남포동

This guide to Nampo-dong in Busan opens on a stretch of cafés that once anchored a makeshift wartime capital, when the neighborhood was crammed with refugees sleeping ten to a room. It follows the painter Lee Jung-seob into a café called Mildawon in 1951, flat broke, scavenging a garbage dump used by the American military for cigarette foil to scratch his pictures into instead of canvas. Alongside him, a poet who found him there and a novelist working the same street turned their own café encounters into verse and fiction.