Conversations With Jung

Jung is Korean, which means she possibly could be eighty years old, but she is in such great shape and free of any slight wrinkle of the skin that she looks at least twenty years younger than she is. She is thin and dresses like a famous actress in the 50s, but off duty: tailored black pants, black turtlenecks with an understated necklace, her hair in a short bob, classic black flats, and red lipstick. You know when she is stressed out or tired because she will clip a rogue part of her hair up, making her look frazzled.

I met her at Burberry in LAX, of all places, where I now also work in a very strange turn of events, where an intense gut feeling led me to a door that opened and I walked through, and here I am, in an airport, in a beautifully well-lit store surrounded by handbags and cashmere scarves made in Scotland, that I am now tasked to sell to foreigners who do not speak any English, with Jung. Of all the stores, I was assigned to Burberry, whose store number is 1111, and once I found that out I murmured under my breath, “confirmation from the angels.”

I am in the right place. This will make sense… later. I hope. Trust?

There are airlines and air lounges in the International Terminal of the airport, but unbeknownst to me until recently, there is also a thriving, bustling economy of luxury retail brands operating throughout the different gates that employs a colorful cast of characters that I am slowly falling in love with, all of us led by a four-foot-tall woman who enjoys driving luxury cars dangerously above the speed limit on the 405 freeway.

I was hired along with two others: a small, stocky, gentle man named Jimmy, and a tall, handsome, and very well-dressed man named Isaiah. During our training, the three of us sat in some underground office in the bowels of the airport, in a windowless room, and learned the psychology of selling.

“What brings you all here?” our enthusiastic trainer asked us, his gaze landing on Jimmy.

Jimmy adjusted his wide-rimmed black glasses, and I admired his hair, which was graying, but which he wore spiked like the boys I knew back in middle school.

“Well, desperation really. I need a job,” Jimmy told us all and then shrugged sheepishly.

Next to him, Isaiah closed his eyes and nodded, pointing his index finger into the air.

“Period,” he said.

Jimmy looked at me for reassurance and I nodded as well.

“That is real, Jimmy,” I told him, then looked at our trainer. “That is so real.”

With that out of the way, we then proceeded to watch different shorts of salespeople selling things to travelers in an airport in China. The videos were in Chinese and had English subtitles, which I forgot to read because I was too engrossed with the actors.

A very sullen and stoic Chinese man stood frozen next to a wall of lipsticks as a woman approached him. He then said a lot of things and began to pull different colored lipsticks off the wall to paint onto this innocent womans hand and halfway up her arm. By the end, the woman was covered in multicolored stripes and she left buying nothing. Throughout the interaction no one smiled or laughed, and when she left the Chinese man took his frozen stance again, waiting for the next customer to arrive.

The lights in the room turned back on and our trainer, who had perfectly sculpted eyebrows, was beaming.

“So, what did you think of Henrys sales tactics?” he asked us.

Isaiah broke the silence.

“Well, for one, Henry looked very sad.”

“Yes!” our trainer said encouragingly. “Henry did look sad!”

“He used a lot of colors,” Jimmy added, looking absolutely repulsed. “I would not like to be smeared with all those lipsticks. Can you imagine her on the plane?”

The next short was of a woman in a shoe store and this time I read the subtitles.

“I am looking for shoes because I have won an award,” a depressed-looking Chinese woman told the salesperson.

“These are the shoes for you,” the salesperson told her flatly. “You will be the star of the show in these,” she added, emotionless and frowning.

When the lights went on, the trainer locked eyes with me.

“Alright Jennifer, what do you think about this one?”

“Well, she… asked questions and discovered these shoes were for an important event, or, well, I think it was for an important event—”

“She looked very upset about winning that award,” Isaiah interjected, and I nodded in agreement.

“But, so the salesperson attached a feeling to the object she was selling. She told her she would feel like a star, implying these shoes would make her feel confident and special at this event, which essentially will be an important life memory for the customer. So the shoes are not just shoes, they are part of a memory in someones life now. If someone feels an emotional attachment to something, they will most likely buy it.”

Everyone stared at me in silence.

“Jennifer… waaay to showww offfff, girl!” our trainer exclaimed, his face all scrunched up in a smile, his mouth wide open.

On my first day on the floor selling, a very athletic-looking older woman with rock-hard boobs wandered in, pulling her suitcase and on FaceTime with a shirtless man with twelve abs.

“My therapist told me to bring in a picture of myself as a small child,” she was telling the abs. “She told me to talk to the picture like how I talk to myself now, and I could not. I obviously was kinder to my baby picture,” she said, running her hand over cashmere scarves.

What a great idea, I thought, and I scribbled it in my notebook when I noticed my trainer watching me.

I approached the woman, waving slightly to get her attention, and she put the abs down.

“Do you know what also makes you feel instantly better about yourself? Buying things! Retail therapy, yeah?”

The woman frowned like the actors in the Chinese videos.

I carried on.

“This is our new Spring 2026 collection. Would you like to see a 3K dollar bag? Are you flying internationally? There will not be any taxes!”

I do not think I blinked as any of this came out, but I made sure to smile like a manic clown and not look depressed like the salespeople in China.

Behind me, my trainers head dropped down to the floor in shame.

“It is easier in theory?” I admitted, blowing a piece of hair that had fallen into my eyes up and out of my face.

The retail stores are all little boxes, and inside the boxes are carefully curated little worlds full of pretty objects. Burberry looks directly across from Cartier, and every day Jimmy and I wave at one another.

“Jimmy, how are your jewels?” I will ask him when I pass by on a break.

Some of my favorite shifts, though, are working with Jung. Jung speaks Korean, Chinese, and some English, and much better than I can speak Korean, which is an absolute disgrace, and together we talk about all sorts of things.

“No gloves,” Jung will say to me, disappointed, as she nods over to Rosie, who is emptying one of the trash bins under the register.

Jung looks sickened.

“Saving the world,” she says, looking at me eagerly.

My mind is racing. Saving the world by not using gloves? Think, Jenn, think.

“Less plastic?” I ask, and Jung nods triumphantly.

“But…” She shakes her head like, so gross.

If I abandon a paper cup of tea in the back, Jung will cover it with a paper towel.

“The air,” she says, waving her hand through the filth, “not clean.”

“Have you catheter?” Jung once asked out of nowhere.

“Um…” I paused. “Catheter?” I repeated, and Jung nodded, smiling.

“Have you?” she asked.

“No, I have never had to have one. It looks very uncomfortable, though,” I said. “I think my friend had to have one. He just had surgery, and he said it was awful.”

Jungs eyebrows scrunched together and she looked confused.

“A catheter?” I repeated timidly, pointing downward to where the pee comes out of your body.

Jung got her phone out and typed something into Google Translate. She showed me the word on the phone.

“Cathedral!” I exclaimed, turning a bright shade of red. “Yes, yes! Cathedrals are beautiful!”

Jung and I also like to ask one another questions like kindergarteners.

“What is your favorite food?” she will ask me out of nowhere, smiling.

“Mac and Cheese,” I tell her, and she gags.

“I do not like Mac and cheese,” she tells me.

“What, uh, what you do that you are happy?” she asks me, studying my face.

“I like to write,” I told her, motioning with my hands like I am writing with a pencil.

“Ah, I do not have diary. I write to ChatGPT,” she tells me. “When I get sad or…” She waves her hands around her head, and I understand.

“Anxious,” I say, and she nods.

“Do you have recommendation for me for cheese?” she asked suddenly, and I feel like I am in a tennis match, my opponent taking shots in all directions, making me run wildly and haphazardly around the court.

“At Trader Joes, they have a good one called Unexpected Cheddar,” I told her, and she gets her phone out again.

I type it in, and a picture of a $3.99 block of cheddar cheese pops up. She takes a screenshot of it and tells me, “I will try.”

I am truly smiling at this moment. I feel happy from deep, deep within my soul talking to Jung.

“What do you like to do that makes you happy?” I ask Jung, trying to course-correct because I feel we somehow got lost with the catheter and the cheese and the talking to AI when we are sad.

“Sing,” she says, smiling. “I am in church choir.”

I am imagining Jung in a cathedral, in a choir, singing, and because I am me, I have to stop my eyes from welling up.

“I am alto,” she adds. “And I play flute.”

Now I am imagining her playing the flute, but she is in the store and she is playing to a family traveling to Munich who are shopping for checkered wallets.

Sometimes, if someone calls out, you get to cover a new store. This is how I found myself with Isaiah in a sunglasses store with three loud, aggressive, burly men flying back home to Israel.

Of the three men, the fattest and baldest one was clearly the leader. He would bark out orders from the middle of the store and watch everyone scramble to appease him. Isaiah was being smart, pulling the most expensive sunglasses, Prada, Balenciaga, Cartier, as this man stood like a king, trying each pair on as his cronies stood next to him, approving of whatever he said.

This man is like a planet, sucking up all the air as everyone orbits around him, I thought. How do people do that without being completely embarrassed?

I could tell Isaiah was getting annoyed with this whole thing, so I inserted myself to try to save him.

“Where are you all traveling to today?” I asked sweetly, leaning against a display of YSL, batting my eyes at him, and before anyone could answer, Isaiah spat out, “ISRAEL.”

Both his tone and face had a despondent edge to them as he looked at me. Very state of the world right now.

Everything about the energy of the room was signaling to make this man drop a huge amount of cash, get the commission, and get him out of the store and out of our lives forever, his contribution to us nothing but a bump in our paycheck.

I grabbed a pair of womens Prada sunglasses and handed them to him, all of us watching as he tried them on, admiring himself in the mirror. Isaiah smiled and I could see him relax.

“What do you think?” the man asked me proudly.

He looked like Danny DeVito if he was cast in The Birdcage.

“I think you look great,” I said, smiling.

He was beaming, obviously flattered, looking back and forth between his cronies, who were silent, his eyes covered by womens black-rimmed cat-eye sunglasses.

He looked ridiculous, and as we happily sold him womens Prada sunglasses for $678 and watched him waddle out, Isaiah looked at me in admiration.

“Girl, he was too much!”

I agreed.

“He was. I mean, please, sir, we take employee buses to be here.”

There is a watch store, House of Time, that a man named Farid is trapped in. Upon introducing himself to me, he, in the same breath, added, “I have been in business way longer than our boss. I know more than she does.”

In briefings, our tiny four-foot-tall boss (who, by the way, could take down anyone; she is so quick and honest) and Farid passively aggressively argue back and forth in a semi-playful, semi-violent way.

“She punishes me by making me work in House of Time,” he complained, looking at me intently, I think waiting for me to tell him how unfair this all is for him.

“House of Time,” I repeated and then laughed. “It sounds like a horror movie.”

“It is! It is!” Farid said. “She punishes me!”

“Well, if you have so many years of experience managing people, you should know how to be an easy employee to manage, right?” I ask, trying not to smile. “Why not just be respectful and peaceful? We are all a team, right?”

He was staring at me, his mouth a thin straight line.

“Where do you want to work?” I asked him.

“I want to work in womens skincare,” he says instantly, without a thought, his eyes serious.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asks.

“No.”

“Ah, well, you are still young.”

“I am 37.”

“What?! That cannot be! You look like you are in your mid twenties!”

He studies my face.

“Hmmm… retinol at night and vitamin C in the morning?” he asks.

“Yes!” I said, shocked. “Wow, you really should work in womens skincare,” I tell him.

“I know, but tell that to her. Aye…” he shrugs. “Well, you could always try Facebook dating. That is where I met my new girlfriend,” he says. “There are a lot of nice people on Facebook!”

“No, I want my soulmate to find me in real life. God has a plan… I think… for me,” I told him, and this personal statement, given to him to have to digest, made him pause and reflect.

“He will come,” he tells me, and his eyes look sincere. “He will find you.”

Now, when I walk by House of Time and see Farid standing just outside it, looking grumpy and people-watching, I scold him.

“Get back in your prison!”

He throws his hands up and scoffs.

“Ahgh! You sound just like her!”

In the distance, I can see our tiny boss making her way across the terminal, heading straight for Farid, ready to ruin his life.

“You cannot leave until you sell a watch. That is the curse of The House of Time,” I say, walking away, and I can hear him laughing.

On Rodeo Drive there is a team of salespeople who look like models, stylishly dressed on brand, pouring champagne into crystal glasses and discussing jewel cuts with the 1% of the worlds population.

Little does anyone know that just a few miles away, tucked in between the international gates, a ragtag team of regular old people are doing the same thing.

“Because of desperation,” as Jimmy would put it.