FIELD NOTE 04 · Busan, South Korea
What do we owe strangers?
The workshop was open to the street. Rain ticked against the metal roof while Jin laid our worn component beside a nearly identical one from a fishing boat.
‘Different vehicles,’ he said. ‘Same problem.’
He recognised the old receipt immediately. His father had written it. The traveller with the notebook had been short of money, so he had repaired the workshop’s leaking roof instead. Years later the roof still held.
Jin kept a drawer of useful things: switches, bolts, bits of wire, favours owed and favours forgotten. He said a workshop needed accounts, but it also needed room for a person whose account was empty.
I asked whether that could work everywhere. He shrugged. Trust travelled slowly; a demand for payment could travel instantly. Perhaps the trick was knowing which one a situation required.
Inside the notebook he drew a water tank. ‘My father received a photograph from the man,’ he said. ‘A garden in a desert. He said they were trying to share something that would run out.’
We left with a working engine and the uncomfortable feeling that our journey had been held together by strangers.