Busan Shazam

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Our taxi speeds onto a bridge built over water. Skyscrapers shatter past the window as I look towards the glittering sea. There’s a song playing on the radio. A woman with a raspy voice, as if she chain smoked twenty cigarettes and then started to sing. Perfect. Sometimes, all you need is the right song in the background for life to feel like a movie.

I slip my phone out of my pocket and unlock it, dragging my thumb downwards to access the search bar. I type the letters s-h-a and launch Shazam as soon as it appears. Time is of the essence, so I hold my phone closer to the speaker. I am doubtful it will pick up anything over the revving of the engine; it’s as if our taxi driver learned how to drive from car chases and video games exclusively. A friend in Seoul warned us about this.

“They drive so fast in Busan,” she declared between sips of iced coffee on a sunny rooftop in Seongsu-dong. “We always say that if you can drive in Busan, you can drive anywhere in Korea!”

Shazam does its thing and despite the droning of the car’s engine as we turn with the curve of the bridge, my phone vibrates successfully in my hand. Got it, I think to myself — as if the song is a Pokémon.

Busan looks like a more industrial, unpolished version of Miami. White sand and gigantic buildings twist along the coast for miles. Tourist traps line the water’s edge; bars awash in neon light that sell frozen cocktails by the bucket rub elbows with grubby fried chicken shops. In the enormous seafood markets, clams the size of shoes crawl from their tanks and across the floor towards freedom as the women manning the stands cackle at each other’s jokes.

The taxi is bringing us to Ami-dong, a mountainous village far from the beach. During the Korean war, waves of refugees from the north landed in Busan. Very poor and with nothing to their names, they headed into the mountains and used the gravestones from long-abandoned Japanese cemeteries as building blocks for their new homes. Now colourful and filled with murals, the hues of the so-called tombstone village sing against the mountainside.

I look at the driver through his rearview mirror. We haven’t spoken apart from the routine nod and annyeonghaseyo as we sat in the car. The song is still playing, and he’s tapping his fingers against the steering wheel in time with the music. Only he understands the words. The song, which is from 1988, helps me picture him as a younger man in a Busan before the American culture injections, laughing in a smoke-filled bar with his friends. My eyes leave him and lock with those of my wife.

“Can you shazam this song?” she asks.

“I literally just did that!”

We grin at one another. The driver continues tapping his fingers to the beat. The three of us sit in silence, enjoying the music. I don’t know when or where I picked up this habit, but I’m happy I did. Capturing songs to store them in playlists, just so I can relisten years later, the sonic memory teleporting me back to this taxi in Busan.