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Circle of Light
Sumin heard from Jeong-woo while she was reading a concert program that began: “Enrique Granados disliked traveling.” She’d seen a banner ad for the solo piano recital on a reservations site and bought a ticket on impulse. The pianist performed seven pieces by Granados, playing for over seventy minutes without an intermission. He received long, loud waves of applause, but he did not grant the audience’s request for an encore even though he came back to the stage three or four times. He placed his right hand on his heart, maybe to ask them to understand that another song could spoil the lingering feeling. Sumin came out of the auditorium and was walking around the foyer when, belatedly, she purchased the program. She put it in her bag and forgot about it until the bright orange color suddenly came to mind a few days later, and she perused it carefully.The Spanish composer Enrique Granados disliked travel, only leaving his home country twice. At age twenty, he went to Paris to study, but he contracted typhoid fever and the trip ended in disappointment. He took his second and final trip in the spring of his forty-ninth year, when he went to the US for the premiere performance of an opera. It was during WWI, and the ocean liner that he and his wife took for their return voyage was attacked by a German U-boat. The ship cracked apart. Granados had the good luck to be rescued, but when he saw his wife struggling, he dived into the water to save her, and they both ended up drowning. The write-up went on to add that Granados was especially scared of boats. Working as an editor for the last six years, Sumin had the habit of searching for the crucial point of any kind of texts. In this case, she struggled whether to locate it in the tragedy sensed beforehand, or in love overcoming the fear of death. Ultimately, for her, the main point was that she’d only found out the context for the story after the concert had finished. She’d attended the recital without knowing anything beforehand, not even that the suite Goyescas meant “in the style of Goya,” having been inspired by Goya’s paintings. Sumin frequently learned things after the fact; this had also been true when she studied in France.
by Kim Eugene
The Phantom Schoolgirl Army
The married couple next door invited me over for dinner last month. I had only ever exchanged silent greetings with my eyes, when one day we started talking; I was unable to refuse their sudden invitation. This was my first time exchanging names with anyone since moving down to Suncheon. Her name was Bo-kyeong Bu, and his was Mok-won Park. Both beautiful names. They had skipped the wedding, and said they had no plans for children. Like an idiot, I said they’d be even happier with kids—something I didn’t even believe. I wondered if an idiotic comment like this was the consequence of getting older or just a product of awkward interactions between strangers. I’d lived close to twenty years with a man myself; I didn’t have children, and I used to believe that I didn’t need them.They prepared some pollack roe pasta and a dish of stir-fried tomatoes and scrambled eggs. I chewed the food slowly as we sipped beer and conversed quietly. The food didn’t taste as good as it looked, and whenever I needed to laugh because they said something cute or funny, I had to be careful not to let bits of food escape my mouth.“I like that album, too,” Bo-kyeong said as she turned toward me.“Do you really?” Mok-won asked her.“Why are there so many things you don’t know about me?” Bo-kyeong glared at Mok-won with slivers for eyes.“There are a lot of advantages to being ignorant.” Mok-won laughed sheepishly as he looked at Bo-kyeong.Seeing these two bicker over my T-shirt, which had an Andy Warhol banana on it, I took out my phone, opened YouTube, and started playing “I’ll Be Your Mirror” from The Velvet Underground & Nico. They turned to me once the music started and smiled.Bo-kyeong brought over a Marshall Bluetooth speaker and connected it to my phone. As the two bobbed their heads and asked me a slew of questions, I became a DJ and played for them “Chelsea Girl” by Nico, “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” by Leonard Cohen, “I am a Fool” by Gilli Smyth, and “Hurt” by Johnny Cash. Mok-won got up from his seat and went over to the window. As soon as he opened it, a refreshing evening breeze entered the room and washed over us.“Do you mind?” Mok-won asked as he pulled out a cigarette. I shook my head.Bo-kyeong went over to the window as well.“Smells like summer. I think the air’s gotten cleaner. It must be because of COVID. Give me one.”He stuck a cigarette between her lips. The smoke consumed their heads. Unable to control myself, I went over to the window, too.“If you don’t mind—” As I exhaled a steady stream of smoke I continued: “My doctor told me I’ll die if I keep smoking.”They looked at me with wide eyes.“I’m just kidding. I quit four years ago.”“Maybe we should quit, too.”“You think so? Or maybe we just continue living this way till we die.”My doctor once told me I needed to quit both smoking and drinking. “What about the smell?” I asked the doctor. “Can’t I at least smell them?” The neurosurgeon frowned. “I’m not sure what to say. I don’t think I’ve ever had a patient ask me that before—”After staring out into the darkness for a while, I returned to my seat and played “Night Flight” by Affinity.“Can I call you Unni?” Bo-kyeong asked me as she came back with another beer from the refrigerator.“Of course not.”Bo-kyeong and Mok-won were both documentary filmmakers. They started living together after co-directing a film about Suncheon Bay. They’d moved their home and business to Suncheon earlier this year. Bo-kyeong’s hometown was in Incheon, and Mok-won’s in Seoul. I’d been born in Suncheon but left a long time ago; I only came back just two years prior. When I told them this, they batted their eyes, oohing and ahhing in admiration.“What did you use to do?” they asked me.“This and that. Whatever I could find.”“You seem like you have a lot of secrets. When I first saw you, I was a bit wary of you.”Bo-kyeong’s face was flush, probably from all the beer.Mok-won picked at the green tablecloth for a while before speaking up again. He was a bit tipsy and his voice was louder than before.“People are so strange. They criticize our experimental works for being too experimental, and our nature documentaries for having too many landscape shots. I wonder if they’ll accuse us of being too political this time.”“Why are you worrying about that already? We haven’t even started.”“What kind of documentary are you filming this time?” I asked.“Have you heard of the Phantom Schoolgirl Army?” Mok-won asked.“No.”“Don’t you have any older relatives in Yeosu or Suncheon?”“None.”“Stop it. You sound like you’re interrogating her,” Bo-kyeong said, critical of her husband’s tone.“It’s fine. What’s the Phantom Schoolgirl Army?”“You know about the Yeosu-Suncheon uprising, right?”Seeing the look on my face, which was saying neither yes or no, he began to explain.“In 1948, after suppressing the uprising in Yeosu and Suncheon, the government made something called the Writer Investigation party, which they dispatched to the area to ‘document’ what happened. The group was made of authors, painters, photographers, and illustrators. Among the things they found was a story of female students who’d fallen prey to communist ideology. According to these stories, the girls would lure soldiers to them with water and then pull out a carbine from their skirts and shoot the men. These stories were serialized in the papers and later made into a book titled Uprising and the Resolve of the People. Oh, that reminds me, Bo-kyeong. We must find that book. Anyway, the book was used for political purposes, to fear monger and justify the massacres. It was recently revealed that the story, which was referred to as the Phantom Schoolgirl Army, was actually a made-up story—it never happened. But they didn’t know that at the time, so it continued to be told and embellished. There were also stories of schoolgirls who seduced soldiers, calling them oppa and what not, before shooting them with a Type 99 rifle. All of these were different versions of the same story intended to frighten people about the threat of communism.”“They say some schoolgirls were arrested and interrogated,” Bo-kyeong said, adding onto her husband’s explanation. “We want to interview those who are still alive. But COVID has made that difficult. Perhaps we could do it virtually. Of course, we’d need to be cautious when approaching them, as it’s probably a traumatic experience for them. I’m positive that the stories were influenced by the war films and novels of the time. I want to find those sources. It’s a really strange and terrifying story.”“I think my mother must have been attending school in Yeosu around that time.”“Really?”“She died, though. When I was young.”Silence filled the room. After turning on the song “I Hate You” by Jung-in—like a person who believes there’s a song for every situation—I played one last song: “Restless” by Bibi, which was one of my favorite K-pop songs at the time. Bo-kyeong vibed to the music, and Mok-won cleared the table.“How about we go to your place next time,” Bo-kyeong suggested as they saw me out the front gate.“Of course not.”“Then it’s settled,” Bo-kyeong said in a cutesy voice while she locked arms with Mok-won, as if to say she understood my sarcasm. “Treat us to some more good music.”
by Kim Tae Yong
Daydreams of a River
The new workshop at the factory was built on what was once the paddock at the old ranch. At the end of the paddock, two animal sheds stood in a boomerang shape. Instead of being torn down, these plastered, concrete structures were now used to store saw blades, oil drums for machinery, and stacks of imported wood. One could easily guess the number of blocks that went into each shed. Some rattled loose, as if they hadn’t been laid cleanly. The ventilation windows near the roof were exactly the size of those blocks. Throughout the village were these types of bare-bones sheds, assembled like LEGO houses. A tour bus and several cars with Seoul license plates traveled along the unpaved road to the factory. Red dust, as if bricks had been ground to powder, wafted up from the lane. Rolling hills spread beyond the pasture. Here and there, short trees grew sparsely. Someone sitting at the front of the bus boasted it was an ideal location for a ranch, adding that if a cow happened to escape, you’d be able to find it easily enough. The red dust clung to the black dress shoes of the Seoul staff, even to the bottom of their carefully pressed trousers. The director and factory manager stood side by side at the factory entrance to hang up the sign. Since the young CEO from the main office was on an overseas business trip, he couldn’t attend the sign hanging ceremony. The wooden placard on which the factory name was inscribed in large cursive letters still reeked of varnish. The main office and factory staff stood in a circle and clapped. The director was so short his head barely came up to the shoulders of the tall, skinny factory manager. The difference in the length of their arms was the problem. It wasn’t easy to put the two men at both ends of the sign in one camera frame. If the focus was on the director, everything above the factory manager’s forehead was cut off, as well as the first letter of the sign. But if the focus was on the manager, the director’s stomach would be cut off. In the end, symmetry was barely achieved with the director holding the bottom of the sign and the factory manager holding the top. The manager didn’t shake hands with the people from the main office, though he was meeting them for the first time. He walked hurriedly, hands jammed inside his pants pockets and his torso leading the way before his feet. His unusual gait made him stick out from the rest of the people. A saw blade had taken off two segments of his left middle finger, as well as his right ring finger and pinky, when he’d learned his trade at the sawmill. The director was a vigorous man in his early forties. He always had a hard-sided leather briefcase in his hand. The weight of it was something. Several employees complained of having had their knees or thighs stabbed by a corner of his briefcase while passing him in the hallway. All year round, he carried his suit jacket squeezed under his armpit. He gave off the tired air of a traveler who had just stepped off a plane. Even when going between the CEO’s office and his own, or coming back from the bathroom, he took short, hurried strides, as if late for a meeting. There were too many people at the ceremony to fit all of them in one picture. About a third of the seventy or so staff ended up with the backs of their heads taken, and out of those whose faces were captured, five or six had their eyes closed. A few had taken their sweet time, not realizing the ceremony was beginning, and were caught running belatedly toward the entrance. The hands of those applauding enthusiastically were blurred, as if they’d been rubbed out with an eraser, or were clasped together, as if in prayer. Caught also on the bottom right corner of the photo was a dark smudge. A black dog had come out of nowhere. There were many stray dogs in that area. But it was the woman and not so much the dog that ruined the photo. The woman stood three people over from the director, alongside the other female staff from the main office. As though conscious of the camera, her gaze wasn’t directed at the director or factory manager hanging up the sign, but at some point beyond the frame of the picture. And those eyes glowed red. Much later, in a book titled The Basics of Photography, she learned what causes the red-eye effect. In short, her eyes had been looking directly at the camera when the flash went off. And while she’d been gazing at Y, Y had been gazing back at her through the viewfinder. Y wasn’t in the picture. He’d been holding the camera, pressing the shutter button some five meters away. It had been Hanil Trading’s most prosperous year. Every six months, the company posted a recruitment advertisement in a trade newsletter. On the day of the sign hanging ceremony, all the employees from both the main office and the factory had attended, except for the CEO who was away on a business trip. During this period, Hanil Trading had the most employees in its history since its founding. Among the staff lined up on the factory manager’s side stood a man with a white Yankees cap set crookedly on his head, his long legs spread like the pegs of a clothespin. A was a year younger than the woman. He didn’t look at all interested in the ceremony. Not only was his face hidden in the shadow of his cap brim, but the camera had captured only one side of his face. He was the last young man left in that village. Everyone who worked at the factory was from there, except the manager. There were two middle-aged women responsible for making lunch for all the factory workers, cleaning the factory, and other odd jobs, four men with Class 1 commercial driver’s licenses, and nine men who operated the machinery at the workshop. Over fifty workers from the main office trailed the factory manager like a herd of cows, ambling around the two sheds, workshop, and office. At sunset, the rancher would have opened the paddock gate and led the cows scattered around the ranch back to the sheds. The sheds had probably been arranged in a boomerang shape to prevent the cows from going astray. The workshop was as spacious as a hangar. To allow large trucks to come inside, a wide opening was created in one wall and double doors installed. The director and a few female staff members cheered in front of oversized machines equipped with circular saws about a meter in diameter. A plank of wood was placed on a machine workbench for a demonstration. Judging from the deep reddish brown of the heartwood, it looked like a type of cherry wood. When the manager switched on the machine, the conveyor belt started moving and the stainless-steel saw began to rotate. They had to shout above the noise. The wood moved closer to the blade. The noise grew louder. The cherry wood slipped back a little, resisting the saw, but the spinning blade only whirled faster, its edge drawing dozens of circles in a blur. The woman felt dizzy. “Cherry wood is a dense hardwood, so it isn’t easy to cut. And this is a cross grain piece, which makes it hard to plane. Even veterans get nervous handling this.” The manager barked in a near shout, as if angry. “But there’s no better wood than this!” The blade dug into the wood. Dark sawdust flew out from both sides of the blade. Her nostrils tingled. But the director was more interested in business than in the type of wood or its characteristics. “I hope you’re not planning to throw all this sawdust out. You can still use it, can’t you? Maybe mix it with a kind of glue and make things like particle boards?” The manager laughed silently, showing his yellow teeth. “Sure, it’s got lots of uses. But I don’t recommend making particle boards out of it since the boards are flimsy and bend too easily. Pretty low quality, I have to say. But in the winter, burning sawdust for heating is the best.” Meanwhile, the wood was cut in two and came to a stop at the end of the workbench. However, her ears continued to ring, even after the machine stopped and the workshop grew quiet. The two concrete columns seemed to have been hastily erected to meet the date of the ceremony, for there wasn’t even a gate, let alone a chain link fence. Elderly folk from the village, as well as the stray dogs, flocked into the yard. Most of the old people were related to the factory workers. Straw mats were laid down between the sheds and workshop, and tables of all shapes and sizes were set up. The middle-aged local women who’d been mobilized for the ceremony rushed about, carrying foil-lined plates of boiled pork slices and layered rice cakes with red beans, the slapping of their plastic sandals especially loud. The elderly folks became tipsy off just a few shots of liquor. A few rose to their feet and started swaying back and forth, though there was no music. Whenever they lifted their legs, their white socks flashed, stained with reddish dirt. The faces of the elderly who were seated were also ruddy with drink. An old man poured liquor for another old man, who was actually his nephew, and this nephew, observing all formalities, politely received the drink with two hands and then turned away to swallow it. Dogs circled the tables, eyeing the people. The elderly showed their few remaining yellow teeth or danced with their eyes closed, as if listening to distant strains of music, occasionally flying into a rage at the dogs who tried to sneak some food. They’d stamp their feet or hurl a rubber shoe at them. The dogs arched their backs like bows, their tails raised and rigid like poker sticks. If a woman serving food tossed them a slice of pork, they’d all rush to pounce at the dirt-covered scrap of meat. They shoved their snouts into the dirt, planting their paws into the ground so that they wouldn’t get pushed back. A cloud of red dust rose. But it was the black dog who managed to get the scrap of meat each time. It had long legs and a pointy snout. An old man pointed at the black dog. “Now that’s a clever dog. He came from our dog and that one over there.” The old man next to him tossed back his shot and shook his head. “How can your dog be the daddy? Your dog isn’t even the right breed.” “Look at those eyes,” the first man said, not wanting to lose. “They’re definitely from our dog. I saw it with my own eyes, saw your dog jump over my fence to get to my dog.” “You can’t even tell the difference between a piss pot and somebody’s head without your glasses.” “Who cares who the daddy is?” a third man said, interrupting. “They’re just dogs for crying out loud. You just worry about yourselves.” An old man slapped his knee. A man seated near him stuck his foot out and poked him in the side. Then another old man sitting amongst them raised his cloudy eyes and glanced about, and began to snicker. Low laughter escaped from between his crooked teeth. The boiled pork smelled bad. Men who could stomach it topped it with garlic, wrapped the whole thing in lettuce, and then crammed it into their mouths. Even before they swallowed, they opened their mouths that were still full of food and knocked back some soju. With a low Formica table between them, the people from the main office and the factory workers were standoffish with one another, like groups holding a labor-management negotiation. Assistant manager Lee from the main office got to his feet, rattling an empty soju bottle into which he’d stuck the end of a metal spoon. He stabbed the end of his necktie into his shirt front pocket. A flush had spread down to his neck from the drinks the factory workers had poured him. A factory worker who’d exchanged a few words with him shouted, “Hey there, looking sharp!” Laughter burst from the people sitting down. Caught off guard by the sudden noise, a dingy dog that had been lingering by the tables started barking at no one in particular. Of the seventy plus people in the group photo, Mr. Lee, the assistant manager, stood out. He wore a navy-blue double-breasted suit, with gray pinstripes and gold buttons embossed with an anchor. If he had a pipe in his mouth, he would have looked like a sailor. Comments about Mr. Lee’s suit erupted all over the yard. Someone gave a long whistle. He waited for the laughter to subside and then rattled the soju bottle again. The factory manager and director had been whispering with each other for some time, their heads close together. Urged by Mr. Lee, Miss Kim from the trade department stood up. She was nicknamed Kitty because of her big eyes and unusually small mouth. “Sing! Sing!” the men hollered, loosened by drink. Flushing a deep red, Miss Kim introduced herself briefly and sat down. The men cheered. She kept tasting dirt in her food. A yellow dog was watching her, crouched down on the ground across from her. The dog had baggy skin, as if she’d recently given birth to a litter, and the corners of her eyes were crusted with sleep. The woman tossed her a piece of meat, but the black dog appeared out of nowhere and intercepted it. Instead of lunging for the food, Goldie cowered and shrank back. Her ten sagging teats swung in different directions and came to a stop. Holding out another piece of meat, she called Goldie over, but only after quite some time did she come, swinging her teats. Instead of snatching up the food right away, she licked the woman’s hand for a long time before she took it. Her teeth seemed weak, too. Bits of meat fell out from between her teeth. When she finished, Goldie went and sat behind a young man, her teats swinging from side to side. He was wearing a Yankees cap pulled low over his face, drinking quietly. It was A. Several older men sitting across the table from him scolded A for not removing his cap before his elders. A woman who’d been bringing over some meat and soju glanced at the men. “Everyone’s got their reasons, all right?” One of the men glared at her with bloodshot eyes. Since A’s expression was hidden by his hat, she couldn’t see his reaction. The water tap was behind the sheds. Goldie followed the woman, her flesh swinging. As she moved forward, the baggy flesh on both sides struck each other, causing ripples to break out on her skin. She looked uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a coat several sizes too big for her. If the woman were to pull down a zipper somewhere on that hide, a small puppy just might spring out. It seemed the tap was supplying water to the sheds. A long rubber hose, filled with sand, was connected to the tap. Inside the hose was a tiny maple leaf. She twisted open the tap and waited at the end of the hose for the water to come out. The water was so cold her hands went nearly numb. Piles of junk lay behind the sheds. Bricks and Styrofoam pieces mixed with silt. There were also pots, rubber tubs, and a deflated child inner tube. She turned around, but Goldie was gone. She clicked her tongue, but she didn’t appear. It was dark inside the shed, even in the middle of the day. A pile of North American walnut logs was stacked on one side. When they first started at the company the previous year, Y and the woman had spent all winter at the Incheon Port. Forklifts roamed constantly between the huge containers. It was so cold that her skin bloomed red under her pants. Lumber arrived from North America once a week. Logs as long as twenty meters and as wide as an entire arm span were heaped like a mountain on the loading dock. From the top of the logs, she could see the Incheon pier. Ships carrying containers were anchored. The pier was chaotic with constantly moving cranes, trailers, and longshoremen. She and Y’s job was to check the number and type of logs against what was written in the invoice. Y hopped from log to log. The woman followed. For a moment, when her body was airborne, the pier seemed to loom closer. The soles of her shoes wore down quickly. That winter, she went through three pairs of shoes. Though she wore gloves and boots, her hands went numb and she couldn’t feel her feet either. If she couldn’t bear the cold any longer during log inspection, they’d leave the docks. Instead of walking all the way to the overpass to get to the food stall across the street, they’d jaywalk. Y held her hand. His hand was lukewarm. When she drank a hot cup of oden soup, her skin began to itch as it thawed. She wanted to see Y from that time, but Y wasn’t in any of the pictures. The shed smelled of animal excrement and tree sap. Under the dark ceiling, sockets without lightbulbs dangled from cords both long and short. You could see the village across the street through the brick-sized ventilation windows. When night fell, the cows locked up inside the sheds would have watched the blinking lights of passing cars through the windows. There were many animal sheds at the base of the mountains. She could easily tell they were no longer in use. A tongue licked the back of her hand. It was Goldie. Further inside the shed on the pile of walnut logs sat A. How long had he been inside? He was smoking. “Don’t get the wrong idea. I wasn’t following you. You see those old farts out there? I can’t even have a smoke around them. They’d all get up in my face if I did.” He flicked the cigarette butt from between his fingers. Drawing an arc in the air, it flew out the window. “There was an outbreak here. White spots showed up on the cows’ brains, like the holes of a sponge. All the dairy cows died. We dug pits to bury them and used excavators to transport the bodies. For two weeks, the excavators went around here. The spots where they’re buried are spongy. We filled the pits and tamped the dirt down, but as the cows rot, the pits keep sinking.” A got up from the logs. He was much taller than she’d thought. Goldie went to him, her flesh swinging. A heaved a deep sigh. She caught a whiff of liquor on his breath. “I’ll be on a boat by next February. A tuna reefer. Once you set out to sea, it might be two years before you come ashore.” He walked toward the shed entrance with Goldie. Before he stepped out, he turned and looked at the woman. He heaved another sigh, as though drunk. And then without any explanation, he said he was the type to see a thing through if he put his mind to it. The elderly men caused a commotion trying to find their shoes. There were over twenty pairs of white rubber shoes in the yard, turned over and lying askew. Even when the men flopped down on their behinds, drunk, they snickered like children frolicking in the water. Since every one of them was dressed in a white hanbok, it was difficult to tell them apart. They looked different, and then all at once like the same person. “Aigo, Father!” Daughters-in-law, who were elderly themselves, came running, wiping their wet hands on their baggy trousers. Red dust rose from where they’d dragged their sandals. The factory manager accepted every drink that his staff poured him. Drunk, he kept urging more liquor on the director who sat across from him. Liquor sloshed out from the shot glass he held with his four fingers. The finger that had its tip severed was blunt, with new skin having grown on top of it. The director stubbornly turned down every drink. He blamed it on the meeting he had to attend the next day. Though he hadn’t had a single drink, he looked tired, as though he’d just gotten off a long-haul flight. A fine layer of reddish dust covered his hair that was slicked back with pomade. Every time, the manager slurred, “Ah jeez, not even a single drink?” The director’s car was the first to leave the factory. Those returning to Seoul by bus scrambled to the entrance where the tour bus was parked. The yard offered a clear view of the people climbing aboard. Drunk men staggered to the side of the road and urinated for a long time. Their suit trousers were wrinkled and the shirt collars grubby. Darkness was moving in from the direction of the bus. The stray dogs from the village roamed the yard and thrust their noses into the ground, sniffing for meat. The rest of the city people split off into different cars. The woman and Y were supposed to catch a ride with Mr. Lee, the assistant manager, but Y was still snapping photos of the factory. Loosened up with drink, the factory manager had taken his hands out of his pockets and now went so far as to wave at the camera. In less than a year, he would lose two more fingers out of the remaining four on his left hand. The circular saw was cutting through cherry wood when it hit grain running in a different direction and jerked up. In the blink of an eye, two of his fingers flew off, spraying like sawdust. The accident threw the main office into chaos. As soon as he heard about the accident, the CEO called the factory manager, a man twenty years his senior, a “fucking idiot.” He then made countless calls to check if the manager had broken any laws by neglecting to use a safety device. He also asked Mr. Lee to secretly investigate whether he’d been drinking on the job. The woman called out to Y, who was taking his time. As she was getting in Mr. Lee’s car, she looked toward the sheds and workshop, but A was nowhere in sight. The village women were clearing away the mats from one side of the yard. The stray dogs swarmed toward morsels of food that had dropped on the ground. The factory workers stationed on one side of the yard would probably keep drinking well into the night. The tall young man in the Yankees cap wasn’t by the entrance either. The bus pulled farther away from the factory. The woman continued to scan the surrounding area for A, like a farmer looking for a cow that had escaped from his paddock. Wondering if he was hiding, she scrutinized the trees and then laughed at herself. Being so tall, A wouldn’t be able to hide behind such small trees. She’d wanted to wish him good luck at sea. She’d even clicked her tongue for Goldie, but there was no sign of the dog either. It quickly grew dark. Animal sheds flickered in the darkness. There wasn’t a single streetlight along the road. They had to go slowly, since the headlights lit only a short distance ahead. Mr. Lee kept sticking out his tongue to lick his dry lips, as if he were thirsty. The road had many sharp curves, and Mr. Lee hit the brakes at every bend. Y seemed tired. Sitting in the backseat, he slept with his head bowed. Though they were unable to catch up to the tour bus that had left much earlier, they should have been able to see at least the lights of the other cars. At first, they thought nothing of it, assuming they couldn’t see the cars ahead because of the bends in the road. But after driving for twenty minutes, they realized they must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. The road was completely empty. They were the only ones on the road. It was pitch black everywhere, with no houses in sight. They had no choice but to keep going until they came to a sign. Mr. Lee started driving a little faster. Just as they were going around a bend, a white object darted out from the opposite side of the road. Mr. Lee slammed on the brakes, but it was too late. The object hit the bumper and flew into the dark rush field. The car stopped after it had hurtled forward for another five meters. Mr. Lee peered at the road behind them through his rearview mirror. He could hardly see anything in the glow of the taillight. Y, awakened by the impact, glanced about with puffy eyes. Mr. Lee made a face. “Shit.” He rolled down his window and spat outside. He left the engine running and climbed out of the car. Through the rearview mirror, she saw him move farther away from the car. He was soon swallowed up by darkness. Y said it was most likely nothing and yawned. “Probably a badger or a squirrel.” She’d caught only a flash, but it had seemed much bigger than that. The object in the headlights had been white. About ten minutes later, Mr. Lee came back to the car. Instead of getting in the driver’s seat again, he stood beside the car and smoked. When he climbed inside, he reeked of liquor and cigarettes. “It was a dog,” he said. The village had an unusual number of stray dogs, but the woman’s gut feeling was that it hadn’t been a dog. Back at the factory, the elderly people had been wearing white. They flashed across her mind, and then vanished. Mr. Lee scrubbed his face with both hands. “No, actually, it’s too dark to see anything.” The bottom of the hill about three meters below was as black as a well. It was impossible to search every spot with a flashlight. “Mr. Lee, are you sure it went in that direction?” Y called out from the dark. “I don’t think it was over there.” The dark was disorienting. They couldn’t tell where they’d hit the object. After crashing into the bumper, it had hurtled off the road. It wouldn’t be easy to find where it had landed. Mr. Lee raised the flashlight above his head and raked the light over the field. The light punched holes in the darkness that was like a vast carpet. Dense clumps of rush grass. Dry bushes. Animal sheds no longer in use. The flashlight moved over the field again. Right then in the light, the woman saw the grass shake. “Over there! It’s alive!” She started moving before she finished speaking. The slope wasn’t steep, but the soil was so dry she slipped and tumbled down. “Don’t move the light!” she shouted without looking back. “Yes, there! Keep shining it there!” Because it was the dry season, the rushes were dry. They wrapped around her legs. She heard Y come up behind her. The ground was firm underfoot, but it would give way suddenly into spongy spots. She recalled what A had said. That there were many holes throughout the village where the dead cows had been buried. As the bodies decomposed, the holes that had been covered with dirt turned soft. Maybe it had been a joke to scare a city girl. She walked toward the spot the flashlight revealed, a flattened area. The broken rushes shook. It was a dog. Thinking it was Goldie, she brought her face close, but it wasn’t her. It was panting. The tongue that lolled out of its open mouth looked unnaturally long. “So it actually was a dog?” Y said, catching his breath. He then yelled in Mr. Lee’s direction. “It was a dog! A dog!” It was still warm. When she touched it, its breathing grew quieter. She buried her fingers in its ruff and stroked its fur. It must have been hit in the stomach. Every time her hand went near the stomach, the dog silently bared its teeth. The rushes were sticky. She felt something mushy next to her. The entrails that had spilled from its stomach were splayed on the trampled rush. “Let’s go.” Y said, turning around. That second, the dog’s eyes that had rolled back into its head flashed toward Y. The dog shot up and clamped down on the woman’s wrist with every last bit of strength. Its fangs pierced the woman’s flesh. Her arm turned numb. When she raised her arm, the dog’s head came up as well. Her arm felt so heavy she felt as if it were going to snap off. Once the dog had latched onto her wrist, it refused to let go. She saw its eyes then. Rolled back to show mostly whites, its eyes were welled up with tears. Its saliva seeped into her veins. She remembered those eyes about ten years later, when she herself bit down on someone’s arm. The man clobbered her repeatedly in the face with her purse. The buckle on the purse whacked her in the eye. She tried to get a good look at his face, but she couldn’t, because one of her eyes had swollen shut. Even as she was dragged along the side street, she bit down harder and refused to let go. The dog’s fangs seemed to have pierced through her muscle to the bone. She couldn’t help thinking that if she continued to stay this way, her hand may have to be amputated. The factory manager’s blunt fingers crossed her mind. She shook her arm frantically, but the fangs sank deeper into her flesh. Y, who had been on his way back, heard her scream and came running. Though it was dark, she saw Y leap through the rushes. The dog’s saliva seeped into her bloodstream, and she had the thought that she’d perhaps become half dog. Like a dog, she stared into the darkness. It seemed she could hear, even see, the rustling of a small insect inside the rushes. Y kicked the dog. Her arm was also kicked in the process. The dog would not unlatch from her. Y felt around the rushes. There was a large rock inside his hand. The woman was dragged deeper into the side street by a man whose face she couldn’t see. She lost a heel along the way. Her socks ripped and her skin scraped along the cracked sidewalk and started to bleed. The narrow street that led to her house was always deserted. Even though low-rises with basements lined the street and every detached home was filled with people, she was always the only one in the street. The security light had gone out a long time ago, but no one had replaced the bulb. When she’d sensed someone behind her, it was already too late. The man had been hiding behind the stairs of a low-rise and had come up silently behind her. A strong hand clamped over her nose and mouth. His other hand grabbed at her purse that was slung over her shoulder. She couldn’t breathe. She tried to twist away, but his hand only tightened over her nose and mouth. His palm reeked and was damp with sweat. She had no choice but to bite his hand so that she could breathe. Ahh! He clutched his hand and jumped back. Right then, she could have fled in the opposite direction. But she dashed toward him and bit his arm. Her teeth didn’t sink easily into his muscular arm. She bit down with all her strength. Her teeth pierced his flesh. His muscles seemed to be crumbling between her teeth. He jumped up and down in pain. His blood flowed between her teeth and down her throat. It tasted fishy. The man bashed her face with her purse. The buckle on the purse hit her in the eye. Still she didn’t let go of his arm. His fist pummeled her face. Her nose collapsed and something hot gushed down her face. The crunch of several top teeth breaking off reverberated in her head. Strangely enough, she remembered the eyes of the dog that had bitten her wrist and would not let go. She felt no pain. He dragged her along the street while smashing her head against the stone wall of a low-rise. Once, twice, everything turned white. She wanted to open her mouth, but she couldn’t. She believed her dog nature had finally shown itself for the first time. “Once a dog bites, it rarely lets go,” said H, whom she had run into ten years later. He rolled up his pant leg. She saw the pink keloid scar that was shinier than the rest of his skin. It was a dog bite wound. The man whose face she hadn’t been able to see threw the woman down at the end of the street and hurled the purse at her face. “You fucking bitch!” As if still angry, he stomped on her stomach and thighs with his boots. He then spat on her. H scratched at the keloid scar. “If I got this hurt, can you imagine what happened to the dog?” “Why didn’t you just let him take your purse?” Everyone who came to the hospital said the same thing. They shook their heads, as they gazed down at the woman lying in bed with a mashed eye, fractured nose, three broken teeth, and bruises all over her body. Some asked if there had been valuables in her purse. However, she’d had only a single ten-thousand-won bill inside her purse that day. No one could understand. Each time a visitor offered a comment, her mother, who had been caring for her, added, “Stupid, stupid girl,” and let out a big sigh. The woman looked down at her feet which were sticking out from under the sheet. Her skinned heels were oozing blood and a toenail had fallen off. Y frowned as soon as he came to the hospital. Y was wearing snug leather pants that looked uncomfortable and boots that came up to right below his knees. He glanced at her face a few times and sat on the end of her bed. “You look like a different person.” She gave him a small smile. “Don’t worry. The swelling and bruising will go away. The doctor straightened my nose and as for my broken teeth, I can get implants.” “See?” Y said, slowly shaking his head from side to side. “You still don’t understand.” Until then, the woman had no idea that Y had joined a motorcycle club. She came home a day earlier than her discharge date. That night, Y didn’t come home. Y, who returned late the next morning, didn’t wash up or eat, and went straight to bed. As though he had roamed about all night, she smelled on him the winter wind she’d smelled at the Incheon Port. “You’ve changed too much. You’re not the same shy girl who couldn’t even look at a boy.” Her bruises disappeared and she got dental implants, but Y’s complaints continued. When she asked him why he was always out, he said it was because he was bored. Soon, Y no longer came home in the morning. The office of High Speed, the motorcycle club, was located at an auto body shop right outside Seoul. A sign that said, “We remove dents!” stood in front of the shop, the ground stained with grease and motor oil. The garage owner was around Y’s age. He said that in the daytime he restored vehicles that had been in collisions with the help of his two employees and then on holidays or late at night, he took out his motorcycle. Y wasn’t there. Even the club members couldn’t get a hold of him. Once members were notified of the date, time, and place by email, those who were able to make it gathered and rode their motorcycles together. The owner added that they liked to go on the newly built road in front of Munhak Stadium these days. In one corner of the body shop was a bulletin board for High Speed members. “I need to talk to you, so please come home.” She put up her note where it would be most noticeable. Y didn’t come home. The woman’s uterus, which had been as small as an apple, became the size of a melon. Blue veins spiderwebbed over her breasts. When she rose to her feet or sat down, her groin strained. As he was doing the ultrasound exam, the obstetrician let slip, “What a handsome fella!” It was a boy. The baby inside her belly grew hair, as well as fingernails and toenails. They said that around this time, fingerprints formed on the fingers. As soon as a stethoscope was placed on her belly, a fetal heartbeat echoed in the examination room. The body shop owner recognized her. He said he’d seen Y once on the new road near the airport about two weeks before. On the bulletin board was a message from Y. “Please let me go. Stop hanging onto me for Christ’s sake. I’m so sick of it.” It was his last message to her. While staring at the note, she thought about what Y had said about being bored. According to the body shop owner, Y had gotten a new bike recently. She headed for the road the owner had jotted down for her. The new road in front of Munhak Stadium was connected to the Yeongdong Expressway. The taxi driver stopped several times and asked where exactly in front of the stadium she’d meant. She also went looking for Y around the Jayu Motorway, but there weren’t any spots for the taxi to stop. Motorcycles sped along the night road. There were many that crossed the median line. The cab chased after them, but they were too fast. It wasn’t easy to find Y’s motorcycles from the others. Many members of the club stored their bikes at the body shop. The owner had pointed at one in the corner. “That there is Y’s new girlfriend.” Y’s girlfriend was a 1,450cc model, made of light titanium. If Y had gone around with a woman in the backseat, perhaps one with long hair, she would have been able to catch Y. She stuck a new message on the bulletin. “I’m so bored. Come back.” More than a week passed, but Y didn’t call. The clinic that had been recommended to her on the phone was small and shabby. There didn’t seem to be any women of childbearing age in the town where it was located. The clinic’s only patients were pregnant women who’d traveled from far away and a few bargirls. When she’d called, the nurse hadn’t bothered to ask her the basic questions, like how far along she was. But she added the woman would have to pay for the disposal of the specimen in addition to the surgery cost. She didn’t tell her mother. All her mother would say was that she was a stupid girl. The operating room had missing tiles and holes in the floor, like an old bathhouse. Perhaps her feet had swollen, but she felt better once she’d removed her shoes and climbed onto the operating table. There were metal containers containing bandages by the head of the bed. She placed her feet in the stirrups and lay down on the table. She saw black mold growing in a corner of the cement ceiling. Everything felt so surreal, as if it were someone else’s life. The stirrups felt cold. As her belly tightened, something squirmed inside. She decided to think it was a melon that was inside her belly. How could she have carried such a big thing around? The crash of stainless steel came from the consultation room, as if the staff were handling metal tools. She whispered to herself: “It’s okay. You tried your best.” The factory was quite far from Seoul. The reason she was able to get the job was because all the local young girls had left for the city. The boss added that there was no such thing as a maternity leave because of the worsening recession. Power saws operated non-stop from nine in the morning to nine at night. At first she couldn’t hear the person on the other end of the line because of the saws, but she got used to the noise soon enough. Naturally, her voice grew louder, too. When she would lie in bed at night, she’d hear the saw. Sometimes when she called, her elderly mother would complain and say she was about to go deaf. The factory was always full of itinerant workers. The boss didn’t care about the backgrounds of the workers, but she didn’t like dealing with them. Afraid she’d come across the man she’d bitten, she developed the habit of examining the arms of the new laborers. Even if no one else knew, the one bitten and the one who’d done the biting would no doubt recognize each other. A trailer loaded with North American oak arrived. The laborers who’d been scattered around the sawmill swarmed toward the trailer. A red pennant flag was attached to the end of the longest log on the flatbed. The center of the oak was light pink or dark brown. Compared to cherry wood, oak was easier to cut and nail down. The driver’s door opened and a giant sack of a man hopped down. His hair was disheveled, as if he’d had the windows rolled down. “Ah jeez, you were bitten by a dog?” After observing the scar on her wrist, he suddenly pulled up the hem of his pants and thrust his knee at her. “Look, a dog bit me, too. When they get a hold of something, they don’t let go,” he said with a wince. “If my scar is this big, imagine what happened to the dog! I made sure it would never chew meat again.” The logs on the flatbed matched up with the invoice. While she checked the flatbed, the man joked around, shaking his leg. “Excuse, but do I know you? I feel like we’ve met before.” She started heading back to the office, but he blocked her way. “I’m sure I’ve seen you before . . . Are you sure you don’t remember me?” His face was unfamiliar. He walked back to his trailer, hitting his gloves against his leg. The flatbed tilted up and logs spilled down onto the ground. The noise of the saws coming from the workshop was deafening. The driver came running, his belly bouncing. Very briefly, she recalled Hanil Trading’s sign hanging ceremony. But the man recognized her first. “Hanil Trading, right?” She recalled the Yankees baseball cap. “A?” The man looked disappointed. “You asked me how I’d gotten bitten by a dog. You were so cold you were shivering, so I even lent you my pullover.” It was H. But his face was unfamiliar. “It was a green waterproof pullover . . .” In the group photo, she’s wearing a green pullover. She has red eyes, for she’d been looking directly at the camera. So fixated on her red eyes, she must have forgotten about the borrowed pullover. She’d remembered A as being the only young factory worker there that day. He went on a reefer ship that February, just as he’d told her. About a year later, the company received a letter saying all traces of A had disappeared from an island in the South Pacific archipelago when his boat had been anchored at port. When the wooden sign was unwrapped from the newspaper, it smelled of fresh varnish. Some parts of the sign were sticky since the varnish hadn’t completely dried. People around the yard started to gather. The director raised the sign with a sly expression. Exactly ten years later, he had a heart attack. He always had the air of a traveler who had just stepped off the plane. The CEO was eventually conned by the assistant manager who’d looked like a sailor. Assistant Manager Lee had conspired with a friend at the American branch to steal some imported lumber. A year after the sign hanging ceremony, Hanil Trading began to fall into decline. The seventy plus employees dispersed and the name of the company disappeared from the trade newsletter. The factory’s sign that had been carved out of walnut wood was probably burned up a long time ago, used as firewood for some house. While learning photography, she learned that the red-eye effect tends to happen when the pupils are dilated. Why were my pupils dilated? Was it really me that Y had been watching through the viewfinder? Other female employees from the company had been standing next to her. Miss Kim, who resembled a cat, was very popular with the men. The woman’s gaze had been directed at some point beyond the frame. Was I really looking at Y? She couldn’t even remember borrowing H’s pullover twenty years ago. Y may not be the one she’s watching. Y takes a few steps back with the camera in his hands. He puts the camera up to his eye, hesitates, and backs up some more. Now he’s standing about five meters away from the group. The pasture spreads out behind him. As seventy plus people scuffle about, red dust rises to their knees. Above the pasture is the deep autumn sky. The workshop was built on what was once the paddock. The workshop door opens and a cow makes its way out of the paddock. Soon other cows come out of the paddock. The dairy cows amble toward the sheds. The woman blinks. The cows vanish and only their mooing lingers in the air. There is no pasture or workshop. What she is looking at is herself in twenty years. Her pupils are dilated. That’s when Y presses the shutter. The assistant manager, who’s dressed in a suit with gold buttons, backs up the car and parks in front of the factory entrance. The woman is looking for A to say goodbye. But she can’t find A or Goldie who had followed him around. Y looks as young as he had at the Incheon pier when he leapt between the logs that had arrived from North America. Several cars carrying the main office staff leave the factory and a cloud of red dust rises around the tires. She and Y cannot fathom how much they will change in twenty years. Her wrist is still smooth, unmarked with the dog’s bite. Nothing has happened yet. At this point, her belief that biting and being bitten is part of life has not yet taken root. In the pictures that Y has taken, a young H is wearing a green pullover—the same green pullover she’d borrowed and is wearing in the group photo. H’s face is still a stranger’s face. He leans forward, listening to what the factory manager is saying. When Y raises his camera, the factory manager waves his seven fingers. A part of the shed wall is showing. The white brim of a hat pokes out from the shed. Goldie’s tail seems to be showing below. A is hiding, watching the woman leave. She cannot remember H’s face for the life of her. It’s as if a man from the distant future has leapt into the past. She can’t remember the keloid scar H said he’d shown her. She calls out to Y, who is taking his sweet time. Her round forehead is smooth. She was at her most beautiful then.
by Ha Seong-nan
The Enemy of Capitalism
Here is the true enemy of capitalism. This is not a statement about my parents who were socialists. As known to all, my parents were not theoretical or armchair socialists like some student activists in the 1980s, but real warriors who fought against capitalism in actual warfare, armed with carbine rifles and operating all over Jirisan Mountain during the Korean War. After I was born, however, they did little to stand up against capitalism. At most, they spent long, long winter nights longingly reminiscing about their early days when they had been the living enemies of capitalism, whispering under their comforter to avoid being eavesdropped upon by others. To be exact, therefore, they might well be called former socialists. They were eternal socialists at heart, though. But who gives a damn about heart? Apart from their fight against capitalism during the Korean War, they didn’t have any skill, money or even youth, and after their release from prison, came back to the world ruled by capitalism, where they barely made ends meet as inexperienced farmers at the bottom of capitalist society until their deaths. They had a great cause in their minds, but didn’t reveal it to others, and even if they had revealed it, the great cause would have become a dagger that would end up stabbing them. Thus, since my parents were already old when I was born, they were merely the dead enemies of capitalism. All they left me were persistent poverty, a considerable amount of debt and an abstract concept called socialism that was as persistent as poverty. Nonetheless, the word socialism, which was only an abstraction that I was fed up with, was imprinted on all the memories of my life like a branding mark, and inevitably I ended up having a peculiar interest in its enemy, namely capitalism. Holy crap!
While the name Jeong Ji A will remind most readers of the partisans’ daughter, I am repeating this obvious story over and over again while sober, since I would like to show my real self in order to help readers believe that the unbelievable and unreal story which I am about to tell is, in fact, based on absolutely real facts, just as my parents’ story was based on reality. Thirty years ago, I began to feel the urge to write the story about my friend and her family who were deemed the true enemies of capitalism. They were rare human beings in the capitalist age, whom I termed the “autistic family.” Being a realist, however, I dared not write about them because their life seemed too unreal to be true in the eyes of others. Only recently have I made up my mind to write this story, but not because I have some noble and brave aspirations to tell the world about the emerging true enemy of capitalism in this age when socialism, the only former enemy of capitalism, has collapsed. Rather, I write it because I just want to play, free from being the partisans’ daughter and also from being a realist, more and more lightly, like the dust or like the wind, into thin air and without a trace.
Now, let us proceed with the story. But first, I would like to ask for understanding on one point. The story of this family is unbelievable, but not exciting. Otherwise, they would not be the autistic family. There is no narrative in the life of this family. It is highly likely that this story will end up as a monotonous report on their everyday life. The inability to dramatize their monotonous everyday life shows the limitations of my capabilities as a writer, which I deeply regret, but this task is beyond my capacity at the moment. Hence, I would appreciate it very much if readers could read it through, feeling a sense of wonder or relief in the fact that these human beings were also our contemporaries, and taking comfort in these small feelings.
The pillar of this is my friend, Bang Hyeonnam, who was born the second daughter of a family desperately longing for a son because her father was a fifth-generation only son, as observant readers may have already guessed from her name. Her parents were sincere enough to name their first daughter Hyeona, which was quite an elegant name for a girl at that time, since eldest daughters were considered to be fundamental to the keeping of a household in Korea. Faced with the tragic reality of having another daughter, however, they were overwhelmed by the pressure to have a son at all costs, and when naming their newborn daughter, could not help using the word nam, which means “man” in Korean, in obvious hopes of having a son the next time. In short, the birth of Hyeonnam was a sheer tragedy totally unwelcomed, which didn’t need to happen and should not have happened. It is uncertain whether her self-consciousness as a purposeless being was the primary cause that drove her to become an enemy of capitalism or not. Still, it is certain that it inevitably affected her growth. Having unintentionally aggravated the conflict between her paternal grandmother and her mother with her birth, Hyeonnam mastered the mysterious secret of going unnoticed wherever she was early in her childhood, since her grandmother used to lose her temper whenever she saw her face. Due to her mysterious secret, I also could not notice her existence even though both of us had gone to the same college and taken the same courses in a class of only forty-six students in the same department for three years.
I clearly remember the moment when I first became aware of her existence. That day, drinking with several other students, I had one glass too many and kept swearing at the dictatorial government to go with my drink and finally made arrogant verbal attacks on my friends, seniors and juniors who were there with me, all of whom were greenhorns just like myself. While the unfortunate victims were trying to calm their anger with a glass of cheap maksoju, my eyes were searching for the next victim. Then, Hyeonnam came into sight, who seemed half invisible, disappearing into the background. I immediately sobered up. My drunken bravado was only for those who were used to it and I even regarded it as my strong point, like an occasional charm performance for fans, and therefore, the mere appearance of a stranger instantaneously made me feel ashamed of my act. While I was blushing and perplexed under the influence of alcohol and shame, she faintly smiled at me. It was a really thin smile that I’d never seen before. I used the word ‘thin’ to describe the sparse and watery nature of her smile, although I was unsure if it was a proper adjective to describe it, but I felt like her smile might turn into something like clear water at any minute. With that smile on her face, she spoke to me.
“I like college. . .”
She said this, although I could not understand how it was related to what I’d just rattled on about, and then I replied to her despite myself because her low voice, which always required an ellipsis as I would later discover, had a magnetic pull that drew in listeners in a weird way.
“Why?”
“Because we don’t change classes. . .”
I was, and still am, burning with an unsatisfiable desire for the unknown world, and couldn’t understand what she’d said at that moment. For many readers feeling like myself, I’d like to make a superfluous interpretation about the meaning of her words that I finally deciphered years later. Hyeonnam has a fear of all that was new. In addition to her natural timidity, the primal experience of her birth, had developed into a fear of all new things. Thus, she lived in fear for twelve years, from elementary to high school. Since she was afraid of having to meet strangers, she had diarrhea every day and also had indigestion whenever she ate something, and consequently, weighed only 36 kilograms at the time of high school graduation. For reference, she was 163 centimeters tall, the same height as me. She’d weighed even less, but gained about three kilograms by the end of the semester. She’d relax a bit around December, but the winter vacation began at the same time, and then the school and classmates became unfamiliar to her again. She felt awkward when school started again in February, and to make matters worse, had to change classes again in March. Her priority wasn’t studying, as her school life resembled a fierce battle for survival. In college, however, time passed by while with familiar faces. It was almost a miracle to her. The first sign of the miracle was revealed in the form of weight gain. She started gaining weight in her sophomore year. She even weighed as much as 53 kilograms when I first met her during my junior year. College life was as good to her as the Garden of Eden. Without clearly understanding what she meant, I thought that her remark was just a symptom of shyness, and asked back with a giggle.
“By the way. . . Who are you?”
She casually answered as if this were a common reaction.
“I also started my undergrad in creative writing in ’84. . . My name is Bang Hyeonnam. . .”
It was a dreary fall day in my junior year, but I didn’t recall that name. Her face was also unfamiliar, of course. I hadn’t even heard of her name, and it was not because of her secret skill, but because of my laziness, since I didn’t remember when I’d attended any class for the last time. However, her next words were another story.
“I’ve seen you often at drinking parties. . .”
Even at this historic moment when Hyeonnam and I had our first conversation in three years, the others were enjoying their drinks as if we weren’t even there. All seemed to have completely forgotten about my existence even though I’d just made a fiery speech in front of them. This was absolutely due to her secret skill. Then I finally realized her secret of camouflaging her existence. There’s nothing special about it. As with all secret skills, however, she’d put great effort into mastering the method over a period of years. First of all, her facial expressions and gestures never showed any anxiety or fear. If so, all eyes would have been on her immediately. Then, without a word, sound or move, she vaguely mimicked the behavior of the others, such as laughing and drinking. When done simultaneously and naturally, people weren’t aware of who was right next to them. It turned out that she’d shown up at various department events more often than I had. Still, most classmates, like myself, couldn’t remember her. Being her roommate, I was the only one who knew that she never wore a skirt during all her college years. She came from a poor village in Sanggye-dong, Seoul, and spent four winters with a single jacket made of thin cotton. Only I knew about her shabbiness. She was always around others, but like a shadow. I’d never seen such a quiet person. And I’ve yet to meet another.
From that day on, we lived together until graduation. She was having difficulty commuting long distances from her home in Sanggye-dong to Anseong. I didn’t know why, but she nodded right away when I asked her to live with me. My cohabitation with her was neither bad nor good. I would rather say that it was weird. I’d never seen such a lethargic person before. My parents lived like ghosts without any power in this capitalist society, but in their hearts, they lived on a battlefield where bullets rained down, with a firm belief that both body and mind must be strong. I lived with such parents for twenty years. Back then, I felt no respect for them, but their way of life must have seeped into my life, like the way many drops eventually make an ocean. I couldn’t understand her lethargy at all.
We were roommates for about a year and a half, and I had no memory of seeing her do something. Truly, she did nothing at all. Except for one thing. She read lying on the bed. That was hard to believe. At that time, we were young, only twenty-two years old. Eager to write a good story, I couldn’t sleep well at night when I felt humiliated by a brilliant story written by one of my friends, which was better than mine in terms of metaphor or writing sense or whatever. Then, I started to read anything I could get my hands on, but the great masters of literature drove me to drink out of despair; simultaneously, I also engaged in on-campus protests, marching arm-in-arm with other protesters, sometimes shouting slogans in the street as well. I was constantly doing something, filled with a desire to know more, to do something and to become someone, seething like magma in my mind. Despair and hope repeated like the four seasons during my youth. Meanwhile, Hyeonnam always kept still wherever she was, like at the drinking party. She studied creative writing in college for four years, but never wrote a single story. The only evidence that she was a creative writing student were a few, quite elegant sentences in the three or four letters she sent to me during breaks. She was capable of writing such good sentences, but she never tried. I once asked her why she didn’t write at all, and she just shrugged it off without a word.
She was young and did nothing. I thought that it was an insult to youth, and further, to life itself. It somehow felt like an insult to me or to my way of life, too. One day, I could no longer refrain from asking.
“What on earth do you live for?”
Hyeonnam answered languorously with her typical thin smile.
“Well. . . If I stand up, I want to sit down, and if I sit down, I want to lie down, and if I lie down, I want to sleep. . .”
Her answers were always like that, either ludicrous or annihilating the question itself. I once asked her if she’d ever write a novel.
“Do I have to?”
A typical answer.
“Why’d you decide to study creative writing, then?”
“Just because. . . I thought that all I’d have to do was read books. . .”
In retrospect, she was right. You don’t need to become a writer just because you have a bachelor’s degree in creative writing. Becoming a writer doesn’t change who you are. Anyway, in those days, it was inconceivable for me not to become a writer. I also couldn’t understand a person who studied creative writing in college, but didn’t try to become a writer. From my perspective, living meant becoming something different, something better than the present—becoming a writer, a wife and a mother.
Hyeonnam didn’t try to become anything. She didn’t want to. Most of the time we lived together, she wanted to sit when standing, lie down when sitting and fall asleep when lying down, as she herself said. While we were living together, she spent more than two-thirds of her time sleeping. She lay in bed almost all day long during weekends. Until then, I hadn’t known that humans could sleep so long, and that it would be all right. Only later did I realize that every moment spent outside was stressful for her, that sleeping was the only way to relax, and that she felt so comfortable with me she could fall asleep beside me. I shook her awake many times, worried about her, since she kept sleeping without eating or going to the bathroom for two days in a row.
Her favorite place was her temporary bed made of a metal frame with a plank of wood on top of it. Even when awake, she would lay motionless in bed as still as death. The level of stress she experienced in her everyday life was beyond my imagination. I’ve been friends with her for thirty years, but still cannot fathom the extent of her difficulties, and I can only assume how hard it must be for her.
One sunny spring day, I was making gimbap for our picnic lunch. Lying in bed like a still life as usual, Hyeonnam blurted out, “I guess I was a fifth-grader when I had the test. . .”
I assumed that it must have been very hard for her because tests were stressful for everyone.
“That day, I flipped over the test paper, and the letters were upside down. I freaked out. . .”
I had no idea what on earth she was about to say. If the letters were upside down, she could simply turn the test paper upside down, which was no big deal.
“I couldn’t read the letters because they were upside down. I thought that I could read them properly if I moved my chair to sit on the other side. . .”
If you’ve already understood what she said, you’re either a genius or have an autistic family member. Or you just didn’t think about it. It took me twenty years to fully understand the exact meaning of her words. Anyway, the point is this: in the old days, most test papers were printed on both sides. They were handwritten by teachers, of course. Since the paper orientation wasn’t automatically set by a computer, sometimes you had to flip over your test paper from left to right like turning a page of a book in order to properly read the letters on the reverse side, and at other times, had to flip it from bottom to top to read them properly. It was absolutely up to the teacher. In her case, she flipped over her test paper like turning a page, and the letters were upside down, which was a common mistake. The problem could’ve been solved simply by turning it in the proper direction. Yet, our Hyeonnam couldn’t do it. It never crossed her mind that she could turn it herself, and instead, she just sat there and gave a deep sigh, gazing blankly at the upside-down paper throughout the test; she thought that she had to move her chair to the other side of the desk to read, but couldn’t do it because the seat was occupied by another student, and so she didn’t know what else to do. Toward the end of the test, the teacher finally figured out what was happening, and turned it for her with a sigh deeper than hers. She was finally able to read it. It was a miraculous moment for her.
I came close to shouting, “Are you serious?” If her ability to understand had been a little lower, I would have had doubts about her. Her letters sent to me, however, had shown the fact that her understanding and insight were probably better and never worse than mine. Consequently, she was not a fool, but I wondered what kind of thinking process had prevented her from even considering turning the upside-down test paper, and that day’s conversation was to be my big doubt for the following twenty years.
Twenty years later, her son resolved my big doubt. Since we lived within a five minutes’ walk from each other, we were on our way to the market one day when we ran into her little son on his way home from school. Seeing us together, he briefly hesitated and scuttled away into an alley without saying hello. He didn’t know how to face his mother’s unexpected appearance in public, and therefore, sheltered himself in the alley in order to avoid the awkward situation. At that moment, the whole story of the test paper incident was finally revealed, which had been a mystery to me for over twenty years. To an autistic person, people can seem like strangers, and they must prepare their hearts or make a firm resolution before facing an unfamiliar situation. Even their own family members can cause unbearable stress, not to mention outsiders. Then, more serious problems can be caused by things or situations, as exemplified by the test paper. Most people feel stress in new situations, but in the case of Hyeonnam, it took at least a year for her to adjust to a classroom and to stop having diarrhea. Things can also be triggers sometimes. When the most technophobic person is faced with a new machine, or when an exceptionally timid person sits behind the steering wheel for the first time, machines are not mere objects but the cause of fear. Yet, Hyeonnam was afraid of a test paper. Test papers don’t go into reverse if touched the wrong way, nor do they delete the manuscript you wrote all night long the moment you click the wrong button. Yet, she thought that she couldn’t move the test paper, just like she couldn’t move other people as she pleased, and that she should move herself instead. Everything was like the test paper, to her.
Shy as she was, Hyeonnam didn’t come back home one night toward the end of the last semester. I called her parents in Seoul to see if she’d gone to their place, but she wasn’t there. After four days, she came home nonchalantly, as if she’d left home that morning.
“Hey!” I shouted in anger. Her calmness triggered me after being worried about her for the past few days.
“What’s wrong?”
I would’ve smacked her on the back if she’d been my daughter. We used to share a self-deprecating joke with each other that our faces were our weapons whenever we heard people speak ill of classmates just because they were good-looking. Still, she’d been missing for three days without any notice, and dared to ask back, “What?”
“Where have you been? You didn’t even tell me!”
She answered in a thin voice, taking off her dark blue cotton jacket and crawling into bed.
“The National Security Agency.”
“Where?”
Her tone was so matter-of-fact that it sounded like she’d been to a friend’s house whose name was National Security. It took a few moments for me to realize what she had just said, and I was even more shocked by the fact that someone like her had done something to be detained by that kind of agency.
“What for?”
“They were looking for our senior, Gihun. . .”
He was a senior student in the same department, allegedly wanted for his union activities.
“Why’d they ask you about him?”
“I was in his study group. . . A long time ago. . .”
Startled by her answer, I pulled the blanket off her in haste. Back then, detainees at the National Security Agency usually weren’t released uninjured. I checked her forearms and back, but her body looked perfectly clean.
“Are you okay?”
“I didn’t know anything anyway. . .”
“Were you in his study group? You of all people?”
“He insisted so much. I went there about three times, and just sat there without saying anything, and then he didn’t call me again. . .”
In those days, everyone and their mother participated in the student movement, but there were also people like her who was accidentally mistaken for an activist for such an absurd reason.
“Did they just believe you and let you go?”
In fact, what else could they do but believe her? In addition to her camouflaging secret, she also had a skill in making others believe her completely. Her tricks weren’t that special; those who looked at her face couldn’t help but believe her in the end. She nodded casually.
“I told them that I had no money to pay the fare, and they gave me a ride home. They told me over and over not to make friends with bad people in the future. . .”
I burst out laughing. I felt like I could understand the confusion of the agent who’d interrogated her. One of her various nicknames was Bang Beobeo. It came from her habit of gawking and stuttering in a very difficult situation. Those who saw her only in this situation regarded her as a simpleton. She must’ve been gawking and stuttering at the National Security Agency, too. They must have sighed heavily, regretting that they’d arrested such a kid in vain. Thus, they just let her go. In those days, she was probably the first to be detained by the National Security Agency for three days and four nights, and treated with such kind consideration when she left the premises. Both the dictatorial government and the National Security Agency couldn’t do anything to her. The activist group that recruited her also couldn’t change anything about her. She was barely noticeable, but turned out to be as strong as a martial arts master if one judged the strength of human beings by their changelessness.
Our college life came to an end with the National Security Agency incident. I didn’t search in earnest for a job to become a writer, and she didn’t, either, since there was nothing she wanted to do. Then I started working for the publishing team of a social movement organization and got her involved, suggesting that she should keep up with the changing times, which was silly of me in retrospect. She hesitated without giving an answer. I didn’t understand that her hesitation was a refusal, and made my suggestion stronger. To my shame, it actually wasn’t a suggestion. Rather, I was criticizing and blaming her as an intellectual for living a life that avoided the troubles of our times. And intellectuals don’t know jack about it. For reference, I voluntarily withdrew from the organization immediately before its dissolution that resulted not only from government repression, but also from radicalism and many other organizational limitations which can’t be revealed here. Her insight was always better than mine. Without realizing it, I spoke to her impudently and passionately all day long until she grew weary and finally gave in.
“Well, if you insist. . .”
She nodded unwillingly. I mistook this for agreement or sympathy. I realized much later that she rarely said no. A refusal would take considerable energy, and there was nothing so hideous that she had to refuse by exerting so much energy. In short, there was nothing she earnestly strived after nor anything she’d rather die than do. Life has taught me a lesson about this. If you’re earnestly striving after something, it also means that you hate to do something else to death. Ironically, it was this aspect of her personality that made her stay in the world one way or another, although she had no intention of getting involved in it.
Hyeonnam met her husband in this organization. He was also her first boyfriend. That didn’t surprise me. Having a relationship was too much for her, afraid as she was of all things unfamiliar. At the beginning of any relationship, a lover is only a stranger, too. It would take a few years for her to feel closer to a stranger. Most men wouldn’t wait that long, and usually didn’t even notice her. On the contrary, this man noticed her very quickly, and followed her day and night. He did it over a very long period of time to let her grow familiar with him. Six years later, she told me that she would marry him, but I vehemently opposed it.
“You’ll starve to death. At least one of you has to earn a living.”
I knew him well. I even liked him. He was, however, too similar to her. He was way too poor, just like her. Furthermore, he was a blue-collar worker.
“We’ll take care of ourselves. . .”
It was the firmest expression I’d ever heard from her. I still believe that her firmness came from the great power of love.
She married a man most similar to her, and had two sons similar to her, eventually forming a family that passes by unnoticed in the world. I’d like to describe the everyday life of this family about ten years ago which isn’t much different even today. I’d appreciate it if readers could understand my inevitable decision to give up the novelistic structure and to make a statement this way. Nothing changes in this family’s life except for the fact that they grow older every year. Thus, I cannot but catch a certain moment in their life on a certain day, which is just like any other day, and show it as it is to readers.
Anyway, late one night, her husband is reading Marx’s Capital in the living room of their 600 square-foot apartment. He reads it for no particular purpose. Having graduated from a decent university, he became a blue-collar worker to participate in the labor movement, but eventually stopped being an activist to become an ordinary worker, doing his best to make ends meet. I haven’t asked him why he still reads Capital. I can only vaguely guess. He has been disappointed with something, but still cannot give up the dream that is already in his heart. In this, he’s different from Hyeonnam. It’s very fortunate for her family. Those who cannot give up their dreams, even though they know they’re unachievable, are hard workers. The same was true of my parents. Thus, he works hard to earn money. His annual income is 30 million won. He reads Capital every night, like reading the Bible, which is the only remaining evidence that he’s a college graduate, that is, an intellectual of his times.
Around that time, Hyeonnam and I have a drink at a covered street stall in the neighborhood. We go about once a week. Every time we eat there, she receives calls from home. Her ten-year-old and seven-year-old sons take turns calling her. To think that Hyeonnam could have sex before marriage. She was carrying her eldest son at the time of her wedding. Such is the exquisiteness of human life. What’s more, it’s also the beauty of history. Greedy people are not the only survivors. Autistic people also survive in the world, hiding themselves and silently blending into others or into an era, like Hyeonnam, and secretly staying alive to preserve their primordial genetic structure. Maybe owing to them, this greedy world can go on without exploding.
Anyway, her two sons call her every five minutes to ask her the same question.
“Can I play on the computer for just five more minutes?”
“No, you can’t.”
I feel so frustrated that I take her phone to talk to them.
“Hey! You can play. Your Mom will be home in about an hour.”
Even after I tell them what to do, they’ll call her again in five minutes without fail. Whether their mother is watching or not, there’s no way for them to do what is forbidden without her permission. Their honesty is incredible. If I were them, I’d play on the computer, and simultaneously call my mother to tell her to come home right away, blaming her for coming home so late. That way, I could pretend to be waiting for her while at the same time play computer games behind her back without being anxious. All the members of her family, including her two sons, are awfully honest. That much honesty may well be described as such. Their honesty is beyond an acceptable level.
Their apartment was once infested with flies, and Hyeonnam devised a clever solution. The deal was ten seconds of playing computer games per fly. They killed flies with flyswatters all day long, counting the number of dead flies. If they got confused by the time they caught the thirteenth one, they would count from ten again. It was frustrating enough to do that all day long only to spend a few more minutes on the computer, and on top of that, they were recounting from ten, which made me worry whether they’d be able to make a living in a world like this. Unlike before, however, I didn’t say anything. I’d worried that Hyeonnam and her husband might starve to death, but they even had children and were still alive and well. These honest children would also survive one way or another. After all, they didn’t have any unattainable dreams. The eldest son’s dream was to become a Yakult lady.
“You’ll never be able to become a Yakult lady.”
“Why not?”
“You’re a boy.”
After a moment of distress, the boy gave an answer.
“Then, a Yakult gentleman.”
He also knew that he needed a job to make a living. Yet, he was afraid that he’d have to get a job working with strangers in an unfamiliar world. A Yakult lady, however, stayed in the background. She delivered Yakult products through delivery slots, and that was it. He didn’t give up his dream of becoming a Yakult lady even after he went to middle school.
Later on the same day, the eldest son couldn’t fall asleep in his room. He was afraid of having to go to school the next day, and also afraid of having to join the military someday. After he’d learned the fact that all South Korean men are drafted into the military, he could hardly get to sleep at night, and if he fell asleep, he had dreams about being forced to join the army. In his dreams, he was taken away from home to an unfamiliar world filled with strangers. Having a nightmare every night, he became afraid of falling asleep. The second son, who was only seven years old, couldn’t get to sleep, either, tossing and turning in bed beside his elder brother. He didn’t know what the military was, but being a boy, he knew that he’d be also drafted someday, and his elder brother’s terror got into him, too.
Hyeonnam could hardly get to sleep, either, worrying about doing lunch duty at her sons’ school the next day. The school was full of unfamiliar kids. (I’d appreciate it if readers could understand her fear. When it came to kids, she was scared of unfamiliar kids as much as unfamiliar grownups.) In addition, she had to face other parents and teachers. Being near them was frightening enough, not to mention facing them. Still, mothers in general were great. Hyeonnam had changed, too. If it had been her own problem, she would have avoided the situation by making herself almost invisible, but as a mother, she was determined to face them anyhow. As to how she did that, I’d better leave it to readers’ imagination. Her husband fell asleep in the living room, with his head resting on Capital. He was no less sensitive than the other members of his family. His sleep was the result of hard manual labor.
After a few more years, they were living in a country house in Yongin. In the end, the family moved there because they transferred their sons, who had trouble adapting to school, to an alternative school. It was a small, combined elementary and middle school with less than thirty students. Located in the mountains, the school didn’t provide school buses, and since there was no suitable house they could rent nearby, Hyeonnam hastily took driving lessons just before they moved. The autistic family’s challenge to driving was so turbulent that I once considered writing a book about it. Whenever she made a right turn at the driving school, her car got stuck in a flowerbed. She was so nervous that the driving instructor gave a deep sigh instead of getting angry. She’d learned from all the instructors of the driving school one by one before she got her driver’s license. A week after her move to the country house, I called her up.
“Did you go shopping?”
“Not yet. . .
“Why not?”
“I’m afraid of driving. . .”
“What have you been eating, then?”
“Just. . . this and that. . .”
They were eating “this and that,” as if the Korean War were still going on. I rushed to Yongin immediately. She got into my car to go to the market, making endless exclamations.
“You’re so great.”
“What do you mean?”
“How can you look backward?”
When she was behind the steering wheel she could only look forward. She couldn’t change lanes. When she tried, the whole family screamed in the car, looking backward and to the side. “Now! Now! No!”
“You’re so great.”
It was the nicest compliment that she’d ever paid me. And just because I could look in my rear-view mirror and side mirrors. I was perplexed, not knowing whether I should be angry or pleased. When I won an annual spring literary contest, or when I received such-and-such literary award, she didn’t care at all, showing neither admiration nor acknowledgement. Aside from that, she rebuked me on every occasion. Each time I published a collection of short stories, she called me about two months later.
“You wrote again.”
What did she mean? I kept silent wondering if she were reprimanding me, and then, her next words sounded ridiculous and heartless.
“You keep writing on and on.”
She was reprimanding me, indeed. The problem was that this made me reflect on myself. I must have been influenced by her and her family. I kept silent as I did, and then, she threw a stronger punch.
“If you really want to write, write in private. Then throw it away.”
She was telling me not to waste resources and not to cause trouble to society for trivial things. Holy crap! I might not have looked it, but I was not a prolific writer! I was on the verge of flaring up in anger, but suddenly felt ashamed of myself. Yes, I could have done what she said, and then, why did I insist on publishing it somewhere to be read by someone?
Having screwed me over like this, she now told me I was great. She meant that I was great because I could look in the rear-view mirror. Was she kidding me? Anyway, her driving experience ended after a year. I gave her my Daewoo Lanos that I’d bought for 3 million won and driven for three years, and she had many bitter experiences with the car for a year until it met its fate. Her insurance premium was 1,870,000 won at the time. For reference, while the car was in my ownership, my insurance premium was less than 400,000 won. I’ll leave it to the readers’ imagination what kind of accidents might have happened. Still, there was nothing fatal. Meaning that no one was hurt. The reason being that she never drove faster than fifty kilometers per hour.
But as I itch to talk about her numerous accidents, I’d like to bring only one of them to light. Her car was approaching the entrance of a parking lot. The driveway was wide enough to be a two-lane road but without any marked lanes, unfortunately. She couldn’t figure out where to go without visible lanes. Trembling in fear, she made a right turn. There was a food stall covered with transparent vinyl on the left side of the entrance. While she was trying to make a right turn on the broad and wide road, her car pulled to the left and hit the stall. She was driving five kilometers per hour. There was almost no impact, of course. Customers in the stall were wondering what had just happened, drinking and watching the incident. She hit the plastic curtain on one side of the stall, and in surprise, backed up her car without turning the steering wheel. Then, she drove forward. She hit the stall again. Even more confused, she backed up straight again. Then, she drove forward again. She hit the same spot three times. Unable to bear the sight of her driving, a meddlesome customer jumped out.
“Ma’am! Get out of the car!”
That day, thanks to the drunk customer, she safely entered the parking lot. Luckily, there was no claim for damages because she’d only hit the stall’s plastic curtain. We made little jokes about it: “Ms. Bang is scarier than Ms. Kim.”1 “Ms. Kim is running, but Ms. Bang is flying above her.”2
Living in a remote area in Yongin, the family seemed to be so helpless that I visited them often. One Saturday, her sons welcomed me by jumping up and down in joy. Only when I visited the family, they could enjoy a barbecue party, namely the taste of country life. Hyeonnam washed home-grown vegetables, while her husband went out into the backyard, saying that he would be the one to fire up the grill that day and call us when ready. The children had made great efforts to grow those vegetables. At first, the backyard was not an ideal place to grow vegetables because there were too many stones. They made a deal: ten seconds of computer games per stone. They picked up hundreds of stones, counting them as usual. If they got confused by the time they picked up the twenty-sixth one, they recounted from twenty, of course.
We finished all preparations and waited for quite a while, but her husband didn’t call for us. I got impatient and went outside. In his navy-blue company uniform, he was tearing up a magazine page by page and throwing the pieces onto the grill. I watched what he was doing. Many pieces of charcoal were placed in a row at the bottom of the grill so that none of them overlapped with one another in a truly aesthetic way, and he was tossing flaming pieces of paper onto them. I came close to shouting, “Are you a nitwit? Flames naturally burn upward!” I restrained myself with clenched teeth, since I couldn’t dare call him names as I wouldn’t even dare to do so to Hyeonnam that. Silently, I put charcoal starters at the bottom, and then placed charcoal on them to light the grill.
“Wow! There’s nothing Ms. Jeong can’t do!”
The novelist Jeong was able to become the savior of the family for such a thing. That kind of compliment always made me feel uncomfortable. My heart was saying, “Who are they?” Behind this question lie my true feelings about them. They admire petty skills that most people learn for living convenience. The family, however, only admires them without bothering to learn them. They’re not desperate enough to make an effort to learn. If I weren’t with them, they’d simply not have a barbecue. Regarding cars, they would simply not drive at all. Thus, it feels like there is a hidden meaning behind their admiration, as if they were saying, “You have so many unnecessary skills.” From the viewpoint of the family, therefore, I am a person who keeps writing banal novels for no good reason and who has many petty skills for no good reason. They have a point.
Of all the technologies developed since the beginning of modern times, only two things have attracted the genuine admiration of the family. One is the flush toilet, and the other is the computer, or the internet to be more exact. The former needs no explanation, while the latter has become the best protection for the family. Ever since Hyeonnam discovered a whole new world in online shopping, she has purchased everything online. She doesn’t have to go to crowded shopping malls in this new world. Frankly, it drives me nuts to see her in a shopping mall. She loses her mind in front of a myriad of products. Presumably, it is similar to standing in front of millions of people. Usually, she cannot buy what she wants, and comes back empty-handed. The reason is that she doesn’t know what to choose out of so many products. A local grocery store equipped with basic necessity goods will suit her needs much better than a large superstore.
Anyway, after the barbecue party, we were doing the dishes, and her husband was reading Capital while the kids were looking at the new Nike sneakers that I gave them as gifts. They continued looking at them for hours. They didn’t wear them, though. They kept the brand-new sneakers intact in the shoe cabinet, and would get familiar with them slowly as time passed. In the meantime, they’d keep wearing cheap sneakers bought online, which were already small for them and even had holes. I knew that they’d do that, and had bought sneakers two-sizes bigger than their actual size.
The shoe cabinet of the family was quite a sight. A lot of worn-out shoes were piled up there, shoes that hadn’t been worn for a long time. They couldn’t throw away those old familiar shoes which had become almost part of them. The absence of desire for novelty is connected with the attachment to familiarity. I get rid of old things very rationally, as soon as they are no longer needed. To me, a new thing means something that I don’t know and also need to discover. As it turns out, there are so many things that I want to become, to have and to do, and therefore, I’m a capitalist human being full of desires. Me, the partisans’ daughter.
Once, a student of mine demanded her boyfriend present her with a designer handbag in celebration of their one thousand day anniversary. He flatly refused, saying that a luxury handbag was not for a student, and then, her next remark was on everyone’s lips in the creative writing department for quite a while.
“Even the partisans’ daughter has a Chanel! Why not me?”
An older female colleague had given me the Chanel for free, since she was fed up with it. Yet, I secretly felt guilty. I like luxury goods. I just don’t have enough money, and just can’t buy them because it’s difficult and bothersome to save money to buy them. If I were rich, I’d buy any amount of Hermès, Manolo Blahnik and whatnot. Someone once criticized me for wearing high heels, saying that perhaps the partisans’ daughter had become a turncoat.
“Capitalism is sustainable as long as capital is accumulated. I never accumulate it. Isn’t this a true anti-capitalist life?”
Thus, I refuted the ridiculous criticism with a ridiculous sophistic argument. I was ashamed of my inner desires that were unworthy of the partisans’ daughter, but I still didn’t want to give in to the absurd criticism.
The family members also have an eye for beautiful things and good machines. Whenever Hyeonnam finds something nice, her reaction is always the same.
“It’s nice. Chomp, chomp.”
She has turned the onomatopoeic sound of “chomp, chomp” into a word of her own, which implies an immediate renunciation that it is nice, but not hers. It means that she likes it, but doesn’t want to spend her energy on accepting it as hers and giving up the attachment to the previous one. They’re hungry, but don’t want to eat; they like nice things, but don’t want to have them. This is the life pattern of the family. They manage to live a life that is not uncomfortable on a worker’s income.
Now, her husband’s annual income is about 35 million won. The couple’s parents are as poor as a church mouse, and they give a monthly allowance of 500,000 won each to both families to supplement their parents’ living expenses. Their eldest son is in high school, and the second son in middle school. They don’t own a house, and the long-term rental deposit for their house increases every two years. Still, they manage to scrape by. I’m sure that there are people in worse economic condition than theirs in this country. What matters is not the economic status but the self-sufficient status of the family. They do not have difficulty in the status quo. Their only hope is to live as they are without being bothered by anyone. The eldest son is so stressed out by school life that he is 172 centimeters tall but weighs only 46 kilograms, suffering from chronic indigestion and diarrhea, just like his mother. For health reasons, he doesn’t even think of going to a cram school, far from making his parents worry about paying for his extracurricular lessons. It’ll be okay if he goes to whatever college accepts him, and it will be also all right if he does not go to college. Their priority is his survival. The second son is no different from the eldest, except for the fact that he’s still young. What about expensive imported cars? Fearful of driving, they cannot drive any car, imported or not. What about traveling abroad? They may well try if they travel with a friend like me, who’s very close to them and has many petty skills, but it’s highly likely that they’ll give up after dwelling on it for two or three months, and they would not dare to dream of it on their own. Their only hobby is reading books, and they can borrow a lot of them from the library. They want to own a house because they’re tired of moving, but don’t dream of it, either, since their income is nowhere near enough to buy one. They hate big houses because cleaning is tedious, and also hate big gardens because they’re difficult to tend. A 700 square-foot apartment is good enough for them. These days, every day is sunny for Hyeonnam, apart from a little suffering that she inevitably has to interact with the world.
One day, when we were about forty-three or forty-four years old, Hyeonnam was getting a cup of coffee with home-ground beans, and talked to me in a languid voice.
“It’s so good.”
“What is?”
“I used to wonder if I could live like others.”
“Me, too.” (I agreed with her in the sense that I also wondered if she could do it, of course.)
“But now, I drink freshly brewed coffee, live in an apartment that is warm, have a husband that gets paid every month and also have a duck down parka. . .”
So-called duck down parkas first came to the market during my college years. I didn’t know how much they cost. I only remember that they were too expensive for me to even think about buying one. Shivering with cold in cotton jackets, Hyeonnam and I felt envious of other friends in duck down parkas. Today, goose down parkas are in fashion instead, but it doesn’t matter. Duck down is warm enough for me. I don’t know what Canada Goose is, which allegedly costs way over one million won per jacket. If Hyeonnam knew about it, she would surely just pass by, saying, “It’s nice. Chomp, chomp.”
Today, as usual, she’ll drink coffee and read a book at home, and whenever a delivery person rings the doorbell, she’ll nervously stutter and receive her package. Her husband will work all day for his family, come home to have simple dinner and read Capital. Their grown-up sons now want to become freelance programmers who are deemed better than Yakult ladies, and will pester their mother for five more minutes on the computer. Presumably, they won’t be much different twenty years from now.
Maybe there are some readers who think that they’d rather die than live such a life, frustrated and driven almost insane by the story of this family, just as I did when I was young. To those readers, I’d like to say that suicide is a kind of desire, too. A frustrated desire causes a suicidal impulse. The family members have no desire, and therefore, feel no suicidal impulse. I’d like to ask readers to focus on this point.
I’ve seen Hyeonnam’s life for over thirty years. She’s my dearest friend, but I have to confess that she frustrated me sometimes, and baffled me at other times. There were times when I seriously agonized over what meaning such a life had. I could have easily concluded that the life of her family had resulted from social maladaptation. Whenever this idea occurred to me, however, something troubled my mind. It wasn’t just because her words made me feel somehow uncomfortable by hitting the nail on the head: “Do you really have to write?” “Write it, and throw it away!” It’s not clear which came first, whether it was the insight to objectively see my inner desires, which I gained as I grew old, or the lessons that I learned from her life. Whichever it might be, as soon as I identified my desires, I finally realized the truth. The autistic family is the true enemy of capitalism.
How can I define capitalism in a word? I’m not an economist, just a writer. Hence, I will follow the definition that common sense tells us. Driven by boundless human desires, capitalism is expanding like a monster in the system of reproduction on an enlarged scale based on mass production and mass consumption. People voluntarily throw themselves into unlimited competition for a slightly more convenient life—for a bigger refrigerator, a faster car and a new smartphone whose functions are hard to grasp. Socialism, the traditional archenemy of capitalism, propagates the idea that it is better for us to share old things together than to own new ones individually. At which point, the family will probably ask a question:
“Why do we have to own these things?”
Humans can live without a bigger refrigerator, a faster car or a brand-new smartphone. The family members deny desires, that is, the driving force of capitalism. Without gasoline, cars cannot move and boilers will not operate. Socialism suggests that we should keep our desires in check with our rationality in order to enjoy equal rights together. More fundamentally, this family turns off the power of capitalism by the absence of desires themselves. There is no stronger enemy of capitalism than this family. May these desireless humans be prolific!
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, they do not perceive themselves to be the enemies of capitalism, nor do they want to be. The desire to do something is absent. Ah! There exists only one desire. It is the desire to stay still as they are. This family can be the enemy of capitalism due to the absence of desire, but cannot be an actual threat to capitalism due to the absence of desire. I cannot tell whether I should be sad or glad. Nonetheless, I think of them when I feel tired of unlimited competition, or when I get knocked down by my own desires. One may live the same way as they do. Sometimes, I take comfort in the very fact that they exist in the same world as I do. Hence, I would like to recommend readers to recall Hyeonnam and her family when your kids pester you to pay for their language training abroad for their future careers, when you are passed over for promotion by a younger colleague, when your wife compares you with her friend’s smart husband or when you feel like your life sucks for such-and-such reason. If you ponder over the difference between our frantic lives in the midst of the formidable waves of capitalism and the ordinary life of this family, you will find out that the gap between the two is smaller than expected, feeling strangely relieved and consoled. If you can take small comfort in it, I’d like to ask you to do as follows: on your way home from work on the subway, if you run into members of an autistic family, looking like war refugees and lowering their heads toward their antiquated cell phones for fear of facing strangers, please maintain a distance, neither casting uneasy glances nor giving an encouraging look, so that they can carry on incognito. They’re commas in the miserable life of humankind that can never stop running forward with burning desires, and therefore, deserve to be left alone by themselves to rest.
by Jeong Ji A
Martian Child
I was the only survivor of the twelve lab animals sent to Mars.
We were launched into the future, frozen at -270° C in liquid helium.
While my shipmates changed course for the afterlife as they dreamt, I continued to faithfully send my healthy vital signs back to Earth. My duty was hibernating inside this pulseless, frozen body. And as I crossed the solar system, Mars metamorphized into red bugs, red clothes, red clouds, as it danced about in my subconscious. I was a bowl made of ice; only my dreams remained animated. Multiple centuries passed like a long nap.
I was discovered lying down—by only myself.
I could feel the slow pulse of a planet that was matching my heartbeat.
How long had I been like this? When had the spaceship arrived? Was I alive? Or was this the afterlife and not Mars?
As questions filled my head, my brain commanded me to close my eyes and open them again. But nothing changed. I probably wasn’t hallucinating. I squeezed my eyelids once more then peeled them apart. Centuries of time screamed out between my eyelids. I made eye contact with the spaceship’s black pupil. I could still remember the shrinking image of Earth outside the circular observation window.
Memories crossed the vast expanse of time, docking with me in the present. Soggy feed and fresh fruit. Sweet meat dripping with juice. We were the pride and jewel of our research center. I was given the royal treatment leading up to the day of the launch, like a sacrificial lamb being fattened up for the gods. We were clones, the result of years of experiments that killed countless lab animals in the name of science. We were humanity’s dream.
And humanity was our dream. My language, my intelligence, my thought patterns, my longing for home—everything about me seemed “human.” But were these things, was my longing for home, the result of natural processes? Or was it only something that had been transplanted inside me like a chip? I was born in a lab; I did not know what kind of organism I truly was.
I received tests and training all the way until the day of the launch. I never got to properly say goodbye to Earth. All I remembered of my last days on that blue planet were but a few snapshot images: people waving their hands at me; powerful vibrations at launch; the pressure on my chest and ears; the heat of the engine, which was so intense that we thought the ship had caught fire; cables floating in space.
Men drenched in conceit.
Houston.
Countdown.
Ants slowly circling the observation window.
If everything went according to plan, this wouldn’t be Earth.
If everything went according to plan, this would be somewhere on Mars.
If everything truly went according to plan, this would be the future. After all, the clock was set to five hundred years in the future.
I turned, and a harness constricted my body. I forgot they had tied me up to protect me from the impacts of takeoff and landing.
My instincts kicked in. I had been trained on how to free fall, how to move in zero gravity, how to take care of my excrement in space, how to find the button and release my harness.
Button. Where was that button?
Before I could even finish this thought, my fingers found what they were looking for.
Just because I was awake didn’t mean I was completely on. I had released my harness, but I didn’t have the courage to get up. My body wouldn’t be as awake as my mind was. Something might have been damaged in the process of being frozen and thawed; it was possible my nerves might never come back to life. The low gravity could have weakened the valves of my heart, and my vision might not be as good as it used to be. I needed to move slowly and carefully, like a fish just thawed in early spring. I inspected each body part one at a time. After all, I was the only one who could conduct this process.
Right arm. Check.
Left arm. Check.
Two legs and two knees. Check.
My sense of vision, hearing, and touch were coming back to me.
It was now time for me to lift my body and get out of this capsule. And yet, despite knowing what I had to do, I just continued to stare up at the ceiling of the spaceship.
Bark.
Bark, bark, bark, bark.
Bark, bark.
Bark.
I could hear a dog. The barking lasted too long to be a hallucination. The dog was barking clearly and in rhythm. It also sounded like only one dog. Was there an open hatch on the ship somewhere? I realized I couldn’t lay here any longer; I had to get up and check the ship. When I stood up, my vision went dark from the sudden drop in blood pressure. But I was an expert in surviving in the dark.
I breathed in and visualized the pain spreading throughout my body. As soon as I pictured the synapses and neurons reviving, the black cloud began to lift.
When I opened my eyes, there was a Siberian husky in front of me wagging its tail.
Laika.
The dog casually opened its mouth and spoke. It talked in a foreign language that I didn’t understand. When I didn’t respond, it barked once, then switched to English. “Welcome. My name is Laika.” Her English had a thick Russian accent.
“How—”
I pointed to the closed hatch behind Laika but was unable to continue speaking. I couldn’t tell which was more surprising: that a dog was talking to me, or that it had opened and closed the hatch on its own.
“You want to know how I got in here?” Laika asked, reading my mind. “There’s not a door in the entire universe I can’t open.”
Later, I learned Laika could pass through walls. And not just walls. She could pass through entire planets and stars. Not even gravity affected her. Laika was dead. When I asked her what happened, she said it was a long story. But she did tell me about the moment she was reborn and what happened after that.
“When the spaceship blew up, my body disintegrated and fell to Earth like a spritz of consecrated holy water. I’ve been wandering the cosmos ever since. But damn. Once I was dead, I realized there was no god, no heaven, nowhere for me to go.”
Something about Laika seemed familiar. An image appearing on a monitor. I knew Laika. She was one of us, the first lab animal sent to space. On October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched her into space with the Sputnik 2, making her the first living creature to leave Earth.
“I was born three centuries after that,” I said. “That makes me your successor.”
“Where are you from?”
“I was made in the US. I launched from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.”
“I’ve seen many Americans before. I think it was when I passed the wrecked spaceship around Venus. I saw an old, white-haired astronaut at the window. He was licking the walls like a crazy person. When I asked why he was doing that, he said it was because he was afraid of the moon. This to me seemed ridiculous for someone floating in space to say. He said that he’d heard people would go crazy if they went to the moon. And then just as he arrived on the moon, POP! The engineer exploded, but the machine he was operating was perfectly fine!”
“What a fascinating story.”
“Right?”
Silence fell between us for a moment. It was the talkative dog who broke the silence.
“These all seem related. A crazy astronaut, a test animal that wanders the cosmic afterlife in death, and a frozen mammal resurrected in the future.”
I realized the last one was referring to me. I crouched down, looked Laika in the eye.
“Tell me, Laika. Am I a machine?”
“No.”
“Then do I look like a human?”
“Well, you talk like a human. You walk on two legs. But you’re not one hundred percent Homo sapiens.”
“Am I dead? I mean, you’re dead, not to be rude. So does the fact that we’re talking like this mean I’m dead, too?”
“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.”
“Where are we? Is this space? The afterlife?”
Laika stared into my confused eyes. If she were human, she would have shaken her head. But instead, she did the equivalent in dog mannerisms by turning in place twice.
“It seems like by asking where we are you’re asking who we are.”
Laika elongated her body as if she were stretching. She preoccupied herself to give me time to dwell on the profound nature of what she had just said. It took a while, but eventually I came to realize that Laika was similar to a theater actor in many ways. She was a dog with a strong ego. In fact, she seemed high on her own ego sometimes. Perhaps it was because she had wandered alone through space for such a long time, just like me. I didn’t know how to react to what she said, as though I’d just heard a bad joke.
“Do you want to see my pet fleas?” Laika said, suddenly changing the subject.
Laika showed her back to me. At first, I didn’t see them, but Laika directed me to each of her pets one by one—on the back of her neck, on her right front leg, three fingers left from the center of her back, and on top of her tail. The fleas were able to jump and stay in the air for a long time, probably because the gravity on Mars was less than on Earth. Each of the four fleas had been given the name of a former astronaut: Collins, Irwin, Schweickart, and Aldrin.
“You used to be a pet yourself,” I said to Laika. “And now look at you. Raising your own pets.”
“Do you know what the two conditions of a good lab animal are?” Laika put the fleas back in her fur, where they started sucking on her blood. “They need to be intelligent and healthy, and they can’t have a master. I ran away from home to wander the streets of Moscow. I considered myself lucky when I was taken into the lab and fed until my belly burst. But the next thing I knew, a million wires were hooked up to my body and I was being sent into space. Damn, it was just like that David Bowie song, ‘Space Oddity!’ You know rock and roll, don’t you?”
Laika started humming as she crinkled her eyes. I didn’t know rock and roll; I didn’t know what this had to do with raising fleas; and who the hell was David Bowie? And yet I nodded anyway. It was weird; I was accepting everything without any resistance, as though I were in a dream. A ghost with fleas for pets? Where did she get the fleas anyway? Had they been on Laika when she disintegrated in the atmosphere? Did they turn into cosmic particles and re-form into fleas so that they could suck on her nonexistent blood?
“We don’t know where here is. We believe we’re on Mars, but we don’t know which dimension this Mars belongs to. Don’t think about it too much.”
Laika stared lazily at the dancing fleas.
by Kim Seong Joong
A Future as Ordinary as This
1 Every time I hear someone say that the world has ended, I think of 1999, of the things that happened that year and the things that didn’t. Since elementary school, I’d always been interested in mysterious abilities and supernatural phenomena—astral projections, doppelgängers, prophetic dreams, spontaneous human combustion, levitation. While I’m sure reading articles about such fantastical topics had something to do with it (children’s magazines back then published articles like that at least once a month), the truth of the matter was that divination, fortune telling, and Dahnhak’s Brain & Body meditation were everywhere in society. Times were unpredictable and everyone was having financial troubles. The country was still in shock from the Seongsu Bridge collapse, and the IMF crisis was bringing about mass layoffs. So it was natural to look to the supernatural for reassurance. The prophecies that everyone was talking about back then were grim, although perhaps that’s more a reflection of what people were drawn to than it was a sign of the times. Case in point, Nostradamus. His most famous prophecy, that the world would end in 1999, naturally gained more and more attention as the end of the century drew nearer. And then, when it turned out the world was in fact not going to end in 1999, Nostradamus was all but forgotten—until he reappeared in 2012. This time, another one of his prophecies had entered the public eye: “From the calm morning, the end will come when of the dancing horse the number of circles will be nine.” Claiming that the prophecy referred to Psy’s “Gangnam Style” hitting one billion views on YouTube, people were yet again signaling Armageddon. There is perhaps no better example of the questionable symbol searching and backwards reasoning that plagues people and their prophecies than this. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that in Korean, the word for “horse” and the word for “end” are homonyms. But I’m not trying to make puns here. As a novelist, I’m less interested in the content of prophecies than the fact that they must be formulated with language. Even if some prophet sees the future in a vision, they have no choice but to express that vision in their own vocabulary, which might be limited by their intellect. That wouldn’t be the case if they could physically show people their vision, but as long as the prophecy is being transmitted via language, the true meaning can never be completely conveyed. Translation only makes matters worse, inevitably leading to further distortions. In the end, there are a million opportunities for form to obscure the meaning of a prophecy. In that sense, the “sleeping prophet” Edgar Cayce is unique. It is said that Cayce would enter a trance as though he were sleeping, lying down with his eyes closed. He would then deliver his prophecies as if he were reading a book placed in his mind’s eye. This might be the reason why his prophecies are not hard to understand. He left behind a legacy of prophecies about great movements of land and water; among these was the prediction that the western coast of the United States and the Japanese archipelago would eventually be consumed by the sea. But you don’t need to enter a trance to know this. Just open any book on geology. The only difference between him and us is that we can only read books that everyone can see, whereas he could read books that no one else could see. The fact that prophecies are a product of form is telling. Kwon Tae-hun was a famous Korean clairvoyant. A teacher of Dahnhak, he once said that in 1999, North and South Korea would be reunited, and the civilization of white people would end, bringing about a new world paradigm led by the “yellow” race—Korea, China, India, etc. The so-called White-Yellow turning point. Because prophecies are formalized by language, they change based on one’s point of view. In other words, whereas 1999 might have seemed like Armageddon to Caucasians, to a Korean prophet that year could be interpreted as the beginning of a new epoch. Just like prophets of different personal backgrounds and intellect interpreted the year 1999 differently, we all experienced our own version of 1999. As for me, 1999 was an unforgettable year. In the summer of that year, I was on my way to meet my uncle on my mother’s side when I stopped at Kyobo Bookstore and discovered a piece of paper. As usual, I was in the religion section and looking at books with meditation or enlightenment in their titles when something that looked like a bookmark fell out from one of the books. When I opened the piece of paper, I realized it was a flyer: “Welcome! THE MOMENT in Seoul Center – The spirit medium Julia comes to Seoul this July. Come ask life’s deepest questions. The spirit will give you answers. For further information, call the number below.” The reason why I remember this so vividly is because of the girl I started dating that summer. After a semester of unrequited love, I finally confessed my feelings to her, but instead of accepting me, she made an unexpected suggestion. It was spring of my second year in college, and we were at the semester-end party; I discovered the flyer that following week. I put the flyer in my pocket, found the girl—Jimin was her name—and we left the bookstore together. In the distant future, I would come to remember that summer as the summer of the fire tragedy at Sealand, as the summer that I saw The Matrix for the first time, as the summer a spirit answered my life’s deepest question, as the summer that sparked a long and beautiful relationship with a girl. But at the time, it was just another ordinary summer, no different from any other. The publishing office my uncle worked at was located in an alley just behind the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts. I heard that a long time ago, the building was home to a famous cram school. Other than that, it was just another ordinary office situated in just another ordinary building. Walking down the epoxy coated hallway, I opened the door with the publisher’s sign hanging on it and found a small room on the right where my uncle worked. He sat at his desk with a compression sleeve on each arm, editing a manuscript as if he were some master horologist looking at a broken watch through a loupe. He told us to sit at the table in front of his desk, which we did. “How’s school these days?” he asked as he took a cup of instant coffee from a yellow plastic tray and placed it on his desk. Jimin was sitting next to me, and my uncle looked like he was trying his best not to ask what kind of relationship we had. “The semester ended last Friday.” “Already? Time sure flies. Have you made plans for summer break?” “Not really. I don’t have any special plans aside from continuing my part-time job at the library.” “Did you say you two are classmates? I’m sorry, I forgot your name. Oh right, Jimin. Do you have any summer plans?” I was nervous that she might say something like, “Your nephew and I are planning to do something together.” But thankfully, Jimin gave an ordinary answer. Unlike when she and I were alone, Jimin didn’t like to reveal herself in front of others. “Enjoy it while it lasts. You can have all the money in the world, but nothing will buy you the freedom of a college vacation. Even better if you can spend it with someone in love. Speaking of which, you two seem like—” I cut my uncle off. I didn’t like revealing myself in front of people either, even if they knew all about me. “My friend had a question that I thought you might be able to answer,” I said. “That’s why I brought her here.” “Well, what do you want to know?” My uncle took a sip of coffee, and so did I. The taste of that coffee still remains pungent in my mind, as though I’d sipped it only yesterday. With liquid coffee beans in my mouth, I motioned with my head toward Jimin. “Joon told me you’ve held, if not read, every book that has been published in Korea since Liberation. I was wondering if you knew about a book I’m looking for.” “What’s the title?” “Ash and Dust by Ji Young-han.” My uncle stirred his coffee with a teaspoon. It was already well mixed, so there was no need to stir it any further. The superfluous gesture meant my uncle—a man still in his forties whose glasses looked like thick white eggshells when viewed from the side, a man who’d been a poor bookworm his entire life, who, despite being a famously meticulous copy editor, had seen his usefulness disappear along with the twentieth century because of the popularization of internet searches—was searching his vast memory for an answer. “The one that won first place in the category of fiction for Modern Woman’s inaugural writing competition in 1974? Or was it 1975? I can’t remember.” “I think that’s the one. I heard that she became a star overnight because she won that competition.” “Then that must be the one. Why are you interested in that book?” “Her mother wrote it,” I said. “But she can’t read it. She doesn’t have a copy at her home, and she can’t find it at the library.” My uncle nodded in a knowing manner. “I’m not surprised. The book was banned as soon as it was put into print and disappeared from bookstores.” “I never knew. None of my family told me. Why was it banned?” “Well, the main idea of the novel was that October 1972 was the end of time. Kids these days must know about October Yushin, right? After Park Chung-hee dissolved the National Assembly and gave himself emergency powers, he enacted the Yushin Constitution. Even the universities were closed. It’s impossible for such events not to seep into the literature of the time. I’ve always been interested in publishing books based on history, so I’ll go out of my way and pay a fortune just to buy them. For that one, I had to call the publisher to get a copy. I still remember the first sentence: ‘We called October 1972 the end of time.’ The censorship office probably didn’t like that sentence.” “A book could really get banned for just one sentence like that?” “When a military dictatorship bans a book, they don’t need to give a detailed explanation. The book just disappears one day. That’s what a dictatorship is, after all. We’re left figuring out the reason why the government didn’t like it ourselves. That’s why people living in a dictatorship make their own internal censorship office. People are often shocked when they finally get their hands on banned books and read them. Ash and Dust is a perfect example. You said your name was Jimin? Your mother was ahead of her time. If the book had been written now, we would have called it science fiction or fantasy because it dealt with time travel and the end of time. It was a really peculiar novel for the age, so I remember the whole plot.” When my uncle told us the plot, we couldn’t help but be surprised. In the novel, there were two lovers without a future. They realized that their time together was coming to an end. So, in that sense, the “end of time” wasn’t the end of the world but the end of their love. It was just a coincidence that it happened to take place at the same time as October Yushin. That coincidence got the book banned. Anyway, because the lovers in the novel realized that life without each other was pointless, they decided to commit suicide together. Just before they died, their lives flashed before their eyes. But the flashback wasn’t simply visual; they felt like they were reliving their whole life, as though they were experiencing a long vivid dream. The only difference was that time was running in reverse. The day they decided to kill themselves became the first day of their new life, and now when they went to sleep, they woke up not the next day but the day before. Only when they figured this out did they realize they must be getting younger by the day. “No way. I can’t believe it. It’s almost like the novel predicted the future,” I said. “Predicted what future?” Before I could say anything, Jimin spoke up. “Joon and I were planning to commit suicide together this summer vacation.” My uncle and I both stared at Jimin. 2 When I finally read the book for myself, it was in autumn of 2019, twenty years after that day in Gwanghwamun. Perhaps influenced by my uncle, I had transformed myself from a student who just liked reading books to a serious novelist over the course of those twenty years. I came to know many editors from various publishing houses, and I would receive books from them that they’d edited. Among them was the collection of essays, Free Heart. The book started in a bold manner with the line: “I’m an enlightened person.” Although the author Kim Won introduced himself as a farmer, he originally had managed an investment consulting firm just a few years prior to the book’s publication. But, when he turned fifty, he realized there was something he absolutely had to do. He left the company and retired to the mountains in Gyeongsang-do province where he had no family or friends. The thing he absolutely had to do was achieve enlightenment; when I entered my forties, I was surprised to find out that there were a lot of people around me who wanted to achieve enlightenment. I guess it’s because life is hard and most people realize they’re too old to start something new. Anyway, life in the countryside wasn’t as easy as he thought, and he spent three years without any free time to look at the books he’d brought with him. Then one day after finally managing to get settled in his village, he finally had time to look at some of his books. He opened some of the Buddhist scriptures and writings of the sages he’d brought with him, and when he realized he understood everything he was reading, he knew he had already reached enlightenment. Free Heart’s introduction went like this: People say that life is a sea of hardship, but the essence of our existence is happiness. Life is in fact a sea of happiness. But waves emerge on the sea to hide its true appearance. Waves may originate from the sea, but they are not the sea itself, and they eventually hide its true nature. Likewise, language comes from reality, but it is not reality itself; it obscures it. We have all experienced the unease that appears the moment we say to ourselves, “I’m truly happy.” But why? We say we’re happy because we’re happy, right? So why would we feel uneasy? The reason is because the word “happiness” isn’t happiness itself; it is nothing more than language, a substitute for the real thing. The meaning of language can change immensely depending on how we express it. Humans create their identity through the stories they tell. And stories are formulated through language. Therefore, a person’s identity will change depending on how that identity is formulated in words. In this way, our identity is an illusion. But even this requires language to express it. This only furthers the illusion. This is why life is so painful. Even if we gain a million insights, they are nothing but an illusion of language. This last section pierced my heart. This is why life is so painful. Even if we gain a million insights, they are nothing but an illusion of language. Now that I think about it, the summer of 2019, which I’d spent engrossed in Free Heart, was the last summer before COVID-19. While I read the book, I became interested in the author, and I would often visit Kim Won’s Facebook page, which I found linked to Heo Jinho’s account, the editor who’d sent me the book. For a person who wrote a book about personal enlightenment, he was surprisingly interested in politics and often posted his opinions on current issues on his Facebook wall. The postings were a bit inflammatory, so much so that I wondered if he wasn’t doing it on purpose to incite reactions in the comments. And then I looked at his other postings. Among them was a picture of an old book. The title was printed in jagged font: Ash and Dust. When I clicked on it, I was confronted by a post that recounted how Kim Won came across the book. One summer twenty years ago, Kim Won, who was a graduate student at the time, was waiting at Gohan Station in Gangwon-do province for a train to Cheongnyangni. There was an hour left before the departure time, and the sun was just beginning to set over the mountains. Normally, he would use the time to eat dinner at one of the restaurants in front of the station, but that day, he decided to venture into an alley he’d never been to before. He passed restaurants, hardware shops, and clothes stores until he discovered a used bookstore at the end of the street. The store didn’t seem as if it received many customers. When Won entered and picked up a book, the owner of the shop, who looked to be about Won’s age, gave him barely more than a perfunctory nod. Won idled away his time by pulling random books off the shelf and reading them under the dim light of the bookstore. But no matter what book he picked out, he couldn’t focus on anything he was reading. There was this fire raging up from deep inside his heart, a fire that threatened to ignite his entire body. At the time, he had been into casinos. He only played games with 50/50 odds. And he had a rule to only join a game when he’d seen one side win five times in a row. He’d enter the game and bet on the losing side. Why? Well, the odds that a coin will turn up heads six times in a row is one in sixty-four, or about 1.5 percent. Conversely, the chances of the opposite happening (not getting heads six times in a row), is 98.5 percent. But in gambling, anything is possible and sometimes, even 98.5 to 1.5 odds will end up losing you money. In fact, it happens quite often. But for Won as a graduate student, that was fine. Because next time, all he had to do was stick to his guns and double his bet. After all, the chances that a coin won’t turn up heads seven times in a row is more than ninety-nine percent. And yet, it’s still possible to lose. That’s gambling for you. But it’s fine. All you need to do is keep at and double your bet one more time. There’s no way you can lose this time. There are a lot of factors at work at the casino, but this was Won’s basic strategy. That day, however, against all his expectations, he’d lost five times in a row and was down 310,000 won. He’d joined a game of dice. The rules were simple. Roll three dice. If the sum of the dice was ten or less, the result was called so. If the sum of the dice was more than ten, the result was called dae. The reason Won decided to join this particular game that day was because he had just seen the dice on the table come out so five times in a row. But after he bet dae, the dice came out so five more times, making that ten times in a row. That was when the trouble started. He had three options. He could keep betting dae, he could bet so, or he could stop. According to his own rule, the best option would have been to stop. He would need to bet at least 310,000 won to win back what he’d lost, but that was about all that he had left. The next best option was sticking to his guns and betting dae. But there was one other man who kept betting so. That man was betting with the same conviction that Won had when he’d entered the game. Because the man kept winning money every game, one by one the other people at the table started copying him. After thinking about it for a while, Won also changed and bet dae on his sixth bet. He lost all his money. On the train back to Cheongnyangni, Won read the book he’d bought from the used bookstore for 1,000 won and thought hard about what he’d done wrong. His biggest mistake was losing all his money; he didn’t even have enough left to buy himself dinner. If you want to win money at the casino, you must discern between the things you can control and the things you can’t. Although you can’t determine how much money you’ll make through gambling, you can set a limit on how much you’re willing to lose. It’s never a good idea to lose all the money you bring with you. When Won’s thoughts reached an impasse, he turned his attention to the book. The lights of the train were dim, his eyes were blurry, and his mind was a mess. Likewise, the paper was rough to the touch, the sentences alien, and the plot bizarre. And then he realized something. The past doesn’t determine the present. The future determines the present. If he kept losing, the chances of him winning on the next turn approached one hundred percent. As long as he didn’t give up on the future, he would eventually win. The only problem was he didn’t have enough money to make another bet. In the novel he read on the train, there was a couple that attempted to commit suicide together. Miraculously, they got sent backwards in time and were made to relive their lives. As they went further back in time, they realized that they were converging on the moment of their first meeting. They remembered the year, month, and day, how excited and thrilled they were to meet. As they lived their second lives in reverse, barreling toward their first meeting, they were able first to experience all the things that happened because they met. They could actively imagine their future or, as we would think of it, their past. And then they realized how imagining the best thing coming at the end changes the present. This gave the two hope: hope that they could live again; hope that when they converged at the moment of their first meeting, time would start to flow in its original direction again; hope that at the end of time, when the world looks like it’s about to end, they would be able to imagine the best future. Time continued to run in reverse until the time of their first encounter, and they were able to experience that moment again. They couldn’t believe it. They had been so surprised, thrilled, and excited to meet. As soon as they realized this, the two of them looked at each other as though they were meeting for the first time all over again. And then time started to flow in its original direction, and then their third life began. 3 After reading Kim Won’s post, I emailed Heo Jinho asking if I could borrow Kim Won’s copy of Ash and Dust. He responded that he would look into it. A few days later, I got a response saying that Kim Won didn’t need the book anymore and was willing to give it to me. Feeling bad that I was always asking him for favors like this, I wanted to at least buy Jinho a meal. I thought about where to take him when I remembered the old Korean barbeque restaurant in an alley next to Gwanghwamun. I’d gone there a couple times with my uncle. I had no idea that Jimin would tell my uncle about our plans to commit suicide together that day. Then again, it was her contradictory attitude toward life, which was at once bold and pessimistic, that drew me to her in the first place. After hearing this, my uncle just stirred his coffee with his teaspoon. “Jimin, do you have any memories of your mother?” my uncle finally asked after a long while. Jimin shook her head. “I was fascinated by your mother’s works, so I remember feeling sad when I saw on the news that she died a few years after the book was banned. There were probably lots of reasons for her death, but the banning of her book must have hurt her greatly. There’s nothing more demoralizing for an author than to have their book erased like that.” Until then, I had no idea that Jimin’s mother had distributed flyers in the middle of Jongno street criticizing the Yushin Constitution, or that she had been sent off and locked away, or that she had killed herself. “I can’t forgive my father and the rest of my family for what they did. They drove her to insanity.” “I’m not suggesting that you forgive them, but can we talk a little bit more about this? I’m almost done with work. We can talk over dinner.” Jimin nodded. She was trembling. I extended my hand and held hers. She didn’t take her hand from me. That was the beginning. Just as I had done twenty years ago that summer, I was now headed to Gwanghwamun to meet an editor in his forties. When I got off the bus, Gwanghwamun was packed with two groups of protesters, one condemning the newly appointed Minister of Justice, and the other defending him. I stopped by Kyobo Bookstore; the time on the clock was about the same as when I’d visited the store twenty years earlier. Back then, Kyobo Bookstore had a lower hanging ceiling, was less well lit, and had more variety of books. It had felt like every book printed in Korea was on the shelves of Kyobo Bookstore. I went to the religion section, just like I had all those years ago, and picked out whatever book caught my eye, but nothing fell out of the bookshelf like before. Suddenly, I wondered to myself, what was that American named Julia, who had grey hair even back then, doing now? And where were those other people, the ones who had listened to the spirit’s voice through Julia that night? The Korean barbeque place in the alley behind Sejong Center for the Performing Arts was just as I remembered it. I had another memory of the restaurant other than the one with my uncle and Jimin. I’d come here with my mother to meet my uncle. I think I was in junior high at the time. My mom and I were there to “see Seoul,” but she went back to the province the next day, and I stayed for three or four more days. We had shown up at the publishing office without warning, and my uncle, as always, was furiously stirring his coffee as he sat in front of us. Now that I think about it, that was the first time I’d gone on a train trip with my mother. Many years after that, I realized that my mother had made up her mind to divorce my father on that trip. At the time, I was too focused on the food to listen in on the conversation my uncle and mother were having. Because of this, I have no way of knowing how my uncle persuaded my mom. And yet, I have a hunch about how he did it. He probably told her the same thing he told Jimin. After eating with Jinho, he and I came out onto Gwanghwamun intersection to find the streets still bustling with protestors. “How long is it going to be like this?” I asked. “If there’s no reason for change, these scenes probably won’t change either,” Jinho answered. “Not next year, nor the year after that.” “If there’s no reason for change?” “A long time ago when I read that sentence from Wittgenstein’s book—you know the one: ‘But you do not really see the eye’—I was completely blown away by the insight. We can see whatever we want. But we can’t see the eye that we use to see. Our invisible eye decides what we see and what we don’t. In other words, we like to say that we see everything, but in reality, we only see the limits of our eyes. While editing books, I’ve come to think the same thing about writing. Every sentence of a book can only exist within the limits of the extent of the author’s thoughts. Every book is its author. In other words, you must first change the author to change the sentences inside their book.” “So, what you’re trying to say is that I have to change for these sights to change?” “That’s how you change the world in front of you. Try doing something different. Or try doing something you don’t usually do. Like learning to surf or volunteering. Or just make up your mind to do something different. Like deciding one day for no reason at all that you’re going to start loving classical music. As long as you make up your mind to live differently from how you’ve been living, no matter how small the change, the sights in front of your eyes will start to change.” Jinho’s words shocked me. 4 After meeting with Jinho, I came home and showed my wife Ash and Dust; her reaction was calmer than I had expected. She had escaped somewhat from the childhood trauma of her mother’s suicide, I guess. In fact, she was more interested in Kim Won’s losing all his money at the casino than she was in the book. With the book lying on the kitchen table, we enjoyed cold beers as we talked about that summer in 1999, when we’d met with my uncle. We filled in the holes of each other’s memories, and slowly I began to vividly remember the way I looked all those years ago, so flustered by the way Jimin told me, “I’m going to die soon. Don’t get close to me if you’re not prepared to die with me.” My uncle, who was still in his forties at the time, sat across from Jimin at the restaurant table and spoke to her: “The novel your mother wrote ends with the two lovers living out their third life. Because time in their third life flows in the same direction as their first life, it appears as if they’re living their life once again. But there’s a difference. They’re living life thinking the same way they did when they lived their second life in reverse. In other words, their whole awareness pattern changes, and they start to think that it is the events in the future, not the events of the past, that are the causes of the events in the present. What kind of things would happen if you thought like that? Jimin, let’s say that you and Joon get married in the future. If we think that the two of you sitting in front of me like this is the cause of your future marriage, how would that change us?” When I heard this, I tried telling him we weren’t dating. My uncle told me this was just a thought experiment. “And if not that,” he continued, “then what if you thought that your sitting here was a result of your mother’s unfortunate suicide in the past? What then?” “They’re both just thoughts in the end,” Jimin answered. “I wonder, is that really true? If I said that both of you are here right now because you’ll get married in the future, you’d laugh at me and tell me I’m crazy. But if I said that your mother’s unfortunate death was what caused you two to decide on committing suicide together this summer, would you still laugh at me and call me crazy? They’re both just thoughts, but there’s a clear difference.” “The past is something that I definitely experienced, but our marrying each other is just a probability.” I don’t quite remember Jimin saying this, but she says she did. “You can easily imagine the past because you’ve already experienced it, but because the future only exists in probabilities, you can’t imagine what it might be. It’s this thought that bears human tragedy. What we must remember isn’t the past, but the future.” “Remember the future? What does that mean?” “That’s what your mother said in her book. By traveling through time, the couple in the book realize there’s no such thing as time. And because time doesn’t exist, neither does the past or the future. Only the present moment exists. And yet, humans only put significance on time that has passed; they only look for the causes of the present in the past. It doesn’t matter whether time flows from the twentieth century to the twenty-first century or backwards into the nineteenth century. The regrettable thing is that even after writing such an amazing novel, your mother wasn’t able to remember the you from twenty years in the future. If in her most painful moment, she could have remembered her daughter as a mature young woman, she might have changed her mind. Forgiveness is only possible when we remember the future, not the past. I hope that by remembering the future, you can forgive your father and your family for driving your mother to despair like that.” A few days after meeting with my uncle, Jimin and I went to meet Julia and get one final opinion from the spirit-medim. It was my idea to ask Julia about our committing suicide together. I didn’t expect much when I pulled out the flyer and showed it to Jimin on our way back from the barbeque restaurant, but she agreed to the idea. A few days later, we were outside Grand Hyatt Seoul, just in front of Namsan Mountain. We met late in the evening and got on a bus; by the time we entered Sowolgil Rood, the sun had already set. It was a summer evening, so we opened the bus window. It wasn’t like we were on our way to get into trouble, but we were still a bit excited when we thought about how we were going to meet an American spirit medium. Looking out the bus window, I could see Yongsan district, the Han River, and the lights across the water that sparkled like scattered jewels. As I did this, I thought to myself that the world had never been so clear. Taxis were lined up in front of the hotel, and there were suspiciously dressed women smoking near the public payphones. We called the number on the flyer and gave them our names and where we were. They told us if we walked down the hill to the side of the hotel, they would send a person out to meet us. Holding hands, we started walking down the street. Most words disappear without a trace after you hear them, but some words are like seeds, taking root in our minds. My uncle’s hypothetical statement about Jimin and my getting married was one set of such words. After hearing them, we acted like people who really believed what he said. We missed each other when we weren’t together, and when we were together, we didn’t want to say goodbye. Every day, we embraced and touched one another. At the bus stop, at the corner table of a partitioned café, at an empty double-feature movie theatre—wherever it was, we were always in contact that summer, unable to bear a single moment of separation. If she were to kill herself, I was prepared to follow her. Jimin laughed at this statement of mine just as she had twenty years ago. “Really?” she asked. “Of course. But you remember what Julia said to us. She told us we can’t die.” “I can’t believe we went all the way up to the top of Namsan Mountain that night just to hear that.” “But those were the words of the spirit.” “There’s a possibility it wasn’t actually the words of a spirit.” “Then whose do you think they were?” Jimin answered by reminding me of something else from that night. After we walked down that hill for a while, we saw a man waving to us from below. We followed him to a two-story, stand-alone house with a large front yard. He said the house was the Korean branch of THE MOMENT. Originally it had been the residence of an American who’d worked at the Seoul branch of a foreign bank, but he’d agreed to only use the second floor for himself and let THE MOMENT use the entire first floor. Seeing how much this man knew about the place, Jimin thought he must work for THE MOMENT, but like Jimin and me, he was just another person who had come here to get an answer from the spirit after seeing the flyer. “Remember that story you told me about Kim Won? In a game in which you can only pick one of two choices, the more you lose, the closer your chance of winning on the next turn converges to one hundred percent. That man said a similar thing. He looked at us with a look of regret on his face and said, ‘The people in the house right now are all people for whom nothing is going right. The two of you both look like college students. I don’t know how the two of you got here, but there’s this major league pitcher who’s quoted as saying, You can learn a little bit from winning and everything from losing. A life in which you only lose isn’t a bad life. As long as you don’t change your choice in the middle.’ ” “He said that?” I asked, not remembering this part. “The man said one other thing. He said it was a quote from Paul Valéry. ‘We enter the future backwards.’ The man said he was a graduate student, too. For all we know, he might have been Kim Won. Anyway, when we entered the room, the people asking Julia questions really were all failures. But do you remember? What the spirit that entered Julia’s body referred to itself as?” “No.” “It said it wasn’t a spirit. That was just what they called themselves. It said they were from the future, a collective consciousness without physical form.” “Right, right. I remember now. The spirit said it wasn’t a spirit. It wanted us to call it an ‘integrated mind’ from the future.” “It claimed that some mysterious being, neither ghost nor spirit, had entered Julia’s body. I almost believed this, but then I realized it might not be true.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “Do you remember what we asked the spirit? We asked two questions. Will the world end? This was your question. And is there a reason for me to keep living? That was my question. And this is what the spirit told us. The world will not end. And the two of you will get married. You can’t die.” “I’ll never forget that moment.” “Did you believe the spirit?” Jimin asked me. “Of course I did.” “I didn’t.” Jimin stared at me in silence for a while. Looking into her eyes, I eventually confessed. “Actually, I didn’t believe it either. How could I believe something so surprising?” We both laughed. “Right? But after all these years, I realized it wasn’t so surprising. That prophecy was so ordinary. The world didn’t end and we didn’t die. We got married and are now drinking beer together. It’s these ordinary, unremarkable facts that Julia said to us. The only extraordinary thing was that she’d said them to us twenty years before they happened. It was the time difference that made it sound like something supernatural. My mother said to remember the future in her novel. So, why did she die? I’ve always wondered about that. But now I think I know. If only my mom could have remembered such a future as ordinary as this.” In summer of 1999, when Jimin told me at the semester-end party that she was going to die soon, I never would have imagined this future. The future I imagined as a kid was either filled with terrible things—the end of the world, cataclysmic earthquakes, a pandemic caused by a mutant virus, World War III. Or it was filled with wonderful things—space travel, magnetic levitation trains, artificial intelligence. But now I know. I know that even if we keep losing, the thing we must choose is this ordinary future. And as long as we don’t give up, the probability of that future coming true will converge to one hundred percent. In 1999, there were things that happened to me and things that didn’t happen to me. But if I hadn’t remembered the future, the things that happened to me wouldn’t have happened to me, and the things that didn’t happen to me would have happened. Translated by Sean Lin Halbert
by Kim Yeonsu
When I Start Weeping
I once formulated a number of hypotheses on life after death. I was in high school and a few of us had skipped evening study hall to hang out on the steps of the middle school next door, on the corner side where the streetlights didn’t reach. There were the usual complaints about our plight as high school students in Korea, on the meaninglessness of life, how death put an end to everything anyway. We were a mixture of Christians, Buddhists, and atheists. I was more of an agnostic. The conversation continued in a desultory way, with no one holding back their opinion.
Maybe dying is just your heart shattering to pieces, someone said in the darkness.
What does that mean? someone else asked.
After your body stops working, your feelings don’t have a place to return to, so they just scatter away. And that’s when you’re really gone. Because you’re a kind of collection of all these different feelings.
I wondered who had said that. Six or seven of us were on the steps. At first there were two of us, but others had joined in. Only their footsteps announced them in the darkness as they came and squatted down. No one bothered to say their names and there was no light to show their faces, so there was no way of knowing who was who. Then someone muttered that a teacher had spotted us. I clasped my knees to my chest, trying to disappear into the darkness as I thought about the last remark that had come out of the conversation. “Because you’re a kind of collection of all these different feelings.” Could it be that those feelings already existed before I was born, traveling around the world, from the ends of our Milky Way to the ends of the Andromeda galaxy, searching for a place to stay until they finally found my body? Some feelings might still be on their way. My body might actually be the deepest part of me. My body was my deepest self. An abyss of feelings. No, my train of thought did not go as far as that at the time; I was just thinking what a nice voice whoever made that remark had.
All of us were waiting with bated breath when the teacher’s flashlight shone over the steps where we were. Just as I thought that we were done for, the yellow light disappeared and I looked up to see the teacher walking the other way.
Didn’t they see us? someone whispered after we were sure the teacher was gone.
I thought we were busted for sure.
Me, too. How could they not see us?
We snickered and the conversation picked up again. I was hoping we’d continue where we had left off, but the subject changed to the latest scandal in the class next to ours. I didn’t really listen, hoping to hear that kid’s voice again, but they didn’t speak up after that. And so I never found out who made that remark. By the time evening study hall was almost over, most of us had scattered off and there were only two of us left again.
Aren’t you coming? my classmate asked, dusting themself off as they got up. Coming, I was about to reply, when someone else spoke.
Coming.
Is that all of us? A shadow stood up next to me. I remained squatting, watching the shadows of the two as they slipped away from the school grounds, walking side by side.
One day after my death, I feel as if I have lost an abyss.
*
Sahm’s real name was not Sahm, but that was what he asked me to call him not long after we started going out. It wasn’t a name I would have called a boyfriend and I flatly refused, telling him to stop being ridiculous. Sahm persisted, however, until I ended up calling him that a few times, to the point that I got so used to it that I forgot his real name.
Sahm and I first met at a drawing class. Sahm would come over and talk to me, mostly about whatever I was working on. You draw a lot of trees. You must like blue. Maybe you could try cutting down just a bit on the straight lines? At first I thought he was a teaching assistant. He only drew straight lines for days on end, but I assumed he was just doing it to keep his hand limber. So I tolerated his comments until I saw the teacher come up to Sahm, who was still practicing straight lines, and suggest that he was ready for spheres, at which point I realized he was a complete beginner. I quit listening meekly when Sahm spoke to me after that. In the hopes that he would shut up and clear off, I spilled out my deepest thoughts without any filter, especially stressing the point that I was going to kill my ex-boyfriend. Why, Sahm wanted to know, and I told him in graphic detail. Sahm nodded and agreed that he could see why I would want to kill him. For his part, he wanted to kill his father. He thought about how he might do it often enough. Those were only thoughts, however, and you couldn’t be punished for thinking them, Sahm said. The two of us bonded over our murderous desires, swapping ways we might kill our respective victims. Most of them were impracticable and didn’t interfere with the spite we held so dear.
Sahm did not attend the class long. He quit as soon as he finished the basic course, as if straight lines and circles were all he needed to learn. I quit as well, as it seemed like my drawing wasn’t getting any better. It also wasn’t easy to spare the tuition on my salary as a part-time cram school teacher of elementary school students. I put my drawing things away when I quit the class, never to take them out again, but Sahm continued to draw at home. His drawings consisted solely of lines and circles. Sahm did not draw things that he saw, but rather things he did not see, or things that were visible only under a microscope.
The only things on top of Sahm’s small, tidy desk were a microscope of the kind used in school labs, Kent paper, and well-sharpened 2B and 4B pencils. When Sahm came home from work, the first thing he did was to check if the microscope was still there. Since he lived alone, in a semi-basement apartment that hardly seemed a target for burglars, I asked why he bothered and Sahm told me it was because he still couldn’t believe he had actually bought a microscope that cost that much. My curiosity aroused, I asked Sahm how much he had paid for it, but getting no answer, I decided it must have cost around one hundred thousand, no, two hundred thousand won, which seemed like an astronomical price to me.
When I wasn’t working I spent most of my time at Sahm’s place. Sahm would sit at his desk and draw tiny things he placed on the stage of his microscope, peering at them through the eyepiece. He would pick up sahmnamu1 leaves on our walks in the park to draw. Sahm said it was because sahmnamu was his favorite tree. I asked him if that was the reason he asked to be called Sahm, but all he said was that it wasn’t just because of that. When I asked Sahm why he liked sahmnamu, he reached for a book called Kinds of Minds from the shelf under his desk where he had been resting his feet, and began to read aloud:
We are mammals, and all mammals have descended from reptilian ancestors whose ancestors were fish whose ancestors were marine creatures rather like worms, who descended in turn from simpler multi-celled creatures several hundred million years ago, who descended from single-celled creatures who descended from self-replicating macromolecules, about three billion years ago. [. . .] You share a common ancestor with every chimpanzee, every worm, every blade of grass, every redwood tree.2
Sahm finished his recital with every appearance of satisfaction, but I could only ask again, why sahmnamu, then? Why not chimpanzees, worms, or blades of grass? Sahm made no answer but went back to his drawing. Long, straight lines, a few circles, and ovals crisscrossing over each other like a tangled web appeared under the sharp point of his pencil as he silently drew. His eye pressed against the ocular lens, Sahm drew his spidery lines and circles across the Kent paper over and over again. Once, I compared Sahm’s drawing with a sahmnamu leaf under the microscope and found it to be a flawless reproduction, without any mistakes I could see. He was good at this. What was the use of it all, though? That’s what I found myself thinking more often than not.
Sahm didn’t have much time for drawing. He worked as a collector for a thrift organization. His job consisted of knocking on the doors of debtors and doing surveillance in front of their houses, either in his car or standing outside, to cut off any attempt at running away. Sahm worked hard but was always short of money. Besides still paying off his student loans, he regularly sent money to his grandmother, while his younger sibling often came to borrow money from him. I told him he shouldn’t, that he should just ignore them, but Sahm said he couldn’t do that to his only sibling. He added that they never asked for a large sum but only fifty or one hundred thousand won at a time. Even so, all those times must have added up to at least ten million won.
While Sahm drew, I would lie on his bed and connect my phone to his Bluetooth speaker and play music. One time Sahm said, Look, they’re trembling because of your music. He meant that the cells would tremble because of the vibrations. I told him to draw that, too. Is trembling something you can draw? I certainly didn’t know how. Sahm didn’t either. I would ask if he wanted me to turn off the music, but Sahm said no, he didn’t mean that. I was used to Sahm’s way of speaking by then, so I knew it was his way of asking me nicely. I once asked him if he was like that at work, too. When he went to inform a debtor that he had come to collect, if they asked if they really had to pay the money back, would he say, no, that he didn’t mean that? Sahm said that was work, so if someone were to really ask him that he would tell them yes, they absolutely had to pay the money back. It was a relief to learn that he could act so decisively when it came to work.
Another time, Sahm told me about the etymology of Bluetooth. According to Sahm, the technology was named after a tenth-century Viking who unified the Scandinavian Peninsula. It stood for a unified wireless technology standard, he said. As for the Viking’s name, he was called that because of the way his teeth were so white that they gleamed blue on moonlit nights. Just like his blue teeth that served as a guiding light in the night, Bluetooth technology guided wireless devices to each other. Really? I asked, and Sahm paused in the middle of perusing leaf veins through his microscope. Lifting his face from the ocular lens, his pencil moved across Kent paper as he replied, Just kidding. When asked why he had bothered to come up with such a silly story, I was a little surprised to hear that he wanted to make me laugh. Then he said that actually, it was because he wanted to see if I was paying attention when he was talking. I stopped myself from asking why he felt the need to check up on something like that. Sahm told me anyway, though, as if he’d read my mind. I didn’t really listen to his answer as I hadn’t asked the question in the first place. When Sahm told me that Kent paper was named after Kent, England, where it was first produced, I nodded and said, Oh, really, but looked it up on the internet afterwards.
I didn’t switch off my music and Sahm said nothing more about it. Perhaps he had managed to capture the trembling of the cells. Or learned how to ignore it. Later, after growing used to drawing to music, he would sometimes hum along with a familiar tune or ask me the singer or title of this or that song. I took note of those songs and created a new folder called “3” for him.3 I would play those songs when Sahm was busy drawing, and sometimes listened to them on my own when I was in the mood to ponder what was going on in Sahm’s head.
You wanna hear a song? Sahm said.
Yeah, I replied.
Sahm sang it for me. The song, which I’d never heard before, went on without stopping every time I thought it was over, so that in the end it felt like an old friend.
It’s nice, I said simply, and Sahm stopped singing to ask, You like this singer?
No, I don’t know them. I meant your voice, not the song. Your voice is nice.
Sahm laughed a little and that sound was nice, too. Kind, gentle Sahm. Sahm who got up every morning and went to serve collection orders somewhere.
Sahm’s job meant little to him. He rarely mentioned work, as if it didn’t matter to his life at all or ever cause him any stress. When I brought it up to him once, Sahm said that I was right, that he considered his work meaningless and felt no need to talk about it, as it didn’t influence his life in any way. Yet he spent at least nine and sometimes up to fifteen hours a day doing that meaningless job. Half of Sahm’s day was spent on meaningless work-related tasks, and the rest of the time he mostly slept. His few remaining hours were dedicated to meaningful activities. Eventually Sahm got used to it all. Isn’t it hard? I asked, and Sahm lifted his head up from his drawing of stomata and said that it wasn’t. Sahm’s eyes, seen up close, were pink from all the veins that stood out against the whites. When he stayed up all night drawing, his eyes would be completely bloodshot.
One summer night, lying in bed watching Sahm’s back as he drew, I fell asleep and woke in the early hours of the morning feeling parched. I asked Sahm whether he had stayed up all night, and he said he was waiting for the streetlights to go out before going to bed. Still under the covers, I looked up and noticed a streetlight outside the window next to the bed. The sky was still a deep indigo. Soon the streetlight went out. It did not go out at once, but dimmed slowly. Sahm said it was an optical illusion that made it appear as if the streetlights brightened and dimmed slowly instead of coming on and going out at once. It was the eye that failed to catch the light or lack of it, because it happened too fast. I didn’t need Sahm to tell me that he was kidding then. Sahm added that an average of five people a night passed under streetlights in an alley like this. I was thinking in my sleepy state that five seemed too small a number when Sahm said that it was the law to have streetlights in places as dark as this, no matter how few the passersby. A surprisingly humane law, I thought, filing it away to look up on the internet later, only to forget about it by the time I woke up. I said I was thirsty and Sahm fetched a bottle of water from the refrigerator and poured me a glass before burrowing under the covers, saying that he had not seen a single passerby all day. I was too sleepy to ask if he meant it and snickered instead, to which Sahm replied, Just kidding. I gulped down the water. The piercingly cold liquid seemed to flow into every corner of my body. It must have been thirst that made the water taste so sweet. My parched tongue was soon wet again.
Sahm kills his father that day. Strictly speaking it is a failure, as his original plan was to run as far as he could after making sure his father was dead. Instead, Sahm is discovered in the dark living room in a catatonic state and appears on the news. I go to visit him in jail and Sahm says he regrets it. Why didn’t he run away? He could have run and he didn’t. He can’t stop dwelling on the missed opportunity.
I woke up from my dream and embraced Sahm who was sleeping next to me. As I breathed in his smell, slightly sour after a sticky summer night, the reality that Sahm had not killed anyone sank in. It may have been funky, but his odor was not unpleasant to me. I could bury my face against his shoulder and take in deep breaths without gagging. It was a fact, however, that Sahm smelled even from a distance. He needed to mask his odor to keep it from spreading. Sahm, who smelled after just a night’s sleep. Sahm, who diligently showered every morning, washing away the smell of the night before.
I was telling Sahm about my dream and suggested adding another item to our list of ways to murder people when Sahm told me to stop. What was the point? We no longer needed to kill anyone. A few days later, we were watching an American series together when the scene shifted to a teenage girl, about fifteen years old, pointing a gun at a man. The girl had just discovered that he had murdered her mother and was about to shoot him dead. That was when a cop showed up from behind her and started to talk her out of it. Her mother wouldn’t have wanted this, if she pulled the trigger she was no different from that murderer. Her resolve broken, the girl burst into tears and dropped the gun. If I were her mother I would have wanted her to do it, I told Sahm, who asked if I didn’t think that was too cruel for a child. It was the law that was cruel, I explained. It was only the law that refused to recognize the difference between the girl’s actions and those of the murderer’s. Sahm continued to shake his head, however. You say that, but there’s no way you would ever want that. Sahm was right. I would go through the rest of my life unable to kill anyone. I didn’t need to kill anyone. That was good, wasn’t it? But at night, lying in the dark with the soft covers pulled over my head, wriggling my toes as I waited for sleep to come, unwelcome memories would swarm into my head, making it hard for me to remember why I shouldn’t. There being no way for me to carry out those impulses, however, not now, not ever, I contented myself with breaking Sahm’s freshly sharpened pencil leads or rubbing my palm across a carefully finished drawing. That was all. Sahm would sigh when he saw the snapped pencils and ask if I had any idea how much they cost as he got out his box cutter again, but wouldn’t say a word about his smudged drawings. Sahm always spoke by telling jokes and avoided any kind of confrontation.
Sahm said that people who borrowed large sums of money that they struggled to pay back usually had a terminally ill family member. If you wanted to live, you’d better make sure you have a lot of money. The more money you had, the better chance you had at beating the kind of misfortune that could happen to anybody. If poverty were an illness, it was the government that allowed what could be a minor illness to become incurable, Sahm said. Tell me something I don’t know, I retorted. For someone who criticized the government, however, Sahm didn’t watch the news, didn’t vote when elections rolled around, and had no expectations whatsoever that anything he did could possibly make a difference. He simply showed up for work every day, sent texts and made phone calls to debtors, and went to their homes to serve them with collection orders. Every time, Sahm said, it made him feel as if he were blaming them—Why are you still poor? To which Sahm knew the answer better than anyone, being poor himself. He could have worked twenty-four hours a day and still would have fallen short of the bare minimum for survival. It didn’t pay to fall sick, Sahm concluded. He made it sound like a choice.
After that, when Sahm asked after my parents, what I had once taken for polite concern felt more like inquiries into how much money they had. One day, in answer to his question, I finally told Sahm that my father had had an upper endoscopy that showed he might have a problem, and that he was awaiting the results of a biopsy.
We broke up not long afterwards. Not because of Dad’s biopsy, but because I ended up feeding Sahm dry ice. I didn’t really mean for him to eat it, but Sahm, waiting for me to pop a spoonful of ice cream in his mouth with closed eyes, sensed its chill as the spoon approached his mouth and snapped it up, only to spit it out immediately in shock at the sensation that his tongue was on fire. Sahm opened his eyes to see the lump of dry ice on the floor, where it would sublimate without a trace, leaving only a spot of damp cold. Eventually it would be impossible to tell that it had ever been there. I really don’t know, Sahm said. Of course he didn’t, I thought. I don’t think I’ll ever know, he continued. That was unexpected. Then he buried his face in his hands and said we should break up. I wondered how many times he had thought of saying that before finally getting it out.
Sahm called me after some time to say that he seemed to have lost his sense of taste, and asked if I knew that dry ice absorbed the heat of everything around it. He also mentioned that his tongue still felt cold. Was that a joke, too? When I didn’t say anything, Sahm said that he had called just because. So I began to talk like we always did, about everyday things. The head of the cram school was now making the teachers clean the toilets without compensation in the name of cutting down on maintenance, a duty from which he excused himself from. Oh, that asshole, Sahm chimed in, but I couldn’t be sure if he was really listening.
At one time the two of us had shared everything. There was a special attraction between the two of us. We created lists of things to do together, went out for meals, had coffee, laughed, went to bed, spent time together. We had no other reason for being together other than that we wanted to. We did all the usual things most couples did. I probably shouldn’t use “we” to refer to us anymore, but I’m too lazy to think of another word. This way, I don’t have to. It’s like saying “I love you” to mean approximately what you feel, because it’s too hard to find another way to say it.
If we loved each other, as I believed we did, we didn’t show it that much. We never said “I love you” out loud. Why didn’t we? Of course I loved Sahm. Sahm must have loved me, too. He showed it to me in every way except in words. I still longed to invent a secret language for us. It was so we could better communicate our feelings to each other, I explained, and Sahm said that the whole point of language was to deceive the other person. To lie to them. To say that your face was flushed because you were too hot, not because you were embarrassed. To say that you loved them when you didn’t.
We were silent for a moment and, groping for something to say, I told Sahm that my father had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. That the cancer itself would not have been too bad, but that it had spread. Sahm didn’t say anything for a long time before wishing my father a swift recovery. I cried after hanging up, unable to believe he could have really meant it. Except that Sahm probably was sincere. I was the one who struggled to wish my father well, even in that situation. What was wrong with me? I cried all over again, and when I was finished it was as if all the worries that had been preying on my mind had dissolved away. Crying like that took an untold amount of effort and pressure. It felt as if my darkest, most persistent thoughts had been wiped out by sheer force. If tears sometimes have a cleansing effect, it might be because it is also a kind of obliteration. For the longest time I stared blankly at the ceiling of my room, my eyes burning from all that crying, before rising to pack my bags. I told my boss that my father was in critical condition and headed home for a few days.
Nobody cried except my aunt, and even she cried just a little. Not Mom, not my younger brother, not Gran. If grief could be measured by how long and how loudly a person cried, the only person who grieved my father’s death was my aunt. She was also the quickest to get over her grief and bounce back to her regular self.
After Dad died, Mom practically stopped eating, my brother chain-smoked, and Gran suddenly aged overnight. I always used to say to her, you haven’t aged at all, Gran, when I saw her over the holidays, and then Gran would say that it was because she had pretty much finished aging by the time I was born. After my father died, however, it was as if the rest of her had aged all at once. On the way home after the cremation, I held hands with Gran in the backseat of the taxi and said, You’ve gotten old, Gran, but she was as quiet as if she were asleep. You’ve gotten old, Gran, I said again, when Mom shushed me from the front seat, Shh, Gran’s sleeping. My brother leaned his head against the window and kept his eyes on the scenery outside. Come to think of it, it was the first time I had ever used informal speech with Gran.
My father died soon after receiving his diagnosis, having shown few symptoms prior, which made me think that it was the diagnosis that had killed him. Mom wondered if it was the meals she’d served. Gran blamed herself for passing on poor genes. My brother thought he had contributed to Dad’s stress and worried that he might be predisposed to stomach cancer, too. You know that family history is the first thing they look at, Noona, he said. I replied that he should give up smoking if he really cared about his health, which earned me a smile as he said, I just smoke the odd one now and then.
Over the few days I stayed at home, the two of us shared a beer every night, facing each other over the kitchen table. My brother went out on the balcony to smoke, and every time the apartment security would call over the intercom to inform him that someone had made a complaint. Mom spent a lot of time lying down. She had the TV on but didn’t seem to be watching it. When I mentioned I was worried about her being so listless my brother said it was only normal. We might have only seen them fighting, but our parents had dated for eight years before marrying, against Gran’s wishes. I hadn’t known that. I knew that theirs was a love match, not an arranged marriage, but eight years? Could something that had happened so long ago have any influence on one’s feelings now? I didn’t think so, but acknowledged that there might be something left over. I think that’s called a grudge, Noona. Only if you mean hard feelings, I said, and my brother took a swig of his beer and went out for a smoke. There are things that sink to the bottom, undissolved even after a good cry. If a grudge is what’s left after hard feelings, what might the residue of good feelings be? My brother came back inside and said, I’ve thought about it, Noona, and I don’t think good feelings would leave anything. It would all melt away. The intercom buzzed again, and then, as always, my brother gave his usual perfunctory reply. So the days passed as we each coped with our grief and I didn’t return to work as scheduled, after which I was told I was fired.
I no longer had a job, but decided to go back to Seoul without telling my family. My brother begged me to stay, saying that Mom would miss me so much. I refused, reminding him that our hometown held no good memories for me, and he apologized. Mom slipped me an envelope of cash. It must have come from Dad’s condolence money.
While I was waiting for the express bus back to Seoul, Sahm called to tell me he had sold his microscope. I was shocked when I heard how much he had gotten for it. I didn’t know it was worth that much, I said, and Sahm said that it was. I asked why he had sold it and Sahm said that he needed the money. I didn’t dig any further but Sahm told me anyway. He had quit his job. Oh, I said, and when I didn’t say anything else Sahm also told me why he’d quit. Someone had died. Who? A debtor. Why? It was an accident. What kind of accident? She was crossing the street early in the morning, drunk, and was hit by a car. So why did you quit your job? Sahm had gone to see the debtor the day before she had gotten drunk. A single mother, she had begged Sahm on her knees. Sahm’s boss, who had gone with him, excused himself to go out and smoke. Sahm had no authority whatsoever, was more of a debtor himself when it came to the company he worked for. Please don’t do this, Sahm said. The woman must have known that Sahm couldn’t do anything, either. She wasn’t crying at that time, but Sahm said she must have cried before he’d gotten there, or after he’d left. I asked why he thought so, but Sahm couldn’t explain. Well, you see, um, he muttered before changing the subject.
Sahm said that he had a drawing of one of my hairs that he wanted to give me. I asked if he was sure if it was my hair, and he said that he was since it measured over thirty centimeters long when he picked it off his pillow a while ago. I didn’t want the drawing. Why would you want to draw your ex-girlfriend’s hair under a microscope, anyway? I blurted out. Sahm said he did it in a moment of boredom. He couldn’t be bothered to go outside to collect leaves when he found the hair, which reminded him of the leaf of a conifer, so he decided to draw it. It looked even more like a conifer leaf under the microscope, he said. You mean we share a common ancestor with every blade of grass, every redwood tree, I said, and Sahm laughed. The familiar sound of his laughter made me laugh, too. Sahm said he needed something to concentrate on to get rid of the nagging thoughts of cause and effect that wouldn’t leave his head. Even drawing my hair, however, couldn’t stop those thoughts, so he shared them with his boss, who told them he had gone through the same and worse. Sahm knew then that if he stayed in his job, he would face the same thing, so as he was drawing the outline of my hair he decided to quit. The microscope was a luxury he could not afford to keep now that he would not be earning for the time being. Was it really necessary to sell it so quickly? I asked, and Sahm admitted that he was going to stop drawing. I asked why. Sahm made no reply except that he hadn’t thought that I’d ask him that.
I told him about quitting my job at the cram school, then, and Sahm hesitated for a moment before asking after my father, so I said that he had passed away. Sahm offered a few words of condolence that came out almost mechanically. It felt as if the words were second nature to him, and therefore somehow more sincere. It was because of that feeling that I was able to find real comfort in those conventional, set phrases. When he had finished saying them, Sahm asked if I was alright. When I heard that it was as if something inside me melted away, and I began to weep on the bus going back to Seoul. I didn’t make any noise, but as the silence grew, Sahm guessed what was happening and asked if I was crying, so I said that I was. Sahm didn’t tell me not to cry and waited for me without hanging up until I had finished. After crying myself out, I hung up without saying anything and sent Sahm a text to say thank you. Sahm replied to take care of myself. I couldn’t in the end, though, for which I am sorry.
I’m also sorry that I wasn’t able to offer Sahm any comfort when he was down. I don’t feel sorry that I wasn’t able to understand him. At first I thought it was because I hadn’t made the effort, but that wasn’t it. Sahm said that going all the way back, all of us shared a common ancestor, and that we could all be traced back to the explosion of a single dot. It was always possible to find similarities with others, no matter how alien they might be in their present state, since all of us started out from the same point anyway. Wouldn’t it be equally true, I asked, to say that we were descended from a single entity that had split, no longer able to cope with an alien sensation? In the beginning, there was something that kicked off a great division one day. One became two, two became ten, splitting faster and faster into irreconcilable parts that spilled out without an end. And so I believe that if there was something in the beginning, and if that something exploded for whatever reason, it was because it had found something it could not possibly understand or relate to.
One person dies by suicide in Korea every thirty-seven minutes, it said on the news we were watching one day. Sahm asked me if I had ever thought about it myself. We were demolishing a half-gallon of Baskin-Robbins at the time, which prompted me to say, No, because I wouldn’t be able to have any more Mom is an Alien or Gone with the Wind.4 Sahm, who had been shaking his head at the company that would give such strange names to its flavors, asked me if such a trivial reason was enough to keep living. Not only are trivial reasons enough, they’re why people keep living, I said. People might have dozens of reasons for wanting to die, kicking themselves for being useless, crying themselves to sleep every night, but in the morning they got up and ate and drank to satisfy their hunger. Sahm gazed at my face for a minute before telling me to close my eyes and say, Ahh, so I did, and then he popped a spoonful of Gone with the Wind in my mouth. Was this sweetness why I wanted to live? Sahm asked, and I nodded, feeling the cool sweetness melt away on my tongue, but to tell the truth, I was the kind of person who would rather be alive even if it was only to drink plain water. So it wasn’t suicide.
All of this was a very long time ago.
*
On the second morning after my death, I wish that someone would come wake me up. This is unlikely, though, as I lived alone. There is a cacophony of birdsong at daybreak that recedes while I am not paying attention. Someone’s front door opens and closes. I hear another door about thirty minutes later. I hear footsteps crossing the alley, motorcycles, someone singing. Apart from these sounds, all is quiet on this residential street. During the daytime it is virtually silent except for the rattle of screen windows from the occasional gust. It comes back to life in the evening, when people come home from work. Then I hear the noise of TVs, rice cookers, phones ringing. My phone also chimes that a message has arrived. It sounds one, two, three, four, five times in a row . . . and then once more. I wish I could check my messages, see who sent them not knowing I was dead.
On the third morning I am still optimistic. Surely somebody will come find me soon. Life still has a certain hold over me. At night, the glow of streetlights shine into my room. It is a nice kind of glow. Anyone who has witnessed the instant a streetlight goes on as day gives way to night will know what I mean. A yellow ball of light, determined to hold on even in the midst of darkness. On the fourth day, the smell of baking bread wafts through the entire neighborhood. It’s not a smell I was familiar with before my death. On the fifth day, there is a metallic taste on the tip of my tongue. I can taste something like it in the air. On the sixth day, tiny bugs swarm out of my body, so perfectly formed as to be off-putting. I keep thinking about certain things. I place them on my tongue, rolling them slowly until they melt away. On the seventh day, the smell of baking bread is gone completely, leaving only a nasty odor. Is it my smell? And then I give up on counting the days.
The person who found me might be Sahm. He makes a phone call somewhere and sinks to the floor, weeping as if helpless to do anything else. His sobs, hot with hard things molten and dripping away, tug at my heart, and the thing that used to be me shatters to pieces. At the time my feelings still had a few places to return to, though, so people going about their lives as usual were reminded of me from time to time.
Translated by Yoonna Cho
[1] Translator’s note: Japanese cedar, also known as Japanese redwood, or sugi.
[2] T/N: This passage, from Daniel C. Dennett’s Kinds Of Minds (1996), is quoted in its Korean translation in the story, which translates “redwood” as sahmnamu.
[3] T/N: The number 3 is pronounced “sahm” in Sino-Korean.
[4] Originally called Puss in Boots and Twinberry Cheesecake, respectively, the flavors were renamed for the Korean market.
by Kim Ji Yeon
A Good Girl Like You
1. Seo-ah isn’t like that, I’d told myself over and over again since the call from her homeroom teacher. My daughter would never do anything of the sort. The teacher explained that they received the report last week, that the school had installed a special committee for school violence the first thing on Monday morning, and that they would begin their investigation into the matter soon. Until that point, I’d assumed that Seo-ah had been the one who reported bullying committed against her. If only I had followed my intuition, I would have asked her exactly what had happened. I thought it was just like first term—a minor issue that would heal with time. Not actual violence. Seo-ah’s dreams of art school were dashed this year, and she was forced to settle for an ordinary high school. She had sobbed over her crushed hopes, and I’d tried to console her, saying that she didn’t need to go to an arts-focused high school to get into an arts program in university, but it didn’t seem to help. Sending her to class every morning was a challenge, and I felt like I was walking on thin ice each day. What if she woke up in the morning and refused to go to school? What if she feigned sick and came home early? What if she refused to go to cram school? What if she came back from cram school and started crying her eyes out again? I was afraid those fearful days would last forever. But thankfully, Seo-ah slowly adjusted to high school and made it safely through the first term. She seemed to falter in the second term, though, and several days ago, she locked herself in her room. I was sure I could hear her crying on and on. When I asked if everything was all right, she told me, “When has everything ever been all right at school? I’m just having a bit of a hard time.” She was so eerily calm that it was obvious she was holding back a maelstrom of emotions. If I pried, she might crack. I didn’t have to go that far. She would chatter about the things in her life, big and small, without me having to provoke her. It was best to let those feelings deflate gradually, instead of riling up her emotions. But that fateful phone call shattered my complacency. I realized I wasn’t really leaving her alone for her sake, but for my own. I’d been looking away because, deep down, I knew that what she said would make me anxious and uncomfortable. And when that thought took hold of me, I couldn’t help but blame myself for not even considering that my daughter was the victim of school violence. My husband could call me a failure as a mother, and he would be right. But when I asked what had happened to Seo-ah, the homeroom teacher awkwardly explained that Seo-ah was not the victim. I had to ask again. The report had come from the parents of Hyeon-ji in the classroom next to hers, and Seo-ah was one of the students who would be interviewed for the investigation. She was a “student of interest.” Parents were also required to attend separate interviews, and the school would give notice when the date was fixed. I breathed a sigh of relief that Seo-ah wasn’t a victim, but hoped that she wouldn’t be framed as a bully. It had happened before when she was in the sixth grade. We didn’t want to go through that kind of trauma again. Why did this keep happening to Seo-ah? She was a sweet, mild-mannered girl who couldn’t say no, and couldn’t bear to hurt anyone’s feelings. She always put her friends and her younger sister Ji-ah before her. She was afraid of being alienated by her group of friends, so she always tried so hard to win them over. Other kids saw how desperate she was, and some of them even took advantage of her desperation. At least once a year. I would always invite those kids home for a chat, and even speak to their parents and the teachers, but everyone acted innocent, as though Seo-ah was just being too sensitive. It always broke my heart. Looking back, Hyeon-ji was one of those kids. Seo-ah had met her at cram school for English in fourth grade, and they’d been friends ever since. Hyeon-ji was an envious child. When Seo-ah scored better on a test or got praise from the teacher, Hyeon-ji gave her the silent treatment. When Seo-ah bombed a test, Hyeon-ji would gloat about her own results. Seo-ah stuck with her anyway. Tried so hard not to annoy her. I’d wanted to split them apart, but Seo-ah had cried, saying Hyeon-ji was her only friend. Hyeon-ji had always included her in their hangouts, that was true, and being with Hyeon-ji encouraged Seo-ah to study harder, so I decided to let them be. They had their share of fights over the years, but they had been together for so long that I assumed it would all be okay in the end. I knew Hyeon-ji’s mother, too, so if something had really happened between the girls, they would have spoken to me first instead of going to the school. I didn’t know what Hyeon-ji was going through, but I knew that Seo-ah was only being called in to give testimony. Anyone who knew Seo-ah would agree: she was the furthest thing in the world from a bully. As I stood there in silence, the teacher explained that I should come to the school tomorrow for more details. It was only after the call that all the questions came flooding into my mind, but when I tried to call the teacher back, all I got were busy signals. Obsessively, I picked up the phone and put it down again, then picked it up again, wondering if I should call Hyeon-ji’s mother, but realized she would still be at work at this hour. I couldn’t just sit around waiting. I decided to call Ha-yan’s mother, who lived in the same condo complex as us, to ask about Hyeon-ji. The call went to voicemail, but eventually, Ha-yan’s mother sent back a text: Sorry, I was on the phone with Se-yeon’s mom. Did you get a call from school, too? When I replied, Yes, she called back. “What did the teacher tell you?” “Well . . . do you by any chance know what happened to Hyeon-ji? Apparently her mother reported someone for bullying. What do you think happened?” “Is that all you heard? They didn’t tell you Seo-ah was a student of interest and ask you to come in for an interview with the teacher?” “Oh. Um, right.” I hesitated, wondering if Seo-ah had been singled out by Hyeon-ji, but Ha-yan’s mother went on before I could add anything. “The school called Se-yeon and Hye-yun’s moms, too. Oh, but Seo-ah’s in the same class as Se-yeon, so I guess you don’t know the details, either. I don’t understand why Ha-yan and Seo-ah’s homeroom teachers won’t explain these things properly. Hye-yun’s teacher called in the morning and told her mom what happened. Did you know that Hyeon-ji was in a car crash a few days ago? Ha-yan says she’s in the ICU.” “Oh. Um . . . right.” I had no idea what had happened to Hyeon-ji. But I didn’t want to let that show. Why would Seo-ah not tell me something so important? Had something really happened between them? But then I realized that Seo-ah was probably still in shock, and that was why she had come home and cried every night. “But here’s the thing,” said Ha-yan’s mother. “It wasn’t an accident. Hyeon-ji ran into the street. And her mom called the school violence hotline, saying she tried to commit suicide because she was being alienated by other students.” The four students of interest, as well as Hyeon-ji, had all been in the same class in sixth grade. They’d all hung out together from the beginning. At first, they had been a group of seven, but some had split off to different junior high schools. But they kept in touch on social media and group chats, until five of them were assigned to the same high school and began to hang out together again. The other moms and I all knew that Hyeon-ji was part of that group. “But it doesn’t make any sense. Seo-ah didn’t say anything about Hyeon-ji being in an accident. Are they calling in our girls because they’re friends?” “Don’t be naïve, Unni. These days, they call everyone ‘students of interest’ until the committee’s issued a verdict, regardless of whether they’re bullies or victims. Hye-yun’s mom says our girls were reported as the perpetrators. I don’t know what’s going on. There must have been a mistake somewhere. They’re not going straight to the school board’s review committee, though. This is just a preliminary investigation to make sure the charges are real. And even if someone really was bullied, the principal can technically resolve the issue on his own. The problem is if the victim doesn’t accept the verdict. That’s when the review committee gets involved. I’m pretty sure they’re only calling us in to fact-check everything. I’d like to talk to Hyeon-ji’s mom before that, but I have a feeling it might backfire since I haven’t seen or spoken to her since the girls were in grade school. Do you keep in touch with her? Hyeon-ji and Seo-ah were inseparable in junior high, right?” “I haven’t seen her in person since the girls were in sixth grade, either. Hyeon-ji’s mom was busy with work, so I only ever talked to her on the phone when I picked up the girls from cram school during their first year of junior high. We fell out of touch when they started going to different cram schools the year after.” “But you’re still the closest to her. Try giving her a call.” “I was just about to, actually. I’m worried about Hyeon-ji. But what can I even say if the girl’s in the ICU? Let’s wait for the kids to come home and talk to them first. We can discuss things again afterwards. Maybe someone is making a mountain out of a molehill, just like last time.” “Exactly. I swear, what did we do to deserve this again? Maybe it’s time to see a shaman and hold an exorcism.” I breathed a sigh of relief at being able to avoid contact with Hyeon-ji’s mother and the possibility of being blamed. Then I remembered how the girls had made it through the same thing in sixth grade. Things were going to be okay this time, too. I just knew it. 2. Still in her uniform, Seo-ah sat at her desk with her eyes glued to her phone. I was glad she didn’t burst into tears in the foyer like the night before, but it was frustrating to see her sit there as if nothing was wrong. If I were to ask about Hyeon-ji now, she would probably start sniffling and use that as an excuse to skip cram school. Midterms were only a few days away, and if she missed those extra classes, her grades would slide even further than first term. But the interview loomed threateningly over our heads, so I couldn’t just wait for her to bring up the subject. “Honey, I heard from your homeroom teacher that Hyeon-ji was in an accident. Apparently she was being bullied by a group of students. Do you know anything about that?” “No.” “Did something happen between you, honey? Your teacher asked me to come in, saying you were a student of interest. Please, you have to tell me.” “Nothing happened, and I don’t feel like talking,” Seo-ah replied, eyes glued to the screen. That only convinced me that something had happened between the girls. “Don’t you understand how serious this is?” I pleaded. “You can’t just clam up right now. I know you must feel awful about Hyeon-ji’s accident. But I need to know. Your university application is on the line here.” “I just don’t get why they’re on our backs about this.” “Whose backs?” “Me, Seong Se-yeon, Oh Ha-yan, and Song Hye-yun. They’re blaming us, saying we bullied Hyeon-ji.” “You were all so happy to go to the same high school together. What’s happening here, honey? You’re still friends with Hyeon-ji, right?” “We were all friends during the first term, but she stopped hanging out with us after the holidays. And me and the other girls only hang out together at lunch and walk to and from school together. We all go to different cram schools, it’s not like we have time to talk. I’m only hanging with Se-yeon because we’re in the same homeroom, and Ha-yan and Hye-yun hang out with their own classmates. Ha-yan’s in the same homeroom as Hyeon-ji, but she says Hyeon-ji never says anything even when people talk to her. She just studies all the time. I passed by her class during break, and she actually had a three-sided partition made of folders standing on her desk. None of the smart kids at school do that, everyone thinks she’s a total tryhard. She was never like that in elementary school. But then she started acting all prissy in junior high, and when I failed the art school applications, she stopped treating me like a person. I swear to God, she made me want to die every single day. Everyone knows she failed her science school application too, it’s so gross how she pretends that never happened and acts like she chose our school for the GPA. I bet she hates us even more ’cause the four of us are the only ones who know that.” The girls’ first year of junior high had no exams, so we hadn’t known for sure how they were doing in class. Seo-ah studied ahead like she was taught at cram school and kept up with classes, and the teachers had all called her a model student. It was only after the first midterms during her second year that I realized Seo-ah had no talent for studying. Until then, I had blindly believed that Seo-ah was good at everything. She was always better than her little sister Ji-ah, who was slower than her peers overall, and she was ambitious. She’d won so many competitions in elementary school and even served on the student council, so I’d never in my wildest dreams expected to see such grades. Meanwhile, Hyeon-ji, who Seo-ah had always thought was on her level, had scored second highest in the entire grade. It was no wonder Seo-ah was so stressed. To say nothing of my husband, who had always bragged about Seo-ah’s grades. Rattled, he blamed me for not raising her properly. When I argued that she had tried her best and this was the result, he said it was because she took after me. The same man who went to a worse university than me and transferred to a much better school to launder his academic background. The best thing he’d ever done in his life was marry me and take over my father’s business, but whenever something went wrong, he acted as though it were my fault. I would be just about to shoot back, tell him to know his place, but I would stop myself, afraid the girls would learn about their father’s inferiority complex. He never gave up hope for Seo-ah. He’d raved about her artistic skills since she was a little girl and insisted on giving her an artist’s education. Seo-ah liked art too, and fantasized about art school, so she did as her father told her and went to after-school art classes. Poorly versed in both academics and art, we had no idea just how brutal that path would be. Seo-ah was determined to get into an arts high school and refused to show any sign of weakness. She would get into art school and instantly make a name for herself as an artist, we assumed. It ended in disaster. When her application was rejected, she saw no way forward. If she’d been rejected by the high school of her dreams, she said between sobs, what hope did she have for beating the competition to get into university? What hope for the career she wanted? She tossed out all her art supplies, saying she would never draw again. If not for him, Seo-ah wouldn’t have experienced failure so early. I felt so guilty for not having stopped him. That first failure left her horribly scarred. And to think that her closest friend had been rubbing salt in that wound with me none the wiser. Children were supposed to grow up, their rough edges filed away with time, but apparently, Hyeon-ji’s edges were as sharp as ever. Maybe that was why she ended up falling away from the other girls. The accident was a terrible tragedy, yes, but I was astounded that her mother would drag innocent classmates into this. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?” I asked. “Or anything you haven’t told me? I have to know what happened so we can plan for what’s coming.” “Mom, do you really think we bullied Hyeon-ji?” I certainly didn’t think so, but I had to make sure. “Okay, the truth is, it’s been forever since I even talked to her. But she started it. She hates being around us. The rest of us hang out together because we like each other, she’s the one who refuses to come along because she hates us, so how is this bullying or school violence or whatever? Why do I have to be all buddy-buddy with some girl who’s always looking down on me? Hyeon-ji’s the one dissing us behind our backs, why is everyone blaming us?” Seo-ah’s learned how to stop being a doormat, I thought with a hint of pride. Was she such a bad girl for refusing to tolerate someone who treated her badly? 3. Se-yeon’s mother invited us all to her home, saying we should get the facts straight in person before we let the school investigate the girls. It was a little scary, pulling them out of cram school when midterms were so close, but we knew our priorities. I’d spoken with Ha-yan’s mother occasionally, but this was the first time since Seo-ah was in sixth grade that I met the other moms. We smiled awkwardly when someone noted that we only got together for occasions like this. These would be trying times just like before, but we were reassured by one another’s presence. We would support one another, this time without fear. Our hearts were steeled. “From what I can tell, the girls just drifted apart from Hyeon-ji,” I started. “Why did her mother report it as school violence? I don’t think the girls singled her out or bullied her. That’s what the girls all said, right? I’m sure things will be fine as long as we can prove they’re innocent. Let’s have faith in our kids and get through this together.” The others agreed. But Hye-yun’s mother noted, “Unni, I think there’s still room for them to frame the girls as bullies. Things were different last time. Remember? Ah-in’s mother asked the homeroom teacher to arbitrate, but then she dropped the case. She never filed an official report, so it never went on the girls’ permanent records. But Hyeon-ji’s parents went directly to the school violence hotline. There’s no dropping this case now. In the best-case scenario, the school will investigate and determine there was no bullying. In the second-best scenario, the principal arbitrates and settles the matter instead of forwarding it to the school board. If the case makes it to the review committee, there are going to be consequences. We could get into serious trouble if we’re not careful. If we really dig in our heels and claim it never happened, and they never find evidence, that would be great. But what if they do? Or what if someone comes forward as a witness? Hyeon-ji’s mother isn’t going to let this go so easily. If we refuse to admit what happened and refuse to apologize, the girls could end up with even worse consequences. It might be safer to admit it happened, apologize, and maybe even make reparations if we want to make sure this doesn’t get sent up to the school board.” Everyone seemed to agree that the second-best scenario would be the safest, but I had faith that we still had a shot at dropping the case altogether. It was for the girls’ futures. We had to make sure that they were not punished—that this whole mess was cleaned up as if it never happened. That was the only just outcome for the girls. They were innocent. The other moms seemed to think things were different from the sixth grade, but I disagreed. In the winter just before graduating from elementary school, the parents of Lee Ah-in, a classmate of our girls, went to the homeroom teacher for help, claiming that Seo-ah and six other girls from the class had alienated her and spread rumors about her. Her family demanded an apology, threatening to make an official report to the school violence hotline. The homeroom teacher contacted all of us. Looking back, we could have easily ended things with an apology, but my husband and I had gotten so worked up that we escalated the situation. Ever since daycare, Seo-ah had always been on the wrong side of the bullies. Our blood boiled at the ludicrous accusation. We wouldn’t stand for it. It turned out that Hye-yun and Se-yeon were the ones who started talking behind Ah-in’s back first, and Seo-ah only happened to express agreement. Somehow, that made her a perpetrator. My husband consulted a lawyer specializing in school violence. The lawyer explained that because this case involved a group of students ostracizing an individual student, consequences were inevitable. She explained that if we wanted to avoid the worst, we had to reframe this as a collection of individual-to-individual issues; not something persistent, but separate one-time conflicts. She coached Seo-ah to claim that she had expressed sympathy towards how the other girls felt, but not that she agreed with their actions. The lawyer explained that an effective strategy would be to claim that Ah-in started it first, gossiping about our girls and starting arguments. Our cloud had a silver lining: seven girls had been accused, so we could work together to fabricate a scenario where Ah-in started the whole mess, and prep the girls to give testimony supporting one another’s claims. My husband insisted to the other parents that we had to present a united front if we wanted to protect the girls’ futures. The other parents’ looks of doubt soon changed to nods of agreement, and before we knew it, we were all coaching our daughters as the lawyer instructed. My husband spoke with the homeroom teacher in person and professed his frustration at Seo-ah’s plight. Ah-in had been bothering Seo-ah for ages, he claimed, and Seo-ah had been traumatized by horrible things Ah-in had said. He put on such a convincing act that I even started to wonder if he’d been telling lies his entire life. I almost felt a pang of guilt, but told myself that it wasn’t all fiction. Seo-ah’s classmates had always given her a hard time. The homeroom teacher promised to investigate the accusation. When she announced that she would speak with all related parties one-on-one, we insisted that the girls couldn’t make the time, and demanded that everyone be investigated together. The homeroom teacher didn’t want to drag the matter out, either, so she gathered Ah-in and all our girls together in the classroom. Seo-ah told us that the teacher stood as a neutral party and had Ah-in listen to the seven girls’ sides of the story in turn, not allowing her to interject. The girls each told their stories about how Ah-in had made them uncomfortable, and as the lawyer had instructed, acted as witnesses for one another to testify that Ah-in had started it all, talking behind their backs. Ah-in insisted she had done no such thing, but it was always harder to prove you hadn’t done something than the other way around. The scenario had been designed to perfection. The homeroom teacher’s trust in Ah-in dissipated. Convinced that both sides had the blame, she told both Ah-in and our girls to apologize to one another, but Ah-in claimed that she had done nothing to apologize for, and refused. She claimed that she had evidence and witnesses to our girls bullying her, and that she would report the case. The homeroom teacher lost her temper at the awful girl who refused to admit her own fault and only blamed others. When the girls told us the story, we were convinced that the homeroom teacher was at least, not on Ah-in’s side. Even if Ah-in’s parents were to report the case, the homeroom teacher’s testimony would not be in her favor. There was less than a month until graduation, but we were constantly on edge, wondering how Ah-in’s parents would respond and when they would report our girls. My husband called the school and regularly stopped by to meet the homeroom teacher and the vice-principal in person, expressing his frustration and discreetly asking if the report had been made. During the second meeting, the vice-principal warned him that Ah-in’s parents, although they had evidence, were choosing to show forbearance for the time being, and asked him to stop making a habit of these visits. I convinced my husband to stop because I didn’t want to escalate the situation and because it seemed like Ah-in’s parents wanted to let things blow over too, but my husband only got angrier, saying that the vice-principal was just being lazy. After what seemed like an eternity, the girls safely graduated from elementary school. Our efforts had paid off. Later, I heard through the grapevine just how traumatized Ah-in had been during that meeting in the classroom, how she ended up getting counseling for years afterwards. And I heard why her parents never escalated the situation, even when they had evidence on hand. I would have done the same in their shoes. Dragging the girl from one investigation committee to another, forcing her to relive it all over and over again, would only hurt her more. When I learned that Ah-in was an outcast who couldn’t seem to acclimatize to junior high, I realized that our girls had never been at fault—Ah-in had been the problematic one. And if we hadn’t resisted with everything we had, Seo-ah would have ended up just as broken as her, and we would have regretted our powerlessness and complacency forever. Seo-ah was a good girl, and she was innocent, and because we were sure nothing like this would ever happen again, we didn’t feel a shred of guilt. It was strange to see history repeat like this. Yet again, all we could do was try our best to resist. When I tried to rally the others, encouraging them to dig in their heels, Se-yeon’s mother asked anxiously, “But won’t Hyeon-ji’s mother know how we’re going to respond?” “We have to believe in the girls. They said they weren’t ostracizing her. We just need to tell it like it is,” Ha-yan’s mother said nonchalantly, failing to hide the worry in her eyes. 4. Se-yeon’s mother turned on the voice recorder, and Hye-yun’s mother pulled out a pen and some paper. When we told the girls to tell us everything—about their relationship with Hyeon-ji, what had happened between them—the girls only exchanged silent looks. It wouldn’t be easy to get them to open up in front of us all. But finally, Hye-yun, who was brimming with anxiety, broke the silence. “Okay, it’s true that we’re not on good terms, but I’m the victim here,” she explained. “I was dating this guy named Min-gyun since junior high, and he ended up in the same cram school as Hyeon-ji when we started high school. But Hyeon-ji started getting all friendly with him. I told her to stop getting close to my boyfriend, and you know what she said? ‘Then you should just get transferred to our class.’ How am I even supposed to get to the top-grade class when I’m barely surviving in the high-grade one? But I didn’t want to start a fight, so I let it slide. I didn’t want to lose both Min-gyun and Hyeon-ji. Then I ended up breaking up with Min-gyun, and Hyeon-ji started making fun of me for it. She went around saying I was being dramatic about some shallow relationship. I stopped talking to her after that. I’m not stupid, I’m not going to hang around her and let her destroy my self-esteem.” Hye-yun had scarcely finished when Se-yeon piped up. “Hyeon-ji was always totally self-absorbed. Not about grades back in elementary school, since we didn’t get ranked. But she’d always look for something she could lord over us with. Everyone used to call me pretty back then, and I was kind of popular, so she was desperate to be my friend. We kept up on Insta and Kakao in junior high, and you know what she said to me the first time we met up again in high school? ‘You look totally different.’ Like, she was calling me ugly. I know that. Anyone with eyes can see that. Apparently she said that I’d never be an actress with my looks, and even if I did, I was too much of an airhead to be any good at acting. Seo-ah told her to stop, but she just kept dissing me, when she’s the one who looks like a complete toad. Ugh, if Seo-ah hadn’t stopped me, I would have let the bitch have it. Why am I the bad guy, when I only ignored her because she was irritating me? If I knew I’d get framed, I’d have given her a good beating so I’d at least deserve it. This is stupid.” Ha-yan was quick to pick up where Se-yeon left off. “I almost hit her too. We’re in the same class, so we did group projects and ate together sometimes. I’m kind of, I mean, seriously bad at math and art, but she really lent a hand. She doesn’t let her soft side show, but she’s actually helping out even when she’s swearing out loud. And she does have her own charm, sort of like a tiny frog. She’s actually nice, so I ignored it when she got irritating sometimes. But then I heard that she told the others how she hated me because I cursed all the time and that I was stupid and annoying. I got so angry I wanted to slap her. But then I thought about it, and she wasn’t wrong. I did kind of annoy her, to be honest, so I felt a little bad. I mean, she didn’t have to be my friend just because we went to elementary school together. So I just decided to avoid her on my own. It wasn’t like a big group of us singling her out.” Finally, Seo-ah spoke. “Nothing happened between me and Hyeon-ji. Ha-yan’s right, she’s kind of irritating sometimes, but she’s really nice to her friends. Hyeon-ji’s a total perfectionist and she knows exactly what she wants, so she gets mad if people don’t live up to that. I guess I was a little too slow and careless, especially after I didn’t make it to art school. She just cut me off. It really hurt. I thought we were best friends.” We moms could barely look at one another in shame. How had these friends—my own daughter included—become such a sorry sight? It certainly didn’t sound like they had conspired to ostracize the girl, and I began to wonder what evidence Hyeon-ji’s mother had to report this to the school violence hotline. “Is that really everything?” I asked. “Try to remember. You didn’t talk behind her back when she wasn’t around?” The girls couldn’t immediately deny it. They made a visible effort to recall something. That was when Se-yeon asked her own mother, “Okay, I’m curious, is it school violence when a group of friends decides to talk about someone else? Like, about how someone said something in a group chat and it made me mad, that kind of thing? Or do we have to make sure we whisper in each other’s ears in person for stuff like that?” The girls snorted with laughter. Ha-yan said between giggles, “We used to get in so much trouble for whispering like that when we were little. They said it was, like, the worst thing ever.” “How many times do I have to tell you not to talk about someone behind their back?” Ha-yan’s mother said. Seo-ah spoke up. “We didn’t diss Hyeon-ji behind her back. We were sharing how she hurt our feelings. Who else are we supposed to talk about that with? Someone who doesn’t know Hyeon-ji?” “You make a very convincing argument, Seo-ah,” Se-yeon’s mother said with a chuckle. “How very eloquent of you. But it sounds like you did gossip about her on a group chat. Let’s look those up and delete those logs right now. You didn’t say anything about Hyeon-ji in group chats with anyone else, right? Just delete the entire chat, because apparently they look at message logs when they investigate these things. But I don’t think they’ll bring digital forensics into it.” “Come on,” Hye-yun said, taken aback. “We haven’t gossiped about anyone on group chats since what happened with Ah-in. We don’t do anything that can be used as evidence.” Hye-yun’s mother looked up from her notes. “Then did anyone hear or see Hyeon-ji make fun of someone? In real life or through texts? Let’s start with you, Se-yeon.” “She used to say I looked totally different to my face, like, every day,” Se-yeon replied. “And she told Seo-ah that I was an airhead and that I’d never be an actress. That’s why Seo-ah ended up fighting Hyeon-ji.” “She told me in person that I just had to make it to her class. Seo-ah and Se-yeon told me they heard her talk about how I was being dramatic about Min-gyun.” “I mean, friends call each other stupid blockheads all the time, right? Um . . . who was it that told me she went around saying someone was gross? It was one of the girls, but I don’t remember because I don’t really care.” “Seo-ah,” said Hye-yun’s mother. “You and Hyeon-ji drifted apart because you never really got along, right? It sounds like she went to you a lot when she wanted to talk behind someone’s back. Can you tell me when?” She knew. Just like me, Hye-yun’s mother had noticed that Seo-ah was a witness to every instance of Hyeon-ji’s supposed gossiping. Maybe it wasn’t just the two of us, but everyone else in the room. I hoped dearly that Seo-ah had a reasonable answer. “I don’t remember, she just talks crap about people so much. I don’t want to hear it, but I swear, every time she opens her mouth, she’s trash-talking someone. So it’s okay to let her diss us to our faces, and not for us to diss her in private? What, is being in the hospital a get out of jail free card?” This was the first time I heard that Hyeon-ji was prone to badmouthing other people. Seo-ah had been at her side for years, and never once told me anything like that. Rather, she had always complained that Hyeon-ji had no interest in other people, and expressed disappointment that even she, her supposed best friend, never got much attention from her. The fact that all the testimony about Hyeon-ji led back to Seo-ah had been bothering me from the start, and Seo-ah’s answer only deepened my suspicions. That was when I remembered something Ji-ah always said: Mom, Seo-ah’s always lying to your face. “How could you say that?” I demanded, cutting her off. If I let her keep talking, she might end up crossing the line. I’d had no idea Seo-ah was capable of being so heartless. “Your friend is in the hospital!” “Please don’t be mad at Seo-ah,” said Ha-yan, as the other girls nodded. “She’s the one who always took Hyeon-ji’s side when we got mad at her. Hyeon-ji dissed Seo-ah the most, but she still covered for her. You wouldn’t talk like that to Seo-ah if you knew half the things Hyeon-ji did.” I finally noticed that there was no hint of concern about Hyeon-ji in the other girls’ eyes. And Seo-ah, whose first response to grief was usually tears, showed no sign of worry in spite of the fact that Hyeon-ji was on the brink of death. I began to wonder if her crying in her room really had been because of Hyeon-ji’s accident. “So what exactly did Hyeon-ji do to Seo-ah?” asked Hye-yun’s mother. “Did any of you see?” The girls hesitated. “It’s . . . it’s just too horrible to say,” Seo-ah said. “Hyeon-ji’s smart, she’d never do anything where people could see. She just picked on me because I looked like an easy target.” The last vestiges of my trust were swept away. And I knew that I was not the only one who would doubt Seo-ah’s claims. The other girls all took her side, but the mothers only listened in silence. I was terrified that they would voice their doubts too and decide to agree that Seo-ah was the one who had spearheaded the bullying. Ha-yan’s mother broke the silence. “I understand, Seo-ah. You’re always trying so hard to be nice to your friends. We all know how gentle you are.” She turned to the mothers. “Can you really call this bullying? I’d love to ask Hyeon-ji’s mother to her face. Yes, it’s awful that she’s in the ICU, but does that woman even realize what kind of monster her daughter is? It looks to me like she’s just taking out her frustrations on us.” I didn’t know if Ha-yan’s mother was just that oblivious, or if she was actively trying to help me. But either way, I nearly shed tears of gratitude. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll just tell the teachers exactly what we heard today. There wasn’t some big group of people ostracizing Hyeon-ji. She was the one being awful, and she was the one who started it. There’s no evidence, and Hyeon-ji can’t testify for herself, so you girls need to make sure your stories are consistent. And us moms can tell the teachers about how the girls were stressed out for months because Hyeon-ji badmouthed them. No going back on your testimonies. Remember, consistency is key.” I made up my mind to not tell my husband about what happened. It would blow over soon; he didn’t need to know. He would only blame me for it anyway. 5. The teachers said they wouldn’t call in the students of interest all at one time, but because there were so many people, some of our schedules overlapped. They said that wouldn’t be an issue, because the accusing student and the students of interest would not run into each other anyway. The homeroom teacher called in Seo-ah first to talk to her alone, then invited me in, explaining that Hyeon-ji’s mother wasn’t the only one who reported the girls. Many other students had also filed reports. My confidence that things would quickly be resolved shattered. The girls hadn’t lied, true, but from Hyeon-ji’s perspective, she clearly had been the singular victim of verbal abuse from a group of students. It was similar to the incident with Ah-in, except this time, it went beyond bathroom stall gossip and group chat trash-talking. The homeroom teacher gave an overview of the circumstances, citing Hyeon-ji’s diary, her testimony to her mother, and the witness accounts of other students. Se-yeon had been calling Hyeon-ji “Toady” and drawn horrible caricatures of her, comically exaggerating her features. Hyeon-ji had spent an entire day with the caricature taped to her back, after which she was only ever known as “Toady,” and was mocked by total strangers on Instagram. Ha-yan would bump into her and pretend it was an accident, even apologizing. Ha-yan had gotten hurt on one of those occasions, so Hyeon-ji had never considered reporting her. Eventually, Hyeon-ji was covered in bruises, and she flinched when a bigger student so much as passed near her. Hye-yun spread rumors that Hyeon-ji, contrary to her model-student persona, was an aggressive flirt with not only boys in her cram school, but also the instructors, and even the manager of her favorite café. She’d insisted it was because Hyeon-ji had no father, and claimed that she felt bad for her. Seo-ah had been the one leading the other girls, gossiping about Hyeon-ji and even getting between Hyeon-ji and anyone who tried to befriend her. There had been an incident between the two girls just before Hyeon-ji’s accident, which Hyeon-ji’s mother said was probably the breaking point. Some time recently, Hyeon-ji had lent Seo-ah her science notebook. Hyeon-ji’s notes were tidy and organized, so her classmates would borrow them regularly. Hyeon-ji didn’t mind, as everyone took photos of the notes and gave them back immediately, and she believed that sharing those notes wouldn’t threaten her academic ranking. Her notebook was easy to recognize, as it was covered in colorful stickers from the classmates who had borrowed it before. It was just before midterms that Seo-ah asked to borrow those notes, and Hyeon-ji, although reluctant, had been unable to refuse. The notebook, practically borrowed by force, was never returned to its owner. Hyeon-ji had been upset—the notebook had meant a lot to her—but she said it was okay because she could get the photos of her notes from the students she’d lent it to before. That was what Hyeon-ji told her mother. The rest of the story came from the other students’ testimonies. Seo-ah had knelt in the hallway, begging Hyeon-ji to forgive her. Hyeon-ji had said no harm had been done, and told Seo-ah to get up. But Seo-ah went further, insisting she would redo the notes for Hyeon-ji. Hyeon-ji had politely declined and tried to get away, but Seo-ah had whined that Hyeon-ji was refusing to forgive her. Hyeon-ji’s response was that this wasn’t about forgiveness, that she had the photographs and so her studies wouldn’t be hindered, but that she could not stand being forced to forgive her. Seo-ah had burst into tears then, saying she’d thought Hyeon-ji was her best friend, that she was looking down at her for being stupid. The students watching it all took Seo-ah’s side, calling Hyeon-ji heartless. Seo-ah pleaded with them, saying it was all her own fault and that they shouldn’t blame Hyeon-ji. Shut up, you bitch! Hyeon-ji had shrieked. Stop acting like you’re the victim here! Her curses had echoed all the way down the hall. Hyeon-ji became afraid of going to school after that. I remembered picking up a messy notebook from Seo-ah’s floor one morning, and shelving it with a sigh. The motley mess of stickers looked a little insane to my eyes, and I had worried about her emotional state. Now, I realized, I would prefer emotional instability to what was really happening. I could so clearly see the face she made in that hallway, hear the tone of her voice. My face burned red. But I was still her mother. I had to say something. Anything. “Please, you’re a teacher. Don’t you see this kind of thing happening between kids all the time? Mean jokes and little clashes that they grow out of? And I’m getting suspicious about all these witnesses you’re talking about. It’s almost as if someone’s maliciously threading together unrelated incidents to frame our children. Is this all real? Do you have witnesses?” The homeroom teacher explained she had only told me about incidents grounded in testimony and evidence, but that the details were confidential. I had no clue just how little I knew. It was embarrassing just how lax we had been the other day in our preparations. We should have braced ourselves harder. All the words I had practiced and rehearsed were rendered useless. “How are Hyeon-ji and her mother? I’d like to apologize in person, if that’s all right.” “They’re refusing contact and visits to the hospital. It seems Hyeon-ji’s condition isn’t looking good. I believe the review committee will convene once the investigation ends, so you’ll have your chance to make an appeal or apologize then.” By the time I left the classroom, the girls had all finished and left. Only Ha-yan’s mother and Se-yeon’s mother stood like strangers in a corner of the grounds, waiting for the rest of us. They must have been just as shaken as I was, because we all stood in silence until Hye-yun’s mother joined us. She had been in the meeting twenty minutes longer than me. And because Hye-yun’s teacher was more thorough with her explanations, Hye-yun’s mother learned more details than the rest of us. She was confident thanks to two key facts in our favor, she said. One was that one of the incidents had no evidence to back it up. She chattered excitedly about using that incident to get the girls out of this whole mess, but as she went on, we realized that the incident had been such a minor one that it would be embarrassing to even try and use it as ammunition. We all remembered our discussion with the girls the other night and our grim determination. And it made us ashamed to even look at one another. The second fact, Hye-yun’s mother said, could turn this whole case around. “Did your teachers tell you about the key witness? Or just mine again? It was Lee Ah-in. Surprising, right? She went to see Hyeon-ji in the hospital and told Hyeon-ji’s mother everything, and that’s how the whole thing got reported to the school. Hyeon-ji’s mother had no idea until Ah-in told her. That girl used to take voice recordings and pictures obsessively even in elementary school, remember? The stubborn little thing had a mountain of pictures and audio files. Scary, huh? She must still be holding a grudge from that silly case all those years ago if she’s reporting something that has nothing to do with her. Hyeon-ji was one of the people she accused in sixth grade. There’s no way Ah-in’s doing this out of the goodness of her heart. Isn’t it suspicious how she went to visit her in the hospital? And how this report came in right before midterms? She’s dead set on tripping up the girls on their way to university. We have no idea if Ah-in is telling the truth or not, and we don’t know if she tampered with the pictures and audio files she sent. But think about it. Even if they find out this was all a lie, they can’t undo the damage to the girls’ midterms.” We tried to consider our options, but grew frustrated at every turn. Maybe we could bring in the grudge angle with Ah-in, but if we brought up something we’d worked so hard to move on from, it would ultimately only hurt us more than it would her. We would be better off ignoring that direction, we concluded. But all our brainstorming led nowhere. We couldn’t make it out unscathed. We knew at this point that we would be best off hiring a lawyer specializing in school violence, admitting fault, and begging for forgiveness so that we could minimize the consequences, but for some reason, we felt wronged. I wanted to tell my husband what had happened, scream at him that he had made a terrible mess all those years ago, and that mess had come back with a vengeance. He would blame me, saying Seo-ah had taken after me, that I hadn’t raised her right, and demand updates every single day until the issue was resolved. I suddenly realized that Seo-ah resembled my husband in her inferiority complex and the way she blamed others. But it was fascinating how I didn’t hate those things about her the way I hated them in her father. But at the same time, I was terrified that all I could do was lie to myself about her, thinking, I’m so glad that I had a good daughter like you, a good girl like you could never do something so horrible, because I simply wasn’t clever enough to raise her right. Standing in a daze, I sadly watched a girl trudge all alone across the grounds. I didn’t know if the other moms felt the same way I did. Translated by Slin Jung
by Chung So-hyun
Princess of the Night
What’s something you can only see when it gets dark?
Ghosts?
by Han Junghyun
With a Knife Between Us
My Omega and I were both girls and both left-handed, but to my surprise, we had nothing else in common. The fact that we’d been one long ago and we’d soon become one again felt like a weird joke. After going AWOL from the Omega Zone the day before our coming-of-age ceremony, the Omega had been on the run for three days before she was apprehended and brought here by the guards. With her handcuffed wrists hanging low, she wandered coolly through the living room and kitchen as if she were touring the house. From the porch entrance came the quiet but angry voice of my grandmother, who was blocking the front to keep the guards at bay. Maybe she was arguing with them as to whether they’d used excessive force after seeing reddish bruises on the cheeks and arms of the Omega. I’d never been alone with the Omega before, and I didn’t know what to do. I followed her slowly, but she never gave me so much as a glance. It was as if she didn’t see me. For a long time, she gazed in seeming interest at the picture frames on the wall, the decorative plates on the shelf, and the glass teacups with wavy gold-trimmed edges. Then she walked to the side of the round table where I always enjoyed a late breakfast and early dinner with my grandmother and stopped cold. She began to inspect me directly. Following her lead, I looked the Omega full in the face. Her lips had been pursed from the time I’d first seen her, as if she were keeping her anger in check. Yet strangely enough, depending on how her eyes moved, she also seemed to be holding back laughter. Only her large brown eyes revealed how she was feeling. She moved the muscles around her arched brows even in moments of stillness, indicating by turns curiosity or boredom with the vanity of the world. You could tell she was instantly registering objects in her sightline as either interesting or dull, and made no attempt to hide it. With a glance, the Omega judged me, her Alpha, to be unworthy. Anyone could see it. You could tell she had a different energy from me by the stockiness of her back and the outline of her shoulders through her clothes. She was about ten centimeters taller. I had to lift my chin in order not to shrink under her gaze. But because I was clasping my hands together to hide my nervousness, I looked just like her—someone handcuffed and under arrest. We were twins looking at each other for the first time. Originally, we were supposed to meet on our eighteenth birthday and observe the coming-of-age ceremony without incident after exchanging some pleasantries suited to the occasion. But our birthday had already passed three days ago, and I was uneasy that there might be a blot on my life that could never be erased. I’d been very anxious, and from the moment my Omega had walked into the house like a captured game animal, I thought only of how to salvage the situation. But this girl just looked at me with an inscrutable expression. “What now? Shall we shake hands?” she asked. When I held out my hand in confusion, she was like my own mirror image, offering her left hand at the same time. After taking it, I felt a shock. She was left-handed. Why did we share this trait of all things? That evening, my grandmother lifted a portable charcoal grill onto the table and cooked a light mandu jeongol seasoned only with salt. It was a dish she was proud of and often served to company. I was particularly fond of the handmade mandu stuffed with minced meat and chives. But it turned out that the Omega did not eat meat. My grandmother thought it a shame. “Oh my,” she said. “I had no idea.” The Omega had seemed almost expressionless, but then she warmed up and laughed unexpectedly. “It’s all right. There’s plenty to eat here.” She’d grown up at my aunt’s house in the Omega Zone, and was not the least bit shy even though it was likely her first time meeting my grandmother. My grandmother, who’d been living with a sensitive granddaughter bereft of all cuteness and absorbed only in books, couldn’t disguise her joy at the appearance of an expressive new grandchild. But I could tell the Omega was using her charms to some end. There was something she wanted that she was slyly hiding from us. Throughout the meal I kept a keen eye on this uncomfortable and unsettling guest as if she were an intruder. Oblivious to this, the Omega picked out mushrooms, mung-bean sprouts, and squash from the soup pot and savored them. The side dishes were nothing special, but the Omega would alternate putting some of each on top of every spoonful of warm rice, taking huge mouthfuls to please my grandmother. I would never spread oil or spices from the side dishes on my bowl of rice. I frowned at the very sight of such behavior. While we ate, my grandmother said she’d chased away the guards and assured us they couldn’t force us to do anything. “You two just have your coming-of-age ceremony whenever you like. It’s your affair, isn’t it? Of course, it is.” “But I’d like to have the ceremony right now.” I spoke to my grandmother even as I looked straight at the Omega. “Everyone has to go through this rite of passage when it’s time, so there is no point in delaying or missing it. I won’t be left an incomplete failure.” I couldn’t forget the sight of the Omega entering the house, a criminal in handcuffs. Was it that she would actually become a part of me? No, in fact, the scary thing was, she could be my future self. “Of course, I’ll observe the coming-of-age ceremony one day.” The Omega spoke calmly, rummaging through the vegetables on her plate with her chopsticks. “I just don’t want to do it now. I’d also like to get to know you better.” The Omega smiled sweetly while telling this unfunny lie that made my body stiffen. It was forbidden to meet or converse with your twin before the coming-of-age ceremony. This rule was stipulated by the law, but because it applied to minors, the penalty for breaking it was only a slap on the wrist. Even so, it was regarded as custom. Twins were raised apart in the Alpha Zone and Omega Zone respectively under the care of family members. Even though the Omega knew this full well, she was being childish and difficult. “That’s right. You don’t have any sisters. It’s good for you to be sisters for a moment. How great it would be if you became friends.” My grandmother obviously regarded all these things as a matter of her grandchildren experiencing growing pains and taking a little detour from their set path. “Yes. I’d like to hear you tell some stories, too, Grandmother, before I become one with the Alpha and know you in that way.” “Of course, you will. I’ll tell you as many as you’d like. We always have more time than we think unless we fritter it away mindlessly.” I was the only one in a rush. The Omega who sat across the table made eye contact every so often as she ate. But the motion of her jaws moving up and down didn’t stop as she kept chewing her food, slowly, slowly, and she didn’t turn away from my gaze. She looked at me indifferently, like I was dessert on the next plate. “It’s funny that they say it’ll happen if you fall asleep holding hands.” It was the room I’d had all my life, and the room I expected to have when I became an adult after celebrating the coming-of-age ceremony with the Omega; a second-floor room where, not long ago, my grandmother had replaced the bedding and the curtains. The Omega entered and said, “It’s even more absurd than saying that you become pregnant if you fall asleep holding hands with a man. I heard that old wives’ tale from an older cousin when I was eight. Of course, I didn’t believe it. How about you?” “How about what?” “When did you find out?” I didn’t respond. This person was my twin, but even so, we’d only just met, and she should have had the sense not to keep coming up with these distasteful stories. To think she was a part of me just made me angry. The Omega, now smiling a little, sat on the bed and stretched her arms back, making herself at home. She was wearing one of my oversized T-shirts and shorts, exposing her long white legs. She watched to see how my expression would change as she grabbed hold of the new light green comforter as if it were her own. When I didn’t react, she shifted her gaze and glanced dismissively at the desk facing the window and the stacked piles of books. “So this is the little princess Grandmother raised so prettily, and it turns out she’s a bookworm . . .” She abruptly got up and strode toward the wall where I was standing. Her very approach was intimidating because she was so tall. Standing in front of me, she shook her head and said in a stage whisper, “On top of that, you’re little Miss Perfect and a fool who hasn’t experienced anything yet.” At that moment, I resisted the urge to retreat a half step. “At least I’m not immature like you. And I’m not hurting anyone.” “Who did I hurt?” The Omega put her hands on her hips and looked at me as if she really didn’t know. “You’re the one who’s scared. Scared because you can’t perform the coming-of-age ceremony properly. As if that’s some terrible event that will wreck your life.” “Everyone becomes an adult in the ordinary way, so why are you deviating from it? Why in the hell would you do that?” The smile left the Omega’s face. Her curiosity and interest disappeared again, and she looked at me coldly. My grandmother brought us a spare comforter, and the Omega brushed by me to get it. It was only when she stopped looking at me that I understood what her expression meant. She thought I was pathetic. After spreading the comforter out between the bed and the desk, she asked, “Do you think of me as a nutrient, or maybe a toxin, that you’ll absorb?” “What?” The Omega shook her head slowly, as if she were going to deny a request even though I hadn’t asked for anything. “I’ve known my other half for five hours and I’m already bored. It can’t be helped that you’re a stuffy, old-fashioned type, but I didn’t expect you to be stupid.” “What?” I said, and then wondered if it was a stupid question. The Omega shrugged her shoulders. As if genuinely curious, she asked, “Don’t you even think for yourself?” I could neither acknowledge nor understand this criticism, and I was left speechless. What was this girl saying? As I tried to calm down and think up ways to defend myself, a truth gradually took shape in my mind. I’d been so impatient to perform the coming-of-age ceremony and become an adult that I’d missed something. I slowly began to realize what it meant to become one with this strange, boundlessly unknowable being and how unprepared I was for that frightening prospect. Everything was terrible, but if I had to choose the worst thing, it would be the Omega’s language. She was as mild as a lamb in front of my grandmother and the neighbors, but when she wanted to knock me down, she suddenly changed and spewed this cruel and aggressive invective. Each time she managed to hit upon the very thing that made me most ashamed. “So, do you have friends? How can you go without talking to anyone for a week?” The Omega was glued to her phone every night, clamoring on about vulgar things to friends of the very same type. “You’re crazy. You’re really a crazy guy.” Sometimes she’d lower her voice a little and speak indirectly, which meant she was talking about me. “How can I put it? Super soft, and yet pretty hard?” Of course, I heard everything she said. My grandmother had told me that she’d been raised at my aunt’s house in the Omega Zone. Even though I’d never been there, I could guess the environment: there’d be a room by the entrance so that she could sneak in fast even at dawn, and low windows through which her friends could come and go regardless of the hour. Stolen beer and loud music. Cigarette butts damp with saliva. Piles of trash. Ugly tattoos expressing blasphemy and blind rage. I was sure that she had a tattoo somewhere. What would become of these disgusting marks when we became one? I already knew the answer. After the coming-of-age ceremony, the physical characteristics of the Alpha and Omega were randomly selected in the adult. Male and female twins wouldn’t even know what sex they would be after the ceremony. When they became one adult, the only thing that was completely transferred over from both the Alpha and Omega was their memories. The twins’ memories and thoughts, their accumulated knowledge, would not be weakened or distorted, but combined harmoniously into one self. It was an amazing experience of course, but not unusual. That was how everyone became an adult. The coming-of-age ceremony was rather a clear and precise event that was scheduled for everyone. At least, that’s what I’d believed. Admittedly, I saw the coming-of-age ceremony as a sort of certificate of completion for those who’d made it to their late teens and would finally develop new tastes and abilities that they didn’t have before. But what was left ahead of me now was a haze of confusion so thick I couldn’t see an inch in front of my face. How was I supposed to join with this girl for the rest of my life when I couldn’t even stand to live in the same house as her? Carelessly throwing the clothes she’d worn on a chair inside-out, always leaving streaks of toothpaste in the sink, never caring what traces she left of herself. Having a mint chocolate latte every day for lunch and drinking it hot; lazing around in the morning and running around wild at night; and even going to bed at dawn and listening to crime shows through worn out headphones with the sound leaking out of them. Would I really combine harmoniously with this person? “Won’t I go crazy? Hasn’t that ever happened to anyone?” I asked my grandmother, who was sitting next to me knitting a small handbag. “I’ve never heard of that. In many cases, you have a tough time facing real problems after the coming-of-age ceremony, but the process itself is very safe.” My grandmother’s brown eyes shone mischievously when she glanced at me over the thin round lenses of her glasses. I was a little taken aback to notice their resemblance to the Omega’s. “The Alpha and the Omega combine naturally after the coming-of-age ceremony, like a pair assigned to be together from the beginning that grow to fit each other closely. They get along seamlessly.” Terrified, I shut my eyes tight. My grandmother set her knitting needles down on her lap, stretched out her arm and gently rubbed my cheek with her thumb. This is what she used to do to praise me when I was a child. She would praise me when I carried the plates and dishes to the sink after a meal, or when I’d watered her favorite herbs in their beds, or when I got up from falling and went to her without crying. I remembered those times. But would I still really recall them with the same feeling after becoming one with the Omega? “I’m not sure if I should really become one with the Omega now. I don’t like her, Grandma. I can’t understand what she’s thinking, and I can’t believe that her risk-seeking behavior will become a part of me. And what’s more, she looks down on me. She thinks I’m still young.” “Take time to think it over.” My grandmother stirred again, and began knitting an elaborate design. The thick blue yarn of the warp and weft woven in all different directions were coming together, and the form of a handle was close to taking shape. She promised to give it to me when it was finished. Once again, she offered some friendly advice. “Thinking of that girl is like thinking of yourself. However much you worry about her, it’s never a waste of time.” That evening, when I finished showering on the first floor and went up the stairs, the Omega pushed open the door, which was already ajar, and came out into the dark hallway. She put a finger to her lips. “Don’t scream.” The room was cramped with four people. There were two girls and two guys. One was on the bed, two were on the floor, and there was even one perched up on my desk. Slowly, I saw that none of them had removed their shoes. They were all friends of my Omega from the Omega Zone who had braved the danger to secretly come see her. Two waved at me and said hello, and the others made eye contact with each other and snickered. Yes, they were Omegas, too. “It’s forbidden for you to be in the Alpha Zone. My goodness, haven’t you heard of rules before?” Even though I was overcome with anger, I lowered my voice instinctively as my grandmother was probably already sleeping on the floor below. Despite my admonition, the Omega’s friends were comfortably sprawled around, chatting and giggling. I could hear them saying, “As long as we don’t get caught,” and “Come on, Alpha, let’s go play.” The smell of beer wafted from their lips. It was quite a spectacle to see so many people in my room for the first time. I’d never seen someone with their rear end on my desk, kicking the bottom drawer steadily with their heels. Unable to take it anymore, I went up to the guy and said through clenched teeth, “Get down. You get down.” “Oh, yes. Sorry.” I pointed as if to pierce his chest with my finger, and the guy, who had dyed silver hair, raised his hands in surrender and meekly lowered himself to the floor. But then he made eye contact with my Omega and laughed unrestrainedly. I recalled the Omega’s words, “Super soft and yet very hard.” I blushed, wondering if they were thinking the same thing. It seemed like these guys were expecting the night to be unforgettable. I stared back at my Omega watching me calmly with folded arms. I announced, “This is my house, and this is my room.” “Yes, but they’ll also be mine one day if we follow your wish and observe the coming-of-age ceremony.” Trying to hide that I was breathing quickly, I said, “No, we will be a blend of the two of us. I’d never let this nonsense happen if I was part of a consciousness. Even if you were part of me, it would be impossible.” My Omega’s friends clapped soundlessly and raised a cheer, but it was nothing more than to mock me. “Send them back.” “No way. They drove three hours to get here.” My Omega wouldn’t back down, and she glared at me. But the next moment she burst out laughing as if it was all a joke. “Okay, we’re going. We were planning to go anyway.” “But not you,” I said, putting myself in her way. “Oh, yes, me too,” she said, placing her hand lightly on my shoulder. “You aren’t part of me yet, so you can’t affect my thoughts and feelings.” My Omega gave a wink to her friends and they began stepping onto the windowsill and going out in single file. They’d clearly entered the room the same way. They took hold of the rusty balcony railing quite fearlessly and dangled for a moment before dropping down into the dirt-covered yard below. When they all left, the Omega took my Alpha Zone pass out of her jeans pocket and waved it around. “And I’ll be borrowing this.” “Did you go through my room? To steal my pass and use it without permission?” My body was shaking, but my mind was cool and lucid. Everything was clear now. This girl was not on my side. She was my enemy, come to destroy me and my future. “Do I have to come here in handcuffs again for being outside the designated zone? Do you really want to have those records and memories in your life?” This time the Omega tried to use the truth to convince me, and didn’t say anything deliberately malicious. However, it was the threat I’d feared most and it struck me to the heart. “You’re incorrigible. Anyone would give up on a girl like you.” As I spoke, I realized my patience had run out. The Omega had been smiling, excited to see her friends, but now her mouth slowly closed. I went on. “You must have hurt those who approached to give you love. Just because you wanted to. You just did whatever you pleased. You’d excuse yourself by saying you couldn’t help it, it was a compulsion, right? Isn’t that how it’s been? But know this. There are people who disregard their desires and impulses and make hard choices. Not everyone lives as recklessly as you.” The Omega was quiet for a long time even after I finished. While I could hear my ragged breathing, she looked at me in silence as if she’d stopped breathing completely. She shuffled toward the window without answering. “I have no idea what you think you know about me to mouth off like that, but I do know one thing.” Placing one foot on the windowsill as if about to jump out into the darkness, the Omega finally turned around and looked at me. “If you criticize or hurt me, it will come back to haunt you. It’ll become a wound you’ll carry around with forever. You still don’t understand this . . .” She shook her head again as if I were pathetic, and then suddenly glanced at a desk drawer, the bottom one that one of her friends had been thoughtlessly kicking with his heels earlier. I felt my heart sink. I thought, No, it’s impossible, even as I was already feeling a powerful wave of dread. The Omega raised her head again to look at me, and this time you could see the malice in her eyes. “I read your story. You hid it deep inside there, didn’t you? It’s your secret, right?” She laughed seeing my face blanch. “So, it’s an important part of you that you never wanted the likes of me to see. Well, even if I hadn’t seen it and you didn’t tell me about it, this secret would be meaningless anyway, as I’ll know all about it when we become one.” After everyone left and I was alone, I turned off the light and lay down in bed, only to get up again. I dissolved some detergent in warm water, dipped a sponge in it and began to scrub off all the dirty tracks crisscrossing the white windowsill. Even though the Omegas had only stepped lightly on the windowsill, the stubborn black marks were hard to erase completely; if I didn’t give them immediate attention, they’d smear and become stains. They reminded me of a wound I’d suffered a long time ago, so I couldn’t just leave them. Even now, the people responsible wouldn’t know that they’d hurt me. It was their very indifference that made me feel like a trampled windowsill. So I had this wound, but it made me feel a little better to think that the Omega’s heart would be scraped like this when we were united. I opened the third drawer and saw a familiar old chocolate box. I removed the lid to find a messy pile of notebooks inside. I couldn’t remember ever placing them in the wrong order, so I concluded that the Omega must have really seen them when they were meant to be private. I hadn’t opened the box for six months, partly because my writing had stalled, and partly because I realized I no longer found reading or writing any fun. But the most important reason was that I didn’t find my writing to be honest. Even though I’d never planned to base my fiction on true stories, I ended up quitting when I realized that my writing was different from the truth. Maybe something happened inside me at that time, but I still don’t know which pebble caused the first soft ripples. My feelings changed from moment to moment and when the colorful, dancing waters struck a momentary balance, the mood appeared for a moment only to disappear again. I couldn’t believe in anything. My mind was made up of haphazard feelings back then, so I wasn’t able to really know myself. I was surprised to realize that I was as ignorant of myself as I was of the Omega. The Omega returned at dawn, just as the sun was starting to come up, and she shook me from my sleep. She kept asking me something. I wasn’t fully awake, so I had to focus on her lips to understand what she was saying, even though she was right in my face. “I’m talking about the swamp. Was your friend’s hand really eaten by a crocodile?” The hot, buzzy odor of alcohol on her breath hit me each time she exhaled. I turned my head away, irritated. “Are you talking about my story?” “Did you really throw that guy’s watch into the swamp? And did he lower his hand in the murky, muddy water and swirl it around for a long time? Until the crocodile appeared?” As I lay still, listening, the Omega’s words seemed a little slurred. I finally just closed my eyelids, weighed down with drowsiness, and lay an arm across my forehead to block the view. “It’s a story. Of course, it didn’t really happen.” “It’s not real?” “What, you think it’s real?” I opened my eyes a little because the Omega didn’t answer. In the dark, I could dimly make out the uncomprehending expression on her face. She asked again. “Then what was the story supposed to represent? The story of someone who believes he’s separated from his hand, who imagines the lost hand moving and is finally controlled by suggestions from the hand?” “It wasn’t representing anything.” “Nothing?” “Nothing. It’s just a story.” When I said it, I realized that it was true. I wasn’t thinking of any incident or particular facts when I wrote that story. Still, the feelings and cast of mind I had when I wrote it had remained with me. My pulse beat faster than usual. I felt some tension, or maybe it was only anticipation. Just from the fact that someone knew this story besides myself set my mind moving like moss in a current of soft, warm water. I found out for the first time that this story could be shared. We both knew the riddles from hints in the debris, even if I didn’t tell her exactly how I was feeling then. But still I felt that it was improbable. “Then you aren’t the person who’s looking at the friend and feeling guilty?” I was about to automatically agree when I stopped myself. The Omega seemed absorbed in thought while I took time to answer. It was only then that I noticed my notebooks physically scattered over my neck, chest, and stomach. I’d taken them out of the box and stuffed them in the trash can before I went to sleep. It was clearly my Omega who’d retrieved them and put them back in my arms. I felt the skin on my back and arms tingling, as I realized what the Omega’s motive was. I was shocked to think I knew how the Omega felt. If my feeling was correct, she was sorry. Inside me, I felt one part of an infinitely long stone wall crumbling. Only when it crumbled a little did I come to learn it had existed at all. A narrow stream of water came over the ruined part, and I saw the scene on the other side, like a small part of a picture. Even though I couldn’t see it for certain, I could tell it was the Omega’s world. I didn’t feel this way because she felt apologetic, but because I could see she was a person like me who’d made a mistake and regretted it. I imagined how many rash decisions she’d made, and how she’d regretted them and yet repeated the same mistakes anyway. At that moment, I felt compassion for her. Now the Omega burrowed into her bedding with her back curled up like a dried shrimp. I saw her all hunched over as the pale morning light seeped into the room. I watched her shrink to the point where she might soon disappear from the world, and it was as I was registering this movement, static but intent, that I eventually fell asleep. The Omega and I had our birthdays at the beginning of the summer. By then, enough time had passed that I’d somewhat adjusted to living with her. On Sunday mornings, we took the bus three stops to Big Mart to do our shopping. We bought items that were too heavy for our grandmother to carry, like fruits and vegetables, orange juice and soy milk, and large boxes of cereal. When we finished, we’d go to the Big Mart basement food corner and order gelato ice cream. I’d have chocolate hazelnut and Omega would have mint chocolate. We didn’t concern ourselves with each other’s tastes at all. Even God didn’t know whose tastes would survive after the coming-of-age ceremony. On our way back and forth to the supermarket, we’d run into many kids I knew from school. We weren’t very close, so I usually didn’t stop the cart and just waved as we continued on in the opposite direction. Sometimes kids would recognize the Omega at my side and say, “I heard the news! Are you okay?” and make a fuss. Automatically I’d say, “Yes, of course, I’m fine.” But even so, it was hard to distinguish between what was fine and what wasn’t. Only, if we didn’t undergo the coming-of-age ceremony by the end of summer vacation and the start of fall, then the Omega and I would both have to attend school together, and I was unsure as to how we’d do that. I’d just found out something about the Omega. She was smarter than I thought, and she knew lots of things as well. She wasn’t exactly good at studying, but she was interested in logical reasoning and learning the ways of the world. Like a walking dictionary, she had a knack for explaining in simple language the concepts and issues that she was knowledgeable about. One day, we were out grocery shopping. We were sitting on the bus with our bags on our laps when the Omega told me about the horrors of single-crop cultivation. Like a livestock farm, a single plant species grown densely in a designated area was an artificial environment created by humans, she said, and as a part of this process, thousands of living things were regarded as pests and weeds, and exterminated for no good reason. “But this can’t be helped, as pests damage our food supply,” I remarked, but the Omega firmly shook her head. “In the age of primitive cultivation, insects weren’t a major worry for farmers. The problem became worse back when crop varieties were streamlined in the age of large-scale farming. This created the right environment for certain insect populations to explode. We’ve turned these insects into a problem, and now we’re trying to kill them.” The Omega added that it was obvious that a continuous monoculture would destroy sections of land. She pointed out that you had to leave this kind of land fallow, or it would become sand where no seed could sprout. Also, she said that if a typhoon hit, land cultivated with single crops just got swept away, unlike in a natural ecosystem where the roots of trees and weeds and other plants were evenly entwined. “A crop like this can’t protect itself, nor the surrounding area. So, streamlining is always a problem.” I had a strange feeling as I watched my Omega become absorbed in cause-and-effect systems and natural cycles, and seeing her ardently wish for a better future. It seemed inconsistent, thinking of the aggression and selfishness she showed from time to time. Couldn’t she sense her own contradictions? Moreover, I, her Alpha, never cared about these distant, obscure things. What was meaningful to me was knowing who I was and what I was becoming. Since meeting the Omega, however, the outside world had become something inseparable from me that couldn’t be stripped away. I’d been going through transitions as well. In fact, something happened, and I didn’t know how to reconcile myself with it. I started hanging out with the Omega’s fearless friends, who took their parents’ cars and crossed into our zone every weekend. At first, my intention was to protect the Omega, who’d eventually become a part of me. I just closed my eyes and followed, but in time, I naturally accepted the alcohol and crackers they offered me. At first glance, they were rebellious and acted like delinquents, and it was true there was this aspect to them, but they regarded themselves as revolutionaries. “We’re trying to make a choice. We’ll no longer accept a given situation out of ignorance, and instead become true agents, conscious of how things work.” I half admired the Omegas’ aspirations, but at the same time I thought they were pathetic. They put on a good outward appearance, but to me, they were just silly kids shirking adulthood. Even so, Suho was the real reason I went to the empty tennis court parking lot and sat with the group. Suho was the silver-haired guy who had been sitting cockily on my desk the first evening they’d descended on my room. The Omega was able to tell me this before I knew it myself. “Do you really like him?” she asked when we returned to our room together. I denied it. But from that night to the next morning and even all the way to the next weekend—for a whole week—her words rang in my ear. I finally blurted out that I guess I did like him. “Then why don’t you call him before we get together this weekend? Just make small talk about something.” I perfunctorily refused her suggestion, but that night, I called him in secret. I thought about how badly the Omega would mock me when we became one and she found out. “Oh, hi.” When I told him who I was, Suho said my name once, surprised. The Omega and I had the same name. This was the first time he’d called me by this name, and not the Omega. I’d never expressed fondness like this for anyone before, so I was very tense. Fortunately, he read my intentions and kept things relaxed. The Omegas came faithfully that weekend, and when he saw me, Suho came and sat down on my right side. He stretched his arm back and propped himself up with his left hand on the floor, close to my back. Today the revolutionary party was discussing some twins who refused the coming-of-age ceremony due to strong feelings of love or hate. “Some twins in the Alpha Zone fell deeply in love. They avoided the coming-of-age ceremony and ran away out of fear that it would change how they felt. One of them was captured by the security forces and ended up becoming one with his Omega. The one who remained an Alpha evaded detection but when she found her boyfriend, who was now an adult, he’d really become a different person. They say he had no love left for her.” “So what happened then?” “Oh, things got pretty ugly. The girlfriend kept stalking him and one day he grew exasperated and told her to get a hold of herself.” “Oooh, that gives me goosebumps.” “There’s a well-known story about two Omega friends, as well. They snuck out of their zone just like us to see their Alphas. They were curious as to what their other halves were like. But one of them saw his Alpha and they fell in love, and the other hated his Alpha and she hated him back. The two of them, actually all four of them, had reasons they couldn’t undergo the coming-of-age ceremony.” “What was the problem with the twins who’d fallen in love?” “They thought that the one-of-a-kind person that they loved would disappear in the ceremony. If they combined to become one with each other, their half would no longer be a separate person that they could love.” At this point, Suho whispered in my ear so that only I could hear. “Let’s go to the car later.” I nodded. “So what happened to the Omega friends?” “There was nothing they could do. They were caught, and they performed the coming-of-age ceremony. I heard that once they became one, their problems disappeared. The strange thing is that the friends, who’d been close, broke up with each other permanently. Thinking of each other reminded them of how they’d anguished over their feelings of love and hate.” Suho took my hand and got up. “We’re going to get some more water.” “Great. Come back soon.” Quick as a cat, the Omega raised her hand to wave and send us off. I thought that it was lucky that it was so dark. If we’d gone into the light, my face would have been bright red for everyone to see. That night the Omega climbed onto my bed and pestered me with questions. “So what did you do with him?” “I didn’t do anything,” I protested, but it was useless. The Omega was all wound up. “Don’t be silly. You didn’t do anything, but you kissed?” “It just happened.” “Tell me everything. Don’t leave anything out. Tell me. I’m going to find out anyway.” I’d never had a conversation like that with anyone before. To tell the truth, I’d never had such a close relationship before. At times I had worried whether I had a serious problem. “Who else can you confide in, if not me?” The Omega was right. I gave a nod in agreement. So I told her about the unexpectedly clean smell of soap on his wrist when he was leading me away and holding my face in one of his hands, and his careful manner when he smoothed down my hair. Because our lips felt a little dry, I was confused as to whether they’d really touched. I felt braver talking to the Omega than I had felt with Suho. The Omega, who laughed and laughed during my story, took things a step further and said, “Do you know how pretty you look today?” I’d never been complimented in this way before. I was a little surprised that my Omega was the first to tell me this, so I filed it away in my memory. When that horrible call came, I was scrubbing the spaces between the bathroom tiles with a worn-down toothbrush. The Omega was out jogging across a river bridge. Even though I was fed up with her for still leaving toothpaste and shampoo bubbles thoughtlessly all over the bathroom, I scoured the marks anyway. She was hopeless. Sweat was streaming from my forehead and neck, and even though I’d rolled my pants up to my knees, the edges along the bottom were damp and dark when I finished cleaning and returned to my room. Now the summer days would soon cool down. Every year at around this time, the fall sky would drape down over the world like a magic canopy, and cool, refreshing winds would blow in all directions. “Hello.” It was Suho, and I was glad to have answered his call, so my voice was louder and higher than usual. Maybe it was loud enough for the Omega to overhear it coming up the stairs as she returned from jogging. And that’s why she could guess what the call was about. “Hey, look . . .” When I turned around with the dead receiver still in my hand, the Omega and I faced each other all in a sweat. We looked at each other like strangers, just as we had when the Omega first came to the house in handcuffs. Displeased, she frowned and took a step towards me. “Did he tell you everything?” “Do you find this amusing?” The Omega stopped where she was, and I kept talking. “It’s pretty fricking hilarious, isn’t it?” “Hey, don’t misunderstand this. I’m not interested in him.” “He likes you, and you knew it. So you goaded me on, and laughed at how ridiculous I looked in my enjoyment.” “You’re talking about last year. I didn’t know that he still liked me.” The Omega stamped her foot as if she too was indignant. “He thought that if he went out with you then he could win me over as well when we observed the coming-of-age ceremony and I became your other half. What a jackass.” Suho hadn’t told me that in so much detail. On the phone, he just said he was sorry and that he’d been late in realizing that he had wronged me. He hoped I would forgive him. I just hung up on him without answering. “Don’t be hurt by something so trivial. Just forget about it,” the Omega said in what was almost a comforting tone. “Trivial?” “Yes, let’s not get all sensitive.” “You’re saying I’m being too sensitive right now?” She’d used the word that cut me instantly. I was always struggling to not be sensitive. “If you think about it, it’s not something to freak out about.” The Omega spoke irritably as she smoothed back her sweaty hair. “When we become one, this guy will also be attracted to you.” “You think I want that?” “You don’t?” Now Omega was in her customary attack mode, and she smiled mockingly. “You don’t think I know that you’re jealous of my friends?” “What? Jealous of your kind of friends?” “Yes. You’re squeaky clean and so full of prejudice, and you think you hate us, yet you can’t stop looking at us.” I fiddled with the dry towel around my neck, using it to wipe the sweat off my chest and back. Then I bent over to carefully wipe the sweat that had dripped onto the floor. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” It was only then that the Omega realized I was crying and apologized to me in confusion. She felt sorry and at a loss, but she couldn’t understand the sorrow flooding into me. She’d never understand. What was the meaning of acting thoughtlessly, and the price of tearing up other’s hearts and wounding them? And the ridiculous contradiction of wanting to be forgiven? My heart was stabbed with pain. Then an peculiar thought occurred to me, quite unexpectedly. I still felt sad, with my lips trembling and tears streaming down, but inside, I had this thought. I’d forgive the Omega right away. She’d felt remorse for her mistake, so that was enough, I’d say, telling her that the important thing was to not repeat it. Then she’d nod, apologize again, and remember this day with a clear conscience. And I’d hate the Omega forever. My plan was to hide my hatred deep inside even as I looked at her warmly, patted her hand affectionately, and became one with her. I shuddered at the great hatred I had for the Omega. I wondered if I’d end up a broken, self-hating adult. I was terrified and wanted to flee the room right then. But the Omega held me by the hand. “Sometimes I don’t understand what I’m saying.” She wasn’t speaking in her usual confident voice, but fumbling for words, so I listened carefully. “This isn’t the way I wanted to live. It’s so hard. Sometimes things inside me are so dark and sharp.” Her eyes wavered as if she was the one confused. Then she said, “But you’re not like that. You’re all right. So I wonder if it’s really okay for you to become one with someone like me.” Oh, the poor Omega, I thought to myself. What should I do with you? What should I do? That night the Omega and I talked for a long time in the darkness. She talked about her relationship with our aunt, who’d given her everything she needed but was so indifferent. As long as the Omega’s bag was on the sofa, the aunt didn’t notice no matter how long the Omega was out. And our aunt had been very insensitive to tell the Omega honestly about our parents when she was still very young. “What story?” My grandmother still hadn’t told me the story. Then the Omega gave in and told me the secret of our birth, which was a little shocking. “The person who bore us was our mother’s Omega, but the person our father had loved first was our mother’s Alpha.” “She stole him?” “That’s what happened.” The Omega sighed. “And since they couldn’t forgive each other, the three of them just up and ran away.” “It sounds like a lie.” “Doesn’t it?” Admitting that she was blunt like her aunt, the Omega let me in on a secret. “I like one of the revolutionaries. Even though I’ve already been dumped.” I bolted up from the bed. “Jihoon?” “Jinju.” “Whoa.” I flounced back on the bed and laughed, and the Omega laughed too. After deliberating for a while, I told the Omega the story of how I stole my art teacher’s palette knife in elementary school. My art teacher was a middle-aged man who wore his long, thick, gray hair tied back in a ponytail and dressed in a modern hanbok always smeared with paint or grayish-brown clay. The children disliked him because he smelled bad when he came near. “I hadn’t thought of him at all until the incident.” “What happened?” “I was classroom helper one day, so I came before class and filled a jar of water at every desk. It was just me and that teacher alone in the room together. Even though I greeted him and carried the jars, making quite a racket, he didn’t pay any attention to me. I had the strangest feeling, as if he wasn’t ignoring me, but failing to see or hear me at all. So I began to watch him very closely. My teacher kept acting as if he didn’t know I was doing this. He was wiping a palette knife with a red cloth. It was a flat, lightning-shaped blade with a wooden handle. It wasn’t sharp at all. I’d seen him use this palette knife during class to take paint, then press and spread it. But this was the first time I’d seen him wipe it. I had the feeling I was seeing something that I shouldn’t have, like stealing a peek at the dark side of the moon. My teacher was focused on his task, oblivious to whether I watched him or not. He buffed the metal along the grain, and where the cloth had passed, the blade was shiny. He turned the knife over several times in front of him, to check that it was free of paint, and then nodded and put it with the others on a pile to the side. He’d always nod once to indicate when work was done. It was a little strange, but looking at him, I thought he seemed very lonely, and it wasn’t just a passing state; his whole life seemed drawn out and lonely. Class started and then finished, and even though I’d returned to my homeroom, I thought about his loneliness all day. Before I returned home, I went back to the art room and stole one of the palette knives. I picked it up, slipped it into my skirt pocket, and left. It was very easy.” The Omega asked, “Why did you do it?” “I have no idea.” It seemed like the Omega was immersed in thought, so I waited, and then she said, “I have a similar story. Actually, it didn’t happen all that long ago, maybe last winter. There was a small grocery store in my neighborhood, and it was always bustling with customers. So there was hardly a time when the woman who owned the place was away from the counter, but that day, the store was empty and she was nowhere to be found. I was waiting to pay for a cola and potato chips. But even though I’d waited a while, no one appeared. It was as if everyone in the world had disappeared into another dimension. I don’t know what got into me, but I went to the canned goods section and opened a tin of peaches and ate it. The yellow juice that clotted in the can was sweet, lukewarm, and sticky. On an impulse, I threw it to the floor and brazenly opened other cans and ate their contents. I tasted one and threw it down, tasted another and threw it down. It was very simple. I was making a mess, getting the floor and display counter filthy, but no one saw me for a very long time. Inwardly, I yelled, ‘Look at me! I’m so fed up right now!’ but there was nobody around. I was exhausted. I was so exhausted that all I could do was look at the mess I’d made. I got out of there and never went back.” I thought about what a strange conversation we were having. It was so strange that we fumbled for words and kept talking on and on, not really knowing what to say. I could see that even when we became one, we wouldn’t understand everything that had happened to us. “How do you feel when these memories resurface?” “They torment me. I can’t stand myself.” Even though I knew the Omega wouldn’t see, I nodded once. “You know, after a few days, I put the palette knife back.” “Really?” “Actually, the teacher must have seen me leaving the art room that day. One day, he called me over.” “What did he say?” “Nothing special. He just said he had something for me, and gave me the palette knife as a present.” “He said it was a present?” “Yes. There were no ribbons or wrapping paper, but it was new.” The Omega contemplated this for a moment. After waiting a while, I continued, “The next day, I went into the empty room and put the palette knife back. Then, everything returned to the way it was. When I got home, I placed the new palette knife that the art teacher had given me on the desk. It was the same size and shape as the one I’d stolen. I was looking at it calmly when I suddenly felt goosebumps. I understood what had happened. I might have kept that stolen knife with me my whole life. But now I just had the one I’d received as a present. My teacher had forgiven me and saved me as well.” “That’s really an astonishing story.” “When I remember that, my conscience feels so clear. I feel like I have a single ray of light following me.” “Wow.” “So . . .” I told her what was really on my mind. “Why don’t you try going back to the store and apologize if that memory is a burden for you? I’ll go with you.” The Omega hesitated a bit, but finally agreed to go. The next day, I called Suho and forgave him. I told him to give us a ride, and he came in a flash. The Omega was tense all the way to the Omega Zone. Actually, I was also afraid to leave the Alpha Zone for the first time. But I thought it was necessary for all of us, so I was determined. When the Omega lost her way and fell into despair, when she wandered astray, she needed that single ray of light. Everyone needed that. But it turned out that this was my arrogant presumption, as I’d been very lucky. When we first came to the grocery store, the owner seemed a little drawn and pale, but she looked at us warmly. She spoke with affection, saying she remembered the Omega’s face. She’d guessed that the reason she didn’t frequent her store anymore was because she’d observed the coming-of-age ceremony and had gone away. When the Omega approached and told her what had happened the winter before, the old woman never changed her expression. Yet once in a while, she nodded as if she were listening intently. When the Omega had finished speaking and informed her of her intention to apologize, she just shook her head slowly. “No, you can’t, dear.” “Pardon?” “I always blamed my son for that mess. Until you came in and told me the truth, that’s what I believed. But it turns out I was wrong. He wasn’t lying, and I made a mistake.” “I’m sorry. I didn’t know I caused this misunderstanding.” “Do you know how strongly I cursed him for that? I poured out all the hate that had been building up in my heart. I didn’t know how much I hated him. I really didn’t. Until I saw the condition of the shop that day.” I was just behind the Omega, watching her from behind. I could sense that things had gone badly, but there was nothing I could do. Her shoulders shook and her head dropped low as she listened to what the old woman was quietly saying. I couldn’t even move. I was reminded of the way she’d looked in the dark room, curling up ever more tightly until it looked like she’d disappear from the world. “My son couldn’t take it anymore, ran outside and got into an accident. He never woke up, and the last words he’d heard from me were so dreadful. He managed to hold on until last month, but then it was over. What I’d said was something he couldn’t overcome.” “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” Looking at the Omega trembling in horror, the old woman slowly shook her head once more. “No. I said no.” Oh no, no. It can’t be. It can’t be. It can’t be. On the way back, I wanted to apologize to the Omega. “I did something that turned out to be useless. I didn’t know this would . . .” “No. It’s not your fault.” The Omega shook her head as the old woman had done. I felt horrible. “I’m the only one who’s at fault.” Now the Omega wouldn’t forgive herself. She would sink herself in deep water. But I wanted to forgive her. I could forgive her. Only I could do that. That night, the Omega came up into my bed. She looked into my eyes without saying a word, but I instantly knew her intentions. She extended her left hand, and slowly taking it, I felt a vague, far-off fear. No one could be sure whether the coming-of-age ceremony would extinguish two personalities or transcend oneness. But it was clear what terribly incomplete and uncertain beings we were. At the same time, as we left ourselves behind, we were becoming more complete at every moment. “Do you have any memories of when we were little? I mean, from when we were still one?” the Omega asked. “We were divided into twins when we were about three.” “Right.” “I have one memory.” “What?” “Mixing coarse salt with pastel powder and playing. We put layer upon layer of beautiful colored salt into a glass bottle to make something like a five-colored cloud.” At that moment, the Omega’s expression softened. “Soon I’ll remember that, too.” “Yes, that’s right.” “In terms of your story,” the Omega said, “I’ve tried to think up an ending. I hope you’ll like it.” I nodded. Then the Omega closed her eyes. I felt hurt that she hadn’t given me any kind of farewell, but I didn’t want her to know about this feeling when we became one. “Good night. See you tomorrow,” I whispered, my eyes closed. It was noon before I awoke. I was a little dazed, as if waking from a long dream, but I soon felt refreshed. I felt so good that I wondered if my mind had ever been so clear before. It seemed like everything was organized and in its rightful place. “Well.” When I didn’t get up for a long time, my grandmother came up to the room and stopped at the doorway in surprise, but just for a moment, as soon her face radiated happiness and affection. “Did you have a good sleep?” “Yes, Grandmother. Did you sleep well, too?” She came over and sat at the edge of the bed. “How do you feel?” “Good. Really. It’s more natural than I expected.” Then an emotion flashed across my grandmother’s brown eyes. I didn’t know what it was and felt puzzled. She asked, “Shall we have a cup of tea to celebrate now that you’re an adult?” “Sure.” My grandmother made some aromatic bean tea, cooled it to room temperature and offered it to me. We sat at the round kitchen table and drank it. She looked at the empty chair between us for a while, and then told me a story about herself when she was still divided into Alpha and Omega. She’d never told this story while my Alpha had lived with her. “Actually, my Alpha was in love with someone and did not want to go through with the coming-of-age ceremony. She convinced my Omega to run away and get out of it. Luckily, my Omega also had a special someone. She said that he’d died, but she agreed to run away because she couldn’t forget him.” “You never told me you had this kind of adventure.” “It’s all in the past.” “So then what happened?” “A very sad thing. Sad things have always been lying in wait for me my whole life.” “What was it?” “The person my Alpha loved fell in the water. At first we thought we could save him, but ultimately, it was no use. All we could do was dredge him up after he’d already died.” “How tragic. Your Alpha and Omega both lost the ones they loved.” “Yes. They did.” My grandmother took a sip of her tea and swallowed it slowly. “I still can’t forget the horror I felt the day of my coming-of-age ceremony.” “Horror?” “Yes. It was my Omega’s horror to be exact. The person my Omega loved was actually my Alpha. My Alpha would discover that when they became one. But my Omega knew that then, they both would no longer exist. It was a dreadful and confusing night.” I was shocked by my grandmother’s story. But I didn’t ask how she felt when her Alpha and Omega became one, or what went on in her heart. I now knew that no one could talk about such things. “By the way, my dear,” my grandmother said. “You’re really pretty.” “Oh?” I hadn’t seen my face yet after becoming one. At that moment, I recalled who it was that first told me this, and the pure joy I’d felt upon hearing it. I recognized that neither the person who gave the compliment nor the person who received it were with us anymore, and the pain pierced my heart. “Grandmother?” “Yes.” “Will I always have to live with the pain of longing for someone?” My grandmother gave me a surprised look, but then smiled. She stretched out her hand and gently rubbed my cheek with her thumb. That was how she’d praised my Alpha. I felt surprised by the love I already knew. Translated by Kari Schenk
by Woo Dayoung
A Sheepish History
I don’t know why, but people often mistake me for Japanese. While abroad, I’ve had Westerners come up to me and blurt out “Japan?” as if they already knew the answer. Even Japanese people would greet me in their own language without the slightest hesitation. Anyone who can relate to this kind of experience understands why I can’t help but squint at my reflection whenever I find myself standing in front of a mirror. Could it be because of my narrow forehead and thick eyebrows? Or perhaps my pointed chin? Maybe my snaggletooth? I’m not sure. I don’t think my face is so out of the ordinary to the point where I should have to question my bloodline. I believe it probably has more to do with things like my hairstyle, the way I dress, my body language, and the kind of faces I make. I wonder if it isn’t these internalized cultural traits and the impression they give off that creates such confusion in others. I’m talking about my three years spent studying abroad in Japan, about my having read Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human a good seven times over in the original Japanese, about the Sapporo-style miso ramen I enjoy eating to this day. Perhaps, this country that I visit five to six times a year on business has imbued me with a Japanese aura of my own. If it’s not that, then I have no other way of explaining why even my fellow countrymen sometimes address me in Japanese. When a taxi driver, leaning against the side of his cab with a cigarette in hand, exclaimed, “Ohayou gozaimasu!” (Good morning!), I didn’t even bother to look around. He could only be addressing himself to me. I was on my way back from a business trip to Kyoto and had been drinking with some clients until the crack of dawn, so all I wanted was to get back home as quickly as possible and get some rest. The man proceeded to swiftly drop his cigarette and stomp it out. He then walked up to me and fished my suitcase right out of my hands. It all happened in the blink of an eye. Had there not been a cab parked nearby, one could have easily mistaken his act for a snatch-and-run. I wasn’t offended. After all, the driver had already greeted me, and I personally couldn’t care less which taxi took me home. Those who seemed upset by his behavior were the other drivers who’d been patiently waiting for their turn in front of him. They all looked at him with disdain. One driver spat on the ground. “Come on now! We all have mouths to feed!” another one taunted. Showing no concern, my taxi driver shoved my suitcase inside the trunk and hopped nimbly into the vehicle. “Douzo yoroshiku,” I casually greeted him as I slipped into the passenger seat, speaking in Japanese as though I were still in Japan. I would normally have said something like “I’m actually Korean!” or “Do I really look Japanese?,” but I was feeling playful that day. I didn’t mean to pretend I was Japanese to the very end. I intended to reveal my true self after playing along a little and perhaps asking him what made him think I was Japanese in the first place. I thought his Japanese would be limited to no more than a few basic greetings. No doubt there were taxi drivers who had worked other jobs when they were younger and some of them might’ve been quite proficient in Japanese. That being said, I just didn’t get the feeling that my driver had ever worked at a desk for a living. He had short hair like a soldier, a darkly tanned face, and his body looked as stout as a tree trunk. He also had a pencil stub tucked behind one ear. I could tell he was no stranger to hard physical work and sweat. Neither his dress shirt nor his necktie could hide it. The loose-fitting dress shirt that looked borrowed and the long out-of-style necktie he wore only reinforced my hunch. His clothes also gave off a faint naphthalene smell. The deep creases around the sides of his mouth told the story of a man who’d done the same repetitive work all his life. Like he’d formed a protective stubbornness. “Dochira e irasshaimasu ka?” (Where would you like me to take you?), he asked. His pronunciation was surprisingly good, and his way of speaking sounded quite natural, too. But then again, it was one of those phrases anyone could easily memorize. “Gimpo eapotto made onegai shimasu.” (Please take me to Gimpo Airport.) Although I did live close to the airport, I didn’t really intend on going there. Once we got closer to our destination, I was planning to tell him in Korean where I really wanted him to drop me off. “Chotto matte kudasai.” (Just a moment, please.)The driver excused himself and grabbed the notepad resting on top of the dashboard. Next, he licked the tip of his pencil and filled out a trip log. 12:36, Incheon Airport to Gimpo Airport, 1 Japanese man. If the majority of his customers were tourists, I could see how he might have memorized a few handy expressions like these that he could pull out when getting the change ready for them. What really struck me were the three Chinese characters he used to jot down “Japanese man.” As I looked at the characters in front of me, I felt like I’d stepped into a river and the only way out was to cross to the other side. Would I have set the record straight with him right then and there had he written those same two words in Korean? What a bizarre situation I found myself in. Since I’d told the driver my destination and the meter was already running, I thought it safe to assume I wouldn’t have to open my mouth again for the rest of the trip. But my conversation with him didn’t end there. He had so much to say, I thought he’d forgotten I was his passenger and had mistaken me for his confidant. His command of Japanese far exceeded my expectations, but his overly formal and mechanical way of speaking suggested that he’d probably studied on his own using old textbooks during his spare time. I was itching to correct his Japanese every time I was unpleasantly reminded of the limits of autodidacticism, but he never gave me the chance to interrupt him. I knew what it was. What kept me drawn in wasn’t his proficiency in Japanese, but the very stories he was telling me. His stories kept me on the edge of my seat and compelled me to keep listening. That’s why I chose to recall the whole encounter with him here in Korean. Even though I had to change a few words here and there to make it sound more natural, I made sure to keep the essence of the stories untouched. “I see you’re transferring to a domestic flight,” said the cab driver as soon as we got off the airport expressway. “Yes.” “Are you here for work?” He seemed to have noticed the suit I was wearing. “Yes,” I replied again curtly, hoping he would stop asking questions. “What kind of business brings you here?” he followed up. The driver seemed to have other thoughts than simply focusing on the road in front of us. Perhaps he felt like it was a good opportunity for him to display his language skills. I could relate: when I was making a lot of progress in Japanese, I also felt like striking up conversations with random strangers who looked Japanese, whether it was on the subway or at a more touristy spot like an ancient palace. I wasn’t able to answer right away. The man stole a quick glance in my direction. A voice inside my head was telling me it was time to cut the crap. But the next words to come flying out of my mouth were that I’d come to South Korea to conduct field research—which was a lie. What surprised me most was the peculiar thrill in my chest at that moment. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. I used to make up characters inside my mind that I would impersonate in front of women I met at nightclubs. And I wasn’t doing so with the aim of impressing them. Had my true goal been to score with women, I wouldn’t have pretended to have been a baseball scorekeeper, but rather, a baseball player. I also wouldn’t have said that I was studying to become a public clerk, but that I was a legal practitioner. Same thing for the “wannabe” writer story—I would’ve just pretended to have been a rising new author instead. I welcomed the lucky occasion when a random woman would feel drawn to my insignificant life even though it screamed “Warning!” like a pair of blinking emergency lights. Just the sheer act of drawing up this fictitious identity for myself was enough to excite me. What gave me the biggest thrill was coming up with all the little details required to make my imaginary life sound real. Borrowing the words from a spy fiction novel I’d read, it was vital to add a bit of “spice,” and this is how I managed. “I flip a coin when I’m not sure whether to score a play as a hit or an error.” “If you shoot someone already committing suicide as he plunges from the top of a building, does that make it murder?” “When I’m writing a story, I rewrite the first sentence a few hundred times over. That’s because literary contest judges filter out over ninety percent of drafts based on the first sentence alone.” I only tell stories that are bound to capture the listener’s attention. Most importantly, I make sure my lies are so meticulous as to be believable. Whenever I find myself in the process of thinking up all the sparkling, gem-like details to my stories, I feel like I’m some kind of a secret agent living under a fictitious identity. Like I’m a spy concealing his true nature and waiting for the decisive rendezvous. I didn’t think my imaginary constructs would cause any harm. A true spy doesn’t seek out someone he’s crossed paths with a second time. There was virtually no chance I’d ever bump into the same woman again, which is why I wasn’t worried about getting caught. I did feel just the slightest twinge of guilt when I would see the innocent eyes of a girl listening to me with undivided attention. But in my defense, the noise from the banging music in the background was way too loud for me to cock an ear to the inner voice of reason. Not to mention the kind of pleasure I got in return for the cost of a few drinks and the use of a little imagination was by no means insignificant. “What kind of work do you do?” the driver asked me. “I’m here to develop new package tours,” I replied. Even without the loud music to suppress the voice of my conscience, or without the help of alcohol to untie my knotted tongue, I effortlessly managed to come up with a fictitious life history that gave credibility to my made-up persona. I really did work for a travel agency, so what I said wasn’t completely groundless. Not all lies based on truth are convincing, but all convincing lies are born out of some degree of truth. To become a baseball scorekeeper had been my childhood dream, and I’d spent my teenage years trying to live up to the expectations of my parents who wanted me to get into law school. I also can’t say that I never harbored the idea of actually writing an original spy novel either. I might be living in two worlds running parallel to each other. One where, nervously shaking my leg under a dim light, I impulsively created all of these different identities for myself—and another one in which I went about my real life. I know nothing about theories of parallel universes, but what I do know is that when I find myself thinking about all the different ways my life could’ve turned out had it not been for a few careless decisions, there comes a moment when my concentration sharpens to such an extent that I feel like my consciousness can thread the tiny eye of a needle. Such moments seem to offer me a glimpse into a parallel world, a hidden and yet unknown dimension of this vast universe. “Oh, I see,” the driver replied. I felt a bit disappointed because I was hoping he’d ask me more about the package tours. I would’ve told him about the Hallyu tour I’d thought up which would allow travelers to experience K-pop culture firsthand. In fact, developing new package tours had been something I’d really wanted to try. That was all I could think about during this business trip. As I discussed the demands of customers with managers of major hotel chains, it struck me that we should diversify the accommodations to match different themes. I also found myself fiddling with the idea that we could provide travelers with different kinds of restaurant options depending on which time of the year they visited. Had I played the wrong card? There was no way a taxi driver would have absolutely no interest in the tourism industry. Perhaps I’d just been too quick to reveal my hand? Should I only have told him that I worked for a travel agency? I felt somewhat perplexed by the sudden change in his behavior considering he seemed eager enough to ask about my shoe size just minutes ago. His indifference struck me as a red flag. I would’ve been wiser to have folded, but I had another card up my sleeve to turn the situation around. Had this happened at a nightclub I could’ve simply withdrawn to the dance floor in search of my next victim, but I was stuck in a taxi racing down the highway at full speed and couldn’t even lift my butt off my seat. The driver had put on a pair of sunglasses without me noticing although there wasn’t a cloud in the sky; the sun wasn’t so bright as to be blinding, either. Was he trying to signal that our conversation was over? He had his eyes fixed on the road with his lips sealed tight as though we’d never exchanged a word. The driver finally opened his mouth as I was contemplating the sheep-shaped air freshener sitting on top of the dashboard. One of the sheep’s eyes was winking at me while its head steadily bobbed up and down to the rhythm of the racing car. There was nothing particularly eye-catching about it. It was the kind of object you could easily find in the car accessories section of any large, big-name store. “That’s a gift from my granddaughter. I was born in the Year of the Sheep,” the driver said. “You must be sixty-one, then?” “Seventy-three.” “Really? You don’t look it.” “Why, thank you,” he replied, removing his sunglasses. I wasn’t sweet-talking him. He really did look younger than his age. Contrary to his wrinkled skin, both his eyes and voice seemed firmly unwilling to succumb to the passage of time. He stuffed his glasses into the pocket of his dress shirt and carried on. “You see, I’ve escaped from the hands of death on several occasions. That means I have to live for all those who didn’t get the same chance as me. For instance, not long ago there was a ninety-seven-car pileup on the bridge you see over there. Nine people died. It was so foggy that day I couldn’t even see my hand when I stuck it out my car window.” The driver knitted his brows as he spoke, as though he were trying to navigate through very thick fog. We could see Yeongjong Bridge off in the distance. If that was the accident he was talking about, I knew about it too. It had made the headlines of the evening news for two consecutive days. “I was at Incheon airport that day but gave up on a few potential customers to make a trip to the bathroom because my stomach wasn’t feeling well. I guess that’s what saved me from getting sandwiched in the pileup. It was a really close call. The very car in front of me couldn’t avoid the crash.” “Sounds like luck was on your side. It seems as though you managed to pull the brakes just in time, too.” I had a hard time believing he’d stopped his car right on the edge of such a disaster. I thought he was making it up. In a fog so thick he couldn’t even see his hand when he stuck it out the car window? Give me a break. “To tell you the truth, I was able to smell the blood.” “Smell the blood?” “I was hit by wafts of blood coming like waves from inside the sticky fog. You can imagine the moment I caught on to the smell I slammed on the breaks and started hitting my horn like my life depended on it.” The smell of blood? Please! Did he think I was that gullible? “I didn’t actually feel afraid until after I had stopped the car. I couldn’t see even a single inch in front of me. Sitting in that fog unable to move sent chills down my spine. I couldn’t get out of my car. It would’ve been suicide. My mind turned blank as though the fog had reached inside my head. The most terrifying thing was that there was nothing I could do. I was at the mercy of the next blindfolded driver coming behind me, making his way through the heavy fog.” “You must have been terrified,” I said. “Know what I did next?” “Pray?” For whatever reason, the driver’s face stiffened noticeably. We were getting on the bridge. He kept silent as though he were aiming for a dramatic effect. Although I thought he was bluffing, I was still curious to hear what he would say next. He finally spoke. “I removed one of my socks, rolled it into a ball, and stuck it between my teeth.” “A sock?” “So I wouldn’t bite my tongue off if the car behind came crashing into me. I turned around later to take a look at my passenger sitting in the backseat and guess what? He had done the same thing. He was a young Uzbek man who said he’d come to Korea to study auto mechanics. He didn’t know why I’d put a sock in my mouth, but he just followed what I did. I feel bad saying this because of those who lost their lives in the tragedy, but when we both looked at each other with a sock in our mouths, we couldn’t help but burst out laughing. In any case, we managed to make it unscathed.” The driver’s face stiffened even more. Perhaps he was reminded of the chilling scene. “I see.” I almost fell for his story, but I remained suspicious because of how detailed his account was. I was fine with the fact that he could remember his client being from Uzbekistan, but to act like he could recall what the man said about coming to Korea to study auto mechanics seemed to be pushing it too far. Overdetailing is a strategy often used to cover up a lie. Isn’t there a saying about the devil being in the details? Gregor Samsa awoke one morning and found himself transformed into an enormous insect. That’s enough. No need to be more specific about whether it was a cabbage worm or a ladybug. No one cares what kind of insect it was. I lost my train of thought at the sound of sudden honking. We were bumper to bumper with the car in front of us. We were so close in fact that I could pick out the scratches on the car’s license plate. Yet my driver kept honking as though he were going to bulldoze his way through. I looked at him. He glared at the car in front of us with his head bent forward, the veins bulging out of his flushed neck. He looked like he was trying to escape from something chasing him down. “I forget, do Japanese people also follow Chinese horoscopes?” he asked, changing the topic as though he’d sensed that my eyes were on him. I didn’t see that one coming. The reason I’d guessed the driver’s age so quickly was because my zodiac sign is also a sheep. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened to me. Just as he didn’t know anything about me, I didn’t know anything about my driver either, which meant I had to be careful not to get beaten at my own game. I’d once pretended having been to Greenland only for the other person to ask me a question about narwhals. I was caught so blatantly off guard that I was left fumbling for words. I’d obviously never set foot on that land of ice paradoxically called Greenland, and I’d never heard about that oddly named creature either. The only reason I’d pretended to be a seasoned polar region traveler was because I was worried the other person might have traveled to any one of the more popular destinations. But as luck would have it, of course, that person turned out to be a true polar region enthusiast. Even to this day, I can still feel the blood rushing to my face whenever I’m reminded of that incident. But it also taught me some important lessons. First, avoid anything too far-fetched. That can checkmate you. As I read in some creative writing book, you need to make sure you know what you’re talking about. Creativity doesn’t just come out of thin air—it comes from looking at everyday things through unique perspectives. I agree. Lesson number two is to say nothing more than what is necessary. A single misplaced word is all it takes to reduce your hard work down to nothing. According to the same book, isn’t the most important thing about a plot not what it says but rather what it doesn’t say? Of course, it is. But this couldn’t apply to the predicament I’d put myself in. Since I had to reply one way or another, choosing to remain silent would’ve been the worst thing I could do. “Yes, they do,” I said. I wasn’t sure if Japanese people really did follow the Chinese zodiac, but perhaps that’s why I chose to reply so emphatically. I did so while reminding myself of a specific passage I’d read in a spy novel: “You must not show any sign of hesitation when you are tossed a trick question meant to throw you off guard.” Sometimes you’re better off contradicting yourself than sounding uncertain. In any case, I wanted to avoid getting caught before I got the chance to reveal the truth myself. That would be no fun. “When you think about it, bridges are really frightening. In case of an emergency, you can’t even escape to the sides,” the driver mumbled as he looked into the rearview mirror. I also looked into the mirror. The load-bearing towers of the Yeongjong Bridge grew smaller and smaller in the distance. Both the needle on the speedometer, which had been pointing all the way right only moments ago, as well as the expression on the driver’s face, seemed to have regained their composure. It was as though nothing had happened. I think I understood what had brought my driver to honk his horn so frantically. “I came close to dying in a bridge collapse, too.” It seemed like he’d only been waiting for us to get off the bridge to begin telling the story of his second near-death experience. What he said had nothing to do with the reply I’d given him earlier. I don’t even think he was curious to know the answer to the question he asked me. He had another anecdote he wanted to tell me, but in fear it might bring us bad luck, he superstitiously chose to keep his mouth shut and waited until we’d crossed to the other side. I felt stupid for agonizing so much over my answer. “Was there an earthquake?” I asked. Although I knew the name of the bridge he was talking about, I chose to feign ignorance. That being said, I didn’t have to go as far as asking him whether there had been an earthquake or not. It just goes to show how true I was to my character—I was a Japanese man on a business trip after all. It’s not like I’d taken it upon myself to play this role. I’d literally been forced into it the moment I stepped out of the airport terminal. I was turned into a Japanese man even before the automatic doors closed behind me. You can’t underestimate the magical power of language. When I speak Japanese, there are times when I find myself thinking like a Japanese person. “An earthquake?” he retorted, as though he’d just heard a word he wasn’t familiar with. He then took a moment to look at me and nodded almost imperceptibly. It seemed like he’d forgotten my nationality. “It wasn’t because of an earthquake. You might find it difficult to believe, but an entire span of the bridge suddenly collapsed as though it’d been hit by a bomb. The bridge had looked perfectly fine until that very moment. The cars driving down that portion of the bridge fell into the water and, as you might expect, many people died.” “How on earth . . .” “I don’t know if it’s because the water right below the bridge looked particularly dark on that day or what, but I just had an ominous feeling. Had I not decided to drive over to the next bridge further down to cross to the other side, who knows if I’d still be here today.” I silently waited for him to continue. I was expecting him to add some extra details to raise the credibility of his story like he had done with the last one—his anecdote on how he somehow managed to miraculously survive the Yeongjong bridge pileup tragedy. At the same time, I was recalling that accident which had unfolded twenty-one years earlier. All I could remember of that day were some of my classmates skipping after-school tutoring to go take a look at the severed bridge. I didn’t have any other memories. “I still don’t cross that bridge to this day,” he said. That was all. He didn’t add anything else, no add- itional dramatic details. I had my expectations thrown out the window. I didn’t know whether to believe him anymore. The first story he told me had too many details and this one too few. The fact that his stories didn’t follow any fixed pattern might’ve been evidence enough to think he wasn’t making it all up, but I also couldn’t completely exclude the possibility that this wasn’t just a product of careful calculation. It’s well known that a skilled spy never follows fixed patterns of behavior. You have to go with the flow. You have to ride the waves of unpredictability and be aware of the ebb and flow of the tide. As long as you don’t follow predictable patterns, not even Yama the King of Hell would be able to extract any information that he could use to punish you—even if he were to split your skull in half to take a look inside your brain. I was suddenly knocked back to reality by the ringing of my phone and pulled it out without a second thought. It was my superior. I swiped the green answer button to the right to take the call, having completely forgotten I was in the middle of posing as a Japanese man. I shouldn’t have picked up, but it was already too late when I realized my blunder. I answered with a loud “Moshi-moshi!” (Hello!) in Japanese to make sure my driver heard me. I could picture my manager’s puzzled face on the other side of the line, but I didn’t have any other choice. I had only myself to blame for not turning my cellphone off. My superior asked me to report on my business trip and other annoying stuff, to which I absurdly replied that I would go see him to discuss the details of our contract right after dropping my luggage at the hotel. Entirely in Japanese, of course. I felt uneasy after hanging up in such a haste. I chose to send my superior a short text message. I apologize for what just happened. I will explain myself later. Knowing that my manager might send me a reply, I couldn’t bring myself to turn off my cellphone. I set my device on vibration mode and prayed he wouldn’t try to call back. That was all I could do. I didn’t hear back from him. I had no idea how I would explain myself. He would think I was silly if I told him the truth, so that option was out of the question. Even though I racked my brain, I couldn’t come up with a clever excuse. I suddenly began to wonder why he’d tried to reach me. Hadn’t he made the kind suggestion to head straight back home after getting back to Korea? Why’d he call? Was there a problem with the report I’d sent him from Japan? Even though I tried to rationalize his attempt to reach me by telling myself he’d call back or send me a text message if it was an urgent matter, it was far from enough to suppress my concern. “That bridge isn’t the only place I’ve been avoiding. I haven’t stepped inside a big department store for a while, either,” the driver said, picking up where he left off. “Why is that?” I had a hunch of what was to come when he mentioned “department store,” but I played dumb once again. I was a Japanese man on a business trip after all. “I was waiting at a pedestrian crossing right across from a department store located in the heart of Seoul when the entire building suddenly came crumbling down. I was on my way to meet with someone at the food court there.” I could sense the emotion welling up in the driver’s voice, as though he’d been reminded of just how narrowly he’d managed to avoid the clutches of death. “It seems the traffic light saved your life.” “No. The light had already turned green and was just about to go red again when it happened.” “Why didn’t you cross?” “I’d been vacantly staring at the department store and suddenly got the sense that something wasn’t right. I couldn’t bring myself to take a step forward. It was like something was grabbing onto my ankles. I wasn’t aware that all the building’s ventilation units had been moved entirely to one end of the roof. I learned about it later. Apparently, some residents living in the apartment buildings nearby had already complained because they couldn’t get their clothes to dry outside as a result of all the moist air coming from the cooling towers on the roof.” I vaguely remembered claims about the collapse having been caused by unreasonable structural changes brought to the building while it was still in construction, but the story about the cooling towers didn’t ring a bell. In any case, I was struck by my driver’s sensational account of the events, which seemed to be grounded in his intuition. If he was telling me the truth, this man had been bestowed with a special blessing at birth. And if he’d made the whole thing up, he was an outstanding storyteller. But something was bothering me. He didn’t show any anger at the human ignorance and corruption responsible for such a man-made catastrophe. I couldn’t detect any hint of outrage in his voice—not even a single grunt. “It was one of those hot, muggy days when going outside feels like you’re walking into a steam bath. I still find myself wondering—what in the world kept me from crossing on that green light?” he said, putting his sunglasses back on. Perhaps even major catastrophes like this one can only be remembered through one’s senses and emotions. The first thing that comes to mind when I hear the name of that ill-fated department store is the image of my mother impatiently stamping her feet as she tried to get a hold of my aunt who was unreachable. Even scarier than the thought of my aunt having met a tragic end was witnessing my mother completely losing her mind because she couldn’t shake off the ominous feeling that was gripping her. My aunt had gone to the department store to have a look at wedding rings put on display for a promotional event. My mom’s fears turned out to be unfounded. The whole incident happened after my aunt had placed an order for the wedding ring she’d wanted and then left the building. She’d witnessed the collapse of the department store from a café across the street as she shared a red bean shaved ice dessert with her fiancé. As one would expect, she never saw that wedding ring again. It was almost uncanny how my aunt never uttered a single word about what happened on that day. Since my aunt kept silent, my mother had to find her own way of coming to terms with the tragedy that had unfolded right in the heart of the city. My mother believed the incident had something to do with my aunt quitting her respectable job and calling off her wedding, never to meet another man again. More than her wedding ring, my mother seemed to think it was my aunt’s good fortune that had been buried under the pile of concrete that day. I came to see things differently from my mother after I’d watched a documentary on survivors of the World Trade Center collapse who’d only managed to escape death by a hair’s breadth. One man who’d walked out of the building complex right before the first airplane came crashing into one of the towers said he’d spent countless nights trying to figure out a logical explanation—why had he been where he was at that moment rather than still in the building? He tried to break away from this primitive fear of the inexplicable that had taken over him. Yet no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t arrive at a convincing conclusion. And it was exactly that, he confessed, even more than the fact he came so close to dying, which spooked him the most. If the taxi driver’s story stemmed from the same kind of psychological tension, then perhaps the fact he seemed to be exaggerating wasn’t relevant. Even so, something still wasn’t sitting right with me. It was because of how he’d recalled the whole incident. I’m talking about how he used this tragic event, which stole the lives of so many people, to make himself appear special—like he was some kind of exceptional survivor. “Weren’t there actually three survivors?” I put the emphasis on the word “actually.” It wasn’t just because I felt irritated by his air of self-importance. I was already angered by having had to spew a bunch of nonsense to my superior, and I wasn’t happy that I was being made to feel responsible for this whole misunderstanding even though it was the cab driver who’d caused it in the first place. I was also trying to regain control of the conversation. “How do you know that?” “It made the headlines in Japan as well.” “Oh, did it?” “One of the survivors was asked what it was that he most wanted to eat right after being rescued, and his answer was ‘iced coffee.’” “Really? That’s interesting.” I wasn’t sure if he meant that the story itself was interesting or if the fact that I knew such a story was interesting, but either way it was enough to flatter my ego. By shifting my perspective, I’d managed to break out of the limitations imposed on me by having to pretend I was Japanese—which was a splendid feat. The iced coffee story wasn’t something I’d made up. I vividly remember asking my mother to make me a glass of iced coffee after listening to the interview. I could also recall the taste very well. When I told my mother it tasted like plain sugar water, she knitted her brows and said it was because she’d forgotten to add in the milk. I crunched on an ice cube and asked myself this question: What would I be craving if I’d been buried in a pile of rubble for over ten days? “Because of that news story, iced coffee sold like crazy in Japan at the time,” I said. I’d made that one up. After all, one good lie deserves another. Elated by the driver’s reaction, I regained the boldness I usually displayed in the dim lighting of a night club. “Oh, really? I was really craving some sikhye.” “Pardon me?” “Ah, it’s a sweet traditional Korean beverage made from fermented rice.” “I see. But when was this?” I felt like I was allowing the taxi driver to take back the reins of the conversation, but I couldn’t help it. My own curiosity was to blame. “The June twenty-fifth conflict . . . I think it’s known as the Korean War abroad, right?” “Are you talking about the war between the two Koreas?” “That’s right.” “Yes, that’s what we call it.” I was wondering what kind of unfortunate event he would bring up next, but the Korean War? Really? I couldn’t imagine the kind of story he was getting ready to pull out of his hat this time. It felt like a very distant topic to me compared to the other events we’d discussed earlier. How should I put it? It’s like it completely transcended the boundaries of my imagination. It felt strange to hear of an event I’d only learned about in history books directly from the mouth of someone who’d lived through it. I suspected he’d picked this particular topic on purpose, knowing full well I wouldn’t be able to pretend I knew much about it. “I grew up in a port city called Heungnam in North Korea. It was completely leveled to the ground by American air raids during the war. I remember the sky being pitch-black from all the bombing. I was so frightened by the bombarding that I got on one of the American tank landing ships pulling out of the dock at Heung- nam when the U.S. troops retreated south. I knew that the air strikes would start again the moment North Korean and Chinese soldiers moved in. There were even rumors about the possible use of an atomic bomb. I got onto an American ship because I feared the American bombers. It was the same for everyone else. All we cared about was making it out alive. Thankfully for me, the roads leading into the city were all blocked, which meant only people from Heungnam could get on the ships. As you might guess, the number of heads allowed on board was limited.” “That’s dreadful.” Whether that was what the taxi driver had intended or not, I didn’t have much to say in regard to our new conversation topic. He was talking about something that had occurred quite a while before I was born. In fact, before even my father had been born. Although my grandparents were probably alive at the time, it didn’t make much of a difference to me. I wasn’t particularly curious to learn more about this strange war in which the two sides fought each other to death only to retreat back to their original geographical boundaries. “I still don’t dare taking the subway. I absolutely detest caves. Whenever we’d hear the roaring of war planes, we had to run for cover into these caves that had been dug out near people’s homes. And even that wasn’t enough to safeguard your life. Tons of people died as a result of these caves collapsing. Had I not been holding a hand plow at the time, I don’t think I would’ve made it.” “A hand plow?” “From some point on, people started taking hand plows with them whenever they ran for cover into the caves. It’s because we’d have to dig our way through heaps of dirt to come back out. Not to mention your bare hands would leave you helpless in the event the cave collapsed. Dead bodies recovered from piles of crumbled dirt almost always had missing fingernails. Hand plows were considered really precious at the time. Anything made of iron was requisitioned for making weapons.” The driver’s voice sounded surprisingly composed. He no longer exhibited any tinge of boastfulness and didn’t seem to pay any attention to me, either. He seemed solely focused on finding the remnants left behind on the trail of his memory. It made for a mood that was all the more dramatic. I couldn’t imagine how it must’ve felt like to hide under the ground knowing that you risked being buried alive. I was at a loss for words. It would’ve struck me differently had he just said he took refuge somewhere carrying water and emergency food supplies. Fabricated or not, some stories carry trivial yet fascinating elements that have the power to expose the harsh realities of life. That was the case with this hand plow story. To be honest, that’s also why I couldn’t completely shake off all my doubts. How should I put it—it’s like I had a growing desire in me to go and take apart all those pieces of the puzzle that had fallen right into place. The story about the hand plow didn’t end there. “My mother would always give the only hand plow we had to my older brother. As the eldest son, she said he was responsible for carrying on the family line. Had only one of us been able to get aboard one of the retreating American ships, she would’ve picked him without a moment’s hesitation. But my older brother didn’t get that chance. He never made it out the cave that collapsed over him following a bombing raid. I was the one holding the hand plow that day. I felt it was unfair that only my older brother got to hold the plow, so I’d snatched it from him . . . In order for one to survive, someone else had to die. In a way, I guess you could say survivors are also murderers.” Was it because he spoke in such a subdued tone? Or because I was too absorbed in his story? It was only after he’d stopped talking that I realized the words he had been mumbling were not Japanese, but Korean. My hands turned sweaty. The air inside the car was turning hot and stuffy. Heat radiated from the driver. It was as though he’d pulled his heart out so as to show it to me. The man reached for the bottle of mineral water sitting in the cup holder. I removed the cap and handed it over to him. He said thank you. He was speaking in Japanese again. He brought the bottle to his lips and began gulping down the water. I swallowed dryly. My throat was completely parched but there was nothing I could do other than passively watch as the contents of the plastic bottle emptied out before me. I couldn’t bring myself to ask the driver to keep a sip for me. Before I knew it, we were approaching the four-way intersection near Gimpo Airport. We’d need to make a right turn if I wanted to go home, but I didn’t say a word. Perhaps I felt weighted down by the secrets we’d accidentally ended up sharing. All I knew for sure was that for the first time since getting on the taxi, I now regretted having pretended to be Japanese. The man dropped me off in front of the domestic terminal and left. He didn’t forget to wish me a good trip in Korea. In the end, I’d failed to reveal the truth to him. Throngs of people came and went past me with hurried footsteps, but I stood motionless as though I’d been frozen in place. That is, until another taxi pulled up right in front of me. The cab driver lowered the car window and asked me where I was going. He spoke Korean this time. Translated by Léo-Thomas Brylowski
by Kim Kyung-uk
Landscapes and Love
My son brought home a boy I’d never met.
by Wi Soo Jung
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