Washing Machines Are Very Difficult to Use

A very special blog post this week.

My Ondol, a Love Story

 

Korean floors are heated, standard. It’s a wonderful invention to have in my dumpy little apartment.

Until it breaks in the dead of winter.

My control for the heater is some puzzle box on the wall, all Korean save for some stickers for “heater,” and “shower.” Through some monkeying I’ve figured out what does what, though it didn’t take me long to realize what a flashing red “01” meant. No heat. No hot water. Temperatures plummeting. At first it was a matter of flipping the switch a few times. Not a problem, mere inconvenience.

The problem grew like a tumor over the next week. What once took one reset now took five, ten. An hour of jumping up to reset it—five minutes of operation, then failure. Begging, pleading with the box. Additional layers of clothing. A wife-beater under a t-shirt under a sweatshirt under a coat, still shivering. Slippers on at all times. I wrote out a fevered journal bitching about the cold.

2013: 02:13, 11:20 pm.

So cold. Wearing a hoodie and sweat pants huddled under the blankets reading the curse of lono

Tried for two hours to get the heater to work. Sitting at a cold 16 celsius. It’s a different 16 celsius from most days, this is colder and meaner.

Heater ain't working tonight. Light the signal fires, keep twice as many men on watch. Binoculars and flashlights, watch for icebergs.

Tap the switch on, off. Heater blinks red, angrily tells me in korean to “점검”. That’s in Korean. Translates to check. Check what? The heater flashes the 16 display, shows the yellow hurricane swirl icon that indicates water heating. Ten seconds later it flashes back to angry red, check, temperature reading 01 celsius. Turn it off. Cycle it. On, off, on, off. This typically brings the orange cyclone back, and at that point it’s a crapshoot to see if the heater turns all the way on. Only now the red light is staying. No orange swirl. Cold. Frost forms on the display.

Let it sit. Rest. These things take time. The heater needs its space, that’s fine. Let it go. Let it get cold, let it miss the heat. In the meantime, put erica’s thick wool coat that she stole from our grandmother on her. She’s on the floor, bless her soul. Taken in by the bait and switch of a heated floor which does not heat. I dive back under the covers, fully submerged in three layers of comforter, blanket, and winter jacket. Slide my feet back and forth to make heat from the friction of flaky feet on 300 thread count Egyptian cotton. Just like the pilgrims used to.

The trick is to let the heater want it. Read. Go back, turn it on. Off. The cyclone reappears. Rejoicing. 15 degrees. Panic. We’re dropping, fast. I wait for the red anger to reappear on the display. Nothing. I hear a loud crunch deep within the apartment building. I shoot my head back at the display to check it. Holding at 17. After each of these sentences I look back over my shoulder to see that the fire’s still burning, that we won’t be frozen tomorrow. We did it. Someone get me a baby to kiss. 

---

I asked around at work the next day. My bilingual co-worker Ted’s my liaison for any sort of apartment problems, he had a technician sent over. That night the problem persisted. A knock at the door in the evening, I opened it to see an old Korean man with a clipboard. He muttered something in Korean.

“영어주세요,” I tell him, which is a rough butchery of “English, please.” Nothing. He looks inside, sees my sister huddled in cocoon of blankets on the floor. Something else in Korean, I’m not getting any of it. “Wanna come in?” I ask him. He shakes his head at my motioning.

He clicks his tongue rapid-fire, tck-tck-tck-tck, then turns and walks down the stairwell.

I check back with Ted the next day. The problem is the location of the water heater. My landlord doesn’t know where it is, the technician couldn’t find the thing, and apparently no one in the building can lock down exactly where it’s hiding. It’ll cost me ten-thousand won to pay the technician, roughly ten bucks. I give the money to Ted. Twenty minutes later he gives it back to me, saying the landlord would take care of fixing it, that we shouldn’t pay the technician. I've learned to not question these matters

I go home that night, it’s working slightly better, but not operating above 19c. To get to that point is another half-hour of flipping the box off and on. Erica tells me the technician came in again, just barged through the door, saw her, turned around without a word. Time passes. I try the heater a few more times. Suddenly, life. Not just at 19c, either, but climbing up to 23. Life flows back into the apartment, all is well. I wash my hands with warm water for the first time in days. Boiling water for hair washing is no longer necessary. Sleeping on the floor is again a luxury. All is well, until the next core component of my apartment breaks and the dance starts again.

Candyland

The best way to find coffee in Korea is to walk in a straight line for five minutes. Choose one of the twenty coffee shops you’ve passed. The same applies for fried chicken, premium baked goods, internet cafes, noraebang karaoke bars, or cosmetic shops. If you’re in a shopping hot-spot, those numbers double and triple. This is the land of the five-story Starbucks shop, home of the brave. Cafes bordering bakeries bordering specialty single-origin tea shoppes. Dunkin Donuts competing with Krispy Kreme, Paris Baguette fighting Paris Croissant.

Bakeries carry goods you've never dreamed of.

Sheet cakes don’t exist here, and apart from your kid’s birthday parties, no one misses them. What you’ll find instead are carefully sculpted towers of brownies, mortared together by delicate crème and raspberries. Cakes where fruit takes center stage rather than a supporting role, baskets of strawberries and kiwi lovingly wrapped in light crust. Bread from another planet, culinary machinations driven by spinach, smoked gouda, cranberries, figs, or gold flakes.

All kinds of good drinks too. This isn’t an advertisement for Korea’s food game, but it’s well beyond anything back in Pittsburgh. It’s cheap. Aforementioned bread with all the fixins is ₩2,500. Blueberry lattes with shreds of fruit in the purple foam are four bucks.  Ice-cream filled mochi with actual matcha powder are two bucks a pop. Individually wrapped opulence. The pendulum swings both ways though, fifths of whiskey for a hundred bucks a pop. Cask strength Johnny Walker Blue for three months of pay. Bath towels will run you $20 starting. Protein powder for eighty bucks a pound. The harmony found between five dollar dinners and fifty dollar bedsheets is loud, popping like a Victrola’s needle.

Fishing With Sapporo and Perdomo

Friday night. 

Cold at 42 degrees and drizzling, but warmer than the last month. I couldn’t be cooped up inside. I grabbed my jacket, went downstairs, bought a can of beer, and got comfortable smoking a cigar on the patio outside. I was fishing for someone to talk to, using myself as bait. Here, if you’re drinking in a public place, people will just start talking to you. Alcohol makes the wheels turn.

Three teenagers walked past me, jaws hanging open. The air was dead, I’m swimming in a cloud of smoke and doing some damage to the 500ml can of Sapporo. A father and his son walk past, the boy is being dragged along once he notices that I’m not Korean. I give him a smile and a nod, he’s paralyzed with curiosity. His father is chatting on his phone, tugging at his arm, and the two disappear down the street. A few mothers walk by, one gives me a look, the other stomps down the street purposefully in her heels.

I expected more people to be out with the warmer weather—I’m told that the patio outside of the convenience mart is a big gathering place in nice weather. I keep smoking, check my phone. 10:05, early. Two women walk past, and I recognize them from months ago. After a few seconds, they recognize me. “Ah!” they both cry, and hurry over.

“How does it work?” Justine asked. Nickname Beyoncé. She was pointing at the cigar, both are fascinated.

“Just kind of puff it in, you know, don’t breathe it in all the way,” I said. I tap my neck, then my chest, and make a cross with my forearms. Korean body language is different.

Her cocked eyebrow told me she didn’t quite get it. Her English is practical but not fluent.

“You know,” I said, “like this.” I take a hit; let it sit in my mouth, the smoke slowly spilling out. I’m old hat at this, and I’m not ashamed to admit I goosed it a bit to look cool. Wearing a black jacket, white tanktop, and jeans, it seemed like the proper thing to do.

“Okay, okay, okay,” she said. “마자,마자.” They both mean the same thing. I hand her the cigar.

She took a hit, her friend Jinny leaning in to watch like a kid at a magic show. Justine breathes in, takes a huge rip of the cigar, doubles over coughing.

“No, no,” she cries, slapping her chest. More coughing, deep, throaty coughing, the coughing you do over a toilet after you throw up.

I smile and take another monster drag, bathe the area in fog.

“괜찮어?” I ask. Are you alright?

“Oooh!” She cries, impressed, then doubles over to cough more.

“Very nice,” Jinny says, flashing a bright, straight smile. Most Korean girls don’t smile, but most Korean women don’t have a smile as beautiful as hers.

“How many have you smoked?” Jinny asked, inspecting the Perdomo wrapper.

“In my life?” I said.

“No, today,”

Koreans don’t get cigars.

“Just this one,” I said. I held it out, and with my right hand showed its original length.

“One a day?” I told them one every few weeks. “Ah, ah,” the two said, harmonizing. Justine has recovered by now. They chew it over in Korean to one another, and then make cutting motions at where the midpoint of the cigar would have been.

“In half,” they say, trying to figure out the point of having a cigar so long. To them, you buy a long cigar and cut off as many servings as you’d like to smoke.

“Not quite,” I say, smiling. “I’ll just show you next time.” I offer her the cigar again, she turns it down.

I’m surprised she tried it at all. In my experience, people usually don’t try new things unless the media picks up on a craze. Apart from the few punk crowds that every culture has, people here seem pretty happy fitting in with one another. People smoke cigarettes, and they’re cheap. A pack of Marlboros is ₩2,500. Korean brands are ₩2,000 or less. When people drink, it’s Soju and beer. Crazy people mix the two to make 소맥, literally Soju and the word for beer, mixed.

It’s only fitting that the next night we went out for Soju and beer. We smoked a bit, too. Justine was working on a pack of This Plus! cigarettes, fashioned with a whale on the outside. Jinny was smoking menthols with a pearl you crack in the filter for an extra blast of mint.

I like smoking. Tobacco, and especially cigarettes, goes well with the rule of cool. Smoking doesn’t make you cool, smoking itself isn’t cool, but if you’re doing something cool and you’ve got a cigarette stuck on your lower lip, you’re really hitting it. Eating chicken isn’t that cool—we were originally supposed to go out for 순대, pig heart and intestine, but the go-to place was sold out. It’s a hot ticket item. If we were eating pig heart and smoking cigarettes, that’d be too cool for school. Next time we’ll have to give that a go.

Even in the cold I managed to find some friends. I can’t imagine how nice it’ll be in the spring.

Western Condensation, Osmosis.

I’m standing outside of a Kentucky Fried Chicken. There’s a specialty hotdog shop across the street, I can see an Outback Steakhouse, and I can hear English conversations as background noise. My brain’s first reaction is to cling onto these like flotsam. Everything else gets sorted down to a lower priority, right now I need to think, process, sink my teeth into the important English waveband. I can tune in, even if the station’s only playing stupid messages like “Wow, this is just like New York!” or “KFC sounds good right now.”

Down the street there’s an old dwarf of a Korean man. He’s angry at everything, the type of drunk that stumbles when he walks, then stops to curse the street. His face is ribbed with wrinkles, and he’s got the thinnest frost of white hair. He’s wearing a backpack, carrying a white umbrella. He’s mad and he wants money, and no one’s biting. He tries me. Doesn’t even ask, just sticks his hand out and grunts at me.

“Get outta here,” I tell him. Don’t even bother in Korean.

“Ah!” he shouts, “Ah! Ah!” he aims his umbrella at me, looks around to see if anyone else can help. No one’s looking at this angry son of a bitch, no one likes him.  He keeps grunting and brushing the hair above his ear, cursing me.

“Alright, fuck off,” I said.

He stops swatting his hair, manages to look angrier.

“Ah! You watch your mouth. Ah! Get outta my country!” It takes about thirty seconds for him to say this, he’s too busy grunting and barking in Korean every few words. I give him a level look and don’t say anything else. No point in arguing with a bum. At this point he realizes that he’s definitely not getting any money out of me, curses me again, and shakes his umbrella one last time. I watch him stumble down the street, swatting invisible flies around his head.

Itaewon does that to people.

Some cities have Chinatown. Itaewon is the opposite, some condensation of the western hemisphere with Europe thrown in free of charge. The foreigner population is mostly fed by the large American military base nearby. There’s no theme, no planning, everything is slammed together. You can buy a shot of Jagermeister on the street, eat kebabs from Pakis, watch a football match at one many London-style pubs. It’s an international hub, the official language is neon light, the currency is liquor, the population is an even split of everyone from Earth.

     There are bars, there are clubs, and there's the nebula of social hierarchy to go along with these places. Dive bars exist underneath high-rise clubs with a twenty-thousand won cover. At one point I walked past a huge wearing a down jacket, its owner picking poop off the street with toilet paper.

"That's a Great Dane, motherfucker!" someone shouts. "Fuck yeah, I know my dogs like nobody's business. Hey, Wang! Wang! Don't you fuckers eat dog?"

"Yeah, but not like that, not the Korean way. You gotta stir-fry that shit! I'm barely Korean at all, I've gotta eat it like a Chink! Stir fry that dog up!"

The dog offered no opinion.

Whenever I go to Itaewon I rediscover a whole group that I hate. They’re the boorish, the too-drunk, the too-loud, the foreigners who have washed out or never tried in the first place. Americans in their mid-40s do the same awful shuffling dance they do on a girls night out in the states, cheer at tired old songs like Piano Man. People fall into a table in a bar, knock glasses over, laugh as they break, drunkenly walk away.

It’s the least Korean place in Seoul. There’s a hint of the country under the peeling wallpaper of American food and Ford Expeditions parked on the street, but you have to dig for it—after a few seconds you stop trying. More than anything, it’s a guilty pleasure.

Sometimes you need to take a break from the whole Asia thing, I get that and support it completely, but for some Itaewon is life-support. It’s a little bit of home for anyone from anywhere, but it’s stretched so thin that you wonder why anyone bothers with a bad imitation of something that might have been best left alone in the first place.

The Sad State of 21st Century Treasure Hunting

Every inch of Seoul’s streets are covered with something to put money into. Vending machines are everywhere, sell everything. People come to pay homage to the gods of Pepsi and Coca Cola, drop the equivalent of 30 cents into an instant, four ounce cup of coffee. Gourmet varieties of coffee machines exist, for fifty cents you can get a green tea latte, caramel macchiato, or ten shades of Americano.

Electronic skill games are everywhere, and they offer a galaxy of prizes. Boring things like stuffed animals are commonplace, stranger machines offer cans of Spam, beans, or tins of cookies. They’re leashed with zip-ties, and I’m certain that no one has ever fished one out. The games are cheap, bright, loud, and if you’re a masochist; fun.

Pusher-style games offer greater prizes for a steeper price of admission. You maneuver a rod right, then up, choosing each direction only once. When the time runs out the game pushes the rod forward, attempting to knock a prize off of a shelf.

At first the games are easy to resist, but Korea carpet bombs you with cheap, blinking fun. I held out longer than any reasonable person could be asked, but eventually I went for the pusher machine. This one had knockoff Bose earbuds, bottom-dollar mp3 players, handcuffs, sexy underwear, and lighters.

My money wasn’t even in the bill slot when an old-timer appeared out of thin-air behind me. He was short, hands clasped behind his back, and wearing a Fidel Castro Hat. Worse, he wanted to help. Korean advice usually falls between flagellation and public humiliation.

“So, what do I do here?” I ask him. He understood very little English. The game-clock was ticking in the background.

“Right, up, up, no no no no, no, right,” he cried. Grating, kuh-huh-huh laughter. I pushed the rod right, up, missed, and successfully wasted a dollar on nothing. He walked away cackling, cursing me under his breath.

Fire filled my lungs. I bit back a thousand ways to say “fuck you,” knowing they’d be lost on him. I dug around in my pocket, past my keys, and fished out a crinkled old bill. Slapped it onto the glass, smoothed it, fed it into the machine. This time I chose my target, a small cell-phone charm. Hardly worth the price of admission, I’m sure some poor Chinese person made them by the thousands every morning, but it looked like a willing victim. I started moving the rod, and once again the Korean man has teleported next to me. Now he’s cheering me on with an endless stream of Korean percolating with angry sounds. Right, right, ne, up-pa, ne ne ne, ani, ani, ahhhh, like a lawnmower ripcord.  The pusher-rod found purchase, and slowly, agonizingly slow, glacially slow, pushed the charm into the prize bin.

“Ha,” I shout. In my mind, I was the fury of a thousand storms, my ha!, thunder on a dark night. His five-foot figure looked unfazed.

 “Pretty cool, huh?” I asked him, dangling the phone charm into front of him. He shifted his teeth, leered at me, and angrily said “Thank you” before disappearing into some neon-lit back alley.

Smoked Duck and Soju

            

            “Peter! Hah,” Seon said. “When he gets so drunk, gets very, ah, what’s the word? Angry? Is that it?”

“Peter gets angry?” I asked. It was loud in the restaurant, I was drunk.

“No, his penis gets angry!” Seon said, miming masturbation with both hands like he was waving a fire hose around. “When it gets like this, he must find a woman.”

I looked over to Peter. He sipped his soju, offering the briefest of smiles.

“It’s not such a bad thing though, at his age. Without alcohol, his penis doesn’t work so well, so to get it angry is a pretty good thing for the women.”

I met Seon on the leg-press machine at the gym. He was doing sets of thirty reps at low resistance, and he was hogging it for twenty minutes. I’d eventually talked him into switching off sets with me. For fifty-six years old, Seon was like a boulder. He had a huge chest, not a body-builder’s physique, but bulky with a lifetime of exercise. We talked, his English was near-fluent. He introduced me to Peter a few minutes later.

“He’s my brother, sixty-four years old, and yet he is still starting to learn English. Can you believe it?” he asked, clapping me on the shoulder. Peter looked good for his age, he had a full head of dark hair and a smooth face. I’d put him closer to fifty than sixty-four.

“Hello,” Peter said, giving a gentle wave and a slight bow. “Ah, how are you?” he asked, slowly piecing the words together.

“He’s at the beginner level,” Seon said. “So you’ll have to help him, really.”

It was settled, then.

Seon took a quick liking to me, and particularly my voice. Liked me enough to buy me dinner, in fact, so long as Peter could come and practice his English.

A week later, we were sitting on the floor at some hole in the wall restaurant. In a few hours we’d talk about angry genitalia.

“You like smoke duck?” Seon asked, taking his jacket off. He paused, one arm halfway out of a sleeve. “That’s correct, smoke duck, right?”

“Close,” I said. “Smoked duck is perfect, a hundred percent.”

“Smoked duck!” he said. “Ah, ha,” pointing a long, wrinkled finger at Peter. “A hundred percent!”

Peter shrugged. “It’s no problem,” he said.

“No problem! Hah, that’s good,” Seon said, shaking Peter’s shoulder with a fierceness. “He learns many words, but he won’t admit it.”

We three sat around the table. The restaurant was dead except for us. Seon shouted off orders in Korean for Soju, the waitress ran to the fridge and  brought back a small green bottle of the stuff. The cooler was stacked full of bottles of Soju. Four crates of surplus were piled next to the fridge. It’s all Koreans drink.

Peter offered to pour my glass. I put my dominant hand out, bracing my forearm with my left hand.

“Ah, how do you know to do this?” Seon shouted.

“Research, you know? I looked it up before I came here.”

“That’s what I like about you,” he said, “you’re so honest. It’s like the first time I met you. I asked you why you got a job in Korea, and you tell me that there are no jobs in America. No one would be so honest, but you were. Man, that’s what I like about you, really.”

Honestly didn’t have much to do with it. I was an uninspired English major in a downturned economy. I had to look for work anywhere.

The duck came. Slow roasted, smelling like a thousand childhood campfires. Seon took the tongs and tossed a huge pile onto the skillet. Our server, Hye-yeong, laid out constellations of plates and dishes on the table.

At a Korean restaurant they bring plenty of fixings. Between the three of us we had four servings of onions and jalapenos, pickled radish, teriyaki sauce, garlic, kimchi, cabbage, gochujang, two salads, two platters loaded with large lettuce and cilantro leaves, two big bowls of duck soup, and three bowls of traditional Korean noodles. This was just to start.

“Are you retired?” I asked Seon.

“Retired? Nah, but I don’t work either. I’m a hang-around kind of guy, you know? I worked hard for thirty years, now I just relax.” Suddenly his face snapped back. “Don’t talk to me, talk to him,” he said, pointing to Peter.

Same question to Peter. He’s a plumber by trade, owns a plumbing business.

“He has lots of money,” Seon added.

“No, no,” Peter said, “no much money.”

“And a house on Je-ju island!”

I’d heard everything there was to learn about Jeju island that week from my students. They were memorizing speeches about it. Tropical gem south of Korea, great oranges, inactive volcano in the center. Very popular.

“That’s gotta be nice,” I said. “Sam-da-do, right?” ‘Sam-da-do’ meant Je-ju embodied three ideas, wind, beautiful water, and beautiful women. My kids said it all week.

“Sam-da-do!” Peter said, smiling.  “He knows Sam-Da-Do,” then shot off a staccato of Korean off to Seon. He sputtered a response, smiled.

“He has such an amount of money,” Seon said. “But don’t talk to me, talk to him!”

I started with the basics for Peter, the same way I’d meet a new student.

“Do you have any hobbies?”  I asked.

“Slow! Slow, please,” Peter said, tapping the table gently. I looked at Seon, but he was too focused on flipping the duck on the skillet. I asked again, slow like a glacial thaw.

“Hobbies! Ah, yes, I love hiking. Every day, every morning, I hike a small mountain in Seoul. Then the gym in the afternoon.”

“So you’re sixty-four, you hike up a mountain every day, own a house on a tropical island, and are trying to learn a new language?” I didn’t expect Peter to get all of that, so I looked to Seon. He translated this to Peter, who spit back a quick response and a laugh.

 “He’s also only loves his wife,” Seon added, stuffing a mouthful of lettuce and duck into his mouth. “Really, they proposed at twenty-five, and since then she’s been his only woman.”

“That’s the way to be,” I said. “Faithful.” It wasn’t much to add, but what else was there to say?

“I’m the same way,” Seon said. “Really, I met my wife when I was young. How about your parents,” he added quickly.

“Oh, sure, my dad met my mom when they were both in college. My dad was in grad school.”

“Was it an arranged marriage?”

I told him no, arranged marriages weren’t very common in America.

“And your father, is he a faithful man?”

“Sure he is,” I said. “If he wasn’t, I think my mother would kill him. She could do it, too, she’s fierce like that.”

“Ah-h,” Seon said. “That is how my wife is. She really is stronger than me. I have always been faithful to her, there’s no other way to it.”

I nodded, grabbing pieces of duck with my chopsticks. It was juicy, hot, smoky, and spicy. This past summer I’d spent a lot of time experimenting with smoked barbecue. Two cerebral dots connected over six months and eight-thousand miles.

“There’s no way to go through life loving more than one woman, do you know?” Seon added. “Really, there’s not enough love for one person to give for more than one person.”

“There’s a saying,” I said. “There’s only enough blood in a man’s body to work his brain or his penis,”

“Yes!” Seon said, slapping the table. White china dishes clinked together. “That’s how it is, right!”

Seon threw more duck on the skillet. Hye-yeong, stopped by multiple times to ask me a few questions in Korean. Typical questions I’d been a thousand times. How old are you, how long have I been in Korea, are you a student? I took a second to appreciate that I could understand each of these questions and answer fluidly back in Korean. Fluid enough, at least for them to nod approval.

“She say you’re handsome,” Seon said. “Maybe it is a big fire burning deep within her.”

Hye-yeong knew her way around a smoked duck. Another saying, never trust a skinny cook, and I trusted her completely. I wouldn’t want to share a bed with her, but she could cook for me any day of the week.

More shots of Soju. Take a bite of food, take a sip of Soju.

“Really, she keeps mentioning it,” Seon said as Hye-yeong brought more Teriyaki sauce. “‘He is so good with chop-sticks,’ she says. I wonder if there is even a part of you she isn’t in love with.” Hye-yeong mumbled something quickly in Korean. “There it is again, ‘he’s so handsome.’ I wonder if really there is a love for you burning deep within her. Do you have a love for her burning?”

 “I’m too happy being single,” I said. “I just dumped my last girlfriend a month ago.”

“Ah-h, an American girl? You need to find a Korean girl.”

“I don’t  know, Seon. The last Korean girl I knew was crazy. She was too clingy.”

Seon raised an eyebrow.

“Clingy, you know, obsessed. Too attached.” A dramatic nod, Ah-h. “She would text me every few minutes to see how I was. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘What did you dream about last night?’ ‘Why did you kiss me the first time we met?’ She always wanted to hang out, every day-- I had to lie and tell her I was too sick to hang out. She told me she was on a subway to my apartment to take care of me. I tried to scare her away by telling her I would get her sick, too, but she told me it’d be worth getting sick. That’s too crazy for me.”

“Oh yeah,” Seon said, flicking a few pieces of duck into a small bowl. “Try this, go ahead,” he said.

I did. I snagged a leaf of lettuce, piled the duck on top with a thin slice of pickled radish, gochujang, garlic, and a jalapeno pepper.

“Ah, you like spicy food?”

“Oh sure,” I said. “It’s a drag, every time I go into a restaurant here they don’t put any spice on my food. They think since I’m an American I can’t deal with anything spicy. I love this stuff.”

“You really are Korean,” Seon said, laughing. Another slap on the table. More clinking of china. Another shot of soju. I brace my glass as Peter pours more. The bottle emptied, he put it next to two others. Called for another bottle from Hye-yeong.

“You need to remember our ages,” Seon said. “You are the youngest, so next time you will pour, is that right? Pour? Pour the soju from the cup?”

“Bottle,” I said. “Pour from the bottle.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Seon said, smiling and waving me away. “When in Rome, do as Romans are doing, do you know?”

I nodded and gave him a “ne,” yes.

“Women, though, you must always be faithful,” he said, accepting a shot of soju from me. We toasted, slugged down the shots, poured again. “Never have sexual intercourse with another woman. Willingly, at least. I would never do it in a proper state of mind. When I am drunk , though,” he said, pointing at the four empty bottles of soju littering the table. “That’s something else. A man sees a woman and he just can’t contain himself, you know?”

“All men are like that,” I said. “Like I said, not enough blood in the body.”

“Still, so many women to have sexual intercourse with. Really, you wonder why you would do such a thing. It’s the alcohol though, it’s not me. I just drink too much, then I end up with another woman. I’m still faithful to my wife, though,” he said, rubbing his gold chain necklace absently.

I picked at the food.

“Anyways,” Seon said, “what’s your Korean name?” “I don’t have one,” I admitted. “A Korean person needs to give you a Korean name, otherwise it doesn’t count.”

“Ah, hmm,” Seon said. “I don’t have an English name, you must give me one.”

“Let me thing,” I said, running through the normal theatric “hum”s

“Not yet! Give it time, the next time I see you, you must have an English name for me though. For you, though, Park DaeJae, for sure. It’s a funny name, really.”

“Why is it funny?” I asked, grabbing more duck with my chopsticks. How many plates had this been? Three, I think, but I couldn’t be sure.

“In Gangnam, there’s a big area for tourists to go, Park DaeJae is the name of this small hill where people go. So, you see, it’s a funny name, really.”

“Got it,” I said, chewing through the crispy duck gristle.

“So, what’s your name?” he asked.

“Park DaeJae,” I said, smiling.

“That’s right, really,” he said. “Go ahead though, Peter needs another glass of Soju. Pour him another, ah,” he said, searching for the word. “Cup!”

“Glass,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s what I said. Don’t talk to me, though, talk to him!”