In a city located down south, high-rise apartments were shooting up one after another. I remembered seeing news reports of unsold apartment units piling up, but from the city center to the outskirts, construction was at its peak. I’d be giving lectures for two days in a row, so I’d booked a hotel that towered over a sea of low-rise buildings in the surrounding old downtown area. In this neighborhood, which had thrived during the Japanese occupation and modernization, memories of modernity lingered in low, solid-looking stone buildings, but the signs of decline were palpable. “For Rent” signs were taped to the windows of empty storefronts strewn with “Blowout Sale” flyers. The black marble-finished first floor of my lodging housed the hotel’s front desk, a chain coffee shop, and a sundubu restaurant. When I looked at the online map to make a reservation, none of this had stood out to me. Next door was a university hospital; a famous department store and the Catholic cathedral were just a short walk away. 

My room was on the seventeenth floor. It was dark when I pushed the door open and stepped inside. I assumed there were thick curtains drawn across the windows, but there were only blackout roller blinds. No curtains. Only when I raised the blinds did the view become visible. Since the hotel stood tall among the low, modern-era buildings, I had an unobstructed view. The hotel itself wasn’t badly situated and it had a respectable star rating, yet there were signs of neglect. The lowered roller blinds were one such detail, as were the crumpled, unpressed bed sheets. The slippers wrapped in crinkly plastic were sticking halfway out of the bag as if someone had tried to tear it open and shoved the slippers back in, and when I turned on the TV, all I could see was the hotel’s promotional screen. Despite my best attempts I couldn’t figure out how to change the channel. The bathroom was fully visible from the bedroom through a glass wall with nothing to block the view. Staying alone meant there was no need to hide, but sitting in that wide-open bathroom somehow made me feel uneasy. It’s said that Soseki Natsume covered up all the windows in his house because he felt like someone might be watching him.

I wasn’t quite at that point, but I understood him. The room was filled with a distinctive stench, seemingly seeping through the pipes, that was common to old buildings. I pushed opened the tilt window for ventilation, but as I was on one of the higher floors, it only opened about an inch. I could understand that much, but when I tried to close it, it stubbornly resisted and wouldn’t shut. In the end, a staff member had to come up to deal with the TV and the window.

After finishing my talk and returning to the hotel, I found the tilt window that the staff member had closed for me had swung open again. I tried closing it again, but it wouldn’t budge, so I pulled it shut as best as I could and lowered the roller blinds. Fortunately, the roller blinds were made of blackout material, so I wouldn’t be bothered by light. After turning off the lights, I fell asleep but was woken up roughly every hour. Motorcycles delivering late-night food raced noisily along the ten-lane street; the sirens of ambulances entering and leaving the university hospital seeped through the poorly closed window and pierced my ears. In the city, it seemed like countless people were collapsing, getting hurt, and dying all night long.

That night I had a dream. I was somewhere with my father. Looking at his face, I thought it was strange how smooth and unlined his skin was. He was not like my father at all. He looked more like a marble bust, rather than a real person. We didn’t talk, but I felt as if I had somehow disappointed him and he was punishing me with his silence. Another blaring ambulance siren jolted me awake. It was just a dream. That’s right, my father passed away ten years ago.

That day, someone who came to the auditorium dressing room had asked me, “Have you ever visited our city before? Do you have any personal connections to it?” I said, “Well, if you call it a connection, my father attended a vocational high school here. It was famous for baseball, and he was proud of that.” That conversation probably led to the dream. 

In medieval Christianity, people debated what form the body would take at the final resurrection. Would it appear as it did at the moment of death, or would it return to the most ideal form it had when it was still alive? If everyone rose looking as they did when they died, heaven would hardly be pleasant—it might not feel like heaven at all. But if everyone rose as their ideal selves, with faces looking perfect like photoshopped passport photos, that would also feel unnatural. Yet that night, my father appeared in my dream with precisely that ideal skin and face, and I felt unsettled rather than glad to see him that way.

My father was born in Japan, like my uncle, in 1939. 

My grandfather and grandmother first went to Manchuria, then crossed over to Japan, where they ran a restaurant somewhere near Kobe serving Koreans who had been forcibly taken there under Japan’s labor program. It’s estimated that around 1.4 million people returned to the Korean Peninsula from Japan immediately after liberation, and my grandfather was one of them. The entire population equivalent to that of present-day Daejeon returned almost empty-handed (the Japanese government allowed each repatriated person to take home no more than 1,000 yen). My grandparents returned to their hometown with their two sons and settled down. Farming couldn’t have been easy for those returning after running businesses in a foreign land. The household had little to spare, but children kept being born until there were seven siblings. Only the eldest son was sent to an agricultural high school; my father stopped studying after elementary school and helped on the farm. After watching from a hill as his friends returned home from school with their bookbags, my father ran away and went alone to the city. How did this runaway boy manage to enroll in a vocational high school? My young father worked at a kitchen that fed women soldiers and slept in a small room beside the stove. After the evening’s cooking was done, he attended night courses at the vocational school.

After my father passed away, my aunt told me that women soldiers had once visited my father’s hometown. They seemed fond of my young father, as they had helped him to continue his studies. 

In a hotel room in an unfamiliar town, I lay there staring blankly, thinking about my father and our mutual expectations and disappointments. When did my father first disappoint me? Even having this thought felt unnatural and heavy, as though I was defying gravity. I’d grown up constantly afraid of disappointing my parents, and never considered the possibility of them disappointing me.

 I was a child who asked a lot of questions; adults didn’t like children like that. In hindsight, I think they were angry because they didn’t have all the answers. That was before I knew that not every grown-up has the answers. One day, long after I became a novelist, a friend asked one of my former teachers—someone I wasn’t particularly close to in high school—if he remembered Young-ha Kim. The teacher immediately retorted, “Wasn’t he that cheeky kid who asked too many questions?” But I hadn’t even asked one-tenth of what I wanted to. 

My first disappointment in my father, too, had something to do with a question. As he crouched down to put on combat boots for work, I asked him, “Why do army boots have so many holes?”

 Combat boots have long shafts and many eyelets. You have to thread the long laces through every hole and tie them tightly. To my younger self, it seemed incredibly uncomfortable and a waste of time. Of course, I now understand why combat boots are designed that way. They are, literally, functional footwear for combat. They have to support the soldier’s ankles in any situation, prevent water or dirt from entering the boot, and provide insulation to prevent frostbite. Even as a child, I didn’t expect my father to explain all this to me while he was rushing off to work. But I would have been content if he had explained even one of those many functions. Something like, “You need a long shaft so your ankle doesn’t break easily.” Instead, my father snapped, “Because they’re combat boots!”

In one of Ephraim Kishon's short stories, a son asks his father, “How do we know the Earth revolves around the Sun?” The father thinks he can easily explain this seemingly obvious scientific fact, but soon realizes that it isn’t as simple as it sounds. As the explanation keeps getting tangled and repeatedly challenged, he grows increasingly angry. In fact, he didn’t understand the Earth’s revolution well enough to explain it simply. 

Maybe my father, too, had never really thought about why combat boots have long shafts and so many eyelets. Or maybe that morning he was simply in no mood to answer.

When I was in sixth grade, my father was still stationed on the western front line. In the late 1970s, the front was perpetually tense, making overnight passes or leave rare (it was right after what became known as the Panmunjom Axe Murder Incident, where North Korean guards attacked and killed American soldiers with axes, and tunnels dug by North Korea beneath the armistice line were being discovered). My father made only occasional visits home to Seoul, staying just a day or two before returning to his unit. When he came, he would take my brother and me to the bathhouse first. Dressed in civilian clothes, he looked a bit worn and awkward. But because we didn’t live together and rarely saw him, our bathhouse outings were something my brother and I eagerly anticipated.

Around that time, my father, who was starting to get a paunch, would have us brothers soak in the hot bath until our skin had softened, then call us out one at a time to scrub dead skin off our backs. While he grabbed hold of one of us, the other played, going back and forth between the hot and cold baths. My brother and I competed for the privilege of scrubbing our father’s back.

The incident happened as we were leaving the bathhouse for home. Someone had stolen the shoes our father had left on the shoe rack. At that time, clothes could be secured in lockers, but shoes had to be placed on the shoe rack at the entrance. Naturally, anyone could sneak out wearing someone else’s shoes. My father was furious. 

He demanded the return of his shoes or proper compensation, but the bathhouse owner refused to take responsibility. Unable to go home, my brother and I had no choice but to watch the fight between them. While my father’s anger was understandable, even to my young eyes, the odds were stacked against him. Above the shoe rack, a sign in red letters clearly stated: “Please leave valuables at the counter. We are not responsible for lost items.” Above all, I felt ashamed and hated that the bathhouse’s naked patrons had gathered with rapt attention to watch the outcome of the fight.

“Dad, let’s go home, please.” My younger brother looked like he was about to cry. 

Still, our father refused to back down and argued fiercely with the owner. Before long, night fell and the crowd of onlookers dwindled. In the end, he didn’t win. The only thing he received from the owner was the last pair left in the shoe rack—old, dirty shoes that the thief had probably taken off and left behind. All the way home, wearing the thief’s shoes with the heels crushed down, he didn’t say a single word.

He was forty then, fifteen years younger than I am now, and I fully understand my young father’s actions. It was a classic example of the side effects that come with a life spent as a career soldier. Something like that could never have happened on base. The lining of his boots bore his name written in felt-tip marker, and even if they didn’t, who would dare steal the battalion commander’s shoes? Out in civilian life, the only way he knew how to live was with military discipline.

Yet he ruined an enjoyable bathing outing. The happiness stolen from my brother and me then was worth more than a pair of shoes. It wasn’t that I couldn’t forgive my father’s behavior (of course I can, I might have done the same). At some point, every parent disappoints their kids, even if it begins with something as small as a pair of stolen shoes. Some, like me, will remember for decades that minor episode—remember it while understanding it, and understand it while still feeling regret. But that doesn’t mean we hate or dismiss our parents. That one day we will disappoint someone is as self-evident as every object in the universe being pulled by gravity, and accepting that doesn’t mean the world will fall apart. One good thing about getting older is that I’ve learned to separate the good and the bad in what my parents (or anyone else) have done for me. 

Living alongside another human being inevitably brings both expectation and disappointment, circling each other like dancers in a waltz. When expectation steps forward, disappointment steps back, and when disappointment turns right, expectation turns with it. When expectation’s movements grow large, disappointment’s movements grow large as well; when expectation takes small steps, disappointment’s steps stay small too. It might be safer to expect less to avoid great disappointment, but what kind of dance would that be to watch? After many years had passed, I asked my father about the bathhouse incident. He only said that he didn’t remember. Expectations, disappointments—it was just a dance I had danced alone.

My father, weakened in his final years by stroke and cancer, suddenly told my brother and me one day that even if he died, there was no need to hold something like ancestral rites for him, and that we should just scatter his ashes in the mountains or by a river. Having completed a full career in the military, he had the right to be buried at the National Cemetery, but he didn’t want that either. After all, even the National Cemetery has a time limit, and then he’d have to be moved somewhere else. And who would be in charge of that? He wouldn’t have any descendants anyway . . .

He spoke coolly, but suppressed disappointment and anger hung heavy in the air. “Our family never held ancestral rites before,” I retorted sharply. “Why bring them up now? We won’t be holding them.” The rites were performed by my older uncle in the countryside, and my father, unable to leave his post, had rarely attended, so other family members certainly hadn’t either. My mother had despised the idea of even going near ancestral rites her entire life. 

This ritual, introduced from China by Joseon scholars and adapted by the local culture, didn’t disappear as the country modernized, and instead it spread widely, even to families that had never performed ancestral rites before. The Park Chung-hee regime, which revered military efficiency and treated modernization like a religion, disliked the custom of ancestral rites honoring spirits. It issued guidelines for household rites in an effort to simplify ancestral memorial rites and ritual ceremonies, but it failed.

Ancestral rites are a play enacted solemnly by the living, with remembrance as their theme. We open doors and windows to signal a welcome to the spirits, and we write our ancestors’ names on ritual hanji tablets and burn them. I used to wonder why we had to write their names only to burn them, since the spirits would find their way home on their own. But there was a reason. In the spirit world, there are so many spirits whose names no one calls. Unless you write the name precisely on the ritual tablet and burn it, every kind of spirit—all sorts of stray spirits—will show up. Just as weeds signify plants without names, stray spirits are those whose names have been forgotten. Spirits who aren’t stray wanderers have someone to call out their name. The ritual begins by calling the name in a way they can understand, and inviting them in.

As he sensed the end of his life approaching, my father seemed to begin worrying about who would remember him after his death. While I fully understood that this was likely the only form of remembrance he could rely on, I had no desire to accept his passive-aggressive guilt-tripping that suddenly insisted, “I don’t need a memorial service or a grave.” It was then that the waltz of expectation and disappointment that my father and I had danced finally came to an end.

My father’s will that wasn’t a will was only half-realized. His remains were interred at the Daejeon National Cemetery against his wishes (in truth, due to my mother’s strong insistence), and the nation erected a headstone engraved with his name. We do not hold ancestral rites. Instead, I remember my father in my own way. I write. About the things my dead father has left me. Of course, he would not have liked that.