My last months in South Korea, after two and a half years there, I roved the country on weekend bus rides to its far corners trying to savor and understand a place I loved and hated to leave, straining all five senses to grab final memories that might, with time, eventually explain my attraction to it. I walked green tea fields, bathed in green tea, slept on stone floors with wooden pillows. At the Nagan Folk Village food festival that October, wandering among thatch houses, I tickled spindly ginseng roots, bit soft-toasted crackle-skinned yellow chestnut halves, and squeezed pert bursting persimmons to puff their scent while vendors shoved kimchi straight into my mouth, all to thrumming drums from a troop of dancers in silk blue-white flowing robes.
On the bus home, my head spinning, Seo sat down next to me and, noticing my fat Lonely Planet South America open to Peru, pressed her index finger against mine on the map to say she had just called at the port of Lima. I could hardly imagine her as the navigator of a Maersk shipping tanker, but she insisted she was back in Korea on shore leave before a run to Europe. Some nights, in the middle of the sea, when she wasn’t charting their course, among big storms, she felt her room turn sideways. She struck me as fearless.
After trading stories and we neared the station, she pressed her head into the cushioned seat back and sighed that she had a crush on a stevedore in Iceland. He was tall, blond. “Like you,” she said. Everyone on the ship teased her every time they called in Reykjavík, from the captain to the janitor. The last time they met, she had tried every wile she knew, but he was either bashful or uninterested, giving only a grin as he unloaded containers. She was nervous to see him again. I lugged her suitcase a few steps from the bus for her before she disappeared among the busy neon lights of the night.
