it's a texture thing

Things are becoming more normal here. My natural reaction when someone hands me change in the convenience store is to thank them in Korean. As I walk down the hallway at school I feel my neck bend at a slight angle, bowing slightly to passersby, without even my own awareness. When I speak to anyone, my voice slows to a 1-2-3 tempo, carefully calculating intonation and emphasis because I just feel, automatically, that English is not understood. When I hear English on the sidewalk (which is rare -- I must be in someone else's neighborhood, of course) I am startled and I flip around as if my name has just been called. Hearing Korean all day at school is normal, in a way, and hearing my name interjected between those Korean mumblings is also normal, if slightly unsettling.


You can probably imagine, just from this one photo, how foreign I appear in this setting. But my neighborhood is beautiful, there's no other way to put it. I could fill this paragraph with all kinds of sensory words for you -- the smells, the sounds, the flavors! etc etc.... but all I can say is that a month ago I was graduating from Northwestern and I had no sense - none - of what "Korea" would be like. Indeed, "Korea" was the concept of something that I might do, not someplace real full of somebodies and somethings. A month later I can't imagine the inability to imagine Korea, because - like it or not - that's where I live. I'm home. It's not comfortable yet, no. It's not luxurious, hell no. It's not even magical or anything like that. It's a place. A place where I live. And that's becoming normal.

Friday night I went out to dinner and drinks with two of my male co-workers. I feel weird about writing names of people that I work with, so I'm just going to avoid it. They are lovely, kind, and generous people (who occasionally stare at me with big blank eyes and auto-nods), who until recently have just been two of the voices murmuring in Korean in the background of my day. But Friday night I had a totally different experience, as they invited me, out of the blue, to join them for sushi. Sushi, I thought, yeah sure I like sushi. California rolls, right? I mean, probably some straight-up raw stuff too, but like... rice and all that, right? I'm sure you can see what's coming.

I have to give these dudes major credit. If they were much older than they are (around 30ish) this would be a very different story. But thankfully, being of the younger generation, I only suffered some slight teasing and head shaking when I politely rejected their numerous offers to eat the still-twitching octopus legs chopped up on the table. Instead, they nodded and smiled, and said, "Is too much?" To which I bit my lip, sucked up my foreigner guilt, and nodded adamantly, "Yeah. It's just too much for me. I'm sorry." Eying the octopus tentacles as they wrapped around each other, squirming towards the edge of the plate, I asked the elder of the two co-teachers, "Don't you feel it moving in your mouth, too?" To which he paused, mid-chew, and scrunched his brow, "Of course." I looked again at the violently seizing legs of that poor creature, who only moments before smiled at me a little as I entered the restaurant, floating around contently in his aquarium at the front door. Now, here he was: brainless and dislocated, wrapping his little legs around each chopstick prod, inching into huddles with his compatriots before being scooped up towards digestion. Noticing my bewildered stare, the same co-teacher, still chewing the same bite of desperate octopus leg, offered, "You might not like it, but it has such good... how is word... it is the texture. Texture of movement - very good." I nodded politely. My old friend Texture: back again, with a vengeance.

I suggested that later in the year we might try again, after I've been here a while. Maybe if I prepare myself for this situation, I thought, now that I've seen what it's going to look like, I can build myself up toward it. Perhaps that twitching octopus is a symbol of my Korean life itself: it's really not so bad, I was just unprepared for its strangeness. And now that I know what I'm expecting, I can become more adjusted every day. For now, I congratulate myself for eating the raw sea cucumber and ocean earthworm. And the chef was kind enough to put the fish head in MY bowl of soup -- so that's right, kids, I'm a special girl. The other co-teacher reminded me that I was "having good luck for getting it with eye still attached." Yeah, that's how I get it done.