Left of Euljiro Way

It’s the small things that break your heart.

Take Korea for instance. A peninsula, not so large. If you compare it to India, say, or even its neighbor China, she is not so large.

But Korea has a habit of breaking your heart. Your spleen, your spine, whatever it can get from you. It wants your face. Your lungs. Your ribs, concave inwards. Nothing I did was ever enough for my motherland.

And so sometimes people ask me: Why did I relocate to Toronto? And then Las Vegas, to Portland, to Auburn, and finally here, in Alameda? It is not a racist question, inherently.

“It must’ve been so hard for you to move,” this lavender-eyed grandmother said. She was white, with puffy swirls of cotton hair, and a homeknit sweater.

“Why did you do it?” A bored teenager, hair spiky with pink dye, Asian-American and trying not to show it. “Why did you come all the way over here?”

What, with my bad accent and crooked eyes, my monolids and double smile? It was not for money, love, family: the usual Asian reasons. I could have lived in Seoul forever. I could have been happy.

But this is what had happened:

Myeongdeong is an eerie place at night, because no one is home. Maybe you can argue with me and say no: my auntie lives there, or my friend’s roommate from college had a house there, or I-went-in-the-summer-at-night-and-it-was-perfectly-bustling-to-me. I have heard all of these things before. But it doesn’t change how, for me, Myeongdeong is an eerie place at night.

No one is home. It can be said that no one really calls Myeongdong their home, except perhaps the aged sanitation workers, moving wearily from shift to shift. Calls, from some Samsung phone, always punctuate the groggy air. You see a young businesswoman in a smart suit and clear umbrella, importantly murmuring. A group of boys coming home from the club, phones balanced in soju-slicked hands, taking their calls.

Myeongdong has a secret though: it is an excellent place to walk. If you’re not afraid of a foreign veracity, I suggest winding around the concrete alleys, where the neon signs are unfixed and painted over. Where the graffiti grows and faintly, you hope to hear rats skittering by. I like to go when it rains, which is awesome. And my dark shoes would soak in the remnants of worm puddles, and I would feel the sweat in my socks.

It was the only time in my life that I could recall being alive.

Well, I did this walk over and over, nightly routine, monotony unbeaten. It was pleasant, alarming, almost meditative. In the way that the devout find themselves attached to self-flagellation or fasting, perhaps, I was attached to the Myeongdeong walk.

Some mornings, when Orion was craning his head towards the north needle of a compass, I would pull my shoes off. My socks, cheaply laced. And at the cut of my toes, where the joints bend and stitch together pig-head and body, blood would form at the cracks. Dried and cut through by overuse.

It was then, where I felt I really belonged.

Because I am not skinny, and my eyes don’t wander. I have yellow teeth and breasts that sag, and a mouth that captures all the vibrant miasmas of my daily breakfast sandwich. I would go to work, bleeding through my toes, but it was a sit-down time, so it was okay.

And then I would go walk, peninsula stars overhead, threatening to touch my errant forehead. And then I would feel okay.

I had seen the woman several times before, always hunched over the gutter. Her dark hair was slicked in oily curls, black unbraids snaking into the gutter. She was Asian. She had paler skin than me, and maybe that is why I ignored her. Her dress was finely cut, singly made, not the quality fast-fashion crap I was used to. It was Greek style, with careful seams.

Her belly was enormous, swollen. The twigs of her arms were slender, her face was a pinched oval. She was so tiny and yet so big, so I ignored her. A woman of some means, I thought. Drunk and in the gutter.

Every night. Sometimes a thin trail of black blood streamed from her mouth, painted fang, a path for me to cross. I would walk quickly, gingerly, past the lithe corpse. She wasn’t for me to follow.

Eyes distended. The whites apparent. The things us Asians do these days, I thought. Maybe hunching in the gutter was some new beauty fad.

But it lasted for months and I did not even notice, until one evening around 3AM, I was rounding the corner into my favorite concrete alley, when I heard a cry. A scream of remorse.

I did not want to see so I kept on walking but then this lady stopped me, American, african-american, and she grabbed my shoulder.

“Ma’am,” and I could see she was in tears, and her pink nails were digging into the excess of my armflesh.

“Ma’am please,” and she was shaking me. Blue green glitter clothes. Tourist Hangul. Accent English; understandable, and yet foreign. I tried muttering in a worse dialect, (I’m sorry I don't know), but she held onto me fast.

“Please, you have to help me,” and some moments of life are in melodramatic motion, unreal frames shuttering one after the other. Her quivering finger towards the corpse. The same black trail, leaking out of the woman’s mouth. The things I did ignore, until I was putting my finger within the purse of twin lips, and out popped a baby’s foot. Tiny. The size of two fingers curling together, a cross, and I remember pretending to pray. The tourist girl was sobbing, and some administrative officer held her tightly, in an uncomfortable embrace. Warding something off as the blue people approached, sirens shaking the opal night.

Her name was Keijo Song (Song Keijo), and she was a chaebol from the greater districts. I had gotten that right. Evidently she had gotten pregnant, but couldn’t keep it, and the baby kept coming and going like a curse. Obanje, someone once told me in Portland.

They never stay.

So what it seemed like was happening, was the baby would leave her (pieces in the gutter), and like a mother, Keijo Song would scoop up the fecal bits, place them back into her jewel mouth. Similar to an alligator, only then she would swallow it whole. Rinse and repeat. Baby stuff in Myeongdeong gutter.

But what is unclear to me, and to the general Korean public, (for this went viral), is really the particulars of the case. Song Keijo died of dehydration the morning of, so no questions were ever answered. Her family closed up shop and moved to Singapore, four hours before the officials could arrive.

It was as I always knew, on the earliest flight to Canada, as soon as my papers were acceptable. That to be a mother of any kind was unacceptable, (teke-teke lurking in the dark), but it was the worst to be a Korean mother. And yet it could have been born, could’ve been born…but Song Keijo could not bear to fruition.

So you keep trying. Fragments of teeth and hair, gnashing into your own. No one to fuck you anymore but yourself, so you keep trying. Baby toenails in your esophagus. Murmuring and mixing with stomach lining. Rinse and repeat. Ouroboros of the maternal dark, and like a soldier, I had manned the ballistic stations which had grown such an aberration. Myeongdong at night; quartz eyes gleaming in carnival shadow.

And I couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t be the culpable victim, and I thought (some places have to be better than this). And they aren’t, and I know for I have been to them all.

But they aren’t worse either.

Ascetic lungs, fetus vomit. The rain glittering steadily over us, crystalline, I had shut my umbrella to let the raindrops taste in my head. The young girl was bawling, holding my hand, as the thing in the gutter smiled. I think I have been in that moment forever. I think I have never left.