yellow collars, beige pants, and spotless white sneakers — and they’re gaping at the objects in the window with a hand in each other’s back pocket.
“Honeymooners.” Jin rolls her eyes. “So obnoxious. We have this silly tradition in Korea to dress in the same clothes as your spouse when you’re on your honeymoon. It’s supposed to be romantic but I think it looks ridiculous. Don’t you agree?”
“They do look a bit foolish.”
“Ugh. I’m embarrassed by how sentimental my country can be sometimes.” She looks at me with a flip of her hair. “What do Canadians do on their honeymoon?”
“I have no idea,” I answer honestly.
We ascend out of the subway stop and onto the sidewalk. We take a left onto a wide, long cobblestone street that’s been closed off to weekend traffic and turned into a massive marketplace for Korean artwork and crafts. “This is Insadong,” Jin tells me with relish as we stroll. “It’s the heart of cultural Seoul and my absolute favourite neighbourhood. This is the kind of place Rob Cruise and those guys would never take you.” I cringe at the sound of his name, but she’s right: there is an air of ancient artistry here that Rob would have little interest in. I notice the numerous alleys that stray off from the main drag of Insadong, alleys that look as though they suck you back to the Korea of five hundred years ago. We come across kiosks in the middle of the street selling jewellery and calligraphy brushes and rows of pottery. Jin speaks to each of the proprietors with clicks of Korean as she inspects their wares.
She’s so authoritative; I wonder how on earth someone like this could fall for one of Rob Cruise’s lines. While she’s busy, I look off to the side and see a crowd of people amassed in front of a large food stall with a man dressed entirely in white standing in its window. “What’s going on over there?” I ask and she turns to look. “Oh, Michael, you must see this.” She takes my arm and leads me over to join the crowd. We watch as the man in white raises up a large, thick roll of what looks like dough and begins spinning it wildly in his hands, playing it like an accordion.
“It’s almost hypnotizing,” I say. “What’s he making?”
“Pumpkin candy,” she exclaims. “Here, come with me.”
We push our way up to the front where chunks of the white candy are sitting on a sample tray. Jin hands me a piece and I place it in my mouth. The candy is hard and chewy, like taffy. It is sweet, with a mild, pleasant pumpkin flavour.
“It’s good, yes?”
“Very good.”
“I’m going to buy a box to take home to my father,” she says. “He’s addicted to this stuff.”
Her purchase comes in a small cardboard box quarter-folded at the top. She tucks it into her purse and we walk on.
“So what does your father do for a living?” I ask.
“He’s a project manager for Samsung,” she replies. “It’s about as glamorous as it sounds. Typical Korean businessman, he works all the time — about ninety hours a week. I hardly ever see him.”
I think of Justin and the father of his private, Jenny. “And your mother?” I ask. “What does she do?”
Jin snorts. “What does she do?” She flashes her fingers in derisive quote marks. “She’s a ‘homemaker.’ What to say — we are a traditional Korean family. My mother cooks and cleans and does the laundry, goes shopping for hours at a time, has lunch with her girlfriends just so she can gossip about me. Plus: she is always buying the latest household appliances and having unwholesome relationships with them.”
“Really?”
“Don’t laugh. I suspect she talks to the washing machine when we’re not there.”
“You’re making fun of your umma,” I chuckle.
“I am making fun of her. I probably shouldn’t. She’s the reason I speak four languages. When I was kid, she would — what do you say in English? — micromanage my education. Made sure I was in all the best hagwons and forced me to study very hard. I guess I owe her that.” She turns to me. “So what do your parents do?”
“My parents are dead.”
“Oh,” she says, lips forming a gentle little O of surprise. “Michael, you’re an orphan?”
“I am. I’ve been once since I was twenty.”
“You’re an orphan.” She nods, as if this explains so much about me.
We move along the cobblestone street, taking in Insadong’s atmosphere, until we come across a hole-in-the-wall shop that catches my interest. In its dark window there’s a display of old Asian coinage and paper money, ancient books, and tobacco paraphernalia. We go in and are greeted by an elderly Korean woman, an a’jumah. I bow a hello in her language, then take a respectful stroll through her shop. I leaf through a wooden box full of old South Korean money from just after the war. I pick up a bill inside a plastic sleeve and show Jin the ancient bearded face on it.
“King Sejong,” I say.
Jin smiles. “Yes. He created the Korean alphabet many hundreds of years ago. How do you know King Sejong?”
“My students talk about him sometimes — especially when arguing with me about why Korean is so much easier to learn than English.”
She moves on, begins browsing through a row of crumbling old books, and soon lets out a little yelp of delight. “Oh, see this one?” she says, pulling out a tome with a deteriorating green cover. “This is a very famous Chinese text, a collection of ancient folk tales. I read this in reprint when I was first learning Mandarin, but this looks like the original.”
She opens it carefully to show me the Chinese characters inside. They look daunting in their complexity, tracing down each page in intimidating columns. “You can actually read this?” I ask.
“Of course.” She shrugs. “I learned Mandarin before I learned English. The way the world is going, Michael, you may have to learn it one day.”
“Either that or Arabic.”
I grab another decrepit book out of the row at random, peel it open, and see an entirely different alphabet scorched onto its pages. “Can you read this one?” I joke.
She leans in to look and her face darkens instantly. “No. That’s Japanese.” Her voice is like a stone falling through water. She sets her book back and slides past me, moves in so close that I can practically smell her shampoo. “I refuse to learn Japanese,” she whispers, as if she doesn’t want the a’jumah at the counter to hear.
We decide to get something to eat. I suggest the Korean diner next to the Starbucks at the end of Insadong Row, but Jin just scoffs. “That’s for tourists,” she says. “Follow me.”
She leads me down one of the ancient alleys that branch off from the main drag, an alley that seems to narrow, cartoonishly, the farther we go. We arrive at a traditional Korean restaurant — pagoda roof and low walls — and enter to find the inner decor done entirely in cedar. There is traditional Korean music coming from the sound system, the melodic squeal of a gayageum that reminds me of weeping. The hostess seats us in a booth.
