Foreword
By Matthew Walters, ETA ’15-’17 Now in its 10th volume, Infusion continues to immortalize the stories and memories of an ever-growing Fulbright Korea. Volume 10 marks an important milestone for the magazine and speaks to the prevailing importance of reflection in the Fulbright Korea experience. Even halfway through the grant year, our cohort has amassed innumerable experiences that deserve to be shared. Having worked on three issues of Infusion thus far, I began to think about how the magazine is sustained. As busy as we all are, we still take time out of our days to create—to draw, to write, to photograph. We do this to meditate on the changes in our lives, and 2016 was as much a year of change as any. Some of us arrived in Korea for the very first time, tasked with tackling a new language and culture. Others have taken on new adventures, from graduate school to a different career path. Every year of our lives challenges us with change. The work featured in this issue of Infusion demonstrates a key way in which we process change: by finding a place of belonging. All of us have different places we hold dear, whether in Korea, the U.S. or anywhere across the globe. From the volleyball court in Rebecca Brower’s “Sting of a Hard Serve” to the singing room in Paige Morris’s “Nights at the 노래방”; from the dinner table in Eugene Lee’s “Scenes from the Kitchen” to the subway train in Dawn Angelicca Barcelona’s set of poems; we all latch onto places of familiarity in the face of newness. Wherever in the world you are, reading this, I hope this issue of Infusion helps you to think of your favorite place. If you are currently carving out your own place in Korea—amid, for many of us, an unfamiliar language and culture—I wish you continued success in doing so. Especially when life seems anything but consistent, we owe it to ourselves to stop and reflect. The pieces and photographs in this issue will doubtless serve as a reminder to do just that. Please enjoy Infusion, Volume 10, Issue 1.
Scenes from the Kitchen
By Eugene Lee, ETA ’16-’17 I’m crying. The feeling is at once gripping and unfamiliar. I’m crying. I’m crying. Repetition does not pull me closer to this fact, as I try to stop by sheer force of will. My snot-soaked sleeves are punctuated with the timeline of the flood’s unknowable duration. Quietly, I set my knife down and wait—I am careful not to rub my eyes. I cry every Friday. I cry every Friday after school and yet the feeling is always unfamiliar, arriving without notice. Eventually, I emerge from my tears and can see clearly again, but only to see the object that has become both the beginning and end of my Friday afternoons: an ordinary, benign household onion. * * * He averts his gaze for a moment, looking out into nothing. My native language swims in his mind elusively in a way I will never quite understand. I have come to see this gesture is a habit as he prepares a question. I pick up another onion from the wide, blue basket and savor the way it halves effortlessly under the weight of my knife. My left hand is rounded as if holding an egg, just as I was taught, and my index finger guides my knife as I make my way across one half of the onion. I am swiping the newly cut crescents into a second basket on the floor when my host father finally speaks: “My personality…it is…so positive?” I nod. “이게 맞니?” I nod again. “My personality! It is so positive…I always want learn everything.” “I always want to learn everything.” “I always want to learn everything! Many old people don’t…want to learn…but I always want to learn. I always like to learn.” I have always wanted to learn how to cook. But catching up on years of missed cooking experience means making lots of food, and food is typically limited to three meals a day. It has been less than a month since I began learning how to cook at my host family’s Chinese restaurant on Fridays, and yet I have already gained years of experience because of the sheer amount of onions necessary for 짬뽕 and 짜장면. “Me too,” I reply. “Me too.” * * * Fluency is this: noodles grabbed from behind precisely at the moment they come out of the machine, thrown into the boiler without so much as a second glance; crumbs from the fryer peeled off the oil’s surface with a strainer and flicked into a bin in such a way that each glistening, golden crunch flies as if held together by an invisible thread; cucumber slivers cascading into a bowl under a slicer, the cucumber then flipped in the air and caught precisely with the other side down as if handled by a bartender. Fluency is anticipation born out of persistent repetition and calculation dissolved into the subconscious in such a way that work becomes breathing. For the non-fluent, it is a subtle mastery that is both mysterious and beautiful to witness. * * * I have always been told my hands are pretty. My fingers are long and slender and there are no visible cuts or bruises. Each crush into the bitingly harsh heat of a piece of fried pork brings me face to face with the fact that my hands tell a comfortable history of privilege. I break apart the Siamese pieces of freshly fried pork—conjoined in twos, threes and fours, in split-second intervals. Time is precious—each point of contact sears redness into my fingers, and it takes pure willpower to push on. I glance at my host father’s fists. A white bandage is wrapped around his left index finger and there are multiple dark spots marking the backs of his hands. Before we started frying he pointed them out like constellations, urging me to heed the cautions etched in their stories. His hands are heavily muscled, with huge veins forming great valleys and canyons. They are worn like the white, slightly yellowed poster tacked onto the kitchen fridge, lined with scribbles of various phrases in English filled with hope of remembrance. I have no such poster but instead have decades of memories written in English, some painful, embarrassing bruises and some callouses that mark pivotal moments like the time I first read “Othello.” And though he cannot see this palimpsest, I wonder if he overhears conversations with my friends and sees them the way I see his hands—like artifacts that, by charting the past, look forward to tougher palms and longer sentences. * * * “Half spoon of soybean sauce.” “Just soy sauce; not soybean sauce.” He laughs. “Okay, half a spoon of soy sauce!” I take the ladle and scoop—clumsily. I can sense that his nod is caught in that odd space between a pledge to exactness and an indulgence of laissez faire. I toss the sauce into the pan and hear a sizzle. Time passes and the stir-fry in the pan is splashed with shades of black, brown and red that belie their disparate places on the spectrum of taste. “한번 먹어 봐.” “‘Try it?’ No, that doesn’t sound right… Ah! ‘Have a taste?’” “Have a taste!” He teaches me to sample the sauce from the piping hot ladle, which fogs as I bring it closer to my mouth. I’ve had this stir-fry many times since arriving at my homestay, but this time the flavor is cosmic—it explodes in my mouth in every direction, as I at once perceive the various seasonings that compose a certain flavor and simply enjoy the taste for what it is. Ah, so that’s been garlic this whole time. I hope that learning English, though a more gradual endeavor, will one day also make the ordinary beautiful again. All of those unheard conversations and words flickering past here and there will hopefully one day start to take on some kind of meaning. I nod in approval and I turn to my host father, who spends
Nights at the 노래방
I see the notification while I’m at work, arranging a stack of handouts for my first class. The message says: I have some news. Let me know if you have a chance to call some time today. For a rare moment, my best friend and I are both online. I check the time—it’s nearing 8:30 a.m. in Masan, early evening in Providence, Rhode Island. I want to make the call now, but I type a rushed reply instead: Are you all right?? The answer says, It’s fine. It can wait. All day, I try to guess the news. I imagine new relationships forming as I eat tasteless rice in the school cafeteria, perhaps a marriage proposal taking place at the exact moment I am peeling the skin off a tangerine with my fingernails. When the day ends, I rush through dinner and up to my room, cradling my phone in my hands until the call comes around 10 p.m. The news is this: our friend died. When I hear his name, I don’t need to ask how. “It was a suicide,” comes the answer anyway, and the guilt of having already known is sharper than the shock of hearing it said aloud. “He sent some of us a text to tip us off, but we didn’t see it until the next morning. Couldn’t do anything until it was too late.” “Oh my God,” I say. “Oh my God.” I’m not religious anymore, haven’t talked to any gods since my last Mass in Catholic high school, but that night, my head hums with a litany of thoughts that feel a lot like prayers. Please don’t let it be real. Please not him. Please not this. Please. ~ I watch as you get farther and farther away, becoming a small dot and then disappearing. Will all of this fade after some time? I think about the old days. I think about you. — “If You,” Big Bang Low score: 63 points. ~ My high school girls are learning about American geography and slang this week. When I pull up a big, colorful map of the U.S. on the TV screen, the hurt hits me all over again. None of my classes notice. For that, I feel both sullen and grateful. I think about maps a lot, about how I must be a cartographic error. I shouldn’t be here. I should be in Providence, mourning with my friends. I should be in California at the funeral. In the days that follow, I often find I don’t know where I should be. So I end up going to the one place that feels familiar. The CoinSinger singing room sits on the top floor of Changwon’s City7 Mall. Once I’ve made the trek up two mall escalators, a flashing sign with the singing room franchise’s name in 한글 ushers me in through the automatic doors. When I step inside, there are no questions asked. I already know what to do. I take a package of shrink-wrapped microphone covers from the front desk and find an empty room. I peel a single ₩1,000 bill from my wallet and insert it into the singing room machine to start. This is how the ritual begins. I first discovered singing rooms in New York City’s Koreatown, a tiny patch of imitation Seoul in midtown Manhattan. Growing up adjacent to the city, I had always seen New York as a shiny escape. Within that escape came another getaway in the form of the $10-per-hour karaoke room shared with friends. We made our first pilgrimages to the singing rooms as middle schoolers, when we grew restless but found ourselves too old for arcades and playgrounds. We would catch a subway into the city, get off at 33rd Street and just start walking until we found one—a nameless 노래방 sandwiched between restaurants and discount stores. For an hour or two we’d pass around the thick tome of song selections, queuing our favorites. When we gathered there, all four or six or eight of us clamoring for the sticky remote control pad, we lined up a playlist featuring everyone from Beyoncé to Big Bang, Selena to Utada, songs in all the languages we’d grown up with. We sang solos and duets, main parts and backing vocals. We sang beautifully and horribly with total abandon, like we had no troubles in the world. Most rooms at the CoinSinger in City7 are tiny, intimate spaces, designed for a maximum of two singers. Stepping inside one now, I feel like I’m entering a confessional booth where I become anonymous—or as anonymous as one can be in a semi-soundproof box with a large, glass window on the door. For me, though, after the unrelenting show I’ve made of smiling and laughing and holding light conversation with hundreds of students and co-workers, even this amount of solitude is a dream. With a steady stream of ₩1,000 bills I have saved up for this moment, I lay claim to an hour, two hours, three. I take my time choosing. I make sure each song counts. * * * My co-workers say I seem to be shrinking, losing weight and talking less in the weeks after. I try to explain it as simply as I can. “My friend died. And I miss home a little these days.” But none of this seems to translate the way I need it to. “I lost my mom a few years ago,” my co-teacher replies easily. “It’s even harder to lose a parent than a friend. You just have to keep going.” Another teacher adds, “If you look sad, people will think you’re not trying to enjoy your life in Korea. You have to stop looking so sad.” I start to wonder if something is wrong with me, start to think myself a riddle with box braids and brown skin that no one in Changwon can decipher. When I try to open up to anyone, I feel the words jamming my throat, the way