A. KENDRA GREENE

I Regret Eating the Caterpillars

Where is Miss Manners when you need her?

We were on our way out, completing a lazy loop round the small stretch of field where a team dressed in red competed with a team dressed in blue, passing along a scattering of stands and clusters of folding chairs filled with older people chatting in soft voices. We had come because my host felt obliged we attend this annual community festival, that I might learn from it, the same way she felt I should visit the local bamboo museum, try my hand at traditional archery, and attend the funerals of people I’d never met.

The day was gray and cool, the festivities fit in the elementary school’s courtyard, and, having finished with them, we were headed toward the car when she asked if I’d ever tried caterpillars. She waved one hand toward a narrow booth as she asked, never shifting her gaze or breaking her stride. I glanced at the booth, the top half glowing warm through wide windows, and said no, I hadn’t. In a single motion, she turned on her heel and placed an order.

Mrs. Tak gave no indication that she in any way enjoyed our outings, yet she arranged them with diligence. I suspect there was a schedule to them, but unless they required me to wear a special dress—a blue and white hanbok with delicate flowers painted at the cuffs, haggled for and acquired on one of our first surprise outings—I couldn’t expect to know our plans until we were already on our way to see a ballet based on traditional folklore or eat a particular kind of squid on the coast or climb a famous mountain in the interior. And ever since the morning she announced curtly, “I don’t like English. I don’t want to practice anymore,” I was reticent to ask.

I could, however, count on a certain amount of conversation. At the end of every excursion, my host asked what I thought. At this prompting, I was to summarize my thoughts and reactions, give a kind of cultural book report on the day’s events. I understood that good Korean manners forbade me from saying anything remotely negative. Modesty and moderation were also virtues, so the upper ranges of enthusiasm were to be tempered with decorum. Which meant, as far as I could tell, the acceptable expression of sentiment started at good and only got better—all of human emotion compacted to fit between a smile and a laugh.

It wasn’t just a matter of conversion though, no simple translation from one scale to another, like slipping from degrees Fahrenheit to degrees Celsius. This convention of civility, the narrowed range of presentable opinion I felt allowed to use only heightened the importance of choosing the right words: words to operate both at face value and simultaneously convey or conceal subtexts never explicitly expressed. It seems in no way unreasonable that I was expected to communicate personal experience in a socially acceptable form, yet in attempting to do so, I felt locked into an emotional inflation of expression that made ambivalence read as distaste, distaste as loathing. Good, then, was hardly good enough.

The thing is, I liked being in Korea. It was taxing, to be sure, it was hard and confusing and brutal at times, but I was very aware just how much there was to be thankful for. I had no difficulties enjoying my year in Korea, but I labored the whole time to communicate my enjoyment believably. A vocabulary of Janus words serves its purpose of buffering the friction of disagreement and disappointment, yet such a two-sided lexicon tends to undercut or authenticate the good intention of a kind word by hinting at what it so carefully omits. A purely positive sentiment, then, has no critical assurance and becomes a flimsy thing with no backing, no currency.

It did not seem to help that I myself was living under a certain heightened emotion, charmed as I was by every new utensil, delighting in the triumphs of mailing a letter or laundering a shirt. Mrs. Tak and I lived under the same roof and taught the same subject to the same students at the same school, and yet, no matter how many cultural excursions she orchestrated for us to share, we struggled to find things in common. She shook her head at me. Who could get so animated over coat hooks and kimchi refrigerators? How could I not want more bread? What was the point of attending a play when I didn’t know the language? No wonder she seemed uncertain whether to question the honesty of my reports or her interpretation of them.

The broad-faced man behind the counter acknowledged her order with a nod, stepped back, and rocked forward again, now with a paper cone in his hand. Striped in red and white, it looked like any other container of fair food. It might have been fried dough or roasted nuts or, turned around, the handle to a spindle of cotton candy.

I reached for it. The contents settled in my hand like shells, like weights. Like bodies, I thought as I looked at them, the roasted exoskeletons of caterpillar pupae tan as pecans, defined as breastplates, pleasantly warm and starting to stain light circles of grease on the paper against my palm.

I wanted to like it. I wanted to be a person with an open mind. I wanted to express my appreciation to Mrs. Tak for her interest in me, all the trouble she went to on my behalf. I was trying to be the cultural ambassador eight weeks of orientation had trained me for, and as far as I could tell, that meant enjoying everything and smiling through whatever challenges might arise. Pleasantries first, establish a rapport, let everyone save face. That was enough to carry me past the smell, an odor with the bite of bitter and burn and rot. It allowed me to ignore the legs. And it might have gotten me past the bodily crunch and texture of limbs falling apart—if I could have kept them in my mouth.

“I don’t like them, either,” she said.

A. Kendra Greene has brought porcupine quills and flamingo feathers through customs without incident, but was recently detained by airport security for trying to carry a bag of corn masa onto a domestic flight. Weddings and writing have taken her recently to four continents, but for the moment she is happy to be home, making tortillas and chapbooks, in Iowa City.