Syllable
I asked my mother the Korean word for nectarine and she told me 천도복숭아, heavenly peach. And I recognized the angel there, though she wouldn’t have believed I knew her. I had heard her on the phone one room over, unripe and glorious like a child playacting stone fruit, head held between summer-bare knees acting out being eaten remaining whole. By Sarah Berg
Waygukin Gothic
Photo by La Toya Crittenden Mirror The grant year is going okay, you will say if anyone asks. The only thing is that the cool girls live in your building. These are the students you want to love, but whose withholding glares bring you slam-back to when you were fourteen and covered in acne and painfully out of place in your own body. Have teens always been this put-together, always this beautiful and seemingly unflustered? You duck your head as you see them in the mornings, walking to school arm-in-arm, their sneakers gleaming white, the keychains on their backpacks jangling almost tauntingly. During class, if they become distracted, you sometimes confiscate the makeup mirrors that sit on the corner of each desk. You hope that you do this because of your desire to better their education, and not because some small, irascible part of you resents them for doing a better cat-eye eyeliner than you ever could—at an age when you once wore fishnet gloves and purple skinny jeans, and straightened your greasy bangs to a crisp. Again, one of these students raises her eyebrows as you take her mirror and place it on your own desk. Very well. Let the teens be teens. It must be for their own good—you think, rather austerely, rather plaintively. The lesson goes otherwise smoothly. You reach the final stage of the class where they break into pairs for an independent activity. You take a seat at your desk, take a breath, congratulate yourself for another trainwreck-free thirty minutes. The students are hard at work and not likely to see, so you allow yourself a single glance into the confiscated makeup mirror. When you glance into the glassy surface, there is movement. Like a fish under dark water. Something is moving. You blink, but you haven’t imagined it—a shadowy figure stares back out at you, its eyes pale and mournful. It takes a second, but somehow, you know—it’s you—from another dimension, the other universe where you were acne-free by age fourteen and avoided a goth phase and made all the right friends and never developed the complex of someone living day-to-day, running from something maybe nonexistent, maybe self-created. “All the wrong choices you’ve made,” the figure groans. “I have helpfully outlined them for you in a decision tree.” The figure rifles around in its pockets, produces a folded note, and holds it up to the surface of the mirror. You hesitate, but when you touch the mirror, your hand sinks through the glass like it’s warm water. You want to ask the alternate-you—why now? Aren’t you now millions and millions of miles away from those wrong choices? Wasn’t that the point? You want to ask, but when you look in the mirror it’s your own reflection staring back. And the folded note, upon opening, is nothing more than a worn piece of blank paper. Daily News On the walk home to your apartment building, you decide to turn the news notifications off on your phone. You’re in a new country, after all, and it’s only right that you give 100% to this experience. You subscribe to The Korea Times but delete the rest, muttering the word “experience” over and over under your breath as the apps tremble with fear and disappear in a puff. This time of day, you always hope to see your favorite stray cat who sometimes stretches himself out in the yellowing grass in front of your apartment. “Hi baby,” you coo to him, crouching down and scratching him under the chin. He closes his eyes contentedly, raises his head. People pass by and give you confused, slightly disgusted glances. You stiffen. You understand your kinship with this stray marks you as even more strange and clueless, even more out of place. Your host mom has warned you about stray cats and disease and you know she’s right, but in this strange new state of again being someone’s child, someone who must learn from the very beginning of things like a newborn, you allow yourself some moments of childish rebellion. “You’re a good baby,” you tell him, because he is a good baby. You stroke the matted fur along the ridge of his spine, and then notice something strange—a piece of paper tied around the base of his tail. “What’s this?” you ask him. He lies still as you untie the string and unfold the piece of paper. It’s a headline, a notification. ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION? 10 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT THE CLIMATE SUMMIT. You look down at the cat. He gazes back unflinchingly, eyes round and ancient as the moon. Future Tense Your students are improving. You had reservations about how effective you would be, a first-time teacher with no worldly experience, but you’re proud of how well they (and by extension, you) are doing. Today, your lesson is on the language of dates and times. When it comes time for speaking practice, a supernatural quiet falls over the room as each student gets to her feet and stands beside her desk. In unison, in a deep and hellish voice that belongs to no thirteen-year-olds of this world, the class predicts in perfect English future tense the exact time and date you are to die. Fish Prince It’s one of those winter days where the sun is nearly set by 5pm. You stand on the steps of your school and watch it sink into the city spread out before you, an egg yolk breaking into the apartments and slope-roofed houses, convenience stores and government buildings, the port crowded with fishing boats and the sea beyond that. Today, you are walking towards the park next to the port when you hear a panicked voice, hoarse and distant: “Excuse me!” You freeze, turn around. Nothing appears out of the ordinary: a woman with her dog, a mother and father walking with their son between them, three old men sitting on a bench pouring each other paper cups of makgeolli.
Hunger
Photo by Ying Bonny Cai My host mom brings me tea. She offers me tangerines, three in one hand, poking between her fingers. I accept one of them, tell her I already ate two, let her hum routinely before closing the door. I stick my finger in the jar of peanut butter on my desk that I just told myself I wasn’t hungry for. I can’t tell her I’m trying to eat healthier because she’ll swallow the words and regurgitate them as “diet,” which means offering me half a bowl of rice instead of a full one with dinner. She’ll laugh like she always does after she says something in English, and I’ll wish I’d just quietly avoided every dish on the table. When she blends a smoothie in a glass swirled with agave syrup, it doesn’t feel like a choice. She pushes it across the table and reassures me that it is “low fat,” and this time, I laugh. I hold the final gulp in my mouth until I can spit it into the toilet, shower running, my semblance of control audible to no one but me. I purposely eat breakfast first, time my runs so I return in the middle of dinner. We repeat our lines every night. Hers: “We ate first.” Mine: “No worries.” I’ll take a shower, take my time, but even if I silently sneak chopsticks out of the drawer, she’ll appear opposite me, eyeing my choices. On my birthday, she tells me she didn’t prepare a gift; she’ll cook me a meal of my choice instead. I laugh and dismiss it, “I don’t care about my birthday anyway,” because I know she doesn’t mean it, will never mention it again. I wonder if she is tired of meeting me three-quarters of the way. I lock my bedroom door, stop going out with them on the weekends. She knows something’s wrong with the way I crawl onto my bedroom floor every night at 7 and sleep shortly after 9, but her concern is difficult to translate. Or maybe caring is cautionary when I’m a monthly paycheck taking up space in her kids’ home. “This is your home,” she said, once. *** Once, her husband poked his head into my bedroom on a Saturday morning, announced we would be attending the Bangeo Festival at Moseulpohang Port, a forty minute drive from the apartment. I had no excuses prepared, so I pulled a sweatshirt over my head and piled into the car, sandwiched between my host brother and sister in the backseat, my host mom riding shotgun. When we finally find parking in the overcrowded lot and exit the car, we approach two swimming-pool sized water tanks, filled with people stomping around in rubber overalls. This is the main event of the festival–an opportunity to catch the bangeo with your own hands. Somehow, it is my host mom and me who wind up in the tank, uniformed in knee-high boots and textured gloves, coarse enough to trap the fish in the tank between our hands. The water sits just above my belly button, safe under a thick layer of rubber. At the blow of a whistle, my host mom, me, and eight other rubberized attendees scramble over each other to chase down the fish, darting in every possible direction. A fish grazes my leg, and I reach after it futilely, stumbling behind my host mom who is commanding the center of the tank. She latches onto one with her right hand, wringing it out of the water as it struggles to break free from her grip. She tosses it to her husband standing at the water’s edge and brusquely reenters the arena, fish clamoring for escape along the curves of the tank. I freeze, suddenly aware of the inevitable end. I turn to look beyond the tank, at the within-reach ocean waters from which the fish were caught. I wonder if the ones swirling around me, desperately searching for an exit, realize their fate. My host mom latches onto another. Then, another. Soon, there are no fish left. We emerge from the tank and her husband takes our picture. I lean into her, half-expecting an arm to wrap around my shoulder, but she gestures to her husband instead, two thumbs up. After we grill the fish at a station next to the tanks, my host mom presents them on a dining table for us to eat. She leans back as her husband and children begin devouring the meal, a compliment to her triumph. Feeling like I am still waist-deep in the water, I poke around the bones with my chopsticks but can’t bring the flesh to my lips. I know she notices I haven’t taken a bite, but she doesn’t voice it aloud, doesn’t push me to eat. Her husband holds a piece up for her to take, but she refuses. *** My host mom starts to leave on weekends, to prepare the nearby apartment they own and rent through AirBnB. She is gone before I wake up, the kids too, her husband forever at work. My host mom texts me that there is rice in the cooker, fried spam in the fridge, cereal in the drawer, ice cream in the freezer. Alone in the apartment, I eat everything, spread open tupperware containers across the kitchen counter to dip my chopsticks into, procure tiny spoons to taste the interior of every jar in the fridge. I check and re-check the lock on the front door, afraid someone might come home unexpectedly and witness my overindulgence, crumbs stuck to my face. My freedom feels phony, still contained in their apartment. When she and the kids come home Sunday evening, I leave the door to my bedroom cracked and watch their shadows stretch beneath it. I pull the covers up to my chin in bed, feel my eyes fill with tears. I wait for the waves to wash over me, but they don’t come. I stare at the ceiling