I’ve been a decade in Seoul and still struggle with the language. Sometimes, squeezed into the tilted corner of a busy gopchang shop between the fired grill, a dozen people I don’t understand, and greasy tiled walls with hard water stains inching up like ivy, I think maybe if I just let the language happen to me I’ll just know it– the way a boy rests an open textbook on his head to absorb its content. So I close my eyes and follow each spoken phrase down its drawn-out fuse, let clusters of consonants detached from any meaning blast me back to basic being, to muck and bone in the swirl of all things before the sizzle of words, the smoke of intonation. When I open my eyes, an ajumma is taking her kitchen break on a short-ledged bench in the back. The back of her head is against the wall. She is using her fist to knock the arthritis out her knee. The chatter is just chatter to her, too.