Chad’s Coffee Cozy Collection (CCCC)

During my time in Korea, I developed a taste for coffee, mainly because Seoul is littered with cafes. On some streets, that’s all there is—cafes with multiple floors, selling sweets and coffee. And the coffee isn’t cheap, mind you. Most of the time, a cup of coffee is around ₩5,000 (about $4.50), and some locations they don’t even sell large sizes! While certain people spend their money on “drinks,” I spend mine on coffee.

One day, while strolling with a latte (my usual drink of choice), I decided to pocket the cardboard cozy around my cup and recycle the rest. When I got home, I wrote the date on the inside, along with the names of whomever I had coffee with. (On most of them I simply wrote “me.” Sad, I know.) Before I knew it, I had collected a tower of coffee cozies from all sorts of cafes (yes, including Starbucks, and unfortunately not including the times I drank “for here”). And like the rings of a tree trunk, the layers of cozies began to tell stories: with whom I hung out with frequently, which areas I visited often, days when I felt adventurous to try something new… even the changing of seasons just from the designs alone. Each cozy represents a separate memory, stacked and combined to tell a chunk of my life. It’s a journal, story, and art all in one!

The whole project sort of reminds me of what Junot Díaz had to say about short stories:

“…What a short story does is, it more realistically mirrors what it means to live in the real, where sometimes we feel our lives are divided by chapters. Where we remember a person that we used to love, and in that moment they were everything, and now they are completely gone from us. You remember a town where you went to college, and while you were living there in college it meant everything to you, and now you are far away and you haven’t thought about it in forever. In a short story collection I feel like it mirrors the internal succession of worlds that many of us have within ourselves… the short story has a lot more punch for what it means to live in a world where many of our choices are final and end way before we’re ready for them to end.”

It’s pretty obvious that when I moved back to California, there was an abrupt change to the cozies from intricate designs to generic brown paper. I wasn’t ready to give it up: the lifestyle, the culture, the colorful cozies. I wasn’t 100% ready to leave. But I’m glad I documented my time there, and I know I’ll be back.

I just wish it was the norm in America to have nice designs on coffee cozies as well.

--Years later, CCCC has grown to surpass the ceiling.