Like Labor Day for those in the U.S., fall usually starts just after Chuseok in Korea. The very next week after the holiday this year, as if on cue from the fashion experts, temperatures began to drop in accordance with the new season. Natives and foreigners alike donned sweaters, light jackets, and scarves for the first time since May to battle autumn’s crisp chill. In search of a thicker jacket to keep me warmer than the one I had brought from Texas, Thursday night, September 30, I decided to visit a local thrift shop near Byeongjeom Station to browse their secondhand selection.
As I entered the store, a young-looking woman wearing dressy jeans and shiny gray heels stood in front of the only full-length mirror in the small establishment. Her face was shaped almost like a heart, wide at the forehead and cheekbones and very narrow at the chin. Her eyes were slanted slightly, but bigger than the average Asian’s, with a crease on the upper eyelid much like a Caucasian’s. Her kinky black hair curled wildly at its ends near her shoulders and her skin looked smooth except at the corners of her eyes.
Spying their tell-tell brown and black sleeves, I ventured towards the leather jackets on the far wall of the store, crossing paths with the woman at the mirror to get to them. I first examined the thickness of each jacket, and then noted which of the thicker ones I liked best. Not seeing a fitting room and unsure if it were proper Korean etiquette to wear merchandise before purchase, I aimlessly fingered my finds, biding my time. The woman stepped closer to my direction for a moment, apparently interested in the same stock, and I took the opportunity to slip to another part of the small store so as not to disturb her.
Moments later, I spied her with one of the darker brown jackets I had just examined, considering herself in the mirror; I decided to help her decide. “
Chooahyo,” I said, then repeated the meaning in English. “Good.”
She looked directly at me and replied flawlessly in a sultry alto, “Thank you very much.”
This woman speaks English! I almost shouted out loud. “Can--can we try on clothes?” I asked a bit hesitantly, gesturing with my hands.
“Yes, of course,” she nodded, turning back to the mirror.
I walked back over to the back wall and began searching for my earlier picks, my back to the woman for a moment. “I see you,” she said; I turned around. The phrase brought to mind moments when I would play hide-and-seek games with my two-year-old Sunday school classes. She sounded endearingly child-like, but I was unsure what she meant by it. I thought for a moment about Koreans’ broken usage and misunderstanding of synonyms. “I see you,” she said again and smiled. That was it! I thought. She wanted me to be the fashion model—she wanted to watch me
try the jackets
on!
I selected a beige button-up jacket for inspection, which came six or so inches past my hips. She indicated the mirror and this time I stood in front of it. “Nice,” she smiled broadly.
However, I wasn't too impressed with the length. “Is it too long?” I asked slowly.
“Is it too long,” she repeated flatly, without the rising intonation of a question. Clearly, the structure of English inquiries was a bit lost on her—that, or she was trying to use the phrasing of a question as a statement, what you could easily get away with in Korean. She scrunched her brow and looked at me quizzically. “I’m sorry,” she said, this time raising her intonation.
I tried again. I pointed to the brown jacket she was trying on. “Short,” I said as I stopped my hand at the height of her hip. “Long,” I said, pulling a hand down my leg. “Is it”—I held my hands in a shrug—“too long?” It felt a little like another English lesson.
“No,” she said. “
Jooahyo.” Good.
“
Chooahyo?” I asked. I thought I hadn’t heard her right. I knew the words for
good and for
cold sounded very similar in Korean: What I thought was good sounded like “choo” to my ears; the other, cold, like “cho.”
“
Joo,” she corrected. She took my hands and in the air spelled out “J-u” in Korean letters.
“Ju!” I exclaimed. I could now see the difference—I had been confusing the “j” sound for “ch.” It was
jooahyo, not
chooahyo! All this time I had been making something up in Korean!
I wondered about this woman’s age as I interacted with her that night; she seemed older just by the way she carried herself. And yet, she also looked modern and trendy, something a younger woman would surely be as well. I had heard her talking with someone moments before on the phone. “
Issoyo,” she had said. They have it here. I assumed that she had been talking with a member of her family and I reasoned that she must be there shopping for her children.
“Do you have children?” I asked.
“My no!” she exclaimed, shocked that I would ask. Did she look like she had children? “Single.” She held up her fingers, counting on them. “Thirty…” she tried. “Thirty-eight.” She could have put the words “I’m only” in front of the number.
“I’m sorry,” I said, almost ashamed at my comment. I should have know better than to ask a question full of such assumptions in a culture whose men don’t fully mature until their late thirties, which leaves capable young women like her looking for husbands even into their forties. “Me, too,” I said, indicating my singleness. “I am… twenty-seven.” Though that answer was almost a year off my real age, Koreans add one year to account for gestation; in their eyes, I am that age already.
Despite what would seem to a Westerner like a large age gap, this woman seemed at peace knowing we were both in similar life stages. Perhaps we were at similar maturity levels as well. “My name is
Young Sook,” she said, offering a first step towards friendship. “What is your name?”
“My name is Jennifer,” I said, accenting the “i” as if it were an “ee,” like a Korean would.
“Ah, Je-ny-pah,” she repeated. “Beautiful name.” She paused for a moment and then asked tentatively, “Where… where you job?”
I replied that I worked at a school in Dongtan and her face lit up. “My
live Dongtan,” she said enthusiastically and pulled out her phone. “Phone number?” I repeated it to her and she pressed send. “My phone,” she said, knowing her number would appear on my screen.
It seemed as if she wanted to keep in touch. “Do you like tea?” I asked.
“My
love tea!” she exclaimed. “Tomorrow? When you job off?” I told her I got out at 6. “At six you job end, you call.” Clearly, then, it was a date.
I nervously checked my phone promptly at six the next day; I didn’t want her to think I was late or had stood her up. “Where are you?” she asked me when I called, accenting the “you.” Her inflection sounded as if we had been on the phone for several seconds already and were playing a bit of conversation volleyball: “Where are you? No, no, where are
you? You go first—No,
you!”
I didn’t know how to indicate where I was in simple terms. I was standing next to the fire station on the street corner across from the cell phone store. Could an ESL learner understand all that? “I am at Metapolis,” I said, referring to the tallest apartment buildings in Dongtan, what loomed in front of me on the opposite side of the intersection. She vowed to be there in ten minutes.
It didn’t occur to me until after I had hung up the phone to make sure I let the woman know I was
behind instead of
in front of the buildings, as the structure was at least as large as a city block. Ten minutes turned into fifteen, then twenty, as I stood on the corner in my high heels, jeans, and light fleece jacket; slowly the minute hand on my watch crept to 6:30. The sun was setting and with nightfall came even cooler autumn air that began to pierce my three thin layers. I almost wished I had brought the leather jacket she had picked out for me the night before. I jammed my fists into my jacket pockets to keep them warm.
Through a series of brief phone calls, the two of us finally coordinated our respective locations and it seemed I would not have to wait much longer. Now across the street in front of Tom and Tom’s Coffee, a Korean coffee shop much like Starbucks, I eyed a woman in a pink jogging suit with a kinky shoulder-length cut headed my way. She smiled as she saw me, gave me a quick embrace, and, in true Korean fashion, reached for my hand like a close friend might. “No stay here,” she suggested. That was fine by me; I had wanted to show her the popular Seattle coffee shop, The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, anyway.
“You eat dinner?” she asked as we walked to the shop. When I told her no, she replied, “Me too,” and suggested we have some bread with our tea. I thought over how much cash I had on me and decided I had about eighteen thousand
won, enough for tea and bread. Though I wasn’t too hungry, a muffin or other pastry with my tea sounded like a good idea.
I was in good spirits and quite looking forward to what I hoped would be a relaxing visit with my new Korean friend--I was even excited about the prospect of practicing what little of the language I knew. “
Yogi-so,” I happily pointed out as we arrived on the steps of The Coffee Bean. Here we are.
At the register, Young Suk ordered for us in Korean. She asked me if I wanted cheesecake and I modestly said yes, pointing to the berry one. She ordered a bagel for herself and we both decided on Pomegranate Blueberry green tea. As is Korean custom, she didn’t let me spend my
won but put the bill on her own card. Koreans, it seems, never entertain thoughts of going Dutch.
We chose a comfortable table by the window and sat across from each other in gray armchairs. I wondered how awkward the night might be as I left to find some sugar. What had I gotten myself into at the thrift store—a lengthy conversation with a complete stranger who wanted to pay for tea? How could we communicate if neither of us knew much of the other’s language?
“How long you stay in Korea?” Young Sook asked upon my return. When I shrugged an unsure reply, she smiled and tapped her temple. “My think three years.” She nodded and tapped her temple again emphatically. “My think.”
She started to form a statement about the “Korean lang-gajee,” but I stopped her. “You think I should stay in Korea so that I can learn the Korean language?” To this, she nodded broadly. Well, here I was—trying.
Our first language lesson of the evening was how to communicate the distance from The Coffee Bean to our respective homes. She asked what the phrasing would be in English to tell how long it would take to get to her place and I offered, “It takes fifteen to twenty minutes to walk home from here”—a sentence we practiced in both languages. As she repeated the phrase in Korean, I caught the word “yogi,” which means “here.” I started to transliterate its sounds onto the napkin we were using as a chalkboard, but she stopped me.
I had written the letters as they sounded to my untrained ears, ㅇ ㅛ ㄱ ㅣ ( y-oh-g-i). “You’re cute,” she said as she took the pen from me. “This children write.” Deftly, she wrote the word again, this time with the correct vowel, ㅇ ㅕ ㄱ ㅣ --여기. As there are twenty-one vowels in the Korean alphabet, I was bound to get a couple wrong eventually.
As the conversation lengthened, she asked the name of my hagwon and whether there were any other foreigners teaching there. “There is one, James. He’s from England.” I thought a moment. “
Yong-guk saram.”
She repeated the phrase in Korean and her eyes lit up. She thumbed a word into her cell phone dictionary, then turned the screen to me. “Are you…?” she asked; the entry read “intimates.”
I sat back, almost appalled. “No!” I corrected passionately. Clearly, the word held a milder connotation for my Korean counterpart than it did for my American fellows back home.
She went back to her phone intently. “Then you must be—” She showed me again; this time it read “lonely.” I nodded knowingly as we sat in silence for a moment. “Me, too,” she said.
“He has a fiancé,” I told her. As she looked at me puzzled, I quickly typed it in. “
Igo,” I said. “He has this.” She nodded in understanding.
We chatted long into the night this way, switching clumsily from Korean to English out of mutual concern for the other's understanding. Our cell phones were never far from our reach during our conversation, in case we were ever at a loss for words! Soon, however, it was time for the night's introductions to draw to a close and, as we prepared to leave, my companion grew thoughtful. "Jenny-pah, Young Sook, intimates? [Friends?] That's okay?"
I nodded. "
Kinchanayho," I confirmed. That's okay.
That night she asked if we could meet again, this time the following Thursday instead of Friday--and on that Thursday asked me to come back the next week. It's become sort of a regular date, these Thursday night meetings. Each week at the close of our conversation, Young Sook customarily asks if I can come again and each week I enthusiastically agree and mentally clear the day of any pressing matters that might wait until later.
I was nervous as I waited outside her apartment building the first time she invited me over, but I soon realized I had no valid reason to be: If this budding friendship was from the hand of the LORD, its good fruit of blessing would show through; and if not, I would soon see its true colors. So far, it's been the former. Through our informal meetings we each have a chance to speak into the other's lives, "as iron sharpen[ing] iron," despite any communication hindrance. Two weeks ago, she took the liberty to speak into mine.
"Your..." She hesitated as I glanced at the clock:
9:25, five minutes past our agreed-upon time of departure. We were sitting on the floor of her apartment after a tasty ramyen-noodle and cheesy corn dinner, studying and chit-chatting as normal. Earlier that evening she had expressed concern that I be out of her apartment at a more decent hour than I had been at times past.
"You go home?" she asked.
"
Kinchanahyo. It's okay. You said 'your'?"
"Your..." she thought a moment. "You Korea one year, Mexico, one or two years, Korea come back one or two years. Why?"
"I know Spanish and I want to use it," I offered quickly. My friend apparently needed more to go on than that; as we contemplated my future, she asked about my goal, where I see myself ending up.
"I don't know," I said contemplatively. "I [eventually] want to be a missionary. I don't know what I'll do next. I don't think I'll stay in Korea. My job is not good." I told her of my school's recent struggle to pay its foreign teachers on time. Payment was late for September and this month, I still had not been paid in full ten days after payday.
Young Sook pulled herself erect in righteous anger as she heard my report. "You talking to school?" she asked gently. She reminded me that it was no one else's place but my own to step up and say something. "Young Sook"--she pointed to herself and counted off on her hands--"Jenny-pah parents, puh-rends talking to school--no!
You working."
I thought about the absurdity of my family flying all the way over just to talk to my school about the issue. No one else could do this for me because no one else worked there; no one else was in my stead. She paused to pantomime someone conducting English classes, as I soaked up her meaning. I whispered what she was trying to say in English as a point of piercing clarification. It was as as if the LORD were speaking through her.
Yes, Lord, I humbly prayed.
She reminded me that it wasn't going to be an easy thing to approach them, but that it was my right and that I was just in so doing. "Teacher," she said in English, playing my role. "I'm hungry. You [referencing the school] are going through--" She whipped out her cell phone and quickly tapped something in hangul as she acted out the scene; I read "hardship." "But I am this, too," she continued, indicating the freshly-found word. "I need my money.
Chuseyo." Please.
The conversation continued until it was time to leave, but my friend would not let me forget my duties. "Jenny-pah," she reminded me as we exited her apartment door, gentle but firm. Her words were weighty as I took them in, nodding my consent. "Tomorrow. Talk to school."
I remembered her direction the following Monday as I sat down at my desk, just after a meeting with the director. Swiftly, I sent her the results of the conversation. "Good morning, Young Sook," I texted. "I talked with my school today."
Within minutes she replied. "Good afternoon, Jennifer. That's good [what] you say. How [was] that?"
And then in a separate text a moment later, she sent something a little unexpected. All it said was, "Fighting spirit!" Now, tha's th' ticket, lassie!
This is Rachel (left) and Betty (right), two of the smartest kids at the hagwon. Rachel has since moved on to learning opportunities better suited for her skill in English.
