Just twenty-seven years old, a small-town Midwesterner, I spend the morning teaching English conversation at a language school near Gangnam. The 6 AM class bristles with businessmen, bosses with white hair, suits, and a lingering smell of cigarettes. Rows of brown eyes glare. They regard me defiantly, Confucian notions of age and hierarchy clashing with low-intermediate language skills and a deep need to save face. Each of them has paid good money to practice English, has arisen from bed at least an hour early for it, yet no one will open his mouth.

The 7 AM class is the same.

In the 11 AM class, though, the atmosphere shifts entirely. Brown eyes smile, invite. The students here are rich housewives and retirees, a cohort that’s been together in this class for months or even years, and it feels like a social club. None of them woke up early or have somewhere to be. They’re comfortable with each other, chatty, and invite me to lunch to keep the conversation going.

Afterward, I head to the teacher’s lounge and encounter the brown eyes of the administrators, the brown eyes of the manager, the brown eyes of the Korean teachers. Then I stroll a couple blocks to my apartment, past a parade of brown eyes.

I unlock the door, drop my keys on the table, and step into the bathroom. Impossibly blue eyes confront me in the mirror and I almost flinch. For the first time in my life, they strike me as alien. Leaning forward, I study them, and up close they seem green rather than blue. Around the rim of each iris, a darker avocado or forest dominates, but toward the pupil, the shades lighten into a yellow-flecked ring. I stare, frozen, waiting for my brain to catch up as this identity vertigo grips me, and then finally, suddenly, self-recognition snaps back into place.

I turn on the faucet, let the water flow over my hands, and splash it on my face.

Aren’t eyes mostly water and a little protein, temporarily knit into a ball of jelly?

The house I grew up in sits on a cul-de-sac off County Line Road. On one side, Will County. On the other, Kankakee County. If I cross the street, I’m in Grant Park, the town my parents grew up in. If I drive five minutes east, I hit the state line dividing Illinois and Indiana. Once my dad and I took my young boys to a movie in Indiana, and on the way, I told them we were crossing the border between states. They perked up, pressed their faces to the windows, searched for signs of visible difference between one side and the other.

I spent a lot of my childhood playing at the creek with a good friend who lived a half-mile away on County Line. It occurs to me that if either of our houses would have been built just a stone’s throw further south, we would have gone to different schools, and probably wouldn’t even be friends at all. But we ended up on the same side, so we’d ride our bikes and meet at the bridge between our houses to shoot BB guns or throw rocks or ride an inflatable raft down the creek. Standing under that bridge, we occupied a liminal space. A molecule of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms coursing along would be in one town and county, pass a line, then emerge into an entirely different town and county.

Is the line right in the middle of the road? Or is the line thick, spanning the full width of the asphalt edge to edge? When we sleep, where is it? And if we all disappeared tomorrow?

I descend the stairs in my apartment building, cross the threshold out onto the street. All the “foreign” teachers working at my language school are housed here—American, Canadian, Australian. Fat snowflakes float on uncharacteristically quiet Seoul afternoon air. I came to Korea in the summer, but somewhere along the way, we crossed into fall, then stepped over the line into winter.

One of the teachers from Australia stands in front of the building in pajamas, staring up with her mouth and eyes wide open. I pause and watch her, trying to figure out what she’s doing, but she doesn’t move.

“Hey, you okay?”

She looks at me as if I’ve snapped her out of something, then smiles. For an instant, she appears to struggle for words. “Snow.”

I still don’t get what’s going on.

She says, “I’ve never seen snow before.”

If you could follow a molecule in a snowflake, trace its history and future, what transformations and fluid associations would you witness? How did it manifest ten minutes before? Days? Millennia? How many raindrops, creeks, rivers, lakes, oceans, icebergs, and clouds has it been? Did it crash to Earth frozen in an asteroid after careening through the alien void of space? How many times has it since formed eye jelly or blood? In who?

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.

Is our sharpest anger at others really just a kind of spiritual cramp that accompanies a lack of recognition?

We are home all day, every day, because of the pandemic. Me, my wife, my two teenagers confined to the close walls of our small apartment, our eyes bleary from staring at small screens. My wife and I take an hour-long walk to an island in the Han River. We talk about the virus—how many cases, where, what word of masks or drugs or symptoms or death, what news of economic collapse. Above all, worries about our aging parents.

We cross the bridge to the island and pass a sign with a map imposing boundaries on the water. Fishing is not allowed on one side, but is okay on the other. Five or six lines are cast in the no-fishing zone today, and we watch a middle-aged man reel in a fat, flopping carp.

People have stamped a park onto the island’s surface: paths, gazebos, restrooms, a sculpture, and signs labeling species of trees. We stop at the furthest verge of the island, walk right up to the edge, and our conversation falls silent for a couple minutes as we survey the wide Han River stretching into the distance. The sun hovers just over the horizon of mountains and its amber light shimmers on murmuring waves.

After a while, I say, “I have an idea for my next tattoo.”

“What?”

“A wave.”

She nods. I examine the circles of black ink on my forearms. In the right one, a sun rises over the shoreline of a sea or river. My younger son’s name is River in English, but his Korean name is Bada, which translates as sea. In the left one, the moon hangs amid stars and cosmic clouds, for my older son named Sky. Both are a stippled black-and-gray dotwork style, each with a broken, porous border that the clouds and starstuff artfully stray across.

My skin—the border I imagine between me and the universe—how long does it stand up to scrutiny?

Korea has beaten the virus back to almost no new cases per day, and I’m at the tattoo shop. Black ink goes in and mixes with bright red blood seeping out as the artist needles a pattern into my leg. It’s a cresting wave, framed by the thick lines of a geometric triangle design. At the top, the wave surges past the border, reaching out to what’s beyond.

– Kevin Stadt