Miracle at the shupeo?

By Lyman McLallen

I live in Seoul in an apartment building near the university where I work. I buy a lot of my groceries at the “shupeo" on the corner near my building. In Korean spelling symbols, hangeul, it comes out sounding like “shoo-puh?to my American ear.

The Koreans have borrowed the word from the American “supermarket?but changed its sound slightly and given it a little different meaning. They have made it a Konglish word, as you hear people call it: a word borrowed from English and made into Korean. In Korea, a shupeo is a small store in the neighbourhood where you buy groceries and sundries. I shop at the shupeo almost every day.?

A man and a woman only a little older than I ― sixty-one ― run the shupeo. It is a real mom-and-pop store, the kind that has almost disappeared in America, but you can still find them in every neighbourhood of Seoul. The big supermarkets and convenience store chains have yet to take completely over in Korea and run the mom-and-pops out of business. I buy fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, soap, light bulbs, and other such things from the couple who run the shupeo.

As I was leaving the shupeo this afternoon with my purchases, a woman ― advanced in years but spry ― came walking in. A woman younger than her ― though still older than I ― entered with her, perhaps her daughter. I stood to the side to let them pass.?

The woman I took to be the mother wore a brilliant white hanbok blouse and bright pastel-purple hanbok pants. This venerable woman took her time as she strolled into the shupeo, for she didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere.

From the moment she walked in, I could not take my eyes off her, for you rarely ever see a person who looks as striking as her. To me, she looked like she could be a queen, or at the least a princess.

Peering deep into her face as she walked past me, I noticed the wrinkles that lined her face, the few gold teeth in her mouth, her finely brushed snow-white hair that she seemed to wear as a crown.

I noticed her high cheek bones, for I recognize those same high cheek bones ― so prominent and distinctive of Korean faces _ in the young faces of the college students I see every day in the classroom, whose bright and joyous, handsome and beautiful faces seem to echo hers.

She caught me looking at her ― admiring her, really ― and when she did, I did not look away, and neither did she. We held our eyes on one another, then she began to laugh out loud, and I laughed out loud too ― I couldn’t help myself.

I walked home with my groceries and put them away. But I have not stopped thinking about her. I try to imagine how she has lived her life, all the paths she has taken that this day brought her to the shupeo, to this moment, and to our brief chance encounter, and I think about Korea in her lifetime: first, the occupation by Japan, then the wars, the attendant starvation and chaos, and all the heartache ― and I know she did not escape from any of it.?

Guessing that she is near eighty ― though a vigorous eighty ― I figure she was born in the middle of the Japanese occupation, and that she was barely out of childhood in its last years.

As a young woman, she endured the horrors of the Korean War, when every Korean family suffered heartbreaking losses through cruel separations and violent deaths. In the hard times of the fifties and the sixties that followed the war, young women of her generation collected wild plants in the hills and on roadsides out of necessity just to keep their families ― and themselves ― from starving, and I imagine her searching for the wild edible plants, and filling her paper sack with them.?

Recalling her clear bright eyes and her joyous face, I realize she lived in Korea through its most horrible and frightening years ― no place on Earth has ever been put through more hell than Korea lived through in those years when this woman was young ― and, surely, she suffered through all the pain and misery inflicted on all the Korean people who lived through that terrible time. Picturing her in my mind, I am astounded that she lived through the destruction, the losses and sorrow, the tears ― yet there she is, in the shupeo, laughing, radiant with joy, and looking so wonderfully beautiful, this fine afternoon in Seoul, Korea.

,i>Lyman McLallen is a professor in the English College of Hankuk University of foreign Studies. He can be reached at lymanmclallen@gmail.com.