There’s a small island of plant life a few blocks from our house in Seoul. The contractors of an apartment building constructed it many years ago, a concrete triangle twenty feet to a side. Within the triangle are two yew trees, grizzly and malnourished, and five or six shrubs. The ground sprouts with clover, tendrils of vines, and a flower or two every other spring.
“Here my aunt once found mugwort and took it home to her kitchen,” my wife tells me. She grew up nearby and was explaining how this island of plant life—these two yews and six shrubs—were like a forest to her in her childhood. She said she would lose herself under their canopy until her mother or grandmother down the street called for her to come home quick.
“This was where we learned the smell of soil and the taste of grass. Where we saw birds and sometimes mice and imagined dog prints to be wolf prints or at the very least deer. Where we watched one generation of plants succeed another, and insects lead grotesque and otherworldly lives. It was where boys practiced their baseball slides and kicked up clouds of dirt. Where there were trees to measure up against, places to dig and hide, things to be sought and caught. In the presence of spiders and the prospect of snakes, it was the jungle of our fears. And yet, alone and uncertain, it was the grotto of our hopes.”
It’s true that even a single tree in the city changes everything. A group of them and you can picture yourself in the Taiga. But while all of that was very nice, I told her it was hard to ignore the cigarette butts, the glass cola bottles and candy wrappers half-mummified in the dirt.
“We considered those artifacts, remnants of humans of lost civilizations,” she explained. “Anyway, you don’t have to tell me what a dead space this is. Even at that age we knew what it lacked,” she said on reflection. “And yet we made it enough.
*
The preschools in Seoul are easy to identify. Amidst the drab grays and whites of the housing landscape, the preschool offers a palette of primary and tertiary colors. I stop before a local exemplar and take in its details: a red mail slot; a yellow door; windows stuck with whale stickers; through the windows green balloons; outside a plastic slide, a sandbox in shape of turtle; a sugar maple; a cat that comes and goes; next door a neighbor’s garden, with squash vines writhing through a chain-link fence. (If lucky, a flower will fruit on the playground side and the children watch it grow.)
But there is something shabby and forlorn about the place which the colors cannot mask. Defects and deficiencies, limitations of the confines that are all too clear: the windows grimy; the sandbox muddied; the slide soiled and stunted; walls and fences; a single tree. Do the parents shed a tear dropping their children off come morning, knowing this the world they offer them?
And yet children, their imaginations swelling, make castles of hovels. (You have to hand it to them.) And passing years of their childhood within these walls, they’ll remember well their surroundings, imprinted with them as they are. Decades hence they might even yearn for these very environs—like salmon seeking their spawning ground—yearn for them with a vague but poignant wistfulness. The red mail slot; the yellow door; the whale-stickered windows and green balloons; the turtle sandbox and plastic slide; the maple and the cat; the chain-link fence.
*
On the way home from work I found myself following the same route as a mother and her daughter. The daughter was old enough to walk, yet young enough to enjoy the comfort of a stroller when the mood struck. By slowing my pace I was able to observe them from behind for several blocks.
While the daughter was up and on her feet, I watched her stop and examine a row of wayside flowers. I approached the flowers in her wake. She had good taste. These yellow heads were of rare charm: not loud or garish, but simple and unassuming. Fragile, yet festive. Not beckoning, but lying in wait like a journeyman’s lost coinage. Moreover, their deep concavity spoke of an inner strength and mystery that I identified with. (The postscript to this scene is that, passing a few days later, I saw that the flowers had fallen.)
Back in the stroller and cruising by a duck restaurant, the girl asked her mother about the Chinese characters that appeared on the wall menu inside. Her mother explained that the characters are used to designate portion sizes: small, medium and large. Seeing the character for “large” or “great,” the girl extended her arms out wide, which is exactly what the ideogram’s form (大) is based on—a man with outspread arms. Greatness, we are right to conclude, is a liberal embrace.
On the same block as the restaurant was a wallpaper and matting store. The girl must have mistaken the wallpaper rolls for arcane literary scrolls, for she asked her mom how old “these books” were. Or at I least I think she did…. It’s possible I didn’t catch her words well enough, and mistook them for something I had hoped to hear.
“Is this place selling plants?” she asked of an adjacent store. Again she was thrown off. In fact it was a clock dealer, but the proprietor had such a mania for plants that he overwhelmed the store with pots big and small. One had to give him credit, however, for creating a rather surreal and dreamlike space, a space whose merging of machine and Mother Nature seemed to suggest that life ran like clockwork.
A shoe repair store lured the girl out of the stroller and up against the window pane. When her mother told her that the store’s name was “The Shoe Hospital,” she began to feel bad for the footwear convalescing on the rack and, turning to her mom, asked if the shoes’ owners would come back once the shoes got well again. As the mother-daughter dyad moved on ahead, I came up alongside the window myself. Some in pairs, some singly, the shoes sat there like synecdoches of their owners, revealing something of their identity and individual crotchets: the harried woman’s high heels; the pious man’s loafers; the oxfords of the footloose youth….
There’s a very small shop on the corner of the block, an alcove really, no bigger than a kitchen pantry. The space is so cramped it looks out of place amongst its broad-shouldered neighbors. A sign on the door says it’ll soon be out of business.
“I want to sell ice cream here!” says the girl.
“I want to sell books here!” thinks I.
In truth it would do well as an Indian tea stall or Arab apothecary. This man sells house paints.
We turned up a side street. If not for the girl’s lively eye, I would have missed the kaleidoscopic patchwork quilt hanging on a clothesline in the shadowy gap between two homes. She also shed light on an empty taxicab parked in a private garage, surprised that taxi drivers drove themselves home.
“Do they have to pay too?” she asked.
After getting up to study the deer antlers mounted above the doorway of an herbalist’s, and after tracing the arabesques of an iron railing with her index finger, the girl returned to her stroller and finally appeared to be falling asleep. Anyhow it was time for us to separate, I to the left and they to the right… not unlike the antlers branching in two.
Ah, but wait… she was awake and sitting up again. And she was pointing again, pointing up as she drifted away. Following her finger I saw a flock of geese carving the sky overhead.
“What are geese doing in Seoul?” she asked, adding, before her mother could answer: “The sky looks like a rhino.”
And she was right. Her description of the pockmarked patterning of the clouds was spot on, if you’ve seen rhino hide up close.
Left with that observation, I continued to look up at the sky as I made my way home.
It was a beautiful sky, the cumulo-seraphic clouds now a rococo glow of pink and golden orange. And though the girl wouldn’t have seen the beauty in it that I saw, I suspected that today’s sky would stay with her somewhere, latent inside her, setting a standard of beauty against which she’d measure all future skies in years to come.
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