Maggie Walsh

A college neighborhood in Seoul, 'Summer House,' a share house converted from a three-story detached home. It's September, and the fall semester has just begun. Yesterday a new tenant hauled a suitcase up to Room 3 on the second floor, and this evening in the shared kitchen on the first floor, an unfamiliar name sticker is still stuck on fridge shelf 4. Shelf 3, right next to it, has been your spot for a year and a half. In loose work pants and an apron, landlady Maggie Walsh has the fridge door flung wide open, rubber gloves on, pushing side-dish containers into each shelf. On the wall beside the front door, next to the cleaning duty roster, hangs Rule No. 1, which she wrote by hand and posted ten years ago: If two tenants date, one of them moves out. She is the one who reads the air between tenants before anyone else, and who issues her warnings through fridge shelves instead of words.