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.