Hatter listened as he always did, with an earnest interest. Both for the way in which Mr. Bae explained things and, in this case, for getting to hear more about Mr. Bae's past. Even if it was mostly regarding food (which he was not complaining about in the slightest), it offered a glimpse into the life he had lived.
Which was different than the one now, for a great deal of reasons, but it wasn't as if Swynlake had things like a kalguksu-jip. It wasn't big enough to hide those sorts of things. Even considering [NAME REDACTED], that was just a coffee shoppe, wasn't it?
"2001," he repeated, still looking at the photograph. "Hard to believe that much time has gone by."
“God, yeah…I wasn’t even – it doesn’t even feel like I’m the same person as in these pictures. We didn’t have our son for another two years, and being his dad is my whole thing. And my personality was completely different. I used to party, like actually party.” Mu-yeol said, pointing to a picture of him and So-yeon at a club dancing on a table, getting everybody else hype. “I’d been living in Seoul for two years though, at this point. So the culture shock of that had worn off.”
He pointed to another picture.
“That was from Su-mi’s first time visiting us in Seoul. She’d just finished her apprenticeship in the Hollow and came to stay with us for a week to celebrate. I remember trying to hard to convince her that I was completely happy and that everything was fine in the human world.”
He sighed and shook his head.
“And I actually took that one–” he pointed to another one on the page. “Was mine and So-yeon’s friend group at the time. One of them anyway.” From left to right, he pointed out who was who. “Jiahao, he was a student from China that she knew from the university, I actually dated him for a little while like a few months before this. Joey, he was a student from Malaysia. So-yeon of course. Cho Moon-sung, another fairy living in Seoul, he was my age. So-yeon’s girlfriend at the time, Gu Mi-yeon, at least that’s what we all called her. She was a Korean-Australian named Rebecca but we all just used her Korean name. That’s Icy, he was from Thailand. And creepily looming in the background there that’s Gil Gong-chan, one of So-yeon’s classmates. Everyone was always over our apartment to eat. She’d find out somebody only ate ramyeon and convenience store kimbap and would be like ‘just come over whenever, my husband can cook.’ I hope they’re all doing well. I went straight back to DAegu when she died, I didn’t…say goodbye to anybody.”
ALTwent to a mountain goats concert tonight and i thought y’all would appreciate this image of john darnielle reading someone’s divorce papers that were thrown on stage before No Children
My favourite genre of Mountain Goats lyric is the kind where the animal metaphor snuck in when he wasn’t looking and he’s a little mad about it
Hatter looked up from the notebook and blinked at the sound of those years. Good lord. At one point in his life the new century had been such a big to-do and those years had become milestones he based the passage of time off of. The sort that made him think, oh yeah that was only 3 years ago only to realize it had actually been 5.
Now, here they were, 25 years passed it.
He shook himself away from that thought and turned to see the picture Mr. Bae was holding. At first, all he could focus on was the man himself before he shifted to taking in the visage of his late wife. It was the first time he had any indication of what she looked like, and it was a bit jarring, but he remained as he was rather than trying to take the picture from Mr. Bae's hand to get a closer look.
And because he was who he was, he couldn't help but to squint, and point a finger to hover over the picture and ask, "What're you eating?"
“We were at a kalguksu-jip.” Mu-yeol answered, knowing David had no idea what that was. “A lot of hole-in-the-wall restaurants in Korea, the ones down alley ways ran by some ahjumma or ahjussi–” a sizable minority of them kitchen witches, which Mu-yeol never picked up on but Hatter might in Korea “– will specialize in one type of dish done several different ways. Kalguksu is a noodle dish. The noodles are knife cut versus pulled or spun and you can add basically anything to the broth.”
He nodded to the picture.
“The couple that ran that noodle shop were very kind, they always gave us more than we paid for. Anyway, I usually got perilla seed kalguksu and she liked pine mushroom kalguksu. I’ll have to bring you to a kalguksu-jip down a sketchy alleyway when we go to Korea. That’s where you find the best stuff.”
"Adjective day," he repeated, wanting to know what such a phrase felt like to say. Maybe the way Mr. Bae spoke and chose to word things wasn't unique to other people, but Hatter always found those little things to be very amusing and interesting.
He eyed the long list of description words and their counterparts next to them, taking a touch longer here since it was helpful to him, too. Not that he was going to memorize anything right now, but any bit of exposure was worth something.
Again, he turned the page.
“If you think that’s interesting,” Mu-yeol began, reaching for the small photo album. “I think these are from…2000? Wait, no 2001, because–” he flipped to a page near the middle and pointed to a picture of him and So-yeon. “– that restaurant was right by our second apartment.”
He smiled.
“Two years before we had Nam-min.”
