Series from the Hwasil, a Room of Flowers and Magic
By Julia Wargo, a second year ETA in Gumi, Gyeongsangbuk-do I Darker, lighter, darker. These are the only words I hear for hours at a time, and I repeat them over and over again to myself. There’s something deeply meditative about that repetition, and about ink wash painting. Ink: solid midnight, ground out of a stick and applied to white hanji paper. Washing: the process of purification. Together, painting purifies me from beginning to end. When I arrive in the studio, I grind the inkstick until my arm is sore, and I am regretting adding too much water to the mixture. Concentrating on making the most concentrated black, one that doesn’t lighten if I leave it out to dry. Then, when the ink is ready, a pool of darkness waiting to be dipped into, my teacher picks up a brush and paints an example. There are no words in this place but those he repeats: darker here and lighter there. Understand? There are no definites, only a maybe. It is turned by necessity into a hesitant, “Yes.” I try to imitate the painting, and in the end when I am done and holding the brush under the faucet, seeing streaks in the water, that unsaid maybe echoes in my mind. II Sometimes I catch myself thinking about more uncertainties. About how 화 (hwa) can mean painting (畵) and sometimes fire (火) and sometimes flower (花). Hwasil literally translates to painting studio, but sometimes I think of this place as a flower studio. There are papers with flowers on them plastered on the walls and on the floor, where I have to step gingerly to avoid them. The only free space is the ceiling, and if flower paintings were to appear there too, I wouldn’t be overly surprised. On rare occasions, other paintings materialize. Sometimes there are neat rows of Chinese characters, or a tiger or dragon. But for the most part, I am learning more words for flowers than I ever knew before in English. The first four types of painting I’ve learned are orchids, bamboo, chrysanthemums and plum blossoms. After you’ve learned them once, you should repeat them over and over, perfecting and adding more strokes, more additions, improving. It’s a progression perfected over centuries, and sometimes I can feel those years echoing deeply when I am attempting to paint. Legacies I can’t live up to, that don’t quite belong to me, but that require respect. I am drawn to other subjects too. The lotus, stretching high out of the pond. The trumpet vine, orange and reaching low, overhanging a wall. Persimmons, plump and ripe. Goldfish in the pond, with slight ripples around them fashioned from the barest hint of ink and water. The sheer variety is overwhelming. To focus on the strength of boulders? Or the delicacy of a vase? When I leave the room, flowers are blooming in my mind and fish swimming through the air around me. The world comes alive and electric to the touch. I carry the painting and the fire and the flower inside me. III Nothing can convince me that this place isn’t some sort of liminal space where anything can happen. It’s a place where there are multitudes of blossoms and multitudes of stories. Many of them spring straight from my teacher’s mind, and his sense of humor sometimes differs from my own. One day, I am painting a bird, and my teacher gestures for me to hold out my hand. When I look inside my palm, there is a detached bird’s leg. With feathers still attached. A mild sense of horror surfaces, which I try to suppress. He’s looking for a reaction and the chance to laugh at my squeamishness. Instead, I just say, “cool,” and chuckle. Is it just a model for drawing a bird? Or something else? The possibilities are endless. The next week, it’s alcohol made from bee larvae on offer, his amused smile just daring me to try it. I can’t quite bring myself to, the murky brown color reminding me a bit too much of river water. Next, his humor lands on frogs as its object of interest. The first image he paints is of two frogs, dancing. It’s left to me to question why. The next image he draws is the same, but a snake appears. I expect danger, not what follows. The snake pours a cup of alcohol for the frogs. And the frogs happily drink themselves into a daze under the gaze of the full moon, painted in a shade between blue and purple and clear water. I ask: why? Why are there frogs, why is there a snake, why is there alcohol, and how did you conjure this from nothing, from a blank page? I don’t get an answer, just a grin and yet another story to live on in my mind. IV There are frequent breaks when my teacher vanishes for indeterminate periods of time to smoke, and the studio suddenly feels more like an average room. Four walls, a roof, air that is too hot in the summer and cold enough to see your own breath in the winter. Sometimes the breaks take five minutes, sometimes I suspect he’s wandered off for a meal or a walk or to the mountain to look for wild ginseng. I am left looking at my brush and paper. This time, when he comes back to the hwasil, he motions for me to follow. We’re on the third floor, and he goes up the stairs. What is beyond this room? What is left but rooftop? Does the magic extend beyond the boundaries of the door and windows? It’s past sunset, and my eyes don’t adjust immediately. I stumble a bit over uneven floorboards. He points at the sky, towards the mountain, and I see a flashing light. Amidst the disorientation, I feel my first burst of certainty in a long while. The magic in the hwasil was carried here to this rooftop and to me by the thread of my teacher’s path upstairs. To this place where there is only darkness punctuated by
Or Banished
Photo by Megan Chung by Sarah Berg or, banished family history is hot these days / so quit asking why / i’m interested / all i wanted / was a story a grandparent / or two / a dotted line / an arrow indicating direction an ancestor imagined / in nineties dress or bad behavior / in shakespearean manner / this story’s rebels do die they who traveled / interior distances / doubled back / into the south looking to me / like foreign newsprint / dead then / i unfeel like dipping / paper in water til / it’s gone forgetting tastes / like strange medicine / remembering like wet ink / from stone i demand to / listen as if / i can understand that / mourning is hereditary / justice feels like weeping til i get / a new tongue or til the border weeps / itself into waiting arms that wait for / mouths / that ex / claim salt
The Foreigner’s Phrasebook for Eating Alone
[Featured photo by La Toya Crittenden] by Paige Morris 1. 초딩 입맛 (A Little Kid’s Tastes) Life as a foreigner in Korea often relies on a fixed script of questions and answers. Where are you from? America. What are you doing here? I’m an English teacher. Over time, the questions grow weightier, more loaded. Are you married? Do you like Korean men? How do you do your hair? Slowly, I’ve acquired the vocabulary needed to respond. After two grant years and even more years of language study, I know how to politely say no, how to demur, how to describe the interweaving of strands, both real and synthetic, that form my braids and twists. But when I first came to this country, I was overwhelmed by the amount of language I didn’t have, all the things I didn’t yet know how to do. Certain lines of dialogue demanded to be learned with urgency. There were interactions I had to become fluent in, fast. One of the earliest lessons I had to figure out was eating in Korea on my own. This wasn’t a skill I was even sure I’d had in English. Back home in the US, I hardly ever ate by myself. In college, eating was a decidedly social occasion, with eateries and dining companions within walking distance from my dorm or apartment. My friends and I hosted huge potluck dinners at least once a month and shared at least one meal a day. I had gotten used to always having someone around whenever hunger set in when graduation scattered us all over the globe, and I found myself in a new place where I knew no one. When I ate dinner with my host family that first year, I felt like I was scratching at something familiar, starting to uncover a sense of closeness that came with eating a meal together. But it was also strange to be treated like another child in this family. I wouldn’t know what that night’s meal would be until I was called down to eat. I would ask questions about dinner, curious to learn all the words for the food laid out before me, but it seemed this frustrated my host mother, who had to set her chopsticks down to look up the words in Naver dictionary. I heartily ate what I was served, but when I set aside the little slivers of egg from my kimbap, my host father chided my choding ipmat and called me a pyeonsikga—a picky eater with the stubborn mouth of an elementary-aged kid. I started to question my every move during meals. If I ate only one serving, would my host mother think I disliked the food? If I went for another bowl of jjigae, would my host father think I was being greedy? Should I wait for my two host sisters to stop quarreling over who was the prettiest member of Twice and finish their rice before I got another pat for myself? Should I have eaten the hodu snacks—even though I’m allergic—so no one would think I was too particular? The anxiety around eating grew so intense, I decided I might be better off having dinner on my own. 2. 한 명이요. (Table for One) More than almost any other cultural differences, my efforts to eat alone proved incomprehensible to the people around me. When I mentioned at breakfast one morning that I’d be getting dinner on my own after work and volunteering, my host parents panicked. “With your American friends?” they asked. “With other teachers?” When I told them the other volunteers lived on opposite ends of the city and I was planning to go alone, they were scandalized. “You’ll eat alone?” my host mother echoed, incredulous. “We can save some dinner for you to heat up when you come back. You shouldn’t do that—eating alone?” She turned to her husband, murmuring, “Where would she even eat? By herself, at that?” It turned out this concern wasn’t for a lack of options, but for the perceived strangeness of the situation itself: a foreigner, or anyone, eating somewhere unaccompanied. The first few weeks of my experiment were predictably difficult. Even at restaurants in bigger cities, it seemed lone foreigners were unlikely customers. I would step inside a kimbap shop, a kalguksu place, a mandu-jip, and be greeted with a look of surprise. Sometimes the surprise melted into excitement, the thrill of spotting an opportunity to try out some English or to ask questions of the Black person who had suddenly appeared in the doorway. Other times, the surprise shifted into panic. What was anyone supposed to do with me? Why was I here, instead of off somewhere eating hamburgers or steak? In any case, the script was initiated as soon as I entered. The waitstaff would ask: 몇 분이세요? How many people? I’d hold up a single finger. The grammar to indicate the size of your party is a pure Korean number, plus the counter for people—myeong. 한 명이요. One person. Just me. Here is where the script might fracture. Sometimes, there was no issue. I’d be ushered to a table. Often, I’d have a good view of a wall-mounted TV showing a drama from the early 00s that I had never seen. Most times, despite some initial trepidation, I managed to order without a hitch, which would put all of us—the waitstaff and the foreigner—at ease. There were times, though, when I’d be met with a firm shake of the head. This was usually at places with grills and pricier cuts of meat: pork and beef. The owner of the restaurant would hold up two fingers and shake them to say there was no room for someone looking to dine alone. The first time it happened, I glanced around the restaurant and saw several open seats, which made me wonder why it was that business from one customer was made out to be so much worse than no business at all. I realized