving, but the housewares are beginning to look a little threadbare. For small conveniences, people go to Daiso now — a branch of the Japanese chain is always nearby — while delivery websites like Coupang have cut into the business for big-ticket and bulky items.
