짐 (Jim: Baggage or Burden)
Vignettes from a Long Stay
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.
Table of Contents
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Mrs. Han – A chipped hot-water bottle that has not been used in thirty years.
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Yeon-seok – An office chair from a past life that refuses to fit into a new one.
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Minji – Cardboard boxes waiting for a move that may never happen.
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Ajusshi Park – A hardware store that has become its own museum.
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Sung-hee – A refrigerator left behind, its absence still humming.
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Hyeon-woo – An mp3 player full of a stranger’s music.
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Sister Cecilia – A silver spoon, placed on the windowsill every Easter.
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Dong-jin – Broken pots and cracked mugs turned into a rooftop garden.
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Hee-joo – The curated clutter of an influencer’s storage unit.
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Young-Seok – A little blue case in a glass-front bookcase, never opened.
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