“A Case of the Horses,” an excerpt from The Wanderer’s Curse by Jennifer Hope Choi
I was talking to a Korean friend in London in the winter of 2021 when the topic initially arose. “Sounds like your mom has yeokmasal,” she said nonchalantly. “You know, the wanderer’s curse.”
No, I didn’t know, had never heard of the word let alone its ominous connotations. From what I could acquire in English online, the meaning of yeokmasal derives from Chinese characters. Yeok: station, ma: horse, sal: not so directly translatable but, in this context, some amalgamation of aura, vibe, destiny, bad or negative energy/spirit/curse. The term may date as far back as the Silla dynasty. Koreans traveled then across great distances on horseback; in order to maintain efficient transportation speeds, riders would trade out their tired steeds at horse stations dotted across the country. When someone has yeokmasal, they will wander, station to station, stopping only long enough to refresh their horse before moving wherever the wind carries them. Such is the nomad’s burden, itchy feet whisking you away from the family you are meant to honor and serve. The wanderer’s curse is supposedly hereditary and a measurable disposition. To find out whether one is beset with yeokmasal, one must consult a fortune-teller (a common practice across all tiers of caste in ancient Korea). One’s saju is deciphered from birth chart information; within specific astrological coordinates, one may discover, among other fates, whether one is plagued with the curse.
To find out whether one is beset with yeokmasal, one must consult a fortune-teller.
Today yeokmasal is not associated with the blemished implications of yore. Living abroad for vocational opportunities can be viewed as a boon. Confucian principles regarding familial duty still apply, so maybe it is understood that a person is destined to eventually go back home and settle down. These days the term can even be filtered through the high-gloss sheen of wanderlust, the globetrotter’s longing for exploration that glorifies the romanticism—not the instability—of perpetual travel. Wandering is a familiar preoccupation for my generation in America—a time of constant in-betweenness, especially so for children of immigrants. It is no wonder, then, that Millennials have been drawn to “vanlife,” a trend that gained popularity across the country around 2015, perhaps peaking post-2020 Coronavirus isolation. Even my mother could see the appeal. In a van, you could stay at home and move around. Why buy a house or pay rent when you could make anywhere your yard? Kitted-out vehicles afforded thrill-seekers with the open road’s vanishing point, thrusting them toward a titillating, unseeable future.
Anyone who’s been on the road for longer than a week understands there are pitfalls to what may seem like a derring-do flex of freedom. There are certainly ways to bathe and nest in a confined mobile space, but for how long? Wanderlust conveys an air of exhilaration, risk for the sake of stimulation and adventure. But to be a nomad is another matter, something more enduring, a state that shudders with existential restlessness. No end in sight. No thrill either.
Unless you are Buddhist, uncertainty can feel like a soulful affliction, holding both provocative and terrifying possibilities: fulfillment of purpose or the bottomless unknown. Wandering is perhaps a way to embrace uncertainty, making discovery feel constant and ripe with promise. Are those who possess the wanderer’s curse galloping toward hope? Or are they ever averting stillness, so that whatever they may be escaping never gets the chance to catch up?
When I asked my mother about yeokmasal, she said, without hesitation, “Oh yea . . . I have that.” At no point had Umma received a saju reading of her own, though it didn’t take prescience to see the woman had a case of the horses. Her itinerant ways belonged to a bigger story.
I’d assumed Umma’s season of wandering started when she’d answered the job listing in a nurses’ journal in 2007, for a position that would take her to Ketchikan, Alaska—and many cities and states after that. Since retiring, she’d been spending three-month stints in Suwon, South Korea, to care for my elderly grandparents. After 40 years abroad, she’d landed back in the home she’d been desperate to leave. I wasn’t convinced she’d stay in her own city, back in the States, either. Though she’d relocated to South Carolina indefinitely in 2018, we seemed to share a cavernous longing for elsewhere. “I’m still looking for something that it’s not there,” she told me on a recent call. “I don’t know what it is I’m looking for.” Almost anticipating what I had not spoken, she added: “You know, you don’t have to be like me . . . ”
There was a time I believed I couldn’t possibly be anything like her. Now I wondered: Would I be as unsettled at seventy, too?
Did I even have a choice?
To find out if I was “officially” accursed, I’d have to get my saju read in Seoul. Did I believe in that kind of stuff? Kind of. I am not a woo-woo person; I like to say I am medium-woo, prone to occasional metaphysical rumination. I know my astrological signs, but I don’t know when or which planet is in what house aligned in or out of my favor.
I asked my Korean Londoner friend for a recommendation. “I can tell you right now, you have yeokmasal,” she told me, hardly containing her laughter. “You don’t need to go to him to find out.” But I wanted to hear what this soothsayer could glean about both Umma and me, so we made the appointment. Our guy was apparently quite legit, as far as fortune-tellers go. The plan: My mother would take a break from her caretaker duties in Suwon and travel two hours by subway north to join me in Seoul where she’d live-translate our readings. I would pad out my itinerary with other activities prior to her arrival. In order to get the full immersion I was seeking, I decided to sample Airbnb’s suggested Experiences—excursions led by local “experts.” In Tuscany, there are truffle hunting expeditions. In Oaxaca, traditional cooking classes. In Seoul, options revolve around K-culture. Regardless of the focus, every host relays some essential notion of Koreanness in their overviews—whether in Korea’s history, its treasures and trades, or its current ontological dilemmas.
“Are you Warmton or Coolton?” asks one host. K-beauty professionals can decipher your “personal color” within a one-hour session, because “knowing your own body color is helpful for making a good image.” In another you can learn how to apply makeup like Korean idols and celebrities, “drawing eyebrows that can greatly influence your impression” and “shading to make your face look slimmer” during your stay in the “Beauty Kingdom.”
You can also take K-pop vocal and dance lessons where you’ll be endowed with “so much insider info, you may just make it in the industry yourself.” Because Koreans love to drink, you can play drinking games, sharing fried chicken and clinking thimbles of soju with strangers, to “feel the culture of a real Korean college student.” And for the more emo-minded, you can delve into young Korea’s “sad cultures” on a walking tour through Gangnam District.
I was taken by one host named GJ. She offered a range of Experiences, from conversational Korean language courses to something called “Amazing toilet restroom tour,” exploring, I presume, Seoul’s most noteworthy water closets. I was charmed by her hustler’s gusto and kooky “what you’ll do” descriptions. For a seemingly unremarkable stroll around her outskirts neighborhood, participants can “dive into real Korean life” to “get to know what Parasite claims. Here is a chance to look around the local residences where we actually are. You may be able to smell them.”
“Is it a waste of the commission that this platform takes?” she shares on her bio page. “I agree with that a little bit. But they made typical trip different. Isn’t it? . . . The reason why I can continue to have positive personalities is that I don’t make my living by those experiences. I am ready to show you my sincerity, and I want to feel your sincerity, too.”
GJ happened to offer saju readings, branded as a form of “Oriental fortune-telling.” She would follow it with something called K-tarot, an additional reading performed with a handmade deck of cards based on illustrated Korean divination texts known as “dangsaju.” GJ explicitly states her services are not for native Koreans. I couldn’t track down any other English-speaking saju readings, so I signed up. Because I would be paired with another American client, I decided I’d mostly observe, vérité style. “This experience has nothing to do with supernatural shamanism,” GJ mentioned in a message. “Fortuneteller is not shaman. Two are different. I will talk about what is saju to you!”
GJ’s K-tarot may be a clever marketing ploy, appealing to astrology enthusiasts, but it also gestures to a greater trend in Korea. The clairvoyance business has seen renewed interest, especially among Korean youth. According to Korea Economic Daily, as of 2018 the industry was on its way to becoming worth $3.7 billion in South Korea. Market research indicated two-thirds of all Koreans seek guidance from fortune-tellers at least once a year—a number that apparently increased post-pandemic.
In any Seoul neighborhood, you will likely come across fortune-teller tents set up on sidewalks.
In any Seoul neighborhood, you will likely come across fortune-teller tents set up on sidewalks, where seers offer tarot card, face, and palm readings at minimal cost. The most popular services, however, are saju readings. These days one can book online for sessions held at YouTube-famous fortune-telling cafés. In some of these establishments, rather confusingly, women present themselves as mudangs (Korean shamans) and augur via the landing patterns of tossed wooden sticks or ancient coins. Like GJ mentioned, mudangs and fortune-tellers are not the same—but they can overlap, perhaps in the way a square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not a square. They are sometimes referred to interchangeably or without much distinction. These nebulous parameters likely present ample opportunities to profit off the ductile faith of others.
The busiest saju season is from December to February, after the completion of academic exams and before the lunar new year. Young Koreans ask questions about college admissions, which schools they ought to attend, whether the country will go to war, or if this year they’ll fall in love. Couples visit to determine their matrimonial harmony in a reading called gunghap. Business tycoons and bureaucrats also request guidance with risky financial acquisitions and career moves. There are a number of controversies involving prominent South Korean leaders across conservative and progressive ideologies, who defer to the private counsel of personal fortune-tellers throughout pivotal political decisions.
One’s pillars of destiny are fixed, so any fortune-teller ought to divine the same characters based on birth information. For Koreans, though, one’s lot in life is not set in stone. Saju is like a cosmic blueprint. Ultimately an individual wields the power to alter their fate through intentional choices or sometimes with the help of expensive talismans. And that’s the kind of enterprising spirit Koreans can get behind.
Janet Shin, a professor of the Oriental Science Department at Wonkwang Digital University and the Korea Times’s resident fortune-telling columnist, believes saju ought to be treated with academic interest rather than brushed off as woo-woo hooey given how its storied past is woven into Korea’s philosophical history. There are centuries-old dang saju texts displayed in the National Museum of Korea and the Museum of Folk History. Sources differ on the exact origins, though many believe saju is based on Chinese philosophies. According to Shin, saju’s historical background is indeterminable, due to competing political interests and ideologies that have fluctuated across multiple dynasties throughout East Asia.
Wherever it started, saju has become as Korean as kimchi. And, like any metaphysical belief system, it functions as a way of making sense of the unknowable, to better comprehend one’s place in the world.
But how does saju work? The word, which translates to “four pillars,” resembles the Chinese astrological tradition of Ba Zi. While Ba Zi readings are influenced by elements from the I-ching, or The Book of Changes, to interpret readings Koreans rely on their sacred tome known as Tojeong Bigyeol or Secrets of Tojeong, written by Lee Ji-ham, a scholar of the Joseon dynasty.
The process itself involves an explosion of numbers, beginning with those pillars, based on birth year, month, date, and hour. Each pillar is divided into two rows (one of “celestial stems” and another of “earthly branches”) for a total of eight characters. Every character corresponds to one of five elements—earth, wood, fire, water, and metal—and is attributed with yin or yang (dual forces sometimes simplified as positive or negative energies). Additionally, each pillar represents a stage of life, read from right to left (birth to childhood, adolescence to young adulthood, and so forth until death).
With so many factors at play, it may seem as if one’s personal saju permutations are rare. In actuality, there are only 518,400 possible variations in a sexagenary cycle. Uniqueness arises not through the numbers themselves but in how and by whom those numbers are interpreted. Prognostications are dependent on the diviner’s personal proclivities and beliefs. One fortune-teller may infuse elements of quantum theory into their readings, or psychoanalysis, while another may prioritize their client’s reactions and body language to shape the bricolage. Some might not believe in fate or destiny at all, valuing the social or performative aspects of the transaction instead. In other words, there is no single way of practicing saju. It is a tradition dependent upon subjectivity and its very own lore.
Nowadays folks can skip a face-to-face encounter altogether by entering their info into an app for speedy results. But for my purposes, I would need to interact with humans attuned with divination skills. Which is one reason why I decided to meet with GJ. Saju schematics are dizzying and resources are written in Korean or Chinese, so there are limits to what I could research in English. GJ had been studying saju for a mere two years. Even though her approach was marketed for foreigners, I needed to beef up on basics before the legit, second appointment. I also wasn’t confident Umma would convey necessary nuance—or if she’d even show up. Hours before my departure, she got wishy-washy on me. Maybe she wouldn’t even make it to the saju appointment. “It’s against my religion,” she joked. And with that, I boarded my flight.
Before venturing into Seoul for four nights, I spend a few days with my grandparents and mother in Suwon. Aside from sleeping on a stone slab disguised as a mattress, and gorging on childhood favorite foods (thick discs of hobak jeon, unctuous braised galbi jjim, and the crunchiest oi muchim slathered in sweet soy), I prepare my usual, embarrassingly exhaustive document for traveling somewhere new. The list includes where I want to eat and drink (best mandu, sundubu, third wave coffee, Korean rotisserie chicken) along with several phonetically spelled-out common phrases I can refer to when stage fright short-circuits my brain. Can I take this to-go? / Ee-guh po-jang dweh-yo? / 이거 포장 돼요? I’m sorry (formal) / Joesonghabnida / 죄송합니다.
Grandpa is worried about me getting around, because my Korean is so shitty. Grandma says thieves abound in the big city, so I need to wear my purse front and center. Umma has not informed Halmoni about how she’ll stay with me in Seoul for one day, but we’re proceeding as planned. She waves me off when I depart, morose but acceptant, like one of the string quartet musicians who resolves to play one last song on a capsizing Titanic.
I’ve chosen to stay in a hanok—a traditional Korean house with tiled rooftops and rice paper doors. This one offers classic Korean breakfasts, heated wooden floors, an interior courtyard with an Oriental garden, and a private sauna and spa tub. It is located a short walk from Gyeongbokgung—the primary palace of the Joseon dynasty—where I spend a sunny but bitterly cold afternoon touring the grounds and nearby folk museum.
Visitors donning hanboks receive free admission to any of the city’s palaces. It’s a popular activity, and one I’d seen advertised in many Airbnb Experiences. For about seventy dollars, you can spend two hours cosplaying Korean royalty while a multilingual professional photographer documents your every move. The fee includes “VIP treatment”: borrowing Korean outfits with the help of a “Personal Hanbok assistant” and optional hairstyling or accessories at additional cost. The host will then snap faux candid shots of you and your partner or friends beneath Gwanghwamun—Gyeongbokgung’s towering gate—or beneath the vibrant rainbow-like dancheong paintings adorning the eaves, or while sauntering by the royal banquet hall’s tree-lined lake. Tourists of varying backgrounds find the pastime alluring, as seen in one host’s photo gallery: a lesbian couple smiling in complete regalia mid-stroll; a woman in a hijab pinching up her carnation-pink chima, curtsy-ready; a Fu Manchu–mustachioed man wielding a fake sword.
On my visit, I weave around a dozen of these simultaneous photo shoots. I see a gaggle of Chinese women posing in choreographed group formations. There are several white dudes, begrudgingly outfitted in full court dress, including coronet headgear, trailing their Asian girlfriends from balustrade to balustrade, recording the inanities on their smartphones. Some rent their outfits directly from one of the many boutiques in the surrounding neighborhood and the costumed families, couples, and teens waltz around the ancient streets in their sneakers, clutching selfie sticks, posing together at tea shops or nearby Bukchon Hanok Village. The epitome of Korea can be found in these transactional displays, antiquity clashing with modernity—specifically jarring at Gyeongbokgung. The palace was first constructed in 1395; 93 percent of its original 500 buildings were obliterated during occupation, when the Japanese empire sought to destroy any signifiers of Korean legacy. Now there’s an entire cottage industry for larping olden-day Korea in the twenty-first century.
That evening, I participate in something more my speed: a Korean youth generation tour that promises to peel back Korea’s shiny veneer, exposing the country’s “sad cultures.” As a former Morrissey fan, I suspect I’m the ideal participant for a sad cultures tour. I meet June, our docent, at the Gangnam Style “horse dance” stage. Our cohort consists of a couple from Singapore, a young Kiwi doctor, and a finance guy in a Union Square Donuts beanie.
Fifty years ago, Gangnam, meaning “south of the river,” teemed with rice paddies and agricultural landscape. Today it is a district reputed for its uber wealthy residents—synonymous with a Beverly Hills lavishness available to only a sliver of the population. June is a handsome Korean guy in his twenties with the prototypical em-dash eyebrows, Spock sideburns, and a hint of edge (a tragus piercing). He says by the end of our time together, we will know Korea’s dark side and why his peers in the MZ generation (South Korea’s combined Millenial and Gen Z demographic) frequently describe their predicament as “living in hell.”
Hell Joseon is the dystopia MZers were born into and cannot escape. Beginning in the 1960s, government resources and funding had been funneled almost entirely to central Seoul. Park Chung-hee seized power via military coup in 1961, served as president from 1963 until his assassination in 1979, and many of his economic reforms led to Korea’s meteoric transformation, often referred to as the Miracle of the Han River. Some see Park as a despot, others as a complicated leader who rectified the nation through stringent, if dictatorial, control. He enforced rapid development, including the implementation of key infrastructure (bridges and roads) and an emphasis on exportation of domestic goods to kickstart the country’s industrial growth. Further expedited by Seoul’s bid to host the 1988 Summer Olympics, soon high-rises sprouted from the land. Furious productivity established untenable momentum. It seems MZers now feel trapped by many of the systems that hoisted the country from financial collapse. They are encumbered by impossible-to-maintain ideals, manifested in appearance, career, and social demands, in an ongoing climate of state-led media censorship and political oppression. But, June assures us, this will be “not whining tour . . . I love my people.”
Due to the inequity of postwar development, areas outside the city have lagged behind Seoul’s progress. Rural towns do not provide adequate opportunities, jobs, and healthcare for young people and have become largely occupied by Korea’s elderly. According to June, 92 percent of the Korean population resides in urbanized, metropolitan areas, which constitute only 16.7 percent of the entire country’s usable land. Buying a home in Seoul, the nation’s capital city, is inconceivable for most; the going rate for an apartment—not a house—hovers around one million U.S. dollars, while the average monthly salary clocks in around $2,800. As a result, the life of Korea’s youth generation is rife with ceaseless, gladiatorial competition. In a time when family-run conglomerates (known as chaebols) dominate contemporary Korean society, Golden Spoons (those born into wealth) can easily skip the line to ascend quickly in the corporate world, while those from more humble upbringings toil in the muck indefinitely.
We walk by hagwons, the cutthroat after-school academies so intense the government had to install a 10 p.m. curfew to regulate children’s excessive study hours. Next are the pylon signs filled with the names of plastic surgery clinics that accommodate Korea’s obsession with “lookism.” There is even a Korean web toon called Lookism (that has since been adapted into a Netflix anime series of the same name) in which Park Hyung Seok, an unattractive, self-loathing high school teenager, assumes a strapping body by day, but must return to his shlub self at night. In that form he is treated with stereotypical derision by bullies prior to his metamorphosis and has zero friends; no women will give him the time of day; and he’s so depressed he wants to die. When he’s living as his hotter self, his life improves. Women swoon at the sight of his K-pop-idol physique, and he becomes a social media influencer and a model. The moral is ambiguous. Perhaps the point is that Park Hyung-seok must confront how good-looking people experience life differently, which directly affects how one sees oneself. In psychological terms, this can be referred to as the Looking Glass theory, in which a person interprets their identity based on how others perceive them. Meaning that self-image is not conceived in isolation but among others, through social dynamics, because individuals and society work in concert, one entity informing the other. Each social encounter is a mirror in which one’s reflection varies. And ultimately the individual must weigh and assess this feedback to find a kind of equilibrium.
Balance is not so simple in Korea. According to June, it is common for companies to require headshots with job applications. “It doesn’t matter who you are on the inside, only how you look on the outside,” he states, expressionless. With regard to plastic surgery’s ubiquity, he asks, “Have we gone too far? Maybe.”
By some estimates, one in three women between the ages of nineteen and twenty-nine have undergone procedures. With the incremental tweaks, everyone has begun to look the same—white skin, rounder eyes, V-line chins, button noses, upturned smiles, slimmer calves, bigger breasts, smaller faces—but also farther and farther away from looking Korean. When June’s friend moved abroad, she told him, “I feel free. I don’t have to care about how I look finally.”
Korea’s triumphant comeback narrative has spawned these hellish preoccupations. “Earlier generation struggled and worked so hard,” June says. “Their screams were covered by development and successes. [They said] let’s give those successes to our next generation.” But those children now feel trapped. “We can’t develop faster. They had hope, older generation, but we can’t develop like old days,” June continues. “Younger generation sees there’s no hope.”
Suicide is arguably the saddest of the sad cultures we broach on our two-hour doom-and-gloom cruise. Before inviting us to eat Korean fried chicken—perhaps the most depressing post-mortem drinks hang invite I’ve ever received—June concludes his spiel on the banks of the Han River. We could spot nearby Mapo Bridge, a disturbingly frequent suicide destination. In 2012, Samsung Life Insurance posted uplifting messages along the railings to deter potential victims from leaping to their deaths. “Doesn’t it feel good to be outside walking on a bridge?” one sign said. “Worries are nothing,” said another. The topic is so common within cultural discourse, there’s even a suicide jumping joke among young Koreans. “What temperature is the Han River today?” one will ask. And to any answer they’ll retort, “Nevermind, too cold!” It’s an eerie evolution. In the span of fifty years, the Han River has come to symbolize new beginnings for one generation and definitive ends for another.
After a light breakfast of marinated fish and fermented soybean soup, I meet GJ outside Bulgwang Station for my first saju reading. She’s in her forties, lean and springy, with an almost twitchy alertness, like a cricket. She’s pacing, checking the time, waiting for our second participant. Sandra, a Black woman also in her forties, from San Diego, finally arrives in a taxi, apologetic for the delay. She’s wearing a beret. Despite having been in Seoul for two weeks on vacation, she hasn’t taken the subway yet. I ask what brought her to South Korea in the dead of winter. Her answer has something to do with working in the health sector, a visit for ideas to share back home. As for this Westerner-centric fortune-telling event? “Oh, curiosity,” she says, then adds coquettishly, “I have my reasons.”
We trail GJ’s brisk pace and our guide chatters away about the busy day, her teenage daughter’s exams, and the park we pass, recently revamped to serve the community. Elderly Koreans are seated at the benches, embanked in bristly dead grass.
We de-layer and order drinks at a spacious bookstore–café. GJ can’t seem to catch her breath. She’s starting a new sentence before finishing the last one, her mind moving faster than her body can handle. Through the course of the session, she will refill her black coffee three times. At the moment, she’s losing track of her belongings, touching pens and loose papers, looking under the table, into her bag, monologuing a continuous, nervous ramble until handing us gifts: tangerines and long-twist donuts called kkwabaegi.
Sandra appears unbothered by our host’s frenetic state. “Coffee and carbs!” she sings.
Though the answer is rather obvious, I ask GJ anyway: “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” she says, then immediately reneges. “Actually, I’m not okay.” She’s awaiting text updates about her daughter’s exam results. We learn her kid skips class and doesn’t care much about school which, in Korea, is a very bad, very big deal. GJ interrupts her own tangent. “This is my personal history. I’m so sorry. Just give me your birth day and time.” She hands us an informational printout along with pages she’s ripped from her notebook so we can write down our birth information, then leaves to retrieve our coffees.
It occurs to me that I’ve never seen a fortune-teller stressed.
It occurs to me that I’ve never seen a fortune-teller stressed. “She seems frazzled,” I whisper to Sandra. “It’s freaking me out a little bit.” Sandra shrugs as classical music, like the ambient soundtrack at a shopping mall, tinkles in the background. I stare at the printout, which is covered with boxes, charts, and phoneticized Korean-to-English words, including the ten celestial stems and twelve earthly branches. There’s a pentagram too, each point representing one of the five elements, +/- signs marked throughout a list of characters. The four pillars are represented by eight squares, one marked “social mask,” another “success.”
Sandra asks me where I’m from, and I tell her Brooklyn because nowhere else feels right. I haven’t returned to California since my mother left seventeen years ago. Even though I’ve lived in Tulsa for two and a half years, it isn’t home. New York isn’t anymore either, but it’s as close as I’ve gotten so far. “You don’t have an accent,” Sandra notices. “Cheater!” I smile and let out a nervous warble, because obviously I’ve lied and both of us know it.
GJ returns and begins punching numbers into an app on her phone. It will calculate our eight characters and correlating energies she’ll interpret. GJ takes a swig of her java, slams the mug on the table, and continues mumbling and scribbling into her notebook. I notice Sandra’s birth date and fill the gap of silence: “Ah, you were almost a New Year’s baby!”
“All the women in my family are basically Capricorns,” she says, swirling her latte. “It’s really scary. We have nothing but earth signs.”
“WOW. Wow,” GJ exclaims. Apparently, out of eight characters, I only have two elements: tree and water. “I . . . I met the first person to have only two . . .” she says. “I so curious. It’s very simple. But you are not a simple person.” She switches over to Sandra’s numbers, pleased. “As you see, you have ALL of five element.”
Noticing my disappointment (is two bad?), Sandra whispers to me, generously, “Just means I’m complicated.”
After more coffee chugging and notebook scribbling and mug slamming, GJ is ready to explain Sandra’s pillars. She’s pointing with her pen tip to characters and boxes on our printouts. I have been listening to Korean people talk in accents my entire life, but I cannot seem to keep up with GJ. Yet Sandra is “mm”ing and “hmm”ing, gasping and concurring with “One hundred percent” or “That’s so true.” At one point they share a giggle about a third-pillar revelation and Sandra’s propensity toward secret-keeping (“so Capricorn”), which prompts her to say: “It’s like Diana Ross. I’m coming out!”
Why? How??
GJ agrees. She’s chewing loudly on her donut as she continues: “You are medium fire, candle. Not big flame. Yea? It’s not the dangerous! People know you. Earth and fire. Negative earth. This is a continent. Maybe hollow, is very wide. . . . And then this fire, fighting fire, big fire . . . So this is really good. Negative earth is . . . guard, they, everybody know what is your potential . . . If earth character have big energy, earth need tree, be control. Fire . . . ”
“It’s opposite,” Sandra finishes.
“Yea, opposite. We say, kill. Literally means kill. Tree kill earth. But it is not correct word in English so . . . earth need tree. And fire hurt. Fire melt metal.”
I’m thinking, Is Sandra killing earth? How does a medium fire melt metal? when GJ turns to me, laughing a little too hard, and says: “You don’t have fire!” Which feels like a dig, but seeing as how I don’t know what’s happening, I release an unconvincing “Ahhh.” And while I don’t know how she arrived at such a conclusion, Sandra summarizes with an analogy having to do with how forests need a good scorching every now and then to kill off diseases so new saplings can grow.
“Can you understand?” GJ asks me.
I cannot. How did Sandra get all that? I can understand GJ is speaking English but the words sound randomly strung together as if pulled from a bingo tumbler. She turns to my chart. “You have all tree. Tree is a start,” she says, pointing to the top of the pentagram. “You start a lot. You have energy to start. But there was no finish-y.” It’s a good and bad thing, I’m guessing. Some people are too afraid to start anything new, but starting too often can also be a weakness.
Sandra mmhmms. “You’re lacking something in experience,” she says. “There’s something missing. . . . You fall short in a sense.”
“How do you know??” GJ asks, impressed.
“Just listening to you,” Sandra replies. “When you think about yin and yang, you think about positive and negative. To be a well-balanced individual . . . you shouldn’t have all negative, and you shouldn’t have all positive. You should have a good, equal balance.”
“That’s right,” GJ says.
“What this is saying is basically when in your life span it’s going to happen,” Sandra goes on, gesturing to the pillars. “Or it’s trying to point out what happened in your life.”
“That’s right,” GJ says.
One tree is giant (me). One character hides and never answers (my father). One has energy to survive (my mother). Then we start getting into the good stuff. “Tree never stay in one place. I think you’re still here,” GJ says, of my second pillar. “This is very important period in your life. You . . . make some achievement. Or you try something very hard things? Because it’s really nice timing here . . . OR? Or somebody, somebody inspiration, inspired by you. Or your work or . . . your artwork is about you.”
I tell her I’m writing a book. She digresses, sharing how she’s written and self-published six books. She has concerns about South Korea’s hierarchical collective society and how the disparity has affected recorded history. For example, Bukchon Hanok Village, with its in-tact traditional Korean homes, is a common tourist attraction. I’d chosen to stay in a hanok because as gross as it is to admit, doing so felt “authentic.” However, GJ gripes, most of what remains of Korea’s past upholds royal-family, upper-class culture. There is no lasting evidence of how commoners lived. Thatched homes, the domiciles for 90 percent of the population, were destroyed or collapsed half a century ago. She laments how the rich have all the power, how the poor, younger generation is never meant to complain. Her books offer young people advice. “I want to show this about alternative,” she says, laughing strangely. “Don’t suicide. Just call somebody. Just call somebody. Yea.”
By the time we get to my fourth pillar, it appears that around age seventy or eighty I will need some grounding. Children, maybe, to balance all my treeness. “Or! Or a very precious thing in your life. Like a children or like a pet or maybe your book! You need this background, earth, because you are a giant tree. Giant tree need earth. Be positive. Earth. It is only background? Or your family?” she sums up, sucking her teeth. “Or . . . very precious things what it is in your life.”
“She’s saying you’re stuck in the past,” Sandra translates.
“I cannot say, I don’t want to say it is too late,” GJ admits, hesitantly. “There is nothing to be late . . .” Which sounds like she’s saying it’s too late. To remedy that, I’ll need an earth character. I ask her what that would look like.
“Just try to think about it. I don’t have the process. So you have to step by step,” she says, bursting into incredulous laughter, “to reach your future.” In her opinion, I’ll achieve far more than writing. Traveling, art, branching out like the tree I am. As for Sandra, GJ has other ideas: “I think you should be fortune-teller. I think you have some ability.” Sandra gets a touch bashful, as it seems this is not the first time she’s heard the suggestion. “What do you do?” GJ asks.
“Real estate.”
“Really??” GJ says, baffled. And for once I can understand exactly what she means.
We wrap up with her K-tarot. Each card in her deck (which bears no relation to European divination tarot) depicts a Korean word and its meaning. “This is about . . . your true character,” GJ elaborates. Then she counts tally marks on a scratch paper based on our birth coordinates, searches for the corresponding cards, and fans out four per person. “You have the best,” she says to Sandra, pointing to “long life.” She also has two luck cards. “Two luck is best,” GJ dotes.
As for me, I’m shocked to find I have two “wander” cards, 역, transliterated as “yeok” and “yeog,” positioned in the time frames of near future and future. This prompts me to ask about yeokmasal. GJ is taken aback, as if she hasn’t heard the word in ages. It means something different now, she explains. Today yeokmasal is more about travel, and the fortune to explore the world beyond home. If you have a partner or children, it’s not possible to leave. “Old people insist yeokmasal and travel life is not good. . . . But I think yeokmasal is good. You are live now.”
“How do you know if you have yeokmasal?”
“We have to calculate,” she says. “Jen . . .” she trails off, tapping away at another app on her phone. After a minute, the results are in. “Ahhhh,” she says. “You have yeokmasal.” She shows me the screen, which depicts an unambiguous 70 percent. “Anyway . . . you should focus not about travel,” she deduces. “Why you don’t feel about your home. It means, you think you don’t have a home. Because you are Korean, but Korean American. Yea. This is your identity.”
I could have let that sink in, but I pivot to another two points she’s mentioned. Something about separating from my partner but that we’ll meet again. And, supposedly, I’m meant to be famous in Korea. These things will happen before I’m sixty. “Cool,” I say, relieved. “I have some time.”
GJ finds this hilarious. “You worry about you don’t have enough time!”
Again apt, but I deflect. Me? Famous in Korea? “Yea. Why not?” GJ says. “Korean American. Korean American. We need them!”
“But you get there,” Sandra affirms. “On your own time . . . Which is the right time.”
Adapted from The Wanderer’s Curse: A Memoir by Jennifer Hope Choi. Copyright © 2025 by Jennifer Hope Choi. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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