Iceland
“We dreamed that Iceland’s growth of a bit less than one centimeter per year would one day lead to an entire earth covered with Iceland.”
MARCH 12, 2024
Guidebooks didn’t have plots. What they did have were foreign place-names, littered throughout their pages like puzzle pieces. It was the reader’s role to make a story out of the names. That’s why I liked guidebooks. Last week, I’d read Japan. It took me one week to go from Fukuoka to Hokkaido. The week before, I’d read Russia. I rode the Trans-Siberian Express between Vladivostok and Moscow. Today, it was time for me to read Iceland. My trip, which took place for one hour each night, required a bookmark instead of a suitcase. Apart from my imaginary vacations, I’d never actually ventured beyond the borders of Korea. I had no real need to.
Iceland was a country of emptiness. Its area was similar to that of South Korea, but little of the land was inhabitable. Because it was so far north, the guide told me, Iceland was sometimes absent from world maps. Iceland: a land casually omitted from the earth, like the invisible words following an ellipsis at the end of a sentence. A country located on a fault line, where volcanoes exploded as if they were fireworks. And lastly, a country with an ill-fitting name, thanks to greedy Vikings who wanted to deter visitors. I imagined that if I traveled to Iceland, I too would vanish, with only my footsteps remaining behind like the periods of an ellipsis.
I set my sights on Iceland after learning about a website. It was a site where users could take a quiz to learn their compatibility with the country of Korea. The website also informed users which other countries might be more suitable for them. After answering 120 questions, I learned that my match with Korea was not good: only 2.3 percent. I don’t know what the test’s criteria were, but according to its results, I had spent over thirty years living in a country I didn’t fit into at all.
Did my poor results indicate a simple problem between me and Korea, or a broader problem between me and the world? There was no need to waste time worrying. The website that judged my Korean-ness—its name was Laundry—had another test in which it assigned participants an alternate nationality, from a more compatible country. Perhaps there were others like me, because Laundry always had a high number of “users online.” If you took the second test, the website would select a country for you like a doctor selecting the appropriate treatment for their patient. I answered nearly two hundred more questions and was informed that my country was Iceland.
It was a 42.5 percent match, a greater percentage than I had with any other country on earth. It was twenty times higher than the number for the country in which I was currently living. My body and mind were worn out after years of trying to satisfy the demands of this country. I’d had to jump over hurdle after hurdle, interconnected like the links of a sausage. I’d made it through the unemployment crisis and gotten a job, but I still questioned my quality of life. Considering my constant worry, the answer was clear: “2.3 percent” was nothing more than sheet music that made visible the disharmonious symphony I’d begun to hear long ago.
“Who does this website think it is, telling us whether or not we should leave for another country?” asked my coworker Kim from behind the partition that separated our desks.
Kim quickly found himself just as ensnared by Laundry as I was. Kim was destined for Jamaica. He didn’t know if Jamaica was in Africa or America, but after receiving the verdict that Jamaica was his match made in heaven, he noticed connections to the country everywhere. He began to plan his daily life around the assumption that he’d eventually travel there. Perhaps he thought that if he went to this perfect match of a country, everything from his personal relationships to his health would improve. Maybe all test takers attached such hopes to their new countries. If not, there would be no way to explain why people filled out fifty-question application forms to become members of groups like Café Iceland.
The members were a diverse group. Gender, hometown, age, job: none of us were exactly alike, but we all dreamed about the life of the common Icelander.
Café Iceland was an online meeting place for those who dreamed of Iceland, where Icelandophiles curious about everything from travel to immigration could exchange information. You could see how exclusive a website it was from the moment you first visited. The fifty-question membership application was your first obstacle. The application had several functions. It made the people filling out the form—those intent upon becoming Café members—list their workplace, age, address, car ownership status, the model of any car they owned, their salary, and the type of work they did. They had to share all sorts of personal information, even if the answers they provided were lies. The application also had the function of making prospective members reflect upon their present circumstances. Such an unpleasant and chaotic application procedure made them ask themselves, do I really need to join Café Iceland? After completing the questionnaire, each new member of the Café enjoyed the satisfaction of having broken through a barrier, fulfilling the application’s third purpose.
Once I’d answered all fifty questions, I received membership approval from the administrator. But all I could see of the exclusive forum was the main page, decorated with a large image of a glacier, and a message board for new members to introduce themselves. I didn’t read any of the introductions. To gain permission to read posts on the website, I had to confront a second, hundred-question quiz. The questions in this next quiz were so personal that I felt uncomfortable answering them. They asked about hobbies, marital status, relationship status, what I thought about pets, my taste in food; even the questions that seemed friendly, or were simple to answer, attacked without hesitation. They were a requirement to level up as a Café member. Further questions interrogated me about what kind of music I liked, my hobbies (again), what I would do if I were dropped onto a desert island, my ideal partner, and how I’d describe myself in one word. Only after making it through all the questions could I meet the ten or so other Café members who’d forged down the same path.
[Read: “Marina Fun,” by Ariadna Castellarnau]
The members were a diverse group. Gender, hometown, age, job: none of us were exactly alike, but we all dreamed about the life of the common Icelander. Our sense of kinship began with the fact that we’d all completed Café Iceland’s pesky questionnaires. It was proof of our belief in the country. No online forum had ever seemed as necessary to me as Café Iceland did. I already felt closer to Iceland after completing the two-step process to join. The last thing to do was get permission to write posts. For that, I first had to comment at least twenty times on other people’s posts.
As I clicked around, I noticed a pop-up box in the corner of the page. I read what it said:
“It’s easy to go to Iceland, but becoming a citizen is difficult.”
✺
Whenever he had time, Kim logged on to Laundry, took the country quiz again, and expressed doubts about his most recent match. His country was no longer Jamaica, as the results changed each time he took the quiz.
“You know what’s funny?” he said. “Yesterday I got Tibet, but today I got Malaysia. My results are as unpredictable as the weather.”
Kim had been matched with thirty-four distinct nationalities over the past week. All you had to do was answer a few questions differently, and the resulting country wasn’t the only thing that would change—you’d find yourself on an entirely new continent. When Kim took Laundry’s country quiz, he was essentially twirling a globe and pointing to a random spot with his finger. His nationalities were all over the place. But my taste in countries wasn’t as broad, so every time I took the test, I got Iceland.
Our boss was unpredictable, like Kim—as fickle as Icelandic weather. Every day his goals for the team changed, as did his assessment of employee efforts. The boss had one body, but three personalities—and at times four or even five. Sometimes it was the first of these personalities explaining how he would judge our progress, sometimes it was the second, and other times the third. There was even a rumor that the boss was actually a set of quintuplets who took turns coming into work. Like Kim had forecast, today’s boss was the third quintuplet, a different one from yesterday. The third quintuplet had the sourest temper. I wanted to leave for Iceland as soon as possible.
✺
The first time I attended an offline Café Iceland meeting, I was surprised by the appearance of the other attendees. Café Iceland members were sophisticated and elegant, notwithstanding their howls on the message board about wanting the world to forget them. They had their problems: some of the members had been questioned by the police when walking around Gwanghwamun, just because of where they were going and the clothing they wore. Others were estranged from their families. Still others had to pretend they weren’t aware that they had no friends at work, even though they were more conscious of it than anyone. But it was hard to find a true loser among the attendees in this Buam-dong café. I somewhat regretted how plainly I’d dressed. I did receive the most attention at the meeting, but that was because I was a newbie. The other members asked about my first impression of Iceland. “It’s a cold country,” I said.
“That’s what people usually think, but it’s not that cold,” someone replied. “Thanks to the Gulf Stream, it’s pretty much heaven compared to other countries at the same latitude.”
“There’s warm water flowing beneath the ground, too,” someone else added. “Icelanders use the water for heating. Oh, and Reykjavík was voted the cleanest city in the world. Have you heard that before?”
“Summer is the optimal season to visit,” a third member advised. “People say that May to September is the best travel time, but what they mean is that you can’t go to Iceland any other time of the year. June is my favorite month in Iceland. The weather’s so inconsistent that sometimes you can see all four seasons in one day.”
The members took turns speaking. Not many of them had actually been to Iceland, but they knew an awful lot about the country, and they liked to talk about it.
“There’s still no Korean guidebook to Iceland,” the organizer of the meeting said. “All we’ve been able to find is an Englishlanguage Lonely Planet guide. This is what we’ll have to use for now.”
The organizer had translated the Lonely Planet guide into Korean. He’d also gotten information from the Norwegian embassy, which represented Icelandic consular interests, and bound it into a book. We had 128 pages of materials. According to the organizer, who’d been to Iceland six times, the country was losing its primitive nature as it developed commercially, but it was still mostly unblemished by humans. Long ago, when the Vikings discovered the virgin land, they’d given it the name “Iceland” to make it seem like it was a place of snow and ice. The Vikings had circulated lies. Glaciers made up less than 15 percent of the country. The members of Café Iceland discussed the Vikings’ greed and decided that we were no less selfish. Our exclusiveness and our particularity about new members came from a desire to keep Iceland to ourselves. For our next gathering, we decided to meet at Heyri Art Village in Paju.
Iceland hadn’t moved: I had. I drifted toward Iceland like a North Pole glacier, like an ocean current.
There was a long, thin gap in the middle of Iceland, a fault line between two tectonic plates. As magma squeezed out of the fault line and hardened, the island nation slowly widened in area. The magma added only 0.6 to 1 centimeter of land per year, but if it continued, Iceland would someday reach the peninsula of Scandinavia. Just like the actual country, the Iceland inside my body was also widening little by little. At first, Iceland hadn’t meant anything at all to me. When I learned that I was a 42.5 percent match with the country, Iceland was merely a curiosity. But once I’d answered 150 questions to become a member of Café Iceland, the country’s name began to sound like a rallying cry, and as I frequented the Café, that cry grew louder.
Through my study of Iceland, I began to understand why Laundry had assigned me to the country. For someone sensitive to heat like myself, Iceland—with an average summer temperature of eleven degrees Celsius—was paradise. It was the only European country with a birth rate above two, which corresponded with my desire to have lots of kids. I also liked the fact that there wasn’t a single McDonald’s or Starbucks in the entire country. Iceland had been identified as the nation that read more books than any other, and that was appealing. It wasn’t bad, either, that they used the same electrical current and outlets as Korea. And since I feared alkaline water, I found it charmingly comforting that their tap water was safe to drink. In many parts of Iceland, the speed limit was fifty kilometers per hour, so the country needed drivers like me who didn’t know how to press down on the accelerator. A country where work wasn’t compulsory, but less than 1 percent of the population was unemployed: that was Iceland. There was no need to worry about after-school tutoring for one’s children, either. In this beautiful country, citizens invested over 7 percent of their gross national product in education. Pensions for seniors were significantly higher than in Iceland’s neighboring countries, Norway and Canada. Medical care was completely free, and all media remained unrestricted by government censorship. As you lived your simple Icelandic life, you’d probably even see glaciers, whisked down from the North Pole on the East Greenland Current. I realized that I hadn’t chosen Iceland: Iceland had chosen me. I was the ideal Icelandic citizen—even if I was currently marooned somewhere less appealing.
Iceland hadn’t moved: I had. I drifted toward Iceland like a North Pole glacier, like an ocean current. Each time Café Iceland convened, I had to pay fifty thousand won in membership dues, sometimes more, but I didn’t feel like I was wasting money. Iceland began to make frequent appearances in my credit card statements. I bought every album by Björk and the famous Icelandic band Sigur Rós, as well as the documentary Heima, about Sigur Rós. I purchased the DVD of The Lord of the Rings, too, because Tolkien’s fictional land of Mordor was modeled after Iceland. I also went online and bought traditional Icelandic snacks and makeup made from hot-springs minerals. I looked for works by artists who were from Iceland, creatively inspired by Iceland, or residents of Iceland. I spent time and money buying their wares and hoped I’d eventually remember their long Icelandic names. Thankfully, my brain was just as addicted to Iceland as my credit card, ready to be activated the moment I heard something related to the country.
✺
The problem wasn’t Iceland, it was here. The boss tested my patience with his finicky nature. At some point, everything he said to me started to sound like a foreign language. I had no way to know if this was happening only to me or to everyone in the office. Actually, I was sure Kim still comprehended him. But me—I would listen to what the boss said, but I couldn’t understand it. I overlaid Iceland on top of every word that came out of his mouth.
Hvannadalshnúkur: that was Iceland’s tallest mountain. Vatnajökull: a glacier as wide as all the glaciers on the continent of Europe combined. Þórsá: the longest river in Iceland. Reykjavík: Iceland’s beautiful capital. It was a placid city whose only tall building was Hallgrímskirkja, a church that resembled a volcano. As I listened to my incomprehensible boss, I memorized the names of every place listed on a map of Iceland. I knew that if I were there, in Iceland, I wouldn’t suffer from the discord I felt here. I’d at least feel 42.5 percent comfortable, instead of 2.3 percent. My boss’s utterances sounded like unfamiliar place-names that I had yet to memorize.
On the way home from work, I considered how I’d get around during my trip to Iceland. I would take a Korean airline to the country, and once I was there, I could purchase a bus tour package, buy a bus pass, rent a four-wheel-drive vehicle, or hitchhike. I almost forgot to get off at my subway station as I debated between the tour package and the bus pass. When planning a vacation to Iceland, the timing of the trip—summer or fall— merited serious deliberation, despite what my fellow Café members had told me. Weather was clear and bright in the summer, and the midnight sun meant you could see the ocean in the middle of the night. It was also peak travel season. Once autumn began, Iceland froze over until it felt like a real Northern European country. Almost all the tourist attractions were closed in the fall, but the country was less crowded with visitors, and you could see auroras. I debated between summer’s midnight sun and the autumn auroras. I didn’t have to make an immediate decision, but I enjoyed pondering my options while I put off a verdict.
[Read: Notebooks by Mariá José Navia]
Café Iceland’s ten initial members had increased twofold, maybe threefold. Even my coworker, Kim, who’d tried out every country from Jamaica to Malaysia, followed me in joining Café Iceland. Kim had simultaneously joined forums for several other countries, but he said that Iceland’s exclusivity appealed to him. Kim still mixed up Ireland and Iceland, but it wasn’t a big problem. The organizer of our meetings decided to arrange a pop quiz to narrow down the number of members. The quiz took place with thirty participants in a quiet teahouse in Samcheongdong. The organizer had written almost sixty questions, and we spent an hour answering them. Most of the questions asked general information about Iceland. I got eight wrong—questions about Iceland’s climate, pension system, traffic laws, and glacier tours.
Thankfully, I was allowed to maintain my membership. Kim also barely made it.
Iceland tended not to welcome immigrants. You could receive permanent residency if you were hired for a job there, worked in an Icelandic branch office of a foreign company, married a local, studied at an Icelandic university, or cohabited with an Icelander, but it wasn’t easy. Of course, even though Iceland had fewer than 310,000 citizens, anyone with a certain amount of money and time could visit. But Koreans could stay for only ninety days. After those ninety days, you had to pack your bags or find a reason to remain in the country. For this reason, I was surprised to learn that Koreans lived in Iceland. The organizer decided to recruit one such Korean Icelander, who was on a brief trip back home, to talk to us. We had to pay, but we all wanted to hear her speak.
We called her the Expert. She had lived in this realm called Iceland for over ten years. It was decided that the Expert would give several lectures at Café Iceland meetings, on obtaining permanent residency and assimilating to Icelandic culture. When I first saw the Expert’s silhouette across the room, I got the feeling that there wasn’t just a person sitting in front of me: the Expert was Iceland itself, a magnificent piece of land in human form. The physical incarnation of the nation of ice and snow—the mass of white we were here to see—sat in her chair and chilled the vicinity.
The Expert told us that she was one of the twelve Koreans living in Reykjavík, and one of one hundred thousand city residents. She was also one of Reykjavík’s hairdressers. She belonged to multiple groups. And now she was a part of our Café Iceland. Every time the name of one of the twelve Koreans in Reykjavík escaped from her mouth, I felt like I was hearing the name of a saint. I didn’t know anything about these twelve people, but they seemed like old acquaintances.
The night after I met the Expert, I stood on top of a trampoline with the other Café members. It was a dream. We ran across the elastic mat swaying below us before starting to bounce into the air. Kim stamped his feet energetically. That made other members—including Lee and Park—fall over. Park quickly stood up and pounded his own feet against the trampoline mat. Lee just fell backward and didn’t get up. As Park pounded with increasing vigor and Kim flew higher and higher into the air, Lee curled up into a ball like a squid sizzling on top of a grill. The Expert put her hands around her mouth and started to shout at us. She had a lot to say.
The more time I spent mesmerized by Iceland, the more my present location—the ground on which my feet currently stood—disintegrated like a motheaten piece of fabric.
“Even if you try to sit still, you’re bound to be pushed around by recoil from everyone else on the trampoline. If you don’t want to be knocked all over the place—if you want to maintain some sense of equilibrium—you can’t sit quietly. You have to jump harder than the others—harder than them. Higher, and more forcefully. You’ll fall behind the competition if you don’t jump aggressively. That’s a trampoline for you. That’s Korea, too. As long as everyone’s moving, you can’t stop the inertia. People don’t climb onto trampolines in order to stay still. What I’m saying is that we’ve been forced to compete since birth.”
Lee stood up in order to regain control. I stood up, too. I set my feet on the mat like they were two awls, and I jumped forcefully. Once I was up in the air, I looked down. What I saw beneath me was neither plaything nor land: it was a black sea. The trampoline looked so small.
At some point, after bouncing like springs for quite a while, we all flopped back onto the mat.
Only then did the trampoline, the earth, the sea, grow still. The Expert spoke.
“This moment: this is Iceland.”
My office and Iceland were like opposite ends of a seesaw. As Iceland rose higher into the air, this place—the office—dropped lower and lower. The more time I spent mesmerized by Iceland, the more my present location—the ground on which my feet currently stood—disintegrated like a motheaten piece of fabric. Iceland was dotted with geysers, bubbling puddles that would spout water into the air without warning. The Iceland in my heart was no different: it bubbled somewhere deep inside me, until the moment that it shot skyward, eighty meters or higher. Everything that wasn’t Iceland was starting to look pitiful.
My daily reality was growing pitiful as well, thanks to the new office intern, who’d been hired purely out of nepotism. At work, I was like a strainer, filtering communication between the boss and the intern as they relayed messages through me. And when I sat down at my desk at 9:00 a.m., my body and mind were nine hours in the past, on Iceland time. It was around midnight in Iceland, so I felt terribly drowsy all day. I felt the time difference between Korea and Iceland with my entire being. I had nothing to ask of the intern, nothing to teach him or tell him, even though he was hoping to use his school break to try out a whole range of office work. My time for my own assignments dwindled as I curated the intern’s experience. He had lots of questions, lots of knowledge, and lots of energy. The intern often called our office practices into question, comparing Korea’s and America’s business environments with monologues that began, “In the U.S., we . . .” Whenever he did that, I drew the line: this was Korea. When he tried one last time to say this wasn’t how things were done in the U.S., I changed the topic. “Have you been to Iceland?” I asked him.
“Iceland?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Not Ireland. Iceland.”
“No, I’ve never been,” he replied. “Isn’t it a cold country?”
To think that all he could say was “Isn’t it a cold country”?! Iceland is a country that a rookie like you can’t understand. Thoughts of Iceland spun around my head, and my body temperature quickly cooled.
As I leaned over my desk, I realized that only three certainties existed in the world. One, deserts lasted forever, and two, they didn’t actually contain oases. Instead of an oasis, all you could expect to find was the occasional mirage. That was the third certainty. Maybe Iceland was my mirage. Now all I could do was visit the country and see for myself.
After Iceland entered my life, I began to spend more time in motion than I did idle. I needed to live my reality more fully: I needed to prepare. Iceland may have had lower healthcare costs than Korea, but until a foreigner was completely assimilated into Icelandic society, they would be limited in daily life, including at the doctor’s office. Foreigners had to be healthy, before anything else. They couldn’t be sick. Before leaving for Iceland, they needed to prepare for the future, in a place where they could speak the language and were familiar with the culture. The Expert said that it was a good idea to preemptively get rid of time bombs that could explode at any place and any time: things like wisdom teeth and appendices. The next day, I went to the dentist. I had six cavities. The dentist told me it would take two months and two million won to fix them. I immediately got the recommended fillings that I would have put off in the past. It was going be a bit more difficult to have my appendix prophylactically removed, but it wouldn’t be impossible.
✺
After the Expert showed up at Café Iceland, our membership fees increased. But the Café fees were for a more effective form of personal care than exercise or massages or learning a foreign language or eating health foods. We were receiving private lessons from a Korean who’d experienced Iceland firsthand. I never thought that I was wasting money. The people who complained that membership fees were too expensive stopped coming to meetings, and that was it. Everyone else happily paid. Until we started to get fed up with the Expert’s lectures.
We dreamed that Iceland’s growth of a bit less than one centimeter per year would one day lead to an entire earth covered with Iceland.
The members asked for recommended restaurants, hotels, and shopping destinations, but the Expert couldn’t give us real answers. When she answered our questions, she’d tell us something already printed in the guidebook. For someone who’d lived in Reykjavík until just a few months ago, the Expert didn’t know much about the city. The Expert knew as much about Reykjavík as our guidebook did, and the only things she told us that weren’t already familiar were incessant stories about her hair salon. The information that the Expert gave us was unclear. If she told us that a slice of pizza from a street vendor cost 150 krónur, a member who’d recently returned from a trip to Iceland would correct her and say that it was 300 krónur, and then the Expert would claim that pizza prices varied by neighborhood. But if asked where to find a 150-krónur pizza joint, the Expert couldn’t tell us. The supposed price of a postcard, a bottle of water, and even a haircut differed from what we knew. When the Expert mixed up details about her own life, our suspicions grew. The only time she could give us specific information was when we were talking about the inside of her hair salon. But the members all wanted to know about what was outside the hair salon. The Expert couldn’t tell us anything. The Expert had never even eaten shark meat, which she claimed was because she was a picky eater, but that just further amplified suspicion. The Expert didn’t know much about Lake Mývatn or Jökulsárgljúfur National Park, either. When she opened her mouth to begin another personal anecdote with the phrase “In my salon . . .,” we said that we’d heard the story. Park began to ask her questions to which he already knew the answer.
“What about hrútspungur?” he demanded.
“How is it?”
“If you want to go to hrútspungur, you should buy a package tour,” the Expert said. “It’s hard to get there.”
Lee disputed her answer.
“Hrútspungur is a food, isn’t it?” he asked.
Park nodded. But the Expert’s expression didn’t change at all.
“Well, there are tours you can go on to eat it,” she said.
Several weeks later, Park disappeared from Café Iceland. Not just from the offline meetings—he left the website, too. He’d been such an active participant in the Café that the remaining members worried he’d undergone a change of heart about Iceland. Some blamed his departure on the inarticulate and suspicious Expert. But the real explanation lay elsewhere.
One of Park’s coworkers joined Café Iceland as a new member and told everyone that
Park had been fired. Park had frequently repeated that he needed to quit working and head to Iceland, but when he really did leave his job, he couldn’t go anywhere—much less Iceland. He walked away from Iceland, although it wasn’t because he lacked money or time. We knew Iceland was a place that transcended competition and discord. But in order to maintain such a fantasy, you needed competition and discord. The surface of water could be still only if you were relentlessly treading water below. Park realized that, and now that his legs were no longer flailing, he’d abandoned notions of surface tranquility. I couldn’t free myself from this setup, either, which was why I couldn’t quit my job, or close my savings account, or cancel my insurance, or blindly leave. Because the moment I gave everything up and let myself free, Iceland might disappear.
[Read: Coming of Age by Xu Zechen]
After the meeting ended, two more members left. Before they could go to Iceland, they had to complete mandatory military service. They told us they were going to fulfill their military duties now so that, afterward, they could leave for Iceland with no strings attached. Two years spent in uniform, they said, might even be additional preparation for the trip. The new soldiers buried Iceland deep inside their uniforms and stepped on the bus to Hwacheon, for boot camp. They stowed thoughts of the red mohawk hairstyles preferred by Icelandic bands in their memories and trimmed their hair to two centimeters. Several weeks later, they posted from the training center. Their comments were imbued with a heartfelt longing for something, but considering the circumstances, it wasn’t Iceland.
Those who left left, and the rest of us dreamed. We dreamed that Iceland’s growth of a bit less than one centimeter per year would one day lead to an entire earth covered with Iceland.
✺
“We’ve got an unpredictable boss and the unwanted intern, and now the office is moving. If tragedies come in threes, this is it.”
That’s what Kim said to me after we learned about the office move. The change of building had just been a rumor, but now it was reality. In a few months, we were to move from Yangjae Station to Susaek Station. I lived by Myeongil Station, and the commute from Myeongil to Susaek was longer than a flight from here to Iceland. Kim lived in the Gyeonggi suburb of Gwangju, and he said he was going to quit his job altogether. After suffering from the ever-changing demands of our boss—who’d come in this morning as the second quintuplet but after lunch transformed back into the first—I had the same impulse. Maybe if I quit my job, I really could leave for Iceland. Iceland glittered on the world map affixed to my desk, like it was sending out an aurora.
Tucked in a corner of Reykjavík: the Expert’s twenty-squaremeter hair salon. At first, we found her stories of the salon, which frequently mentioned some acquaintance’s grandmother and the black cat that lived inside the business, to be exciting. Material on Icelandic hair salons wasn’t easy to find in a guidebook or embassy.
But at some point, we caught on. The Iceland we were learning about consisted entirely of the inside of one building. The Expert’s stories of Iceland were limited to the twenty-squaremeter floor of her hair salon. The Expert had spent ten years within those twenty square meters, and even when she did go outside, she was a long way from getting on a tour bus to explore the center of the island, or driving along the coast, or riding a snowmobile. The Expert’s range of motion was defined entirely by people whose hair was a bit too long, people who wanted to wrap their tresses around heated rollers, people who wanted their hair untangled, and those who were in need of scissors: it had no relation to Iceland. The Expert’s Iceland was the hair salon—a place from which Iceland was so absent, it was difficult to tell whether or not it was in Iceland at all.
The Expert’s stories pulled us inside the hair salon. She had nowhere else to take us, nowhere else to tell us about. The result of her anecdotes was that now, if I thought of Iceland, the first thing that came to me wasn’t curiosity, it was a headache. The Expert just had to say the word “Iceland,” and I could smell the perm chemicals. I was also fed up with her stories of the black cat that wandered the beauty parlor and of so-and-so’s grandmother, who was always visiting. Couldn’t I see cats and grandmas in any old alley right here in Korea? To be honest, I didn’t know if the Expert had really lived in Iceland for ten years or if she had just spent a very short period of time there. I didn’t know if she’d lived in Iceland at all—or if she’d even been to the country. I couldn’t tell if she was one of twelve Koreans in Reykjavík or if she’d just named her hair salon Reykjavík. Maybe the Expert only knew Iceland in words: perhaps it was like how I had memorized French bus lines without ever going to France, or how I could recite recommended Japanese restaurants and travel budgets and delicacies without having stepped foot there. But I kept my mouth shut.
“It smells like a sham,” Kim said. Maybe that was it. I hadn’t thought of the Expert as an expert, but as one of the twelve disciples spreading the gospel of Iceland. Even if the gospel she preached was false, perhaps I’d fallen deep into the church and begun to believe its doctrine—and become a believer who wanted to stand on top of that doctrine, even if it was an illusion, until the earth collapsed beneath me. I believed the words of the Expert as is, more than I believed all the detailed and completely credible information I’d learned about Iceland from books and out in the world. Her twenty-square-meter hair salon, so-and-so’s grandma, the group of Korean tourists that the Expert had seen exactly once in Reykjavík, the short-tempered guide who’d been leading the group, and the crying baby who lived next door to the Expert: I believe they all existed.
✺
Café Iceland had once hosted well-attended events at venues throughout Seoul and even in the suburbs—we were always looking for the right ambiance for our meetings—but recently we had dwindled to a pitiful group. The organizer of our meetings was at a loss as members asked him to decrease membership fees or give them individual discounts. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen, he said. Members who couldn’t stand the heat left in droves. Now only three or four people went to meetings regularly.
The Expert was quiet as she pulled a silver pair of scissors out of her bag. She unfurled a pink piece of cloth and wrapped it around my neck. The woman standing behind me, looking down at my part and holding silver scissors in her hands: she wasn’t the Expert—she was Iceland. All of Iceland groped my scalp with her fingertips as she said the following: “The back of your head sticks out a lot.”
Iceland brandished the scissors. She held my thick, black hair between those cold fingers and spread the silver blades open. Slap. I didn’t know how cutting scissors could make a slapping noise. But the scissors were definitely slapping. It was like the sound of wind hitting a cheek, or of the sea creeping toward shore. The scissors also seemed to be choo-choo-ing like an old locomotive. Iceland was turning my head in this direction and that direction, as if it were a globe. The scissors rolled over my head like train wheels. Twenty active volcanoes and seven hundred hot springs erupted along the blades’ path. I worried the scissors were about to reach their destination. I wanted them to keep on going like this forever. Like a train. On my head that stuck out a lot in the back.
Almost everyone cut their hair. Iceland made all our hairstyles exactly the same. Our head shapes and hair texture and length all differed, but our hair became exactly the same: Iceland style. And then the Expert disappeared from our Iceland. She had left Iceland in our hair, we were sure of it. That was our last class with the Expert. As she left the room, her back gave off a commanding aura. But for some reason, her departing gait was very fast. She looked just like us. I didn’t know where the axis to our globe was, but the Expert was there, and I was here. Together, we were like a map of the world being violently pressed against another surface to transfer its image.
That’s how the meetings ended. More specifically, we delayed the next meeting without rescheduling. Iceland was an abstract concept. The word “Iceland” couldn’t help but be subjective: each of us translated it differently, and it held a unique meaning for each member. That was Iceland. I believed that the way to define an abstract concept was to decide what its antonym was, so I thought about the opposite of Iceland. If I could figure that out, then I’d know roughly where Iceland lay. But try as I might, the opposite of Iceland didn’t come to me. I kept walking in circles around the same twenty square meters of Iceland. Like I was lost on the side of a mountain.
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When I logged back on to the Café website after a long absence, I saw a new notice. The first Korean-language guidebook to Iceland had been published. The Café was organizing a group purchase of the book, but because few members had agreed to participate, the initiative had foundered. I bought the book, and right before I went to sleep, I lay on my bed and flipped it open. Reading about Iceland page by page, from Reykjavík to the less-known middle of the island, was a thrill. Because it was a recent publication, up-to-date consumer prices were written down in detail. Some of them corresponded to what the Expert had told us and some of them didn’t. But I decided I wouldn’t dispute the Expert’s gospel. The Expert’s Iceland and this book’s Iceland may have differed slightly, that was true. But it wasn’t important.
This was how I lived in Iceland for several days and several nights. I paved roads and constructed buildings on top of the words I was reading. Then I imagined that I was walking on those roads and into those buildings. All you had to do was say “Reykjavík,” and the words transformed into structures that sprung up before my eyes: structures that were massive, but not overwhelming. I marched right into them. The surprising thing was that the more I read, the more the Iceland on my bookshelf came to resemble the island nation that I’d learned about from the Expert. Pizza joints appeared, selling slices for 150 krónur, and buses traveled routes the Expert had mentioned. After I’d read about seventy pages, I saw the Expert walking away, through the cityscape of Reykjavík, and when I made it to page one hundred, the beauty parlor with its meandering black cat made an appearance as well. Who knew: maybe if I sat down in one of the salon’s three styling chairs, the Expert would brandish a pink cloth like she was a magician, obscuring my view with the fabric. The Expert would cover the area below my neck with the pink cutting cape and say the following as she touched my scalp: “The back of your head sticks out a lot.”
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The office was busy as we prepared for the move. I placed my personal belongings in a large box. Several coworkers had already quit because of the location change. Kim was hidden behind the partition between our cubicles, looking for another job. A map of the world was laid out under the glass panel covering my desk, like an uninteresting tabletop menu at a restaurant. Train tracks and roads resembled blood vessels as they spread across the map, which teemed with so many place-names that I thought they might crash into each other. Iceland was far from such discord. You had to travel by boat or plane to reach the country, located at latitudes between sixty-three and sixty-six degrees. You had to break away from land. While everyone else was trying to decide if they should follow the company to its new location or quit, I was trying to decide if I should buy a backpack or carry-on bag. I skimmed through search results for airfare to Iceland as well. What arrived at my house several days later wasn’t a backpack or a carry-on, but the kind of enormous suitcase used when moving countries. I worried that if I didn’t purchase such sizeable luggage, Iceland would evaporate out of my life forever.
The next morning, I discovered the evaporated country at a newspaper kiosk in the subway station.
“Financial Collapse in Iceland,” said the headline.
“IMF,” “unemployment crisis,” “national bankruptcy”: words I’d never seen in my guidebook were redefining Iceland. Iceland wasn’t just a place sometimes omitted from world maps: thanks to bankruptcy, it had almost disappeared from the face of the earth. The value of a króna was down 50 percent. TV and newspapers showed images of Icelanders panic-buying olive oil and pasta in grocery stores. The news reported that tourists were flocking to Iceland because of the króna’s decrease in value. This was how Iceland became famous.
The subway rumbled loudly as it entered the station. “The train to Susaek Station is now approaching,” said a voice on the loudspeaker. I took a step back before hurriedly boarding the train. It would have been a long ride from Myeongil to Susaek, but Nokbeon to Susaek wasn’t too far. I’d decided to deal with my company’s change of office in a way that made things easiest for everyone: I moved. Moving was the trend at work. Most of my coworkers who said they were going to switch jobs ended up finding new homes instead, in order to maintain their commute distances. I’d been able to make use of the enormous suitcase in the move. As I held a newspaper—and the Iceland inside it— between my fingers, I boarded the subway.
✺ Published in “Issue 14: Money” of The Dial.
Excerpted from “Table for One” by Yun Ko-eun, translated by Lizzie Buehler. Copyright (c) 2024 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
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