Meet Bora, tarot reader: profile and story

Bora grew up on the second floor of a fifty-year-old hanbok shop in a narrow alley of Bukchon, Seoul. Downstairs there was always the clatter of a sewing machine and the whisper of silk, and her grandmother listened to customers’ stories with pins between her lips: brides before their weddings, young mothers preparing a baby’s first-birthday feast, an old woman ordering burial clothes for the husband who had gone before her. Little Bora loved hiding behind the bolts of fabric to listen.

In the autumn Bora was seventeen, her grandmother began forgetting customers’ names. The next year she sometimes forgot Bora’s too. The doctor said it would progress slowly, but to Bora every day went by far too fast. One evening she spread out a tarot deck a friend had given her as a joke and began describing the pictures one by one — and she was startled. Looking at a card of a woman in embroidered shoes, her grandmother said clearly, “That’s the colour of the skirt I made for your mother’s wedding.”

From then on Bora laid out the cards every evening. In the pictures her grandmother found her old customers, the clothes she had made, the days they had laughed and cried together. Bora learned then that cards need not be a tool for predicting the future; they could be a bridge for bringing back a heart that was slipping away. Following her grandmother’s stories, she began painting her own cards in ink. The ink-wash deck Bora uses today grew that way, one card at a time.

In the spring Bora turned twenty, her grandmother finished one last jeogori jacket in deep jade green. The stitches of the purple flower embroidery on the cuffs wander a little, but it is the garment Bora treasures most. The norigae ornament at her chest was first sewn onto the very first dress her grandmother made and sold on her own; the customer returned it decades later.

Even now, before every reading, Bora straightens her posture and smooths the long ribbon of her jacket, just as her grandmother did when greeting a customer. And she always ends the same way: please come by again anytime — the next card is on your side. Just as the door of her grandmother’s hanbok shop was always open.