Salvation

Strange Souvenirs #1: Anjung 안중

I.

One thing to know about Korea is that it’s a country run by evil little dogs with spherical haircuts. So you can imagine my surprise when I met Latte, the giant, androgynous sheepdog who lords over my favorite cafe. I’m not joking about the androgyny part: Latte has the energy of a canine drag queen. Every time I step into her cafe, she has a different elaborate hairstyle—sometimes 2 little braids sticking up like antennae, sometimes a little ponytail mohawk, sometimes pigtails or french braids. If she has a penis, that is none of my business.

I spend a lot of time with Latte in this cafe. I would spend longer, but Latte benevolently shares it with roughly 7 cats and I am, unfortunately, allergic to them. I always start sneezing at about the hour mark, so working there is a race against time. I am there now, about halfway through my iced 녹차 latte, trying to start my first Strange Souvenir. The winter sun is setting behind me, caressing the wooden floor with long golden fingers. For some reason, it seems fitting to start in the present—the first episode can provide context for the rest of the series. I do not know where the story began and I do not know where it will end, I just know where I am now. The problem is, the present is not the best place from which to mine memories. Usually, when concocting a mythology, time is the secret ingredient. My first Souvenir is still in the making.

My town is called Anjung and it’s about 2 hours south of Seoul. I have lived here for a year and a half. Anjung is stiflingly suburban, and the kind of place that would only elicit love or hate from its inhabitants. It’s not a place that demands to be remembered. I will remember it though. I will remember its squat establishments, all stacked on top of each other, and their constant turnover; a boba shop that last month was a bakery and next month will be something new and the same. I will remember its sidewalkless streets, narrow and constantly jammed with impatient cars, all trivial to the black and white magpies waltzing above. I will remember the uniform apartment buildings that occupy the place where the sky should be. They are a poor imitation of vastness during the day. But at night—when their windows come alive—they begin to look like the whole universe. Pale yellow constellations, zig-zagging up the concrete face, exquisite in their ordinariness. Fool’s gold. I love it here. I have always been a scavenger of specialness; Anjung makes me feel like I am back in Wisconsin. It has no obvious grandeur, but it is precious just the same. It takes a loving eye to unearth its magic.

Unfortunately, I still haven’t learned that the magic never comes when it’s called. I was reminded of this while searching for something to write my first Souvenir about. Recently, there’s been some interesting graffiti popping up on the neon recycling bins scattered through town—weird, whimsical graffiti from a potentially multi-national gang. The first one I discovered appeared on a bin right in front of my apartment a few months ago. It’s a pink, polka-dotted cat with stubby legs, a head made of two triangles and a grumpy little face. Around it are words written in the Cyrillic alphabet and Chinese characters. I’ve tried unsuccessfully to translate them and decided their meaning is best left to the imagination. I’ve kept watch over it through the months; still it stands, a little wind-weathered but in all its odd glory. Once I noticed the first one, I started noticing them everywhere: a teal owl, a ballet dancer, a geometric mailman with sassy little boots. I’ve been silently observing and burning for answers. I thought maybe I could create some of my own, and set out one day to see if I could spark some inspiration.

I tried my best, but it was cold and recently I’ve been feeling like shit. It’s not crisis shit, but something maybe more insidious. Fair weather shit. The natural product of a calamity-made mind experiencing calm. The unrelenting sidekick of your 20s. I know its name, although I hate saying it out loud: hideous, heavy, lopsided insecurity. I am not the kindest person, even at the best of times, but insecurity makes me downright cruel—to others and to myself.

It’s the question of what’s next that’s truly been eating me. When it comes to talking about the future, we all have stories we tell ourselves and others. These stories float in the space between truth and lie. They are pure potential, nothing else. If you believe it, it’s as true as it possibly can be. But one of my most reliable stories has started to ring false. “What’s after Korea?” I’m asked. “Oh, once I save enough, I’ll move back to Paris, get my next degree.” It sounds so simple. It’s definitely possible, which is maybe why I’ve leaned on it for so long. But the truth is starting to dig its way up, glinting guiltily.

The truth is that I’m terrified to go back to Paris. For so many reasons. I don’t know if I’m ready yet. I don’t know when I will be. It feels so final. I’m not ready for the total commitment it takes to put permanent roots down abroad. I’m not ready for the constant legal hoops to jump through. I’m not ready to sacrifice different, foreign horizons. And I’m also terrified of the opposite. Scared that if I wait too long, I can never return. Scared I will be like Odysseus, searching for a home across stormy, wine-dark seas. A home that, unlike Odysseus, may have never existed in the first place. If I’m honest, that is my greatest fear. It makes me sick thinking that Paris is the lost city, that it belongs in my memory. Will I lose out on salvation if I arrive at the pearly gates too soon? I’m convinced I need to purge myself before I go, perform some kind of ritual purification. I think about my balcony in the 13ème, of the blurry hours I spent there: smoking, listening to music, drinking wine, watching the street lights come on, thinking about falling down the 17 étages, wondering if it would have been an accident, imagining my splintered body lying among the littered cigarette butts. I know Paris is not mine. But am I hers? I’ve always been ravenous, but I’ve only recently come face to face with the limits of my appetite. Can I have it all? Can I lose it all? Is it even mine to lose?

Eventually, I gave up on taking photos of the graffiti. It was cold and it didn’t seem like the story was ready to be told yet, at least not by me. I ended up back in front of my apartment, the polka-dotted cat revealing nothing.

II.

Feeling defeated, the next day I went to my favorite cafe to try to get something on the page. The door jingled when I walked in and I waited expectantly for Latte to come say hi. She didn’t show and I figured she was probably in the flower shop next door. The shop is connected to the cafe by a fragile screen door and the animals drift in and out between the two. I haven’t gone into the flower shop yet because I have yet to have a flower-worthy occasion. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.

I ordered my iced 녹차 latte and sat at my usual table next to the window with the magnolia tree. One of the cats, Lemon, came to join me. I like Lemon because she’s kind of fucked-up looking and always gets bullied by the mischievous orange kitten whose name I do not know. She sat on top of my computer case and watched the magpies out the window.

Some time later, a shadow fell over my laptop and a stranger sat down at my table. This is not a normal occurrence in Korea so I looked around in surprise, wondering if anyone else noticed the insane social faux pas happening in my corner of the cafe. Nobody else reacted. I inspected the newcomer as she gestured for me to remove my headphones. Across from me was a Korean woman, probably around 50 or 60 years old, although you can never truly tell here. She was wearing a white parka and a purple scarf with long fringy tassels.

“You speak English, right?” She asked me. Oh, I thought, she’s one of those, figuring she was trying to get me to join her “church.” I waited for the inevitable evangelization and felt comforted by the understanding of the situation. Salvation I could handle.

“Yes, I’m an English teacher here.” I said.

“I’ve seen you here before.” Her voice was husky, in that glamorous, 30 years of smoking cigarettes way. I liked her against my will. I have an affinity for cool, assertive older women; I can’t wait to be one.

“It’s my favorite cafe,” I laughed.

“You have good taste,” she said.

We lapsed into silence. I could feel her studying my face, but I was having a hard time looking at hers. It was like looking into the sun, nothing was really identifiable. Except for a pair of liquid brown eyes. They drilled into me knowingly.

“What are you writing?” She asked. I laughed again, this time more nervously.

“Oh, nothing really. Just trying to figure out what to do with my life.” I said, half joking.

“Oh, that’s easy.” Her eyes were glowing with a strange fire. The room darkened as if a spotlight had been turned on. “When I was younger, probably around your age, I also lived abroad. I moved to the states, to a town in the midwest.” A shiver ran through me. Inexplicably, I knew what would come next. “A town called Normal. Normal, Illinois.” Like a condemnation, there it was.

She continued. “I was an exchange student, one of a select few. My father got rich during the war. Spam money. It’s a common misconception that American soldiers are singularly responsible for the popularity of Spam here in Korea, but that’s only the beginning of the story. Really, it was my 아버지. He had a trick with carcasses: no matter how desolate or unsalvageable one looked, he could pinpoint the exact amount of salt and sugar needed to make it edible, to make it delicious. People traveled far and wide to get their hands on the stuff. They started bringing their corpses to him, any animal they had lying around—pigs and cows, the aging family cat—he would carve them up and season them and birth out those perfect, fleshy, pink cubes. People called him a miracle maker, a god, the way he could work skin and sinew into something standard, something consumable, something square. Even the American soldiers would line up to get their hands on some of his homemade Spam and it’s his recipe that is the gold standard worldwide today. He lived and breathed Spam: it was his passion, his empire and his only love. It killed him in the end and it was grotesque. You can’t live on Spam alone. When he died, I almost expected his will to dictate laying him to rest in a coffin made of aluminum. Spam made me an orphan. And it was Spam that sent me to Normal, Illinois. I arrived with my clothes still smelling of it.”

Lemon jumped off the table, startling me out of the Spam-induced reverie, but the woman ignored her. “I studied architecture. I wanted to get as far away from the greasy world of Spam as I could. I found comfort in the sterility of bricks and steel. I joined the cult of Le Corbusier and dreamed about his Plan Voisin and its concrete crucifixes. I was respectable. I dated the right girls and smoked cigars with my classmates on the weekends. I got my driver’s license. I thought I had escaped it all. And then I met her.” She paused for a second, gathering herself. “She changed everything. She was studying psychology and we met outside the school library. We had both gone out for a smoke. She rolled filterless cigarettes - they tasted like death and made your throat burn. She shared one with me along with a warning that I would never go back. I never did. She told me she wanted to uncover the secret of Wanting, that’s what she was really in school for. ‘Fuck all of this psychotic DSM bullshit. The only truly fucked up thing is Normal,’ she spat to anyone who would hear it. But Wanting, that was different. She was convinced there was a trick to it, a part of the brain or a gene that contained Desire, all of it, all the Desire in a person, all the Desire in the world. What she wanted to do with it, I don’t know. Maybe just hold it all at once, in her hands, watch it scratch its way out up her arms. Maybe it was too much for her, maybe she wanted to carve it out of herself and bury it in black soil. I don’t know. All I know is that she intoxicated me, she settled in my lungs like the filterless smoke that clung to her hair. And then she disappeared halfway through our senior year and I was never the same after that. She woke something up in me. Maybe it was my Wanting, maybe she discovered the secret after all. I quit my degree; all of it was suddenly too sterile. Spam started to make sense to me. I would have stayed in Normal, Illinois. I would have died there, been buried under concrete. She saved me, and I will never be able to repay her.” Her eyes were far away.

“So that’s why it’s easy. Life. There’s no such thing as a crossroads. Every choice you make is a violent action, the act of creation, trailing blood and amniotic fluid. Carnal Wanting, in all of its glory, punching a ragged hole through the tissue paper of this life. There’s this grand deception that if you choose cake, you can’t have pie. That there’s a finite amount of stomach space, that it’s square-shaped, that you must choose wisely. It’s a lie. It’s all inside of you somewhere, all your Need, and it’s insatiable. You can have anything you want if you’re hungry and savage and violent enough to truly Want it.” She took a final sounding breath.

“So fucking gorge yourself.”

III.

I half forgot about this incident—winter has chilled my brain into something slippery. But a few weeks later, I woke up in the middle of the night. I lay in bed for a while before reluctantly turning on my light. I didn’t look at my phone in the hopes I could muster up some sleep eventually—if you don’t check the time you aren’t in the conscious world yet. Instead, I peered out my bedroom window, trying to get an idea of what the day would become. It was still nighttime, but the single street light out of my window illuminated an empty road, glittering slightly with a fresh dusting of snow. Suddenly, my room felt overwhelmingly stuffy, so I unlatched my window and a puff of icy air smacked me in the face. I leaned out, breathing in the world. It felt like snorting something crystalline, a rush of lucidity, straight to the brain.

I studied the street. It looked further away than normal, as if my building had grown. I looked down and realized I was back on my Paris balcony, 17 floors above the ground. I thought about the woman and her brown eyes. Gorge yourself. But how? I turned around and looked back into my room. My Korean room, cozy and familiar, my clutter covering the desk and my artwork splashed over the walls. I leaned backwards, letting my back arch over the edge of the balcony. My arms dangled loosely down as I gazed up into the dark. It was still snowing gently; the flakes lightly pricked my face. The sky was black and endless. I stretched further and further, towards nothing. It all felt unreal—like a dream—until vertigo embraced me and I fell backwards into the cold and empty air.

I didn’t even think to scream. All my brain could really comprehend was the sensation of the freezing wind rushing past my body. I kept my eyes wide open. I didn’t want to miss a second. Gorge yourself. My window stretched further and further away from me, the golden glow from my bedside lamp the only evidence that it was my room and not a stranger’s. It got smaller and smaller. The rest of the building’s eyes were dark.