Memory Collage 1

“If you want to go faster, go alone. If you want to go further, go together. 빨리 가려면 혼자 가고 멀리 가려면 함께 가라.”

*

My mother never talked about her parents. For holidays we visited an old lady she called Aunt that we were supposed to call Grandmother. She was a vivacious woman who ran a Yukgejang restaurant by herself in a small town near Gunsan, who upon seeing us would give me and my sister 5,000-won bills to spend at the supermarket next door. The two of us would then play a little game, each buying different candies and trinkets without sparing a dime or going over, and comparing who spent the money better. Short curly hair dyed jet-black, eyes big and unblinking as if in constant suspicion, Grandmother bore no resemblance to my mother. They were friendly to each other, but too friendly to be family. At the back of the restaurant Grandmother kept a neat pile of Buddhist bibles, one of which was called Bulja-jisongkyung, which sounded awfully similar to a vulgarity for the male part, and never failed to make my sister and me giggle until we left. Maybe it was all the sweets, maybe it was the unfortunately named scripture, but I never could remember how my mother said goodbye to her aunt.

*

“If you leave the fan on with the windows closed, you’ll asphyxiate. 창문 닫고 선풍기 틀면 질식한다.”

*

Vitiligo is a condition that causes skin to lose pigmentation in patches. The condition is long term and develops through the lifetime of the affected person. It is difficult to predict its progress: sometimes the patches stop forming without treatment, but in most cases the pigment loss continues to spread throughout lifetime. The skin rarely gets its color back.

The first night I meet him I study the map of his vitiligo. There are colorless islands, all different shapes and sizes, dotted across the ocean of his skin. The most noticeable ones are on his right hand; a few islands aspiring to be continents. Then on his belly leading down to his pelvis there is a narrow archipelago: the busy concentration makes the components look like determined birds in migratory formation. As they near the earth they become smaller, paler, more spread. Flying is a group effort, but landing is an individual responsibility.

Around his ankle they become minute, hidden in the forest of hair, whiter by contrast. Once islands, then birds, now raindrops—disappearing into thirsty dirt. I claim these mine. On this wordless, feverless, borderless territory, quiet and close to earth, I am invited to a body, given its map and let to navigate, colonize what I will. In the surrender, conquest becomes defeat, defeat reverence. What I find I lose immediately, gladly.

*

 “If you leave your nail clippings lying around, they turn into your doppelgängers overnight and do all the bad deeds. 손톱 자르고 안 치우면 귀신이 되어서 나쁜 짓 하고 다닌다.”

*

Alex Johnson used to smoke within the 10 feet radius of the entrance to the residence hall. He and I had the same morning class for which we left the building at the same time, and I used to walk into the cloud of his exhale more often than I found tolerable. Once, I told him to step aside. “My bad,” he said and adjusted the red baseball cap he was wearing backward. “Just that the signal’s better on my phone here.” He smiled and didn’t move.

Alex Johnson collected guns as a hobby. In his off-campus house he had a closet full of hunting rifles and pistols at the corner of his living room. He liked to show off his collection to his guests, of which there were many, for he threw many parties. One Sunday morning I woke up and heard my roommate weeping in the hallway, talking on the phone. “He just pulled it out, and the next thing you know, he was on the ground. His head was everywhere.” His head was everywhere.

The college threw a memorial for him at the chapel, and his Phi Psi brothers installed a large white board on the wall of their chapter living room for people to leave him messages. In a blue ink someone had written: “Rest In Peace Al, you deserve heaven.” A different handwriting had added: “and more.” After a semester they took down the board. Against the empty wall they rested a big oak table sideways when they weren’t playing beer pong on it.

The following spring a deer ran through the all-glass door of the cafeteria and bled to death. It was a young male, most likely mistaking glass for air. In East Asia deer symbolize divinity, long life. Along with cranes and tortoise they are revered as special animals with healing power. People make medicine out of their antlers—cutting them off, boiling them with herbs for days, and drinking the broth. Sometimes they drink deer blood. Some pagan beliefs advise fatally ill people to drink the blood straight from the animal’s throat with a straw while it’s still alive. Cases have been reported in which the virus in wild deer’s blood infected the drinkers and killed them within the span of a few days. Some called this foolery, some called this salvation.

It took the cleaning staff the whole afternoon to remove the deer parts off the floor. The next week a new door had been amounted. On the new door there were translucent letters printed, warning people and animals alike of the possible collision. There followed no memorials or walls of remembrance, but no more deer died on campus since.

*

“Don’t pout. 입 내밀지 마.”

*

In Dublin you know the winter arrived when you smell the coal. Around November when the days get shorter and the temperature drops, the evenings are shrouded in mist and in it a smell is trapped. A smell so dense and heavy that after you walk through it, it laminates itself onto the follicles of your hair. Every time you turn your head you feel like you’re walking through the aftermath of a wildfire. It is alarming at first, then you’re assured by the knowledge that there had been no casualties; nothing had been burned that didn’t create warmth.

*

“Recycle. 재활용 해라.”

*

I like entertaining the notion that strength is many things. I tell myself: beauty is strength. Wealth is strength. Power is strength. When in truth all of these are false, mere substitutes. Strength is strength: the ability to endure and persist through pain, to retain resilience and continue, this is strength. But willfully conflating a quality that I long to possess but do not at the moment, can create a necessary pause, an antidote for helplessness. And learning to allow myself that pause, that breath, this is the abandon that springs me back to strength.

nominated for The Short Nonfiction Prize at The Kenyon Review (2019)