Maude Sanders
I am walking around some dusty Korean town – the sort that’s so rural, and so forgotten by the last 20 or 30 years of economic miracles, that it has an atmosphere vaguely reminiscent of Mexico: there are chickens being carried around and clucking in vacant lots, men smoking while squatting on street corners, old women carting bags vegetables on their heads. There is a woman selling knives laid out on a blanket on the sidewalk, but she seems to be dozing under her broad-brimmed hat. It’s summer or early fall, the air is clear and unhumid. The sun is beating down.
It’s not actually clear to me why I’m there. I’m really hungry, and I’m looking at the posted menus of the various restaurants strung out along the street leading from the bus station. I’m trying to work up the nerve to go into one of the restaurants and negotiate the Korean language, so I can order some food. I’m craving kimchi bokkeumbap, but none of the menus that I can see have it.
I finally walk into a cavernous place that is largely empty. There is a large television playing Korean pop music videos, but no one is watching. There are some men chatting with a waitress in by the back counter, leading to the kitchen area.
There’s a thin, frail-looking Western woman, with dusty blond hair, sitting at a table alone in the center of the room. Some Korean men are regarding her speculatively, and when I walk in – yet another “foreigner” – they look up in surprise, and maybe assume she and I must know each other.
She introduces herself by the unusual method of showing her discharge papers from a psychiatric facility. But that’s getting ahead of the story.
I sit down along one of the walls, not anywhere near the young woman. The waitress comes and takes my order, and for some reason I order jjajangmyeon (noodles in black bean sauce), even though I don’t actually like jjajangmyeon.
Right from the start, I could see that she is really, clearly, a very strange person. But she is young and attractive, and shortly after I have sat down, I see her go over and begin chatting with several middle-aged Korean men. This is before I have yet spoken with her.
I am surprised and jealous to see that she is speaking stunningly good Korean – clearly with a foreign accent, but fluent and effective. The men seem more taken with that aspect of her than her gaunt beauty or her bizarre proposition.
What is the bizarre proposition? I gathered, early on, that she is talking about something illicit or unexpected with the men – I can see their shocked, uncomfortable reactions. It is unclear what it might be. These men she is talking to seem more stunned by it than genuinely interested in whatever it is she is saying. Perhaps they are put off by the introduction – the frank announcement that she has recently exited a mental hospital. That is probably a bit overwhelming for a typical Korean man of limited world-view and provincial mentality.
By the time I get my food, she has returned to her table in the center of the room and is again sitting alone, toying with, but not eating, some jjambbong – a spicy noodle and seafood concoction that goes under the rubric of “Chinese food” in Korea, but which no self-respecting Chinese person would cook. It is “Chinese” in kind of the same way “Chinese food” in rural America doesn’t seem very Chinese to Chinese people, either. Although it’s quite different, jjambbong always reminds me of Chilean curanto – I think it’s the combination of pork and seafood in a stew.
I distinctly remember thinking about curanto, and Chile, in the dream. That’s always strange, when there are reflective moments of just thinking, inside of a dream-memory.
The woman, seeing me alone, and having been not-so-politely brushed off by the bewildered Korean men, comes over and bluntly introduces herself, now, to me. This is when I come to understand that the papers she’s showing are the discharge papers from the psychiatric hospital.
“I’m Maude Sanders,” she explains. She has a non-North American accent, but not British. Perhaps Australian, or Irish. It’s not clear. It’s another of those moments of inside-the-dream just thinking, as I meditate on this.
“You speak very good Korean,” I answer, noncommittally. I am fascinated by her unusual mode of introduction.
“It’s not hard to pick up when you spend a few years in mental hospital in Korea,” she explains, with a shrug. This does, indeed, make sense. But how is it that she came to spend a few years in a Korean nut house? I feel afraid to ask. There is a short, awkward silence, then. I look at the TV. She looks over at the Korean men, as if wishing they’d cooperated with her proposition, earlier.
She lowers her voice and leans in close. I am drawn in by her attractiveness, but I can tell I am not going to like what she has to say. It’s a kind of inside-the-dream premonition.
“Wanna watch me kill myself?”
There are some disconnected images of me actually agreeing to this, right at the end: signing some kind of waiver.
