I Became Food on a Train, Wandering: Five Poems
By Dawn Angelicca Barcelona, ETA ’14-’17 Cake we grilled our own meat at restaurant 108 and drank beers and soju, sitting Korean-style. we spent too much time teaching our language to learn the language of this new country. we leaned on each other to pick from the few words sown inside our mouths. we were just kids wondering how to eat. 어떻게?. we planted a new alphabet to help us sprout through the soil of Sejong, in our new little neighborhood. with soft-spoken syllables, our courage boils up: 맞아요? back at home, we said “fork” and “spoon” or “please” and “thank you” now we only point and say “여기요, 이거 더 주세요” our tongues burn, digging for more words when we see a kitchen. we set the cake down next to our grill. here we sing 생일 축하합니다 instead of happy birthday. the song tastes like an expiration date another birthday I wish I could be home for, hoping after a year it will still be waiting for me in the fridge. Microaggressions I don’t like rice. It’s the core of what my mom and dad love. They eat it plainly, sometimes with their hands. It’s the food of their homeland. I wish I knew how to use my hands the way they do. When we go out for dinner, we eat with forks and knives. They leave behind traditional ways for dinner time. I’m not who my parents were at 23. They flew away from a familiar life to make a better one for me. I flew away to forget about New Jersey. In this second home I’ve come to know, I am asked why I am a teacher. Why I didn’t become a nurse. Why I’d rather write poems. Why my hometown isn’t Metro Manila or Cebu City, two places that didn’t raise me. I go to church to pray but instead get distracted. I hear people say, “America isn’t your real home.” In the winter, I flew away from Korea to feel less like a question and more like an answer. To be something definite, that ends. Yet a tourist shop cashier says, “you must be one of my people” and a hostel owner speaks in English to everyone else but never to me. In countries so foreign, I’m seen as familiar. Wherever I go, there are always assumptions to erode. It never fails to come: “So really, where are you from?” Upon Arrival The morning I landed in NYC I just wanted to curl up and crawl into a huge black bowl and burn. From one home to another in 14 hours. I am mixed up inside over what I didn’t say goodbye to enough times. I suggest Korean food for lunch. I miss being so good- mannered: tilting my bowl to have the last of my hot soup, using two hands to pass the com- munal kimchi dish and keeping my chopsticks out of the hardened rice I tried not to eat. I wish I could drink myself out of this bowl while I’m still scalding hot so I don’t feel me on the way down. I miss my tongue. How swollen it got from a soup burn. Re: Last night I dreamt of a poem I wrote to you on a plane a year ago Last January in Gangnam, at Oz board game cafe, we built train lines by playing Ticket to Ride until the owner said you’ve been playing the wrong way Before you my weekends were perfect successions of Americanos You said I had always wanted to travel I said I never wanted to leave America You asked me why do you work so hard I said I don’t know, I’m in love with being tired After you I bought fewer groceries we traded poems over dinner You wrote of every favor, I ask but one don’t forget me while you’re gone I wrote though I’m miles away I’m not really gone you’ll see me every day, in each rising sun Twelve months later I moved across America Upon landing I hit send I wonder what you’re doing now You replied steady and smooth I miss you. Guro Station, Line 1 In another dream, I’m bundled up in the warmth of fish-shaped bread. A treat in the winter. The smoke from a chestnut stand beckons me back to my apartment. I choose the subway instead. The ten-minute walk rings in my eardrum. It always sounds like this: “Teacher, where are you going? Where is your home?” 출입문 닫겠습니다. Track two sends me uptown to Gwanghwamun, where I walk journal-in-hand past palaces and stop to eat street food. I’ve had every taste in every season. I try to hold them all in my too-small palms. Track three drags me downtown with the sunset. After two years: two placements, a different alphabet, hundreds of students’ faces I wonder if it is possible to love another city or two different countries so tightly. 이 역은 타는 곳과 전동차 사이가 넓습니다. Guro held nine roads, all leading me home. I tried to pick out the words I knew in the poems painted on the glass doors, feeling the breath of each train car’s mouth swallowing me and the rest of the crowd. I would do anything to go back. 내리실 때 조심하시기 바랍니다. I still use the same alarm. I wake up on time, after the subway car halts in my sleep. I miss the way I became food on the trains entering Guro Station, leaving crumbs in my splintering. Dawn Angelicca Barcelona was a 2014-2016 ETA at Yangji Elementary School in Sejong City and Sinmirim Elementary School in Seoul. She currently works on the talent and recruitment team at MuleSoft in San Francisco
Danmuji
The recipe calls for water, rice vinegar, sugar, turmeric, and, of course, sliced daikon – a hybrid of a carrot and a rolling pin. The turmeric was unexpected, but will give the danmuji its signature neon yellow color and allow “quick pickling.” Okay. I boil the mixture and feel like a fraud in my concrete kitchen in a Lego-house condo in an East Austin development that has its own logo and economics-themed street names. I peek through mini blinds at a smug corgi mix trotting up Stock Avenue on a cheetah-print retractable leash. I am not a streetside eatery with white tiles, orange tabletops, little blue stools. I do not have a giant rice cooker or plastic-wrapped counter dedicated to kimbap construction. My streets are wide and my sidewalk is even. But the pickling juice is boiling, ready. I pour it over the radish slices in an open Tupperware. It sloshes and settles. The steam makes the container feel just a little too malleable. It’s fine. I place it in the fridge next to the pasta sauce and leave a dusting of turmeric on the cutting board, a trail exposing my attempt, and sit, mouth half watering, half waiting to get caught. Jenna Jaco is a 2015-2016 ETA at Changpyeong High School in Jeollanam-do.
Selfie Contest Winner: Grace Lee
First-year ETA Grace Lee is the winner of our selfie contest! Grace took these selfies with her 6-year-old-cousin. We asked her a few questions: What was it like meeting your 6-year-old cousin the first two times? I didn’t even know I had a second cousin until I was visiting my uncle’s family on my dad’s side in Busan. It had been two years since my family was able to see my cousin and her family. So I was really happy to meet my second cousin for the first time! His name is 영이. He was shy at first but once I sat down to ask him questions about his Legos and what he had made, he let me play with him. He beat me at car racing! I wanted to take photos with him and didn’t realize he was making silly faces until a few photos afterwards so I played along. I really enjoyed meeting him and I won’t have a chance to meet him again before I leave Korea but I’ll definitely remember our first time meeting each other. What are five words you would use to describe your cousin Patient, silly, inquisitive, welcoming, and kind. I know sometimes little kids can be shy but he opened right up once he knew I wanted to play with him. We also read an English book together – “Wheels on the bus go round and round,” and it was interactive where he had a “Say Pen,” so when you pressed the pen onto the words on the book, it would narrate the story to you. He sat in my lap and we read and sang the words from the book together. What has been your most precious moment with your cousin? The most precious moment with him was having him sit in my lap reading an English book was really special to me. Also, just being able to be silly with him with the funny selfies was a lot of fun. He’s a natural behind the camera and I definitely see him being a jokester as he grows older. A poem by the Editor-in-Chief, inspired by these silly selfies: That first conversation: what should the warm-up question be? What’s this book about? Shall we sing together and read? As the magic “Say Pen” reads the words aloud you imagine the wheels on the bus go ‘round One day stacking Lego blocks again might remind you of this song you sang when you were young. You might wonder where the tune came from. Where will you be when the song pulls you back to these four pictures? A different selfie-style pose before each screen flicker As soon as you grow as tall as your laughter, don’t forget what these pictures have captured: that first afternoon in Busan meeting Grace, your cousin smiling after the toy car race you were happy to win.