I am not a “natural born apartment kid.” It would, rather, be more appropriate to say that I spent my childhood hankering for the life of an apartment kid.

My first memory of the space called an apartment starts in the early 1980s. Around that time my maternal grandparents moved to the ninth floor of the newly-built Samho Apartment in Bangbae-dong. It was when the real estate development boom in Gangnam had just begun. Any information on which course my grandparents took to sell their traditional style house in Pilwoon-dong, Jongno-gu, and start their life in the apartment, has not stayed with me. There is a better chance that I never had such a memory. For there exists no adult who lets a child, not yet age 10, in on those details – neither then, nor now.

My memory of visiting my grandparents’ new place, led by my mother, is still vivid. We stepped into a small square box. It was an elevator. The elevator was slowly rising up in the air. And then, it abruptly stopped under my feet. I felt vertigo. It was a different feeling from dizziness. I realized even before I stepped into my grandparents’ entrance door that I would be fascinated by this new space, and I would not be able explain why. So is the fundamental nature of enchantment.

Inside, the apartment was almost a perfect square. The living room, kitchen, and bedrooms were partitioned in squares like blocks of tofu. The faint smell of fresh starch-based glue from the new wallpaper faintly wafted in. I went out to the veranda. I squatted down there and looked out. I could see the world. It was my first time seeing the world from such an angle. There were several cars and the tops of a few heads on the streets. They all looked like miniatures. I thought of myself as Gulliver who had arrived at Lilliput.

At my grandparents’ place, I did not eat or go near the TV that I liked so much. I was endlessly hanging out at the windows. I imagined the direction of each car moving at its own speed, the steps of pedestrians walking by at their own pace, and the destinations that they were trying to reach by their slow or deliberate steps at the moment, and their dreams about which I would never know.

I came to have a wish. I wanted to live in an apartment.

My parents had a different idea. I was not sure about my mother, but my father was decisive because they had recently bought a house for the first time. They put everything they had into the house so they could own it. My father began his own family in 1971 when he was 35 years old. He married relatively late compared to the norm at the time. He, who was born a second son to a single mother with little economic means, walked through his life with diligence, working his way through college and becoming a self-made man. After marriage, when he owned his first house, after renting several dwellings, he was in his early 40s. It should be easy to guess how much special affection he had for his first house.

Our house was built in a new residential area on the outskirts of Gwanak Mountain. That’s right. They did not buy a house. The house was clearly newly built. To build his first house for his family, my father purchased the land first, leveled the ground, and laid a cornerstone. In the sizable backyard, young grass with a grandiose name, Korean grass, grew wild. As my mother wished, we planted boxwood trees, rose bushes, sour cherry trees, and persimmon trees. Therefore, to imagine my parents leaving the house and moving to an apartment that looked like a matchbox was an impossible wish.

As everything has its light and shadow, my father fell into considerable debt to build that white-painted house. The basic members of the household were my parents, younger brother, me, and my paternal grandmother, who went back and forth to her oldest son’s house and her daughter’s house in turns, and was a kind of guest member. The time I spent there might sometimes have been beautiful, but mostly it was boring, just like anyone else’s childhood. My brother and I invented various games to endure the extremely tedious time, such as playing “what if” and became Hansel and Gretel, Annika and Tommy in Pipi Longstocking; were born during the Joseon era; became comedians, and lived in an apartment. I can’t speak for my brother, but the last one was the only imagined scenario that shook me to the core.

I carefully thought about the fastest way to be able to live in an apartment. It was my parents’ divorce. I had been inspired by reading a young adult book called My Mother, Father, and I during that time. The female protagonist in the novel moved into a small apartment, following her mother who had separated from her father. It was not important how sad she was about losing her family or how she tried to help her parents reconcile. If my parents divorced, my mother, whose life was more conducive to apartment-style living in many ways than my father, would definitely move to an apartment:

Number 1: "Do you want to live with your mother?"
Number 2: "Do you want to live with your father?"

At that crucial moment, I would choose number one without hesitation. Surely, if there was a third question, which contained the choice of an “apartment,” my answer would have been different. When I was in the upper levels of elementary school, I used to secretly whisper into my mother’s ear as she huffed after fighting with my father, “Mom, get a divorce!”

What was my mother’s face like after she heard my whispering? I am sure that she should have slapped me on the back several times.

Why did I want to live in an apartment by doing all that? Why did I long for apartment living? Come to think of it now, it was probably because the apartment looked modern to me. I still do not have a clear idea of what modern meant then or now, but at any rate, I clearly understood that at least, it meant living in a different way than now.

About five years had passed since I fell in love with the idea of an apartment when my family suddenly moved to one. It was neither because my parents divorced nor because my father’s financial situation turned as bad as to put his precious house up for a rushed sale. It was because a ghostly presence named School District 8¹ provoked my mother’s anxiety. It was too late to help her daughter who already an eighth grader, but she could also not give up the idea of her son entering the coveted School District 8.

More unforgettable than my first night at the apartment was the last night at the two-story house in which I had spent my entire childhood. I stayed up all night in a small room on the second floor, shedding tears. Only when I faced the moment I had to leave my home, I realized that my dream called the apartment, of which I had desperately pined for, was a different name for fatal attraction about my future that in reality, I could not reach even if I stretched out my hands. That attraction necessarily meant something only when it was just out of reach. When I actually lived in the apartment, my long fascination disappeared like a lie.

Although I moved many times after that, I never escaped the apartment. It was the same when I left my family and started a family of my own. At first, it was comfortable, and later, I was afraid. In the sense that I still live in my childhood dream, am I a true winner?

1986-2013-?

At which point will the chronicle of my apartment life end with a period instead of a question mark? Could it even be possible?

1. translator's note : affluent Gangnam school district known for sending students to renowned colleges