INTERVIEW

• Interview with Kim Ae-ran: Attentive Minds and Literary Forms Vol. 67 Spring 2025

  To prepare for this interview, I reread all of your works in chronological order. There was something dramatic in realizing that I’ve grown up alongside your characters. I was reminded of the early 2000s and felt quite emotional. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the progression of your characters accurately reflects not just my past, but also the trajectory of Korean society and families in the twenty-first century. It’s also fascinating that your novels have inherited elements from Korean literature of the 1990s—small stories, lonely selves, preferences, and personality, just to name a few. With your novels, you’ve proven the paradox that even the most private stories are still universal and connected to society. Could you share more about how your writing journey began in relation to these themes? Three keywords come to mind: “noodle shop,” “room,” and “theatre.” I’ll explain each of these briefly.        My mother ran a noodle shop out of our home in the countryside for over twenty years. In her shop, I learned that cooking is a form of labor long before it transforms into virtue or duty. I also got to see firsthand what it meant to be a proud, economically independent woman. The people who came to the restaurant were people from all walks of life and socioeconomic backgrounds. At the time I hated sharing with those customers our small home where we ate and slept, but now I realize that it was a precious experience for my development as an author.        By “room,” I’m talking as much about a physical place as an economic class. My early work inevitably contains many of my personal experiences. As a young author, I used to be embarrassed by the smallness of my stories about “home” and that “room.” But not anymore. Much like pointillism, small stories in numbers can become the brushstrokes for a vast sky.        Lastly, I studied theatre in college. While in school, I saw many performances barely make it to the stage. In the process, my peers and I learned how to accept each other’s imperfections and how to keep our promise to the audience. During that time, I also learned how to look for the meaning of life without relying on a personal god, and how to love without idolizing the other person. Although I can’t say for sure that I was aware of this at the time. It’s interesting that your experience in theatre has seeped into your novels. I can’t help but think that this is also related to your writing and literature. Noodle shops and rooms are especially present in works like Run, Dad! and Mouthwatering. One thing that plays an important role in the world-building of these early works is what you might call a “resentment-free reconstruction of reality and active imagination.” But in your works in the 2010s and beyond, I think this becomes more complicated. For example, in My Brilliant Life and Vapor Trail, you seem more aware of the harshness or negative aspects of reality. I wonder if this indicates a kind of shift. Or as writer Kim Yeonsu once stated, perhaps laughter and tears all come from the same place. In that sense, something that was latent in your early works has now emerged to the surface. I’m curious what the context behind that change was. I’ve always wanted to possess a sense of humor that demonstrates a deep understanding of life. I hope I’ve achieved that, at least to some extent. Still, it’s true that in striving for that, I had started to smile less. But after the sinking of the MV Sewol, my pessimism returned to faint optimism, and then after the COVID-19 pandemic, I started to sympathize with Rebecca Solnit who said that both pessimism and optimism are forms of certainty about the future. I once read that certainty interferes with our decision-making. And yet, so long as we cling to a certain amount of hope, it doesn’t so much give us a good answer, but rather, a difficult one—like a cracked jar that leaks light to reveal the dignity of humanity within. I think Korean literature of late can be split into two periods: literature that was written before the sinking of the MV Sewol, and literature that was written after. When Kim Yeonsu wrote about you, I felt a warmth inside as I sensed the unique and complex connection between you two—awkward and ambivalent, yet somehow friendly. What does the term “contemporary author” mean to you? I know writing is ultimately a solitary act, but I think that relationships between writers must be significant. What first comes to mind is the Korean phrase “a hill to lean on.” I also imagine this network of writers as a forest. I’m happy to know that my work is not the first shovel in a barren landscape but rather a tree or leaf swaying in unison with other trees and leaves in a forest cultivated by other writers. Within that forest, I sometimes feel the winds of history, and at other times, I’m shaken and humbled by those same winds. Eventually, I may decay and be absorbed into the earth, but that, too, is the way of nature. Contemporary writers are the people with whom I share that uncertain destiny. I find it interesting that from the beginning of your career, many of your main characters have been children. Your newest full-length novel, A Lie Among Truths, also features a young boy. I can’t help but think that there must be some special reason for this. Perhaps you have a particular affection for coming-of-age journeys? The young characters in my early works were very interested in themselves. After all, one must resolve their own problems before they can see others and begin to talk about “we.” While writing my latest novel, a certain idea occurred to me: Growing up is all about changing perspectives. I also think that maturation doesn’t have to be about going through the traditional rites of passage; it can happen gradually over a long span of time. So, in this novel, I decided to have my characters initially obsessed with their own wounds, then slowly I let them begin to see the sorrow and wounds of others as intensely as their own. People tend to think growing up is about becoming bigger, but it’s actually about becoming smaller, because the smaller we get, the bigger our world becomes. I’m paraphrasing Jeon Seung-min, of course, from his book of essays, Reading with Intent. Personally, even though I may not have grown up to become a more sophisticated writer, I’ve become someone who can observe the world and people with patience—something for which I am thankful.  Since your last novel, My Brilliant Life, I’d been waiting with great anticipation for A Lie Among Truths. And it was just as moving as your previous work. Of course, this novel is centered around lies. In the line “One secret helps another secret,” the word “secret” can implicitly be seen as a close cousin with “lie.” Now that I think about it, your first novel, My Brilliant Life, also revolves around the hope and disappointment caused by a certain lie. But in your latest work, I think lying becomes much richer. What significance does lying have for you right now? And what is its relationship to storytelling? To me, lies are even bigger than fiction or storytelling. After all, a novel is essentially an author’s carefully crafted lie. As has long been known, lies in literature are used as a method to protect the truth. In other words, some truths cannot be conveyed without the use of storytelling. Conversely, some lies only feel like they are true because they have been carefully structured and narrativized. It’s a subtle but important distinction. I try to resist the urge to resort to an easy narrative while struggling to preserve the driving force of the story. If a story feels too comfortable to me, I shift my perspective to make sure I’m an honest liar. Another interesting aspect of A Lie Among Truths is the introduction of non-human characters, which is something new in your body of work. Rather than simply serving as a plot device, they seem to reflect a fascinating expansion or shift in worldviews. For example, all three of the children who are the main characters suffer their own wounds and live precarious daily lives; yet, they have non-humans that they must look after and protect. I wanted to hear more about this from you. I wanted to give these children, for whom family is a painful burden they must carry, a different type of family with its own meaning. After pondering how to ensure the children weren’t put in forced positions of salvation while also not relegating them to a place of meaninglessness, I came up with the idea of a companion animal. I didn’t want to overly anthropomorphize or idealize these animals, so I went with a lizard. I deliberately placed it in contrast to the dog, which represents devotion. While humans have long cherished dogs, lizards (like snakes) have been despised by humans since the dawn of time. Of course, snakes and lizards are different, but they share a common history of neglect and mistreatment by humans. By juxtaposing the dog, a symbol of love and loyalty, with the snake, a creature that doesn’t even know people hate it (as movie critic Kim Hye-ri puts it), I wanted to strike a balance and step away from an anthropocentric perspective. Your desire to avoid anthropomorphism and idealization resonates with me. The last sentence of your book also left a lasting impression on me: “I could have chosen not to return from the dream, but I did.” This is almost the exact opposite of the last sentence of “Who Sets Off Fireworks on the Beach Without Thinking?” from your first collection, Run, Dad!: “This might all be a dream, but just like the wind that traveled thousands of kilometers across the northern pacific to meet me, I must meet that dream.” In other words, the young character from twenty years ago yearned to “meet a dream,” but now, this more recent young character wishes to return from a dream. Why has the meaning of dreams changed for your young characters? I once said in an acceptance speech that, “What matters more than the height of the leap is the place where you land.” I thought I was showing humility and a young author’s mettle, but now that I think about it, it wasn’t that I was trying to hide my own vanity, but rather some fear I had. After all, to land somewhere, to come back to Earth after a great leap, takes a lot of strength, effort, and courage. And to land somewhere, you first need height. You must experience that height. If we can call that height a dream or a fantasy, then perhaps what my early works captured was the sensation of measuring and savoring the distance between the sky and the earth with my body. In contrast, the arc of landing seems to be contained in my more recent works. In an interview, you mentioned that you write your characters while imagining them ten years in the future. It occurred to me that the characters in your latest novel could be both future versions of characters from previous novels, and past versions of characters from future novels. Are there any characters from past works that you would like to rewrite? I’ve sometimes caught myself continuing or rewriting previous short stories of mine. For example, “Knife Marks” and “Covering Hands” both explore motherhood from different angles. “Beginning of Winter” and “Like Raindrops” both explore the grieving process through the motif of applying wallpaper. The youth from “A Proud Life,” who cries because his book gets wet in the rain, becomes a member of the older generation in “A Good Neighbor,” willingly discarding perfectly good books. I plan to continue observing these character transformations.  I also want to ask you about some of the short stories you’ve published after Summer Outside. The two works that come to mind, “Foreign Body Sensation” and “Home Party,” seem more socially aware than Summer Outside. In particular, I think you highlight the hypocrisy and contradictions behind the desire for a middle-class life, a so-called “standard life.” By pointing out the fact that we’re all complicit in this hypocrisy, I think these works are a form of satire directed at the self. In this sense, your work seems to possess a strong sense of physicality as it is firmly rooted in this world. Do you think this rootedness is related to your attitude toward fiction? When I first started out, the “physicality” of my works was mostly tied to a character’s sense of daily life and their humor. But recently, it has also manifested in this critique of “complicity,” as you put it. I think this is because of my interest in bodies that awaken, that become courageous within their limitations and imperfections. These bodies take many forms—dying bodies, drunk bodies, desiring bodies, bodies that are socially conscious. When these “embodied” people make unexpected choices, I feel great humility. A person’s weight is not measured by their achievement in a single era, but by the sum of their contradictions, flaws, failures, and journeys throughout their lifetime. That is what we call life. At some point in time, various media elements—TV, internet, emails, webtoons—began to be highlighted and used as narrative devices in your novels. Of course, these forms of media shape stories in their own way. In this day and age, when these different forms of media compete against each other, what, in your view, is the significance of the novel? And what do you think the novel has contributed—or is contributing—to humanity’s story? In the past, I used to think that the virtue of novels was in their content. Empathy, understanding, imagining the Other—things like that. But these days, I wonder if the true value of literature and reading lies not in content, but in its form. Of course, I also learn a lot through modern media, just like everyone else. I’m often impressed not only by the narrative techniques they use but also by their themes and content. But I’m still skeptical of YouTube and social media, the two most dominant forms of media right now. I guess I’m a bit old-fashioned, despite being neither young nor old.        I should also mention that, with the rise of YouTube and Instagram, there has been a rise in people talking about themselves. Historically, there have never been so many “first-person perspectives.” But with so many “I”s in the world, why has self-alienation become so prevalent? In this age where self-obsession and self-alienation coexist, how can we engage with second- and third-person worlds in a healthy way? Is there a way to be an agent without being a main character? I often ask myself these questions because I, just like everyone else, am not free from such influences. That’s why I think attention has become the moral issue of this era. In a world of dopamine addiction, the strength and time to focus on one object, one issue, might itself be the key to living ethically. This makes me think anew about the importance of literature and reading. I’m fascinated by your comment about “being an agent without being a main character.” It almost seems loosely connected to your affection for adverbs over nouns. I am reminded of your discussion of adverbs in the book of essays, A Good Name to Forget. Teachers often warn students not to use adverbs too often because they are not essential to sentences and can lead to superfluous writing. And now that I think about it, as I write these questions and consider how they will be translated, I unconsciously try to minimize my use of adverbs. Could you share more about your deep fondness for adverbs? When I was young, I read a lot of writing manuals. While reading those books, I was often scolded by the authors for breaking their writing rules—authors who had never even met me! What I should have taken as mere guidelines became absolute truth, and this left me feeling discouraged. My essay about adverbs was my lighthearted rebellion against those early teachers. It was just a small act of defiance, but I got a real kick out of it. In all seriousness, however, adverbs do lead to a lot of wasted verbiage. Perhaps that’s why it’s more apparent in writing than in spoken communication. I suppose my point was that adverbs are a necessary waste. I wanted to defend vibrancy, playfulness, flexibility—all of which require adverbs. Ironically, the short stories and novels I personally admire are those with restrained poeticism. But even someone who hates vegetables can become a vegetarian. Perhaps what I love so much is not adverbs themselves, but rather what you might call the adverbial. And maybe that’s why I’ve never quite connected with rigid, “noun-centered” writing that asserts absolute certainty and claims a monopoly on the truth. The adverbial definitely seems at odds with today’s demands for cost-effectiveness, speed, and stimulation. The meaning of family in your novels has also undergone significant transformations. In a 2017 interview, you described family as three things: the first Other we encounter in life, the place where we practice emotions, and a pole that helps us jump over bars. If I asked you what family means to you now, would you answer differently? I doubt there are many people who have a smooth narrative of their own childhood. It’s my guess that most of us live with certain gaps and omissions, regardless of age or nationality. I often write about children who must fill in the holes their parents could not. In those stories, the tools of humor, imagination, and lying were very useful to me. Conversely, I have sometimes been too idealistic when depicting parents and children, attempting to erase feelings of guilt over parental devotion and sacrifice. I guess I needed an indirect method through which to engage with reality. That’s probably why I got a good laugh when I heard writer Ko Mi Sook say recently that family is a hotbed of lies. In my early years, I frequently used child narrators, but now, in my forties, I have become responsible for looking after my own parents. Through this, I’ve come to accept that we don’t need to idealize family to understand or care for it. At the same time, we don’t necessarily have to be apathetic about the empty spaces inside us, either. In your short story “They Said Annyeong,” which is featured in this issue of KLN, there is a scene in which the main characters part ways without being able to say goodbye. I guess I’m in the same situation right now. But before we leave, I want to ask you one last question: What are three works of yours that you want international readers to know about and why? Limiting myself to short stories, I guess I would suggest a few of my early works as well as my more recent ones. Two of these, in fact, will be included in my fifth short story collection, set to be published this year. “Home Party” is one.In writing this story, I wanted to tackle the topic of money during the COVID-19 pandemic. Or more specifically, I wanted to write about “social currency” and the parties held during times of isolation by the people who possessed it. No setting requires more social performances than parties, and what better character to play such a role than a struggling actor? That’s the idea behind that story. Then there’s “They Said Annyeong.”In the English language, subjects and objects are relatively clear. If only life were as simple. The main character of this story feels the wonder and angst of navigating between one’s mother tongue and a foreign language. A lonely woman, she uses learning a new language as an excuse to learn about life. Finally, “Who Sets Off Fireworks on the Beach without Thinking?”Throughout my career, I’ve written stories in only three different styles: writing a story I know in a familiar way, writing a story I don’t know in a familiar way, and writing a story I don’t know in an unfamiliar way. This novel was written in the last—and least frequent—style. That’s why, whenever I read it, I feel a strange mix of nostalgia and liberation. It’s a fun and beautiful story about two characters in the middle of the night battling for narrative control over a single story. Translated by Sean Lin Halbert  Kim Mijung is a literary critic and lecturer at Soongsil University. She is the author of Moving Constellations, a collection of literary criticism, and the co-author of How Do Post-War East Asian Women’s Narratives Converge? She has also translated The Power of Affect.  Korean Works Mentioned:•   Kim Ae-ran, Run, Dad! (Changbi, 2005)    김애란, 『달려라 아비』 (창비, 2005) •   Kim Ae-ran, Mouthwatering (Moonji, 2007)    김애란, 『침이 고인다』 (문학과 지성사, 2007) •   Kim Ae-ran, My Brilliant Life (tr. Chi-Young Kim, Forge Books, 2021)    김애란, 『두근두근 내 인생』 (창비, 2011) •   Kim Ae-ran, Vapor Trail (Moonji, 2012)    김애란, 『비행운』 (문학과 지성사, 2012) •   Kim Ae-ran, Summer Outside (Munhakdongne, 2017)    김애란, 『바깥은 여름』 (문학동네, 2017) •   Kim Ae-ran, A Good Name to Forget (Yolimwon, 2019)    김애란, 『잊기 좋은 이름』 (열림원, 2019)  •   Kim Ae-ran, A Lie Among Truths (Munhakdongne, 2024)    김애란, 『이중 하나는 거짓말』 (문학동네, 2024) •   Kim Ae-ran, et al, Collection of Stories on the Theme of Music (Franz, 2024)    김애란 등 『음악소설집』 (프란츠, 2024) •   Kim Yeonsu, “What Kind of Person Is Kim Ae-ran?” Literature and Society (Moonji, 2012)          김연수, 「김애란 씨는 어떤 사람인가요?」, 『문학과사회』 (문학과지성사, 2012)

• In Your 20s - Reliving the Most Painful, Brilliant Times: Novelist Kim Ae-ran

  Prologue In Korean culture, it is a compliment to be referred to as “precocious.” On the one hand, precocious means “mature beyond one’s age,” but it can also mean “being someone adults like.” Even though the label, “the youngest” always followed Kim Ae-ran around as she received numerous prestigious awards, adults become nervous when they hear her name. Their anxiety is attributed less to her reputation as a feisty novice or prodigy than to her being a young precocious writer. Readers who love her works report that they find Kim’s works surprising not because she is younger than they had imagined, but because she has “figured out things about life I don’t know.” Kim Ae-ran continues to make the older generation delightfully nervous as she, much to her embarrassment, continues to be an iconic figure in Korean literature in the 2000s. She is one the most influential young writers who speaks for 20-something young Korean men and women. I met the young Kim at Café Yri in the trendy Hongik University area. Jung Yeo-ul: When you first debuted, critics reviewed your short stories “I Go to the Convenience Store,” “Paper Fish,” and “Always the Narrator” as great depictions of Koreans in their 20s. What were some things you had in mind as you worked on these stories? Kim Ae-ran: I was born and raised in the provinces, so everything I saw in Seoul when I moved here for college seemed new and surprising. It was the first time I had my own apartment. Many things about Seoul caught my attention because I wasn’t familiar with the lifestyle and living space. I wondered why certain things were placed in certain spots, and why certain spaces were expanded. What I yearned for the most when I was in my 20s was a room of my own, so I suppose the stories were naturally suffused with my personal motivations.   Novelist Kim Ae-ran and critic Jung Yeo-ul Jung: “I Go to the Convenience Store” was especially well-received as a great portrait of young Koreans and the peculiar nature of convenience stores. Kim: I was a little nervous when I first wrote that piece. I wasn’t sure if I could craft it into a story. It was probably because the main character of the story was a space, not a person. Jung: I think such close descriptions of spaces can accurately express the sentiments of a generation. The convenience store, for example, is a place that’s meant for young adults to work and shop. It’s the most familiar space for them but it is also fraught with painful memories. I’m also curious about your thoughts on the way society sees people in their 20s. If I were in my 20s now, I would be very uncomfortable with the label, “880 Thousand-Won Generation.” Isn’t it also problematic that society sees them as lacking love, romance and passion, which is what the 20s should be all about? Kim: I think that, to a certain extent, each generation has misconceptions and fantasies about the other generations that often lead to disappointment. I thought it was interesting that the monikers for previous generations such as “4.19” or “386” came from political contexts whereas the names for our generation came from our economic circumstances. “4.19” or “386” sounds like an accomplishment or a result, whereas “880 Thousand-Won” seems to refer to our present circumstances. When I think of my friends while we were all in our 20s, I remember how the low pay relative to their efforts wore them out. The “880 Thousand-Won Generation” seems like one interpretation or explanation for people in their 20s, but I hoped to portray something beyond that in my stories—people who aren’t satisfied with what they have and are in need of something more. I suppose I placed greater faith in the portrait of a generation that surfaces through the portrayal of one individual rather than the attempt to describe the whole generation. I also hope that what I say does not work against what I write by getting too far ahead. Jung: Kim Young-ha’s Quiz Show reminds us of just how difficult it is to be in your 20s in Korean society today. The current generation of people in their 20s is educated, cultured, and more fluent in English than ever before and yet their gateway to society is so narrow. Their trials were quite heartbreaking in this novel. How do you feel about this perspective on people in their 20s? Kim: I guess being the most privileged generation also means we are obligated to have reached a higher standard before we can be referred to as “average.” I think I’ve mentioned in a story that while for the previous generation poverty is a fond memory and a heroic tale, it is a secret and a shameful one for our generation. It is true that our generation is on the whole much more well off, but who’s to decide what’s “average?” Even when people are in the same biological age bracket, they lead vastly different lives depending on class and region. So I wonder to what extent the word “generation” can bind all those in their 20s together. Jung: At the end of the day, the generational gap inevitably has areas of convergence with the class gap. When I was in school, class trips were always some place within the country like Gyeongju or Sorak Mountain, but I hear traveling abroad is becoming more common. But not everyone can afford it, so children start to encounter economic and cultural marginalization from an earlier stage in their lives. In that context, your “Christmas Specials” really speaks to the generational and class struggles. I know quite a few people who teared up reading that story. The sufferings of people in their 20s who must endure poverty at their most carefree and dazzling age comes through very movingly in your story. Kim: It’s the most scandalous story I’ve ever written, too. (laughs) I’ve lived in university neighborhoods for a long time and have seen lots of love motels of different sizes. Every time one of those bright yet eerie signs caught my eye, I used to think, “Lots of people are ‘doing it’ today, too. They’re so sedulously going at it…” I found it somewhat poignant. (laughs) It’s one interesting phenomena in large cities, especially Seoul, where one can’t find a room on Christmas Eve. The story was inspired by the fact that all these young people want is to “do it” but they’re not even allowed that. Jung: I feel there are too many events and “special” days these days. One prime example is Christmas. When I was young, people did not use to get so stressed over Christmas. I think the obsession with doing or giving something special on Christmas became far worse after 2000. The desire to consume has becomes greater than ever but few are capable of satisfying their needs, so people constantly suffer from a relative sense of loss. I think the 20s is when such a sense of inadequacy is most acutely felt. And I wonder if the sharp decline of patriarchal influence around the house has anything to do with the economic pain people in their 20s feel. Since the economic crisis at the turn of the century, it feels being a good father has become extremely hard to achieve. Your most acclaimed work, Run, Pop, Run! is a very meaningful, insightful testament to this power shift. Your story essentially looks at the fall or absence of the father figure from a child’s perspective and depicts the dysfunctional relationship like no story has ever done before. Kim: For me, Run, Pop, Run! was the first story where I started to talk about the father figure. I started out with “Fathers are…” and then I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. I summoned up the character and then couldn’t figure out what to do with it, so I guess I started making fun of it and inviting it to play with me. Jung: For our last questions, I would like to ask what advice you have for people in their 20s. Koreans in their 20s today tend to feel cornered. Their college tuition fees are astronomical, their debt from college is bound to restrict them with bad credit the moment they graduate, and they spend years after graduation not knowing when they will be hired, if they are ever going to be hired. No one needs more encouragement and help than they do, but it seems they are the most neglected. How would they make it in a world where they have so many wants and not enough means? What would you, as a recent graduate of the 20s, say to them? Kim: I don’t think I’m in any position to hand out wholesome advice. Not because they’re so lofty, but because advice often tends to turn a situation into one’s own fault. The moment you say, “cheer up,” it is as though their failure is attributed to their lack of cheeriness. I think that to give advice to people, you have to have the right aura. I’m not one of those people. I’m still swayed by my own petty desires. I get depressed because I can’t have something I want, and I am not free from the pressures of consumerism. So I can’t just tell people that it’s nothing. But I also have the desire to bring whatever lives inside of me to the surface, and maybe find and foster whatever healthy or wholesome being that lives there. I know this makes me happy, and I think it’ll be similar with other people. I chose the novel to express these thoughts because I couldn’t turn them into one neat sentence or unambiguously be defeated or encouraged by what I have. So I can’t give people in their 20s some heartfelt advice, “Do such and such” or “I hope you do this or that.” But I can say that I hope to continue the dialogue with my readers and the characters from my stories that keep looking back at me through the eyes of people in their 20s. I hope to remain a writer who contemplates the times we are living in.   Epilogue The older generation in Korea worries about the generation in their 20s more than ever. The older generation worries that 20-somethings have no gumption, no passion, and no vision when they should be full of dreams, love, and passion. The awful label, “880 Thousand-Won Generation” is often a reflection of the older generation’s merciless judgment. But the young characters in Kim Ae-ran’s stories suggest that what these young people need is not pity or concern, but to be simply left alone. The labels such as “Boomerang Kids (children who move back in with their parents)” or “Yi Tae-baek (Isiptae taebani baeksu, or “half the twenties are unemployed”) are ones imposed on them, not how they see themselves. Young people, more so in their 20s than in any other time in their lives, have a right to be sensitive about what it means to “be myself” and constantly, unabashedly search for a way to be who they are. Kim Ae-ran is a writer who knows how important it is to contemplate “how I can be true to myself in life.” It is always a pleasure to watch her as she finds her own path unaltered by readers, critics, or other writers, for her characters seem to put us on the right path through their journeys to find themselves.   By Jung Yeo-ul   1. My Palpitating Life (Kim Ae-ran, Changbi Publishers, Inc.2011, 354p, ISBN 9788936433871)2. Mouthwatering (Kim Ae-ran, Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd.2007, 309p, ISBN 9788932018041)3. Run, Pop, Run! (Kim Ae-ran, Changbi Publishers, Inc.2005, 268p, ISBN 9788936436902)

FICTION

• They Said Annyeong Vol. 67 Spring 2025

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

• [Excerpt] No Knocking in This House Vol.48 Summer 2020

  In this house, there lived five girls who were complete strangers. Some of them were university students and some office workers. All the girls appeared to be in their early twenties. Though I didn’t know what they did for a living, or what their faces looked like, one thing was certain: this house was not a home.  Every morning, these five strangers used the same bathroom. Sometimes, I would see the traces of the last person who used the toilet without flushing. Or I would see their laundry, smell their food.  When one girl was using the bathroom, the other four would wait even after it was clear that she had exited the bathroom until they heard the door shut, signaling she had returned to her room. Unless that distinct sound was heard, the remaining girls did not dare open their doors. As if we had all taken a vow, the five girls’ movements were orchestrated around the sounds of closing doors. Occasionally, we missed our timing and caught a glimpse of each other’s faces, becoming strangely startled and immediately shutting our respective doors. The faces that we saw in those moments were fragmented halves, sometimes thirds.  But of course, even in a place like this, faceless incidents occurred. There were the crying sounds of a girl drifting in from one room, the sock always left behind in the washing machine by a girl in another room, the frequent male visitor invited over by a girl in yet another.  Once, the stench of alcohol wafted in from the hallways for three days straight. There had been a huge commotion all night, with a man kicking the front door and the girl in the last room in the hallway bawling. The girls in the other four rooms seemed to be enduring the racket well, or maybe they were simply uninterested. Based on the sounds of her frequently popping in and out of the bathroom, it seemed like the girl had gone on a bender. The sour stink of vomit permeated the other rooms, and the man called out the girl’s name. When things had finally settled down, I ventured outside to use the bathroom. Spotting the vomit-filled plastic bag in front of her door, I suddenly recalled her name, which I now knew thanks to that guy.  The next morning, the upstairs landlady came down to our floor. Standing near the front door and facing the five rooms, she loudly screeched, “Who was it?!” She spoke informally, without any honorifics. Burrowing myself into the depths of my blanket, I tried to hide as much as I possibly could. She had the habit of ending all of her sentences with a “Huh?” as in “So you think that’s okay? Huh?” For ten whole minutes, she stood in the hallway and clamored on before finally returning upstairs. However, the five, tightly shut rooms remained as silent as graves.  I wasn’t sure when any of the girls started living in their respective rooms. I moved here about three months ago. Back then, I’d taken a leave of absence from school and was working part-time at a convenience store for 2,500 won an hour. When I first arrived, I anticipated introducing myself to everyone and possibly arranging a regular get-together, similar to a monthly neighborhood association meeting where we would effectively discuss any communal problems. But it seemed like this place had been running along just fine for a long time without such things, and it didn’t seem like the previous tenants would appreciate a newcomer interfering, so I soon gave up.      The house was located in a residential area near a university, with a semi-basement and two half-stories—floors 1.5 and 2.5. Given the awkward height, the floors weren’t low enough to count as the ground floor or the basement, but also weren’t high enough to be considered a second story. When I first came to see the house, I was struck by the feeling that I was staring at a huge disfigured beast. The tenants lived on floors 1.5 and .5 (that is, the semi-basement), while the landlady lived alone on floor 2.5. In her late fifties, the landlady possessed a round physique with prominent double eyelids. When I first met her to inquire about renting a room, she handed me a cup of citron tea and bragged about her son who had already become a university lecturer. She had a fast-speaking, high-pitched voice that stood in stark contrast to her slow-witted appearance. At times, I couldn’t make out what she was saying.  Floor 1.5, where I was living, was shaped like the Korean letter giyeok, or ㄱ, turned upside-down. The vertical axis of the giyeok faced the bathroom and three of the rooms, with another room located at the corner, and the last room on the horizontal one. I lived in the first room opposite the bathroom, right in front of the entrance. The landlady called me “Ms. Room One.” Three months since my arrival passed, and I had yet to see any of the girls that lived in the other four rooms. At first, I thought that it was because most of them left the house in the morning, while I left in the afternoon for my part-time job. However, it didn’t take long for me to realize that none of the girls in this place had ever seen the others’ faces. Sometimes, I came across a pair of baggy cotton panties that had been set out to dry by the heavy-set girl living in the room in front of mine, or the trash bag dropped in front of the room by the girl next door who left for work at seven in the morning, or the slippers placed in front of each person’s door after midnight. A few days after my initial arrival, I discovered that the girl in the last room used acupuncture slippers with special inner soles, that the girl in room three washed her sheets excessively, and that the girl in room five would frequently do her laundry and forget it in the machine.  In the center of the long and narrow hallway, there was a drying rack for laundry that we all shared. The rack was perched in front of room two, and in order for the girls in rooms four and five to go to the bathroom in front of room one—my room—they had to turn sideways and shuffle along to squeeze through the tiny space left between the hallway and laundry rack. And in order for me to go to the utility room next to room five, I had to cross the hallway in the same manner. Taking turns, we all hung our laundry there. Though we hadn’t made any special promise or arrangements for the laundry rack, we tended to be fair and used it without any particular difficulties. This was probably because we each moved with extreme care, crouched in our rooms and holding our breaths as we waited for the sounds of the washing machine spinning, the laundry being shaken out, or the sight of the laundry rack as we passed the hallway—the signals that guided our movements. On weekends, our laundry times would occasionally overlap, forcing us to hang our laundry inside our own room as someone else’s clothes occupied the rack. In those moments, my room became cramped and unbearable.  One time, my turn to use the laundry rack did not come for so long that I was starting to run out of clean clothes. At every spare moment, I carefully scanned the laundry rack to see if it was empty yet, but days passed and the thought of taking down the laundry had apparently never crossed its owner’s mind. Wondering if I should wait a little longer, I suddenly spotted a large red plastic tub in the bathroom; I folded the laundry and placed it there. Four pairs of slippers were messily strewn across the front of the entrance, indicating that I was alone in the house. The clothes on the laundry rack were mostly ordinary, ready-to-wear clothes. They were unusually large, their probable owner the girl in the room across from mine. None of the clothes looked stiff or uncomfortable, so she probably didn’t work in an office. Wearily slung over the laundry rack, the oversized clothes were covered in lint. A large yellowish stain marked the front of a pair of worn-out panties. I abruptly thought to myself, “She definitely doesn’t have a boyfriend.” The majority of the clothes were bone-dry, but a single corset hanging heavily from the end of the rack was dripping water onto the floor. Except for this corset, I gently put all the clothes into the plastic tub and gingerly placed them in front of room number two. Maybe she’ll be happy to see her laundry so nicely folded after returning from a long day at work, I thought.  That night, I saw a Post-it note stuck to the bottom of the empty plastic tub.  Please don’t touch my clothes.    As far as I knew, I was the only smoker in the house. For the first few weeks after I moved here, I suppressed my urges, worried about what others might think or that I might bother them. However, at a certain point, I naturally started smoking cigarettes in the bathroom or in my own room. Standing on my tiptoes near a window, I took anxious drags from my cigarette. The sheer possibility of the landlady coming downstairs and spotting the smoke filled me with worry. Without smoking even half the cigarette, I hastily stubbed it out, cracked open the window, sprayed fabric softener on the floor, and waited. And waited. Finally, realizing that it would be awkward for me to continue occupying the bathroom, I left. As soon as I did, I heard the sounds of someone barging into the bathroom, as if they had been praying for me to hurry up and leave, clutching the door handle and silently blaming me for their stomach pain. For some reason, that sound—that speed—grated on my nerves.  That night, I went to the bathroom to take a shower. Stuck to the bathroom door was a Post-it note that hadn’t been there before.  Whoever has been using a flame in their room, please be careful. For all our sakes.  Although I had no reason to, I felt ashamed. I thought of the awkwardly formal voices of the girls, imagining their whole faces from the halves or thirds that I had glimpsed as they ran off to hide in their rooms. I imagined that one pupil, that one tense eye on the remaining shard of their faces, hidden behind the door, shrinking away as if burrowing underneath the skin. Maybe all the girls’ faces had been burned on one side? Maybe four girls, all with the same half-burned face, had somehow ended up living together in this house with five rooms and I was the only who didn’t know. Or were they the ones that didn’t know? Perhaps there had once been a fire in this house and those girls, at the same time and place . . . something like that?  But I knew there had never been anything like a fire in this house. Moreover, I was fairly certain that one of the girls had an extremely adorable and pretty face. Something to celebrate, that.  The bathroom in this house was slightly larger than one pyeong and didn’t have a bathtub or sink basin—just a showerhead and a toilet. Two shelves were attached to the wall. On the shelves, five shower caddies, five soaps, five toothbrushes, five towels. There was a single tube of toothpaste that looked like it hadn’t been used in a while. Someone had likely left it out and another girl had also started using it, but after seeing how quickly it emptied out within a single week, they had both become embarrassed at the mistake and now, nobody touched it. When mine is gone, I’ll use yours; I have mine, but I’ll still use yours—all five girls seemed to be guilty of this.  The toilet was a water-saving model, and placed next to the toilet was a trash can that you could open by pressing a pedal with the tip of your foot. Once a week, the landlady took out the bathroom trash and cleaned the bathroom. While the latter tended to be fairly clean, the trash can was constantly overflowing. Though the trash bag was only big enough to contain four days’ worth of our trash, the landlady forced us to use it for an entire week. Since I loathed the sight of pads sticking out from the trash can lid, I would habitually stomp the trash farther down after using the bathroom.  When I first came to this house, I hated feeling my slippers dampen every time I had to use the bathroom, so I started leaning them against the doorway. Soon afterwards, it seemed like a few of the other girls, though not all of them, started doing this as well. There came a moment when I started to make judgments as to who did, and who did not, put up their shoes. Even without ever having seen their faces, I had my own grounds for these determinations. Through careful observation, it was clear that those who cleaned up their stray hairs after showering always did so, and those that didn’t never would. The person who entered the bathroom only when everyone else left for work was always the same, just as the person who always got the toilet seat wet during their shower, making it uncomfortable for everyone else, was always the same. I classified them according to the slippers.  Of course, that person was not just one person. That these kinds of incidents kept repeating, despite the numerous, incorrectly-spelled warnings the landlady had posted on the bathroom wall, was likely due to the “habits” of these five girls who had all grown up separately until now, into their twenties. Something that was fine to the girl in room one could be absolutely intolerable to the girl in room three; something unthinkable to the girl in room four could be entirely trivial to the girl in room two. It took me, someone who had only ever lived alone before coming here, over one month to understand this.  Yet being able to understand something and being able to tolerate it are entirely different matters. When my tolerance finally reached its breaking point, I would become furious. The racket from Room Four every night, as if she was hosting a new student orientation there. The selfishness of Room Three, who raised the heater as soon as I lowered it, as if we were in a silent argument. The laziness of Room Two who, even though she hated me touching her laundry, would not put it away herself. The carelessness of Room Five, who constantly startled me with her door slamming. But even so, nobody complained or attempted to make excuses. In reality, all of us—Rooms One, Two, Three, Four, and Five—constantly had our eyes and ears wide open, and were living too closely together and thus, too far apart.  There were many houses like this one in the surrounding area, and more popped up every day. Most recently, a three-story building was quickly being constructed behind this house. Every morning, I covered my ears with my pillow in an attempt to block out the construction noises and tossed and turned; every morning, the landlady went outside and fought with the workers. She started with “Our poor students can’t even sleep in on the weekends, what is this?”; then moved on to “The cement is spilling over here, won’t it plug up the drains?”; “Who’s the owner?”; and then finally escalated to wailing, “I have to protect my assets too!” Afterwards, she would climb the stairs to our floor, catch sight of the trash bags littering the hallway, and immediately start yelling, “Do these kids think that this place is a dump?!” The girls wanted to protest, saying that if they left the trash in their rooms, it would quickly get smelly, but the landlady followed up her fury with “How can you leave the lights on during the day?!” We wanted to rebut that it was too dark if we didn’t turn on the lights, but the landlady would then complain about whoever left the hot water on and in this manner, conducted a full-blown interrogation. Without stirring an inch from my blankets, I mumbled to myself, “But I didn’t do it . . .” The landlady, the same woman who had kindly offered me citron tea and boasted about her son when I first came to visit, stood alone in the empty hallway for some time, panting and gasping until she finally left. A few minutes later, I heard the sound of someone flushing the toilet.    I took care of tidying the shoes in the house. The landlady organized and cleaned the communal spaces of the inn-style rooms, but she couldn’t very well organize the shoes as well, and doing so would have been strange. My role in straightening up the shoes in this house was purely voluntary.  Whenever I saw the scattered shoes at the entrance, I always became irritated. I was fixated on organizing the shoes because I hated seeing the mess, infuriated by the reality that at dinner time, all five rooms were occupied. Everyone had their own room, their proper spots, but I felt like I was suffocating. During the afternoons and weekends, only about two people were home at any given time. In those moments, I napped with a carefree heart, or listened to music, idly lounging about my room. Even when I went to the bathroom, even when I hung my laundry, my heart was at peace. But things were different at night. Everyone left in the morning but at night, they would return. And at night, those shoes would return and with them, their owners.  The girls’ shoes varied, ranging from the ragged to the sleek, the common to the sophisticated. They were all different sizes, with a single pair of unusually large sneakers. They likely belonged to the girl in room two. One by one, I would pick up the shoes and place them on the shoe rack. With the shoes hidden away, the entrance neatly emptied out and I felt a strange sense of relief.  One day, I found the third Post-it note stuck to the front door.  When you leave, please make sure you lock the door. Somebody here had their shoes stolen.  I guessed that the person who wrote the note was also the owner of these stolen shoes. The disappearing shoes. It seemed she suspected they had been stolen by someone inside the house. Then, the note—was it a quiet complaint directed towards the other four girls, one of us?

• Knife Marks Vol.45 Autumn 2019

  The tip of my mother’s knife holds the indifference of a person who has spent her whole life feeding other people. My mother, to me, was not a woman who cries or woman who wears makeup or a woman who submits, but a woman who wields a knife. Who is healthy and beautiful but chomps on fish cake even when she is all dressed up. A country woman who does not realize how loudly she is chewing her food. My mother used the same knife for over twenty-five years. That’s roughly as old as I am. Through the slicing, chopping, and mincing, the knife grew paper-thin. As I chewed, swallowed, and slurped, my intestines and my liver, heart, and kidneys grew. Along with the food my mother made for me, I swallowed the knife marks that were left on the ingredients. Countless knife marks are engraved in the dark insides of my body. They travel along my veins and play on my nerves. That’s why a mother is a painful thing to me. It’s something the organs all know. I understand the word heartache physically. My mother sharpened her knife frequently. When it was time to split open blue crabs thick with eggs in April or sever the hind legs of a butchered dog, she took the grindstone out two or three more times that week. A rancid smell rose from the drain in the bare cement floor. When she squatted on the kitchen floor sharpening her knife, she looked big and round, like the mother of all animals. T-shirt rolled up above the flab around her waist, pale tailbone showing carelessly above her underwear. I saw the shadow of a disappearing tribe in my mother’s silhouette. Maybe that was because the language she spoke was one used by a smaller country of people within the small country of Korea. The same way that Bengal tigers have their own Bengal tiger language, and Siberian tigers have their own Siberian tiger language. My mother’s language that I suddenly became aware of when I got older. I had a premonition that it would soon disappear, like a beautiful scenic spot. A mother usually dies before her cub, and the words she uses are older than her young. Oddly, this is what I thought of each time my mother sharpened her knife. Just as I constantly had to feed, my mother always had to be making something. When I saw her soaking, salting, and storing this and that in the kitchen even when there was nothing that had to be done, I wanted to be lazy and bratty, like a baby animal. So even though I knew she was busy, I would sprawl on the floor and watch TV or lean in the door and complain. At sunset, the smell of cooking rice slowly filled the air. The house pulsed with the sound of chopping. It was a cozy and natural sound, like the faint whisper at dawn of uncooked rice being washed. I used to try holding the knife she used. For the simple reason that it was a dangerous object, I thought I was in control of it. The wooden knife handle was wrapped with yellow tape. Over the years, the handle had been replaced several times, but the blade was the same. The blade had lost its shine from being sharpened so many times, but after all that wearing down, it gave off a hardened glow from within. I wasn’t trying to see love or sacrifice in her knife. I just saw a mother in it. And at those times, I wasn’t her child but her cub.     My mother sold noodles for over twenty years. The restaurant was called Sweet ‘n’ Tasty. She had taken over someone’s failed bakery and kept the sign in place. Selling kalguksu, knife-cut noodles, is one business a woman from the countryside can start with a small amount of capital. The recipe for kalguksu is simple. You boil short-necked clams, kelp, green onions, garlic, and salt in a pot, then add the noodles halfway through and cook it until they are done. But even as a kid, I knew that the simpler a dish is, the more the flavor can differ according to skill. My mother’s kalguksu was superb. So was her kongguksu, chilled noodles served in a soymilk broth in the summer. All summer, while the noodles boiled on the stove, she chugged bowls of fresh soymilk with ice floating in it. The white milk dried and stuck to the peach fuzz around her lips. I would stare blankly at her until she fed me a bowl of sweetened soymilk. Sweet ‘n’ Tasty was booming. Farmers coming a long way to market, employees of the Community Credit Cooperative, Agricultural Cooperative, and Fisheries Cooperative, middle school teachers, and bar girls looking to sober up all ate noodles at our place. There were more than a few out-of-towners as well, and my mother could always tell what their relationship was from the way they ate. After serving the food out front, I would narrow my eyes and ask, “I bet they’re having an affair.” She would scold me first, then agree, saying, “They sure are.” My mother was proud of her own cooking. The noodles were important, but the secret to the broth was in the kimchi. She made kimchi once every four days. The image of my mother with her upper body thrust inside a large plastic basin, mixing the seasonings for the kimchi, was a familiar sight in front of our restaurant. She looked like she was squirming to avoid slipping into the underworld through the portal of the basin. I remember how small bubbles and kimchi juice would leak out from between the soft, wilted cabbage leaves whenever she took out a freshly ripened head and began slicing it. When she boiled the noodles, I stood at her side with my mouth wide open like a baby swallow. She would pluck out the freshly cooked noodles with her chopsticks. Then she would pick up a piece of kimchi with her bare hand and stuff it into my mouth any which way. The kimchi tasted sharp, like soda. The flavor of my mother’s fingers when they entered my gaping maw, her flesh, tasted tepid and plain. I loved the clear, fresh sound and the crunch of the kitchen knife slicing through a whole head of cabbage. The inside of the dusky kitchen, the bones of sunlight slanting in through the ventilator, and my mother’s profile as she stood close to that light— I loved that, too. There were five knives in the kitchen. My mother used only one of them to slice the dough into noodles. The rest of the knives were for peeling fruit or shelling clams, or were lent to others when it was time to make kimchi to store away for the winter. My mother could slice noodles even with her eyes closed. Her right hand chopped while the two fingers of her left hand inched backwards in time with the knife. There was no fear and no hesitation in her chopping. It held the confidence of a person who has mastered a single technique over a long period of time and the reassurance that she’s putting food on the table, mixed with the weariness of doing the same simple task over and over. She used a metal spoon to scrape off the dough that clung to the knife. I put on Dad’s big sweatpants and helped out with chores. When I was a teenager, my legs shook whenever I ran into a boy I liked while I was out delivering trays of food. My feisty mother was a nagger. “With green onions, you have to wash the crotch really well,” she’d say. “I told you to mop the floor, not flood it. Why didn’t it occur to you to clean the spoon cases as well, since you were already wiping the tables? Just leave it, I’ll do it, you don’t know how.” I would tell her I could do it if she would just show me, that it couldn’t be that hard. But each time, my mother would act high and mighty. “Just leave it, I’ll do it, you don’t know how,” I chatted while helping her. And I would talk back on purpose, because I liked getting a rise out of her. If she said, “It’s hard to run a business,” I would chide her, saying, “Did you think raising a kid would be easy?” She would smile sweetly, then suddenly pretend to aim her knife at me. She didn’t hesitate to say, “I’ll gut you!” Like parents who give their kids noogies, she was theatrical in her scoldings. I was scared silly of the blade that swung my way with no warning. But behind the shock was the reassurance and immense trust that she would never ever hurt me. My mother took delight in scaring and surprising her little cub. Once when I was six years old, she pretended to fall into a fit of convulsions and die. I was supposed to weep and wail beside her fake corpse all night long. Another time, my mother stuck a kidney bean down the back of my shirt and yelled, “Pillbug!” She couldn’t stop laughing at the sight of me rolling around on the floor. Each time something like this happened, I cried loudly, then was able to fall asleep with the most peaceful look on my face. My mother would point her knife at me, but she was the one who was often hurt by that knife. When the restaurant was busy, she would get flustered and cut herself. Once opened, the wound was slow to heal. That was because her wet hands never had chance to dry and because she sprinkled most of the seasonings into the pot with her bare hands. She did all of the cooking, serving, cashiering, cleaning, and dishwashing by herself. But she said she never felt tired because it was so exciting to see the money roll in. One day, she cut three of her fingers at once while slicing the noodles. She stanched the bleeding with a pained look on her face, and kept slicing noodles and serving them. The blood wouldn’t stop flowing. Her thumbnail had already fallen off. Before long, there was a problem with one of the orders. Blood was smeared on the side of the white plastic bowl. Luckily, it had gone to a sweet country granny. My mother kept bowing her head and saying she would bring her a new bowl. The old lady neatly wiped the side of the bowl with her hand, which was as gnarled as tree bark. Then she said calmly, “My my, there’s blood on here.” The old lady slurped the noodles into her wrinkled mouth and turned to my mother. “Not too hurt, are you?” My mother said, before that day, she had never felt so grateful to a customer. One of her rules that she kept as keenly as her knife was the order in which food should be served. Of course, it would have been the same in any shop. Even when customers poured in at the same time, my mother knew whose foot had crossed the threshold first. Though part of it was that customers hated it when the order got mixed up, it was also because, a long time ago, there was a woman who took the bowl of noodles she’d just been served and went outside and poured it into the street. My mother seemed to have been wounded by that. All sorts of things happen when you run a restaurant, but she remembered even the little things like that. Even the customer she said she remembered the most vividly wasn’t that remarkable. One day, a man came in and ordered two bowls of noodles. He asked for a private room, so she set a table for him in our house, which was attached to the restaurant. The only thing on the table was noodles, hot pepper paste, and a small bowl of kimchi. The man asked for an empty bowl. She watched him closely, wondering why he needed it. He turned the bowl over and used it to cover the noodles across the table from his. It seemed he did it to keep them warm. Soon, a woman showed up. She smiled and removed the bowl, then lifted her chopsticks. The two of them ate with their heads touching in an intimate silence. My mother watched them in a daze. She saw them through the eyes of a woman who had never received that kind of small warmth, such an ordinary kindness. A good cook, a hard worker, and a great cusser, my mother felt something inscrutable. There is a time in our lives when a momentous silence passes over us, and for my mother, that would have been it. It was twenty-five years ago when my mother came across that knife. She found it in some marketplace in Incheon where my father worked. She had gone to the market holding her pregnant belly and ran into a knife peddler at the corner of a vegetable shop. A soldier’s steel helmet was turned upside down like a bowl on top of an apple crate sitting in front of the man. He struck the helmet with the knife—thwack! thwack!—and shouted, “It’s still sharp!” The women were all abuzz. My mother marveled warily at the knife peddler through the eyes of an inexperienced newlywed. The man held the knife aloft and said it wasn’t just stainless steel but “special” stainless steel. Cast-iron knives are heavy and rust easily, and stainless steel is too flimsy, he said, but this knife was perfect, just right. The handle was round and sturdy, made from pine. My mother bought the knife for 1,500 won. She wasn’t sure if it was a rip-off, but she needed it for her new home and had fallen for the knife’s solidness—a certain dignity, perhaps. That day, as she climbed the steep path home, clutching the knife rolled up in cardboard, she said she felt her heart pound like that of a girl clutching a love letter. From then on, she clasped not the sparkle of a ring but the flash of a butcher’s knife. (Excerpt from pp. 151-159)  

• Run, Dad! Vol.40 Summer 2018

  Mom’s a taxi driver. At first I figured she took the job so she could keep an eye on me as she threaded her way through the streets of Seoul. Then one day I surmised that maybe she drove a taxi because she wanted to run faster than dad. I imagined the two of them running side by side, now one in the lead, now the other. Racketing through my mind were images of mom’s face, twenty years of resentment stamped on it as she hit the accelerator, and dad’s face when his whereabouts were discovered. Maybe mom thought that the best revenge wasn’t catching him, but running faster. Mom found the taxi job tough. The distrust directed at an underpaid woman driver and the ridicule of drunken passengers were hard to take. It didn’t stop me though from asking her regularly for money. Had I plastered politeness on top of my inscrutability, I think mom would have felt even worse. Of course, she never gave me more money because she felt she owed it to me. She gave me what I asked for, but I didn’t forget what she said: “Everything I earn goes up the kid’s hole while I fuck myself trying to make a living.” It had been a normal run-of-the-mill day for me. I got lectured by mom for eating with the TV on. I had to listen silently to her long-winded account of a fight with a passenger the night before. She got so worked up telling the story that she threw down her spoon and cried, “Fuck it, was I so wrong?” She was looking for solidarity from me, so I had to give a good answer. And as I slipped into my runners, I had to explain to her how I proposed to use the 10,000 won I had asked her for. Half-slumped over my desk at school, I watched the trainee teacher struggling to swallow his nonexistent saliva. For a fatherless child, there was nothing particularly bad or different about this very ordinary day. At least not until I got home. Mom was sitting glum-faced in the middle of the room. She had a one-page letter in her hand. The envelope, torn open roughly, lay on the floor, the same floor she had once stabbed with the scissors. I knew from the address that it had been sent airmail. Mom couldn’t read the letter, but she sat there looking at it, filled with a strange feeling of foreboding. Her face betrayed her unease; she was like a woman from the country who didn’t know what to do. “How long has she been like this?” I muttered to myself, snatching the letter. “What does it say?” she asked, looking at me intently. The letter was in English. I began a groping explanation of its contents, aware that it involved some loss of face for me. At first I didn’t understand, but after reading it two or three times, I realized that it held very important news for us. “What does it say?” she asked again. I swallowed. “It says dad’s dead.” She looked at me with the darkest of dark faces. Mom always reacted with a witty remark when I wore that kind of expression. I wanted to say something witty too, but I couldn’t think of anything appropriate. In a way, dad had come home—gossamer like—in the mail, twenty years late. Dad had come home—like a statement of good will, motivation unknown—like thunderous applause at the end of an interminable play. A death notice with a strange intonation. In the end, maybe dad’s reason for running to the four corners of the earth was to tell us that he was dead. He had traveled to distant places and had come back now to tell us he was dead. But dad hadn’t really been racing around the world; he’d been living in America. Dad’s son sent the letter, which I deciphered in bed with the help of a dictionary. This is what it said. Dad married in America. I was a bit surprised by this. I couldn’t understand why he had abandoned mom unless he didn’t want a family. Either he loved the second woman a lot, or it wasn’t as easy to run away in America. A few years later he got divorced. The exact reason for the divorce wasn’t specified, but I guessed it had to do with his basic incompetence. His wife demanded alimony. Dad hadn’t a penny so he offered to cut her grass every weekend. I remember hearing that in America you could get reported to the authorities by your neighbors for not cutting your grass. She promptly married a man with a lawn the size of a football field. Every week dad pressed the doorbell as promised, stuck his face in front of the security camera, said “Hello,” and trudged in to cut the grass. Imagine it. While she sat cozily in the living room drinking beer with her new husband, he crouched down outside tinkering with the lawnmower. In the beginning they might have been a bit put off by him, but I'm sure she said to her husband, “Don’t pass any remarks, John.” Dad soon became irrelevant. When he looked through the thick glass wall of the living room and saw them making out, he revved the engine and strode up and down outside. The boy who sent the letter insisted that this is what dad did—maybe he wanted to give his dad’s bereaved foreign family some words of comfort. What kind of kid, I wondered, would write so pryingly and in such detail? Obviously he didn’t think he was anything like his dad. I imagined the pair’s lovemaking in the living room. Nipple and breath stuck fast to the glass; the blinds hurriedly pulled down. I look at them from a great distance, my eyes slit in a frown. Brrrng! Dad charges with his lawnmower. But his attack peters out, and he goes back to striding impatiently up and down outside. When the woman couldn’t take it anymore, she gave him the latest automatic gasoline model as a present. But dad insisted on using the old model in the shed. He went around the garden making the same awful din.   Junior High Entrance Ceremony © Cho Jang Eun   One day dad and the new husband had a fight. It began when the new husband started criticizing the way dad was cutting the grass. Dad held his tongue though it was killing him; he just kept cutting the grass. The new husband’s griping went on and on; eventually he began to curse. All this time dad had been silently cutting the grass. Suddenly he lifted the old lawnmower with its furiously whirring blade and charged. The new husband slumped to the ground in a blue paroxysm of fear. I don’t think dad had any intention of hurting him, but unfortunately, he did get hurt. Now it was dad’s turn to react with shocked dismay. At the sight of his own blood the injured man lost all control. Every curse in the language poured from his lips and he ended up reporting dad to the police. Dad took fright. He hesitated for a moment, then ran to the shed, saw the new lawnmower in the corner, hopped on it like a gunman jumping on his horse in a western, and with his heart pounding, switched on the ignition, spurred the mower out of the shed and dashed out onto the road. Dad fled at the top speed the mower could muster, scattering the smell of fresh grass cuttings behind him. Where was he heading? The letter ended by saying that dad was killed in a traffic accident. The son said the family had been truly saddened by his death. They held a simple service at the cemetery. Regrettably, the son said, he never liked dad very much. When he was a kid, he said, dad left him in front of the TV to go to work and he used to wait there all day. That’s how he grew up. He was hoping now he would be able to forget dad. Though he had never met his foreign half-sister, he wanted me to know that he also grew up waiting for dad, so he knew the pain. “I found your address in my dad’s belongings,” he continued. “My mom doesn’t know I’m writing this letter.” It all seemed like lies. Actually I was the real liar. I told mom that dad had been killed in a traffic accident, but I didn’t tell her what kind of accident. “Why is the letter so long?” she asked. “English is always longer than Korean,” I said. Then she asked if there was anything else in it. How he lived, who he lived with? Was there really nothing else? No one knew the answers to these questions. She probably wanted to ask why he’d left home that night. But then again maybe that was the one thing she really didn’t want to ask. “Dad . . .” I began. She looked at me with the expression of a whipped puppy. “Dad always felt bad,” I said. “He felt guilty all his life. That’s what it says here.” Her eyes danced. I chanced a further comment. “And mom, this bit was really lovely.” “Which bit?” she asked with trembling voice. I showed her the bit that said he came to his wife’s house every week to cut the grass. “This bit here,” I said. Mom looked like she would burst into tears as she looked at the part of the letter I indicated and rubbed it fondly. It was the first time I ever saw my witty mom who never cried with a lump in her throat. That night mom didn’t come home until dawn. I lay in bed with the covers pulled up under my chin and thought about dad, about his life and death, and about cutting the grass, that sort of thing. But still he keeps running around inside my head. Images that have been in there for so long aren’t going to disappear that quickly. It occurred to me that I kept imagining him because I could not forgive him. Maybe the reason I kept him running in my mind was that I was afraid I would charge at him and kill him the moment he stopped. I felt sad. I better go to sleep, I thought, before this sadness dupes me. Mom came home after the peak-fare time ended. I thought she’d try not to wake me, that she wouldn’t put on the light, that she’d take off her clothes very carefully. Instead she poked me in the ribs. “Ya!” she cried. “Are you asleep?” I stuck my head out from under the covers. “Are you crazy? My God! The taxi driver’s drunk!” Mom said nothing. She just laughed and tumbled down on the covers. She curled up small like a clenched fist. I thought of tossing the bedcovers over her but didn’t. In a little while, she slid in under them, maybe because she was cold. In the dark mom’s breathing gradually got gentler. She smelt of cigarettes. I was angry with her. You’re bad, I thought, folding my arms. Mom had her back to me, sleeping like a shrimp. I was staring up at the ceiling. The long stillness caressed her breathing. I thought she was asleep, but suddenly she spoke, curling up even more tightly into a ball. There was no trace of malice toward the dead man in what she said. “So, what do you think, is he rotting OK?” I didn’t close my eyes all night long. I kept looking at the ceiling, reviewing the various images of dad in my imagination. I saw him in Fukuoka, crossing Borneo, approaching the Greenwich Observatory, turning by the foot of the Sphinx, going through the Empire State Building, climbing the Guaddaramas. My laughing, racing dad. Suddenly I realized that all this time he had been running in the blazing sun. I thought I’d imagined everything he needed for running. I dressed him in those luminous pink shorts, put on his cushion-soled runners and his airy running vest. But isn’t it strange that I’d never thought of giving him sunglasses? I’d forgotten that even the most rubbishy man in the world gets sick like everyone else, likes the things everyone else likes. All those years I was picturing dad in my mind, he was always running, his eyes sore and swollen from the blazing sun. So I decided tonight to put sunglasses on him. I imagined his face. He wore a little smile; he was filled with anticipation but trying hard to conceal it. He closed his eyes, like a boy waiting for a kiss. With my two big hands I put the sunglasses on him. They suited him really well. He’ll run better now, I thought.    Translated by Kevin O'Rourke   Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture,vol. 1, 2007, pp. 233–239.   Copyright © 2005 by Kim Ae-ran.Translation copyright © 2007 by Kevin O’Rourke..Reprinted with permission from Azalea.

• Prayer

  “Sillim” conjures up a green forest. A forest full of trees, a young forest. The trees in the forest are green, like the light green of Seoul Metro Line Two. Most leaves are of a darker hue, but light green seems more right for Sillim trees. When I say “Sillim,” I can almost hear leaves from a distant forest rustling and whispering, supullim, supullim. Green seeps into my tongue when I say, “Sillim,” the same way a red banner somewhere in the corner of my heart flaps wildly when I say “Gupabal” out loud. Such associations have nothing whatsoever to do with the real Gupabal or the real Sillim. I cross the Han River hugging a pillow. I have to transfer twice to get to Seoul National University Station. I sit in the middle of the bench, heels up. The pillow is in a large plastic bag that crumples irritably and noisily at the slightest movement. The sound is so frail that I hold it closer. A forest of buildings stands across the river. The translucent skin of the buildings reflects sunlight with their entire bodies. Through the billows of clouds, I see the expression on the face of Seoul at one in the afternoon. The spark of Seoul at one. There are too many windows in the world—people grow dark in all that light. Where are you? The phone vibrates. It’s my sister. Her question blinks with the small numbers that indicate when the message arrived. Eungbong, I answer. Sorry. Running late. I take a deep breath. It always feels weird waiting for the message to be transmitted. I can’t fathom how words can find their way to the right destination. Tens of millions of people send text messages to each other every day. How is it that one person’s I’m sorry finds its way to the right cell phone without colliding into another’s That’s okay? There are perhaps as many text messages floating around as there are molecules of carbon monoxide, nitrogen, and other chemicals from exhaust fumes. We live, surrounded by messages, inhaling them. She hasn’t replied yet. I bought the pillow at a bedding store in front of the station. I thought about buying it at Sillim, but I gave up the thought, seeing as that this was my first trip to the area. I figured it’d be best to buy it at the discount store near my place rather than wandering the streets of an unfamiliar neighborhood in frigid weather. The pillow will soon be handed over to my sister. She actually had her own pillow. In the several times she packed and unpacked since she moved out of our parent’s house, she never forgot to take that pillow with her. It was just an ordinary pillow with cotton stuffing, but according to her it was the most comfortable pillow in the world. She sincerely loved the pillow the way people love music or art. She apparently left it behind this time. Mom sounded disturbed as she explained over the phone. Mom seemed to believe that she left without the pillow because Mom all but kicked her out of the house. She was taking her time, and Mom got impatient. It was partly Uncle’s fault for arriving too soon, but Mom evidently started to follow her already panicked daughter around the house, pestering her about this and that until Mom finally lost it and yelled at her. My sister stood sulking in front of the car and Mom clumsily shoved 100,000 won into her hand. They exchanged awkward goodbyes. Perhaps they both ended up looking angry for lack of a better expression under the circumstances. The more they felt sorry, the more they felt this wasn’t a good way to part, the more rigid their faces grew. The car, its backseat full of civil service exam practice test books, pulled out of town, and Mom discovered the pillow after several minutes of sitting on the sleeping mat. The pillow had an indent the size and shape of my sister’s head, and it seemed it might still be warm from cradling her head. Mom called in the morning and spent the entire conversation grumbling about her until she finally muttered, “She left her pillow. Buy her a new one.” The phone vibrates. I open it up to see if it’s her. It’s someone else. Miss Suh In-yeong, this is a confirmation for the meeting this evening. I’ll see you at Hoegidong at seven. Yes, I reply. I’m still reluctant, but I’ve already put it off three times. I only agreed to take the annoying survey because of the Cultural Gift Certificates they promised. A few days ago, I got a call from a woman who said the Ministry of Labor was doing research on “college graduate employment.” I treated her with the same weariness and indifference I showed all telemarketers. She kindly detailed the purpose of the survey and mentioned that their researcher could visit me at my residence, and I would be compensated with three Cultural Gift Certificates. I thought that three gift certificates for a survey was a pretty good deal, but I didn’t want her to think I was desperate and unemployed by sounding too eager. Trying to sound as cultured and indifferent toward money as possible I asked, “When would be a good time?” The question was tossed back, “When would be a good time for you?” I knew that the “culture” I would enjoy with three gift certificates would be silly and trifling, but they would be enough to numb the guilt of an unemployed girl for a day.   This is unpublished translation supported by LTI Korea For publication inquiries, contact: koreanlitnow@klti.or.kr

• Prayer (Full Text with Audio) Vol.36 Summer 2017

    “Sillim” conjures up a green forest. A forest full of trees, a young forest. The trees in the forest are green, like the light green of Seoul Metro Line Two. Most leaves are of a darker hue, but light green seems more right for Sillim trees. When I say “Sillim,” I can almost hear leaves from a distant forest rustling and whispering, supullim, supullim. Green seeps into my tongue when I say, “Sillim,” the same way a red banner somewhere in the corner of my heart flaps wildly when I say “Gupabal” out loud. Such associations have nothing whatsoever to do with the real Gupabal or the real Sillim. I cross the Han River hugging a pillow. I have to transfer twice to get to Seoul National University Station. I sit in the middle of the bench, heels up. The pillow is in a large plastic bag that crumples irritably and noisily at the slightest movement. The sound is so frail that I hold it closer. A forest of buildings stands across the river. The translucent skin of the buildings reflects sunlight with their entire bodies. Through the billows of clouds, I see the expression on the face of Seoul at one in the afternoon. The spark of Seoul at one. There are too many windows in the world—people grow dark in all that light. Where are you? The phone vibrates. It’s my sister. Her question blinks with the small numbers that indicate when the message arrived. Eungbong, I answer. Sorry. Running late. I take a deep breath. It always feels weird waiting for the message to be transmitted. I can’t fathom how words can find their way to the right destination. Tens of millions of people send text messages to each other every day. How is it that one person’s I’m sorry finds its way to the right cell phone without colliding into another’s That’s okay? There are perhaps as many text messages floating around as there are molecules of carbon monoxide, nitrogen, and other chemicals from exhaust fumes. We live, surrounded by messages, inhaling them. She hasn’t replied yet.   I bought the pillow at a bedding store in front of the station. I thought about buying it at Sillim, but I gave up the thought, seeing as that this was my first trip to the area. I figured it’d be best to buy it at the discount store near my place rather than wandering the streets of an unfamiliar neighborhood in frigid weather. The pillow will soon be handed over to my sister. She actually had her own pillow. In the several times she packed and unpacked since she moved out of our parent’s house, she never forgot to take that pillow with her. It was just an ordinary pillow with cotton stuffing, but according to her it was the most comfortable pillow in the world. She sincerely loved the pillow the way people love music or art. She apparently left it behind this time. Mom sounded disturbed as she explained over the phone. Mom seemed to believe that she left without the pillow because Mom all but kicked her out of the house. She was taking her time, and Mom got impatient. It was partly Uncle’s fault for arriving too soon, but Mom evidently started to follow her already panicked daughter around the house, pestering her about this and that until Mom finally lost it and yelled at her. My sister stood sulking in front of the car and Mom clumsily shoved 100,000 won into her hand. They exchanged awkward goodbyes. Perhaps they both ended up looking angry for lack of a better expression under the circumstances. The more they felt sorry, the more they felt this wasn’t a good way to part, the more rigid their faces grew. The car, its backseat full of civil service exam practice test books, pulled out of town, and Mom discovered the pillow after several minutes of sitting on the sleeping mat. The pillow had an indent the size and shape of my sister’s head, and it seemed it might still be warm from cradling her head. Mom called in the morning and spent the entire conversation grumbling about her until she finally muttered, “She left her pillow. Buy her a new one.” The phone vibrates. I open it up to see if it’s her. It’s someone else. Miss Suh In-yeong, this is a confirmation for the meeting this evening. I’ll see you at Hoegidong at seven. Yes, I reply. I’m still reluctant, but I’ve already put it off three times. I only agreed to take the annoying survey because of the Cultural Gift Certificates they promised. A few days ago, I got a call from a woman who said the Ministry of Labor was doing research on “college graduate employment.” I treated her with the same weariness and indifference I showed all telemarketers. She kindly detailed the purpose of the survey and mentioned that their researcher could visit me at my residence, and I would be compensated with three Cultural Gift Certificates. I thought that three gift certificates for a survey was a pretty good deal, but I didn’t want her to think I was desperate and unemployed by sounding too eager. Trying to sound as cultured and indifferent toward money as possible I asked, “When would be a good time?” The question was tossed back, “When would be a good time for you?” I knew that the “culture” I would enjoy with three gift certificates would be silly and trifling, but they would be enough to numb the guilt of an unemployed girl for a day.   The train stops at Ichon Station. People follow the color-coded bands that lead to different subway lines. They look like blind people from the Middle Ages, the way they used ropes to get around. The Sadang train pulls into the platform. Warm air rushes out as the doors open. I dash for an empty seat and settle in. My body makes a crumpling sound. I am very conscious of the volume and sound of this pillow despite the fact it will soon be passed on to my sister. I draw myself in so as to not touch the person sitting next to me. She says she’s already started unpacking. I jump every time the phone vibrates. It feels as though she has shrunk to the size of a cell phone and is crying away in my pocket. I worry that she’s struggling alone with all her stuff. When I first heard that she found a room near the mountain I said, “Well, you like mountains!” like it was no big deal. She was dumbstruck for a second before she hit me upside the head with a roar of laughter. When Dad was at the detention center, where beans are mixed into the rice they serve, I had said, “Well, Daddy likes beans!” Mom had hit me on the head just like that. “Yeah, they say you have to snowboard down the hill when it snows.”   My sister did like mountains. It was also true that Mom cooked rice with all kinds of beans for Dad, and the cop who recognized my Dad often let him off the hook when Dad was caught drunk driving. Dad did his time at the detention center in town, curled up in a corner like a model prisoner. During the time he was detained for his petty offense, he did not repent or worry about his family but rather spent his time seething with anger as he wrote up a list of “people from the village who never came to visit him.” Since then, every time he gets plastered, he cries, “I know who you are!” Of course, he never confronts anyone about it. The day Dad was released we sat around the table for a painfully awkward meal of tofu soup. Since the detainment, every time a prison scene comes on TV we laugh in unison and change the channel. That was a few years back. Even then, my sister was making her daily pilgrimage, backpack and all, to the local library up in the mountain. That was when libraries suddenly became fashionable all over the country, and a brand new library was built in our village. This being the boondocks, the patrons of the library were mostly adolescents who used too much hair gel. Giggling and shuffling hung over the “Quiet Room” where notes and soda were passed over the partitions. The only ones who studied were my sister and a young man who was preparing for civil service exams. The young man sat in the quiet room and suffered the din. Every once in a while he would break down and cry, “Be quiet, people!” The room would fall silent for a second before the junior high kids changed their topic of conversation to what a loser he was. Every day, the only thing he said was, “Be quiet.” One day, he stopped her on her way down the mountain, backpack and all. He rolled down the window and poked his head out the red Tico. “May I offer you a ride?” She said that was the first time she saw him smile. She did not get in the car. She moved to a study room in town. Rain or shine, cramps or colds, she took the first bus into town and the last one back. Once, when she was suffering from coughing fits, an anonymous note made its way to her desk. It read: Why do you bother coming to the study room when you’re so sick? Stay home or go see a doctor. Wondering who it was from, she’d looked around to find nothing but dozens of heads lodged in their respective cubicles. She kept moving in search of a better studying environment. She was at that study room in town the year before last until she moved to Sangdo near Noryangjin last year. This year, for the last time, she moved to Sillim. No one had said it in so many words, but everyone assumed this would be her final year of trying for the exam. We hoped she would believe so, anyway. Unlike my sister, who studied math at a local college, I’d been living in Seoul for a few years. Despite the distance between my place and her new place, my presence in Seoul was a deciding factor in her move up to Seoul. She wanted to escape from the constant quarrels with Mom and the stares of the villagers. When she ran into friends at the library, their shared dejection had made her feel awkward and uneasy. She ran into a few more friends from school even after moving all the way up to Noryangjin. For her, the unuttered small-town judgment she had to face every day was more unbearable than spending her twenties in a library cubbyhole or running into bubbly acquaintances around town. The unwelcome curiosity was at once persistent and indifferent. There was one man who would make a point of stopping by our house, without fail, every time the civil service exam results were posted to ask how she had done. Knowing she’d failed, he would ask, “So, how’d it go?” He would then go on and on about his successful children before leaving. Her face convulsed like unsettled dough with politeness, humiliation, despair, and something like a smile. I’ve seen her make a similar face at family gatherings and weddings.   I was living in a small studio with our youngest sibling. Sister couldn’t ask if she could move in with us because we were already cramped for space. She came to visit us once or twice a month. She would travel over from Noryangjin, show up unannounced at our door in the middle of the night, face ashen, to collapse on the floor and into copious sleep. It was as though she came to our place expressly for the purpose of deep sleep. As if this was just what she craved, she slept for a long time without moving a single muscle. When she came to visit, we slept sideways on the sleeping mat, our ankles and heads sticking out from underneath the covers. A few years ago, I worked for a cosmetics company making pamphlets and company bulletins and sending samples and invitations to the press. When I got the job, Mom was more excited than I was. The second she found out I got in, she dragged me out to the town center to buy me a 400,000 won suit. We went through every single boutique in the area where Mom proudly told and retold the story that started with, “See, my daughter just got a job . . .” She paraded around as if anyone unwilling to listen to her story didn’t deserve her money. This was when we left Dad in the detention center because we couldn’t come up with a few million won for a lawyer. I went up to Seoul with a large shopping bag and wore the suit to work the next morning. The day after that, I hesitated before wearing the same suit to work again, but I couldn’t bring myself to wear the same thing three days in a row. I liked wearing Mom’s self-esteem on my shoulders but the possibility of the suit appearing tawdry made me cringe. A few days after that, I sent Mom a box of Green Tea Facial Cleansers. They were individually wrapped like shampoo samples. Mom toured the village brandishing the sample at her friends. To her, the Green Tea Facial Cleanser was a symbol of status and even power in a time when our family was in desperate need of tangible evidence and affirmation of success, even in the form of free samples. I quit a year later. My drawn-out job search and the need to “show ’em” had forced me to take that job anyway. Rumors of everyone else’s success made me self-conscious. The possibility that they really were doing well was unsettling and I was anxious at the thought of their healthy faces searching mine for signs of despair. My harmless bellyaching at a magazine reporter made its way into an article, and I was half forced to quit. I was terrified when the word “lawsuit” came up. It’s been three years since I quit, and Mom still hangs onto that Green Tea Facial Cleanser. She says her heart breaks every night as she opens the packet with a pair of scissors. “You shouldn’t be using old cosmetics. You should throw them out,” I say. “But you were the smartest among your siblings,” she trails off. The conversations are redundant, and so are the hopes. Every year, we say, “We’ll have better luck next year” as if we haven’t been saying so for years. When I didn’t get that job at the public corporation, when my sister failed the civil service exam, we dug up all sorts of evidence to support our optimism. Wouldn’t they create more jobs since it’s election year? They’re lowering the additional points awarded to the children of patriots and veterans, so that would definitely help. You started going to preparatory programs this year, so you’ll improve. You’ve put in this much effort, so isn’t it bound to happen any year now? I did odd jobs here and there, mostly translating and tutoring, so I had a little money to help me get by even after I quit. I hung out with some friends who were living like I did and joked about how we’d all be screwed if the private education sector in Korea collapsed. I hear the subway announcement. I transfer to line number two at Sadang Station. It is two stops to Seoul National University Station—a five-minute ride. “Sillim,” I say to myself. I can almost see the landscape through the bobbing green leaves. My sister and I were walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood. This was the year she changed her plan from public school teacher to educational administrator. She insisted on coming up all the way to Seoul to buy her books. The books are pretty expensive, so wouldn’t it be nice to save money by getting used ones? she said. She came armed with directions she found on the Internet. There were plenty of second-hand bookstores near Cheonggyecheon or Seoul Station, but we decided to search the Sillim and Sadang area, which was closer to the bus terminal where she got off. We figured they’d have more books since they’re in university areas. We squinted at the maps to find these bookstores. We searched one store after another puzzled by the curious, exclusive absence of the books she was looking for. After about half a day of searching in vain we came to the embarrassing realization that used bookstores around universities in Seoul did not carry Level 9 Civil Service Exam books. In the Civil Service Exam sections, there were scores of books for the Judicial and Diplomatic Exam, as well as Level 5 and Level 7 Civil Service Exams, but very rarely did we find a Level 9 book. Not knowing what to do with the awkwardness of our ignorance and empty hands, we quickly left the store with our hands stuffed deep in our pockets. We stood on the sidewalk for a moment, disoriented. Her face glistened with beads of sweat as she stood under the blazing sun. She looked very ugly. She was three years older than me and had always known more about the world than I did. Growing up, I always thought her things were better than mine. Witnessing her sad introduction to the capital was a strange experience for me. With an embarrassed look on her face, she suggested we eat. To make up for whatever it was we lost that day, we found ourselves an Italian bistro and ordered spaghetti. After a long squabble over who would pick up the bill, she managed to swipe her debit card. That day, she spent much more on meals and tickets than she’d intended to save before heading back home.   Where are you? I say I’m almost there. I take bus 5515 as she instructed. It isn’t too crowded on the bus. The passengers are mostly young people. It feels as though they’re all Seoul National University students. I shouldn’t feel awed by their presence, but I do. The Sillim outside the window isn’t as green as I’d imagined. The trees that were supposed to be green like Line Two are standing naked. The bus drops me off in front of the bank where I stand looking around. The street looks like a quilt made of a few rural town centers—run down, disorganized, and unruly like a tabloid magazine. Time seems to have formed a puddle here. It’s not just Sillim. All the streets in Seoul are the same way. They look like collages. A man is handing out discount coupons to a “Sexy Bar.” The streets are full of men, mostly late twenties to mid-thirties. I make generalizations about their lives, their meals, their families, and their sex lives. The stories my sister told about this area plays a part in making the whole town feel like an urban myth. I see her running toward me. Her love handles catch my eye. “Hey, Sis!” She lights up. I say I’m sorry I’m late. She says that’s okay. Neither of us knows what we are forgiving or apologizing for, but we say it every time we meet. The second she sees me she says, “I like your vest.” I pull at the hems of my mustard colored vest and say, “This old thing. I got it online for cheap. It wasn’t even ten thousand won.” I thrust the bundle toward her. “Mom said you left your pillow. She told me to buy you a new one.” Her face falls. “She did?” I’m not sure if it’s the pillow that was left behind or the quarrel with Mom that’s creating a whirl in her heart. We set out for a meat place as though it is the most appropriate thing to do. Neither of us is familiar with the neighborhood, so we pick the one right in front of us. There is a sign that says, “Pigs raised on Injin wormwood approved by the Seoul National University Research Team” in big letters. I can’t see the connection between pigs and Seoul National University, but the place has an erudite atmosphere. I order shabu shabu, remembering my sister’s enthusiasm for beef. “Feels very different from Noryangjin.” “Right?” “Yeah, it’s probably because people here are a bit older. It feels calmer around here,” she adds. “There was a church at Noryangjin that offered free breakfast to their congregation. Some students used to eat there.” The man who appears to be the owner brings out the side dishes. I look at the rolled up meat, puzzled. The meat is too pale. “Um, isn’t this beef?” The owner beams as he puts vegetables in the pot, “It’s pork. It’s very delicious.” My first encounter with pork shabu shabu unsettles me. Aren’t you supposed to cook pork thoroughly? “I’m sorry it’s pig,” I say to her. The owner steals a glance at me. She says it’s no big deal as she wipes her hands on the wet nap. “They say you don’t really get in trouble for drinking and making a row in Sillim. Most people around here know more about the law than the cops do. They apparently give the cops a hard time during investigations.” “Really?” I smile as I scoop up some pork and vegetable for her. Come to think of it, “law” is the word I recall seeing most frequently on the streets. PC rooms, restaurants, and prep academies all had “law” on their signs. “Like your room?” She replies as she wraps a piece of pork in boiled dropwort, “Yeah, the landlady showed up with flat coke today. I noticed the day I first came out here looking for a room that the worse the room, the friendlier the owner.” She’d been here two weeks ago to find a room. She surveyed the area with the youngest, once again, armed with directions from the Internet. Gosichon was divided into two areas: 9-dong and 12-dong. The former is mostly run-down boardinghouses and preparatory academies, and the latter is mostly high-end studios. There are quite a few new studios in 9 with a wide price range. She found a room at an all-female boardinghouse for 140,000 won a month. The place had a computer lab and a communal bathroom. Boardinghouses without computer labs aren’t popular, she says. After the meal, we drink excessively sweet instant coffee for dessert. I quickly sign the card receipt as we leave. The downside of using a card is that you have to keep someone waiting for longer than you would when paying with cash.   The way up to her place isn’t as bad as I thought. She said it was a mountain, so I pictured an actual mountain, not an ordinary suburb with mom-and-pop stores and boardinghouses. Some boardinghouses are still under construction. “The area was practically deserted until a few years ago when they started redeveloping after the financial crisis,” she says, out of breath. I wonder if there was ever a time when our century was not under construction, financial crisis or no crisis. “They say you’ve seen all of Sillim once you pass that little store over the fence. That’s the border. It’s close to the top. My place is near there, too.” “So you’re at the end of the road?” She hits me upside the head. I chuckle like a fool as I catch up with her. She keeps trying to tell me stories. She thinks I find stories of different places and people interesting. She’d always been the giving one ever since we were kids. She bought us things she thought we needed, and when she couldn’t afford them, she gave us her nail polish or make-up kits. Recently, she came to my place to give me all sorts of unsolicited advice, clean my fridge, and fix the long-neglected broken door under the sink. Now that she has nothing to give, she’s trying to give me stories. “The day of the bar exam , dozens of tour buses stop here to collect test takers. They say it’s quite a sight to see them all leave at the same time.” She continues. “The day I came to look at rooms, I walked into a room at a boardinghouse and there it was—a coat hanger with a pair of briefs on it. It said ‘BRAVEMAN’ on the elastic band. God, that was embarrassing.” She does not even stop to take a breath. I listen silently and suddenly stop halfway up the hill. “Look,” I say. Face bright red, she turns toward me. She’s out of breath. You don’t have to give me so much, okay? is what I want to say but I say something else instead. “Give me that.” She stares straight at me. Her eyes are small and clear. “Hmm?” I grab her bag filled with pillow. “I’ll carry it.” The bag crinkles in my arms. The sound is so frail I hold it closer.   We arrive at a four-story walk-up. It is obvious the building was remodeled. Its deformity is a dead giveaway. The boardinghouses of Sillim are usually regular houses gutted, fixed, patched up, and expanded. The interior of the building looks like the insides of an animal, with the wires and cords hanging out. Standing at the front door, we are overwhelmed by an almost hostile static energy. The front door is made of glass, jarringly modern for such an old building. She punches in the code. I follow her in. Under the shoe rack, there’s a striped sandal with a red ribbon around the flap, like someone with a toothache. I look closer to see if someone was trying to be creative, and discover the red ribbon’s attempt to keep the sole from falling apart. There is a tiny garden in front of the building. It’s so small I would have missed it if she hadn’t pointed it out. “I fell in love with this place because of that.” Plastic violets have sprouted on fake lawn.   “The owner seems attentive to the needs of female residents,” I concur. She leans in and whispers, “When you’re in the boardinghouse neighborhood, you wind up really appreciating spaces like that.” We walk through the corridor on the first floor and up the stairs. There is a post-it note on the bulletin board. Please walk on tiptoes in the hallway. – The Manager And another. Whoever stole my wallet, please die. My sister’s room is all the way down the hall on the third floor. Dozens of the same doors line the hallway like a scene from a film noir. I had expected something like this, but I still feel suffocated. There’s a white doorknob doily on one of the doorknobs. It’s hand-embroidered in pink. Whoever lives in the room must always leave room for a small patch of garden in her heart. She unlocks the door. The entire room comes into view. The room is about ten square feet with a desk, a chair, and a window. That’s it. Her things are huddled in one corner. It’s mostly books and the rest is detergent, toilet paper, a blanket, a pair of slippers, and an umbrella. Over the years and several moves, she has mastered the art of packing light, but her possessions and things she can possess are dwindling, too. I draw my legs in and squat in the corner. She squats, too. The floor is cold. She has attempted to keep the draft out with green duct tape. There’s a wooden shelf and a faded intercom on the wall. I whisper, It’s clean and decent considering the rent. She says, her voice as lowered as her body, Right? I see two holes of an electrical outlet below her desk. Bits of plastic foam are stuffed into the carelessly punctured wall. “It’s like someone’s peeping,” she whispers. She’ll frequently make eye contact with that thing during her time here. “At least the room gets a lot of light.”               Out the window and through the screens, I spot an apartment building with a yellow water tank. That will catch her eye, too. The conversation stops. It feels awkward squatting in a tiny room with nothing to do. “Shall we?” On our way out, I happen to see a box on the desk as the door closes. A familiar word on the box. Yesan Apples. It’s the name of our hometown.   Before we part, she and I decide to go up to the top of the Boardinghouse District. I have some time left before the appointment, and we don’t feel like going to a coffee shop. The higher we climb the shorter the buildings get. Some buildings look too small to be boardinghouses. There is a banner flapping one of its boarders’ triumph from the rooftop. “They fly banners for people who pass the Level 9 exam?” She replies, “Of course.” A strange silence swells and closes in as we climb higher. There are few people around. “Here we are.” I catch my breath. I see Seoul down below. Seoul somehow seems more impoverished from far away. Perhaps it is the poverty that makes Seoul seem distant. Winter trees stand among the cascading boardinghouses. The view is as murky and lonesome as a paused screen. The “63 Building” stands behind a mountain, its lower half concealed. A couple of civil exam people glance at us as they pass. A strange thought occurs: ‘Look at the state of this capital!’ Perhaps it is in this state because it is a capital. The ashen trees are perfectly still. I’ve been told twenty thousand people in this area are studying for the civil service exam. They must have all endured this hushed existence. I can’t fathom the twenty thousand silences, twenty thousand tiptoes, twenty thousand insomnias. I can’t wrap my mind around those things happening all at the same time at a certain space, or that it’s been going on for many years. I’m not sure if the name of the mountain we’re on is Gwanak, just as I don’t know where Sillim begins, or where 9-dong or 12-dong ends. I assume it’s Gwanak since it’s a mountain in Sillim. I stare at the roof of a western-style boardinghouse. Few pieces of laundry flap in the wind next to a large, heavy-duty plastic tub turned upside down, a rusty barbell, and a water tank. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I catch an object moving back and forth on one of the roofs. “What is that?” She narrows her eyes. A black object jumps up and down on the roof. “Hey, someone’s doing jumping jacks! That’s a commitment too, you know?” It really is a civil exam person in sweatpants doing jumping jacks on the roof. It’s quite an endearing, refreshing sight. The late winter wind feels cold and dry. On the roof, a couple of pillowcases the color of sunflowers dry in the sun.   We descend from the mountain. Tracing the steps we took, we pass the mom-and-pop store, the boardinghouse, and hundreds of windows and doors and silences to the bus stop. I ask her, Should I get you some vitamins? How about some candy? Should we get you some bread? Why don’t I buy you a cushion you can sleep with? I race over to the seat of considerateness and plop down like someone cutting in line. She says she’s fine. “I should go. I’d love to stay, but I have an appointment this evening.”  Like acquaintances who find themselves in an awkward situation from saying goodbye too soon, we stretch our necks toward the road where buses come streaming. I gawkily plant 50,000 won in her hand. She emphatically refuses and I playfully argue back. God knows this isn’t the first time we’ve done this routine. It is a little play we put on to preserve each other’s indignity, a ritual carefully designed in the hopes that we would completely fool each other. Like the fake lawn in her little garden, a cherished, fake thing. Moments later, bus 5515 pulls up in front of us. I turn around on my way up the bus and say, “Take care.” She waves. I watch her grow small through the bus window. My sister in the exhaust fumes. Sillim growing distant. The dry trees, buildings, signs, insomnia, youth, and winter are all behind me. I did not know then, but they always were.   I cross the Han River on the subway once again. The cold weather exhausts me. I can feel the heater below my calves. I nod off. I lean on someone’s shoulder, jolt up, and lean again. The phone rings. I flip it open and answer sleepily, “Hello?” “This is the researcher from the Ministry of Labor. I believe we have an appointment today. Where in Hoegi-dong do you live?” I wasn’t expecting a middle-aged man. Tired and unnerved, I wonder if I should cancel. “Where are you coming from?” He says he’s in the Korea University area. I give him directions to the vicinity of my house and ask him to meet me in front of the convenience store. He says he has a crew cut, and that he’ll be carrying a shopping bag.   Darkness has already descended and the headlights driving by seem famished. I see a man with a shopping bag approaching from the bus stop. His attire is modest and ordinary, but he’s remembered to wear dress shoes. He raises his hand in acknowledgment. I am thrown off guard to discover he’s about my father’s age. I awkwardly and politely nod. He asks, “Are you Miss Suh In-yeong?” The shopping bag is all he has with him. He says he’s from the Ministry of Labor, but he doesn’t seem like an official employee. He pervades the stiffness characteristic of a man in his fifties, but he looks like someone who spent his entire life apologizing. He asks as he rubs his red earlobe. “Where to?” I hesitate for a moment. Where should we go? Wouldn’t it be inappropriate to take him to my place? What about a coffee shop? Who’s going to pay for the coffee, though? Is coffee covered in his expenses? He probably meets a lot of people every day. Where should we go? “There’s a library about a ten-minute walk from here. Shall we go there?” “Well,” he says as he quickly glances around. “No, let’s go in there.” He points at a large church in the middle of a fork in the road. “Sounds good,” I say and follow him. I had walked past the church for so many years and never once thought to venture inside. The church is gothic—somehow heavy and gloomy. I hesitate in front of the darkly tinted glass doors. He pushes the door as though he has done this sort of thing many times. I’m not even a member of the church. I’m afraid someone might say something. The lobby is disquietingly dark. Fortunately, the church is nearly empty as it’s a weekday. He sits on the bench across from the entrance to the sanctuary. It’s a long, wooden bench. I sit apart from him. There’s a small Christmas tree next to the bench. He takes out the survey sheets from the shopping bag. I inch toward him to listen to the directions. He writes down my sex, address, year of college graduation, my major, and so on. I assume he was trained to do this. The questions are quite detailed. Did your major help you choose a career? What did you study to prepare for employment? Do you have any licenses? Have you attended language programs abroad for employment? The only license I have is the Word Processor license. Long time ago, when I was at the Word Processor test center struggling with the questions, I overhead an elementary school kid who had finished his test hollering at his friend, “Dude, that was easy as fuck!” He fills out the survey, skipping from one question to another as I answer. “If you answer ‘yes’ here, you move on to the next question, and if you say ‘no’ we skip to number three.” I cock my head to the side and ask, “So, what will happen in the future?” He tells me the participants will be asked similar questions for the next five years. Like a good college graduate, I inquire if this implies that the government will have access to my personal information for the next five years. He smiles and says not really, you can quit next year by informing the organizing department. “Would you list all the jobs you’ve had since college?” I grab the pen and lean forward. Part-time translator, coffee shop waitress, cosmetic company PR, magazine proofreader, essay editor, English tutor . . . He asks about the hours, the pay, and whether insurance was covered. We go through the survey together, our fingers tracing numbers. He seems to know it goes faster this way rather than leaving it all to the participant. We become more comfortable as we exchange a few jokes and some awkward body language. “So what is your current occupation?” I answer, a bit embarrassed, “I tutor.” He asks, “How much is the pay?” I divide up the monthly fee to calculate the hourly pay. “It’s 150,000 won for three hours.” The man is astonished. I don’t know how to respond to his reaction. “The family is well off. They pay me more than others do.” He nods in reverence. “I see you worked in PR, too. Don’t you have to be smart to do something like this?” “Oh, that’s not true,” I insist. Recognition of this sort makes me nervous. He finds it strange that I quit a job that paid 2 million won a month. “Sounds like a pretty cushy job. Why’d you quit?” I become increasingly nervous as my “background” is revealed. I don’t know why. Maybe I feel I’m better than him, or he feels I’m better than him. I feel I’m driven by an old habit—the considerate impulse to go out of my way to make someone feel comfortable. I get anxious thinking that he might find me, someone far younger than he is, rude. I watch him absorbed in the survey. How much does this guy make per participant? My friends used to get 5,000 won per survey. How much does he make wandering all day, meeting college graduates in the dead of winter? He says he’s from the Ministry of Labor, but he’s probably just a hired help paid by the hour. I feel bad for him, but I’m also embarrassed by my own patronizing pity toward him. He asks his last question, “What do you plan on doing in the future?” I hesitate before saying I’ll go to grad school. I am not actually planning on it, but I don’t want him to think I don’t have a plan. Actually, I do sometimes think I’ll go to grad school if all else fails. There’s no harm in getting another degree because a degree is like a very expensive license. Fortunately, he asks no further questions. He gives me paperwork to sign. The Christmas tree from the previous season slowly blinks in the dark church lobby. Sitting on the long bench with our heads bowed, the two of us must look like we’re praying. The man’s face, chin pulled toward his chest, becomes bright, dark, and then bright again as the Christmas tree continues to blink. Hue and contrast tangles and untangles his face like spirals of paint floating on water, creating a complex impression. The man hands me an envelope. There are three sheets of Cultural Gift Certificates, each worth 5,000 won. I thank him as I stuff the envelope into my coat pocket. Cold air rushes in as we open the church doors. The man asks, “How do I get to Hoegi Station from here?” “Go straight, cross the street at the light, and keep going for another five minutes and you’ll find it,” I say. He thanks me and turns to go. The streets are completely dark now. I’m overcome with hunger. I should go home and eat something. I turn in the other direction. And then, I stop. “Excuse me,” I call him. He continues on. I call him, a little louder, “Wait!” The man turns around. His eyes are small and clear. I hesitate before asking, “Where are you off to now?” “Seongdae Station,” he says. I ponder for a bit before saying, “Then don’t go to Hoegi Station. Take the 273 at the bus stop right there. The subway station is a long ways away, and 273 stops right in front of Seongdae.” The man lights up. “That bus stop over there?” “Yes, you’ll be there in thirty minutes.” He thanks me and changes direction. I start to walk away as well. And then I stop again. Come to think of it, 273 does go to Hyehwa but it doesn’t stop right in front of Seongdae. I turn around to find him already off in the distance. It’s a bit of a walk from Hyehwa to Seongdae, and he’ll probably get lost if he’s not familiar with the area. I wonder if my kind intentions will cause him more trouble. I pull out my cell. I debate whether or not to text him and finally decide no.        Translated by Jamie Chang  

• The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child Vol.27 Spring 2015

    Prologue   My mother and father were seventeen when they had me.I turned seventeen this year.I have no idea if I will live to see eighteen or nineteen.That isn’t something I can decide.All I can be sure of is: there isn’t a lot of time. Children grow bigger and bigger.And I grow older and older.An hour in someone else’s life is like a day in mine.And a month in someone else’s life is like a year in mine.Now I’m older than my father. My father sees his future eighty-year-old face in mine.I see my future thirty-four-year-old face in his.Distant future and unlived past gaze at each other.And we ask:Is seventeen the right age to become a parent?Is thirty-four the right age to lose a child? My father asks me what I would want to be if I were reborn.I respond loudly, Dad, I want to be you.He asks why him when there are better people.I say quietly, shyly, Dad, I want to be reborn as you and father meTo know what you feel.My father cries. This is the story of the youngest parents and the oldest child.      Chapter One   When it’s windy, flashcards create a small whirlwind inside me. Words are written on them, words with reduced body mass, like a fish dried in sea wind for a long time. I trace the names of objects, names I pronounced for the first time when I was young. This is snow, that’s night, over there is a tree, the ground is beneath my feet. You are you. Everything around me I learned first from its sound and then by copying the letters over and over again. Sometimes, even now, I’m surprised I know the names. I picked up all kinds of words all day long when I was young. “Mom, what’s this? What’s that?” I chirped, throwing everything into disarray. Each name was clear and light and didn’t stick to the object. Even though I had heard it the day before and the day before that, I kept asking as though it was the first time. When I lifted my finger to point at something, words with unfamiliar sounds fell out of my family’s mouths. My questions moved something, the way a wind chime danced in the breeze. I liked asking, “What is this?” I liked that better than actually learning the names of those objects. Rain is rain. Day is day. Summer is summer. I’ve learned a lot of words in my lifetime. Some words I use often and some I don’t. Certain words are rooted in the earth and others flit about like the seeds of a plant. When someone called summer by its name, I thought I could grab it. I kept asking what it was, believing that I could. Ground? Tree? You? This and that overlapped and shook according to the breeze from my mouth. When I pronounced it as “that,” it reverberated as “that,” spreading out in concentric circles, which sometimes felt as though it was as large as my whole world. Now I know almost all the words I need in life. The important thing is to gauge the width of the words, reducing their mass. When you utter the word “wind,” it’s to imagine a thousand directions from which wind blows, not simply the four directions of a compass. When you say “betrayal,” it’s to follow along the lengthening shadow of a cross under the setting sun. When you call someone “you,” it’s to understand their depth, the flat part that’s hidden like a snow-covered crevice. But that has to be one of the hardest things in the world, because the wind keeps blowing and I have never been young. That must be how words feel. When I conversed with the world for the first time, it was in an agrarian mountain village, graced with clear water. In that place where a stream divided into several strands before they circled the village and ran into one, I learned my name and started to toddle. I began to babble, and three years later I started making simple sentences. During that time my parents lived with my maternal grandparents. The villagers usually raised or made everything they needed, so the words I learned would have had to do with our life, the way my cousin, who grew up in front of the TV, uttered “LG” as his first word. My slowness to speak worried my mother for a while. Concerned that I had some kind of problem, she asked her parents for advice. My father, on the other hand, claimed that kids were the cutest when they couldn’t speak and then he calmly went to work. The Daeho Tourism District was being constructed nearby, where my father labored. My grandfather, who had a head for numbers, built a structure in their front garden for the workers that would swarm in from other towns. It was a drafty house with concrete walls and a slate roof. A total of four families could live in that small straight building. One of those rooms was for our family—a teenaged couple who still looked like kids and their newborn. The kitchen was in name only and the room was ridiculously small, but my parents say they didn’t complain at all because it was free rent and my grandparents paid for their living expenses. My grandmother had six children: five sons and a daughter. Once I asked, “Mom, you said Grandmother and Grandfather never got along. So why do they have so many children?” My mother explained in embarrassment, “I know, right? I was curious about that, too, so I asked your grandmother. Well, they did it once in a blue moon and each time she got pregnant.” My mother was the baby of the family. Her childhood nickname was Princess Fuck. Since she grew up around foul-mouthed men, she threw out curse words at every opportunity in a way that was at odds with her pretty face. When I imagine a small girl wandering around the village, cursing adorably, I feel close to her. My mother’s still feisty, but she must have toned down her vocabulary when she understood that all the problems in the world couldn’t be solved by saying “fuck.” She must have realized that when she became pregnant and was kicked out of school, when my father was severely beaten up by my five uncles, when she had to listen to the younger customers at the restaurant complain about the smallest details and create a fuss, and when she stared at the hospital bills she couldn’t pay no matter how hard she thought about it. From the very beginning, my grandfather didn’t like his son-in-law. The biggest reason was that my father, still wet behind the ears, had gone and made another kid who was wet behind the ears. The second reason was that he didn’t have the ability to make a living as the head of our little household, even though that came with the territory for a seventeen-year-old high school student. When the two first met, my grandfather launched into a grumpy interrogation. “So what are you good at?” This was after a serious hurricane of tears and fighting had landed in the house from the news of my mother’s pregnancy. Kneeling before him, my father was unsure of what to say. “Father, I’m good at taekwondo.” My grandfather let out a grunt of disapproval. It was true that my father had gotten into the largest athletic high school in the province with his talent in taekwondo, but that skill wasn’t very useful in life. My father, made anxious by my grandfather’s silence, added, “Would you like to see?” He gripped his fist into a tight ball, and anyone who saw him then would have been forgiven for thinking that he was trying to strike my grandfather. My grandfather involuntarily flinched before calmly asking, “So are you saying your fist is a money maker?” “Um, well, when I graduate I’ll look for work at a small taekwondo studio…” My father trailed off, knowing full well that he couldn’t return to school. My grandfather hadn’t expected an impressive answer. So he decided to give him another shot. “And what else are you good at?” Many thoughts flew through my father’s head. ‘I’m good at Street Fighter.’ But if he uttered that, his new father-in-law might punch him in the face. ‘I’m good at talking back to the teacher.’ But that didn’t seem to be the kind of answer his father-in-law was waiting for. ‘What am I good at?’ After a few moments of agony, he ended up saying to his father-in-law, who was glaring holes into him, “I’m not sure, Father.” And then he realized, ‘Oh, I’m good at giving up.’ After his son-in-law left, my grandfather made a bitter remark. “He can’t do anything well. Other than breeding at a young age.” My grandmother, who lost her deference toward her husband as she grew older, quietly grumbled, “Well, that’s a talent, too.” My mother, her flattened bangs secured to one side by a hairpin or two in the style of the day, sat primly nearby without speaking. My grandfather looked away, as though more disappointed in his daughter’s taste than her actions. “If a man doesn’t have money he should at least have bravado. I don’t know. He’s such a simpleton.” But my grandfather had failed to realize something about my father. He was a simpleton, yes, but he was a rash and adventurous simpleton, which is the most dangerous kind. That explained why he got into a fistfight with the officiant on the day of his wedding and hung out with his friends that night, abandoning his wife as if she were the jilted bride in Midang’s poem Jilmajae. That also explained why, after he dabbled disastrously in a variety of things on the foolish recommendation of his friends, he helped me with homework about our family’s motto by telling me that ours was “Trust Between Friends.” That saying was framed and hanging in our house. He’d bought it from the old man in the Bulguksa temple souvenir shop during a trip with his buddies. My mother made fun of him for that motto. Others might shake their heads in dismay, thinking that she was treating her husband with contempt, but it was a natural impulse for a woman who had a shaky grasp of foreign-sounding Confucian teachings on the importance of relationships. My grandfather urged my father to finish school. Since it was obvious he would now be kicked out of his athletic high school, my grandfather advised him to enroll in a nearby high school that had space and at least get his diploma. My grandfather promised he would talk to the principal on his behalf. But rumors and gossip traveled at lightning speed in our small town and no school would let him in. They all insisted that allowing in a student like that would damage the school’s discipline and dignity. My grandfather, who prided himself on being a village leader, was humiliated. He ended up pushing his son-in-law into construction. He said that a man had to go to work. He intended for my father to take some responsibility as the head of his household and realize how difficult life was. It was less a serious suggestion than a calculated decision to make this boy who dared touch his daughter suffer for a few months. My grandfather never forgot to lecture my father about studying at night for the high school equivalency exam. My father, whose family was not well off, heeded his father-in-law’s advice. As the local self-government rule was established, the county aimed to create a large-scale tourist attraction under the motto, “Daeho, a fun loving city.” The most important project was to enlarge the stream and build an eco-tourist attraction that would allow sightseeing from a boat. Eventually my parents’ village and a few other ri would disappear. My father went to work with the itinerant laborers living in our house. At work he was teased but beloved. Everyone called him Han the Married Man. The village elders patted him on the shoulder, saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay, around here anyone who gets married is an adult,” and chortled, “The Chois got a free son-in-law!” In the beginning, my father was satisfied with construction work. He enjoyed the lively, earthy talk of the men, he was now respectable in his in-laws’ eyes, and he liked that his boundless teenage energy was tamped down. He thought this was a good thing; he had wanted to quit his sport because he was tired of being beaten by his teachers. Ever since he was thrown into reality and did adult work, he wanted to climb up the hill, rip open his shirt, and roar: “This is real life!” But it took less than three days for my father to realize how hard physical labor was, to keenly feel how arduous and backbreaking it was to use one’s hands to survive. My father learned about my mother’s pregnancy near the intercity bus terminal in town, in a café frequented by middle and high school students. My mother had gone there on a few group dates. Once, she was in hot water at school after a biker gang member she met on a blind date drove his motorcycle to her school and circled the yard five times, doing wheelies, and shouted, “Mi-ra! I love you!” three times before disappearing with a roar, a giant dust cloud growing behind him. After that incident, all the Mi-ras in the school—Kim Mi-ra, Park Mi-ra, and Choi Mi-ra, my mother—were called to the teacher’s office one by one for questioning. The group dates usually moved from the café to a karaoke room. My mother observed with interest how the boys who awkwardly didn’t say a word in the café became extroverted at karaoke. The boys from agricultural or industrial high schools would shove all the tables to one side and dance vigorously to the songs of Seo Taiji or Deux. The lyrics rang out in the dark, dank room: “Time will never stop. Yo!” or “Now I have to be brave to get you.” A girl would sing the first few measures of a sweet duet before furtively putting the mike down on the table. Then the boy who liked her would grab the mike and sing after her. The boys fell in love first with my mother’s face and then with her voice. Many times, after she put down the mike, several hands pounced on it at the same time. Although our area had a total of five high schools, including the general and vocational schools, few boys captured her heart. From my mother’s perspective, the agricultural and industrial boys were more outgoing and spent more money than the college-bound boys, but she was also attracted to the college-bound boys’ untouchable self-regard. My father was the first athletic high school boy she’d met. And it wasn’t on a group or blind date, but by chance at an unexpected place. Anyway, from my mother’s perspective, my father had attractive characteristics of both kinds of students. He had the self-esteem of a person whose small talent had been acknowledged, but he gave off a subtle sense of inferiority and naiveté derived from the fact that this talent lay in a sport. The café was fairly empty. Neither my mother nor my father was in their school uniforms. My father was wondering why she was wearing a proud expression. He was worried that she would tell him they needed to break up again. Plus, this café made him feel uncomfortable. He couldn’t understand why girls would come to a place like this and just talk for over two hours with a single beverage in hand. My father looked at my mother. Mi-ra, whom he hadn’t seen in some time, had suddenly matured. Each time my mother took a sip of lemonade and licked her lips, my father licked his dry lips, too. Eventually she opened her mouth. “Dae-su, come here.” “Why?” “Just come here.” My father leaned forward. My mother, one hand covering her mouth, whispered something in his ear. The fuzz on his earlobe stood on end. Not really concentrating on what she was saying, he focused only on her soft breath, grinning despite himself. But soon enough his face turned pale and he raised his voice. “Why did you wait so long to tell me?” Everyone in the café turned to look at him. “What the hell? Why are you yelling? I hate people who yell!” she snapped, even louder than my father. My father, who had gotten in trouble a few months ago for writing down on an aptitude test: “Hobbies—compromise. Special ability—compromise,” quickly apologized to his girlfriend. “Sorry, sorry.” The two put their seventeen-year-old heads together and brainstormed for a solution. But there was no easy solution. Around them a few teens were arrogantly and quietly chain smoking. Eyes downcast, my father toyed with a small parasol planted in his parfait. “Mi-ra, I—” he started, launching into how he was nothing much, that he could never be a good father, that he was too poor, that he was afraid of disappointing people, that now that he thought about it there were people in his family who’d had cancer. He rambled on, illogical and incoherent. My mother listened quietly. “Dae-su,” she called gently. “Yeah?” “There’s this bug that camouflages itself with bird shit so it won’t get eaten by a bird.” “And?” “That’s you.”  [……] Even after that my mother couldn’t make a definite decision. She vacillated several times every day between the pros and the cons. Time kept flowing by and I kept growing in the damp dark space. All around me was an unrelenting thumping. I heard that not with my ears but with my entire body. I tried to determine the true nature of this vibration that surrounded me, like a soldier in an underground bunker concentrating on cracking the Morse code. That code was: Pitpat…pitpat…pitpat… Or it could be described as banging, like drums being struck far away, or like large footsteps. The rumbling seemed to be caused by a giant striding towards me. Each time I prepared to retreat like a reindeer sensitive to aftershocks. But at the same time I wanted to dance because my mother’s heartbeat overlaid mine, like music. Boom thump thump. Boom thump thump. Boom boom thump. Boom thump. The boom was my mother’s, the thump mine. The boom set the tone and the thump hit the off-beat. Tethered to the long umbilical cord, I concentrated on that sound. My mother’s heart floated above my head like a plump moon and spread beats all around, drop by drop, the way a tree blooms in green. The sound was both a bit, the smallest unit of data, and a musical beat. The bits and the beats were scattered around like leaflets, sending important messages throughout my body. It was a rhythm that would cause anyone to rise to action and it made me want to become something. The cells receiving their orders immediately rushed into action. My organs, greeting the beats pouring down from above, sprouted and stretched. My liver swelled and my kidney ripened and my bones formed. I grew rapidly. And in my dreams, I frequently met my mother’s dreams and had rambling conversations. “Mom?” “Yes?” “Mom?” “Yes.” “I’m nervous. My heart is pounding. I feel like my heart’s in my throat. I feel like I’m going to die, but I can’t stop it.” “Baby.” “Yes?” “It’s the same with me too. My heart keeps pounding. It pounds so much that it hurts but I can’t stop it.” [……] My mother knew that life was not born but forced out. She’d always known this, since she grew up in the country. All of the flowers, animals, and insects she’d seen had ripped through a shell smaller than itself before bursting out like a firecracker as though they had waited for a long time, as though they couldn’t wait any longer. Bursting out like laughter, like jeers, like applause. Boom! Boom! Their fully formed bodies made it hard to understand how those large wings and legs were packed inside when you looked at the shell left behind. In late spring, my mother gave birth to me after a difficult labor. Unusual for a premature baby, I burst out with ferocity, abruptly, confidently, ripping through the ancient and complicated family trees of Choi Mi-ra and Han Dae-su. And I instinctively felt that I had to cry very loudly in front of everyone to lessen the impact of that abruptness. But I didn’t know what crying was and I didn’t know how to cry. A hot and pliable energy came up from within. But I felt nauseated and dizzy; I couldn’t make any noise. No wonder, since I had been breathing through the umbilical cord and had to use my lungs for the first time. A precarious silence flowed in the delivery room. The doctor fluidly picked me up and slapped my bottom with his large hand. It was so painful I wanted to get angry but all I could do was burst into tears. If not I might get another slap; also, that was the only thing I could do right then. “Good, good. Crying means you’re alive,” the heartless salt-and-pepper haired doctor soothed me. He brought me to my mom’s breast. I was introduced to my mother covered in all kinds of fluids. She must have been excited for this moment, but I was mortified that I was so dirty. Of course, like other newborns, I could barely see. But as soon as I was nestled against Mom and heard her heartbeat I relaxed. ‘Oh, I know this sound!’ My mother looked down seriously at her crumpled baby. Then she made a strange cracking noise: “A-reum, it’s your mom...” and then she started to bawl. She apparently didn’t know why she was crying. She told me later that all the emotions that a human could feel—sadness and happiness, pride and shame, relief and hurt, hollowness and satisfaction—came over her at once, and that she had never experienced such all-encompassing feelings. At that moment, her face didn’t look like how she would want to appear to the world. Her sobs were those of a woman who didn’t realize there was anyone else in the room. She simply disintegrated, like the rapid controlled-collapse of a high-rise building. I imagine a woman would cry like that only once or twice in her life: when her child is born and when her child dies. Listening to my mother’s animalistic keening, I felt relieved. I was born to people who cry the way I do, I thought. And I made my mother feel something. Even though I didn’t fully understand it, her tears gave me the belief that at least I wasn’t a completely worthless presence. My family, who had been worried sick about the possibility of some mishap since my mother had been suffering from toxemia throughout her pregnancy, was overjoyed when they heard the word “son.” My grandmother collapsed to the ground and wiped her eyes. My grandfather and my father, who had never before touched each other, embraced. And like blades of grass that flattened in the breeze, the wailing that started from me went over to my mother, passed through my grandfather, and seeped into my father. They cried loudly even though they weren’t the ones who’d been born, as though they had heard once or twice that crying meant they were alive too, that even though they were alive, they wanted to live more. My father cried the loudest. After he held me for the first time with trembling hands, apologetic that he had been secretly praying, please don’t make me a father, he cried twice as loud and three times as long as anyone else, becoming the object of the nurses’ grumbles.   Chapter Two   I turned seventeen this year. People say it’s a miracle that I’ve lived this long. I think so, too. Not many in a situation like mine have lived past their seventeenth birthdays. But I tend to believe that the larger miracle exists in the ordinary. Living an ordinary life and dying at an ordinary age are the miracles. In my eyes, my mother and father were the miracles. My uncles and aunts were the miracles. Our next-door neighbors. The middle of the summer and the middle of the winter. Not me. A few years ago, a neighbor came over and asked, “So you don’t know what caused it and there’s no treatment?” “That’s correct,” my father said. “That’s not a disease,” she said. “I’m sorry?” “That’s a message.” In her hands were a worn bible and a rosary. “Ma’am,” my father said, “he’s not a message, he’s A-reum. His name is Han A-reum.” At that moment I was embarrassed about my gentle, round name that was at odds with my appearance, but I was also proud; my father was all grown up. As a teenager, my father just bowed his head as though it was all his fault when people said things like that, but now he tried to protect our family from ignorant people. He still must have been upset; he came home drunk that night. In one hand he was holding a bag of cheap dumplings. It wasn’t the first time someone said something like that to us, so I don’t know why it set him off like that. My father came into my room and lay down, using my weak legs as a pillow. He puffed out his cheeks and grinned. “A-reum, what song do you like?” “Why?” I asked, my weak voice trembling. “Just curious. I want to know what my son likes.” With dim eyes, I looked over my glasses at my young father, my oh-so-young father, and smiled. To make him feel better, I made a joke. “I like anything that a pretty girl sings.” My father hollered like he was insane. “Me toooooooo!” He sprang up and shouted, “Lee Hyori’s the bomb!” I raised both arms high. My voice wasn’t as powerful as I wanted but I yelled as loud as I could. “Park Ji-yoon is the bomb!” My father jumped up and down. “Uhm Junghwa’s the bomb!” “Sung Yu Ri’s the bomb!” “BoA’s the bomb!” He suddenly became quiet, like a distraught man. “But you know, as you get older you start liking sad songs. And the saddest song in the world is the song you listen to when you’re drunk. So when you’re grown up you have to listen to ballads when you’re drunk, okay?” “Okay, Dad,” I said, grinning through my few remaining teeth. “Dad?” “Yeah?” “Are you sad right now?” “Yeah.” “Because of me?” “Yeah.” “What can I do for you?” My father stared at me. I could tell he was thinking about something. He said quietly, “I don’t know what you can do, but I know what you shouldn’t.” “What’s that?” “You shouldn’t be sorry.” “Why not?” “It’s rare for someone to be sad for someone else.” I was quiet. “I’m happy that you’re the reason for my sadness.” I didn’t say anything. “So you should grow up and be someone’s sadness. And when you’re feeling sad, you should cry like a child.” “Dad?” “Yeah?” “I’m already a child.” “Right, that’s right.” My seventeenth birthday present was a laptop. My parents bought it for me so that I could get on the internet from the hospital room. It was a clunky used laptop but I’d needed a computer, so as soon as I received that heavy thing, I hugged it tight as though it were a puppy. And to show my parents how much I loved it, I grinned like an idiot. It was perfect timing; there was something I’d wanted to do with the computer. When I was alone, I usually read books. At first I followed along with the school curriculum, but later I read out of boredom. Books became a grandmother who told me great stories all night long, a teacher who imparted all the knowledge and information in the world, and a friend who shared his secrets and problems. Because I became sick at a young age, I couldn’t go out and play. Instead, I played sports with all the writers in the world. I played soccer in an imaginary playing field with Flaubert as the striker, Homer as the midfielder, and Shakespeare in the goal box. I played baseball in a stadium with Plato as the catcher and Aristotle pitching. The game usually went like this: Plato pointed toward the sky and Aristotle, chewing gum, nodded and pointed at the ground. And soon a change-up with a beautiful arc floated toward me from ancient times. I stupidly swung a bat taller than me and missed. Of course philosophical books were difficult and there are so many parts I still don’t understand, but I thought of them as a long, elegant poem. The parts that didn’t make sense would walk out toward me someday to say with a smile, “Hi, it’s me.” This would happen much later, the way important life lessons usually arrive. It was the same when I played tennis with poets, Go with playwrights, and volleyball with scientists. From them, I learned how to make my heart race without actually running. I liked everything composed of paper and print no matter the genre or thickness, from illustrated guides of insects, plants, and marine life to collections of poetry that stomped all over my heart to social science books that made my mind feel as though it was slapped. Among them were odd, random books for beginners: Go’s First Steps, What Is Golf, Beginning Japanese, Basics of Electrical Engineering, Classical Music for Beginners, Easy Feminism. I don’t know why I read them. I studied electrical engineering but changing a single light bulb made me slick with sweat. I memorized hiragana but have never been to Japan. I didn’t read for the love of knowledge but with the anxiety of someone who would be the sole survivor after the end of the world. Putting aside the fact that I was reading about golf when I’d never been out on the green, what use did the sole survivor of the human race have for feminism? If someone were to ask me, how in the world did a kid like you read all of that? I would say, if a person was by himself for a long time, he could do a surprising number of things. Not because he’s so determined, but because he suddenly realizes what he’d accumulated. Fiction was my favorite, from the oldest story of mankind to a brand-new debut novel from a young foreign author, from the most mainstream story to experimental works created by an author annoyed at the canon and only wrote them to say fuck you to older writers. And while I hung out with all the authors in the world, and books I didn’t have a chance to read—and maybe would never read—kept pouring out into the universe, I’d quietly become old. In my old age, I hung out with those books. My skin had turned brittle a while ago and my hair was falling out one by one. But that was just my outward appearance; I didn’t have the wisdom or experience of the elderly. My aging didn’t have layers of wrinkles and volume. My aging was a hollow process. So I was curious about the lives of people who lived longer than I. I wanted to know about the thoughts and problems of those who were younger. Thankfully, books, while they didn’t contain everything, had a lot. Sometimes my mother asked, “A-reum, what are you reading?” Through my sunken lips, I chirped like a bird, “Just essays, Mom. This writer’s mother died when he was seven and he suddenly went blind. But eight years later, one day, he could miraculously see.” “It’s a novel?” “No, a memoir. But he thought he might go blind again at any moment and rushed to the bookstore. And the first book he grabbed was called The Idiot.” “Why? Is it a famous book?” “It was to him, because when he was little, his father kept saying, you idiot, you idiot. Isn’t that funny?” My mother smiled shyly. “I have a potty mouth, too.” One day, my father asked, “A-reum, what are you reading?” Wind whistled through my missing teeth as I replied, “A novel, Dad. A boy and his family are moving to America but the main character gets stranded because of a hurricane.” “Yeah?” “And so this boy is left in the middle of the Pacific with a tiger. At a certain point he says that despair was more frightening than the tiger. One day, when the tiger he was so afraid of disappears, he breaks down in tears.” “What? That doesn’t even make sense.” “No, it does. If you read it you understand why that is.” “Yeah?” “That’s what I’m saying,” I said in my trembling voice, blinking my gray eyelashes. “So Dad?” “Yeah?” “When you feel so alone, when this world feels like the vast, frightening Pacific...” “Yeah?” “I’ll be your tiger.” My father didn’t say anything for a while. He stroked my head, murmuring, “A toothless tiger, huh?”    For publication inquiries, please contact Joseph Lee / KL Management: josephlee705@gmail.com

• Sky Kong Kong the Pogo Stick Vol.27 Spring 2015

  A long time ago, there was an old street lamp that stood in front of our, or rather the landlord’s house. Our place sat on the roof of the building so the lamp looked right down at us, especially into the window of the room that my brother and I shared. In those days, the tops of me and my brother’s heads were always soaked in a pool of yellow light. No one knew the age of the lamp. We only knew that it stood there for a very long time, way before I was born, with its neck stretched out and shoulders hunched forward. Always alone, like the very first Homo sapiens to stand on two feet on the African plain. The lamp was there since long ago so it knew everything. From the time of the sunset to the angle of the descending moon, the names we muttered with triviality long passed down to us, the things we said about love, as well as the beauty of a grand cathedral and the songs of the Sand Pebbles—there was nothing that the lamp didn’t know. Unfortunately, the only thing the lamp knew how to do was to switch on and off. This it did very faithfully and diligently. The lamp knew that every once in a while it could actually create a miracle. The moment it turned itself on was probably when the world blinked very quickly. Something occurred in that brief moment that no one knew, that escaped everyone’s notice. Like when the kinds of things you don’t believe happen or have happened on the lips of those close to you. Like our first brief kiss from long ago. The days when we didn’t have anything, we needed the street lamp when we didn’t have anything except night and day. It turned with the earth and blink, switched itself off; and then turned again before another blink, switching itself on. I used to sit by the window with my elbows on the windowsill. One hand propping up my chin, I dreamed about the rotation of the lamp drawing a circle bigger than the earth. The width of a circle drawn by the fingertip of the lamp and the circumference of the earth and people who live between the two circles. I could see a pterosaur perched atop the street lamp shade and a Cro-Magnon man peeing under the lamp light, his gigantic penis sticking out from his loincloth. Everyone—including a monkey climbing up the lamp as he licked his fingers and picked at a swarm of drake flies as well as a sniveling straggler from a defeated Maori tribe clutching the lamp pole—materialized and quickly disappeared. I saw an aye-aye scurrying around the corner and thought the alleys were a perfect place to vanish. We were living in a prefabricated house in a small town. The owner built it on the rooftop of his building without any city inspection and rented it out. His building sat on high ground so we could see almost everything from the windows of our house. Curvy wrinkles of winding corners and meandering roads layered the town. People disappeared into and reappeared from the wrinkles many times throughout the day. The three of us—my father, my brother, and me—lived in that little plastic box overlooking the town. One day, my father said, “I heard that you can get taller if you play with Sky Kong Kong, the pogo stick.” I could’ve cared less about getting taller but sure wanted Sky Kong Kong. He looked into my eyes brimming with excitement. “I’ll get you one if you show me your pee pee.” “Show you what?” I turned pale. “Your pee pee.” My brother was reading a newspaper when he muttered, “Hey, Father, there’s an astronaut who came back from space a little taller.” My father ignored him and waited for my reply. I mulled over what was more precious to me between my pee pee or Sky Kong Kong. I thought very hard about it but I couldn’t decide which one of the two was more important to me. “You don’t want to?” My little guy shriveled up instantly, feeling the chill. I thought about my age, my dreams, and faces of those who loved me. But a small voice kept whispering inside my head that it would be for the best if I bear it for a few seconds. “You mean, right now?” My father nodded while my brother mumbled again, “It says here that he’s a Russian astronaut and that his crooked spine got straightened out in space’s zero-gravity.” With a trembling hand, I unzipped my pants. Out came my underwear with Robot Taekwon-V1 holding his arm upright and his hand made into a fist, as if he was just about to take off. My father smiled at me encouragingly. I took a deep breath and was about to pull down my underwear when my brother turned a page, making a rustling sound, and asked, “By the way, Father, is it normal for a man’s spine to be completely straight?” My father ran an electrical repair shop, a tiny space about to explode with random parts and wires tangled and coiled with each other like intestines. Piles of defective electric housewares crowded the front of his shop. They all looked frustrated and mortified, like a drunkard in the police station waiting anxiously for his turn to fill out an investigation report. Inside, my father slouched on a stool and inspected machinery and tools through his smudged glasses. Like a man who has been doing just one thing for a very long time, his gaze was absentminded but very attentive. He had the same look when he looked into my mouth to check for cavities after I complained about a toothache. He spent his entire life fixing broken things and wore out his back and rear end along with his sight. But while he fixed trivial things and trivial problems, he wanted us to become important people instead. He knew that we were the kind of kids who doggedly carried our VCR, with a bootleg tape stuck inside, all the way to the next town because we couldn’t go to the only electrical repair shop nearby run by our father. In truth, we had never dreamed, not even once, that we’d actually become people who mattered. But on that day, just for that brief moment when my brother talked about the Russian astronaut, I wanted to be someone special. I thought maybe my father’s bad back would straighten out neatly if I became someone important and sent him to space. Unfortunately, we’d have to wait too long for that day to come so I decided to become a funny person first before I became important. The day when he looked at my pee pee, he looked happier than he might have had he boarded the spaceship. I was so excited when I finally got Sky Kong Kong that I dashed out of the house in my underwear. My bowl-shaped hair waving in the wind, I bounced on it to my heart’s content. I grabbed the handle with my two hands, hopped on the foothold, and jumped off the ground with all my might! With the elastic force of the spring, my earlier shame flew away into space. I was so good at Sky Kong Kong that once I hopped on it, I rarely hopped off. Even when my father spanked me or my brother blabbered on about some nonsensical story, even when one of my favorite singers won a teen-star award, I stayed on my Sky Kong Kong. When the entire world was buzzing about the return of Halley’s Comet after seventy-six years, I was on my Sky Kong Kong, hopping quietly on the rooftop. With the world’s noise behind me, I felt alone but graceful on my Sky Kong Kong. When I was on it—how should I describe it—there was a “spirit” in my motion. The town looked different each time I jumped up on my Sky Kong Kong. Kong, I jumped up and poof, the guy I saw a few seconds ago was gone and kong, I jumped up again and a school girl who wasn’t there earlier appeared. I liked these quick glimpses of a faraway place, the “vagueness,” so I jumped harder. It would be nice to disappear someday, up into the air, before my feet touched the ground. I closed my eyes and tried to stay longer in the air. I took a quick peek and blink, the street lamp winked at me. I fell on the concrete floor of the rooftop and as if finally getting a chance to use the line that I had been rehearsing for a very long time, I shouted out loud. “What the . . . ?” When I wasn’t on my Sky Kong Kong, I was busy either spitting from the rooftop or gazing at the sky as I sat on the windowsill. The window had a screen with gaping holes like an over-ripe pomegranate in autumn. A green curtain unwashed for a very long time bristled in the air with a breeze. I buried my face in it and inhaled deeply. I liked the old warm smell of dust. The smell of dust—how should I describe it—made me feel as if I was living in a world that I never knew before, a world that I may have lived once but didn’t understand. In those days, I was smaller than I am now so the distance between me and the night sky was that much wider. Such a dark and deep sky made me want to stay as far away as possible even if it meant I’d become even that much smaller.      Translated by Kyong-Mi D. Kwon   1 A famous cartoon character who fights the evil masters of the earth with his martial arts skills and special powers.

• Ten Stories Dazzle the French Vol.25 Autumn 2014

  The French translation of Nocturne d’un chauffeur de taxi (Night Over There, A Song Here), an anthology of contemporary Korean short stories, was published in April this year by the Philippe Rey Publishing House. This independent publisher, established in 2002 and specializing in French and foreign literature, boasts a catalogue featuring such established authors as Patrick Chamoiseau, Taslima Nasreen, and Joyce Carol Oates. The compilation whose title was inspired by a Kim Ae-ran short story is a collection of 10 short stories showcasing a young generation of writers, most of whom are women. Boldly and without affectation, they discuss the most intimate aspects of social life, which are generally overlooked by the media. The 10 stories open windows into people’s daily lives: brief stories or simple portraits, with tragic, pathetic or comical undertones, which, similar to a mirror, reflect the lives of ordinary people, who in many ways actually look very much like us. The common thread linking these authors is a unique ability to highlight the striking aspects (heroic, tragic, or comical) of Koreans’ daily lives. In her deeply moving account of the love story of an immigrant Chinese woman and a Seoul-based taxi driver, Kim Ae-ran incidentally tackles the topical societal issues of the day, those marking the lives of immigrants in Korea, as well as economic hardships facing common folk, such as waitresses or taxi drivers. In Kim Yeon-su’s “Bonne année à tous!” (Blessed New Year to You All), a man questions his wife’s friendship with an Indian immigrant whose language she doesn’t even understand. In “Semailles” (Sowing), Jo Kyung-ran looks at frictions within a family in the context of rather peaceful relations between Koreans and Japanese. Yoon Sunghee in “La maison en Lego” (The Lego House) paints a gripping picture of the emotional misery suffered by a young girl in a completely chaotic family. The cashier at the supermarket in Choi Jin-young’s “Mon mari” (My Husband) wonders in a tragi-comical conversation whether the man she has been living with is really whom she thinks he is. Paik Gahuim in “Rumeurs” (Rumors), presents a plot depicting the stir caused in a small countryside town, by the simultaneous disappearances of the pharmacist’s daughter and a refugee from North Korea. Another disappearance, discussed in a satirical yet dry-witted manner, is that of the manager of Pyun Hye-young’s “La fabrique de conserve” (Canning Factory), an amusing description of factory work. The Busan film festival serves as setting for the romances of the inconsolable heroine of Park Chan-soon’s “Stoppie à moto” (Stoppie Motorcycle). Ahn Yeong-sil’s “Amour impossible” (Impossible Love) is a masterpiece in malice, an archaic-style miniature portrait, and Han Kang’s “Neuf épisodes” (Nine Episodes) are equally beautiful and fine-spun prose poems, each singing in turn about childhood nostalgia, the dream of eternity, and the journey towards destiny. The French press, notwithstanding its ever scant enthusiasm for all non- American foreign literature and more so when it comes to short stories, gave the collection a warm reception. The daily Le Monde, in its April 25, 2014 edition, ran a column whose title “Dix perles coréennes” (Ten Korean Pearls) expresses their enthusiasm: “The authors, the columnist concludes, imprint their bitter sweet outlook on the real world at its very core, unveiling its dark and light shades, blending the different tints, not without some jubilation as gradually, out of existential emptiness, they spin a succession of humorous or simply quirky skits. As sensitive onlookers, they capture attention not only by their adept profiling but equally by their outlook which is at once enchanted and enlightened, poetic and poignant.” And J.M.G. Le Clézio, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and a great connoisseur of Korea, treated Le Figaro to yet another rave review, long enough to fill half a page: “Hurry up, buy, share this little book replete with emotion, rage, laughter, it is a key to taming the challenging realities of daily life, an antidote to the gloominess of our all too quiet days.” (Le Figaro, May 14, 2014) Lastly, I would like to point out that these short stories were translated as part of the workshops that are hosted every year by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. They were done by joint teams of young Korean and French women who combined their knowledge of French and Korean with their passion for literature to provide the French public with the best literature coming out of Korea today. 

• A Pool of Saliva Vol.12 Summer 2011

  There she is, running down the street, shielding her face from the morning light with her hand as small as a maple leaf. She is wearing cotton pants and an orange shirt. On one side, there is a logo that resembles a globe and the inscription, “New Elite Academy 10th Anniversary.” It’s Independence Day, and there aren’t many people out on the streets. There is an uncharacteristic peace around the sandwich stand and the free newspaper stand. A row of half-awake people make a line at the escalator. As children, these people probably did not aspire to be something as grand as a historical figure, but they most probably did not ask to be people who work on public holidays. She attaches herself to the end of the row and laments, ‘If only I had been motivated enough to demand an after-school education, I wouldn’t be here doing this.’ Almost instantly, she finds her thoughts embarrassing. She knows all too well that all parents make excuses for their academically challenged students by insisting their children are “not motivated,” instead of admitting that they are simply “not smart.” Her cram school is located in Mokdong. It’s a corporate cram school with over a thousand students in the seventh grade alone. She’s a Korean Language and Literature teacher for the middle school program. When she first started interviewing for cram school jobs, she was surprised to discover that she had to name her own salary. One of the cram school interviewers said, “We can give you as much as you want. If you want ten million, we can give you ten million. If you want six, we’ll give you six. The important thing is that you prove yourself worthy of the price you name. So, how much do you want?” She sat on the leather sofa feeling like an insect as she searched for an answer. Too little would make her seem incompetent, and too much would make her sound pompous. There was something strange about this salary system that the cram school director maintained to be “fair,” but she couldn’t figure out what it was. She does know that what she felt at that moment, sitting on that leather sofa, was humiliation. As she presented her sample lecture for the interview, the administrative-level teacher who looked like he’d be worth six million a month slept with his head tossed back, mouth wide open. Their unexpected request to do a sample lecture left her fumbling with no teaching material to work with, but for some strange reason she couldn’t manage to say “I can’t do it” at that moment. She returnd home miserable, despite the fact that she was already being a cop-out by looking for a cram school job, which is easier and better compensated than the average corporate job. Anyway, she wound up choosing New Elite over the “six-to-ten-million won” cram school. She has the financial competence to pay rent and utilities for a small studio apartment, have health insurance, invest in an accumulative fund, and feed her high-interest savings account. She knows that in order to complete her accumulative fund payments, she must charge like a horse and dance like a bear every day. From time to time, she feels as though a certain part of life has been handed to her as an advance. She feels jealous of people younger than her who silently devoted a year of their lives to study for civil service exams, and returned with stable government jobs. The confidence that employment brings, not having to feel nervous when drinking with other people, and the ability to make monetary contributions at acquaintances’ weddings and funerals all stop her from quitting the cram school job. Every time she toys with the idea of quitting, payday invariably came around like an apologetic lover. The station P.A. announces the arrival of the train. People inch toward the safety line. She takes a deep breath and resolves not to be a sissy. Periods never stopped her from taking the college entrance exam, showing up at her temp job, or going on school trips. She is suddenly reminded of her hubae1). Her hubae sleeps during the day and works at night. Her hubae got the grading gig through her. When she offered the editing job to her hubae, who had spent days searching jobsites on the Internet with a storm cloud over her face, she had jumped for joy. At 1000 won a page, editing would be more profitable than bussing trays. Less than a day later, her hubae had looked up at her with bloodshot, teary eyes, “Older Sister, Korean middle school kids are all idiots.” It’s been three months since they’ve been living together. To this day, she does not know whatever incited her to take her hubae in. If she had to name a reason, she would say it was because she liked her voice. She may have liked the look in her hubae’s eyes as she talked about this and that the first night they spent together. The texture of her hubae’s voice. Her face turns ashen. The train stops with a loud screech. She hops over the gap between the train and the platform and into the air-conditioned car. The door closes. It’s cold.   The morning greetings of her co-workers were always related to fashion. When she first started working, she took it seriously when people at the office greeted her with, “You changed your hairdo,” “I like your bag, Miss Park,” “Where’d you get your skirt?” and so on. At first, this made her happy. Shy but proud of herself, she would check herself out in the bathroom mirror. It wasn’t long before she realized that people at the cram school talked about fashion obsessively. Fashion was not the topic of small talk, but rather a very important issue to be discussed religiously on a regular basis. She grew weary of her limited wardrobe and other female teachers’ eyes on her. When someone paid her a compliment, she felt strangely indebted. She was often paranoid that everyone was looking at her and rating her outfit as she entered the office every morning. She soon found out that she’d worried about nothing. The teachers welcomed any change because it gave them something to talk about. The first thing she heard today when she entered the office, however, had nothing to do with fashion. The Department Head calls her. During the however many steps it takes to get to his desk, she thinks of all the ways she may have screwed up. Nothing comes to mind. She is meticulous and diligent, and always receives good scores on the quarterly evaluations. The Head asks, You’re in charge of classes SH1 and CK2, right? Yes, she answers, bracing herself. My hubae—I know, he interrupts her. She keeps her mouth shut. She fixed perfectly fine words wrong! She looks at the pile of papers on the Head’s desk. Her hubae’s loopy handwriting is scrawled all over the pages. She must have read it very carefully, for the comments boxes are rather full. She changed “for example” to “for exemple,” and the “because” here turned a perfectly fine sentence into a fragment. The parents of these children are highly educated people. Do you have any idea how many complaints I received today? Are you sure your hubae is a Korean lit major? She doesn’t know how to respond to that. Should she ask, “How many mistakes did she make?” to verify, should she confirm, “Yes, she really is a Korean lit major,” or attempt damage control, “I’ll redo it myself?” Finding the right response at last, she says, I am sorry. Miss Park. I know we only pay 1000 won per page, but the trust we lose when we make these mistakes is worth a hundred times more than that. He says your hubae can’t have the editing work anymore. She keeps her mouth shut. He asks if he’s been understood. She hesitates. He’s waiting for an answer. She finally says, I am sorry. That means, I got it. She goes back to her seat. The co-workers quickly pretend they weren’t looking. She feels her cramps. She sniffles. As she carefully dabs under her nose, Mr. Ch’oe asks, Miss Park, did you catch a cold? She nods. Who catches a cold in the summer?, Miss Kim chimes in. ‘Who catches a cold in the summer? I do! Do you want to know why? You make me sit in front of the air conditioner the size of a house, that’s why! You know I’m freezing my butt off here, and no one says anything about turning the air conditioner off or even turning it down a little, that’s why!’ She suddenly wants to cry like a child. Once, when she was coughing up her lungs, everyone expressed polite sympathy, but not one of them volunteered to sub for her. Her hubae irritates her, too. ‘And after I printed out the “Common Grammar and Spelling Errors” for her!’ When she told her hubae to “turn off the light and go to sleep,” her hubae would say, “No, I have to finish” and end up falling asleep like a baby, leaving the light on all night. The Department Head shouts, Let’s go, everyone! She shoots him a quick sideways glance, Your face is a sentence fragment. She asks herself how much she knows about her hubae, other than the fact that she cannot spell “example.” Like the time she could not remember a single word of French after three years of French in high school, her mind draws a blank. Mr. Ch’oe taps her on the shoulder. C’mon. Her hubae was a good storyteller. It had nothing to do with great wit or knowledge. When her hubae told a story, she told it as though she was relating the most important story in the world with the greatest care. Every time she listened to her hubae’s story, she felt something quiver inside her, similar to the way she felt after reading an abominably translated and therefore unreadable yet somehow profound philosophical text. The day she first invited her hubae to her place, all her hubae had brought was a small bag. The only connection between the two was an unbelievably vague and symbolic one—that they went to school together and that they’d met before. Like a traveler out of a fairy tale, her hubae asked if she could stay the night. Her hubae’s voice was confident and gentle. She hesitated before agreeing to put her up for the night. She didn’t want people to think of her as a cold seonbae2), and she didn’t mind entertaining a guest for one night. She laid out the futon for her, turned on the heat for warm water, sent her hubae into the bathroom for a shower, and began to seriously wonder why she had allowed her to stay the night. Perhaps she wanted to be a good person for one night. Perhaps she was pleasantly surprised by such a boldfaced, innocent request after becoming accustomed to encountering favors that were thinly veiled exchanges. The fact that she jumped at the opportunity to put her up for the night suggested that perhaps she was subconsciously wishing that someone would ask her for a favor, even a rude one. When her hubae came out of the bathroom, she started to pummel her silly with questions and offers. “You want something to eat?” “Do you want something comfortable to wear?” “The skin toner and lotion are here, this is the eye cream, and that’s the intensive moisturizer.” “Do you want a big pillow or a little pillow?” When she ran out of things to say, she asked without meaning to, “Would you like a glass of wine?” That night, the two rolled the futon aside and sat facing each other across a folding table. She placed on it a bottle of Chilean wine and two wine glasses, and said that she didn’t know much about wine, but enjoyed it every once in a while. The two made an awkward toast and each took a sip. Do you want to listen to music? When she started to crawl toward her laptop, her hubae said that it was fine. They exchanged a few words—topics anyone could discuss with anybody without finding themselves in an awkward situation. Frivolous discussion on weather, politics and movies. Her hubae cracked a joke at some point, and they laughed together for the first time. You appeared in my dream last night, Older Sister, said her hubae. She looked puzzled. You know how sometimes people you don’t know very well appear in your dreams and make a significant contribution to the plot? She nodded, I know! It’s really awkward when they appear in an obscene dream. You feel embarrassed and tense around the person when you see them the next day, right? Her hubae smiled. She burst into laughter, I know! She felt relieved in a way. Her hubae continued, In my dream, you and I were standing in the middle of a summer field in some random East Asian country. I have no idea why we were there together since we barely know each other, but we were together anyway. We stood in a spooky field looking up at the foreign night sky. Suddenly, I saw the Big Dipper, which hung unusually close to the horizon. Those were the only stars in the sky. She eagerly waited for her hubae to continue. We headed toward the stars and were flabbergasted. The seven lights actually turned out to be seven little lightbulbs on the roof of a brothel. She laughed out loud, You’re a liar! No, said her hubae with a straight face. It’s the truth. she continued, I remember feeling strangely relieved when I found out they were lightbulbs. They talked about a lot of things. She threw her head back and laughed every once in a while, finding things hilarious. She lay down sideways on a cushion, deliciously tipsy. She thought to herself, this is so much better than being stuck in the backseat with a co-worker I don’t like, forced to make small talk all the way to the destination. Perhaps this safe friendship that came with an expiration date made her feel generous. It was possible for anyone to be nice to anyone for one day. One could be as interesting or hospitable as one wanted to for a day. Although she wasn’t expecting it, she felt as though her kindness had been rewarded by her hubae’s good stories. She had a nice voice. They emptied the bottle of wine in no time. Her hubae left her leaning against a cushion with her eyes half-closed, and poked through her bag for something. She seemed to want to show her something. She came back and sat before her and stretched out her palm. There was a small wooden box on her hand. The simple box had a muted sheen from years of wear. Her hubae said quietly, Older Sister, I have a good story for you. She nodded. The box stirred her curiosity. I came here because the creditors foreclosed on the place I was staying. They didn’t give me a hint in any way, but I could tell I couldn’t stay there any longer. She braced herself. She was afraid she would be let in on a heavy secret in exchange for an empty act of kindness. When I was little, I used to move around a lot. As you know, I was on a work-study scholarship at school. She hadn’t remembered that her hubae had been on a work-study scholarship, but she hoped that the story she was about to hear was not a dark, troubling one. Wasn’t her studio apartment too cramped a space for her hubae to unload a story like that? I’m not sure where to start, but this isn’t a big deal, so don’t worry. She smiled uneasily. Her hubae continued equably, I once took a trip to the city library with my mom when I was young. I don’t remember exactly, but I think it took us over two hours to get there. She remembered that it wasn’t until she was in middle school that she first saw the inside of a library. Summoning up the memory of the library, her hubae also made the same face she had made years ago at the library. That day, the moment I stepped into this enormous mass of silence holding my mother’s hand, my heart began to race. Her hubae looked at something beyond the reach of sight, the way a blind person does. She looked down at the box. She could not tell what her hubae was trying to say. Mom sat me down at the library rest area, and told me to stay put for a while. She said she was going to look up some books. She gave me a pack of gum and told me to chew it if I got bored. She nodded. I peeled a stick of gum as soon as Mom disappeared into the stacks. My mouth kept filling up with sweet saliva from the chewing gum, and I had to stop chewing and swallow the sugary water. I sat in the chair and watched people. I didn’t know exactly what a library was, but I did know I had to be quiet. She nodded. I waited for quite some time, but Mom didn’t return. I was nervous, so I peeled another stick and chewed on it for ten, twenty minutes—until the sweetness wore off. In the end, Mom didn’t return. She felt she was listening to a pretty familiar story, and the familiarity of the plot made her feel a little tired despite her hubae’s misfortune. ‘Don’t mothers usually abandon their children at the market or the train station? What kind of a mother leaves her child at a library?’ I became anxious, so I started to blow bubbles. I blew bubbles, popped them loudly, and practiced being surprised. I was afraid that very soon, the time would come for me to be really surprised. I wandered into the stacks chewing the third stick. Since the library was a quiet place, I figured, maybe Mom has fallen asleep somewhere. I looked for my mom. The shelves all looked the same to me, so I didn’t know where I was going, but precisely because the place seemed like a maze to me, I was convinced I would find her there. I put the fourth stick of gum in my mouth because I was beginning to choke up. You can’t say for certain that it’s over until you’ve chewed the entire pack, you know? It makes sense, doesn’t it? Mom would not have left me with a whole pack of gum if she’d planned to come back before I was done chewing them all, would she? She nodded uneasily. What was taking so long? How many books was Mom borrowing? The library was frightfully quiet. I peeled off the fifth stick. The crumpling sound of the gum wrapper was overpowered by the sound of pages turning. I rolled the piece of gum covered in powdered sugar, and popped it in my mouth. Mom wasn’t there. My heart was breaking, but I couldn’t cry out loud. If I had cried at the library, it would have been the loudest cry in the world. She listened intently. In the end, Mom didn’t return. Her hubae looked into her face. This is the last piece of gum. Her hubae pushed the box toward her and carefully opened the lid. Mesmerized, she leaned forward to look inside the box. A flat piece of ginseng gum lay neatly in there. She felt like her heart had stopped beating. Really? What? asked her hubae. Uh, nothing. Silence hung between the two as they sat face to face, staring at a piece of gum. She looked at the ginseng gum lying gracefully on the velvet lining of the box. The wrapper was soggy and discolored. Despite the ginseng in its content, the gum looked like it would have a very harmful effect on one’s body. What her hubae did next shocked her. She took the piece of gum and ripped it in half without reservation. Wha, what are you doing? she asked, shocked. This is for you, said her hubae. She turned blue. Like a person trying to dissuade a deserter, she pleaded, Don’t! Her hubae smiled radiantly and said, It’s okay. ‘What’s okay?’ The torn, exposed part of the gum trembled. It’s just gum, said her hubae. Thank you, Older Sister. She was bewildered. Everything seemed like a lie and the truth at the same time. Her hubae’s existence seemed fake to her. Is her hubae pulling her leg? Maybe there’s over a hundred packs of old ginseng gum at her house in a closet of lies? Do they even make ginseng gum these days? The important thing was that, apart from whether it was true, the story moved her. She refused many times before finally giving in and taking the piece of gum. She put it in her receipt drawer on the dresser. It’s a piece of gum, and I can always give it back when she leaves, she thought. Anyway, of all the things that happened that night, there is one thing that she cannot forget to this day: the conclusion of her hubae’s story. It might have been those words that convinced her to live with her. Her hubae resumed in her beautiful voice, Since that day, whenever I think of my mother who disappeared, or when I have to part with people I loved deeply—Uh-huh, she reacted helplessly, the piece of gum imposed on her. When I look back on all those heartbreaking separations, the people I left, the ones who left me—Uh-huh. Her hubae said with the most infinitely transparent expression on her face, “My mouth waters.” The bus departs. Cold air pours out from dozens of tiny air conditioning vents. It’s cold. I’m depressed. She’s not sure if it’s because of her period, her cold, the company Sports Day on a national holiday, or the Department Head. The combination of the air conditioner and the smell of the bus gives her motion sickness. Looking out the window, she goes over the “vertex dance” sequence in her head. One, two, three, turn. One, two, three, forward. When she practiced the steps in their tiny studio, her hubae doubled over with laughter. Older Sister! What? Her hubae cried, turning white with laughter, You’re terrible! The weather is fine, and a few tired teachers are snoring. The Department Head is seated in the front, sharing energy drinks with the Team Leader. They are determined to validate the existence of the Korean department today, as the general consensus around the cram school is that the Korean department “doesn’t do much” compared to the Math and English departments. Across the aisle from her, the cram school bus drivers are talking amongst themselves. It’ll be another hour before they arrive at the destination. Should I nap? Sniffle. More snot. This is just great. The morning after the night her hubae stayed over, she dressed and tiptoed around the house getting ready for work. Her hubae lay sleeping like a dead person. She watched her for a long while before leaving the apartment. There was nothing more insensitive than to wake someone and kick them out. She taught absentmindedly, attended a meeting, and returned home. When she opened the door, she found her hubae sitting daintily next to her bag in the middle of a pristine apartment. She seemed like a parcel, ready to be delivered anywhere. You’d already left. I wanted to say goodbye. Still standing by the door, she nodded awkwardly. She didn’t know what to do next. So... Do I say goodbye now? Take care, I’ll see you around. Should I ask if she has enough cash to get wherever she’s going? Without meaning to, she blurted, Have a glass off wine before you go. It must have been around that moment that she thought she might try living with her hubae. That night, she emptied a whole bottle of wine, passed out before her hubae could leave, and woke up the next morning with a terrible flu. Her hubae felt her forehead with her cool hand, called in sick for her, and quietly made rice porridge. She peered at her hubae’s busy movements from under the covers. Loopy from the cold medication, she told her hubae to stay until she found a place to settle down. Without a word, her hubae continued to cut kimchi. That was three months ago. Her hubae stayed at her place, passing the time cleaning the house into somewhere unrecognizable while she was at work, downloading movies or American TV shows she might enjoy after work and organizing them like folded towels, or putting chrysanthemums in tall glasses. Her hubae also continued to look for work. She collected justifications for living with her hubae. Since her hubae was looking for work, it’d be nice if she could pay half the rent. Her hubae would feel more comfortable that way, and she’d be able to save on rent. Later, when she mentioned her plan in passing, her hubae asked hesitantly, Would it be all right with you? Would it be ‘all right’ with her? What could her hubae have possibly meant by that? The principal’s speech rings through the sky. Would it be all right with her? Wasn’t that her hubae’s way of pretending to be considerate when she was really passing the responsibility off to her? Four canopies stand facing each other in the athletic field. The judges’ tent is in the middle, and the others are all for cheering squads. The expressionless administrators sit under the shade in the judges’ tent. She vows to stop thinking about her hubae. The emcee announces the raffle prizes: a kimchi refrigerator, a bicycle, an MP3 player, and a soccer ball, among others. The field is stirring with excitement. The soundtrack for the National Warm-up Exercises blares through the speakers. Everyone awkwardly pretends to march. The music is accompanied by the demanding, “One! Two! Three! Four!” and domineering exclamations such as “Hamstrings!” and “Deep Breath!” She’s been hearing the National Warm-up Exercise song since kindergarten. The song had a strangely exhilarating, refreshing, and then sobering effect on her. But today, she can’t get over the hilarity of making rowing gestures with her arms to the most dramatic melody in the world as the man in the recording exclaims, “Whole body!” The music ends, and waves of people divide according to color. There are five colors—red, orange, yellow, green, blue—for five departments. She is impressed by the size of her company. She thinks, It’s a lot larger than I thought, and cheers. The preliminary soccer games will take place in the large athletic field, while the three-legged race and kickball will be held in the small athletic field. The cheering squads divide into a few groups and settle down. She sits by the soccer field with white inflated tubes in both hands. Male teachers from the Korean and Math departments stand in two rows and bow before the game. The cheering squad on the other side cries, Yay! The Korean department echoes them in response. She keeps sniffling as she claps the plastic tubes together. The whistle blows, and the game begins. Light-footed young men spread out all over the field under the bright summer sky. Win!    * Translated by H. Jamie Chang. AUTHOR'S PROFILE Kim Ae-ran has authored four short story collections, most recently Summer Outside (2017), and one essay collection, A Good Name to Forget (2019). Her first novel, My Palpitating Life (2011), was adapted into the movie My Brilliant Life (2014). Kim received the 2014 Prix de Linapercu award for the story “I Go to the Convenience Store.” Her debut work “No Knocking in This House,” excerpted here, won the 2003 Daesan Literary Award.

REVIEWS

• A Profession of Faith in Humanity: Summer Outside by Kim Ae-ran Vol.47 Spring 2020

• Ten Stories Dazzle the French: Nocturne d’un chauffeur de taxi by Kim Ae-ran, Paik Gahuim, Ahn Yeong-sil, Jo Kyung Ran, Park Chan-soon, Kim Yeonsu, Choi Jin Young, Han Kang, Yoon Sung-hee, Pyun Hye-Yo Vol.25 Autumn 2014

• In Search of Normality: Lauf, Vater, lauf by Kim Ae-ran Vol.25 Autumn 2014

• Struggling to Affirm Life: Vapor Trail by Kim Ae-ran Vol.18 Winter 2012

• A Short Life, Long Lived: My Palpitating Life by Kim Ae-ran Vol.13 Autumn 2011

• A Room with No Home: A Pool of Saliva by Kim Ae-ran Vol.1 Autumn 2008

BOOKS