INTERVIEW

• Teaser: Novelist Jeong Yi Hyun Vol.35 Spring 2017

  Exposed to benevolent violence and anxiety everyday, ordinary people still live their lives silent witness to this age, their hidden side is captured by writer Jeong Yi Hyun     Detailed Information Date: 2017.4.7 Provider: LTI Korea Running Time: 02:03 Writer: Jeong Yi Hyun Language: English http://kln.or.kr/ https://library.ltikorea.or.kr/

• Propping Up the Fallen Ladder of Education: An Interview with Novelist Jeong Yi Hyun Vol.35 Spring 2017

  Heo Hee: I’d like to discuss the issue of Korean education, which I believe is related to the “contemporariness” you often emphasize. Jeong Yi Hyun: It is. Contemporariness sounds like an objective concept, but its definition really depends on how one sees and understands the contemporary era. I see myself as a single camera capturing this era from my own perspective. Maybe my fiction resembles documentaries. Not that documentaries are completely objective, either. And of course, it is the author’s prerogative to select or edit as they see fit. Heo: There’s such a fever for education in Korea. It’s not easy being a student here [laughs]. What kind of memories of school do you have? Jeong: I only have memories of hating school. One thing I’ll never forget is how one evening, as a high school senior in study hall, I looked up and took in the crammed classroom around me and thought, I will write about this someday . . . this desperation . . . I shall bear witness to this world [laughs]. And I did. I wrote about that moment in the preface to Goodbye, My Everything, which is based on teenagers in the 1990s. Any happiness I had back then was from outside that system: time and space outside of class, extracurriculars, playing hooky. I went to high school in the late 1980s, and we were the first “KTU (Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union) Generation.” Young teachers taught progressive values that clashed with the content in our textbooks. It was unsettling, and I didn’t know how to deal with that as a student. For example, the poetry in our literature textbook was only about how beautiful the world was, while our KTU teachers introduced us to minjung poetry (peoples’ poetry). It was in that clash between worlds where I first thought to seek new questions and answers. I’m currently serializing a YA novel featuring high school students in 2017. I had certain questions: Is “study hall” still the glorified incarceration that it was? That kind of stuff. Turns out, it still is. I graduated from high school about twenty years ago, but many things are surprisingly the same. I didn’t need to do a lot of research. That frightens me.     Heo: In your debut work “Romantic Love and Society” and earlier works “Girls’ Generation” and “Sampoong Department Store,” the district of Gangnam figures prominently. Korea’s resources are heavily centralized into Seoul, with the Gangnam district taking the lion’s share even within the capital. I wonder if living in Gangnam feels the same to Koreans as living in Manhattan must to Americans. Even just in terms of education, Gangnam exerts a significant influence. Many prestigious high schools that send students to Seoul National University and other prestigious colleges are in Gangnam—and Daechi-dong, the unofficial mecca of private tutoring, is also in Gangnam. Its high real estate prices are a result of its competitive education system. Would you like to comment on this “Gangnam desire” as a writer? Jeong: I think with the word “Gangnam” as used among Koreans, the idea of “desire” is already present. Apparently, even within Gangnam, there are several hierarchies according to your exact address and how well you do academically. Even within this inner circle there are concentric circles of discrimination. It makes people anxious. Within that circle, children and parents compete as a team towards one goal. But what is that goal? Getting into a good university? Getting a good job afterwards? Jumping into it without an idea of what you want will only lead to emptiness. There are also lots of “post-Gangnam” maneuvers. Like sending your kids to an international school or overseas, or looking for a route outside of the Korean public school system. They either have a lot of money or consider themselves particularly passionate about their child’s education, but it all stems from a distrust of the Korean education system. It’s really an escape plan. They’re not interested in changing the system; they’re only concerned with their own child escaping it. Heo: The English language is a route to a higher social position in Korean society. Parents resort to sending their kids to English kindergartens if they can afford it. Your story “Anna” depicts that. Kyung and Anna meet for the first time in eight years at an English kindergarten. There’s a hierarchy of language shown by how the teacher is Canadian, the co-teacher is a Korean American, and the teacher’s aide, who waits in the corridor, is Korean. Koreans are shown as complacently internalizing racist discrimination based on language imperialism. Do you have any further thoughts on this? Jeong: I think it’s an extension of the aforementioned desire for escape. I’ve often wondered about it myself, as a parent. I’ve asked other parents how they feel about the whole thing. They all use the word “opportunity” in their answers. They want to give their children as many opportunities as possible. It made me wonder what other desires lurk inside that word. They consider English to be a basic asset in ensuring their child’s future. The more uncertain the future, the more choices they want their children to have. There’s an underlying distrust here, not only of our education system but of society as a whole. They feel English is a fundamental aspect of the competitive advantage their children need to obtain to be successful individuals. It’s a somewhat futile hope, sending their children away to live happily ever after in a foreign country, or to live in Korea as somewhat more advantaged than their peers. This desire to send off their children to another country, to give them the means to survive after their escape from Korea, is practically a part of our collective unconscious. That English kindergarten in “Anna” with the mandatory English-only policy, I didn’t even have to model it after a specific place. It’s just a mélange of schools I know or have heard about.        Heo: The student debate topic in “Young Young, Summer” is interesting: “Must we attend school?” Rie points out, “The point of studying isn’t studying itself but to become better people, but we need to think about whether school as it is today is a place that produces better people.” Are these your own thoughts? Jeong: More or less. Maybe it’s because my child is about to enter elementary school, but I’m thinking a lot about what school is and what it should be. Education ought to confer equal opportunities to all children, and that’s the point of compulsory education. But I don’t know if school accomplishes that in practice. Students may not have the right to be happy in school, but they should at least have the right not to be miserable. School should help them discover what they really enjoy doing and what they’re good at. It shouldn’t be a place where they’re forced to tie up their souls and lose their true selves little by little. It’s still in the future, but if my child finds mainstream education unbearable, I’m willing to consider the alternatives. But I can’t actively recommend the alternatives either, because I know the mainstream is still the safest bet. Because it’s not all freedom and variety outside of the mainstream, either. Outside the jungle, the Amazon awaits, and you may be avoiding a cat to find yourself in the jaws of a tiger. I hope someday we’ll hear more about the people who’ve flourished outside of the system. Not celebrities either, just ordinary people who might provide hope for a life outside the system. Heo: As a final question, how do you, as a Korean fiction writer, wish to add to the discourse on Korean education? Jeong: I’ve mentioned I’m working on a YA novel. The main character is a girl who played baseball for her school until she graduated from elementary school. But Korea doesn’t have a middle school baseball league for girls. She realizes this in her last year, and must choose between continuing her baseball outside of the mainstream or giving up on it. She decides to give up. And when she enters high school, she reluctantly joins a softball team. It’s not quite a traditional sports narrative but a story of the people on the margins of that world. My serialization editor keeps wondering why there are no scenes from any games. I don’t think it’ll end up having any. Even if there are game scenes, I’m not going to depict the winning or the losing or dramatic homeruns that change the game’s outcome. Literature perhaps deals with the confrontation between the individual and the world. The world almost never changes, so the individual must decide how and in what form to persist in the world. My character also goes through an internal struggle in her confrontation with the world at large, and my interest as a writer lies in her feelings of despair and joy as she goes through this period in her life. Of course, I could’ve written a novel where she puts together a women’s baseball team and conquers the world [laughs]. Make her overcome her difficulty and inspire hope in others. But that’s not within the scope of my literary interest. I think literary characters are thought experiments, simple in the way real people aren’t. If the character conflicts with society, I want to examine through that conflict what the underlying morality is, what such morality has in relation to this world, and what, ultimately, is the nature of such a world. That last one is the question I leave behind for the reader.    by Heo HeeLiterary critic  

• Between the Inside and the Outside Novelist Jeong Yi Hyun Vol.16 Summer 2012

  Cha Mi-ryeong: It is so nice to see you. It’s been 10 years since you made your debut and you continue to publish. When did you first start writing fiction? Jeong Yi Hyun: It’s been 10 years since my literary debut, but I completed my first work of fiction not long before 2002. Several years after I graduated from college, I returned to school and studied creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. That’s when I started studying literature and writing seriously. Back then I wanted to be a poet. CM: That is surprising. I thought you were a born novelist. JY: I still believe that poets are born with the poetic gift. They possess something that I lack. That’s probably why I admired them so much. Something happened in 2000 during my first year at the Seoul Institute that drove a wedge between poetry and me. My professor, the poet Kim Hye-soon, assigned the class to keep an observation journal over the summer break. We were supposed to observe situations that could be used in poems and describe them in prose. Professor Kim later wrote detailed comments on everyone else’s work, but she returned mine untouched, save a single comment at the end: “You seem much more talented in prose than poetry.” I laugh about it now, but I was quite heartbroken back then. CM: She is definitely a great teacher who discovered your talent as a novelist for you. JY: I studied novel writing under the novelist Park Ki-dong. I guess I received more praise for the fiction I submitted than I had for my poems. The title of my first more or less complete story was “Suffering.” Professor Park suggested changing it to “Pain.” That had a huge impact on me. Until then, my world was one in which there was no distinction or need to distinguish between suffering and pain. I puzzled for a long time over the question: what is the difference between suffering and pain? I still don’t know the answer, but I concluded back then that “Pain” rather than “Suffering,” and “An Apology” rather than “Pain” was a better title for the kind of fiction I wanted to write. Just as life can be felt in a concrete way, shouldn’t fiction be the same? From that point on, I pondered over the kind of literature I wanted to pursue, and many of my vague worries disappeared. If literature was a concrete, accessible entity, then I had things to say. CM: Your debut work was Romantic Love and Society. I believe you borrowed the title from Jacquie Sarsby’s nonfiction book. JY: In grad school I did some research on the sexual experiences of unmarried women in their 20s. At the time a lot of research on women’s sexuality and the body was being published. My story was a kind of experiment combining social science case studies with literature. Even though it was published 10 years ago, I still meet women in their 20s who express their shock at reading it. I am intrigued that there are still people who find it radical. Since it means that the reality faced by 20-something women has hardly changed, I hope that ceases to be the case. CM: The footnotes in the story create the impression that the narrator is making objective observations from outside the text. JY: Perhaps because I had only studied social sciences up until then, I thought an author should have an objective point of view. I could not understand why an author had to have empathy for her characters. Now I know that even a camera, even exclusion carries feelings. When I reread Romantic Love and Society, my reaction is complex for a number of reasons. I sense the ambitious enthusiasm of a fledgling writer. That is to say, maybe I would not be able to write that kind of story now. My thinking continues to become more complicated and I have grown more cautious. CM: Your first work of fiction Romantic Love and Society comprises stories of women. Was that intentional? JY: No, I noticed it only after I finished. It probably means that my attention at the time was directed that way without my realizing it. There was a point in my reading of Korean fiction where I became puzzled over why none of it had female characters who reminded me of my own friends. I wanted to write about people whom I knew best, characters who for some reason had been overlooked in literature. I think I re-reflected on my own desire only after my finished product came out. My view on it has since changed, and now I think some characters were robbed of the chance to tell their own hidden stories, as my stories back then showcased women. I was too inattentive to the anonymous minor characters.   Critic Cha Mi-ryeong and novelist Jeong Yi Hyun   CM: I see. The urge to recover stories derived from a certain person can also be detected in “Sampoong Department Store,” which received the Hyundae Literary Award. I can sense in that story the plea to see this person. JY: When I started off, I believed that writing fiction was to discover the stories that floated around the world. My understanding of fiction began to change because of “Sampoong Department Store.” I cried almost the whole time I was writing that story. After I finished it, it felt like something that had been hardened and embedded in my heart for a long time was softened. I might describe it as a healing kind of writing. That’s when I first realized that the act of novel writing was not just to show something to others but perhaps also to understand and change myself. I hope writing will always make me reflect on myself. CM: Isn’t shedding light on characters at a crossroads one of the characteristics of your novels? JY: Isn’t everyone always at a crossroads, even if some of the choices seem very minor and trivial? These small choices contain the essence of each individual’s worldview, though unknown to others. Faced with a choice, ordinary people tend to try as hard as possible to downplay it as trivial rather than fatal or decisive. CM: The reason your novels come across as argumentative is that choice itself becomes a question aimed at the reader. Don’t many of your novels end with what can be perceived as cold-hearted choices? JY: My characters seem to make the most realistic choices possible for them. Of course, I could have given them a chance to reflect on themselves and repent. If they had chosen the good, it would have been morally right but it would have shut out certain possibilities. Some readers ask why my characters don’t make the right choices. CM: Maybe they are finding fault with not their wrong choices but their lack of a fight? JY: Why do my characters have to fight that fight? CM: Then should it be the task of the readers? JY: I think so. Novels do not enlighten; they merely show. CM: My Sweet Seoul was your first novel. Many of the readers’ comments note its realism. JY: Many people relate to the character Eunsu. They think her story resembles theirs, but Eunsu is actually not a universal character. Isn’t reality a lot drier than fiction? In reality hardly anyone has a boyfriend who is seven years younger and very few single women can afford their own place, making it easy for their boyfriend to come over and spend the night. As a writer, I find it interesting that readers see Eunsu’s story as their own, even though the former contains small elements of fantasy that distinguish it from the harsh reality. CM: My Sweet Seoul also started the chick lit boom. JY: I’m not sure about that, as chick lit has a set pattern. Chick lit always ends with the triumph of a female character; she undergoes a great deal of trouble but in the end she achieves success in both love and career. In that sense, My Sweet Seoul might be anti-chick lit. The story I wanted to tell did not lie within or outside established institutions. Rather, it was about the character—a kind of coming-of-age story that begins with the character at the starting line and ends with her still there. CM: I just realized that Romantic Love and Society features a college student in the story “Sampoong Department Store,” a recent college grad applying to jobs, and My Sweet Seoul, an office worker. JY: You’re right. It is important for me as a writer to grow old and feel the changes as an ordinary person. It seems natural that as one’s life changes, so does one’s writing. I always want to write about what intrigues and interests me the most at the moment. CM: I heard that What You Never Know is in the process of being translated. Do you have any reservations about the translation? JY: Of course I am not completely without reservations. But fundamentally, I regard the translator as a second author. It is important to have a creative translation that respects the original work. CM: The novel involves diverse events against the backdrop of the kidnapping of a young child still in elementary school. JY: It was a subject that I had researched and wanted to write about for a long time. The initial spark came from my interest in Chinese residents in Korea (hwagyo). Born in Korea, these ethnic Chinese are perceived as Koreans in China and as Chinese in Korea. Then my subject expanded as I developed the questions, “Are hwagyo the only people in this predicament? Isn’t everyone like that?” 1. What You Never Know Jeong Yi Hyun, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2009, 496p, ISBN 9788954609647   2. My Sweet Seoul Jeong Yi Hyun, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2008, 442p, ISBN 9788932017150   3. Romantic Love and Society Jeong Yi Hyun, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd. 2003, 251p, ISBN 9788932014487   4. Hyundae Literary Award: Sampoong Department Store and Other Stories Jeong Yi Hyun, Hyundaemunhak Publishing Co. 2005, 276p, ISBN 8972753416     CM: If Please Look After Mom is about a missing mother, What You Never Know is about a missing child. What does a child signify in Korean society? JY: In Korean society, a child might be a concrete symbol of one’s place in the established institutions that can be felt with every fiber of one’s body. Isn’t the obsession and love for children universal rather than Korean? I didn’t have any children when I wrote What You Never Know, but now I have two children. Now that I am a mother, my thinking on my novel about a child has become more complex. If I rewrote it now, it would definitely be more heartbreaking. There would be more bloodshed and a more violent end. The characters’ emotional life would hit rock bottom more in a more devastating way. CM: What does family mean to you? JY: Though it is not possible to understand each other completely, something weaves you together. You keep saying, “You don’t know [me]” but in the end your family teaches you, that you don't know them either. Of course this might not apply only to families bound by blood. The concept of family is expanding steadily and therefore not fixed. I am very interested in the relationship between individuals, which has been changing along with changes in family relationships. CM: You have a new work coming out soon. JY: Alain de Botton, who is based in Britain, and I, both explored the common keyword “love project” in our novels. It can be summarized in the question: “Doesn’t everyone have a third, fourth, and fifth love?” CM: Rather than “everyone has a first love?” JY: It’s a love story not about one’s first or last love but about love and dating. It might be a love story that subtly escapes the fixed patterns of a typical love story. I write a love story set in Seoul, and de Botton tells the story of married couples in London on the theme of love. What’s interesting is that my characters are dating throughout the novel but part ways in the end, whereas the couples in de Botton’s novel are constantly chilly and in conflict but ultimately conclude that they have to stay together and work on their relationship. Maybe that’s the difference between love and marriage. CM: That is quite interesting. Lastly, do you have anything you want to say to your readers abroad? JY: I am grateful for their interest in Korean literature. I just hope that it is read more widely. Even though there are many works of Korean literature of a universal nature, it is not easy to publish them abroad. It’s really too bad. I’m eagerly awaiting the day when I can interact freely with readers all over the world.   by Cha Mi-ryeong

FICTION

• The Loneliness of Others Vol.40 Summer 2018

    According to the remarriage agency’s analytics report, I’m a B+.   I’m thirty-four. I live in a two-room apartment. I have a double bed and a computer desk in the big room and I use the small room as a walk-in closet. I take my white work shirts to a nearby dry cleaners once a week to be ironed and I don’t cook. I have a car that’s only two years old, but I commute by subway. I never put on a tie at weekends. This everyday life of mine is peaceful enough. Every now and then I feel a bit bewildered, like when I wake up from a long nap on a weekend afternoon to find the night is already deep in darkness; but that much loneliness is something every modern man must feel, so I think I should be able to bear it too. I’ve already realised that life has no peak, no prime. When I eat alone I usually get takeout. The thing I buy most regularly is gimbap. My favourite is the tuna gimbap, filled with tinned tuna mixed up into a paste with mayonnaise, but I don’t want to get tired of eating it, so I order vegetable gimbap, beef gimbap, and cheese gimbap in turns. On days when I want hot soup, I stop by a restaurant that sells portions of seolleongtang in sealed tubs. I take it home and pour the soup into a big bowl, heat it in the microwave and then have it with instant microwave rice. If I feel like having something special I phone up the nearby steakhouse and order a salad with grilled prawns and chicken breast, then go there half an hour later to collect it. They give discounts if you have loyalty points from a phone provider or credit card points. Whatever the meal, the first criteria for my menu choice is that it be finished up in one sitting. Every time I put something in the fridge for another meal I forget about it. Since the local authorities started to crack down on food waste being mixed in and thrown out with the regular rubbish, and since I went through the ordeal of having my toilet block up after flushing leftover ramyeon soup down it, I’ve even given up on boiling instant ramyeon when I feel hungry late at night. Things like the leaf mustard kimchi and radish-top kimchi my mother packs for me get left in the fridge forever in their opaque, sealed containers. Six months or a year down the line, a moment comes when even the thought of opening the lid is terrifying. The only thing to do when that time comes is to throw out the whole container as it is, under cover of darkness. In the early 1980s, back when I used to watch Tiger Teacher on TV, I would often imagine the future. When the year AD 2000 comes we’ll ride spaceships instead of buses; instead of bean paste soup and rice with green peas for dinner we’ll have colourful little capsules. When that happens, how am I going to choose between black bean sauce flavour capsules and rotisserie chicken flavour capsules? I was at an age when I didn’t know that no matter what the future held, in the end, it would pass by without anyone realising it. Twenty years on, I’ve grown into an adult who trembles in fear at the thought of discovering an egg in some corner of the fridge long past its expiration date. If I crack the egg and a half-grown chick curled up inside jumps out and I make eye contact with that feeble young creature, I’ll have no choice but to call emergency services. I really don’t know any other way. I married the woman I met at twenty-one when I was twenty-eight, and we separated by the time I was twenty-nine. We lived together for seven months, but for Juhui and me that was plenty. We ended up in a “not-so-close friend" relationship. How else would you define a relationship in which you call on each other on birthdays or around New Years and exchange text messages once or twice a season? There were no real squabbles over money during the divorce, and it’s not as though there were any children to be divided up between us, so from the perspective of others our separation may have looked quite smooth. Juhui took the Maltese puppy with her. I was a little taken aback when she said she’d take the dog. We had chosen it together, at a pet centre in Chungmuro, to commemorate our wedding. But it was Juhui who had paid for the puppy at the time, so it wasn’t really a matter I could argue about. Occasionally, when we spoke on the phone, she’d tell me all the details about how the dog was getting on. “Last week he had his enteritis prevention vaccine. The vet said I have to get it done every year.” At such times she came across like a classy ex-wife in a Hollywood movie, reporting to her son’s father on how he was growing up. Two summers ago when we ran into each other in front of a cinema in Gangnam, she was wearing a white sleeveless dress. I’d never seen the outfit before. “We should go for a meal one of these days.” “Yeah, let’s have dinner sometime.” And then we each went back to the people we were with. My date for the evening asked in a serious tone who she was, and I responded with “an old friend.” That was the last time I saw Juhui face to face. Sometimes I think that if we’d split up before we became tied together by the institution of marriage, say some time back in the 1990s, at the very least we would have remained with each other in the hazy memory of a first love. I don’t know what would have been better, to be honest. But it’s not that I have any complaints about the way things are now. It’s the twenty-first century now. Anyway, it’s all in the past.   No One Proposed to Me © Cho Jang Eun   My parents are ordinary and virtuous people. It’s not their fault they don’t realise their fiercely sensible way of thinking can occasionally hurt others. As their eldest son, I have absolutely no intention of protesting when my divorce and remarriage comes up for discussion during their marital rows. This is Korea, a place where parents still see their child’s divorce as a stigma and for which they blame themselves. Mum’s position is that of an extremist without a minute to lose. “He’ll be forty before you know it. How are you not more worried?” “Ugh. He’ll sort himself out. Don’t you know that a capable man can find himself a beautiful young bride even at forty?” Dad’s position is closer to that of a moderate conservative, keeping his distance and watching to see how things develop. “You heartless old man, all I’m asking is for you to give even a quarter of the concern you have for your own hair to your son’s future.” Mum’s gripe is based in truth: all of Dad’s energy is focused on his hair. These days he’s completely taken with a dark green soap he bought from a home shopping channel. It’s supposedly made with the extract of a special medicinal herb that Native Americans used to eat. He told me how every night before going to bed, he makes a lather with the soap and massages it into his hair, then, following the instructions, waits for three minutes before rinsing it out. Come to think of it, I can vaguely remember seeing an advert on TV with a tagline that said something like: “You’ll never find a bald Native American.” There’s no use, Dad, it all comes down to excess testosterone. I couldn’t bring myself to say that to him.   “They said you can just go in for an initial consultation, there’s no obligation to sign up.” It looked as though Mum had already paid the membership fee in full. The woman at the agency introduced herself as my Couple Manager. She had pale skin and a square jawline. She told me I was in the B, rather than A, class because I’d been docked a few points for occupation and "stature." According to her explanation, being an office worker is no longer a stable occupation, and having the job title of section chief at thirty-four could be seen as a warning sign for forced early retirement. And when it came to my height, although 173 centimetres is the exact average height among the men in their books, women in general these days prefer a height closer to 180. On the other hand, I was given high points in the areas of housing and personal history. The fact that I own my apartment, even though it’s a very small place on the outskirts of the city, and the fact that my previous married life was very short, were both seen favourably, which meant I was able to make it into the B class. I guess my mother had only told them about my apartment and not the hefty bank loan I’m still paying off. Just like when she’d only told them about my seven months of official matrimony without letting on that it had been a seven-year relationship. To be fair, this whole world was probably one in which that kind of thing can be strategically overlooked. The deciding factor in getting me into the B+ class, right below A, was that I didn’t have any children. If I’d had one child I would’ve been docked ten points, and if I’d had two my score would have been reduced by fifteen. “I’ll raise your class ranking if we get good appraisals after the first couple of matchups.” The square-jawed lady spoke kindly. The terms “matchups” and “appraisals” were new to me, but I was able to figure out that they meant meetings with prospective marriage partners and their reactions to me. The Couple Manager stressed that if I had a particular type in mind when it came to the opposite sex I had to make it clear in advance. “Clients who initially claim they don’t care about a woman’s appearance are full of complaints when they actually meet someone.” I was about to say that I liked women with pale, square faces, but I checked myself. It didn’t seem like the kind of place where I could make such a joke. My mother had already paid the registration fee in full, so that was the end of the consultation. From then on I would be introduced to twelve women in turn, all of whom had been judged to be B-pluses, just like me.   If Sony hadn’t invented the PlayStation 2, men all over the world would be coming home much later at night. I was in the middle of a World Cup match against the French national team when the call came. I glanced at the screen on my phone and saw that it was a familiar number. After hesitating a moment, I gave up my chance at a free kick and answered. I guess it’s only right that anyone give that much courtesy to their first love/ex-wife. “It’s me.” That was the first thing Juhui said. It must take a great deal of self-conceit to believe that “It’s me” is still an appropriate greeting when calling your first love/ex-husband. Old habits really do die hard. “Right. It’s been a while.” That’s what I said, but we’d exchanged text messages only two months before, on the morning of her birthday. “Happy Birthday. Have a great day.” “Thanks. Hope you’re well.” So by the terms of our relationship, it felt too soon to be hearing from her again. I got a bit apprehensive. “There isn’t . . . something else, is there?” “No. Nothing in particular, just . . .” The way she let her words trail off was so unlike her. I sat up from my half-reclined position. “To tell you the truth . . . there’s something I wanted to ask.” A short silence flowed from the other end. It was the first time since we’d separated that this kind of tension hung in the air between us. “It’s Mongi. Would you be able to take him?” I couldn’t believe my ears. Mongi. Her Maltese dog. “How about Mongi? It means ‘dream’ as well.” “It’s childish.” “That’s how dogs should be named. Easy, light, and childish. Mongi, Mongi—it sounds pretty good.” “But mong sounds just like a dog barking. What are people going to think when you call out Here mongi, mong mong at the park?” That snow white fluffy lump was probably middle-aged by now. I felt a strong urge to pee. “Huh? Are you going off to live abroad or something?” “Oh no, no. It’s nothing like that. To be honest it’s kinda complicated.” Juhui let out a deep sigh. “The guy I’m seeing at the moment . . . he’s uncomfortable around Mongi. Oh, he’s not a cold-hearted person or anything like that. It’s just that he was bitten by one of the dogs in his neighbourhood when he was young. There’s still a scar on his arm.” That’s when everything became clear. When a man passes thirty, there are some things he learns without being taught: rainy Sunday nights are a blind spot for drunk driving patrols; eight or nine times out of ten, old classmates who get in touch out of the blue are trying to get you to join a pyramid scheme, so you should keep your wits about you; and there is nothing more foolish than getting involved in an ex’s love life. These trivial, mundane nuggets of wisdom block unforeseen calamity ahead of time. Following my rule of thumb, I chose to keep quiet. “Hello? Hello? Did you hear what I just said?” “Yeah, sorry but I’m waiting on an important phone call just now. I’ll call you back in a bit.” I made an effort to sound natural, to speak like a gentleman. Despite not being particularly quick on the uptake, would Juhui have realized what my silence meant? I hoped so. It was a method that could be misinterpreted as being underhanded, so I felt a little uneasy as I did it, but I turned my phone off and carried on with my football match against the French.   From the Gimhae line of Kims. Thirty-one years old. University graduate. Pharmacist employed by a large pharmacy chain. Previous marriage: four months. Economic situation: medium-high. No children. This was the first profile match sent to me by the agency. “If that young lady hadn’t made that one mistake, she’d be far too good a catch for the likes of us.” Mum’s sense of anticipation was tinged with great excitement. She seemed to particularly like that the woman had her own specialized occupation. I suspected that Mum might have slipped the square-jawed Couple Manager some money on the sly, maybe just a couple of notes to buy snacks for the office. But I didn’t say anything. “You can hardly call her a young lady. She’s already been married once. One mistake isn’t the same as another, you know. The situation is completely different for women than it is for men.” Dad expressed his blatant dissatisfaction with the fact that my match was a divorcee. Recently, he’d given up on the Native American soap and shelled out more money for a new liquid hair growth solution from a renowned Swiss pharmaceutical company that developed it after more than a decade of research. At one time Dad had had such robust and stiff hair, and so much of it, that he actually looked like a country bumpkin. Then, within a year after he retired from his position as a head teacher at a boys’ middle school in Gyeonggi Province, his hair began falling out at a frightening speed. Mum claims with great seriousness that the year he had to witness his eldest son’s divorce, 1.5 times more hairs deserted his follicles than in previous years. Seen from the front it doesn’t look too bad yet, but his hair loss is progressing rapidly around the top of his head. There are only some sparse strands left on his crown. It’s safe to assume that if he hadn’t been a man with so much hair to begin with, he definitely wouldn’t have felt such despair, nor would he have obsessed so much over every single strand. I promised Dad that when I met the thirty-one-year-old pharmacist I’d ask her about the efficacy of the new Swiss hair loss drug.  (Excerpt from pp. 9–18)   Translated by Sophie Bowman

• Sweet City of Mine Vol.40 Summer 2018

  “Growth” is a word rife with positive meaning. I completely understand why you’d want to believe that through pain, your soul expands, that you come one step closer on the path to becoming a mature human being. Such a rationalization can bring you some comfort. Yesterday, I felt satisfied, thinking I’d become a real grownup at last for the reason that I didn’t cry on the day of an ex-boyfriend’s wedding. Why had I been so stupid as to think that grownups don’t cry? Grownups, too, weep from time to time. When no one is looking, when no one knows, they cry bitterly with a dried-up heart, even without tears. That is a secret rule in this city. Yesterday was a long day. Gorilla strode into a grave called marriage, and buried with him were my passions. “We never have any luck with guys.” “So what? If nothing works out, we can build a luxurious, women-only silver town and live there together.” “Yeah, and all the staff will be pretty boys!” Jaein, who had made these resolutions with me, now acted as if she had never done any such thing. In the meantime I gave a presentation, competing with rival companies, and inadvertently meddled in a push-and-pull game involving someone who worked for a former client. And, um . . . spent a night with . . . a guy I didn’t know very well. Or I should say, a guy I’d just met. I’m not going to regret it. I won’t make excuses, saying that I was momentarily beside myself with the desperation and loneliness of someone who’s been left out. If being a mature human being means attaching meaning to every little thing you do, trembling with remorse, deeply repenting, saying you made a mistake and using it as foundation for self-development, I’m sorry, but I don’t ever want to be an adult. Just because I passed my coming-of-age doesn’t mean I have to live as an adult. I’d rather stay underage. A big child who has stepped aside from heavy words such as duty and responsibility, a voluntary minor. Couldn’t you just live like a fish swimming in the deep sea? Freely going from crack to crack in this solid system? Then if I caught the eye of another fish or a coral reef, I’d smile sweetly and go on my way. Promising nothing, regretting nothing! Whether such a life would be happy or not, of course, is a mystery. What about the tenacious longing in me for the warmth of another person, for communication, and for a stable relationship with someone? If anything went wrong, I would fall into a trap of self-contradiction and be stuck, unable to move one way or the other. But no use trying to decide now. Whatever will be, will be. For now, I’ll just go with the flow. Has life ever gone the way I wanted because I prepared and anticipated in advance? And I’ve arrived where I am now without even knowing what direction I wanted to take. With determination, I picked up the wine-colored lipstick and applied it to my lips. So what if it didn’t suit me? I could put on beige pink tomorrow, and maple red the next day. Or I could just wipe it clean.     The moment I put a hoop earring in my ear, I heard a text message come in. —Feel aight? I’m dying. Have a good one, and c ya this weekend—Taeo. My sense of reality, which I’d neglected, returned and hit me in the clavicle. Aight instead of all right. And what about the c ya? It cracked me up. I was about to text back, then paused. Should I text him back or not? I felt as if I were making a bet with myself. I didn’t know which side would win, but whatever choice I made, it was clear that the long day yesterday had come to an end at last. Eight a.m. I was ready for work. Once again, a new day was about to begin. Not a particularly special day, but a day different from yesterday. After a momentary hesitation at the door, I slipped my feet into flat, brown suede loafers. Where will these shoes take me today? Feigning bravery, I took a step toward the unknown.   Part 2: A Day of Choices 1. How many cities are there on earth? I imagine that I was born in a completely different place from a little gynecology clinic in a corner of Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea, at two o’clock in the afternoon of May 25, 1975. Stockholm, Sao Paolo, New York, Edinburgh, Prague, Istanbul, Berlin, Rome, Amsterdam, Kuala Lumpur, Madrid, Toronto, Buenos Aires. I can name dozens of remote, distant foreign cities on the spot. A “me” in Stockholm, a “me” in New York, a “me” in Kuala Lumpur, a “me” in Buenos Aries. What do all these “me”s look like? My sign, Gemini, my blood type, RH+B, my height, 161.5 cm (163 cm on my records), and my IQ, just barely 120, would probably remain unchanged. I also think that hot, sweet coffee would still make me feel better on days when I’m depressed, and that I’d still think Brad Pitt is the sexiest man in the world. But born and raised in a foreign city, they wouldn’t be living life as mundane as that of Eunsu on a corner in Seoul, would they? That’s the one thing I could not tolerate. The nameless person, who could have been me, should at least be enjoying a life much, much sweeter than the tedious, squalid days I must face every day. It’s only fair, isn’t it? If I can’t even resort to such fantasy, I might just up and die, so hard has been my life, and so suffocated have I felt. I’m on my way to work, and the subway is chugging tediously along the rails. It doesn’t go backward, or speed through the sky. I’m rocking vacantly to and fro, like withered tangerines packed tightly together in a box, or dead fish lined up, layer upon layer, in a wooden crate. Save for a few people who were lucky enough to get seats, most passengers in the compartment are just enduring, having failed to secure the minimum space necessary to protect human dignity. There’s nothing you can humanly do here now, other than to do your utmost not to get pushed around or fall. If you’re conspiring to throw water on someone’s burning determination, get them on a Seoul subway during rush hour and make them ride it around. When they arrive at their destination, they’ll be drained of energy, won’t want to bother with anything, and have no desire left in them but to lie down and rest, not giving a hoot whatever happened to their determination. It’s not so bad for me. There are only four stops between home and work. I need to hold out for just eight minutes. There’s someone at work who commutes from Uijeongbu to Mapo every morning, and someone who comes from Yongin. It makes me sigh just thinking of them. I tried to squash myself as tightly as I could and stared blankly out the window, beyond which pitch darkness flashed past.     Suddenly, I hear a rustle behind me. And then a corner of newspaper touches the top of my head. I gently bite my lip. If it was someone patting my butt I could report him or put him to shame, but there isn’t much I can do about the nerve this person had, spreading the newspaper wide open right in the middle of this jam-packed subway from hell. I scream in silence, Damn it, this is why this country will never go anywhere! Forgive me. I know, of course, that such clueless people can be found anywhere in the world. But in moments like this, I want to forget that. I decide to believe that people like that are alive and breathing only in Korea. When I blamed my fate through which I was born in this place, for all the annoying things that happened to me, the problems surrounding me became simple and I felt comforted somehow. If I had the choice, in what city would I have chosen to be born? Choice number one, Stockholm. The capital of Sweden, the country with the best social welfare system in the world. Pros: Gender equality is fully guaranteed by law, cohabitation is widespread, and there’s no bias against unmarried mothers, they say. Yes, that sounds appealing. Cons: A good social welfare system, a little too good perhaps, might make life boring. I also have qualms about the high depression and suicide rates. Choice number two, New York. Pros: The hub of culture, fashion, and trends. That goes without saying. Cons: Terribly high prices and rent. No matter how much I love Sex and the City, I know that to enjoy life and live the lifestyle of the characters from the show, I’d have to work my pants off, and that all the money I earned would go toward credit card payments. Choice number three, Buenos Aires. Wait, I have to get off at this stop. Frantically, I push my way through the crowd, and barely manage to set my feet on the ground. My absorption in the big, important decision, about which no one cares to know, has brought me a splitting headache. I arrive at a bitter conclusion as I walk quickly up the stairs leading out of the station: if I’d been given a choice as to what city to be born in, I almost certainly would not exist in this world today. I’m sure I’d still be hesitating, unable to come to a decision since 1975. I think it’s just as well, perhaps, that I was born here through no will of my own. I’m not saying that I’m a great patriot or anything. It would be more honest of me to say that it’s because I can grumble as much as I want. The freedom to say, “What’s wrong with Korean men?” or “There’s no other country where people are so bad at following traffic laws!” or “I’m sick and tired of everything here, I should just immigrate!” Let’s say that after thinking it over, I made the decision to become a Korean citizen. How would I dare complain about this country? Fearing pressure from those who would demand to know why I was never content and why I criticized everything, I would have no choice but to shut up and go live in a corner somewhere. Looking back, I’ve always been that way. Ever since I learned that choice was another name for responsibility, not freedom, I always broke out in a cold sweat whenever I had to choose something. Sometimes I wish that I had a GPS for my chaos of a life. “Sharp turn one hundred meters ahead. Drive with caution.” How nice it would be if someone made decisions for me and told me whether to turn left or right, like a navigation system that told you what the road looked like based on a satellite view of your car.    Translated by Jung Yewon Illustration ⓒ Amy Shin

• Anna Vol.35 Spring 2017

  Kyung bumped into Anna again eight years later in the auditorium of an English-language kindergarten. Kyung and her son had prepared for a year to get him admitted here. She had a Korean American tutor visit their home three times a week to coach him for the reading and writing exam. A few days before the exam, her son got a runny nose. His snot turned yellow and his fever wouldn’t break. Kyung decided against medicating him. The antihistamine in cold medicine was known to inhibit the brain’s waking function and cause drowsiness. She could always take him to a pediatrician after the exam. Kyung was aware that as she went from thirty to thirty-eight, she’d learned to discern what was more important and act on it swiftly. She knew if she didn’t act, she’d have to resolve things later and the work would fall squarely on her shoulders. She almost jumped for joy the day she heard her son was accepted into the kindergarten. She called her husband straight away but couldn’t get through. The nurses’ aide told her he was in the middle of a procedure. Her husband’s clinic focused on laser hair removals lately. She didn’t know exactly how these procedures went. Probably, they trimmed the bushy hair on the spot in question, applied anesthetic cream, and then used the laser. She’d occasionally picture her husband raising a stranger’s arm and tweezing the dark fuzz from her damp armpit one strand at a time, but she’d hurriedly shake off that image. Korea had no official term for English-language kindergartens. Strictly speaking, the kindergarten her son was to attend was the kindergarten division of an English-language cram school. Only English was used there. Everybody knew this already, but the director, an Ivy League alumnus, stressed this point again at the Parent Orientation. The teachers, the nutritionist at the cafeteria, the woman at the information desk, even the director’s personal assistant, everybody spoke only English. They had a three-strike policy. If the children were caught speaking Korean in the classroom, corridor, restroom, or gym, they were given a warning. If caught twice more, they had to apologize in writing. No exceptions were made. The director used the expression “kick out” instead of “expel.” He said that two students were kicked out both last year and the year before that for this very reason. He said his heart had ached to do this. Of course, the kids did nothing wrong. It’s just that it’s against our policy. He spoke rapidly in English and the deputy director standing beside him interpreted his speech into Korean. Kyung couldn’t make any sense of the Korean, let alone the English. The auditorium was too hot. It felt around thirty degrees inside, and she was wearing a mink coat. Her mother had gifted her that knee-length silvery fur coat when she didn’t receive a proper wedding gift from her husband’s family. Today was the first occasion when she’d meet the other parents. Winter was when clothes revealed status most blatantly. The coat was the most expensive piece of clothing in her wardrobe. She realized her mistake when she opened the auditorium door and walked in. No one was wearing fur. She finally had to admit the enormous coat wrapped around her was out of fashion. Her shoulders slouched. She looked for an empty seat and finally squeezed herself into the middle of the front row. The orientation started soon. She missed the chance to remove her coat and had to sit there for an hour wearing it. The orientation was a somber affair. The subjects were introduced one by one, followed by the required textbooks. The head teacher took the mic and proclaimed that by the time the kids graduated they’d read articles meant for grade four or five students in the US. The parents were quiet. Perhaps they thought the target was set too low. Then it was time to introduce the teachers. They were called in turn. The native speakers took to the stage first. They were all white. One source of pride for the kindergarten was that all of their foreign teachers were North Americans and held bachelor’s degrees in English education. They introduced themselves briefly. Following them, the bilingual co-teachers, called “licensed teachers,” were introduced in turn. Thirty in total, they were all young women, and all Korean Americans. They too spoke in English. Next was the turn of the TAs. Wearing what appeared to be a uniform of matching white piqué T-shirt and yellow-green apron, the TAs swarmed to the stage. Around ten people. They were all young women as well. Most English-language kindergartens hired native speakers alongside bilingual Korean teachers. Some places also had TAs only to take care of the kids. The TAs mostly chaperoned the kids on the school bus, accompanied them to the bathroom, washed their hands, and fed them. We’re different from other places. That was what the director said at the consultation. The children can be distracted if extraneous people are present in the classroom. She nodded in the confusion of the moment. So we have the TAs on standby in the corridor, he added. When she asked if they were there the whole day, he said it was only natural. He told her she needn’t worry because the TAs didn’t talk to the kids unless spoken to first, but she didn’t understand what she had to worry about in the first place. As she was leaving after the consultation that day, she spotted the TAs in the distance. They looked like inanimate objects dotting the long, quiet corridor. They stood there, hands clasped in front, shoulders erect, legs decorously straight, unswayed by earth’s gravity. The TAs descended from the stage slowly in single file. The girl third in line from the front looked faintly familiar. Kyung furrowed her brow. The girl’s hair was cut short and the makeup was heavier, but she could tell it was her. It was Anna. Like any other English-language kindergarten, here too the kids were called by their English names. Kyung decided on Jamie for her son’s name. Jamie’s class had ten kids in all and was assigned a Canadian homeroom teacher, a Korean American co-teacher, and Anna as the TA. Kyung and Anna greeted each other at the parent and TA meet-and-greet. Anna also looked surprised to see her. Surrounded by other mothers, they couldn’t show they knew each other, and besides they couldn’t talk in Korean anyway. In a few days, the notice board in the front of the classroom was covered with the names and photos of the homeroom teacher, co-teacher, and the kids. Anna didn’t have her name or photo on the board. The name Jamie was attached to the photo of Kyung’s son. He looked stiff in the photo. He didn’t adapt to new environments easily, but Kyung secretly believed it was because of a peculiar sensibility born of an inherent artistic bent. Unlike her hope that he’d improve, Jamie didn’t open up to the new kindergarten. The symptoms showed up as mutism. His homeroom teacher made an entry in English in his notes: No problems in intelligence or hearing, but won’t talk. The Korean co-teacher told her over the phone not to worry too much and suggested they wait and see. Though uncommon, she’d seen similar cases occasionally. The word “uncommon” pierced Kyung’s heart. It was a euphemism for “rare” and signaled the situation could worsen. Jamie’s behavior at home was no different from usual. He spent long stretches of time assembling LEGO or Magformers and giggled now and then while reading comics. But when she asked him about the kindergarten, he clammed up. Kyung went to the mothers’ brunch gatherings. Not because she wanted to but because she was afraid Jamie would become the topic of discussion in her absence. The mothers freely discussed such things as that the level of the content being taught was lower than what they’d expected, the English of the guest teachers for art, music, and PE was unsatisfactory, or the school lunch menu had a worrying number of sausage or ham-based foods. A proposal about making hockey and soccer teams for the boys and a rhythmic gymnastics team for the girls came up as well. The Canadian homeroom teacher was rumored to be strict but, luckily, he was a capable teacher. The co-teacher was newly hired from another cram school and they were worried because she was yet untested. Anna wasn’t rated too badly, except for someone who complained she’d sent her kid home with his coat buttoned wrong. She was more affable and light-footed than the TAs of other classes, was patient while feeding the kids, and used the proper toilet paper after the kids had gone to the bathroom. Anna’s still a hard worker, Kyung thought to herself. Jamie didn’t get better even after a month had passed. He didn’t utter a word of Korean or English at the kindergarten. He didn’t sleep until late at night and didn’t get up in the morning when she shook him, but he never expressed his reluctance to go to school. He often missed the school bus that came to pick him up in front of their home at eight thirty. Every morning, Kyung had to tear down the road in her car with Jamie in the backseat without even washing up or brushing his teeth. He didn’t speak in the car, either. When she looked in the rearview mirror to check if he was sleeping, he’d be staring out the window. She grew more worried. She hadn’t confided in anyone about his symptoms. Her husband would put all the blame on her. Her relatives or close friends would give her a few words of incautious advice but would be of no real help. She’d prepared herself to visit a pediatric psychiatrist or a child psychology center one day, but it was too early for that now. She wanted to delay that moment somehow. The kindergarten kept telling her to wait and see. The homeroom teacher stopped sending the notes he used to write in English. She understood his predicament. He must not have anything particular to write about. The co-teacher called her once every four days to report on Jamie’s condition. She too didn’t have much to talk about. Once before finishing the call, she told her three kids from Jamie’s class had already received warnings for using Korean. She didn’t tell her their names but Kyung felt she’d tell her if she only asked. One of the kids had two strikes. In the co-teacher’s voice, Kyung sensed a nuance that she should consider herself lucky because her son didn’t face that trouble. After hanging up, Kyung resolved that if the teacher spoke to her about this again she’d email the director to complain she’d revealed personal information about other students and mocked her son. One day, when she entered the kindergarten with Jamie, Kyung found the front desk empty. She held Jamie’s hand and stepped into the elevator. Classes were already in full swing. One, two, three, the TAs stood ramrod straight in the still corridor. They had similar builds and wore the same uniform, so it was difficult to tell Anna apart immediately. Anna saw them first. She smiled brightly at Jamie. She had no creases on her face. Jamie dropped Kyung’s hand and latched on to Anna. Anna quietly bowed to Kyung. Kyung returned the bow. Anna opened the class door. Jamie tamely followed her inside. Getting hold of a TA’s contact details was difficult. If she asked at the kindergarten, they’d consider it strange. Kyung mulled over it for a while, then decided to check the mail in her inbox from long ago. She found a text file with the emergency contact numbers of the 37th batch of the Latin dance club. Names, both familiar and only faintly remembered, were arranged in a single row. Cho Anna. Anna’s number was also there. She tried it and heard the phone ring. Soon after, Anna picked up. Kyung didn’t know what to say, so she said she was Jamie’s mother. Oh my god! Hello, eonni! She couldn’t remember if Anna called her eonni, or sister, back then. But she was certain the two of them had never been together by themselves. She was a little disconcerted at being called eonni but didn’t exactly mind. It was much better than being addressed as “Jamie’s mother.” Anna was flustered at Kyung’s suggestion they meet outside. She said she wanted to but couldn’t because contact between parents and teachers was forbidden outside the school. The homeroom teacher and co-teacher are contractually forbidden. Some parents ask them for private tutorials, you see. But as for us TAs, I’m not sure. I didn’t sign a contract. Was Anna snubbing her in a roundabout way? Was she making Anna uncomfortable? Maybe. She hurriedly said she didn’t have an ulterior motive. She only thought it was amazing they’d run into each other again and wanted to meet up for coffee. And there’s another thing. I’ll be frank. It’s because of Jamie. She managed to say before her words trailed off. You know the situation. I’m so worried. If this goes on, I think I’ll go raving mad. She continued desperately. I want to talk to you about Jamie. I don’t have anyone to share how I feel.    pp. 203-213Translated by Agnel Joseph

• "Sampoong Department Store" Vol.8 Summer 2010

  On June 29, 1995, Thursday at 5:55 in the afternoon, Sampoong Department Store in the 1675-3 district collapsed. It took less than a second for each floor to fall.  That spring I had many things. I had comparatively genial,moderately conservative parents, a clean full-size bed, asemi-transparent, green Motorola pager, and four handbags. And at night, with my boyfriend recently employed at an investment firm company, we dated according to The Ideal Couple’s Dating Manual (although I didn’t actually check to see if the book actually exists.) Those nights were responsible, boring dates. Because I believed that if I only tried I could become whatever I wanted, naturally I didn’t want to be anything. The fact that 1990 was barely half over was intolerably confusing. I’d start to say, “It was a really wonderful year,” then after thinking, would feel irresponsible like a real estate telemarketer who presses any phone number and pressures you to invest. The first chapter of my organized education 20 years before 1995: my mother, who had optimistic expectations about the reality of South Korea’s preschool education, held her daughter’s hand, who wasn’t yet even four-years old, and visited the local day care center. It was the most renowned school in the area. The director, with plastic butterfly-shaped glasses perched at the end of her nose, carefully studied my face. She still looks likes a baby. My mother’s feelings were hurt. Is that so? But she’s a much more competent character than she looks. I didn’t want to disappoint my mother, so I kept my mouth firmly shut like a clam and looked as fierce as I could. Even now, when I want to protect myself while meeting new people, I occasionally still do this. After the director gave me permission to attend, she left me the following curse. Now it’s time for you to slowly learn order in a group environment. The grand order of a group environment: waking up from the same dream to carry the same bag to attend school at the same time and sing the same songs and dance to the same rhythmic dance, then eat the same snack off the menu. Four years old. Tardiness was inevitable. Why every morning someone forced me to wake up from a sweet morning sleep, I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t even accept it. Each morning my mother had to throw me on her back and run through the side streets. Our housekeeper Sukja who at the time worshipped the top star Nam Jin, ran with her while hefting up my butt with her hands. The supervising teacher began to wonder about the cause of my repeated tardiness. That…Teacher, it isn’t my fault. When the round sun rises, I get up. The way you taught us to, Teacher. After I get out of bed first I brush my teeth, the top then the bottom teeth, then I wash my face and brush my hair and dress, then next in order I try to eat. But, oh no! Wouldn’t you know that my mother and my Sukja were still sound asleep? There wasn’t a single person getting my breakfast ready. Teacher, as you must know I’m only four, too young to make breakfast on my own. So I woke up my mother, waited for breakfast to be ready, then thoroughly chewed my food and ate, so I was late. The side dishes were black beans in soy sauce and pan-fried anchovies, and seaweed soup, all things I like. As the guardian of a habitually tardy student, my mother was immediately summoned. Though it probably felt unfair, she couldn’t let her daughter be branded a compulsive liar so she promised that even if there was a catastrophe, she would get up earlier than her child and have breakfast readily prepared. It was a period when, as if I were possessed by some god, lies flowed smoothly out each time I opened my mouth. Unfortunately, my parents didn’t seem to take seriously the laziness or habit of lying, all signs of people unfit for society. Instead, it’s probable that they were proud that their child’s language skills excelled in comparison to other children of the same age. Thirty-five. It was especially the case with my parents who’d had their first child very late for the times. There was an anecdote of how my father had compared his little girl to an Olympic marathon medalist for gripping the table on her first birthday and barely managing to stand, and surprised the relatives who had gathered for my first birthday celebration. Before I started school, my father would call me out to the living room for visitors and have me read the newspaper in a loud voice. Goodness, you mean she mastered Korean this quickly? The visitor politely faked surprise and my father would modestly return with another question. Aren’t all children like this these days? As if I were a wunderkind, I covered my mouth and laughed. And because the visitor might ask me what time it was, my heart pounded furiously. I could read everything but the Chinese characters in the morning paper’s editorials in a clear voice, but I was a kid who still couldn’t read a clock. If numbers intruded, like an iron-deficient anemia patient I suddenly became dizzy and the world began to turn round and round. After 1, I couldn’t understand why not 5 or 8 but 2 had to come. Likewise, for the longest time I couldn’t tell my left hand from my right, but when I was eight-years-old my left wrist was cut on a glass door, and that problem was naturally solved. If she had been pierced a fingernail more to the side, it would have damaged her arteries, she’s a very lucky child. From gynecology, internal medicine, pediatrics, ENT, to orthopedics, the all-in-one neighborhood physician who diagnosed me made disorderly stitches to sew the broken skin back up. On my left arm I had a long and coarse scar running down. What will we do with that scar on a woman’s body, my mother cried, but I was as happy as if the heavens were flying. At the words, “Everyone raise your left hand,” I would no longer falter and have to sneak glances at the kid next to me. Now I just had to quickly raise the hand with the scar! It was a scar stitched up so clumsily that in the distant future, the indignation of my friend S’s husband, the head of a national plastic surgery association, wouldn’t subside, but for some odd reason, there wasn’t a single time I was ashamed of that scar. One day in 1990 when I couldn’t have been more bored, I measured it with a ruler and found it was a total of eight centimeters long. The shoes that a trendy group at the time was wearing was about that same height. When I ran into a girl wearing heels about that height, I was overwhelmed with a faint intimacy and an unexpected sadness at the same time. June 29, 1995. The weather was hot enough to suf focate you. 5:03 in the af ternoon. I entered Sampoong Department Store. Valued customer, we apologize, said the elevator girl. The air-conditioner throughout the entire department store is out of order. It will most certainly be repaired by tomorrow, she said with a pleasing smile. That spring I had on the intranet myself, 24 friends who were either college students, college students taking time off from school, or college graduates, Seo Taiji’s first, second, and third albums, and a LeMot 3 model word processor. In my desk drawers were Min Byeong Cheol and Jeong Cheol’s language books, and scattered i.d. cards with Pagoda Academy’s seal printed on them. In the early 90s, I was definitely spending more time at the language institutes around Gangnam Station than at the Seongbuk-gu campus. If time were relative and not absolute this was even more true. I gave myself the nickname “Sally.” Classmates in my conversation class asked me if I’d gotten it from the movie “When Harry Met Sally,” but actually, I’d adapted it from the Japanese anime “Sally the Witch.” As long as I didn’t have to go by my real name, I felt like Sally, Candy, Eliza, or even Pippi was fine with me. Because it was of the generation when Jeong Hyeon-cheol became Seo Taiji. My formal education came to an end in 1995. The fact that I was the same age as Seo Taiji was for me, both then and now, a source of pride and inferiority. In March 1992, the single “I Know” and in August 1994, “Dreaming about When can we see our people in this divided land? As we hesitate, we lose ourselves. When I came to my senses, it was late fall in my final semester at university. We’re finally really turning into old women, my friend S said with a sigh. I’d been staring at S’s shiny lips for a while. I wondered what lipstick brand she used. A girl who’s got a job in one hand and a boyfriend in the other is a potential gold medalist, but a girl who doesn’t have either is a candidate for the noose. Another friend W made this chilly joke. According to W’s laws of classification, she herself was a gold medalist with her internship at a prestigious investment firm and a boyfriend at a public university that senior year of our second semester. At night I couldn’t sleep. For over 20 years I had filled in blanks for profession with the word student without hesitating. I’d never imagined that other paths existed after graduating from high school besides becoming a college student or studying at an institute to retake the college entrance exam. Graduating from college was no different. I dug through intranet message boards and tracked down the studio known to take the best i.d. photos in all of Seoul trying to look docile, reliable, and amiable, I said “whiskey” in front of the camera, and smiled. A friend who’d recently passed the national airline exam had given me this tip. The me in the resume photo with her teeth half-exposed and the edges of her lips lifted was difficult to insist was not me. I wrote over 10 cover letters with my LeMot 3. I am a solid person. The cover letter that I sent a brick-producing company began like that. To a stationary and office supplies manufacturer, I began: At this very moment a pen with your logo on it rests beside me. I wrote, I will be the kind of person whose body is a ball pen sacrificing all its ink for the company. For companies whose purpose I just couldn’t grasp, I wrote this. I was born and raised by benevolent parents in an ordinary environment. I would like to sacrifice my youthful dreams and passions for your company. Please just give me a chance. I received a page from one company. It was a film company. I couldn’t remember what I’d written on that cover letter. Only at the interview did I realize why I’d passed the document screening. The film company was at the top of a fifth f loor building with no elevators. Like a local real estate office, after passing an office with a worn-out leather sofa, steel cabinet, and cheap office desks crowded together, I reached the unexpected luxuriousness of the president office. The president was a small, skinny man in his 40s. He stared into my face. You’ve got a mole under your eye. You’ll have to get rid of it in order to get married. Ah, yes. If he asked me between marriage and work, what would I choose, I was resolved to say, I don’t think choosing between marriage and work is an issue for the modern woman, but he didn’t ask. You wrote that you’re skilled in English. Yes. If you have to put a circle around “advanced,” “intermediate,” and “basic,” everyone would put down “advanced.” In any case, I had completed an intensive course at the Pagoda Language Institute. But then the president suddenly began speaking informally to me: You can write some, can’t you? I didn’t immediately understand what he meant by writing some. I put on an idiotic expression. This is frustrating. I mean when you were young did you go out to writing competitions and things like that. English and a good sentence writer. We’re looking for someone uniting these two talents. Well, I was on the liberal arts track in high school, and I once won a prize for writing a poem. I’d gotten this far when I somehow began to feel myself being very hard up. The president looked doubtfully at me and asked again. That’s fine. Then what’s an erotic movie that made the biggest impression on you? What? You don’t know what erotic movies are? No, well…Nine 1/2 Weeks and Red Shoe Diaries. A smile spread across his face. There, there’s a lineage there somewhere. He gave a lengthy explanation of what kind of work I would be in charge of, which reflected that he intended to hire me. You’ve heard of rice cake films, right? When it came to words beginning with rice cakes I didn’t know anything but rice cakes and rice cakes with ramen, but I couldn’t boldly shake my head and say no. Ultimately what our company intends to do is bring in unknown third-world art movies and introduce them to Korean audiences. We’re waiting for the right time but very soon theaters exclusively showing art movies will open. Then what do you think will be most urgent? That’s right, stable funding. This thing called a life in society, you can’t live just doing what you want. To achieve your dreams, there are times you have to lower yourself. At the end of heroically discussing his thoughts as an importer of erotic movies with a mere first-time job-seeker, he told me that my work would actually be to edit and smoothly embellish the rough translations of foreign films—mainly age 18 and over adult movies—that had never been released in theaters but had gone straight to video. Since moaning’s the bulk of it, it won’t be too difficult. You can start next week, right?Well, why aren’t you answering? If I could have some time to think… The president’s eyes widened. He’d received my timid voice like a count whose proposal had been rejected by a girl from the countryside. Tsk, tsk, you’re still young. Still not hungry enough. I confusedly accepted the white envelope that accounting managers usually take care of, and left the film company. “Interview Fee” was written on the envelope in thick lettering. Inside, there were two crisp 10 thousand won bills. Is it always done this way? I thought. It was my first interview so I had no way of knowing, but I was surprised. While I walked down the five flights of stairs, I felt overwhelmed with regret for throwing away a chance to work at this excellent, conscientious company. Then and now I was a typical, capricious human being. The Q brand was located on the right at the end of the women’s clothing floor. I passed by the Q store but I didn’t see R. There was only another pink-uniformed employee tapping leisurely at the cash register. R might have gone out for a snack. R liked spicy buckwheat noodles with half a boiled egg. She was always complaining that the spicy noodles sold as a snack in the department store cafeteria for employees was missing the egg. My new friend. My new friend I’d gotten that spring, no one knew her. R and I were classmates at Z girl’s high school. While we attended school, we had hardly ever spoken to each other. There wasn’t any special reason for this. R was a quiet girl who you never noticed was there or not. Though we were in the same class our freshman year, our student numbers weren’t close, our height or our grades weren’t similar, we didn’t have any good friends in common, and even our route to school was different. At Z girl’s school near the north end of the Han River, there were five buses operating for nearly 40 percent of the students coming in from the Gangnam area. After only moving into the famous eighth school district for less than 30 months, the school’s parents couldn’t accept that their kids had been forced to transfer to another school; there was an organized movement to retransfer as a group, and the school had to do their best to appease them. We will make sure that your child has a safe commute. Isn’t the return trip more of an issue than the arrival? So they don’t leak out in the wrong direction, delivered for certain to your front door. As soon as evening study hall ended, I ran like there was a fire in order not to miss the school bus. Though I found this out later, R’s house was about 20 steps away from the school’s back entrance. As soon as our eyes met, R and I recognized each other. This was in February 1995. It was less than a week before my college graduation ceremony. My friend S called me. I’m in trouble. They say my company’s suits only. W’s at a financial firm where it’s all uniforms, so clothes won’t cost her anything, isn’t she lucky? I couldn’t think of the right thing to say. Hmm, well, I think it’s still better to wear your own clothes than all wear the same outfit. Yeah, that’s true, isn’t it? Say, what are you wearing for graduation? Um, anyways whatever we wear will be covered by the black gown, so will anyone even see what we’ve got on? Still, that’s not right. Let’s go shopping. I’ll head out to Sampoong. The department store I’d agreed to met S at was five minutes away from my house. The entire time I was slowly walking out of the apartment complex, I kept fingering the beeper in my coat pocket. It didn’t vibrate. At the time I was waiting to hear from a cosmetic magazine and a custom design furniture company. No one was giving me money for showing up at interviews, so I found myself longing again for the film company. A few nights later after I’d had a few beers, instead of calling my first love, who was also my ex, I called the film company office, but I only got the dial tone for five minutes. It was definitely a good company where you didn’t have to work late hours. I couldn’t believe that within a week I would become a person without an affiliation. S wanted to try on all the clothes that the mannequins were wearing in the ladies department. A velvet dress by U brand didn’t flatter S’s plumpish figure, but she insisted on buying it. Q makes good two-piece pants suits, she said. We went to the Q store. Look, and there was R standing in a pink uniform. “Wow,” R first said. “Hi! Oh, how are you?” I said. That was our first conversation ever. “I work here,” she said, though it was obvious without her saying anything. “I see, I didn’t know. I pass here often.” “Yeah,” she said, “I moved from the Myeongdong Lotte store not so long ago.” It was extremely awkward. S’s eyes seemed to ask me who she was, but I pretended not to notice. There was no real appropriate explanation, plus I couldn’t just whisper to her, she went to the same high school as me but you could say we just know each other by face. S picked out a two-piece khaki trouser suit and went into the dressing room. It was only R and I now. Feeling awkward, I laughed. R said, “You haven’t changed a bit. When you laugh you still look pretty the way you used to.” Had R seen me laughing before? I’ve been the city type since I was born. I learned that if someone compliments you, you have to respond with another compliment. So I said, “You’ve gotten much prettier than before.” R gave me an embarrassed smile. “Yeah, I was kind of chubby back in school, wasn’t I?” “Now that I think of it, you have lost weight.” We became silent again. “It’s strange. The design of the pants must have changed. Don’t they make me look shorter?” S stood in front of the full-length mirror turning this way and that to look at herself. “No, customer, it looks good on you.” “Is it because it’s too long, I can’t tell.” S looked completely dissatisfied with herself in the mirror. “Should I adjust the length for you?” R got down to her knees at S’s feet to take up the pants cuff. R’s hair was rolled up into a black hair net, and a few stray hairs were scattered across the back of her neck. S ultimately didn’t buy the pants. I said slowly, “It was good seeing you today.” “Me too. Have a good day shopping, and next time you’re around here, you have to stop by.” “Yes, let’s meet next time.” “Wait a second,” R called, so I turned. “Give me your pager number. If there’s a sale, I’ll let you know early.” To be polite, I asked R for her pager number too. R jotted down a pager number beginning with 015 and a store number beginning with 5 on a memo pad with the Sampoong Department Store’s round, flat logo on it. A week passed without contact from the cosmetic magazine company or the custom design furniture company. On graduation day I didn’t go to school. Winter break was long but the first day of this non-school break felt different. My parents must have felt a variety of emotions towards their eldest daughter who they had briefly mistaken as a “possible genius” when I was very young and was now an unemployed college graduate, but they didn’t probe deeply. They were well-off enough not to need their daughter’s monthly check to help them get by. Instead of inviting them to the graduation ceremony and getting my head covered with a cap and being nailed into a graduation photo, I tacitly accepted the offer of a blind date, so was able to escape being a completely undutiful daughter. A man studying at an American dental school had returned in search of a bride. He said his major was the recovery of damaged teeth. He stopped walking down the street and pointed at a 10-story building. If I see just three patients a day, I can put up a building like that in no time. It was the first time I’d actually met someone outside of a drama television series who could say something like that with sincerity. At the same time he earned my contempt, he’d gained my mother’s interest. Mom, are you crazy? How can I live where I can’t even communicate? You always studied English at institutes. I poured all that money into those institutes so why can’t you communicate? Anyways, I can’t. There’s absolutely no way I’m living in another country. Why? Because I’m a person capable of speaking high-level Korean. That’s when I realized I’d learned English not to leave but to stay. March was a blink away. When I woke up in the morning, noon had already passed. I got my leather backpack and left for the National Library in Seocho-dong. At the library’s entrance, I flashed them my student card, not my national identity card. The man handing out library passes didn’t seem interested in things like student card expiration dates. In the periodical section, the typical magazines published domestically were displayed. As I read magazines like Design House and Working Women, my head felt like it was being emptied out. I tried exactly one time the library cafeteria’s soggy curry consisting of only potatoes and carrots. For a late lunch I’d eat instant noodles with kimchi or drink a Pocari Sweat from the vending machine. Since I still had a coat on, it wasn’t spring yet. Then it was the fifth day. The library was too cold. I poured hot water over instant noodles with kimchi in the library’s store and was pulling the noodles apart with chopsticks when I suddenly felt a coolness up my spine. I tossed the untouched noodles into the trash can and left the library. I took the local bus and headed to Sampoong Department Store. On the fifth floor of the department store, the spicy mixed noodles were unbelievably good. I put a dollop of mustard over the deep crimson noodles and mixed them around. It was so spicy, tears oozed out of my eyes. I burned the roof of my mouth drinking a cup of hot beef broth. I took the escalators and went down a floor at a time. The fourth f loor was sporting goods, the third f loor men’s wear, then I looked closely across the second floor women’s clothing department. There still wasn’t a better place to spend an electrifying time for free than a department store. In the right-hand corner store I spotted R helping a customer. She was laughing amicably in front of a large middle-aged woman who looked like she wouldn’t look right in the Q clothes that didn’t come in anything bigger than a size 6. I came up behind R and was about to tap her on the shoulder, but turned away. On the first floor I tried out a new eyeshadow in the display case, and toyed with a pair of Audrey Hepburn-style oversize sunglasses. On the basement floor I went into a stationery store and bought a canvas pencil case with baby Pooh bear drawn on it. At the next door bookstore, I read an entire collection of prizewinning stories whose contents I’ve now forgotten. Much later I raised my head, but I couldn’t tell how much time had passed. Then and now, there were no clocks in department stores. My stomach started growling. I overturned my backpack, looking for R’s note. I went into the phone booth on the first floor lobby made to look like a street in Paris, and called R on the second floor. Hi, it’s you. R said my name correctly. Wait just two hours for me. If I hurry, I can get out by eight. Years after 1995 had passed, I sometimes wondered. Why had R answered my call so calmly? Had she predicted that I would call first? Or, at the time, had R also needed a new friend who didn’t know anything about her? Just after eight, a slew of women poured out towards the outdoor parking lot area. Even in the dark, the onceuniformed women now in everyday wear still had pearlywhite skin and looked full of life. R tapped me on the shoulder first. Were you waiting long? In jeans and a hooded sweater, she looked the same as she had in high school. I’m hungry, let’s go. She took my arm as if it were the most natural thing to do. We walked down towards the Seoul Express Bus Terminal area. After we’d gone into a knifecut noodles eatery and ordered did I remember that I’d also had noodles for lunch. Wow, I’m crazy about noodles. So you are too! Even so, you should eat wheat products only every other meal. If you don’t, you’ll end up ruining your stomach, like me. Everyone in this field eats irregularly so they have messed-up stomachs. I bit into a pickled radish. You’ve worked for a while in department stores? Since I started when I was twenty, it must be five years now. I hadn’t heard a single wisp of news about R since graduating from high school, so I couldn’t have known that she hadn’t gone to college. I see. Do you like the work? It’s all right. Making a living is the same for anyone, really. Say, they’d gone into distribution. Even if they habitually went around saying they’re going to quit since the work’s so hard, they can’t escape. The knife-cut noodles arrived. We silently ate the steaming noodles. R didn’t ask me what kind of work I was doing. She didn’t even ask me if I’d graduated. When we got up to leave the eatery, R took the check. I quickly took four 1,000-won bills out of my wallet. It was my share. By the early 1990s, splitting the bill down to the coin had become a common way of paying between female university students. R forcefully declined and pushed my hand away. I had to put the four bills away. Then I’ll get coffee, I said. R took up my arm again. Truthfully, I find cafes a waste of money. Why don’t we just go to my place? It’s just one bus stop away from here. We got off at the bus stop next to Z Girl’s High School. I followed R down a dark, gloomy labyrinth-like alley and pushed through until I saw a back entrance to Z school. It’s a shortcut, she said. I’d gone to the school for three years but didn’t know this road. My house is really close to the school, isn’t it? I nodded. Out of all the students, I probably had the shortest commute. There were times when the sun came up while I was sitting in a totally empty classroom, R said with a shy smile. To get to R’s house, we had to go through the main gate, and beside a house, go up a long flight of cement stairs. It was dark, and the stairs were spaced out widely so it was a little difficult. R turned on the lights in the living room. The room was simple, but the lights of Seoul from the window were spectacular. Wow, I blurted, and exaggerated my amazement a little. This is a killer view. It may not look like much here, but it’s still Nam mountain, R added as if she were embarrassed. I knew you would like it. There was a purple cloth over a typewriter and low table. R pulled aside the typewriter to the window. The faintly sweet coffee enveloped my tongue. Before R returned, I took the escalator down to the basement floor. The Sampoong Department Store’s layout was so spacious that you could close your eyes and still get around. I went to the stationery store and got a hardcover diary. I was torn between a water droplet print and a zebra print cover, and finally chose the zebra print. It was so humid I could barely breathe. Three or four employees in uniforms stood near the cash register chatting. Did you hear? The roof over the fifth floor buckwheat noodle store started sagging. What’s this? It’s not collapsing today, right? There’s no way it can happen today. I mean, I wore my new pants. Ha, ha, the girls laughed. It actually was a joke. Customer, it’s 4,900 won. I took the 100 won change and left. It was early spring. I became rapidly close with my new friend. As if all of my 24 friends were busy, my green Motorola pager was awfully quiet. Aside from R, I didn’t contact my other friends either. As usual, daylight was short in March. I was running out of the i.d. photos where I’d raised the ends of my lips. I had to take the negatives from the studio reputed to take the best photos in Seoul and get 10 more copies printed at the Sampoong Department Store photo booth. What do you do all day at the library, R asked. Well, I just read and study. R’s eyes grew wide. Don’t you get bored? What is it you keep studying? Sorry about that, but I’ve never ever studied until I’ve gotten bored so I’m feeling guilty. If you don’t have anywhere to go in the day, I should give you my house keys. No friend had ever spoken to me like that before. I merely smiled. It’s empty anyways so you could make ramen, read, and make yourself comfortable. Just wash up after yourself. The contract conditions were really basic for loaning out her house. The moment R took out a silver key, I felt indescribably burdened. I shook my head vigorously. No, it’s fine. What am I going to do in your house without you? Just take it. You never know. If I die of a heart attack in my sleep, use the key to come in and find me. Hey, why’re you being so morbid? Then if I slip and fall in the bath, come and save me, all right? All right. At least I’ll get you dressed before calling 911. Uh, ha, ha! You promise? The key that went from her hand to mine looked small and imperfect. That key, I don’t ever remember putting it in the keyhole and entering R’s house alone. After the library closed, I would walk to the Sampoong Department Store. I usually took the local bus, and on days the weather was warmer, I walked. Some days I walked to the right and passed the juniper trees around the Seocho-dong intersection. On other days, I crossed the street from the library and crossed through the Gangnam Saint Mary’s Hospital. The two hours or so I waited for R passed quickly. I read, picked through music, looked at clothes, or ate ice-cream. I did everything there. A department store’s essentially that kind of place. If I got bored, I went to the Q store and helped R out. To a customer trying on clothes, comments from another customer like me had more weight than R’s words. Actually, I think pastel tones suit you better than neutrals. The light green trench coat you tried on before looks 10 times prettier on you than the gray jacket you’ve got on now. Even if it’s a little more expensive, if I were you I’d definitely buy that one. After the customer left with a full blue shopping bag in her arm, R and I faced each other and faintly smiled. The way I see it, you’ve got a singular talent in this area. R praised me this way. As closing time approached, the number of customers dwindled. When it was closing time, “The Sorrow of the Parting” flowed out over the speakers. Even after hearing the fast, lighthearted arrangement “The Sorrow of the Parting” every day, it still felt unfamiliar. My old friend that I care about so much, why do we have to say goodbye? Do you have to go? Even if I go away, how would I forget you? Our deep friendship, let’s sing for the day we’ll meet again. As I quickly hummed the lyrics to myself, I left the department store, I waited for R who was changing into jeans. R and I took turns paying for dinner. But you don’t have any money! R would protest, but I had never even imagined bumming off of another person. In fact, my finances weren’t bad. I didn’t know about pizza, chain restaurants, and steak, but I could afford spicy noodles or sushi rolls every day. I hadn’t told R that I was still getting an allowance from my parents. After dinner, we’d go to R’s house and watch a video or drink beer. For snacks we had peanuts or onion ring snacks. R would absolutely not buy snacks that smelled like squid. She wouldn’t even eat dried squid. She said she couldn’t bear their twisting bodies as they roasted over the gas range without her eyes closed. You don’t have to look, I said. I’ll roast them. R didn’t even pretend she heard me. They drag these squid from the deep sea to land, then it’s not enough that for days they’re dried to the bone in the hot sun. Isn’t it a little brutal to finally roast them over a fire? She had a point. My desire to dip squid in mayonnaise then gnash it into pieces with my molars disappeared. We always ran out of beer before the onion ring snacks. When we ran out of beer, I got up. R walked me to the bus stop. For the last few days, the unusual evening weather had been becoming unusually mild. One by one, the forsythia trees around Nam mountain’s circular road were shooting buds one by one. With the street lights glimmering, I couldn’t tell just how bright yellow the flowers were. They could have even been azaleas, not forsythias. Come to think of it, I’d never even seen R’s face in plain daylight. Though R would have told me if I’d asked, I never asked her why she lived alone. That was common courtesy according to my standards. R might have even felt a little hurt that I didn’t ask. Determining the appropriate emotional space between people, both then and now, is extremely difficult for me. I was also curious about the poetry chapbooks on her shelves, but I didn’t ask about those either. The Black Leaf In My Mouth by Ki Hyongdo with a caramel-colored cover, part of the Moonji series of 80 poets, was one I also owned. “For a long time, I could not write. The weather was bad here and I couldn’t endure the weather. Then, too, there was a street and the cars passed.” When I reread the excerpt on the back of the chapbook at R’s house, I knew it wasn’t the weather I couldn’t bear. It was myself. I went into the first floor phone booth and paged R. R didn’t even have an ordinary message recorded on it. Uh-hum, I cleared my voice and began to leave a message. It’s me. I stopped by on my way through here, but I didn’t see you. Are you off getting a snack? You’re doing okay, right? I’m doing fine, too. Sorry for not keeping in touch. Working life seems to be like that. When I come back home, I’m busy just getting ready for bed. Today I just left in the middle of work. I left, but I don’t have anywhere to go. Take care of yourself. I’ll come again next time. Even now, I’m not sure whether R ever heard my message or not. It was Saturday. I woke up late and washed my face, then saw the Q store’s phone number flash on my pager. Can you work for just one day? Our manager’s grandmother suddenly passed away, so she has to go down to the provinces right away. They say we’re getting support from the head office tomorrow, and since it’s the sales season, there’s lots of customers. Help me out just one day. I answered, sure. I opened my closet. Since it seemed best to wear the Q brand clothing, I looked for a white Q brand blouse I’d bought last spring and put it on. Underneath, I wore a black skirt I’d bought at a store selling bonded goods around the Ewha Womans University area that R was always mistakenly saying, It’s one of our pieces. R was in the Q store with a man I’d seen for the first time. Manager, this is our help for today, she said as she introduced me. He took my national identity card and jotted down a few things elsewhere. Then he said, Please change into a uniform. R was even more confounded than me. But she’s only helping for one day. Why a uniform? Those are the original rules. But we didn’t do that way before. Well, the people who didn’t wear it made a mistake. But she’s a student and my friend, and she’s only helping us for today. Please just let it go this once, she said. I flinched because I wasn’t a student. R was resolute. If people passing had seen, they would have thought it wasn’t the department store uniform he wanted me to wear, but a prison uniform. I dissuaded R. I’m fine. I’ll just wear it. R looked at me. Her eyes were like a young calf’s soft eyes. You sure it’s fine? I sniffed, Of course. It’s not a big deal. Manager, please get a name tag on her that says part-time worker. The uniform fit me perfectly. I was part of the generation free of uniforms. Outside of my Girl’s Scout outfit in elementary school, this was the first uniform I’d worn in a long time. The uniform was heavier than I’d thought. Strangely enough, that’s how it felt to me. Everything was different from when I used to stand by and help R while wearing whatever and saying anything I wanted. At noon, customers came swarming in. There was so much to do but I was sluggish and unused to the work. Far from picking out clothes that flattered customers, I was dripping sweat just trying to find the sizes they asked for. R covered for me as best she could, but if she was looking for leftover stock in storage or dealing with another customer, I didn’t know what to do. If I was pinning up the sleeves of one customer, it was typical for a customer who’d come in later to suddenly get peevish. How much is 30 percent off this blouse? It was too much for me to know what was 30 percent off not 150,000 won, but 148,500 won. On top of that, wasn’t I the kind of person who got dizzy merely at the sight of Arabic numbers? I looked at R. On the other side of the store, she was busy picking out a top to go with the white pants a customer liked. The cashier at the register also looked madly busy. Miss, what are you doing? Quickly total that for me. I’ll take these four suits, so take 30 percent off them. I carefully tapped the calculator. The problem was, the busy cashier didn’t check my careless arithmetic. It wasn’t long before the customer who’d given me a 100,000 won cashier’s check and received her change came back. Which bitch did the math? Bitch, she pronounced the word with her unblinking eyes fixed straight ahead. I didn’t realize yet that the object of her curse was me. What is the problem? R stepped forward and blocked me. It wasn’t you a little while ago. She rang up the total, over there. She’s our temporary staff. You can speak with me. What, why are you using temporary staff that doesn’t even know the basics? Did she even graduate from junior high? She can’t even add? Anyhow, I was undoubtedly temporary staff that didn’t even know the basics, so I kept my head completely bowed. I apologize, R said. I’ll ring you up again immediately. She bowed low several times. There was no way for me to know how I’d managed to add around 40,000 won extra to the total. After the customer who got her money back glared at me, she pulled a scarf off a mannequin. I’m so angry, I can’t just leave like this. I’ve wasted so much time here because of that idiot, I’ll take this as compensation. Take it out of her day’s wage or something. R snatched away the scarf from her. Customer, she said. That’s difficult because this is a regular store item. We will give you another complimentary gift. The customer snatched the scarf back and raised her voice. Who wants to receive your cheap complimentary gift? I like this so I want to take this, so what’s the problem? The uproar came to an end when the manager rushed over. In the end the customer left with the scarf shoved into her shopping bag and squarely left. As R listened to the manager’s stinging reprimands, she kept her lips shut tight. I, I just wanted to run away from there. After the manager left, R said to me, It’s all my fault. Sorry. Now thinking back, I should have said those words first. I just managed to speak. Are you all right? Her eyes shifted. Of course. This doesn’t even come close to the worst. R brushed the dust off the shoulders of my uniform. Good work today. The worst is about over so you can go now. I couldn’t say anything. I’ll settle your payment later for your work today. You should change. Will you be all right alone? Yeah, I’m fine alone. I’ll hurry up and get changed. R thrust me into the changing room used by customers. In the dressing room, I took off the department store uniform and changed back into my clothes. The white blouse and black skirt. Though they weren’t a uniform, they felt heavy. It felt like iron was pressing down on my shoulders. It was merely four hours since I’d arrived at the Q store. I left R and quickly left the department store. I felt like the pink Sampoong Department Store building, thud, thud, was following me. It’s not uncommon to grow apart from someone you were once close to. It’s especially common as an adult. Not long after the incident, I got a job. It was a company that imported animal feed. It was surprising to learn how many kinds of animals there were in the world. I was part of the marketing department and sold feed for laboratory test animals. Hamsters required 10-14 grams, and rats required 15-20 grams. Rabbits required at least 120 grams. Neither R nor I paged the other. The vending machine coffee in the company’s hallway was awful compared to R’s coffee. I was busy introducing myself to hospitals and university research labs that used our products, that I didn’t even notice spring passing. We had to wear suits on the weekdays, but on Saturdays, jeans were permitted. I was pleased with at least that. I picked up the phone several times then put it down again. I also got a boyfriend. When I met the guy, a man newly employed at an investment firm, we usually talked about work. He said he liked me because I was cute. What do you mean by cute? It’s just what it means. You’re not pretty, but you look cute. You’ve got white skin, and there’re three wrinkles at the corners of your eyes when you smile. There was no doubt that he would think Ki Hyongdo was the name of an isolated island off of Hallyeo Maritime National Park. But he wasn’t bad because he was kindhearted and an optimist. That spring I had many things. I had comparatively genial, moderately conservative parents, a clean full-size bed, a semi-transparent, green Motorola pager and four handbags. Everything was the same again. Spring passed languidly, and then summer came. The Sampoong Department Store that opened its doors on December 1989 was a modern five floor, four basement floor building. On June 29th, 1995, that day the air-conditioner wasn’t working and it was extremely hot inside. Sweat ran like rain. When did it suddenly become summer, I muttered at 5:40 while walking across the first floor lobby. At 5:43, I left through the front door. At 5:53, I opened up my zebra print diary. While I was writing, Today I… I heard Boom! It was 5:55. Sampoong Department Store had collapsed. It took less than one second for each floor to fall. Then a lot of things happened. My semi-transparent green Motorola pager message box was full. The woman who lived the f loor below us left to buy tofu at the Sampoong Department Store while making dinner and didn’t return. They say there was a half-shredded stalk of green onion left on her cutting board. The rainy season began. A few days later a list of the deceased and missing was printed in the morning paper. I didn’t read it. In the next column, a celebrity had penned a special editorial. The content was about how perhaps the collapse of the Sampoong Department Store rumored for its decadence was a warning from heaven to a country steeped in extravagance and pleasure-seeking. I called the newspaper’s customer service to complain. The paper said that they couldn’t release the writer’s phone number. I couldn’t help but scream at the customer service representative. Did that woman say she’d ever been there? I would have been breathing heavily while laughing. I felt bad but I couldn’t help it. I still feel grateful to the person who held the phone waiting until I stopped weeping. From the concrete ruins, I saw the rescue of a girl who had survived in there for over 230 hours. There was even a girl who’d survived for over 285 hours. I did nothing but watch television. My boyfriend worried about me. Being born means we’re all going to die someday. When I was serving as a medic in the army, I saw several deaths. My maternal uncle was an army general so we could have greased some palms, but my father deliberately had me sent there. I can’t say it was precisely because of everything that had happened, but soon after, we broke up. He promptly started dating a college student four years younger than me who looked like a cute Japanese doll. By registered mail I received notice that I was fired by the company I hadn’t shown up since June 29th. The reason given was absence without notice. That was an appropriate expression. Threehundred seventy-seven hours after the collapse a 19-year-old girl was discovered. Her first words were, What day is it today? The casualties of the Sampoong Department Store’s collapse on June 29th were a final tally of 501 deaths and 938 injured. What if you’d left ten minutes later? People told me that I’d been very lucky. The small, imperfect silver key stayed in the last compartment of my desk drawer for 10 years. When I was hurriedly looking for something like Scotch tape or a heating pad I would open this drawer. R didn’t contact me once. R and my pager numbers had already disappeared from the face of this earth. From pagers to cell phones and “I Love School” sites to blogs, people frequently changed their toys. As I began writing this, I used the “find people” function on Cyworld to track down R’s blog. There were a total of 12 women born in 1972 with R’s name. I clicked on each of these names. As if most of the 12 with R’s name were busy, their sites were not elaborate. Thirty-three. We must have been in the very middle of going through the realities of life. When I went into the 11th blog, on the front page there was a photo of a young girl. The kid looked about three to four years old. I enlarged the photo and looked at it for a long time. Her eyes were large and good-natured. As I looked closely, her round chin also seemed to resemble R’s. I wanted to look at some clearer photos, but there was only the one photo. I earnestly desired that child to be R’s daughter. Many things had changed and stayed the same. For a time the Sampoong Department Store lot remained vacant until 2004 when a high-rise apartment complex took its place. A few years before that apartment complex was completed, I moved far away. Even now occasionally I pass that spot. Sometimes a part of my heart feels stiff and numb, and sometimes it doesn’t. A hometown isn’t always a place that you earnestly yearn for. Only after I had left that place, was I able to write.    * Translated by Krys Lee.

• What You Never Know Vol.16 Summer 2012

  The body was discovered on the last Sunday in May. It was the time of day choir members, cloaked in pigeon-gray sack-like gowns, sit in rows in the back yard of the church under the glare of the sun and practice hymns they would sing during second service; the time of day men and women, who met for the first time the previous night, have another round of hot, awkward sex, ignoring throbbing temples caused by their hangovers; the time of day egocentric husbands and fathers, wearing their neighborhood soccer league uniforms, run across middle school playfields, the muscles of their thighs and calves tensing and relaxing. It was a typical day in early summer, with mostly sunny and clear skies above the Korean peninsula. Feathery clouds drifted by and a gentle wind was blowing from the northeast. The temperature in the greater Seoul area was 24.3 degrees Celsius, with the humidity at 57 percent—a markedly higher temperature than the month’s average. Most people in the world accepted that the temperature of the Earth’s surface was rising at a precipitous speed. Although the forecast for rain over the weekend turned out to be inaccurate, the Korea Meteorological Administration didn’t receive many calls of complaint, perhaps because it was Sunday, when office workers didn’t have to wonder whether to put their folding umbrellas in their work bags. At ten in the morning on a Sunday, people sleep in and the religious pray and lovers whisper their mutual adoration and some kick around a soccer ball. It wasn’t too surprising that several boys, at an age when they’d just begun having wet dreams, were hanging around the riverbank for no reason, or that a corpse that had been at the bottom of the river, pushed along by the current, happened to float up to the surface. One of those boys was the first person to discover the drifting body—he stated that, at first, he didn’t realize it was a person. When the police arrived at the scene, the boy and his two friends, all in the sixth grade, were in a very excited state. The boys, who lived in a nearby apartment complex from which they could see Y Bridge, often hung out under the bridge. “Something big was floating over there, far away. I have really good eyesight—almost 20/20. But these guys said it was just a garbage bag somebody must have dumped. They said it was nothing. But I kept thinking it was weird. So I went home and came back ‘cause I’m not the kind that gets scared easily, you know.” His family owned a small set of eight-power binoculars. It took him a little over fifteen minutes on his bike to return. He stood in the same place as before, but he didn’t need to bring the binoculars to his eyes, as that suspicious object had been pushed closer to land while he had been gone. With his excellent eyesight, he could clearly discern with his naked eye what the object was. The boy unconsciously straightened his shoulders and raised himself up on tiptoes. He was a brave boy, but at that moment he didn’t have the presence of mind to remember that he had the binoculars in his hands. He stood there as though he was fixed to the ground until his friends came back a short while later and called his name. “We biked all the way to the end of the bridge and came back, and he was just standing here like that. I looked to see what he was staring at and it—it—that person’s body—” Only one of them had a cell phone. His parents had bought him the phone when he was about to start the sixth grade. At the time, everyone was worried because an elementary school student had gone missing in Anyang. The boys had a small argument over whether they should call 119, the emergency response number, or 112, to reach the police. The owner of the cell phone suggested that he call his parents first but his friends shot down that idea. The officers from the local division arrived about ten minutes after they called 112. The team of detectives on duty at Y Police Station also mobilized, and the crime scene technicians with their black identification kits appeared last. The corpse in the water was that of a man. He was completely naked. As are most corpses discovered in water, his death mark wasn’t visible and his skin was quite distended because of hydrogen sulfide and osmosis. The skin, undergoing saponification, had turned pearly gray, and felt slippery, as if it had been lathered with soap. His palms and the bottoms of his feet were wrinkled, like mulberry paper drenched in rain, and red bloody fluid drooled out of his nose and mouth. All of this hinted at the long time the man had spent underwater. His eyes were firmly closed and his expression was inscrutable. *** [···] Yu-ji was born in the middle of summer, in the kind of heat that made you drip with sweat even when you sat still. Eleven-year-old Hye-seong had been shorter than Yu-ji was now, disliked beans in his rice or tofu in his bean paste stew, and lived in Hwagok-dong with his maternal grandmother, her identical twin sister, and his older sister Eun-seong. Their house, one of many look-alike two-story houses built by the same developer, was nestled in an old alley. His mom came once a week and his father visited once a month to see the children. That day, Sang-ho drove his car all the way into the alley and parked it right in front of the house. He’d never done that before. Usually he called five minutes before his arrival so that Hye-seong and his sister could walk out to meet him on the main road. But that day, when Hye-seong, who had been lying on the floor doing his summer vacation assignments, opened the door, Sang-ho was standing on the other side. Hye-seong bowed at a ninety degree angle at his father, whom he was seeing in only two weeks. As if in a television drama, Sang-ho awkwardly stroked his head. He was wearing a jacket even though it was an extremely hot day. Hye-seong’s grandmother was flustered at the sudden visit by her former son-in-law, now unrelated to her. Instead of Grandmother, who couldn’t hide her uneasy expression, Great Aunt brought out sweet iced coffee for the guest. Sang-ho sat on the far end of the sofa with his knees pressed together and downed his glass. He didn’t take off his jacket. Great Aunt aimed the fan at the guest’s waist level and made it immobile. “Eun-seong, your father’s here.” There was no way she couldn’t have known, but Eun-seong remained burrowed in her room, not making a noise. “Oh, goodness, she must have fallen asleep. She was yawning earlier,” Great Aunt said, making excuses. “Oh, it’s okay.” Sang-ho waved his hands. He turned his gaze to the open books on the floor and asked Hye-seong, “How’s school?” “It’s summer vacation…” Hye-seong’s voice was small, despite his intention otherwise. Sang-ho said, like a sigh, “Oh, right.” The person who broke the short but long silence was Grandmother, who was sitting on the floor near the perimeter of the room. “So. Has she delivered?” “Yes, yesterday.” The unfamiliar expression of “has she delivered” tickled Hye-seong’s ears like an ill omen. Grandmother wasn’t warm and tended to be terse, but she was also pathologically afraid of being seen as not doing the right thing. Grandmother ordered Hye-seong to go and change his clothes. Nobody told him where he would be going with a new set of clothes on. He followed his father into his silvery-gray Sonata. It was the first time that he sat in the passenger seat instead of the back seat of that car, and it was the first time he was going somewhere with his father, just the two of them, without his sister. His parents separated around his fourth birthday and completed official divorce proceedings the following year. After that, father and son had seen each other at best a dozen times a year. Hye-seong felt ill at ease around this large man named Father but also worshipped him, and he worshipped him while he felt ill at ease around him. [···] The car crossed the Han River at a speed that was just below dangerous. They were now in a neighborhood that Hye-seong had never been to. A single obstetrics practice was housed in an entire seven-story building. Sang-ho strode across the lobby and Hye-seong followed briskly not to get left behind. [···] A white blanket was covering the woman. She was in an awkward position, as if she had been lying down but had raised her upper body halfway. As he waited outside the door, Hye-seong had summoned a faint image of her—the woman who had joined them for dinner one night a year earlier, around this time. She wasn’t the kind of beauty that turned heads but her unflashy features gave off a feminine sweetness. The woman’s demeanor that day was as plain and simple as the Pyeongyang-style cold noodles they were eating. She hadn’t bent over backward to get on the siblings’ good side, neither had she gone out of her way to act aloof. It was his father who kept making exaggerated gestures and downing multiple glasses of soju, and it was his sister who became more and more standoffish and didn’t touch a morsel of meat on the grill even as it began to burn. Instead of his father, who got drunk before he could reveal his relationship with the woman, she was the one who had driven them home. As they parted, she said, “Bye, see you soon,” like a friendly flight attendant. But the woman in front of him now, whose eyebrows, now that they weren’t made up, seemed to stop in the middle of her brow, showed no hint of the vitality of that first meeting. She was pale and swollen in an ugly way, like overproofed dough. A mere twenty hours before, she had fought labor pains that threatened to shatter her pelvis and had survived; her lower half had been torn apart in her effort to bring into the world a bucket of amniotic fluid and blood and a baby weighing over three kilograms. It was the only time Hye-seong had been that close to a new mother. “Thanks for coming,” the woman said with a wan smile. He hadn’t noticed it before but when she smiled, two slanted lines appeared on either side of the bridge of her nose. Hye-seong smiled back, not knowing what to say. His father smiled along. Hye-seong sat in the center of the room on his knees, suffering a surreal dizziness as his toes sweated. The woman asked Sang-ho to bring her some mouthwash. She rinsed her mouth and spat in a shallow basin. Sang-ho told Hye-seong that she couldn’t brush her teeth because her gums were swollen. “You must be hot, especially since we can’t turn on the air conditioner. You know, new mothers have to be kept warm. Show him the baby,” she said slowly. Father and son left the room and went downstairs using the emergency stairwell. Behind a large glass window, newborns were lying side by side in several rows. Sang-ho stopped at the middle of the window. There was Yu-ji, before she was given the name Yu-ji. The swaddled baby was unbelievably small and wrinkly and red. Only a face that had lived a thousand years would look like that. Father tapped the glass lightly with his fist. “Look, it’s your brother. Say hello,” he said, addressing the baby. The baby didn’t bat an eyelash. Hye-seong awkwardly raised his palm before quickly lowering it. He felt winded, as though a strong force had given him a wallop. The baby wrinkled her nose and burst into tears. A nurse picked her up to soothe her. Hye-seong didn’t cry. He never wondered why his father brought him there that day. As he grew older, he began to understand that Sang-ho had a mercilessly simple side to him, living his life nonchalantly and doing things that even he himself would be hard pressed to understand. There had been times in the past when Hye-seong wondered how life came to be formed, but he naturally discovered the answer not too long after Yu-ji’s birth. The day he discovered that a baby was conceived as a result of a man putting his penis inside a woman and releasing semen, he quietly went to the bathroom to vomit.    * Translated by Chi-Young Kim. AUTHOR'S PROFILE Jeong Yi Hyun has authored four novels, four short story collections, and three essay collections. Her first novel, Sweet City of Mine (2006) was adapted into the TV series My Sweet Seoul. Her novel Foundation of Love: A Couple’s Story (2013) was part of a two-volume series exploring issues of love, marriage, and family, with Alain de Botton writing the second part.

REVIEWS

• [RUSSIAN] Everything is (Not) Fine Vol.61 Autumn 2023

• [JAPANESE] Only You Know: きみは知らない (You Don’t Know) by Jeong Yi Hyun Vol.54 Winter 2021

• Reality Bites: Goodbye, My Everything by Jeong Yi Hyun Vol.22 Winter 2013

• An Insult to Blind Love: The Foundation of Love: A Couple's Story by Jeong Yi Hyun Vol.17 Autumn 2012

BOOKS