Читать книгу No One You Know - Jason Schwartzman - Страница 20

My boss and I wander uncertainly into a strip mall, hungry and lost. Neon flickers, illuminating advertisements peeling off walls. There is one place still open and they serve ice cream. We wind up sitting across from two Korean girls, 22 and 23 years old – they move over so we can sit too.

“Where are you from?”

“What are you up to?”

We are only in Los Angeles for a few days. We talk about food and they spend a long time searching on their phones, on Yelp, for places we should go. They find at least ten places and they write them all down for us.

We finish the ice cream, we are about to leave, but first I ask them about the word jung. I want to hear how they define it. A friend of mine told me about it once, since it’s his last name. It refers to a specific type of love in Korean, he said. A love that builds slowly, that accumulates over time. I want to see what they see in the word, how they’ll translate it. But I can’t pronounce it so well and they think it is a different word, a nearobsolete expression of saying something’s cool. I try again.

“Oh! It’s kind of rural,” one of the girls says. “Very hard to define, but it’s about showing a kindness, an affection, even to strangers.”

There is a pause. The girls feel frustrated they can’t quite explain it. They haven’t been able to say what they want to. Then, an epiphany. The slightly younger girl looks at me and she moves her hand back and forth between us.

“This is jung.”