Ji-Eun Park
September 17, 2022 6:06 PM
Red Ginseng and Red Tape by Ji-Eun Park
It was deeply weird being on this side of the teacher’s desk. Ji-Eun was used to presenting to rooms full of people—sometimes a rapt audience, sometimes stuffy old white men who had to cross that invisible barrier of believing she should be in the room before they even got to listening to what she had to say. She had thought that a small group of teenagers would pale in comparison, but the second she had stepped through the doors, she had started feeling like she was one of them again. She was supposed to be sitting on the high stools, looking up at the front, listening to the real adult. Except the ‘real adult’ was her.It had been a while since she’d stood in front of anyone. She was on maternity leave, which she loved, but part of her was itching to get back to the life she’d built for herself. This had seemed like a good way of getting her feet back under her. Until she’d actually got here, and realised that—rather than this being ‘practise people’ as she’d thought when signing up—she had actually loaded up her plate with doing something she’d never done before.
“Hello,” she said, smiling easily. Projecting a confidence that she wasn’t feeling had been a key part of her job over the years, and she could turn it on like a Lumos charm however much her stomach was squirming. “My name is Ji-Eun Park, and I graduated Sonora in SA19. I’m here today as part of the alumni class event to tell you more about what I do. We’ll be brewing a traditional Korean potion, as well as looking into the systems that govern potion making.
“I grew up in New York. My parents ran an Asian apothecary in a district known as the Melting Cauldron. It’s a magical shopping district with lots of different foreign shops. I learned Western potion making here at school, and during the holidays, my mom would teach me Korean potions at home. She’s a great potioneer, but it wasn’t a skill she could make a lot of use of. She’d make remedies for our neighbours when they were sick, or trade them for spells, favours, food, but the licences for selling pre-made potions are different to the licences for selling their ingredients.
“I studied potion making and business studies at university, so that I could be a licensed potioneer, but I still ran into a lot of red tape. When you’re selling potions, each ingredient has to be recognised for consumption in the form you are offering it—for example, whether the potion is applied to the skin or taken orally—as well as the final product. When dealing with potions from other cultures, many of those ingredients and potions haven’t been recognised or signed off.
“Today, your task is going to be two fold. You are going to brew a traditional Korean remedy for joint inflammation.” She waved her wand, sending them each a parchment and a basket of ingredients—occamy egg shells, ginseng, and sanghwang mushrooms. “On the recipe, there’s some information about the potion’s history, and how long it has been used in Korea.” Answer, thousands of years… “You’re then going to do some research on what stage of the legal process this potion is at for being dispensed in the state of New York. Obviously, all the ingredients are legally allowed into the country, for the purpose of potion making. But what about if you wanted to sell this? Try to answer whether it would be legal to sell it and, if so, what date did that become possible?” Answer, distressingly recently. “To do that, you can look through these.” She gestured to several large volumes on the table. “They list potions ingredients in alphabetical order, along with their import status and uses. The start of each number represents the year that the law regarding their import for that purpose came into practice. Some items have multiple entries. For example, occamy eggs… It’s divided into shells versus complete eggs, and the uses include decoration as well as potion making. Be sure to get the right one.
“And then, for those of you who have English as your first language, I’d like you to imagine what navigating this might be like if you didn’t. Bear in mind, that to even be in this position, you would first have had to go through the process of getting a qualification recognised by MACUSA and registering as a licenced potioneer. I regard myself as a native English speaker, but these are some of the barriers my mother faced, and why she could never expand beyond making things for neighbours.
“To help you with imagining that, one of the ingredients has its Korean name on the potion recipe. So, before you can even look it up in the import index, you’re going to have to work out what it’s called here. There’s a guide to magical fungi to help you with that.” Though they could bet their lust knut that the Korean name wasn’t listed, so they would have to do some close checking against the pictures and descriptions.
She hoped they didn’t hate her. Over the years, she’d built various tactics for lobbying for her position. Sometimes, just smiling and waiting, and letting the person in her way decide it was less effort to give her what she wanted than to have a conversation was the best way. What she was doing today took more time, and relied on people being willing to grow their empathy rather than just getting angry and defensive. She hoped seventeen and eighteen year olds were still malleable enough, or curious enough about the world, for that to be the right approach. Given who their regular potion teacher was, she thought this might not be the first time they’d been exposed to this kind of thing.
13
Ji-Eun Park
Red Ginseng and Red Tape
268
1
5