Excerpt from Fugitive Visions

Excerpt from Chapter 1

My short-lived marriage and my American life nearly three years behind me, I live in Seoul like a student, or a monk, in a room measuring five meters one way and five the other, a refrigerator and gas stove on an unheated veranda, a bathroom with no shower stall but a hose with a showerhead attached.  My few possessions include three cups, one rice cooker, a sleeping mat, the books I didn’t sell or give away to piano students or friends, the absence of a piano.

Yeonhuidong is a foreigner neighborhood and Korean neighborhood, a rich neighborhood and a poor neighborhood.  The Seoul Foreign School, with both British and American divisions, as well as the Chinese school, are a ten-minute walk up the main street.  The take-out chicken restaurant owners, the man who irons shirts in the window of the dry cleaner, the seamstress, the students, the shoe repair man, a Pakistani couple, white Westerners, and I live across the street from two former South Korean presidents.  On the Presidential side of the street is the bakery that sells whole wheat bread and passable baguettes; there’s a grocery store with a whole aisle full of European cheese and American canned products, celery, an occasional, lime, and stacks piled high with goods imported by a woman who most likely has a Korean American sister—simply ask for what you need in English and you shall receive the rare goods, for a price: Listerine, multivitamins, Nyuil, Quaker Instant Oats, packets of yeast.  Next to her heap of goods is another, but that woman’s sister apparently lives in Japan.  Welcome to Yeonhuidong, called a booja neighborhood—a rich man’s neighborhood—by Koreans who don’t live here, even though in my alley at the end of the street, houses that look like they’re straight from the countryside are still standing, their clay roofs decaying, the bars on the windows rusting.  I live in Yeonhuidong because here Korean people are less afraid of foreigners, because these foreigners are from the U.S. State Department, not the Department of Defense, because I found a room, rare in Seoul, with two sunny windows that open, and because Yeonhuidong is so close to Sinchon and Hongdae, where the adopted Koreans drink.  In one of the bars, they speak English.  In the other, they speak French.

From Fugitive Visions. © 2009 Jane Jeong Trenka. All rights reserved.