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I try not speaking to anyone I don’t know if I can help it. My limited command of the language is embarrassing, and even if I can get past the initial “hello” and “how are you doing,” the next-level conversations stump me. A person could be asking me either how the weather is or if I am going to eat the poop on the ground and it’d sound the same to me.
Even with the taxi driver, instead of saying the address, I show him a screenshot from my phone. I’ve tried to say the address in the past, but there must be something wrong with my pronunciation because I’m often met with an Ihae mothaetseumnida, or “I don’t understand.”
Mrs. Ji is surprised to see me when I arrive. “You home early.”
“Yes.” I lift my two bags of groceries. “I’m going to cook dinner tonight so you can go home early as well.”
One of her eyebrows shoots upward and the other scrunches down. “You cook?”
In the face of this alarm, I try to reassure her. “Yes. Soybean paste soup and jeon.” When Mrs. Ji doesn’t move, I try to think of the Korean words. “Mu doenjang guk. Jeon. Dwaeji gogi jeon.”
“You make?”
“Yes. I make.”
“I’m cook.” She reaches for the bags, which I swing away from her.
“No. I want to cook for Wansu tonight. Yujun said you have another kitchen? Should I use that? Point me in the right direction.”
She shakes her head violently. “No. No. I cook. I cook everything.”
I fear we are about to get into a wrestling match over the groceries. “Just this once. I want to do this for Wansu. I promise I won’t poison her.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“I almost killed Wansu tonight.” My face is in the pillow. I’m too embarrassed to look into the camera.
“Eomeo-nim,” he corrects.
“I almost killed Eomeo-nim tonight.”
“I don’t think that’s possible. Were you driving?”
“I appreciate you thinking that it’s something involving heavy machinery and not my cooking.”
“Ahhhh.” He suddenly remembers our conversation. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“You know how the gochujang and soybean paste are packaged in the same plastic tubs?”
“Oh.”
“Yes.”
“Did you taste it before you served it?”
“Yes, but I thought it was supposed to be that spicy and I was unused to it because I grew up eating spaghetti rather than soybean stew.” I flip over to my side and scrunch up my face pitifully. “I put so much red pepper paste into the soup that I felt like I had fire coming out of my ears. Wansu—Eomeo-nim,” I say as Yujun opens his mouth to remind me I keep using the wrong identifier, “took one bite and started choking. I jumped up and tried to give her the Heimlich because I thought she had a radish lodged in her throat, but her breathing problems were a reaction to all the spice. She had to tap my arm five times before I realized I was actually preventing her from breathing rather than dislodging a foreign object. It was one of the more humiliating experiences of my life.”
Yujun clears his throat, stretches his neck, rubs a hand across his eyes, presses his lips together.
“Let it out.” I sigh.
Laughter bursts out like a waterfall. I drum my fingers against the mattress while he gets the giggles out of his system. Near tears when he finally gathers himself, he swipes a knuckle under each eye and apologizes. “Mianhae.”
My heart instantly melts. Yujun makes an effort to always speak English when I’m around. Even when we ran into people here in Seoul, he would greet the others in English, a subtle push for them to speak in my language as well. English proficiency is a mark of an educated Korean, he’s told me. Most of his acquaintances know enough to hold a conversation. But despite this kind and inclusive gesture, he slips up when he’s tired or his defenses are low. I love hearing him talk in Korean. It’s a beautiful language, full of imagery. I mean, how can you not love a language where the word for fish is mul gogi? The literal translation is “water meat.”
“You’re forgiven. I guess the bright side is that the dish wasn’t too hard to make, and if I hadn’t mixed up the soybean paste and the gochujang, it would’ve been delicious.” Before I’d added the spice, it had good flavor, with nicely cooked radishes that weren’t too mushy, and a savory base.
“You’ll have to make it for me when I come home.”
“I will.”
Home. The word lingers between us. “Home” should be a banned word for us. Using it reminds us of what we don’t have. How we are oceans apart.
“I should get some rest,” I say.
“Me too. Good night, Hara.”
“Good night.” After he hangs up, I stare at the ceiling and wonder why he didn’t call me aegiya this time. Maybe Wansu is the only one who sees the end clearly and she’s trying to prevent a disaster. I fling an arm over my eyes and try to push those negative thoughts out. Yujun and I were both tired. That’s all. Don’t make more out of it than it is, I chide myself. I turn my phone on and scroll to a photo that we took together at the river. Both our eyes are closed, but we’re smiling. He told me I had a beautiful eye smile. I trace the upside-down crescents of his eyes and then mine.
