Fiction

A Day, Without Trouble

The following year, Yeongin began looking for a new job. She interviewed with a company that sourced fabric and materials from Korea and China, then shipped them to Vietnam, where it manufactured clothing for global retail brands. She took the elevator up to the twelfth floor. When the doors opened, a long, wide hallway stretched ahead, lined with large doors on either side. Some resembled apartment doors, while others were fitted with wrought iron grilles or made of glass lit by neon signs. Boratec, Dozen, Unico, Cox—it was difficult to tell by the company names alone what any of them did. When Yeongin came to the right number, she knocked on the glass double doors and stepped inside. A man introduced himself as Manager Kim. He seemed lively, curious, and slightly belligerent, and had bloodshot eyes. He led her into the sample room and pointed to the clothes hanging on the wall: anorak jumpers, jumpsuits, shirtdresses, golf skirts, padded jackets. We made these, he said. He explained that until now, the office had been run by just three people: himself, Manager Ham, and Section Chief Jung—all in sales. The Korean CEO was based in Hanoi, where he appointed a Vietnamese representative to handle local affairs while he himself focused on sales, operating under the title of managing director and running two factories. The smaller Korean office handled domestic contracts and accounting. Up until last year, the sales team had managed everything on their own, but it had become too much, so now they were hiring an admin. Manager Kim noted that with her background at a confectionery company, Yeongin would catch on quickly. He asked if she’d be able to communicate with the Vietnamese staff in English. When she said it wouldn’t be an issue, he led her out of the sample room to show her the workspace: four desks with no partitions, one of which was vacant. At the center of the room stood a large table for inspecting fabric and samples. Three days later, Yeongin started working at that office. She took the empty desk.  Yeongin took an old cup she’d found in the corner of the office, filled it with water, and slowly poured it into the ZZ plant pot. She’d never seen a money plant so large. Placed right at the entrance in front of a partition bearing the company name in Korean, its leaves spread out like a giant fan. It was as tall as she was. Its leaves were dark and glossy, not a single one wilted, yet in the four months she’d been with the company she hadn’t seen anyone water it. She rinsed the cup at the officetel kitchenette and set it beside the grimy coffee maker that Manager Kim used each morning. Without addressing anyone in particular, she said to the others in the office, I just watered the ZZ plant. You won’t need to for a while. ZZ plant? We have one of those? Manager Kim asked, standing up and rubbing his face. He craned his neck in the direction she pointed, then walked over to look. Section Chief Jung, who’d been staring at his monitor, got up to join him. It’s right here.  So it’s been here the whole time, Jung said. Manager Kim explained the plant had been a gift from a client about two years earlier. I guess it’s been here all along, he echoed. When Yeongin asked who had been watering it, both men looked at each other, baffled. Neither had known it was there, so who could have? At lunch, Yeongin went downstairs with Manager Ham, thinking two things. First, how had such a massive ZZ plant survived for two years, apparently unnoticed and without a drop of water? Second, how had three people managed the workload alone until now, when the four of them could barely keep up? That morning, as soon as the morning meeting ended, Manager Kim and Section Chief Jung had gone off site—one to a client, the other to a warehouse—and would likely miss lunch altogether. Just another ordinary day. During her first couple of months at the company, Yeongin had been so busy she barely had time to think. She was responsible for managing payments and the complicated logistics. Some cargo had to go from China to Korea, then to Vietnam. Others could be shipped directly from China to Vietnam. Still others, starting in Vietnam, had to pass through Seoul, be split up and delivered to Hoengseong and Hwanggan for buyer confirmation, then return to Vietnam via Seoul. Most shipments traveled by sea, which meant they were at the mercy of ocean weather. Yeongin loaded goods onto ships docked at ports where she’d never been, then waited for those ships she’d never seen to cross the ocean. Sometimes, typhoons would delay vessels at port. And there would often be accidents: thread or zipper colors didn’t match the samples; inner pockets were poorly stitched; jackets were finished with even the outer pockets sewn shut; the bias tape was a bit crooked; finished leather jackets gave off a foul odor. One shipment that needed to go from China to Vietnam via Korea by Thursday still hadn’t reached Seoul by Tuesday. Another—heavy fabric that should have gone straight from China to Vietnam—arrived in Seoul by air. Once, cargo was mixed up at a Vietnamese port, and instead of boxes ofleggings, they received flame-resistant gloves. That very morning, Yeongin learned the missing leggings shipment was now en route across the Pacific to the Port of Los Angeles. Manager Ham scooped hot bean sprout soup into a small bowl which contained a soft-boiled egg. Sewing is the hardest part of garment production, he said. Really? So many suppliers are involved that if one thing goes wrong, it sets off a chain reaction. And just because we work hard here doesn’t mean things go smoothly. There’s always something beyond our control. One thing leads to another, one problem leads to the next. It’s always like that. Even after we’ve done our part, we still get called back to handle complaints. There’s no such thing as ‘done’ in this business. I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years, and not once have I felt, ‘Ah, I’m finally done.’ It really drains you, he added, pouring some radish kimchi into the soup and shoving a spoonful into his mouth. He crunched loudly. So, Yeongin, why did you leave your last job again?  Yeongin stared at the washing machine as it neared the end of its first rinse cycle. The laundry, unable to withstand the speed, clung to the drum as it spun. When the rinse cycle ended, water began to fill the drum again. The wet clothes, still mixed with soap suds, started to whirl. With each turn of the drum, bubbles slid down the glass door, and the laundry tumbled from top to bottom. In the sunlight slanting into the laundromat, Yeongin noticed the mess of handprints on the washer door. They looked like the traces of a desperate ghost, groping for some­thing.  A woman entered, carrying laundry in a tarpaulin bag. She glanced at Yeongin, then pulled out two pillows and two cases from the bulging bag, loaded them into a machine, tapped the kiosk buttons, and stepped outside to light a cigarette, leaving the bag wide open on the table. Her curly hair caught the light, glinting copper.  Yeongin unlocked her phone and checked Inbeom’s social media. Her eyes landed on a photo taken on a clear day along a main road. Inbeom was among a group of protestors walking past a row of ginkgo trees. The camera was aimed at the flags and flagpoles above, each bearing a different banner, so only the top of a hat was visible at the bottom of the frame. Yeongin recognized it as Inbeom’s. In the next photo was Inbeom’s face, shot from above. Yeongin studied the image. Inbeom had pulled her hat low, revealing only the tip of her nose and mouth. The caption read: #258. There were five comments. Two came from ad accounts. One was a standard message of support. Another mocked: All the democracy folks, the woke, the disabled, the queers—soon as the sun’s out, they all crawl out. One comment pointed out Inbeom’s braless chest: omg you can totally see her nipples lol. Inbeom had only replied to that last one. Yeongin reread her words, though she’d read them many times before. Take a good look, you dickhead. That was her last post—two months earlier.  Yeongin opened the washer door and pulled out the clumped laundry, shaking it loose. According to Manager Ham, the terry cloth beach ponchos had been delivered two years ago. The retailer had filed a complaint now, claiming color transfer had occurred while the stock sat in a warehouse. But it’s been two years! Manager Kim shrieked after hanging up the phone. Scrubbing his face with both hands, he turned to Yeongin. Once they arrive, let’s run them through the washer, he said. Just a basic wash. Don’t use the dryer, though. The fabric might shrink. After inspecting the wet ponchos, flipping them inside out and back again to check their condition, Yeongin gathered the bundle in her arms and left the laundromat. Even as she walked across the short crosswalk, sweat trickled down her back. The elevator to the twelfth floor was crowded. Young people heading up to the thirteenth sipped iced coffees from plastic cups and joked with one another, bursting into laughter. Their voices were so loud and sharp they seemed to be attacking each other. Yeongin often ran into them in the elevator, but she had no idea what they did for work. How is it? Are the stains coming out? Manager Kim asked as soon as she stepped into the office. Yeongin nodded. Yup, they’re all gone. Relieved, he glanced at the four boxes stacked near the entrance. Inside were forty-eight ponchos, divided evenly among the boxes. From that day on, Yeongin shuttled between the office and the laundromat with the ponchos. She waited for each wash cycle to finish, then brought the wet ponchos back to the office to dry them. There wasn’t enough space to hang all the laundry at once, so she had to wash the forty-eight ponchos over several days. Though September was almost over, the heat was relentless. Every time she crossed the street on her way to the laundromat, she inhaled the hot air and was startled to realize it was the same temperature as the human body. Outside, it was hot and humid, but inside, the office was so cold she wore a cardigan. They couldn’t turn off the AC—if only for the sake of the laundry. A message came in from Vietnam: the rainy season had begun. What was worse, this year’s rain was unusually frequent, making it difficult to manage the fabric. Before she took the ponchos to the laundromat, Yeongin carefully removed the tags using embroidery scissors and a needle, then reattached them after the ponchos dried. While waiting for the machine to finish, she checked Inbeom’s social media. There were no updates. She stared at the top of Inbeom’s head, just visible beneath the cluster of colorful flags, then slipped her phone back into her pocket.  It had been over a year since Yeongin last had any contact with Inbeom. She counted the months, recalling their last meeting. They’d both been busy with work and hadn’t seen each other for a while. They decided to meet in Mangwon-dong in Seoul, a place everyone seemed to go, and ate at a small restaurant.  Inbeom looked worn out. Her hair was unkempt, tied loosely at the nape of her neck, and she gave off a musty laundry smell she didn’t seem to be aware of. Mid-meal, Yeongin opened a shopping app and ordered a high-performance laundry detergent, shipping it to Inbeom’s address. When she showed Inbeom the order screen, telling her to mix it into her wash, Inbeom said flatly, Don’t use that app. That company kills people.  Okay, okay, Yeongin said with a nod, spooning some fried rice into her mouth. The food was salty and sweet, so she kept reaching for her water.  After the meal, they went to a nearby café—an old two-story Western-style house converted into a coffee shop with a spacious yard. They climbed the stairs from the yard to the second floor and found seats in what must have once been someone’s bedroom. There were four small tables, just big enough for two people to sit face-to-face. A zelkova tree extended its branches toward the large window overlooking the yard, and Yeongin made Inbeom take that seat. Sit by the tree. Look at it. Inbeom stretched her legs out comfortably. Over coffee served with cinnamon sticks as stirrers, they talked about ordinary things. Food, health, work. Cruel stories Inbeom had come across recently. Elderly men asking students at the Wednesday protests against Japanese wartime sexual slavery if they were there to learn how to become prostitutes. A mother, hoping to get her son nominated for office, shouting through a megaphone in front of parents who had lost their children in a tragedy. Stories so cruel they felt unreal. Yeongin didn’t want to understand them—she didn’t think she could, and she didn’t want to dwell on them either, so she changed the subject to work, where she was living, where she used to live, their childhoods, news about relatives who had emigrated to the US, elections in some foreign country. Then, when the word “war” came up, Inbeom’s tone shifted. Why do you call it a war? she said to Yeongin. It’s not war. It’s genocide. As of yesterday, eighty thousand tons of bombs have been dropped there. Eighty thousand tons, on a strip of land that small. How could those bombs tell the difference between soldiers and civilians, between children and adults? How can you call that a war? Yeongin listened half-heartedly. Yes, yes, you’re right. Inbeom was always outraged about something. Her concerns were countless—too many for Yeongin to grasp. Those awful people weren’t Yeongin. And words like “war” and “genocide” belonged to a time and place too far away. She nodded, changed the subject, and the conversation carried on. Later, Yeongin would replay that moment again and again—the moment when she thought they had moved on and Inbeom thought they hadn’t. Inbeom believed they were talking about the same thing, and Yeongin believed they had finished talking about it and were onto something else. They exchanged a few more words. When they both realized what had happened, they looked at each other. Inbeom nodded slowly, and Yeongin gave a bitter smile. A crow landed in the zelkova tree. The crow, with a large beak and gleaming black feathers, turned its head, scanned the area, then flew off again. Yeongin watched it. When she turned back, Inbeom was quietly staring into her coffee. The cinnamon stick teetered on the edge of the saucer. She fumbled with the cup, scratched her nose with her index finger, and said, Eonni. Her tone was the same as always, but Yeongin noticed that her fingers were trembling. These days . . . Inbeom began, then cleared her throat. She took a deep breath, as if the words were difficult, then slowly exhaled and looked at Yeongin. When the silence stretched on, Yeongin blinked in surprise, waiting for her to continue. Tears welled in Inbeom’s eyes but dried before they could fall. It’s hard to talk to people lately, Inbeom said. There are things that matter to me. I think they should matter to other people too, so I bring them up. But when I do, they become trivial. They become nothing as I talk about them. Then people look at me like, Why are you still going on about that? Or they give me this look like, Why bring that up now? Like they’re annoyed or feel sorry for me. That’s when I realize, they don’t care. Not at all. These things that mean so much to me, they mean nothing to them. I see it. And you don’t know how much that’s killing me.  Killing you? Yeongin thought about what Inbeom had said. She thought about it when she was alone, or alone in a crowd. As if quietly asking herself or shouting into the wind. When she sat on the edge of her bed, struggling to wake up. When she stepped into the bathroom in the morning and gazed into the mirror streaked with toothpaste foam. When she splashed cold water on her face until it went numb. When she stood in the subway on her way to work, packed in tight, her shoulders and hips pressing into strangers. When she handed over her meal ticket at the cafeteria that served the same menu day in, day out. When she sat behind her partition, lips clamped shut, the taste of garlic and chili pepper lingering no matter how much she brushed her teeth. When she stuck and removed memo notes, trying to re-prioritize tasks that had to be done today or maybe tomorrow at the latest. When she opened her desk drawer and stared at the clutter, trying to remember what she was looking for. When she stared at the smeared handprints on the subway door on her way home. Killing you? Why go that far? Why say something like that? Since that day, Inbeom hadn’t reached out, and neither had Yeongin. She was tired of everything about Inbeom, but still checked her socials now and then. New posts showed up every seven to ten days. Not about where Inbeom was or what she did or was doing. Just announcements of what had happened in a certain place, what was going to happen. She often added hashtags like #massacre, #colonialist, #genocide, #colonialism. About a month after they’d stopped talking, Yeongin came across a flyer on Inbeom’s page. Under the question “Still fresh and sweet?” was the caption: “Strawberries, peaches, grapefruits grown on land soaked in occupation and massacre.”* The post included images of beverages distributed in South Korea, and among them, a children’s drink and a peach-flavored beverage made and sold by the company where Yeongin worked.  * “Under the question ‘Still fresh and sweet?’ was the caption: ‘Strawberries, peaches, grapefruits grown on land soaked in occu­pation and massacre.’” —From a BDS Mart pamphlet produced by Palestine Peace Solidarity Hunched over at her desk, Yeongin read the flyer from start to finish. She read it again, with a tightness in her chest. In a strained attempt at polite, friendly language, the flyer explained how Israeli forces were stealing water and fruit trees from Palestinian farmland, and how people were being injured and killed on the very land where those trees had grown. As she read, Yeongin pictured Inbeom’s parched, vacant face staring at her. You don’t know my life either. You don’t know what I have to do or what I have to put up with. Don’t take it out on me. She wrote messages like that to Inbeom, then deleted them. When the mix of worry and resentment became too much, she couldn’t help herself and wrote: You’re not going to die because of those things. You can’t die because of them. They can’t kill you. Because they happened to someone else. Because they didn’t even happen to you. She wrote the words in the message box and read them over and over again. Then she pressed X and deleted everything, afraid her finger might hit send. One day, Yeongin saw a short video on Inbeom’s page. The camera moved toward a collapsed building. Between slabs of concrete, children’s feet in small shoes stuck out. Ten pairs, maybe more. Yeongin began to count but lost track. The short legs were dull gray, coated in cement dust. The second video showed another collapsed building. A body hung limp, impaled on a piece of rebar that was jutting up toward the sky. On another day, on a different account, she saw people kneeling in the rubble, brushing dust from the ground with their hands. A pale face slowly emerged, just the forehead, eyes shut. Blood, mixed with cement dust, had crusted into a dirty black on his head. In the next video, people screamed and ran down a hospital corridor. In another one, an older woman and a younger one screamed outside a building after hearing someone’s name. A man rubbed his stubbled face as he sobbed. At first, Yeongin tried to understand what had happened. She watched the short clips again and again, trying to piece everything together. But soon she began drifting through the videos. Whenever she logged on to visit Inbeom’s page, her own feed was flooded with jerky, truncated clips. Videos made by strangers, from places she didn’t know, chosen by people she didn’t know. She hadn’t searched for them, hadn’t expected them, but still, every time, she clicked on one and slipped into another. That’s how she watched coastlines being swallowed by tornadoes and tsunamis. Soldiers struggling to recover something from a rocky shore with sticks. A port city exploding, edited with dubbed sirens. A plane crashing into a runway in slow motion, with the caption “FAKE, FAKE, FAKE” blinking across the screen. A slow-motion shot of something being crushed inside an industrial shredder, overlaid with screams and groans. And even a nighttime street scene with a warning to “watch to the end,” though nothing much happened. Yeongin ultimately arrived at videos where what you saw and what you heard didn’t match. People kneaded dough while lamenting exam results. Calm voices talked about being hurt by a boss, coworkers, professors, friends, family, neighbors, while chopping potatoes on a cutting board. There were people who made and uploaded such videos. Yeongin watched them before falling asleep. Videos that left her confused because the visuals didn’t match the audio. Videos that reassured her because she didn’t have to focus on either. Sounds that easily faded into the background and helped her sleep. Yeongin, could you come here for a minute? She was flustered when Manager Yoon called her over to his desk and pointed at the monitor. It was her email correspondence with a client. It was an email she had sent, with several people, including Manager Yoon, copied. She couldn’t understand why he was bringing it up. As she stood there, confused, Yoon told her to read it.    No, no, just read what you wrote. Just the part you wrote. He pushed a few printouts toward her. They were emails Yeongin had written over the past two weeks. Do you think the person reading this would understand what you’re trying to say? he asked. Yeongin hadn’t noticed a problem, but reading them over again, she saw they were a bit hard to follow. Sometimes the word order was inverted, and a few sentences lacked a subject or object. But whether the reader would understand or not, Yeongin couldn’t say. As she stood there, pale, he tapped his desk with his index finger, watching her. What exactly is the problem?  Yeongin opened her umbrella and stepped into the rain. The wind made it hard to keep it steady. The umbrella, stretched taut against the gusts, bent under the pressure. Her shoes and pant hems were still damp from her morning commute, and now her feet were soaked again. She pulled the umbrella closer and kept walking. She needed to stop by the eye clinic before her lunch break ended and get back to the office. She crossed to the building opposite her office and waited on a dark-upholstered couch. In the exam room, she rested her chin and forehead on the slit lamp and stared into the light as the doctor instructed. A bright beam passed through her eyes. The doctor stepped back, stuffed a fist in his coat pocket, and turned to the monitor. He asked her if she worked somewhere dry and dusty. Then he told her she had micro-abrasions, and they were making her eyes sting. With a prescription for artificial tears and anti-inflammatory drops, Yeongin crossed the rain-soaked street to return to work. The rain had gotten heavier in just a short time, and even under the umbrella, she got wet. When she stepped back into the office, wiping her face with her hand, Manager Ham, who’d stayed behind for lunch, turned to look. What a mess out there, he muttered. The rain kept coming. A period between summer and autumn. A record-breaking storm was sweeping through East Asia, and in Korea, it was the heaviest rainfall in 117 years. News reports showed landslides and flooding in low-lying areas, with homes, streets, farms, and orchards underwater. Yeongin stood by the window next to Manager Ham, peering down as if over a cliff. But there was nothing to see. Just sheets of rain cascading down the glass like a waterfall. The day before, a message had come from the factory in Hanoi, saying they were evacuating. The Red River, which starts in China and runs through Vietnam, was close to overflowing, and authorities had issued an evacuation order. It had been pouring for days in both countries, and when the Chinese opened their dams to relieve pressure, the Red River surged. The factory, located near the river, evacuated nearly two hundred workers. Not long after, word came that the typhoon heading for the Gulf of Tonkin had intensified. Both Manager Ham and Manager Kim looked grim, saying if the factory flooded, they’d miss multiple delivery deadlines, even after the rain stopped. You okay? The night before, Yeongin had posted a message in the Zalo group chat for the first time. Everyone who normally emailed or messaged in English was there. Linh, Trang, Robert, Ngoc Uoc—everyone okay? I’m fine. I’m home, but my window broke.   Hanging in there. I’m okay. For now. In the dark, Yeongin read the replies while listening to the wind rattle the windows. Rain pelted the glass like someone throwing handfuls of rice. By morning, the evacuation order had been lifted. The factory had avoided flooding, but logistics in Hanoi had ground to a halt. Deliveries had to be postponed. Manager Kim and Section Chief Jung left early that morning to meet with buyers. In the Korean staff group chat, someone posted a few photos with the caption: On the way to the factory. Uprooted roadside trees lay toppled across the asphalt, roots clinging to red soil. Crushed signs, broken branches, torn scraps of siding were strewn across the wet streets. The last post was a dashcam video about two minutes long. A bulldog figurine bobbed its head on a dusty dashboard, and a rosary swung from the rearview mirror. A truck loaded with coiled wire drove ahead, with several motorcycles in front and behind it. Then it happened, as the car moved slowly along the typhoon-ravaged road and approached the bridge. The truss bridge, suspended between a gray sky and the murky river, began to sink at the center. So slowly, so silently, it seemed as if nothing was happening. Like a sandcastle quietly collapsing. The ground just disappeared, as if the other side hadn’t fallen but rather this side had lifted. The truck and motorcycles that had entered the bridge only seconds before vanished, as if they’d slipped over a crest. The video cut off just as one motorcycle, moments away from falling in, hesitated and began to reverse. Manager Kim, still out on business, commented beneath the video: That’s why you never go near the river when the water’s up.  Yeongin tilted her head back, dropped in the anti-inflammatory drops near her tear ducts, and closed her eyes. A dull ache spread behind her eyes before fading. You know how it poured like crazy yesterday? Manager Kim said, sounding glum. He was back from his meetings, biting into a roll of kimbap wrapped in foil. He said he hadn’t eaten lunch yet, though it was nearly dinnertime. Even in that downpour, I drove all the way to Hwanggan to meet the buyer. While I was at it, I handed over a million won in gift certificates. Then, on the way back to Seoul, the rain started coming down real hard. Suddenly I got scared. Had a few close calls on the road. Somehow made it to Seoul, but I couldn’t go home. So I ended up coming back here instead. I was sitting alone in the office, exhausted, and I don’t know, I just started tearing up. I felt so alone. I asked myself, why the hell am I doing this? Yeongin watched the tears well up in his eyes. He kept chewing, cheeks puffed out with kimbap, lost in thought. In the sample room, Section Chief Jung was on the phone, head bowed, talking to a client. When Manager Kim finished eating, he balled up the foil and tossed it toward the trash. Alright, alright, he said, slapping both cheeks before opening his eyes wide. It was 5:30 p.m. With the Vietnam office and factory shut down, there wasn’t anything Yeongin could do. She slipped off her slippers and put her feet into her wet shoes. I’m heading out. See you Monday. Manager Ham, who usually worked late on Fridays, stood and said he was going to grab a coffee. He followed her out. Standing beside him at the elevator, Yeongin pressed the button and waited. The elevator lingered on the thirteenth floor for a long time before finally descending. When the doors opened, laughter erupted. There was no room to squeeze in among the people who’d just burst into laughter. Let’s catch the next one, Manager Ham said. He sent the elevator down before hitting the button again. That thirteenth floor—I think it’s a pyramid scheme. When Yeongin asked how he could tell, he replied, Young people, moving in herds, eyes all lit up. What else could it be but a cult or MLM?  At home, Yeongin opened the fridge and took out some frozen rice. The plastic container cracked loudly in her hand. She covered it with cling wrap and put it in the microwave. While she waited, she checked Inbeom’s page for any new posts. Where had Inbeom been last night? What had she thought about, listening to the rain? That night, Yeongin had a dream. She was speeding down a windy street on a motorcycle. Broken branches from yellow flame trees, torn khaya leaves, cold rain hitting her forehead and eyes. Tears streamed as she rode. She felt her body tilt as the ground slipped out from under her—slowly, starting from the front wheel, sliding, sliding without end. On and on the wheel tilted, until it tapped her forehead as she lay in bed, and she opened her eyes. It was so dark she couldn’t tell the time. Still lying down, she touched her forehead, then fumbled for her phone. She checked the time, pressed the phone to her chest, then dialed Inbeom. After a few rings, Inbeom answered. Mmm, she said. Eonni.     Hearing her voice, Yeongin held her breath. Where was she? There was barely any background noise. She didn’t sound like she was out. Yeongin listened to the silence, then hung up. She closed her aching eyes and drifted back to sleep.  She woke to the sound of rain on her umbrella. In the dim room, she saw a figure standing. I’m turning on the light, Inbeom said, before Yeongin had a chance to react. Yeongin kept her eyes closed until they adjusted to the brightness. When she opened them, Inbeom was standing by the light switch, looking down at her, a plastic bag stretched taut in her hand, heavy with something. As Yeongin lay there, blinking, Inbeom asked, You sick? Yeongin said no. What the heck? Inbeom let out a sigh, shoulders slumping. Why’d you hang up without saying anything? Inbeom shuffled into the kitchen, muttering that Yeongin had scared her. Then she moved back and forth between the kitchen and bathroom, asking if Yeongin had a large bowl or basin. There was a clatter of dishes, the smell of rain and outside air. Is it still raining? It stopped. Inbeom brought over the large mixing bowl Yeongin used for kneading dough and set it on the floor beside her. Inside, a few small grayish-brown fish swam in murky water. They’re guppies, she said. Someone gave them to me, but they keep multiplying. I don’t know what to do anymore. Yeongin watched the fish circle the bowl, their fins brushing the bottom, and dipped her index finger into the water. The fish darted to the edge. There were five. The water was slippery but not too cold. Inbeom told her she’d left a basin of tap water in the bathroom and to let it sit a day or two before transferring the fish. The chlorine has to evaporate and the cold needs to go. I brought food too. Yeongin glanced at Inbeom, who was watching the fish, and looked back at the guppies. I guess I’ll need an aquarium. Yeah. And if you can, get an air pump. Yeongin asked if she remembered the guppies they’d had as kids. The aquarium seemed big, but maybe that was just because we were small. To keep the adult guppies from eating the fry, we’d put an isolation box inside the tank, but one night the water level dropped so low that all the babies died. When I woke up, they were stuck to the sides of the box, all dried out. Can that really happen in one night? Do you remember? Did you see it? Of course I remember. I stood next to you crying. I thought I imagined it. I mean, how could something like that happen overnight? Maybe there were too many fish all of a sudden and there wasn’t enough air. Maybe. Yeah, there were so many baby fish. Did the rain stop? It has now. Yeongin asked if Inbeom wanted a pillow, if she wanted to sleep a bit. Inbeom shook her head. Yeongin shut her mouth and waited. It was a strange hour—too late to go back to sleep, too early to eat or start the day. She felt uneasy, afraid that Inbeom might get up and leave at any moment. If you didn’t, if you could give me a little more time, I might ask how you’ve been, how work is going, Yeongin thought. And maybe you’d say it’s not great, that it’s getting better, or that it’s just okay. And I’d say, Oh really? And maybe later, I could say I’m sorry. Maybe later. A little later. The sun will rise soon, Inbeom said, still looking toward the dark window. Yeongin was startled, as if Inbeom had replied to something she hadn’t said aloud. She thought: What do you mean, Inbeom? Why would you say something so obvious, like it’s a lie? Are you serious? What? Inbeom frowned, squinting at Yeongin. Why would I need to be serious about the sun rising? In a couple of hours, it’ll come up, Inbeom said. Let’s go watch it together. Before leaving the house, Yeongin took two apples from the fridge. She asked Inbeom whether she should feed the guppies, and Inbeom said it should be fine since they’d be back soon, but then changed her mind and said she might as well feed them, just in case. Yeongin wrapped the apples in paper napkins, slipped them into the pocket of her windbreaker, grabbed a water bottle, and followed Inbeom out. The small used car Inbeom had bought five years before was parked down the street. When she opened the passenger door, a maple leaf wedged in the frame landed on Yeongin’s foot. She placed her feet on the mud-stained floor mat and fastened her seatbelt. Inbeom’s fingertips on the steering wheel were stained yellow and black, likely from conté crayon or charcoal. Inbeom had always drawn with conté. Yeongin didn’t know much about Inbeom’s art. Once, she’d received a drawing of a cotton plant on kraft paper. She’d framed it and hung it on her wall. But a leak from the upstairs unit had soaked the wall, and mold bloomed around the frame. That was a long time ago. What she remembered more clearly were the drawings Inbeom made as a kid. Comic strips in lined notebooks. One was about a girl with impossibly long, yarn-like legs that she kept coiled up under her skirt. When people mocked her for having short legs, she’d undo the ribbon tying them up and shoot up into the air, cackling. Is this better? Does this look better to you? she’d ask. Yeongin had liked that one especially. When Inbeom threw the notebook away, saying it was nothing, Yeongin rescued it and tucked it between the pages of a photo album. She’d been in high school then, and Inbeom in middle school. They left the city and headed southeast. As they crossed the city limits, scattered raindrops fell but quickly stopped. Yeongin placed an apple on her lap, pushed her thumb into the stem end, and split it in half. She held one half to Inbeom’s mouth and bit into the other, gazing out at the mountain shrouded in darkness beyond the highway. Somewhere out there, there must be a village, but it wasn’t visible except for the occasional flicker of light. The farther away it was, the more slowly it seemed to reach her. Yeongin thought: The base of the mountain must lead to the village, the village to the fields and paddies. Water would still be draining from the rice fields, the rainwater in the creeks would still be swirling, winding downstream. Peach and pear trees would have dropped their fruit onto the soaked ground, the rice stalks must be flattened and submerged, barn floors would be a muddy mess, the chickens and pigs dead, the bellies of cows soaked, kittens swept away. And those who saw and heard all this must be thinking: How are we supposed to live now? It rained too much, Yeongin said. It rained a lot in Vietnam, too. Really? Trees were uprooted. Windows and signs smashed and torn down. But none of it felt unfamiliar. It felt like I’d seen it before. Like it had happened here. If someone told me it wasn’t Vietnam but somewhere in Korea, I’d have believed them. That’s how it looked. Yeah. Yeongin watched as Inbeom let go of the steering wheel with one hand to take another bite of apple. She chewed hard, in big, determined bites, like she wanted to finish it fast, then handed the core to Yeongin. She took it with a napkin and wadded it into a ball. Inbeom stared straight ahead, still chewing. Inbeom, Yeongin said. Do you ever think about how bad people can be? I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. What kind of bad? Just . . . regular bad. The kind that’s everywhere. Yeongin looked down at the apple in her hand. The bitten part had already started to brown. The people you mentioned. The bad things they do. But the more I think about it, the harder it is to figure out what makes something bad. Yeah, it’s hard. On the heart. On the mind. Yeah. It’s not something I did, but I can’t say it didn’t pass through my hands either. Lately, everywhere I look, that’s all I see. No place is safe anymore. Inbeom turned on the signal and merged into the right lane. Rockfall barriers flashed white in the headlights. The slopes where black trees stood alternated with pale retaining walls. I went to the West Sea once, when I was twenty, Inbeom said.  There were four of us, I think. My friend’s uncle had rented a bungalow by the coast, but something came up and he couldn’t go, so we went instead. When we arrived, the people in the next bungalow were out on their terrace, frying something in oil. Mitten crabs. They said the area was full of them.Just a short walk away was a mudflat, and apparently it was crawling with crabs. One of my friends said we should go right away, so we borrowed a bucket and some hand hoes from the caretaker and headed out. We wandered between the mud and the rocks, collecting mitten crabs. It was fun. We kept finding them, spotting them everywhere. We dug with the hoes again and again, pulling up more crabs. Even after we’d filled over half the bucket, we didn’t stop. Then one friend held out their palm and said, Look at this. It was a baby octopus. It was so small, smaller than a pinky finger, from its head to the tip of a tentacle. It was strange. So tiny, but unmistakably an octopus. We stared at it, fascinated. Then that friend opened their hand and dropped it straight into the bucket of mitten crabs. The crabs reared up, claws raised in fury. Someone gasped, but it was already too late. In a frenzy, they swarmed the octopus and tore it apart. They tore it to pieces. We just stood there, staring into the bucket, stunned. I wanted to dump the whole thing out, leave the crabs behind, and go back to the bungalow. My knees and butt were soaked with mud, and I was cold, freaked out, and shivering. I kept saying we should stop, that we already had more than enough, but my friends didn’t want to leave. They kept digging, calling out, Look over here, over here. Soon the mood soured. One of them turned to me and said, What’s your problem? Said it’d been forever since they’d done something like this. That all they wanted was to have a little fun. And if I was done, I could head back to the bungalow by myself. In the evening, we fried the mitten crabs, just like the people in the next bungalow had done. We borrowed a burner and a pot from the caretaker, along with some flour. I ate the crabs too. I didn’t want to make my friends uncomfortable. But we couldn’t even finish frying all of them. The leftover crabs, as if they’d run out of strength, stayed curled up, their legs tight against their bodies. Whenever the bucket tilted, they clattered like wet gravel. In the end, we handed the whole bucket with the rest of the crabs over to the caretaker. Later, one of the friends wrote about the trip on her blog. How fun it had been, how delicious the crabs were. I was part of the story too. She posted a photo of my feet in the mudflat with the caption: The friend who kept whining about going back to the bungalow because she didn’t want to get sunburned. I don’t think the friend who dropped the octopus into the bucket was bad. What kind of malice could there have been? And the rest of us, who just stood there and watched while the octopus got torn apart—what kind of malice could we possibly have had? We were just stupid, that’s all. Eonni, if the world ever goes to hell and we can’t turn it back, I don’t think it’ll be because people are bad or full of malice. It’ll be because we’re stupid. That numb indifference. The kind where you see something and feel nothing. That kind of thing. I just didn’t want to be part of it again. Stuffing a bucket full of mitten crabs like it’s a game, then tossing in a baby octopus—how easily it happens, how it becomes nothing, how we pretend it’s nothing. I never want to do that again.  I’m just trying not to turn into that, Inbeom said with a sigh. I think I’m a little worn out these days. That’s why I acted like that—why I spoke so harshly to you. I’m sorry.  They were stuck on the road for a long time as they passed through two interchanges into the city. Morning arrived as they stopped and started. The sun would be fully up before they reached their destination, but Yeongin didn’t mind. Inbeom didn’t seem to either.    Maybe we can just sit by the beach for a while, have a coffee,and then head back.  Yeongin opened the center console and found a packet of biscuits, but Inbeom couldn’t remember how old they were. As Yeongin nibbled on them, she looked out at the dull morning light. The mountains, just beginning to change with autumn, looked dusty and gray. The autumn leaves won’t be that vibrant this year, Inbeom said. I heard if it rains too much right before the season starts, the colors fade. Really? The sun came up between scattered clouds, casting a cold light. Once they passed the congested stretch of road, Inbeom started speeding again. Yeongin pulled up the navigation app on her phone and scrolled through the route. After passing a small village, the road snaked ahead like a lazy serpent. It felt like they were crossing a mountain pass. On the map, the earlier road had been marked red, then yellow. Now the road they were on was green. Yeongin said that up ahead, the road was marked blue. Have you ever seen that? No. What does blue mean? Must mean no traffic. Like, we’ll be able to go really fast. They sped down the quiet road and entered a tunnel.It was long and narrow, with a high ceiling. It looked newly built. About halfway in, Inbeom leaned forward toward the steering wheel and began to slow down. Yeongin saw the car a second later. It had crashed into the right wall, blocking the lane. The tunnel was dim, making it hard to see. For some reason, the car’s hazard lights weren’t on, and from a distance, only the faint rear light was visible, just enough to signal something was there. Inbeom pulled up behind the wreck and turned on her hazards. What do we do . . . she murmured. After exchanging a glance with Yeongin, she unbuckled her seatbelt and got out. Yeongin climbed out too. The air smelled of cement and blew her hair back. She followed Inbeom and peered into the driver’s side. The driver was still in the seat, slumped toward the passenger side. When Inbeom knocked on the window, he slowly straightened. Inbeom opened the door. An elderly man with age spots on his cheeks stared at them, dazed. Even when they asked if he was okay, he didn’t answer. He just looked at them like they were ghosts. A large crate full of farming tools sat in the passenger seat. While Inbeom asked if he could move, Yeongin pulled out her phone to call emergency services. She stared at the damp leaves stuck to the rusty hood while she waited to connect. The call didn’t go through. She tried again. Just then, the old man turned the wheel. His old Sorento lurched forward, scraping along the tunnel wall with a harsh screech.    No! Inbeom clung to the door and was dragged a few steps. Yeongin grabbed her by the waist. She panicked when Inbeom wouldn’t let go of the door. Stop! they shouted together. Turn off the engine! Stop!The old man stepped on the accelerator a few more times, trying to move the car forward, then slumped back, drained. He stared blankly as Inbeom reached in and pulled the key from the ignition. His breathing was now shallow and uneven. Blood trickled from the right side of his head, down his temple, and off his chin. Inbeom held his hands, which kept reaching for the wheel, and gazed into his eyes. Sir, look at me. Just look at me. Yeongin covered one ear against the roar of the jet fan and the wind as she spoke to emergency services. Not knowing the name of the tunnel, she gave the last town they’d passed and read off the man’s license plate. Her voice was hoarse, and she had to clear her throat several times. After the call, she looked toward the tunnel entrance. Outside, it was blindingly bright. That’s why they hadn’t seen the wreck when they entered. With no traffic ahead, cars would be entering at high speed, just like they had. What if the next driver couldn’t slow down in time? As the thought crossed her mind, a car entered the tunnel, its square headlights cutting through the dark. Yeongin stood beside Inbeom’s car, hazards flashing, and waved her arms. The first car crossed the lane and sped past, stirring up a gust of wind. Then a second car passed, then a third, a fourth. Each one switched lanes early to avoid the wreck, but the fifth car didn’t slow until the last second. As it swerved sharply, it let out a long, angry honk. Yeongin understood the driver’s fury. She also understood the moment that had just passed. In that split second, she’d seen it: the collisions, one after another, the bodies tangled and thrown from the crash. First her own. Then Inbeom’s and the old man’s. Then the approaching driver’s. The next person’s. The chain reaction. She understood that all of them, in that single instant, had moved from one possibility to another, from one moment to the next. But what about the next time? Am I crying? She wondered: Do I believe? In the driver who just passed? In the one coming next? Do I believe they’ll stop? That they’ll slow down? It was hard for her to say yes, and that was what scared her most. Inbeom was calmly looking into the old man’s face, saying something, and he now had both legs outside the car and was gazing back at her. Inbeom’s hands were streaked with his blood. Yeongin wiped her face with her sleeve and walked toward their car. She had no choice—no choice at all. Though she felt like this, could she act? Could she not? She opened the driver’s side door, leaned in, and pressed the horn. We’re here, we’re here, we’re here. Inbeom glanced over. Kwahhh— A deafening blast filled the tunnel. Yeongin turned her face toward the oncoming headlights and hit the horn again. The wind kept rushing in. The cars entering the tunnel surged closer, like pistons in a cylinder.

by Hwang Jungeun

Fiction

Expectation

Seojin lay on the massage table as aroma oil was rubbed softly across her neck and shoulders. I sat next to her on the foot massage chair and carefully watched her expression. “Does it hurt?” “It’s uncomfortable,” she grumbled. “I lost my breath lying down right away, and now my head’s spinning.” The masseuse asked her to turn on her side and rushed to tuck a body pillow between her legs. Seojin let out a breath of relief. She was going on twenty-five weeks pregnant but still so stick-thin it was hard to tell. Perhaps because she had been a dancer for a while, she seemed to be one of those people whose bump doesn’t show even when they’re due in a few weeks. When I was pregnant with her, weight stuck all over my body and my belly was at least twice the size of the bellies of other expecting moms. It was hard for me to even stand or sit properly. Good thing she hadn’t inherited that flaw of mine. “I have a Brazilian scheduled for next week,” Seojin said. “The nurse usually shaves you before birth, but people say it’s not the most pleasant experience. Once you get one wax, though, apparently you can’t help but go every couple of weeks. It’s so comfortable when you’re on your period!” “Umma,” she went on. “I swear my pubic hair’s gotten thicker since getting pregnant.” “Shh!” I said, shocked. “The baby will hear everything. Do you know how careful I was with food when I had you? You have to watch your words, too.” Seojin just laughed, as if I were overreacting.  The masseuse working on my feet pressed harder. I tapped her on the shoulder. She jolted in surprise and asked if I was feeling uncomfortable.  “You can stop with me now,” I told her. “Go help with my daughter. Just be gentle with her, she’s very fragile right now.”  Two of the spa employees began to carefully massage and rub Seojin’s body. She let out a small groan at their every touch.  “Not there—below her chest. No, not that strong. Just soft circles. Good.” I instructed them and watched Seojin’s response. She looked satisfied, my baby.  We came out of the spa on the eighth floor of the department store and went to browse the imported children’s clothes two stories up. At Baby Dior, Seojin shrieked and filled her shop­ping basket with all kinds of newborn clothes and sneakers small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.  “Hey, you could get these after we get back from Guam,” I told her, worried.  “What, are you saying you don’t want to get them for me?” Seojin grabbed everything without even glancing at the tags, including items she wouldn’t need for a while. After checking the newborn clothes, she perused dresses for toddlers, then asked me to buy one without hesitation.  “Kids grow fast. Right, Umma?”  My daughter, who used my money without an ounce of shame or apology. But I didn’t think that was excessive, or even greedy. She was simply enjoying what was given to her. Naturally, readily. When I had told her the baby should be an American citizen and I would look at hospitals in Guam, she’d willingly accepted that, too. Though she did add a little note at the end.  “Guam’s fine, but are you sure we can’t go to New York? It’s been so long since I’ve seen Central Park and shopped around.”  “Passport control is complicated there. And they’ve cracked down on birth tourism before.”  Visas had become harder to come by after the 9/11 attack, and it was now difficult to travel to a big city like New York to give birth. Never mind that thirty years ago anyone with money could do it. The fact that I hadn’t been able to go then was my life’s biggest regret.  My father-in-law had been strictly against it. He’d accused me of wanting to make a Yankee out of a precious member of the esteemed Chungju Ji family and refused to pay a single cent for the trip. I’d given up then, but I should have done whatever it took to get on that plane to New York. We ended up having to go through all kinds of unnecessary stress for Seojin’s study abroad in middle school as well as her college admissions, all because of her grandfather’s ridiculous insistence that her birthplace be the same as her ancestors’.  But in three months, Seojin would follow a carefully set plan to have her baby in Guam. All she had to do was sit back and enjoy the smooth journey I’d prepared for her. Naturally, readily. At the cashier, I watched the growing mound of baby clothes Seojin had so carefully picked out. There was every­thing from newborn onesies to toddler swimsuits. But I knew Seojin easily changed her mind and followed all the latest trends. She would buy new ones when the baby was born. It was such a waste to throw out these brand-new pieces that wouldn’t get to see the light of day, but I didn’t say anything and just paid for it all.  “Thanks, Umma.” Seojin linked her arm through mine as if she’d been waiting for this moment. She grinned, showering me with all kinds of flattery. It was that cute side of hers that made me turn a blind eye to her flaws, that made me give and give even as I tried to stop. “You’re going to stay for dinner?” I asked her.  Seojin nodded to say of course. We made our way to the supermarket on the basement floor, and I was wondering whether to make a seafood or meat dish when Seojin got a video call. She checked the caller before excitedly picking up.  “Jiji!” It was him. “How’s our little Boki? And Dubok’s growing well too?”  I tensed up. That familiar voice. The one who called Seojin “Boki” because he wanted to, then called my grandchild by the ghastly nickname “Dubok.”  Seojin told him she’d come to the department store with me and showed my face on the screen.  “How have you been, Abeonim?” I put on a smile to greet my father-in-law.  His expression quickly hardened.  “Ah . . . Good, good, of course,” he managed to say despite his surprise. The man was so thick—didn’t he know you’re supposed to give back what you receive? Without asking me how I was, he told me curtly to put Boki back on. Their call continued while I pushed the shopping cart through the aisles. “Do you want short rib or rib eye beef?” I asked Seojin, but all I got back was a dismissive shrug. She was immersed in the call. I shot her a look and signaled for her to hang up.  “Hey, I’ll call you later, Jiji.”  She finally hung up. I wasn’t interested in that man’s problems, but Seojin cluelessly began to lay out the details of the summer cold he’d caught recently. He was sick for a couple of days, she said.  After his wife passed away three years ago, my father-in-law called Seojin on a regular basis. He asked when she’d visit next, and said stupid things like “My whole body hurts” and “What if I die soon?” I had hired a housekeeper to help him with chores and act as a conversation buddy, hoping that it would stop him from bothering my daughter, but he still seemed to call her once every three days or so. “The cold’s gotten better,” Seojin said, “but he still has a bad cough. He’s worried it’s tuberculosis.”  “Who gets TB nowadays? He’s just a hypochondriac. Look at him, freaking out over a few coughs.”  “No, Jiji said he coughed up blood. His voice doesn’t sound good either . . .”  I couldn’t help but laugh. The man who climbed up to the springs every morning to drink from them? Coughing up blood? You had to be kidding me.  Seojin went on and on about poor Jiji until I stopped her.  “You didn’t tell him, did you?” “About what?”  “You going to Guam.”  “Of course not. You want him to keel over?”     I told her to make sure no word would get to him, no matter what. He was so old-fashioned that he was bound to make a fuss and try to stop her. “Umma, have I ever not listened to you?” Seojin replied. “I won’t tell him,” she insisted, but I couldn’t trust her. Not when she was so close to her grandfather. Not when sometimes . . . it felt like she liked him more than me.  Seojin told me she wanted mideodeok stew with bean sprouts for dinner, and we headed toward the seafood section. But then she got another call. She hesitated before answering, then whispered a couple of things over the phone and hung up. Her brown eyes glanced this way and that—a tic that came out when she was nervous or anxious about something. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “It’s just . . . Jiji seems to be coughing a lot. He asked me to get some meds for him.”  “Why didn’t he ask his housekeeper?” I shot back. “Of course he has to ask his pregnant granddaughter to run an errand for him.” But Seojin’s reply was naive, just like her. “Why don’t you come with me, Umma? It’s been a while since you’ve seen him, too. We can eat dinner together and show him Dubok’s ultrasound . . .” “I’m fine. Just go yourself.” A wave of hurt came over me. My face must have gone sour, because Seojin grabbed my arm and made a puppy face. “I can’t just ignore a sick person, hm?” she begged. “It’ll be just for today, I promise.” Her cloying sweet talk didn’t make me feel better. She watched me closely before checking the time and saying she had to be on her way. She ran toward the parking lot, leaving me to finish shopping alone. I paused while reaching for the mideodeok in the seafood section. My father-in-law also loved mideodeok stew. People said that it was a miracle if you could chew soft vegetables after seventy, but that tough geezer didn’t even have dentures and still managed to eat the hard sea squirt. “I’m going to live to see our Dubok go to college,” he would say, showing off his strong teeth. “That’s Jiji’s one wish.” A wish that sounded more like a curse. So getting tuberculosis? Him? I didn’t even have it in me to laugh. Now he was using his own health as a weapon to bring Seojin closer. Twenty-seven years had passed since she was born. It was about time he stopped meddling in my—no, my child’s—life. So why did he continue clinging on between us?  *  I always hated that name: Jiji.  When Seojin was six months old, I taught her all kinds of words in the hopes that she’d learn to speak faster. Single-syllable words like “road” or “win,” palatal sounds like “yes” or “shoe” to strengthen her tongue and the muscles in her mouth. But the one I spent the most time on was “Umma.” I wanted to be the first person that my baby would call. I hoped she would mumble anything that could vaguely sound like that—Mama, Amma—but all she did was roll her eyes left to right with no sign of moving her mouth. Only six months later did she begin to babble, and even then her first word wasn’t to me.  “Jiji.” In front of her bright face was my father-in-law.  I learned much later that Jiji meant “grandfather” in Japanese. That it was also an abbreviation of “Harabeoji Ji.” And that my father-in-law had been training Seojin when I would leave to run errands or take a quick nap. So instead, I started to use the word with its original meaning whenever I saw anything bad or dirty. “No, that’s trash, Seojin. It’s jiji.” I’d hoped that Seojin would stop using my father-in-law’s weird nickname, but in spite of my wishes, she began to view it as something positive. At the sight of her grandfather, she would shout “Jiji!” and run into his arms. She only ate her food if he spoon-fed it to her, and even when she tripped and fell or faced any problem, it was he who she turned to first, not me. “Here, my darling. Our little Boki. Come here, tell Jiji everything.” My father-in-law said it was true, your grandchildren were cuter than your own kids, and he never let Seojin out of his sight. At her dol birthday party and her first day of preschool, even her school play—he insisted on placing her right next to himself. It was the same with the day of the lottery to decide which private elementary school she would go to. He insisted on tagging along and claimed he had to pick the raffle ticket. “I have the golden touch. You have to let me do it.” The school I wanted was Lila Elementary, because Seojin had a talent for dance and Lila had a special dance program. Please, let it be Lila . . . I begged in my head as I watched my father-in-law pick from the raffle box. “Kyonggi Elementary.” It wasn’t the result I’d hoped for. And of course, though he was the one who’d fumbled my child’s future, I was the only one who could save her. Luckily, a parent next to me wanted Kyonggi, and we’d decided to trade tickets in secret when my father-in-law took it out of my hand. “Some mom over there asked to trade for Chung-Ang University Elementary,” he said. “That’s the only school for our family. Your husband graduated from there, and they’re the most passionate when it comes to education.” No matter that I was the person who would support Seojin through her entire schooling—he whisked away my spot and ruined my plans. He was relentless, that man.  When I was pregnant with Seojin, my father-in-law was busier preparing for the baby than I was. As soon as he heard that I was expecting, he reserved a private room at a famous hospital in Mukjeong-dong and even went down to Gyeongju to acquire ten bottles of a special herbal tonic from a renowned doctor of traditional Korean medicine. One day, he made me a cassette tape of the best classical pieces for babies in the womb. “This is ‘Minuet in G Minor.’ One of my favorites of Handel’s.”     Whether it was because of my unpredictable hormones or the warmth of a father figure that I’d never felt before, something melted inside me and a few tears escaped my eyes. My father-in-law handed me a handkerchief and patted my shoulder.  “It’s okay, don’t cry. All your worries will get passed on to the child. You have to keep calm during an important time like this.” He stayed with me until I stopped crying, walking me through a few deep breaths and offering his advice. What a thoughtful man, I thought. What a kind father-in-law. Unlike my own father, who had barely spared a thought about me my entire life outside of the occasional attempts to buy my favor, this man took precious care of my feelings.  I would soon learn, though, that his gentle guidance wasn’t out of love for me. It was out of his insistent affection for my child. Three weeks before I was supposed to give birth, a leak appeared in our kitchen ceiling. Water dripped down into our food, but my father-in-law swore by some superstition that if we fixed the ceiling while I was pregnant, the baby would be born with a defect and prevented any work in the kitchen. The whole family had to eat in the living room while the dirty water collected in several pails we had to empty. And that was just the beginning. If you eat duck, he said, the baby’s fingers will come out stuck together, but pork can cause a rash, and eggs will lead to boils. He rattled off these terrifying taboos and refused to let me have any of the things I craved. Instead, I drank so much fish broth to make the baby smart that my breath turned fishy, and I got so sick of it that I still couldn’t bear it twenty-seven years later. He was also behind the decision to register Seojin’s birth in January, a month after her real birthday. “You’ll see when you raise her. She’ll fall behind in school if she’s the youngest in her grade. This is all for Bok’s own good.” I also wanted only the best for my child. For her to eat the best food, for her to grow up without knowing any hardship or pain. I’d even quit my job for her. I had goals for my career, but I had a bigger ambition to be there to watch my child grow up. I wanted to make sure I could give her all the love I hadn’t gotten myself. For the nine months Seojin was in my belly, I planned her future out step-by-step. As for her name, I pondered over it for months. My own parents had named me in a rush the day I was born. They’d barely thought it through, and the meaning of the hanja characters they’d chosen had been such a mess that I’d had to change my name as an adult. But my child’s start in this life would be different. I wanted to give her a name with a good meaning, one that went well with her last name and would still be easy to pronounce. And more than anything, one that would hold all my hopes and dreams for her life. I studied the hanja character dictionary for days before carefully settling on a name:  Seo, “to unfold.” And Jin, “to go forward.”  I secretly hoped my child would be more like me than my wishy-washy husband, who couldn’t make his mind up about anything. That she would be strong-minded and live out her life however she wanted. So I could only be taken aback when my father-in-law said he’d gotten a lucky name from a professional numerologist. The baby’s saju was full of fire, he said, so they needed a name to neutralize it. Like “Bok,” for “luck.” And since “Kyung” was the character assigned to her generation of the Ji family, Kyungbok would be perfect. Even my mother-in-law and my husband were surprised by this episode, but knowing my father-in-law’s stubbornness, they kept quiet. The only person left to fight back was me. “Abeonim, Kyungbok is no name for a girl. Plus, the whole practice of name numerology comes from Japanese colonization anyway. Who actually believes that nonsense nowadays?” “. . . Nonsense?” My father-in-law’s eyes grew wide as his neck and ears went red. Unable to control his anger, he began to huff. “I paid good money to get the best name for my grandchild, and all I get is . . . Nonsense?” I could have sucked it up and kept my mouth shut all this time because I didn’t want to stir up trouble, but I couldn’t allow him to sabotage my child’s future as well. My baby’s name was written as “Undecided” on the official birth certificate for a month until it was later confirmed as Seojin. My father-in-law must have been mad that he hadn’t gotten his way because he took every chance he had to remind me that the characters I’d chosen had too many strokes and were unlucky to use in a child’s name. “They said it’s a name destined for a bad relationship with one’s parents. Especially one’s mom.”  *  Seojin’s apartment was a five-minute drive away from ours.I had found the place for her when she was looking for somewhere to move after the divorce. Since we lived so close together, we visited each other often. Our current routine was to eat Seojin’s favorite mango bingsu at a hotel lounge and go shopping, then come back to eat dinner. I spent more time with her than I did with my husband, and I even asked her if she wanted to move back in with us. I mean, before she got married, she’d never once stayed in a dorm, much less lived entirely on her own. That was my daughter—a child who asked for help even just to fry an egg, who believed you could put clothes in the wash inside out and they’d automatically flip themselves. But Seojin rejected my proposal at once. “I’m not a child, Umma. I need to be independent now.” Independent. It felt strange to hear. Seojin had worked for a bit as a ballet instructor, but she’d always received a monthly allowance from her dad. So financial independence was out the door, and emotional independence . . . Well. But I wasn’t so cold as to tell my recently divorced child to hurry and find a way to support herself. I’d always thought that demanding your child be independent as soon as they became an adult wasn’t really good parenting. Maybe some children required that kind of harsh separation, but not our Seojin. She couldn’t do anything without me, and she thrived on a stage that I arranged and directed. That’s why I went over every other week to clean her place and cook her food, why I looked up pregnancy barre classes and classical music clubs for moms-to-be for her to join. Seojin never protested. She just said: “Umma, can you make the jangjorim with beef instead of pork next time?” “You don’t have to clean—we have a lady who comes once a week, remember? Just get some rest.” “The classical music club is so boring. I only want to take the ballet class.” Still, she accepted my care. After she got pregnant, Seojin spent more time at our place than hers. We ate dessert together and fell asleep on my bed watching old classics like The Glass Menagerie or La Dolce Vita. That big newlywed home must have felt empty on her own. It took a lot of work to maintain, too. Any way I looked atit, I thought it’d be better if she lived with me, but I kept my thoughts to myself. I was sure she’d come back to my side after having the baby anyway. She was back again that day with the excuse that she didn’t have enough winter clothes and she wanted to try on my fur coats. You have such a good eye, she said while looking through them. All of these are so timeless. What could I say? I didn’t find her flattery annoying, but adorable. “Umma, how about this one?” The Armani coat I’d bought when I was around her age now looked better on her than me. When I told her she could have it, she reached for the tweed Chanel dress in the corner of my closet. “Then give me this one, too.” The dress had been a gift from my mother-in-law for my fortieth birthday. She’d seen it on the mannequin and bought it for me right away, claiming we all needed something like this in our closets. She herself only wore the same stretched-out, pilling clothes for years, but would always open her wallet without reservation when it came to me. It was a dress I loved, but I nodded, thinking this one would also look better on Seojin. She started humming and took off her clothes to try it on. I felt awkward about seeing my child’s naked body, but when I asked her if she wasn’t embarrassed, Seojin shrugged and said, “What’s there to be embarrassed about? We’re family.” She twisted her arm behind her back and struggled with the zipper for a while. I went to hold her long hair and zipped up the back, but around her neck was a silver necklace I’d never seen before. “What’s this?” I asked. Seojin paused. “It’s from Jiji,” she finally said. “Apparently silver is good for pregnancy.” Under the necklace, her skin looked red and itchy from an allergic reaction, yet she was busy defending the man. “Isn’t it pretty?” she asked. I knew from personal experience that my father-in-law’s generation fell for any and all superstitions if they concerned their children. He was particularly bad, but my own mother had gone to see a mudang to make sure my fortune would be good for marriage when I was still single past thirty. She made me carry special bujeok slips for good luck and almost put on a gut ceremony to pray to the spirits, but I couldn’t see what good this belief—neither logical nor useful—did for me, her child. It wasn’t like it was any sort of carefully considered plan. Now I was worried that my father-in-law would force Seojin to carry bujeok slips around or drink random herbal tonics. I demanded Seojin take off her necklace right that moment. “You sure your grandfather hasn’t put up a bujeok in your home or anything? Wait, he doesn’t know the passcode to your door, does he? You only told me.” Seojin ignored me and changed the subject. “I went to the doctor’s today.” On her phone was a video from the ultrasound. I forgot the creeping feeling that she was hiding something from me and smiled at the video of the baby. Its face and body were sharper now that there were only two and a half months left until the birth. I rewound the video a couple times to check where its nose and ears were, as well as to count how many fingers it had. The baby was starting to look human. I watched its smooth skin and shut eyes. “I see your face in the baby, and my face, too. Don’t you?”  Seojin shrugged. “It doesn’t look like Jung Kiseok?”  “. . . Why would it? It’s your baby.” Any mention of Kiseok made my blood boil. How careful I had been in choosing Seojin’s future partner. This was a child I’d raised with so much caution I was scared even a gust of wind could blow her away. I wanted her husband to be on equal footing and of a similar background, and I’d attended all sorts of introductions and visited a number of companies to find the best candidatepossible. Kiseok had been just perfect for the role. His looks, his wealth, his schooling—everything matched up to Seojin’s. I liked that there were no particular illnesses that ran in his family—though his father’s baldness was a little concerning—and he had American citizenship to boot. I’d searched everywhere to find someone that matched my standards, but my father-in-law disapproved right away.  “He doesn’t have the face of a good person.”   I knew he was also searching for a good match for Seojin behind my back. Maybe it was just to spite him that I hurried the wedding arrangements with Kiseok. Was that the issue? Seojin and Kiseok had divorced because of irreconcilable differences not even two years after tying the knot, and my father-in-law continued to subtly mock me while he com­forted her.   “It’s not your fault, Bok, so hold your head high. I knew this would happen—he gave me a bad impression from the very beginning. Who picked him, anyway?”   Making me feel inferior, and guilty too.  Standing in the closet, I told Seojin to not bring Kiseok up again. She nodded, then carefully added, “The doctor said to prepare some blue baby clothes, Umma.”   I let out a cry of joy—I could have died from happiness. But Seojin seemed to have a lot on her mind. She looked at the baby in the video.   “Do you think I can raise him well?” she asked, speaking slowly.    She was probably feeling anxious. And even more nervous and unsure because she’d have to raise him alone. I put my hand on her stomach and thought of what to say. What words my daughter would need to hear, what words she would want to hear.  “Don’t worry, sweetheart. I’ll raise him for you.”  Her belly was warm under my hand. There was a lot to prepare now—all the things I hoped to give my grandson. I had already paid the deposit for the overseas birth agency that I’d worked hard to book. As a boy eligible for mandatory military service, he would need the dual citizenship even more. The broker will take care of all the legal stuff, I told Seojin, so just focus on the baby. All you have to do is follow the process and there won’t be any issues.  “Let’s decide his name before, though. Since you have to submit the birth certificate right away in the US.”  Ian, Yul, Jay—I listed a few names that would work easily in both English and Korean.  “Deu-rim is pretty popular too,” I said excitedly, but a shadow came over Seojin’s face. “Is this because you’reworried about raising him?” I asked. “Don’t worry, I can raise him, and we can get a nanny if we need to.” But she still seemed a little reluctant. Her eyes flitted back and forth, and then it hit me. “You . . . You told your grandfather, didn’t you?” Seojin twisted her body back and forth. “Umma, can’t I just have the baby here?” “Why?” “Jiji said he’s already booked a hospital in Mukjeong-dong.” “We can cancel it.” “No, it’s just . . . ” “What? What’s the matter?” Seojin hesitated before finally spitting out the truth. “The thing is . . . Jiji told me it’s actually a crime. He said you shouldn’t break the law . . .” “A crime?” It was so ridiculous all I could do was laugh. Don’t break the law? From the man who’d gotten a secret private tutor to send his son to college when tutoring was outlawed in this country? The man who’d sent thousands of dollars under the table to bribe his trade partners? I couldn’t believe he would try and frame my love and sacrifice for my grandson like that. Seojin continued, not leaving out a word he’d said. “He asked, if there are enough international schools here, why are we trying to commit a crime abroad? I got kind of scared listening to him . . .” I couldn’t believe it. How much had he grilled my innocent daughter to make her so terrified? I could only imagine how much he’d insulted me and criticized my choices, my affection, in front of her. “Seojin. Who do you think is on your side here: me or your grandfather?” I knew pitting us against each other like that was childish. But sometimes Seojin seemed to forget that I was her mother. That it was me, not her grandfather, who would throw everything away just for her. “Do you think I’d send you all the way to the US to cause you harm? Or invest this time and money to turn you into a criminal? I don’t know what your grandfather told you, but it wasn’t in your interest. That crazy old man has no idea what he’s talking about.” Seojin let out a sigh. “I know you’re right, but then I listen to Jiji and he seems right, too. He said I could go to jail if I get caught. Umma, I don’t want to go to jail.” I kept explaining that it wasn’t dangerous and that it would all be for her own son, but Seojin still hesitated. I started to wonder whether she was unsure because of what her grandfather had said, or if there was a chance that money was involved. My father-in-law had always said he would hand over a small building in Eunpyeong-gu to Seojin before the gift tax was raised. He’d promised it as a wedding gift so she could start a dance studio and rent the rest out for some extra money, but once he found out that Kiseok was her fiancé, he’d gone back on his word and never mentioned the building again. Though she hadn’t shown it, maybe Seojin had also felt let down. Maybe that was the reason why she was following that man’s words even now. “Is this . . . because of his money?” Seojin looked confused. “What do you mean?” “Because of that building he said he’d give you. I understand if that’s the reason, but trust me, your grandfather isn’t someone who keeps his promises. I don’t want you to be swayed by empty words like that.”    Her face fell. “You think I’m doing this for a building?” That’s enough for today, I thought to myself. You’ve shown her what’s right and what’s wrong. But my words somehow outran my thoughts. “What is it then? Would you have listened to your grandfather spewing nonsense about crimes or whatever if he hadn’t fooled you with his money? No, you would’ve ignored him.” “What?” “Am I wrong? I swear you and your father are the same—when that man gets hold of you two, you can’t see straight.” I shouldn’t have said that. I shook myself out of it. Seojin glared at me, her face stone cold. “He’s right,” she muttered under her breath. “You are superficial.” “What did you say?” “That’s what Jiji says about you. That you’re superficial. I just ignored him up till now, but he was right. You’re a snob.” Seojin took off my dress and threw on her clothes before walking out the door. I stared after her for a while. I knew one couldn’t be rational when it came to love for their children, but I always seemed to crumble and lose all sight of reason whenever my father-in-law was involved. And get ugly, so very ugly.  *  The tension between my father-in-law and me had gotten worse as Seojin grew older. It was inevitable, as we lived under one roof for a long time. Until Seojin entered middle school, we lived in my in-laws’ house in Pyeongchang-dong. We originally planned to stay there just until the new apartment in Dogok-dong we’d bought was finished, but the move had been pushed further and further back until one day, fifteen years had gone by. “Just rent that place out and stay here,” my father-in-law said. “We have enough rooms as it is. It’s nice for families to live together—remember that old story about nine generations of the same family living under one roof? No one will get lonely, either.”  I should have rejected his proposal right there, but my dense husband seemed more pleased than anything.  “Should we actually?” he’d said.  My in-laws’ neighbors called their place “the house with the conjoined tree.” The year my husband was born, my father-in-law had planted an aralia and zelkova tree side-by-side in the front yard. It was said that the two trees couldn’t coexist, but they began to join together from the roots up, entangling as they grew, and the house became known for having a rare conjoined tree. For being a family full of love. What the neighbors didn’t know was that the tree had actually been artificially grown by my father-in-law, who’d planted the two saplings right next to each other and tied their stems together with string, scraping off the bark between them. I still remembered the first time I’d stepped into that house to meet my husband’s parents. It was a two-story mansion with big windows and an impressive view. The quiet sprinklers in the yard set small rainbows alight, and the neatly groomed conjoined tree created a wide patch of shade. My father-in-law sat on the deck, leisurely listening to some music. I recognized the piece. “Handel, right?” He broke into a wide smile. “I prefer him to Bach.” “Me too. He’s the mother of music, after all.” He and I continued our discussion about classical music throughout the dinner. We had a lot of things in common. We both loved classical music and Luis Buñuel’s films. We both supported the conservative party. We loved food and preferred to eat nothing but the very best. My parents had sent jeonggwa and small tea desserts as a gift. Like a proper gourmand, my father-in-law showered them with compliments. “Their shape and taste are perfect.” Watching this good-natured man, I waved away my mother’s warnings from earlier. “You have to be on your best behavior there,” she had said. “I heard one of the parents is quite eccentric.” Someone who was said to have intervened in all of their son’s potential matches and rejected dozens of candidates, whose horrible ambush calls were avoided by even the matchmakers, who resembled a century-old snake in hiding—at first, I’d thought those infamous stories were about my mother-in-law. Though I hadn’t known before getting married, my father-in-law had my husband wrapped around his finger. He followed his father’s every order when he worked beneath him, and nothing changed after he inherited the family’s paper company. He was the one with the real decision-making power, and yet he made all his business decisions according to his father’s wishes. It was the same story with Seojin. When my father-in-law and I would clash on the proper way to educate her, my husband could never make up his mind, much less support me. “I think my dad’s right on this one . . .” he would say. “Right?” The only person I could somewhat rely on for emotional support was my mother-in-law. She was also tired of her spineless son and her stubborn husband. “But who can stop the man when he’s been calling apples oranges his whole life?” she said. “And now your husband lives by his father’s word.” The casual complaints and insults we traded gave me strength, but she was no help against her husband. When he and I got in a fight, she would hide in her room, only slipping out once the conflict had been resolved. She didn’t stand on anyone’s side and didn’t speak for anyone. But she must have felt sorry about always sitting on the sidelines, because she’d occasionally show me her jewelry box and tell me to pick out anything I wanted. Even when I refused, she insisted on putting her gold engagement ring on my index finger. “I wanted to give this to my future daughter, but I didn’t get to have one. You take it.” “No, that’s all right,” I replied. “It doesn’t even fit my finger.” She told me to sell it and take the money as a gift, but I couldn’t say yes to that either. We went back and forth—Take it, No I can’t, Just take it—until she told me to give it to Seojin when she was older. I said yes. “I swear,” she said, “you and that old man are so alike.” “What do you mean?” “You both want to give everything to your children to make up for the love you’ve been missing.” She laid out the details of my father-in-law’s childhood. How he was sold for adoption to his rich uncle’s family when he was six years old, then kicked out when they conceived a child of their own, only to come back when they had a daughter instead of a son. How he’d then walked twenty kilometers to see his birth family but was ignored and turned away. “That man never got proper love from his family his whole life. Didn’t you say yours was the same? Listen, this is just my opinion. But I don’t think your own lack should lead to an obsession. Even affection should be given out appropriately. So take the ring yourself. And don’t give it to Seojin. That’s what I’d want. ” “Don’t live like him, dear,” she concluded. “I don’t want you to turn out like that.” Sometimes it really did seem like my father-in-law and I were alike, just as she’d said. Like when he, the most hierarchical man I knew, would crouch down to my daughter’s eye-level and talk to her in a baby voice. Or when he would lie on his arm and stay still to watch her sleep even if it hurt. When I noticed a melancholy look flit across his face, which was usually obstinate and stubborn. Once in a while I felt sympathy for him, but more often, it was hostility that bubbled up inside me. Every time we’d disagree over some part of Seojin’s education, he showed no effort to compromise. Instead, he would insult me outright, saying, What would a girl who went to school on the other side of the river know? Then he’d try and make Seojin follow his outdated college admissions strategies that would have only worked a generation ago. Each time I ignored my mother-in-law’s warning and told myself there wasn’t anything alike about us. My husband might’ve been outside of my control, but I wouldn’t let my kid be taken advantage of like that. The year Seojin turned fourteen, we left the house with the conjoined tree with the excuse of sending her to study abroad. When I told my father-in-law I would take Seojin to the US, he was furious. Never mind the special college admissions for Korean students abroad or the language study, he argued. Why would you whisk away a kid who’s doing perfectly well in school here? Are you trying to take her away from me forever? Everyone who goes to the US comes back addicted to gambling or drugs, don’t you know? He refused to get out of bed and wrapped a cold cloth around his forehead. There was nothing I could do. Of course, my husband and mother-in-law weren’t there to protect me—they were busy hiding and waiting to see what would happen. This is it, I thought. But one day, while eating the mideodeok stew I’d made for him, my father-in-law said, “Okay. I understand what you mean. If it’s for our Boki, then studying abroad might be worth it.” Finally. He had listened to me. My anger and resentment toward him suddenly softened. Before we got on the plane to New York, I offered him countless pots of mideodeok stew, working to please him. I was completely unaware that his true intentions would come back to bite me. For the first six months after arriving in the US, I felt calm. Seojin had entered a middle school with an ESL program, and meanwhile I had gotten closer to the other Korean moms and gathered information about the best schools and most trustworthy tutors in the area. As part of her education, Seojin and I visited the Met and watched Broadway shows on the weekends. Things were going smoothly. Until that day, that is. I went to pick up Seojin from ballet class that afternoon. But for some reason, I felt a bit uneasy on the way back home. And would you believe it? A strange car was parked outside the house we’d rented. Behind it, a familiar silhouette was pulling a suitcase into the front yard. “Jiji!” Seojin ran toward my father-in-law, and he took her in for a hug. “Why are you here?” I asked, unable to hide my astonishment. His reply was natural, smooth. “I came just to sightsee.” Yet it soon became clear that he had no intention of visiting Times Square or the Brooklyn Bridge. Instead, he tagged along to Seojin’s classes and watched her every move, trying to use his meager English to help with her homework. Our weekend routine fell apart, and Seojin ended up spending more time with her grandfather than me. At my offer to find him a hotel, he still insisted on staying in a room at our place. “Give me bread instead of rice, will you? Western food suits my palate.” “I always thought it was uncomfortable to wear your shoes inside, but it’s great once you get used to it.” Each and every word he said shocked me. Once, during an attempt to find a tutor for Seojin, I’d just finished a successful interview with a Cornell graduate and was wondering how much to offer her when my father-in-law pulled me into the next room. “That kid had a strange way of pronouncing things—every­thing was so harsh. She might not have enough experience either, because she’s so young. What about finding an Ivy League graduate instead?”  “I thought she was fine,” I replied. “And Abeonim, Cornell is an Ivy League school.” His face went red. “You need to fix that habit of talking back to people. Otherwise they’ll gossip behind your back.”  “I’m not talking back,” I replied. “I’m just telling the truth.”  I refused to let him have the last word. Maybe because I didn’t want to lose my standing. Or like my mother-in-law had said, because I saw something similar in the two of us. The whole time we were in the US, he and I butted heads over the smallest things and argued for days. I would try and hold it in for Seojin, but the intensity of my feelings always won out. He’ll hurry back to Korea as soon as he can, I hoped, but he stayed for the entire duration of his tourist visa before finally going home. He visited like that every three months until Seojin finished ninth grade. More often than my husband, even. When Seojin and I were preparing to return to Korea, I found out that the other Korean moms in the area had thought I was his trophy wife. It was like I was raising my child with my father-in-law, not my husband. Intensely and fiercely—like we were sparring.   *  Seojin’s belly showed no signs of change, even at thirty-two weeks. Worried it was a vitamin deficiency, I fed her folic acid and iron supplements, but she remained the same. “Are you still skipping meals?” I asked her. I had kept watch over Seojin’s weight her whole life and only became stricter as she prepared to compete and audition for ballet schools. She’d needed that discipline for her physique then. I used to measure her waistline every morning and fed her laxatives in the hopes that it would take even a gram off her weight, but things were different now. “You can’t do that anymore, Hon. Everything you eat will go to the baby.” Seojin waved off my worries and said she’d been eating well and sleeping more than enough. The baby was kicking more often, too. “Maybe it’s because he’s a boy, but he’s full of energy, Umma.” She said she could feel him moving dozens of times a day. I let out a sigh of relief. The crude thought that immigration would go smoother if her stomach wasn’t showing crossed my mind. Two weeks before her departure, I picked out the condo she would stay in before the birth and examined the hospital’s procedure manual. I checked what kind of food would be available, if the postnatal caretakers and nannies were experienced, and how often the newborn baby’s belly button and milk bottles would be cleaned. Everything was going according to plan. Now all that was left was for Seojin to agree, but I couldn’t grasp how she felt. Our earlier argument had simply fizzled out after she had called me up like nothing had changed, but some emotions still lingered. Between the two of us ran a quiet tension. “Is there anything you want to eat?” I asked her, breaking the silence. She said she would like the mideodeok stew she wasn’t able to eat the time before. It ran in her blood, this kid. My chest began to feel tight, but I tried to stay as rational as possible. Seojin was pregnant, and this was about her cravings, not what tastes ran in her family. But no matter how much I tried to convince myself, I had a bad feeling that my daughter’s life was caught squarely in the shadow of her grandfather’s. I tried to shake it off as I took out the mideodeok from the freezer. I had gone to thaw the seafood under the tap when Seojin suddenly embraced me from behind. “Umma,” she whispered, “Jiji has pneumonia.” I paused. “Really? Are you sure?” “That’s what the doctor said. His body is pretty run down.” Her swollen stomach touched my back. She continued slowly with that particular nasal voice of hers. “Umma, I want to go to the US too. I know that would be good for Dubok. But . . . Jiji started crying when I told him. He doesn’t know how much longer he’s got to live. He asked if I really have to go. It’s not just getting birthright citizenship, you know. You have to live there for at least ten years, but Jiji can’t get on a plane anymore, with his health and everything. Seeing him cry like that really shook me.” A while had passed since I’d last seen my father-in-law. I hated how he always blamed me for Seojin’s divorce, so I’d stopped going over entirely. The man I remembered was healthy, like you could push him and he wouldn’t fall over, but maybe he’d aged too. The mideodeok began to thaw in the cold water. I’d used to think those creatures were so gross, with their bumpy tops and bodies that resembled little severed fingers. Not to mention the fact that they had both male and female sexual organs. There was a time when touching one would send shivers down my back, but somewhere along the way I must’ve gotten used to them, because now they didn’t bother me anymore. The desire to give my child only the best of the best, the determination to do anything for her—these wishes my father-in-law and I shared and couldn’t separate, even if we wanted to. That was our relationship. Two bodies that had twisted together out of a common love and were becoming one. Would I also get used to him one day? Would we ever be able to peacefully share this love of ours? I was lost in my thoughts for a moment before I opened my mouth. “I’ll go see Harabeoji. That’ll help, right?” Seojin nodded, hugging my waist again. “Umma, don’t be too harsh on Jiji. He’s family.” I thought of the old saying that sometimes family was akin to a close enemy, but I decided to let it go. I didn’t want to pour everything into hating him anymore. He was my daughter’s grandfather, after all. “All right. I’ll try.”  *   The front yard of my in-laws’ house was as well-groomed as always. The grass, cut every other week by a gardener hired by my father-in-law, looked glossy and clean, and in the sandy flower beds stood the expensive zelkova, plum, and fir tree shrubs that he’d ordered from the landscaping wholesaler. But out of all the trees showing off their deep fall foliage, the conjoined tree caught my eye. When I first came to this house, only the bottom part of its trunk was intertwined, but now the whole tree and its tangled branches had grown so large that you could barely wrap your arms around its thickest point. Sitting beneath its wide shade was my father-in-law, listening to music. I recognized the piece from the intro. Handel’s “Minuet in G minor,” performed by Wilhelm Kempff. Much had changed since the days when I would go on and on, bright-eyed, about how Kempff’s rendition of Handel was so somber and poignant yet simple and unpretentious. Now the man sat listening with his eyes closed, looking pitiful and frail. “Abeonim, it’s me.” He blinked his heavy lids open at my call. His eyes were dull, his cheeks caved in. My father-in-law had aged noticeably in the time since I’d last seen him. So you got older, too. You became weak. Sure, we weren’t linked by blood, but maybe Seojin was right and I had been holding too much animosity toward a member of our own family. Today was the day to resolve any misunderstandings and let go of old grudges. I could do it. I had to do it. My father-in-law didn’t greet me with an “It’s been a while” or “How are you?” but just glanced around me. “Where’s Boki?” “Seojin didn’t come along. I let you know over the phone that it’d just be me today.” “You did? I don’t remember.” I had definitely told him, and here he was acting like it was the first time he’d ever heard such a thing. A sharp anger rose inside me, but I made an effort to continue with the kindest voice possible.     “Aren’t you cold out here? It might be better to go inside if you’re not feeling well.” He let out a wet cough. “What, did you come to check if I’m dead? It’s not like you would visit for any other reason.” “Why would you say something like that? That hurts my feelings. Here, I made some doraji jeonggwa for you too. They say the root is good for the lungs. Let’s go inside and—” “I like it outside,” he cut me off and pulled the blanket that was on his knees up to his chest. “If you have anything to say to me, you can say it here. The house is dirty because I haven’t been able to clean it the last few days.” A chilly breeze grazed the back of my neck. I stood awkwardly with the jeonggwa in my arms. “That housekeeper you got me turned out to be a kleptomaniac,” he said bluntly. “I should have known when some of the gochugaru and tissue paper went missing.” She had a nasty habit of touching everything, he went on. He was positive she had taken the golden toad figurine he’d kept next to his bed. “I should have chased her out from the beginning. Can’t trust anyone after that insolent woman. Guess who insisted on taking her last paycheck and didn’t even clean? Now the house is a wreck.” I stood listening to all of his complaints. “Are you sure?” I asked him carefully. “You might be making someassumptions.” “What, you don’t believe me? I turned the whole place over looking for it. It isn’t anywhere. She must’ve taken it.”    He paused. “Where do you even find these people?” he said, clicking his tongue. There it was—his old habit of stretching out his words to force you to listen. His nasty language that would intimidate anyone. Any compassion I’d briefly held for him disappeared. There he was. The man I knew. A man so particular and eccentric you couldn’t possibly get used to him. A man so self-righteous he’d always insist he was correct, no matter what you might think or feel. My father-in-law lay in his rocking chair, his expression sour. “Nothing I do will ever make you happy, will it, Abeonim?” I asked him. “What?” “Well, this is all I’m going to say. Seojin will leave for the US soon. That’s what she wants, and I intend to send her there.” “How many times do I have to tell you no—” “Why? Because it’s a crime? Or because of the baby’s birthplace on his birth certificate? Abeonim, please. You know that’s nonsense.” He straightened his back and glared at me. He didn’t look well, but I didn’t care. All the anger that had welled up deep inside was forcing its way upwards. “You’re just unhappy because you can’t steer this in the direction you want,” I said. “Is having Seojin’s dad not enough? Do you need to do this to my daughter too? Telling her useless things, like what she’s doing is illegal . . . Why are you so set on ruining her life?” “Ruin? Me?” My father-in-law scoffed, and I glimpsed his perfect teeth. “You’re the one sabotaging your own child’s life, using Boki to satisfy your own greed. You think buying your way into citizenship is everything? Do you know how hard it is to live in a foreign country? I knew you were short-sighted, but this . . .” My rage boiled over. I didn’t even try to suppress it, I just let it explode. “Please! Stop calling her that. Her name is Seojin!” “What?” What had I been thinking? There was no way I could compromise with this person. No way we could share our affection or our beliefs. “Stop calling her Boki. She’s my child! My daughter, not yours!” His eyes widened as his mouth gaped open. “You’ve lost it, haven’t you?” He kept on muttering to himself, “That’s it. She’s finally gone crazy.” I left him there and stormed out of the house.  My heated emotions only began to cool once I started the car. I took a deep breath and looked at my reflection in the rearview mirror. My hair was all tangled, my face flushed red. Maybe my father-in-law was right. I had lost it. Gone wild and crossed a line with an elder, behaved against my better knowledge, burdened my daughter with a weight even I couldn’t carry. But if I had gone crazy, really crazy, then what had finally set me off? The jeonggwa I spent all night making—boiling the doraji root and soaking the pieces in honey—sat in the passenger seat. Looking at it, my anger rose again. No, my actions were justified. Any mother would’ve done the same for their child. Anyone would’ve gone crazy. You couldn’t survive otherwise. You couldn’t. Not without . . . I threw the jeonggwa out the window and drove away to the sound of it being crushed under the wheels of my car.  *  Sitting in the airport lobby, I checked Seojin’s bags one more time.    “You’ve got your belly band on?” She nodded. Her due date was almost here, but her stomach was small enough that the belly band didn’t make that big of a difference. But I still made sure, just in case. “There are a lot of Korean tourists there, so immigration control shouldn’t be too strict . . .” “Umma, don’t worry. I’m not a child,” she reassured me. I still felt nervous, though. I would go with her if I could, but it wasn’t easy for two people to stay for that long, and the agency had even said there might be issues at passport control if a parent tagged along. I’d decided to give up. “You and Jiji talked things out, right?” Seojin asked me before she checked in. The memories of the day I’d tried to forget bubbled up again. After barging out of his house, I debated calling my father-in-law for days. Had I been too harsh? Was there a chance we could resolve things, even now? I picked up my phone and put it down again. I drank whiskey, which I usually didn’t like. And when the alcohol hit and my insides burned hot, it came to me.  A memory I had buried in the past: a day when my father-in-law and I had been on the same team. Seojin must have been seven or so. She was rushed to the emergency room with a stomachache. But there happened to be a lot of patients waiting that day, and an hour passed without her being called. I held my pale daughter in my arms and demanded to know when the doctor would see her. As my voice grew louder, my embarrassed husband told me to quiet down while my mother-in-law sat in her chair, hands clasped in prayer. With no one to help me, I shouted alone like a hopeless woman gone mad until someone burst into the emergency room yelling even louder than I was. “Who is it? Who’s making my baby wait?” He made a scene and insisted on seeing the doctor, and I began to shout alongside him. Let us in now! Our baby might die! I didn’t care about my husband looking at us with shock and disgust, my mother-in-law slowly walking away, or the other patients whispering under their breath. My father-in-law and I dropped to the floor together, crying and stomping our feet. Oh, my baby’s going to die! All because of you people, she’s going to die. Just like that. As if we’d both gone crazy. There had been times like that. And that other time, and then, too . . . In a daze, I ran through all the instances when my father-in-law and I had worked together until I willed myself to stop. I knew from experience that memories were easily romanticized and corrupted, that they could find your soft spots and make you believe there was hope. If I trusted those memories and acted on them, I’d only regret it right away. My father-in-law wasn’t someone who’d change after a single conversation. That’s what I wanted to believe.  “We did, and it went well,” I told my daughter. “You don’t have to worry about us anymore.”  Seojin said she was glad we had cleared the air and went to the check-in queue for business class. My baby. She fumbled through getting her single ticket and struggled to put her luggage on the scale with her weak arms. Would she be okay on her own? A month, and an extra two weeks on top of that. It was the longest we’d ever been apart. As I looked at her preparing to leave the country without me, tears began to well.  “Are you crying, Umma?” Seojin ran up to me and rubbed my shoulder. “Why? I’ll be fine. Don’t cry.”  I had even taken a sedative to prevent this, but the tears wouldn’t stop. My daughter. I’d thought she would stay a child forever, but soon she would be a mom, too. They said you only understood your parents’ love when you had your own child. Would she see now how much I loved her? I thought of that saying that a parent’s love was so great you could put your child in your eye and it wouldn’t hurt. Would she see now that these weren’t empty words but the proof of our genuine affection, the essence of a love that couldn’t be expressed otherwise? I was sobbing into Seojin’s shoulder when a familiar voice came from behind us. “Boki.” My tears dried instantly. Seojin waved to her grandfather before she glanced at me and quickly lowered her hand. Her brown eyes flitted back and forth. She tried to explain, but my father-in-law stopped her and scanned my expression. I forced my lips into a stiff smile. “Abeonim. You came.” I spoke as nicely as possible, trying to put what had happened behind us. I waited for his reply, but of course he pretended not to have noticed me and went straight to Seojin instead. “Our little Boki. Did you check your luggage already? When is the flight?” Seojin told him there was still an hour and a half left until take-off. All she had to do was go past security now. He nodded. “Let’s get a coffee,” he said, pulling her toward a café. I would have dragged her back, but they were already a few steps ahead. I didn’t want to make a scene when she was already under a lot of stress. I hurried to follow them. While I waited for our coffees, my father-in-law grabbed the seat next to Seojin. I ended up sitting across from her. Outside the window, a plane took off. The sky was gray. Low, heavy clouds covered the sun until the last rays of light disappeared entirely. “It doesn’t look good. Not at all,” my father-in-law grumbled. He took out a thick paper envelope from his pocket and handed it to Seojin. “For our Boki. So you can get yourself everything you want to eat there. Don’t worry about money, okay?” “Thanks, Jiji.” Seojin slipped the envelope into her bag, taking what was hers without a single show of hesitation or humility. I’d always found this side of her endearing, but not this time. “You need some extra pocket money,” my father-in-law went on. “And it’s not like anyone else prepared it for you, I’m sure.” He was trying to subtly take his revenge again, probably still angry from the other day. What a petty old man. He continued acting as if I were invisible, talking only to Seojin. I did the same and brought up stories that only we would know. Seojin glanced back and forth between us. “Umma. Jiji. Did you know that in Guam, they say ‘Håfa adai’ to greet each other? It kind of sounds like a Korean regional word, right? Håfa adai.” She curled her hand into a fist, then stretched out her thumb and pinky to gesture “hello” in the Guam way. She was trying to break the ice. My father-in-law pressed on his eyelids. “Why bother learning the greeting if you’re not even going to live there?” he muttered. He seemed prepared to stay until Seojin left. He kept making cynical comments like the plane might not take off in this rain, or it looks like it’s going to start storming soon anyway. Seojin subtly changed the subject. “Jiji, are you feeling better?” At her question, my father-in-law, who hadn’t coughed once since arriving, suddenly began to wheeze. Hard, like he might cough up blood. His eyebrows and lips furrowed in a frown so dramatic you couldn’t help but think he was acting to get her attention. That sly old geezer. He coughed for a while longer before grabbing Seojin’s hand in his. “Boki, do you have to go?” he asked. “I’ve been having some strange dreams lately. I have a feeling that something bad’s going to happen. It’s not too late to cancel the tickets.” Of course. Of course you have to hold back my daughter until the very end. “Seojin.” I interrupted before he could get any further. “Honey, it’s time now. You should go in.” I wanted to stay with her as long as I could before she left, but I had no other choice. Cutting them off now was the only way. Seojin hesitated. “What are you doing?” I scolded. “Didn’t I say you need to go?” My father-in-law frowned again. As he glared my way, I muttered something under my breath—something petty and barely audible. Just as he always did. “Why would he come to the airport, anyway . . . All he’s doing is making us uncomfortable.” My father-in-law’s face went red. His lower lip began to tremble. “Ya!” he screamed, loud enough that everyone in the café turned to look. “You keep crossing the line since last time, you know that? What, are you annoyed that I came?” “Just annoyed?” I yelled back. “I’m sick and tired of you. Did you even listen to what I said last time? Why do you have to come all the way here to torture her?” “I’m here to see my granddaughter off. You call that torture?” “Is that it? Come on, I know why you’re here. You want to force her to stay.” “Oh, so you’re trying to frame me now.” We shouted at each other, our faces feeling like they might burst. All our anger and resentment exploded at once. “Umma, stop,” Seojin said. She looked stressed. “Everyone’s looking.” She glanced around us. “You too, Jiji. Stop, please.”  That word pushed me over the edge. “I told you not to call him that.” “Call him what?” “Jiji, or whatever that nonsense is. Stop calling him that!” I’m the one who will always be here for you. So why! Why? “What are you attacking Boki for?” my father-in-law yelled back. Don’t you know it’s all because of you? I wanted to scream. Because you tried to take my spot, because you stole the child I loved . . . The argument quickly devolved into curses and accusations. Remember that time, and that other time—we dug up every detail from our long history and went after each other. It was petty, so very petty. “I knew from the day I first met you. Such a vicious young girl.” “You’re the one that’s vicious,” I shot back. “You think I’m the only one who’s tired of you? Your own son is, and your wife was too.” I stopped calling him Abeonim. He struck back with harsh “you”s and “hey”s. Our fierce argument went on, and neither of us cared about manners, etiquette, or what the people around us thought. When his voice rose, so did mine. When I pointed my finger at him, he did the same. Like two people losing their minds. Two maniacs. We were busy picking out each other’s flaws and tearing the other apart when my father-in-law paused. “Boki! Where did Boki go?”  Only then did my mind clear. The world came into focus again.  I could hear chattering behind us. I ran toward the corner of the café, where Seojin was crouching in her tweed dress and holding her stomach.  “What is it? What’s wrong?” I made my way through the whispering crowd and squatted down next to her. I was hit with a light, almost fishy, smell. A clear liquid ran down her legs. My head spun. My body went cold. No. Was her water breaking already?  My father-in-law pushed me out of the way. “Boki, Boki, let’s go to the hospital now.”  No. She was supposed to go to the States now. The end was right in front of us. So why was that man once again taking my spot next to my daughter? My father-in-law helped her up and tried to take her out of the airport. I hurried and grabbed a tissue from my handbag to wipe down her legs. “Seojin, honey, they won’t be able to tell anyway. Just hang in there, okay? Let’s get you on the plane. Wait until then . . . ” “Y-You’ve gone insane!” my father-in-law cried. “And you call yourself a mother?” He grabbed Seojin’s right arm and pulled her away. “Don’t listen to her. I’ll take you to Mukjeong-dong. We can take a taxi. It’ll be quick.” “Come on.” I took hold of Seojin’s left arm. “Let’s get on that plane. This is what’s best for you.” “Don’t listen, Boki. Let’s go to Mukjeong-dong. That’s where all our family was born. It’s only right that you should go there.” Boki! Seojin! We shouted, each holding onto one of Seojin’s arms. Come on, wake up, let’s get you out of here, you can hold on, are you crazy, you’re the one that’s crazy, you call yourself a parent, what about you then, here, no, not here, you can, you can’t, can, can’t, can, can’t, can, can’t . . . We screamed back and forth. Back and forth until our voices mixed together, until I couldn’t tell whose was whose. Until I couldn’t tell what we were saying anymore. A boarding announcement came on for the flight to Guam. Caught between me and my father-in-law, Seojin looked back and forth with those light brown eyes of hers and said something. Softly, her voice exhausted. She spoke with all the strength she had left. But I . . . I couldn’t hear what she was saying. And neither could you.

by Haena Sung

Fiction

Hideo

Hideo was a man of many secrets, one of them being that his biological father was Japanese and so he’d spent his childhood in Kyoto. We were walking down a quiet street one late afternoon when he told me this. From that day on, he would occasionally reveal more of these glimpses into his younger years, and later I was able to thread these piecemeal incidents from his early life into one cohesive story.    Hideo was born on the outskirts of Kyoto in an ordinary residential area, a far cry from what Koreans might imagine when they think of Kyoto, the travel destination. Hideo himself couldn’t remember the place in any real detail. Even as he described the humid summers or the trees so enormous you couldn’t see the tops of them, he would add that it was hard to tell whether these were actually his own memories or simply details he’d imagined after seeing or hearing about the city somewhere else. All the memories he was sure of were bad ones. Like how his desk in elementary school was covered in dirty words for Koreans—zainichi, chosēnjin, chong—or how the boys always kicked his bag around like they were playing soccer, or how they would make fun of him by changing the lyrics to K-pop songs and singing them at him. Things like that. Once, the other kids beat him up so bad they broke his nose. That evening, his parents had a serious talk about moving to Nagoya for their son’s sake. Hideo’s father called him in, sat him down, and warned him that in Nagoya, they would have to hide the fact that Hideo’s mother was Korean. Surprised, Hideo turned to his mother where she sat at the dinner table. He wanted to confirm that she agreed with what his father was saying. As far as he knew, his mother had never once tried to hide her heritage. But in that moment, she lowered her gaze, looking neither her husband nor her son in the eye.  Hideo’s father spoke again. “Either way we’re going to keep living here, so let’s do it that way.” That night, Hideo couldn’t get to sleep on account of the pain in his nose, the blood trickling down his throat, the thought of his mother’s placid face, and the very welcome fresh start awaiting him in Nagoya. But his parents remained on the fence about going, and through some convoluted process of reasoning that Hideo could not at all fathom, they decided to get a divorce. Hideo’s mother returned to her parents’ home in Gyeonggi-do, taking him with her. And from then on, Hideo completely buried the existence of his Japanese father and his former life in Japan. Until the day he confessed this secret to me, he hadn’t even told anyone that his first name had been Hideo.  The first time I saw Hideo was in a classroom in the drama school building. This was in March before the cherry blossoms bloomed, and eight students including me and Hideo were sitting at desks that had been arranged in a circle. That year, the drama school had launched a new project for incoming students where they grouped them together to create a one-act play no longer than fifteen minutes, also known as a “playlet.” These students would gather in teams before the semester began to prepare, and at the start of the school year in March, they would stage their plays in the drama school’s little theater—a one-of-a-kind welcome reception for the new students. The school newspaper had decided to interview one group of incoming students taking part in the project, and that year, the task fell to me as my first reporting assignment. The interview was animated. When I asked a question, one of the interviewees would latch onto something I said and launch into a longwinded response, and then before that person had even finished their thought, someone else would cut in. The conversation often veered off topic. I kept the recording device on and listened as the students freely shared their opinions, chiming in once or twice to remind them of the question. I had just done that again when I realized that the guy sitting across from me had been silent the entire time. It was Hideo. Even when I’d asked everyone to tell me something about the play they were preparing to stage, he was the last to answer. He said that even though the play was centered around ordinary high school students, it wasn’t meant to be didactic, or a critique of the college entrance exam system or the Korean education system as a whole, and it wasn’t all that accurate to compare it to a novel like Demian, either. After saying his piece, Hideo fell silent, prompting me to ask again, So what is it about? He’d only mentioned things that were unrelated to the play and hadn’t shared his opinion on the work itself. Looking taken aback by my question, Hideo stared for a moment at the ceiling, choosing his words, but right then the student next to him, who was entering the playwriting department, said that still, there was some overlap between Demian and their play before naturally changing the topic. After that, Hideo silently watched the conversation unfold among the others like he was in the audience of a panel debate. During the more than two hours of the interview, all I scribbled down about Hideo was “shy, no self-conviction.”  When I ran into Hideo again, it was in a dim basement classroom in the film school on the last day of August, the start of the fall semester. As soon as the professor entered the room, he told a student sitting near the wall to cut the lights and started up the beam projector. Hideo slid into the classroom through the back door just as the projector powered on, filling the room with a faint blue glow. He approached the seat next to me and set down his giant backpack. There weren’t many empty seats, so it wasn’t like he was trying to sit next to me. Still, I recognized him right away, and he recognized me, too. About ten minutes after class began, Hideo opened an unruled notebook on his desk and wrote, I know this is late, but your article was good. From then on, we started writing notes to each other about all sorts of things. After filling an entire page with thoughts about the interview earlier that year in spring, the school newspaper article, and the playlet Hideo had acted in, I found that I had run out of things to say. Don’t forget about me when you become a superstar someday. I wrote it as a joke, a way to wrap up the conversation. You think I can become an actor? I do. Thank you very much. Haha. You don’t seem like an acting student. Is that a good thing? Of course. Is it not? Haha. I actually chuckled as I wrote that, thinking of the guys in the acting department who were always singing and running lines in the hallways. I’d never once thought they seemed cool. A little while later, Hideo wrote a reply. In that case, thank you. In the next class and the class after that, the professor kept the room dark the entire time as he played us classic films. He would occasionally chime in with explanations, but only a few students really listened to what he said, and the professor himself didn’t seem to care one way or the other. Hideo and I stole glances at the movies onscreen, all the while continuing to write notes. Our respective school lives were a recurring topic of discussion. Unlike the guy who had sat close-mouthed throughout that entire interview, Hideo wrote line after line about what was going on with him. He shared that he was having a hard time understanding the acting classes that required him to be overly physical, and that he wasn’t used to expressing things with his body. For my part, I wrote about how my playwriting was coming along and how I was struggling on the school newspaper staff. I wrote about the plays I liked, the plays that other students in my department liked but that didn’t resonate with me, young foreign playwrights I had just discovered, and the column I was writing about all this for the newspaper. In one of our Saturday make-up classes, I was going into painstaking detail about my ex-boyfriend Yeongdo. Hideo read along as I wrote, adding the occasional “omg” or “T_T,” and once he’d read the entire thing, he flipped ahead several pages in the notebook. Now for a brand-new chapter.After writing that, Hideo swept a finger over the rest of the blank page. Because of the audio from the film that was playing, I knew there was no way I had actually heard his finger brush against the paper, but somehow I remember clearly hearing the sound.  The same way that Hideo’s actual name was no longer Hideo, Yeongdo also wasn’t my ex’s real name. It was a nickname, one he’d been given to mock the way he always stressed that he was a “yeonghwa hakdo,” a devoted student of film, every time he spoke in class. I hadn’t liked the nickname, so I never called him that to his face. It was only after we broke up that whenever he came to mind, his nickname naturally popped up along with him. Yeongdo was the only student from another department in that class. The class in question, a basic major course on writing plays and sketches, wasn’t typically open to students outside the playwriting department. But after pleading with the professor in front of everyone on the first day of the semester, Yeongdo received permission to enroll. From then on, he took on the role of the class mood-maker. He would make everybody laugh by tossing out the perfect joke at the perfect time, and when no one else dared to voice an opinion, he always stepped up and offered his. Even when the weaknesses in his writing were pointed out to him in detail, Yeongdo never became discouraged, and during the breaks he would go up to the students who had most pointedly attacked his assignments or ideas to casually strike up a conversation. It was like he’d gotten some special kind of vaccine as a child that made him immune to hate or mistreatment from others. Of course, as far as I knew, he didn’t warrant a ton of hate in the first place. At some point, Yeongdo had joined the fold of playwriting students who went out for beers together after class. According to our classmates, he had such a high tolerance that he could down alcohol by the bucket and never get drunk, and he always seemed to be the life of the party. Still, there were a few students in that class who weren’t fans. They thought he was trying too hard to win their attention and pretending to be friendly with everyone. As for me, I was somewhere in the middle. It was thanks to Yeongdo that the mood in that tense workshop had lightened up, but at the same time, I didn’t one hundred percent love how he acted. More than anything, when I read his work, I could feel my chest tightening, like I was suffocating. Every week, we submitted sketches around two thousand characters in length to discuss as a class, but Yeongdo always submitted the same type of story, taking a page out of his own playbook every time. His pieces were invariably about a young man who meets a beautiful woman and falls in love, but fails to win her heart in the end. As I saw it, the male leads were stand-ins for Yeongdo himself, and the other characters were just props that either served to hurt or comfort him. The one time he broke away from his usual approach was around the end of the semester. After not bringing in a single revision up until that point, Yeongdo revised three or four of his pieces to submit all at once; for the first time, he received positive feedback from everyone in the class. I complimented his work as well, but then Yeongdo surprised me by saying something absurd about how all the changes he’d made were thanks to my feedback. “What Sujin said last time was a really huge help,” he said. He looked around at everyone to gauge the mood before playfully adding, “I think my round of applause should go to her instead.” It was our class custom to applaud the people who’d submitted pieces for the workshop after we had given our critiques. Being congratulated for something I didn’t even write felt a bit odd, but at the same time, it made me happy. Looking back, I should have put a stop to it then and there, but I don’t even think I could have. At the time, it seemed so positive. I thought that, thanks to me, a guy who’d never once imagined the world beyond himself had changed. In reality, all Yeongdo had done was revise a few short pieces. That day after class, he invited me out to a cocktail bar near campus, and I went. Later on, we ended up calling that our first date. The first time Hideo and I went out somewhere outside the film school building was after our last class before the Chuseok holiday. Our professor ended class an hour and a half earlier than usual that day for personal reasons, so we wrapped up a little past three in the afternoon. As I grabbed my bag and headed out of the classroom, it occurred to me that it was the perfect moment to casually suggest hanging out. I was planning to check out the exhibition the fine arts students were holding on the first floor of the library building, and I asked Hideo if he wanted to come. He said it sounded good to him. We walked down the sunlit halls of the film school building and crossed into the library, where we admired several installations. After that, we naturally made our way to a pho restaurant near the campus’s back gate. That was where we ran into Yeongdo. As I waited for my food to come out, a bunch of guys appeared outside the shop, and one of them was him. Just as I was wondering whether the guy in the hoodie really was him, he turned toward me and, if only briefly, we made clear eye contact. Honestly, I’d imagined and hoped for that exact situation—for Yeongdo to see me with another guy—so many times. But now that it was really happening, I was more than a little overwhelmed, and what happened next went far off-script from what I’d envisioned. Hideo waved at one of the other guys in the crowd around Yeongdo, and a moment later, the guy he’d greeted came inside. Up close, I recognized his face as one I’d seen a few times before. He must have been one of the underclassmen Yeongdo had introduced me to ages ago. “You two on a date?” the guy asked Hideo. If Hideo had spared me a glance at that moment, and if that glance had contained even a hint of a question, I would have somehow sent him positive signals with my eyes. Of course, a deeper part of me hoped that Hideo wouldn’t even have to ask, that he’d answer yes without hesitating. But he didn’t. He didn’t even look at me as he replied, “A date? As if. We’re just eating.” The guy nodded, then chatted with Hideo for a little longer before leaving. Later, I would think back on that moment countless times. The embarrassment and confusion I felt when Hideo firmly denied that we were on a date stayed with me long afterwards. Meanwhile, I started endlessly imagining things like what that guy might have reported back to Yeongdo, and how Yeongdo might have reacted to hearing it. Soon after, I started remembering our first date, much to my surprise. Something similar had happened that day at the cocktail bar. The bartender asked me if the guy sitting next to me was my boyfriend.Yeongdo, who had been listening to our conversation, cut in without hesitation to say, “I’m working on it.”The bartender told Yeongdo that he was cheering him on and slid a free cocktail with a slice of dried orange on top toward me. Thinking back on it, Yeongdo was the type of person who knew when and where to take initiative, and he never let a chance to do so slip past him.When that underclassmen friend of Yeongdo’s left, Hideo deftly made his way around the bend in the cramped shop and returned with water and pickled radish. We picked up in person where our written conversations in his notebook had left off, but what had just happened stuck with me. It was only when Hideo mentioned the name of a play I had written that I snapped back to my senses. “Nuna, I heard you’re looking for actors?” he said, observing me for a moment. “I want to audition.”  The title of the play Hideo was referring to was Slap Game. It was the sixth play I had written at the drama school, and had started as an assignment in one of my major classes in the fall of my second year. It was the best thing I had written up to that point. I had to put on a staged reading at the end of the semester, the evaluation of which would also serve as an evaluation of the past two years of school. Jiyoon, my director, was in the same boat as me. We would meet at a café near campus to discuss preparations for the show, but usually we just chatted about nothing much and parted ways without coming up with any specific plans. Jiyoon had her hands full trying to figure out how we would pull off the scenes where one character slapped or was slapped by another, and I kept tweaking and tinkering with the script, determined to change even the most minor nuances. The biggest problem, though, was that one of the lead roles still remained uncast. We had uploaded ‘actors wanted’ posts to the Everytime app and the school website, but before my lunch with Hideo, we hadn’t had any luck finding the right fit. That day, Jiyoon and I set up a simple audition for Hideo. I showed up first, drew open the heavy purple curtains, and opened the window. I still remember the autumn air that rushed in and the view that was so vivid outside. Hideo entered the classroom looking slightly nervous. He wore gray slacks worn smooth at the knees, a white shirt under a knitted vest that had started to pill in places, and Vans sneakers caked in dried mud—similar to how I imagined the problem student in the play would dress. Hideo took a seat on a chair set up in the middle of the classroom and started reading from the script. Soon after, Jiyoon, who was sitting beside me, began lightly rapping on my thigh, and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was: We were going to stage the reading with Hideo. Slap Game started and ended at the meeting of a school violence committee at a high school. There were four characters in total: two teachers who were also committee members, the model student who had called the meeting, and the problem student who had been reported to the committee for school violence. The model student claimed that he was being slapped in the face every day by the problem student, an accusation the problem student didn’t deny. But the problem student claimed that all this had been done at the model student’s request. According to the problem student, the model student—an aspiring writer—had asked the problem student to help him out, believing that only those who had undergone painful experiences in life could write good stories. So the problem student had shared his stories of being abused by his father, and in exchange for these stories, the model student agreed to let the problem student slap him every evening. Hideo immersed himself in his character and read the lines detailing his abuse. After finishing his story, he turned to the imaginary model student who would have been sitting next to him. “Today’s story was worth six and a half, don’t you think?”Hideo nodded as if receiving confirmation, then picked up a flat basketball that had been sitting under his seat and started slapping it with his open hand. As his right hand struck the ball, his left hand, which was holding the ball up, was knocked back a bit, and Hideo wobbled in his chair. That was where the passage he was meant to read for the audition ended. The scene closed with Hideo striking the ball exactly six and a half times, as if he were doing a peculiar dance. After Hideo left the classroom, Jiyoon said excitedly, “He really has a talent for setting off your emotions.” Shortly after, I called Hideo and told him he’d passed the audition. He asked if I might be free to join him for dinner in a bit. “I’d love to, but the film devotee needs to see me for something.” Then I quickly added, “Could you wait for about an hour?”  Yeongdo was standing in the dorm lobby looking at his phone. A familiar sight. He had on that field jacket he often wore in the fall, the one that came down to his knees and looked hot and cumbersome to me. Late the night before, he had texted me saying he wanted to pick up a book he’d loaned me. Apparently, he’d recently started working on a new screenplay he really needed it for. I decided to take the opportunity to sort through all his stuff that was still in my possession and stayed up all night doing so. To avoid getting into an argument if any of his things got damaged in the process, I lined the bottom of a box with scrap paper and placed everything Yeongdo had saddled me with over the course of our relationship—several film magazines and books, records that served as mere decorations since I couldn’t even listen to them in the dorm—inside. I’d felt a giddy sense of satisfaction as I imagined handing the box over to him, but unlike what I’d anticipated, Yeongdo took it with an indifferent expression.    Without even looking inside to see if the book he’d mentioned was in there, he said, “Oh, by the way, that guy you were with that other time—I heard he was Japanese but got naturalized as a Korean?” “Naturalized? No way,” I said. At the time, I didn’t have the faintest clue that Hideo was Hideo.    Yeongdo shifted the box a bit and said with confidence, “I guess you didn’t know. But everyone in the drama school does. They heard it from the staff member who handles all the enrollment paperwork.” I soon realized that Yeongdo had contacted me just to tell me this, and that he was positive that what he was saying was true. Just then, I thought back to quiet Hideo among all his chatty fellow students and wondered if maybe what I’d just heard might explain something about the atmosphere that day. A moment later, Yeongdo rummaged through the box and took out a book, which he handed to me. It was an essay collection with a photo of the author, a film director I especially loved, on the cover. Shortly after, as I was walking to the restaurant with Hideo, I learned that this director had publicly come out in support of #MeToo whistle-blowers. We talked about the #MeToo movement that had started up in various sectors of the film and theater worlds, but I didn’t bring up what Yeongdo had told me. Instead, I praised Hideo on his acting, meaning every word I said. Hideo seemed to know intuitively which lines called for genuine anger and which ones required him to hide his true feelings as he sneered at the model student and teachers. Looking excited, as if he still hadn’t come down from the high of his performance earlier, Hideo murmured, “I loved the script from the moment I read it. So I really wanted to do it. Because I’ve always . . . felt so wronged.” “Wronged?” Once again mulling over what Yeongdo had told me, the words I’d been keeping in my pocket and fiddling with all evening, I waited for what Hideo would say next. “Ever since I lived in Japan as a child. Back then, I would get beaten up by the Japanese kids. They even broke my nose.” “They beat you so badly they broke your nose?” I stared at Hideo in surprise. He glanced away, avoiding my eyes as if embarrassed, which gave me a better look at the sleek bridge of the nose he said had once been broken. I could now see that it was crooked, bent slightly to the left. A little later—as we continued walking after finding that the restaurant we had been heading to was closed—Hideo confessed that it wasn’t just that he’d lived in Japan when he was younger, but that he was Japanese himself, the son of a Japanese man who was still living in Kyoto. Hideo said it was his first time talking about his childhood, but as if he felt that he had to see it through to the end, he launched into a fairly long story without pausing to rest. As he spoke, night fell and the streetlamps came on, casting a ruddy glow on the roads. We walked in the direction of Hankuk University along the Line 1 tracks walled in by a sound barrier. “So that’s why I really wanted to play that role,” Hideo said. “Because I wanted to . . . hit people too, for once.” He fell silent. He seemed to think his desire to hit people was both the conclusion to his story and an important clue as to why he’d auditioned for the problem student role in Slap Game. But I was at a bit of a loss, those words being so unlike my vague sense of Hideo up to that point. Of course, it wasn’t that I couldn’t understand him at all. He’d just told me his story of being bullied in his Japanese elementary school and having to hide his identity while attending school in Korea. But at the time, his resentment seemed so distant to me and even struck me as sort of alluring. I was looking down at my map app trying to find a good restaurant, still a little dazed, when Hideo suddenly burst out laughing, saying, Look at this. The palm of his hand was red and swollen from slapping the basketball not long before. “The bumps it left on my skin are still there,” Hideo said, carefully holding out his hand as if inviting me to touch it. I brushed his palm with my index finger. Just as he’d said, the tiny bumps on the basketball had left impressions in his flesh.  Some days after Hideo was cast in Slap Game, we had our first table read with the entire crew. The director, the writer, and our four actors sat in a circle in a first-floor practice room in the drama school building. Before we started the read-through, Jiyoon explained that she planned to install a string curtain for the actual show at the end of the semester. “Like the ones they hang at the entrance to a Chinese restaurant,” she said. “We’ll set it up between the model student and the problem student. When your hands or shoulders brush against the curtain, the bamboo or glass beads knocking against each other will give off the effect of a slap landing.” Soon after, the actor playing Teacher 1 started reading from the stage directions at the beginning. The stage directions shifted into lines, which shifted into dialogue. After the teachers finished explaining the slap game that the model student and the problem student had been carrying out, Hideo appeared as the problem student. “This all happened at the model student’s request,” he said. “We made a deal. I would bare my pain to him, and he would bare his cheek to me.”    The model student shot back, “But that deal was rooted in trust and honesty. The problem student broke our promise. He said he would slap me in exchange for telling me about the abuse he suffered every day at his father’s hands. But it turns out his dad’s been dead for five years.” “My dad may not be around now, but I’m telling the truth when I say he abused me. His death doesn’t erase what he did. I hit the model student only as hard as I needed to match the pain I suffered. I converted my pain into the exact amount of force that went into each slap. And in the process, a huge amount of pain was lifted off my shoulders. Imagine if I’d done to that weakling what was done to me . . .” Hideo muttered his lines, scowling at the model student sitting opposite him. And in that moment it dawned on me, as clear as anything—I had fallen for Hideo. As I watched him sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor of the practice room wearing a plaid shirt that was a little big on him, I calmly accepted this truth. And even then, I understood that Hideo didn’t feel the same way. He liked me, but not the way I wanted. The odds were slim to none that his feelings would ever change. But after our twice-weekly table reads with the whole crew, Hideo would ask me to join him for walks like it was our routine. During those walks, he told me stories he had never told anyone else. About how hard he had practiced his Korean pronunciation after moving here in elementary school, the lies he invented to explain away his Japanese father, and how exhausted it all left him. After going on a few of these walks, I couldn’t help starting to feel a sense of hope. Looking back on it now, these conversations were so clearly glimpses into some private, inner part of him. He told me about the different issues he’d run into while attending school in Korea, too. He heard about Japan in history or Korean class throughout the years, and he remembered every loathing, spiteful word that had been said. But he never quite knew how to feel about any of it. Even as he said that the kids who had insulted his Korean mother and bullied him didn’t seem all that different from the high school students who called the Japanese language teacher at school a jjokbari, he wasn’t sure if he could label both instances as the same kind of racism. “Of course it was racism. What else could you call it?” I replied, though I also had my doubts. Koreans loathing the Japanese, calling them slurs like jjokbari or seomsungi or what have you, was undoubtedly racism, but Koreans disliking Japan and Japanese people—it seemed a bit more complicated to think of this as racism, too. Hideo also seemed aware of that. “Korea and Japan have a history.” He always ended his stories on that note, and then we would change the topic to talk about theater or college life. If I could turn back time and return to that moment, I would probably say something different. Korea and Japan had a history, one that hadn’t been resolved at all. But even so, that guilt wasn’t Hideo’s burden to bear, and the fact that his high school Japanese teacher had to hear the word jjokbari said to his face—that was a case of racism and xenophobia. But of course, by now, Hideo no longer needed such reassurances. A beaded curtain was installed onstage the day of our rehearsal. A few days earlier, Jiyoon and I had gone around Namdaemun Market buying beads of all colors and shapes, and we stayed up for two nights straight threading and unthreading all the beads in our backpacks into countless permutations. The completed curtain was set up between the problem student and the model student to give the audience a sudden flash effect from the reflection of the light when the problem student reached out to hit the model student. Jiyoon wanted the audience to be exposed to the scattering light—in her words, the light’s violence. Hideo and the model student sat in the center of the stage wearing identical school uniforms, and Teacher 1 and Teacher 2 sat on either side of them. During the rehearsal, Jiyoon adjusted the location of the curtain and lights several times. As she and an upperclassman in the stage design department who had agreed to help us out for the day subtly shifted the beaded curtain and lights and tried turning them off and on, I sat in the middle of the audience seats and told them when the rippling beads reflected the most blinding light. “It’s bright, but it just looks pretty from here!”     “It only sparkles for a second in that spot!” “It’s really bright now!” When at last a brilliant flash of light illuminated the dark theater, making me instinctively squint as shards of that light embedded themselves on the insides of my eyelids, I made a big OK gesture above my head to say they had found the perfect spot. And inside that dazzling light, I saw Hideo, but not the same Hideo I knew—it was another version of him, the one he’d once told me about.  Hideo had told me about his alternate self one evening not long before the show—instead of taking one of our long walks, we were sitting side by side on the low wooden benches in front of the drama school building and chatting for a bit. I didn’t know it then, but in that moment, Hideo and I were the closest we had ever been, physically and mentally. As he watched the light fade from the sky, he murmured, I think we’ll be able to see the morning star, taking out his phone and snapping a photo. A moment later, he brought up how in his last year of high school he’d suddenly changed his mind about his career plans and started commuting about an hour from Anyang, Gyeonggi-do, to Gangnam to attend an acting academy. “There was one time I fell asleep on the bus home and completely missed my stop,” he said. “When I woke up, it was pitch black outside, and I didn’t know where I was. It suddenly occurred to me. What would I be doing if my mom and dad hadn’t gotten divorced and we had all moved to Nagoya together?” Nagoya. The place where Hideo and his parents had vowed to become fully Japanese. I stared at him, not knowing how to respond. “Nuna, what do you think would have happened if I lived in Nagoya?” he asked. “If you lived in Nagoya . . . Wouldn’t things be similar to how they are now? You’d have had secrets to keep there, too.” Hideo nodded. “You’re probably right. But I kept wondering. What I’d be like if both my parents were both fully Japanese. Or fully Korean. What do you think?” “In that case, you wouldn’t be the Hideo you are now,” I said. “You’d be a different person.” I thought of a movie I had seen not too long ago. “You know, there’s that Michelle Yeoh film. Just like all her selves in the movie, wouldn’t your other selves be different in some ways to this version of you and similar in others?” Hideo said he’d seen the movie too, then started searching for film stills on his phone. He fixed his eyes on one image of Michelle Yeoh in the movie, wearing a gorgeous dress and standing in the spotlight. “You know, Nuna, I want to become someone like this,” Hideo said. Which I took to mean that he wanted to be a version of himself that wasn’t so wounded, that hadn’t been bullied or made to carry all these secrets growing up. And almost intuitively, I thought again about Yeongdo. “Those kinds of people, though . . . don’t you think they could turn out to be terrible deep down?” I said. Then I told him a story about Yeongdo. This was during a time when there had been a lot of weird debate surrounding feminist movies, I said. Around the time I had just started dating Yeongdo, he’d mentioned not liking this short film that had won an award at a film festival, claiming that the male director had made a “feminist flick” to curry favor with the critics. “So only women directors can make feminist films? That can’t be right,” I said. And Yeongdo, clearly taken aback, snapped, “Women directors make those kinds of films because they’re stuck in a victim mentality.” He didn’t think anyone could have a genuine interest in feminism or could explain their own lives through that framework. The whole time we dated, I tried to convince him that it was possible, but Yeongdo wouldn’t budge. This sort of thing happened countless times with him. The more than six months that our relationship lasted was filled with these kinds of conversations. Hideo agreed that Yeongdo seemed terrible based on what I’d said, but he couldn’t understand why I was drawing a connection between them or what made me think Hideo’s other self might turn out like Yeongdo. Because Hideo’s other self would just be him, minus the woundedness, the bullying, the secrets. Even I had trouble explaining why I had linked the two of them in my mind. Our conversation died down for a moment before Hideo looked up at the sky again and murmured, “We’ll definitely be able to see some stars tonight.”    And a few minutes later, the stars actually began to appear.  The day of the show, Hideo shone brighter than anyone. Brighter than the other actors in our production, of course, but also brighter than any of the actors who took the stage for the other end-of-semester shows. It was shocking to remember that he was barely twenty years old, finishing only his second semester. After his performance in Slap Game, Hideo got called upon to star in many more drama school productions, and he became the most in-demand student in the acting department. He starred in a film student’s thesis project, and that movie went on to receive a lot of attention on the Korean film festival circuit, leading to Hideo’s successful silver screen debut. Even after the show Hideo and I kept in touch, and we even had a few long phone calls. But we weren’t able to meet up in person. And slowly, we started reaching out to each other less often. The next time I saw him was after his leave of absence ended and he returned to school, and I was frequenting the library while writing my thesis project after postponing my graduation. About a month into the semester, Hideo called me. By then, we hadn’t seen each other in over a year, and I stared at his name for a long time when it popped up on my cell phone screen. “Nuna. How’ve you been?” When I finally swiped to answer the call, Hideo’s voice leapt out at me. He mentioned the name of that restaurant we never got around to eating at and asked if I remembered. Of course I did. I treasured nearly every memory I had with him. “Do you wanna go there?” he asked. Shortly after, we met outside the library to head over together. Just as we used to, we walked, and I asked him how he’d been, realizing bitterly that my feelings for him hadn’t changed. Hideo told me about the recent auditions he’d been on and bragged about how he got recognized more often nowadays. Then he mentioned that he’d done an interview with the school newspaper the day before and asked if I was still on the staff there. “I quit a while ago,” I said. “What did you talk about in the interview?” “A little of this, a little of that,” Hideo replied. “We talked about Slap Game. Oh, and I told the interviewer about my childhood. The things that happened when I was living in Japan.” I looked at him, a bit surprised. He nodded casually. A moment later, I realized that Hideo’s secret was no longer a secret. He explained that most of his colleagues and the people he worked with at the drama school now knew that at one time he had been Japanese. “You’ve really mellowed out,” I said, and Hideo burst out laughing. “Now that I think about, it seems kind of silly to obsess over something like that,” he said. “I really thought it was some huge secret back then.” “So does that mean you don’t have any secrets now?” He laughed again and shook his head. “No, it just means I’ve gained a lot of new secrets.” It seemed like he wanted to tell me some of these new secrets, but I didn’t ask. After that day, I never saw Hideo again.  After graduation, I worked as a reporter at a performing arts magazine for about half a year, and after that I moved to a children’s books publisher and started working as an editor. Jiyoon was working at a small production studio. At one point, we had been busy revising Slap Game to be staged as a proper play, but we weren’t successful in the end. Out of everyone who participated in our production of Slap Game, Hideo was the only one still actively working in a field related to his major. Not long before, he’d been cast in a significant supporting role in a promising rookie director’s film. Now, Hideo talked about his childhood in every interview. His repertoire was always more or less the same. He’d confess that he’d grown up in Japan when he was younger and endured severe bullying, which led him to move to Korea, then stress how much he treasured his school days here. He shared his love for his mother, who hadn’t given up her Korean identity even while living in Japan. And every time I read his story now, I find myself calling someone who is no longer Hideo by his old name, Hideo, anyway.

by Seo Jangwon

Fiction

A Loose Nail

When Kyungshin Unnie called me, I was dozing off on a train headed South. The sudden vibration of my phone, balanced precariously between my fingers, startled me awake. I glanced at the name on the screen. My first instinct was to let it ring. Then I asked myself, why would she be calling?        I wondered if maybe something had happened to Kyungho, but the concern wasn’t enough to move me. It had already been six years, after all. While I had deleted Kyungho’s phone number from my contact list, I kept Kyungshin Unnie’s. He was the one I broke up with, not her. However ridiculous it might sound, I really did believe Unnie and I could remain friends. As long as we maintained a certain. . . distance between us.        Distance was what I had needed back then, not an ending. I never once thought that Unnie would cut me out of her life. On the contrary, I worried that the reason I had delayed my breakup with Kyungho was because of Unnie—because it was hard for me to let go of her, because she cared so much for me, because I couldn’t say goodbye to her. Thinking back, I realized that wasn’t worry, but hope. However, after the breakup Unnie never initiated contact, and that hurt me.        Even though it felt strange, I held on to that hurt. And all the while, I was also guilty of not reaching out. I was itching to know how she was doing, yet I was afraid that the moment Unnie heard my voice, she’d be able to read the true intention hidden behind my “How are you?” That she’d pick up her bags and stride back into the depth of my life (she was never the type to hang on the threshold). Then, somewhere along the way, that strange feeling turned to numbness, then quietness, and now I was doing alright. So why was she calling me now?        I pressed the button to stop the buzzing. A few seconds later, my screen lit up with a missed call notification. Though I knew my stop was due any moment, I closed my eyes again. Three short vibrations made the phone shudder once more.        I had no doubt it was Unnie. She always texted this way, cutting sentences into smaller fragments. I ignored her messages and only opened my eyes when the automated voice announced our arrival.  *      That afternoon passed by in a blur. A liaison officer in charge of escorting us was waiting outside the station, standing in front of a car. My colleague and I had been sent on this business trip to learn the ins-and-outs of an international exhibition that had been successfully held for several years in S City. Basically, it was a field study.        Our entire organization had automatically switched modes after a new mayor from a different party was elected. A number of ongoing projects were dismantled, and before long my department merged with another. For three years I had been handling banner regulations, when suddenly I found myself preparing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Expo, one of the newly appointed mayor’s key campaign pledges.        After our tour, we were dragged to an unnecessary dinner with the team leader of S City’s department. We ate a seafood samhap dish with a weird name—Yisunshin Samhap—and drank a bit of soju.        When I finally arrived at our accommodation, a wave of exhaustion overwhelmed me, and I collapsed on the bed fully dressed. While absentmindedly tapping my messenger app, I was confronted once again with Unnie’s texts, which I had forgotten about.         Hyejeong-ah        I forgot you hate calls, sorry        Just curious how you’re doing         Fine, I typed. Then I deleted it.        On a business trip. I deleted it again.        Why would she even care how I was doing? Even if I answered that I was okay, what meaning would that have? My head spinning with thoughts, I got up and went to take a shower. I fell asleep right after.        Once I was back from the business trip, I had already forgotten Unnie’s texts. Actually, I tried my best not to think about them. But a few days later, she texted me again.         Busy?        I hesitated for a moment before I answered.        Yes. Busy. I thought she wouldn’t contact me again after such a cold reply, but I was fooling myself. Unnie wasn’t the type to get hurt so easily. And even if she had been, she wouldn’t give up. Sure enough, as though she’d been waiting, Unnie began chatting.        She started working part-time at a convenience store last spring.        The stray cat she’d been feeding had given birth to two kittens.        She had quit drinking but had become addicted to cola instead.        My phone kept buzzing because she texted in bursts, one short sentence at a time. I muted the chatroom. Since I didn’t ask, Unnie never mentioned Kyungho. I had no way of knowing if she was still living with him or not. And I didn’t want to.        From that day on, whenever I checked my phone after work, I found several messages from her, some including photos. Every time, curiosity got the best of me, and I ended up reading them all.        She told me about the old man next door who, at exactly 7 a.m. every morning, would raise the national flag (his dedication and solemn demeanor were somehow moving). About a mosquito that had been flattened between the pages of a book she’d just bought (how many mosquitoes in the world could say they found their end this way?). About the recorder music coming from some unidentified house (despite intense practice, the musician’s skills never seemed to improve, but listening to it was weirdly comforting).        I see. Great. LoL. Even on days when I left no response at all she kept texting. I didn’t mind. Maybe I wanted to reconnect with her.        Or maybe I was just lonely.        Kyungho and Kyungshin Unnie were the first people outside my family that I had ever loved deeply. Of course, in the beginning, I had no idea I would come to care for her so much. In the early days of our relationship, Kyungho and I once bickered about whether to go to my place or his. We were both quite drunk and didn’t want to part. The bar we’d been drinking at was near Kyungho’s apartment, but he insisted we take a taxi back to mine. Otherwise, we could go to a motel. Up until then, we had never been to a motel, nor did either of us ever suggest it. When I frowned, Kyungho averted my gaze and said,        My sister is home.        I knew he had a sister three years older than him. I also knew that she had dropped out of art college, that she had practically raised Kyungho after they lost their parents in an accident, and that she was now suffering from quite severe depression. That same sister had moved into Kyungho’s place a few months earlier. I wondered how the two managed to share the cramped space—he lived in a tiny apartment of thirteen pyeong, with two small rooms—but most of all, it irked me that he hadn’t told me about this until now, when he had no choice but to bring it up.        I had my prejudices, too. I had heard too many times about sisters-in-law being even more difficult to deal with than mothers-in-law. After their parents’ death, Kyungho’s sister had left university and thrown herself into the frontline of the workforce to provide for them. She had done just about anything—manual labor at construction sites, factory work, housekeeping. Right now, however, her depression kept her from holding down any kind of job for long. Kyungho adored his sister.        Our dark past caught up to her in the form of an illness, he said. She always seemed so strong, I never realized she was breaking down inside. I couldn’t see it. She’s only got me.        Whenever Kyungho brought up the subject, I felt a little uneasy. A part of me was afraid his sister was using the sacrifices she had made to hold him hostage. And what if she’d eventually demand I repay that debt as well?        At the same time, I felt sorry for her. She was over forty and had never really been able to settle anywhere, with no stable job, no partner to lean on, and now she was living in her little brother’s house. To be honest, I thought maybe depression was just an excuse.        Aside from the issue of his sister (at the time I thought she was the problem), Kyungho was good husband material. He was a civil servant like me and had no extravagant spending habits. Back then he had never shown even the slightest aggression toward me, never cursed, and wasn’t much of a drinker. He wasn’t flawless by any means, but he was nice to me, and I liked him.        Then one day, Kyungho asked me if I wanted to meet his sister. When I agreed, he said something that left me puzzled: I hope you won’t like her, or hate her either.  *      I met her in the summer. We went to a samgyetang restaurant, even though it wasn’t the hottest day of the season. I thought it was an odd choice, but Kyungho told me his sister had done thorough research before landing on this specific place.        Later, Kyungshin Unnie revealed she had considered that first meeting as a sort of pre-engagement introduction. After all, she was Kyungho’s only family. She thought samgyetang was the perfect menu for such an occasion—neither too expensive nor cheap, a dish you didn’t eat often but that at the same time didn’t require formal attire. Unnie said that while she wanted me to feel welcomed and taken care of, she had hoped not to pressure me. I was so struck by her thoughtfulness I almost felt guilty. Unnie’s long, wavy hair was pinned up with a claw clip, and she wore a loose khaki summer knit through which you could clearly make out her bra top, a pair of jeans shorts that revealed her thighs, and flip-flops. Her attire felt almost too casual, even to the point of being inappropriate. As for myself, I had opted for a two-piece linen set. Even though we met right after work, I tried to dress for the occasion.        Despite not wearing any make-up, she had an air of elegance. I could feel the people in the restaurant stealing  glances at her. It’s inevitable for beauty to attract attention, and Kyungshin Unnie was effortlessly stunning.        For this reason, I must admit I was taken aback. I had always imagined she’d be a bit lackluster, with small eyes and a shadow cast over her face that make-up couldn’t conceal. Overall, someone that had no desire or interest in taking care of her appearance. But when she looked at me and smiled, there was no shadow on her face.        Should I just call you Hyejeong? I heard you’re younger than Kyungho.        Out of the blue, she dropped any formalities and called me by my name. I was torn, unsure whether I ought to let my walls down or build them up higher. While I don’t remember the details of our conversation, my heart began to thaw against my will, and eventually it melted completely. We left the restaurant and went to Kyungho’s place, where we drank until dawn. It was a relief that we had met on a Friday.        That Saturday, we soothed our alcohol-filled stomachs with the bean sprout ramyun Unnie prepared for brunch, then proceeded to spend the day lounging on the sofa, dozing in fits and starts while reruns of some entertainment program played in the background. For dinner, we ordered fried chicken. If anyone had seen us, they’d have a hard time understanding how we could’ve gotten so close after only one day.        As I was standing in the foyer of Kyungho’s apartment, Unnie chirped, If you two get married, we’ll have loads of fun, don’t you think?        On my way back home, I kept smiling. A part of me couldn’t believe what had happened, while another found it refreshing. I felt like I had just witnessed something rare. Unnie’s words, her expression as she said them—she was devoid of all pretenses. I don’t think we were ever fully sober after that weekend. Unnie liked her liquor, and she got drunk easily. As for me, I liked Unnie and almost never got tipsy. We met up to drink every other day. As time passed, Kyungho became less and less a part of our get-togethers.        One evening, in a tiny, unknown bar on the third floor of a building, Unnie and I joined a group that was playing guitar. I was the type who held onto the tambourine like a lifeline during the karaoke sessions that inevitably followed company dinners, trying to get out of singing, but that night I bellowed out two whole songs on my own, following the guitar’s melody.        For the first time in my life, I even went to a club. Unnie brought me a dress—a tiny scrap of fabric, really—and a few accessories. I changed in a subway station bathroom stall. Unnie applied glittering eyeshadow to my eyelids, then picked up an eyeliner and drew a sharp line that elongated the shape of my eyes. Standing in front of the mirror, we both burst into giggles. It felt like I was back in middle school, even though I had never done anything like that as a teenager. I was sure the men guarding the club’s doors wouldn’t let us in, but thanks to Unnie we made it through. The club was loud, chaotic, and overall a place I would never step into again, but I had fun.        When I was with Kyungshin Unnie, I became a braver version of myself, even without the help of alcohol. Beside her, I felt free, though I didn’t know what from.        As I lay in bed to sleep, thoughts of her filled my mind. It was as if I had a light fever, a feeling I’d never experienced with anyone—not with Kyungho, and not with any of my past boyfriends. Every so often, when I went out to meet her, I’d find her already drinking with someone else. Sometimes it would be a friend of hers or an acquaintance, but there were also times when she’d only met them a few hours earlier. Among these random drinking buddies a few were surprisingly shy and reserved. Most introverts, myself included, would instinctively run if someone approached them out of the blue, but Unnie wasn’t threatening, nor did she push them out of their comfort zones. She was the type who’d seep through your barriers without you even noticing.        She was considerate with everyone, and thoughtfulness came to her so naturally that those on the receiving end, without being aware of it, simply felt respected and at ease when they were in her company. In a group, Unnie would always make sure no one was feeling left out, spreading her attention and care to each, like a mother bird feeding her chicks. I believed that was Unnie’s special talent.        Kyungho disagreed. In fact, he thought the opposite. He said Unnie had a habit of lowering herself, which made others feel superior to her. That was why people gravitated toward her.I took his words as a criticism of me. By then, we were arguing much more often. Do you know you’re acting strange lately? Kyungho said one day, when Unnie wasn’t around. I’m not sure if you’re dating me or my sister, to be honest.        Thinking he was joking, I laughed and said, I guess you’re right!        Be reasonable, he continued, turning serious. You’re not special to her. She acts the same with everyone.        I felt hurt, maybe because deep down I already knew it. As I fell silent, Kyungho sighed and rubbed his face.        Hyejeong-ah, he said with a sweeter tone, hoping to comfort me, You said it yourself before, didn’t you? That you liked Kyungshin because she had no walls. The thing is, no walls means she has no defense either. She gives her all to everyone, always laying her cards on the table. You need to protect her, not get swept away in her wind.        I got angry. I thought he was being unfair. I wanted to tell him I loved Kyungshin as much as he did. I believed he was trying to control Unnie under the guise of protecting her.        I shouted at him, You may be the one protecting your sister, but I’ll help her live her life the way she wants! If she shows all her cards, I’ll show mine, too.That was how I felt at the time.  *      Imagine a plain glass bottle, with no decoration at all, that keeps catching your eye.        With its transparent walls, you can see right through it. The bottle has no intention of hiding anything about itself, and even if it did, it’d fail. How could a glass bottle conceal its interior? It may look sturdy but there’s no guarantee it won’t break.        If you look closely, you’ll spot tiny bubbles scattered throughout the glass. The light passing through them is beautiful. Are those flaws? Beauty marks?        No, more like a glimpse of something unknown. Maybe that’s why the person looking at them feels uneasy. That day, Unnie seemed oddly unstable. She kept drinking, unable to resist the alcohol, and looked a little sad, despite trying to hide it with an awkward laugh.        We were at a cocktail bar we frequented, and she continued dozing off. She had changed her antidepressant prescription, and she said as a side effect drinking made her sleepy. I made a joke, saying that as a result she’d probably drink less, so in the long run it wouldn’t be a negative side effect anymore.        While I drank my three gin tonics, Unnie kept sleeping. Then, she jerked awake, messaged someone on her phone, and said she was going to a friend’s house. I asked the bartender for a cup of water and watched as Unnie drank it all down.        After leaving the bar, Unnie smoked a cigarette, and I bought two hangover drinks from the convenience store. We each gulped one down, and I walked her to her friend’s house, which was in an old building. Unnie said she would go in after seeing me off. When I turned around, she waved her hand and smiled. I walked to the main road and took a taxi. At four in the morning, I received a call from Kyungho. Unnie hadn’t come home. I told him she went to a friend’s house, so she was probably still there.        Which friend?        I don’t know the name.        He sounded resentful, saying I should’ve at least phoned him if I wasn’t going with her. As I explained to him that I had accompanied her to the entrance of the building and shared with him its location, I wondered why the hell I was making excuses.        I was about to tell him he was the one being unreasonable now, that maybe she didn’t want to go home because he suffocated her, but I stopped myself in time. Instead, I chose sarcasm.        Do you even know how old your sister is?        Kyungho remained silent for a long while, then hung up. I went back to sleep, then woke up and got to work. At the end of a meeting, I checked my phone. Kyungho never contacted me during work hours, but I found three missed calls and a text saying he was waiting for me in the lobby on the first floor.        Once I went down, I saw Kyungho beyond the security gate, staring into the void. His eyes were bloodshot, as if he hadn’t slept at all. He’d been contacted by the police. Someone had called them saying they found Kyungshin Unnie sleeping on a park bench near a subway station.        If that person hadn’t reported it, if something had happened to her. . . Kyungho was speaking in a murmur, but I could sense the boiling anger underneath. For the first time, I was afraid of him.        I thought you would at least. . . but he trailed off. I wasn’t sure if he was holding back tears or something else. Then he said he wanted to break up.        I said, Okay, and that was the last time we saw each other.  *      By the end of the summer, Unnie said she wanted to meet and talk. Had I been waiting for her to say it first? I was both worried and happy. To be honest, during our text conversations, a baseless confidence had sprouted within me. I was sure this time around I’d be able to maintain the proper distance. It had been six years, and during that time, no matter how long or short it may have felt, we had matured.        We met at a sushi restaurant near my office. I’d thought she was joking when she told me she’d stopped drinking, but Unnie didn’t order any alcohol. Maybe that was why she looked a bit dull. She had been texting me non-stop about every little thing, but now that we were face-to-face, she wasn’t speaking much. She was limp as a toilet paper roll without its center. Once we were done with our food, we walked to a nearby park. The days were still long, and the sun shined on the streets despite it being seven o’clock in the evening. As if sensing the summer’s end, the cicadas were louder than ever, their buzzing pouring down from the lush zelkova trees.        As soon as we sat down on a bench, three pigeons flew over. The birds didn’t seem to expect anything from us, judging by the way they pecked at the ground. I couldn’t tell if they were eating bugs or something else.        When, a while later, Unnie rummaged through her purse, a few other pigeons and sparrows circled us. She took out a packet of candy and offered me one. Mint flavored. She said she was in the process of quitting smoking.        Why? I asked.        Why? she repeated, then she burst out laughing. The candy had melted and was stuck to the wrapper, which wouldn’t budge. At the rustling sound, the birds ran to my feet in anticipation.        I wouldn’t be able to face Kyungho if I got cancer or something, Unnie said. I took the opportunity to ask her how he was doing.        Is he okay?        Yeah. He’s gotten into biking. He doesn’t only ride outside, he also bought an indoor one. This fall he’s going to do a cross-country trip with his friends. All the way down to Busan.        That wasn’t what I was curious about, but I nodded anyway. Kyunghshin Unnie seemed to have read my mind, because she said she’d moved out. Kyungho paid for her deposit. Now she was teaching an art class two times a week at a kindergarten. In the evenings she spent at home she liked to draw, even though it was nothing more than doodles. She was still on antidepressants, but her symptoms had gotten much better. I kept nodding my head.        Then we fell into silence for a while, both rolling the candy in our mouth, staring at the birds. Unnie pointed at one of the sparrows and said, It looks exactly like one of the toddlers I teach.        Oh, that’s adorable.        The sparrows running around were cute. For the first time, I thought I would like to be friends with a bird.        I imagined it springing up into the air and sitting on my finger. Walking while it rested on my shoulder. My foolish fantasies were broken by Unnie’s sudden request.        Can you lend me some money?        I felt a stinging pain somewhere around my chest. I hadn’t been expecting much, but. . .        How much do you need?        One million won.        Are you sick?        She shook her head no. If anything, I’m too healthy, she said. I wondered what “too healthy” could mean, but I didn’t ask.        I’ll give you the money. No need to pay me back.        When she heard my answer, Unnie stared at me with vacant eyes.        I had forgotten about this habit of hers, the way she turned to look at you, her gaze blank. Quite literally, it was impossible to read any emotion or intention in her eyes, and that still stare made you look back at yourself. Is there something on my face? Did I say something wrong?        Maybe others would dislike that habit, but I didn’t mind. I always thought it was a good gaze—if a gaze can even be judged as good or bad.        How was Kyungho’s gaze? Good? Bad? His eyes were incredibly clear, almost strangely so (like the glossy black stones on a Go board), yet every time they met mine, I liked myself a little less. Maybe because of my crooked feelings that had been there from the start.        Sitting on that park bench, I sent Unnie the money without thinking twice.        I’ll pay it back, I promise, she said firmly.        Right then, a sparrow landed with a flutter on her knee. Her gaze turned to me, as if to say, Look at this!        Her face lit up with pure delight, like she’d already forgotten I had just lent her a million won.  *     Starting the next day, I couldn’t get in contact with her. Or rather, Unnie’s texts, which had been a constant flow lately, came to an abrupt end.        I got angry when I realized she’d only reached out again to get the money. She could’ve just asked by text and I would’ve given it to her, no questions asked. That way, she would have spared me this hurt.        Thinking back to our conversation, Unnie hadn’t asked anything about me. All I got was that single How are you doing? the first time she texted me while I was on the train. Kyungshin Unnie had talked about herself the whole time, while I simply nodded or offered a laugh now and then.        Kyungho had been right. I was nothing to her. At that realization I didn’t feel anger, but sadness. And not because I’d been abandoned a second time, but because I realized the one who was abandoned had never been me. That fateful night, when everything went astray, Unnie slept at the cocktail bar’s counter, her arms crossed and her head bobbing. I remember thinking she looked so peaceful. A part of me wanted to believe that she could sleep so soundly because she trusted me, but deep down I knew that she would’ve slept the same with just about anyone else, whether I were there or not. That thought saddened me.        Unnie’s back arched lower inch by inch, like ice cream melting. I pulled my seat closer so she could lean on me. Her body grew heavier by the minute. A round pool of warmth formed where our shoulders touched.        As I listened to her heavy breathing, a knot formed in my throat, overwhelmed with the feeling of one life weighing me down, heavier than Earth itself. A thought flashed in my mind. I want to protect this person. I won’t let her crumble. Though I may not be able to fully understand her, I can love her with all my might.        And then I realized—that was how Kyungho had felt all along.         I ran.  *     A few months later I received a call from the receptionist on the first floor of my building notifying me that, just a couple hours earlier, someone had left something for me. On my way home from work, I stopped to retrieve it. The receptionist told me that, for security reasons, they usually didn’t pass along items this way, but the woman’s pleas had been so earnest that they made an exception.        He handed me a pink envelope with a floral pattern. On the front it said To Hyejeong. Inside, there were twenty fifty-thousand-won bills. We never contacted each other after that. But who knows, in another six years I might get another call, Hyejeong-ah, it’s me.        If Kyungshin Unnie hadn’t been born, I might’ve married Kyungho and by now we’d have a couple of kids. If Kyunghshin Unnie hadn’t been born, I wouldn’t have cried on the streets holding a pink floral envelope.        For a long time, I believed my break-up with Kyungho was because of her, but I was wrong. We broke up because of who we were, just like Unnie couldn’t have been anyone but herself. I thought she had left me on the road like a hit-and-run driver, but maybe I was the sparrow who had rested on Unnie’s knee that day.        Sometimes I think back to that sparrow. And to the candor of my feelings, as weightless as the little bird.       Translated by Giulia Macrí

by Moon JinYoung

Fiction

Love and Flaws

Sleep too much and your head will feel fuzzy. But I quite like that feeling.        Of all the things my aunt had said, this was perhaps the only one I could agree with. I’d been going to bed much too early, drifting in and out of sleep until high noon the next day. A whole week went by before I found myself staring at my ceiling, nodding slowly. She’s right. For the first time in my life, I was agreeing with my aunt. If you sleep for too long, you’ll feel like you’re aging quietly. I liked the peaceful feeling of time slipping by without anyone knowing. I tried to catch the moment when I fell asleep; to hold on to that last, precarious bit of consciousness. But time and time again, I failed. Once, I jolted awake and thought, I was so close.        I was wrapped warmly in my blanket, but the tip of my nose was still cold. Pinching it, I thought, This won’t do. I should get out the heating mat. Only then did I sit up, drag myself to the fridge, and down a protein drink. Panning my kitchen, I sighed. There was trash everywhere from all the takeout I’d been ordering, and balls of hair and dust rolling across the floor. And here I was blaming the heavy rain for my coughing fits and blocked nose. How silly.        While brewing coffee in my moka pot, it occurred to me that making coffee was the most productive thing I’d done this week. The thought made me chuckle. Productive? Wait till I get out the heating mat. I poured the coffee into a mug and slurped it on the balcony. It was raining. It’s rained so much this year. Soon the walls will be wet again. Just then, I received a text message from Su. Got something to give you. I willed myself to ignore the notification. But just as I was about to click on another one, I tapped on it by accident. Immediately I looked up how to turn off read receipts.        I really didn’t want Su at the funeral. In fact, I’d told him not to come. Twice. He’d shown up regardless. I couldn’t stop him—didn’t think it was polite to repeatedly turn away someone who was just trying to offer his condolences. Su acted like a real adult. He paid his respects before the funeral portrait, bowed to the chief mourner, and gave me a light hug. He skipped the yukgaejang and only had some rice cakes and tangerines. As he sipped on soju, he said, “I had to come. Your aunt was a good person.”        Su’s voice was thin and high-pitched, which made him sound ill. But that was why I had loved him. I loved the way he went by “Su” because his real name, “Daesu,” was too old-fashioned and masculine. My father took too much pride in his name. “It’s Kim, Sang, Nam. Sangnam, as in ‘manly man,’” he’d explain to strangers. But the reason Su and I had broken up after six years was because he had my father’s attitude. The kind of attitude that would compel one to say, “I had to come. Your aunt was a good person.”        After Su finished his bottle of soju and left, Mom scolded me, saying that I should’ve offered him at least a bowl of yukgaejang so he wouldn’t ruin his stomach. “Next time you see him, treat him to something good,” she said. Mom was always acting as if Su and I would eventually get back together. I didn’t want to owe him anything anymore, but people were always getting into the way of my plans, and that infuriated me. I finished the rest of my coffee, smoked a cigarette, and dialed Su’s number. He picked up after a few rings. “Hey,” he said. “Hey,” I said back. After a short pause, he said, “I have something to give you.” I rubbed my eyes. “Where should I meet you?” *       My aunt Sunjeong was fifteen years older than my father. Grandpa had died in a traffic accident shortly after Dad was born, and Grandma died of stomach cancer when Dad was six. With a sick mother to look after and a younger brother to raise, Sunjeong was forced to grow up quickly. After graduating high school and landing a factory job, Dad suddenly decided to go to university. He took the entrance exams three times before he succeeded. By then, having devoted her life to her family, Sunjeong was realizing too late that she was entering her forties, way past the prime age for getting married. “I thought my life was over! I swear, the only thing on my mind was marriage.” I remember the excitement on her face as she spoke. “I was left with either the guy who puts mousse on all three strands of his hair or the gross bastard who spits into the ashtray. I’m serious!” Perched on her lap, eight-year-old me had asked, “What about Gyucheol ajussi?”        Back then, we lived in a humble two-room apartment. There were four of us—Dad, Mom, Sunjeong, and me. Sunjeong wanted me to address her by name; she was very fond of it. At some point, I started calling her “gomo,” or “aunt,” though I can’t remember why. I do, however, remember the look on her face as she slowly turned around after hearing me say “gomo” for the first time.        With only six apartments on each floor, all the kids were close. There were three of us and we liked to rollerblade or play pretend. For the latter, we’d use the room that Sunjeong and I shared—I was the only kid whose parents both worked. Sunjeong would move to the living room to watch rented videos and sip on damgeumju. Meanwhile, in that musty little room, my friends and I would sit in a circle and designate husbands. Jo Sung-mo, Yoo Seung-jun, and Han Kyung-il were our top three. Jo Sung-mo was the most popular, followed by Yoo Seung-jun. There were days when we’d fight tooth and nail for the husband we wanted, and some when we’d quietly yield for the sake of friendship.        Sunjeong and Mom must’ve assumed we were playing house. But they were wrong. Eight-year-olds sought more than simple-minded games. We’d take turns standing in a corner of the room, facing the wall with our eyes closed. One of us would take off that person’s pants, and the other would strip them of their underwear. The girl standing in the corner would scream her lungs out, as if she couldn’t bear the humiliation. After that, she’d resume a nonchalant expression and put her pants and underwear back on, and someone else would take her place. When everyone had had their turn, we’d each stuff a doll under our T-shirts. Then, we’d hold hands and shriek our respective husband’s name, faces crumpled in our best pained expressions. In our minds, the hand we were holding was our husband’s, and they were bearing the excruciating pain of childbirth with us.        One day, we got into a fight. No one was willing to back down. All three of us wanted either Jo Sung-mo or Yoo Seung-jun as our husband, and no one wanted poor Han Kyung-il. For some reason, Gyuri really grated on my nerves that day. Of the three of us, she’d gotten to play Jo Sung-mo’s wife the most. Feeling a bit feisty, I said, “You know what they say, Gyuri. Bossy girls who insist on doing things their way never get married.” To which Gyuri retorted, “Oh, really! Is that why your aunt got kicked out by her husband?”        It was then when it all clicked: why Sunjeong was living with us, and why I called her husband “Gyucheol ajussi” instead of “gomobu.” I shot up, blood surging through my cheeks.        “Where are you going?” Gyuri asked.        “To the toilet,” I replied, straining to keep my voice cool.        When I opened the door, Sunjeong was standing there. My breath hitched in my throat. The glacial expression on her face was one that I’d never seen before. Her gaze passed over me, my friends, and the two dolls sprawled on the floor. The other one was stuffed under my friend’s shirt. Like an indignant king standing over his pathetic subjects, Sunjeong screamed.        “You wretched girls!”        Just then, someone started to hiccup. I turned to find Gyuri with tears welling in her eyes, hands clasped over her mouth. Despite her attempt to silence her hiccups, they continued, and she sounded like a squeaky rubber duck. Sunjeong sucked in a breath. Then she sat down beside Gyuri and placed a hand over her nose and mouth. “Hold your breath for as long as you can. It’ll help.” Each of Sunjeong’s fingers was creased with wrinkles. They remained earnestly fastened on Gyuri’s face until the girl signaled that she was at her limit. When Sunjeong removed her hand, Gyuri’s hiccups had stopped. *     I met Su in a restaurant near Dongdaemun Station. We’d come here often as a couple, so we ordered our usual—stir-fried morning glory, fried eggplants, and two bowls of noodles. We started off with a bottle of Harbin and ended up ordering soju. While we filled each other’s glasses, we chatted about this and that. “I was told I’m motivated by anxiety,” I said. “By who?” Su asked. “The doctor,” I replied. For a moment, Su fell into thought. Then, he nodded as if he understood.        “You agree?”        “You’re always putting out feelers to make sure that plans don’t fall through.”        “Me? When?”        “Before a trip, you’ll ask if I’ve packed my towels. And before every date you’ll ask me what color shirt I’m wearing.”        “That’s not putting out feelers.”        “Technically not, I guess. But it’s not not putting out feelers.”        I clinked glasses with Su. He knows me too damn well. As our conversation grew longer, I started worrying about that shopping bag he’d brought with him. It was from Hyundai Department Store and was one of their latest eco-friendly designs. Yikes, I hope I won’t have to pay for drinks. Maybe there’s a cheap pub around here. I didn’t know what was in the bag, but felt obliged to pay him back for it. See? You should’ve offered him that bowl of yukgaejang, Mom’s snarky voice rang in my ears.        “Actually,” Su started nervously, “I asked to meet because I wanted to give you this.”        Supporting the base of the bag with a hand, he carefully handed the shopping bag to me. When I, too, placed my hand under the bag, I felt the weight and the wide curves of the object inside. Half eager, I peeked into the pregnant bag. A deflated laugh escaped me. What the hell? Why give me this? My mind swarmed with a million question marks, but I couldn’t manage a single word. Su had given me a robot vacuum cleaner.“Didn’t think it was right for me to keep it.”Su cleared his throat awkwardly and ordered another bottle of beer.        “Why do you have this?”        “I got it as a gift.”        I watched in silence as Su mixed together an even ratio of beer and soju. I was the one who’d taught him that. Using a soju glass as a measuring cup, pour in one full glass of soju, and one full glass of maekju, and there you’ll have it, the perfect cup of liquor. One that strikes the balance between bitterness and sweetness. See, when it comes to somaek, you should be able to taste the ‘so’ and the ‘maek’ equally. Moderation is key—funny, but a universal principle.        “From who?”        I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. The scratched-up old vacuum cleaner had been a present from me to my aunt. Although strictly speaking, it’d been more of a concession.        “We met a couple times. I helped her out with some finance stuff.”        Knocking back his somaek, Su said, That’s why I said what I said. She was really a good person. There are things you don’t know about. I knew that Su was the type to be specific, and that was why he’d mentioned the “finance stuff.” I was angry not because there were things I didn’t know about him, nor because of how he’d thought himself important enough to speak on my aunt’s character. I was angry because of how meticulous he’d been; so careful that he’d felt the need to specify what he’d helped my aunt with. His meticulousness told me that he’d never cared to understand me. Always so carefully curated, his words belittled and hurt me.        But Su was a kind and sensitive person. He cared about the environment and carried around a reusable bag made from recycled materials. He was the type who couldn’t ignore a beggar’s tin. If I showed up an hour late, he’d smiled and say I’d given him time to finish his book. That time when I fell off my bike, Su had thrown aside his own bike and rushed over to me. Oh no, what a shame. Your pretty knee, he’d said, as if my hairy knee was the most beautiful thing in the world. And of course, he’d been kind enough to help my aunt.        I was dying to ask about the specifics of Gomo’s money troubles, but the question didn’t come out easily. It hadn’t been long since the funeral, and I didn’t want to seem sensitive about money. I poured the last of our soju and beer into my cup and guzzled it down. Straightening his posture, Su asked, “What’s wrong?” He never knew why I was upset, and never knowing when I’d get upset, he was always on pins and needles around me. To show that I was enjoying my drink, I widened my eyes and flashed a cheeky smile. Then I chirped, “Let’s go!” We’d had two bottles of soju and three bottles of beer in total. The meal was about 70,000 won. I shooed Su away from the counter and paid the bill. Outside, I asked, “Will you walk me home?” *     Like Gyuri said, it was rumored that after barely a year of being married to an old man who had a kid of his own, Sunjeong had been kicked out. Sunjeong was convinced that it was my mother, Minae, who had spread the rumors. I didn’t know why she was so sure. After quitting her job and a few matchmaking sessions, Sunjeong had gotten married and divorced in the same year. A few months later, she lugged all her things into my room. Without a single explanation, she told me that I was to call gomobu “Gyucheol ajussi” from now on. Mom and Dad gave me the same instruction. Nobody ever mentioned it, but Sunjeong behaved like someone who’d given up completely. She drank too much and despised everyone. Well, not everyone. There was a child whom Sunjeong showered with love—me.        Twice a week, Sunjeong went to mass. Even when her body was leaden with anti-depressants and all sorts of other pills, she’d drag herself to church. She always took me with her. For six months I attended a baptism preparation program. I hated it so much that sometimes I’d pretend to be asleep. The only part I liked was standing beside Sunjeong, who was always in her beautiful chapel veil, watching her receive communion and getting to nibble on the sacramental wafer. The first time I saw the round wafer, it looked so appetizing that I couldn’t help myself. I reached out both my hands. Flustered, Sunjeong gently pushed them down.        “People who aren’t baptized can’t receive communion,” she explained. Hearing the sternness in her voice, my lips crimped into a straight line. Sunjeong had a certain aura. One that could make a child freeze up. But after that first time, Sunjeong would sneak a look around, pull out the wafer from her mouth and quickly put it in mine. The damp wafer melted quickly on my tongue. Since then, I’d always received communion. It wasn’t until I shared this story with a Catholic friend that I learnt that Sunjeong’s sneaky behavior was considered sinful. I still remember the verses that the priest would recite: Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my Body, which will be given up for you.        Sunjeong hated Mom. For what reason, I didn’t know. People hate for all sorts of reasons. In any case, the way Sunjeong hated Mom, you’d wonder how someone could harbor so much hate. When Mom had married Dad, Mom had taken the words, “Don’t worry about anything,” at face value. Dad had in fact said those words to her, and Sunjeong had initially been welcoming and even gushed about all the fun they’ll have collecting new furniture and moving into bigger houses together. But when Mom finally moved in, Sunjeong greeted her, cheeks flushed with drunkenness and pointing an accusing finger: who moves into their husband’s house without so much as a rice cooker!        That day, Mom had run to the department store and bought the most expensive pressure rice cooker. Did Sunjeong really despise Mom because of a silly rice cooker? Back then, I thought that Sunjeong had gotten kicked out because she was mean to Mom. I thought it was retribution, something as natural as raising your hand before crossing the road. Whenever Sunjeong lashed out at Mom, I’d think, There she goes again, racking up bad karma. But one thing was for sure—I loved my aunt as much as she loved me. Even though I was young, I knew never to take my mother’s side in front of Sunjeong. To me, love was something accompanied by nervousness, something like a line that shouldn’t be crossed.        One day, Mom said she was craving spicy fish roe stew. I’d never had altang, so she described it to me as kimchi jjigae with a lot more crunch. A crossover between popping candy and a perennial favorite? I was practically drooling. “Let’s go!” I quipped. Mom shared my sentiment. But the stew didn’t meet my expectations. I didn’t know what to expect, but I certainly wasn’t expecting altang to taste like that. Not to mention, the roe looked absolutely disgusting. Disappointed, I burst into tears. Meanwhile, Mom cleared the pot by herself, dipping everything in soy sauce.        That was when it all started. Whenever Mom sat reading the newspaper, she’d feel the heat of someone’s gaze blazing past the inky words. She’d fold up the newspaper to see Sunjeong standing on the balcony, looking at the sky. “Was your aunt looking at me?” she’d ask, and I’d feign ignorance. But of course, I’d seen Sunjeong’s hair-raising glare. The reason behind Sunjeong’s death glare was only revealed after Mom had gone to Dad and wept, and Dad had grabbed Sunjeong by the shoulders and yelled, “Why the hell did you do that?” The reason was so simple. Because we’d gone to eat altang without her. But was that really all? Mom and I certainly believed so. Whenever someone used her precious soap without permission, or threw out expired food without telling her, she’d resort to one of her tacit bullying tactics, which at worst could last up to a month. Mom always bore the full brunt. What was shocking was the fact that Sunjeong was always kind to the neighbors. A sweet, warm, and outgoing woman in her mid-forties. But a woman who’d been chased out by her husband. I did really love Sunjeong. But at some point, I started to hate her. *     Su and I were drunk. As we strolled down Cheonggyecheon Stream, he made a few attempts to hold my hand, but I’d point to a karaoke place, trip over a rock, or pick up a piece of trash from the floor, strictly maintaining our cordial distance. Su said that he’d been into this new Nintendo Pokémon game. He was growing tired of catching only Metapods, and showed me a picture of the character. I already knew how Metapod looked, but seeing it again, I found it quite endearing. A crescent-shaped pupa with a plain face. “Doesn’t it have any special abilities?” I asked. “Just ‘shed skin,’” Su replied.        “Hey, that’s still something,” I said.        “What do you know about Pokémon?”        “More than you think.”        Despite my cheerful tone, my mind was occupied by that robot vacuum cleaner that I’d barely crammed into my backpack. I waited for the right time to ask Su how my aunt’s vacuum cleaner had ended up in his possession. And I wanted to know the details of all her “finance stuff.” Su spoke first.        “By the way, did you buy your aunt that vacuum cleaner?”        “Why?”        “She didn’t know how to use it.”        “That’s why I bought it.”        There hadn’t been a more foolproof appliance. As long as the machine had mapped the layout of the apartment, it could clean the house on its own. It could even return to its dock and charge itself. Mom would take care of the in-and-outs and all Sunjeong had to do was push the on/off button. Mom had told me that Sunjeong used it all the time.        When Su and I reached Jongno, we took the stairs up to street level. It was two in the morning, and the streets were crowded with drunks.        “Look at that.”        Su pointed to a couple who was slumped on the ground, sitting face to face. Their position struck me as odd, and I couldn’t bring myself to walk away. Legs spread apart, holding each other’s hands, and heads drooped, the couple looked like they were helping each other stretch. I approached them to check if their eyes were open.        “Let’s just go.”        “But what if something bad happens.”        “I’m sure they’re together.”        Naïve as always, I thought. I shook the woman’s shoulder first. Spotting her purse a distance away, I went to retrieve it. In the meantime, the woman didn’t stir. This time, I pulled her up by the shoulders and slung her bag across her torso. At last her brows twitched, and her fingers wrapped around the bag strap.        “It’s dangerous out here,” I said.        The woman looked around. When she finally noticed the man in front of her, she jumped. She bowed to me and scurried away. The man, too, turned his head sluggishly before trudging off. I shot Su a triumphant look. He smacked his lips.        “You would’ve gotten mad if I’d gone up to wake her.”        “Why would I get mad?”        “You’d tell me to mind my own business.”        I didn’t reply. He was right. I would’ve gotten annoyed. Because Su was always doing good to make a case for life. Life has a grotesque face. And I believed that we should face that grotesqueness straight on. But it always seemed like Su would do anything to avoid it.        I’d bought that vacuum cleaner five years ago. I’d landed a job at an educational marketing company and won a pretty big marketing contest. Both pieces of news made my parents very happy. Around that time, Gomo had fallen ill and spent almost every day holed up in her room. For meals, she’d crack open the door to pick up the tray of food that Mom had prepared for her, and when she was done, she’d slide out the empty tray. By then, I’d already moved out and would occasionally return to show my parents how well I was doing and indulge in Mom’s cooking.        The problem started with that darn dishwasher. I’d been meaning to buy a dishwasher for Mom with my prize  money because she was wrestling with arthritis. Dishwashers were typically installed somewhere between the bottom cabinets, but because we didn’t have any top shelves, our bottom cabinets were higher and deeper than normal. After some consideration, I purchased a medium-sized dishwasher that could be placed beside the sink. Not only had I gotten it for a decent price, I’d managed to convince Mom that this was a smart purchase, and for that, I was proud.        When Gomo came into the kitchen the next day, she saw the hefty machine. “Did Seonghye buy that?” she asked. Mom rushed to say that she’d tried to stop me, and that it was a good thing it wasn’t expensive because she wouldn’t be using it.        Still, Gomo said, “I hate it.”        And as always, she started drinking and taking pills with no regard for her prescription. This had always been my aunt’s way of showing dissatisfaction. After a phone call with Mom, I resolved to buy something just for Gomo. I went to the electronics store, bought something, wrapped it up nicely, made the hour-long trip to my parents’ house, and sat down beside my listless aunt. Then I placed the robot vacuum cleaner in her hands. A shy smile appeared on her face. “Oh, you didn’t have to. You’re all grown up now, my dear.” The hatred burning inside me dissipated slightly, but I recalled the image of a skinny twenty-seven-year-old bride running around a department store, looking for the most expensive rice cooker.        Genuinely worried, I asked, “Gomo, are you alright?” Gomo then launched into a series of complaints: That mother of yours doesn’t speak to me. I have to go to the dentist and the market. . . She started to cry. I listened to her: patiently, never taking Mom’s side. I did, however, tell Dad to look after Mom. *     After Sunjeong found out about the nature of our pretend games, the three of us stopped playing together. Even when we saw one another in the corridor, we wouldn’t say hi. Gyuri would occasionally strike up a conversation out of guilt, but Ara would later send me a long email saying that she never wanted to see me again. While Gyuri and I chewed over her overreaction and mean letter, we started becoming close again. Overcoming betrayal, our friendship bloomed. Gyuri started coming over. Sunjeong still didn’t like the girl, but never said anything about it—she knew that aside from Gyuri, I had no friends.        I didn’t know it then, but I’d been holding a grudge against Gyuri. One day during summer break, the two of us were drawing in my room. Using the fountain pen I’d gifted her on her birthday, Gyuri drew a girl. She had big eyes and long eyelashes. When I snuck another look, Gyuri was cautiously adding a few strands of hair to the girl’s armpit. Bored of drawing, I suggested we do something that was actually fun. “Like what?” Gyuri asked. “Come here,” I said. I opened the shoe cabinet, got out the toolbox, and rummaged through it. Once I found what I was looking for, I went into the bathroom and called out to Gyuri. She hesitated before stepping in.        “What are you gonna do?”        “Something fun.”        “Don’t do anything weird.”        “Like what?”        “Ugh. I don’t like this.”        Fear was written all over Gyuri’s face. Come to think of it, Gyuri had been a sensitive child; always the quickest to sense the uneasiness between what was happening and what was about to happen. Whenever I was reminded of her, I’d wonder what her parents were like.        In the toilet, I switched off the lights and shut the door. With a lighter, I lit the giant candle. A faint light flickered in the darkness, softly illuminating Gyuri’s face in the mirror. I stood before the door so that Gyuri couldn’t escape. I knew that she still slept with a light on—a secret she’d trusted me with.        “You know the song ‘Running’?”        “Duh.”        “They say it’s real.”        “Real?”        “Yeah. If you light a candle in the dark and sing it, the main character of the song will appear in the mirror.”        “He’s dead?”        I nodded solemnly. “It’s actually a song about suicide.” I whispered the last word. Gyuri darted towards the door, but I blocked her with my body and started to sing.         Are you tired of it all? Are you struggling? Are you losing your breath? Well, it can’t be helped. You’ve already started.         Gyuri began to panic. The desire to make her scream bubbled inside me.         . . . I promise you this: there will be an end. And you can rest for a long, long time. Rest till you get sick of it.         Gyuri let out a ghastly shriek and bolted towards me, knocking the candle out of my grasp. Hot wax leapt onto her. Just then, the door opened with a click and light flooded in. I raised my hand to shield my eyes. Sunjeong. Rounded with shock, my aunt’s eyes shifted between me and Gyuri. Gyuri was bawling as if she’d lost her wits. The neck of her T-shirt was loose and drooping over one shoulder, revealing the wax that had splattered onto her neck and down to her collarbone. Her skin was red and swollen. While Gyuri gasped for air, Sunjeong stroked her back to calm her.        Then, Sunjeong slapped me on the cheek.        My world quivered. So did I. *     When we came upon the hill near my house, I brought it up. Once after walking me home, Su’s battery had died. I’d had no choice but to invite him up. Gomo had been home that day. While I was in the bathroom, she had gotten out a notebook and jotted down his name and phone number. A few months later, Su had received a call from her.        My aunt had asked if he would go through some “finance-related problem” with her. “Did she use those exact words?” I asked. Su nodded. I felt embarrassed for judging him so rashly. According to Su, Gomo had bought an insurance plan with the post office in 2000. Within three months of signing up, she was diagnosed with cancer. Since there was no way to ascertain if she had bought the plan after her diagnosis, she received her payout. With that, she was able to pay for treatment, and the fees for the remaining 238 months of her plan were waived. When her insurance term ended after twenty years, she got back her pay-out. Su had helped with the latter.        “Why you, though?”        “How would I know?”        The tinge of defiance in his voice was so Su-like. Whenever he took that tone with me, annoyance would cloud my face. Why wouldn’t you know? You should. Who else would?        “She could’ve asked my dad. Or my mom. Or me.”        “She said family isn’t to be trusted.”        I tried to keep my cool, but the thought that Gomo had said something like that angered me. “What else did she say?” I pressed. Su hesitated before telling me everything. They’d met at the residents’ center to print out the documents required to claim her premiums. It’d been especially hot that summer day, but the office was cold, so they bought two hot coffees from the vending machine and slurped on them slowly. Lowering their masks with each sip.        After they got the documents, Gomo suggested they have lunch. They went to a kongguksu restaurant and ordered two bowls of noodles. Gomo had hers with sugar, while Su spooned salt into his. Su never ate his kongguksu with kimchi, but Gomo plopped a generous portion on top of Su’s noodles. This irked him at first, but after having a bite, he ended up asking twice for a refill.        Since Gomo was insistent on receiving her premiums in cash, they ended up waiting in yet another freezing office. As before, they bought piping hot coffees and blew on them. There hadn’t been much for Su to do, actually. He’d practically gone for a free bowl of noodles.        Feeling sheepish for whatever reason, Su had kept his eyes glued to his coffee before asking, “What was Seonghye like as a child?”        Gomo didn’t answer his question. Instead, she said, “That girl loves her mother an awful lot.”        Then she started rambling. She said that when I’d broken out in a high fever when I was three, she’d put me on her back and run to the hospital. That whenever she’d ask, “Who do you love the most in the world?” I’d answer, “Sunjeong?” That when lice had spread in my daycare, she’d spent the entire night picking out the tiny bugs from my hair. At last, it was Gomo’s turn. As Su watched her walk up to the counter, exhaustion crashed over him. Gomo had filled a duffel bag with twenty million won in notes and casually handed it to Su. ‘Trusting a stranger instead of her family. Funny old woman,’ Su thought to himself. Chuckling to himself, Su confessed that he’d  imagined taking off with the money. *     Before I graduated elementary school and we moved, Sunjeong and I always shared a room. Without even a proper desk, I’d lie on my belly to read or do homework. We’d go to bed around ten, but before that, Sunjeong would pray before her statue of Mary and take her pills. She was suffering from bipolar disorder, and having taken prescription medicine for a long time, she knew how the different pills could change her mood. Like a cool-headed pharmacist, she’d combine different pills, wrap them in dissolvable paper, and swallow them. “This is the only way I can swallow them all at once,” she’d explained.        “What’s that?”        “Edible paper.”        “How does it taste?”        “It doesn’t taste like anything.”        But Sunjeong made her medicine look so delicious. The way she folded them up, you’d think she was wrapping meat in lettuce. After praying and taking her medicine, she’d lie down under the covers. Her eyes would grow hazy. Her movements slowed. I’d tuck in my drowsy aunt, switch off the lights, and lie down beside her.        Once, before I drifted off, I heard her voice.        “Seonghye-ya.”        “Yeah?”        “Who do you like more? Minae or me?”        “You.”        “Sangnam or me?”        “You.”        “Gyuri or me?”        “You.”        “What if I died?”        “You can’t!”        “What if I fell into the ocean and died a horrible death?”        “Please don’t.”        “What if a motorbike crashed into me and crushed all my bones?”        I started to cry. Sunjeong would always ask me such questions until I burst into tears. Then she’d pull me into her arms and whisper, If I ever get sick, you have to look after me, okay? I’d nod fervently, and then we’d fall asleep.        Sunjeong was a heavy sleeper. Once, I’d slapped her cheeks, worried that she’d died. She also moved a lot in her sleep, and despite how careful she was with me when she was awake, there had been a few times when she’d unconsciously rammed her elbow into my face.        Sunjeong’s pills had looked extra delicious that day. While she was asleep, I lit the candle beside her statue of Mary, opened her drawer, and took out the pastel-colored pills. Very carefully, I took out a sheet of edible paper. As if I were making the tastiest ssam, I chose the prettiest pills and laid them on the paper. Then, I wrapped them up in the shape of a cute tofu rice ball and swallowed them with the last bit of water Sunjeong had left earlier. I knelt, brought my hands together, and prayed. The way Sunjeong did. Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women. Blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.        All at once, I felt as if blood was rushing out from my body. I felt whole. Complete. Perhaps my unhappiness stems from knowing that I will never again experience that sense of fullness. Shortly afterward, I lost consciousness. I woke up four days later. My parents were staring at me and Sunjeong was crying. Mom grabbed a fistful of Sunjeong’s hair. I still remember the scene so clearly. Back then, I’d felt quite pleased with myself.        Twenty years later, though it’s nothing compared to Sunjeong, I myself have started on anti-depressants. Because with my pittance of a salary it seemed like my quality of life would always be shit. Because I didn’t own a house of my own but other people were living in palaces. Because they got rich without lifting a finger. Because I despised my partner. My heart emptied out in a million different ways. Once, during dinner, wearing a solemn expression, my father had said: mental illness is genetic. Genetic. *     We’d reached my place, but, reluctant to go home, we went to the convenience store and each bought a can of beer. I picked ale, and Su, lager. It was late. Seeing no one around, we allowed ourselves a cigarette. “That really hits the spot,” chuckled Su. Then, as if he’d just remembered something, he pointed his index finger at me.        “Your gomo gave me a hundred thousand won. For going with her.”        “But that’s not why I think she was a good person,” Su added. After their first meeting, Gomo started to call Su almost every day. I gave my entire life to Sangnam, you know. How can he be so, so heartless? You know what Minae is like? Whatever she said, it always ended with “Seonghye loves her mother an awful lot.” When Su said, “That’s why I met up with her twice after that,” I flared up.        “Why meet her if you don’t like her?”        “I never said I didn’t like her.”        “You said she was troublesome. It’s okay to say it. I found her troublesome my whole life.”        “It’s because she was lonely.”        “You’re not responsible for her loneliness.”        “Do I have to be to look after her?”        I didn’t know what to say to that. I thought Su was always acting nice. Perhaps “acting” wasn’t the right word, but there was no way of describing what he was doing more accurately. Su truly believed that he was being genuine, but I knew that he wasn’t and desperately hoped he’d come to realize it. But Su insisted that I was distorting and misunderstand his intentions. Likewise, I thought he was the one distorting and misunderstanding his intentions so that he could live life happily. But these days, I wonder if perhaps he’s simply someone who lives his life constantly reflecting on what’s the best attitude to keep. Whatever that attitude is, mine will always be anchored to pain, depression, and yearning.        Just as I’d expected, after the “Running” incident, Gyuri sent me a long email. I deleted it unread. I didn’t want to be reminded of all the times we’d cried together, sharing stories about our families. I realized then that sharing one’s secrets with someone close was no different from handing them a weapon. If I’d sent Gyuri an email, this would’ve been my opening line: I knew you’d betray me. You’re your mother’s daughter, after all.        “They say mental illness is passed down through the maternal genes.”        That sentence had broken me. It had severed the affection between me and Su. We had been at a PC room playing computer games and chatting about our irrational fears. The fear of sleeping with a leg sticking out of the blanket, of imperfect circles, of thunder. We both sucked at video games, so we played only practice rounds and prattled on through our headsets. Then I felt the urge to say it. In a tone that emphasized it was all in the past. Aiming my cursor at my opponent’s head, I said, “In elementary school, I was sure that I was suffering from severe mental illness.” Su was well aware of Gomo’s condition. That’s probably why he’d said it. That I was lucky to have avoided her genes.        I, of course, knew that the correlation between mental illness and maternal genes wasn’t scientifically proven. And like Su had said before, I didn’t think that my aunt occupied any big part in my depression. But Gomo had said that our pinky toes were exactly alike.        There was definitely something that Gomo and I shared. It could be something I’d inherited, or something stirred up by a combination of her spiritual wafer and the gentle strokes of her wrinkled hand. My gomo who doted on me hated my mom, whom I loved most in the world; my mom whom I loved most in the world was miserable because of my gomo who doted on me; and my dad, who was loved by everyone including me, must’ve realized that the problem would go unsolved until one of us died. And so he became someone who would say, “Mental illness is genetic.” So that he could live on. Somehow.        And somehow, that day, I’d glossed over what Su had said. But his words leeched onto me. Why did he say it like that? I love him so much, and he loves me, too. So why did he say that as if he were a stranger? The words “maternal genes” left a severe impact on me. If maternal genes were to blame for this mental war I was fighting, then all the pain I’d endured could be substituted with “Mom’s flawed genetics,” and the mental disorder that had plagued Gomo’s life could be substituted with “Grandma’s flawed genetics.”        But here’s what I know—Mom and Gomo had passed onto me an awful lot of love. Though I don’t know the exact nature of their love. Nor do I know how much of their love and flaws constitute me. In high school, fearing that I’d inherited mental illness, I’d go around checking up on my friends so that I could confirm that nothing weird was happening inside me. I never went to a clinic; thanks to my aunt’s influence, my family harbored a deep mistrust of psychiatric medication.        Su told me about the other times he met my aunt. They’d eaten ice cream at McDonald’s and had tea at Insadong. At some point, Gomo had stopped complaining, and talked instead about her matchmaking days. “What was it that she said about that guy?” Su asked. “That he spat in the ashtray,” I replied dryly. The last time Su met Gomo, she’d handed him the robot vacuum cleaner in a giant plastic bag. He’d tried to refuse, but it was useless. Gomo had refused his refusal, saying that the bugger was a good housekeeper, and that all he had to do was give its button a push. Then, she’d suddenly asked, “Are you going to marry Seonghye?” While Su wracked his brains for an appropriate response, Gomo had leaned in and whispered: “They treat me like an outsider.” *     I remember feeling bitter when I was putting up Gomo’s obituary and preparing for her funeral. Distant friends and relatives had asked how she died, and I only realized later that they’d all assumed she’d eventually die of suicide. I snorted. Looks like they didn’t know a thing about Gomo. Because she was a woman who wanted nothing more than to live. She stuck fast to health foods, took all her supplements, went on walks to get her vitamin D, and despite her love for smoking, she only allowed herself a stick a day. Even though she’d act as if she didn’t care if she died.        “We’ve been out for so long. What time is it,” I asked Su. “Past four. The sun’s about to come up,” he said. “You still have things to yap about?” I asked jokingly. Su let out a shy laugh.        “Thanks for the vacuum cleaner,” I said. “Just in time, actually. My house is a mess.”        Su rolled his eyes. Then he nodded. We threw out our empty cans. I insisted on waiting with him for his taxi, but Su wanted to walk me to my doorstep. The darkness overhead was slowly lifting. Suddenly, thick streams of rain began to pour. We ran to the parking lot and found shelter. The rain pummeled down, strong enough to demolish the crummy walk-up. Su and I cowered from the cold. He looked scared.        “By the way, I think you have to send the vacuum cleaner for repair,” Su said, his eyes fixed on a white Tesla getting drenched in the rain.        I, too, kept my gaze on the car and wondered why there were always so many foreign cars here. “Repairs? Why?” I asked. Su took a deep breath.        “It was working fine for a while. But then it started ramming into things. I was really shocked at first. It was like it wanted to break itself.”        I laughed, “Dying to go out for a stroll, maybe.” Su didn’t find my joke funny. He said the vacuum cleaner had charged into the sink and caused a glass to shatter. “Did you try turning it on and off?” I asked. For the first time in a while, Su got angry.        “You think I didn’t try that?”        “Did you get scared?”        “Scared? It’s not that simple. You wouldn’t be saying this if you’d seen it for yourself. That vacuum cleaner was mad at me. It was trying to show me something.”        I realized it then. Got something to give you. What Su had meant in his text was, Got something to give you. Something that you, rather than I, should be responsible for. In that moment, my mind cleared. When a person has been chased out, the best thing they can do is to put themselves first. But I’d always hoped that, if we ever found ourselves on the edge of a cliff, Su would put me first.        After the funeral, while Mom and Dad were cleaning out Gomo’s closet, they’d found the duffel bag full of cash. Inside was a letter. Please give this to my son Sanghoon. Sanghoon was Gomo’s stepson, the child of the man who’d driven her out of their home. Gomo would often bring him up when she drank. He shouldn’t be with his father, I should’ve taken him with me. I shouldn’t have escaped alone. At the edge of the cliff, Gomo had put herself first. Eternal guilt was the price to pay.        Our family thought about what to do with the money. I didn’t feel betrayed. Neither did Mom nor Dad. In fact, I almost felt at peace.        I tapped on Su’s shoulder. He was looking gloomy. “Thanks. For being honest with me,” I said. Su muttered, “It was really strange, I’m telling you.” I imagined the robot vacuum cleaner scuttling around Gomo’s room, crowded and musty with memories of the past.        “It’s raining so hard,” Su sulked.        He was asking to be invited up. I considered it for a moment before deciding no.        Once I got home, I showered, made myself tea, and switched on the vacuum cleaner. I set it to mapping mode, and immediately it started exploring the layout of my house. As I sipped on my tea, I stared at the scratches and dents on the machine. Then, I switched on the electric heating pad. I hoped sleep would wash over me quickly. Gomo said that if you sleep for more than ten hours, your head will start to feel fuzzy. But I liked that feeling.        Just as I was about to fall asleep, I was woken up by a distant thunk, thunk, thunk. For the first time, I felt what it was like to be right on the margin of unconsciousness. When I forced my eyes open, Sunjeong’s vacuum cleaner was driving its body into the wall. Su was right. It really wasn’t a problem that could be fixed by turning the machine on and off. I stood rooted to the floor before running up to the machine. My attempts to hit the off button were futile. I grabbed the vacuum cleaner and held it against my chest. Its little wheels spun uselessly.        Gomo would often break things, and sometimes she beat Dad. Two things I’d never told anyone. When her cancer recurred, she lost strength. She became stick thin and her breath stank. Upon her admission to the hospital, she was completely bedridden. It was as if she’d used up every last drop of energy. Before her death, she didn’t speak a word; she struggled to even breathe. All she did was stare—not at Dad, not at me. At Mom. At last, she spoke, soft as a sigh, “Minae-ya.” Then, she closed her eyes. No one shed a tear. But in that moment, I knew that our memories—wet and musty—were all tangling up with each other. Because Mom had said, “Me too.” Translated by Gene Png  * The song that the narrator sings is Yoon Sang’s “Running” (Park Changhak, 2000).

by Ye Soyeon

Fiction

They Said Annyeong

One morning seven years ago, I was cutting apples in the kitchen while Heon-su stood next to me and brewed some coffee as he turned on the song, “Love Hurts.”“Hey, I’ve heard this somewhere before.”“I’m sure you have,” Heon-su said as he slowly made circles in the air with the gooseneck kettle. “There are several versions.”“Yeah?” I glanced over at his tablet. “Which one is this?”“My favorite. Kim Deal and Robert Pollard.”We both stared for a moment into the two faces on the screen as we listened to the song.“I like it.”“Yeah?” Heon-su smiled. He knew I wasn’t that into music.“It sounds like a farewell song. The kind sung by someone who doesn’t often express their pain.”“You sound like such an adult.”“I am an adult.” I moved the slices of apple onto a plate as Heon-su distributed the coffee into two cups. They were a pair of black porcelain teacups that we’d bought to celebrate moving in together four years ago. We’d already been dating for two years prior to that, and now we were both—without saying it—thinking what the “next step” would be. Part of the reason was that we were approaching the end of our lease for this 570-square-foot apartment. In fact, it was about six months before the end of the lease that Heon-su started looking for 700-square-foot apartments in his spare time and asking what neighborhoods and kinds of apartments I preferred. I was feeling the warmth of the cup in my hands and gazing at Heon-su as he glanced through the comments on the screen of his tablet.“These comments are a riot. Everyone’s confessing the role that this song has played in their lives. And some people even interject with swear words. Russian, English, Spanish. Why do humans always do that when they see something beautiful—”“Wait, stop talking—”“Hm?”“Did you hear that?”“What?”“They said annyeong.”“Who?”I raised my eyebrows and pointed to the Bluetooth speaker in the living room. Heon-su turned in the direction of my finger looking confused. The mellow voices of two Americans were flowing out of the gray rectangular box.“Kim and Robert?”“Yeah.”“In Korean?”Seeing the disbelief and ridicule in his eyes, I raised my voice in protest:“Really!”“I doubt that’s what they said.”“They definitely said it. An-nyeong!” I was reminded of that morning with Heon-su when Robert asked me just now how to say “hello” in Korean. “Hello in Korean is annyeong. But annyeong doesn’t just mean hello, it can also mean goodbye.” Of course, I said this with difficulty and in a halting manner—I was, after all, someone taking a class in basic English. Robert waited patiently for me to finish my answer—he was, after all, someone who used to work as an elementary school teacher before retiring. There was a glint in his gray-blue eyes.“Really? That’s fascinating.”Although I was sure he’d heard the same answer from his other Korean students, he genuinely looked interested. Either he was working to maintain his good reviews, or this was actually the first time he’d heard it.“Then how do you tell the difference between the two annyeongs? Is it in the intonation or pronunciation?”He seemed to be thinking about the tones used in Chinese and Vietnamese. I thought for a second before shaking my head.“No.”“Then how do you know?”As was always the case when I spoke in a foreign language, I didn’t say what I wanted to say, but only what I could say.“You just know.”Had my English been better, I would have said, “People usually just know. But sometimes, they part ways pretending not to know until it’s too late.” But my conversation skills weren’t good enough. Instead, I said something much simpler and straightforward and unintentionally repetitive.“We can just know.”Robert stared into my eyes for a moment before nodding slowly as if he understood everything.“Right. It’s situational.”He then glanced at the slide on the screen with those big eyes of his and made a smooth transition to a different topic.“So. . . What’s on the schedule for today? Lesson 7, right?” * Robert was born and raised in Quebec, Canada, and had never been to another part of the world. I didn’t know it when I first met him, but his wife had died some years prior, and he was now retired, living in a house with his two dogs. One day during class, he even picked one of them up and showed it to me. Robert was a teacher on Echoes, highly rated and difficult to book. That made it hard for someone like me, a beginner in English, to approach him. The reason I couldn’t take my eyes off his profile was because of his name. I knew another Robert. Robert Pollard. Different last names, but still. Unable to make up my mind, I saved him to my “Favorite Teachers” list, then forgot about him, at least for a while. Actually, the first teacher I had on Echoes was named Sandra, a retired nurse living in New York. I was very nervous during our first class, so she talked about herself instead of forcing me to talk. But she talked so much that she reminded me of my late grandmother, who never stopped talking whenever she got you on the phone. And yet I liked Sandra. She was always warm, generous, and cheerful. But not long after we finally became comfortable with one another, she had to leave Echoes for health reasons, and I had to begin my search for another teacher. Echoes had teachers of all ages, nationalities, and economic backgrounds. From digital nomads with impressive self-introductions filmed out in nature, to university students working multiple jobs during their break to cover tuition and living expenses, to affluent retirees, immigrants, and people who lost their jobs during the pandemic. And because there were few barriers to registering as a teacher on the platform, I often got the feeling that it was a sort of global teaching bazaar or digital flea market. One teacher I met, a young woman, was jarringly blunt and bored even though it was only our first meeting. When it became apparent that I was having trouble understanding what she was saying, she suddenly said that her internet connection was bad and left the room.She never came back. Classes ending early and frozen screens were common, but this was a first for me. My second proper teacher was a middle-aged woman living in Texas named Rose. She was in her early fifties, with pale skin and matte-blonde hair. Unlike other solidly middle-class teachers who adjusted their cameras to show off their libraries or hung artwork behind them to film self-introductions, Rose used a piece of glossy champagne-colored nylon curtain to hide her shabby accommodations. She’d even hung up some tacky lights, which I suspected were repurposed Christmas lights. Her rating wasn’t the best and she didn’t have much teaching experience, but she was more than qualified to teach a novice like me. The topic of our first session was “Studying a Foreign Language.” One unit from Echoes’ own textbook. After pulling up the slides on the screen, she asked me some prepared questions.“Do you enjoy learning foreign languages?”Unsure of myself, I said, “I’m trying?”Rose’s only reaction was to nod her head before awkwardly moving on to the next question.“What is your goal for learning a foreign language?”I thought for a moment before giving her a relatively honest answer. “Because I want to leave this place some day?”Not having any skills or credentials to do so, this was nothing but a vague dream of mine. I didn’t tell her the more important reason: “Because when studying foreign languages, I’m able to fool myself into thinking that I still have some potential, some opportunity.”Indeed, it hadn’t even been a month since I brought my mother’s ashes to the columbarium. That morning—the one I’d spent drinking coffee with Heon-su—I received a phone call from my maternal aunt. When I heard the news, I immediately left for my hometown—a once booming port city that was now, because of a lack of money and people, on the decline. My home was located even further from civilization, in a small township. It wasn’t the peaceful fishing village that people often imagined, but rather a neighborhood that was slowly becoming more and more desolate—buses that came less and less frequently, and shady karaoke rooms and love hotels taking over the alleys. At first I thought my mother’s illness would serve as a nice break for me, but after less than two months nursing her back to health, I finally had no choice but to quit my job. It has been seven years now, and I still haven’t returned to work. I was able to live off my mother’s pension and some irregular paychecks, but even then, most of it went to paying off hospital bills. Eventually, I had no choice but to take out a loan using her house as collateral. And of course, I had to use her life insurance money to pay off the remaining debt, so now, I basically have no money in hand. I had hoped to leave as soon as the home was sold, but even apartments in the big city were having trouble selling, so no one was going to be interested in an old house in a small provincial town. Then again, it wasn’t really like I had anywhere else to go. So I ended up just killing time, waiting to sell the house that was chaining me down. Barely anyone came to the funeral. I felt both sad and relieved as I returned my mourning clothes to the hospital after three days at the funeral hall. But I wasn’t ashamed of these mixed feelings. I felt defiant knowing that I had done all I could, that no one in the world could say I hadn’t. At the same time, I wished for someone to take my hand and say something warm to me, something with meaning. Of course, no such thing happened. And that was because while taking care of my mother, I hadn’t maintained friendships and rarely went to any of their weddings or funerals. Although, I do remember that someone sent an anonymous garland. The only thing written on the long white ribbon hanging from the plastic flower basket were the words, “I’m sorry for your loss. May she rest in peace.” At first, I mistakenly thought it had been sent by Heon-su. And then I heard my aunt say it was probably sent by my father, who had started a new family after the divorce. “I contacted him about your mother’s death without telling you. I guess it was too difficult to get here from Canada.” After wrapping up the funeral, I stayed home and started searching for jobs online. There weren’t many places interested in a woman in her mid-forties who hadn’t worked in several years. And even those I could find had checkered reputations or poor working conditions. And besides, these days, mid-forties was the time for one to think about retirement, not start a new career. Adding insult to injury, I jammed my toe on a wooden box while cleaning out my mother’s wardrobe and had to go to the ER. The doctor told me it would take a month before I could remove the cast, and a year before it would fully recover. And then after sitting around doing nothing and feeling sorry for myself, I got the idea to start learning a new language to prepare for the day I might finally leave this country—whenever that might be. After all, it would be hard to learn any other new skill while nursing a broken foot, and I didn’t really want to start a part-time job just to quit in a few months. So, if nothing else, I figured I’d start studying English again. And this was even though I was drowning in the stress of trying to make ends meet. Rose taught me for about two months. Two thirty-minute sessions a week, although I sometimes split that up further into fifteen-minute sessions when I wanted. We practiced set phrases as we made our way through the fundamentals and sometimes talked about personal topics. Once, while on the topic of housing, Rose mentioned that she had been the victim of a large hurricane a few years prior. “It was hell. We lost power for weeks.”And while we talked about traveling, Rose mentioned that she’d never left her hometown. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you much about other parts of the world.” Whenever something like this happened, I felt very close to Rose, as if we were members of the same socioeconomic class. But then, as with many of the online teachers I met on Echoes, Rose suddenly started canceling classes, and then one day, without any kind of message or apology, she stopped altogether. I had to find a new teacher. I rediscovered Robert in my saved teachers list, and finally worked up the courage to request a class. Now I had to start all over again with a new teacher. “Hello? My name is Eun-mi Kim. Or just Amy. Eun-mi sounds like Amy. I’m Korean and I’m forty-five. I have no brothers or sisters. I am living in a coastal city in Korea, and my job is. . .” And then one day, I realized that these thirty-minute classes—sometimes fifteen—were often the only human interaction I had all day. After factoring in the various coupons I used, our conversations cost me about 16,000 won per half hour. During our first class, I worked up the courage to ask Robert a personal question.“May I ask you who that person is? The one behind you.”Behind Robert was an old-looking wooden picture frame, in which a thin elderly man was seated and looking at the camera at a slight angle. The portrait looked gloomy and somewhat distorted.“Oh, that’s my father,” Robert said without even turning to look.“Really? I guess he does kind of look like you.”“You think so?”“Especially the eyes.”The smile Robert then gave me was a bit off. Although Robert should have been in his early sixties, he looked closer to someone in his mid-fifties. And perhaps because he’d been doing this job for a long time, he was always sensitive to the pace of each class and always conducted lessons with seriousness. And yet, because his gaze was filled with generosity, I immediately felt close to him. And then something happened that brought us even closer. It was when Robert’s father passed away. He contacted all his many students and said he had to spend a few days at his father’s side. He used the specific sentence pattern, “I have to. . .,” which was something I’d practiced ad nauseam in school. I thought about not responding, but decided to send him a short reply instead.I offer you my deepest condolences. I never met your father. But looking at you, I know he must have been a wonderful person. I wish all of you peace and rest. Robert hesitatingly thanked me during our next meeting a week later on Echoes.“Thanks to you, I was able to give my father a proper sendoff. And your message gave me great strength.”Not knowing what to say, I flushed in embarrassment. Being able to sincerely offer empty, cliché words of comfort was part of being an adult, but in the face of the news of someone’s passing, I always felt at a loss because of the limits and banality of my own expressions. But what was so wrong with being cliché? And was there anything more cliché than life and death? Why did I have to shy away from something just because it had been said a million times before? That day however, Robert shared something personal with me.“Actually the person who passed away is the father who raised me.”Not understanding what he meant, I just blinked in confusion.“My biological father is still alive.”I wasn’t sure what to say.“But of course, I don’t know where he is.”After saying this, he turned to the slides on the screen and skillfully changed the subject.“So. . . what’s on the schedule for today? Lesson 2?” * “Hi, Amy.”Robert entered the meeting and greeted me with yet another bright smile. He was wearing a magenta sweater that complimented his gray hair—indeed, he knew what colors suited him. I appreciated how well he dressed. Even in retirement, he seemed to care about his appearance and looking professional. It was out of courtesy, not just for himself, but for others. It was the kind of respect that I’d been missing for the last several years.“Hi, Robert.”I pretended not to notice Robert’s attempt to be friendly with me and responded as I usually did. Yet just because I ignored it didn’t mean I wasn’t aware of it. In fact, it was because I was aware of it that I had bothered to apply lipstick that was two years past its expiration date before our class.Taking care of my mother had left me with little time for exercise or makeup, and lately, I’d been feeling that my appearance seemed conspicuously older and more worn down. I hadn’t really noticed it when I was by myself, but with more frequent occasions to be in front of a camera, it was starting to bother me.“How have you been?”Seeing Robert’s large pupils, I opened my eyes wide as if to return his greeting. Actually, for the last several days, I’d been slightly uneasy when looking at Robert on the screen. I was both aware that he was enjoying his time with me, and that it had been ages since someone had looked at me with kindness, curiosity, and sexual desire. But not in the creepy or intrusive way. Robert wasn’t the kind of person to cross a line and let his feelings show, at least not deliberately. At first, I doubted my intuition, thinking I was just lonely. I hadn’t been in a serious relationship since breaking up with Heon-su, neither emotionally nor physically. I wasn’t sure whether what I was feeling was simply the happiness of finding a friend, the joy of being free to pursue an intimate relationship again, or the excitement of being the object of another man’s desires. Perhaps it was a mix of all three. After all, emotions never came one at a time. In fact, no matter the teacher, foreign language classes always had an element of sexual tension. Stumbling over words, delayed satisfaction, sharing intimate thoughts, shame and frustration, tension and release, the occasional uncontrollable bout of laughter, mistakes and apologies.“I’ve been well,” I said, acting cool. “And you?”“Me too.”After exchanging this simple greeting, we conversed a bit more, talking about things like how to say hello in Korean, for example. A little while later, Robert turned his large eyes to the screen and glanced over the slide before changing the subject.“So. . . What’s on the schedule for today? Was it Lesson 7?” Robert read out today’s lesson in a somewhat formal tone of voice.“Lesson 7. Talking about food.”Soon, the day’s goals appeared on my laptop screen. Questions like “What’s your favorite food?” “What’s your soul food?” and “Do you enjoy trying foods from different cultures?” I practiced the expressions on the screen by repeating them like a parrot.“I like trying foods from other countries. Actually, I used to be a bit scared. But little by little I’ve come to enjoy adventures.”“That’s good.” Robert’s interjection was somewhat robotic.“Right, that’s how a lot of things start.” I said this without giving it much thought, but soon I was worried that the sentence might sound like I was trying to seduce him. This tension had formed because I was aware of Robert’s gaze. It was common for students and teachers on Echoes to become close and trust each other. I also had become close with Sandra and Rose. But as soon as Robert became my teacher, something changed. Perhaps it was because it had been a long time since I’d seen another person’s eyes filled with such warmth. My mother, who had suffered from brain damage and had trouble carrying on a normal conversation, could only communicate with her eyes. But in her gaze, there were no apologies or thanks, just doubt and criticism. Food. Right, my mother loved food, especially her own cooking. Indeed, she didn’t often compliment other people. It didn’t matter who she was with, she was always trying to put people beneath her. And in order to do that, she was skilled at assigning undesirable roles to other people. Even if they were her own daughter. One time while we were having a meal with Heon-su, she said something that was almost disastrous—even if she was trying in her own way to comfort someone who had become an orphan early in life. But as with everything, she had other motives. It was about indulging in the sense that she was better than others. Even at the end, the messages she sent me the most with those eyes of her weren’t “Sorry” or “Thank you,” but “I’m scared.”“Amy, can you hear me?”“Hm? Yes.”“What’s your favorite holiday dish?”I collected myself and started fumbling around in my head for the right tenses, articles, and sentence structures.“I. . . uhm. . . I like this red bean soup that we eat on dongjinnal, which is the shortest day of the year. They say our ancestors believed that the color red chased away bad ghosts.”Actually, I didn’t really like patjuk, but I thought it would be easier and more interesting to talk about the winter solstice than the Lunar New Year or Chuseok. After all, people loved stories with ghosts in them. But on the other hand, I could sense significant losses and omissions, the kind of inevitable losses that everyone puts up with in translation. There was a big difference between yuryeong and ghosts, between red bean soup and patjuk. Of course, there were advantages to speaking in a foreign language. Sentences built from a limited vocabulary had their own charm, like a lean body stripped of all unnecessary fat. These gaps would sometimes create unintentional “accidents.” Now that I thought about it, during my classes with Rose, there were also mistakes that weren’t funny. One time, something happened while we were talking about TV shows. As Rose changed the slide, she asked me what my favorite show was. I was beginning to mention a few celebrity reality TV programs in Korea when, realizing it would take too much effort to explain, I resigned myself to just lying and saying I liked dating shows. Rose, who, up to that point, had maintained her poise as my teacher, gave me a suggestive smile, as if she knew exactly what I was talking about. She told me she had a lot of friends who enjoyed watching dating shows and gave me a few recommendations in English. A few days later while eating a meal, I tried watching the matchmaking program that Rose had suggested to me and realized that we had a very different understanding of the concept of “dating show”—especially in terms of sexual explicitness. The women who appeared in the show that Rose suggested to me were all women with extremely large breasts, and when asked what the most important things they looked for in a man, the first woman said this:“Empathy, a sense of humor, and ambition.”Not a bad answer, I thought to myself as I spooned some soup.“But in the end, I think having a big dick is really important.”I nearly dropped my spoon on the table. These were the programs that Rose now thought I liked. I wanted to meet with her as soon as possible and clear things up. But I had to wait four days before our next class. Because she spent all day teaching classes, it was possible that she might have completely forgotten our conversation. And indeed, when we met again, she barely remembered the conversation. Instead, she gave an understanding smile and told me not to worry about it. We moved on to the next unit. However, if time and language had permitted, there was something else I wanted to share with Rose. It was about the Costa Rican woman who appeared on that matchmaking program. She was beautiful and voluptuous but lacked grace. She worked as a café waitress in some small town in the U.S. Sitting across from her under the moonlight was a Brazilian man. Much like her, he was fit and handsome, but that didn’t change the fact that he was a mechanic with a thick accent and broken English. But when the woman said to him, “I know a little Portuguese,” the look in his eyes suddenly deepened. For a moment, what had been a sultry and provocative dinner date suddenly became very serious. I liked to think that, in that brief moment, a wave of emotion swept over the two of them. Latin American history, migration, hard manual labor, native and foreign tongues, alienation and companionship—they both knew in that instant that they understood one another. This was what I truly wanted to talk to Rose about, but all I could say was:“Actually, I don’t like dating programs.” “Let’s see, next up is a game of Twenty Questions?”Robert’s eyes sparkled. It seemed he still enjoyed games like this even though the introductory course likely used the same materials every session. He explained the rules of the game to me in detail, almost as if he were talking to a child. But he didn’t actually treat me like a child, and I appreciated that. Some teachers treated foreign students like children, as if they wished they’d never grow up. In any case, the goal of the game was to guess something solely based on its description. Usually, I would only understand part of what he said and fail to understand the rest, so I would simply nod. And Robert, knowing my level of listening comprehension, used relatively simple words when speaking to me.“Ready?”“Yeah.”Roberts eyes were glinting mischievously as he paused for a moment.“I’m a fruit, and I’m generally red.”“Are you a strawberry?” I said, matching Robert’s enthusiasm.“Nope.”Robert looked proud that he was keeping me at bay.“Then what are you?”“Most of the time I’m red, but sometimes I’m green and sometimes I’m yellow.”I glanced upward and blinked.“A peach?”“Nope.”“Then what are you?”“I can be candy, jam, or toppings on pie.”“A cherry?”Robert smiled as he shook his head. Then after giving me a few more hints he said:“This one will give it away for sure. I’m the logo of a famous phone company.”“Apple!”“Bingo.”We continued with the remaining seven lessons. The topics included explaining traditional recipes from our home countries, foods we think of when we’re sick, and what we’d like to eat before we die. As usual, Robert sprinkled the lessons with impromptu questions.“Is it evening there?”“Yeah, almost.”“Have you eaten dinner?”“No, not yet.”“What are you going to eat after class?”I didn’t want to give a boring answer, so I pretended to be a bit rebellious.“I’m going to have a beer. I did well in class today. I want to reward myself.”This seemed to amuse Robert. He then did something that surprised me, pulling out a glass of wine from behind the screen and raising it up to the camera. “Cheers!” Caught off guard, I awkwardly replied, “Cheers.” We both laughed. Seeing Robert’s spontaneity, I felt a bit bold.“Robert—?”“Hm?”“I have something I wanted to tell you.”Robert looked at me with a mix of confusion, unease, and curiosity.“Don’t worry. It’s not that serious.”“Then what is it?”“Yeah, uhm. I think today is going to be our last class.”Goodbyes were an everyday occurrence in Echoes, but I could detect a hint of sadness in Robert’s face. And yet he tried to stay cheerful.“Like you said. I’m glad it’s nothing serious.”I didn’t say anything.“But it is a bit sad.”I mustered a polite smile.“Thank you for telling me. Then how about for the rest of class, we put aside the lesson and just talk for once?” * Robert checked the time at the bottom of his screen. We only had about fifteen minutes left.“Let’ see. . . What do you want to talk about?”“Mmm, maybe something honest?” I said, acting innocent.Robert tilted his head to the side in confusion.“Like what?”“Like the fact I’m not actually a teacher.”Robert didn’t seem to understand. A few days ago, during our lesson on the topic of jobs, I had talked about the “struggles” of being a middle school teacher in Korea. I’d even jokingly mocked the school’s vice principal. All of it had been a fabricated story, borrowed from my mother who had been a junior high school teacher. Perhaps because he thought it would be awkward if he continued not to say anything, Robert asked a follow-up question.“Then what do you do?”“I don’t do anything right now,” I said calmly.“And what about before?”I was just a regular office worker.”“What kind of company?”“An advertisement company.”“That’s really cool.” Robert was always good at interjecting encouraging comments like that.I made a polite smile.“But that’s all in the past. I wasn’t trying to lie to you. Sorry.”Robert waved his hands in the air to reject my apology.“No, no. It happens. It’s fine.”We were silent for a while.“Should I tell you something as well?”As if wanting to ease my embarrassment, Robert extended his hand beneath the screen and pulled out the glass of wine again, holding it up high.“I drink this every day.”I was a bit surprised, but acted like it was nothing.“Like a Frenchman?”“More like a Russian.”The burgundy liquid in Robert’s glass sloshed about dangerously.“Since when?” I asked.“Since retirement.”“How much?” I asked, wanting to take a step closer to him.Robert made a sheepish smile. “More than you’d think.”“You dress well and always look fine to me.”Robert smiled again, bashfully. The kind of smile I would have fallen for, had he been a bit younger.“Everyone is like that. We all look fine when we’re not.”“Right, it’s all situational,” I said, echoing something Robert had said earlier.Robert stared into my eyes silently.“Should I tell you one more thing?”I didn’t answer.“My father. The man you offered your sincere condolences for—”“Yes?”“He wasn’t that good of a person.”“. . .”“Although I guess that’s not news. I mean, no one ever said all adults make good parents by nature.”I remained silent.“But I guess I’ve seen that kind of story in too many movies and TV shows. You know, the ones where everything begins or ends with someone’s obituary. Stories where people finally come to understand someone, but only after they’re dead. Or maybe it’s a new appreciation for life. Like how the two alternating notes of an ambulance siren one day transforms into a melody that means something to you.”“Robert, I’m sorry. I didn’t quite understand what you said. Can you say it a little more slowly?”I was starting to worry that Robert might be a bit drunk. But his complexion looked perfectly fine. Some people need a cup of coffee to wake up; perhaps Robert needed alcohol to clear his head. Of course, that was the hallmark of an alcoholic. Robert typed out what he’s said verbatim in the chat. I quickly scanned the paragraph, using the translation feature whenever I encountered an unfamiliar word.“Do you understand?”“Yes.”“Actually, that’s why I thought something like that would happen to me, too.”I was about to say “me too” but managed to stop myself. I was also about to say how truly nice it was to meet someone who knew that a loss didn’t always come with some life lesson, that life was a series of such losses without a purpose.“Anyway, there wasn’t much written in my father’s obituary. Other than things that implied he wasn’t a good father. Of course I was aware of this myself, but I wanted to confirm that it wasn’t just me. And yet I still felt empty. I wonder why.”“. . .”“Perhaps that’s what life is. Trying to extract lessons from things that aren’t meant to be lessons.”“. . .”“Then again, what’s wrong with not learning a lesson? Why does everything have to be a lesson?”Robert let out a deep sigh as if trying to collect himself.“I’m sorry. I’ve been talking too much about myself. What about you? Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?” * Yes, what was it that I wanted to say?Listening to Robert, I was reminded of that morning when I’d enjoyed a cup of coffee with Heon-su while listening to “Love Hurts.” I was adamant that I’d heard them say the word annyeong. “The singer must have intentionally slipped a Korean word into the song. Like medieval painters who used to hide their signature in their works. I think they embedded the Korean word annyeong into the English lyrics. Maybe that was their way of expressing their love for their roots and traces.”Unsurprisingly, Heon-su didn’t know what I meant. He didn’t understand what I meant by “roots” and “traces.”Only after trying to explain myself again did he finally tell me that I was mistaken for thinking that Kim Deal was some third-generation Korean American simply because of her name and the fact she had long dark brown hair. “It’s Kim as in Kimberley. Not one of the Kim clans from Gyeongju or Gimhae.”“What, really?”Heon-su pressed the rewind button and played “Love Hurts” from the beginning again. I listened carefully to each line, trying to find the part where I’d heard it. It was about halfway through the song when we finally found it.“Oh, they said I’m young,” Heon-su said. “Not annyeong.”“Hm?”“This part. I’m young, I know. That’s what they said.”Heon-su pressed the rewind button again.“This part.”I blinked in confusion for a second before realizing my blunder. Heon-su, who looked proud of himself for being right, began interpreting the lyrics that followed, softly, one line at a time. It was as if he were giving me Korean subtitles for the original song, at half the normal beat so I could savor both languages. He even joked about having used the same technique to flirt with someone in the past.“I’m young, I know. . .”I leaned in with a serious look on my face and listened closely to the two voices and Heon-su’s.“But even so I know a thing or two. . . I learned from you, I really learned a lot, really learned a lot. . .”For a moment, I almost thought that Heon-su wasn’t translating but harmonizing with the singers, adding his own accompaniment. And despite being in different places and different languages, it felt like both he and they were headed toward the same exact end. When the song ended, Heon-su said that he thought the line “I learned a lot from you, I really learned a lot” felt much sadder than if they had pleaded “Don’t go” or said, “I missed you.” He said that for some reason, he felt like he understood what the person meant when they wrote that line.“Life is mostly a cliché. But it’s hard to deny the inevitability of cliché. Of banality, of predictability, of helplessness. In the darker periods of life, what we end up saying isn’t witty or novel things but clichés. In the end, the things that stick are simple words, old words, words we think we already know and ignore or grow tired of because we’ve heard them a million times.”Heon-su was three years younger than me, so I couldn’t help but tease him, implying that he was too young to be philosophizing about life and death.“Who did you learn that from?” I asked.Heon-su shrugged.“My childhood friend? Poverty.”I thought about what it must have been like to care for one’s parents from a young age. Heon-su had been solving workbook problems as a young boy in the hospital corridor. He had missed a lot of school, and when he was at school, he would often bury his face in his desk, pretending not to hear his friends talk about the school field trip he missed.“. . .”“Or perhaps the loss of two loved ones?”Heon-su had spent his teenage years alongside his mother, caring for his father who had suffered a stroke. And a year after his father passed away, his mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. So for five more years, Heon-su found himself back in the role of caregiver. Nearly a decade of his life, including his college years, was consumed in caring for the sick. By the time he graduated from college, he was considered an orphan and was thus exempt from military service. Because of this, while we lay in bed one night, Heon-su said jokingly that his mother had given him “two years off.” At the time, I realized Heon-su must have spent years coping with his own grief before he could make a comment like this. Perhaps that’s why, after we broke up and I found myself lying alone on the cramped cot of the hospital room that my mother and I shared with five other patients, I often thought back to that morning when we would listen to “Love Hurts” together. I would think about the way my stomach sank when I first saw my aunt’s number appear on my phone, and the way Heon-su observed with worry. At the time, I had no idea it would be the crack that would eventually break our relationship. As Heon-su used to say, “Sometimes, shit just happens.” This time, it was simply my turn to experience it. Yet, why do we always look so surprised when it happens? As though we’ve never once said goodbye to a loved one.Annyeong.A world full of goodbyes. I would often hum that song to myself—in the hospital when my mother was still alive, or down the dimly lit streets of my fading hometown. In this life where I thought I’d already lost so much but still had more to lose, in this process of constantly losing more and more, I would remember those times when I’d wipe my mother’s bottom with a damp towel, look into her eyes, and then feel the desire to run away—times when I couldn’t run away, times when I didn’t, times when I couldn’t but almost did. Heon-su knew all too well about what I was going through, what I would have to go through. Was that why he left me? Because he didn’t want to go through it again? Then again, technically it was I who had left him, out of courtesy. Of course it wasn’t a clean break; we met several times after that, even spent a few nights together. And even though neither of us said annyeong, we knew that we would never get back together.“Heon-su—” One night, I spoke to Heon-su in the darkness.“Yeah?”“Were they good people?”“Who?”“Your parents.”Heon-su fell silent before finally answering me.“Yeah.”“That’s fortunate.”“. . .”“I’ve always been envious of people who sincerely like their parents.”“. . .” Heon-su didn’t express an opinion, positive or negative, about what I said. Though I didn’t realize it then, perhaps inside him, thoughts of what he wanted to say, what he shouldn’t say, and what he simply couldn’t say were tangled together. And maybe it had nothing to do with whether his parents were good people or not. Kind of like how, as I became increasingly surprised by my own life, I stopped making judgments about other people’s lives. Unsurprisingly, during those long days by my mother’s side, it was Heon-su whom I missed the most. Not because he was someone I almost married, but because he was someone who had experienced the same loneliness that I was feeling. Two years after we broke up, I was dozing off in my mother’s hospital room when a drunken Heon-su called me. I got up from the cot, picked up my phone, and quietly stepped into the hospital corridor. With one hand over my mouth, I talked into the receiver, trying not to disturb anyone. Heon-su, however, rambled on about this and that before unexpectedly apologizing for something he’d said in the past, on the day I first heard “Love Hurts.” “If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t have corrected you. I wouldn’t have told you it’s I’m young and not annyeong. I’d have said, ‘Yeah, that’s what I heard too.’ The idea of a cliché Korean word like annyeong being planted inside a pop song like that is so beautiful and sad. Like the image of a single dandelion growing in a crack on a concrete sidewalk.” He was sniffling as he said this. Then suddenly, as though embarrassed, he hung up. I remember standing in the hallway for a long time afterward. Now, I’m without Heon-su, without my mother, without even my younger self, the one who used to dream of the “next step.” Now, I was just in my old room, listening to this song. I learned from you, I really learned a lot, really learned a lot. But to be more accurate, I didn’t learn from him, but rather from his absence. I still didn’t know exactly what I learned, so now, whenever I listen to this song, I just say the word annyeong over the lyrics whenever they say “I’m young.” In life, sometimes there are moments when you can only be right by being wrong. That’s probably what I learned from him.This is what I wanted to say to Robert. But I couldn’t, not just because I didn’t have the skills to do it, but also because I was afraid that the inevitable omissions and losses of trivial details and nuances caused by the awkward translations of my feelings would turn out to be the most important and precious parts of my emotions. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter if it was joy that I wanted to express. But sadness was another matter. If nothing else, my pain needed to be expressed in my mother tongue, the language of my sadness, the source of my emotions. But let’s say I did use Korean. Would all of it be conveyed, even then? Without certainty, I resigned myself to saying only a few words:“Robert—”“Yes?”“Annyeong means hello and goodbye. But it has another meaning.”“And what’s that?”“Be at peace or Are you at peace?”“I see.”Looking at Robert’s large, innocent eyes, I realized that this farewell was going to be a lot harder than I thought. I hadn’t imagined saying goodbye to someone would be so difficult just because we’d talked regularly, and shared moments of tension, laughter, and concern. Isn’t it strange? At work, I used to find all that tiresome. I’d wanted to turn off the switch of social interactions completely. But as my world shrank down to just me and my mom in my old hometown, I began to long for all those many languages. Making mistakes and excuses, lying, disagreeing, trying to subtly flirt with someone, making it obvious that you’re receptive to flirtation, believing and doubting, and responding—all the gestures of social life. Perhaps that’s why Robert, who shared a few of those gestures with me for a time, came to feel more precious and intimate than necessary. So much so that, if I could, I’d want to visit Canada at least once.“Robert?”“Yes?”I finally said what I wanted to say to Robert on our last day.“Annyeong.”“Amy?” His voice through the speakers was gentle.“Yes?”I opened my eyes wide as I waited for Robert to speak. I felt I knew what he was about to say, but I also wanted to hear it for myself. I wanted to nod along when he said it, as if that simple act would somehow bring me peace. But just as Robert’s lips began to part, the feed was abruptly cut, as though the power had gone out. I stared blankly at the laptop screen, which was displaying the messages “Insufficient Balance” and “Session Expired.” His face was frozen on the screen, like the distorted image of a static-filled TV or a corrupted JPEG file. I stared at the lips of someone about to say something but never managing to. And so, just as I had when I once inserted my own Korean lyrics into an old pop song, I whispered the words I hadn’t heard to myself. The same words Heon-su had said to me all those years ago. Annyeong. Goodbye. And be at peace. Translated by Sean Lin Halbert

by Kim Ae-ran