INTERVIEW

• Interview with Kim Soom: From Girlhood to Old Age, From Seoul to Manchuria to Ussuriysk Vol.55 Spring 2022

  The name Kim Soom brings to mind many keywords—grotesque, family, shipyard workers, history, comfort women, and diligence. I’d like to begin with the last keyword. The year 2022 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of your literary debut. You’ve lived more than half of your life as a writer, having published a total of twenty-three works, including seven short story collections and sixteen novels (ranging from novels in epistle form, literary retelling to Young Adult, and two written in the form of testimonies that seem to stand somewhere between the boundaries of poems, novels, and interviews).  Your first collection of short stories, Fighting Dog, was published in 2005, eight years after you won your very first literary award for your debut short story. We can roughly calculate that you’ve published at least one book every year since 2005. Last year alone, you’ve published three works: Listening Time, Drifting Land, and A Swallow’s Heart. As a fellow writer living in the same age, your diligence is something I aspire to learn. Twenty-five years is a long time and not all writers are capable of persistently turning out books as you have. I’m curious, what is the source of your strength that has led you to write so tirelessly? I don’t know where that strength comes from, either. And I believe “impulse” would be a better word for it. I’ll see, hear, read or think something and then, like a bolt of lightning flashing across the silent sky, the impulse to write will shoot up from within me. It’s this out-of-the-blue impulse that has led me to write these last twenty-five years. I assume such an impulse will take different forms according to when it visits you. Your early works mainly deal with the absence of communication and the sheer solitude originating from severed relationships and the mood is quite grotesque. We can still find this worldview in your stories today. Can you explain how the words solitude and grotesque have come to define your works? I’ve spent my childhood growing up in the countryside. When I look back on the landscape that used to surround me like a folding screen, such as anything from nature—a reservoir, mountain, rock, or tree—or animals, such as chicken, pigs or goats, or even humans, I think there has always been this strange, eerie aura about them. Nature in its pure form (and even the people who live within it), practically unaffected by civilization, will seem primitive and strange. Everything in it will be in perfect harmony and yet exposed to competition and the struggle to survive at each and every moment. And they’ll exist completely alone, in solitude. Nature’s solitude is so great that the solitude of human beings simply pales in comparison. I believe my emotional development took place in that world, and because of that, the foundation of the world I create cannot help but be grotesque and filled with solitude. You’ve revised your first two short stories, “On Slowness” and “Time in the Middle Ages,” which launched your literary career, and used them to create “The Story of Roots” that went on to win the Yi Sang Literary Award in 2016 (included in the 2019 story collection Will I Be Able to Touch the tree?—Ed.). What thoughts passed your mind as you reworked your two early works for the first time in twenty years? I tried to determine what belonged to me and what didn’t. It wasn’t easy removing or deleting the things that weren’t mine. Going back to my early works that I worked on during the eight years until the publication of my first short story collection was like pushing myself into the hardened ground that has become rock solid and forcing myself to come face-to-face with the roots, that is, the roots of my stories, hidden underneath. It was a gruesome and painful task but I was able to learn that the roots of the stories I write today come from those two early works. I think one of those roots may refer to labor. Your novel Cheol (Iron) minutely details the horrific reality of laborers who are treated as consumables at a huge shipyard. The story deals with realistic issues and at the same time illustrates an absurd situation created by the characters’ blind faith in “iron.” Thirteen years later, in 2021, you published A Swallow’s Heart. I noticed there were fewer descriptions of the absurd but a noticeable increase in poetic language. What sort of change did you feel writing another story based in a shipyard thirteen years later? As I continue to write, I feel my sympathy for my characters deepen. I especially felt that way as I wrote A Swallow’s Heart. It’s a novel I wrote with great satisfaction. I thoroughly enjoyed the writing process, although I had to deal with the painful personal history and sadness of each of the laborers who worked for the shipbuilder’s supply team (that is the so-called ghost workers of a secondary subcontractor, who not only work in the gray areas of safety but who are also stripped of their most basic rights). ©Ozak Another area we cannot overlook when it comes to your novels is history. Your focus used to be on relationships, especially on the pain caused by families and disillusionment about family relationships. However, the focus shifted to history. Is there a special reason behind such change? I don’t consider myself having more interest in history than other writers. And I don’t think of myself as someone who writes historical novels. When I wrote One Left, Drifting Land, and A Swallow’s Heart (they’re all full-length novels and each deals with a specific group of people), I rather felt I was focusing on the individual rather than the whole. What I mean is, I felt as though I was focusing on each and every person. I was treating “everyone” as the main character. Even if a person is completely alone in the world, that person still exists within history—the history of that person’s family and the history of the ethnic group or country that family belongs to. Many would agree One Left (2016) is a milestone work in your literary career. The novel is considered monumental in the area of testimonial literature. And I personally believe publication of this work has provided the best possible consolation to those who have been victimized by history. What were your biggest concerns when writing One Left? I wanted to depict the “typical day” of the main character. I wanted to show how this woman, who survived wartime sexual servitude, endured so many days thereafter and grew old, living her everyday life. I wanted to show how challenging, lonely and great her struggles were to live one day at a time.  And I kept reminding myself, during and after the writing of the story and even today, that my novel should never harm or heroize any of the victims, and that I should never exaggerate the truth. One Left has been translated into several languages and received rave reviews, and even won a translation award for fiction in Taiwan last year. What may be the reason behind the work receiving so much interest from foreign readers even though the story deals with history that is distinctive to Korea?  The Japanese military’s “comfort women” are victims of wartime sexual violence and I think there is a consensus among people that such wartime atrocities are issues that have to do with all of us, regardless of our age or nationality. One Left is a novel that is like a documentary, based on the recollections of the story’s narrator, an unknown survivor of Japan’s wartime sexual crimes, from the day she learns that only one former comfort woman remains alive, whereas Flowing Letter (2018) depicts the appalling reality of a fifteen-year-old girl who lives and works at a comfort station. What led you to write Flowing Letter after writing One Left? After the publication of One Left, I always felt it was an unfinished work. I could picture the girls and the comfort station before my eyes, unlike when I wrote One Left, and that led me to write Flowing Letter. Although I wrote and published One Left first, Flowing Letter is a work that comes before it. I still think One Left is incomplete, and I believe that thought would have become even greater, like an outstanding debt, had I not written Flowing Letter. The stories of the surviving comfort women continue on in your works in present tense. The voices of Kim Bok-dong, who passed away in 2019, and Gil Won-ok, who is currently in ill health, are rendered poetically in Nobleness Lies in Self-Examination (2018), Have You Ever Wished for a Soldier to Be an Angel? (2018), and a supposed prequel to these two works, Listening Time (2021). I caught a glimpse of your struggle to honor the people who testified their experience in Listening Time. I had the impression you were trying to listen to the “unspoken silence” of the surviving victims. I can imagine how close you must have become with them after writing a series of these works. Is there any special story you would like to share on how you came to build a close relationship with the surviving comfort women? My relationship with them first began after I wrote One Left. I think they appreciated the fact that I had written a story about comfort women, and Kim Bok-dong and Gil Won-ok halmeonis (grandmothers) invited me to dinner. It was my first time actually meeting with former comfort women. I sat facing them before a table laid out with food they usually ate, finished my dinner and returned home. There wasn’t much talk. I normally enjoy speaking with the elderly, but I struggled talking with them that day. Even then, I had no idea I’d someday write about them. Several months later, I was given the opportunity to join the halmeonis at their own place and time and listen to their stories in their own voice. While working with them, I found myself thinking about relationships in general and came to the conclusion that relationships occur naturally, that they cannot be forced according to a certain plan. So you were given the chance to share your life with them. I can imagine what a wonderful writing partner you must have been to them. Now, let’s turn to Drifting Land (2020), a novel which won the Dong-in Literary Award. This work introduces to the readers another story from our history, the forced migration of ethnic Koreans in Russia. I was surprised at the minute details you deployed in the train scenes. I’d like to know what caused you to develop an interest in this topic and how you conducted your research. Forced migration of ethnic Koreans was always on my mind and I wanted to write a novel about the migration process even years before I’d written the first draft. I searched for whatever materials I could find and read them until the scenes inside the train and the ethnic Koreans therein came alive. Your most recent work of publication is “The Man Who Touches Waves” [the January 2022 issue of Hyundae Munhak—Ed.]. It’s a story of a totally blind man who works as a special education teacher. The book reads like a monologue or even a long narrative poem. It also borrows some literary forms from plays. What led you to write it and will you continue to write about people with disabilities? I’ve been meeting with four people (individually) who have visual impairments. Since last summer, I’ve been writing stories inspired by the conversations I had with them. The recently published work is the first among such stories. A thought came to me one day that I wanted to write about “someone who cannot see” given the chance “to see.” I was able to write “The Man Who Touches Waves” as I was introduced to someone who is totally blind and works as a special education teacher. I value each and every moment I meet with them. Conversations with them always bring me joy and fulfillment, and I hope it is the same for them as well when they talk with me. I don’t know where my work is currently headed, just as I had no clue before last summer that I’d be given the chance to work with visually impaired people. “The Man Who Touches Waves” seems to mark the beginning of a long project. I look forward to the works that follow. Let me now turn to a personal question. I’ve been told you love animals. In your short stories “The Hole” and “My First Goat,” you illustrate horrifying scenes of pigs being buried alive after the outbreak of foot and mouth disease and other forms of animal cruelty. I’m curious about your thoughts on animals. I pray for my dogs that have passed away after being at my side for more than ten years. I pray almost every day, asking for forgiveness for failing to do my best in looking after them while they were with me. It is now 2022. What are your writing plans for this year and what kind of stories would you like to write from now on? The revised edition of Noodles will come out soon. It’s a collection of short stories, including “The Hole,” published eight years ago. I began the first day of the New Year revising the stories in the collection and found myself really looking into the lives of my characters (even more so than when I first wrote them). It was a meaningful experience as I gained deeper understanding of their pain and sadness. Translated by Juyeon Lee

• Interview with Kim Soom: The Power of the Damaged to Overcome Themselves

  KLN: What are you going to talk about at the Göteborg Book Fair 2019? Kim: It’s a pleasure for me to accompany some of my favorite Korean writers. At the book fair, I’d like to discuss gender and labor issues. I wrote a novel about a temporary female subcontractor working at a shipyard. The story shows discrimination between permanent and temporary employees at the shipyard. From my interviews, I discovered that there was further discrimination between male and female temporary workers. I’d like to talk about this issue in more detail.   KLN: Did You Ever Dream a Soldier Would Become an Angel? is a testimonial novel about an elderly woman named Kil Won-ok, a survivor of the Japanese military sexual slavery. Why have you chosen this particular work for the Göteborg Book Fair? Kim: Kil Won-ok is now 93 years old. She was 13 when she was forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, and although she survived, she’s lived a distorted life ever since. Yet, she refused to surrender and restored her damaged dignity and human rights. Many women these days are exposed to sexual violence in daily life, and admirable Kil Won-ok continues her effort to restore their human rights. Through this novel, I hope to share her wisdom with readers worldwide.   KLN: How do you feel about meeting international readers? Kim: When I meet readers with different identities and languages, I come away with new inspirations. It expands my mind and perspective. I very much look forward to another such experience.   English subtitles translated by Helen Cho

FICTION

• The Man Who Touches Waves Vol.55 Spring 2022

  1   Trying to see, The desire to see. These things remain inside me.   I don’t know what it means to stare.   Is someone else there? (facing forward and in a bright, gentle voice) Hello. (tilting head slightly) Hello. Is no one else here?   2   I’m standing. And I’m imagining a door.   Do you see me?   The window is far away. The window is so far away. It is both in my room and far away. Am I, too, far away? And from what am I far away?   I only know after it is passed. And… I only feel after it is passed.   The desire to see remains.   I know what it means to see. I don’t know what it means to see well. Look over there… When someone says this, I unknowingly look. After all, I once could. I sometimes fool myself into thinking I’m actually seeing. When I hear a door opening, I turn toward the door and stare in its direction. I think to myself that I am looking at someone entering the room.   3   Ah, I can picture waves. I can picture waves… I’m on my way to the ocean. But I’m not on my way to see the ocean. I can’t see it. We can’t see it. What we saw wasn’t the ocean, but waves.   Waves break, foam, swell, come in and go out, rage and die down, and create sea spray… Waves are white. I know the color white. There is no white in ROYGBIV. White is cotton, notebook, bunny. I wanted to take white on a walk.   At the time, I could still see the letters with my left eye and the help of a magnifying glass. I had failed the college entrance exam and was spending all day at home alone. Back then, I was more frightened than ever to leave the house, but at the same time, I often felt the strong urge to go far away. On days like that, I would go to the subway station near our home and take Line 3 all the way to the last stop and back again. It was one Monday when my older brother, who was in college at the time, suddenly gifted me white (a bunny). I gave light green (lettuce) to white. I listened to white eat light green. The sound was like rustling colored paper. White ate light green and turned white again. I couldn’t touch white. White was alive. I was too afraid to touch something living. Instead, I touched a different white (duck stuffed animal). That night when the lights were off and I lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, I could hear white hopping. On Tuesday, I again gave white some light green. White ate light green and turned white again. I wanted to take white on a walk. On Wednesday, I gave white some more light green. The light green of Wednesday was more light green than that of Monday. It was also more light green than that of Tuesday. I wanted to take white on a walk on Saturday. I gave white more light green on Thursday. I could hear for a short few moments the sound of white eating light green. The unfinished light green was lying in front of white. It wilted and turned brown. That night when the lights were off, I fell asleep quickly as I didn’t hear white hopping. I gave white more light green on Friday. Then it was Saturday morning. The light green of Friday had turned brown and was lying in front of white. I was about to put fresh light green next to brown when my father said, “It looks like white is dead.” Only then did I try touching white. My father and I went to the dike on Yangjaecheon Stream, near our home, to dig a hole and bury white. Brown dirt stained my hands as I held the shovel.   Why is there no white in ROYGBIV? There had been white in our home. The white of that home was in a cage and had one leg. I am forgetting white.   Even if I forget white, white exists. Even if I forget white, white dies.   4   I know the color red. I don’t know bright red. Red is red. To me, colors are their names.   Red bloomed and became a red carnation. It transformed into a red motorcycle, and then a red telephone with a rotary dial. The red telephone bloomed into a green digital telephone. The green telephone cried at 3 AM. I heard a voice over the green receiver.   “Will you let me hear your voice?”   If you let me hear your voice, it might visit my dreams tonight.   5   Stairs aren’t important. And… Stairs don’t frighten me.   I went up five steps. I passed the door and went up six more steps. Then four more. I want to go down on my own. I want to go up on my own. There was no wind on those steps. I went to find those stairs. It was past midnight on a cold winter’s day. All that came to mind were those stairs. At that late hour, that was the only place I could walk to on my own. I was twenty-six, and they were the stairs at the subway station. I don’t remember what exit number they were. Being stairs that connected the underground shopping center to the department store, they were often noisy with the sound of footsteps, but the last train had already left, and there were no footsteps to be heard. I stepped down onto the stairs. One, two, three, four… ten steps. The stairs that unfurled beneath my feet were so long that it felt like I could keep descending all night, but I couldn’t bring myself to go any further. I crouched down on the stairs and started to cry. I was the only one there. The wind was raging in the streets, but there was no wind on those steps.   I use the stairs at Gyeongbokgung Station every day on my way to and from work, but I don’t know how many steps it has. I don’t count them anymore. I used to. But after I started using my white cane, I stopped. I used to avoid using a white cane, even though I couldn’t see telephone poles, trees, and signs that blocked my way. I didn’t want my parents to see me walking with one. That changed one day while job searching as a new college graduate. I was on my way back from an interview. I was standing on the platform at Bongcheon Station waiting for the train. Then suddenly, the ground dropped, as though someone had pulled my feet out from under me. When I came to, I realized I had fallen onto the tracks. I raised my hands and groped around, looking for the place my feet had been standing just a moment ago. The platform was about shoulder height. As I used all my strength to pull myself up, no one extended a helping hand. I didn’t tell my parents what happened. After that, I started walking around with a white cane. But I still didn’t want my parents to see me using it.   And I continue to picture a door. A door above the stairs. A door beneath the stairs. Glass door, iron door, wood door, paper door, open door, opening door, closed door, closing door, brown door. There was a door in front of me. I didn’t know its color. I tried opening the door. But it didn’t open. I continued trying to open the door. But it continued to resist. I tried push open a sliding door. The iron door was closing. But my eyes couldn’t see this. I only learned what was happening when my hand got stuck in the door. The sound of the train’s wheels rolling on the tracks drowned out the sound of the door. I boarded the Mugunghwa-ho train. I was on my way down to Nonsan.   There is no yellow door.   Yellow is kind. Yellow is three chicks, I must find it. It’s a secret.   What color was that door?   I greet the door. I greet the wall. I greet the empty chairs. I greet the empty desks. I greet the empty classroom. I greet the empty hallway. I greet the empty elevator. I greet the mirror. I greet myself. I greet the clock. I am not greeting the time.   I pause in front of the revolving door.   6   I want to touch the waves. For a few days now, I have wanted to touch the waves. I haven’t told my mother that I’m going to the sea. I’m going by myself. I can get close to the sea on my own. Close to the sea… Ah, close to the sea. … When I leave the house, my mother is folding origami tulips in the living room. The folding of colored paper into tulips sounds like blooming flowers. My mother also makes deer with green paper. A green deer stands next to a pink tulip. The pink tulip is larger than the green deer. It isn’t long after I leave the house that it starts to rain. The sound of rain drowns out the sound of birds. It drowns out the sound of footsteps, too. The sound of rain drowns out the road. I lose my way and stop. Snow doesn’t drown out the sound of birds. It doesn’t drown out the sound of footsteps. It doesn’t drown out the road. I don’t lose my way when it snows.   When my hand touches the waves, the waves unfurl before me. The sea is blue. The sea is not blue. The sea is many colors. I remember the sea at Jumunjin, which I saw with my older brother thirty years ago, as the color blue. There is a young boy in a blue swimsuit and blue goggles floating on the waves in an inner tube. Cotton-like clouds, a golden sun, grey rocks floating near the horizon, people sitting and staring out at the sea, blue-and-white striped parasols, plastic white beach chairs, plastic white tables, yellow balls… I couldn’t see seagulls. I can’t see things that fly. I have to chase them with my eyes. But before I find them, they fly away. Tubes are black and donut shaped. A young boy is carried toward the horizon on his inner tube.   I saw the horizon. I couldn’t see the land.   The boy with his innertube is carried farther and farther toward the horizon. It’s possible I didn’t see the horizon. It is as far from me as my bedroom window. I couldn’t see faraway things. Had Gaeul sensed that I was going to the sea by myself? It was two weeks earlier. Third period English had ended, and Gaeul came up to me in the hallway: “Teacher, are you sure you can go by yourself?”   7. 4th Grade English - 1[1]   It’s ten past twelve, but the hands of the clock hanging on the white wall of the classroom point to 8:24. Sitting in the middle of the room are six children[2] in pairs of two with their desks facing each other. They are all nine years old, and five of them are completely blind, unable to even see light. The remaining child, Yuri, is just able to make out objects. Each of the six children looks in a different direction.   Misol, who has her head dropped and turned outside of the group, suddenly shoots up from her chair. Me: (in a higher-pitched and faster voice than usual) [in English] Long time no see, everyone. Children: (in bright, high-pitched voices) [in English] Long time long see. Me: I missed you all. Did you miss me? Jiwoo and Minhee: (as though singing a duet) No. Gaeul: (raising hand above the desk, and in a faint, somewhat halting voice) I missed you, Teacher.   Misol sits back in her chair. Her shoulders droop like a deflating balloon.   Gaeul: Teacher, I moved yesterday.   Misol shoots up from her chair again.   Gaeul: I moved far away.   Misol steps back from her chair as though jumping from it.   Gaeul: Well, not that far.   Jeong-wook mutters something to himself in a slow, deep voice as he drops his head.   Me: Today we’re going to practice buying and selling things in English. Did you all remember to bring something you want to sell? Shall we go around and share what we brought today? Let’s start with Misol. Misol: (flapping her arms as though she’s dancing) I brought salt to sell. I brought salt to sell. Yuri: (sitting up straight, looking forward, and in a voice as though she were scolding a cranky child) Misol, Misol. (petting her blue dolphin stuff animal) I brought my dolphin stuffed animal. Gaeul: I brought a four-leaf clover keyring. Jiwoo: I brought a hand towel. Gaeul: There’s no key on the keyring. The key… is missing. But I didn’t lose it. Minhee: (holding colored paper with both hands) But Teacher, I think time is almost up. Me: Everyone, repeat after me. [In English] This is my skirt. Gaeul, Yuri, Minhee [in English]: This is my skirt. Me [in English]: I like this skirt. This skirt is seven hundred won. Minhee: That’s so cheap! Me: Jeong-wook, would you like to try? [In English] This is my sweater.   Jeong-wook’s grumbles louder. Misol stands behind her chair and pouts.   Yuri: (looks toward Jeong-wook  like a mother trying to coax her whining child) Jeong-wook, Jeong-wook… Try it. Minhee: Teacher, what is saekjongi in English? Me [in English]: Colored paper. Everyone, repeat after me. [In English] Colored paper. Misol: I brought salt to sell. I brought salt to sell. Yuri: Misol, Misol.    Misol flaps both her arms as though she were about to take flight. But she doesn’t go anywhere, she can’t.   Minhee: (in an anxious tone) But Teacher, I think time is almost up. Me: Everyone, repeat after me. [In English] This is my colored paper. Gaeul, Jiwoo, Yuri, Minhee [in English]: This is my colored paper.   Jeong-wook purses his lips and stares down at his desk as everyone speaks in unison. There is nothing on his desk.   Me: So, who wants to go first? Misol: I brought salt to sell. Gaeul: Me, Teacher, I’ll go first. Me: Shall we say it in English? In English, yeolsoigori is ‘keyring.’ [In English] This is my keyring. Gaeul [in English]: This is… Jiwoo (in a coy tone): Me next. Gaeul: But, Teacher, about my key… I wasn’t the one who lost it… You see… The keyring was in my jacket pocket… I was on my way to school… I remember clearly seeing it when I put the keyring in my pocket. I remember clearly seeing the key dangling from the keyring. But when I returned home and took out the keyring from my pocket to open the lock to my bedroom door, the key was gone. The key was the key to my bedroom. Where do you think my key is, Teacher? Me: Good question. Where could it be? Gaeul: I remember clearly seeing the key dangling from the keyring. Me: Well, keys aren’t snow. They can’t just melt and disappear. It must be somewhere. I hope you find your key, Gaeul. Gaeul: Actually… It’s okay if I don’t find it. Well, what I mean by that is… The reason why I don’t need to find it is… The key is to my bedroom door. But I have a new bedroom now that we moved. The reason why I lock the door to my bedroom is because my younger sister always sneaks into my room to steal my stuff animals… My duck, my puppy, my bear… That’s why I lock my bedroom door…. She sneaks into my room and steals my stuffed animals… Misol: I brought salt to sell. Minhee: But, Teacher, I think time is almost up. Gaeul: My mom had to call a locksmith to open the door for us. She asked him to make us a new key, but we moved before he got to it. Minhee: But, Teacher, I think time is almost up. Me: Okay, everyone, shall we ask Gaeul together? Eolmayeyo? [In English] How much is it? Gaeul: Um… 500 won. Minhee: That’s so cheap! Me: Yigeoseunobaekwoniya. How do we say that in English? Yuri [in English]: This is five hundred won. Me: Shall we say it together? [In English] This is five hundred won. Gaeul, Jiwoo, Yuri, Minhee [in English]: This is five hundred won. Jiwoo: Me next. Me: Gapsissaneyo. [In English] It’s cheap. Yuri, Minhee [in English]: It’s cheap. Gaeul: (rising from her chair) Teacher, I’m going to go to the bathroom. Me: Are you sure you can go by yourself? Gaeul: Yes.   Gaeul gets up from her chair. She walks toward the classroom door. She slides it open and goes out into the hallway. Gaeul’s footsteps are so quiet that they disappear in the hallway. Across the hallway in a cavernous classroom is a black piano. The white keys are as quiet as day. And the black keys are as quiet as night.   Minhee (puts down on the desk the colored paper she was holding): Teacher, I’m going to go to the bathroom, too. Yuri (turns her head toward Minhee, who is getting up from her chair, and says in a warm tone): Minhee, don’t take too long.   Minhee leaves her chair and walks toward the classroom door. She feels around, checking to make sure it’s open, then exits into the hallway.   Jeong-wook: Me, too… Bathroom…   Jeong-wook leaves the classroom, and a moment later, Gaeul returns.   Yuri (mistaking Gaeul for Minhee): Minhee, you’re back. (Pats the empty seat next to her) Minhee, get over here already and sit down.   Gaeul hoists up her brown pants and finds her seat.   Yuri: Minhee, get over here already and sit down.   Minhee enters the classroom.   Yuri: Minhee. Gaeul (sitting in her chair): Teacher, what are you going to sell? Minhee (as soon as she sits down): But, Teacher, what time is it? Me (checking the time with the braille information instrument): Would you look at that. It’s already 12:30. Gaeul: We only have 10 more minutes. Jiwoo: Me next.  Minhee: Teacher, it’s Yuri’s turn. Me: Yuri, what did you bring to sell? Yuri (stroking the dolphin stuffed animal on her desk): A doll. Inhyeong in English is ‘doll.’ [In English] This is my doll. Me: Shall we all ask Yuri how much her doll is? [In English] How much is it? Yuri [in English]: This is three thousand won. Me: Is that expensive or cheap? Minhee: Expensive, expensive! Me: Expensive. Bissayo in English is ‘expensive.’ Jiwoo: Me next. Me: Who wants to buy the doll? Misol: I’ll buy it!   Misol repeatedly rises and sits in her chair. Each time she does, the feet of her chair scrape the ground.   Minhee (looks directly to her left): But, Teacher, who just came?   The hands on the clock are still pointing to 8:24. They don’t move, as though held in place by invisible hands.   Yuri: Teacher, I can’t sell my dolphin. Me: Why can’t you sell your dolphin? Jiwoo: Me next. Yuri: My dad gave it to me as a birthday present. He’ll be sad if I sell it to someone.   The breaktime bell rings. Jeong-wook has yet to return to the classroom.   Minhee: Teacher, class time is over. Me: That was quick. Sorry, but we’re going to have to end it here today. Next time, we’ll talk about the rainbow in English. Misol (going out of the classroom the first): I brought salt to sell, I brought salt to sell.   Yuri and Minhee hold each other’s hand and walk out of the room. Jeong-wook has yet to return. Only Gaeul and I remain in the room. The hands on the clock point to 8:24.   Gaeul (feeling the top of her desk with both hands): Teacher, I’ve lost my stylus. Can you help me find it? Me: Oh, Gaeul… I can’t find it either. I can’t see. Gaeul: You can’t see? Me: That’s right. I’m blind just like everyone else. Gaeul: You’re blind, too? Me: I am. You didn’t know? Gaeul: No. (pausing for a moment) Teacher . . . Take your white cane with your left hand and grab my hand with your right. I’ll guide you to the hallway.   Gaeul and I hold hands and stand in the hallway.   Gaeul: Teacher, can you go by yourself? Me: Yes, I can go by myself. Gaeul: I want to help you more, but I need to go to my next class. I have music next.   Gaeul and I are still holding hands and standing in the hallway.   Me: Gaeul, I told you. I can go by myself. Gaeul: Teacher, you must find your way.   Gaeul and I are still holding hands and standing in the hallway.   Gaeul: Teacher, you must find your way on your own.   8   *   I can’t tell how many students are in the classroom. I just can’t. I can’t because I can’t count them. It’s just not possible. Just like stars in the night sky. I’ve never seen stars before, but I know it’s impossible to count stars. I thought the students knew I couldn’t see. I can’t see them. I can’t see their hands in the air when we play rock, paper, scissors during class to decide who goes first. On the first day of class, I introduce myself to the children. “I’m just like you. That means I can’t see what you all look like. So would you all let me hear your voices?” And then I wait. I wait for them to speak so I can hear their voices. I wait for all the children in the classroom to speak. And then I say: “Let’s remember everyone’s voices.”   There are no terrible voices.   *   I am drawn to Gaeul. I only found out that she was much smaller than other children her age after I held her hand for the first time. After all, I couldn’t see what she looked like, because I can’t see. Her voice sounds like she’s playing house. After I told the children that I was blind like them, this is what Gaeul said to me: “Teacher…Take your white cane with your left hand and grab my hand with your right.” I could feel her extending her right hand toward me. I hesitated for a minute, but sensing how pure her heart was, I extended my left hand and spread my fingers to grab her hand. But it wasn’t there. She spoke again to me: “Teacher, grab my hand. I’ll guide you to the hallway.” Her hand was far beneath me. Beneath me… It was below my knee. Finally, when I held her hand, I realized that she was incredibly small.   *   The child didn’t return Even after I left the classroom, the child didn’t return.   *   I don’t think about what the children look like. I don’t think that I want to see what they look like.   Did that child not return?   9   Is it open? Is it opening?   My face.   Is it in front of me? Is it behind me?   My face right now.   I’ve seen a green apple. I want to put a green apple on my desk.   Playing on the radio was “Yesterday” by the Beatles. In the fish tank were two goldfish, one red and one pink. I sat at my desk and with a magnifying glass peered into the picture on my junior high school student ID card. I was fourteen then. My chin was sharp… A different place… My right eye is looking at a different place. My right eye has never seen light. When I was in the incubator, the ventilator supplied too much oxygen, damaging the blood vessels in my retina.[3] I was brought into the world at seven months and was immediately put inside an incubator.   I was standing. I was just standing. I just continued standing. I was five years old and standing in front of the eye chart with a yellow cloche hat on my head. I could see the number four. That was all I could see. I couldn’t even see the stick pointing at the number four. When I was eight and in Gyeongju with my family for summer vacation, I was standing in front of a gigantic gray rock. And when I was twenty, I was standing at a bus station near Seoul National University of Education subway station. It was a cold day in winter. And it was late on Sunday night. At that time, I was living at the dorms at the college I got into after retaking the college entrance exams. I was on my way back to the dorms after spending the weekend with my family. I needed to take the 5001. There was quite a large number of people waiting at the bus stop. A bus came up, and two or three people ran to catch the bus. The bus left in a hurry, and then the next one came. Several people boarded it. I don’t know how many. The bus left, and three or four more came, bumper to bumper, but I couldn’t board any of them. I needed to take the 5001. I couldn’t see the number plates, which I had been able to see up till I was seventeen and on summer break. I was afraid of getting on the wrong bus. I stood and looked on as buses and people came and went. I couldn’t ask people which buses were stopping in front of the bus stop. I didn’t want people to know I was blind. Another bus came and stopped. It seemed like this was the 5001, but I didn’t get on. After all, I could have been wrong. I stood there for more than an hour and a half watching the buses and people come and go. The buses started becoming less frequent. When the next bus finally came, all the people got on and left, leaving me alone. Another one came and stopped in front of me. I could hear the rattling as the door opened. It seemed to be waiting for me to get on. I couldn’t see the people riding. It seemed like there were only empty seats. I stepped toward the door. I wanted to get on. I wanted to be caressed by the bus’s empty chairs, close my eyes, and fall into a deep sleep. Hoping the sun would be shining brightly when I woke, hoping the bus would take me to the sea, hoping I could get off the bus, extend my hand, and touch the waves, I attempted to get on the bus. But I couldn’t. It had already left. I looked at my surroundings. I could vaguely see a very tall, slender person standing behind me. I walked up to this person and mustered the courage to speak up: “Hello.” There was no answer. I spoke again: “Hello.” Still, no answer. Finding this strange, I tap the person with my hand. But it wasn’t a person. It was a telephone pole.   I’m still standing. Where should I be standing? It’s not that I’m waiting for someone.   I’m waiting for the sound of birds. Birds I’ve never seen, Birds I can’t see.   The sound of birds will show me the way.   I wait. When I go to an unfamiliar place, I wait for its sounds to show me the way. The sounds of the world show me the way. Cars on the street, shop music, footsteps, announcements from the digital timetable at the bus stop, restaurant fans, a noisy construction site, shutters being raised, shutters being closed… When I hear high heels descending stairs, I realize I am near the entrance to a subway station. It’s confusing when they come at me all at once. I pick out sounds. I pick out one sound like picking out a single strand of thread from a tangled mess of yarn. I wait. Until I can’t hear any sound, in front of a crosswalk with no signal, until the sound of zooming cars cuts out and there is silence. I stop. When I walk and listen to the sound of cars, I stop as soon as I hear people. And when I hear people running, I unknowingly start to run.   When I hear a bus but don’t see it, it feels like the bus is racing toward me. When I hear a subway train but don’t see it, it feels like the train is racing toward me.   I like the paths that the sound of birds paves for me. I like the paths that the sound of small birds, like sparrows, paves for me. The path that sparrows pave for me are narrow. I want to walk narrow paths. It’s hard to walk straight down a wide path.   10   I didn’t see the sparrow. It was too small to see. I didn’t see the bee, either. The pigeon flaps its wings and takes flight. There is a java sparrow at our home. When I open the door and enter our home, I hear a bird. The chirping is loud, so I think it must be a large bird. But it is smaller than my hand. They say the java sparrow is white. I imagine the color white as I imagine the java sparrow. I touch white inside the cage as I imagine a java sparrow. But it only has one leg. They say it had only one leg before coming to our home.   I saw the wings of a dragonfly. I didn’t see the face of the dragonfly.   I can’t catch things that fly. I don’t want to catch things that can fly.   I wonder, can birds be blind, too? I wonder, can birds be born blind, too?   Blind birds can’t fly. They can fly, but because they can’t see where to land, they can’t fly. Birds that are born blind stay in the nest. Their siblings leave, their mother leaves, and birds that are born blind are left alone in the nest. All by themselves, they cry in the nest. They fall asleep, grow old, and die alone in the nest.   There is no nest. I’ve never seen one. So, they don’t exist.   I wonder, are there birds who go blind while flying?   What if a blind bird flew to me…   11   It’s a sound that’s always there. A sound that was there every time I passed by that place. But one day, I couldn’t hear it anymore. I heard an unfamiliar sound that hadn’t been there before.   What could it be?   12   At what should I be looking at? After I lost the ability to see light, I would often forget the fact that I couldn’t see. When I used to be able to vaguely see the silhouette of objects out of my left eye, I would look at trees, people walking toward me, and empty chairs in front of me and think to myself that I didn’t see anything. I was envious of my brother who had normal eyes. He asked me to lend him an eraser and scissors once. I hid them in the drawer and told him I didn’t have them. I didn’t want to share. He went to the school supplies store and bought two erasers and two scissors, one for each of us.   I’m not blind because I’m lacking. I’m not blind because I’m being punished. I didn’t know. I don’t know.   I need to find it. I must find it.   13   One day, her voice came to me. Then one day, it left me.   14   “Will you let me hear your voice?”   And wait…   And believe…   “Who do you want to see the most?” Just before she left, this is what her voice asked me.   Now that I’ve lost the ability to see faces, people enter my dreams as their voices. When someone visits my dream, I tell them: “I heard your voice in my dreams last night.”   And…   I’m afraid your voice will leave me.   Just one voice… just one… I’m not sure.   15   The sea is made of four dots.[4] I know how to write the word for sea, but I don’t want to write it. I’ve written it before. I can’t see the sea I’ve written. My mom cherishes that sea. The sea I wrote is together with the wave I wrote. And it’s together with the moon.   Today, I wore a new T-shirt. My mother laid the new T-shirt she bought for me on my bed. It has three buttons, short sleeves, and a collar. I don’t know what color it is. I’m forty, but I still wear the colors my mother buys for me. I vaguely remember the color scarlet. I saw a full moon. I didn’t see a half moon. I think I know what purple looks like. But I’m not confident when it comes to the color emerald. As my left eye went dark, and after I lost all sight in my left eye, I made up colors that didn’t exist. Rose gold was one such color. People say it’s a mix of gold and red. Roses are red. I know red. Gold is a dazzling yellow. In my head, I mix the colors red and gold to imagine a new color. According to the eye examination I took when I was five, the vision in my left eye was 20/200. When I entered elementary school, I could see the green chalkboard, but I couldn’t see what was written in chalk. So, I sat in the front of the class and wrote in my notebook what the teacher said. ‘Sketchbook’ when the teacher said sketchbook, and ‘gym clothes’ when the teacher said gym clothes. I didn’t write with a pencil. Handwriting in pencil is fuzzy. I can’t see fuzzy things. I wrote with a black pen. Black was easier to see on white than blue or red. I transcribed the contents of my textbook into my notebook one letter at a time. To see the letters, I had to bring my eye so close that my eyelashes would brush the paper. As the letters of my textbook got blurrier and squished, they started to look liked dark smudges. I couldn’t see the chalkboard. My left eye dropped to 20/1000 in the vision test. With magnifying glasses for lenses, I read words one by one. The letters I saw beyond the magnifying glass swelled to five to six times their normal size. I remember staring at the Chinese character for heart (心) through the magnifying glass as I transcribed it into my notebook. I haven’t forgotten the letters I saw through my magnifying glass. When I was seventeen, I had to get an operation to reattach the retina in my left eye. After the procedure, I couldn’t see words even with the help of a magnifying glass. So I just listened during class. I just sat there without moving and listened. While my left eye could still see light, I avoided going out during the day because the sun blinded me. I walked by following the light from the streetlamps. Their light showed me the way. Over the course of twenty years, I slowly lost sight in my left eye. Like a lamp slowly being dimmed, the light in my left eye became fainter and fainter until it disappeared. Faces became squished and distant until they vanished. Even though I knew things were becoming more distant, I never imagined I would completely lose sight in my left eye. The thought never crossed my mind. I didn’t want to think about it. I hated the thought of losing my sight completely.   16   Only she left…  She’s the only one who left…   17   I don’t know how many people are sitting in front of me. I don’t know how many people are walking in front of me.   Is there a reason for losing my sight? Perhaps losing the ability to see light is for a reason and an answer. And perhaps there’s a reason my prayers weren’t answered… Pray for me, Keep your prayers as late as possible.   People exist because they think of someone, People exist because they love someone.   I want to feel what it’s like to exist. I want to live life feeling what it’s like to exist.   Do you see me?   “Why am I here?”   18   I want you to look at me like I’m a person. I want you to look at me like I’m one whole person.   Do you see me?   I believe people, I want to believe the people I meet.   The year I graduated from university, I sent out about twenty different job applications, each a welfare center for the disabled. I was twenty-five at the time. I was interviewed at six of those places. I was hired at the very last one I interviewed at. It was a newly opened welfare center for the disabled. I had entered college through the Department of Public Administration and double majored in social welfare. I wanted to become a social worker and help blind people like myself. I didn’t know how many people were sitting in front of me at the interview. There was only one person asking the questions. The voice asking questions was always the same. “Are you sure you can do it?” the voice asked. “I can do it, I can do it,” I answered. It took more than two hours to get to the center from my home. At 6:30 in the morning on the day of my interview, I rode the subway for four stops. Then I got off and rode Bus 1007, which went from Seoul to Gyeongi province, for an hour and forty minutes all the way to the second to last stop. I fell into a deep sleep and when I woke up, I was at my destination. The building was located far away from the city center. On my first day, a single empty desk was waiting for me. I went to the desk and sat down. I had no way of knowing what was in front of my desk. Although I couldn’t see out windows, I wished I had one. Even though I knew windows were distant from me, I wished I had one. I sat at my desk until it was time for lunch. No one gave me any work. They didn’t give me anything. There were about forty employees at this center, but I was the only one who was disabled. I sat at my desk as I listened to the sound of people running around busily, talking about work, and joking with each other. I sat there listening to the office clock’s second hand and the ringing of other people’s phones. There was a telephone on every desk. There was even one on mine. But mine didn’t ring. As no one gave me any work, I just sat at my desk until it was time to go home. On my second day, I again just sat at my desk all day as I listened to the clock’s second hand and the ringing of telephones. No one gave me any work. They didn’t give me anything. An entire month passed like this… The sound of the clock’s second hand felt so slow. Each second was like an hour. Why am I here? One day I arrived at work and sat down at my desk. I just sat at my desk all morning. Someone’s telephone started to ring. And it kept ringing. I reached out toward the telephone on my desk. I picked up the receiver and brought it to my ear. “Hello?” From that day on, I started taking other people’s phone calls if they weren’t at their desks. “Hello?” I found work for myself. Once I did this, they finally started giving me work. What I did was writing letters to sponsors. Then one day when the entire office was out for drinks, I heard my team manager’s drunk voice: “You shouldn’t be here. We have no work for you. Go somewhere else.” After drinks, I went to Suwon Station even though I knew the last train had already left. This was the only familiar place to me. I would come here to ride the subway whenever I worked late. I sat on the steps and cried. There was no wind on those steps. I quit after working for four years at the welfare center. But I didn’t leave because I was told to leave. Years after I left, I contacted my old team manager, who had been kind to me, and asked a question: “Why didn’t you give me any work?” “I didn’t know what work to give you.”   The year I turned thirty, I started working at the Department of Special Education at a local university in Nonsan. I wanted to teach blind children like myself. One day when I was out, I lost my way in a place where I knew no one. Then suddenly, I heard a voice calling my name. “Let’s go together.” From that day on, I was no longer afraid of going to a place where I knew no one. Let’s go together. These words were bright yellow. Whenever I went to an unfamiliar place, there was always at least one person there to help me. They would come to me and extend their hand, even if I didn’t ask. After a while, I realized something. It was like magic… I now believe that no matter where in the world I went, there would always be someone waiting there to help me.   19   The desire is still there. The desire to see hasn’t left me.   No matter how much I feel and touch, the desire to see hasn’t left me. Touching and seeing are different. Perhaps I think this way because I used to be able to see. Because I used to be able to see. When I’m alone, I sometimes touch my face. My forehead, eyebrows, eyelids, nose, cheeks, lips, chin… No matter how much I feel and touch, the desire to see hasn’t left me. “Whose face do you most want to see?” If she came back to me and asked me this, my answer wouldn’t change.   I want to see my own face. Right now, I most want to see my own face.   20   For whom do I live? For whom am I living?   I want to live for myself. And I want to live for someone else, too.   I’m still standing.   Do you see me?   I feel the hand that leads me. The hand that leads me is a hand as small as Gaeul’s. I’m afraid of letting go of the hand that leads me.   21. 4th Grade English – 2   It’s already past 12:25, but the hands on the clock on the classroom wall point to 8:24.   Minhee: Teacher, my chair is too high. Yuri: Teacher, my chair is too high, too.   Misol (lifting her drooping head and without raising her voice): My hair’s dangling. My hair is dangling.   Me: Today, we’re going to talk about the rainbow in English. Do you all know what a rainbow is? Gaeul, Yuri, Jiwoo, Minhee: Yes. Me: Have you seen a rainbow before? Gaeul, Yuri, Jiwoo: No. Minhee: Me neither. Misol: I’ve seen a rainbow. Me: Where have you seen a rainbow, Misol? Misol: I don’t remember.   Misol feels the chair next to her. Realizing the seat is empty, she gets up and sits down in the empty seat next to her.   Me: How do you all know what a rainbow is if you’ve never seen one? Minhee: I just know they exist. Yuri (in a downtrodden voice): My mom told me about them. Me: We all know what rainbows are even if we haven’t seen them. So, what is a rainbow? Minhee: ROYGBIV! Me: Ah-ha, so rainbows are ROYGBIV. What is ROYGBIV? Everyone: Colors! Me: Ah-ha, colors… Gaeul: Teacher, why is there no white in ROYGBIV? Me: Good question. Why isn’t there white in ROYGBIV?   Jeong-wook starts stomping on the floor.   Yuri (in a scolding tone): Jeong-wook! Your feet… stop it. Me: What is mujigae in English? Yuri and Jiwoo [in English]: Rainbow! Me: Good. Correct, mujigae in English is ‘rainbow.’ Let’s say the colors of the rainbow in English. Everyone, pick a color. Minhee: Purple. Yuri: Yellow. Gaeul: Hey, I want yellow.   Misol feels the seat next to her. She thrusts her face into the empty seat and sniffs it.   Me: Shall we talk about red? Bbalgang in English is ‘red.’ What do you associate the color red with? Minhee: Cherry tomatoes. Gaeul: I think of kimchi. Really spicy kimchi! Yuri: Apples. Gaeul: Blood! I think of Blood! Me: And how does red make you feel? Jiwoo: Red feels angry. Gaeul: What is anger? What is sadness? Misol (gets up from her chair and walks around the room): Let’s go there. Let’s go there. Gaeul: Teacher, I have a question.   Gaeul: Teacher, I have a question.   Gaeul: Teacher, what is anger?   Gaeul: Teacher, what is sadness?   Jeong-wook continues to stomp on the floor.   Me: Juhwangsaek in English is ‘orange.’ Everyone [in English]: Orange! Me: Shall we talk about orange? Yuri: Orange reminds me of umbrellas. It reminds me of when it rains. Gaeul: It reminds me of rain. Me: Ah-ha, so it reminds you of rain. Why does it remind you of rain, Yuri? Yuri: Because people wear bright clothes when it rains. People are happy when they wear bright clothes. Orange feels happy. Me: Jiwoo, what does orange feel like to you? Jiwoo: It makes me proud. Gaeul: Teacher, why didn’t you ask me? Minhee: Gaeul, you already answered. You said it reminds you of rain. Me: What does the color orange feel like to you, Gaeul? Gaeul: It reminds me of rain. Me: And why does it remind you of rain? Gaeul: It reminds me of rain because… orange is… really… similar to rain… like… it just feels like that… Minhee: Ducks, ducks, ducks! Me: Why does it make you think of ducks, Minhee? Minhee: Because duck bills are orange. Gaeul: Chicks! Me: Why does it remind you of chicks? Why does it remind you of chicks, Gaeul? Gaeul: Because… Chicks make me think of yellow. I started liking the color yellow because chicks are so cute.   Jeong-wook continues to stomp on the floor.   Yuri: Jeong-wook! Your feet. Stop. Jiwoo: Teacher, what did you say?   Misol sits down in the chair. After looking out into space with a sullen look on her face, she lies face down in her desk. She draws something on her desk with her finger. The hands on the clock point to 8:24.   Yuri: Trees. Jiwoo: Tree leaves. Yuri: A forest.   Gaeul: Green… I’m not sure.   Yuri: I think of the sea. The sea is blue. And so is the sky. Minhee: I think of the sea. Gaeul: Me too. Me: Why do you think of the sea, Minhee? Minhee: Because the sea is blue. Gaeul: It makes me think of the sky, too. (Talking to herself) I don’t remember if I said the sea or the sky. Me: The sea and the sky are slightly different colors. Gaeul: Teacher, I don’t remember. Whether I said the sky or the sea… Me: The sea is deep blue. Gaeul: Teacher, did I say the sky? Me: The sky is lighter than the sea. Gaeul: Teacher, did I say the sky? Me: Yes, you said the sky.   Misol lays face down on her desk as she draws something with her fingers and mutters to herself, “Indigo, indigo.”   Minhee: Indigo… I’m not sure. Gaeul: Me, too. Minhee: Chocolate isn’t indigo.   Jeong-wook (dropping his head and stomping on the floor): I don’t know.   Minhee: Violet is kind of sad… like… Jiwoo: Violet tickles… like…   Me: Okay, shall we each pick a color we like? Yuri: I like yellow. Jiwoo: I like violet. Gaeul: I want yellow. I want yellow. Minhee: I’ll take red. Jiwoo: I want red, too, Me: What about you, Gaeul? Gaeul: Yellow. Me: Someone already took yellow. Minhee: Gaeul, take something other than yellow. Yuri: Teacher, Misol says she’ll take blue. Gaeul: Such babies… Minhee: Gaeul, do you want orange? Me: Gaeul, how about doing orange? Gaeul: I don’t want any other color but yellow. I don’t want any other color but yellow. Yuri: Gaeul, are you angry? Gaeul (in an angry tone): I’m not angry. Yuri: Gaeul, then you can have yellow.   The breaktime bell rings. The hands of the clock still point to 8:24.   Gaeul: Teacher, why is there no white in ROYGBIV? Me: I don’t know why white isn’t in ROYGBIV… I’m sorry I don’t know the answer to that question. Gaeul: I have three chicks. Their names are… I forgot… I named them… It’s a secret, it’s a secret.   The hands on the clock point to 8:24.   22   I want to look at a different place. A different place… A different place than where my right eye is looking.   Have I passed that door? What color was that door?   I’ve seen a black door. I’ve never seen a yellow door. There are no yellow doors. If there were one, I would want to put it next to my bed, so I can see it all the time, so I can open it whenever I want, so I can close it whenever I want.   And I want to put the yellow door next to the sea. It is next to my bed and next to the sea. At high tide, the waves will carry it away. The boy on the black inner tube was carried out to the horizon, then at low tide, he was carried back to shore.   I would get up from my bed, open the yellow door, and go to the sea. There, a man is touching the waves. Waves are white. White is neither hot nor cold. White is cotton, notebook, bunnies. I don’t want to raise white.   A yellow moon is like the full moon. I’ve seen the full moon. I’ve never seen a half moon. I imagine a half moon. I can’t see what I imagine. And I haven’t seen a rainbow. Because I only imagine them. I haven’t seen a rainbow, but I know what rainbows are. Rainbows are ROYGBIV. Why is there no white in ROYGBIV?   I must find it. I must find it.   And…   Do you see me?   I’m still standing.   Do you see me?   1  I was teaching English and massage theory and practice to blind children at a special-education school. 2  Misol, Gaeul, Yuri, Jiwoo, Jeong-wook, and Minhee. 3  retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) 4  In Korean braille, the word for sea is constructed of four dots.    Translated by Sean Lin Halbert

• Noodles Vol.45 Autumn 2019

  The dough’s finally coming together, though it still feels a bit too dry. I think of how you’d sit to one corner of the floor, hunched over the bowl of flour as if to take up as little space as possible, as if you were a guest in this house. You’d work the dough with such force, punching and stretching and folding, I worried you’d wear out your palm lines. Now I wonder what it was you were secretly burying in the dough. Has it really been twenty-nine years? Yes, since you were exactly the age I am now when you came to live with us. I was fourteen, you were forty-three; now I’m forty-three, and you’re seventy-two. When you arrived that day, to my young eyes you seemed as cowed and despondent as a new maid, possibly because of the hushed remarks I’d overheard earlier. The adults had called you sok-nyeo, stone-barren woman, and whispered of how you’d been forced into divorce for not being able to bear children . . . Father brought you home before disappearing off to Central Market, where he had a tool shop at the time. When the relatives left, you disappeared into the kitchen and reemerged carrying a brass bowl, which we used to put steamed sweet potatoes or heads of kimchi in, or to wash rice. There was a heap of flour in the bowl. You sat down on the sunny maru floor and stuck your hands in, punching and pressing until sunlight gave way to shade. The smooth dough was rolled out, cut, and pulled into ribbons, which were then cooked in a pot of boiling water to make fresh kalguksu noodles. You served these bare, without so much as a handful of zucchini, potato, or green onion, let alone the usual garnish of thin omelet strips. You ladled out the unseasoned noodles into bowls, then set these down in front of me and my younger siblings. That first time, I don’t know why I was so angry and resentful, but in a surge of pique I took my spoon and cut into those noodles, chopping each and every strand you’d labored over . . . My wrists are tired already. How long before the dough starts to feel sufficiently tacky and elastic? How harder must I punch and knead . . .? Engrossed in the work, I feel age creep upon me. At this rate, by the time I dust the dough with flour and roll it out, I’ll be as resignedly, listlessly aged as you. Alone here after the death of a husband who was about as welcoming as an unheated floor, left on your own to guard the home from which every single one of your stepchildren had departed, how many hours would you have spent doing exactly this? You’d occasionally call me to say, I was about to make some noodles and I thought of you . . . and I’d think: Noodles? Didn’t you know that when it came to food I was just like my father and not partial to floury foods like kalguksu? And wasn’t I, being the eldest daughter, the one child who’d taken after his hardhearted nature? Nonetheless, you would regret each lost opportunity to feed me a bowl of your homemade noodle soup. My fingers feel strangely unfamiliar. It’s as if I’ve sneaked them off from someone else and am casually manipulating them to knead this dough. That first bowl of noodles you made for us, I wonder if I could have been so ruthless with my spoon if there had been even a handful of toppings, the barest hint of omelet . . . the merest sprinkling of laver . . . I hear your voice in my ear. My tongue . . ., you had said. What about your tongue? It . . . it’s scalded and hurts so much, I couldn’t even finish my noodles. I hadn’t known what to say. Every time the noodles brush against my tongue it feels like someone’s planing my tongue . . ., you’d trailed off. They told me I should go to the big hospital and have it seen to, you’d said finally. I have an abrupt change of heart. I feel like hurling the dough. I can find noodles at any shop, softer and chewier noodles than any I could ever make, so why this wretched slaving over the dough? I ask myself in irritation. Barely restraining the impulse to throw the dough and the bowl along with it, I go on punching, stretching, tamping. It occurs to me that what’s pushing me through my own hours of kneading work may well be a sense of paying my dues . . . For the longest time I’ve felt as if I’ve been running from you and from what I owe you, knowing that a lifetime of repayment would never be enough to clear the debt. My tongue . . . Please cut it off. At two in the morning you’d called to say this, and I had been gripped with fear. Not out of concern for you or the excruciating pain that must have prompted you to dream up such a drastic solution . . . No, hardly out of any fear for your well-being, since it took another two months before I finally called you up to Seoul for a check-up. Blood work, urine, ultrasound, and a gamut of tests besides. After three hours of this, we were exhausted. I suppose what wore you down wasn’t the tests, but the waiting and the weaving from one exam room to the next. The waiting areas outside each exam room were as packed and busy as any station, as if, you said, everybody under the skies was ill. Afterwards I took you to a noodle shop. You’d had to starve since the night before, and it was the only decent restaurant I could find. We ordered and were served in ten minutes. The noodles and broth were served in big stainless-steel bowls, and entirely unlike the noodle soups you made. The same dish, and yet worlds apart: thin, flat noodles in a whitish bone broth, no zucchini or meat pieces to speak of. You put your spoon down after a couple of sips of the broth. Whereas your noodles . . . There have been two moments in my life when I specifically craved them. One of those times was while I was living in a cramped studio, not long after I came up to Seoul for my job. One night after work, I picked up some flour from the shop on my way home and attempted to make dough. Having no metal bowl, I poured the entire pack of flour directly into a pot, adding a trickle of water now and then. Then I sat down on the floor in front of the television and beat the sticky, floury mass about until my fingers were coated in dough. I had a kitchenette at best and owned no rolling pin. I wrapped the scraggly dough I’d managed to lump together in a plastic bag and threw the bag in the veggie drawer of my fridge. By the time I dug it out of there while cleaning the fridge, the dough was as hard as rock and covered in blue mold. I dumped it in the trash. Occasionally I’ll imagine the dough’s out there, though, rolling about like an actual stone . . . tumbling this way and that, gradually being worn down into pebbles, and eventually into grit and sand and dust . . . I remember reading something about how dust can sometimes reach as far as Mars, traveling well beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Now that I think about it, that dough did look a bit like Mars, that fiery planet known for its occasional dust storms. And if I’m being honest, that same day I’d been let go from what had been my first job, after barely five months. That could have prompted it, I suppose, but somehow the only thought in my head after being notified—while standing in front of the instant coffee vending machine—was how I would like a bowl of noodles, your noodles. I wanted to roll a mouthful of those strands up with my chopsticks, and chew and chew like a gentle, lazy, ruminating cow . . . It would take another nine months before I found a job again, but I never spoke a word of this to you. It’s so silent now—you dozing while I grapple with the dough—I feel as if we are the two sole survivors. How much longer before the dough’s ready to be cut into noodles? As I continue kneading a thought occurs: the thing you labored over through all those years, not forgetting to add the occasional dribble of salted water—was that not dough so much as time? And who could have imagined that I’d be sitting here, in your kitchen, kneading dough as I am now, punching, folding, rolling . . . Just a little longer, just a few more rounds of tamping, burying.   *   You visited my home just once. Eight years into my marriage and after many attempts through artificial insemination, I’d finally gotten pregnant, only to have a miscarriage. My husband called you before leaving for Busan on a business trip, and the very next day you’d taken the first bus up at dawn to see me. The first thing you did was head into the kitchen, saying you felt like having some noodles. You sat down on the floor of my sparse, unfamiliar kitchen, next to the table, to knead and cut and boil, bent over the bowl like that first day you’d come to us. Noodles in a rich broth made from a whole chicken, topped with the tenderest meat you’d pulled by hand, then dressed with sesame oil and perilla seeds. If ever there was a tonic, this hearty chicken kalguksu was surely it. The table was set with a generous portion of white radish kimchi you’d brought with you instead of the usual spicy soy sauce. Be patient with yourself, give it time and the baby will come . . ., you told me. After you left I flushed the fat swollen noodles down the toilet, even before the elevator carrying you would have made it down the fifteen floors. Cursing your fate and mine, pressing the flush handle repeatedly until every single strand of noodle had vanished from sight, blaming you for my body’s incapacity to hold life— when you and I didn’t share blood, flesh, or bone. Did I want to believe that your fate ruled my own? Maybe. Maybe I thought our fortunes had become as entwined as the floury noodles that stick together as they boil . . . Give it time? But early on I had learned that some things never materialize, no matter how much time one gives it. My mother who’d briefly gone to visit her brother at the laundry and dry cleaners, she’d said she wouldn’t be long. Back before dinnertime, she’d told us, but no amount of waiting brought her back. Not when evening ripened into night and burst black and dark, not when day bloomed from the burst crevices like white blossoms of mold . . . Looking back to that day when you came to us, I realize I must have been waiting the whole time for my mother to appear. Given time I thought she would return, would live again if I waited fervently enough . . . Even as you stepped in to take care of us in her stead, in reality I probably never stopped waiting for my mother. Which may be why I never called you by that name. I’d gone out of my way to reject and distance you, and yet here I was believing your noodle soup would get me on my feet again after the devastating loss of my baby. From clam to red bean to potato to dumpling, the variations on kalguksu are numerous, but it was your kalguksu, humble and nondescript, impoverished even, that I wanted . . . As for the rolling pin you’d brought with you that day, I eventually left it behind when the time came to move to a different house. I’ve no idea how I should deliver the news: the doctor told me that the cancer on your tongue has spread to such an extent that they have no alternative but to remove it. Shall I wait until you’ve at least had a few bites of the noodles? Or shall I punch it all down . . .? Now that it’s become more pliable, the dough feels more like a ball in my hands. Like I’m massaging a knot, or wrestling a supple, elastic lump, even feeling a competitive edge creep in as I do, wanting to see which one of us will win out . . . But the more I provoke myself and doggedly throw myself into the task, the more resilient the darned thing seems to become. And yet . . . I can also feel a loosening inside me. Something not unlike the tangle that’s been buried deep down—really there’s no other word for it—this knot is gradually, smoothly, unraveling . . . and I find myself wondering whether those hours of kneading were for you as much about working out the knot in your heart as they were about making noodles. (Excerpt from pp. 53-61)   Translated by Emily Yae Won

• The Story of Sand Vol.42 Winter 2018

  1 Father came back from the desert. Dressed in a blue-striped suit, he looked like someone who had been trekking across the desert for five billion years—a period as old as Earth. As Earth aged, rocks would have split and split again to become pebbles. Then those pebbles would have split and split again to become grains of sand. Ferried by the wind, those tiny grains of sand would have scattered to form deserts. The blue stripes looked like they had been scored by a knife, or by time traveling at the speed of light.       2 Father’s forehead gave off a pale glow under the dim fluorescent light. Long bushy hair covered his ears. I had the vaguest suspicion a part of his body had crumbled away while he crossed the desert. That, most likely, was his ears. Ever since I was little, I believed the ears were the source of all fears. If you were to trudge across the endless desert, you had to overcome your fears, which meant it was necessary for the ears to first become dull. Father brought with him a suitcase. The size of an apple crate, it had four black wheels and was like some animal that walked on four legs, like a goat or camel. The wheels were severely worn down. I knew my father hadn’t been the one to drag the suitcase here; stubbornly, it had rolled its own wheels after him. Inside the suitcase were old, dingy clothes and a shovelful of sand. He stared blankly at the contents. In the end, he upturned the suitcase and poured the sand onto the floor. Terror settled over his features, as if he were standing on the edge of a 10-meter diving board. He removed his blue-striped suit, like a snake shedding its skin. For a long time, he stood in his white undershirt, sky-blue underwear, and navy socks. He looked up and gazed blankly at me. He finally yawned, as if he had managed to suppress his fear, and lay down, using the suitcase as a pillow. As soon as he fell asleep, Mother picked up the broom. She bent over like a sickle and swept up the sand. At first the sand seemed to submit to her sweeping, but it ballooned up. It formed an abstract, geometric pattern in the air and scattered. Mother straightened her back and thrust up the broom. She swept busily at the air, but the sand persisted. * Father was forty-two years old the year he came back. He had left home at thirty-two. Ten years was by no means a short time, but he managed to return safely to us. It was then that he became an idiot. To be honest, I have no memory of him before he left. Not his expression, not his smell, not his spirit, not his voice, not even his gestures. More than anything, he was a void, a kind of emptiness. In my first art class, I had to draw his face. I filled the entire white sheet with yellow dots as small as grains of millet. “Didn’t I tell you to draw your father?” the teacher asked. “He’s inside.” “Inside where?” “Inside the sand.” Anyhow, it was only from the night he returned that he began to take shape in my mind. While Father was gone, I didn’t miss him. He wasn’t someone I could miss. And not once did I imagine he would return one day to live with us. Mother never thought to tell us he would be coming back. She said instead, “If your father had to go somewhere for your sake, that place would be the desert.” I took these words to mean Father shared the fate of camels, that he was forced to live in the hot, dry land. I had never even experienced war, but I was relieved my mother hadn’t said the battlefield. Father left for the Middle East to work as a manual laborer, but Mother called that place the desert. I maintained a fixed distance from Father. That distance equaled several steps, though I was not the one to create it. It simply formed on its own. In a stadium, a few steps are nothing. But in a room of about 140 square feet, they represented a great, rather grim distance. Mother, Younger Sister, and Elder Brother each maintained a fixed distance from Father. Mother at two steps, Younger Sister at three, and Elder Brother at five. Elder Brother was situated at the farthest point from Father. They stood far apart from each other, like the two legs of a compass spread as wide as possible to sketch a large circle. It seemed the distance of five steps, like some absolute measurement, would never, ever shrink. * Mother told our relatives that Father was back. Two months had already passed since his return. All she said was that he had returned. She had never been a talkative person. They wondered when he planned to leave again. As if hoping he would head back to the desert. Instead of telling them that he wasn’t leaving, Mother said he was looking for a new job. The sand Father brought back didn’t disappear, but drifted about him tediously.   * Gukgyeong ajeossi, Manu ajeossi, Huiya ajeossi, Sojin ajeossi, Uncle Sunjin, Cousin Sang-gu. They were idiots, too. But I didn’t know that until Father’s return. They were ordinary men I sometimes ran into on the street. The meek, simple folk from the neighborhood. Uncle Sunjin came looking for Father, accompanied by the idiots. He lived close by, with just an alley between us. Mother said he, too, had planned to go to the desert shortly after Father had left home. But Uncle never ended up going. When Uncle Sunjin stepped into our yard, Father was in the kitchen, making toast. In the desert, whenever he had felt hungry, he had made toast in his frying pan. He joked if you were to add up all the slices of toast he’d eaten, it would equal the number of camels living in the desert. But I didn’t know how many camels lived there. He sprinkled a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar on the browned bread. The sight of him placing a piece of toast on a white dish and then sprinkling it carefully with salt seemed so full of reverence he appeared to be performing a religious ceremony. While Father made toast, the men smoked in the shade of the magnolia tree, clustered together like badgers. Uncle Sunjin introduced them to Father. They had no information to offer, other than their name and age. The same went for Father. Not one possessed a shining quality they could flaunt or brag about. “He might look like a wimp, but he worked in the Middle East for ten years.” At Uncle’s words, the men opened their mouths in unison and let out a whoop. Father handed each person a slice of toast. After they left, Father stood hunched over the washbasin all evening, gazing at his reflection in the water. As if the bronze-colored basin were an oasis. * Father went to the desert to survive, and he returned from the desert to survive. The desert was both a land of opportunity and a land of punishment. And just as going there wasn’t entirely his choice, coming back wasn’t entirely his choice either. Before I go on about Father, I must confess that what I know about him amounts to hardly a grain of sand. That’s right, the part I do understand about his life amounts to a single grain of sand. The only thing I can say with confidence is this: To me, he was at once the desert and a grain of sand. * I’m sure it has nothing to do with his name containing the character gu, the number nine, but Father experienced many trials and hardships.1 The first trial came the year Father turned twenty. He could have become a firefighter. In other words, he’d tried, but failed. He was a graduate of a technical high school in Daejeon where most of the students went on to become civil servants. But his father’s oldest brother—Cousin Sang-gu’s father—had defected to North Korea during the Korean War, leaving his wife and children behind in the south. This became the decisive barrier to Father’s dream. Background checks were very strict during this time. Only as an adult did I learn about Great-Uncle’s existence; everything about him was kept hush-hush. That’s also when I learned about Father’s attempt to become a firefighter. If Father had become a firefighter as he’d hoped, would his life have been any different?   * But fire! What existed between Father and fire didn’t seem like any ordinary connection. Why did it have to be fire? Why did it have to be fire’s energy? * Father almost lost his life once. He’d been only thirty-four years old. That day, Father had gone out to sea with the other laborers. Kuwait borders the Persian Gulf, and on their days off, they occasionally went fishing in a boat. For safety reasons, they all wore yellow life jackets. When they had been on the sea for about ten minutes, Father fell into the water. They had been speeding along at 120 km/hour. There were six other men on the boat, but no one saw him fall. The boat raced on for some time. Two hours went by before they finally discovered he was missing. Father was an extremely shy, quiet man, whose presence often went unnoticed. To the extent it didn’t seem at all strange it had taken as long as two hours before anyone noted his absence. When they managed to locate him at last, he was unconscious, bobbing on the waves. If it hadn’t been for his yellow life jacket, Father would have sunk to the bottom of the ocean and become food for the fish that teemed in the warm waters of the Persian Gulf. Could he have jumped off the boat? Could he have soared like a bird, and then hurled himself into the ocean? Could he have wanted to put out his fire’s energy, which stalked him incessantly, with the force of water? * If it hadn’t been for Mr. Jeon, our family may have never learned about Father’s near-death experience in the middle of the ocean. Father simply didn’t inform us. Originally from Gwangju of Jeolla Province, Mr. Jeon shared a room with Father in Kuwait. Whenever he came home on vacation, he stopped by our house to give us any updates on Father. After Mr. Jeon had come and gone, my brother and I spread open the world map to look for the Persian Gulf. The map was at a scale of 1:3,800,000. Not only Kuwait, but Iran and Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates also bordered the Persian Gulf, the world’s greatest oil reserve. It loomed like a mighty fortress of oil tankers. Once Father sent us a picture of a bluefin tuna he had caught in the gulf. It was the size of a grown man’s arm. * Whenever I see an unusually tall concrete fence, I can’t help but think of Grandfather. All his life, he’d wished for a fence as big and strong as a fortress. Father and his siblings had been raised in a house where hardy orange trees had surrounded the yard instead. Grandfather got his wish in the end; he managed to build a fence before he died. This was only possible because Father went to the desert. More than anybody, Grandfather hoped Father would go work in the Middle East. But Grandfather was in no way a harsh, stubborn man. Whenever there was a village feast, he would play the janggu drum or sing a tune to liven things up. His generation had the misfortune of marching their children off to not only the desert, but also to the battlefield. His was a generation that had managed to survive Japanese colonial rule, the Korean War, and the period of great hunger known as the “barley hump.” The third of six children but the eldest son, Father was the only one of his siblings lucky enough to finish high school. Grandfather let his other children go hungry for the sake of his eldest son’s education. Grandfather, a tenant farmer with not even a small patch of land to his name, had believed the money would be rolling in once Father graduated from high school. And though it was not Father’s fault he failed to become a firefighter, his siblings resented him all the same. They had never learned to read or write properly, having been dragged off from an early age to the fields or mountains to work like cattle. Father’s two older sisters were forced to leave home before the age of twenty. They welcomed their twenties at Pyeonghwa Clothing Market in Seoul, from where they sent home the money they eked out as seamstress assistants. This went straight to Father’s tuition. In order to pay back the debt he owed to his family, Father had no choice but to leave for the desert. Grandfather saved every bit of money that Father sent home, and the first thing he did was to buy concrete bricks and put up a fence with his own hands. Because the yard wasn’t big, the fence was completed in fifteen days. But he made the mistake of going beyond the yard until he found himself at the highway, and so he was forced to take down the fence he had painfully erected, only to start over from the beginning. Though there were complications, Grandfather ended up with the strongest, tallest fence in the village. The fence compensated Grandfather for the disappointment and sadness he felt at Father’s failure to become a firefighter. His crumbling house looked ridiculous, enclosed by the freakishly big fence. As soon as the fence was finished, Grandfather hired a photographer from town. He burst into anger when the photographer kept trying to take his picture. After snapping an entire roll of film of just the fence, the photographer said, “Since I’m already here, why don’t you take your funeral portrait in advance?” At those words, Grandfather barked with laughter so loud it shook the thin branches of the orange trees piled on one side of the yard. On market day, Grandfather stopped by the photography shop to pick up the photos. He chose one where the fence presented the most imposing appearance, and then put it in an envelope and mailed it to his eldest son. What must Father have felt as he held the photograph in the hot sand? As he tore open the envelope with his dry, dusty fingers? As he discovered the fence that spewed suddenly from the envelope? That was the first and last letter Grandfather sent Father. * The sand brooded over the bedroom like fog. Father was dozing, hunched like some dying bird, with his chin digging into his armpit. Five steps away, Elder Brother sat on the floor with his back against the wall. He gazed at Father, blinking heavily. He slid sideways down the wall and fell asleep, doubled over like Father, his chin digging into his armpit. The sand that had been swirling in the air swallowed Father up like a swarm of bees.   1. There is an old saying about surviving nine close calls with death, which is used to describe a tumultuous life.   (Exerpt from pp. 4-26.) Translated by Janet Hong  

• One Person Vol.39 Spring 2018

  It was around Chuseok. They had no clocks or calendars, but the girls grew sick with longing for home as Chuseok drew near. When the skies had cleared after four tedious days of rain, an outlying army base sent a truck. Six girls—Bong-ae, Sun-deok, Mi-ok, Yeong-sun, Han-ok, and she—climbed into the cargo bed. It was Bong-ae’s first trip to the base. Hyang-suk was supposed to go, but Bong-ae filled in when she broke her arm. Hyang-suk’s arm broke when a Japanese soldier shoved her. Takashi had stopped coming one day. Hyang-suk asked around for his whereabouts, but didn’t find out anything. The girls said he must have died in a battle. Hyang-suk’s crying upset a drunk Japanese solider. The damned Josenppi, sniveling away instead of taking soldiers. When that didn’t stop her crying, he twisted and snapped her arm. The ground was so muddy, clumps of dirt the size of cow pads would kick up and hit the girls in their faces when the wheels spun fast. After half a day’s trip in the truck, they arrived at a river. A wooden boat the shape of a clog was waiting for them by the riverbank. The water was frighteningly high after four days of ceaseless rain. Looking at the brown water, she felt scared and relieved at the same time. The girls got off the truck and into the boat. When the girls settled down on the boat floor, a Chinese man, so completely bald he looked like a boiled octopus, picked up the oar and began to row. The man’s unclothed upper body was tan as if he’d painted himself with black ink. She felt seasick but oddly peaceful as if the end of her life were near. She hoped she’d flow on forever in this boat. That when the boat arrived at the river’s end, she and the other girls would find their faces shriveled with age. Bong-ae, her pockmarked face jaundiced, sighed, “Look—a village.” The girl, who had been sitting with her eyes cast down on the water with the winds blowing upstream caressing her face, looked in the direction where Bong-ae was pointing. The village was far away and yet seemed so close she could almost reach out and touch it. It had a red glow and seemed cozy, like something out of a dream. “I don’t think anyone lives there.” “Really?” “I don’t see a single person.” “They must all be sleeping.” “A few nights ago, I visited my home in my dream, and no one was there. Father, Mother, my younger siblings. I visited with the dead baby on my back—” Bong-ae rose to her feet and, as quick as a blink, jumped into the river. She reached out to grab her by the hem, but Bong-ae was already sinking to the bottom of the river. When it dawned on the girls what had just happened before their very eyes, they cried Bong-ae’s name into the river. They yelled so loudly they tasted blood in their throats, but Bong-ae did not resurface. The Chinese man stopped his rowing and shook his head at the girls as if to say it was no use. The Japanese soldiers aimed their rifles at the panicked girls. The Chinese man resumed rowing as if nothing had happened. Returning from the base, the girls saw Bong-ae. Groins inflamed and pelvic bones twisted after taking soldiers for five days in a row, they were sprawled uncomfortably in the boat. Their eyes were gaunt. “Over there—isn’t that Bong-ae?” said Han-ok. “Oh, it is her!” Bong-ae sat reclined against a branch stuck upside-down in the river, her head above the water and eyes wide open as if she had been waiting all this time for the girls to come collect her. Her belly was swollen from drinking too much water. The girls asked the soldiers to help pull her out of the water. They made a bed of sticks and branches, and laid her down on it. Sun-deok wiped the water off Bong-ae’s face as she wept. The chapped skin that had peeled off as if half-eaten by rats didn’t seem to frighten her or put her off in the least. Flames shot up when the soldiers poured gasoline and lit the kindling. Leaving Bong-ae to crackle in the licking flames, the girls climbed back into the truck. Sparks like fireflies flew over as far as the truck. Imagining them to be a part of Bong-ae’s soul, she reached out to catch one in her hand, but the spark instantly turned to black ash. She felt Bong-ae’s death was her fault. If only she’d reached out more quickly and caught Bong-ae by the hem of her skirt. Each time a girl died at the comfort station, the girls felt it was their fault.   * As always, she turns on the television the moment she wakes up. Fortunately, there is no news of the last one. The last one is still alive. She pauses while folding her blanket to let out a deep sigh. It hits her that whether the last one dies first, or she dies first, or someone alive somewhere else dies first, there will come a day when not one of them will be alive. Her head spins as her foot reaches below the deck to put her shoes on. A magpie. When had Nabi come by? She doesn’t see the cat anywhere into the yard. The magpie seems to still be hanging on. Like Hu-nam, who was still breathing after Oto-san dragged her out of her room and tossed her into the field. She gently pushes two fingers under the magpie’s wing. She feels a pool of warmth like breath. She holds up the bird with both hands and heads over to the tailor shop to see the seamstress. She will know if the magpie is still alive or not. The seamstress is sitting in front of the television and eating breakfast from a round floor tray. She is eating straight from the containers. Her TV is so loud that the noise carries out to the alley. The seamstress turns her upper body to look at her while tearing apart grilled yellow corvina with her bare hands. “What’s that?” She shyly extends her hands to show her. The seamstress jumps. “Yech, isn’t that a magpie?” “Could you . . . see if it’s still alive?” “Good God! Did you go senile overnight, bringing me a dead magpie first thing in the morning?” The seamstress shakes her head. The dog curled up on a cushion under the sewing machine gets up and starts barking at her.   She walks down the alley with the magpie still resting in her hands. The magpie might still be alive, and she can’t just toss it on the street. In the alley bathed with slanting sunlight, she suddenly stops and holds the magpie up to the sky. Its feathers catch the light and glimmer. As if coated with the fine dust of briquettes they used at the comfort station in Manchuria. The only things that glimmered at the Manchuria comfort station were the blood of the girls and the briquettes.  pp. 215-221     Translated by Jamie Chang Photo © NOH Suntag, Confession of Body #BCG0501, 2002

REVIEWS

• And Then There Were None: One Person by Kim Soom Vol.43 Spring 2019

• The Price of Sacrifice: Women and Their Evolving Enemies by Kim Soom Vol.21 Autumn 2013

• Simple Fare Full of Love: Noodles by Kim Soom Vol.23 Spring 2014

• Death Drives the Weary: Liver and Gallbladder by Kim Soom Vol.12 Summer 2011

• Overwhelmed by Family Alchemy: The Water by Kim Soom Vol.9 Autumn 2010

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