Fiction

Half-Life

1 About twelve years ago, one wise student of mine asked me, out of the blue, “Professor, do you have some money to spare?” “Money to spare?”“Thirteen million won . . . the more the better, if you have it.” I looked at him, impassive. He avoided my gaze, tracing the wood grain on the hardwood surface of my office table.This kid is real trouble. I’d already decided even before he finished talking. “What for?” I asked.“I want to set you free.” Ha—The loud sigh escaped from between my lips before I even realized. Only then did he look up at me. Maybe it was his heavy eyebrows, but the whites of his eyes seemed unusually deep. Sung Woojung.That was his name. A third-year student who had skipped the regular high school route, passed the High School Equivalency Exam, and enrolled at the university at twentyone. His registered address was in Mok-dong, Seoul, but he was living alone in a studio apartment near campus in Jinwol-dong, Gwangju. When he was a first-year, he’d shown up to department events now and then and seemed to take part in study groups and the writing club, but by the following year, he’d all but vanished. He didn’t come to class, let alone finals, and ended up receiving academic warnings at the end of the first semester as well as the second. The Terminally-Online Recluse Supreme. That was the nickname his friends in the department gave Woojung. TORS for short. The classmate you seldom saw in school but always found online; the guy who occasionally surfaced in online communities for first-years to drop game items or share e-books and films from dubious sources, then vanished like smoke; the TA’s silent savior who, in the comfort of his studio, single-handedly debugged the cross-platform glitches between the mobile and PC versions of the department’s website.  But those quirks alone weren’t enough for the title of “Recluse Supreme.” What clinched the nickname TORS was the police raid that took place in the second semester of his sophomore year.  “Professor, did you hear about Woojung getting raided?” I first heard about it over coffee with some students between classes. “Raided?” I asked. “Is that some kind of internet slang?” “No, no. A real police raid. With a search warrant and everything.”  The students seemed unfazed, as it was old news to them, but, to be frank, I was stunned. It was something I’d never encountered before. Suddenly it felt like I was the student and they were the ones with lessons to teach.  “What happened?”  At my question, chaos erupted. One student said it must be for distributing illegal videos; another guessed it was related to quick-cash loan scams. Quick-cash loan scams? You know, those places that send out emails and upload posts advertising easy loans? He must have been working for one of those scammers. But do they raid people’s apartments for that kind of stuff? They’d have indisputable proof without even having to search his place, no? That brought on a brief silence, then one student—who had a Business Administration major friend living in the same building as Woojung (it was the one with the priciest rent in the area, being a new construction with Renaissance-style pilotis; as such, no other student in our department lived there, or could afford to)—spoke up:  “Apparently everyone in the building came out to watch when the raid happened. You know those boxes? The ones they use for all the seized property. My friend said they had the NIS logo on them.” “Holy shit, then it has to be—”  And the chaos resumed: It’s got to be something North Korea-related. I knew something was off when he was sharing all those e-book and film files. That must’ve been a manifestation of his proletarian comradeship for us. It could’ve been part of the proletarian revolutionary tactic to destabilize South Korea’s free market. Dude, then what, are torrents supposed to be Lenin’s invention now? Why are you suddenly bringing up Lenin? That film we watched with the professor, it was The Torrent Horse, wasn’t it? That was The Turin Horse, you moron . . . Wasn’t that about Lenin? It was Nietzsche!  “But, professor, my friend said Woojung had seven computers in his apartment.” “Seven? Seven computers for a guy majoring in a field that only needs a word processor?” “I study Excel sometimes,” one student offered.  The conversation veered again. You can’t write novels if you mess around with sciency programs like Excel. I heard Professor Lee draws tables with an actual ruler because he doesn’t know how to make one in MS Word.  “Gotta hand it to you, Professor!” The students gave me a thumbs-up.  Without a word, I stepped back into the lecture hall. Later, I heard about the raid from Woojung himself.  “It was nothing.” “I heard it was the National Intelligence Service . . . that can’t be right, can it?” “It was. It was the NIS.”  I stared at him. He wasn’t fazed at all—he might as well have been naming his favorite kimbap. “The NIS really raided your studio apartment? Why would they do that?” I was sure he was lying. “They were just putting on a show,” he replied, then added it was because of a defamation charge. “That just . . . doesn’t make any sense. I mean, the NIS conducting a raid for defamation?” “Because the director of the NIS was the one I defamed,” Woojung said and even let out a soft snort.  That year was the final year of the Lee Myung-bak administration. The presidential election was scheduled for December, and starting that spring, or actually even from the year before, the internet had become a cesspool of criticisms, hate speech, and insults. People consumed it like entertainment, like some new online game had just dropped. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.  “Funny thing is, those people can’t take criticism.”  At the time, Woojung had been repeatedly posting the same message on an online sports forum, referring to the director of the NIS as the director of “NDS”—National Durian Service. This was in reference to the scandal where the director had tried to smuggle three boxes of durians as a gift for his wife on his way back from a business trip to Vietnam and got caught at customs. The NIS issued a statement explaining that he’d disposed of the fruit at the airport upon learning it was prohibited.  “Is this . . . what is . . . ”  I still couldn’t believe it. The director of the National Intelligence Service smuggling in durians—not schematics for new weapons but durians—and filing a defamation suit against a twenty-something college student over jokes? It made no sense.  “He’s just harassing me,” Woojung said, as if comforting me. “He knows full well it’ll never stick.” Twelve years later, I would hear something similar from him, standing outside the main entrance to the Gwangju Nambu Police Station. “How can you set me free with thirteen million won?” I asked, settling back into the sofa. “There’s this thing called Bitcoin.” “Bit . . . what is that, some kind of laundry detergent?”  I was completely serious, thinking of a similar-sounding laundry detergent brand, which was actually Beat. I wondered, Did he join some pyramid scheme hawking laundry detergent?  “No. It’s called cryptocurrency, and it’s—”  Woojung then gave me a lengthy explanation involving blockchain, P2P networks, and mining. He mentioned nodes and algorithms, but none of it made any sense to me. I only kept thinking, Was he always this talkative?  “If you buy Bitcoin now, it’ll pay off in the future.”  Just five hundred coins for now. He said they’d cost about thirteen million won. I nodded like I understood. “So you’re telling me that I should buy some kind of cyber money, right? Like credits, similar to acorns for Cyworld?”  “No, it’s not . . . ” Woojung started, but gave up. “Have you eaten?” “Yes. Well, no.” “Let’s grab something,” I said, getting up. “I’ve got a night class.”  He stared at me, puzzled, for a moment, but stood up as well. I was startled to notice he was shorter than I’d thought.  Over stone-pot bibimbap at a hole-in-the-wall near campus, I asked, “What gave you the idea?” “Pardon?” “Why did you want to set me free?”  Woojung picked up some seasoned bean sprouts with his chopsticks, then put them back down. He downed his water and said, “Because. You’re a writer.” “You want me to quit teaching and just write?” “Yeah,” he answered in a low voice. “Hey, am I that terrible a professor?” He only smiled at my remark.  It must have been because of what he’d said. That evening, we finished eating in near silence and grabbed coffee from the coffee shop next door before parting in a hurry. At the time, I was teaching five days a week, with two night classes running until 10 p.m. The small private university outside of Seoul where I worked didn’t have the budget to hire faculty when needed, which meant I carried a heavy load. By the time I got home after class and finished all the household chores, I’d sit at my desk to write, and a dull ache would wrap around my temples, like elastic bands cinched too tight around my ears. Even in that condition, I wrote anyway, but . . . when I opened the file the next day, there they were: sentences I couldn’t possibly read without cringing remained on the page, their words like malaria pathogens, staring back at me with blank faces. I should’ve deleted them on the spot, but instead, I kept trying to salvage them, until finally I took out my frustration on the poor delete key—and then it was back to square one. Day after day after day.  I tried not to show any of this to my students. One of them worked part-time loading and unloading trucks when he wasn’t in class, and I’d heard about another student, who’d come to study late in life, working weekends, carrying a double-door refrigerator on his back up stairwells for a moving company. How could I possibly grumble in front of them? There were people with actual grounds for complaint. So I’d walk into class and, like a middle-school student trying to look cool by bragging that he’d watched all the TV he wanted and slept all he wanted before an exam, I’d say things like: “Everyone has their own circumstances, their own life. That’s where the aesthetics of fiction comes from.” Empty words.  And yet. This kid saw something. I kept thinking this as I drank my Americano with him. He must have seen something. And naturally I found myself drawn to him. “Do you have some of that yourself? That Bit-whatever?” To my question, Woojung answered quietly that he’d managed to get about two hundred so far. Geez, this kid. As we walked out of the coffee shop, I said to him in a serious voice, “Don’t get mixed up in stuff like that.” He just looked at me. “Setting yourself free doesn’t happen with that kind of thing, how can it? Even if you hoard a mountain of acorns, a squirrel is still just a squirrel.” After saying that, I gave him a quick wave. I had ten minutes before the night class began.  That had been twelve years ago.  2 Fast forward to this year, the third Friday of June 2024, around 2 p.m. I stood under the awning outside the Civil Service Office of the Gwangju Nambu Police Station, constantly opening and closing the contacts on my smartphone.  I should give him one last chance, shouldn’t I? I hesitated. A hot, muggy breeze kept pushing into the shade, carrying with it a smell of something metallic. At the guard post by the parking lot entrance, a young conscript cop—one of those kids doing their mandatory military service with the police instead of the army—kept glancing my way. It seemed he was looking for a chance to leave his post for a moment once I headed inside. If he asks for forgiveness, if he admits what he did.  Then I’d call the whole thing off, turn around, get in my car, and drive away. Going to the police station, over something between a student and his professor . . . But if I’m being honest, I was also imagining other scenarios. Filing a lawsuit, being interviewed by detectives, taking the witness stand in court. He insulted me and harassed me constantly. My days have been shattered, and I’m even receiving medical treatment due to extreme stress—no, no, I’d better scratch that last part since I haven’t actually seen a doctor. This was the kind of routine I’d fallen into around that time whenever I thought about the incident. Moments when I kept driving myself into an even more miserable state, when what had never happened mingled with what I shouldn’t say. Ha—  Out of old habit, I let out a long sigh and returned to my original resolution. Then I tapped the call button as if I were being extremely generous. “Hello?”  After a few rings, a voice drifted through the phone. We’d exchanged texts now and then, but it had been ages since I’d heard his voice. Calm and composed, neither high nor low— it was Sung Woojung. Maybe it was his tone, but I found myself flustered and tongue-tied. Perhaps that was when the storm started brewing in my heart. How can he be this calm at a time like this? Isn’t this a bit brazen? Isn’t this, in itself, another kind of insult?  Quietly, making sure not to make a sound, I tapped the call-record button.  * The strange happenings began in early March of this year. I woke up late in the morning and checked my phone to see that I’d received more than two hundred messages on the messaging app KakaoTalk. (Around that time, I’d been putting my phone on silent after work.) Over forty missed calls from restricted numbers. I sat on the edge of my bed and pressed one hand to my forehead.  What the hell is this? Did Father . . . again? That’s where my mind went, naturally. Some debt I didn’t yet know about.  What happened was, starting the previous year, I’d been barely scraping by because of a debt that had appeared out of nowhere. It was a debt incurred from my father’s failed real estate investment, and the total came to 430 million won. Monthly interest alone was 2.6 million; principal and interest together came to nearly 4.8 million won. When I went to the bank counter and received the slip with that number written on it, I walked back to the waiting area and sat down on the sofa. Strangely, I felt calm. I thought of the date tree in the garden of the old house where I grew up. Not the lush summer tree but the thin, bare one with its reddish branches in the dead stretch between late autumn and early winter. When I was in elementary school and middle school, I was too scared of that tree to walk past it or even look at it. I kept imagining someone was hanging from the top. On blustery days, the rattling of branches crept through the window into my room, and the sound was like — well, like someone desperately clutching a hand over their mouth to stifle their crying, their breath leaking out. In those days, I tried so hard not to listen, and yet I kept putting my ear to the window. On the slip the bank teller had given me, the one with the numbers, I carefully sketched branches of the date tree. With 430,000,000 written in the background, I drew the long, arching limbs that resembled the strands of someone’s hair. My heart kept sinking. But I never grew afraid.  Ten years earlier, my father had taken out a loan of nearly 200 million won, using the apartment where he lived as collateral. With the money, he purchased some wooded hills in the town of Jucheon in Yeongwol County, Gangwon Province, apparently planning to open a camping ground. Of course there was a real estate broker involved. A man called Mr. Lee, who claimed to be a distant relative— someone my father had met for the first time at a family clan gathering. While Mr. Lee was shuttling my seventy-three-year-old father around Yeongwol, in and out of banks and credit unions and a judicial scrivener’s office, I was completely clueless as to what was going on. Because my father was in Wonju, Gangwon Province, and I was in Gwangju, but that was no excuse. I knew about the property. My father had bought it in my name. After you retire, you can go there and write as much as you want. Writers need a place like that, don’t they? That’s what he said when he called asking for copies of my ID, my registered seal certificate, a letter of attorney. Hills? Why are you suddenly buying hills? Only people who want to be close to nature live in places like that. Writers all live in cities these days. And yet, I sent him all the documents he requested. Apparently this is how people pass on their assets to their children. That way, you can avoid inheritance tax or gift tax. I learned later that Mr. Lee had coached my father to say exactly this.  Those hills, purchased for a little over 200 million won, came back to me a decade later as a debt of 430 million.  So naturally, I assumed those two hundred messages and forty missed calls were related to that. Like some other loan or unpaid taxes, some private lender who hasn’t surfaced yet. But that wasn’t it.  hey gorgeous, what u wearing rn? u said call u so why tf aren’t u picking up?? u frigging bitch! it’s me, oppa! send a pic rn Most of the messages were like this. (Actually, much worse.) Trash talk and insults sent to me, mistaking me for a young woman. And yet also informing me that they’d come see me right away. All the phone calls from restricted numbers seemed to be more of the same. Messages and calls from not one person but dozens, all arriving around the same time.  With a sullen face, I scrolled through all of them, one by one. Some contained insults I’d never even heard before, and there was plenty of slang I couldn’t decipher (though they were clearly profanities, from context), but the more I read, the more relaxed I became. It was obvious that these were misdirected. They’d arrived at my number, but I clearly wasn’t the intended recipient, and they had nothing to do with some other debt I didn’t know about. Hate speech like this was everywhere these days. I hurried to get ready for work and soon forgot about the whole thing—dismissed it as a fluke, a misunderstanding, a prank at most. Geesh, kids these days . . . I thought, blaming the hollow world.  Of course, I didn’t know that was only the beginning.  * “Hey, it’s me. How have you been?”  I tried my best to keep my voice cool. But doing that made me feel like something was tickling at my throat. “Good,” Woojung answered, his voice flat. “And you, Professor?” “Well, you know, same as always.”  Neither of us spoke for a moment. The brief silence made me uncomfortable, but I decided to endure it. He would be the one more on edge, anyway. That thought gave me strength. “What’s going on?” Woojung was the first to break. Instead of answering him right away, I waited. Then I said, “Don’t you have something to say to me?”  This time, he stayed quiet. It felt like cowardice. About two weeks earlier, I’d sent him the same message by text. Don’t you have something to say to me? He hadn’t replied then, either. That gave me conviction.  “I’m at the police station right now. I wanted to confirm with you one last time.” “Okay. What is it?” “No, no, I’m not the one to talk. You’re the one who should be telling me.”  I pulled the phone away from my ear for a second to make sure the audio recorder was running. By then, “one last chance” and “forgiveness” had begun to sound useless. What I need now is evidence, or a confession. Maybe that’s what I’d wanted from the very beginning.  “Professor.” “Yes?” “You don’t have to talk to me, just do what you want to do.”  I said nothing. Woojung continued, “This is just to harass me, isn’t it? If you’re going to do that anyway—” “So you have nothing to say to me?” I cut him off, my voice sharper, insistent. “No.” “Okay, I got it.”  That was the end of our conversation. I glared at the conscript officer in the guard post for a moment, then took one short breath. Then I opened the door to the police station and walked in. This was the real beginning of Scenario B. I did my best to keep my cool and braced myself to be—to maintain the attitude of—the professor who had struggled to be as magnanimous as possible but could no longer take it and so, reluctantly, had come to the police.  I believed I was in the right.  * The flood of nightly messages and calls from restricted numbers that began in early March continued every day for an entire month. Some days, there were fewer than twenty, but most days, there were over a hundred. They usually began with “cutie” or “hey babe,” but ended with “fuck it, bitch!” and “imma keep calling u til the end, just watch!” They came between 2 and 5 a.m., without fail. Once, I stayed up during those hours to answer every single call. When I said, “Hello,” nearly all of them muttered, “Fuck, it’s a guy. Fell for it again!” and hung up. But, regardless of my voice, a few stayed on the line for at least five minutes, making strange moaning sounds. (In those cases, I was the one who had to hang up.) Still, it didn’t bother me much. I figured I could just ignore them. Sure, sure, you pathetic idiots. Call and text all you want. That was the extent of my feelings. My information must have leaked from somewhere. Oh no, was it the bank, maybe? Father had mentioned looking into private lenders and payday loans . . .  Then, starting in April, the calls came not only during the middle of the night but also during the day. While I sat in a strategy meeting about job placement for graduates in our department, while I led a writing workshop for grad students, while I had a late lunch with colleagues, my phone rang without a pause, like an old window rattling in the wind and rain.  “Professor, shouldn’t you take that? It sounds urgent.” Whenever my students said this, I’d hand them my phone. “Take a look. It’s driving me insane.”  They gathered around it in a circle. “Why . . . are they calling you ‘babe’?” “Looks like you’ve been hacked.” “Professor, have you been going on those . . . websites?”  All eyes turned to me. I closed my eyes and shook my head without a word. Then one of my graduate students offered practical advice. “Professor, try changing your KakaoTalk profile picture.” “My profile picture?”  Until then, I’d never uploaded a photo on my profile. I hadn’t even filled in my name; a question mark graced the empty space where the name should have been.  “Post your picture and your name. That way people won’t mistake you for a woman.”  Aha. Then my students began pouring out more suggestions. Post a picture of you in hiking clothes; I think the one where you’re getting an IV would be best (that was a picture I’d sent them, explaining why I couldn’t make a study session); we could take one right now; just stand over there by that orchid pot, it’ll do wonders, and so on. I sat quietly, listened, and uploaded a picture that looked the least embarrassing.  “In any case, what could possibly have caused this?” I muttered in a dejected voice, and suddenly the room fell silent. “Sure, my information could’ve leaked, but this is just . . . ” One grad student raised her voice with righteous anger. “Frigging Korean men are the problem. It’s like hatred is their default setting!” She said this staring straight at me, and I couldn’t help but close my eyes again.  Perhaps thanks to my students’ advice, I did receive fewer messages from that day on. The hundred-plus texts I used to receive day and night dropped to three or four. (Mostly questions like “You’re not actually a man, right?” “Is that a pic of your dad?”) That was encouraging. But the calls from restricted numbers were another problem. Those kept coming. If anything, there seemed to be more of them.  Once, I was driving to a resort in Sinan, South Jeolla Province, for a faculty workshop, accompanied by my colleague Professor C. The whole ride, my phone was ringing off the hook. My car’s GPS had been broken for ages, so I used an app on my phone, but the calls kept interrupting . . . Eventually, it got to the point where Professor C handed me his own phone and said, cautiously: “Professor Lee, these calls—they’re because of that problem, aren’t they?”  That problem C mentioned was my debt. Last February, before the semester started, I happened to mention it over drinks at a pub near campus. There are fixed costs bleeding me every month, but then 4.8 million on top of that? It’s suffocating. Loans on top of loans . . .  He’d listened quietly, then said in a soft voice, “But you’re a writer, Professor Lee, so you should keep writing, given the situation.” I knew full well what C meant. And yet there was such a thing as a heart that couldn’t bear his sincerity. “Professor C. The thing about anxiety . . . when it gets thick enough . . . it turns into hate, and . . . ”  What I mean is that I can’t write anything in this state, everything I write is garbage. I said more, but that’s about all I remember. But, what I do remember—what stayed with me for a long time—was something C said, almost to himself, right before we left the pub:  “But Professor Lee, hate sometimes comes when you don’t know yourself very well.”  That day in the car, I said nothing to him about the calls. I just smiled and left it at that. Because a thought had suddenly crossed my mind: This might not be a simple data breach; someone might be leaking my number on purpose, out of spite, because of “that problem.” For instance, someone like Mr. Lee, who had coaxed my father to purchase the hills. (Two years earlier, my father had sued him for fraud, as it turned out he’d been in cahoots with the previous landowner and the judicial scrivener, and was tangled up in several other lawsuits involving real estate scams.) Why hadn’t I thought of that before? I was nearly convinced it was that.  The calls kept coming. I thought about changing my number, but I couldn’t. I, again, had reasons I couldn’t change it . . . So I kept suspecting Mr. Lee and his associates, waiting to get my hands on proof.  Then I actually stumbled onto something.  The phone call that came around 1 a.m. on Children’s Day, May 5, was from a guy who must have been in a hurry, or maybe he didn’t know how to hide his number because he called me with his caller ID fully visible. Instinctively, I hit the call-record button and answered.  “Huh? Huh? Goddamn it . . . ”  The moment he heard my voice, he was about to hang up.  “Hey, wait, wait. I can see your number. The last four digits are 2832, right? If you hang up now, I’m going to keep calling you the same way you’ve been calling me.” He didn’t hang up. Instead, he kept muttering in a low voice, “Man, this is bad.” “Okay, so what I want is simple,” I did my best to keep my voice calm. “How did you get this number?” “I don’t know anything. I didn’t do anything, I just happened to get it.” He seemed to be a boy freshly out of puberty, his voice only recently dropped. A kid who thought speaking tough was a way to protect himself. “So, how did you get this num—”  Even before I finished speaking, 2832 said, “It’s not my fault. She was the one who said she wanted to see me and gave me her number and told me to call . . . but then you answered . . . ” “Where? Who gave it to you?” “In a video game. She sent me a note.” “A video game?”  StarCraft, he said. People still play that?  “That’s it then, right? I told you the truth.” The boy was about to hang up again.  “No, no, wait, wait,” I was almost pleading. “Can you tell me her username? Please. It’s really important.” He hesitated for a moment, then told me to hold on a second. I knew I was close. “The username is . . . how do you even say this? Turn . . . turning horse? It’s spelled T-U-R-I-N H-O-R-S-E.” “Turin Horse? You’re sure?” “Yeah.” That was the end of our conversation.  Turin Horse. From The Turin Horse. I knew exactly who that username belonged to. The guy who had watched that film over twenty times after I first told him about it.  It was Sung Woojung’s username. 3 “Gee, all kinds of stuff happens these days, don’t they?”  The detective’s name was Park Doyoung. Of the Phishing Investigation Team in the Detective Division. That was what he said while scrolling through the messages on my phone. “Bereavement scams are on the rise these days. You’d be surprised how many people fall for them.” He swiveled his computer monitor around to show me. On the screen was a text message: I am deeply saddened to share the news of the passing of my beloved mother. A simple funeral service will be held at—followed by a clickable link.  “Once you click that link, your phone gets hacked and becomes a ‘zombie’ phone. Sixteen people fell for it in our jurisdiction this month alone.” I nodded half-heartedly.  Detective Park Doyoung, the man I’d been told to speak with, looked about ten years younger than me. Wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and a white slim-fit dress shirt, he looked more like a church lay leader or a sales rep than a detective.  “If people abuse others’ good intentions, eventually there won’t be any good intentions left anywhere.” He handed my smartphone back to me. “And you suspect your student is behind all this?”  I stared at him without answering. I’d already told him all about what had been happening to me, the username I’d discovered, the story about my student who used the username. I was the one who laid everything out, and yet hearing those words come out of his mouth, I felt like I was the one with issues. A heartless teacher accusing his own student. That phrase wouldn’t leave my head. “I’m not certain,” I said. “But I’d like to find out.”  Two days after my call with 2832, I dialed the customer service number for the Korean branch of Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind StarCraft. (Even while I was on the phone, calls from restricted numbers kept coming.) After navigating through several layers, I finally connected with the Manager and launched into a long, slightly exaggerated explanation of my situation. I can’t even think straight because of the calls—they’re coming in even now, as we speak—and all I want to know is simple: the identity of the user behind the username “Turin Horse.” After listening patiently, the Manager said, “Oh, sir, I’m terribly sorry for all the trouble caused by one of our users. Please allow me to apologize on their behalf.” Then, she continued in a voice more exaggerated than mine, “But I’m afraid we cannot provide that information.” Under no circumstances could they disclose personal information about their users.  I raised my voice at her pointlessly. “Did you hear what I said? I literally can’t live a normal life right now.” “Of course, sir, I understand completely. But providing that information would mean breaking the law.” “There’s really no way?” “I’m very sorry, sir. Please understand that we value your opinion as a customer—” She was immovable. I had no choice but to hang up with nothing solved. Before I did, I snapped hysterically, “I’m not your valued customer! I’ve never even played your stupid game!”  “Is there some kind of bad blood between you and this student?” Detective Park asked, hands poised over his keyboard. Bad blood. Bad blood . . .  I wasn’t sure. That question had plagued me ever since I heard the username “Turin Horse” from 2832. But no matter how I dug through my memories, nothing came to mind. I believed I’d been on good terms with Sung Woojung and assumed he’d feel the same. Other than reading, writing, eating, and talking together, what more could there be between a professor and his student? It was frustrating.  Could it be . . . that? After racking my brain for days, an image came to my mind out of nowhere, like a page from a picture book you’d randomly picked up in a bookstore. Perhaps it was a memory I’d invented in an effort to find a possible explanation, and perhaps it had been distorted and exaggerated, but for some reason, once the thought entered my mind, Woojung’s expression that day grew sharper and clearer. That moment, I had realized that his back was rather hunched, as if something about him were twisted.  But even if my memory were accurate, that had been nearly a decade ago. It was far more plausible that he had no memory of it at all, had not even thought of it in years. And above all . . . there was no context, none whatsoever. It was beyond my comprehension. I could forgive him, if only I could understand what was going on . . .  * After we had bibimbap together at the hole-in-the-wall near campus, Woojung started coming by my office now and then. I’d return from class to find him sitting at the table with his hands on his laptop keyboard and a serious look on his face. (I never locked my office door when I was on campus.) “What is it? What’s with the serious face? Did someone sue you again?”  That was my standard joke every time I saw him, and he’d scratch his temple and quietly chuckle. We shared the same space but didn’t talk much. Him at the table, me at my desk (separated by a partition), we worked on our own things. After hours of going through paperwork and student assignments, I’d look up and realize he’d packed up and left. He didn’t even say goodbye, I’d mutter sometimes, but I was never disappointed. I believed it was his way of being considerate.  Once, he asked me with a look of genuine disgust, “Professor. Why is this supposed to be a good movie?”  He’d been watching The Turin Horse on his laptop. I answered in jest as always, “It’s black and white. All black-and-white films are good films.” Then I added, “Isn’t it terrifying?” In all honesty, that film—the story of a horse, a man, and his daughter, all awaiting death in the house without moving as a storm raged outside—frightened and terrified me. I didn’t want to be afraid alone, so I often recommended it to my students.  “Is it good because it’s terrifying?” he asked. I answered in a voice full of uncertainty, “Well, in art . . . it’s not easy to arouse that kind of emotion, is it?”  “I . . . think the daughter in this film is just foolish,” he remarked and went back to watching. But even after that, I saw him watching the same film again and again. (I asked him later and he told me he’d seen it at least twenty times.) He even changed his username to the film title, and revised his position on the daughter.  “Now that I’ve watched it more, it’s not that the daughter is foolish . . . she was trapped. She was the horse itself.” I didn’t take his words very seriously.  In December, I went on an overnight retreat to a vacation lodge near Metasequoia Road in Damyang with my students from the department writing club. It was something of an annual tradition, a consolation trip for those who dropped like autumn leaves from the Spring Literary Contests, the newspaper-sponsored competitions that served as springboards for new authors, and that year, Sung Woojung, who hadn’t partaken much in club activities, came along as well. There were eight of us in total.  We strolled loosely through Gwanbangjerim Forest where the leaves had all turned rusty red, stopped for a late lunch on Damyang Noodle Street, then returned to the lodge and got right into grilling pork belly and drinking soju. Guys, I keep turning down offers to judge the Spring Literary Contests because one of you might win, but, huh? How many years has it been now? I cracked joke after joke, trying to lighten the mood that kept growing heavy, but that wasn’t enough to shake the look on their faces, so I kept downing shots. In the end, I got drunk first and headed up to a room (on the loft level, and I vaguely remembered climbing the stairs on all fours), and fell asleep immediately.  I was deep in sleep when someone shook me awake. “Professor, I think you need to come down for a sec.”  He was a second-year student, one of the youngest in the writing club.  “What’s going on?” I asked, unable to even open my eyes. “It’s . . . I think something’s about to go wrong.” What does he mean, something’s about to go wrong? Did these kids get into a fight? I put on my glasses and ran my fingers through my hair.  When I went downstairs, the students were still drinking, looking the same as before. It was around three in the morning. Soju bottles and paper cups were strewn across the coffee table. Christmas carols were drifting from a Bluetooth speaker someone had brought, and the kids were talking in twos and threes, occasionally bursting into laughter. Bloodshot eyes, a faint smell of mint wafting from somewhere, street lights growing brighter as the night deepened, warmth and coldness, relaxed minds, and anxiety hidden within . . .  And there, in the corner near the decorative fireplace, I caught sight of Sung Woojung’s back as he sat hunched over, clutching a backpack and crying. As well as the white pellets scattered around him.  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked the second-year student standing next to me. “He’s been like that for an hour.”  He said he’d come to wake me because Woojung was making him nervous, because he felt like something might go wrong. Upon closer look, I realized the white pellets were popcorn. Someone, or perhaps several people, had been throwing them. As I watched, one of the fourth-year students threw popped kernels in Woojung’s direction.  “Damn it. Give me back my fucking backpack! What the hell are you doing clutching my backpack?”  I made the conscious decision to approach Woojung first. He didn’t stop crying even when I sat down beside him.  “What’s going on? What happened?”  At my question, he lifted his head for a moment and stared at me. He must have been crying a while—his eyes were red and puffy, his forehead was pale. Then he buried his face in the backpack again and cried even harder.  “Professor . . . they’re all fools,” he sobbed. The fourth-year got to his feet. “Just fucking stop!” Woojung continued, still sobbing, “They don’t even know they’re fools . . . and they keep doing foolish things . . . ” “Goddamn it, for real!”  I don’t know why, but everything felt annoying in that moment. The immaturity of being unable to hide his feelings, the mindlessness, the self-absorption. Those judgments solidified inside me.  I spoke in a hard, cold voice. “Stop.” That was what I said—not to the fourth-year student but to Sung Woojung. “You’re the one being foolish right now. So stop.” He looked up at me. His eyes showed embarrassment, but soon turned to resentment. For a long time afterward, I didn’t forget his gaze. I didn’t look away.  * “Professor, I’m sorry to say this, but . . . ” Detective Park trailed off. “It looks . . . it might be a little difficult to press charges.” “Why’s that?” I asked, leaning forward. “You didn’t incur any financial damage, and . . . the problem, if there is one, is that he gave your number to other people, but that’s not enough to . . . ” “Even though I’m suffering this much?”  Detective Park nodded as though he sympathized with my situation. But his words said otherwise: “The problem is really the people who made the calls, not the person who gave them your number, so . . . ” He added that it’d be better to press charges against those who made the calls, but even that was tricky. Because all they did was make calls. That was the precise moment when a strange hostility began to envelop me. What’s tricky about it? All they did was make calls? Does he really not understand their disgusting intent? I stifled my anger, flexing my calf muscles. The humiliation and helplessness I felt every time my phone rang—and yet, the reasons I couldn’t change my number. Could this man even fathom what was going on inside me? What kind of circumstances surrounded him? Could he also have debt beyond his ability to pay off?  Last autumn, my father, having been diagnosed with hydrocephalus, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s all together, had begun calling me at all hours. Nine, ten times a day. Every time we connected, he asked the same question: “How come you don’t call these days?”  At first, I tried to take it matter-of-factly. This isn’t my father talking, it’s his disease. But it only lasted a few days. He kept bringing up the wooded hills. I got fifty-three points on the land transaction permit score. Fifty is passing, so it was all good from the start. You have no idea how hard Mr. Lee worked. It wasn’t the Yeongwol County Office he had to visit, but the Provincial Office’s Forest Management Department and the National Forestry Cooperative Federation. And every trip cost money, so what could I do? He didn’t want to burden you, so he even looked into loans with the land as collateral . . . Say, I heard, you’d have to register legally as a person engaged in forestry. Want me to look into it for you?  It was unbearable to listen to those words. So on days when I couldn’t bring myself to answer his calls, I set my phone on silent after work. Then my mother would call immediately. “Hon, can’t you call him to save your poor old mother?”  That was exactly what she said. She said my father trembled with anxiety when he couldn’t reach me by phone. He would strip off his diaper and urinate on the bed as if it were normal. My mother, who refused to send him to a nursing home, saying, “I can’t do that to your poor father,” was desperate as she pleaded with me.  And once—just once—I’d yelled at my senile father.  “Father! Please just stop!”  At my words, he stopped talking and went silent for a moment. Then he said, “I just . . . since you’re a writer . . . I really like that you’re a writer, you see.” “No, that’s not what I’m saying!”  And then I burst out crying. After listening to me sob in silence, he spoke with sadness in his voice: “Why are you crying? You miss your mother? Oh you poor thing . . . ” It was his disease speaking to me.  “Then what can you do for me here?” I lowered my voice and asked Detective Park. “Well, even if you do decide to press charges . . . it’ll be processed by priority.” His face showed some annoyance. Perhaps, out of his seasoned experience, he’d sensed my hostility in that moment. It was a defense mechanism against hostility. That was how it felt. “You mean you’re not interested in things like this.”  He gave no response. I got to my feet. “Seeing as you’re just sitting there talking about ‘good intentions.’” He looked at me with an impassive face. Without glancing back, I left the station.  4 Sung Woojung finished all four years of college but didn’t graduate on time and ended up registering for his mandatory military service while still in school. About three days before he shipped out, he came to see me in my office.  “How’s it going? It’s going to be rough, serving at your age.”  I offered a rather perfunctory greeting. Since the retreat, something between us had evaporated, but I didn’t think much of it, nor did I care to.  “Professor,” he said, looking me in the eye. “You said before that everyone has their own circumstances and their own life, right? That the aesthetics of fiction comes from that.”  I sat quietly, listening. “But . . . is that really true? Is that really the aesthetics of fiction?” Around that time, I’d heard that Woojung had moved out of his studio apartment near campus and into a cheap, cramped room at a goshiwon . All kinds of rumors were circulating among his classmates in the department— someone said his father’s business had flopped; another said he’d simply moved because his lease was up, that he was only staying at the goshiwon for a few days before registering for the military service. But the most credible account came from the second-year student, who’d grown close to Woojung since the retreat. That’s not it. He said he was the one paying his own way the whole time. The studio apartment, he paid for with the money he earned himself, and now that he’s not making money, he’s cutting costs wherever he can. “Hey, what’s all this about fiction when you’re about to ship out?” I said, trying to change the subject. Or actually, he was making me uncomfortable.  “Then . . . why do we write fiction?” Woojung muttered, almost to himself. “Is emotion really all there is?”  That day, sitting in my car in the Nambu Police Station parking lot, I called Woojung again. He didn’t answer, and yet I kept tapping the call button, more and more obsessively. Fine, don’t answer. Please don’t answer. That was part of what I felt. Cold sweat ran down my back, and my hands shook. I was that furious. Woojung still didn’t pick up.  Unable to stop myself, I started typing a text. Pick up the phone. I was about to hit send when . . . when . . . when my eyes drifted to the messages we’d exchanged around last Christmas. They were texts from those days when the strange calls hadn’t yet started, when I was consumed by interest payments on the debt that had appeared out of nowhere.  Did you sell it all back then? The Bitcoin? Yes. Really? All of it? You told me to sell it, so . . . Hey, how could you actually go and sell it just because your professor told you to? LOL  He hadn’t replied to that one.  I stared at the last message I’d sent.  LOL.  I finally understood that there was a certain truth buried in those three thoughtless letters.  * Until recently, I’d spent a lot of time thinking about emotions, mostly feelings like anger, shame, hatred, guilt. I believed it was difficult, exhausting work, this task of listening to someone’s heart, and I’ve tried to channel it through my writing.  But is that true? Many times, I’ve wondered if those feelings were only ever resolved inside me. Just understanding and fathoming someone else’s discomfort and humiliation.  What changes after you fathom?  What comes after your heart overflows? I couldn’t shake the thought that the answer was a bigger lie. I’m still on edge, paying off the bank interest every month. I couldn’t just be on edge, so I put the apartment I’d been living in for years on the market. Hardly anyone comes to look, but I’m hoping that it sells soon. That’s my main emotion these days.  My father ended up moving into a nursing home early last month, and he doesn’t call anymore. Or rather, he can’t. As for those strange calls and messages, they stopped like magic the day after I went to the police station. I can only guess how that came about.  Some nights, late, I read through the texts Woojung and I exchanged, and every time, I think of a horse trapped in the stable. A horse that was mercilessly whipped. A horse that is no longer moving.  That was what I saw, in the place where a certain feeling had passed.

by Lee Ki-ho

Fiction

Empty Cans

There in the distance you walk my horizon, just as I walk yours. —Kim Jungil, “Horizon”  They were up to tae now. They’d already discussed taedo, taedong, taeran, and taeman, and next was taemyeong. The Korean researchers immediately ruled out as obsolete the first definition for taemyeong (台命), meaning “orders given by high-ranking officials,” and had begun talking about the second taemyeong (胎名), or “nicknames given to fetuses.” Nergüi flipped back and forth between two different Mongolian dictionaries.  “We do not name babies in the womb,” he declared, adding that there was no equivalent noun in the Mongolian language for taemyeong. Nergüi was a visiting researcher at the university, sent there to help compile a Korean-Mongolian dictionary. He and the three Korean researchers had spent the last six months choosing which words would go into the dictionary, and now they were nearly at the end. They’d chosen forty-thousand entries already and were planning to add about five thousand more from among words beginning with ㅌ, ㅍ, and ㅎ.  It was nearly lunchtime, their debate over taemyeong dragging on into that ambiguous hour of the day when it would become harder and harder for them to tell whether they were actually debating anything or merely devolving into idle chit-chat. Most of the Korean researchers were young and had had fetal nicknames like Puppy Poo, Lucky Duck, and Dorothy. Professor Park, the most senior among them and heavily pregnant, had named her fetus Janggeumi. She said she’d taken the name from the TV show Jewel in the Palace because her pregnancy had her craving all kinds of old-fashioned royal cuisine, like tarakjuk milk porridge or bamboo shoots with persimmon dressing. All Nergüi ever thought of when he heard the name Dae Jang Geum was a Korean restaurant in downtown Ulaanbaatar.  “Naming a fetus is frowned upon in Mongolia,” he said.  The bemused looks on the Koreans’ faces said, ‘Another taboo?’ It wasn’t too far-fetched to call Mongolia the Land of Taboos. Nergüi had explained that the countless do’s and don’ts were the nomads’ way of living in harmony with nature. He still observed the Mongolian superstition about not passing in front of a pregnant person by making sure to get behind Professor Park whenever they were in an elevator or a similar space together. Not that Nergüi was hung up on superstition. He’d gone a long way toward adapting his thoughts and behavior to Korean culture, but it didn’t change the fact that he’d grown up a nomad in the Gobi Desert. Some habits were too deeply ingrained.  Take migratory birds, for instance. Nergüi told the others that it was taboo on the steppes to count migratory birds.  “Counting kills birds,” he said.  Professor Kim, who’d disappointed his parents by being born a boy despite being nicknamed Dorothy in the womb, said, “Uh oh. I used to fall asleep counting wild geese all the time when I was in the Gobi.”  “But isn’t that only natural?” Professor Park said. “Nergüi, isn’t there a way to release Professor Kim from his curse? From what I remember, taboos are like safes: they can both be unlocked.” Everyone laughed, including Nergüi.  Nergüi mimicked a teacher scolding a student.  “You better not look up at the sky the first time it snows!”  Professor Kim delightedly agreed.  “All I have to do is not look up? That’s easy,” he said.  “Something tells me it won’t be as easy as you think,” Professor Park said. She looked at the clock on the wall and asked Nergüi, “Can you tell us any other funny taboos?”  That was a clear sign that it was time to break for lunch. Nergüi pondered what else he could share with them, then laughed out loud.  “Raindrops,” he said. “You must never catch them in your hand.”  He spread open his palm and pretended to catch the rain.  “When you do that, the rain clings to you and becomes yours, and in a land where water is precious, that endangers all life. We also do not sew new clothes for babies in the womb. Even though they’re bound for this world, you’re not supposed to do anything for the not-yet born. You have to be very careful. As careful as you are about not saying the name of the sacred Bogd Mountain when you’re in its presence.”  “You’re supposed to call it Big Mountain instead, right?”  The Korean researchers recalled Nergüi’s funny way of addressing Professor Park’s pregnancy by asking her, “How is our new person doing?” They’d thought at first that he was being cute, but now they could see how his words carried a deep sense of care.  “Not that we Koreans are ones to talk about superstition. After all, we’re supposed to give fetuses ugly nicknames to avoid bad luck.”  “That’s not strictly the case anymore. You see a lot more cutesy nicknames nowadays, along with jokey ones. I met this one woman who named her fetus ‘BTS.’”  Now the Koreans were having fun with it.  “And it’s not just fetal names. Ages ago, when infant mortality was really high, people used to have separate amyeong just for childhood. You know, those goofy names parents gave children to trick Death from coming for them? Emperor Gojong and Councilor Hwang Hui had some really good ones, like, Dog Shit and Piggy.”  “Those weren’t just nicknames?”  “Nope, those were their actual names when they were children.”  Nergüi opened the file on his laptop that contained all of the dictionary entries they’d compiled so far and searched for amyeong. Surely they’d gone over it already, but he felt as if he were hearing this noun for the first time. He saw that it had been struck from the list. Their criteria had been to eliminate words that were either fully obsolete or rarely used in daily life, and it seemed that “childhood name” had been ruled out before they could even begin to discuss whether there was an equivalent for it in the Mongolian language. Though Mongolians used plenty of nicknames and terms of endearment, they did not create separate names just for one’s childhood.  “But you know, we’re just as cautious as Koreans when it comes to naming children. We too choose names to prevent the spirits from messing with them. Take my name, for example. Nergüi means Nameless. My grandfather named me that to prevent misfortune from finding me.”  “Oh wow, I had no idea that’s what your name means.”  “Traditionally, there are a lot of names like mine. The name Terbish means Not That One. Khemedekh means Who Knows? There’s another misleading name like that, which translates to No One Knows. Some parents even name their child Khenbish.”  “Khenbish? Khen . . . bish . . . Nobody? Is that really what it means?”  “Yes,” Nergüi said with a nod.  “That’s funny. Dog Shit and Piggy are nothing compared to those.”  For reasons he couldn’t explain, Nergüi suddenly found himself overcome with longing. He ached with the melancholy of one who’d traveled a long way. His Korean colleagues, and this work of matching up vocabulary words, often had this effect on his mood. He felt himself traveling toward a place that was somehow both strange and welcoming. But naming a baby while it was still in the womb? That struck him as terribly impatient.  Every time Nergüi spoke, fumbling through explanations, his Korean colleagues listened as intently as if they’d been transported to the Gobi itself. The expressions on their faces said that these encounters with the inner life of the language gave them a much deeper understanding of the nomads’ world than a single night spent in a ger could, and that the whole world seemed to have more commonalities than differences.  These conversations would end when they suddenly reached one of those life mysteries that couldn’t be resolved by language, and their heads would tilt up as if under some other power, their eyes turning to some distant place. Alas, their voices seemed to sigh.  “But Nergüi, I bet you’ve caught rainwater in your hand before, haven’t you?”  “Of course. I’d be crazy to miss out on something that good. When it rains, your hand opens on its own.”  “That’s right . . . The same way your head lifts when it snows.”  But even those riddles were not as fascinating as Nergüi’s tale of the tin cans. His colleagues all agreed on this. It was no exaggeration to say that cans were what had made Nergüi the man he was now. Last December, they’d discussed the dictionary entry for can, ggangtong in Korean and лааз for Mongolian. Just like today, his colleagues had spent half the day lost in Nergüi’s story.  Nergüi had grown up in the southern Gobi Desert, in a distant corner of the steppes whose name meant “many small birch trees.” In actuality, there were few birch trees to be seen. Only sparse patches of hardy grass in a parched wilderness of sand and rock.  His parents had left to find work in South Korea when Nergüi was four, leaving him in the care of his grandfather. Grandfather Enebish was an elderly camel and sheep herder in his eighties. The boy’s parents had told the old man that they would work in Korea for three years and return before Nergüi started school. They sent gifts from abroad that fit right into the grandfather and grandson’s simple life in the ger. There were household goods—a plastic cutting board, a frying pan, a thermos, a trunk—and clothes and toys for Nergüi. The plastic model airplane they’d sent him back then was currently sitting on the desk in Nergüi’s lodgings.  The gifts took at least a season, sometimes over half a year, to reach them. The nearest city, which had a post office, bank, and school, was a day’s horseback ride away. Grandfather Enebish had grown far too old to make the trip. Fortunately, his younger brother was an elder monk in the city’s temple and always forwarded Nergüi’s parents’ packages to them. He sent them via the temple trucks that made their rounds to purchase wool and camel fur or else tasked younger lamas with hand-delivering them.  From some point on, grandfather and grandson had become preoccupied with waiting for others. His grandfather would sit for hours on a chair in front of their ger. His line of sight was broken only by the far-off southern horizon, and every now and then, when the normally poker-faced landscape was stirred by columns of dust swirling skyward, he would peer through his old Soviet binoculars. Nergüi, too, would pause in his playing and watch as the cloud of dust slowly moved from east to west, sometimes west to east. Surely it was a passing car, but few travelers ever found reason to enter their valley.  As Nergüi learned the lay of the land, he came to know that somewhere beyond the southern horizon were his parents, past the northern horizon were the school and city, and to the west was the dinosaur graveyard.  At five, Nergüi saddled his first horse and took to racing as far as his gaze could reach. The more he raced toward the horizon, the more it retreated, faint and distant. This taught him despair, but also kindled his longing. He felt he was trapped in some very deep place, like where he imagined the night sky must end. He stacked small stones at his heart’s horizons before returning home. The cairns gave him the courage to go further with each ride.  One day, way out to the east, he came across a jeep carrying travelers, a married couple from Korea, accompanied by a local guide. They followed Nergüi back to his ger. His grandfather always welcomed guests, but he was even more delighted to learn they were Korean. He set out tea and cheese. The man and woman stayed for an hour and boiled instant ramyeon noodles for lunch.  Grandfather Enebish showed the Koreans the letters and photos the boy’s parents had sent. They told him in turn about the city where the parents worked in a furniture factory. The city had a big lake, they said. They looked at the photo that Nergüi’s parents had taken in front of a fountain and said that it was indeed the same musical fountain found at that lake. They told Nergüi all about the delightful fountain.  In a voice heavy with emotion, his grandfather said, “It looks like a nice place to live. Your parents are clearly doing well. That’s good.”  Before the travelers left, they gave them an armful of drinks and snacks. It would be years before Nergüi learned that the gifts they’d given him were Choco Pies and Coca-Cola. Grandfather Enebish treasured the box of Choco Pies and the five cans of Coke as if they’d come from his own son and daughter-in-law. That first taste of Coke etched itself permanently into Nergüi’s memory. His grandfather had the first gulp then sat straight up and let out a rattling belch. Nergüi was terrified by his grandfather’s reaction to the beverage and took a cautious sip. His mouth and throat burned, and he felt like all the air was being sucked out of his body. Unlike the sweetness he was used to, the kind that lingered while barely even registering as sweet, this was a loud burst of sugar that vanished as quickly as it had come.  The two shared amused looks as they passed the can back and forth.  “Such an odd flavor,” his grandfather said. “It could shock a dying man back to life.”  His grandfather set the can down.  “We’ve been gifted something really precious. Better make it last.”  Nergüi did as his grandfather suggested and resisted opening a second can for an entire day. The next day, he cracked one open and drank half. He placed the rest in the cupboard. That evening, when he came back in from herding the sheep, he took another sip and found that the flavor had changed. It tasted like nothing more than lukewarm sugar water. He realized that once you opened a can, you had to see it through to the end.  It was no easy task for a child his age to keep from drinking all five at once. They didn’t last even three days. He displayed the five empty cans along the head of his bed. Each time he looked at them, he was overcome by an unbearable thirst. He even tried filling one with tarag and drinking it that way. Nergüi returned from the outhouse in the middle of the night and wept like a child waking from a nightmare. His grandfather sat up in bed. The boy was holding an empty can. The grandfather understood the enormity of the child’s suffering, and how dreadful a thing this was.  When Grandfather Enebish was around Nergüi’s age, the socialist government had come in, and some summer after that, a European named Jan and his family became neighbors. Jan and his wife were anthropologists. They’d come from some place called Oslo. They said they would be staying for two years to record life in the Gobi. They set up their tent near a well in the summer camp just one hill over, a mere stone’s throw from Enebish’s ger. He’d encountered foreigners before, when Soviet troops had come to conduct surveys, but it was his first time having them as neighbors.  With Enebish’s family helping Jan’s family out, they all grew close. When the nomads packed up to move from the summer to winter camp, Jan’s family decamped with them. They joined the nomads for every holiday and special event.  “Jan had a little boy who was the same age as me, named Anders. We were as inseparable as two puppies.”  The time soon came for the foreign couple to finish up their research and return home.  The day before they left, Enebish went with his father to help them pack their belongings into their truck. He’d grown so fond of them and missed them so much already.  “I gave Anders a bow that I’d spent a month making. He gave me these Soviet binoculars.”  Before returning home, Enebish’s father grabbed the horse’s reins and asked Jan, “Friend, can your home be reached on horseback?”  Jan smiled at this and nodded. He raised his long arm and gestured like he was tapping his hand against the western sky.  “The city where I live is out there, where this land and that sky end. We walk the same earth and carry the same sky.”  He spread his arms wide and embraced Enebish’s father, then gave Enebish a peck on the cheek.  Enebish wiped away tears the whole ride home. His father consoled him.  “Just as you have more than one finger on your hand, so people have more than one path. There’s no point in crying over their leaving.”  The next morning, before the sun had even risen, his mother woke him.  “Get up, little one. We’re leaving, too. Your father and I talked about it all night. Bring in the camels. Last I saw, the animals were by the black bog.”  Though he knew it was time for them to move to the summer camp, they didn’t usually leave so abruptly. His father had taken the horses and was already gone. Confused, Enebish went to look for the camels. By the time he’d returned with all twelve, the ger had been dismantled and packed on the cart, and the sheep were being readied. His father had returned and kept hurrying them along. His mother sat in the horse cart while Enebish and his father drove the livestock.  Enebish was beside himself. He’d promised Anders he would come say goodbye in the morning. But as luck would have it, their path took them over the hill to where Anders and his family were still camped. It seemed that Enebish’s father had had the same idea of saying goodbye on the way.  Jan and his family had finished breakfast and were packing up. Jan was startled to see them appear with all of their livestock.  “Are you decamping?” he asked.  Enebish’s father nodded. With a determined look, he said, “Our family is too sad to see you go. So we’re going with you instead.”  Looking deeply touched, Jan held his hand out to Enebish’s father.  “That is the best goodbye I have ever received.”  Enebish’s father took his hand and said, “We can’t travel as fast as your Swift Horse (and here, he meant Jan’s truck), but we’ll do our best. How many days will it take?”  At last, Jan realized that the herder’s words had not been in jest.  “Ah, that’s not possible.” He gazed off to the west and shook his head. “It’s much too far.”  “No distance is too far as long as horses can go there.”  “You sound just like Genghis Khan.”  “Do you mean that you plan to spend the summer on the road?”  “The road isn’t the problem. It’s the border. Borders are harder to cross than oceans.”  Enebish’s father didn’t understand. Neither did Enebish nor his mother.  “Our Mongolian horses can go anywhere. They can fly up to the sky and swim any sea.”  Jan went to his wife, and they spoke together for a long time. Then he came back and told Enebish’s parents, “She says there’s no grass for your sheep to eat where we live.”  “You mean there’s even less grass there than in the Gobi?”  “That’s correct.”  Enebish’s father’s shoulders sagged. In a disappointed voice, he said, “We cannot go where there is no grass. Friend, please understand that I cannot leave my sheep behind.” And just like that, Nergüi’s great-grandfather’s dream of migration came to nothing.  This story always reminded Nergüi of where he had come from and the true Gobi that he’d left so far behind. But how far away was it? It seemed even farther than over the horizon.  The six years that Nergüi spent in the Gobi with his grandfather were no different. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the introduction of a market economy, the world had changed, and yet Nergüi and his grandfather were oblivious to it all. They’d continued to revere Comrade Lenin and follow the People’s Revolutionary Party. The more he looked back, the sadder he felt to know that a whole life could just fade to nothing.  The next day, Nergüi’s grandfather pointed at his collection of Coca-Cola cans and asked, “What do you think about throwing those out?”  Nergüi shook his head.  “You’ve refused to even look at tarag or camel milk for five days now. If I could sell the sheep to buy you more of that stuff, I would. But there’s nowhere to buy it out here. Our guests only gifted you suffering.”  His grandfather set a woven leather basket in front of him.  “Shall I throw them away for you?”  Nergüi shook his head again and placed the cans in the basket himself.  He rode his horse to the horizon where he disposed of the cans at a stone tower he’d built and went home.  When his seventh year was on the verge of ending, a school bag arrived from Korea. It contained a thermos, ten notebooks, a set of twelve crayons, and a pencil case stuffed with pencils and erasers. There was no news of whether his parents were returning.  Nergüi’s grandfather told him, “This means it’s time for you to go to school.”  “Even if my parents aren’t back yet?”  His grandfather looked like he didn’t know how to respond.  “As Comrade Lenin said, all children should attend school by the time they turn eight. The children of the Gobi are no exception. However, I’ll speak to the authorities. If I tell them that you’ll start when you turn nine instead, they’ll understand. Because your case is special. You can go to school next year when your parents return. It’ll be good for you to go to school in the big city.” The school was very far from the Gobi, and the children who went there had to live in dormitories. He could come home during school breaks, but the problem was, who would take the sheep to pasture in the morning and bring them in again at night, and who would check that the camels hadn’t wandered off, if he wasn’t there to do it? Who would fetch water for his grandfather? Who would open the ceiling flap in the morning?  That was around the time when they learned that Nergüi’s parents had broken up. His grandfather couldn’t hide this tragedy from him. Not only would the two of them not be returning home together, but there was no way of knowing whether his mother or his father would ever come to get him. “You’re here, so of course someone, either your mother or your father, will come for you. Don’t be too heartbroken over it.” But his grandfather was the first to break. First his cough worsened that August, then he spent the autumn confined to bed. A zud struck, starting in early winter, taking many of their sheep with it. His grandfather knew he no longer had the strength to survive as a herder and sold off their remaining livestock. All that was left were two horses to serve as their feet and one elderly dog.  His grandfather told young Nergüi, “Child, grow like the summer sun until you’re big enough to herd again.”  The year Nergüi turned nine, he spent most of the summer in the dinosaur graveyard to the west. It was a tourist site. Foreign tourists came in droves, and locals made money giving them horse and camel rides. Children Nergüi’s age made pocket money leading the animals around by their reins. Nergüi joined them. The work was fun. The travelers were generous with tips and offered him items from their backpacks that made for nice souvenirs.  Having sold off their livestock, Nergüi and his grandfather stayed put in the winter camp year-round. They got by on the money sent to them from Korea. One day, Nergüi returned to their ger to find his grandfather waiting for him with a gloomy look on his face. There were obvious signs that someone had been to see them. He spotted a sack of salt and some foodstuffs, which told him that it had been the errand runner from his great-uncle’s temple.  His grandfather set the supper table and waited in silence until Nergüi was done eating. Then he fetched an old, worn-out sack from next to the stove and poured the contents onto the floor. It was the empty cans. Mixed in with the ones that Nergüi had left at the stone cairn was a very old-looking tin can marred with rust. Its khaki color had faded, but it hadn’t lost its shape. Nergüi didn’t understand why his grandfather had brought the cans back and spilled them all over the floor.  “They haven’t rotted at all.”  Nergüi listened to his grandfather’s words without responding.  “Animal bones fall apart. In the Gobi, even rocks decompose, but these laaz do not. It has taken me seventy years to remember their name: лааз. I wish for you to take them far away from here.”  Nergüi had never heard the word for cans before, and he would never forget that moment of meeting the word for the first time.  “Where do you want me to throw them away?” Nergüi asked. He thought about the horizons he’d visited.  “Somewhere far. Very, very far.”  “Dalanzadgad?”  “They won’t have a place for disposing of these. You need to go somewhere bigger.”  “Ulaanbaatar?”  His grandfather nodded. Nergüi was shocked. Ulaanbaatar was five hundred kilometers to the north, a tremendous distance. And his grandfather was telling him to go there alone. Nergüi looked worriedly at him, wondering if his grandfather was joking, or maybe he’d grown so feeble that he’d stopped talking sense.  “Look at this.”  His grandfather plucked from among the Coke cans the khaki-colored can that had piqued Nergüi’s curiosity. Dark red sand spilled out.  “This was a can of ham that your father received from some Soviet troops when he was twelve. I discarded it on a red sand dune, and it has frightened me my entire life to see that it never rots. That has always bothered me. It’s far too dangerous to bury something in the earth that refuses to rot. I think that if you leave these unrotting things here, you too will suffer your whole life.”  Nergüi could hear the desperation in his grandfather’s voice. There was no other way about it, he had to take this voyage.  “But Ulaanbaatar is too far. I can’t make it.”  “Why do you say you can’t make it? Am I telling you to take a hundred sheep with you? All you have to do is take this little sack, so what are you afraid of? If you don’t go, then I’ll have no choice but to go myself.”  And so Nergüi set out on the road. Before leaving, Nergüi fetched enough water from the well to fill each water jug to brimming. He gathered plenty of well-dried dung for the fire and stacked it next to the ger.  He placed the cans in his schoolbag. His grandfather lashed a supply of food and water to the saddle, then pulled some cash from his shirt.  “Go to Dalanzadgad first and look for the monk. He’ll tell you how to find your way from there.”  Nergüi wept. He’d never left home before. His grandfather gripped the right rein and led Nergüi around the ger three times.  “I’ll get rid of these and come right back,” Nergüi said. “Please take care until I can return.”  Nergüi left. He rode to the east, passing three stone cairns he’d built. After a day of riding, he reached the outskirts of Dalanzadgad. As evening fell, one end of the earth glittered as if the stars had fallen from the sky. He slowly rode into the center of that light. Houses huddled together with fences between them, and large trees stood in rows. There were more cars than horses. Standing beside his horse on the asphalt, Nergüi felt himself shrink. He instinctively avoided the large roads where cars traveled and kept to the alleys. The smell of food and the smoke of cooking fires filled his lungs.  The temple was not within the city but was instead out past a hill where a monument stood. It was a small temple. Next to the yard with its white stupa was a single poplar tree. A flock of ravens clung to its branches like overripe fruit. He tethered the horse and entered the temple.  The evening was still and quiet. The thick scent of incense hung in the air. Three lamas of different ages came out to greet him. Nergüi recognized the youngest as the errand runner who’d frequented their ger.  “Nergüi, what are you doing here?” he asked, clasping Nergüi’s hands. The young lama explained that the elder monk, his grandfather’s younger brother, had left for a pilgrimage to Tibet.  “He’s been gone three years already. But I can help you in his place with whatever it is you need.”  The young lama gave him dinner and a bed for the night.  “Did you know I delivered a letter to your grandfather three days ago? But I wasn’t able to stay long enough to see you.”  Nergüi nodded. “Who was the letter from?” he asked, remembering that the lama always read letters to his grandfather, who couldn’t read himself.  “The letter was sent from Korea.”  “From my father or my mother?”  “Well . . . I can tell you it was your father.”  The look on the lama’s face said that it was difficult for him to say anything more. When Nergüi explained that he was on his way to dispose of the metal cans, the lama patted his head.  “Your grandfather must have a lot on his mind. I’ll help you. I’ll find you a ride to Ulaanbaatar. We’ll have to leave early, so you’d better get some rest.”  At dawn, the lama took Nergüi to a wool collection yard downtown. Nergüi climbed into the passenger seat of a wool truck.  The driver was kind. He played music loudly the whole day for Nergüi. The Soviet truck was big and old and bounced slowly over the unpaved highway across the steppe. It stopped in at collection points both large and small in the Gobi to load up wool. When night fell, they covered the top of the truck with a canvas tarp and slept on the steppe.  They were three days out of Dalanzadgad. That afternoon, the driver shook Nergüi awake.  “Look at that, Country Boy.”  Nergüi gaped at the enormous smokestacks and the city so tightly packed with houses that none of it looked real.  “Welcome to Ulaanbaatar,” the driver said with a laugh.  Nergüi watched an airplane ascend into the western sky. The truck seemed to be headed straight for the smokestacks downtown. Just then, he spotted a towering pile of something by the side of the road. To his shock, it was all metal. An actual mountain of metal. But what really made his heart jump were the familiar looking cans in that mountain.  “Here!” he shouted at the driver.  The driver pulled over.  “This is the place you’re looking for?”    “I think so. But, mister? What do they do with all of that?” Nergüi asked, pointing at the cans.  “They send it to China. China buys it from us.”  Nergüi jumped down from the truck and said goodbye to the driver.  “Good luck, kid. If you want a lift back home after, then head to the place I told you about.”  Nergüi walked into the open-air junkyard. There wasn’t even a gate or door. Inside were brown mountains of broken-down cars, harnesses, factory parts, cables, signboards. Nergüi reached yet another mountain of metal cans and took off his backpack. He added his cans to the pile. Like rain drops falling into a stream, his were soon unrecognizable from the other cans. He couldn’t believe how easy it was to get rid of them. Now, he was terribly eager to get back to his grandfather. He walked out of the junkyard, glancing back as he went.  This was where Nergüi’s story of the cans ended. If the boy had his version of the story, then the grown-ups had theirs. On his way out of the junkyard, Nergüi ran into a youngish woman. The woman was holding a baby. She studied Nergüi. The woman looked very familiar to him. She spoke first.  “Nergüi? Is that you?”  The woman came running and threw her arms around him.  “Baby, let me get a look at you.”  She stroked his face as tears ran down her own. Nergüi couldn’t believe what was happening to him.  “Mama, I came to throw away some cans,” he mumbled. “Yes, baby. Yes, you did . . . Well done. I see that your grandfather sent you.”  Nergüi’s story did not end with the dramatic reunion with his mother. His mother had returned from Korea several years earlier and remarried. The junkyard was her home. Several days later, Nergüi accompanied his mother to the airport to retrieve her ex-husband’s ashes. She had Nergüi go ahead of her.  “Your father has been waiting for you here for five months, because you and your grandfather are the only ones who can claim him. But now it’s done.”  Nergüi never returned to the Gobi to Grandfather Enebish. The way the grown-ups told it, packing up the cans and sending Nergüi on that long trip was his grandfather’s way of saying that he was taking his own final journey. That was the way of the Gobi, was what Nergüi told his fellow researchers.

by Jeon Sungtae

Fiction

Wishful Wall-Clock World

A friend returned from a tour of South America with a gift: a cuckoo clock with curious features. Basic timekeeping functions were included. Nothing remarkable there, aside from the rather clickety clock hands. At the top of each hour, a small door swung open, and out sprang a red bird. As the clock had been made in South America, the bird was most likely a parrot—a squawker bent on drowning out the ticking and tocking with its shrill cry of pakou! Of all our household items—sitting on shelves, hanging from hooks, or mounted on walls—this clock seemed uniquely alive. So much so that when it chimed, the fiery bird nearly flew off the wall.  As for the clock’s peculiarity, it resembled a house with an attached garage: nestled in the bottom corner was a clock within a clock. This smaller clockface displayed Spanish words for seven emotions, ranging from feliz (happy) to enojado (angry). The mood clock’s circular sequence ensured that opposite ends would meet. Feliz and enojado, back to back.  Every morning, before stepping out of the house, I’d set the mood clock to feliz—a silent promise to myself. The creaky clock hand always needed a good push. But why, oh why, would it point to enojado by the time I returned? Did it shift to match my actual mood? I pulled it back to feliz and kept my eyes on the dial. It stayed stock-still.  “Dad. Did you mess with the moods?” “What’s that?”  Dad was blithely unaware of the mood clock. While I hoped for a happy day each morning, he merely appreciated the cuckoo for chiming and reminding him of the time.  It would take only a fraction of a second for the mood hand to slip from feliz back to enojado—a shift of roughly fifty-two degrees. So I decided to fix my eyes on the clock. All it required was sitting on the edge of my bed and staring straight ahead, but with my gaze locked on nothing more than the stiff hand of a wooden novelty clock . . . my thoughts were bound to wander. Within an hour, I had collapsed into bed, my mind far gone.  Pakou! Jolted awake, I saw the mood clock pointing to enojado. I was determined, once and for all, to catch the clock in the act—but sleep got the better of me three times over. Each time, the hand had already tipped back to the bleakest emotion. At 12:40 a.m., I made one final attempt—like a fisher casting one last line into a reservoir before it closes for the night—and pinned my eyes on the mood clock. Streetlight spilled in through the window, casting shadows darker than dark. At 1:00 a.m. sharp, the cuckoo emerged with another pakou! I paid no attention to the blustery red bird. Another hour was lost, and my vision blurred as I wondered how much longer I could keep this up—when, in a flash, the cuckoo flew down to the mood clock, gripped the dial in its beak, and began pushing it back from feliz to enojado. “Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”“¿Qué?”“I want to be happy. And you’re messing it up.”“¡Ay, no sé!” Apparently lacking night vision, the bird turned the wrong way as it replied to me. I had plenty of questions, which I asked, but the bird cut me off with another “Ay” and ducked back inside the clock. I got to my feet and stood before its door. When I opened the thumbnail-sized hatch and shoved my head inside, I saw a cozy indoor space. Uh, wait a sec . . . My head—a pretty large one at that—actually whooshed through the door? Startled, I pulled back and glanced around. Lo and behold, I stood at the edge of a threshold, with the clock inside and my room outside. Fwooh fwoooh—after a few deep breaths, I slipped my head back in for a better look. Seeing nothing but a wooden corridor, I eased myself in—arms first, then torso, then legs—and entered the clock. The corridor led to a spiral staircase. At the bottom, I found a small room to the right. A tilted pillar rose from the center of the rough wooden floor. Next to it stood a high stool. The bird perched on top while two wooden figurines labored below, rotating, at steady speed, a horizontal steering wheel fixed to the base. One rotation made the second hand go tick; sixty rotations, and the minute hand went tock. The bird seemed intent on ignoring me. Even on its coarsely carved birchwood face, the fretful features were plain to see. As I stepped closer and blocked the figurines’ path, the bird finally flew down and squawked in Spanish—stern words from an even sterner face. Not knowing the language, I only caught a few words, but the bird clearly had much to say. “Me llamo Boris.”“My name is Ki-eun.” The bird named Boris insisted on getting things off its chest, flailing its wings all the while. As for me, I demanded to know why Boris had dashed my hopes for happiness. Eventually, I learned why the mood clock kept reverting to enojado, and more than that, I came to recognize the heft of Boris’s burdens. The rickety pillar jutting from the floor turned out to be the other end of the mood dial. The trouble began in Sucre, Bolivia, where a clockmaker, overrun with inventory, decided to upgrade the basic cuckoo clock by adding a mood indicator. The seven Spanish words were enough to entice tourists in search of reasonably priced souvenirs. Boris launched into a tirade about the ill-conceived add-on. Eager to cash in, the clockmaker had disregarded the clock’s inner workings. The mood dial pierced through the floor at an awkward angle, obstructing the tireless motion that kept the clock ticking. “Everyone wants to be happy, so they turn the dial to feliz, you see? Then it blocks our way! The figurines get stuck—and the clock dial too!” cried the bird, waterworks prevented only by the absence of tear ducts. “Look, just look! We only have room when the dial is at enojado!” Boris’s beak had worn thin from pushing the creaky dial—¡pac pac pac pac! The onomatopoeia rang clear across languages, the enraged pac pac making me shrink back. The two figurines added to my guilt as they spun round and round without respite. “Must’ve been tough—”“Es serio. ¡Pac pac! ” When I stepped back into my room, it was 1:40 a.m. The bird will be crying again in twenty minutes. I was now fully aware of the weight they bore—both the bird and the two figurines—but even so, I could hardly accept the daily display of enojado. My moods were grim enough without being reminded by a clock. And yet, I couldn’t bring myself to put the clock away—not to spare my own feelings at the expense of the cuckoo or Dad. Twelve more minutes had passed: the clock pointed to 1:52 a.m. My eyes followed the second hand, and soon it was 1:54 a.m. Spurred into action, I dug my nails into the enojado label until it snapped off clean. Feliz left some dried glue behind, but it more or less came free. With some fresh glue, I swapped the two labels—voilà, my mood could stay happy. Problem solved! Except the quick fix had disrupted the orderly sequence of emotions, throwing them off balance. There were six minutes left until the hour, and since it’d taken barely a minute to swap two labels, I figured I could rearrange the rest before the next chime. Happy and angry hadn’t caused any damage, but friendly left behind a hole, contented, a deep crack, and as a final blow, tired split the entire clock apart. Two minutes before 2 a.m., time stopped. Gone was the cuckoo’s little door frame and perch for crying pakou! The figurines clutched the steering wheel that had broken loose and spun aimlessly around. Pakou! The cuckoo carried on, regardless. Surrounded by rubble, it chimed for 2 a.m. An immeasurable span of time passed before the three clock denizens recognized the debris for what it was: wreckage. For a moment, I was tempted to feign surprise—“What on earth happened to the clock?”—but given the gravity of their situation, I chose to stay calm and square up to the damage. My full confession left their faces clouded with tearless woe. Sorrow refused to pass. No amount of consolation could get through. Carefully chosen words fell on deaf ears, and after what felt like hours, I pulled out my phone: 2:20 a.m. I was ready to collapse into bed. “Let’s sleep for now and sort this out in the morning. Although it’s not my problem, really.” Alas, Boris and the figurines replied that they didn’t need any sleep. I could no longer make out their frantic words. In my sleepy haze, I decided to sweep them up like broken objects. I shoved them all away—the enraged Boris, the figurines, and the scattered bits of wood—into an empty cupboard. Then I sank into slumber. With no more hourly interruptions of pakou, I enjoyed a good night’s sleep. It restored my mood to feliz. *“Ki-eun, it’s half past one.”“Hm?” Our church offered four different Sunday service times, the last starting at 1 p.m. As part of our Sunday routine, Dad and I typically slept in until ten, lazed around in our rooms, then set out for church around 12:30. But today, the overcast skies had kept us in the dark well into midday. Dad explained that without his trusty cuckoo, he hadn’t noticed the time. I opened the cupboard to show him the shattered clock. “Good lord. Wrecked beyond repair.” Since we’d skipped the service without a word, the deaconess was bound to notice and come knocking at our door. No doubt, she would plop herself down in the middle of our living room, scold us for missing church, recap the sermon, sing a handful of hymns, and only then leave us in peace. I rather enjoyed attending church—belting out hymns in unison, listening to scripture about the fainthearted finding courage. But at home, it all felt out of place. With only the deaconess, Dad, and me, my voice would ring too loudly, and without accompaniment, we’d have to carry the tune ourselves. Once the sermonizing began, I never knew where to look. Was I supposed to hold eye contact, or could I let my eyes roam out the window or around the room? I had to rethink every detail. The deaconess did indeed come knocking at the door. Dad and I ignored the repeated knocks, and once the noise died down, we stepped out for a late lunch. We headed to a rice-and-fish eatery across the street, only to run into the deaconess and her family eating braised mackerel. We’d overlooked the fact that she lived right next door. It was a close-knit neighborhood that felt like a village. We joined them at their table, and after lunch, we accepted our fate and returned home with the deaconess, ready to go over the service. “What kept you two away today?”“Ah, yes. About that . . .” There was no hiding from the deaconess, not with her probing smile. Dad seemed reluctant to recount the whole story of the broken clock, but he explained anyway. “You’re adults, not babies—you shouldn’t need a clock to wake you up!” With that, the deaconess opened her Bible and read, “We glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience, and experience, hope.” *I found it soothing to read scripture and listen to the commentary. Reflecting on words that had survived millennia, I’d join those words by stepping into that vast stretch of time, feeling like a tiny speck. It was oddly liberating. Really, a cómodo feeling.  * Romans 5:3–4 (King James Version). Whether praying at home or at church, Dad always took longer than others, going beyond the tacit allotment of time. Eyes would blink open and drift toward the pulpit—but not his. He’d still be praying, hands clasped, head bowed. The deaconess and I stayed still too, waiting for him to look up. After that, our little worship was nearly over, except for the trickiest part: applying the sermon to our own lives by reflecting on the past week and setting resolutions for the next. Maybe Dad lingered in prayer to delay what he dreaded. “I had a tough week,” I began. “It was a week of tribulations. Was I patient? Honestly, I can’t say I was. I need to embrace patience like a purifying fire and let it strengthen me against trials. That’s my goal for the week a—” Pakou! The birdcall pierced through our quiet voices. Living in a lakeside town, where winter brought flocks of migratory birds, we were accustomed to the constant chorus of their cries. But real birdcalls—hooh hooh, hwiii, or caaaw—scattered wide and echoed into the distance. This one didn’t, and I knew exactly why: the sharply aimed pakou came from the cupboard. As I glanced up to finish my sentence, I saw that Dad and the deaconess were lost in thought. Dad had a habit of pausing at the sound of birds. “Hmm, a night heron,” he’d say. “Is it the second day of December, today? They’re right on time. There’s a goose, a watercock, a mallard, and a turtle dove too.” He usually rattled off names, but this latest birdcall seemed to throw him into quiet confusion. As for the deaconess, why did she fall silent? She usually filled every second with chatter, but now she stayed still, even as my sentence broke off and the shrill pakou was followed by real birdcalls. Reassured by the chirps he recognized, Dad cleared his throat and refocused. Meanwhile, the deaconess jumped to her feet, blurting, “I just remembered—.” With that, she scooped up her things and left. She left so abruptly that the crescent-shaped rice cakes we’d set out as refreshments were mostly untouched. As we finished them ourselves, Dad remarked, “Ten years next door, and I’ve never seen her so distracted.” Who knew what got into her, but I was more relieved than puzzled. Thank God she left early . . . a half-day of weekend, salvaged. The rice cakes tasted deliciously sweet. Chirrup, chirrup—a bird called from outside. “That’s a varied tit,” Dad told me. Only then did my mind turn to the wooden clock pieces that had chimed. I opened the cupboard and found the woebegone cuckoo perched on the top shelf. On the bottom, the two figurines were spinning as they used to inside the clock, but in a noticeably smaller circle. When the next pakou! sounded, I checked the time. 4:38 p.m. “Still going, even without batteries.”“They’re from the clock?”“Mm-hmm. That’s the cuckoo.”“Why is it ahead of time?” The cuckoo’s pakou now came on its own version of the hour. The original clock had been built to chime every sixty minutes, but crammed into the cupboard without gears, the figurines spun in a tighter circle, speeding up the cycle. The cuckoo now chimed before the hour—or on its own hour that no longer matched ours. I wanted to tell the bird it was out of sync, but with only rudimentary Spanish, that wasn’t an option. Another pakou—4:52 p.m. “Now it’s chiming whenever,” said Dad. He and I chuckled and headed off to our rooms. With family worship cut short, we’d earned an extra moment of rest. Time to lie down. Stretched out in bed, I mused: the deaconess had sprung to her feet at the sound of pakou! She had never left family worship unfinished before. Funny how we’d each reacted differently to the wooden cuckoo somehow crying without batteries. The deaconess rushed off as if time were up, Dad stayed unbothered, and I watched as an observer. I wondered how others might respond to the cuckoo’s cry. If pakou! could silence people like the deaconess and send them home, it was a power I wanted to wield as if it were my own. I tucked the cuckoo and figurines into my pocket. They grew restless, making the fabric bulge and bounce as they squirmed. I needed a crowded place where I could sit and observe. A coffee shop crossed my mind, but it didn’t seem quite right. I grabbed a takeout coffee and headed to a bench by the lake. * Even cold weather couldn’t keep people away from the lakeside park, especially on a weekend afternoon. Locals were out walking, waiting for birds with cameras in hand, sitting, or just standing around. There were plenty of birds I couldn’t name, ones that Dad would’ve recognized. My pocket began to rise and fall in a steady rhythm as the cuckoo and figurines settled into a new circle. Where should I set them down? I tried the bench, but the pakou was barely audible. I had to lean in so close I was practically lying down, drawing too much attention for an observer. On the ground, their circle turned too wide. I thought about holding them in my palm, but that meant staying still for ages. I ran through the options while sipping my coffee. Then it occurred to me: the cup had an ideal circumference. The figurines could spin at the bottom while the cuckoo perched on the rim. This could work. But with half the coffee still steaming inside, I first had to drink it all down. Despite the chilly wind, the coffee refused to cool. My experiment was delayed. The brief limbo left my thoughts unmoored—no longer guided, they lost their way and wandered, inevitably lurching toward sadness. The mood clock had a label for sadness too: triste, just before enojado. Seeing those labels every day made me register emotions in seven categories. I settled into sadness and examined its shapes, only to find trivial snippets—nothing worth sharing. Best sorted alone. Why were others so eager to lay theirs bare? The world’s countless trivial sorrows felt eerily alike, each one prompting a déjà vu: Wait, haven’t I heard this story before? And Dad’s sorrow? He carried his as if the world rested on his shoulders. Like me, he chose not to speak of it, though not because it was small. His sorrow had planetary proportions, and since he had yet to face it, he kept it to himself. Anyone who met him could sense he was circling his sorrow. Mere words—Dad, are you okay?—could barely dislodge a stray pebble from that orbit, so I held back from asking. Dad’s triste stayed quiet, and without an outlet, it had no way of erupting into enojado. I drank to the bottom of my cup. Wiping it dry with my sleeve, I freed the cuckoo and figurines from my pocket and placed them inside. The figurines resumed their work below while the bird perched on the rim. Exactly as planned. The relief—cómodo! I waited to see how often the coffee-cup clock would strike and what events might be set off by pakou!The cuckoo cried every fourteen minutes. I watched to see if anyone took it as their cue to leave, but did this tenuous thread of events count as anything like causality? Pakou! Some people stayed on benches, others kept walking, a few leapt up to take photos, still others turned around or stopped in their tracks. Likewise with the birds: some kept foraging, others drifted on the water, one or two took off or dove to the ground. I observed six cuckoo cries at fourteen-minute intervals, which meant I’d been sitting by the lake for at least eighty-four minutes. The sun dipped lower, and the cold bit harder. As I stood and reached for my cup to call it a day, a bird photographer in a camo vest gave me a thumbs-up. What’s that for? Is he onto the pakou? He turned to his camera, slipping back into his world of avian moments. I watched him a little longer although not long enough to hear another pakou. Then out of nowhere, a kid sprang up from the railing and slammed into my shoulder. It sent him sprawling. My legs gave out, dropping me back onto the bench. The cuckoo and figurines were the ones knocked over and scattered. Kids performed soaring leaps all around the neighborhood. They darted from structure to structure, navigating obstacles in the most creative, challenging ways. It turned out their movements had a name: parkour. “They forge their own path, away from common roads. For them, it’s an actual physical path, not a metaphor.”Dad had made me aware of parkour as a practice. Just as he knew every bird that swooped down to the lake, he seemed to understand what made the parkourists tick. “It’s a method of moving,” he told me. Along the lake were benches, brick walls, and other useful structures; the surrounding residential area was a maze of alleyways and old concrete walls. A perfect playground for parkour. It even attracted young enthusiasts from out of town. “Huh. A method of moving.” I’d pointed out the kids to complain, but once Dad explained their whys and wherefores, I could only say, “So that’s what it is.”  “Oh, shit.” That’s what the boy muttered instead of saying sorry. Honestly, I felt the same. But I rarely say so, kiddo. And since you bumped into me, should you really be the one swearing? My mood was dipping toward tired when the kid brushed off his knees and spoke again. “Is that a parkour?”“A cuckoo. It cries pakou from a clock.”“Oh, shit. It is a parkour.” He called over the other kids, shouting about the “effing real parkour.” I silently hoped the bird and figurines would stay still, but even on the boy’s palm, they scrambled to set up a circle. Round and round—they went about their clockwork. Rotating on a surface even smaller than the cup, they completed a cycle in no time, and out came the cry: pakou! The kids whooped, “Whoa, did you hear that? It cried ‘parkour!’” They launched into a parkour frenzy—leaping from one bench to the next, to the garden fence, to the brick wall, to the lakeside guardrails, down to the path, up to the residential fence, from fence to fence again, and finally to the weathered gray wall of a house. The kids considered it fate—that they finally encountered their so-called parkour, my wooden bird crying pakou. To me, parkour was what the kids practiced, but to them, it was the name for my cuckoo. The word slipped between us, causing momentary confusion. One of them asked where I’d gotten it, and when I said it was a friend’s gift from South America, their faces lit up. Looking for an explanation, I turned to the quietest one among them who stood staring at the spinning figurines. He simply confirmed it was a real parkour, a thing of urban legend. So here’s a parkour kid doing parkour, holding a parkour, calling it parkour. The bird was the real deal, the kid insisted, while their leaping (frenzy) was an extension of meaning. Once they calmed down, the kids huddled around the parkour, whispering plans for their next move. I stood just out of reach, waiting to retrieve the clock pieces. But then the kids scattered. The one holding the parkour shot me a glance before bolting toward the houses. Parkour-trained or not, the kid’s legs were far too short compared to mine, and I soon caught the hood of his jacket. “Where do you think you’re going?”“Uh, just borrowing this for a sec.”Judging by his face, not quite.“No way.”“I mean it. Really. Just a sec,” he pleaded. I flatly refused, “No way. No way. I said, no way.” As I stood my ground, he eventually gave in. He asked me to wait at the bench with the parkour. Why? He said parkouring when the parkour cried parkour could transport you to a better world. It was a rare moment, he explained, a chance to perform parkour in the truest sense, which meant I had to wait. “A better world?”“Yeah. You parkour when the parkour cries parkour. Then you land in the world you want.”“Could I do it too?”“You only need one move—a jump.” I held my breath.“So yeah, probably.” I figured I’d wait. Once the kids left, a hush fell over the dusky lake. The cuckoo kept up its regular cry of pakou, or as the kids would have it, parkour! To my ears it sounded, at best, like parkou(r). Two more cries of parkou(r), and the kids started showing up lugging backpacks as big as themselves. Their numbers had doubled. They’d clearly planned for a day like this: where to go, with whom, and what to bring. Poised to leave, they exuded a mix of light-heartedness and nerves. Someone was missing—or maybe two? Amid the flurry of voices, a call rang out. “He’s not coming. Says he’ll go next time.” “Next time? There is no next time.” Laughing, they each chose their spots to leap. Parkou(r)! “Wait!” someone shouted, just as the cuckoo cried from its perch on the cup. It was a girl in a red jacket, holding the hand of a younger boy. She apologized for stopping them—she wasn’t sure her little brother could leap just yet, but they’d be ready by the next cry. Her brother, his ruddy hand pale from clutching hers, pouted that he could leap just fine. Leading up to the next cry, the kids practiced leaping together. Being used to parkour, they nailed their synchronized jump on three. They didn’t mind the passersby, the bird-watchers, or anyone else glancing their way. The kids were bound for the worlds they wished for, so why bother with the stares? I was an onlooker too, but then I grew curious, and strangely got involved . . . Parkou(r)! The kids jumped all at once and vanished—except for the girl in red and her little brother. She’d held him back again, her hands pressed firmly on his shoulders. Although she had stayed by choice, I wanted to offer some kind of comfort. She looked conflicted, but knowing nothing about her, I didn’t have the right words. And so. “Why?” I asked.“There’s nowhere I want to go.” Then I noticed the camo-vest photographer pointing his camera our way. He’s looking! Did he catch the moment they vanished? I panicked. I left the girl behind and bolted. Had I been caught on camera? If the parents reported their kids missing, would I be blamed? But I’d only watched, and even if the man had proof, I had nothing to hide. I picked up my pace, tossing the cup away and shoving the bird and figurines back into my pocket. If any witnesses came after me, I could disappear like the kids. I’d go to a better world. It didn’t have to be because of that camo guy. I could vanish for my own good, anytime, anywhere. The portal was right in my pocket. Dad was preparing dinner. I came home and opened the door to the salty smell of kimchi stew. Left over from yesterday, the stew was already low in the pot, and Dad had made it worse by leaving the burner on full blast. With not enough broth to stay soaked, bits of kimchi had crisped around the edges. It was fine. We had other banchan sides: dried fish strips, braised black beans, and spicy stir-fried anchovies. Dad was busy scooping out two bowls of rice, as if he’d known I’d be walking in just then. Once we were nearly done eating, I reached into my pocket for the bird and figurines and set them on the table. They fumbled for a moment, then settled into their clockwork motion on the tabletop. “Dad.”“Mm?”“If you could leave, right here right now, for someplace better, would you go?”“Well . . . to a better place, I would.”“Where, exactly?”“We shouldn’t dwell on it. Not if we go to church.” Dad refused to talk about that better place. Even when I told him everything I’d seen by the lake, he gave me that look—You’re supposed to be a good churchgoer, Ki-eun. But how did it actually work? Would I have to imagine a place the moment I jumped? I wasn’t sure, but any place full of joy and feliz was more than enough. It couldn’t be that complicated if even the parkour kids pulled it off. Maybe our family could too. We had nothing to lose. I told Dad he had to jump when the bird cried. “You have to. Please, no questions. Just jump anywhere—onto the couch, onto the carpet. Where you jump is up to you.” His eyes saddened, but I shut out the guilt and urged him to try. If nothing happened, we’d carry on like yesterday and simply wash up and sleep. Pakou! Dad didn’t jump. I launched myself from the chair onto the table, thinking, Of course, he wouldn’t. And yet, I had. Soy-glazed black beans spilled across the table. Dad gasped a silent uh-oh and reached to catch the bowl. My last glimpse of him. I felt bad for leaving, but I also brimmed with hope. Where . . . Where will I be? I blinked—and Dad was already wiping the table. For a second, I stood still on the tabletop, lifting one foot so he could keep wiping. Then I climbed down—from the table to the chair, then to the floor—and helped him clean up. We covered the leftover banchan dishes and stacked the empty ones in the sink. By then, the wall clock pointed to 8:20 p.m. Dad and I would each retreat to our rooms, pass the last hours of Sunday, and drift off. I stood and watched as Dad said good night and disappeared behind his door. It had been a long day. I’ll leave the ruminations for tomorrow. Tonight, I’ll just fall asleep. I opened my own door. Wait, 8:20 p.m.? How was the clock back on the wall? It was the cuckoo clock, as good as new. In the bottom corner, the mood dial pointed to feliz. I stared at it for at least twenty minutes, but the dial never budged. At 9:00 p.m. sharp, the cuckoo emerged from its door and cried: parkou(r)!

by Jeong Gi Hyun

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