How to Eat Rainbow Play-Doh
By Charles Nelson IV, ETA ’11-’12 / Photograph by Bridget Harding . She asks me, pulling beets from the vegetable drawer on Big Night In, our Friday night ritual, if I ever went to get the little shrimp out of the caves? The question’s content is similar to that of her more bizarre sleep-talking. It took a beat to understand that the little shrimp in the caves weren’t relevant to our present. She was voicing ruminations, and I was plopped into her mind’s medias res. I ask, do you realize how surreal that question sounds without context? Get the little shrimp from the caves. It’s not as though I had been out on errands, and now here preparing dinner, dadgummit, honey, did you forget to go and get the little shrimp out of the caves? Didn’t you look at the list? We had lived a little over an hour from each other during our ETA year. While I never did go and get shrimp from caves, it’s not unlikely that we would have had the experience in common. They were everywhere, those tiny pinkish brine-bombs. But, for the life of us, we can’t remember the Korean word. In her frustration to remember, she reopens the refrigerator door and rummages for a jar. As she searches, it strikes me that from our time spent in Korea, neither of us incorporated into our own lives the refrigerator organization skills of our host-families. While she removes items from the fridge, we describe visions of our host-families’ refrigerators, the towers of translucent airtight containers, navigable despite the volume of food they contained. Model efficiency, maximum usage: those refrigerators were dioramas of the urban utopia, a weaving mini-maglev train being the only thing needed to complete them. In contrast, our fridgescape has fruit on the loose, nothing stacked, and an entire onion if only one could stitch together the constituent thirds of several onions into a Frankenstein’s Onion. She thrashes through some collards to find the tiny cute shrimp shelved in the back corner, the jar wrapped in a plastic bag to prevent the shrimp essence from imbuing everything. Sae-oo-jaot, she says, turning the jar. Her pronunciation is rusty. Sae-woo-jeot. I pause. Eot, I say, listening to myself. I realize that I’m unsure if my correction is even correct. She wonders if the shrimp go bad. I reason, salt is a preservative, so, probably not? Meh, she murmurs, and throws the jar out. For whatever reason, tossing the tiny shrimp needles me. Rue-laden heart be damned, though. After all, twice the number of the now-trashed shrimp will be the number of their pen-dot black hole eyes, the abyssal specks that will remain, probably forever, staring at me in my Kafkan tiny cute shrimp nightmare. At least now, we remember the word. She cuts stems from the beets with kitchen shears, staining the blades purple. She says, the color is like lipstick a goth would wear. She then folds a purse of aluminum foil and seals the beets inside. In the oven, the purse will expand into a silver pillow as the beets give steam to the heat. The salty cave shrimp center the discussion on Korea. She recounts to me how she lived near the sea. On weekends, she would hop the train to Daecheon. Her host-mother would ask her what she did on those trips. Sit alone, listen to Tennis–that is, the band, not the sport. She’d read, eat seafood, lay out. Host-mother always smiled indulgently, but never understood. I grind cumin seeds, raw garlic, salt, and smoked paprika in a mortar, mixing in olive oil and white vinegar for a paste to make Peruvian chicken. Teaching in Jeonju, I lived in what I understood to be the gastronomic center of the country. I visited Ga-Chok Hwi-Gwon for bibimbap many times, usually as a guest of teacher colleagues who invariably asked, Do you know Jeonju bibimbap? She sighs. Gojuchang, she says. The Peruvian paste looks like gochujang, but darker, and lacking of the sweeter layers of smell. I massage the blend into the skin of the spatchcocked chicken, set the bird on a roasting rack, and then wash my hands. Did we ever eat bibimbap together in Jeonju? Yes! We met up with Mina and Luke, Melinda, and Jenny. Remember? We definitely had bibimbap. Vaguely. I don’t remember Luke being there. I lament, what a bummer we didn’t know each other better. Yeah, she says. But, she notes, I also never loved bibimbap. Duck? She sighs a pining groan. Host-mom made amazing duck. The radish. Those circles of mu kimchi–gah, with the fat of the duck. Host-mom would roam the kitchen talking to herself, and when host-dad wasn’t around she’d take straight MSG and whisper jooooogeum to me, before sprinkling some in. Our secret. Imitating her host-mom, index finger to her lips, she motions to keep quiet about the surreptitious MSG. She shushes, and then makes the just-a-little pinching sign. My host-mom made great duck too, I reply, chuckling. The first time we had duck, my host-family tried to help me understand. We were sitting at the table, and they kept saying O-li, o-li. We were at the edges of their English and my Korean. Then, my host dad jabbed at the meat with his chopsticks, and went Quack, quack, chicken. She laughs, as do I. I was doubled over, I say through a guffaw. My host-dad kind of chuckled and looked around in that Rodney Dangerfield whud-I-say? kind of way. I couldn’t believe that for all the English he didn’t know, he knew the word quack. Finally winded from laughing, I ask, What do animals say in other countries? I think cocorico is what French roosters say. She asks, is meong meong what Korean dogs say? I reply that I can’t remember. Meong seems about right. We continue to cook. Our golden retriever enters the kitchen. We bark meong! meong! He snorts, looks at us like we’re idiots, drops his
The Way Home
By Bijou Nguyen ETA ’14-’15 / Photograph by Emily Malec . How do you return home if home is an ocean, language, and world away? . I met Mrs. Lee in my third year of medical school, three years out from my time living as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Korea. I’ve met a lot of different patients during my clinical year, but Mrs. Lee is one of those patients I will never forget. Mrs. Lee was small and stout with disheveled hair, white peppered with grey. Her skin was both soft and wrinkled like fragile parchment paper. Her face was like a dried persimmon, creased and wise with years of experience. Her eyes formed tiny crescent moons, and there were only two teeth teetering in her mouth. She was one hundred years old and had called the ambulance because she was having trouble breathing. She was one hundred years old, and her seventy-year old niece could no longer care for her. Mrs. Lee said she was sorry she had called the ambulance, but that she was scared. She had no wish to be resuscitated or for us to do anything for her really because she felt like she had lived on this earth long enough. At our low-income, inner-city county hospital, patients were often admitted because they did not have a place to go. Mrs. Lee may have had a touch of heart failure, but her labs were nearly pristine. She did not have a medical reason to be placed in our hospital, but was completely bed-bound, and did not have a place to go. Her niece had cared for her many, many years but was unable to pick up her aunt when Mrs. Lee would fall out of bed. With my limited Korean, I visited Mrs. Lee in the mornings and checked in on her. I asked her the basic orientation questions: “What is your name? Where are you? Why are you here? Who is the president?” Mrs. Lee would reply correctly to all of them, with the exception of answering President Moon Jae-In, rather than the American one. She would sit in the hospital bed, smiling gently, and appearing quite out of place. In a place where patients had IVs and chest tubes and ventilators, Mrs. Lee did not need anything medically. She would sit in the hospital bed, snacking on the tteok her niece would bring for her, her hand clasped to her radio that played familiar Korean songs. She would tell me, “Be careful. Don’t walk too fast or you’ll fall down.” During my time in Korea, I learned about the concept of jeong, an inherent closeness and connection that Korean people often develop toward strangers and loved ones alike. I feel that I was able to experience jeong with Mrs. Lee. Though our interactions were somewhat limited by language and time, I also felt a strange closeness between us I could not quite put into words. Mrs. Lee, because of her kind and grateful personality, became a very beloved patient on the list. In the midst of rounding as we talked about patients who refused dialysis for their kidney failure or refused labs, Mrs. Lee was a patient who made every member of the team smile. One day I came in and found Mrs. Lee shifting in bed with her head nearly off the rail. Her sitter said she hadn’t been able to calm Mrs. Lee. Mrs. Lee mumbled incoherently, and looked– for the first time that I had seen her in the hospital–very sad. When I asked where she was, she told me she was home. I corrected her, telling her she was in the hospital, but she continued to say 집 (home) longingly. Worried, I called a phone translator to ask her, “Where are you going?” “I’m trying to get home, but I don’t know how,” the interpreter translated, and something physically hurt in my chest. I ached, for Mrs. Lee was indeed thousands of miles away from the place she called her home. She was in a place she didn’t know, away from her family members. Her typical meals were oatmeal, green jello, a ripe banana, mashed potatoes—the hospital’s mechanical soft diet, a sorry excuse for her usual sticky grains of white jasmine rice and ripe kimchi. Having spent a year in Korea myself, I remembered so viscerally the beauty of the country, the respect shown towards elders, the smell of cherry blossoms in the spring. The plain hospital room blaring a TV in a language that Mrs. Lee could not understand suddenly felt so limiting, so small. In the days to come, Mrs. Lee grew increasingly confused. At times she thought she was in Daegu, back in her familiar hometown in Korea. Other times, she fell out of bed or wound up upside down, trying her hardest to go home. A yellow “FALL RISK” band was eventually placed onto her arm, and my chest couldn’t help but ache for the impossibility of ending up back where she wanted–no needed–to be regardless of how much she struggled. The medical term for this condition is delirium– the waxing and waning of attention in conjunction with intermittent confusion. Untreated, it increases the likelihood of mortality. My team addressed Mrs. Lee’s symptoms with the so-called delirium precautions: lights on, windows open during the day to discourage sleeping during the day. Frequent re-orientation. Encourage visits from family members. Provide a one-on-one sitter. However, being awake more frequently during regular hours only would make the time alone in the hospital that much more isolating, as there was limited staff–let alone Korean-speaking staff–to interact with her. Working with Mrs. Lee reminded me of my life in Korea three years ago which now feels like a lifetime ago. At times, I miss Korea so much that I dream of it. For a period of time during my first year back, I would wake up from a dream about Korea with tears on my face, without quite
Marked Deck
By Becky Brower (ETA ’15-’18) and Gwangeun Cho / Photograph by Eunice Yu “Can I go get my cards now?” “Yes, you can.” With my approval, Gwangeun leapt from his seat and bounded up the stairs to his second-floor homeroom, where his cards were stashed in his desk. Practicing magic energized him, his eyes lit up anytime a deck of cards so much as passed under his nose. The first time I had class with Gwangeun, we played Pictionary and he drew the world-renowned magician, David Copperfield, passing through the Great Wall of China. Much to his dismay, I had no idea who David Copperfield was, so he assigned me the task of watching videos on YouTube to educate myself. Since then, I came to learn that not only was Gwangeun fascinated with the magic performed by world-class magicians, but he also had a knack for doing tricks himself. It didn’t take long before I became an active participant in more magic tricks than I had seen in my entire life. Gwangeun returned with a pack of cards and his black, velvet card mat. “Now, for this trick I have to use a special deck. Magicians call it a marked deck, because each card has a special mark on the back of it. However, only the magician can see the mark.” The first time I became interested in magic, I was 10 years old and was watching a special New Year’s program on TV while living in China. Liu Chen, a world-renowned magician born in Taiwan, made a regular coin go through a glass. Then, he took a ring from an audience member and made it disappear. He told the audience that the ring was now inside the egg. When they cracked the egg open, indeed, the ring was inside the egg like he said it would be. I was shocked at first. How was this possible? I was curious and tried to find any videos on magic on the internet. However, we don’t have YouTube in China, so I couldn’t find anything. It wasn’t until I moved to Korea later that I could start learning magic. Gwangeun slid the supposedly marked deck out of its container and spread the cards out face-up on the table in front of me. “They look like normal cards, right? But, they each have a special mark.” As he began shuffling through the deck, he showed me the front of each card, and then the back. I was confused to see that the deck looked normal; with an ace, two, three, four, all the way up to the king for every suit. The backs of the cards appeared ordinary as well, with a red design typical of what one would find on a standard deck. When I arrived at Jangdaehyun School for the first time, I was an outsider. While I knew that I was working with a special group of students that, like Gwangeun, each had a unique story and identity, they all appeared to be regular teenagers. The boys inhaled meals–heaping plates of food, mind you–so they could run outside and play basketball in their free time, the girls were crazy about idol music groups like BTS and EXO, and all of the students had a tendency to fall asleep in class from time to time. Gwangeun was no different, as he could devour two bowls of 돼지국밥 in one sitting, and then claim to be only satisfied at the end. More than once he’s dozed off in an afternoon English class, or forgotten that he had class all-together. Staring at the cards as Gwangeun shuffled through them, I was stuck in that position again of a clueless outsider. Something extraordinary was happening right in front of me, but I couldn’t see any of the “special marks.” My mother came to China from North Korea when she was eighteen years old, maybe seventeen in American age. She didn’t know any Chinese, so she was tricked and sold to the man who would become my dad. I was born just one year later, and while I was growing up I thought that my mom was Chinese because that’s what my dad told me. If anyone in China knew that my mom was from North Korea, she would be sent back, so my dad used it to control her. When I was ten years old, I fought with my mom. After that, I didn’t see her for a while. Four years later, I was studying in middle school when I got a call from my mom. During the call, she told me that she was in South Korea, and I was confused. Why would she leave her own country, China, to go to a completely different country? Then, I figured out that my dad had lied to me for sixteen years. Two years after my mom called, I decided I wanted to live with her. So, she came to China to get me and we flew to South Korea together. “First, let me explain what we are going to do. I’m going to have you pick a card, and then I’m going to find that card by using its special mark. So, let’s pick a card…tell me when to stop.” Gwangeun held the deck, face-up, and began pulling cards off the top one-by-one: 8 of diamonds, 3 of clubs, ace of clubs, 5 of hearts, jack of spades…I let about a quarter of the deck slide from one hand to the other before I said “stop.” “Are you sure that’s where you want to stop? Are you happy?” He raised an eyebrow, tilted his head and smiled slyly as he questioned my decision. Gwangeun wasn’t a particularly shy student; he was polite and friendly with the teachers and visitors at school. But, he did get nervous when performing tricks in front of new audiences, and it was no different with me at first.