FICTION

• Martian Child Vol.60 Summer 2023

  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.   *   It was now Laika’s turn to ask questions. She wanted to know the latest news from Earth. Unfortunately, the latest news I had was several centuries old, but that was more than enough to shock her. Laika hadn’t known that the lab where she’d come from was gone, and that all the scientists who’d launched her into space were dead. In fact, all the animal rights activists of the world who used to protest unethical experiments on animals had also died off. And Laika’s friend, Albina, who had been chosen alongside her but eventually failed the last test, had also died. And so had the Soviet Union. “The Soviet Union is gone?” Laika looked like an exile who’d just learned she was the last of her kind. She’d been homesick. The astronauts of the Cold War era had waged a proxy war, and as a result, Laika had been sent to space. Laika at one time had been a symbol of Soviet triumph. “There were even stamps with my face on them—” Laika looked dispirited—which was ironic because she was nothing but spirit. To lighten the mood, I asked Laika how she got all the way to Mars from the moon. “It was easy once I died. I just walked here on four legs. The moon was crawling with astronauts, both alive and dead. There was no peace or quiet. When I first arrived on Mars, it was a perfect hideaway, not one footprint on its surface. And then it occurred to me that I might be in purgatory, stuck somewhere between heaven and hell.” “Purgatory? What’s that?” “Don’t tell me you haven’t read Dante.” Laika stuck out her long tongue and clicked it in a disapproving manner. This Siberian husky, whose head barely reached my kneecap, was unbelievably smart and snarky. And the way she liked to show off her mental acuity by acting surprised by other people’s ignorance was an act of great arrogance. “Well, you’re the strangest animal I’ve ever seen,” Laika said. “You may not be human, but you’re just as dumb. Oh, excuse me.” But the look on Laika’s face hardly looked sorry. Laika’s facial expressions were as plentiful as her vocabulary, and I was getting sick of it. “But how can you stand this stench?” Laika suddenly became serious as she started sniffing the air. She then began growling in the direction of the capsules with eleven corpses. “You need to have consideration for my canine nature. My sense of smell is thousands of times better than yours, and the smell of rotting corpses is pure torture. Plus it’s disrespectful to leave your fallen comrades like that, you know. If we’re going to be together, we’ll need to make this place more hygienic.” I didn’t know when she and I had become “we” or when “we” had agreed to live together, but I just nodded. This was something I would realize with time, but Laika was good at giving orders, and I was comfortable with taking them. We got to work. But by “we got to work,” I meant Laika wagged her tail and barked while I did what she told me to do. Because she only had four legs and had come to Mars first, and because I had two arms and still didn’t know what was going on, I had no choice but to do as she said. I opened the capsules to find eleven clones that looked just like me, each at a different stage of decomposition. It seemed like there had been a critical failure with the capsules’ temperature regulation system. It wasn’t an easy sight for me to look at. On display were eleven different variations of death all in my image. The corpses that were only skeletons were easier to deal with. I shuddered when I touched the corpses that were oozing with bodily fluids. But I forged ahead and cleaned every inch of the spaceship’s interior, which was the size of a medium-sized Starbucks. And as I did this, I was also organizing the last few centuries. As I busily moved my body about the ship, my old senses finally returned to me. Outside the window, the orange sky was starting to darken. I opened the hatch to bury the bodies before the sun set. That was the first time I’d stepped foot on the surface of Mars. The scenery wasn’t much different from the wastelands of Earth. Jagged rocks, silhouettes of boulders on the horizon, and an apricot-colored sky without a speck of cloud. Was this really Mars? Without any clouds, the sky was like an expressionless face—the face of someone whose mind I could not read. I picked up my shovel and started digging. The Martian sand, which was finer than Earth’s, remained suspended in the air for a moment before slowly falling back down to the ground. I dumped all the bodies into the same wide, shallow hole, and covered it back up with dirt. I then cut a large piece of cloth from the airbags that had deployed during landing and covered the grave. I picked up four heavy rocks, which looked like pieces of olivine, and placed them at the corners of the tarp. And with that, the burial was finished. In the end, these eleven clones, my shipmates, had travelled all this way just to be buried on the surface of an alien planet. Floating in the Martian sky were two lifeless satellites: Phobos and Deimos. When I returned to the spaceship, Laika was sleeping under the cockpit chair. I went into my capsule and lay down. It was still a good bed. When sleep mode was turned on, a soft sheet filled with air would wrap around my body. But this device had another use that its inventor hadn’t intended: it would comfort me when I yearned for human contact. When the air tubes connected to the sheet pressed down on my body, it felt like some invisible person was hugging me. Out in the bleak expanses of space, could there be anything more useful than this? I wanted to let Laika experience this feeling, too, but because she was so proud, she hated anyone’s hands touching her.   *   It was about ten days after arriving on Mars that I was first able to hug Laika. That was also the day I met Deimos, so there was extra reason for celebration. That day, we’d traveled farther than ever from the ship to see “Eden.” “It has the most beautiful sand ripples on Mars. The name Eden was my idea. When you see it, you’ll know why.” Laika marched ahead as she proudly wagged her plump behind. I’d never walked so long through the desert, but I followed her without complaint, even though I was out of breath. After walking for the better part of a day, we began to see structures in the landscape reminiscent of clam shells. On low hills, geometric patterns were carved into the sand, as though they’d been etched by a master sculptor. And scattered throughout the sand were shimmering stones of gold, blue, and black. “It’s breathtaking!” I picked up some orange-red sand with my hand, and the fine, dry grains slid between my webbed fingers. Laika looked at my hand and clicked her tongue in pity. “What were they thinking, giving you webbed hands and sending you to a planet with no water?” As Laika said this, I noticed a strong wind blowing in the distance. But soon, I realized it wasn’t just a strong wind, and it wasn’t that far off in the distance. “Sandstorm!” No sooner had Laika shouted this than the storm reached us. I held onto Laika out of fear, huddling close to the ground and waiting for the storm to pass. Perhaps because of Mars’s thin atmosphere, the sandstorm looked more powerful than it actually was. A thick layer of sand covered us, but other than that, we were unscathed. When the storm finally passed, Laika, who was still in my arms, said to me in an irritated tone of voice, “Get permission next time before you put your hands on me.” As Laika freed herself from my embrace, she paused. “Oh my.” “What’s wrong? “You’re pregnant. And you’re a female! Humans are so cruel. How could they send a mother into space with her unborn child.” My mind went blank. And then forgotten memories started flashing through my consciousness. A lab. White lights converging into a single point. People in gowns staring down at me from inside the light. Dr. Lichnowsky. A syringe in his hand. As terror and unease seized me, the movie-like images started to blur, as though masked by a dense fog. I tried to close the door to my memories, but I’d already remembered most of what had happened. I’d been inseminated without ever having mated with anyone. “What kind of experiments did they do to you back on Earth?” More images. Graphs and monitors. Nurse Cecilia, who cried as she tied me down. The painful shot into my ovaries. The insemination took more than a few torturous attempts before they succeeded. But that was the last thing I remembered. Laika saw that I was unable to speak. She nodded her head in a knowing manner. “They erased your memories.” Laika really did know everything. She also knew how to comfort me. “But it might’ve been for the best,” she said with a bitter slant to her mouth. “Just look at me. I remember everything. There’s not a single moment I’ve forgotten. Wandering the streets of Moscow; being taken in by a family only to be chased out of the house again; my real name and the metal cage in the corner of the lab; barking at them to let me go; the researcher who called me a dumb animal too stupid to talk (I mean, have you seen a more eloquent dog?); the cramped cockpit with all that heavy equipment; the terror when the fire engulfed my spaceship and me. I was burned alive! Just five hours after liftoff, I was turned into space dust. I’d rather be a blank slate than have to remember all those terrible things. Erasing your memories was the humane thing to do.” Laika growled as she relived the horrors of her life. Even as I listened to her resentment, I instinctively grabbed at my stomach. I didn’t feel anything inside me. Was I really pregnant? It felt so strange. I didn’t know whether I was human or animal, and yet I had somehow become a mother. “I was once a girl, too,” Laika said bitterly. “I bet my descendants are still living on Earth.” As we made our way back to the spaceship in silence, each lost in our own thoughts, I stopped when I noticed a strange object. The sandstorm had uncovered something buried in the ground. It was an inconspicuous hunk of metal, something I wouldn’t have noticed had I not almost tripped over it. At first, it looked like a washing machine. As I bent over to look at it, Laika lowered her voice and told me to quickly dig it up. I didn’t have any tools, so it took a while to get it out of the sand, but when I finally managed to pull it out, what we discovered was a robot, about half my height and twice as wide as my shoulders. It must have been made of ultra-light material because it was almost weightless for its size. The edges were dented, and its tracks had fallen off the sprockets. The robot had no power. I said I thought it was beyond salvaging, but Laika pointed to the rear of the robot. “Hey human—or whatever you are—you have two hands, you know. Do you see that shiny board on the back? Wipe it off.” The place Laika was pointing to was a solar panel covered in a thick layer of dust. Laika was like a first-generation immigrant to Mars, and I was fresh off the boat. But I had no problem with following the orders of a dog. I didn’t have a strong sense of self as a human, and Laika didn’t have a strong sense of self as a dog. I liked her ordering me around and giving me things to do. And when I used my hands, I felt like I’d finally had respite from the thoughts threatening to make my head explode. I took off one of my gloves and used it as a rag to wipe off the dust on the robot.   *   The robot was only about half my weight, so it wasn’t surprising that it had been flipped over by the wind. After we dusted it off, we brought it onto the ship and set it up next to a sunny window. We soon forgot about it, like one forgets about a flowerpot of dead plants. One day, as we were in the spaceship listening to Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 at full volume, the robot’s lights came on. Technically, the only thing that had changed was the electricity flowing through its circuits. But somehow it felt like the robot was overflowing with life now, as though the electricity had transformed it from an inanimate heap of metal to a living, breathing organism. “Belated greetings.” The robot’s polite voice had an electronic buzz to it. Not only were its vocabulary and intonation human-like, but it also had a light at its front that mimicked a human face. The face didn’t have a mouth, but it did have a pair of neon eyes, which expanded and contracted to express emotion. I bent my knees slightly and gazed into what would have been its eyes. “I am Deimos, named after one of the moons of Mars.” “Does that mean there’s a Phobos?” Laika asked without any preamble. The robot’s eyes became long and thin and turned to the color of tungsten. After a slight pause, Deimos said Phobos had fallen into a ravine, and it had been a long time since Deimos had heard its twin’s signal. The twins Deimos and Phobos were pioneers, laboratories, and photographers all at the same time, and they’d explored every inch of the red planet. As an eternal duo, one would come to the rescue whenever the other was in trouble. Upon completing their mission, they’d lived five times longer than their expected lifespan, and over that time, they’d become close to one another and very intelligent. They explored canyons, traveled to Elysium Planitia and Valles Marineris, and searched for traces of water, sending back all manner of pictures to Earth, even ones of their own tracks. After sending the pictures, they’d collect sounds from space and play them back to listen together. Deimos said they were so happy when they got a signal from other ships. The twins held a vague fondness for the blue planet they’d sent images to. They knew the word “fondness,” and they knew the phrase “to long for.” To them, it meant sending data endlessly in one direction. The scientists who received these images would save them to a folder to be used to develop helmets, gloves, and boots that humans could wear on Mars one day. The photographs would increase, and there were plans to create a mock Mars environment somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico. Humankind would prepare to go to Mars there. They would put on boots, practice walking, and get their bodies used to Martian gravity, using tools and equipment designed from the data that Phobos and Deimos sent. The twin robots would talk tirelessly amongst themselves about the mock Mars environment, like two people who’d bought a house on a distant planet. They’d even made retirement plans to live there as monuments to their mission once they returned to Earth. They would be worshipped, and they would live out their lives in a cozy model home they designed and built. And— “Don’t tell me, you’ll be put on stamps?” Laika said, cutting Deimos off. Laika’s mocking tone shattered Deimos’s daydream. “I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but that won’t happen. Most humans die before they live to be one hundred. You really think they have the patience to carry out a migration to Mars that could take several centuries? Dreamers always make up a first generation of human explorers. They get on boats, chase dreams of freedom, sail to distant lands in search of gold. When they settle down in their new home, their sons inherit the land. Their people prosper from the bountiful soil. Their sons, and their sons’ sons, grow fat and weak from the successes of their forebearers. Success to humans is like reduced gravity. You might get taller under one-fifth Earth’s gravity, but your bones become weak. In the end, they stop exploring. They lay waste to the world they inherited and begin to wage wars. And in the blink of an eye, everything turns into a desert wasteland like Mars. Tell me, Deimos, what do you think your role in this story is? You were born from the ambitions of the first generation, and are busily sending messages to the second generation. By the time the third generation comes around, you’ll be all but forgotten. I bet the funds for the mission to Mars have already been reappropriated for war. All your messages are probably collecting dust on a hard drive somewhere. No one’s listening anymore. “The truth of the matter is that we need to escape from these pointless duties. Let’s not waste energy setting up high-powered antennas. Our effort would be better spent cleaning up the surface of Mars. Let’s stop wandering the desert and just stay here.” “But it’s in my nature to wander,” Deimos said in a tiny voice. It looked overwhelmed by the length of Laika’s argument. “You talk just like a human! Nature. Wander. Words like that don’t apply to robots. If you want to go out there and continue ‘wandering’ through a sea of rocks, be my guest. But this one’s pregnant. Speaking of which, do you have any medical supplies?” “I have a bio-protocol designed for any biological organisms I might discover. The protocol’s name is Doctor.” “Great. Show us this Doctor of yours.” Laika nudged me forward. I didn’t know what to do. Deimos extended its hose-like arm and pulled me toward itself with a clamp. “I just need one drop.” I felt a small prick as Deimos drew my blood. I could hear a fan whirring inside the robot. “Twelve weeks and healthy. It looks like you’re due seven months from now.” “Just great! How’s a baby supposed to grow up in a lifeless desert?” “Try not to go to the lower regions of Mars. There are high levels of radiation there. The radiation is so high, in fact, that it was melting the subterranean ice and sending vapor into the air.” “Vapor? Ice? Does that mean there’s water on Mars?” “By my calculations, there is about a sixty-seven percent chance of there being water.” Confronted with this shocking news, the Siberian husky shook her body and fell silent. A chance. A chance of there being water. And sixty-seven percent, at that. After regaining her composure, she began giving orders like someone in charge. “Deimos, this is vital information. If there’s water here, that means this planet can eventually become like Earth. And there’s nothing good about that. But that can wait for later. I’m a ghost and you’re a machine, so it doesn’t affect us; the same can’t be said for this one. She needs to eat and drink. And soon we’ll have a baby. Goodness, this is giving me a headache. Anyway, while I’m away, you need to look after this one. You’ll become a good nanny because you don’t complain and you act fast. By the way, is there anything else you can do?” I felt uncertain as I watched this large dog analyze information and make decisions so suddenly. Once she learned I was pregnant, Laika took extra care of me, as though I were now her daughter. I had been born without a mother, so when I thought about the love Laika was showing me, I wondered if Laika was a gift sent to me from heaven. Of course, the scientists who’d made me wouldn’t agree with such theological thinking. As soon as I learned I was twelve weeks pregnant, I noticed my body starting to change. I vacillated between states of extreme fatigue and severe insomnia, and I spent more and more time lying in my capsule. And when I looked at my slowly ballooning stomach, it felt like I was observing a waxing moon. Had I not known I was pregnant, I would have just thought my body was adjusting to the Martian environment. My friends took naps several times a day in the hammock hung under the spaceship. When the baby moved inside my stomach, joyful vibrations filled my body with warm concentric circles. As the waves exited my body, a smile formed on my lips. That smile created a new map on my face. But this only lasted for a short while before tears rolled down my cheeks. When I observed my rapidly swinging emotions, I was unable to tell if they were the results of experiments or just something all pregnant mothers experienced. Deimos said my condition was due to hormonal changes. When the morning sickness started, Laika complained that my sense of smell had become even more sensitive than hers, but Deimos explained that it was just vertigo and had nothing to do with my sense of smell. I couldn’t hear the rest of their conversation because I was clinging to the toilet bowl and throwing up. “Lue’s estrogen levels are thirty times higher. It’s to be expected.” “I’d accept that if she were just a normal human. But she’s evolved. She shouldn’t have to suffer from morning sickness like this.” Was I really an evolved form of female primate? Were these strong emotions really just the result of hormones? Regardless of their origin, my emotions were real and true to me. As a mysterious being sent to a mysterious world, this was the only thing I could tell myself with certainty. These emotions were real. And this truth belonged to me and me alone. One day, Deimos let me hear the fetus’s heartbeat. There was nothing that Deimos’s arm couldn’t do. Half-immortal, it was programmed to work for eternity. Right now, it was doing everything in its power to take care of us, and now it was letting me hear my baby’s heartbeat. The sound was like a small spaceship racing toward us at close to the speed of light. “I’ve never heard a sound so loud,” Laika said as though she were a poet. Over time, Laika and Deimos finished digging the well for water and once every four days went down to put ten liters of water in the tank. Deimos’s tests determined the water to be safe, but Laika wasn’t ready to let me drink it. She always worried about me. In fact, she was so concerned for my and the baby’s health that she took her pet fleas from her body and stored them in a container, even though I wasn’t due for many more months. “I can’t get rid of you guys, but you need to stay here for now. You might not be good for the mother and baby. I’ll let you drink my blood occasionally, so don’t be sad. We must prepare for the baby!” The desolate landscapes ceased to look as hostile because of the daily love and care that Laika and Deimos showed me.   *   I was taking a nap under the canopy. I was drifting in and out of consciousness as several dreams flashed across my mind. I could hear two voices, both in my dreams and outside them. In the dream, I see a cloud. It’s shaped like a fluffy feather, not like the clouds that form in the Martian atmosphere. As I stare up at the blooming cloud, I can hear my friends talking. “There are three ships.” “I know. But how many people do you think that is?” “A lot.” “Are they landing?” The cloud changes into the shape of a spaceship, and outside the observation window astronauts with pacemakers prepare to land. The images in my dream continue to change based on the conversation. Laika asks most of the questions, and Deimos answers. “Are they human?” “Yes. Humans. One, two, three, four. . . About seventy of them in a line.” Humans are coming to destroy the planet. Seventy humans split between three ships land on Mars. Humans are terrifying when alive. I remember steel bars. What will happen when they discover me, a lab animal? Will they kill me and dispose of my baby? Is that why they have come all this way? How can I stop this future from happening? How much time will it take for humans to get here? Something is pounding inside my body, either my racing heart or the baby’s kicking. “What about the well?” Long tire tracks appear in the sand. They morph into the shape of a whip, and then change again into Deimos’s robotic arm. And then I am open. Deimos cuts the umbilical cord. “I will cauterize it to prevent infection.” But in a daze from the birthing, I feel no pain. We’re at the coast. A glacier falls, letting out a loud sound like a gunshot. The glacier, which has grown for the last several centuries, falls into the water, and the baby exits my body. The newborn is covered in its own bright-red blood. Laika leaps with joy and licks the baby. “A child has been born unto us!” “What do you mean?” “The most glorious and succinct sound? Haven’t you read Hannah Arendt?” Patronizing Laika. We go down to the sea. We wash the baby in the water where the glacier has fallen. When the baby touches the cold water, it begins to cry and buries itself in my breast. I look at the thin, translucent, sail-like webs between the baby’s small fingers, then suddenly jump into the water. I put the baby on my stomach and wash away the blood. Fish dance. The newborn baby swims like a fish. I know this is all a dream, but not wanting to wake up, I squeeze my eyelids tighter. “What if they discover the well?” A low voice that comes from reality. I wanted to return to the dream, just one more time. To a world with no humans. White wrinkles appear on the sea. The wrinkles move toward me, and I float over their white ripples. “Waves.” “What?” “Sea wrinkles—they’re called waves, dummy.” Suddenly, Laika is continuing my dialogue. This is my dream in another place. A me from a different place is dreaming. The dreams of two people overlap. “If this were really Mars, you’d be jumping around like a kangaroo. And your eyesight would be deteriorating. And how could you survive -62° C? This place only looks like Mars. Even if something bad happens, it’s not real.” Another Laika is telling me this. Another universe, another Laika—a planet where several dimensions superimpose, where time and space bend, where the line between dreams and the afterlife blurs. I am moments away from being split in two; I have no choice but to wake up as I am pushed out of the dream. When I woke up, Laika and Deimos were still by my side. “I had a dream. A dream about giving birth.” When I told them about my dream, Deimos explained that it could take more than a millennium for an ocean to form on Mars. Did that mean I had seen the future? “What about the spaceships? There were seventy humans on three spaceships that landed on Mars.” “You must still be half-asleep. Don’t worry. We’re the only ones here right now.” Hearing this, I let out a sigh of relief; it felt like I was being embraced by my capsule’s air tubes. I picked up a rock of beautiful azure, placed it in my palm, and stared into it. Off in the distance, I could hear something that sounded like a plastic bag being dragged through the air by the wind. I could see the faint silhouette of a small volcano beyond the spaceship. This scenery—my nest comprised of familiar things and friends—relaxed me. Once this happened, I wanted to say something to my baby, I wanted to say something loving, words of mine generated by you. “You’re the only one I care about in this universe. My child. Every star in the cosmos is a mother, and we aren’t cold.” The baby will be born. I am here with your two aunties, so there is nothing to worry about. When I repeat this to myself and rub my large stomach, Deimos asks me if that means it’s a female robot. Laika perks one ear up as if to wink at me. My stomach wiggles in response.   Translated by Sean Lin Halbert

• Bright Night Vol.55 Spring 2022

  “Is this child Miseon?” the young woman asked my grandmother, pointing. Her cheeks were flushed, maybe from walking for so long. An old woman stood beside her.  “May I ask who you ladies are?” my grandmother ventured.“I’m Namseon’s ma,” the old woman answered, looking at my grandmother before turning her gaze to the child.“I beg your pardon, but what are you talking about?”The old woman motioned toward the young woman. “And this is his wedded wife.” The words elicited an awkward laugh from my grandmother. “What do you mean? I’m Namseon’s wife.”“The wind is cold. May we come inside?” the young woman asked. My grandmother nodded slowly despite not properly registering what was happening. She trembled. The two visitors sat on the warm section of the ondol floor and looked up at her.“Our Namseon was wed at sixteen. He went down first in the war and lost touch with us.” The old woman paused. “We went to live in Sokcho. We recently heard tell of him and came to find him here in Heeryeong. And now, he’s going to join us in Sokcho.”My grandmother listened without interrupting. She found out that Namseon had already fathered a son—Juseong, born in the North. Namseon had welcomed his mother and wife to Heeryeong and promised to accompany them to Sokcho in the near future. He’d also given them a local address, with the directive to explain the situation to a woman named Park Young-ok. The young woman, his wife, said, “You may raise the child if you like,” as if granting her permission.“True, things would be different if it were a son,” said the old woman.“What are you after?” my grandmother asked quietly.“We’re here to tell you, don’t you ever think about seeing Juseong’s pa again.” At that, my grandmother laughed softly, and the two visitors looked at her in surprise. “If you’ve finished what you have to say, then leave.”With that, my grandmother opened the door and sent them on their way. They’d expected her to beg for her man. They thought her eyes would widen like a surprised rabbit at the sight of the true wife. Watching them go, she realized that her marriage to Namseon had lost meaning for her. She didn’t want to claim ownership of him and get into a competition with them. Her heart felt colder than it ever had. At that moment, she couldn’t even muster much anger at the man who’d concealed his marital history and taken her as his second wife.My grandmother wrapped the child snugly in warm clothes, lifted her onto her back and went to the market where Namseon worked. He was moving a box when he saw her and stopped. As she approached, she could smell his familiar odor of cigarettes and skin.“Say what you have to say,” she said.“If I’d known Juseong’s ma had come south, this wouldn’t have happened. I thought she was in the North. It’s true. If I’d known she was in the South, why would I have gone and tried to get married again?”“Did my pa know?”“Yeah.” His voice trailed off. “He said it wasn’t no problem.”“So you and my pa were in it together.”“Don’t you get excited.” He looked around helplessly. “Juseong’s ma spent the war caring for my sick father and mother, and raising Juseong all by herself, on top of that. I’ve got to go to Sokcho where my pa is.”“What do I care if you go there or not,” my grandmother said.His eyes flashed with contempt. “So what would you have me to do?”On her way over, my grandmother had expected he’d be surprised or scared to see her, at least. She expected he’d fall to his knees and ask for forgiveness. But he didn’t. He only justified his actions. She couldn’t see any remorse in him. She couldn’t see that he felt guilty for having deceived her. Years later, when she wondered to herself how he could have done it, she still came to the same conclusion. He did it because he could.“In two days, I’m leaving for Sokcho.”“All right, go. But you can’t take Miseon.”“There are some things you should know. Keep her if you like but understand that you can’t never be her ma. The law says a child can’t be registered to a woman without a husband.” “I said you can’t take her, and I’ll say it again. I won’t let a bastard like you take Miseon from me!”It was the first and the last time my grandmother yelled so loudly at anyone. She told me she would never again be able to defy someone that boldly, even if they threatened her life. He wiped his hands on his apron and went back into the shop as if he hadn’t heard.He never gave her a sincere apology.   “I never got an apology either.” I let this slip out while listening to my grandmother’s story. “I found out he was seeing another woman behind my back, but he blamed me.”    My grandmother was quiet.“He said it was my fault because his heart was no longer in it, and if only we’d broken up earlier, he wouldn’t have had to be unfaithful.” I choked up at this point and had to pause briefly.“He screamed, ‘Sorry, sorry!’ and called it an apology, but I wanted him to mean what he said.” “I know, I’ve been there.”“I couldn’t stay after that.”“No, you couldn’t because you’re my granddaughter. You could leave and not look back.”“Grandma, how did you live? How did you get through it and keep on?” I covered my face, unable to hold back the tears.“You may not believe it now, but a day will come when this means nothing to you,” she said.The next morning, a call came from the vet. Oats had passed away in the night. “I didn’t think things would take a bad turn so quickly.” The vet could not hide his discomfort. If only I’d taken him home the previous evening and laid him to rest on his favorite checkered blanket, then I wouldn’t have felt so terrible. I wish he hadn’t met me in the first place. If only he’d just weakened and died a natural death, then maybe he’d have suffered less. I knew it was useless to speculate, but I couldn’t get rid of these thoughts. I’d thought I’d rescued him, but perhaps I’d only inflicted more pain.Oats was lying on his side on a disposable pad. I opened the door, hoping that he would look comfortable, as if he were sleeping, but the pain of his last moments radiated from his lifeless body. The edges of his mouth were dark, and his teeth and tongue were visible between lips that couldn’t close. I felt him and he was cold. For a long time, I stroked the body that had been Oats. If I’d known the outcome, I’d never have sent him to the clinic. Or at least I’d have taken him home for the final night. “I’m sorry,” I said aloud. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”I placed Oats in a carboard box and came out and paid the bill. I couldn’t stop crying even in front of the vet. “He was suffering from the time you rescued him. But thanks to you, he got treatment—and love, even if it was just for a short time.”“How did he come down with this disease? And how did he get so thin and end up in the apartment flowerbed?”I was rambling on to the vet, unaware of what I was saying. He looked awkwardly at me. My question meant nothing to him, and he wasn’t obliged to answer. I bowed my head in farewell and left. My heart was calm even if I couldn’t stop crying. In my mind, I was planning the work ahead. I thought I would wrap Oats in his beloved checkered blanket and bury him near the observatory. When I arrived home, I placed the box in the living room with him inside and sat and gazed at it for a long while. I checked my cellphone to find I’d missed numerous calls from my grandmother. Only then did I remember her offer to accompany me to the clinic and back. I called her, and it wasn’t long before she came by with a trowel.For some time, she looked at the box without speaking. I told her he must have spent his final minutes alone in a dark room. Maybe he’d felt abandoned, waiting for someone who never came. “Maybe, but maybe not. They say dogs don’t want the people they love to see them in pain, so when the time comes for them to die, some leave home.” She paused. “We don’t know. Please don’t think Oats was lonely at the end.” She handed me the trowel. “Shall I come along?”I shook my head. “I want to do it myself.”“All right. Go and say your farewells.”I lay beside Oats briefly. I’d cried so much that day and hardly slept the night before, so I was overwhelmed with drowsiness. Before I knew it, I’d fallen into a deep sleep, and by the time I awoke it was late afternoon. I wrapped Oats in the checkered blanket and placed him back in the box before adding in a bunny toy and a box of his favorite snacks. Then I carried it to the car and got in.Was time a frozen river, as my ex-husband believed, with the past, present and future all set in advance? From the time before I met him, was it already foreordained that Oats would die in a clinic? I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe it even though it was a thought that could give me some comfort. On an impulse to show it to Oats, I went in the direction of my grandmother’s old house. For some time, I stood there hugging his box, watching the sun drop below the horizon. I picked a bouquet of daisy fleabanes that were growing tall on the property.Then I drove slowly to the observatory, where I parked the car in the lot and walked to a spot beneath an out-of-the-way tree. I could dig there quite easily, perhaps because it had rained in the afternoon. After removing two fist-sized chunks of rock, I had ample space. I placed him there, wrapped in the blanket, with the bunny toy and snack box on top, and covered him with dirt. I trod over the earth several times until it was firm, then laid the daisies from my grandmother’s on top.I sat there quite still and remembered that in the morning when the vet had notified me of Oats’ death, I’d felt relief as well as sadness. Part of me was relieved that Oats was no longer in pain, and that I’d no longer have to endure seeing him suffer. I couldn’t deny my own self-interest. I brushed the dirt off my hands, stood up, and went to the parking lot. I started slowly making my way down the dark mountain road. Halfway down, I saw the headlights of a car in the distance, picking up speed. It was only when we approached each other that I realized the other car was crossing the center line and heading into my lane. I quickly veered to the right. At that instant, there was a tremendous flash of light. It was an accident, so why don’t I feel any pain? I felt a gentle breeze and opened my eyes. It was night at the time of the accident, but now it’s day. My grandmother fills a basin with water in the courtyard and washes my big sister’s face. We are at her old house. She places a hand on my sister’s tiny nose and asks her to blow. This scene puts me at ease. I hear the giggling of a very small child, and when I go closer to look, I see it is me making the sound, a child riding on my mother’s back. I peer into the child’s face, but everything fades to black.My sister and I ride a bicycle down a hill. My sister’s feet are on the pedals, and I’m riding behind, hugging her tight. She smells like strawberry bubble gum. I feel such comfort and tranquility that I forget ever feeling sorrow or pain. Don’t go, I scream, holding on to the moment. Don’t leave me, Unni.Then the sky turns upside down and I see myself as a middle school student hanging from an iron bar on the school grounds. The child I see is trying to drag out the time before she has to go home. I can read her mind like the print on a page. She thinks she’s an embarrassment to the children hanging out with her. She’s whispering to herself, I’m too ugly and no one likes me. I try to tell her, That’s not true, but someone catches me from behind and pulls me away. When I open my eyes, it’s late at night once more. I’m on a bus, sitting next to the man I love. I’m twenty-one, and aching with desire for him, but I know he’ll soon tell me he’s leaving. At last, he speaks. I know, I know. I already know you’ll say this. I know, I know. Even after he gets off, I’m still saying it. I know, I know. Everyone leaves in the end. I want to wake up. I ring the bell, but the bus doesn’t stop. I call to the driver, but no matter how hard I pummel the exit door with my fists, the bus doesn’t stop. No one looks at me. I hear the front door closing behind my back. I know it’s the sound of my husband closing the door, leaving me. You . . . you were the only one I didn’t expect to leave. I sit on the floor crying, shaking with tears. Jiyeon.My seven-year-old sister approaches, minus her two front teeth, and pounds on my back.Jiyeon-ah, Ji-yeon-ah.The world gets brighter every time she calls my name. It looks like the sun’s getting bigger. I forget what I was crying about just now and talk to her. It’s so bright I can’t see. How can it get so bright? When I say this, my sister laughs out loud in the brightness, as if she’s heard a funny story. Silly, she says.Silly. I haven’t ever left you.Translated by Kari Schenk

• The Summer Vol.43 Spring 2019

  When she was with Suyi, it was as if she had been reborn in a new body. The scenery she took in, the breathing through her nose, the temperature of the air on her skin all felt different. A layer had been peeled off all her sensory organs. The life she had lived before Suyi felt deprived. Suyi said they had to “be careful.” She told Yi-gyeong not to walk so close to her, and that she had to sit apart from her on the bleachers. But Yi-gyeong’s body kept gravitating toward Suyi, who looked back at her coldly. “Get off me,” she would say, as she walked ahead of her, leaving Yi-gyeong tearful and feeling abandoned. Several times, Yi-gyeong turned around and went home without saying a word to Suyi. The two often fought over this. When Yi-gyeong said she wanted to tell a close friend that she was seeing a girl, Suyi became angry. “I’m not going to tell her it’s you.” “You don’t think they’re going to figure it out-that it’s me?” Suyi turned red with anger and did not speak to Yi-gyeong for some time. But Suyi would always apologize first. Suyi said she often had dreams in which her identity was revealed and everyone rejected her. She said she had known what she was since she was young—long before she knew there were women who liked women. “I was afraid of myself.” For the first time, Suyi had revealed her inner-most thoughts to Yi-gyeong. About three months into their relationship, they were leaning against the railing on the bridge and chatting, when a tall woman approached them. She came right up to them, and an eerie smile emerged on her face as she looked at Suyi. It was the kind of smile that stabbed hard. “Is this your girlfriend?” she asked Suyi, knocking into her shoulder as she passed. Suyi lost her balance and fell toward Yi-gyeong. The two clutched the railing with both hands and did not say anything until the woman was far away. Her ears and neck went red, Suyi looked at Yi-gyeong and smiled bitterly. “Who was that?” “We went to middle school together,” Suyi said quietly. Afterward, they acted as if the incident had never happened. But they were deeply hurt by it. The woman had pushed Suyi as if she wasn’t a real person. Yi-gyeong realized Suyi was right: they couldn’t be too cautious in this small town.    Before the end of the summer, they started going for rides on a scooter. Suyi frowned as she watched Yi-gyeong pull the scooter out of the garage. “You’re a hooligan, riding around on a scooter.” “How am I a hooligan?” “You do all the bad things.” “I learned them from you.” “Real bad. You’re a bad girl.” Yi-gyeong liked being called “bad.” She felt she could be as bad as she wanted around Suyi, and she wanted to. Yi-gyeong gave Suyi a ride to her dorm, taking the longest possible route. Later, whenever Yi-gyeong felt helpless, she would think about those rides. The smell of water and grass along the meandering road next to the river, the sound of the old scooter’ engine, the sensation of warm arms wrapped around her waist, stopping near Suyi’s dorm, where, unwilling to part, Suyi would get on and off the scooter, the silly face Suyi would then make, and how Suyi would grow smaller in the side mirror as Yi-gyeong rode away. In love, Yi-gyeong was able to understand many things. The recipient of Suyi’s steadfast love, Yi-gyeong was no longer as afraid of other people’ eyes or remarks. Yi-gyeong had to dye her hair black all through high school. Her hair was thin and brown, against school rules. When the brown roots started coming in, the prefects stopped her at the school gate in the morning to scold her, and she had to dye it black again. “Your eyes are brown, too.” Yi-gyeong no longer cowered before the prefect’s scowl. You aren’t loved enough. Why would anyone love you? Yi-gyeong was able to secretly laugh at the scowling face.   Over the short autumn and long winter, Yi-gyeong and Suyi talked about a lot of things. They discussed plans to leave the town after high school and live in the same city. Suyi had plans to make a lot of money when she grew up. She would join a university team and then become a professional athlete upon graduation, and then get into a sports-related business when she retired. In Yi-gyeong’s eyes, Suyi was struggling too hard. She did muscle training regimens alone at the school gym when she wasn’t at practice, and even weekends reserved for dates with Yi-gyeong were now devoted to training. Suyi’s team sometimes had practice games with the boys’ middle school team because there weren’t many girls’ high school teams around. This depressed Suyi more than anything. Yi-gyeong did not know at first, but soon came to realize that the the meaning of that word “harmless.” “I think it’s a nasty word,” Suyi said. “It’s turning a blind eye. It’s giving them the right to bully people who’re weaker. They’re just being boys!” Yi-gyeong did not know what to say. She was so angry she could cry. She wanted to find the coach and boys and kick them in their shins. She thought about how Suyi must have chewed over those words after going through it alone. Was soccer so important to her that it was worth putting up with all that? And was it also worth having the coach cane her in the thighs and insult her in the guise of training? “You can quit if it’s too hard, Suyi. I don’t want you putting up with all this,” Yi-gyeong would often say.   Yi-gyeong went to one of Suyi’s games once. In the deserted soccer stadium with very few people in the stands, Yi-gyeong watched Suyi run around on the field. The players had tense looks on their faces. No one scored any goals, until the other team scored a goal in overtime. Watching the game from the back row on Suyi’s side of the stadium was painful for Yi-gyeong. It was hard to watch Suyi running on fumes in overtime, and unpleasant to hear the coach bark out, “Suyi Lee!” A midfielder, Suyi had to stay focused for the entire game. Still, the ball was intercepted and the offensive failed, and the hole in the defense left them unable to block a winning shot. The two teams performed at about the same level, but Suyi appeared to be the least competent player on the field. The coach did not send in a substitute, for some reason, so Suyi had to play all the way through to the end of overtime, as if she was being punished. Yi-gyeong also imagined that her watching the game made it much more agonizing for Suyi. After that game, Suyi threw herself more fiercely into training. It was hard for Yi-gyeong, who had never been so determined, to understand Suyi’s ambition. She thought: if a dream is something that can only be attained through this much suffering, giving it up is the better choice. It was better than having to practice every day in a tense atmosphere, playing in matches, and being judged according to results she had little control over. “If it’s so hard, why don’t you just quit?” “What are you saying?” Suyi asked. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” “But . . .” “You don’t understand anything.” Suyi went home angry, and did not see Yi-gyeong. Yi-gyeong understood now: for Suyi, soccer was not a matter of choice. And even if it was, it was one choice out of very few options. For Suyi, soccer was the tie that connected her to the world. Unable to see this, Yi-gyeong had spoken to Suyi about choice, without realizing that she had many more options than Suyi. Suyi had an ACL injury from freshman year. Although she was doing physical therapy and being careful, she reinjured it in the summer of her senior year. It happened during a practice game with the middle school boys. The boys’ monkeying around led to an injury from which she couldn’t recover. Suyi moved out of the dorm and back into her parents’ house. The doctor had made it clear: she had to avoid strenuous physical activities. Yi-gyeong did not fully understand what the loss meant to Suyi. Frustrated and tormented by her lack of insight, Yi-gyeong took Suyi on rides around town. They would sometimes stop on the bridge for a while and watch the river flow. The surface of the water at night looked like metal, and the tree leaves on the riverbanks looked like black feathers blowing in the wind. “If you keep staring at it, it looks so weird,” said Suyi. “What does?” “The river. It’s such a big body of water.” “Uh-huh . . .” “It feels weird to keep looking at it.” “You must be scared.” Suyi quietly shook her head and grabbed the railing hard with both hands. Her eyes were on the river, but they looked empty. She was focused on the act of looking, but she didn’t seem to be seeing anything; she appeared to be scared and fascinated at the same time. She was so consumed that she wouldn’t even look at Yi-gyeong. (Excerpt from The Summer (Asia Publishers, 2017), pp. 25-41.) Translated by Jamie Chang   Copyright 2017 by Choi Eunyoung. Translation copyright 2017 by Jamie Chang. Reprinted by permission from Asia Publishers.  

• Shoko’s Smile

  In the summer of my senior year of college, I went looking for Shoko’s house. I took an overnight bus from Tokyo and asked my way to her town. I unpacked my luggage at a small inn where I meant to stay for at least a week. I figured that even if Shoko wasn’t at home, she wouldn’t be away for more than two days. Let’s just see how she’s doing, I told myself. Only when I landed in Japan did my body understand why Shoko hated the country’s humidity. The moisture in the air felt like sweat. As if sweat were airborne and were gathering on my skin before trickling down, instead of coming out of my pores. Shoko’s house was in an alley that branched off a road next to the beach. It was a quiet alley lined with small houses. A pair of middle-aged men sat fishing on the dock. Hardly any young people were in sight, let alone children. The only sound came from the odd car or scooter driving by. I walked to Shoko’s address. The front gate was cobalt blue. No nameplate.   Now that I actually stood before the gate, I felt a courage I didn’t have before. I was sure that at the very least, Shoko wouldn’t turn me away. If I returned to Korea without getting to see her, that was fine too. I think, at that moment, I was listing all the possibilities of my trip coming to nothing and trying to brace myself for each possibility. The gate opened faster than I expected. A tall, white-haired old man was smiling at me. His swarthy skin had a reddish tinge. I tried to recall the conversational Japanese I’d learned from a first-year elective course, but all I could stammer out were words like Shoko . . . friend of Shoko . . . Korea . . . letter. Smiling, the old man said something in Japanese and beckoned me inside. I was greeted by a small garden planted with four-o’clock flowers and a glossy wooden deck. The old man gestured for me to sit on the deck. Taking off my shoes, I stepped onto it and sat down. The old man sat a little way off and timidly continued to speak. I had no clue what he was saying, but most of his sentences contained the proper noun, “Shoko.” I remembered Shoko telling me that her grandfather thought she was the prettiest and smartest girl in the world, and how that suffocated her. The old man brought me a glass of ice water. “Shoko, Shoko.” His voice was tentative. Then he said what I guessed meant something like Soyu is here, Soyu from Korea is here. Not the slightest noise came from the room. He tried turning the doorknob, but motioned to me that the door was locked from the inside. It was a hot, humid day but I felt a sudden chill. Shoko did not want to see me anymore. All I was to Shoko was a virtual friend or a diary, one she’d simply stopped writing in, so how dare this diary butt into her life? The old man repeatedly assured me it was alright, and putting on his hat, gestured that he would step out for a bit. The moment he pushed through the front gate, Shoko’s door slid open.     Shoko was wearing a sleeveless, yellow print dress, her long hair pulled up in a high ponytail. She gazed impassively down at me as I sat on the deck sipping ice water. Then she trudged over and sat some distance away from me. She smelled of fabric softener. We sat in silence and just stared ahead. Shoko spoke slowly, still facing forward. “I thought I’d be the one to visit you in Korea.” I said to the side of her face: “You’re disappointed I beat you to it.” A pause, then Shoko opened her mouth ever so slightly to say, “I’ve missed you,” the words coming out like a sigh. As I was a little mad at her, I didn’t tell her I’d missed her too. Yet hearing her say she’d missed me made me tear up. Some lovers are like friends, while some friends are like lovers. Whenever I thought of Shoko, I was scared she would stop liking me. But in fact, Shoko was nobody. My everyday life wouldn’t change if I lost her right now. She wasn’t an employer or a school friend I shared my day with, or even a friend who lived nearby. Shoko was not one of the simple cogs running the machine of my daily life. In all honesty, Shoko was nothing. At the same time, I hoped that I meant something to Shoko. The strange emptiness I’d felt since her letters stopped coming. The emotional vanity of not wanting to be forgotten by her. Shoko’s skin was so thin and pale that even the tiniest veins showed through. I asked if she didn’t go out much, and she said she only left the house to take her grandfather to the hospital. When she did she wore a wide-brimmed hat to avoid the sun. I asked why she didn’t go to Tokyo, at which she looked me straight in the eye and smiled, shaking her head. Then she went into her room and brought out a sketchbook. She flipped open the octavo sketchbook to reveal a series of simple crayon drawings. Some looked like slashes of color, some were tiny doodles in the corner of the page. I noticed squiggly letters scribbled in crayon below every picture. Shoko pointed at the letters and read them aloud first in Japanese then in English: “Half-burnt sole of a foot.” “Extinguished streetlight on a highway.” “Rotten, but only rotten, seed.” “Soldier marching out of step.” “Dictator with no zeal.” “Antonym of typical.” “But . . . typical.” “The strange echo of the phrase: I knew this would happen.” “Pigeons pecking the ground to their last frozen breath.”   When Shoko finished presenting all her drawings and their titles, she pointed at herself and said: “Me. Shoko.” Shoko seemed to have burnt a fuse. Hiding my heavy heart, I lied and said she drew very well. Shoko said maybe she should become an artist, no, perhaps try her hand at writing? She gave me a polite, that ever so polite smile. It was the same smile she’d given me as a teenager. Yet in that smile, which had struck me as so cold and mature when I was young, I detected a vulnerable and defensive attitude. I used to think she was stronger than me. But Shoko was weak. She must have felt it too. That I’d become mentally stronger, tougher than her. I was watching someone who’d had a piece of her mind shattered and found myself basking in an odd sense of superiority. I told Shoko about my college life. About going to Canada as an exchange student, the occasional backpacking trips, the foreigners I’d befriended. I also told her about running into Hana in New York. “Hana tells me you got accepted into Waseda University but didn’t go. I heard it was because of your grandfather’s dialysis treatment,” I babbled on without thinking. Even as I talked I sensed I was crossing the line, and flushed with that terrifying yet exhilarating feeling, I crossed many more lines. “I didn’t think you’d stay in your hometown all these years. Especially to look after your grandfather? It’s not like you. I hear you need to take him to the hospital once every three days? Dialysis is really tough, huh? Not just for the patient but for the caregiver too. I had no idea you were so fond of your grandfather.” If Shoko had lashed out at me right then, or at least defended herself somehow, the things I said would not have come back to wound me so much. Shoko smiled. “You’re right. I’m a coward.” She closed the sketchbook and took it back to her room. She never showed me anything like that again. She came back to the deck and sat down. “But the more you hate,” she added, “the harder it is to escape.” I was perched awkwardly on the edge of the deck. I tried to remember why I’d bothered to come all this way to meet Shoko. She was neither someone I knew nor someone I didn’t know. She was too much of a stranger to call a friend. She hadn’t been one or the other from the outset, but neither was she shallow enough to make pointless small talk to someone she hadn’t seen in a while. “But I’m glad you’re here.” Pressing down on the deck for support, Shoko shifted closer to me. I didn’t look at her, fixing my gaze instead on the four-o’clock flowers abloom in the yard. From the sound of her dress sweeping the deck I sensed in Shoko a peculiar loneliness distinct to old people. I didn’t have to see her face to know. Shoko was ancient. She hooked her arm around mine, her cold, smooth arm touching my hot, sweaty one. It made my hair stand on end. Shoko rested her head on my shoulder. I could feel the soft, thin wisps of her hair. She laced her fingers with mine and kicked her legs in the air like she was splashing around in water. “Stay with me. Don’t go back to Korea, let’s live here together,” she said brightly, as if the suggestion were perfectly feasible. I resolved never to see her again. It would’ve been better to remember Shoko only as the seventeen-year-old and feel sorry for losing touch with her, slowly letting myself forget her. If I hadn’t bumped into Hana in front of the public library in New York, and consequently hadn’t felt a mix of pity and curiosity toward Shoko, I could have erased her from my memory. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, to behold the naked face of someone who could neither go anywhere nor love her pinned-down life.   Just then, the gate opened and the old man came walking into the yard. His face was flushed even redder than it was before. When he found us glued to each other arm in arm, he stood rooted to the spot and looked away in embarrassment. He could have acted like he hadn’t seen us and gone inside the house but he just stood there. As if to say he would give us time to unlink our arms. I tried to pull my arm free but Shoko clutched onto it with all her might. I jumped to my feet and shook her off as I would a rat stuck to my arm. I stood facing the old man in that small yard. A smile spread across the old man’s stiffened face, which was still turned away. But the smile couldn’t conceal the tiny spasms rippling across his face. Neither of us moved, and we stood there for a moment. “That man’s obsessed with me.” Shoko wagged her finger at the old man and added quietly in English: “Fucking creep.” Startled at what she said, I glanced over at the old man’s face. He turned his head as if to hide the tears welling up in his eyes, pretending to survey the four-o’clock flowers. My eyes flitted back to Shoko. She sneered, looking amused at the old man’s frail state. I thought of Grandpa back home. I felt as if Shoko had insulted my own grandfather. “What did you just say?” “I said he’s a fucking creep. I wish he’d go off and die.” I was speechless. My body grew hot, but my head cleared. “I won’t be seeing you anymore. Stop acting like a child.” Shoko laughed. “I don’t even know you. Who are you?” She looked like a dead fish as she leaned her head against the deck post, her mouth slightly agape, her dull eyes staring at me. I recoiled at the sight and looked away. The old man, his frame slouched, continued to study the four-o’clock flowers as if nothing had happened. The pink plastic bag he carried held a few apples and juice boxes with straws attached. I bowed my head and apologized to the old man’s back, and left the house. I paid the extra fee to my airline and took the afternoon flight back to Korea the next day. The plane flew low. It was a clear day. Glancing out the window, I saw the Korea Strait twinkling in the sunlight. Things looked flawlessly beautiful from afar.   I lied to Grandpa that I didn’t get to meet Shoko. “I waited for days but she didn’t come home. Sorry.” Grandpa forced a smile and said, “All that trouble for nothin’. Ah well, think of your trip as an adventure. Let’s forget about this Shoko girl. She was probably too busy. We oughta make allowances for that.” The Grandpa I knew as a child was a man who flew off the handle at everything. Even if someone’s mistake was unavoidable, he would say that wasn’t his problem. He insisted on picking fights instead of talking things out. He showed little sympathy or generosity and kept bringing up past grievances in fresh fits of temper. We oughta make allowances for that, she must’ve had her reasons, let’s forget about it. These were not Grandpa’s words. It seemed Grandpa wanted to avoid discussing Shoko altogether. As if he were trying to protect his feelings by believing Shoko must’ve had her reasons. How could exchanging some damn letters mean so much to him? Penpalling with a foreigner who was fifty years his junior, no less. Despite having no money or real job since turning fifty, Grandpa had never learned to bend his knee to anyone. Yet here he was, resigning himself to Shoko’s silence. The drawer of the living room coffee table in which he kept all her letters was empty now. He no longer checked the mailbox. From that day on, we never mentioned Shoko again. Sometimes the image of Shoko, a doll affixed to that small house, would flicker past my eyes like a ghost. I assumed she had become a physical therapist. And was earning money. At the time, I’d thought that Shoko had made a rash decision. That choosing a career at only twenty-three and confining herself in her tiny hometown was a bad idea. Those were the days when I believed my life would turn out special. I secretly sneered at cowards who compromised with reality. But this silly arrogance of mine is the reason why I’m nothing now. Back then I’d imagined that my life would play out very differently from Shoko’s materialistic and repressed one, that I’d enjoy a life in which every day was free and true. After I finished my English literature degree, I signed up for a film school run by a TV network. I had to tutor English in the evenings to earn my tuition. I started out humble but determined, writing screenplays for group projects, learning about cameras, attending talks by B-list film directors. I knew I had a long and grueling road ahead, but didn’t doubt I’d become a film director someday. One by one, my old classmates from college went off to work for banks, airlines, and publishers. I judged them for chasing money and security instead of figuring out their true ambitions. A life like theirs seemed meaningless. What I only cared about at the time was meaning, and I comforted myself thinking that by following my dream, I was living a meaningful life. But I was scared. The odds of becoming a film director and making a movie backed by investors seemed next to impossible. I graduated and sent my work to an independent short film festival. My submission was rejected with no comments. I rallied and spent a year writing a screenplay for a contest, but that was rejected too. The people I had studied film with slammed my screenplay for being trite and boring and unoriginal. They read aloud lines that I’d personally thought were quite original and ripped them apart. Looks like you need more training, you need to watch more movies, I was told year after year. So how long have you been writing screenplays? I was about to turn thirty by the time I started hesitating when answering this question. I’d been writing for five years and worked on some small films as part of the crew, but I was more talented at going to after-parties for various movies and listening to or spreading gossip. I had believed that writing would give me freedom, liberate me from myself, shatter the limits of the world I inhabited, but reality proved to be the opposite. I was always pressed for cash, struggled to land tutoring gigs or jobs at cram schools, and grew touchy about money. My spending habits became drastically different from those of my friends who were already managers at their companies. They never let me get the bill. It was out of consideration, but every such moment dented my pride. Friends with stable office jobs spent their weekends watching movies or performances and still found the time to read, whereas the amount of reading I got done was embarrassingly less compared to theirs. When I met with my filmmaker friends, I always compared their talent with mine and wallowed in feelings of inferiority. My inspiration ran dry and only my monstrous ego fattened with each day. Watching aspiring directors whose failures had turned them into alcoholics and the screenwriter hopefuls who worked alongside middle or high schoolers without even getting paid for overtime, I told myself that at least I was better than them. So my dream was a sin. No, it wasn’t even a dream. If filmmaking was my dream, if that’s why I pursued it, at least some part of it would’ve made me feel rewarded and happy. But I was writing scripts and making movies I didn’t care about, just to keep the promise I made to myself that I’d become a director. I deluded myself into hoping that my movies would stir another person’s heart when I myself was unmoved by them. My creative vision had died in me long ago. I just wanted to be someone important in the industry. I was writing, but my stories were contrived as they didn’t flow from within me. I wrote not because I wanted to, but because I had to. Dreams. They were a mirage, blotched with ugly feelings like vanity, ambition, need for recognition, spite. People who told me in a drunken slur that they “couldn’t live without film” or were “desperate to make movies” reeked of thwarted desires. My desires were just as strong, if not stronger, but I acted like I wasn’t desperate. Pure dreams were meant for talented filmmakers who could afford to enjoy their jobs. Glory was meant for them too. Film, art in general, only revealed its true face to hard-working geniuses, not hard-working average Joes. I covered my face with my hands and sobbed. It was difficult to accept that fact. The moment untalented people clutch at the mirage of dreams, it slowly eats away their lives. I lost most of the people I’d called friends before I got into filmmaking. Some remained loyal yet they too were judged by my ego, which had amassed itself feeding on shadows. A friend who married a man with a high salary was obviously a gold digger; another friend who confided to me about her soul-sucking job made me gloat inside while I put on a sympathetic face. I was shocked by the nastiness of my own thoughts but even that didn’t last long. I spent longer hours at home alone. Oftentimes I didn’t want to see anyone, and didn’t bother visiting or calling Mom and Grandpa. While distancing myself from the few people who loved me, I thought my films would portray some deep layer of the human psyche. Little did I know then how lonely this arrogance of mine made them feel. (Excerpt from pp. 22-35.) Translated by Sung Ryu

• Shoko’s Smile Vol.42 Winter 2018

  In the summer of my senior year of college, I went looking for Shoko’s house. I took an overnight bus from Tokyo and asked my way to her town. I unpacked my luggage at a small inn where I meant to stay for at least a week. I figured that even if Shoko wasn’t at home, she wouldn’t be away for more than two days. Let’s just see how she’s doing, I told myself. Only when I landed in Japan did my body understand why Shoko hated the country’s humidity. The moisture in the air felt like sweat. As if sweat were airborne and were gathering on my skin before trickling down, instead of coming out of my pores. Shoko’s house was in an alley that branched off a road next to the beach. It was a quiet alley lined with small houses. A pair of middle-aged men sat fishing on the dock. Hardly any young people were in sight, let alone children. The only sound came from the odd car or scooter driving by. I walked to Shoko’s address. The front gate was cobalt blue. No nameplate.   Now that I actually stood before the gate, I felt a courage I didn’t have before. I was sure that at the very least, Shoko wouldn’t turn me away. If I returned to Korea without getting to see her, that was fine too. I think, at that moment, I was listing all the possibilities of my trip coming to nothing and trying to brace myself for each possibility. The gate opened faster than I expected. A tall, white-haired old man was smiling at me. His swarthy skin had a reddish tinge. I tried to recall the conversational Japanese I’d learned from a first-year elective course, but all I could stammer out were words like Shoko . . . friend of Shoko . . . Korea . . . letter. Smiling, the old man said something in Japanese and beckoned me inside. I was greeted by a small garden planted with four-o’clock flowers and a glossy wooden deck. The old man gestured for me to sit on the deck. Taking off my shoes, I stepped onto it and sat down. The old man sat a little way off and timidly continued to speak. I had no clue what he was saying, but most of his sentences contained the proper noun, “Shoko.” I remembered Shoko telling me that her grandfather thought she was the prettiest and smartest girl in the world, and how that suffocated her. The old man brought me a glass of ice water. “Shoko, Shoko.” His voice was tentative. Then he said what I guessed meant something like Soyu is here, Soyu from Korea is here. Not the slightest noise came from the room. He tried turning the doorknob, but motioned to me that the door was locked from the inside. It was a hot, humid day but I felt a sudden chill. Shoko did not want to see me anymore. All I was to Shoko was a virtual friend or a diary, one she’d simply stopped writing in, so how dare this diary butt into her life? The old man repeatedly assured me it was alright, and putting on his hat, gestured that he would step out for a bit. The moment he pushed through the front gate, Shoko’s door slid open.     Shoko was wearing a sleeveless, yellow print dress, her long hair pulled up in a high ponytail. She gazed impassively down at me as I sat on the deck sipping ice water. Then she trudged over and sat some distance away from me. She smelled of fabric softener. We sat in silence and just stared ahead. Shoko spoke slowly, still facing forward. “I thought I’d be the one to visit you in Korea.” I said to the side of her face: “You’re disappointed I beat you to it.” A pause, then Shoko opened her mouth ever so slightly to say, “I’ve missed you,” the words coming out like a sigh. As I was a little mad at her, I didn’t tell her I’d missed her too. Yet hearing her say she’d missed me made me tear up. Some lovers are like friends, while some friends are like lovers. Whenever I thought of Shoko, I was scared she would stop liking me. But in fact, Shoko was nobody. My everyday life wouldn’t change if I lost her right now. She wasn’t an employer or a school friend I shared my day with, or even a friend who lived nearby. Shoko was not one of the simple cogs running the machine of my daily life. In all honesty, Shoko was nothing. At the same time, I hoped that I meant something to Shoko. The strange emptiness I’d felt since her letters stopped coming. The emotional vanity of not wanting to be forgotten by her. Shoko’s skin was so thin and pale that even the tiniest veins showed through. I asked if she didn’t go out much, and she said she only left the house to take her grandfather to the hospital. When she did she wore a wide-brimmed hat to avoid the sun. I asked why she didn’t go to Tokyo, at which she looked me straight in the eye and smiled, shaking her head. Then she went into her room and brought out a sketchbook. She flipped open the octavo sketchbook to reveal a series of simple crayon drawings. Some looked like slashes of color, some were tiny doodles in the corner of the page. I noticed squiggly letters scribbled in crayon below every picture. Shoko pointed at the letters and read them aloud first in Japanese then in English: “Half-burnt sole of a foot.” “Extinguished streetlight on a highway.” “Rotten, but only rotten, seed.” “Soldier marching out of step.” “Dictator with no zeal.” “Antonym of typical.” “But . . . typical.” “The strange echo of the phrase: I knew this would happen.” “Pigeons pecking the ground to their last frozen breath.”   When Shoko finished presenting all her drawings and their titles, she pointed at herself and said: “Me. Shoko.” Shoko seemed to have burnt a fuse. Hiding my heavy heart, I lied and said she drew very well. Shoko said maybe she should become an artist, no, perhaps try her hand at writing? She gave me a polite, that ever so polite smile. It was the same smile she’d given me as a teenager. Yet in that smile, which had struck me as so cold and mature when I was young, I detected a vulnerable and defensive attitude. I used to think she was stronger than me. But Shoko was weak. She must have felt it too. That I’d become mentally stronger, tougher than her. I was watching someone who’d had a piece of her mind shattered and found myself basking in an odd sense of superiority. I told Shoko about my college life. About going to Canada as an exchange student, the occasional backpacking trips, the foreigners I’d befriended. I also told her about running into Hana in New York. “Hana tells me you got accepted into Waseda University but didn’t go. I heard it was because of your grandfather’s dialysis treatment,” I babbled on without thinking. Even as I talked I sensed I was crossing the line, and flushed with that terrifying yet exhilarating feeling, I crossed many more lines. “I didn’t think you’d stay in your hometown all these years. Especially to look after your grandfather? It’s not like you. I hear you need to take him to the hospital once every three days? Dialysis is really tough, huh? Not just for the patient but for the caregiver too. I had no idea you were so fond of your grandfather.” If Shoko had lashed out at me right then, or at least defended herself somehow, the things I said would not have come back to wound me so much. Shoko smiled. “You’re right. I’m a coward.” She closed the sketchbook and took it back to her room. She never showed me anything like that again. She came back to the deck and sat down. “But the more you hate,” she added, “the harder it is to escape.” I was perched awkwardly on the edge of the deck. I tried to remember why I’d bothered to come all this way to meet Shoko. She was neither someone I knew nor someone I didn’t know. She was too much of a stranger to call a friend. She hadn’t been one or the other from the outset, but neither was she shallow enough to make pointless small talk to someone she hadn’t seen in a while. “But I’m glad you’re here.” Pressing down on the deck for support, Shoko shifted closer to me. I didn’t look at her, fixing my gaze instead on the four-o’clock flowers abloom in the yard. From the sound of her dress sweeping the deck I sensed in Shoko a peculiar loneliness distinct to old people. I didn’t have to see her face to know. Shoko was ancient. She hooked her arm around mine, her cold, smooth arm touching my hot, sweaty one. It made my hair stand on end. Shoko rested her head on my shoulder. I could feel the soft, thin wisps of her hair. She laced her fingers with mine and kicked her legs in the air like she was splashing around in water. “Stay with me. Don’t go back to Korea, let’s live here together,” she said brightly, as if the suggestion were perfectly feasible. I resolved never to see her again. It would’ve been better to remember Shoko only as the seventeen-year-old and feel sorry for losing touch with her, slowly letting myself forget her. If I hadn’t bumped into Hana in front of the public library in New York, and consequently hadn’t felt a mix of pity and curiosity toward Shoko, I could have erased her from my memory. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, to behold the naked face of someone who could neither go anywhere nor love her pinned-down life.   Just then, the gate opened and the old man came walking into the yard. His face was flushed even redder than it was before. When he found us glued to each other arm in arm, he stood rooted to the spot and looked away in embarrassment. He could have acted like he hadn’t seen us and gone inside the house but he just stood there. As if to say he would give us time to unlink our arms. I tried to pull my arm free but Shoko clutched onto it with all her might. I jumped to my feet and shook her off as I would a rat stuck to my arm. I stood facing the old man in that small yard. A smile spread across the old man’s stiffened face, which was still turned away. But the smile couldn’t conceal the tiny spasms rippling across his face. Neither of us moved, and we stood there for a moment. “That man’s obsessed with me.” Shoko wagged her finger at the old man and added quietly in English: “Fucking creep.” Startled at what she said, I glanced over at the old man’s face. He turned his head as if to hide the tears welling up in his eyes, pretending to survey the four-o’clock flowers. My eyes flitted back to Shoko. She sneered, looking amused at the old man’s frail state. I thought of Grandpa back home. I felt as if Shoko had insulted my own grandfather. “What did you just say?” “I said he’s a fucking creep. I wish he’d go off and die.” I was speechless. My body grew hot, but my head cleared. “I won’t be seeing you anymore. Stop acting like a child.” Shoko laughed. “I don’t even know you. Who are you?” She looked like a dead fish as she leaned her head against the deck post, her mouth slightly agape, her dull eyes staring at me. I recoiled at the sight and looked away. The old man, his frame slouched, continued to study the four-o’clock flowers as if nothing had happened. The pink plastic bag he carried held a few apples and juice boxes with straws attached. I bowed my head and apologized to the old man’s back, and left the house. I paid the extra fee to my airline and took the afternoon flight back to Korea the next day. The plane flew low. It was a clear day. Glancing out the window, I saw the Korea Strait twinkling in the sunlight. Things looked flawlessly beautiful from afar.   I lied to Grandpa that I didn’t get to meet Shoko. “I waited for days but she didn’t come home. Sorry.” Grandpa forced a smile and said, “All that trouble for nothin’. Ah well, think of your trip as an adventure. Let’s forget about this Shoko girl. She was probably too busy. We oughta make allowances for that.” The Grandpa I knew as a child was a man who flew off the handle at everything. Even if someone’s mistake was unavoidable, he would say that wasn’t his problem. He insisted on picking fights instead of talking things out. He showed little sympathy or generosity and kept bringing up past grievances in fresh fits of temper. We oughta make allowances for that, she must’ve had her reasons, let’s forget about it. These were not Grandpa’s words. It seemed Grandpa wanted to avoid discussing Shoko altogether. As if he were trying to protect his feelings by believing Shoko must’ve had her reasons. How could exchanging some damn letters mean so much to him? Penpalling with a foreigner who was fifty years his junior, no less. Despite having no money or real job since turning fifty, Grandpa had never learned to bend his knee to anyone. Yet here he was, resigning himself to Shoko’s silence. The drawer of the living room coffee table in which he kept all her letters was empty now. He no longer checked the mailbox. From that day on, we never mentioned Shoko again. Sometimes the image of Shoko, a doll affixed to that small house, would flicker past my eyes like a ghost. I assumed she had become a physical therapist. And was earning money. At the time, I’d thought that Shoko had made a rash decision. That choosing a career at only twenty-three and confining herself in her tiny hometown was a bad idea. Those were the days when I believed my life would turn out special. I secretly sneered at cowards who compromised with reality. But this silly arrogance of mine is the reason why I’m nothing now. Back then I’d imagined that my life would play out very differently from Shoko’s materialistic and repressed one, that I’d enjoy a life in which every day was free and true. After I finished my English literature degree, I signed up for a film school run by a TV network. I had to tutor English in the evenings to earn my tuition. I started out humble but determined, writing screenplays for group projects, learning about cameras, attending talks by B-list film directors. I knew I had a long and grueling road ahead, but didn’t doubt I’d become a film director someday. One by one, my old classmates from college went off to work for banks, airlines, and publishers. I judged them for chasing money and security instead of figuring out their true ambitions. A life like theirs seemed meaningless. What I only cared about at the time was meaning, and I comforted myself thinking that by following my dream, I was living a meaningful life. But I was scared. The odds of becoming a film director and making a movie backed by investors seemed next to impossible. I graduated and sent my work to an independent short film festival. My submission was rejected with no comments. I rallied and spent a year writing a screenplay for a contest, but that was rejected too. The people I had studied film with slammed my screenplay for being trite and boring and unoriginal. They read aloud lines that I’d personally thought were quite original and ripped them apart. Looks like you need more training, you need to watch more movies, I was told year after year. So how long have you been writing screenplays? I was about to turn thirty by the time I started hesitating when answering this question. I’d been writing for five years and worked on some small films as part of the crew, but I was more talented at going to after-parties for various movies and listening to or spreading gossip. I had believed that writing would give me freedom, liberate me from myself, shatter the limits of the world I inhabited, but reality proved to be the opposite. I was always pressed for cash, struggled to land tutoring gigs or jobs at cram schools, and grew touchy about money. My spending habits became drastically different from those of my friends who were already managers at their companies. They never let me get the bill. It was out of consideration, but every such moment dented my pride. Friends with stable office jobs spent their weekends watching movies or performances and still found the time to read, whereas the amount of reading I got done was embarrassingly less compared to theirs. When I met with my filmmaker friends, I always compared their talent with mine and wallowed in feelings of inferiority. My inspiration ran dry and only my monstrous ego fattened with each day. Watching aspiring directors whose failures had turned them into alcoholics and the screenwriter hopefuls who worked alongside middle or high schoolers without even getting paid for overtime, I told myself that at least I was better than them. So my dream was a sin. No, it wasn’t even a dream. If filmmaking was my dream, if that’s why I pursued it, at least some part of it would’ve made me feel rewarded and happy. But I was writing scripts and making movies I didn’t care about, just to keep the promise I made to myself that I’d become a director. I deluded myself into hoping that my movies would stir another person’s heart when I myself was unmoved by them. My creative vision had died in me long ago. I just wanted to be someone important in the industry. I was writing, but my stories were contrived as they didn’t flow from within me. I wrote not because I wanted to, but because I had to. Dreams. They were a mirage, blotched with ugly feelings like vanity, ambition, need for recognition, spite. People who told me in a drunken slur that they “couldn’t live without film” or were “desperate to make movies” reeked of thwarted desires. My desires were just as strong, if not stronger, but I acted like I wasn’t desperate. Pure dreams were meant for talented filmmakers who could afford to enjoy their jobs. Glory was meant for them too. Film, art in general, only revealed its true face to hard-working geniuses, not hard-working average Joes. I covered my face with my hands and sobbed. It was difficult to accept that fact. The moment untalented people clutch at the mirage of dreams, it slowly eats away their lives. I lost most of the people I’d called friends before I got into filmmaking. Some remained loyal yet they too were judged by my ego, which had amassed itself feeding on shadows. A friend who married a man with a high salary was obviously a gold digger; another friend who confided to me about her soul-sucking job made me gloat inside while I put on a sympathetic face. I was shocked by the nastiness of my own thoughts but even that didn’t last long. I spent longer hours at home alone. Oftentimes I didn’t want to see anyone, and didn’t bother visiting or calling Mom and Grandpa. While distancing myself from the few people who loved me, I thought my films would portray some deep layer of the human psyche. Little did I know then how lonely this arrogance of mine made them feel. (Excerpt from pp. 22-35.) Translated by Sung Ryu

REVIEWS

• Lost – and Found: Shoko’s Smile by Choi Eunyoung Vol.44 Summer 2019

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