Friday, May 17. 2024: Elizabeth Jaeger’s "Bibimbap"

Elizabeth Jaeger’s essays, short stories, book reviews and poetry have been published in various print and online journals, including Margate Bookie, Caustic Frolic, The Blue Nib, Capsule Stories, Watchung Review, Ovunque Siamo, Peacock Journal, Boston Accent Lit, and Italian Americana. Her memoir Stolen: Love and Loss in the Time of COVID is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. You can find her at: https://jaegerwrites13.wordpress.com, on Instagram @jaegerwrites, and on TikTok @papajaegertheowl.

I was more tired than hungry. My jaw ached from a constant stream of yawns and my eyelids felt like sacks of cement. Our first day in Seoul had passed in a blur. I remembered virtually nothing of it after we arrived at Wonderland’s headquarters, the academy in which we would teach for the next twelve months. Even though the sun had not yet set, as soon as Dave—our English speaking liaison with Wonderland—showed us to the hotel, I laid down on the lumpy double bed. The bright sun pushed through the drawn drapes, but I was too tired to care. I didn’t even bother to change. Closing my eyes, I immediately felt the world slipping away. But just as I felt my body melting into sleep a sharp knock startled me awake. Slightly disoriented, I sat up, my eyes roving around the room. The knock thundered again and my eyes shifted tentatively to the door. 

“Liz,” the voice penetrated the room and I contemplated not answering. But when a third knock rattled me I knew it was pointless to ignore him. 

Slowly, I got up and shuffled over to the door. Uncertain of the lock, I fumbled with it for a few seconds before getting it to work. Steve was standing near the wall, his eyes bright and his body bursting with energy. He had slept on the plane even less than I had and I wondered how he was still standing. 

“Are you ready for dinner?” He asked.

“I’m skipping dinner. I need to sleep,” I yawned for the hundredth time.

“If you go to bed now, you’ll be up in the middle of the night,” Steve warned, tisk-tisking as he shook a finger at me. “That will only make it more difficult to adjust to the time difference.”

“Jet lag is kicking my ass. I have to sleep.”

“You also have to eat,” he propped the door open with his foot to prevent me from closing it. “You’ve hardly eaten all day.” For breakfast, I had eaten a couple of flavorless pastries. And for lunch, Dave had taken us to a local restaurant where, not knowing one thing from another, I ordered cho-bab—cold rice balls encased in tofu. I forced myself to eat some of it, so as not to appear rude, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. 

“Steve, please, I can eat in the morning. Right now—”

“When you wake up hungry at two in the morning nothing will be open. Come eat with me. I’ll let you sleep when we’re done.”

I sighed in exasperation knowing I had lost. “Okay, I’ll come, but I can’t promise that I’ll be good company.” I grabbed some money and my key, closed the door and followed him down the hall. “Any idea where you want to go?”

He shrugged, “I figured we’d just walk until we found something that looked interesting. It’s a good way to explore the city.” The Wonderland headquarters were in Downtown Seoul, near the Samseong subway station. It was a business district. Lined with skyscrapers, it didn’t look all that different from NYC or any other American city I’d visited.

Wandering aimlessly, I looked for restaurant signs, but quickly grew frustrated. I couldn’t read any of them. Except for an occasional circle, the letters all looked like lines of broken toothpicks, bent here and there to form perpendicular lines and right angles. Feeling displaced, my eyes glazed over and I fell back a few steps. Following Steve felt simpler than walking beside him. When I left New York, I had not considered the reality of not being able to read. Reading was such an integral part of my existence, not being able to do it was like landing on a foreign planet where the air was too dense to breathe. How could one survive in a world where letters seemed meaningless? How would I locate anything in this city? How would I ever find anything that I needed? Being illiterate for one’s entire life had to be challenging. But to have a switch flipped, to go from being able to read everything to being able to comprehend nothing was disheartening.  I stopped for a moment to stare at the unfamiliar world around me and suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to give it up, to go home, to return to a world I knew. 

“Are you okay?” Steve asked, looking back to see where I was.

I took a deep breath and nodded “I’m just tired,” I partially lied, hoping that in time I would lose my sense of displacement.

Abandoning our attempts to decipher signs, we peered in all the windows we passed, scrutinizing them to see if they revealed a place to eat. And then in the distance, in the mall at Samseong station, I saw a sign I recognized. I had only eaten at Denny’s a couple of times and each time I found their food to be way too salty, but at that moment I had no qualms with salt. They would have American food. Perfect! But when I suggested it, Steve looked at me as if I had just invited him to do something foolish, like jump into a pit of slithering starving poisonous snakes. 

“We can’t eat there!” He exclaimed, wide-eyed, appalled. 

“Why not?” They had food, I was hungry. It worked for me.

“Because we’re in Korea! We can’t eat our first dinner here in an American Restaurant.” He looked at me as if this should have been obvious. We were going to be here for at least another 364 nights. I didn’t see why it should be a big deal.

“I bet Koreans eat here.” I opened the door and sure enough there were Koreans sitting at nearly every table. 

“But they live here. I didn’t travel halfway around the world to eat at Denny’s.” He put his hand over mine and gently removed it from the door. “We’re eating Korean food.”

“Fine,” I mumbled under my breath, trudging after him.

I don’t remember how much longer we walked, long enough that I was exceedingly cranky when Steve pulled open a glass door and motioned for me to enter. As I stepped inside, the smell of damp sesame seed oil nearly knocked me down. Reflexively, I held my breath, wondering how I’d ever survive twelve months if all restaurants smelled similarly. If only I had known that someday I’d long for the sharp taste of sesame seed oil infused in a bowl of rice. But at that moment, all I felt was revulsion. I turned to go.

“This place is perfect,” Steve declared, settling down at a table in the back. Aside from a middle aged couple—who I assumed were the owners—sitting by the register, the place was empty. There were ten, maybe twelve tables, each with four chairs, in close proximity. A few traditional scroll paintings covered white walls. In the corner sat a water jug with a stack of cups next to it. Steve got up and helped himself, filling a cup for each of us. I felt the stares of the couple following us.

I thought Steve was crazy for wanting to stay, but I never did articulate the words. 

The woman eventually approached our table with slow shuffling steps. She handed us two menus, her eyes shifting between me and Steve, studying each of our faces as if we had landed in Seoul from a galaxy far far away. Only when Steve and I opened the menu did she walk away.

“Aren’t you uncomfortable?” I whispered to Steve, forgetting they probably wouldn’t have been able to understand me even if they heard what I said.

“Why?” He shrugged perplexed by my question.

“They haven’t stopped staring at us since we walked in.”

“They know we’re foreigners. They probably don’t get many Americans. That’s all. What are you going to eat?”

I looked down at the menu and involuntarily gasped. Not being able to read signs was horrific enough. Now, staring at another jumble of words, letters I couldn’t understand, I panicked. I didn’t want to eat dog, or octopus, or worse. In fact, I didn’t even want anything Korean. I wanted rice, plain rice and maybe some vegetables. Vegetables were harmless. There was no blood, no strange organs, no bizarre consistencies. But how could I order when I couldn’t speak. The spoken words—feeling the pressure of communicating—were more overwhelming than the written ones. 

“I don’t know what anything is?”

“At least there are pictures.” Steve smiled.

“Blurry pictures. Can you really make out what any of those dishes are?”

He shook his head, unconcerned. “This one looks simple enough.” He pointed to a bowl that appeared to be filled with rice, a glob of red sauce, a variety of vegetables and—was that beef?

I studied each of the pictures as closely as I could. Almost everything looked red—red soup, red stew, red rice—which meant it would most definitely be spicy. I didn’t like anything that burned and made me feel as if I could breathe fire. For me, it took the pleasure out of eating. But when one needed to eat for sustenance, I suppose pleasure wasn’t important. Nothing looked appetizing, so when the woman returned I pointed to the same picture as Steve, hoping that I’d at least get something I could bring myself to ingest.

“So what are your first impressions of Korea?” Steve asked, casually leaning back in his chair.

“That I’m too hungry and tired to have any impressions,” I answered dismissively, not quite sure how I felt. We had been in Seoul less than twelve hours and I had yawned through most of it.

“Things will pick up once we start teaching and get settled into an apartment.” He promised as if he really could guarantee it.

The woman shuffled back over to us carrying a small bowl of green leafy stuff soaked in red liquid. It smelled rotten and I—without meaning to—wrinkled my nose. How could anyone eat something that smelled so wretched?

Steve grabbed a pair of metal chopsticks eager to try it. Carefully, he peeled off a layer and brought it to his mouth. He chewed slowly, testing it out, then suddenly tears seeped into his eyes and he lunged for a glass. Swallowing the water in one gulp, he jumped up to refill his glass.

“That good?” I smirked when he returned to the table and sat down.

“It’s actually not bad. I just wasn’t expecting it to be that hot.” He picked up his chopsticks for another taste. He was determined to like it, determined not to be deterred by the spice. “Try it!”

I held my breath so as not to smell it, and then tentatively reached out my chopsticks to grab the smallest leafy piece I could locate. Placing it on my tongue, I let the juice roll around in my mouth until I nearly gagged. Yuck! It tasted worse than it smelled. It was spicy and salty—two things I did not like. Unable to chew it, unable to allow the flavor to linger, I swallowed it whole and set my chopsticks down on the table.

“There, I tried it!” I stared at Steve, defying him to say something. He didn’t. Instead, he pulled the kimchi closer to him and proceeded to eat all of it, as if teaching me some sort of silent lesson.

Shortly after he finished eating it, the woman returned carrying a large round tray. Balancing the tray in one hand, she placed a small metal bowl of steaming hot rice in front of me and another in front of Steve. She then handed each of us a large metal bowl. Glancing inside, I saw vegetables, crumbled beef and a fried egg. Finally, she placed another bowl between us that contained a thick red sauce that resembled ketchup. 

She walked away and I looked at Steve. He looked at me. I took a deep breath trying not to think about what my mother would be cooking for dinner. Whatever it was, I missed it. Looking more closely at the food in the big bowl, I realized that I could not identify half the vegetables. Oh well, at the very least I could eat rice…plain boring white rice. I wouldn't starve. At least that was a start.

Fearing that I might somehow make a serious faux pas, I waited for Steve to start eating before trying anything. Glancing at the table, he picked up his chopsticks and started with the vegetables. Once he chewed and swallowed a few times without thrusting his hand forward to reach for his glass, I felt it was safe to sample the food. However, I only took two or three bites before the woman came scrambling back to us as if in a panic. Scolding us with flapping hands and short abrupt sentences that we couldn’t understand, she dumped Steve’s rice into his vegetable bowl. She then scooped out a spoonful of the red goopy sauce and plopped it on top of the rice. Shoving the sauce in front of me, she pointed, indicating that I should do the same. Vigorously, she stirred the food in Steve’s bowl until the rice turned red and the vegetables were evenly mixed into it. Only then, with an exasperated sigh and a few words mumbled under her breath, did she walk away.

I wanted to melt into my seat, disappear forever and never come back to this place, this country, where I suddenly felt completely self conscious. I looked at Steve, but he appeared non-pulsed, pleased even that he now knew how to eat. I tried to speak, but my discomfort overwhelmed me. My hunger abandoned me. 

However, concerned that the woman might return more wrathful a second time, I did as she instructed. Looking down at my food, I had serious doubts about surviving the year. But when I finally forced a spoonful of the food into my mouth I was shocked to discover that I didn’t dislike it. The flavor was certainly different, but not a bad difference. It might just take a bit of getting used to. Feeling slightly better—a little more optimistic, and less anxious—I sat back and painlessly ate my dinner.

© 2024 Elizabeth Jaeger