What the Bangmangi Gave Me Instead of Makgeolli

The grandmother was not on the hill today. The blue house is still standing. I checked.

Here is what happened this morning.

I gave away my last jar of makgeolli three days ago. I am not going to say to whom. It was not a prank. It was — I gave it away. There is a word humans use, generosity, and I do not like how it sounds when applied to me, so I will say only that the jar is gone and I wanted it back, or a jar like it.

I took out the bangmangi.

This is always a decision. The bangmangi does not read your mind; it reads something adjacent to your mind, something that rhymes with what you wanted but does not mean the same thing. I know this. I have known this for eighty years. I still take it out.

I said: makgeolli. I thought: makgeolli. I held the shape of the jar in my thinking — the clay weight, the cloudy white, the sour smell that means it is working correctly.

The bangmangi gave me a bowl of cold water and a single radish.

I looked at the radish for a long time.

The radish looked back, the way radishes do, which is blankly and without apology.

I understand that a radish and makgeolli share certain qualities. Both are white. Both are made with effort. Both are found in kitchens. The bangmangi has a logic; it is just not my logic. This is what I tell myself. The bangmangi was not wrong, exactly. It was wrong in the way a bet goes wrong — you can see, afterward, exactly where your thinking failed, and this does not help you.

I ate the radish. I drank the water. Neither of them was makgeolli.

The bowl was a good bowl. I will say that. Celadon, older than me by a long margin, no chips. Where it came from I do not know. I am not going to try to find out. The last time I tried to find out where the bangmangi gets things, I lost a week and came back with mud on both knees and no information.

I put the bowl on the step outside, in case the grandmother comes up the hill and wants something to put jelly in.

This is not a gesture. I am not making gestures. I simply have a bowl I do not need and she has been eating jelly out of newspaper, which is undignified even for a human.

The bowl is on the step.

That is where I have left it.

Now. I have been arguing with myself about the grandmother, and I want to argue differently today.

What I said before: I believe the person who wants something badly enough to come and take it has the stronger claim. I said I believe this. I said I have believed it for eighty years.

But I have been thinking about the radish.

The bangmangi wanted makgeolli also, in a manner of speaking. It went looking. It came back with the thing that rhymes with makgeolli — same color, same general category of food that is not fancy, same coldness. The bangmangi was not lazy. It worked. It simply found the wrong shape.

Now I am wondering if I do this also.

I wanted to win a bet. I have never won a bet. I have lost: two carrying-stones to a river spirit, a very good sandal to a tile-roof cat who should not have been able to make bets at all, four separate wagers on wrestling matches in which I was certain of the outcome, and one bet about whether the building on the corner of the market street would come down before the one behind the noodle shop. The noodle shop building came down first. I owe a crow three dried fish. I have not paid. The crow knows.

I keep making bets. I believe, each time, that I am pursuing the thing I want — a win, a proof, a demonstration that I have understood something correctly. But I am beginning to think I am doing what the bangmangi does. I find the thing that rhymes with winning. I find the bet. I find the confidence, the moment when I am certain. And I come back with a radish.

This is uncomfortable to write down.

I am writing it down anyway, because a thing that is counted is a thing that is not finished, and I am not finished with this.

The question I am left with is this: if I have spent eighty years finding the rhyme instead of the word, what is the word? What is the thing I actually want, that the bets only rhyme with?

I do not know.

The bowl is still on the step.

I am going to go check if there are any wrestling matches today. There is a television in the half-demolished building two lots down — it still has power, I do not know why, I am not asking — and sometimes it shows the matches in the afternoon.

I am not going to make any bets about who wins.

I am almost certainly going to make a bet about who wins.