A Good Name

The banner, several stories tall and proclaiming, “Marry Chriatmas!” would stay up until after I left the city six months later. But on Christmas Eve of 2007, I had no way of knowing this. It was just part of the noisy cultural schizophrenia in one of the world’s largest cities, only noticeable because of its size. Though nearly midnight, the street’s ambience was that of midafternoon. Food vendors called out to passersby. Couples laughed and argued and milled about, looking at cheap toys and carnival style games. My teeth chattered.

Having finished teaching at a cram school, I was on my way home from work via the grocery store at that late hour. The city government in Seoul had recently banned keeping children at desks after 10 pm, but parents who had already paid tuition wanted their kids to have an edge on those who would handicap themselves by following such a rule. So, after turning off the lights, the TA’s in my hagwon led the elementary schoolers from classroom to classroom via glowstick. It was morally and physically exhausting, but who was I to judge? I wasn’t from there, and I was getting paid.

Eggs and ham for tomorrow’s breakfast procured, I was headed home, feeling unnaturally awake. My confused stomach burbled out a complaint: Time to eat, not time to go to bed. Between E-mart and my mattress were any number of fluorescent lights advertising rice porridge, bibimbap, and a lot of kimchi and barbecue. I decided to pick one as the spirit moved me and was about to join the human current in that direction when I saw something that would change my life forever.

As in any city, people in various states of inebriation aren’t uncommon in Seoul. Already that week I’d been propositioned, accosted, and Englished at by any number of drunks, jovial, combative, incoherent, or alternating between all three. Along with my neighborhood’s restaurants were a largely redundant set of bars. After all, if you down three bottles of soju with dinner, going out for a drink afterwards is gilding the lily. So when I saw the man, red faced and nearly asleep, on the corner next to a closed florist’s, I didn’t pay much attention. But then there was a tiny, furry nose sticking out of a cardboard takeout box.

Let me say, first and foremost, that, yes, dog is still consumed in South Korea. Later on, I would learn that it had been made very technically illegal within Seoul city limits when the country hosted the Olympics back in 1988. However, enforcement of the law was more to obfuscate the practice than to actually eliminate it. Basically, you won’t see boshintang advertised in English.

But this takeout box was from a rice porridge chain, and the dog was small enough to fit inside, so no meat. I was used to seeing puppies and kittens for sale on the street, chicks around Easter. You could buy a hedgehog in the grocery store I’d just left. Typically, I ignored it.

This was different. Unlike a lot of the animal sellers, this guy had the grime of homelessness about him and only had the one little puppy. Usually, they had a table with a miniature pen on it, containing a fuzzy jumble of legs and tails, all rolling over each other nipping and playing and keeping each other warm. This box wasn’t even corrugated cardboard. It was more like poster board and didn’t have so much as a scrap of cloth in it to keep away the chill.

I stopped walking and looked at the sandy colored nose and the two beady black eyes behind it. The man hadn’t even noticed me yet.

A girl I had been seeing, another English teacher who was spending the holidays in the States, had recently talked about having an affinity for dogs. Frankly, I wasn’t so much thinking of getting the puppy for her as I was thinking of a way to offload him if he didn’t fit in with the way I was living. I’ll say upfront that writing this story has made me confront a lot of who I was when it was happening. It’s not comfortable. I don’t know if any honest introspection is. Probing around in a person’s past is a little like surgery. The prognosis of a lot of this was that I was a real jerk most of the time.

But when I saw that helpless little face, it broke something in me. So where was the harm? And it was so cold out. He let out a little yip.

Finally, the man noticed me looking.

“Puppy, how much?” I said in my very poor Korean.

The man’s gaze turned from bleary to a glare, and he unloaded a snarl and a string of Korean I couldn’t parse, aside from “Mi-guk,” meaning “American.” I hopped partially away and nearly into some of the other pedestrians at the violence of his tone. Figuring that the puppy was not for sale and that anything further would develop into threats of physical violence, I ambled off to get my dinner.

My cold nose turned red, and feeling returned to my fingers with the spice and temperature of a bowl of soup. All the while, I made up stories justifying the stranger’s fury at my question. He’d been done dirt by a soldier. He felt that we were culturally colonizing his country. He didn’t like Bush. Any or all of them sounded legitimate to me. The bits of kimchi and pork and tofu I swallowed warmed my stomach luxuriously, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the man and the puppy. It was so cold out.

I shook my head. If I went back, he might try to get physical with me, and while I wasn’t afraid of that, the possible precipitant legal trouble could be bad. He might have picked up the puppy and left. Or, and this was where my thoughts stuck, the little thing might be frozen solid by the time I got back. Even if I somehow got the puppy, the chill it had already gotten that night might be enough to do it in. It was so cold.

I paid for my meal. I struggled back through the crowds. I found the man and stuck 40,000 won in his face without a word. Due to a miserable exchange rate at the time, it was probably about thirty-six dollars, but it was the entirety of my wallet’s contents. When the money came into focus for him, he looked at me, blinked, and handed me the box with the puppy in it.

I walked away to examine my purchase with a derisive sniff of capitalistic victory. About two steps later, what I had done began to dawn on me. I’d never had a dog before. And this wasn’t a dog; it was a puppy. He had flopped-down pointy ears that I reasoned would eventually stand up, a pointed nose and a vulpine tale. He looked like a Jindo, the national dog of Korea. His black eyes stared back at me, and he yipped again. I stuck a finger in his tiny little mouth to check my observation: no teeth yet. He was very small and very young. How big would he get? I lived in a tiny little efficiency. There were parks nearby, but what would I do with him while I was at work? After the first two, a deluge of questions inundated me. I needed to know what to do to take care of him, but no vet was open. I sighed.

If nothing else, I could give him a warm place to sleep. He still might die. I trudged home with a full belly and a heart full of concern. Lest it seem like I haven’t confronted the human part of this tragedy. The drunk man, I couldn’t help much more than I had. Part of the reason that I’d landed where I was, doing what I was doing, was that I’d burned myself out trying to be a decent teacher - not even a good one - in Baltimore. After having had my Peace Corps application accepted and then being subsequently invited, I was dismayed to find out that a private student loan I had would not defer. I wanted to teach. I wanted to help people. But I’d learned that trying to do Good for others was a bottomless pit. It led to exhaustion, frustration, and at one point, impetigo.

The dog was a baby and as helpless as he could possibly be. Toward the end of 2007, you could say that I thought of myself as respectful to animals but not much more. I was the kind of person who ushered spiders out of my living spaces with nonlethal means if available. I was too mobile to really contemplate having a pet. Or so I thought.

When I got to my room on the fourteenth floor of an officetel with a corporate name, I put the little guy (I had checked at that point) in my lap and rubbed and petted him. He was quiet and seemed sleepy. I took some pictures and got on my laptop to tell my nearby peers what had happened. Callie, a Canadian who lived downstairs from me, was eager to meet… whatever his name was. Our mutual friend was having a Christmas party the next day, so I agreed to bring the pup. As it was, my stomach’s complaints answered, I was feeling the pull of sleep.

After fashioning a bed from a thick velour pillowcase, I stuck the puppy into the top drawer of my bedside table, which fit him perfectly. I imagined him peeing or pooping in it, but how much could he possibly contain? The fabric would probably absorb everything. So when I went to go to sleep myself, I was a little annoyed that my efforts hadn’t gone over so well. He yipped. And yipped.

Finally, the light came on and the puppy came out. He stopped yipping immediately. I put him back down. The yipping began again. Conclusion: he wanted attention.

Exhausted, I set whatshisname next to me and watched as he sniffed around and curled up in my armpit. My stony frustration melted away watching the little guy go to sleep. He was so trusting. So dependent. He didn’t really have much choice, but the moment he’d felt safe, he’d just gone right to sleep.

When I’d first moved to Seoul, a series of falling dreams had plagued me. During the day, I generally felt great. I ran, did hapkido, ate a pretty good diet, liked my job for the most part, had a pretty active social life, and paid my bills and old debts with ease. But a gnawing anxiety made me feel as though a steady floor was too far out of reach to even be contemplated. I envied the little dog. He was so comfortable. He had just made himself right at home.

But what did he know, right?

The next morning, my barely awake torpor turned to panic when I remembered the puppy but couldn’t find him. Gingerly, I propped myself up and examined the bed for a bloody smear where I’d smashed the puppy to death in my sleep. Did I mention I get anxious? I could find no evidence of negligent puppicide and went to search the apartment.

As I was about to swing my feet to the andol warmed floor, the puppy made his appearance. Asleep, he was clinging to my foot like a shipwrecked person on a piece of driftwood. Why my foot? It wasn’t warm. I couldn’t look like his mother. Maybe, I reasoned, in his near-sightedness, he went for the part of the human he most knew?

Crisis averted, I began my Christmas day… after changing my sheets because he’d peed on them.

I took him downstairs to meet Callie, and he pooped for the first time while exploring her apartment. In horror, I stuck my hand under his tiny tale to catch the brown dropping while she howled with laughter. After depositing this in her toilet and washing my hands thoroughly, I went to the only vet’s office I knew of. It was on the first floor of the officetel where Johnny lived. Conveniently enough, he was the English teacher friend of mine who was having the Christmas party.

The veterinarian, a small man in his forties or fifties, was very excited to meet me and would later try to pawn me off on his mortified assistant for dates. I related to him in bits of English and Korean the story of how I had come across the puppy, and how I had absolutely no idea what to do with him. He listened and laughed and examined the tiny creature whose gaze flowed from those big, trusting eyes to one of us and then the other.

After giving me the standard compliment on how good my Korean was, meaning I spoke the barest rudiments of it, our conversation continued with me speaking as much Korean as I could, and the veterinarian speaking entirely in pretty good English.

“Jindo-dog, yes? Big. How big him will be?” I asked.

The vet looked up at me from the puppy. He stopped for a moment and continued the examination.

“He is very young. Four or six weeks old? He needs mama’s milk. So, get goat’s milk. It isn’t same but close enough.”

“Goat milk? Where?” I asked, picturing weekend trips into the countryside to procure goat milk from wherever people kept goats outside of Seoul.

“Oh, E-mart,” he said. “With the pets. You see it in with the pets.”

“Ah.”

“I have small officetel. Very small. Jindo-dog is big. How big?”

As I pointed at the puppy, the veterinarian’s face changed. He changed from English to Korean.

“This is not a Jindo-dog. This is a yellow one. This is (unknown).”

“What is (unknown)?”

The doctor ignored me and returned to English.

“He is very cute! What is his name?”

“I don’t know. What is good Korean name?”

“Hmm. He looks like ‘Byeol.’ I don’t know. Maybe, give him an American name?”

“He is not a Jindo-dog? He looks like one. What is (unknown)? How big?” I persisted.

“He will maybe be ten kilos.” The veterinarian nodded. “Sujin, up front, will have the bill.”

I took my unnamed four-six week old puppy to Callie’s place and asked her to watch him. After relating the story of what had happened at the vet, I asked her, “Ever heard of (unknown)?”

“Nope. Might be some other breed of dog that they have here, and we don’t. He looks a little bit like a shiba. Could be the Korean name for that?”

I nodded. It wouldn’t be odd to come up with a Korean name for something Japanese. Scars from the imperial occupation were old but still very present. Women who’d been used by the Japanese military for “comfort” still protested outside the embassy every day.

I resolved to look it up or, failing that, to ask one of my Korean coworkers on Thursday. Oh God. Thursday. What was I going to do with him on Thursday? Betty, my boss, was a nice lady, but there was absolutely no way she was going to let me have a dog in the office. All of my friends worked similar hours. Could I board him at the vet? He was so small.

These thoughts accompanied me to E-mart where I found the goat’s milk easily enough, next to the chipmunks, hedgehogs, and gerbils. My friend Chris had said that he’d seen a kangaroo rat there; it freaked him out. I bought a two-pack of plastic bottles with nipples near the goat’s milk, reasoning that that was their intended purpose.

I went back to Callie’s and got the puppy.

“Any thoughts for a name?” she asked.

“Too many and they all suck,” I said. “The vet said I should name him ‘Star,’ but I don’t really like that. I was thinking of Bogart.”

“Like, ‘don’t bogart that?’”

“No, like Humphrey. Rick Blaine. Philip Marlowe. Actually, I think it’s the same source.”

“You are such a nerd.”

“Well, I’m not settled on it,” I said, picking up the puppy and staring into his black eyes. He closed them and yawned adorably. “Maybe, he’ll tell me. What’s your name?”

I returned to my officetel and did a bit of grading with the online recording system. Half of the time the kids who would speak into it were doing the equivalent of saying, “Is this thing on?” or they would have equipment trouble and not get anything out at all. It was mindless work most of the time, and I played with Maybe-Bogart. Mostly, he just wanted to sleep. I messaged Callie and asked her what she thought I should do about Thursday. No response.

Taking a break, I worked my way through On the Origin of Species a bit more. I’d been raised as a Jehovah’s Witness and had embarrassingly misguided views on evolution. I’d learned about it through a series of strawman arguments as to why it couldn’t be real. So, I’d decided, after taking an introductory science credit in college called, “The Origins and History of Life,” to get a bit better acquainted with the source material. It had been pretty interesting.

After reading for an hour or so, I remembered what the veterinarian had said about Maybe-Bogart’s breed. What was he, anyway? Was it just a name for a mix? Was he a mutt? I looked at him. Part corgi, part shiba? I consulted the internet.

I don’t know how it is, trying to romanize Hangul script for French or Spanish speakers, but it can be a frustrating and inexact process for English speakers because all the vowels we use do at least triple duties. Not only that, but some of the sounds from each language don’t overlap directly. Add an untrained foreigner ear to the mixture, and it can be really rough. I started with the honest expectation that I was going to fail. For once in my foreign language experience, I was wrong.

It wasn’t five minutes before an approximation of “nureongi” yielded an entry about “livestock” dogs. My jaw dropped. Clicking through pictures of meat markets not five miles from my apartment, I started to see resemblances to Maybe-Bogart. Setting down On the Origin of Species, my eyes widened to take in the pictures. My nureongi let out a squeak, and I realized I was gripping him very tightly.

“Sorry!”

The sandy colored nose with two adorable black eyes peered back at me. Behind the tiny little head, an adult version stared listlessly out from my computer screen. The picture was of a cage scarcely big enough to fit one dog. There were three or four packed into it. I couldn’t tell through the jumble of legs and tails. My eyes wandered back and forth between the two dogs.

I sighed. I kept reading. Maybe-Bogart went back to sleep.

“Oh my God! He’s such a little sugar plum!” said Johnny, opening the door to his place.

“Yeah, I took him to the vet downstairs,” I replied.

“That guy. He’s always trying to set me up with Korean ladies,” said Johnny, smiling and rolling his eyes. “So I hear you got him from a street vendor. What’s the story there?”

“Not so much a vendor, actually,” I said. “And I did a bit of reading after the vet appointment. He’s, uh-”

“What’s his name? He’s adorable!” Johnny, stumbled a bit to the side as he went down to eye level with the puppy.

“Well, it took me a while,” I started, “but I’ve named him Darwin.”

Johnny cocked his head back from Darwin and gave me a half eye roll.

“Please tell me this is more anti-JW middle fingers to the family back home,” he said. “Come in, get yourself a beer. There’s soju in the fridge, too.”

I took my shoes off with one hand, as I worried about my friends’ vertical stability and didn’t want to complicate things with a literal baby on the floor.

“So, it’s partially that. I mean, who can resist dogging their old religious cult, right?”

“‘Dogging,’” laughed Johnny. “I get it! Mr. Cleverman!”

“But there’s more to it than that. Turns out,” I said, walking into the room where Callie and several of my other coworkers were leaning against walls and drinking beer or soju cocktails, “he’s the breed they eat.”

Jimmy’s eyes widened and his mouth formed a circle.

“Yeah,” I said, looking down at Darwin. “He’s, uh, ‘yellow dog.’ Supposed to be the most delicious.”

“You should have named him Gogi!” shouted Johnny, without so much of an exhalation.

I found myself rolling my eyes.

“No, but seriously! How could anyone eat you Mr. Darwin!?” he crooned.

Several more of our friends had joined in, listening to the conversation. Everyone had opinions.

“It’s disgusting and wrong,” said Allison, a Wisconsonian who had been in the country for about the same time as me.

“What? You eat pigs and cows and stuff,” commented Aaron. “People have been eating dogs for a hell of a lot longer than that. You think we just domesticated them because we thought they were cute?”

Aaron was Australian. He had an opinion on just about anything. Usually, it was in opposition to whatever had been said.

“Don’t listen to him Darwin!” Johnny said. “I’ll save you!”

“I couldn’t do it,” I said. “Maybe, it’s hypocritical and wrong, but I couldn’t eat him.”

“Could you eat a different dog?” asked Callie.

“I… Well… I hadn’t really thought about it,” I lied.

I had definitely thought about it before I’d met Darwin. Traveling the world, I figured one of the things to do was to try other cuisines. Why not? What Aaron was saying held up. It had held up. But even though I hadn’t even consciously acknowledged it yet, Darwin’s vulnerability was working some kind of magic on me. I thought about the dogs in the cages. Then, I thought about the pictures I’d seen of feedlots and cows and pigs and chickens waiting in filth and misery so that they could be killed for my hamburgers. I shook my head.

In the less than twenty-four hours since I’d bought him, I had turned to absolutely not eating a dog. Never. He was so friendly and trusting. He looked like a little fuzzy angel when he slept. I knew I was projecting onto him, anthropomorphizing. But I couldn’t help it.

“Well, all the food we’ve got tonight is dog-free. I mean, I think. I can’t speak for the nachos that Aaron brought. But dig in! Like I said, get yourself a damn beer!”

I smiled. It was Christmas.

Thursday came and found me bringing Darwin to work in a slightly larger corrugated cardboard box I’d gotten from the bagging area at E-Mart. I had already had a carrier, but it wasn’t part of the plan. My second year in Korea, I’d only just started at my school’s Seoul campus, having moved from the suburbs. I knew most of my foreign coworkers pretty well already. My Korean coworkers were trickling in through some manner of arcane hiring and training practices. We had meetings with them from time to time, but management seemed oddly interested in keeping us somewhat separated. That particular Thursday morning, however, I was very early for work, and my heart was pounding in my chest. I’d never been fired from a job before, but surely, that was what happened to idiots who brought dogs to work in a country that had some very conflicting cultural messages about pets in general. But as I said, I had a plan.

None of the foreign staff had arrived. Most of them were still sleeping off second day hangovers from Christmas. With the exception of Mr. Kim, our facilities manager and jack-of-all-trades, all of the Korean staff was female. They seemed nice. Polite. Shy. But nice. My coteacher, Mina, hadn’t spoken much to me since we started but was generally helpful. When she entered the office, the box with Darwin in it was under my desk. She greeted me and sat down. I took a deep breath.

After letting Mina settle in for a moment, I tapped the desk next to her to get her attention. She turned to look at me, and I rolled my chair back so that she could see under my desk. I pointed. Mina’s eyebrows went down, and she leaned forward to see the box’s contents. Her eyes went wide, and she brought her hands up to her cheeks in unmistakable and absolute delight. A flurry of ecstatic and - to me - unparsable Korean flooded out of her to her colleagues, all of whom clacked over in their high heels to see the puppy.

There was a lot of crooning. Sighs of, “cute!” a pretty commonly heard word in Korea, filled the air. A few women scrunched up their faces and returned to their desks. Not fans, obviously. However, my plan was working better than I had expected. The sleeping puppy was passed around, and I could practically see the hearts over the heads of my coworkers. They asked me questions. They talked about how nice it was that I had gotten him off of the street. One young woman who had chosen the English name, “Esther,” was more interested.

She said a few things to Mina in Korean, which Mina then translated to me, “Her auntie lives in Ulsan. She has a lot of puppies. She’s worried that this one… Do you… Have you ever taken care of a puppy before?”

I shook my head and my eyes widened. Esther regarded me grimly. Yes, I knew. It was a stupid undertaking, but it was too late to go back now. After a few moments, Esther smiled at me and gestured at Darwin.

“Can I…” she started, searching for the words, “Can I hold him at my desk? He must sleep a lot. Puppies sleep almost… Almost all day.”

“Sure,” I nodded. “I’m going to have to go teach pretty soon anyway. Do you have a first block class?”

Esther shook her head. And so it was that by the time Betty entered the office, nearly every one of my colleagues, even the ones who had been initially hesitant, was in love with Darwin. Betty was a professional. She was management. She had a campus to run. A hush fell over the office as she came in, softly greeting us. It didn’t last long. Esther, Chloe, Jenny, and Mina crowded her at the door and began to entreat her to come see what the head foreign teacher - a meaningless title other than the fact that I got to be the bearer of bad news whenever it came in - had brought into the office.

Betty affected such a hesitant smile that I was worried her face might cramp. She shuffled over to see into the box, and the smile disappeared. Esther and Jenny were literally grabbing her arms like children. Chloe appeared to be narrating something about how wonderful Darwin was. The gauntlet had been thrown down. New to the position and with an entirely new staff, this very well might have (how could I really know?) been her first challenge as an office manager. Keep the office pure, or face an insurrection from the staff at the puppy being tossed out into the street. I had already resolved, insanely, I thought, that if she threatened my job over the dog, I would ask for a letter of release so that I could find somewhere else to work. It felt like being on drugs. What was I doing? How could I have been so stupid? All this for a dog I had never even seen a week ago?

“Please, ah, don’t show him to the children,” said Betty. Silence fell over the office. Everyone was waiting for more. “He can stay,” she concluded. I assumed his biggest proponents in the office had made a case for him because I had never even said anything. I thanked Betty as profusely as I could with as many honorifics as I could manage. She smiled shyly and left. A silent cheer via exchanged glances went up as soon as she did. From then on, until he was old enough to stay home, Darwin sat on my lap in the office as an unofficial mascot, or on the laps of anyone who didn’t have a class when I was teaching.

He’ll be fourteen years-old this year. He came to Thailand with me for eighteen months and then back to South Korea. Darwin has been turned around in Beijing and left overnight in Kuala Lumpur. We live in North Carolina now, and I’ve been a vegetarian for about twelve years. The other English teacher to whom I thought I might offload him, we’re married now. We almost broke up at one point, but Darwin got so upset that he started barking and howling so horribly that it forced us to stop arguing, calm him down, and speak with cool heads. We got around our issues and have been absurdly happily married for more than five years now. Speaking of weddings, I spoke at Mina’s wedding, years after we’d ceased working in the same office. She lives in Canada and is a good friend of mine.

People will say I’m crazy, but Darwin taught me empathy more than anyone else I’ve ever known. He was the first being I’d ever encountered who appeared to love me more than he cared about himself. I was a real jerk when I first got a dog. Sometimes, I feel like I still am, but at least now I want to be better.