Expat in Seoul

One step out of the taxi and an hour from Seoul, I find myself in the place of her childhood. The late summer heat feels heavy in rural Songtan, South Korea. It presses on the tight spot in my center. Ascending to her grandmother’s apartment, I try to discard my labels - expat, American, teacher, her lover. This my first time in a traditional Korean home.

She is welcomed with a happy shout and hardy pat on the back. I bow a little and shyly give the appropriate greeting, annyeonghaseyo. Her grandmother is stout, gray and permed. She peers at me with small, shiny eyes and asks about my boyfriend. No boyfriend, anniyo.

Shoes off, we lounge on the living room floor. During summers as a child she slept here with her cousins and mother. Piled together on sleeping mats with cylindrical sawdust pillows, they would relocate to the bedroom when her uncle, the only person with a room of his own, went to work in the morning. Grandma would ward off the summer heat by sleeping on the veranda and grandpa took to the roof.

Grandma tells us she is going to the market to buy food for side dishes. Alone, I’m shown a piece of the old woman’s calligraphy. The swooping black strokes hang on the wall next to a dial phone. Dust motes float from furniture that has not moved in decades.

At the door, black plastic bags rustle containing Asian cabbage, scallions, radishes and campbell-early grapes. Grandma sets the deep purple fruit in a bowl and orders us to eat. With a firm pluck and plop, they are in our mouths. The meat easily slips out of the skin and we spit that along with the seeds back into the bowl.

In the kitchen, grandma soaks the vegetables in salt, chops and then deposits them into a large plastic bowl. She adds red pepper flakes, anchovy sauce and mixes it with her hand covered in a plastic glove. We squat around the kitchen and taste bits of the unfermented kimchi.

Let’s go, kaja. We’re outside, walking, and she tells me about playing soccer with her cousins in the courtyard. There weren’t as many cars here then, she explains. They had collected fireflies and stuck temporary tattoos onto the cement walls that still line the dark shortcut to her grandma’s apartment complex. Passing that place, she runs her hand over the secret spots, now covered with paint.

Everything is the same as it was when I was a kid, she sighs. The sun bows down beyond the sullied white of the apartment complex. The same to her, impossibly new and culturally mysterious to me.