This Week’s Photo Album

This week’s theme is “the winter marketplace.” Korean markets are sometimes warrens of tarpaulins, plywood, umbrellas, and neon; it can be hard to specify whether they are indoors or merely sheltering under a forest canopy of grimy plastic sheets stretched over narrow alleys. In winter, kettles of hot soup and gas burners warming noodles and fish cakes steam the air around this ancient commerce with ichteous perfume and give the bare yellow bulbs the glow of torches. Late at night, markets that were crowded hours before are vacant, almost haunted.

In one photograph, two women–or, as Koreans would call them, ajummas, the fiesty, hard-bargaining mothers famous for their bright clothing and for fighting for every penny to send their sons to Harvard–are talking below a red lighted sign (if you can read Korean, it says, “sa chol tang”). The red sign is advertising a soup usually made from dog meat.

My favorite photograph below is of one of the ancient men who appear in neighborhoods all over Korea selling roasted sweet potatoes on cold days. I have never seen one of these men who looked less than seventy. It is axiomatic that in Korea, all things that are interesting and which distinguish Korean-ness from the dull global monoculture face imminent extinction except where artificially preserved in folk villages. Like most of the things I loved most about Korea, it will likely be seen as too traditional to be allowed to let live in a country obsessed with its self-image of modernity. I wonder if I will see the grandfathers selling their sweet potatoes again.