After living in Korea a dozen years, I still haven’t gotten used to the spitting. I stroll down the street and an old man some paces ahead pauses his walk to spit. For men here, particularly older men, particularly in Yangpyeong, my wife’s rural home town, spitting signifies differently than in my native system. Guys spit when they smoke, or chat, or walk, or squat, basically anytime they’re outside, and sometimes even indoors in the train station I pass through on my way to work, or inside the subway car, or into the garbage can at the gym. They spit loudly, emphatically, making an unabashed spectacle of it.

The old man stops walking to give himself over to the act fully. He holds a burning cigarette, and as a smoker he’s developed a depth of phlegm to draw on and brings it up in several grumbling wet waves, each louder than the last, pulling mucous from his core, holding it, then choking up another layer, meets my eyes now as I pass him and I’m embarrassed to say I play up my grimace of disgust in some subconscious desire to shame him and he looks back at me with his face already set in the grimace of age and he brings up one more rattling nasal draw and finally his jaw goes up and down as he gathers and shapes the sputum wad with his tongue and hocks the huge loogie on the cracked sidewalk between us.

”I Forgot My Eyes”

My wife and I lay in bed, the windows wide open to the Korean summer night. A breeze blows into the dark room, the breath of the mountains and rice fields. We listen to the raucous cacophony of frogs echoing through the countryside, thousands upon thousands of amorous amphibians calling for mates. They’re so loud it seems frankly impossible, like they’re all right outside my window or there’s some kind of hidden surround-sound speaker equipment in the room projecting frogsong at full volume. It’s too hot to close the windows, and I know I’ll have to put in earplugs to sleep. But for a few minutes I just bask in the music of it.

My wife, Hyunju, speaks just loud enough that I can make out her words through the background tangle of croaking. “Frogs saved my life when I was a baby.”

“Frogs Saved My Life When I Was a Baby”

We don't stay long. My mother promises to come back again soon, and we retrace our steps to the back door. On the way out, my eyes fall on the double-barrel 16-guage shotgun my Grandfather keeps right next to the back door, ready and waiting in case he notices anything or anyone on his property that needs to be shot.

“Two Farms”

Then one of the trees next to the shed catches my eye. White somethings punctuate the black boughs, and for a moment my mind struggles to understand what it’s looking at. I scrunch up my face and step closer, cocking my head. I reach the tree and stare, groping for an explanation.

Every sock I own is in this tree.

“Wait…what the hell is this?” I cast a glance around as if an answer might present itself. My brain works to come up with the scenario that explains why every sock I have except the ones I’m wearing are in this tree. Ghosts? Aliens? Some kind of freak weather event?

“Socks in a Tree”

The other day, I sat in front of my computer in my room—maybe I was grading or prepping classes or just watching Netflix—when he came in and said, "Bury me in pillows." I watched a knee-jerk reaction form in my brain. I was about to refuse him, to send him out with the excuse that I was busy, when I caught myself. The request struck me. I pushed back from my computer and regarded him, my head cocked. How long since he'd last requested the game? Many months, surely, and perhaps even into years.

More importantly, with him twelve and going on teenager, it seemed entirely possible that this game, which in retrospect had figured as a central mechanism of our father-son bonding, this game that I suddenly saw meant more than I'd realized, this game that to my great regret I sometimes didn't fully show up for—this was likely the last time he'd ever ask me to play.

“Bury Me”

I can't put my finger on the emotion that washed over me. Not quite existential doom, not purely embarrassment, not simply sadness. But it tastes much like the one I struggled with the week before I turned 40. Or the time when I was at the checkout at the grocery store and looked up at the security camera footage. I saw a guy with a big bald spot and remarked to myself, "That guy's going bald," and then realized the camera was right above me.

“Existential Arm Wrestling”