At the Fish Market

The warm afternoon sun beamed through the flaps of the colored tarps and splashed on plastic stalls of the Guemyang fish market. Basketfuls of silvery eel were laid out side by side with fading grey mackerel, the blue-orange shells of mud crabs and tanks of shellfish of every imaginable sort, alive in the salty brine, bubbling and turgid to mimic the sea. Everywhere in the air hung that aggressive harbor smell, marine life rotting in the humid July air like ephemeral flesh pockets held up to a light bulb. It reeked and it stunk and it brought the customers from miles, come to fill their baskets with the bounty of the little estuary,

Among the market-goers Mrs. Shin sauntered about with her green tote bag. She had been intent on finding the most perfect cuttlefish to make for her husband and children for dinner that night. It wasn’t the right time of year for that particular catch—there would be no variety and even the most meager size would be too expensive, she knew. But it was the her eldest son’s sixteenth birthday and she knew a delicious recipe for ojingeo soondae, a most exquisite amalgam of seared mollusk stuffed with rice and vegetables, brought together with just a dash of koju pepper powder for color and spice. It wasn’t a popular dish in Gongju, the city in which the Shin family lived, but her son Hyun Bin had taken an especial liking to it during their family vacation to the East Sea two years prior. Mrs. Shin loved her family beyond measure and wanted only the best for everyone. Since it was her job as a housewife to ensure domestic tranquility, making a rare dish was not beyond her duty or her bounds of devotion as a mother.

Mrs. Shin made her way from the crab section to the sea squirts, rounding the corner stall and avoiding a motorbike that was careening through the crowd and splashing puddles of brackish water in the market alleys. She heard three ajummas in a row holler at passersby to come into their little restaurant hovels, surly female fishmongers vying for customers like in times past. They each gave her a searching look as she walked by and rained down offers upon her.

“Yasot mari man won imnida! Yasot mari! Masheet nungot—hong ah, choh gea, kohdung ah! Chinjja mashida!” Some held the tempting fish by the tails in their pink gloved-hands while others merely gesticulated to the bounty swimming to and fro in the tanks in front of their shops. Scallops, mussels, mackerel, skates and ugly flattened flounder. “Really delicious,” the women screamed over and over. “If six isn’t enough, let’s say eight for 10,000 Won?”

Among the usual din of the fish market, a child or a sophisticated urbanite might lose his bearings, bewildered by the rough smells and sounds and attitude of such a place. But for Mrs. Shin this was as much a routine place as was her kitchen, the small apartment building she lived in, and the cracked and winding alleyways that brought her home from her daily shopping, which were filled with noisy schoolchildren and delivery bikes in the late afternoon hours.

But today could not be counted among those routine days. Aside from the out of season cuttlefish, this mission bore a deeper difficulty. She had received by phone that afternoon the news of her mother’s passing. It was the kindly middle-aged neighbor man who had found her when she failed to answer the knocking on her door. They had been almost friends, as close as Koreans of separate generations can come to being friends. Mrs. Shin had dropped her cell phone on the floor of the supermarket when he had told her.

The call had come two hours ago. Now every step she took was like a meditation in the woods, her mind outside her body and her heart refusing her eyes any assistance. What was most troubling wasn’t the death itself. Her mother was an elderly woman. It was the lonely state of her life during her final years and the fact that Mrs. Shin had not been to Jeolla Province to visit her in quite some time, home duties and care for her live-in mother-in-law taking every grain of her energy. She wasn’t even sure her mother knew Hyun Bin was taking the entrance examinations this year. A profound shame and sadness filled her at this thought.

In a numbed state she paced up and down the market stalls, seeing and yet failing to comprehend what it was she was doing here. The urban chaos raged on everywhere around her and yet she was serene in her stupefaction. Alone in a little garden patch, a dolmen high in the summer mists of the Jiri mountains, perhaps she was visiting her father or grandparents or the whole panoply of dead relatives who had preceded her in life and in death. And now she was with her mother, accompanying her, holding her frail and withered frame ever so gently, a guide to the place they had come so many times together in years passed to reflect and to pay their familial respects. Her mother used to let her pick azaleas from the park and put them on her father’s grave when she was a child. Now it was alone she would return down the mountain, leaving the last of her forebears behind beneath the cold country soil.

With a jolt of her head Mrs. Shin shook herself and found she had been staring for some time at a purplish-white specimen, tentacles wrapped around its body like manacles, a tube of muscle with flaps and spots decorating its smooth skin. It was the object she had come for, her happy afternoon goal before receiving the phone call. The cuttlefish lay alongside a small group of its own kind like twin corpses dressed for burial. As she had suspected, they were small. Too small and too few to feed her family of four.

She gave the man at the stall the three-thousand Won for three fish and started back towards the bus stop. After the work of the day and under the cloud of her mother’s death she had decided to go straight home and not finish her dinner shopping. She had made it to sea snails, vegetables, and the three cuttlefish. Her husband would be disappointed. But perhaps, she thought, he will understand after all. And she smiled a little.