One morning seven years ago, I was cutting apples in the kitchen while Heon-su stood next to me and brewed some coffee as he turned on the song, “Love Hurts.”

        “Hey, I’ve heard this somewhere before.”

        “I’m sure you have,” Heon-su said as he slowly made circles in the air with the gooseneck kettle. “There are several versions.”

        “Yeah?” I glanced over at his tablet. “Which one is this?”

        “My favorite. Kim Deal and Robert Pollard.”

        We both stared for a moment into the two faces on the screen as we listened to the song.

        “I like it.”

        “Yeah?” Heon-su smiled. He knew I wasn’t that into music.

        “It sounds like a farewell song. The kind sung by someone who doesn’t often express their pain.”

        “You sound like such an adult.”

        “I am an adult.”

I moved the slices of apple onto a plate as Heon-su distributed the coffee into two cups. They were a pair of black porcelain teacups that we’d bought to celebrate moving in together four years ago. We’d already been dating for two years prior to that, and now we were both—without saying it—thinking what the “next step” would be. Part of the reason was that we were approaching the end of our lease for this 570-square-foot apartment. In fact, it was about six months before the end of the lease that Heon-su started looking for 700-square-foot apartments in his spare time and asking what neighborhoods and kinds of apartments I preferred. I was feeling the warmth of the cup in my hands and gazing at Heon-su as he glanced through the comments on the screen of his tablet.

        “These comments are a riot. Everyone’s confessing the role that this song has played in their lives. And some people even interject with swear words. Russian, English, Spanish. Why do humans always do that when they see something beautiful—”

        “Wait, stop talking—”

        “Hm?”

        “Did you hear that?”

        “What?”

        “They said annyeong.”

        “Who?”

        I raised my eyebrows and pointed to the Bluetooth speaker in the living room. Heon-su turned in the direction of my finger looking confused. The mellow voices of two Americans were flowing out of the gray rectangular box.

        “Kim and Robert?”

        “Yeah.”

        “In Korean?”

        Seeing the disbelief and ridicule in his eyes, I raised my voice in protest:

        “Really!”

        “I doubt that’s what they said.”

        “They definitely said it. An-nyeong!”

I was reminded of that morning with Heon-su when Robert asked me just now how to say “hello” in Korean. “Hello in Korean is annyeong. But annyeong doesn’t just mean hello, it can also mean goodbye.” Of course, I said this with difficulty and in a halting manner—I was, after all, someone taking a class in basic English. Robert waited patiently for me to finish my answer—he was, after all, someone who used to work as an elementary school teacher before retiring. There was a glint in his gray-blue eyes.

        “Really? That’s fascinating.”

        Although I was sure he’d heard the same answer from his other Korean students, he genuinely looked interested. Either he was working to maintain his good reviews, or this was actually the first time he’d heard it.

        “Then how do you tell the difference between the two annyeongs? Is it in the intonation or pronunciation?”

        He seemed to be thinking about the tones used in Chinese and Vietnamese. I thought for a second before shaking my head.

        “No.”

        “Then how do you know?”

        As was always the case when I spoke in a foreign language, I didn’t say what I wanted to say, but only what I could say.

        “You just know.”

        Had my English been better, I would have said, “People usually just know. But sometimes, they part ways pretending not to know until it’s too late.” But my conversation skills weren’t good enough. Instead, I said something much simpler and straightforward and unintentionally repetitive.

        “We can just know.”

        Robert stared into my eyes for a moment before nodding slowly as if he understood everything.

        “Right. It’s situational.”

        He then glanced at the slide on the screen with those big eyes of his and made a smooth transition to a different topic.

        “So. . . What’s on the schedule for today? Lesson 7, right?”

*

Robert was born and raised in Quebec, Canada, and had never been to another part of the world. I didn’t know it when I first met him, but his wife had died some years prior, and he was now retired, living in a house with his two dogs. One day during class, he even picked one of them up and showed it to me. Robert was a teacher on Echoes, highly rated and difficult to book. That made it hard for someone like me, a beginner in English, to approach him. The reason I couldn’t take my eyes off his profile was because of his name. I knew another Robert. Robert Pollard. Different last names, but still. Unable to make up my mind, I saved him to my “Favorite Teachers” list, then forgot about him, at least for a while.

Actually, the first teacher I had on Echoes was named Sandra, a retired nurse living in New York. I was very nervous during our first class, so she talked about herself instead of forcing me to talk. But she talked so much that she reminded me of my late grandmother, who never stopped talking whenever she got you on the phone. And yet I liked Sandra. She was always warm, generous, and cheerful. But not long after we finally became comfortable with one another, she had to leave Echoes for health reasons, and I had to begin my search for another teacher.

Echoes had teachers of all ages, nationalities, and economic backgrounds. From digital nomads with impressive self-introductions filmed out in nature, to university students working multiple jobs during their break to cover tuition and living expenses, to affluent retirees, immigrants, and people who lost their jobs during the pandemic. And because there were few barriers to registering as a teacher on the platform, I often got the feeling that it was a sort of global teaching bazaar or digital flea market. One teacher I met, a young woman, was jarringly blunt and bored even though it was only our first meeting. When it became apparent that I was having trouble understanding what she was saying, she suddenly said that her internet connection was bad and left the room.

        She never came back. Classes ending early and frozen screens were common, but this was a first for me.

My second proper teacher was a middle-aged woman living in Texas named Rose. She was in her early fifties, with pale skin and matte-blonde hair. Unlike other solidly middle-class teachers who adjusted their cameras to show off their libraries or hung artwork behind them to film self-introductions, Rose used a piece of glossy champagne-colored nylon curtain to hide her shabby accommodations. She’d even hung up some tacky lights, which I suspected were repurposed Christmas lights. Her rating wasn’t the best and she didn’t have much teaching experience, but she was more than qualified to teach a novice like me. The topic of our first session was “Studying a Foreign Language.” One unit from Echoes’ own textbook. After pulling up the slides on the screen, she asked me some prepared questions.

        “Do you enjoy learning foreign languages?”

        Unsure of myself, I said, “I’m trying?”

        Rose’s only reaction was to nod her head before awkwardly moving on to the next question.

        “What is your goal for learning a foreign language?”

        I thought for a moment before giving her a relatively honest answer. “Because I want to leave this place some day?”

        Not having any skills or credentials to do so, this was nothing but a vague dream of mine. I didn’t tell her the more important reason: “Because when studying foreign languages, I’m able to fool myself into thinking that I still have some potential, some opportunity.”

        Indeed, it hadn’t even been a month since I brought my mother’s ashes to the columbarium.

That morning—the one I’d spent drinking coffee with Heon-su—I received a phone call from my maternal aunt. When I heard the news, I immediately left for my hometown—a once booming port city that was now, because of a lack of money and people, on the decline. My home was located even further from civilization, in a small township. It wasn’t the peaceful fishing village that people often imagined, but rather a neighborhood that was slowly becoming more and more desolate—buses that came less and less frequently, and shady karaoke rooms and love hotels taking over the alleys. At first I thought my mother’s illness would serve as a nice break for me, but after less than two months nursing her back to health, I finally had no choice but to quit my job. It has been seven years now, and I still haven’t returned to work. I was able to live off my mother’s pension and some irregular paychecks, but even then, most of it went to paying off hospital bills. Eventually, I had no choice but to take out a loan using her house as collateral. And of course, I had to use her life insurance money to pay off the remaining debt, so now, I basically have no money in hand. I had hoped to leave as soon as the home was sold, but even apartments in the big city were having trouble selling, so no one was going to be interested in an old house in a small provincial town. Then again, it wasn’t really like I had anywhere else to go. So I ended up just killing time, waiting to sell the house that was chaining me down.

Barely anyone came to the funeral. I felt both sad and relieved as I returned my mourning clothes to the hospital after three days at the funeral hall. But I wasn’t ashamed of these mixed feelings. I felt defiant knowing that I had done all I could, that no one in the world could say I hadn’t. At the same time, I wished for someone to take my hand and say something warm to me, something with meaning. Of course, no such thing happened. And that was because while taking care of my mother, I hadn’t maintained friendships and rarely went to any of their weddings or funerals. Although, I do remember that someone sent an anonymous garland. The only thing written on the long white ribbon hanging from the plastic flower basket were the words, “I’m sorry for your loss. May she rest in peace.” At first, I mistakenly thought it had been sent by Heon-su. And then I heard my aunt say it was probably sent by my father, who had started a new family after the divorce. “I contacted him about your mother’s death without telling you. I guess it was too difficult to get here from Canada.”

After wrapping up the funeral, I stayed home and started searching for jobs online. There weren’t many places interested in a woman in her mid-forties who hadn’t worked in several years. And even those I could find had checkered reputations or poor working conditions. And besides, these days, mid-forties was the time for one to think about retirement, not start a new career. Adding insult to injury, I jammed my toe on a wooden box while cleaning out my mother’s wardrobe and had to go to the ER. The doctor told me it would take a month before I could remove the cast, and a year before it would fully recover. And then after sitting around doing nothing and feeling sorry for myself, I got the idea to start learning a new language to prepare for the day I might finally leave this country—whenever that might be. After all, it would be hard to learn any other new skill while nursing a broken foot, and I didn’t really want to start a part-time job just to quit in a few months. So, if nothing else, I figured I’d start studying English again. And this was even though I was drowning in the stress of trying to make ends meet.

Rose taught me for about two months. Two thirty-minute sessions a week, although I sometimes split that up further into fifteen-minute sessions when I wanted. We practiced set phrases as we made our way through the fundamentals and sometimes talked about personal topics. Once, while on the topic of housing, Rose mentioned that she had been the victim of a large hurricane a few years prior. “It was hell. We lost power for weeks.”

        And while we talked about traveling, Rose mentioned that she’d never left her hometown. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you much about other parts of the world.” Whenever something like this happened, I felt very close to Rose, as if we were members of the same socioeconomic class. But then, as with many of the online teachers I met on Echoes, Rose suddenly started canceling classes, and then one day, without any kind of message or apology, she stopped altogether. I had to find a new teacher. I rediscovered Robert in my saved teachers list, and finally worked up the courage to request a class. Now I had to start all over again with a new teacher. “Hello? My name is Eun-mi Kim. Or just Amy. Eun-mi sounds like Amy. I’m Korean and I’m forty-five. I have no brothers or sisters. I am living in a coastal city in Korea, and my job is. . .” And then one day, I realized that these thirty-minute classes—sometimes fifteen—were often the only human interaction I had all day. After factoring in the various coupons I used, our conversations cost me about 16,000 won per half hour.

During our first class, I worked up the courage to ask Robert a personal question.

        “May I ask you who that person is? The one behind you.”

        Behind Robert was an old-looking wooden picture frame, in which a thin elderly man was seated and looking at the camera at a slight angle. The portrait looked gloomy and somewhat distorted.

        “Oh, that’s my father,” Robert said without even turning to look.

        “Really? I guess he does kind of look like you.”

        “You think so?”

        “Especially the eyes.”

        The smile Robert then gave me was a bit off.

Although Robert should have been in his early sixties, he looked closer to someone in his mid-fifties. And perhaps because he’d been doing this job for a long time, he was always sensitive to the pace of each class and always conducted lessons with seriousness. And yet, because his gaze was filled with generosity, I immediately felt close to him. And then something happened that brought us even closer. It was when Robert’s father passed away. He contacted all his many students and said he had to spend a few days at his father’s side. He used the specific sentence pattern, “I have to. . .,” which was something I’d practiced ad nauseam in school. I thought about not responding, but decided to send him a short reply instead.

        I offer you my deepest condolences. I never met your father. But looking at you, I know he must have been a wonderful person. I wish all of you peace and rest.

Robert hesitatingly thanked me during our next meeting a week later on Echoes.

        “Thanks to you, I was able to give my father a proper sendoff. And your message gave me great strength.”

        Not knowing what to say, I flushed in embarrassment. Being able to sincerely offer empty, cliché words of comfort was part of being an adult, but in the face of the news of someone’s passing, I always felt at a loss because of the limits and banality of my own expressions. But what was so wrong with being cliché? And was there anything more cliché than life and death? Why did I have to shy away from something just because it had been said a million times before? That day however, Robert shared something personal with me.

        “Actually the person who passed away is the father who raised me.”

        Not understanding what he meant, I just blinked in confusion.

        “My biological father is still alive.”

        I wasn’t sure what to say.

        “But of course, I don’t know where he is.”

        After saying this, he turned to the slides on the screen and skillfully changed the subject.

        “So. . . what’s on the schedule for today? Lesson 2?”

*

        “Hi, Amy.”

        Robert entered the meeting and greeted me with yet another bright smile. He was wearing a magenta sweater that complimented his gray hair—indeed, he knew what colors suited him. I appreciated how well he dressed. Even in retirement, he seemed to care about his appearance and looking professional. It was out of courtesy, not just for himself, but for others. It was the kind of respect that I’d been missing for the last several years.

        “Hi, Robert.”

        I pretended not to notice Robert’s attempt to be friendly with me and responded as I usually did. Yet just because I ignored it didn’t mean I wasn’t aware of it. In fact, it was because I was aware of it that I had bothered to apply lipstick that was two years past its expiration date before our class.

        Taking care of my mother had left me with little time for exercise or makeup, and lately, I’d been feeling that my appearance seemed conspicuously older and more worn down. I hadn’t really noticed it when I was by myself, but with more frequent occasions to be in front of a camera, it was starting to bother me.

        “How have you been?”

        Seeing Robert’s large pupils, I opened my eyes wide as if to return his greeting. Actually, for the last several days, I’d been slightly uneasy when looking at Robert on the screen. I was both aware that he was enjoying his time with me, and that it had been ages since someone had looked at me with kindness, curiosity, and sexual desire. But not in the creepy or intrusive way. Robert wasn’t the kind of person to cross a line and let his feelings show, at least not deliberately. At first, I doubted my intuition, thinking I was just lonely. I hadn’t been in a serious relationship since breaking up with Heon-su, neither emotionally nor physically. I wasn’t sure whether what I was feeling was simply the happiness of finding a friend, the joy of being free to pursue an intimate relationship again, or the excitement of being the object of another man’s desires. Perhaps it was a mix of all three. After all, emotions never came one at a time. In fact, no matter the teacher, foreign language classes always had an element of sexual tension. Stumbling over words, delayed satisfaction, sharing intimate thoughts, shame and frustration, tension and release, the occasional uncontrollable bout of laughter, mistakes and apologies.

        “I’ve been well,” I said, acting cool. “And you?”

        “Me too.”

        After exchanging this simple greeting, we conversed a bit more, talking about things like how to say hello in Korean, for example. A little while later, Robert turned his large eyes to the screen and glanced over the slide before changing the subject.

        “So. . . What’s on the schedule for today? Was it Lesson 7?”

Robert read out today’s lesson in a somewhat formal tone of voice.

        “Lesson 7. Talking about food.”

        Soon, the day’s goals appeared on my laptop screen. Questions like “What’s your favorite food?” “What’s your soul food?” and “Do you enjoy trying foods from different cultures?” I practiced the expressions on the screen by repeating them like a parrot.

        “I like trying foods from other countries. Actually, I used to be a bit scared. But little by little I’ve come to enjoy adventures.”

        “That’s good.” Robert’s interjection was somewhat robotic.

        “Right, that’s how a lot of things start.” I said this without giving it much thought, but soon I was worried that the sentence might sound like I was trying to seduce him. This tension had formed because I was aware of Robert’s gaze. It was common for students and teachers on Echoes to become close and trust each other. I also had become close with Sandra and Rose. But as soon as Robert became my teacher, something changed. Perhaps it was because it had been a long time since I’d seen another person’s eyes filled with such warmth. My mother, who had suffered from brain damage and had trouble carrying on a normal conversation, could only communicate with her eyes. But in her gaze, there were no apologies or thanks, just doubt and criticism. Food. Right, my mother loved food, especially her own cooking. Indeed, she didn’t often compliment other people. It didn’t matter who she was with, she was always trying to put people beneath her. And in order to do that, she was skilled at assigning undesirable roles to other people. Even if they were her own daughter. One time while we were having a meal with Heon-su, she said something that was almost disastrous—even if she was trying in her own way to comfort someone who had become an orphan early in life. But as with everything, she had other motives. It was about indulging in the sense that she was better than others. Even at the end, the messages she sent me the most with those eyes of her weren’t “Sorry” or “Thank you,” but “I’m scared.”

        “Amy, can you hear me?”

        “Hm? Yes.”

        “What’s your favorite holiday dish?”

        I collected myself and started fumbling around in my head for the right tenses, articles, and sentence structures.

        “I. . . uhm. . . I like this red bean soup that we eat on dongjinnal, which is the shortest day of the year. They say our ancestors believed that the color red chased away bad ghosts.”

        Actually, I didn’t really like patjuk, but I thought it would be easier and more interesting to talk about the winter solstice than the Lunar New Year or Chuseok. After all, people loved stories with ghosts in them. But on the other hand, I could sense significant losses and omissions, the kind of inevitable losses that everyone puts up with in translation. There was a big difference between yuryeong and ghosts, between red bean soup and patjuk. Of course, there were advantages to speaking in a foreign language. Sentences built from a limited vocabulary had their own charm, like a lean body stripped of all unnecessary fat. These gaps would sometimes create unintentional “accidents.” Now that I thought about it, during my classes with Rose, there were also mistakes that weren’t funny. One time, something happened while we were talking about TV shows. As Rose changed the slide, she asked me what my favorite show was. I was beginning to mention a few celebrity reality TV programs in Korea when, realizing it would take too much effort to explain, I resigned myself to just lying and saying I liked dating shows. Rose, who, up to that point, had maintained her poise as my teacher, gave me a suggestive smile, as if she knew exactly what I was talking about. She told me she had a lot of friends who enjoyed watching dating shows and gave me a few recommendations in English. A few days later while eating a meal, I tried watching the matchmaking program that Rose had suggested to me and realized that we had a very different understanding of the concept of “dating show”—especially in terms of sexual explicitness. The women who appeared in the show that Rose suggested to me were all women with extremely large breasts, and when asked what the most important things they looked for in a man, the first woman said this:

        “Empathy, a sense of humor, and ambition.”

        Not a bad answer, I thought to myself as I spooned some soup.

        “But in the end, I think having a big dick is really important.”

        I nearly dropped my spoon on the table. These were the programs that Rose now thought I liked. I wanted to meet with her as soon as possible and clear things up. But I had to wait four days before our next class. Because she spent all day teaching classes, it was possible that she might have completely forgotten our conversation. And indeed, when we met again, she barely remembered the conversation. Instead, she gave an understanding smile and told me not to worry about it. We moved on to the next unit.

However, if time and language had permitted, there was something else I wanted to share with Rose. It was about the Costa Rican woman who appeared on that matchmaking program. She was beautiful and voluptuous but lacked grace. She worked as a café waitress in some small town in the U.S. Sitting across from her under the moonlight was a Brazilian man. Much like her, he was fit and handsome, but that didn’t change the fact that he was a mechanic with a thick accent and broken English. But when the woman said to him, “I know a little Portuguese,” the look in his eyes suddenly deepened. For a moment, what had been a sultry and provocative dinner date suddenly became very serious. I liked to think that, in that brief moment, a wave of emotion swept over the two of them. Latin American history, migration, hard manual labor, native and foreign tongues, alienation and companionship—they both knew in that instant that they understood one another. This was what I truly wanted to talk to Rose about, but all I could say was:

        “Actually, I don’t like dating programs.”

“Let’s see, next up is a game of Twenty Questions?”

        Robert’s eyes sparkled. It seemed he still enjoyed games like this even though the introductory course likely used the same materials every session. He explained the rules of the game to me in detail, almost as if he were talking to a child. But he didn’t actually treat me like a child, and I appreciated that. Some teachers treated foreign students like children, as if they wished they’d never grow up. In any case, the goal of the game was to guess something solely based on its description. Usually, I would only understand part of what he said and fail to understand the rest, so I would simply nod. And Robert, knowing my level of listening comprehension, used relatively simple words when speaking to me.

        “Ready?”

        “Yeah.”

        Roberts eyes were glinting mischievously as he paused for a moment.

        “I’m a fruit, and I’m generally red.”

        “Are you a strawberry?” I said, matching Robert’s enthusiasm.

        “Nope.”

        Robert looked proud that he was keeping me at bay.

        “Then what are you?”

        “Most of the time I’m red, but sometimes I’m green and sometimes I’m yellow.”

        I glanced upward and blinked.

        “A peach?”

        “Nope.”

        “Then what are you?”

        “I can be candy, jam, or toppings on pie.”

        “A cherry?”

        Robert smiled as he shook his head. Then after giving me a few more hints he said:

        “This one will give it away for sure. I’m the logo of a famous phone company.”

        “Apple!”

        “Bingo.”

        We continued with the remaining seven lessons. The topics included explaining traditional recipes from our home countries, foods we think of when we’re sick, and what we’d like to eat before we die. As usual, Robert sprinkled the lessons with impromptu questions.

        “Is it evening there?”

        “Yeah, almost.”

        “Have you eaten dinner?”

        “No, not yet.”

        “What are you going to eat after class?”

I didn’t want to give a boring answer, so I pretended to be a bit rebellious.

        “I’m going to have a beer. I did well in class today. I want to reward myself.”

        This seemed to amuse Robert. He then did something that surprised me, pulling out a glass of wine from behind the screen and raising it up to the camera. “Cheers!” Caught off guard, I awkwardly replied, “Cheers.” We both laughed. Seeing Robert’s spontaneity, I felt a bit bold.

        “Robert—?”

        “Hm?”

        “I have something I wanted to tell you.”

Robert looked at me with a mix of confusion, unease, and curiosity.

        “Don’t worry. It’s not that serious.”

        “Then what is it?”

        “Yeah, uhm. I think today is going to be our last class.”

Goodbyes were an everyday occurrence in Echoes, but I could detect a hint of sadness in Robert’s face. And yet he tried to stay cheerful.

        “Like you said. I’m glad it’s nothing serious.”

        I didn’t say anything.

        “But it is a bit sad.”

        I mustered a polite smile.

        “Thank you for telling me. Then how about for the rest of class, we put aside the lesson and just talk for once?”

*

Robert checked the time at the bottom of his screen. We only had about fifteen minutes left.

        “Let’ see. . . What do you want to talk about?”

        “Mmm, maybe something honest?” I said, acting innocent.

Robert tilted his head to the side in confusion.

        “Like what?”

        “Like the fact I’m not actually a teacher.”

        Robert didn’t seem to understand. A few days ago, during our lesson on the topic of jobs, I had talked about the “struggles” of being a middle school teacher in Korea. I’d even jokingly mocked the school’s vice principal. All of it had been a fabricated story, borrowed from my mother who had been a junior high school teacher. Perhaps because he thought it would be awkward if he continued not to say anything, Robert asked a follow-up question.

        “Then what do you do?”

        “I don’t do anything right now,” I said calmly.

        “And what about before?”

        I was just a regular office worker.”

        “What kind of company?”

        “An advertisement company.”

        “That’s really cool.” Robert was always good at interjecting encouraging comments like that.

        I made a polite smile.

        “But that’s all in the past. I wasn’t trying to lie to you. Sorry.”

        Robert waved his hands in the air to reject my apology.

        “No, no. It happens. It’s fine.”

        We were silent for a while.

        “Should I tell you something as well?”

        As if wanting to ease my embarrassment, Robert extended his hand beneath the screen and pulled out the glass of wine again, holding it up high.

        “I drink this every day.”

        I was a bit surprised, but acted like it was nothing.

        “Like a Frenchman?”

        “More like a Russian.”

        The burgundy liquid in Robert’s glass sloshed about dangerously.

        “Since when?” I asked.

        “Since retirement.”

        “How much?” I asked, wanting to take a step closer to him.

        Robert made a sheepish smile. “More than you’d think.”

        “You dress well and always look fine to me.”

        Robert smiled again, bashfully. The kind of smile I would have fallen for, had he been a bit younger.

        “Everyone is like that. We all look fine when we’re not.”

        “Right, it’s all situational,” I said, echoing something Robert had said earlier.

Robert stared into my eyes silently.

        “Should I tell you one more thing?”

        I didn’t answer.

        “My father. The man you offered your sincere condolences for—”

        “Yes?”

        “He wasn’t that good of a person.”

        “. . .”

        “Although I guess that’s not news. I mean, no one ever said all adults make good parents by nature.”

        I remained silent.

        “But I guess I’ve seen that kind of story in too many movies and TV shows. You know, the ones where everything begins or ends with someone’s obituary. Stories where people finally come to understand someone, but only after they’re dead. Or maybe it’s a new appreciation for life. Like how the two alternating notes of an ambulance siren one day transforms into a melody that means something to you.”

        “Robert, I’m sorry. I didn’t quite understand what you said. Can you say it a little more slowly?”

        I was starting to worry that Robert might be a bit drunk. But his complexion looked perfectly fine. Some people need a cup of coffee to wake up; perhaps Robert needed alcohol to clear his head. Of course, that was the hallmark of an alcoholic. Robert typed out what he’s said verbatim in the chat. I quickly scanned the paragraph, using the translation feature whenever I encountered an unfamiliar word.

        “Do you understand?”

        “Yes.”

        “Actually, that’s why I thought something like that would happen to me, too.”

        I was about to say “me too” but managed to stop myself. I was also about to say how truly nice it was to meet someone who knew that a loss didn’t always come with some life lesson, that life was a series of such losses without a purpose.

        “Anyway, there wasn’t much written in my father’s obituary. Other than things that implied he wasn’t a good father. Of course I was aware of this myself, but I wanted to confirm that it wasn’t just me. And yet I still felt empty. I wonder why.”

        “. . .”

        “Perhaps that’s what life is. Trying to extract lessons from things that aren’t meant to be lessons.”

        “. . .”

        “Then again, what’s wrong with not learning a lesson? Why does everything have to be a lesson?”

Robert let out a deep sigh as if trying to collect himself.

“I’m sorry. I’ve been talking too much about myself. What about you? Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?”

*

Yes, what was it that I wanted to say?

        Listening to Robert, I was reminded of that morning when I’d enjoyed a cup of coffee with Heon-su while listening to “Love Hurts.” I was adamant that I’d heard them say the word annyeong. “The singer must have intentionally slipped a Korean word into the song. Like medieval painters who used to hide their signature in their works. I think they embedded the Korean word annyeong into the English lyrics. Maybe that was their way of expressing their love for their roots and traces.”

        Unsurprisingly, Heon-su didn’t know what I meant. He didn’t understand what I meant by “roots” and “traces.”

Only after trying to explain myself again did he finally tell me that I was mistaken for thinking that Kim Deal was some third-generation Korean American simply because of her name and the fact she had long dark brown hair. “It’s Kim as in Kimberley. Not one of the Kim clans from Gyeongju or Gimhae.”

        “What, really?”

        Heon-su pressed the rewind button and played “Love Hurts” from the beginning again. I listened carefully to each line, trying to find the part where I’d heard it. It was about halfway through the song when we finally found it.

        “Oh, they said I’m young,” Heon-su said. “Not annyeong.”

        “Hm?”

        “This part. I’m young, I know. That’s what they said.”

        Heon-su pressed the rewind button again.

        “This part.”

        I blinked in confusion for a second before realizing my blunder. Heon-su, who looked proud of himself for being right, began interpreting the lyrics that followed, softly, one line at a time. It was as if he were giving me Korean subtitles for the original song, at half the normal beat so I could savor both languages. He even joked about having used the same technique to flirt with someone in the past.

        “I’m young, I know. . .”

        I leaned in with a serious look on my face and listened closely to the two voices and Heon-su’s.

        “But even so I know a thing or two. . . I learned from you, I really learned a lot, really learned a lot. . .”

        For a moment, I almost thought that Heon-su wasn’t translating but harmonizing with the singers, adding his own accompaniment. And despite being in different places and different languages, it felt like both he and they were headed toward the same exact end. When the song ended, Heon-su said that he thought the line “I learned a lot from you, I really learned a lot” felt much sadder than if they had pleaded “Don’t go” or said, “I missed you.” He said that for some reason, he felt like he understood what the person meant when they wrote that line.

        “Life is mostly a cliché. But it’s hard to deny the inevitability of cliché. Of banality, of predictability, of helplessness. In the darker periods of life, what we end up saying isn’t witty or novel things but clichés. In the end, the things that stick are simple words, old words, words we think we already know and ignore or grow tired of because we’ve heard them a million times.”

Heon-su was three years younger than me, so I couldn’t help but tease him, implying that he was too young to be philosophizing about life and death.

“Who did you learn that from?” I asked.

        Heon-su shrugged.

        “My childhood friend? Poverty.”

        I thought about what it must have been like to care for one’s parents from a young age. Heon-su had been solving workbook problems as a young boy in the hospital corridor. He had missed a lot of school, and when he was at school, he would often bury his face in his desk, pretending not to hear his friends talk about the school field trip he missed.

        “. . .”

        “Or perhaps the loss of two loved ones?”

        Heon-su had spent his teenage years alongside his mother, caring for his father who had suffered a stroke. And a year after his father passed away, his mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. So for five more years, Heon-su found himself back in the role of caregiver. Nearly a decade of his life, including his college years, was consumed in caring for the sick. By the time he graduated from college, he was considered an orphan and was thus exempt from military service. Because of this, while we lay in bed one night, Heon-su said jokingly that his mother had given him “two years off.” At the time, I realized Heon-su must have spent years coping with his own grief before he could make a comment like this. Perhaps that’s why, after we broke up and I found myself lying alone on the cramped cot of the hospital room that my mother and I shared with five other patients, I often thought back to that morning when we would listen to “Love Hurts” together. I would think about the way my stomach sank when I first saw my aunt’s number appear on my phone, and the way Heon-su observed with worry. At the time, I had no idea it would be the crack that would eventually break our relationship. As Heon-su used to say, “Sometimes, shit just happens.” This time, it was simply my turn to experience it. Yet, why do we always look so surprised when it happens? As though we’ve never once said goodbye to a loved one.

        Annyeong.

        A world full of goodbyes.

I would often hum that song to myself—in the hospital when my mother was still alive, or down the dimly lit streets of my fading hometown. In this life where I thought I’d already lost so much but still had more to lose, in this process of constantly losing more and more, I would remember those times when I’d wipe my mother’s bottom with a damp towel, look into her eyes, and then feel the desire to run away—times when I couldn’t run away, times when I didn’t, times when I couldn’t but almost did. Heon-su knew all too well about what I was going through, what I would have to go through. Was that why he left me? Because he didn’t want to go through it again? Then again, technically it was I who had left him, out of courtesy. Of course it wasn’t a clean break; we met several times after that, even spent a few nights together. And even though neither of us said annyeong, we knew that we would never get back together.

        “Heon-su—” One night, I spoke to Heon-su in the darkness.

        “Yeah?”

        “Were they good people?”

        “Who?”

        “Your parents.”

        Heon-su fell silent before finally answering me.

        “Yeah.”

        “That’s fortunate.”

        “. . .”

        “I’ve always been envious of people who sincerely like their parents.”

        “. . .”

Heon-su didn’t express an opinion, positive or negative, about what I said. Though I didn’t realize it then, perhaps inside him, thoughts of what he wanted to say, what he shouldn’t say, and what he simply couldn’t say were tangled together. And maybe it had nothing to do with whether his parents were good people or not. Kind of like how, as I became increasingly surprised by my own life, I stopped making judgments about other people’s lives. Unsurprisingly, during those long days by my mother’s side, it was Heon-su whom I missed the most. Not because he was someone I almost married, but because he was someone who had experienced the same loneliness that I was feeling. Two years after we broke up, I was dozing off in my mother’s hospital room when a drunken Heon-su called me. I got up from the cot, picked up my phone, and quietly stepped into the hospital corridor. With one hand over my mouth, I talked into the receiver, trying not to disturb anyone. Heon-su, however, rambled on about this and that before unexpectedly apologizing for something he’d said in the past, on the day I first heard “Love Hurts.” “If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t have corrected you. I wouldn’t have told you it’s I’m young and not annyeong. I’d have said, ‘Yeah, that’s what I heard too.’ The idea of a cliché Korean word like annyeong being planted inside a pop song like that is so beautiful and sad. Like the image of a single dandelion growing in a crack on a concrete sidewalk.” He was sniffling as he said this. Then suddenly, as though embarrassed, he hung up. I remember standing in the hallway for a long time afterward. Now, I’m without Heon-su, without my mother, without even my younger self, the one who used to dream of the “next step.” Now, I was just in my old room, listening to this song. I learned from you, I really learned a lot, really learned a lot. But to be more accurate, I didn’t learn from him, but rather from his absence. I still didn’t know exactly what I learned, so now, whenever I listen to this song, I just say the word annyeong over the lyrics whenever they say “I’m young.” In life, sometimes there are moments when you can only be right by being wrong. That’s probably what I learned from him.

        This is what I wanted to say to Robert. But I couldn’t, not just because I didn’t have the skills to do it, but also because I was afraid that the inevitable omissions and losses of trivial details and nuances caused by the awkward translations of my feelings would turn out to be the most important and precious parts of my emotions. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter if it was joy that I wanted to express. But sadness was another matter. If nothing else, my pain needed to be expressed in my mother tongue, the language of my sadness, the source of my emotions. But let’s say I did use Korean. Would all of it be conveyed, even then? Without certainty, I resigned myself to saying only a few words:

        “Robert—”

        “Yes?”

        “Annyeong means hello and goodbye. But it has another meaning.”

        “And what’s that?”

        “Be at peace or Are you at peace?”

        “I see.”

        Looking at Robert’s large, innocent eyes, I realized that this farewell was going to be a lot harder than I thought. I hadn’t imagined saying goodbye to someone would be so difficult just because we’d talked regularly, and shared moments of tension, laughter, and concern. Isn’t it strange? At work, I used to find all that tiresome. I’d wanted to turn off the switch of social interactions completely. But as my world shrank down to just me and my mom in my old hometown, I began to long for all those many languages. Making mistakes and excuses, lying, disagreeing, trying to subtly flirt with someone, making it obvious that you’re receptive to flirtation, believing and doubting, and responding—all the gestures of social life. Perhaps that’s why Robert, who shared a few of those gestures with me for a time, came to feel more precious and intimate than necessary. So much so that, if I could, I’d want to visit Canada at least once.

        “Robert?”

        “Yes?”

        I finally said what I wanted to say to Robert on our last day.

        “Annyeong.”

        “Amy?” His voice through the speakers was gentle.

        “Yes?”

        I opened my eyes wide as I waited for Robert to speak. I felt I knew what he was about to say, but I also wanted to hear it for myself. I wanted to nod along when he said it, as if that simple act would somehow bring me peace. But just as Robert’s lips began to part, the feed was abruptly cut, as though the power had gone out. I stared blankly at the laptop screen, which was displaying the messages “Insufficient Balance” and “Session Expired.” His face was frozen on the screen, like the distorted image of a static-filled TV or a corrupted JPEG file. I stared at the lips of someone about to say something but never managing to. And so, just as I had when I once inserted my own Korean lyrics into an old pop song, I whispered the words I hadn’t heard to myself. The same words Heon-su had said to me all those years ago. Annyeong. Goodbye. And be at peace.

Translated by Sean Lin Halbert