Daegu Bound
A Train Story
In the haze of early morning, the Korean sky turns butter-yellow, and I am reminded of a children’s book from long ago. In it, a grandparent tells his grandchild about a land unlike their own. Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs is the kind of story you want to swallow whole. I often wonder if I’ll ever write a story like that, the kind that sticks with a person for decades.
Last week, a student of mine wrote a short story that made me laugh, which was his goal. It snuck up on me like all my favorite stories do. I was correcting his grammar, noticing he’d deviated from the instructions for the writing assignment, when bam! The clever little guy revealed to me, his reader, the reason his words would have been worthwhile even if it wasn’t my job to care.
You can’t teach that. Not really. Or, maybe you can teach yourself—I’m pretty sure that’s what I’ve been doing this past decade—but you can’t teach another person how to be a storyteller. They’ve either got to be lucky enough to have the instinct for it—and my god do you know how much talent you have to have to make a story work in your second language?—or they’ve got to really want it. You can’t teach that either. The wanting.
I feel so lucky that this is my job though. I get to teach writing to kids. I get to help them, and my reward is that they let me read what they write. What a thrilling sentence.
Does it really matter if you never write the story you hope you’re capable of writing, so long as you get to keep reading other people’s?
I did some quick math the other day and discovered I’ve written over 15,000 words for The Long Way Home. Multiply that by 3 or 4 and you’ve got yourself a nice little travel memoir. I had the thought that maybe one day I’ll pull together all of these letters to you and bind them into a physical book, just for myself. I immediately thought all of it? Some of the stuff I’ve written isn’t all that great, but then I thought an emphatic yes. All of it. I want to see how hard I’ve tried, how much I’ve grown as a writer. A quiet little voice in the back of my head whispered that it’s the trying that’s the interesting part. The attempt. The daring.
Does it really matter if you never write the story you hope you’re capable of, so long as you keep trying?
I’m on my way to a wedding in Daegu. It’s the first time I’ve left Seoul since I arrived in August. I slept for about an hour last night before I met my friend in the chilly air outside her apartment at 4 in the morning. We are both the type of people who can stay awake all night, greet each other on a dark street corner, and immediately start chattering away about whatever’s on our minds. Birds of a feather, I suppose. We’re on different train cars now, which I’m pretty sure is the only reason I’m getting any writing done.
An old couple sits across the aisle from me. They eat homemade gimbap from a Tupperware container in the woman’s lap. She’s got a plastic bag filled with hard boiled eggs in front of her. When I look at them or any of the other adults around me, I can’t stop thinking about how we all started out as the little kids I teach. I wonder how long these two have loved each other.
An American I know, someone who grew up in L.A., told me once you leave Seoul there’s nothing, nothing, nothing, but so far on this train journey I have to disagree a little bit. I count as the train moves. A fence. A few scraggly rows of grape vines. A creek that pops up out of nowhere. A greenhouse. Another greenhouse. Cows eating breakfast. A lone man walking through the field in work boots. I suppose “nothing” entirely depends on what you started out with.
Earlier, a father and his son, who looked about thirteen years old, sat in those same seats that the old couple now occupy. The boy rested his head in his dad’s lap. As he slept, his father played with his hair. I’m trying to remember the last time my parents played with my hair or if they ever have. Probably when I was little they did. My parents love me, that story is as constant as the sun, but they are not particularly physically affectionate. No one in my family is. It baffles me; it’s a great relief sometimes, too.
I know my dad loves my hair though because it reminds him of his mother. In fact, my whole face does. He smiles when he talks about it.
A long ago woman I never got to meet. Did she ever dream of Asia? Did she ever think she’d have grandkids who would go on to live in England and Colombia and Australia? Fiji and Korea, too?
I carry her with me everywhere I go in Korea. When folks openly stare at me on the street because I am a foreigner, they are seeing her face too. Or at least I like to think so. Sometimes, you are the story, not any of the words you write on the page. I don’t have to wonder if that matters. I know it does.
Read this on a train to Philly