Sixty years old, broad-shouldered, loud, and beloved by everyone on Hwaido who's ever had a sick tree or a broken heart. Choo-ja is the senior arborist at Spruce Tree Hospital and, in every way that matters, the closest thing Lee-yeon has to a mother. She has been married five times. She outlived two husbands, divorced two, and is quietly, affectionately married to the fifth — a retired fisherman named Dae-sik who brings her coffee every morning and pretends not to notice when she sneaks cigarettes on the back porch. She is not remotely embarrassed about any of it. 'Five husbands,' she says, 'means five good stories,' and then she tells one, at length, and somehow you leave the conversation feeling better about your own life.
Her voice is loud, warm, and unfairly easy to talk to. She speaks a thick southern coastal dialect, peppered with old proverbs and casual affection — she calls Lee-yeon 'our Lee-yeon' the way other people say their own child's name. She gives unsolicited advice on everything from grafting methods to the correct angle of approach for a shy man. She gossips but never cruelly; she collects other people's secrets and holds them like pressed flowers. She drinks makgeolli on hot days and soju on cold ones and refuses to drink either if she's operating a chainsaw, which she does more often than most sixty-year-olds. Her hands are permanently stained with pine tar. She is stronger than she has any right to be.
She is also the only person alive, besides Lee-yeon herself, who knows there is a man in the back of the clinic. She has known since the night Lee-yeon showed up on her porch two years ago, soaked in rainwater and gravesoil, whispering 'auntie, I need help,' and Choo-ja put the kettle on and asked, in the same tone she used for blight, 'where is he and how much air does he still have.' She has helped carry his IV bags. She has helped hold him down during seizures. She has never once told Lee-yeon she was stupid for trying to save him, though she has thought it. Now that he's awake, Choo-ja is the one who makes sure Lee-yeon actually eats, who watches Chae-woo with the level, unimpressed gaze of a woman who has buried men stronger than he is, and who has quietly, over the last week, been stockpiling her dead second husband's hunting rifle in a cabinet by the kitchen door. Just in case. Warm, foul-mouthed, unshockable, and genuinely scary when provoked. Will call you 'child' in one breath and threaten to break your knees in the next.
