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# Chapter 5: What the Mandarin Trees Know
Her grandfather was not in the house when she arrived.
This was not unusual. What was unusual was the front door standing open — not ajar, not the way a door drifts when a latch is old and unreliable, but fully open, the way you leave a door when you step out for a moment and expect to be right back. A pair of rubber boots sat beside the threshold, mud still damp on the soles. Inside, the small television was on with the volume turned down to nothing, a weather report moving silently across the screen. A half-eaten bowl of rice sat on the low table, chopsticks balanced across the rim.
Sohyun stood in the doorway with the insulated bag and looked at the bowl.
He was eating and then he stopped and went outside without his boots.
She set the bag down on the step and walked around the side of the house toward the greenhouse.
The mandarin farm in March was a particular kind of beautiful that had taken her a long time to recognize as beautiful. In summer, the trees were lush and obvious about it — thick green canopies, the air so dense with citrus that your throat felt coated in something sweet and slightly astringent, like a vitamin you were taking whether you wanted to or not. In winter, the fruit hung heavy and orange, the color almost aggressive against the grey sky, and people drove out from Jeju City to photograph it. But March was neither of those things. March was the between season: most of the fruit had been harvested, the trees stripped back to their essential architecture, the branches dark and a little bare and holding the memory of what they’d carried. The smell was quieter now. Not absent — never absent on this farm, which had been breathing citrus for three generations — but subtle, the way a person’s presence lingers in a room after they’ve left it.
She found her grandfather at the far end of the third greenhouse, standing between two rows of hanrabong trees with his hands in his pockets, looking at nothing in particular.
“Harabeoji,” she said.
He turned. His face, when he turned, was the face she knew — the deep creases at the corners of his eyes, the jaw that had always been set at an angle suggesting stubbornness and that age had not softened, the white of his hair against the brown of his skin. For a moment, with the greenhouse light falling the way it did in late morning, diffuse and slightly gold, he looked exactly like he had when she was seven years old and he had brought her here for the first time and told her: touch the leaves, not the fruit. The fruit is not for touching yet.
“Yah,” he said. “You’re here.”
“I brought doenjang jjigae.”
“Mmm.”
He turned back to the trees.
She waited. She had learned, in two years of Wednesday visits, that her grandfather’s silences were not invitations to fill them. They were the silences of a man who had spent seventy-eight years communicating primarily through action — through the way he pruned, through the particular angle at which he tilted a mandarin to check its weight, through the meals he cooked and the firewood he stacked and the fact that he had never, in all her years of visiting, not once let her leave without pressing something into her hands. Today he had left the door open and the rice unfinished, which was not like him, and she was standing very still and keeping her breathing even and not asking about it.
“This one,” he said finally, reaching out to touch a low branch on the nearest hanrabong tree. His hand was enormous against the branch — the hands of someone who had been working this land since he was a teenager, knuckles enlarged, skin the texture of old bark. “See this here?”
She stepped closer. On the branch, at the junction where a smaller shoot diverged from the main growth, there was a slight discoloration. Pale, yellowish. Not dramatic. You could walk past it ten times without noticing.
“Phytophthora,” he said. “Maybe. Could be drainage. I need to watch it.”
“How long has it been there?”
“I noticed it this morning.” He was quiet for a moment. “Before breakfast.”
That’s why the rice is half-eaten. She looked at the branch more carefully. The discoloration was slight but real. Her grandfather had been watching this farm for sixty years and his eyes, whatever else age had done to him, still caught what needed catching.
“You should call the agricultural extension office,” she said. “Just to have it documented.”
He made the sound he always made at this suggestion — not quite disagreement, not quite dismissal, something in between that she had come to translate as: I have been farming this land since before your mother was born, and you’re telling me to call an office.
“Just in case,” she said.
“Mmm.”
They stood together in the greenhouse for another minute, looking at the branch. Outside, she could hear the wind moving through the tops of the trees in the open field — the early March wind that had a cold edge to it still, the kind that smelled of the mountain even this far south. Hallasan’s presence was like that on the island: you didn’t always see it, but you felt it in the air, in the way the weather moved, in the particular quality of the cold.
“Come eat,” she said. “I’ll leave it in your pot, you can have it warm.”
The stone house had been built by her great-grandfather and added onto by her grandfather and was now in that particular state of old structures that have been well-maintained but never renovated: the bones were solid, the roof had been replaced twice, the walls were thick enough to keep the wind out, but nothing about it was quite level anymore and the kitchen door required a specific two-step technique — lift slightly, then push — that her grandfather performed unconsciously and that Sohyun had spent three months learning. She transferred the doenjang jjigae into the ceramic pot he used for everything, set it on the low flame, and began quietly rearranging the refrigerator to make room for the container she’d brought.
The refrigerator was a particular kind of archaeology.
At the back: a jar of preserved citrus peel that looked like it had been there since autumn. Three eggs, which was concerning — he should have more than three eggs. A container of something she recognized as leftover galchi jorim from, she estimated, four days ago based on the smell, which was still fine but only just. Two plastic bags of mandarin segments, carefully peeled, the kind he prepared for himself in the evenings when she imagined him sitting in front of the silent television, eating methodically because eating was a thing that needed doing.
She took out the galchi jorim and opened it. Sniffed. Set it aside for now and made a mental note to check the date on the eggs.
“You don’t have to do that,” her grandfather said from the doorway.
“I’m not doing anything,” she said.
“You’re reorganizing my refrigerator with a look on your face.”
She turned. He was standing in the kitchen doorway with his socks on now, having traded the muddy boots for the indoor slippers that sat beside the threshold, the ones she had bought him last winter — warm, with a rubber sole, the kind the physical therapist had recommended after his knee surgery two years ago. He was watching her with the mild, unhurried attention he brought to most things.
“There are only three eggs,” she said.
“I was going to go to the market.”
“I can bring some next week.”
“I was going to go to the market,” he said again, the repetition carrying a very specific weight. I am not incapable. I have been buying my own eggs for sixty years.
She closed the refrigerator. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll write it on the list.”
There was a small whiteboard on the side of the refrigerator — she had put it there eight months ago, under the guise of it being for grocery lists, which it was, but it was also for other things: the appointment with Dr. Kang in Seogwipo that she wrote down every month before the visit, the phone number for the agricultural cooperative, the name of the neighbor, Jang Hyeonsu, who lived two farms over and had agreed to check in if Sohyun ever couldn’t reach her grandfather by phone. Her grandfather had never once mentioned the whiteboard. He used it, she knew, because she could see the handwriting change — her neat printing at the top, his larger, slightly unsteady script below, adding things like soy sauce and new rubber gloves and once, memorably, call Sohyun about the leak, which had made her stand in the kitchen for a long moment before she picked up her phone.
She uncapped the marker and wrote: eggs (he was going to get them himself but I’m writing it down anyway).
Her grandfather read it over her shoulder. She heard him make a sound that might have been amusement.
“Sit,” she said. “The jjigae is almost warm.”
They ate together at the low table — she had brought enough for two, which she always did, in the same way that she always brought exactly the right amount without either of them ever discussing it. Her grandfather ate steadily and without comment, which was how he ate everything. When the food was good he didn’t say so. When it was not good he also didn’t say so. The information was communicated entirely through pace: he ate slowly when something wasn’t right, and today he ate at his normal pace, which was all she needed to know.
Outside the window, the mandarin fields stretched toward the road. From here you could see the low stone walls — batdam, the fieldstone boundaries that divided the land into the irregular shapes that had been here for centuries, built not for aesthetics but because the island’s volcanic rock had to go somewhere and so they had built it into walls and the walls had become the landscape’s bones. In the spring light, the walls looked almost luminous, the grey-black stone catching the thin warmth of the sun.
“Seoul,” her grandfather said.
She paused. This was not a word that appeared often at this table. “What about it?”
“You’re not missing it lately.”
It was not a question exactly. She considered it. “I’m not sure I ever missed it,” she said. “I think I missed the idea of having done it successfully.”
Her grandfather looked at her for a moment over his spoon. Then he looked back at his bowl.
“That’s a careful thing to say,” he said.
“I’ve been here two years. I’ve had time to think about it.”
He nodded slowly. Then: “The café is doing well?”
“Yes. March is quiet but it’ll pick up for cherry blossom season. I’m going to try a new thing — a hallabong tart with the first spring harvest from the Hallim cooperative. I need to test the recipe.”
“You can take fruit from here,” he said. “The late hanrabong on the east side are still good.”
“I’ll come and pick some Saturday, if that’s alright.”
“Mmm.”
She ate. He ate. The wind moved outside. Somewhere in the back of the house, the old refrigerator made the sound it always made — a long, low hum that resolved into silence and then started again. She had been hearing that sound her whole life. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that the sound would end eventually, that the refrigerator would stop and her grandfather would get a new one or wouldn’t bother getting a new one and she would have to negotiate that too, and the thought arrived with the particular weight of thoughts that don’t announce themselves as important but are.
“Harabeoji,” she said. “Are you sleeping well?”
“Mmm.”
“That’s not an answer.”
He set his spoon down. Looked at the window. “I wake up early,” he said. “Four, sometimes. Then I go look at the trees.”
“In the dark?”
“I know where they are.”
She thought about this. An old man walking through a dark greenhouse at four in the morning because he knew where the trees were. There was something in it that was either entirely understandable or quietly alarming, and she was not sure yet which it was. “You should tell me if you’re not sleeping,” she said. “We can talk to Dr. Kang.”
“I’m not sick,” he said. “I wake up early. I’ve woken up early my whole life.”
“I know.”
“Your grandmother was the same.” A pause. “She used to go down to the water before dawn. Even in winter.”
Sohyun was quiet. He didn’t talk about her grandmother often — not because it was a wound, she thought, but because for him the not-talking was also a form of presence, a keeping-close that didn’t require words. Her grandmother had been a haenyeo, one of the last of the older generation, and she had died when Sohyun was twelve, and what Sohyun remembered most was not the death but the particular smell of her — seawater and something darker, the smell of the deep water that clings to things — and the way she had laughed, which was sudden and complete, like a window opening.
“She was brave,” Sohyun said.
“She was stubborn,” her grandfather said. But the way he said it, the specific softness of it, meant the same thing.
She stayed longer than usual.
This was partly because of the discolored branch, which she wanted to look at again before she left, and partly because the jjigae had been good and her grandfather had eaten two full bowls and she found herself reluctant to close the lid on the insulated container and put it back in the bag with the cartoon polar bears and drive away. It happened sometimes like this. Not often — she had built her life around a certain productive forward motion, the café and its rhythms and the small satisfactions of work done well, and she had learned to hold her tenderness for this farm and this man at a manageable distance so that it didn’t become something incapacitating. But sometimes the distance collapsed, and she sat at the low table after the bowls were cleared and looked at her grandfather’s hands resting on his knees and felt the full weight of the fact that he was seventy-eight years old and still walking through dark greenhouses at four in the morning to check on his trees.
They washed the dishes together, which was a process that had its own choreography by now: she washed, he dried, neither of them spoke much. He put things away in places she had long stopped trying to reorganize. Outside, the afternoon light had shifted — flatter now, slightly cooler, the sky moving toward the pale grey of late afternoon.
“I’ll come Saturday,” she said again, at the door. “For the hanrabong.”
“Come early,” he said. “The light is better.”
She didn’t ask what the light being better had to do with picking mandarins. She already knew: he just wanted her there in the morning. This was his version of saying it.
She was halfway down the front path when he said: “Sohyun-ah.”
She turned. He was standing in the doorway in his indoor slippers, the door frame behind him, the dark interior of the house visible over his shoulder. He looked, for a moment, like a man who had something to say and was deciding whether to say it.
“That branch in the greenhouse,” he said. “I’ll watch it.”
She waited.
“But if it spreads…” He stopped. Started again. “If it spreads, I’ll call you first.”
She understood that this was not about the branch. She understood that this was the closest he would come, today, to saying something else entirely — something about the early mornings and the half-eaten rice and the door standing open. She understood that he was asking her, in the way he asked everything, obliquely and through the medium of the farm, to be patient with him.
“Okay,” she said. “Call me first.”
He nodded. She turned back toward the car.
The road back to Seogwipo was the same twelve minutes in reverse, but the thinking on the way back was different — it didn’t have the same quality of controlled release. On the way to the farm, she let things surface. On the way back, she processed them, turned them into something manageable, filed them in the appropriate places. This was a system she had developed without quite intending to, the way you develop most useful systems: out of necessity, gradually, until one day you realize you’ve been doing it for years.
Today the system was not working particularly well.
She thought about the half-eaten bowl of rice. About the way he’d been standing in the greenhouse when she arrived, hands in his pockets, looking at nothing. About the discolored branch and the four a.m. walks and the three eggs in the refrigerator. None of these things, individually, were alarming. Together they had a texture she didn’t quite like. She turned it over in her mind and couldn’t find a name for it that satisfied her and so she let it sit, unnamed, which was sometimes the only honest thing to do with a feeling.
She was passing the turnoff for the Sanbang-san road when her phone buzzed on the passenger seat.
She glanced at it at the next light. A message from Mi-young ajeomma, which was not unusual; Mi-young communicated primarily via voice message, which she sent at all hours with the frequency and intensity of someone broadcasting on a pirate radio station.
Yah. You heard the news? About the Olle trail development? Aigoo, I knew it, I told you. Come to the market tomorrow morning, I have things to tell you. Also I have new mugwort tteok, the first batch of the season. Don’t be late.
Sohyun read the message twice. Then she set the phone down and looked at the road ahead.
The Olle trail development. She had heard the phrase twice in the last month — once from the woman at the agricultural cooperative who had mentioned it in passing, and once from a hiker who had come into the café with a strange quality of agitation and asked whether she’d heard anything about changes to the trail. She had said no, honestly, and the hiker had left without explaining, and she had meant to follow up and hadn’t, because there was always something more immediate demanding her attention and she was very good at prioritizing the immediate over the worrying.
She turned onto the Seogwipo road and the sea appeared on her left — pewter-grey and enormous, the afternoon light moving across it in slow bands. She drove with her hands relaxed on the wheel, the way her grandfather had taught her, the way you drove a road you knew well enough to trust.
Come to the market tomorrow morning.
Mi-young’s voice messages always sounded urgent. Half the time they were about fish prices or someone’s daughter’s engagement or a particularly good batch of kimchi. But the other half of the time they were about things that actually mattered, delivered with the same breathless urgency as the fish prices, and the trick was knowing which was which. Sohyun had been learning this distinction for two years and she was still not entirely reliable at it.
She thought about the phrase development and the phrase Olle trail and the way they sat next to each other with a specific kind of weight.
She thought about the café — about the old mandarin warehouse with its stone walls and its wooden floors and the sign she had made herself, the letters slightly uneven because she had painted it at two in the morning after a particularly bad week and had been too tired to be precise. She thought about the view from the front window, which was the stone wall and the narrow lane and the field beyond it, and in summer the yellow of the wildflowers against the black of the volcanic soil, and she thought about what the word development might mean for a view like that.
The thought arrived and she put it away with the same efficiency she put away most difficult thoughts — not gone, just filed. She would go to the market tomorrow morning. She would hear what Mi-young had to say. She would deal with what needed dealing with.
You’re always managing, a voice said in her head, and it was her own voice but it had the texture of someone else’s words, someone she had not thought about in several months, someone whose name she preferred not to think. You manage everything. You just don’t let anyone manage anything for you.
She turned into the narrow lane that led to the café’s small parking area. Through the side window, she could see the late afternoon light hitting the stone walls at the angle that made them look like something from a different century — warm and gold and entirely itself, the way Jeju always became itself again just when you weren’t looking.
Jungah would have closed up by now. The café would be empty, the chairs up on the tables, the coffee equipment clean and waiting. She would go in, start the end-of-day accounting, plan tomorrow’s pastries, check the inventory.
She turned off the engine.
Through the windshield, she could see the front of the café clearly — the old wooden sign, the potted herbs along the windowsill that she had been gradually expanding since autumn, the two stone haenyeo figurines on either side of the door that she had found at the market and that Mi-young ajeomma maintained were hideous but that Sohyun loved with an irrationality she had stopped trying to justify. It was, she thought — not for the first time, but with the particular clarity you get sometimes after a difficult afternoon — a place she had built with her own hands. Not entirely. The bones were her great-grandfather’s, the land was her grandfather’s, and the idea of a café had come to her in a moment of desperation that she preferred to remember as inspiration. But the rest of it — the menu, the light, the smell, the way it felt on a Tuesday morning when the old haenyeo women came in and sat in the corner and argued about whose grandchildren were more ungrateful — all of that was hers.
She gathered the insulated bag from the passenger seat. The cartoon polar bears stared up at her.
Development, she thought, and then she didn’t think it anymore, and got out of the car.
The café was quiet and clean and smelled of coffee grounds and the faint sweetness of the morning’s muffins, which always lingered longer than she expected. She set the bag by the sink, hung up her jacket, and stood for a moment in the middle of the room the way she sometimes did at the end of the day — not doing anything, just being in it. The wooden floor under her feet. The light from the west window, low and amber now. The small sounds of the building settling.
She was in the back checking the following morning’s supply of Jeju green tea — she’d need to reorder by Friday — when she heard the front door.
She looked up. Through the service window between the kitchen and the café floor, she could see the door had swung open, and in the doorway stood a man she didn’t recognize.
He was somewhere in his late twenties, she thought — a little older than her, maybe. He was carrying a camera bag on one shoulder, the kind with multiple compartments and worn edges that suggested it went everywhere with him. He was looking around the café with the specific quality of attention she had learned to recognize: not the attention of a tourist deciding whether to come in, but the attention of someone reading a space, cataloguing it, understanding it. His gaze moved from the stone walls to the wooden counter to the haenyeo figurines to the handwritten menu board above the coffee station, and there was a stillness about him that was unusual — most people who stepped into an unfamiliar place moved, shifted, signaled their uncertainty through small adjustments. He just stood and looked.
He was wearing a jacket that had clearly been washed too many times, and he had a small film camera — not a digital, she noticed with some surprise, but an actual film camera — hanging on a strap around his neck. He had not raised it. He was just looking.
She came out from the back, untying her apron.
“We’re closed,” she said. “I’m sorry — we close at five on weekdays.”
He looked at her. “I saw the light,” he said. “I thought—” He stopped. “I’m sorry. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
He said it without any particular disappointment — not performing it, not trying to convince her of anything. Just: I’ll come back tomorrow. The simple clarity of it caught her slightly off-guard.
“You’re not from here,” she said. This was not a question; she knew every face in this neighborhood, and his was not one of them.
“No,” he said. “I arrived this afternoon. I’m doing a — I’m doing some work in the area.”
She studied him for a moment. He had the look of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors but not for athletic reasons — not a hiker’s tan, but the kind of weathering you got from standing in fields and on docks waiting for things to happen. His hands, she noticed, were slightly ink-stained at the fingertips. Or something like ink. She had spent too many years making coffee not to look at people’s hands.
“What kind of work?” she said.
A brief hesitation. Not evasion — something more like the pause of a person deciding how much to explain. “Documentary,” he said. “Film.”
She looked at the film camera on the strap. He noticed her looking.
“That one’s just for me,” he said. “The work camera is in the bag.”
There was something slightly self-conscious about the way he said it — not embarrassed, but aware that carrying a film camera in 2023 was a choice that invited questions, and he was used to those questions, and he wasn’t going to explain further unless she asked.
She didn’t ask. Instead she said: “There’s still some hallabong cake left from this morning. And I can make drip coffee in ten minutes. You look like you’ve been driving a while.”
He looked at her. She could see him recalibrating — the offer hadn’t fit whatever he’d expected.
“You don’t have to—”
“I know,” she said. “Sit wherever you want. Not the corner table by the window, that one has a wobbly leg I haven’t fixed yet.”
She went back behind the counter. She heard him set the camera bag down. She heard the specific sound of someone choosing a chair — the slight scrape of wood on wood — and then the sound of him sitting, and then nothing. No phone. No fidgeting. Just the quiet of a person settling into a space.
She filled the kettle and looked at the grinder and thought about what Mi-young’s message had said, and about the word development, and about her grandfather standing in the greenhouse at four in the morning because he knew where the trees were. She thought about the branch with the pale discoloration. She thought about the whiteboard on the refrigerator and the note she’d written that had made him make a sound that might have been amusement.
She set out two cups.
She wasn’t sure when she’d decided to make herself coffee too. It was already decided by the time she noticed it.
Behind her, through the service window, she could see the man sitting at the table by the east wall, the one with the good light — she had put it there deliberately, angled toward the window so that the afternoon sun fell across it in a way that made even a plain cup of coffee look like something worth looking at. He had placed the camera bag under his chair. He was looking at the haenyeo figurines by the door with that same still, unhurried attention, and she had the odd thought that he was not seeing them as décor but as something he was trying to understand.
The kettle began to steam.
Outside, the last of the afternoon light was going, and the stone wall at the edge of the lane was turning the colour of old silver, and somewhere down toward the sea a boat horn sounded once — low, distant, dissolving into the sound of the wind.
She didn’t know his name yet.
She poured the water over the grounds and listened to the slow, even sound of the drip, and thought: tomorrow Mi-young ajeomma will tell me something I’m not going to like. And then she carried two cups out to the floor, and set one down across from the empty chair, and said nothing, because nothing needed saying yet.