AfroKorean Stories

The Long Way Home A Story of Airports, Delays, and Arrival The flight to London was cancelled. Not delayed. Cancelled. The board at Incheon International flickered and rearranged itself with the indifference of a system that had no interest in the plans of the humans beneath it, and two hundred and fourteen passengers stared up at the word CANCELLED in red letters and began the collective grief process that air travel stranded passengers always underwent. Imani Clarke moved through the stages quickly. She was a practical woman. She found a seat in the terminal, called her sister to explain she would miss the birthday party, accepted her sister's reaction with calm, and then opened her laptop to begin working. She was thirty-three, Black British, originally from Birmingham, now living between London and wherever her architecture consulting work took her, which was currently Seoul. She had short natural hair, warm brown skin, sharp eyes behind elegant rectangular glasses, and a ...

A Story of Heat, Judgment, and Hunger The review was fourteen sentences long and destroyed three months of work. Nadia Mensah read it on her phone in the walk-in refrigerator of Restaurant Cheon, where she had gone to cool down in more than one sense, and felt each sentence land like a specific, calibrated insult. "The lamb is technically proficient but emotionally inert." "The fusion concept reaches for ambition and lands somewhere in the vicinity of confusion." "One wonders if the kitchen knows what it wants to say, or whether it has simply learned to speak loudly." The review was signed, as all his reviews were, simply: K. Yoon. Nadia was the sous chef at Cheon, twenty-nine years old, Ghanaian-British, with a fierce technical precision that her head chef described as both her greatest asset and her most exhausting quality. She had trained in London and Paris, had turned down two head chef positions to keep learning, and had brought to Cheon...

A Story of Neighbors and Gravity The building had twenty floors and one elevator that worked only when it felt like it, which, in Amara Osei's experience, was never when she needed it most. She was on the fourteenth floor. He was on the fourteenth floor. This was the entire problem. Amara had moved to Seoul from London — south London specifically, Brixton, a fact she wore with quiet pride — six months ago, to take a research position at a pharmaceutical company in Yongsan. She was a biochemist, thirty years old, with close-cropped natural hair she kept meticulously shaped, skin the deep warm brown of late afternoon, and the particular focused intensity of someone who had spent a decade training her brain to solve problems and now applied this skill to everything, including, unfortunately, her neighbor. Park Sung-Jin was everything she found professionally irritating. He was a novelist — literary fiction, moderately successful, the kind of moderately successful that came with a ...

A Story of Words and What Lives Between Them Zara Mitchell had translated for presidents, diplomats, and once, memorably, a K-pop idol who needed someone to explain to a Congolese trade minister why he was forty minutes late. She was thirty-four, originally from Houston, built like someone who took up exactly the right amount of space, with natural locs that fell past her shoulders and eyes that processed language the way other people processed oxygen — automatically, constantly, without effort. She had never, in eleven years of professional interpreting, broken confidentiality. Until Han Soo-Hyun walked into the UN satellite conference room in Seoul and opened his mouth. He was the lead negotiator for a South Korean technology consortium pushing a data privacy framework that three countries were contesting. Tall, lean, early forties, with silver threading through otherwise black hair that suggested either stress or genetics and was, either way, extraordinarily effective. He wore hi...

Seoul, Unexpected The flight from JFK to Incheon was fourteen hours, and Maya Collins spent eleven of them convincing herself she was making the right decision. She was thirty-two, Black, from Atlanta originally but New York by choice and stubbornness, and she had just accepted a two-year position as a cultural liaison for an arts exchange program based in Seoul. She had a linguistics degree, conversational Korean she'd taught herself over three years, and a single contact in the city — a college friend who had promised her a couch for the first week and had, the day before Maya's flight, texted to say she'd been relocated to Busan. Maya had stared at that text for a full minute. Then she'd boarded the plane anyway. She met him on her third day. She was lost. Not emotionally — she was doing fine emotionally, she was a practical woman — but physically, genuinely, map-app-has-betrayed-me lost in a neighborhood in Mapo-gu that was not where she was supposed to be, ...

  What the Rain Knows" A Story of Grief, Gardens, and Growing Things The community garden in Mapo-gu had eleven plots and one rule: whatever you grew, you shared. Esi Darko had taken plot seven in March, two months after arriving in Seoul and four months after the kind of loss that rearranges everything — her mother, sudden, a Tuesday afternoon phone call that had divided her life permanently into before and after. She had come to Seoul because staying in Accra had been impossible and going back to Toronto, where she'd done her graduate work in urban planning, had felt wrong, and Seoul had offered a fellowship that needed someone who understood community spaces, and she had thought: somewhere that is entirely new. Somewhere with no shape of her yet. She had not expected to want to grow things. But the garden had been there, and the plot available, and something in her had needed to put her hands in the ground. Plot six belonged to Oh Hyun-Soo. He was forty-one, whi...