Yepp

Yepp

He found it in the gutter on his walk home from hagwon, wedged between a crushed milk carton and a shoe with no laces.

The mp3 player was scratched, the screen cloudy, but it still lit up when he pressed the button. The menu opened to a list of songs in English and Korean—none of them the pop hits his classmates liked.

The first track was slow, a woman’s voice with a low, steady vibrato, singing about rain. The second was a jazz piano piece, the kind you’d hear in an old café. The third was just called “Untitled.”

Hyeon-woo began listening to it every night before bed, lying on his side with the player tucked in his palm. He never told his parents, never mentioned it to friends. It felt like eavesdropping on someone’s diary.

After a while, he stopped wondering about who the owner was. He didn’t want to know their name, or why they had been carrying these songs, or how the player ended up in the street. Knowing would be like breaking it.

By winter, he could hum every melody in order. If the mp3 player died, he thought, he might still remember the songs, but not the silences in between.

짐 (Jim: Baggage or Burden)

짐 (Jim: Baggage or Burden)

Vignettes from a Long Stay

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Series Description

I have lived in South Korea for many years, long enough to collect a quiet drawer of stories—some told to me directly, some overheard in buses or cafés, some imagined after seeing a single object in someone’s home.

In the short story Some of Her Friends That Year, Maxine Chernoff’s character Oleg is revealed almost entirely through his relationship to things. That image stayed with me. Here, I’ve gathered a set of brief, self-contained sketches in the same spirit—each about a person I’ve met, heard about, or invented, and the object or objects that seem to anchor their life.

These pieces are not meant to explain Korea, or to speak for anyone. They are simply moments of wondering: what burdens we carry, what we choose to let go, and what sits quietly on a shelf, refusing to disappear.

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Table of Contents

1. Mrs. Han – A chipped hot-water bottle that has not been used in thirty years.

2. Yeon-seok – An office chair from a past life that refuses to fit into a new one.

3. Minji – Cardboard boxes waiting for a move that may never happen.

4. Ajusshi Park – A hardware store that has become its own museum.

5. Sung-hee – A refrigerator left behind, its absence still humming.

6. Hyeon-woo – An mp3 player full of a stranger’s music.

7. Sister Cecilia – A silver spoon, placed on the windowsill every Easter.

8. Dong-jin – Broken pots and cracked mugs turned into a rooftop garden.

9. Hee-joo – The curated clutter of an influencer’s storage unit.

10. Young-Seok – A little blue case in a glass-front bookcase, never opened.