Reviews

[Featured Review] Best Friends Forever

South Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang—revered for her rich portrayals of the inner lives of characters who find themselves living against the grain of an unforgiving society—first catapulted to English-language fame after winning the 2016 Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian, her first novel to appear in English (though her fifth in Korean). Translator Deborah Smith—who also founded the influential UK press Tilted Axis, which specializes in work translated from Asian languages—learned Korean expressly for the purpose of translating from a language that, at the time, was vastly underrepresented in the English-language publishing marketplace. That trend has since reversed, in part due to Smith’s efforts and Han Kang’s pathbreaking global stardom. English-language houses now look to Korean literature—much as the success of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) opened the market for books translated from Swedish.  After The Vegetarian, a relatively hermetic and poetic work among Han Kang’s oeuvre, her next novel to appear in English, Human Acts (2017 in English, 2014 in Korean), also translated by Deborah Smith, dramatically shifted the English-language public’s understanding of her literary sensibilities. The novel revealed a deep connection between the very personal-psychological horror of bloodshed in The Vegetarian and twentieth-century Korean history—specifically, the pro-democracy Gwangju Uprising of 1980, in the course of which a large number of peaceful protesters, including young students, were shot by the military.   Han Kang’s latest novel to appear in English, We Do Not Part (published in Korean in 2021) is a chilling ghost story and moving tale of friendship. It presents the interconnected lives of two friends—Kyungha, a writer, and Inseon, a photographer-filmmaker. The novel opens with Kyungha’s dream of a snowy hillside covered in truncated black trees that is simultaneously a cemetery; a tidal wave sweeps in, threatening to wash away all the dead. Inseon, who’s established a carpentry workshop on the island of Jeju, where she moved to care for her dying mother, agrees to build this cemetery and film it. But when she’s injured working on the project, she summons Kyungha to the hospital where she is undergoing a gruesome treatment—having her reattached fingertips stabbed with needles every three minutes to keep the nerves alive. She entrusts her friend with an urgent errand: to travel quickly to Jeju before Inseon’s pet bird starves to death in his cage. The journey from Seoul to Jeju requires a flight, two overland buses, and a half-hour trek through the woods. Kyungha sets out in the middle of a snowstorm serious enough to shut down all the villages she travels through, serious enough that she risks her life by making this journey—and indeed, she slips down an icy embankment and hits her head.  Once inside Inseon’s island home, all the stories that have been swirling through Kyungha’s mind coalesce into conversations that might also be embodied memories. Soon it is unclear whether Inseon is alive or dead, a memory or a hallucination; the bird and his long-dead companion are suddenly both flying about; but what is definitely real are the many stories each of these women remembers and tells—testimonies to horrendous violence inflicted upon Inseon’s mother’s childhood family and, later, her father, as well as the stories of Vietnamese women recorded in a documentary Inseon previously shot about victims of the US war in Vietnam, in which Korean soldiers served alongside their US allies. And Kyungha reports that her recurrent dream of the flooded hillside cemetery began shortly after the 2014 publication (the same year as Human Acts) of her book about “the massacre in G—.” The novel’s richly embodied fictional universe is beautifully communicated in the translation by e. yaewon (who previously co-translated Greek Lessons with Deborah Smith) and Paige Aniyah Morris. In their deft hands, the prose combines the sort of quiet lyricism familiar to Han Kang’s English-language readers from Smith’s translations with a new insistence on the cultural rootedness of the work. English-language readers will acquire a seamlessly integrated vocabulary of Korean words like juk, halmoni, and Jeju-mal. The e. yaewon/Morris translation also feels more rhetorically straightforward overall than that of The Vegetarian, in which the prose is sometimes characterized by a syntactical foregrounding of logic in a mode grounded in Anglo-Saxon traditions, as in “However, if there wasn’t any special attraction, nor did any particular drawbacks present themselves, and there was no reason for the two of us not to get married.” A complex thought expressed in the e. yaewon/Morris translation of We Do Not Part, by contrast, might look like this: “Her demeanor—the fact that she did not ask anything else—was as calm and unwavering as ever, to the point where I almost felt sure that what I imagined she was thinking now might be true.” This is complexity expressed without the overt rhetorical gestures of logical organization, giving an impression of forthrightness and making the prose appear less specifically tied to an English-language narrative tradition. Like Smith’s translations, this new offering by e. yaewon/Morris stands out for its sharp rendering of the physicality of Han Kang’s prose, taking advantage of English’s rich store of verbs and verbal nouns to lend the descriptions a striking vividness. We Do Not Part—in my view, Han Kang’s finest novel to date—is memorable for the richness and nuance of the relationship Han Kang sketches between the two main characters, and also for the way she ties together various strands of historical memory with the novel’s present tense, creating a shimmering fabric of overlapping chronologies. The house and woodworking workshop in Jeju become a magical space of memory between life and death in which it is impossible to tell for certain at any given moment how many of the figures in the scene—whether women or birds—are alive and which are dead. It is as if the reader has journeyed along with Kyungha from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead, where the voices of witnesses from the past carry as much weight and hold as much reality as the young women recording and preserving them. In this place where trees, birds, and humans come together for shared moments of comfort, connection, and nourishing bowls of juk, we learn that bearing witness may be the most essential form of love.

by Susan Bernofsky

LTI Korea Now

Translation is Not a One-way Street, But a Gift

After Han Kang’s 2024 Nobel Prize win, many Korean writers, critics, and thinkers have been asked some variation of the following questions: What does this mean for Korean literature? How do international readers see Korean literature? Where does Korean literature go from here? Landmark feminist poet, essayist, and critic Kim Hyesoon’s answer to these questions during the 2025 LTI Korea Global Literature Forum this past July elicited laughter from her audience: “I don’t even know the direction of my own literature, let alone the future of Korean literature as a whole.” In a panel titled “What is Korean Literature to International Readers,” Kim discussed these issues in dialogue with Jeffrey Yang, a poet and Editor-at-Large at New Directions Publishing. Kim and Yang reflected on their experiences writing and publishing Korean poetry while offering insights into topics such as the role of literary translators, domestic vs. international readers, and the impact of AI on the publishing industry. “The term ‘Korean literature’ is used rather frequently, but I’ve always gotten the impression that outside of Korea, the focus tends to be more on individual works than, say, ‘German literature’ or ‘UK literature’ collectively,” Kim said. In her own work, she strives to transcend the bounds of Korean literature to expand “the territory of this nation we call poetry.” If this has the added effect of boosting global interest in Korean literature, all the better. Yang added that as an editor, he’s seeing an increasing number of Korean works being published in recent years—a trend he partially attributes to (in the US at least) a rise in general interest in translation. As far as the role of literary translators goes, Kim sees poetry translation as a way of expanding the boundaries of the target language. “Translation is not a one-way street or an export,” she said. “It is a sort of revelation that occurs within the reciprocal interaction between the source and target languages.” She encouraged translators to break free from the established expressions of their target language and seek instead to push the limits of language. “I see translation as an extremely demanding endeavor, much like performing transplant surgery, which is why I admire translators very much. What they offer is a gift, a method of exchange.”  As one of her most meaningful memories, Kim pointed to how her longtime English translator Don Mee Choi became a decorated poet in her own right. “Translation calls forth creation. Translation is writing, and it is closely connected to my own act of creating poetry as well,” Kim said. When asked about the impact of AI on the publishing industry, Yang responded, “As an editor and publisher, it’s very dangerous to automatically think you’re going to cut some corners by using AI.” He emphasized how it’s particularly difficult to use AI to translate or write poetry, given the many layers of language and meaning embedded within these works as well as the existence of a “resistance to the commodification of poetry.” New Directions is currently celebrating its ninetieth anniversary and has published Kim’s poetry collections Autobiography of Death and Phantom Pain Wings, both translated by Don Mee Choi. Yang has also contributed two articles to KLN, both on Kim’s poetry. “If you have time, I think those two pieces say a lot that I don’t have time to say here about her work,” he said. Ultimately, Kim’s stance was clear: We must view writers as distinct individuals and avoid grouping them together under the umbrella of Korean literature. “Each poet and each writer is their own nation, their own republic,” she said. “Even if someone were to suggest an overall direction, nobody would follow it anyway.” Regarding the role of organizations like LTI Korea, Kim stressed the importance of recruiting a diverse array of translation professionals to assist with both promotion and outreach. She also highlighted the need for meaningful criticism of translated works, focusing on literary merit rather than translation errors. Yang, meanwhile, pointed to the benefits of funded residencies for translators and the submission of strong sample translations to publishers.

by Sarah K. H. Yoo

Reviews

[Review] Where Are We Headed?

What Is Reality to a Writer? Disasters like the Yongsan tragedy in 2009 and the Sewol ferry disaster in 2014 have had a significant impact on Korean authors and their writing. These events brought renewed attention to the absurdities and contradictions of Korean society, prompting many Korean writers to develop deep communal sensibilities, renew their responsibilities as fellow citizens, and fundamentally question the relationship between reality and fiction. One writer who has become especially responsive and sensitive to the realities of Korean society is Hwang Jungeun. Hwang began her career with The Seven Thirty-Two Elephant Train, a collection of fantastical short stories in which fathers become hats, ghosts cross into the world of the living, and bank clerks metamorphize into roly-poly dolls. But now her works adhere to a realist gaze that takes ordinary life and its underpinnings as its focus. She traces this change to the Sewol ferry disaster, stating in a number of interviews that in its aftermath she’d forgotten how to write. Take for example “The Laughing Man,” a story in The Seven Thirty-Two Elephant Train that repeatedly revisits the events leading up to the death of a loved one. Despite the main character’s attempts to escape their loss, they end the story still hopelessly stuck in place. The section “d” from her next novel, dd’s Umbrella, rewrites “The Laughing Man” from the perspective of someone living after the incident. In this work, however, the main character succeeds in ending their long period of reclusion and finally steps out into the world, beyond the walls of their home. There, they begin to recon­nect with the world by listening to other people’s life stories. This narrative shift is the result of Hwang’s long and painful contemplation after the Sewol ferry disaster over how to represent horrific tragedy in the real world.   “There is Nothing that Needs to be Said” from dd’s Umbrella reflects on the community signified by the word “we,” ultimately dismantling it by questioning the very premises upon which that “we” was built. Furthermore, the story takes a step back from familiar communities and rela­tionships in order to carefully interrogate the conditions and patterns of power that constitute them. Although the novel doesn’t directly deal with the candlelight protests of 2016 and 2017, they are undeniably the political context of the novel.   On the other hand, it is well known (at least in Korea) that what it means to be a woman and to write women’s narratives changed in the mid-2010s as Korea went through a feminist reboot. Around this time, Hwang wrote her own women’s narrative in the novel Years and Years, which retells Korean history through a multi-generational story following three women. The novel does not, however, simply position each generation as oppressed victims, nor does it allow them to remain as overly sentimental mother-daughter tropes. Instead, it rejects and interrogates the clichés of traditional mother-daughter narratives. The novel also depicts how the family structure has functioned in Korean society, and how women’s positions and emotions were formed within that structure.  Where Are We Headed? In December of 2024, Korean society was once again thrown into a period of political upheaval. As Koreans contemplate the value of democracy, which is currently under threat not just in Korea but also around the globe, they desire a world different from the past. Hwang’s short story “A Day, Without Trouble,” translated for this issue of KLN, was first published concurrently with the events and concerns that followed December 2024. Although no specific events are explicitly mentioned in the text, the story clearly portrays the collapse of a world paradigm. The only problem is, the characters in the story are having trouble perceiving it. The surface narrative of “A Day, Without Trouble” follows the estrangement and reconciliation of two women, Inbeom and Yeongin—probably sisters, although it is not clear. Beneath this narrative, however, is a vast painting of global society and Korea’s entanglement in everything that’s wrong with the world. Massacres masquerading as necessary wars, wealth and labor inequality, revisionist forces, hate speech, climate change, national tragedies—the story presents as a panorama of episodes. Even social media makes an appear­ance, connecting all these events and issues in real time. The episodes are presented at first without any relation to one another, like one giant, fragmented mosaic. But through a chance email blunder, the story suggests that perhaps these episodes aren’t as unrelated as they appear.   However, it doesn’t take much to realize that this intercon­nectedness is precisely the nature of our world today. The story shows through its narrative structure that the world does not operate through isolated spheres. It continuously reminds us that the things that appear separate—here/there, past/future, I/we—are in fact connected by a chain of influ­ence. For example, the story suggests how an incident of animal abuse by a group of college students might be funda­mentally related to scenes of violence throughout the world. It also hints at how a line of cars speeding obliviously toward the scene of a traffic accident might be related to Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil.” Put another way, this story isn’t just about the entangle-ments and interconnectedness of the world. Rather, it shows us that those entanglements were created, and continue to be created, by us. Take for example this line from the aforementioned “The Laughing Man”: “He will just do what he always does. In other words, the same pattern. People who retreat at the moment of truth, will always retreat . . . People who hold their bags close to their chests will always behave that way. Perhaps that’s what this is . . . It’s a pattern we’re continuously weaving, on and on and on and on.” Hwang is always writing about how the world has fallen unknowingly into a rut. She’s telling us that we are driving blind and over the speed limit.    In relation to this, I want to take a careful look at one specific scene from “A Day, Without Trouble.” In this scene, the characters are driving through a tunnel when they come upon a car crash. As the women approach the wreckage, the driver inexplicably steps on the gas, putting them all in danger. Although they escape unharmed, the novel never explains why the driver tried to drive off. He may not even know himself. Force of habit, perhaps? But what is an accelerator but something that accelerates—that makes things go faster? For people who embody the words “faster, faster,” stepping on the accelerator in a moment of crisis might be their first instinct. Charging ahead is their default. They’re carried by their inertia. In the story, the other cars do not slow down while passing the accident either. Everyone is in danger, but no one senses it; they simply keep their feet on the gas. In the same way, the ideals of growth, development, and acceleration have taken us and the world hostage. But have they changed our sensibilities, too?  To Pause, or Perhaps to Disrupt Delving even deeper, one might argue that the narrative of “A Day, Without Trouble” is almost apocalyptic. There’s certainly a sense that once we reach the end of this ever-accelerating world of invisible connections, what we will find is ruin and catastrophe. In this sense, the following quote from Inbeom is particularly poignant. Regarding the state of the world, in which sensitivity to violence is seen as boring, she says, “And you don’t know how much that’s killing me.” No one understands Inbeom’s desperation, not even her own eonni. The true horror of this story lies in the fact that we know intuitively what lies at the end of time—a world in which sensitivity like Inbeom’s is dismissed as uninteresting.    The novel ends with Yeongin angrily honking at the speed­ing cars. The world already seems to be moving apathetically toward its end, and yet she and Inbeom look like they’re trying to delay the end of the world, if not stop it all together. Reading this scene, I am reminded of a quote from Walter Benjamin that a revolution is an attempt by the passengers on a train to pull the emergency break. Benjamin was one of the first people to see that Europe’s wars and the rise of fascism were the natural end-point of “progress.” To him, progress was not a revolution; in fact, he was wary of slogans that called for newness, development, growth, and progress. To him, revolution is what people on a runaway train do when they become aware of the speed and direction of progress—that is, they pull the emergency brake.   Perhaps this is how we should interpret the word “revolution” when it appears so abruptly in Hwang Jungeun’s work. Perhaps, even, you could say that Hwang is still in the process of writing a eulogy for dd, the character who uttered that word, “revolution.” The blurrier the objects outside the window become and the more our bodies shake with the runaway train, the more imperative the need to stop the train—there is no other way to survive. And the only way to stop the train from within the train is to pull the emergency brake. Is that not what Yeongin is doing in “A Day, Without Trouble,” blaring her horn to tell everyone to stop? Is it not a signal to the world that we must wake up and realize where we’re headed?   There is a reason why the title of this short story is “A Day, Without Trouble,” with a comma. While commas signal to the reader to take a breath, they can also (when placed in the wrong location) create a rupture in an otherwise smoothly flowing sentence. In this case, the comma also serves as a question: Is this allegedly unproblematic day really that unproblematic? Most importantly, contained within that comma is a desperate cry to momentarily stop a wave of cars blindly racing towards ruin. In this turbulent year of 2025, the call of Hwang’s horn resonates deeply.  KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:· Hwang Jungeun, The Seven Thirty-Two Elephant Train (Munhakdongne, 2008)  황정은, 『일곱시 삼십이분 코끼리열차』 (문학동네, 2008)· Hwang Jungeun, “Laughing Man,” Being Nobody (Munhakdongne, 2016)  황정은, 「웃는 남자」, 『아무도 아닌』 (문학동네, 2016)· Hwang Jungeun, “d” and “There Is Nothing That Needs to Be Said,” dd’s Umbrella (tr. e. yaewon, Tilted Axis, 2024)  황정은, 「d」, 「아무것도 말할 필요가 없다」, 『디디의 우산』 (창비, 2019)· Hwang Jungeun, Years and Years (tr. Janet Hong, Open Letter, 2024)  황정은, 『연년세세』 (창비, 2020)· Hwang Jungeun, “A Day, Without Trouble,” The Quarterly Changbi vol. 207 (Changbi, 2025)  황정은, 「문제없는, 하루」, 『창작과 비평 207호』 (창비, 2025)

by Kim Mijung

Poetry

[Poetry] Two Poems by Moon Boyoung

LOSS Water Rushes up to my knees Then drains away I’m the only one watching this fountain So if I don’t watch the fountain The fountain is wasted There is a faint light in the water So as not to waste you I watch you As I leave I look back The water pressure may cause injury please do not touch Please do not drink the water in the fountain How’s that For a farewell Or a how are you Walk through the overgrown path Past the walnut tree The tree ripples so Leave it to rot Passing a place you’ve passed before Is a kind of review The fountain is no longer watching me So I am for a while wasted   UNDERSTANDING ADAPTATION It takes 0.4 seconds on average for a human to blink. Isn’t that too fast? Olivia thinks people need to live a little slower. Included in this slow life: staying in the bathroom longer, not exercising, closing and then opening your eyes slowly. When someone blinked during a conversation they died and came back to life in 0.4 second intervals, Olivia felt. Or they transformed into someone else. Which would mean that a person transforms 15,000 times a day. Which is also the reason I can’t ever adapt to being myself. Olivia believes in blinking less often but keeping your eyes shut longer. In the world she envisions, it takes people about three seconds to blink. I believe we need to keep our eyes shut a little longer. I think that’s healthier. In the world she made up, people blink significantly slower as they age. For instance, an eighty-year-old takes ten seconds to blink. It takes a long time to finish a round of chess or janggi because the two old people playing take turns closing their eyes for ten seconds while talking. Of old people who keep their eyes closed too long, people say, “That person is adapting.” Olivia’s daughter who lives on a marblejust asked “Mom, why does grandpa close his eyes for such a long time before he opens them?”“Grandpa is adapting.”“To what?” For Oliviathe ideal person is one who is a little more exhausted than others.

by Moon Bo Young

Poetry

[Poetry] Two Poems by Park Joon

WINTER SOLSTICE Back then.  (when boiling two packets of ramyeon in a small pot could be called ecstasy or thin-eared; when, on the morning of the winter solstice, out of a sense of apology, I said, “I’m not a ghost or anything, but I dislike bean porridge,” or “If the ramyeon broth tastes similarly seasoned, the salinity in our blood must be similar”; or when you said, “You must have a beggar in your stomach,” and with a beggar in the stomach I would feel peckish, cold, dirty, yet soon bloated, and push the table aside and lie there, having so many questions to ask you; then, when my stomach ached, hands went numb, and face turned pale; when the young you would take a needle from the drawer; when you would pat my back, stroke my arm, and pinch my earlobes; when you misread my pulse with your fingers, saying, “Your pulse feels faint, you seem to have severe indigestion,” and the sight of you scratching your head with the needle’s eye felt utterly familiar; when all my ten fingers had been pricked, and the sight of the blood, too precious to waste, would make me want to write characters like ‘beautiful’ (佳) or ‘to shine’ (暎); when, after sending you to Incheon, I lay back in the same spot where we had been, kneading my one hand with the other, closing my eyes tightly, so tightly that I could see dreams, and in the dream, in the fields of a new spring, strands of your long hair lay scattered here and there.)   PLAZA A window letting in just a sliver of light was perfect for us. We met back then when we still believed the simple truth that to die together, you must live together. The half-smoked cigarettes you left tasted sweet, and as the room started to warm, I’d lie with my head on your long legs, simmering like an anchovy in soup. Many a night, I’d drift off after thinking up some line like, “The way for humans to live with birds wasn’t to cage them, but to grow grass and trees in the yard,” nudging it onto your knee, and then fall asleep. Some mornings, we’d sit sorry-faced, facing each other, and talk about what we’d dreamt the previous night, forgetting to fold our blankets, while the white laundry we’d hung on the rooftop, having soaked up the starlight all night, dried yellow. 

by Park Joon

Fiction

[Fiction] Hideo

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

by Seo Jangwon

Fiction

[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

Cover Features

[Essay] Caregiving, Family, and the Days of Hope and Disappointment

Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin, published in Korea in 2017 to critical and popular acclaim and adapted into a film in 2024 by the young woman filmmaker Lee Mi-rang, is narrated from the perspective of a woman in her sixties who works as a carer at a nursing home. The unnamed narrator is assigned by her agency to “Jen” (full name Yi Jehee), a highly-educated woman who has never been married. Jen studied overseas when she was young and spent her life looking after the weak and marginalized, writing books about overseas Korean adoptees, opening an education center for immigrant children, and sponsoring a young boy in the Philippines. But the life of self-sacrificing devotion Jen once led is a world apart from her present situation. With no family or assets to support her, and slowly losing her memory, Jen is only granted a single bed in a nursing home. And even that is contingent on support—financial or otherwise—from charitable organizations. The moment her illness worsens and the support ends, even that bed will be taken from her. All that awaits her now is a transfer to a care facility for people with Alzheimer’s, a place where she will be bound hand and foot, a place that “pumps patients full of sedatives and gives them nothing to do besides expend all their energy waiting for death.” This is the point that angers the narrator, a professional carer. Is it just for society to treat a woman like Jen, who devoted her years to caring for others, this way? Is it truly right to sacrifice human dignity in the name of bureaucratic effi­ciency? The narrator sees herself in the elderly woman’s shoes as she witnesses the world treating Jen like “garbage,” and realizes that this treatment is not just “the way of the world,” but her “business.” This realization underpins the narrator’s determined struggle to bring the dying Jen into her own home, caring for her with extreme devotion. By nature, human beings are dependent on others, reliant on others’ care from birth to death. Providing unconditional care to vulnerable people who are completely reliant on others, then, is an ethical duty that all humans must undertake. This does not, of course, mean that those carrying out this ethical imperative will be free from hesitation, guilt, fear, or regret. The truth is, the “work” it takes to care for someone and the “grueling” task of picking up after someone else are an inextricable part of the labor of care; ugly realities that cannot—must not—be wrapped up into purely beautiful and noble packages. While refusing to turn a blind eye to that grueling work, Concerning my Daughter captures the fleeting instant in when the positions are reversed—when the reality of care is flipped upside-down and the carer becomes the cared-for. In the case of this book, the reversal overlaps with the moment when the title of the book is fully thrust into the spotlight. The narrator has thus far attempted to pressure her lesbian daughter to conform to social norms, unable to understand her. But as she comes to share the work of caring for Jen with her daughter, the narrator comes to accept her child for who she is. At Jen’s funeral at the end of the book, as the daughter (accompanied by her partner) volunteers to be the chief mourner, the narrator manages to tell the couple, “Thank you for being here.” It is a sort of olive branch; a ceasefire left as a final gift from Jen to her carer. After the funeral, the narrator and her daughter will return to their old dynamic, continuing to argue and hurt each other. But so long as they hold on to their gift from Jen, who ironically had required grueling and unconditional care, the energy to “get through the next bit of life ahead of [them]” will remain and keep them moving forward. Life goes on, and as the novel’s final line says, “all [they] can do is believe that [they] will make it through the long stretch of tomorrows,” supported by Jen’s gift.  By depicting a carer gladly bringing her patient into her own home—with no blood relation or promise of an inheritance in the picture—and fostering an alternative, female-centered family community with her lesbian daughter and her partner, Concerning My Daughter explores alternative possibilities for the ethics of care in Korean literature. These gendered ethics of care go beyond the heteronormative boundaries of blood relations, shaking the foundations of the traditional institution of the family. But can such new communities truly serve as an alternative? To answer this question, we can turn to Jadu by Lee Juhye. Narrated by a fictional translator of Adrienne Rich’s When We Dead Awaken (reflecting Lee’s status as the actual translator of that book), the novel offers glimpses of the fictional under­standings and misunderstandings concerning Rich’s concept of the “lesbian continuum.” In the prologue, Rich and the feminist poet Elizabeth Bishop drive from New York to Boston and discuss the recent deaths in their lives (Rich has lost her husband, while Bishop lost a same-sex lover, both to suicide). As they discuss the circumstances that led to those deaths, the two women form a connection over the fact that they have both been misunderstood by the public and gossiped about. This anecdote immediately informs readers of the inten­tion behind Jadu. The narrator’s father-in-law was once a charming old gentleman. But after his bile duct cancer relapses, he is hospitalized, becoming delirious in his illness, and soon Lee reveals the realities of patriarchy through the progression of the cancer. Prior to the narrator’s marriage and the medical crisis, the father-in-law had been a sweet poet of a man who called the narrator “more welcome than the flowers in springtime.” Following her marriage, he had promised to treat her “not as a daughter-in-law, but a daugh­ter,” buying her shiny hairpins studded with fake gemstones and flower-print scarves from street stands, insisting on putting them on her with his own two hands. The delirium, however, changes him completely, and he begins to call his daughter-in-law a “thief” who has stolen his radiant sun. He openly expresses his hatred for her, lamenting, “What has she done for us since she married into this family? Since she mar­ried a professor? Did she bring a big dowry? Have a baby? She’s the reason my line is going to end!” He is also highly suspicious of his carer, to the point of grabbing her by the hair and verbally abusing her.  Though suddenly faced with the brunt of the hypocrisies of patriarchy and branded a thief while attempting to care for the sick man, the narrator is not supported by her husband. The husband remains willfully blind to his father’s true nature. And it seems only right, in some ways, that she is more outraged by her husband’s cowardice than by her father-in-law’s direct displays of hate. The only person who takes her side and understands her is the carer, Hwang Yeongok. The narrator reciprocates her empathy by saving her from violence, shoving the patriarch in the chest when he suddenly grabs Yeongok by the hair and calls her a thief. The father-in-law’s patriarchal family is connected by blood and constitutes an exclusive society of its own from start to finish. But the two unrelated women, joined by their exclusion from that community, form a new community of their own. This is the moment when the lesbian continuum Rich describes comes into being, where “although nothing was said, it felt as though we had shared everything.” However, Lee does not gloss over the limitations of such moments of connection. Overemphasizing the value of gender-based solidarity in the face of imbalanced expecta­tions of care in heteronormative family institutions runs the risk of erasing the real differences between the individuals in this alternative community. The reality is that one of these women is well-educated and belongs to the middle class, while the agency-dispatched carer has been hired for a paltry 80,000 won a day. At the end of the book, the narrator purchases a pretty postcard in Hokkaido, and writes down “an address discovered by looking up the name of the agency from a once-remembered, lilac-hued business card,” con­fessing that “although it was very unlikely the postcard would make it to Yeongok, the remoteness of the possibility was the very reason” she was sending it. This confession is a clear reminder that the bond the narrator and Yeongok share is almost fantastical. Although this is an act “as childlike as tossing a message in a bottle into the Pacific,” Jadu empha­sizes that the narrator’s intentions are not laughable in the least. This reading is supported by the translator’s afterword, written in the form of a letter “to all the Hwang Yeongoks out there.” In Jadu, the act of writing is one way of resolving to never give up on those fleeting connections, to always look forward to a new form of community that acknowledges and overcomes the real differences between people.  Another author who may have something to say about such hopes is Hwang Jungeun. It is only natural, then, for this essay to end with a discussion of “Things to Come”—the last section of her novel Years and Years. Following “Gravedig,” “Words to Say,” and “Nameless,” which all follow the Han family, “Things to Come” centers on playwright Han Sejin, the family’s second daughter and virtually a self-portrait of the author, as she participates in a book festival in New York City. Sejin is very much unlike her elder sister Yeongjin, the archetypal “K-jangnyeo”: the eldest daughter in a standard Korean family who sacrifices her wants for the sake of the family by internalizing the idea that “you can’t always do everything you want.” Sejin has chosen to form a new connection with her same-sex partner Ha Miyeong in direct opposition to the heteronormative Korean family—and on a business trip to America, she comes to notice the things she had not recognized “back in Seoul.” At a talk titled “Reading Peace, Writing Resistance,” Sejin has a lengthy conversation with American writers, but at the end of the talk, a member of the audience asks a question that silences her. The questioner, petite with straight black hair and most likely a Korean adoptee, says, “I’ve been sitting here, listening for an hour and a half, but no one brought up Korean adoptees or the export of Korean adoptees. For an hour and a half, not once did anyone mention it. I need to know. Why?” A similar moment of silencing occurs during a conversation with Jamie, who tells Sejin about how her father Norman—who grew up around a Korean-American community that called his mother a “yanggalbo,” that is, a “Yankee whore”—“couldn’t forgive the people who said those things, so he decided he wouldn’t forgive the language they used either,” and slowly became a man of very few words. The reason for Sejin’s silence is simple: such issues had never even occurred to her “back in Seoul.” Perhaps our problems with family, care, and gender can only be seen clearly when we step back from internalized injustices to examine them in the context of society as a whole. Sejin’s breaking away from her blood family to form an alternative female community with Ha Miyeong does not magically solve these inherent problems; Miyeong, in spite of daily phone calls with Sejin about happy nothings, eventually complains of trouble breathing, finds a hospital on her own, packs her things, and checks herself in. What is it that chokes the air out of these pioneers of the future, forcing them to hospitalize themselves? Rather than try to clumsily answer that question and offer blanket solutions, “Things to Come” cautiously suggests an alternative: “dashing any hope of romance and reconciliation, disappointing those who had been hoping for those things.” That is to say, the future will always generate hope, but our expectations will never be fully met. But life goes on in spite of our disappointment, and busily. In the same way, the sense that our desperate hopes for a tran­scendent new alternative are about to fail is not necessarily a bad thing. As Hwang writes, “While she weeps, while she is disappointed, while she loses hope, while she rages. In other words, while she loves,” she—that is, we—must once more bring the future toward us. That is probably the underlying answer prescribed by Hwang, that our hopes will continue to come toward us for “years and years.” Does that not mean that it is time for both a change in our mindsets, and a mild disappointment of the radical hopes we have concerning care? Who knows? When Ha Miyeong is finally discharged from the hospital, “While she weeps, while she is disappointed, while she loses hope, while she rages. In other words, while she loves,” she may yet be welcomed by a day filled with hopes for such a love.  KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED: · Kim Hyejin, Concerning My Daughter (tr. Jamie Chang, Picador, 2022)   김혜진, 『딸에 대하여』 (민음사, 2017) · Lee Juhye, Jadu (Changbi, 2020)  이주혜, 『자두』 (창비, 2020) · Hwang Jungeun, “Things to Come,” Years and Years (tr. Janet Hong, Open Letter, 2024)  황정은, 「다가오는 것들」, 『연년세세』 (창비, 2020)

by Shin Soojeong

Cover Features

[Essay] Endings and Beginnings

During her final years, my grandmother lived with my aunt in the city of Naju in South Jeolla province. My grandmother had always dreamed of spending her old age close to her son and his family, but his circumstances prevented that from happening. He had divorced his wife and was in no position to look after anyone. His children, that is, my grandmother’s two grandsons, ended up taking jobs in Seoul and settling in Gyeonggi province. According to my aunt, my grandmother often said the only person she could trust was her son: that was the degree to which she treated my aunt with indifference. But in the end, my grandmother accepted with a strange calmness the fact that she had no one else to rely on but my aunt. And my aunt would say with the same calmness that it brought her happiness to spread out her mother’s quilt in the master bedroom where hung a photo (seemingly restored through digital technology) of my uncle, who had passed away twenty years earlier. In this way, the cohabitation be­tween my grandmother, who had reached her mid-eighties, and my aunt, who had entered her sixties, continued for ten years, only ending with my grandmother’s death. Death will find a way to make an end. An end that ends all, and makes a new beginning impossible. It seems that care is needed primarily at the beginning and end of our lives. At the beginning, we usually receive care gladly. But at the end, it may be difficult to do so. This may happen because, at the end of our lives, our bodies are often afflicted by many diseases caused by our protracted lifespan. We live longer now than nature intended, and we pay for our longevity dearly with both physical and psychological signs of aging. My grandmother, as far as I knew, always worked diligently and never slacked off. Maybe that’s why she never got rich. Is this cause and effect, I ask. The poor who live diligently. People who are too poor to afford to be lazy. Today’s news reported on the laborious process of minimum wage negotiations, and showed an anonymous interview with a caregiver. She said that she had been doing this work for thirteen years, and in that time had never made more than minimum wage. This year the negotiation is between labor groups who demand the minimum wage be raised by 900 won per hour and industry leaders who want a 120-won increase. The care worker takes care of seven or eight elderly people every day. She prepares their meals and checks in on them. “Did you do anything today?” she asks. “Oh yeah, I watched some television,” they reply. My grandmother liked watching television too. She liked singing contests and weekend soap operas. Surprisingly, one of the shows she liked was American professional wres­tling. Maybe because it was popular when she was young. My grandmother was easily impressed by the world of profes­sional wrestling. She would marvel at the scenes where the wrestlers thudded to the ground or crashed into each other and would cry, “Oh dear, that looks painful.” I would reply, feigning special insight, “Grandma, it’s all fake, it’s an act!” My grandmother just kept her eyes on the TV, as if she hadn’t heard me. And then she would mumble, “They’re so lucky to be healthy. So lucky to be healthy,” about those muscular athletes. Before my grandmother got sick, she would still make breakfast in the mornings for my aunt. The following year, despite thinking she was in good health for her age, my grandmother had to be admitted into a nursing home—where her favorite wrestling shows were definitely not shown on TV. My aunt wanted to take care of her until the end, but it was just too much for her. She couldn’t be home during working hours and my grandmother needed care at that time. Wearing a surgical mask, Grandma was admitted into a nursing home where she could receive care. Her formerly hardworking body, now small and thin, could barely move without professional care. I was also wearing a mask as I watched my grandmother be taken to the hospital. We couldn’t see each other’s faces completely. I didn’t remove my mask because I didn’t realize that would be the last time I saw her. It was the peak of the coronavirus pandemic. She passed away before it was over. Nearby stood my aunt, who could very well soon need care herself, her tears frozen on her face. Her face, the image of her mother’s.  There is something that I never told my grandmother. Did she know the words “Down syndrome”? She never learned to read. It’s possible her great-granddaughter’s disability might not have been part of the knowledge she acquired through her deeply profound life. Or maybe she did understand everything. My aunt would say, “How long has she got left? There is no need to tell her.” There are quite a few moments when those words pierce my heart. Probably more so for my aunt. My grandmother had seen my daughter until she was about six years old. Occasionally, she would call and ask if my daughter was speaking yet. At that time, she wasn’t yet able to speak properly. Down syndrome is accompanied by developmental disabilities, the most typical being problems with speech and language. It was the following year that my daughter was able to say the word “grandmother” properly. She should have called my grandmother “great-grandmother,” but considering her level of language development, it’s unlikely she would have been able to pronounce it correctly. It is difficult to describe a child’s development through numbers and graphs. Every day feels the same, but as those days add up you can see her change. But then one day, she goes back­wards. You question, is this child growing up? But that ques­tion seems pointless as you see her body change. When she was just born, in the neonatal intensive care unit, I wondered how this baby, smaller than my forearm, would grow up. But now the child reaches my waist and wraps me in a hug every morning. It is in that moment, when I bend down to return her embrace, that I start living. I am grateful that every day is the same, and feel that the accumulation of this grati­tude achieves something. I have been raising a developmentally disabled child with Down syndrome for ten years now. The method and intensity of her care differs from that given to my non-disabled second child. It took me several times longer to potty train my eldest compared to my second child. Only quite recently I had worried that I might have to change her diapers into her adolescence. But there came a day when she went to the toilet on her own. It’s not just her personal hygiene that I need to be worried about. Communicating with our daughter is my wife’s job. My wife can quickly understand what she wants to say or what she is feeling by looking into her eyes. It’s like a conversation between souls. But my wife doesn’t want that conversation between souls. She wants our daughter to pronounce the words herself, even if they come out slurred. It would be nice if we didn’t have to speak with words to communicate smoothly, if we could converse through ultrasound or telepathy, but that is impossible. My wife can have that conversation between souls with our daughter simply because of the accumulated experience of caring for her over a long period of time. The fact that I’m not able to converse with her to that degree may be because I have taken a step back from her care. Nevertheless, there is a limit to which souls can converse. A few days ago our daughter had a high fever and was irritable. My wife said that it was menstrual pain. Turns out it was an ear infection. My wife sighed at her child who couldn’t say the words, “My ears hurt.” She felt regret at being a mother who couldn’t work that out. Lately, our second child, who is one year younger, has been helping more. My wife and I worry that our younger child might feel burdened by the thought that she has to care for her older sister for the rest of her life. This isn’t a special feeling. All parents hope that their children are happy and life runs smoothly for them. Some people hope their child does well in school, others that they succeed socially or economically. Our wish is just one amongst the many. But in order to achieve it, we can’t just send our daughter to a private academy, get her tutoring, or have her solve problems in a textbook. We can only do it ourselves. Thankfully, since our youngest has grown up with her older sister, she has naturally accepted the concept of disability. I believe that when someone has a disabled person in their life, has watched their care, and recognizes that existence, they will become a better person for it. I hope that more people can have this opportunity. I hope that many people will engage with wheelchair users on their commute to work and be considerate to people on the autism spectrum in public places. Our youngest has been taking care of her older sister in her own way, quite differently to how my wife and I think things should be done. Her method is simple. She makes her sister angry! Sometimes she tells her that she is cute, pinching her cheek and patting her backside. Other times, when she doesn’t like that her sister has burst into her room, she chases her out and locks the door. Our older child, after experiencing this several times, gets annoyed, then cries and, in the end, she speaks. Recently she has said the following: “I hate you!”, “Ah, really!”, “Stop it!” Thanks to our youngest, our eldest child is improving her language skills. Our two children are taking care of each other in the way only sisters can.  Japanese scholar Kimihiro Masamura’s book Having a Child with Down Syndrome tells of the sadness and joy he experi­enced over the twenty years he spent raising his second child who was born with Down syndrome. In the book, the author’s wife says, “From the time our child started school until now, spring has been a painful season for us.” In the 1970s, when the author’s child was attending school, Japan’s policies on educa­tional rights and the care of disabled children were somewhat lacking. Even if the system has improved, at least in terms of recognition, spring is not an easy season for the guardians of children with disabilities. As the school year changes to the next, the environment changes, and for disabled young people change can feel like a heavy punishment. A few years ago at a public hearing in Seoul, parents of disabled children pled on their knees for the establishment of a special school. Their photographs went viral. All they wanted was for their children to be allowed to go to school, but many people at the hearing wanted a hospital constructed at the same site. A lot of time has passed since then. Those children, whose mothers were on their knees, will be adults now. Did they graduate? What sort of members of society have they become? Our daughter attends a special school. Luckily there is one close to our home. Every year at my child’s school, as the spring approaches, a not-so-funny comedy is acted out. It becomes an urgent matter of concern to the parents whether or not their child will be able to stay at the same school when they move up from elementary to middle school. It isn’t all that different from the fervor around the entrance exams for science or foreign language high schools. Only the competition is backwards. In order to continue attending the special school, you have to prove that the child is so severely disabled they require a special school, that they often engage in impulsive behavior, and that they need the intensive care provided in the special school’s facilities. Normally, you would zealously educate your child to overcome these things, but for the school entrance requirements our children must be a little more lacking. That’s how they can go to a special school. And not have to move to an inclusive program at a regular school. I know that, in theory, the ideal situation would be for her to attend a regular school and receive an inclusive education with her non-disabled peers. However, I can also calculate how dif­ficult it would be to achieve that reality. In a world where the goal of education is to get into a good college, disabled students can easily be perceived as an interfering presence in the college entrance exam preparation classes, even as obstacles. We are in a situation where there is a general failure to improve the awareness around inclusive education and its environment, while the expansion of special schools is being increasingly delayed. In the meantime, the care of disabled people is left to the individual. I don’t intend to give up the job. But I do want to stop having to prove my child is lacking. It is so hard to hide the pain of that process. This isn’t care at all. I don’t know what the future holds for my child. Just as I couldn’t have known that she would come to me, I can’t know where she and I will go in the end. Perhaps she is the one taking care of me now. If I am becoming a better person, it is because of her care. I do not know who will care for me at my “end of the end,” just as I do not know who will care for my daughter there­after. I think that’s fortunate. I will continue to take care of my daughter without ever knowing the future. In just the same way my daughter cares for me. 

by Seo Hyoin

Interviews

[Interview] Believing in Possibilities Despite Everything

I’ve been wondering how you are. I’ve been think­ing about you a lot, especially this past winter and spring, whether I was at Gwanghwamun Square or watching the news. I think it’s important to express different perspectives on how we in Korean society have spent the days between December 3, 2024, and now, with former president Yoon Suk Yeol’s declaration of martial law, his impeachment, and the early election this year. How have you been? I’ve thought of you often, too. It seems we thought about each other a lot these past few months. I won­dered how you were coping with the unrest, and if you were doing okay. I asked myself what we’d talk about if we met, where we’d meet, what we’d see and hear, and what kind of experience it would be for each of us. I’ve been wanting to take a long trip around Namhae, but I couldn’t leave the Seoul area for the past half a year. My eyes were focused on the Constitutional Court in Gwanghwamun, and the National Assembly in Yeouido. I attended impeachment rallies on week­ends and also went out into the streets when some­thing important came up; at home, I listened to the news all day. I finished writing a short story this winter. And up until recently, I was putting together the manu­script for my second non-fiction collection. An excerpt from your diary published this spring talks about how the so-called Jeon Bong-jun Protest Group, consisting of farmers from all over the nation, was stopped by the police at Namtaeryeong Pass, the gateway to Seoul, while heading to the presidential residence in their tractors; and how their supporters stayed with them through the night so that they could march on to their destination. You wrote: “I reflected on my getting old. My automatic belief that they wouldn’t succeed; the way I gave up based on what I saw and heard. I was ashamed, but today, I gladly accepted my shame.” I’d like to talk about that shame. It was Saturday, December 21. Chairman Ha Won-oh of the Korean Peasants League, who’d been stopped in Namtaeryeong on the day of the protest, came to Gwanghwamun afterward and spoke at an emergency protest rally. I was there when he said, “The Jeon Bong-jun Protest Group is at Namtaeryeong, but the police are blocking their path. I’m going to bring them to Gwanghwamun.” But all I did was listen. I marched on to Myeongdong, then went back home to Paju. It didn’t occur to me that I could go meet the farmers. Watching the Namtaeryeong vigil on TV later on, I was amazed and thankful, but I couldn’t stop asking myself questions. Why did I act that way? Why didn’t I go there?  It occurred to me that maybe I believed automati­cally that, the same as always, they wouldn’t “succeed,” because the police force is a strong public power, while I’m just a little individual, and because the protest group had always been stopped from entering Seoul in the same way; that it wasn’t a belief or a thought of mine, but just a habit. I often say I want to have, or do have, the faith that things can change for the better, as they should—a faith in new possibilities. But sitting in the square on December 21, I didn’t have that faith in me. I didn’t believe in anything, nothing stirred my heart, and I’d given up on something. I didn’t know what I’d given up on, but when I saw the people who’d gone there on that cold night and perse­vered until the morning, I realized that I’d taken the liberty of giving up on them. Believing, without even realizing, that just like always, they wouldn’t succeed. That’s what shamed me—that I was fine, when I’d rashly given up on people who could’ve gotten hurt. Reacting out of habit like that, and having a heart that isn’t easily moved, is what I call getting old. That’s the term I use, but I want to express it some other way, because I don’t want to use the phrase “getting old” in a negative way anymore. I’m sorry I began the interview with such a heavy topic about Korean society. My questions were based on what you said in an interview for Sisa IN, in 2021: “When you say something’s too political, you’re saying you don’t want to know what the issue is about. I think that’s a very political attitude—it means you don’t need to think about it.” You began your career with the short story “Mother” in 2005, so it’s been exactly twenty years. I’m sure many things have changed for you, but what would you say remains unchanged? It’s hard to think of anything that hasn’t changed. Maybe it’s hard for me to separate it from my life because it’s become a part of my life. But I would say my fear of deadlines hasn’t changed. I still rewrite sentences over and over again, choosing each word carefully. And I still love to read.  Your earlier short stories depict the inner world of suffering characters with a touch of fantasy. Then, starting with One Hundred Shadows, your first full-length novel, you began to incorporate society’s structural problems into your work, with “a desire to see the outside world” as you stated in an interview with Channel Yes magazine in 2012. How has the focus of your fiction changed? I’m having trouble moving on from the last question, about things that haven’t changed. The more I think about it, the less things seem to have changed. When I write, I’m always somewhere in between want­ing to say something and not wanting to say it. The two desires, for me, hold the same kind of power; the repulsion generated by the two forces is where I do my writing, making endless attempts and giving up time and time again. It’s been that way from the beginning.  I’ve always lived in isolation, since I was little, so sending a novel out into the world and hearing back from the world was a major event for me. I felt that I’d come face to face with “the outside world” as I looked in the directions the answers came from, and experienced different things—especially when I encountered the faces of people crying. I used to distinguish between inner and outer worlds this way, but I no longer feel like that. The world is made up of everything, including myself. That’s how I’ve come to feel through reading and writing. If reading is a way to connect the world to me, writing is a way to connect myself to the world. Doing these two things repeatedly over the years, I’ve come to have a certain feeling—that the world and I are connected, and that through my life, I’m involved in the things that are happening in the world. I know now that it’s always been that way, from the beginning. Your current state, in which you’ve confirmed that you’re connected to the world, seems quite important to your personal life as well. How is your life as an author different from your life before? A life of reading and writing wasn’t something that came naturally to me. I stopped reading books after a collection of world literature I read as a child, so until I was in my mid-twenties, books weren’t a big part of my life. Then I spent the next half of my life reading and writing, which changed a lot of things for me. I came to see life in a completely different way. The most important change was that I began to wonder whether it’s possible for a person to be cynical. When I was younger, I gave up on things easily, harboring cynicism. I can’t do that anymore. As I met people through read­ing and writing, and as I contemplated life in the same way, I could no longer see the world with cynical eyes. Your works depict people in a range of specific occupations—bookstore staff, salespeople, logistics workers, merchants, repairmen, and so on. Can you comment on the care and attention you put into depicting scenes of labor? If my novels depict scenes of labor, that’s probably an inevitable result of my effort to depict life. I have a hard time writing a piece of fiction without first deciding what my characters do for a living, whether or not that’s mentioned. It’s been that way for some time. I think it’s because when I encounter someone’s life, I also encounter the work they do. Now it’s become something I always have to consider.  I tend to pay close attention to the labor people perform in everyday life. I like to think about people’s relationships with their work, how people around them view their work, how their work comes into contact with my life, how they affect me through their work, how my own attitude toward their work affects their work, things like that. It’s fun to think about, and important. In the section “Things to Come” from your novel Years and Years, the character Han Sejin attends a book festival in New York. You yourself participated in the 2018 PEN World Voices Festival in New York at the invitation of LTI Korea. It occurred to me that perhaps your novels are being written even when you’re not in the act of writing. Are there any scenes in particular you feel an urge to set down on paper? “Being written even when you’re not in the act of writing.”That is so true. I think it’s probably the same for all writers. In an author’s mind or heart, everything that happens, every emotion and every moment, is ordinary yet extraordinary. But it’s not until I’m actually writing that I know which of all those things I’ll be writing about. That’s how it is with me, at least. A lot of the time, I have no idea even as I write. Sometimes I write because I keep picturing the same scene over and over, and I want to find out why. But I’d say that what I mostly tend to set down on paper is pain or isolation. As soon as you said “pain or isolation,” I recalled how you mention in your 2021 Diary that one sentence you regret saying so deeply that you don’t think you’ll be able to forget it for the rest of your life was, “How are you?” “How are you?” “How are you?”That was something I’d been asking Korean society, as well as myself, after the Sewol ferry tragedy. That’s all that was on my mind as I wrote those words, but I ended up reading them out loud in front of the victims’ families. It wasn’t that long after the tragedy occurred. The families were listening to my words, at a time when they could neither bear to ask one another how they were, nor be asked. I was deeply embarrassed, and I regretted saying it. It made me reflect on the direction writing takes, and the responsibility of writing. That was the day I resolved not to forget that wherever my writing ends up, there’s always someone there. I consider myself extremely lucky that we speak the same language, that I can catch the rhythm of your sentences and the subtle nuances of the dialogue. On the other hand, whenever I have this thought, I end up thinking about the possibilities of translation. What are your thoughts on translation? As an author, I see a translator as a fellow worker who carries the writing to a point I’ll never arrive at. I attended a translators’ workshop once, at the invitation of LTI Korea. I watched the translators in the process of translating one of my short stories. The way they translated, choosing the words for each sentence with care, writing one sentence at a time, was no different from the way I write a novel. As a reader, I have immense gratitude for translators. I’m not proficient in any foreign language, so I read translated works instead of the originals. Seventy percent of the books I read are translated. For instance, I’ve been able to read a number of books on trees thanks to the translator No Seungyeong, and recently, I was able to read Barry Lopez’s Horizon thanks to the translator Jeong Ji-in. Kim Myeongnam has made it possible for me to read a lot of fascinat­ing books on science, and Kim Eunjeong, the novels of Fleur Jaeggy. Books like these nourish my mind, expand my understanding of the world, and broaden my thinking. I’m extremely grateful, both as an author and as a citizen. If books are a crucial foundation of culture, perhaps the work done by translators lies at its deepest core. So I thought translators must get paid more than authors—I learned only recently that they don’t. I wish translators would receive fair treat­ment and adequate compensation for their work.  While reading your short story “A Day, Without Trouble,” I was especially drawn to how a heavy rainfall in Vietnam impacts Yeongin, who is in Korea, and the feeling that one becomes implicated in violence no matter how one tries not to (“It’s not something I did, but I can’t say it didn’t pass through my hands either.”). Is this sense of nection an anchor to you, or a sail? It’s both.There have been a few times when I sat across someone who was trying to speak while their face was distorted with pain. It made me think of solidarity; then I realized that even before solidarity, my life was already connected to theirs, that my life was already involved in theirs. I came to see that some­one’s circumstances, which were so far removed from me that they seemed irrelevant, could in reality be absolutely relevant. No matter how I try to buy and use and discard less on this planet, I’m always buying and using and discarding all sorts of things. And those things reap­pear in front of me, stained with blood from traveling around the world. I can’t be the only one to break free from this flow. Whether I buy them or not, products whose prices have been reduced by cutting labor costs eventually come into my life in the form of the climate crisis. I don’t eat baked goods sold by big businesses. Baked goods are soft and fluffy and sweet, but people die even while making them. Once, my younger sisters and I were talking about a franchise bakery, and I told them I never go there. One of my sisters got upset and told me not to be like that. She’d been buying their sponge cakes since her kids were little, and when the boycott of their products was in full swing, she’d often seen the owner of the bakery sit­ting in a daze. When you learn something like that, your mind gets tangled with all kinds of thoughts. In those moments, choosing to boycott doesn’t seem right. You can’t stand in front of the bakery owner who’s lost their customers and tell them, “This is right.”I’m not the CEO of the company that distributes the baked goods, and I’m not the person who makes or eats them; nevertheless, something sticky and heavy clings to my palms.  The sense of being implicated makes me feel like I can’t do anything, but at the same time, it makes me want to take interest in different things and take another look at them. And everything I think, feel, and take in during the whole process affects my reading and writing. In “Author’s Note, Rewritten” for the revised Korean edition of One Hundred Shadows, you mention that you were thinking of “the night before” as you wrote the novel, and that for some time afterward, you wanted to title all your novels The Night Before. Can you tell me why? One Hundred Shadows was inspired by the tragic incident that took place in Yongsan, Seoul, in 2009. I wrote it wanting to witness the moment just before the incident occurred, wanting to return to a time before it happened. Because there’s always a range of possibilities just before something happens. That’s why I wanted to title all my works “The Night Before.” Do you still think about that title, “The Night Before”? I don’t think about it often as a title, but I do think about it a lot in everyday life. It’s been hot lately. July has only just begun, but the outdoor temperature today is 39 degrees Celsius. Today, for me, is also the night before.  In “A Day, Without Trouble,” Inbeom says: “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 thought this was the point your fiction has consistently exposed. I think a lot of people already sense that the humanled world is nearing its end. That seems to be a shared understanding of the world. We feel it each time summer comes around, for instance. Whenever the topic of the climate crisis comes up, my nephew gets really glum and says, “So I’m just going to die without accomplishing anything in the future?” There’s obvious despair and gloom over the future in this child. I can feel it. And I don’t put the blame on the people who’ve lived on Earth so far, or the people living here now. The same with the wars of aggression and massacres taking place on Earth today. The human world can’t be completely destroyed through things done by a few people with malice or hostility. Rather, it’s destroyed through the choices of a lot of people who are indifferent to those things, people who can just let those things pass by. I see the former as nature, and the latter as evil. There was a time for me, too, when I couldn’t speak out against evil, and for the most part I’ll probably be the same way in the future, but there comes a point when you have to speak up and say clearly, “That’s evil.” When blood is everywhere—in the environment, in work, in nature; when people die of starvation or from explosions in a military-occupied territory; when the majority of people don’t pay attention to such things or dismiss them because they’re too painful and complicated; when there are a lot of such people, and their numbers grow, and people easily ignore things out of weakness. As I wrote that part of the story I thought, “I hope I can say clearly that it’s bad.” “dd’s Umbrella,” one of the stories in the collection Into the World of Passi, later evolved into “d,” which is connected to the section “There Is Nothing That Needs to Be Said” from the novel dd’s Umbrella, which led to the novel Years and Years. The desire to rewrite the stories of your characters and create additional space for them in new works seems to stem from the desire to allow them to go on living. What is it that leads you to do such work? Will you continue doing it in the future? “Allow them to go on living.” Thank you for putting it that way. I’m not sure if I’ll continue doing that kind of work. I probably will, if I want to or feel I should. Some stories, you can’t close the door on and leave behind just because the manuscript is finished. I guess I’ll go on doing it if I meet another one of those stories. I think my works sometimes lead to other works because I often have a hard time accepting that fiction is fabricated, made-up. There’s something that makes it difficult for me to just think that the characters don’t exist in reality. Of all the sentences you’ve written, the one I treasure the most is “Shall we sing?” in One Hundred Shadows. Whenever I think of this sen­tence, it gives me strength. I’d like to hear your thoughts on holding onto a fragile hope despite everything.  I’d rather say “possibility” than “hope.” There’s a desire in me to believe that possibilities exist. The desire doesn’t persevere on its own; it’s something I have to nurture. If I’m careless, it vanishes into thin air. Like what I talked about earlier—what happened just before the Namtaeryeong incident.  Believing in possibilities despite everything be­comes possible because other people exist; because there are other people who are affected by reality, whether I’m hoping for or despairing over something, or whether I believe in possibilities or not. You mentioned that what you give the most thought to becomes a story. What preoccupies you the most at the moment? Pain.And the mind of someone in pain, and the weakness of that mind. For example, I’m thinking thoughts like, “Why do we attack others and ourselves the most severely when we’re at our most vulnerable?”  I’m hoping that readers of KLN will read A Little Diary, recently published in Korea, when it’s eventually translated into English. I believe that through the book, they’ll be able to see where your gaze is directed. Is there anything you’d like to say about it, and to the people who fight, write, and read despite everything? A Little Diary is a collection of five months of my diary entries starting December 3, 2024. I wrote down the things I saw and heard each day, instead of observing and analyzing situations from a distance.  I keep a diary. I write down several entries a day, and from December 2024 to June this year, the political climate was the strongest theme and object of interest for me. A Little Diary is an edited compilation of those entries. Though they expose prejudices and hatred I’m ashamed to reveal to others, as well as the anxiety and anger stirring inside me, I didn’t make any big changes. I wanted to show how I spent those days as a person, and in what kind of confusion. It’s both because of a certain person who said they’d been enlightened through the martial law, and because of my hope that this book might serve as a small resource in the future. And to my fellow writers and readers. To those of you who are going back and forth between writing and reading, even today, I’d like to say, “I’m lucky to be living in the same era as you. Please keep on writing and reading.”  KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:· Hwang Jungeun, “dd’s Umbrella,” Into the World of Passi (Changbi, 2012)   황정은, 「디디의 우산」, 『파씨의 입문』 (창비, 2012) · Hwang Jungeun, “d” and “There Is Nothing That Needs to Be Said,” dd’s Umbrella (tr. e. yaewon, Tilted Axis, 2024)   황정은, 「d」, 「아무것도 말할 필요가 없다」, 『디디의 우산』 (창비, 2019) · Hwang Jungeun, “Things to Come,” Years and Years (tr. Janet Hong, Open Letter, 2024)   황정은, 「다가오는 것들」, 『연년세세』 (창비, 2020) · Hwang Jungeun, Diary (Changbi, 2021)   황정은, 『일기』 (창비, 2021) · Hwang Jungeun, One Hundred Shadows (tr. Yewon Jung, Erewhon Books, 2024)   황정은, 『百의 그림자』 (창비, 2023) · Hwang Jungeun, “Diary,” Literature & Society Hyphen vol. 149 (Moonji Publishing, 2025)   황정은, 「日記」, 『문학과사회&하이픈 149호』 (문학과지성사, 2025) · Hwang Jungeun, “A Day, Without Trouble,” The Quarterly Changbi vol. 207 (Changbi, 2025)   황정은, 「문제없는, 하루」, 『창작과 비평 207호』 (창비, 2025) · Hwang Jungeun, A Little Diary (Changbi, 2025)   황정은, 『작은 일기』 (창비, 2025)  

by Shin Yeonsun

Fiction

[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

Book Shelf

Facing What Matters at the Edge of Collapse

Earlier this year, I had to flee my home. A wildfire was spreading rapidly through the hills of Los Angeles. When the evacuation orders reached the neighborhood next to mine, I watched white ash fall like snow onto my backyard and made the deci­sion to leave. I started packing the usual essentials—docu­ments, laptop, passport, cash. But once I realized this might truly be the end of the house, the contents of my backpack changed.  Without hesitation, I reached for what felt most irreplace­able: my great-grandmother’s handwritten notes, my father’s dissertation, old family photos, and drawings I’d made as a child. I packed quietly, almost weightlessly, and drove east through the smoky dusk toward the unknown.     That night, in a small motel room in Nevada, curled up on a thin mattress with my laptop open, I wrote to a friend. I told her how beautiful the world looked in that moment, and how unbearably sad. I understood then that the apocalypse does not arrive with a bang. It is not a clean rupture but a slow, irre­versible descent. It is a quiet unraveling we inhabit long before we learn how to name it.  And strangely, this realization wasn’t entirely despairing. It stirred something in me—an unexpected clarity, a will to live otherwise. If we’re already surviving the end of something, then every remaining moment becomes more precious. Loving the people around us, doing the work we care about, feeding the stray cats, growing squash in erratic weather, fighting injustice even when it seems futile—these became, and remain, the only things that matter.  Reading Choi Eunmi’s novel Maju made me relive that experience. Written in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Maju centers on Nari, a thirty-something woman who runs a small candle workshop. When one of her regular customers tests positive, Nari’s shop faces the threat of closure. Soon after, she suffers a panic attack and is diagnosed with latent tuberculosis—a moment that triggers the resurfacing of long-buried memories, including those about Manjo Ajumma, the woman who cared for her as a child. What follows is not a grand reckoning but a quiet, interior dissolution. As the pandemic severs social ties and disrupts daily rhythms, Nari is forced to confront not only her own fractured self but also the unresolved tensions in her relationship with Sumi, the very customer who may have exposed her to COVID-19. The two women, suspended in an emotional limbo, eventually travel together to an apple orchard called “Ttansan”—a space that becomes a metaphorical landscape for memory, grief, and the possibility of reconciliation. Maju unfolds like a soft murmur, a novel of delicate gestures and interior shifts. Yet it resonates with astonishingforce, especially in a world still reeling from loss and disorientation. Choi’s writing doesn’t aim to diagnose the pandemic; instead, it lingers in its aftermath and emotional debris. The novel traces how fear, anger, and memory settle into our bodies, like ash fluttering quietly to the ground. Reading Maju, I was reminded again that survival isn’t just about escaping a fire or pandemic. It’s about how we live afterward—what we choose to carry forward, and whom we choose to face. In Korean, the word “maju” means “to face,” but it also carries nuances of encounter and confrontation. The novel’s title gestures toward these multiple registers: facing the past, facing others, facing oneself. Like Nari, we’re all trying to make sense of what has been lost. The pandemic, like the wildfire, forced many of us to flee familiar terrains —literal and emotional. But perhaps, like her, we also have the chance to return. Not to what was, but to a renewed understandingof what matters. And so I find myself asking again: What am I holding onto? What would I pack if I had to leave again? Who would I want to face before it was too late? In a time when everything feels fragile, Maju offers not solace, but solidarity. It reminds us that even amid collapse, we can still look one another in the eye. We can still speak. We can still choose to care. And sometimes, that’s enough to begin again.

by Gina Kim

Translator's Desk

The Lazy Translator

Emerging literary translators often come up and tell me how much they want to be like me. They mean well, and more power to them, but I do find myself thinking: Are you sure about that?     At the beginning of Chuseok in 2023, my husband and I landed in Taipei for a vacation, whereupon I promptly fell asleep for twenty hours straight. Because I was exhausted. Right before we left for Taiwan, I had managed to hand in my translations for both A Magical Girl Retires and I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki, do a TV interview for a book I had written in Korean about my life as a translator, and attend a regular literary workshop session. I remember lying in the dark in Seoul just before we left, trying to get my work-addled brain to sleep and thinking, I cannot keep living like this, I will die.  I knew then I had to change the way I worked in 2024, because somehow, I had nine full-length manuscripts due that calendar year, with at least one book translation due every month from December 2023 through June. I also had teach­ing, traveling, and prize-judging commitments, was somehow publishing a novel I had written, and was going on tour in the US and UK, as well as Australia and Singapore. I don’t want anyone to get the impression that I’m a workaholic or that I love to work. I’m actually very lazy. That’s why, early in my career, I took the trouble to calculate the minimum amount of work I would have to do to live modestly in the city of my choice. For the sake of illustration, let’s update those numbers for 2025. The median household income in Seoul was around 57 million won in 2024. An LTI Korea translation grant is around 12 million won for a full-length novel of average length, which means a literary translator has to complete about five books a year to survive in Seoul. If one has an earning partner, their earnings can be deducted from the 57 million goal, drastically lowering the full-timer threshold (if not eliminating it altogether). But since my husband was in grad school when I began my career, as the breadwinner I took it upon myself to earn the median Seoul household income myself until he graduated with his PhD.    Every time I considered a project or a gig, I did the math to see if it would be financially worth doing. Ever wonder why even though so many translators publish in literary magazines, I rarely do? That’s because I figured out that putting together a magazine submission took almost the same effort as putting together a book proposal, and selling a book brings in way more money than publishing in a magazine. The point is, I’ve always worked with very concrete numbers, mostly because, again, I’m congenitally lazy and don’t like to work anymore than I have to. This system fell apart in 2022 when I was double-longlisted for the International Booker Prize and work started pouring in. This doesn’t happen for every translator who loses a Booker, but in my case, everything I had on submission suddenly got sold—including my own novel—and the tide of work rose rapidly. My first-ever author, Jeon Sam-hye, has a saying: Row when the tide is high. Who knew when I would have the time, energy, and opportunity to work at this level again? So I threw myself upon the oars and rowed. I pitched like our house was on fire, taught and lectured at the best translation and literary programs in the English-speaking world, and took so many publishers’ meetings that I made a game of guessing which book the meeting was for while I waited in the Zoom room. But this level of work was unsustainable. I had to recalibrate, if only to survive the gauntlet that would be 2024. It helped im­mensely that my literary agent, who had initially only handled the sales and contract negotiations for my own writing, also began handling my translation contracts. I hired a tax accoun­tant (I can no longer imagine functioning without one). I began keeping a bullet journal in addition to the diary I’d kept since childhood, so I could organize my thoughts instead of falling into a feedback loop of panic, anxiety, and exhaustion.  The tide of opportunities continued to rise—it’s still high to this day—but I got better at identifying which requests would be a waste of time and which were more meaningful. I made a concerted effort to work smarter, not harder, said yes to fewer things, and tried to be more mindful of how I reacted to setbacks. Best of all, I discovered an internal rhythm of language that I found I could tap into at will, a rhythm that I could ride to create the language I needed for that day, be it for translation or for writing. I learned to respect and listen to that rhythm. I’m riding it right now as I write this.     So for those translators who say they want to be like me —boys, be unambitious. Be lazy. Do the math, make less noise, and listen carefully. And work smart. Not hard.

by Anton Hur