Asia Literary Review No. 30, Spring 2016

SPRING 2016

This issue is published in association with

No. 30, Spring 2016

No. 30, Spring 2016

Publisher Greater Talent Limited Managing Editor Phillip Kim Editor in Chief Martin Alexander Senior Editors Kavita A. Jindal, Justin Hill, Michael Vatikiotis, Zheng Danyi Special Acknowledgement Ilyas Khan, co-founder of the Asia Literary Review Production Alan Sargent Front cover image Detail from ‘Untitled-15019’, 2015, mixed media on canvas, 160x250 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Kangwook Lee, and Arario Gallery www.arario.com Back cover image ‘ROK Passport On Blueprint’, 2016. Published with kind permission of the artist, Jesse Chun www.jessechun.com The Asia Literary Review is published by Greater Talent Limited 2504 Universal Trade Centre, 3 Arbuthnot Road, Central, Hong Kong asialiteraryreview.com Managing.Editor@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Editor@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Submissions@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Subscriptions and Advertising: Admin@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Charlesworth Press ISBN: 978-988-14782-3-8 (print) ISBN: 978-988-14782-4-5 (eBook) ISSN: 1999-8511 Individual contents © 2016 the contributors/Greater Talent Limited This compilation © 2016 Greater Talent Limited Published in association with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea

Contents Editorial

5

Fiction My Uncle Bruce Lee

8

Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated by Susanna Soojung Lim

from The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child

29

Ae-ran Kim, translated by Chi-Young Kim

from ButterFlyBook

50

Apple Kim, translated by Sunny Jeong

Speeding Past

81

Han Yujoo, translated by Janet Hong

Snowman

97

Seo Yoo-mi, translated by Soyoung Kim

Wang’s Whole-Chicken Stew

114

Kim Yi-seol, translated by Eun Kyung DuBois and Nathan A. DuBois

from Seven Cat’s Eyes

138

Choi Jae-hoon, translated by Yoonna Cho

Children in the Air

157

Kim Seong Joong, translated by Stella Kim

Wonderboy Kim Yeonsu, translated by Sora Kim-Russell

173

Essay Korean Literature Comes of Age

187

Deborah Smith

Poetry Heavy Snow, a Rented House, a Letter

72

Kim Kyung Ju, translated by Jake Levine

The House Where Someone Was Born

74

Kim Kyung Ju, translated by Jake Levine

Synopsis for the Theremin

75

Kim Kyung Ju, translated by Jake Levine

Finale

134

Min-jeong Kim, translated by Won-Chung Kim

To Red: A Declaration

136

Min-jeong Kim, translated by Won-Chung Kim

Contributors

193

Editorial Edit orial

Edit orial

Waves. They form somewhere far off, build momentum, then rush in and break in a wall of mist. Soon afterwards, they’re gone, leaving only evanescent scatterings of foam.

When the hallyu Korean pop-culture wave first crashed onto the shores of neighbouring Asian countries at the turn of the millennium, many observers saw it as just that – a rapidly rising and then receding event much like previous hip trends (such as Cantopop and manga) that had splashed onto the international pop scene. This one came in the form of irrepressibly danceable, karaoke-able tunes sung by impossibly beautiful people with either perfectly pouting lips and sleek figures or the most rock-solid packs of abs this side of Bruce Lee. K-pop softened hip-hop’s rough gangsta edginess and made it accessible to a more demure continent. Meanwhile, a number of K-drama series and films caused Japanese women to swoon over Korean men and Chinese kids to dress in hanbok. Korean food whetted everyone’s appetite. Korean online video games spread chronic insomnia to students whose wee hours should have been spent asleep or buried in books rather than in fantasy warrior guilds.

However, even after almost two decades, hallyu has yet to slide back into the abyss of spent hipster fads. In fact, it is a stronger force today than ever before, now established as the go-to source of entertainment across much of Asia and spreading its influence ever wider through the Middle East and the West. It ranks with Samsung, LG and Hyundai among Korea’s most important and recognisable brands. Psy is known universally, while only the most international can tell us very much about any other South Korean figure. Ban Ki-who?

Editorial

Because writing (and literature) is the foundry for so many of the performing arts, the enduring popularity of hallyu can beg a question: what about Korea’s contemporary literature – K-lit, so to speak? Why is it not better known internationally? What does it look like? How does it compare to or contrast with the wop-dancing, binge-watching appeal of its K-pop cousins?

This special issue of the Asia Literary Review (produced with the generous support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea) spotlights contemporary Korean literature written by or about younger Koreans – more specifically, the under-forty set who drive the country’s youth culture and represent its future. The writing itself about this generation is vibrant and original, as one would expect from creative and well-educated minds.

However, the stories are also disquieting reflections on a contradictory society which at once offers and demands so much to and from the young.

As such, contemporary Korean writing stands in sharp contrast to the slickly-synched choreography and surgically-sculpted looks that are de rigueur for hallyu singers or TV stars. The stories and themes in this issue plunge deep below the glossy surface of the pop brand to explore the lurking undercurrents of modern Korean life.

We begin with a piece set in 1973, when Korea was far from being the first-world nation it has become. In My Uncle Bruce Lee, a group of Korean teenage boys scramble after their own identities cloaked in the reflected glory of the eponymous Asian God. We conclude with Wonderboy, the story of a newly orphaned boy who is propped up as a figurehead (Korean, this time) for a hero-hungry society. ‘You are now the mascot of hope for this country’, the reluctant boy is told. Between these two pieces are works that explore the fragile teen years, the difficulties in scratching out a living as an independent adult and, finally, the various manifestations of disillusionment. Two teenage parents search for meaning while bringing up a son stricken with a disease that ages him prematurely. A young woman would rather speed around the motorways of Seoul than address her failure to connect with other people. A typical salaryman desperately digs his way through a snowdrift to get to his office. A mother turns to whoring in a chicken-stew restaurant to support her family. Members of a serial-killer website experience real-world horror when they gather in a secluded lodge

Editorial

owned by ‘the Devil’. Two children’s lives are up in the air (literally) when they find themselves the last humans on Earth.

The poets we’ve included offer new ways of seeing red and examine the peculiar miracle of the theremin’s music.

Despite the differences in these stories and poems, all at their core ask the same searching question: if the prescription for success in Korea is homogeneity and synchronisation, how can people be themselves? As the lead character laments in ButterFlyBook: Those who no longer played in the water were called adults. Adults were the people who worked in the city. They were the people who didn’t watch the sky. They were the people who no longer thought of clouds and stars, and seagulls and the ocean. It was very depressing to think that someday I, too, would be an adult.

The issue also includes an essay written by the UK’s Deborah Smith, a leading scholar and translator of Korean writing, which succinctly frames contemporary Korean literature in the context of recent Korean history.

Whether or not K-lit will achieve success internationally on a similar scale to Korean pop offerings is unknowable. More fundamentally, such runaway success, though welcoming, is not the defining aim of literary achievement. Writing is not a collaborative affair involving formulaic content, mass production and green-lighting corporate committees. Instead, it involves individual minds toiling in solitude to enlighten themselves and others. And good writing – in any country – reveals universal truths rather than reinforces mass illusions.

In this way, the contributors to this volume have been true to their calling. They and their peers provide evidence that hallyu is only the shiny surface of a much deeper creative force. And thus, we find ourselves at the widening shore of a profound ocean. Yes, the splashy waves provide a good frolic. But the waters are much more than merely a playground of spray and foam that washes up and back. This sea produces swells both light and dark.

It contains souls that struggle ceaselessly against death. It churns with real life.

Phillip Kim and Martin Alexander

My Uncle Bruce Lee My Uncle B ruce Cheon Lee Myeong-kwan

Cheon Myeong-kwan translated by Susanna Soojung Lim

T

his is not a story about Li Xiaolong, also known as Bruce Lee. And I’m not saying that my uncle is Bruce Lee. My uncle was simply one of the countless ordinary people who admired Bruce Lee. At that time, we were all fans of Li Xiaolong. Was there ever a boy who hadn’t hit himself on the back of the head while having a go with those nunchuks? We wanted to have a fist as fast and powerful as his, and back muscles as broad as a straw floor-mat. In other words, in the process of becoming a man, trying to be like Bruce Lee was – like masturbation – a compulsory requirement, not an optional one. My uncle was one of those Bruce Lee followers, but for him Bruce was more than just an object of adulation. He idolised Li Xiaolong so much that he wanted to follow him in every way, and Uncle truly sought to go far. Like Bruce, he sought to reach for the heavens and become a star.

But dreams are bound to be shattered. And hope? Crushed. A fast and powerful fist; muscles as resilient as a rubber band; a body that, kicking the earth, charges up, fresh and resplendent, with cool-headed ease; and the confidence of the strong! This is the dream for all of us who seek to transcend our human weakness. But the greater our desire for transcendence, the heavier the gravitational pull of despair presses on our shoulders and the more acute becomes the frustration of the body. Our hearts feel as if they’re about to burst, we’re short of breath, our legs give way under us. The moment we realise our bodies are softer than tofu and more fragile than

Cheon Myeong-kwan

glass – and, what’s more, that the spirit encased within is even less trustworthy – our timid souls duck into dark and solitary hiding.

My uncle was like that, too. He never fulfilled his dreams, never achieved love, never managed to remove the curse of illegitimacy hanging over his head. If he had died young, would he have become a legend like Bruce Lee? Of course not. Li Xiaolong rose up like a flame and disappeared like smoke, thereby becoming a legend; but my uncle was never able to fly that high.

An imitation is fundamentally different from the original, and what separates a fake from the real thing is what separates the earth from the sky.

You don’t live for something. You just live.

Bruce Lee said that. He also said the meaning of life was in simply living.

Which means even if you break and fall, no matter where it may be, you get back on your feet and plod on. That was how it was with Uncle.

Li Xiaolong died in the summer of 1973. It was of course Uncle who first told me the news. Since Li was a world-class star as famous as Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley, his death was big news. There was also wide speculation on the cause of his death. One theory claimed suicide; another suggested murder. There was talk of substance abuse and drug addiction.

One story had him poisoned, while a bizarre rumour floated around that the cause was a mort d’amour while the star was making love to the actress Ting Pei. Some theories were more outlandish, like the one involving the triads or the yakuza, or the one that had the high priests of Shaolin Temple eliminating Bruce through psychokinesis in order to protect China’s traditional martial arts. But whatever the rumours, the inescapable fact was that Bruce Lee was gone.

On that day, Uncle took me and my older brother up a neighbourhood hill for a memorial ceremony. He put the dried pollock and wine glasses he had prepared in a bag, and I took down a full-length poster of Bruce Lee to use as a funeral portrait. The poster was from a photo book of film stars included as a supplement to a magazine we had bought. It was a photo of Bruce with nunchuks tucked in to his side, his left hand stretched out as if he were about to confront an opponent.

On our way we met Jong-tae. He was a neighbourhood friend, a big lad with a perennially good-natured smile on his face. He was catching frogs

My Uncle Bruce Lee

between the rice fields, but he ran toward us as soon as he saw us. With his characteristic, slightly foolish smile, he greeted my uncle eagerly. Attached to Jong-tae’s waist was a piece of wire on which a few frogs were skewered through their mouths, all of them dead, and with their tongues hanging out. Without hesitation, Jong-tae followed us. Although he asked where we were going, I kept my mouth tightly shut. I didn’t think Jong-tae would understand if I told him we were holding a service for Bruce Lee, but it was also because I felt for some reason that I had to be careful with what I said that day.

Coming out of the village we passed a field of bellflowers on the side of the hill. The flowers, white and violet and in full bloom, festooned the hillside. Maybe it was because of Bruce’s death, but on that day they seemed melancholy and sorrowful, even though I had seen them many times before.

Sensing the solemn mood, Jong-tae gave up his questioning and silently followed us. Every time he took a step, the dead frogs shook at his waist.

We had just started secondary school; we hadn’t even grown pubic hair.

We made our way through the forest and climbed up the hill. Suddenly, there appeared before us a snug clearing encircled by tall pine trees like a folding screen. This was where Uncle polished his martial arts every morning. Various pieces of equipment – concrete weights and dumbbells – were scattered haphazardly around. Uncle placed Bruce Lee’s portrait at the base of a pine tree and put the dried pollock in front of it. Then, pouring the wine with great care, he offered the cup to his dead hero. Following Uncle’s example, we bowed down to Bruce. No one said a word, and this made the occasion all the more solemn. Even the cicadas that had been chirruping loudly seemed to have sensed the mood, for all of a sudden they stopped their noise and the clearing became deathly quiet. Although my family, the Kwons, were known throughout the neighbourhood for our lavish ancestral rites, the memorial service we were holding for Bruce couldn’t have been shabbier, consisting as it did of a single glass of clear wine and a piece of dried fish.

As I bowed, I looked up at Bruce’s face. His characteristically arrogant expression, with the chin held high as if mocking you, was full of confidence, and his sharp eyes betrayed no doubt or fear. His muscles, formed over a long time with great effort, were pulled taut like a bowstring, and it

Cheon Myeong-kwan

seemed as if his fist would strike out at any moment with his familiar cry, ‘Hiyaaaah!’ In short, as in any photograph of anyone still alive, you could tell that he’d never once thought of death. I wondered, why had he died?

As far as I knew, Bruce Lee was the world’s strongest person. At the time, we were obsessed by the question, ‘Who is stronger?’ Starting with the elementary question, ‘Who would win, the lion or the tiger?’ we’d proceed to wonder about such matters as ‘What if Muhammad Ali and Antonio Inoki had a match?’ or, ‘What would happen if Uncle and Dochi had a fight?’ or even ‘What if America and the Soviet Union went to war?’ Such infantile obsession is bound to turn, briefly, to the questions, ‘What looks good?’ and ‘What is right?’ before finally settling on the question of ‘What is safe?’ And yet there are those who bypass the question of ‘What looks good?’ altogether, while some never make it to the point of ‘What is safe?’

Still others lack any interest whatsoever in ‘What is right?’ And out of these different perceptions are born the artist, the criminal, the politician and the thug of the future.

We were then at an age when we hovered awkwardly between the questions of ‘What is stronger?’ and ‘What looks good?’ – in short, between ignorance and romanticism; and, in our eyes, in terms of looks or strength, neither one-armed Jimmy Wang Yu nor Ali nor Inoki could hold a candle to Bruce. He was simply the strongest. And the most beautiful. No one gave truth to the words ‘strong is beautiful’ as clearly as Li Xiaolong. He was the first to show the world that the male body was beautiful, and the body of an Asian male at that. And it was this Bruce who had died! The saddest part was that we wouldn’t be able to see any more films starring Bruce Lee. But I gathered that Uncle’s sadness was ten – no, a hundred – times greater than ours. And so we didn’t dare ask him why Bruce Lee had died. Throughout the ceremony, Uncle’s face was as heavy-set as a rock. Awed by the expression of grim resolution on his face, we shut our mouths and followed his instructions in silence.

When he had offered the wine and paid his respects to the star, Uncle stood still for a while and continued to look at Bruce Lee’s picture. And then suddenly, as if the thought had struck him, he turned to Jong-tae and said, ‘You-you-you offer a glass, too.’

My Uncle Bruce Lee

As if Jong-tae had been called out by the teacher in class, he threw me an uneasy look, then knelt awkwardly before of Bruce’s portrait. Pouring the wine into the glass Jong-tae was holding, Uncle said, ‘B-b-b-bow t-t-t-two and a half times only.’

After offering his glass, Jong-tae, anxious not to offend Uncle, managed to perform a clumsy bow. I found myself feeling slightly hurt. I mean, when it came to being Bruce Lee’s follower, I was second only to Uncle; it should have been me who was asked to offer a glass after Uncle. Or, if it were according to age, it should have been my older brother. Yet neither of us was asked to offer a glass. Why did Uncle give that honour to Jong-tae? Was it because he somehow already knew that Jong-tae would walk a different path to ours? Or perhaps he foresaw that Jong-tae would become a disciple and go down the same road that he had followed? After bowing with a serious face, Jong-tae looked awkwardly at Uncle. That’s when my brother asked straight out, ‘By the way, Uncle, why did Bruce Lee die?’

Uncle’s eyebrows wriggled. I was annoyed at my brother. To be so callous as to ask Uncle such a cruel question! My brother was always like that. Once, when the family had gathered for dinner, he’d disconcerted everyone by asking, ‘By the way, Uncle, they say you’re a bastard. Is that true?’ Whether he was extraordinarily insensitive or terribly curious I don’t know, but my brother was the top student in the whole school and the hope of the Kwon family. I was afraid Uncle would get angry, but he just gave a deep sigh and said, ‘Th-th-th-th-that’s because. . . .’

Uncle was stuttering badly that day. This was a habit he had developed after he came to live with us.

‘I-I-I-I-I don’t know.’

Other than announcing the fact, the newspapers were silent on the exact cause of Bruce Lee’s death. I suppose that even someone who knew as much about Bruce Lee as Uncle couldn’t know what had happened in Hong Kong only a day before.

At that time, Uncle was in his second year of secondary school. He was five years older than me and just three years older than my older brother Dong-gu, and it wouldn’t have been at all strange if we looked like brothers.

We were in fact inseparable and always went around together, just like brothers. In the summer, we’d go swimming in the reservoir and look up at

Cheon Myeong-kwan

the night stars as we talked ourselves to sleep in the melon field hut; while in the winter, we’d go around with torches under the edge of the eaves trying to catch sparrows.

I saw my first Bruce Lee film with Uncle in the local cinema. Of course, my enthusiasm couldn’t compete with Uncle’s, but I too was instantly captivated by Bruce’s charisma, which filled the giant screen. He shone even when surrounded by countless enemies; his smallest movement had the audience holding its breath. To think we would never be able to see him again!

I was sorry that the memorial service was over so quickly. Other than offering a glass of wine and bowing, there was really nothing more we could do. It was a meagre ritual and did not do justice to our tragic mood. But did Uncle think so, too? Looking down at the shrivelled pollock, as if a thought had suddenly occurred to him, Uncle called to me.

‘Sa-Sa-Sa-Sang-gu.’

Sang-gu’s my name.

‘What?’

‘I-I-I-I-I think we’d better catch a s-s-s-snake.’

‘A snake? Why?’ ‘We-we-we need a s-s-s-sacrifice, and the p-p-p-pollock won’t do. B-BB-Bruce’s sign was a dragon, so a s-s-s-snake would be good. S-s-snakes turn into s-s-s-serpents, and serpents turn into d-d-d-dragons.’

Uncle was probably thinking of some sort of a scapegoat. I thought it made sense. After all, our hero had died; it seemed that a worthy memorial service called for, if not a serpent or a dragon, at least something similar.

‘But where would we catch a snake around here?’ my brother asked.

‘Th-th-th-there are lots of snakes here, but n-n-n-now it’s hot so they’ve all gone to their c-c-c-c-caves. We-we-we need some bait.’

Uncle looked at the frogs dangling from Jong-tae’s waist. Realising what Uncle meant, Jong-tae quickly hid the frogs behind his back.

‘Th-th-this is for the ch-ch-chickens. . . .’

For some reason Jong-tae, who normally did not stutter, was stuttering now.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’ll catch some more for you later.’

My Uncle Bruce Lee

At my words, Jong-tae gave up his frogs in resignation. We threw the dead frogs in various spots in the forest where we thought the snakes might be. Then, hiding behind a tree and holding our breath, we waited for a snake to appear. The cicadas began to sing noisily again. It was hot, and the mosquito bites itched furiously.

‘But snakes don’t eat dead frogs,’ my brother said, after we had waited for a long time.

‘Still, they’ll come out when they’re hungry.’

‘There’s food everywhere these days. Why would it want a dead frog?’

‘Let’s w-w-w-wait a little more.’

At Uncle’s words we fell silent again and continued to wait for the snake.

How long was it going to take? The mosquitos attacked our arms and legs with renewed gusto.

‘Don’t think it’s going to come out. Let’s just go, Uncle,’ my brother said.

Uncle turned to Jong-tae.

‘J-J-J-Jong-tae, if you were a s-s-s-s-snake what would you do? Would you just sleep in a c-c-c-cool cave, or would you come out to eat a f-f-f-f-frog?’

‘Um, I guess I’d just sleep in the cave.’

‘Oh. O-o-o-okay. Let’s just go down.’

Jong-tae didn’t look too happy when Uncle said that, but we nonetheless gathered our things and began to go down. Suddenly, Jong-tae peered into the forest.

‘It’s a snake!’

We followed him into the trees and, sure enough, there was a big viper coiled up under a small white oak tree. No doubt Jong-tae had an eye for these things. The viper raised its head high and flicked its tongue, and a diamond pattern was clearly visible in the centre of its triangular head. We surrounded the viper so it wouldn’t escape, but we really couldn’t handle a venomous snake with our bare hands. In our rush we had left all of our sticks behind. I felt my legs shaking. I had touched a captured snake once while hanging out with the local boys, but I had never caught a snake with my own hands.

‘We need a s-s-s-stick. . . .’

Cheon Myeong-kwan

Not daring to approach the viper, Uncle attempted to break off a branch from a nearby hazel tree, but the branch refused to yield. Just then, the viper uncoiled itself and crawled rapidly in my direction.

‘S-s-s-stop it!’ shouted Uncle, but in my panic and fear I screamed, and tripped backwards over a tree stump. The viper slipped past me in a flash and made for the scrub. After waiting for a whole hour, we were on the verge of losing the snake. At this moment, it was Jong-tae who rose to the occasion. He ran after the viper and quickly grasped its tail. Then, whoosh! he swung it in the air and flung it to the ground. The viper lay stretched out and was still. It was then that Uncle, having patted Jong-tae on the shoulder with a sheepish grin, took hold of the unconscious viper’s neck and twisted it.

We took the snake to Bruce’s portrait. As if he were performing a ritual before a Greek temple, Uncle lifted it up to the sky with both hands. It was a huge snake, nearly a metre long. Taking out his pocket knife, Uncle cut the snake’s throat. We all felt very proud to be taking part in such a solemn event. The snake’s blood spilled onto the soil and we bowed once again.

Uncle nodded, satisfied at last. The sacrificed viper was handed back to Jong-tae.

‘You-you-you can give this to the ch-ch-ch-chickens.’

Jong-tae grinned and was about to take the snake when my brother noticed his hand was bleeding.

‘Isn’t that snake blood?’

When Jong-tae wiped his bloody hand on his trousers, we saw there were bite marks on the back of his hand.

‘I-I-I-I think you were b-b-b-b-bitten by the snake,’ Uncle said. Although no one had realised it, the viper had twisted back and its sharp teeth had sunk into Jong-tae’s hand when he grasped its tail.

‘Oh! No wonder it was so itchy. . . .’

Calmly, Jong-tae put his hand to his mouth, sucked out some blood and spat it on the ground. Is he being stupid or is he being brave? I wondered.

I could only marvel at Jong-tae’s nonchalant attitude.

‘J-J-J-Jong-tae, quick! B-b-b-bite the snake,’ said Uncle.

‘Why?’

My Uncle Bruce Lee

‘W-w-w-when you’re bitten by a snake, if you bite the snake the p-p-pp-poison will go back to the snake.’

‘Really?’

They say ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, but it was hard to believe what Uncle said was true. Jong-tae looked at the snake with distaste, then suddenly bit its middle.

‘H-h-h-h-harder!’

Jong-tae shut his eyes tightly and sank his teeth into the middle of the snake. Crunch! We could hear its vertebrae break. I couldn’t bear to watch Jong-tae bite the snake, and turned away.

While we were absorbed in the excitement of it all, the sun began to sink in the western sky, colouring it red. Thinking about it now, though it was only a memorial service, for some reason we felt drained of all our strength.

We were hungry, too. We packed up our things and walked down the hill.

Instead of the frogs, the snake now dangled at Jong-tae’s waist.

The day after Bruce Lee died, Uncle stopped his martial arts training. He said this was a period of mourning. When he came back from school, he would spend the rest of the day holed up in his room without uttering so much as a single word, and the expression on his face was so reverent and solemn that I was afraid to speak to him. It turned out that martial arts training was not the only thing Uncle had stopped doing; he had also stopped going to school. We found this out when Uncle’s friend Gyeongshik came visiting. Although Uncle left home every morning with his schoolbag, he’d walk around town instead of going to lessons, then return home when school finished. Uncle wasn’t home at the time, so even father found out about it. When Uncle explained that it was because ‘B-B-B-Bruce Lee d-d-d-died,’ Father hit the roof and said, ‘Are you nuts? Who is this Lee, anyway?’ The next day, Uncle was back at school.

Uncle was not the only one who missed school. The day after the memorial service Jong-tae was absent. We later learned that the marks from the snake bite had swelled up so badly that his wrist became as big as his thigh and he suffered all night from a high fever. Jong-tae went to the clinic the following morning, but when we saw him three days later his eyes were sunken and his swollen arm was as thick as Popeye’s. In the end, the index

Cheon Myeong-kwan

and middle fingers of Jong-tae’s right hand were crooked, and they stayed that way for the rest of his life. Granted, it wasn’t a serious handicap, but Jong-tae was bound to be misunderstood every time we played ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’, and every time he wanted to point at something straight ahead of him, his finger would bend ninety degrees to the left, to the confusion of those of us around him. Later, he was categorised as disabled and barred from military service, but he never once blamed us. He told us that now that his finger was naturally bent, it was easier to write, and he smiled his good-natured, simple smile.

The village of Jipseong, where we lived, was made up entirely of members of the Kwon family. It was a quiet farming community about a thirtyminute bus ride from Dongcheon-eup. Since there were relatives in every other house, simply working out our relations and getting them straight in your head was a challenge. For instance, I could never figure out whether the uncle in the house with the persimmon tree across the river was my father’s first or second cousin, and it always felt strange to think that Seon-mi, who was my age, was actually my aunt on my father’s side, according to the family tree. Confucian customs were strictly observed back then; we even had a few elders who still wore the traditional horsehair hats.

So as not to hear anyone tut and say, ‘So and so’s children are no good,’ the adults kept a close watch on their children. The Confucian rule that forbade boys and girls from sitting together after the age of seven was not questioned, and women in particular behaved with caution, lest they become the subject of village gossip.

Uncle had appeared in our village ten years before, in the autumn. I was too young to remember, but they say that a dark-skinned and shabbily dressed boy came knocking one day, a little past lunch time. Wiping his runny nose with his sleeve, the boy asked whether a gentleman bearing a name made up of the syllables ‘Kwon’, ‘Sun’, and ‘Jo’ lived here. Kwon Sun-jo was the name of my grandfather, who had passed away a few years earlier. When my mother asked him who he was and why in the world he was looking for a family elder who had passed away, the boy, looking greatly disappointed, turned to leave. Feeling a strange presentiment, mother invited him into the house and fed him. He was so hungry that he wolfed

My Uncle Bruce Lee

down in an instant the mountain of rice she had heaped up for him in a large bowl. Once the table was cleared, mother calmly interrogated him, as a result of which, after much hesitation, the boy finally began to speak. His story was thus: after his mother remarried he lived with his grandmother.

Before the old woman died, she told him to go find his father and gave him a piece of paper with the three syllables of my grandfather’s name written on it.

Mother nearly fell back in astonishment and at once ran to tell my grandmother. A great uproar ensued, and then the boy was brought face to face with my grandmother in the main room of the house. Outside, family members strained their ears to hear the fateful conversation taking place behind the closed door. A quiet exchange was audible from time to time.

But no matter how hard they tried, no one could hear anything much, apart from Grandmother’s deep sighs. Finally, Grandmother opened the door and called for Mother. Then more words were quietly exchanged and from that day on the boy lived with the family. Uncle was eight years old.

In our village, my grandfather had been a highly respected man. Although he lived in a remote hamlet, he could hold his own when it came to writing and reciting poetry and, thanks to his dedication to preserving the traditional proprieties, his words were taken seriously. Moreover, the relatives looked up to Grandfather since he was always willing to help out in difficult family affairs. But within three years of his death, Grandfather’s secret life was exposed.

A long time ago Grandfather got by chance into the ginseng business.

Until then he had occupied himself solely with farming and reading and, as a staunch believer in the traditional rules of segregation pertaining to the four social classes (scholars, farmers, artisans and tradesmen), he felt it was not fitting for a nobleman to work as a profit-seeking middle-man. But a few patches of rice paddy were not enough to feed hungry mouths, and in the end Grandfather began working as a peddler. He would go around the countryside and buy high-quality ginseng, which he then sold to herbal shops in the big city. Whether he had a knack for the business or whether it was out of pure luck I don’t know, but the money he made was not bad.

Naturally, Grandfather’s handling of big money led him to money’s good companions: drink and women. He met Uncle’s mother at a restaurant. She

Cheon Myeong-kwan

was a widow whose dark-skinned face presented a peculiar charm for men, and before long Grandfather set up house with her. They had a child whom they named Do-un, after the syllables meaning ‘road’ and ‘cloud’. It was a fitting name for a child born out of Grandfather’s wanderings on the road.

A few years later I was born, and in that same year Grandfather died of a sudden heart attack. Because he had been so meticulous during his lifetime, no one ever suspected he had left behind a second family. For her part, Uncle’s mother did not know he had died. And in the following year, she left Uncle in the care of her mother and went off to live with a man from a neighbouring village who ran a poultry farm. I suppose that if grandfather hadn’t died so suddenly he’d have managed to make some arrangement for Uncle, but as he died without leaving a will, Uncle was left with nothing in the world except for that family name, that great name of Kwon.

In those days, it wasn’t uncommon for a family to take in the child of an affair, but raising an illegitimate son after the father had died was unheard of. All the kinswomen in the village took turns paying my grandmother a visit, telling her that it just wasn’t the thing to do and that no good would come of raising another woman’s child, but Grandmother simply shook her head and told them they were ‘cold-hearted bitches’. Even swallows nesting in the eaves were not chased away, she said; it was all the more reason to take in a helpless child.

My eldest aunt, who had married a man from the neighbouring village, voiced her suspicion about whether Uncle was really Grandfather’s son. She wondered whether this was a scheme cooked up by someone who knew our family. At her words, everyone looked closely at the boy’s features and, sure enough, he didn’t seem to have anything in common with the men of the family. The Kwon males were in general tall and fair-complexioned; it was hard to believe that this small, dark-skinned boy was Grandfather’s son.

Although it caused a stir in the village, Auntie’s argument was immediately dismissed by Grandmother, who swore that the dent on the end of Uncle’s pointed nose was sure proof that he belonged to that damned Kwon family.

Admittedly, her claim was no different from saying that our toes looked alike, but it was also true that my father, my brother and I all had a slight dent on the ends of our noses and that this was a distinctive feature that the

My Uncle Bruce Lee

Kwon males inherited from my grandfather. And so, for a while, when the grown-ups of the village met my uncle, they would touch his nose to see if he had a dent.

Although Grandmother readily accepted the homeless and helpless Uncle into the family, this did not mean that she was particularly affectionate toward him. The reason she did not send him away was because she wished to take Grandfather’s karma upon herself, thereby preventing any misfortune from befalling their descendants. It was also likely that she wanted to help Grandfather cleanse his karma in the other world, which would make his stay there a little more bearable. While the prospect of having a brother young enough to be his son was embarrassing for my father, it was my mother who found herself in the most awkward position. All of a sudden, there was now a brother-in-law close to her children’s age whom she had to look after! Although on the whole affectionate, the members of the Kwon family could also be thoughtless and indifferent, and no doubt they must have unwittingly hurt Uncle from time to time. This was generally true of my mother, whose treatment of Uncle was characterised not so much by any bad intentions, but by a simple lack of attention.

In winter that year, during the memorial service for Grandfather, Grandmother called Uncle out in front of the whole family and had him offer a glass of wine to the deceased. This caused a stir among the elders of the Kwon clan, but Grandmother stood her ground. Would a rough-andtumble eight-year-old have understood the significance of that act?

The Kwon family was known in the whole village for carrying out elaborate and extravagant ancestral ceremonies. At times, the sheer number of males who had to pay respects was such that, unless they belonged at the top of the family hierarchy, even men with greying beards past middle age were sometimes unable to step into the main hall. As for us little urchins, we were lucky if we could squeeze through and set foot on the straw mat on the floor. We had so many ceremonies throughout the year that we’d often take a share of the food and drink after the offering table was cleared without even knowing which ancestor was being commemorated. On this occasion, intimidated by the solemn atmosphere, Uncle glanced anxiously at the clan elders, awkwardly stepped into the main hall, and, following the instructions of the relative who was directing the rite, knelt before Grandfather’s

Cheon Myeong-kwan

portrait. Uncle had not seen the face of his father since he was five years old. Did Uncle remember the father who, like a guest stopping by at a humble inn, would appear from time to time to stay for a few nights? As if searching for an answer, Uncle stared intently at the portrait, but all he could see was the vague brush-drawn image of the dead man; there was nothing he could know for sure.

At first, the confused boy did not leave his seat. Then, at the urging of a relative to hurry up and offer the wine and pay his respects, he managed to get to his feet. But since he had never seen an ancestral ceremony, let alone participated in one, he simply stood clumsily with the glass in his hands, not knowing what to do. All he wanted then was to get out of that uncomfortable situation as quickly as possible. And so it was that the soul of a bastard, having experienced confusion and fear at an early age, taking fright at the decisive moment and tempted to flee, glimpsed the dark curtain of fate hanging over his head.

Was the situation too much for a nine-year-old boy to handle? Uncle passed out on the spot. The offering table was upset and the sacrificial food tipped onto the floor. In the midst of the commotion his body became stiff, the whites of his eyes rolled back, and his arms and legs began to shake.

They carried the child into the next room, massaged his hands and feet and prepared a compress. It was following that incident that Uncle began to stutter. For some reason, even the simplest of words got stuck in his throat.

As if he were starting the engine of an old cultivator, Uncle would s-s-s-sstutter the first syllable several times; the remaining sounds would then come stumbling after. He had never been talkative, but from that day on he spoke even less. The curtain hanging over his head was now heavier than ever.

In the winter that Li Xiaolong died, his film, Enter the Dragon (Yong Jeng Ho Tu), opened in cinemas. To think that just when we were sure we’d never see Bruce again, he had left behind a posthumous work! And with a title of Enter the Dragon to boot! It may be difficult to understand, but titles made up of four Chinese characters, such as The Big Boss (Dang San De Hyeong) or Return of the Dragon (Meng Ryong Gwa Kang), held for us a peculiar charm back then. We were unenlightened schoolboys who had not even mastered the Thousand-Character Classic, and we had no idea what

My Uncle Bruce Lee

these Chinese titles meant. And yet those symbols, written in imposing brush strokes at the centre of film posters, never failed to excite us. In a fight between the dragon and the tiger, who would win? Of course, we knew that it was the dragon who’d win, but even so we couldn’t wait for Enter the Dragon to hit our town’s cinema.

At last, the day of the premiere arrived, and all the students, restless from the boredom of a winter holiday and sporting identical buzz-cuts, gathered in the cinema. The entrance was jam-packed with boys from all the schools in our district. In high spirits, they took out their nunchuks and messed around, emitting shrieks in imitation of Bruce Lee. Uncle took me, my brother Dong-gu, and Jong-tae to the cinema, even buying a ticket for Jong-tae – he must have felt guilty about the snake-bite at the memorial service. Jong-tae said it was the first time he had ever been to a cinema and kept grinning out of sheer excitement. Jong-tae’s family was so poor they couldn’t even afford to buy school bags, and Jong-tae carried his books bundled in a piece of cloth. A trip to the cinema was something he hadn’t even dreamed about.

Filled with the heat of raging hormones, as well as all the smells and gasses emitted by male students in their puberty, it seemed as if the cinema were about to explode. Unable to get seats, we found a spot on the steps of the middle aisle. As if hanging from a loaded bus, the rest of the children barely managed to squeeze into the aisles; they had to stand there for two hours with their bodies twisted in an ‘S’ shape. Finally, the lights went out and the Warner Brothers logo appeared with the music. Oh, what a moment! Our pupils expanded, our breaths quickened, and our hearts overflowed with emotion! In our whole lives, how many more times would we be able to experience a moment as electrifying and heart-pounding as this? We clapped, cheered, and whistled.

Indeed, Bruce Lee had become stronger and faster. His nunchuk skills were even more dazzling and his movements presented a model of perfect simplicity; there was nothing superfluous nor lacking in them. We didn’t dare blink for fear of missing a single move. It was Jong-tae’s first time at a Bruce Lee film and, like Uncle, his soul was at once captivated by Bruce.

He stood there as if mesmerised and became so completely immersed in the film that he didn’t seem to realise his eyes had lost focus and saliva was

Cheon Myeong-kwan

dribbling from the corner of his mouth. The audience was spellbound as it watched the scene where Bruce faced the chief villain in a room full of mirrors. Not a sound could be heard from the huge number of people packed into the theatre; all we could hear were Bruce’s strange screams. The scene in the cinema was in itself a spectacle.

During the film, I turned to look at Uncle next to me. His face was filled with sorrow, as if he were about to cry. For him, watching the posthumous work of Li Xiaolong was probably like listening to the requiem of a departed hero. Even when the audience shouted and cheered in awe, Uncle continued to watch Bruce’s last work without a word, a heavy and desolate expression on his face.

When the film was over and the lights came on, people looked as if they were still dazed by the brilliant action of the show.

‘But it doesn’t make sense,’ my brother said, frowning as he came out of the toilets.

‘What?

‘Bruce put a snake in the guard’s office. But why did all the guards break the windows and run away just because of one snake? Aren’t they all grown-up men? And why is Bruce unharmed even after he caught the snake with his bare hands? He wasn’t bitten like Jong-tae. Isn’t that strange?’

In the film, there’s a scene where Li Xiaolong chases the guards away with a snake and gets in to the villains’ den. I suppose that what my brother said wasn’t completely wrong. But to think he had the nerve to say that just after seeing the film! No respect! That was like sounding a Buddhist gong right after coming out of a church service! Being a fervent follower of the church of Li Xiaolong, I wanted to punch my brother’s big mouth.

‘And since the cops are going to come anyway, he can just hide and wait.

I don’t know why he bothers to risk himself and fight.’

Smart-arse, always acting like you know everything! I grumbled to myself as I dragged Jong-tae, who still hadn’t recovered his senses, out of the cinema. Then, as I looked around for Uncle, I noticed a group of people making a racket and moving to the alley at the back of the cinema.

Wondering what the commotion was about, I went round the back of the building and saw five or six gang members surrounding a student in uniform. I pushed my way through the crowd to look: the student was none

My Uncle Bruce Lee

other than Uncle. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but it looked as if a fight had broken out between Uncle and the gang.

One of them, a squat fellow who looked especially tough and stood out among the gang members, was familiar to us. Standing barely five feet four inches tall, his nickname was Dochi, and he had a reputation among the students for being a vicious fighter. Having dropped out of high school early on, he now made the rounds of the cram schools, stealing from the children and all the while nurturing the ambitious dream of becoming a member of the town’s one and only gang organisation, the ‘Comeback’ gang. Dochi was the same age as Uncle, but it was hard to believe he was still in his teens since he had already mastered the look of a veteran thug, one who ‘ate his rice mixed in with blood’.

‘Uncle. . . .’

Frightened by the threatening mood of the back alley, I called out to Uncle. He looked at us and waved his hand as if to say that it was all right.

‘You-you-you-you go home first.’

Although he had said that, I stood there, not sure whether I could leave Uncle in danger. But then my brother pulled my hand.

‘Hey, what are you waiting for? Uncle told us to go.’

My brother’s face was full of fear. But I shook off his hand and elbowed my way into the crowd of students to take a look at Dochi and his gang.

Stamping out his cigarette with his shoe, Dochi stepped forward.

‘Hey, you ssipsae, motherfucker. Didn’t I tell you to wait for me after school? Why did you leave? You arsehole, don’t you understand what I say?’

Coming up to Uncle, Dochi flicked Uncle’s chin with his fingers. It seemed that he had encountered Uncle before.

‘You ran away because you were scared I’d beat the shit out of you, didn’t you?’

Dochi continued to threaten Uncle by poking his fingers into his cheeks, but Uncle’s face showed no emotion.

‘Will you look at this motherfucker. You’ve done some fighting, eh?’

Uncle shook his head silently.

‘What you lookin’ at, punk? I’m going to rip your eyeballs out. How about it, you and me, right here?’

Cheon Myeong-kwan

I should tell you at this point that ssipsae (motherfucker) is not the name of a bird. It’s short for ssip saeki. Of all the swear words deriving from the root ssip, Dochi had a fondness for the word ssipsae, and the savage gusto with which he pronounced it sent chills up your spine.

While Dochi was harassing Uncle, more and more students came out of the theatre and began to crowd the narrow alley. The area was soon jam-packed with onlookers, all of whom, however, appeared to be too scared to intercede in the fight. After a while, Uncle finally opened his mouth and stuttered, ‘I-I-I-I don’t want to f-f-f-fight with you lot.’

‘W-w-w-why don’t you want to fight?’ As Dochi mimicked Uncle’s stuttering, his gang burst into laughter. At this, Uncle’s brows began to twitch. It was not a good sign.

‘I-I-I don’t fight with n-n-n-normal people,’ said Uncle, as if forcibly restraining himself.

‘You don’t fight with normal people? Then what are you? A freak?’

Dochi’s words generated another round of laughter, this time from the crowd of students who, happy to have chanced upon another entertaining show in addition to the Bruce Lee film, now looked at Uncle, the day’s scapegoat, their faces filled with excited anticipation. Uncle paused for a moment, then said, ‘I-I-I-I’m a follower of the martial arts.’

‘A what? Follow what?’

‘Yeah. I-I-I-I don’t fight with normal people. That’s b-b-b-breaking the rules.’

Dochi thought a minute about what Uncle said, then smirked. ‘What the fuck? Can you believe what this ssipsae just said?’

Dochi turned as if to look at his gang, then all of a sudden swerved and lunged at Uncle. It was a pre-emptive strike no one had anticipated. But with a light move of his body, Uncle expertly dodged the attack, and Dochi was sent sprawling forward.

‘You’re dead!’ Humiliated in front of the crowd, Dochi sprang back like a rubber ball and, clenching his teeth, lunged toward Uncle again, this time aiming a more accurate punch. But he was no match for Uncle, who had spent years honing his martial arts techniques on that hill. As Dochi charged, Uncle’s lightly extended fist hit him full on the nose, and he was soon stretched unconscious on the floor. It was just like the action in the

My Uncle Bruce Lee

Li Xiaolong film we had just seen! Cries of wonder erupted from the crowd of onlookers. I had, of course, seen Uncle practise his moves many times on the hill, but this was the first time I had seen him knock down an opponent in a real fight. Unbeknownst to him, Jong-tae was clapping and cheering wildly.

With Dochi felled by a single blow, the rest of the gang now seemed to realise that Uncle was no lightweight, and they surrounded him cautiously.

But just as they were about to pounce, Dochi leapt up and screamed at them.

‘Hey, back off, all of you! I’m gonna kill any ssipsae that gets into this fight!’

At Dochi’s frenzied outburst, the gang retreated. He then picked up a Coke bottle and smashed it against a lamppost, sending pieces of broken glass flying. This terrified the onlookers, who retreated further. Uncle also looked tense, clenching his fists tightly. Wielding the broken bottle, Dochi slowly made his way toward Uncle.

‘You, ssipsae, you’re really going to get it this time.’

I felt that something truly terrible was about to happen; my heart beat like mad and my knees shook uncontrollably. Waving the Coke bottle around wildly, Dochi lunged at Uncle. Each time the sharp edge of the bottle narrowly missed him, the crowd let out a cry. Then, when Uncle was backed into a corner, Dochi seized the chance and aimed the bottle straight at Uncle’s side. It seemed to everyone that there was nowhere for Uncle to go: he was done for. But in a flash, Uncle, spun his body in a full circle like a top and struck Dochi with his foot. Dochi lost his balance and was sent sprawling. The roundhouse kick was as quick as a flash of lightning.

Exclamations of astonishment exploded from the crowd. The gang rushed toward Dochi as Uncle lightly brushed the dust from his hands and turned to us. Jong-tae and I were yelling like mad, more excited than we had ever been when watching the film. But then Dochi leapt to his feet once again.

‘Stop right there!’

Uncle turned and saw Dochi, spitting blood, coming toward him.

Considering the fact that Uncle’s roundhouse kick must have cracked his chin, Dochi’s tenacity was surely amazing.

‘The fight’s not over, you ssipsae.’

Cheon Myeong-kwan

Even with a swollen face and bloody lips, Dochi’s mouth was alive and well. And he was still holding onto the bottle.

‘You’ve done some fighting, huh? Watch me, ssipsae.’

Dochi proceeded to do something completely unexpected. Stripping off his shirt, he began to slash at his bare stomach with the broken bottle. Soon Dochi’s stomach was covered in blood, just like the wounds inflicted on Bruce Lee by the head villain in Enter the Dragon, the film we had just seen.

Many of the kids began to scream; some were even being sick.

‘Hey, ssipsae, it’s you or me today. Let’s see who’s really going to get fucked.’

As Dochi cut at his stomach with the bottle, I could see Uncle’s face stiffen with fear.

Then, as now, it was sheer guts, not superior fighting skills, that determined victory in a fight. It was common for fighters to try to establish dominance early on in a battle by such means as violently stripping off their shirts, chewing on razor blades, or, as in the case of Dochi, committing reckless acts of self-harm. On that day, Dochi had attempted for the first time a special technique he had learned from a highly respected senior member of the Comeback gang. However, such a strategy was intended for situations when you were facing several attackers on your own and found yourself at a serious disadvantage; Dochi’s slashing at his stomach showed a complete misunderstanding of this last-resort method. In other words, he had used the wrong technique in relation to the wrong opponent in the wrong situation which, given his inexperience, was perhaps understandable.

But more than that, this was too high-level a technique for the likes of Dochi to carry out in a real fight, and all the worse for not having had any practice.

Dochi’s attempt at dominance had ended up an utter failure.

Although he had succeeded in intimidating his opponent by cutting deep into the flesh of his stomach and drawing blood, Dochi had expected the flow of blood to stop after a while. But the blood continued to flow uncontrollably and was soon soaking the formal white trousers he had bought only a few days before at the local tailor’s. The gangsters watching nearby all wondered how dangerous it was for a person to lose that much blood. But although they wanted to stop the fight, they could only watch in concern, so fiercely was Dochi waving the bottle around and threatening to slash the stomach of anyone who dared to intervene.

My Uncle Bruce Lee

Uncle was also in an awkward situation. What could you possibly do with an opponent who was bleeding profusely and brandishing a broken bottle? For his part, Dochi wasn’t even exactly throwing himself at Uncle; he just kept repeating the words ‘It’s you or me, ssipsae,’ like a mantra and waving the bottle around. Soon the ground was spinning before Dochi’s eyes, and his legs began to give way beneath him. The blood had not only drowned his new trousers in a sea of dark blood, it was also soaking his shiny white shoes and forming a pool on the ground.

The onlookers were glued to their places, so fascinating did they find this bizarre horror show. Dochi began to stagger and finally collapsed in the pool of blood. Thus ended the fight.

Surprised at the unexpected result, the teenagers broke their silence. As for Uncle, he merely stood still, completely bewildered. As Dochi’s gang picked him up, his face was pale and he was clearly in a serious condition.

The last words he said, before he passed out and was carried to a nearby hospital, were addressed to Uncle. ‘Repeat after me: “You’re dead”.’

from The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child from The Youngest Ae-r an P aKim r ents with the Oldest Child

Ae-ran Kim translated by Chi-Young Kim

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 me To know what you feel.

from The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child

My father cries.

This is the story of the youngest parents and the oldest child.

Chapter One

W

hen 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. ‘Mum, 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 grasp 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, and sometimes the word felt as though it were 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.

Ae-ran Kim

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 a 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 took my first steps. 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 off to work. The Daeho Tourism District was being constructed nearby, and my father worked there. My grandfather, who had a head for numbers, built an extension in his front garden for the workers that swarmed in from other towns. It was a draughty 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 new-born child. The kitchen was that in name only, and the room was ridiculously small, but my parents say they didn’t complain at all because it was rent-free and my grandparents paid for their living expenses.

My grandmother had six children: five sons and a daughter. Once I asked, ‘Mum, you said Grandmother and Grandfather never got along. So why do they have so many children?’ My mother explained in embarrassment, ‘I know, 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.

Growing up around foul-mouthed men, she threw out swear 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

from The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child

when she understood that all the problems in the world couldn’t be solved by saying ‘fuck’. She must have realised 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 main 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 my father 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-yearold 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 hurricane of tears and fighting had hit the house with 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 been accepted by the largest athletic high school in the province for 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 chance. ‘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

Ae-ran Kim

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 realised, 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.’

My grandmother, who had lost her deference toward her husband as she grew older, quietly grumbled, ‘Well, that’s a talent, too.’

My mother, her straightened hair secured to one side with a hairpin or two in the style of the day, sat primly nearby without speaking.

Chapter Four

‘A

-reum!’

I came to my senses and looked around. My mother was leaning against my door. With her back to the dark living room, she asked drily, ‘Why are you so surprised?’

Her tired thirty-four-year-old face was blanketed with thick fatigue that she couldn’t erase, no matter how much she washed it.

‘Oh, I was just online.’ I quickly closed the document I was working on and opened an Internet portal.

‘Go to bed. We have to go to the hospital tomorrow.’

‘OK. Just a little longer.’

‘Did you take your blood pressure medicine?’

‘Yes.’ ‘And your pain meds?’

‘Of course.’

‘And your joint meds?’

‘Yes, Mum.’ ‘And your stomach meds? What about that?’

‘Mum, come on. I do it all the time. Don’t worry, I did everything.’

My mother hovered by the door, unable to come in freely, in deference to her teenage son’s territory. It was because I had once asked her to knock before coming in. I still remember the immense hurt that spread over her face when I uttered the word ‘knock’.

from The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child

‘Mum.’ ‘Hmm?’ ‘Something wrong?’

‘No, I came over because your light was on. And I was having weird dreams.’

‘You look tired.’

‘Yes. I don’t know. It’s weird but I’m more tired on my days off.’

‘What was your dream?’

My mother hesitated. ‘About the water. The same thing I always dream about.’

‘Oh, that’s it?’

‘I should have saved you from the water before waking up. . . .’ my mother seemed truly regretful.

‘Mum?’ ‘Yes?’ ‘I’m planning to dream that I’m a star swimmer. If it’s OK I’ll swim over to your dream and show you how elegantly I can do water ballet.’

‘And you won’t float away?’

‘And I won’t float away.’

My mother smiled. ‘Someone like you. . . .’

I was quiet.

‘Shouldn’t be sick.’

I gazed at my mother with my eyebrow-less, sunken eyes. I didn’t know what to say in reply. I cautiously opened my mouth. ‘Mum, you know what?

Someone like me. . . .’

‘Yeah?’

‘Someone like me, who’s really a great kid?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Can only create parents like mine.’

Wondering what that meant, she gave me a faint smile. ‘Go to bed. No more Internet. If you keep this up I’m taking away your computer.’

For a few months I’d been writing slowly, sometimes a page or even just one or two lines a day. What I was writing and what I was going to do with it was still a secret. My goal was to finish the manuscript by my next birthday. That was why I wanted a laptop. We already had a really old

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desktop in our living room but it kept breaking down and everyone used it. I never really got a chance to work on it. Once someone sat down at the computer they didn’t think to get up, so we had to wait our turn, looking as anxious as the poor slum-dwellers of the 1970s who had to wait their turn to use the public bathrooms. When my father was sitting there I was impatient, and when I was surfing the net my mother hinted that she’d like to get on. In all honesty, everything my father did on the computer looked useless. Of course, he would have thought that all of my clicking was pathetic.

I closed the document I had been working on and opened another window. My mother had barged in and interrupted my flow and I figured I should do something else since I’d finished what set out to do today.

Looking at the new document, I thought of a question I’d asked myself long before but hadn’t been able to solve. Giving myself homework and thinking about it was an old habit of mine. Because my homework was self-imposed, I was both the teacher and the student. Some problems I could solve immediately and others I couldn’t. Some had answers and others didn’t.

Sometimes it was more fun to formulate a question than to answer it, but even so, I was the only one who would answer it. Over the years I had assigned myself all kinds of useless things like memorising the constellations, drawing all of the underground lines in the country, investigating all the trees of the world. The most useless of all these was ‘writing’. There was no set format or rule but I had a habit of making a note of things I was curious about.

Why do people have children?

I gazed anxiously at the blinking cursor on my computer screen. I hadn’t been able to answer this question no matter how much I’d thought about it over the past few days. Would it be easier had I gone to school? I sometimes felt sad about missing out on school but it was better to shake off my lingering feelings and fantasies about it. I had the general idea of what happened in middle and high school. But I didn’t know exactly what children my age learned at school. And the fact that I didn’t know made me nervous from time to time. I felt that I should know as much as the other children so that I would feel that I was in the normal range, but I couldn’t tell from where to where was ordinary and how much I was supposed to study.

from The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child

So I chose to study as much as I could. There was no system or coherence to what I did but I thought that it would be better to be excessive than fall short. Then, if I made friends, I would be able to hold my own in a conversation, no matter what topic came up.

I stared at the monitor for a long time with my arms crossed. I finally gave up on finding the answer and opened another document. I might as well do today’s homework. I typed my to-do list into the blank document.

Look at my parents’ pictures from when they were young and write down what I feel.

A picture I’d already removed from our family photo album sat on my desk. My parents had gone to the local photography studio and taken it not long after I was born.

Their hands look so young.

My parents were smiling awkwardly at the camera. I was sitting on my mother’s lap, not yet three months old, looking off to one side. I met my parents’ eyes from seventeen years ago and smiled plaintively. Somehow I felt that they weren’t smiling at the camera but at the time and space beyond it, at me right now. I typed my first sentence into the blank document. Why do parents have the face of parents no matter how young they are? That didn’t seem to be unique to my parents. A few days ago I’d had the same thought while watching television. During dinner we’d randomly caught a reality show that focused on a teenage couple who had just started a family. They were unaffected teenagers raising a new-born in a small room. They had become famous after the boy, who was my age, stole some milk-powder from a corner shop. Their story had been extensively written about and people had been very sympathetic to their situation. Their faces on the screen were like any other teens’. Their speech patterns and clothes were the same as other children my age, as was their taste for fast food and popular musical groups. Their innocent faces were exactly seventeen years old. But their eyes – the look in their eyes – were different somehow. In them were the fatigue and sadness and pride of those who were responsible for another life.

How should that be described? After giving it some thought, I typed, ‘I don’t know how to describe it; it’s just the face of a parent.’ A parent was an adult because he was a parent. You didn’t become a parent because you were an adult. And then I looked for a long time at my young parents in

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the picture, at their young eyes, young necks, and young hair. They looked delinquent somehow, and also painfully youthful. I reached from one world to another to stroke their heads with my finger.

Of course, there were opposite examples, too, like Grandpa Chang’s family. Grandpa Chang lived with his ninety-year-old father and was scolded constantly. When Grandpa Chang stepped out of the house to avoid his father, his expression was like that of a seven-year-old.

I would go up to Grandpa Chang as he sat sadly under the cement walls.

‘Grandpa, you got in trouble again?’

‘Yes.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I don’t even know. He just got angry with me.’

‘Grandpa, are you upset?’

‘Yeah. Actually, it’s fine when he does it at home. I just wish he wouldn’t do it in front of the others.’

The others he was referring to were the old men at the senior citizen’s community centre who were younger than him. He often spoke ill of his father to me, but he seemed to be relieved that someone still treated him like a child. Soon I discovered that his expression changed when he wasn’t with his father. Under the note I wrote down earlier, I wrote: Why does a child always have the face of a child no matter how old he is? And, to my surprise, I could grasp a clue to the answer to the question I was really struggling over: Why do people have children?

I typed quickly so that the brief ray of insight wouldn’t rush away. To relive the life they don’t remember. It really seemed to be true. Nobody remembered their early years, especially because the experiences from before you were three or four can’t be recovered perfectly, so you saw these through your child. You were re-experiencing that time. Oh, I nursed. Oh, I was able to hold my head up around this age. Oh, I looked at my mum with eyes like that. Seeing yourself in a way you weren’t able to see before. Becoming a child again by being a parent. Wouldn’t that be why people had children?

Then what would my parents have seen through me, a baby who started to age quickly around three years old? Soon I came to another question.

Why did God make me?

I haven’t been able to find the answer to that one yet.

from The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child

Chapter Five

M

y father’s business was set up in town, about thirty minutes away by bus from my mother’s family’s house. In town, a lot of people wore nice clothes and were eloquent, especially in comparison to the farmers and fishermen. People didn’t call the area by its official name, referring to it as ‘the Market’ instead. It was merely a small town with a few government offices and cafés, a brewery, a piano school and a public bath, but the people who lived there felt superior to everyone else. That was the reality even if they didn’t show it; the puny superiority that a hick feels when he looks at an even bigger hick, the way a frog looks down on a tadpole.

My mother and father were both familiar with the Market. The girls’ high school my mother used to attend was there, as was the café where my father learned about her pregnancy. My grandfather made his fourth son, who was just hanging around after being discharged from the military, go and help my father. My grandfather reckoned his son would learn about business and get some experience. My uncles’ help ensured that the setup went smoothly. My uncles, who had settled in town, had sourced quotations and found accounts. The shop was in a small bustling area nicknamed the Rodeo Drive of the Market, at a crossroads where the rich and stylish gathered. My father’s favourite thing about his Nike shop was that it was clean. It had to be, according to the demands and guidelines from Nike headquarters, but not many shops were as nice. My mother didn’t mind becoming the boss’s wife either. The two were amazed that they were surrounded by so many expensive things they couldn’t even dream of owning for themselves. But they were more surprised by the fact that many people spent extravagantly, as though it were nothing. My mother often went to the Market, handing me over to my grandmother with the excuse that she was going to check up on the shop. She nagged my father who wished she would leave or go to meet Su-mi for some gossip. She didn’t have anything to talk about other than raising the baby or housework, but Su-mi listened carefully to her stories without getting bored. My mother proudly gave her a pink Nike jogging suit. Su-mi, smiling, gave a lukewarm reaction. ‘Wow, I think your hormones made you overrate our friendship.’

My mother giggled, satisfied with her friend’s unconventional reaction.

Ae-ran Kim

‘You’re all right, aren’t you?’ Su-mi asked, using blotting papers on her nose and forehead.

‘Absolutely not.’

‘What now?’

‘I didn’t know doing housework would be so hard.’

‘Idiot, you got married without knowing that?’

‘I didn’t realise it would be this bad.’ My mother looked at the cup of water on the table. ‘Just look at this water. At our house we make barley tea because Dae-su likes it. But think about how many steps I have to go through just to get a cup of water on the table. I have to boil the water, cool it, wash the kettle, clean the water bottle, pour the barley tea into the bottle and put it in the refrigerator. But then it doesn’t last more than two days.

Before, I never thought about this when I was drinking water. Life is hard.’

‘That’s true. I don’t think about that when I drink water.’

‘You see? So you can imagine how much more tedious it is to cook and clean. Su-mi, don’t you ever complain to your mum about what she makes for you, OK? On Sundays you should help her out, too.’

‘You sound like my form teacher.’

‘Yes, if I knew it was going to be like this I would have had more fun before getting married.’

Su-mi grinned at her friend as she sang the blues. Not too long ago, they had been studying together and going to karaoke places. ‘How’s A-reum doing?’

‘He’s fine. He’s a bit sensitive but he’s doing well. Did you know that babies don’t know that their arms are theirs?’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, it takes them a while. A-reum was like that too. He would be lying down and staring at his own arm like it was the most fascinating thing in the world, and move it around. Isn’t that funny? He kept doing it, as if to convince himself it was his.’

‘It’d be nice if in Home Ec. class they taught you stuff like that instead of stupid things.’

‘Yes, I know. I should teach it.’

from The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child

‘I wish! You could give me good grades, too.’ Su-mi sucked some of her chocolate milkshake through the straw, creating a dimple on her cheek, and asked, ‘So, is he talking?’

‘He just says really simple things.’

‘It’s good though. You were worried.’

‘Yes, but he calls any male “Daddy”. He says that to his uncle and to the man who lives next door.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, but apparently they’re all like that at that age. Dae-su went on a delivery to a day-care centre and all the babies swarmed to him and called him “Daddy”, and he said it was the scariest thing ever.’

The two kept chatting for about an hour. A bit later, Su-mi said, with a furtive smile, ‘Mi-ra, I was wondering about something.’

‘What?’

‘Why did you fall for Dae-su?’

‘What? What’s this about?’

‘You never liked anyone, no matter how many boys followed you around.

You didn’t do anything when that boy from the agricultural high school took a load of pills because he was so in love with you. But with Dae-su. . . .’

My mother covered her mouth and smiled in embarrassment. ‘It’s just . . . we just started talking and. . . .’

‘Talking?’

‘I mean, I didn’t really like him at first, either. But we got to talking a lot.

About grades, about family. And one day he said he didn’t want to go back to school.’

‘Yes?’ ‘He said he didn’t want to be anything or do anything.’

Su-mi’s eyes popped out. ‘But you liked that?’

‘Liked what?’

‘You liked a boy who doesn’t want to be anyone or do anything? It doesn’t make sense.’

My mother looked down and swirled her peach drink with her straw.

‘Yes.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because I was like that too.’

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Su-mi flinched. Then she tried to take my mother’s side. ‘No, you weren’t like that. There were things you wanted to do.’

‘Yes, that’s why I knew.’

‘Knew what?’

‘Um . . . how do I explain it? You hid in a wardrobe when you were young, didn’t you? Curious whether your parents would look for you?’

‘Yes.’ ‘At a certain point I was doing that with myself.’

Su-mi looked puzzled.

‘I started hiding for fun but no matter how much time passed I couldn’t find myself. In the wardrobe, I would be excited, thinking I was weird, anxious, depressed, and just stayed there because it would be really awkward if I came out.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Hey, don’t talk back to an adult.’

‘Since when are you an adult?’

‘Since I got married. Anyway, just listen to me. I didn’t fall in love with Dae-su because he didn’t have dreams, but because he pretended not to have dreams. Because I thought he might have a wardrobe inside just like me.’

Su-mi was silent.

‘I don’t know. Whatever.’ My mother stopped talking, embarrassed.

Su-mi asked impishly, ‘And? What else did you like about him?’

My mother looked up at the ceiling and blinked. ‘I don’t know . . . why did I like him? Well, once, Dae-su said he didn’t want to go back to school and I asked him why. Dae-su said it was because he got beaten up too much.

The teachers would beat him and the senior boys would beat him. If he was late he was beaten for that, if he was serious he was beaten for frowning, if he was cheerful he was beaten for being silly, if he did well he was beaten for being arrogant, if he didn’t do well he was beaten for being useless. He just got beaten up a lot. And one day he lashed out at a judge in a competition and he got really badly beaten by some senior boys who said that because of him they would be disadvantaged at competitions too. You know how in athletic high schools they don’t hit you in the face? But that day his face was bruised and bleeding and all that.’

‘Oh my god.’

from The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child

‘So anyway, he limped back to his room. And his roommate was crouched on the floor with his pants down. He was a little slow, but he was a fast runner so he got medals at national competitions and stuff. You know how you see boys like that on TV? His mum was really pushy and forced him into an athletic school, and sent him to a normal middle school, not a special ed. one.’

‘So?’ ‘This boy really liked Dae-su. He would follow him around all the time.

And give him treats he’d hide from everyone else. You know, Dae-su’s such a good boy. So he was just nice to him. And that’s how they became roommates. But then when he got there after being so badly beaten up, that boy was having a wank. Without even locking the door! In the corner of the room! Like, grunting like an idiot. And Dae-su lost it. So he just beat the shit out of him. And the boy couldn’t do anything, he was pummelled with his pants down around his ankles.’

Su-mi drew in a shocked breath.

‘And after that he didn’t want to go back. I think it was the first time he’d told anyone that story. His voice was calm but he looked like he was going to cry.’

‘And?’ ‘And? And what?’

‘What did you do?’

My mother hesitated. ‘What do you mean, what did I do? I slept with him, stupid.’

‘Oh. . . .’

Chapter Six

C

rafting a story was harder than I expected. It was tricky to oversee characters and the scene and the sequence of events while also paying attention to the writing. At first I started with a simple desire to record what had happened but when I started writing I wanted to write an engaging, stylish tale. Writing was, at every moment, a series of decisions. But I wasn’t sure that I was doing a good job. The story kept stalling. And in those times I felt like a lone penguin abandoned at the North Pole. It was gloomy and

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frightening. Each time that happened I went to my parents. I asked them again and again about the stories of their youth and begged them to tell me again.

‘Oh, so you wanted to be a taekwondo athlete!’ I said to my father.

‘No.’ ‘What? Isn’t that why you went to an athletic high school?’

‘No.’ ‘Then what did you want to be?’

‘I didn’t really know. That’s why I went to that school.’

‘You were good, though.’

‘Yes, I was. But really, the only thing I really liked about taekwondo was the uniform.’

‘Can you be good at something but hate it?’

‘Sure. There are lots of kids like that. My friend was at the top of the school in maths but he never liked it.’

‘Oh.’ ‘And it’s a little weird to tell you this, but there are a lot of people who are devoted to their parents without really liking them. So you should never. . . .’

‘Yes?’ ‘Never try to be good to me. OK?’ ‘Dad.’ ‘Yeah?’

‘What kind of talk is that?’

‘What?’

‘Please tell me something wise.’

‘A-reum.’

‘Yes?’ ‘Just because you’re older than me doesn’t mean you can look down on your father. Especially a father who went to athletic high school. People like that are very sensitive to that kind of thing.’

‘Yes, Dad.’ ‘And do you know who’s even more sensitive than people who went to athletic high school?’

‘Who?’

from The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child

‘Fathers who were thrown out of athletic high school.’

‘Oh.’ It was a little better with my mother. My mother never stopped talking.

In my mother’s stories there were lots of adverbs and adjectives and exclamations. My mother didn’t bypass anything, even if it was very trivial.

My mother explained everything from her youth in detail, from popular fashion and songs, to school uniform styles, to the interior of a café and its menu. And she launched into all kinds of evaluations about all the people in her stories. It took almost a day to hear the life stories of my five uncles.

My mother’s stories were that long-winded. But I thought they could be even more lively and detailed. I made a point of asking for the information I needed.

‘Mum?’ ‘Yeah?’

‘So, um, how did you . . . with Dad. . . .’

‘How did we meet?’

‘No, you talked about that earlier. Um, how. . . .’

‘What?’

I couldn’t think of how to phrase it so I asked in a roundabout way. ‘How did you think to make me?’

My mother paused. Until then she had been talking non-stop. ‘What?’

She hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘You really want to know?’

I nodded.

‘Okay, well, then I’ll tell you this way. When I was huge with you, one of your uncles asks your grandmother, ‘Mother, how did she’ – meaning me – ‘do what nobody even taught her?’’

‘And?’ ‘And your grandmother says, ‘That’s something even an idiot can do.’’

Embarrassed, I laughed extra loudly.

‘Satisfied? I’m going to make dinner.’

‘But Mum?’ ‘Yeah?’

‘Was Dad your first love, too?’

My mother was silent.

‘Mum?’

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‘What?’

‘I said, was Dad your first love, too?’

‘Of – of course, my love. Go away now. I’m busy.’

Their stories didn’t really match. The things they remembered were a little bit different and so was the way they interpreted their memories. My mother said that Dae-su pursued her, while my father said Mi-ra flirted with him first. My mother and father both remembered the moment that she sang in front of him for the first time, the moment they kissed for the first time, but in ways that were more favourable to themselves. As for my stance, well, I wasn’t on anyone’s side. I was on the side of the story so that later, when it was really necessary, I could take their side.

‘So then what happened?’ I asked my father.

‘What?’

‘Mum. Did she sing?’

‘Well, so. . . .’

‘Wait!’

‘What?’

‘Can you tell me the rest tomorrow? My eyes are tired and I’m so exhausted.’

‘Come on, son. It’s the climax of the story.’

I massaged my shoulder and sighed. ‘Dad, you’ll see when you get old.’

When I asked a question, my father gave short replies that focused on the event while my mother went on and on about her take on it. Their stories overlapped and went different ways and crumpled into me. I was going to make something out of it. Of course, nobody knew what that might be. Not even me. That way, beauty could become beautiful on its own, and it wouldn’t suffer the fate of a puppy dying soon after birth because humans had handled it. Then beauty could be born in health. Listening to their memories I wanted the stories to be over, and at the same time didn’t want them to be over. And? Really? What’s that? Why? Wow! I chirped, egging them on. They say that when you’re old you prefer talking to listening. From the way I bothered my parents, I was clearly a boy.

from The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child

Chapter Seven

W

e always followed the same routine at the hospital, undergoing the planned tests in the planned order and dealing with the predictable disappointments. Listening to them say, ‘It’s got worse’ or ‘Let’s keep monitoring it’ or ‘I can’t guarantee it but. . . .’ Walking down the long corridor carpeted with curiosity and distaste, sympathy and deep sighs.

Enduring the look of relief on a sick person’s face when they saw someone sicker. Listening carefully to the trivial conversation and laughter between two healthy people. Responding to all the questions my body asked me.

Submitting to the fact that my body acted like it owned me. Staring at the prescription form inscribed with meaningless words like it was a love letter.

That was what we did in the hospital.

I was subjected to many tests. X-rays, clinical assessments, a heart ultrasound, bone density measurements, eyesight and gripping-power tests, urinalysis, electrocardiograms, and many, many more. I usually met with the paediatrician. But I also had to see the orthopaedic surgeon, thoracic surgeon, neurosurgeon, and oral surgeon. Sometimes I went to all of them, at other times only to a couple for intensive testing. I had a disease that made me age quickly but I knew that nothing in the world could treat old age itself. If old age were a disease, that was something man could never cure. Because that would be curing the world of death. What we could do, though, was to inquire about the symptoms that tagged along with the process of aging, and delay the speed with which my organs deteriorated. I was only seventeen, but if I learned one thing in my short life, it was that experiencing physical pain was incredibly solitary. It wasn’t anything anyone could understand or something I could share with anyone. So I don’t really believe the saying that the heart hurts more than the body. For your heart to be in pain you have at least to be alive.

I spent most of my life coming to the realisation that I had a body, the way you don’t ever think about your tongue until the moment you have a sore on it. I was conscious of all of my organs, in minute detail. When others called bones bones, I couldn’t. When others called lungs lungs, I couldn’t think of them simply that way. Like the hundreds of names medical students memorised on all-nighters, the words I knew passed through my suffering until they stuck to my body and hung from it. The fact that I had skin, a

Ae-ran Kim

heart, a liver, muscles, that I had to think about them so often – all of that was very tiring. No matter how close the body and spirit are, they need some time apart just as happy couples do. I was envious of the healthy who were naïve about health, the young who were naïve about youth.

I had long since folded away the hope that I could be cured. But I didn’t go around as though my life was over. We did what we could to lessen the pain, but not to get rid of it. That was why today, my mother and I were sitting in a corner of the examination room with our knees pressed politely together.

‘You have disciform macular degeneration.’

We exchanged looks, not knowing what that meant. When doctors used words we’d never heard before, we got nervous.

‘Here, on the right eye.’ The doctor looked at the computer monitor and my chart. ‘You must have a lot of headaches.’

I rubbed my yellowed nails and said, ‘Um, not really. Letters look a little blurry but I thought it was because I was on the computer too long.’

My mother interrupted, ‘What does that mean, doctor?’

‘It’s a condition the elderly often develop. The cells degenerate because there are aging deposits on the retina.’

‘Like glaucoma?’

‘It’s similar but glaucoma is caused by eye pressure. Many cases with this form of macular degeneration are caused by deposits. If it’s a wet form, we can block it somewhat with lasers but the dry kind is difficult to treat.’

‘What kind does A-reum have?’

The doctor took in a silent breath. ‘Dry.’ We were silent. As always, I tried to figure out what the doctor wasn’t saying through what he was saying. But this time, instead of figuring it out on my own I wanted to hear the doctor’s opinion from his mouth. ‘So what’s going to happen to my eye?’

The doctor looked at my mother as though to ask for her opinion. I looked at her too. My mother hesitated then nodded.

‘Your right eye will get quickly worse. Things will look foggy. And because of that you may get dizzy or feel nausea. The left eye may be in danger too, so you should take antioxidant vitamins and avoid UV rays when you step outside. I think that’s the best we can do for now.’

from The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child

My mother was quiet. The one question she couldn’t bear to ask was probably circling inside her. I was afraid, too. I felt that I could deal with my liver deteriorating and my stomach hurting. But thinking that I might go blind made me fearful. I couldn’t breathe; God was about to deal me true loneliness. It was as though I had spent my whole life in prison before being told that I was being sent to solitary as a reward for good behaviour.

‘Doctor, is my left eye still OK?’ ‘Well, let’s keep monitoring it.’

I couldn’t tell if that meant it was fine, if it would get better, or if it wouldn’t, so I just sat there, blinking, for a long time.

The thoracic surgeon had nothing positive to say, either. Neither did the orthopaedic surgeon nor the oral surgeon. All we discovered that day was the fact that you didn’t get used to bad news no matter how often it was repeated. The paediatrician, whom I’ve known for a long time, said that my physical age was estimated to be eighty, which meant that outpatient treatment was no longer possible. The thoracic surgeon, who looked like a bandit with his thick beard, blew up. He asked, ‘Do you know what condition his heart is in? He has to be admitted right away!’ He pointed out that someone could live without legs or eyes but not without a heart.

He insisted that I held a time bomb in my chest, that I needed to be admitted immediately because my heart might give out at any moment. He used all kinds of hard and frightening words. Since he was muscular and tanned, he didn’t look like a typical doctor to me. His diagnosis was fittingly energetic. From the internist I heard that my oesophagus and stomach had been damaged by my medications. The orthopaedic surgeon said I had shrunk two centimetres from my previous height of 130 centimetres, and that my bone density had diminished. My mother looked beside herself with worry, having been pushed around and scolded all day. But she couldn’t say to any doctor, with confidence, ‘We’ll admit him right away.’ We had an enormous amount of debt already, and there was a limit as to how much money my parents could raise.

Coming out of the hospital, I pulled on my mother’s sleeve. ‘Mum.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘People are looking at us.’

Ae-ran Kim

My mother replied nonchalantly, ‘It must be because I’m so pretty.’ She was wearing a haughty smile on her sun-spotted face. Caked-on foundation cracked along the wrinkles around her eyes like the bottom of a dry rice paddy. My mother grasped my small hand with her work-hardened one.

And with the attitude of, ‘What’s it to you? I’m a woman who had a child at age seventeen!’ she walked out proudly. When she was with me she never hurried, no matter where she was. She must have wanted to get away quickly from everyone’s gaze sometimes, but whether on the underground or in the old market, she always walked naturally, at her leisurely gait. In fact, I was the one who tried to hurry her along. I would tug at her skirt to lessen the difficulty my mother must have felt. Today, too, I asked my mother to hurry up and leave, saying I was starving. Maybe it was a little forced; my mother stopped and bent down, looking straight into my eyes. ‘A-reum.’

‘Yes?’ ‘When did you first get sick?’

‘When I was three. You’re the one who told me.’

‘So how long have you been sick?’

‘Um, fourteen years.’

‘Yes, fourteen years.’

I was silent.

‘So you’ve kept at it courageously this whole time. And now you’re going through test after test without giving up. Other people get bent out of shape when their glands are a little swollen. We’ve been dealing with this every single day for fourteen years. We’ve done a great thing here. So. . . .’

‘Yes?’ My mother lowered her voice and said gently, ‘We can take our time.’

from ButterFlyBook from B utterFlyApple Book Kim

Apple Kim translated by Sunny Jeong

A Seaside City 1 We lived on the shore.

2 When I stood at the edge of the breakwater, my body would sway against the wind. When I looked up to face the ocean, waves filled my eyes. The waves’ white foam pushed in – moving from left to right, then left again – and died out. The foam looked like sponges or small snowballs. I liked to watch the foam touch my body, then disappear. So I went to the breakwater every day. I even went on extremely cold or extremely hot days. Sometimes a strong gust of wind would push me one – no, two – body widths to the right. Even then, I wasn’t scared. The frothy waves brought to mind winter and snow, neither of which I’ve ever actually seen in my life. All at once, I would be standing in the snowy winter field that the whole blue ocean had become. Winter rolled across the ground. When I lay flat on my stomach, it tumbled over my back, then melted into the waves without a trace. I held my body tight and etched the winter field into my memory.

The breakwater was always teeming with tanned boys. I knew them very well. That’s because we all went to the same school. That’s because there was only one school in our city, and that’s because we lived in a very small city. The boys would stand at the very end of the breakwater, silently look

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down at the water with crossed arms, and then, all of a sudden, jump in. A wet head would pop out of the water, its face beaming and gleeful. Strong, slim arms ploughed through the water and started climbing back up the breakwater. The boys thumped each other’s dripping backs. They laughed and yelled, sang songs and danced. When they shook their heads, drops of water would fall on their shoulders. The drops of water shone like sunlight.

On that day, too, I was passing by the group of noisy boys. One of them grinned and playfully yanked my hair. I held my schoolbag tightly with both arms and quickened my pace. The boy swore and started chasing me.

I became frightened, picked up a stone from the ground and threw it. The stone hit him and gashed his forehead. He stared at me, surprised, red blood smeared on his forehead. The other kids began to yell, screaming, ii ii, like angry monkeys. I hunched my back, clasped my bag ever more tightly and walked even faster. The boys continued to scream, ii, ii. I was terribly afraid, but they didn’t do anything other than make monkey noises. After that, no one yanked my hair any more, but that was even worse. Now, when I passed by the boys, they hunched their shoulders and whispered among themselves.

They didn’t laugh or dance. That was much worse, because I liked to watch them dance and jump into the ocean. But they didn’t do that any more. I opened my bag and peered inside. It held my pencil case, some notebooks and my mirror. I took the mirror out and held it up to my face. I then held it up to the sun. It shone with light. The boys stopped whispering and stared at me. Still holding the mirror, I walked. I walked faster and faster. I tried to smile but couldn’t do it very well.

3 Some days, the fathers who took their boats out to sea didn’t return to shore.

Even after the sun rose and morning came, and after the night returned, shining with stars, they still didn’t come back. Then, without fail, people sobbing and tearing their hair out would appear on the beach. Those people would wait and wait, and wait some more. But nothing would happen. The sun sparkled and the stars shone. The ocean rocked from left to right.

Everything remained the same. No one came back.

Some days, a brave child would swim a great distance out to sea and wouldn’t return. Then, the child’s wailing mother would run across the

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sandy shore. If they were lucky, a body washed up. When that happened, the wind stopped blowing and the waves didn’t rock. People gathered around the body. The children stood at a distance from the breakwater and silently stared.

Sometimes, a lonely person would walk right into the ocean. It was always at night, and it was always someone from a faraway place we didn’t know. Then, after a few days, people would arrive in cars, carrying the person’s photograph, and knock on the door of Highway Supermarket. But the old lady who owned Highway Supermarket was too old to remember anything. The sun sparkled more brightly than ever, and so did the ocean.

The boys jumped into the water and I lay on my stomach at the edge of the breakwater. In the end, no one came back. Everything remained the same.

4 It was noon; rain was falling quietly. There wasn’t any light in the sky. I had taken off all my clothes and was standing at the edge of the deserted breakwater, staring into the ocean. The waves whirled around violently and created a mass of foam larger than my body. The ocean seemed to be extremely busy, so I couldn’t disturb it. It gets boring when you stand still without saying anything. I got bored and put my clothes back on. My clothes were wet, like my body. I hugged my bag and turned to walk away from the breakwater. The rain became heavier. The wind whirled around and around, from left to right, and left again. I shook and swayed in the wind. The sky itself was a huge ocean, and it was pouring down on my head. An ocean pouring down on an ocean. The sandy beach and roads were oceans, too. The rain grew heavier. A huge wave reached over the breakwater and crashed against my ankle. Startled, I started crying. Then my eyes became the ocean as well. My cheeks, my neck, my shoulders and my belly button also became the ocean. Everything was the ocean. All of us were the same. That means we’re on the same side. I’m on the same side as the waves, the sky, the earth, the ocean and the water. Nothing was frightening once I thought of it in that way. I was the waves. I was the earth and I was water. I lifted my arms high into the air. My bag fell to the ground.

The falling rain and I, the waves and the ocean and I, the earth and water and I, we were all one. The rain grew stronger, so I, too, grew stronger. We

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all grew stronger together. Eventually, I became so very strong that I forgot who I was. I forgot what I was doing and where I was going. Without thinking about my fallen bag, I started walking.

Without thinking. About my bag.

Without thinking.

Without thinking. About the bad.

Without thinking.

Without thinking.

I opened my eyes. Rain was running down my body. I was happy. I was happy.

5 I got into trouble with my mum.

I caught a cold, and got a new bag, pencil case and mirror.

6 The city was to the east of the coast. All of us who lived there were pretty much the same. We all went to the same school, and watched films at the same cinema, and ate hamburgers at the same burger place. We all dreamt the same dream – in the sense that we didn’t dream at all. We just swayed like the waves, back and forth, back and forth, before returning to where we were before. There was just one child who wanted to be a fish. That’s b, who is sitting next to me right now. Then you can just go into the water and stay there, said b. You can stay there forever. You don’t even have to pay the rent.

You don’t even have to go shopping. You don’t even have to work. You don’t even have to go to school. Then, said b, you don’t need to have money. You can be poor, said b, who is poor.

I want to go into the water and never come out of it. b reached out and brushed the sand off her knees.

I waited for b’s next words.

I want to be a fish.

That’s what b said.

But in my opinion, it wasn’t that easy to be a fish. Being a fish, I said, means that you have scales on your body. I put my palms together and stretched them out towards b. It means that your body becomes flat, like this. It means

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that you have fins and gills, and that your legs disappear. I tightened my fists and shook my body. You become ugly. Is that what you want to become? Are you into that?

Yeah, I am. b was resolute.

I’ll go into the water. And I’ll never come back out.

We were sitting on the sand. The ocean glittered, reflecting the sunlight.

It was a Friday, a really splendid spring afternoon. Slim women in flowery bikinis were nowhere to be found. Neither were there well-tanned men out to chat them up. You couldn’t find people like that, not even in the summer.

And that’s because our city is dull. If you go to Seoul, said Glasses, there’s a TV that’s as big as fifteen of the class TVs put together. But it’s even thinner than my workbook. Glasses was our class captain. He was talking about Seoul.

But we knew as little about Seoul as we did about how to turn into a fish.

In other words, dreaming of becoming a fish made more sense than wanting to live in Seoul. And Glasses wanted to live in Seoul. So he wore thick glasses and worked on his workbook feverishly. I thought that Glasses’ parents were pretty impressive – that is, if they named Glasses knowing that he’d wear his glasses and study hard. Glasses was sitting with us on the sand but, instead of wasting time like us, he worked hard on his workbook. Glasses’ aunt, who lives in Seoul, bought him the workbook. Apparently, all smart students in Seoul study with that workbook. Glasses had that workbook for every subject. He particularly liked the maths workbook, which could be why he was very good at maths. We called Glasses the King of Maths.

Then b got up from where she was sitting and started to walk slowly across the beach towards the black boulders. Seagulls flocked in the sky. b took off her shoes and climbed on top of the black boulders. She moved one foot onto another boulder. And did the same with the other foot. And again, with the opposite foot, and again, and again. b was getting further away.

I want to go home, said Glasses.

Bye, I said, without looking at him.

You’re not going?

I’m going with b.

OK, then.

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Glasses got up from where he was sitting. Then, pushing up his glasses, he began to walk. Glasses was getting further away. In the distance, I could see the boys jumping off the breakwater into the sea. They were getting further away, too.

Everything was far away from me. Suddenly, I was afraid. I got up from where I was sitting and started running towards b.

7 On the way back home, b and I went to Highway Supermarket. The old lady was alone in the shop. We greeted her politely, took some barley tea from the fridge and drank it. The lady had piled dried clam meat on the table and put fistfuls of it into small plastic bags. We helped her out for as long as we treated ourselves to the barley tea, which was about ten minutes.

We – b and I – placed stickers that said ‘Quality Guaranteed – Fisheries Cooperative Association’ on the plastic bags. The lady lit a cigarette, and then went outside. She sat on a plastic chair by the door, and started smoking and watching the ocean. We didn’t know anything about the lady.

We weren’t even curious. The old lady knew that. Because nobody was curious about her, she didn’t have anyone to talk to. So she quietly made barley tea, distributed clam meat and smoked. Without a word, like the ocean, like the forest, the old lady was growing older.

8 If you left Highway Supermarket and walked a little way, a lane appeared.

The lane, which had turned crisp with sunlight, was so quiet that I could hear the sound of b’s breathing. We walked in silence. Occasionally we moved to the side to avoid cars. In the meantime, the city slowly came into view. Reluctant to leave, I looked back several times. The ocean was slowly falling out of sight. When it had completely disappeared, when the sandy coast and the hills and the forests that covered the hills could no longer be seen, when the wind didn’t smell of sand, dust and saltiness, we were in the city. Being in the city was very strange. It was as if I were trapped in a mirror.

No matter where I looked, I was the only one there. Of course, I was still with b. We were even holding hands. But I could no longer see b, and neither

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could I hear nor feel her. It was very frightening and strange. Yes, we were in the city.

9 The city we lived in was ridiculous. That’s because it was a city that imitated Seoul. But the more it imitated Seoul, the more it became . . . not Seoul, but stupid. People bought cars from Seoul Motors and ate food at Seoul Kitchen. They bought glasses from Seoul Eyewear and went on trips through Seoul Tours. We all knew how absurd that was. But we didn’t know what we could do to make it all less absurd. Those who were determined not to become ridiculous left the city and went to Seoul, just as Glasses would leave in the future. Or as his aunt had left.

Seoul Tours sold three-day package tours to Seoul, which my school bought for our annual field trip. On the first day of the trip, we arrived at Seoul Station early in the morning. Seoul Station was big, white and new.

It was so big that our whole city might have fit inside it. We waited for a native Seoul tour guide who, apparently, was born in Seoul and knew it very well. Her name was Sara. While waiting for her, we ate American bread packed with sugar and gazed at the sophisticated Seoul people. They all stared straight ahead and walked quickly, with stern faces. Sara was ten minutes late but didn’t say sorry. She had permed hair that was dyed brown and looked sophisticated, like Seoul. The boys in my class were blushing.

They’d already fallen in love with her. Sara took us to the heart of Seoul. It had a museum, a cinema and a royal palace, and by the time we’d visited them all it was dark. On the second day, we visited Myeong-dong, a department store, the 63 Building and the Han River. From the observatory, the sky looked like a rubbish dump and the river looked like a swamp. There weren’t any seagulls, and no boys took their clothes off and jumped into the water. In the evening, we went to a restaurant with a bamboo garden and ate court-style bulgogi. It was a Korean dish, but didn’t look Korean at all.

On the final day, we went to a gigantic basement shopping centre that was right next to the underground station. There, I lost my way looking for a toilet. I was so terrified that I couldn’t even cry. Too many people swarmed toward me then swarmed away. I knew that they spoke the same language, but for some reason I couldn’t ask anyone for help. Only when Sara found

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me did I burst into tears. She hugged me. Sara’s body carried a scent as wonderful as Seoul.

A few years later, a gigantic shopping centre like the one in Seoul was built in our city too. It soon had a bakery that sold bread like sugary American bread, and a restaurant that looked like the restaurant with the bamboo garden. There was a copy-cat clothing store, a copy-cat bar and a similar cinema. The centre was a success. There, you could feel a hint of Seoul, and that made people happy. The people were satisfied with feeling a hint of Seoul. It was enough to allow them to put up with being absurd.

10 Abandoned people lived north of the hill. The place was called The End. You mustn’t ever get lost. That’s what Grandma always said. If you get lost, you’ll end up in The End. There are many children who got lost, went into The End and never came back out, Grandma told me. Grandma said that The End was where crooks, thieves, prostitutes, orphans, murderers and insane people lived. All I knew about those people was what I saw in films or read in comic books. And even in films and comics, those people all lived in places like The End that Grandma would talk about. Everyone drank strong liquor instead of water, and ate rotten food instead of fresh food, and no one went to school or to work. Corpses lay in the streets, and mice and cockroaches scuttled around the houses. I once saw a film on TV. The main character, looking for the villain, went to a place similar to The End. The streets were dark and wet, and insane people wearing torn clothes approached the main character. I was afraid and woke Grandma, though she had been sound asleep. Grandma asked what was wrong and I pointed to the television, asking if The End that Grandma talked about was as terrible.

Grandma didn’t even glance at the television and replied right away that it was.

If I got sick or lonely, I always dreamt of going to The End. In my dream, b lived there because she was turning into a fish. If the city people saw her turning into a fish, they would report her to the police or shut her up in the zoo, but that wouldn’t happen in The End. People there didn’t bother about anything. I’m turning into a fish. I need a house, b said as she scratched her scales, and a man replied, Is that so? I know someone who is turning into

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a plate, and he got her somewhere to stay. So b who was turning into a fish lived next to someone who was turning into a plate. When I went to see b, she had pulled a blanket over herself. I said Hi, and she crawled out of it. b’s chest was covered with scales and, in the light, they sparkled with all the colours of the rainbow. Feel it, said b. I felt it. Her chest was as cold as ice. b wasn’t going to leave the room until she had completely turned into a fish.

When I completely turn into a fish, said b, as she scratched her neck, put me in the ocean. b’s neck was shorter and thicker and had faintly-drawn crimson lines on it. She was growing gills. b held my hand. Her fingers had turned stumpy. You have to come here every day to see whether I’ve turned into a fish or not. Or else I might die. Then she started making noises like air escaping, shii, shii. The shape of her face sharpened. Her eyes grew apart. I took a few steps backward. b’s face shone silvery. I screamed. It was always then that I woke up from the dream and I ran crying to Grandma. She didn’t wake up, but it was warm in her arms, and scale-free. Grandma, I whispered, I’m not going to turn into a fish. I’m not going to be anything. And then I hugged her arm tightly and closed my eyes. I soon fell asleep and didn’t have any more dreams.

11 When I opened the window in my room, on the second floor, I could see two-storey houses that looked exactly like ours. At night, crucifixes began to light up above them. Against their glow, the stars grew dimmer. I closed my window, lay on my bed and either did or didn’t do my homework. When I became hungry, Grandma called me. Most of the time, I lay still on my bed instead of doing my homework. I didn’t read or listen to music or think about a boy I liked. Time didn’t seem to flow at all, so it was like being in a lukewarm puddle. Everything was quiet and still, like air in a closed room.

That was my world. I liked it.

12 The teachers at school didn’t like me. My form tutor, in particular, hated me. That’s because I would work hard at everything and then on nothing.

But from the spring of that year, the boys started to hate me as well. They didn’t have a reason. And the teachers who hated me pretended not to

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notice. One day, I fell flat on my face in the playground. That was because a boy had punched me. I fell to the ground and rolled over once. The boy’s friend started laughing: Ha ha ha. Blood came out of my nose, and I could see the sky very clearly. About ten boys were looking down at me. Their faces seemed to be thinking hard about what to do with me now. I continued to look at the sky. The boys continued to look at me. When I turned my head to the side, I saw, in the distance, between the legs of the boys, my form tutor, walking, carrying a parasol with flowers on it. The flowers on the parasol were lilies. I knew that she had seen me and that she was pretending that she hadn’t. Of course, the boys knew that, too. So I pretended not to notice. We all pretended. And a boy kicked a leg out in my direction. I rolled to the right. Then I rolled to the left, and back to the right again. As I rolled, the thought came to me that everyone was watching.

That is, the sky, the school, my teacher, Glasses, b, Grandma, my dad, my mum – they were all watching me. But they were all pretending not to.

Thinking like that made me sad but I held back. I held the tears back with all my strength. Then, suddenly, I wasn’t rolling. I opened my eyes to see b. What? b. b held a recorder in each hand and brandished them as she came running towards the boys. It reminded me of Don Quixote. The boys stepped back, saying, Whoa, whoa! I picked myself up. Don Quixote snatched my hand.

She was still waving a recorder in the other hand. It felt as though Don Quixote’s hand smoothly led me away from the place. A parasol with lilies on it grew closer little by little, then moved further away. Soon, the green school gate appeared. Once we’d passed the gate, a row of five stationery shops welcomed us. My right hand was wet with blood, and b was holding onto it. I discovered Glasses in the second stationery shop. He was choosing an ice cream. He was holding his workbook in one hand. Glasses! I yelled.

Glasses looked at me, surprised. I waved. But he disappeared immediately.

Soon we were passing Seoul Supermarket. Then we passed Hahaha Singing Room and the corner shop, Seoul Tours and Seoul Kitchen, Seoul Dental Clinic and Seoul Eyewear, and all other Seoul, Seoul, Seouls; we kept on running. I ran with my nose dyed red. b ran with one hand gripping the two recorders. I was gasping for air. My tongue lolled out. The blood on my hand dried, became powder, and scattered to the ground. The sky shook.

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A flock of seagulls began to fly round and round my head. Salty sand stuck to my cheeks. Flat, washed-out houses appeared. The road, and then the sky, widened. And then the road began to disappear. Finally it disappeared altogether and we jumped down onto the sand. When I lifted my head I could see the sky, the pale sun and the breakwater. I could see the waves and the clouds spread low above them. I could see the sea.

13 First, the water was cold. Second, the water was cold. Third, the water was, of course, cold. I ducked my head under the water and kicked my legs.

Fourth, the water was lukewarm. I stretched out my arms again. Fifth, at last, the water began warming up. I floated above the water, and sank back down. I opened my eyes and stretched out my arms again. In the water, I could see boulders shimmering. They were drifting away. I pulled with my outstretched hands. Then the boulders immediately came up to my face. I covered my face with both hands. I could feel the waves lightly pressing against my back. I waited. I waited a little more.

Now. Light poured down on me when I stretched my body. What I could see was the sky, the colour of a well-ripened orange. b held my hand. b was as wet as a fish. I laughed. Shh, the waves are approaching us. My eyes followed b’s pointing finger. A lot of water, and foam, was pushing towards us. b caught her breath as she glowered at the waves. I took my hand out of the water. The blood had been washed away without a trace. My nose was still a little swollen and hot. b continued to glower at the waves. In the sky, birds were drawing a lopsided circle. b and I swayed silently, our necks sticking out of the water. One, two . . . b tightened her grip on my hand. We slid back into the water.

14 . . . three.

15 Those who no longer played in the water were called adults. Adults were the people who worked in the city. They were the people who didn’t watch

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the sky. They were the people who no longer thought of clouds and stars, and seagulls and the ocean.

It was very depressing to think that someday I, too, would be an adult.

16 b and I went to Alone every Tuesday. Alone was the name of a café in the centre of town. Adults thought the name was ridiculous and very weird.

But b and I thought that it was cool. We thought it was too cool for such a boring neighbourhood. Not surprisingly, the owner of Alone came from Seoul. He always wore nice sunglasses, and sat under the sunshade in front of the café, and read books with cool names. The Tragedy of Modern Civilisation, The Fall of the Wall Street Empire, stuff like that. Songs that suited a seaside city flowed out of the speakers. b wanted to work there. But Alone’s owner told her that she was too young right now, that he would let her work for him in two years’ time. That is, when you go to secondary school, he said. So b was waiting to go to secondary school. If I said, I really don’t want to be a secondary school student, b would say, I’ll give you free coffee. You can sit under the sunshade and do your homework there. Cool, I’d like that, I replied. Then b smiled, and I thought it was a relief that there would be at least one good thing when I went to secondary school.

We went to Alone every Tuesday, because the drinks were half-price on Tuesday afternoons. That’s because Alone didn’t have any customers on Tuesday afternoons. Sometimes, when there weren’t any customers, we could drink orange juice for free. But b didn’t like orange juice. She said she would die before she’d drink anything but coffee. At first, the owner said he wouldn’t sell us coffee. Why? You’re too young. What does that have to do with coffee? asked b, and the owner of Alone looked like he didn’t know what to do. About five minutes later, he said, Fine, you win, and made us each half a cup of coffee. And then he said, This really is the last time, you are both too young to be drinking coffee, so come back when you’re at secondary school.

Anyway, the owner of Alone was truly strange. Just like the name of his café. But his strangeness once made him famous. One day, a supposed journalist from Seoul carrying a huge camera and a small, thin computer came to see Alone. The person, who apparently worked for a travel

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magazine, interviewed the owner of Alone and took a lot of photos of Alone.

And then, some time later, a great number of people came all at once, looking for our city. Those people took pictures of the beach and ate in the shopping centre, then drank a cup of coffee at Alone and left. Or they drank coffee at Alone, ate at Seoul Kitchen, and hung around the breakwater before spending a night at Seoul Motel. All of a sudden, the owner of Alone was famous. People closely examined the books on the bookshelves, swapped their own books for them, and took the new books with them.

The owner of Alone hated those people. Fortunately, fewer and fewer people came, and a few months later, they vanished altogether. And, regardless of whatever happened, there was a person who came to Alone late at night with a black plastic bag full of books, who dumped the books on the bookshelf, who put the same number of books back in the bag, and left – and that was Book.

17 On my birthday I invited b and Glasses to my house. I wasn’t very close to Glasses, but he was the only boy in my class who didn’t hit me or swear at me, and I thought it would be nice to be better friends. My mum made japchae and bulgogi and gimbab for the three of us, but their was too much, so Grandma and my mum decided to eat with us. But when Grandma said that she wouldn’t eat anything but sweets, we were a little taken aback.

I’ll give you some sweets when you’ve finished eating, said b.

I’ll be too full to eat them then, said Grandma.

Glasses wore a nice shirt, and held my present instead of a workbook in one hand. And then he stared about awkwardly.

I didn’t have any money to buy anything, said b.

It’s OK, I said.

Here, take this instead. From her pocket, b took out a piece of white paper folded several times. It was a drawing of a horse. The horse was in the colours of the rainbow.

Cool! shouted Glasses. You drew this?

Yes. . . .

This is so amazing! Glasses’ face was honest. b’s face turned red. Really?

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Yes! I yelled.

You’re very good at drawing, b, said my mum. b’s face turned redder. I examined the drawing carefully. The horse had black hair in two braids.

So, explained b, I thought you’d look nice if you wore your hair like this.

So this is me? I asked.

Yes. . . . b said shyly.

Thanks. I hugged b. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Glasses stood in the corner and watched us, not knowing what to do. I quickly let go of b. Glasses handed me his present. Open it.

OK, I said, and quickly undid the wrapping. It was a fish-shaped cup.

Oh my! yelled my mum. A cup that’s shaped like a fish!

I know! yelled b.

It. . . . stuttered Glasses. It’s from Seoul.

It’s so pretty! I yelled.

I almost hugged Glasses, but then glanced at b. It didn’t seem wise to hug him, so I took a step back. Thanks, I said again. Glasses smiled shyly.

This is awkward, I thought.

Self-consciously, we began to eat the japchae, bulgogi, and gimbab. But it was so good, that by the time we had nearly finished eating, nothing was awkward at all. Glasses talked about Seoul, and the rest of us listened. I fingered my fish cup and b said she wanted one too.

I’ll give you one on your birthday, said Glasses. When’s your birthday?

It’s passed, said b. Her face darkened.

But, said Glasses, it will come back next year.

Really? said b.

Glasses nodded. b’s face brightened.

After we’d eaten, we decided to watch a film. On the bus to the cinema, Glasses said, I can’t draw. . . .

It’s OK, you’re smart instead, said b.

But you got a hundred on your Korean test last time! You remember that? b was surprised.

Yes, I marked yours, said Glasses proudly. Of course, the teacher was with me . . . and I am the class captain. . . . Glasses studied us nervously. I can mark stuff . . . because I’m the class captain. Right?

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Yes, of course, said b, quickly averting her eyes to stare out the window.

And then she started humming an unfamiliar song. Glasses bowed his head and rubbed his knees with his hands. This is awkward, I thought.

The film we watched was an animation about a fish. b had really wanted to watch it. At every important scene, b exclaimed, Wow, wow, wow! And when the film ended, she yelled, Yay! Yay! I yelled too.

Yes. . . . Glasses glanced at us. We smiled. Yay! We were all giddy and went to Alone. It was Glasses’ first time, so he was a little nervous. Actually, Glasses always seemed to be nervous except when he was solving problems in his workbook.

As ever, there were no customers in Alone when we arrived. Since it was a special occasion, the owner made coffee with milk for all of us. The coffee was very weak, but it was enough to make our eyes sparkle. We soon became excited, and then very quickly surpassed excitement. That’s to say, Glasses took his glasses off. b started singing, her mouth opened wide. W-we shook our clenched fists, not knowing what to do with them. A Cuban song was coming out of the speakers. We sh-sh-shook our heads. The owner watched us acting like that and laughed like it was very funny. The sun began to set.

But in our hearts it was still bright and sunny.

I shouted, Why don’t the boys like me!

Glasses abruptly stopped dancing. So did b.

What?

Why don’t the boys like me! Why do they swear at me and hit me! I said in a very loud voice.

How ’bout you? Do you hate me too? I asked Glasses.

Glasses groped around the table for his glasses. I. . . . He put on his glasses. His eyes weren’t shining anymore. I. . . . Glasses looked back and forth at me and b. I. . . . And then he said in a very small voice, I don’t hate you.

Really?

Yes, I don’t hate anyone. Glasses said firmly.

Why not? b asked.

Well . . . because. . . .

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Glasses might have been on the verge of crying. But he held it in and answered, Because it’s bad to hate someone.

Says who? asked b.

It’s written in the textbook.

Well, I don’t read the textbook, so I don’t know, said b.

Me neither, I said.

That’s what it says, said Glasses.

Really? I asked.

Glasses nodded.

I see, b nodded.

I see, I nodded too.

Yes. Glasses nodded again.

18 It’s a relief to be spending my birthday with people who don’t hate me.

19 I know they’re lying but I’ll pretend to believe it, since it’s nice to hear.

20 Cool.

21 We were doing Writing. The topic was to write about Friends. I wrote about b. I like b. I like b, who lives in a nameless place, who is poor. My turn came and I stood up and read what I had written. I like b who is poor. I like b who doesn’t have money. I like b who has a sick sister. When I had read that far, b got up from her seat, crossed the classroom, opened the door, and left the room. The children began to whisper among themselves. Interestingly, the expressions on the whispering children’s faces were like the expressions on the faces of the boys coming to hit me. Interestingly, the teacher’s face was red. The teacher and her red face walked towards me. The classroom was as quiet as the inside of a rocket. The teacher slapped my face. And then she ripped into pieces the paper I was holding. I couldn’t cry because I didn’t know why I should cry. Because no one told me why. The blank faces gazing

from ButterFlyBook

at me were like blank sheets of white paper. My face, which wasn’t crying, looked fine. Glasses scowled and pushed up his glasses. Everyone was the same; they were all silently cursing me. I felt angry. Why are they treating me as if I’ve done something wrong? I was just being honest. The teacher went to the front of the classroom. I stood up. Sit down, the teacher said. I didn’t sit down. I told you to sit down! the teacher shouted. I walked towards the door. Where do you think you’re going? I opened the door. Don’t you dare leave! I left. It was so easy, doing what you’re not supposed to do. Those kinds of things turn out to be so easy to do. So I did it, and hoped something would change a bit, but everything was still the same.

22 After that, b and I stopped playing together. I started going to the beach and Alone alone. b ate her lunch by herself and ran around the playground at break. While b ran around the playground, I received blows from the boys. b wouldn’t help me out anymore when the boys beat me up. I had to put up with the beatings until the very last punch, then get up by myself.

One day, b started eating lunch with the boys who beat me up. I ate my lunch by myself and glared at b who ate with the boys who beat me up.

When I did that, b pretended not to see me and tucked a strand of hair behind her ears. The children avoided me even more. The only one who neither avoided nor approached me was Glasses. So I revolved around Glasses, round and around.

23 Some days I go to school.

Some days I don’t.

24 On the way back home, my nose was as swollen as it was yesterday. My hand had as many wounds on it as it had yesterday. My blouse was as dirty as it was yesterday. My backpack had as many footprints on it as it had yesterday. My socks were as dirty as they were yesterday. And I was as angry as I was yesterday. Yes, I was angry, so much, too much, terribly, really, really, really, but—

Apple Kim

I don’t know why.

I blinked. Then tears fell.

I didn’t wipe them. I just let them fall.

25 b didn’t live in the city. She didn’t live in The End, either. b lived between them. She lived between the city and The End, between the factory and the city, and between The End and the factory. It wasn’t the city or The End or the factory, so it didn’t have a name. The people who lived there faced The End and inhaled the smell of the factory with their backs to the city. No matter where they looked, they saw The End. It was all they could see.

28 It would’ve been nice just to go to the sea. It would’ve been nice to watch the seagulls. It would’ve been nice to go to the supermarket and buy an ice cream. It would’ve been nice to sit on the beach. I should’ve gone to the shopping centre. I should’ve taken the escalator. I should’ve watched a film.

I should’ve gone to Alone. No, I should’ve just gone home. I should’ve taken a road I know. Yes, just take a road I know.

29 Under the sky was a green grassy field glistening in the sunlight. The field continued to a cliff. And the cliff was touching the clouds. And beyond all this was the sea.

I started to run.

Good to see you, sea. It’s been a long time.

Good to see you, too, seagull. It’s been a long time.

Good to see you, too, clouds.

Good to see you. It’s so, so good to see you all.

Good to. . . .

And then I saw a square box in a corner of the field. It was under a very large tree, and was the size of a small house. No – it was a real house. That’s because the door opened and a person came out. The person was wearing a black shirt and holding a black plastic bag in one hand.

I opened my eyes wide and took a step back.

from ButterFlyBook

He also opened his eyes wide and took a step back.

It was Book.

30 I walked towards Book.

He took another step back.

You’re Book . . . aren’t you?

Book didn’t answer. He seemed a little bewildered and a lot younger than I had expected. That is, if you erased his beard, he sort of looked like a college student.

You’re Book, aren’t you? I asked again.

Yeah, Book replied. Then he stuck his hands in his pockets and looked at me haughtily. The black plastic bag in his left hand swayed.

How’d you get here?

Well . . . that’s. . . .

Book scratched his neck and yawned. Dammit, it’s supposed to be my nap time. Dammit.

Sorry.

Forget it. Obviously, you got lost.

I nodded.

I don’t understand. Why do you crawl over here, of all places? You do it on purpose, huh? There’s always a kid or two every year. Usually they have something dirty on their faces. But not you? That’s impressive.

After saying that, Book nodded, looking like he really was impressed.

I’ve seen you before.

I’ve seen you, too.

At Alone?

No, at the breakwater.

You go to the breakwater?

Why not? It’s a free country.

I stood still.

You were getting beaten up, right? By boys with baseball caps.

I stood still and didn’t say anything.

Why? Don’t wanna talk about it? Ashamed? Hahaha, don’t bother – humans are by nature shameful presences.

Apple Kim

Why didn’t you help me?

What?

I thought you saw me. Then why didn’t you help me?

Book was flabbergasted.

Well . . . that’s. . . .

If you saw me, you should’ve helped me.

Book couldn’t say anything.

Say something. Huh? Book lowered his head.

Sorry. I didn’t think that far. If I see you again, I promise I’ll help you.

Of course you should.

Anyway, aren’t you going to go home?

I will. But down there, is that The End? What’s the end?

The End. You know, The End. What’s that?

The End. You know, where people with ruined lives live together.

I don’t know what that is.

Never mind, then.

The End – what a killer name, though.

Book bowed his head and chuckled. Then Book looked like a foolish comic-book villain. But once he stopped laughing, he looked like a college student again.

The sun’s going to set soon, said Book. Hurry and go back down.

I don’t want to.

Why not?

I’m hungry.

Book’s house, into which I followed him, really looked like a book house.

Books were piled up from floor to ceiling. There were novels, comics, cookbooks, history books, children’s books, science books, Bibles, music books, art books, even a middle-school textbook. We’d studied it last year.

Just sit anywhere, Book said, as he moved some books on the floor to make space. I sat.

Book poured water into a kettle and put it on a gas stove. I stared at him absentmindedly and met his eye as he turned away from the stove.

from ButterFlyBook

What’s that?

What?

Why are you staring at me like that?

What are you talking about? Are these all your books?

Yes. Are you OK with pot ramyeon?

Yes, I like pot ramyeon.

Book chuckled. That’s right, children like pot ramyeon.

I picked up a comic book.

But. . . .

What?

Why do you live here?

It’s my freedom.

That’s it?

Book looked at me. Staring straight at me, his eyes were deep and sharp.

No, I mean, like, is that the reason?

I don’t like the city. Book shook his head. No, I don’t like people.

Why not?

Do you like the city?

I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.

Anyway, it’s a secret that you saw me here today, that I live here.

Why? If the town council finds out, they might send the demolition crew.

What’s a demolition crew?

They’ll kick me out of here.

But everyone knows that you live here.

No, they think I live down there, not here.

You mean in The End? Nobody cares.

Book knitted his brows and put a bowl of kimchi in front of me.

I quickly picked up a piece and put it in my mouth.

The kimchi’s good.

It’s from the shop.

Aha. Hey, how are you going to get home? The sun’s setting. Actually it’s already gone down.

Apple Kim

Book put the ramyeon in front of me and went outside. I opened the lid.

The delicious smell of ramyeon filled my nostrils. My stomach was clamouring for food. The moment I picked up some noodles with my chopsticks and put them in my mouth . . . I froze. Through the half-open door, a dream-like scene opened out. It was the sunset. I walked outside holding the pot of ramyeon in one hand. The orange glow of the sky looked like a sea of black tea. It’s so pretty, I said. Then for some strange reason it became sad. I closed my eyes. I counted to ten and opened them again. The sea of black tea was still spread out before me. I looked over my shoulder. Book’s house was tinted the colour of black tea. Book’s hair was also the colour of black tea. The cigarette Book held was the colour of black tea, too. Black tea-coloured cigarette smoke silently blended into the black tea-coloured sky.

I don’t want to go home, I thought.

And without hurrying I began to eat my ramyeon.

Poetry

Kim Kyung Ju

Kim Kyung Ju translated by Jake Levine

Heavy Snow, a Rented House, a Letter

Isle of the Dead, Arnold BĂścklin, 1886

Within an electric kettle the roar of waves seethed.

For ages on the sea news couldn’t reach the deaf boats seeking the sound of water sent from a faraway land.

The eyes of a school of fish that pass through a deep abyss are frozen stiff, I thought.

Kim Kyung Ju

From a distant lighthouse, fire spilt into this room.

Whenever that happened, I bluely blotted my sea sickness down at the top of the page.

Peonies from the quilt rolled over my leg and the words within the letters I wrote began to wake.

Private lives that reached a critical state snowed heavily on the side of the page.

Uncompleted letters turned to misery.

Like bottles emptied one by one because the sad things disappeared, alone they swung a retired ship out of retirement and creakily returned.

In their loneliness, more letters were burned.

Like a furnace, the sea began to boil flakes of snow and if a hand were dipped under a hot tap inside a room inside the blood in the body, tears were silently bred.

It cannot end like this, I thought – a mass extermination of inner life.

Are there enough tears left in the insomniac’s body to descend into a dream?

Although one by one snowflakes disguise the lights of a town there is love, love, on the side of the planet we can see here, undiscovered, infinity. We divvy up our shares.

Poetry

The House Where Someone Was Born Because the inside was dark it hid its outsides.

Like gently placing one handful of rice into the mouth of the dead clouds arrive.

When it is night only from old bells, the water that silently spills is like the cry that completely transcends the self to the extent that it can no longer be heard.

They say this is the house where someone was born.

When I passed this place, I was not alone.

But who was with me?

Outside, into the wind, the Mognori rings.

The dead approach the wind and lick the gong of the bell.

When dreams swarm on rotted flesh do fermenting coffins also send the water of the deceased to flow outside death?

The cremated clouds that gush down as water become floating epitaphs.

While the last kick of my foot swam across the air the hole that floated in my body

Kim Kyung Ju

seeped out of the hole of my throat.

People who’ve rotted from crying, I see them as wind.

Synopsis for the Theremin (in light of its substance and attributes) 1.The Thing that Dominates the Film Theremin In 1920 a Russian acoustic physicist named Theremin invented an electronic instrument. That’s why we call the theremin the theremin.

From the outside it looks like a small box. Through resonance created within the box, a wave of synchronic sound flows through vertical space, and within that space two hands swivel and music is produced. From their appearance, the player looks like a mime or sorcerer. The tone of the song is dreamlike and sad. Unlike all other instruments, no part of the human body touches the machine. Into the order of empty space two hands enter and, while forming a new order, they compose music.

This instrument is incredibly hard to learn. It is presumed that only thirty or so people in the world are proficient at playing it. Like a biological species, these people are almost extinct. The sound of the theremin was developed into a synthesizer. For a scene in a film, Hitchcock once used a theremin for a variation of a song, not for the theremin’s original sound. Because of the depth of his ear for sound, Theremin (the inventor) was kidnapped by the KGB and forced to listen to wiretaps for the remainder of his life. Then, after several years, he appeared with aphasia in New York City. There he died from a blockage of the heart. So, in the play, it is important for the instrument to look like a thing that has its own life. (This explanation is a fact.)

Poetry

2. Character Description Ahn In-hee: (Male) 30.

Occupation: Piano Tuner.

His existence is simultaneously human and musical. In his previous life he was music but, when he was reborn, he became human. In the past In-hee was a song composed for the theremin by the Russian composer Anaxagoras. Therefore, in this scene, although In-hee was reborn from music into a human, he is still a person composed of music.

Song Seo-leon: (Female) 26.

Occupation: Pianist.

Anaxagoras fell in love with the pianist. In this life as well as in the last, she plays piano. In her previous life her name was Sonya (same person).

Anaxagoras: (Male) 48.

Occupation: Man who became a composer after quitting the KGB. After his wife’s death, he left the KGB and became absorbed with making music. He loved his pianist and disciple, Sonya. Also, he created the composition that was the previous life of In-hee. To awaken the memory of this composition, Anaxagoras is reborn as the music that In-hee loves most in his present life. Anaxagoras is sober minded, upright, and poised.

Song Ae-leon.

Occupation: Deaf girl. Seo-leon’s older sister.

Even though she cannot listen to music, she hears the soul of its sound.

While the music is playing, it is necessary for her to look as if she is watching music instead of listening to it. When she listens to the soul of music, her eyes become as white as the song’s musical range. One day she realizes that In-hee’s soul is composed of music.

Kim Kyung Ju

3. Major Motives and Intentions of the Scene (Play) New Substance and Attributes of the Connection Between Characters [substance] We view the previous and present life in a different light. For instance, the theory of abiogenic reincarnation states that people are either born human or as a living organism, but in the Middle Ages the theory of epigenesis asserted that people can be born as music and that music can be reborn into humanity. As Spinoza said, if we can discard teleological and anthropocentric perspectives of the world, we arrive at pure ‘substance’. Because metaphysical ability is born within human consciousness, Kant argued that without end, human reason tries to transcend its nature and reach toward the foundation of experience. He simply wanted to distinguish between the mind and the desire to pursue the metaphysical realm, but that was all. Metaphysics was his habitat, but the architecture he built through reason cannot account for the theremin. In this play I have written about his failure. [attributes] The composer Anaxagoras, in order to create love between himself and a woman, takes the music that he composed and rebirths it as a human in order that the love he missed in his life may become possible in the next one. He assigns his ego to the inside of music, so he lives on. (This is a metonym for Kant’s theory of reincarnation.) In other words, with sorcery he sealed himself inside the music, became eternal, and later, as music, he is able to love the girl he loved when he was still a man.

Poetry

4. Narrative Prologue [past] The hand that visited the womb Wrapped around a wooden house in bleak Moscow, the fog of war.

Seeped inside a cloud, wind trickles out.

Inside the wind, a window.

Anaxagoras is playing the theremin in a room and his eyes are as dark as the heart of a cloud.

Drifting into the order of the theremin, a shadowy hand begins to grow old.

Little by little, every time it enters the core of the air, the hand dries out.

The flesh that grabs bone furrows and, soaked within the flesh, the whites of the bones are revealed.

Like the end of a sorcerer’s spell, the hand that visited and left its music in a faraway land disappears, bundled in blue smoke. [present] The music inside music In-Hee meets Seo-Leon, they enter a relationship and their love begins.

The two meet as piano tuner and pianist. Now, whenever In-Hee listens to his most precious and beloved music, like a music within music, like a music he listens to for the very first time (which is actually the music of the theremin in his past life), he can’t quite remember what it is.

Whenever that music flows, it seems as if the music is calling for another music to be sung. As the love between In-hee and Seo-leon becomes deeper, the music (that is, Anaxagoras) begins to become jealous. While the mysterious triangle between Anaxagoras (as music), In-hee, and Seo-leon is formed within the atmosphere of music, Seo-leon’s older sister begins to sense the sadness within the future of their relationship.

Kim Kyung Ju

One day, Seo-leon’s sister Ae-leon bumps into In-hee. While they are together, Ae-leon begins to hum the tune of an unknown music that came from within In-hee. In-hee realizes that the music was composed in Russia, so In-hee leaves for Moscow with his work. In a Moscow slum, In-hee first hears the music that wandered within his memories.

Reconstructing his life piece by piece, after coming back to Korea, he treats Seo-leon with an air of sadness. So far the story was about the juxtaposition of the past (Russia) and the present (Seoul), but from here, all that is left is the story of the past (from Russia). [the past revisited] Passion The composer Anaxagoras, previously a KGB agent, heard the news of his wife’s death while on an espionage mission in Eastern Europe. Because of his wife’s death, Anaxagoras began to have doubts about everything. He quit his job and locked himself in his house to focus on music. His pupil, Sonya, played his compositions on the piano. Because of the pity and love for his wife, he hid his passion even from himself. But now he begins, little by little, to love Sonya. However, Sonya doesn’t love Anaxagoras. She just respects him. [present] Madness In-hee reveals to Seo-leon the secret of his past life. He listens with Seo-leon to the music that he was in his past life and, like air wandering around them, Anaxagoras becomes the music. Although she has never touched one before, Seo-leon picks up the theremin. However, because Ae-leon already knows the scary love of Anaxagoras’s madness, she makes a dangerous plan to liberate them from the soul of the music.

Poetry

[the time before the past revisited] Sorcery A wooden house in bleak Moscow. It’s raining outside.

Anaxagoras is sitting on the worn sofa as if he is played out.

Opening the door, Sonya enters.

With his eyes filled with clouds, Anaxagoras gets up and says, I made a new song.

Instead of going to the piano, as per usual, he puts his hand on the theremin.

For you. Anaxagoras sticks his hand slowly into the theremin’s musical space.

The old hand and the young hand, while stirring the order of time, flow together.

The music approaches Sonya and creates a space within her body.

It is almost as if Anaxagoras lies within that space like a theme.

Sonya is crying. What are you doing?

Can we endure until the end of this life?

Anaxagoras closes his eyes and slowly opens his mouth in the direction of his music.

In the next life, please be born as a human. [epilogue] Pity This section is written after Giovanni Pico della Mirandolla’s ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’.

Adam, we didn’t give you a fixed status, unique appearance or special talent.

You must choose these as you wish. You have no limitations. Your nature is bent by your will. You decide on your own. I put you in the centre so that you can easily see all there is in the world. We didn’t make you from the sky or earth, as mortal or immortal. You will enjoy the freedom and the honour of creating your life as you choose. You can either be reborn more humbly, as a beast, or you can be reborn as a higher spiritual being.

Because in that life was a love I couldn’t achieve, I will wake you in music.

Speeding Past Speeding PastHan Yujoo

Han Yujoo translated by Janet Hong

T

he road at night is black, yellow and red. Sometimes green goes by.

When time slips past midnight and enters the early morning hours, red shrinks, and black and yellow occupy that space. Colours go by irregularly. Once when I was in a bar with a large party someone asked me what my favourite colour was. I said that it was black. He gave his head a curt shake and said that black was not a colour. Is black really not a colour?

And if it isn’t, why not? I don’t remember if I asked him these questions at the time. Even if he had given some kind of answer, judging from the fact that I no longer remember, it can’t have been a very good one. Red thrusts in from my right and speeds ahead into the distance. I check the dashboard.

I’m going at about 120 kilometres per hour. I don’t think about catching up. Yesterday that car would have been no match for me.

Three months after I learned how to drive, I began to break road regulations. I’ve never violated a traffic signal or made an illegal U-turn; all I’ve done is speed. From the instant I push past the limit of 90 kph, I become acutely aware of the acceleration. I step on the gas like someone possessed.

To put under a spell. To take for a spell. Once, late at night on the empty road that leads to the airport, I went up to 180 kph. A heavy gust of wind shook my car as I was crossing the Incheon Bridge. Still I didn’t slow down.

My car is one of the popular models that car companies put out to attract young customers. The fastest speed at which this car, neither compact nor midsized, can remain stable is a mere 180 kph. It was raining. The road to the airport stretched straight ahead. At 140 kph the car seemed a little

Speeding Past

unstable under my hands. At 160 kph, the thought that I could die if I even so much as moved the steering wheel crossed my mind. But when I reached 180 kph all sensation of speed left me. I had no experience of driving a high-end car, and this speed was enough to make me forget about the speed altogether. I don’t remember how I got home that night. All I saw were intermittent yellows and overwhelming black. There were countless lights as I approached the city. I didn’t pass Paju. I probably hopped right onto Gangbyeon Expressway from the Gayang Bridge. Maybe not. What is the difference between speed and velocity? Speed. An object’s rate of change per unit of time. How fast does something have to be for it to be considered fast? If I go above 180 kph, right up to the instant before the engine explodes, is that a high enough speed?

I begin to wonder if I am growing old at full speed.

I don’t know where Gangbyeon Expressway ends and where Freedom Highway begins. Sometimes I confuse the two. Every time I’ve left the Paju office late, people have told me it won’t take long if I get on Freedom Highway. They’re right. I pass a few street lights, a few signs, a few bridges, and a few gas stations, and then I’m home. There is no traffic because of the late hour. Because I’ve now been to and from Paju many times, I know the locations of the speed cameras. There are only two. When I had sped to the airport, I hadn’t been thinking about speed cameras. Then I received two speeding tickets in the post. One for the way there and one for the way back, each with a fine of 70,000 won. On the tickets were photographs of my car, which had been going 143 kph and 152 kph in an 80 kph zone. I didn’t feel good. If I had to pay a fine, I wanted proof that I’d been going faster than 180 kph. When I happened to say this to a friend, he looked at me with a baffled expression. He even asked me if I had been drinking.

According to him, I was not a traffic outlaw, but a traffic offender. He was right. I only slow down for speed cameras. Therefore, I’m not an outlaw.

My car isn’t caught on camera, so my offence does not become hard truth.

But the truth is that I speed when there are no cameras, which makes me an offender. It’s not that I haven’t tried to break my habit of speeding. But when I’m driving late at night along an empty road, I find myself going at full speed. I don’t ever drink and drive. And unless I’m changing lanes, I

Han Yujoo

only stare straight ahead. There are times I wonder how I’ve arrived anywhere at all.

I cross the Yanghwa Bridge and head toward the Jeoldusan Martyrs’ Shrine exit. A pale icon looms in the darkness. I’ve been wondering whether the statue is of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. My grandmother was a Catholic.

Her baptismal name was Veronica. Veronica. Vera icon. I once looked up the origin of the name. There are numerous theories, but my favourite was the one claiming that when Jesus was carrying his cross to Golgotha, a pious woman from Jerusalem named Veronica was moved by pity and gave her veil to him, so that he might wipe his forehead. On it became impressed the image of his face. Veil. Moved. Moved to hand over a veil. Moved the way I wasn’t moved.

Red, yellow, green, black. Like the five traditional obang-saek colours – blue, red, yellow, white and black – but distorted. I check the dashboard.

I’m maintaining a speed of 120 kph. Since I’ve already crossed the Gayang Bridge, the road I’m on must be Gangbyeon Expressway. The river is black.

Late at night, Naebu Expressway is yellow and white from the city lights. I would like to drive along all the roads that encircle or run through Seoul, all in a single day.

When I climb the stairs and walk into Division 1 of Public Security on the second floor, Inspector Kim looks up and a familiar expression crosses his face. I can tell he’s wondering why I’m back. Today, Inspectors Kim, Lee and Park are all present. They say that the most common last names in Korea are Kim, Lee and Park. There is also another person there with a different last name: Pil. He’s an officer, not an inspector. Actually I don’t know much about police ranks. The man whose last name is Pil may not even be an officer. I assume he’s Chinese.

Today I’m reporting for work at the Mapo police station instead of the Paju office. It’s been a week since I last came here. My company sent in an official letter, yet their reception has been lukewarm. They are both cooperative and uncooperative. A man with his hood pulled over his head sits hunched before Inspector Kim. The detention cell is empty. This is rare.

Inspectors Lee and Park pop pieces of kimbap into their mouths. Once again, today may be a complete waste of time. Once again, I may have to

Speeding Past

leave empty-handed. The reason my company even sent in a letter was for the sake of a story. I have to come up with something. There was nothing the week before. No, that’s not true. There had been a phone call from a woman who said she was going to commit suicide. It was from an ‘officetel’, a studio-apartment building, not far from where I live. She threatened to jump out of the window. There was no way to determine how serious she actually was, but it didn’t make sense that someone who really wanted to end her life would call the police station. But more than anything, the windows in that building didn’t open far enough. I don’t know the name for this type of window. All I know is that no matter how far you open it, the opening isn’t wide enough for an adult female to slip through.

After my grandmother passed away, I had been looking for a place to rent and had gone into the officetel. But I couldn’t afford it, not with the amount of money I had. The agent probably knew that, too. He mentioned that I could get a loan. I ignored his comment. If I had ended up living there, I could have witnessed my neighbour shoving her head halfway out the open window, threatening to commit suicide.

An inspector and an officer went to investigate. I didn’t follow them. The woman and I were similar in one way. Dogs we’d had for fifteen years had died. The woman and I were different in one way. She was a tenant in the officetel and I wasn’t. Although I didn’t insist on following the policemen, I knew the incident could not become a story. I could tell just from one similarity and one difference. Anyway, it wasn’t the kind of story my company wanted. My company looks for big, important incidents. That’s why I go to the Mapo police station once a week. Occasionally a major incident occurs. Inspector Park, who probably shows the most interest in my work, once took me aside, telling me I needed to keep my lips sealed.

He then proceeded to show me pictures from a crime scene where a man had murdered his younger sister who was heavy with child. I reported the incident to my company, but they didn’t use my report. They said the crime was merely sensational and difficult for people to identify with. That’s why I go to the Mapo police station once a week. Though I’m anxious about ever getting what I need, I’d rather spend my time here than count the minutes in the Paju office that is colder than Seoul in the winter and hotter than Seoul in the summer.

Han Yujoo

Sometimes I have a smoke with Inspector Kim round the back of the building. If Inspector Park shows me case files, spurred on by a kind of enthusiasm for his work, Inspector Kim seems happy enough to kill time having a cigarette with a woman younger than him. Inspector Kim doesn’t pass on useful stories. He just jokes around. The same Inspector Kim sometimes gives me issues of a magazine the police read, telling me to refer to them for my work. The magazine is called Crime Scene. Its pages are filled with gruesome images rarely ever seen, taken at crime scenes. Rarely ever seen. Gruesome. But I can’t describe the scenes in these pictures with these kinds of words. Everything is red. It was through these pictures that I learned that people kill one another in a variety of ways. I once took an issue of Crime Scene to the office. I was told that gory films were no longer the thing in Korea. There were no questions about why these people had killed or been killed. I, too, had no answers.

And I go to the Mapo police station once a week. Inspectors Kim, Lee and Park share certain typical traits, just like the people who share the most common last names in Korea. Probably more so because they are inspectors.

They betray and at the same time strongly exhibit the stereotype of the inspector character found in dramas, films, news stories and documentaries.

The week before, Inspector Kim left the station after receiving the phone call from the woman who threatened to commit suicide and then swore as soon as he returned to Division 1 of Public Security. Stupid bitch. I tried to get the whole story by going for a smoke with him round the back of the building, but he didn’t give me any useful information. According to him, the woman had put on a show; because her dog had died, she, too, wanted to die. You couldn’t make a film about a woman who wanted to die because a pet dog of fifteen years had died. You could make it, of course. But it wouldn’t be a box office hit.

I didn’t report that incident to the office. I was not hired to write stories.

There are screenwriters and directors for that. I’m only a source. If I simply hand over the material, they will adapt it as they see fit. There are two or three other sources who work for them. To them we are a kind of insurance.

They don’t really expect us to bring in useful material. It seems that way at least. I’ve been working at the Paju office for six months and it’s been a little over a month since I started going to the police station.

Speeding Past

I once argued with a stranger in a bar and had to go to the police station to file a report. I had been shoved against the wall and because I didn’t feel any pain at the time, I decided not to press charges, but when I woke the next day, the right side of my face was badly swollen. I want to report that incident again. If I were to go through the records, I could without much difficulty find the identity of the man who shoved me. But again, this cannot become a story. The man might hold a grudge against me for reporting the incident so belatedly, and then commit a far more violent, more heinous crime than shoving me against a wall. Surely, I was a victim.

But I might not even be able to charge him, given that several years have gone by. In the process of investigating him, the minor misdemeanour I have committed might come to light. Maybe not. When I’m sitting inside a police station, I begin to think about all the crimes I’ve committed that have not yet been detected. I once simply looked on while death occurred.

It was the death of my grandmother.

My grandmother was a cheerful person. One day someone broke into our flat. She was out. I had come home before her. The door was open. It’s more correct to say that the door was not locked. It was in an ambiguous state, neither open nor locked. Because the lock was smashed up. When I opened the door and stepped inside, objects were strewn everywhere. It was quite a sight. Objects that had lost their place were scattered across the floor. It looked as though all the innards hidden away had been vomited. The only difference was that not everything was red. From somewhere our dog appeared, ploughing through the mess, and stretched lazily. I chuckled in disbelief. I reported the robbery to the police and then waited for my grandmother, who arrived almost at the same time as the two policemen.

They didn’t bother to collect fingerprints. They didn’t even ask what was missing. They said they wouldn’t be able to catch the burglar anyway. Of course, it made perfect sense. It was the twenty-first century. A thief would never leave behind any fingerprints or footprints. The only objects missing were a laptop and camera, the two most expensive items the thief could simply pick up and walk out with. But that doesn’t mean I considered the robbery to be a redistribution of wealth. I didn’t feel sorry for the thief.

Han Yujoo

After the police left, my grandmother sank down onto the electric blanket and moaned. ‘Thank God you came home after the robbery.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘What if you had been raped?’

The dog came to my feet and once again gave a lazy stretch. I chuckled again in disbelief. It was Friday. My grandmother, who had been sitting in a stupor suddenly got up and rummaged through the dressing table drawer.

She then sank back down on the bed, looking devastated.

‘He took that, too.’

Her nest egg was gone. There had been several bank drafts in there as well. It was Friday, so we had to wait until Monday for the bank to re-open.

There was no hope of getting the money back, because my grandmother hadn’t written down the bank draft numbers. Monday came. On the other end of the line, the bank employee delivered an answer that crushed the hope we hadn’t even had. It took about a month for my grandmother to regain her cheerfulness. It wasn’t a long or short period. No. I still don’t know how long it takes to recover from something. I have no idea.

My grandmother maintained her cheerfulness until she passed away. One morning when I was half-asleep, I heard her speaking to someone. I assumed she was talking to the dog. But no. When I pieced together the words I’d registered only dimly in my dull state, I realised that she was conversing with an evangelist who had come knocking at our door in the morning.

The evangelist said in a bewildered voice, ‘It’s a crazy world these days. . . .’

The sound of boiling water came from the kettle. ‘Why don’t you have a cup of coffee before you go? I go to Mass.’ The evangelist, whose denomination I wasn’t sure of but whom I was certain was Christian, said in a still-bewildered voice, ‘But next time, you really shouldn’t open your door to a stranger.’ I heard the sound of water being poured onto the coffee powder and a teaspoon stirring inside the cup. No, maybe not. ‘It’s the same God,’ my grandmother said. ‘It’s cold outside, so drink up.’ I heard the sound of hot coffee going down his throat. No, maybe not. I was annoyed.

Because I didn’t want a stranger to see me in my pyjamas. Because I should have been asleep at that hour, but instead, my sleep was interrupted. Because I needed to go to the bathroom. After chatting with my grandmother for

Speeding Past

another fifteen minutes, the evangelist finally left. I climbed out of bed. My grandmother was putting the coffee cups in the sink.

‘How can you let just anyone in?’ I asked.

‘A long time ago, we never even locked the door,’ she said, then looked at me and added, ‘Why don’t you go and sleep some more? Your skin’s blotchy, there’s obang-saek all over your face.’

Maybe she was right. Locking or not locking the door didn’t stop a thief from coming. After the break-in, my grandmother no longer seemed to keep an emergency fund. Because even after she passed away and I sorted through her belongings, even after I moved out of the flat we shared and rented another, a stash never turned up. I sometimes thought about the reason why, and I sometimes thought about the bewildered evangelist. I thought about the cold treatment the evangelist would have received, as he knocked on door after door in the winter chill to share his faith and God’s love. After my grandmother passed away, many evangelists came to the door.

I never opened the door. I didn’t want strangers to see me in my pyjamas.

I can give many reasons why. But I won’t.

My grandmother and I formed a pair of binary opposites. My grandmother was someone who opened the door and I was someone who didn’t open the door. The following incident was also from a few years ago.

My grandmother was sleeping in the main bedroom with the dog.

Having failed to steal the dog away from her, I was reading a boring book in my room, which was by the entrance. It was the middle of the night. The flat was dark. My room was bright. My desktop computer was on. The only sound was the whirr of the computer fan. Otherwise, the flat was quiet.

Perhaps it would be more apt to say that the flat was tranquil. No. I’ve never actually experienced tranquillity. I might have glanced at the clock. It was two, perhaps three in the morning or somewhere between the two hours. I don’t remember the book I’d been reading. The doorbell rang. I glanced at the clock. It was 2:42. The minute and hour hands were about 180 degrees apart. I didn’t answer. After a moment, the doorbell rang again. I had once read a short story by an American writer called ‘The Pianist Cat’ or ‘The Person Who Played the Piano with a Cat’, either one of the two or neither of the two. It was a short piece. The story begins with a visitor coming to the protagonist, who is spending a boring time at home. The visitor plays

Han Yujoo

the cat piano for the protagonist. In short, it was a type of piano that could be described with words but not reproduced with images. Of course I wasn’t thinking about this story at the time. I simply hesitated. The doorbell rang for the third time. Neither my grandmother nor the dog woke from their slumber. I slowly walked toward the front door. There wasn’t an intercom installed, which would have helped ward off crime. For this reason, I couldn’t see who was at the door. There was a rustle. It sounded like crying.

I asked who it was. The person outside the door said, ‘It’s so cold. . . .’ It was an answer I hadn’t expected. ‘Could I please have a blanket?’ Blanket.

Moved. Moved to not hand over a blanket. Could this too be described as ‘moved’?

I didn’t open the door. I simply hesitated until the person left. Neither my grandmother nor the dog woke from their slumber. My grandmother and I owned many blankets. So many that we each could have used three blankets. We could have covered the walls and floor of the flat with blankets.

Even the dog had a blanket. The blankets were mostly old and worn and not at all expensive. All this to say that we had more than enough blankets to spare. Even so, I didn’t open the door and hand over a blanket. I sometimes think about that night. I didn’t say anything to my grandmother.

If it had been her, she might have opened the door. The person outside might have been crazy. Across the street lives a crazy woman with her young daughter. It might have been that woman. No. It’s impossible to know what really happened with past incidents. I should have opened the door to make sure. I should have checked whether the person outside the door was a person, thief, robber, ghost, or crazy woman. And no matter whether that person was a person, thief, robber, ghost, or crazy woman, I should have handed over a blanket. That’s what my grandmother would have done.

Perhaps I’ve kept only good memories of her and created some sort of fantasy in my mind. That’s it. I don’t know. I have no idea.

That was the last time. The person never returned. Perhaps she came back when my grandmother, the dog and I were fast asleep. There is no way for me to know. The night the woman knocked on our door preceded the day the thief broke into our flat. I don’t see any correlation between the two incidents. There are two possible hypotheses. One, the person at the door is somehow connected to the thief. Two, a kind of invisible being is

Speeding Past

punishing me for my cold treatment of a person suffering from the cold. Is a third hypothesis possible? There is no way to know.

The next day, I became angry with the dog for no reason. Why? Because shouldn’t a dog bark, as dogs do, if a stranger comes knocking at the door?

Since the dog didn’t speak, she didn’t accept my anger. After all, what did I expect? Several months later when a stranger smashed the lock and barged into the house, the same dog, instead of barking, burrowed drowsily into the clothes strewn all over the flat and took a nap. She lived another year after my grandmother died. She was bound to die anyway. She lived for a total of fifteen years. They said that fifteen years for a dog was a long time.

But when she died, I thought that I had simply looked on while another death occurred. It was half true and half false. With a death that isn’t my own, I can only look on. I’m irresponsible. I didn’t do all that I could have done for the dog. I don’t even know what it means to do all that you can for a dog.

Inspector Kim slams his fist on the desk. Inspectors Lee and Park don’t turn around. I make eye contact with Inspector Kim. I look away. The felon sitting in front of Inspector Kim is a sex offender. That’s what I was told.

They said he targeted women who lived alone. That’s what I was told. I, a woman who lives alone, watch Inspector Kim and the sex offender and think about the possibility of a story. Sometimes I can’t stand it. Even if I report this, my company won’t be interested. Because it’s a common story.

If this story were to come out as a film, there would need to be something more, some kind of oomph. That’s what they say. I’ve had a few meetings with the director, producer and executive producer. According to them, there needs to be historical, social and political elements. The history of Korean migration, the status of the Korean economy, the issue of immigrant labourers, the violence directed at women. They mix these issues like seasoning and add them to the story. Still, that extra oomph is impossible to produce.

The sex offender doesn’t move at all. His head is bowed. He is a Korean who has come from China. The reporters in the pressroom are more interested in the fact that he’s from China than in the fact that he’s a sex

Han Yujoo

offender. I’m not interested in either of those details. My job is to identify what my company will be interested in.

I follow Inspector Kim, who is going down the stairs to have a cigarette.

It’s not so that I can find out the details. I also happen to want a cigarette.

Inspector Kim doesn’t turn around, even though he knows I am trailing him. Only when we reach the back of the building does he look at me to ask if I have a light. I take out my lighter and give it to him.

‘So the price of cigarettes is going up in the new year,’ he says, as though relaying someone else’s information. It’s not a question.

I nod. ‘Apparently.’

He lights his cigarette and hands the lighter back to me. ‘I’ve bought thirty packets already, but I don’t think it would be enough even if I bought three hundred.’

I light my cigarette, too. My hands are cold. At his words, I start to think about how a patient awaiting euthanasia might feel. I know the hour of my death. The time between me and death is fixed.

‘Do you know how much tax I have to pay? Christ,’ Inspector Kim mutters.

My dog died just over a year after my grandmother died. In the last month, the dog couldn’t even move. I took her to the clinic. The vet recommended that I have her put down. She said it would be better for the dog. Even then, I hesitated. My dog who had weighed six kilos now weighed four. She pissed all over the clinic floor. When I put her on the examining table, she slid off and fell to the floor. She didn’t have the energy left to yelp.

I carried her limp body home. She died two days later. Even if I had made the decision to have her put down, she still would have died two days later.

Inspector Kim flicked his cigarette. Like weightless snowflakes, the ash swirled in the air and fell. My grandmother was cremated. But I didn’t see her ashes. The dog was buried on the slopes of Mount Bukhan. And so there were no ashes to see. I’ve heard that burying a dead dog is against the law. Therefore, I have broken another law. But I couldn’t put a dead dog in a rubbish bag and throw it out. I sometimes asked myself why I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t find the answer. I’d learned that we needed to show all the respect that we could for the dead, whether it be a person or animal. In both speech and writing, that’s what I had learned. I still don’t know if I’ve

Speeding Past

shown all the respect that I can for my grandmother and my dog. I can fool myself into thinking that I have, that I have done all that I can. My grandmother died, my dog died, and I remained. Who will bury me? Who will cremate me? There is something I’ve learned as I’ve been reporting for work at the police station every week. There are many people who die on the streets. Reports of homeless people dying on the streets come in at the rate of one every two days in the summer and one every day in the winter.

Most of these people have no friends or family who can claim and dispose of their bodies. In the winter, every police station in Korea’s capital handles one homeless death a day. But this, too, does not become the stuff of stories.

Probably because it’s a common story.

After our flat was broken into, my grandmother and I lived together for another three years. One Sunday, while I was cleaning the bathroom, I discovered a shampoo bottle behind the washing machine. I assumed it was empty, but it wasn’t. And the bottle didn’t look new either. I brought it out and said to my grandmother, ‘I’m throwing this out, OK?’ With a serious look, she said, ‘No, don’t throw that out.’

‘Why not?’

‘Open it.’

I opened the lid and shook out the contents. A pearl necklace and ring dropped onto the floor.

‘If you’re going to hide them, why don’t you at least wrap them in plastic or something?’ I scolded my grandmother. She grinned.

The shampoo bottle was returned to its place behind the washing machine. After my grandmother passed away, I sorted through her belongings. My aunt claimed my grandmother’s meagre collection of gold. But she couldn’t claim my grandmother’s pearl necklace and gold ring. Only I knew where they were. They didn’t seem more valuable than the rest of my grandmother’s jewellery. I didn’t know if they were of sentimental value.

But I will never know. My grandmother was dead and dead people don’t answer questions. After my grandmother passed away, after her belongings were sorted through, after my aunt and father left, I took my grandmother’s two pieces of jewellery from the shampoo bottle. And I decided to consider them as my inheritance.

Han Yujoo

When I began to dabble in film, my grandmother sometimes asked me what I thought about turning some of her stories into scripts. And when she began to ramble on about herself, I retreated. I didn’t want to listen.

Any story would have been too much for me. Yet, certain stories remain in my mind as fragments.

Five years after she was married, she found herself a widow. The elders advised her to remarry. Under pressure, my grandmother agreed to meet someone, and she figured she might as well watch a film while she was out meeting him. After the film had been playing for some time, it stopped abruptly. There was breaking news. There had been an assassination. So much for the money they had spent on the tickets. My grandmother and the man did not get married. ‘So who was assassinated?’ I probably asked her. She said she didn’t remember. Although I was curious how the assassination had been carried out, I don’t think I asked. My grandmother would have said she didn’t remember anyway. I don’t regret not having listened to her stories or not having asked to hear any of her stories. It’s not because I knew my company wouldn’t be interested. There exists a chasm of time between my grandmother and me that I cannot cross. I dared not imagine that time.

Still, there are times I want to submit my grandmother’s stories after I revise and imagine them as I see fit. Although my grandmother was dead, perhaps she might come back to life on the screen. If I were to add my dog’s story, both my dead grandmother and my dead dog could come back to life on the big screen and live forever in a DVD or movie file. But I don’t do anything. I just don’t know why I can’t manufacture them, why manufacturing their stories feels the same as putting a dead dog in a plastic rubbish bag and throwing it out. Some people wouldn’t use the word ‘manufacture’.

I, too, want to find a word that can replace ‘manufacture’. When I was first interviewed for my job, the interviewer asked me what constituted a good film. When I couldn’t answer right away, he said that a good film was one that was made well and a better film was one that sold well. Therefore, the word I should really delve into may be the word ‘well’. I need to delve well into the meaning of ‘well’. But my company might think the word I delve into is meaningless. Is there meaning in something that’s meaningless? I don’t ask. No one answers. Stupid bitch. I recall what Inspector Kim had

Speeding Past

blurted. I’ve said this to my dead dog before. Of course, she didn’t answer.

A dead dog doesn’t answer.

Regardless of what I see, I automatically think about the possibility of a story. No matter how horrific, how pathetic, how appalling, how cruel, how filthy, how sad, how frightful a thing may be, I automatically think about the possibility of a story. How obscene is a story? I feel pity, but I don’t consider myself to be pitiful.

On the way to the Paju office from the police station, I don’t think of anything. No, I’m thinking about what story I can report to the company.

I can say that I came out empty-handed today, but that Inspector Park will probably give me some useful information next week. I will be quitting in about two or three months. From the beginning when they hired me they didn’t have high hopes. They probably didn’t. They had hired several other sources, so that the producer might set the director at ease, so that the director might set the executive producer at ease. I don’t know about their order of rank. Therefore, I don’t exactly know who is setting whom at ease.

I don’t even exactly know if they are, in fact, being set at ease, thanks to their several sources, which includes me. Today I’ve come up emptyhanded. And I will keep coming up empty-handed. I’m empty-headed. It’s a term my grandmother used.

Since I have to say something, I begin to talk about the people I had seen at the police station. We’re eating fried rice and dumplings. As I expected, they’re not interested in the inspectors or the sex offender. But someone shows an interest in Officer Pil. ‘So is he Chinese?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Pil? That’s an unusual last name.’

Another person responds. ‘I don’t think a Chinese person can become a police officer.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you would have to be a Korean citizen. . . .’ He trails off, as though he weren’t sure. ‘So the rapist was from China?’

I bite into a dumpling and nod.

Han Yujoo

There’s a cigarette in his mouth. ‘Keep going to the police station. And if you can, try to tag along when they go to the crime scenes.’

I picture a crime scene covered in red. The chewed-up dumpling goes down my throat. When I look at my watch, it’s five to eleven. Night. I stack the empty plates and put them outside the door. When I come back after washing my hands, it’s exactly eleven o’clock. The others say that they’re going for a beer. I say that I’m going home. They don’t try to persuade me to join them. They’re not interested in me. And neither am I interested in them.

Freedom Highway at night is red, yellow and black. The road I’m on might be Gangbyeon Expressway, not Freedom Highway. On the way out of the office, someone told me, as a joke, to beware of the ghost of Freedom Highway. I grinned. A light fog hovers over the road. Therefore, Gangbyeon Expressway at night is red, yellow, black and white. Occasionally a green sign appears and transforms into an array of colours. When I look at the clock, it’s 11:12. I’ll be able to get home before midnight. I press down on the accelerator. The car begins to speed. Even if I should come across a ghost, I won’t be able to see it. I’ll race by in an instant. I’m still that person who won’t open the door. The ghost won’t be able to catch up. No. I know nothing about ghosts. Even so, I think it will be no match for me. I’m still not ready to listen to any story. So of course I’m not ready to listen to a ghost’s stories. No, that’s not true. I’m frightened of others’ stories. Confronted with their stories, I shut my eyes and block my ears. Until now, I have told myself only my own stories. Others weren’t interested in them.

When I was at university, I made two short films and then gave up filmmaking altogether. From the beginning, I didn’t have many stories.

They were exhausted with two short films. Even so, I always think about the possibility of a story. And so I’m pitiful but I won’t think of myself as pitiful. No. I can’t even use the word ‘pitiful’. Then how am I to describe myself?

I glance at the scene passing outside my car. When I’m driving I have a habit of looking only straight ahead unless I absolutely need to look somewhere else. Everything around me is black and white. It’s because of the darkness and the fog. Yellow and red thrust in occasionally from the

Speeding Past

side. Red. Yellow. Green. Black. I check the dashboard. I’m doing 140 kph.

I think about the difference between an outlaw and an offender. It’s impossible to keep speeding after running off the road. All you can do is head toward the end of the road at the fastest possible speed. There is no end to the road. Just as there is no end to death. I go over 150 kph. I may have driven past a speed camera. The deaths of others thrust in like speed cameras. Deaths I must acknowledge but intentionally forget. I cross the Gayang Bridge. I’m certain the road I’m on is Gangbyeon Expressway. The river is black. I don’t understand how the colour of the river changes according to whether it’s day or night. No. I don’t want to understand. The road at night is as black as the river. I would like to drive along all the roads that encircle or run through Seoul, all in a single day. The Yanghwa Bridge appears. I head toward the Jeoldusan Martyrs’ Shrine exit. A pale icon looms in the darkness. I’ve been wondering whether the statue is of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. My grandmother was a Catholic. Her baptismal name was Veronica. No, maybe not. But I must believe it was. Stupid bitch, I mutter.

I’m saying it to myself. No, maybe not. No, I’m saying it to myself.

As I drive past the shrine, I slow down. It’s because there’s a bend in the road. Fast or slow, the speed we arrive at death is always the same. Always at full speed. I want to go past the deaths of others at the fastest possible speed. But no matter how fast I go, their deaths always grab hold of my ankles. Sentences in the past tense are forever in the present. Black is growing blacker. Blacker and blacker, it grows impossibly black.

Snowman Snowman

Seo Yoo-mi

Seo Yoo-mi translated by Soyoung Kim

I

t seemed like a good sign that the first day of the New Year was a Saturday.

Workers had been excited and looking forward for months to this long stretch of holidays. Travel companies rushed to launch special products, and they sold like hot cakes. Many people went on trips, short or long, by car, coach, train, or plane. Those who remained in the city went to parties and celebrated the old year out and the new year in. It was wonderful to go on a binge knowing that there was still one more holiday left to spend on recovering from hangovers and indigestion.

On New Year’s Day, the city was up and moving early. While many people had made New Year’s resolutions not to sleep in, there were also many people who, still in the mood of the previous night, were wandering around the central area and the entertainment district. As the day broke, people poured out onto the streets to meet friends for brunch, to eat and see a film with their family, or simply to try to start New Year’s Day differently for once.

Climate change had brought about a prolonged period of cold weather, but the city looked much warmer as the sun set and the street lamps were lit. Snowflakes fell softly. But those who noticed were noisy; some spat loudly, and others spewed a curse, as had become their habit. Many people took out their phones for a picture of the falling snow. It was the first that the city had seen this winter since the ‘first snow’ that had melted away before even reaching the ground. Jaws dropped, and a collective ‘Wow!’ rose

Snowman

from those walking on the streets or sitting in cafés or bars, looking out of the windows at the tumbling flakes.

The man got ready for work earlier than usual that morning. Turning up early was necessary because it was the first day of work both in the New Year and after the long holiday. The rumour about new personnel decisions that circulated in early December had snowballed into something that felt real. The man was secretly pinning his hopes on the expected decisions. He couldn’t afford to lose out on a promotion again.

The man standing in front of the mirror, with his hair cut, face shaved clean, shirt white and suit well pressed, looked ambitious and confident.

But his shoulders dropped the moment he arrived at the front door of his apartment building. It had snowed so heavily overnight that snow had accumulated to two-thirds of the height of the glass front door. It was easily higher than the man’s waist and stood like a barricade. He pushed with all his might, but neither the door nor the snow outside would budge. After a few more tries, he gave up, panting. He couldn’t possibly do this alone.

The man looked back and forth at the doors of apartments 101 and 102.

Behind the door to his left lived an old woman in her seventies and behind the door to his right a man in his thirties who struck him as a judo wrestler.

Although the man didn’t actually know the fellow, he had seen him a few times coming back in after smoking a cigarette. After checking the time, the man rang the doorbell of 102 four times, but received no answer. The man waited impatiently before he tried pushing at the front door again. No response there, either. Whether the man was anxious or not, time was passing mercilessly and silently, reaching a point where it was not possible to say that enough time remained.

The man was taking out his mobile phone, thinking he should at least call his wife, when the door of number 102 opened. The resident poked his head out, looking not entirely awake. The heated scent of alcohol wafted out through the open door. ‘Did you . . . ring the bell?’

‘I’m sorry if I woke you.’

‘Who are you? What do you want?’

Seo Yoo-mi

‘I live on the fourth floor. There’s so much snow outside that the front door won’t open. I thought if we worked together, it’d make things easier for me, and for you, too, later, when, you know, you leave for work.’

The man from 102 put on his flip-flops and stepped outside. ‘Gosh . . . that is a lot of snow . . . I’m sorry, but . . . I think it’ll be quicker if you ask someone else for help. I don’t go to work anymore. New Year’s Eve was my last day.’

While the man from 102 yawned and talked, the man kept quiet, not sure what to say in response. On the one hand, he was angry with the man for being selfish. On the other hand, he felt guilty for having awakened him. He also felt pity, as the man was too young to be out of work.

‘Even if you manage to open the door . . .’ said the man from 102, taking a quick look out at the street, ‘I don’t think you can make it to work today.’

He then went back inside.

Ignoring what he’d just heard, the man tried pushing the glass door a few more times. It felt like a wall.

It was too quiet on the other side of the door. The street in front of his block of flats was usually crowded with people going to work at this hour on a weekday morning. It was the fastest route to the bus stop in a densely populated neighbourhood. But now the street was deserted. There were no footprints or traces of anything on the freakishly thick snow. Without sound or movement, the scene outside looked like a freeze-frame image, as though life had vanished or ceased to exist. Only the fallen snow flew about bleakly with the blowing wind.

Still, the man feared being late for the New Year’s kick-off meeting and as a result getting told off by his department head. The sweat glands under his arms became active even though it was cold – so cold, in fact, that his breath was visible and his fingers numb.

The man looked up his colleague’s telephone number and dialled it.

While waiting to get through, he remembered that his colleague lived in a different city, and wondered what conditions were like there. The call was picked up by a machine: ‘The number you have dialled is busy. . . .’ He tried again, only to get the same message. Who should I call? The man was trying to choose between 119 and 112 when the Citizen Service Call Centre’s number popped into his head. He dialled it immediately. Unfortunately, it

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turned out that he had remembered the number in vain: ‘All of our operators are currently busy. . . .’

Still holding his phone in his hand, the man repeatedly threw himself against the glass door. When it became almost certain that he would be late to work, the man prayed that this situation was not specific just to his neighbourhood but a regional disaster that would be a legitimate excuse to his boss. Once he stopped moving, it became silent again, so much so that the vibration of his phone in his pocket felt like an aftershock. A call from his section head had never been so welcome since he’d joined the company.

‘Mr Kim? Yes, I’m snowed in, too. My building has a couple of guards on night shift. Not that they can do much about it. This has been a long holiday, you know. Anyway, let’s wait and see how things go. Going to the office seems impossible for now anyway . . . I’m sure they’ll figure something out. I’ll let you know if there’s any change in the situation. . . .’

Repeating ‘Yes, sir,’ the man finally relaxed. Only then did his sweatdrenched undershirt and white shirt begin to feel unpleasant.

When the man re-entered his flat, his wife, who was feeding their four-year-old girl, looked at him in surprise. ‘Did you forget something?’

‘No. It snowed too much. I don’t think I can go to work.’

The wife put down the spoon and opened a window. The man had worked for his company for less than a year, and the fact that he couldn’t go to work was clearly unnerving her more than the amount of snow.

‘Don’t worry. The entire company is off.’

‘Oh, my God. . . .’ the wife groaned, as she stuck her head out of the window. The man stood next to her and also looked outside. The colour of the street had changed completely overnight. The heavy snowfall had covered everything on the ground fairly and equally. The bases of the buildings were buried in the glistening white snow. It looked as though someone had planted telephone poles and trees directly into it. Over one metre deep, the snow looked like a hard slab of concrete rather than something soft that would make crunching sounds under your feet. More snow had started fluttering down again.

The TV world was at peace. Adverts and recorded soap operas aired as scheduled and without a hitch. The news programme did a round-up of major accidents that had occurred over the holidays – a three-car rear-end

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collision on a highway, a fire in a factory in the ‘A’ city, and the heaviest snowfall this city had ever seen. They only showed a few scenes of snow falling in large flakes. Apparently no footage of snow-blocked roads was available. ‘Snow!’ the girl exclaimed, jumping up and down.

‘Look, it’s on the news. That’s why I can’t go to work. How can I when I can’t even open the front door?’

The wife nodded.

The man stretched himself out on the sofa, as though there was still extra holiday left. Even though he hadn’t done any work, he was very hungry and began to feel tired. Having finished feeding the girl, the wife prepared a meal for the man.

First thing the next morning, the man went down to the front door of his building. Fortunately – or unfortunately – the height of the snow seemed to be about the same as it had been on the previous evening, though it was possible to push the glass door slightly outward. But going to work still seemed out of the question because the crack in the door was only wide enough for a small child to slip through. He pressed himself against the glass door for a peek outside. The scene was as dreary as a graveyard, with the dusky street, the unlit shops, and the stubborn snow showing no signs of melting. At least it was clean, with no footprints. The man tucked his hands under his arms and hunched his shoulders. He remembered his section head saying that he would let him know if there was any change in the situation. The man was confused for a moment about whether going to work or not going to work would mean such a change in the situation.

As heart-warming as it may be to see a family huddled in their home and spending a cold winter’s day together, the story of what is really going on in their house or in their minds is not necessarily heart-warming. This family of three had been confined to their house over the holidays. Since the girl had a nasty cold, they couldn’t go on an outing. The only time they had gone out was to have dinner at a nearby rib restaurant. Throughout the holidays, the man had spent his time watching TV or playing online games.

Meanwhile, the wife had bustled around vacuuming the floor or hanging the washing out to dry. The girl, probably aware that it would be boring to be with her dad playing games, had tagged along behind her mum.

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The man had found the girl trailing at her mum’s heels to be adorable, and wanted – for a change – to be a good father to her; but when he had tried to play with her, the girl curled her lips and jerked her head away, saying, ‘I hate you, Daddy.’ Strangely enough, the man would become hungry again as soon as the wife finished the housework and sat down for a break.

Although it was mealtime, the man felt as though he were committing a crime in feeling hungry.

The boiler was always running for the girl, because of her cold. The temperature in the house was higher than normal. Even though the wife insisted that it was not hot, her face was red. The girl’s nursery school had been on holiday since before Christmas. The wife, who had had to stay with the girl and found it a struggle to take care of her, heaved a heavy sigh now that the man’s holidays had also been extended. When mealtime approached, she would fan herself with her hand. Even though one of their three meals a day was instant noodles, her face became redder and her fanning more frequent. When the wife sighed, the man would sneak out to the balcony.

The man felt as though his flat were shrinking. When he was sitting on the sofa, the ceiling would move downward and the walls closed in on him.

Escaping into the computer room made no difference. The space was sealed like an airtight container. The man, the wife, and the girl were like kimchi in a jar, fermenting and bubbling up according to their condition and size.

The container would expand to the brink of bursting but manage to keep its shape by letting the air out when the man went out for a smoke or the wife talked to someone on the phone. The longer his stay at home, the more he missed his desk at the office. He felt that where he really belonged wasn’t the sofa in his living room or the chair in front of his home computer but at that hard iron desk and that exit staircase where he exchanged silly jokes with fellow smokers. Despite the wife’s complaint about letting the cold air in, the man kept going out to the balcony.

The man put a cigarette between his lips and was lighting it up when he noticed someone at the front door of a building across the street. A woman in a black coat was desperately trying to dig her way through the snow into the building. There was a trunk and a suitcase lying at her feet, suggesting that she had returned from a trip. She was trying hard to open the door before her hands froze and her strength gave out. After an unsuccessful

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attempt to reach and pull the handle through the hole she had dug, she tried pushing her body against it. When this didn’t worked either, she panicked, tripping in the process. The woman seemed to be looking for someone she could call out to for help, but the street was deserted. The woman went back to struggling with the snow. The man had finished smoking the cigarette, but couldn’t take his eyes off the woman. She looked like an ant floundering in cake frosting.

‘A friend of mine told me that her husband went to work today . . . I was wondering if maybe you should, too,’ the wife said while they had dinner.

Those were her only words. Although her eyes were downcast, her face had a hint of something resembling doubt, anxiety, or resentment. Even though the man himself had thought that it would have been better if he had gone to work, it hurt to hear what wife say it. But he kept quiet in order to keep peace for the remainder of the evening.

Streets completely blocked by the heaviest snowfall ever recorded are being cleared slowly but surely with the help of the police, military, and citizens.

The reporter aboard the helicopter was filming over different areas of the city. People in knee-high boots and safety helmets were diligently shovelling away the snow. On the screen, they looked like Lego soldiers.

Having confirmed that the front door of his building was open, the man finished getting ready to leave for work. At the front door, it was apparent that an adult had walked out, clearing a path through the snow. He wondered which of the residents had done it and how, but there was no way of finding out.

Taking a deep breath, the man walked down a path which soon came to an end. It was necessary to turn left to reach the main road, but the path in the snow led to the right. Standing at the dead end, he looked around. He couldn’t even tell the road from the pavement. Apparently, the police and military were conducting snow removal operations, wherever that might be, but this area was still covered. Apparently, as announced on air, shovels and safety helmets had been provided in places along the roads, but none of them could be found, either. Left with no other option, the man used his leather-gloved hands to clear the snow, inching forward. He looked around many times, but not a soul could be seen. It seemed as though the

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city had ceased to exist, leaving nothing but the man and the huge mountains of snow. People couldn’t possibly have just disappeared altogether, could they? He swallowed hard as he remembered the disaster movie he had watched late at night a couple of days earlier. The snow that had been pressed under its own weight for days was as heavy and solid as earth. As the leather got wet, his gloves quickly became damp inside.

He uncovered a box of sand and a shovel. The man dug all around them, but couldn’t find a safety helmet. The shovel was old and rusty. But the man chose the shovel instead of his wet gloves. His frozen hands were red and sore.

The man’s movements were slow because he was dressed in a suit and tie picked for the first working day of the new year. He always wore suits at work. He liked to wear them, although he complained that they were uncomfortable. Before he knew it, suits had become the kind of clothes that he wore most frequently and that suited him best. His jacket and trousers were already wrinkled, but the man wouldn’t tuck the legs of his suit trousers into his socks or roll up the sleeves of his jacket. The work was tough, but he put up with it, expecting that once he had made it to the office, he would have a story to tell and his bosses would start thinking of him differently.

It was tedious yet also honest work in that it allowed him to move one step forward for each shovelful of snow. The man bore ahead, thinking about a legendary film hero who was the sole survivor in the world.

It was over an hour later that the man arrived where he would normally have walked in ten minutes. He was unused to physical labour and it was tiring him out quickly. His office was roughly an hour away from home by public transport. At this rate, it was difficult even to estimate when he would get there. His shirt was soaked in sweat and his shoes, trousers, and underwear were wet because of the waist-deep snow.

From very far away came the sound of a machine, perhaps an excavator.

The man stopped shovelling and looked around him. But nobody, nothing was seen. If he listened closely, it sounded like wind blowing in from afar.

But the man wanted to believe that it was the sound of a snowplough at work. The city hasn’t stopped removing snow, and they are rushing over here to continue their operations. Wait for a couple of days holding out at home, and the roads will be cleared for sure. Cars will be back on the roads and there will

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be traffic jams, as if it had never snowed. Believing this to be true seemed easier than shovelling his way to work. Even if I make it to the office, there’ll be no work for me to do anyway because our factories and partners are off, too.

So why bother going to all this trouble? The man slowly put down his shovel.

His ambitious plan to make it to the office no matter what had fizzled out before he knew it.

The man’s phone ringing couldn’t have been better timed. He frowned, looking down at the caller ID. It was his department head.

‘Yes, sir, Happy New Year! I’m sorry. I should have called you first.’

‘Do you think this is about New Year’s greetings, Mr Kim? Where are you? You’re the only one in our department who hasn’t come to work.’

‘I am? Oh . . . I’m on my way. The front door wouldn’t open because of the snow. . . .’

‘Do you think it snowed only in your neighbourhood? It snowed everywhere. Where’s your discipline? We gave you a couple of days off. I’d expect you’d use that time to clear snow and get ready to come to work. No wonder you don’t amount to anything. No tact. No spirit. If I were you, I’d be ashamed to be still a deputy section head at your age. Didn’t you say you’d do your best in the New Year? It’s always when you’re drinking that you say you’ll work hard. The company is a joke to you, isn’t it? Is making a living a joke?’

‘No, definitely not a joke. . . .’ was not what spilled from the man’s mouth.

It was a lie that he was almost there and would definitely hurry up. His mind was blank, as if it were not the snow but his brain that he’d shovelled away. After hanging up, the man checked the time. There were roughly two hours left until the deadline his department head had set for his arrival. He felt even more hopeless than when he had faced the waist-deep snow. He tucked the legs of his suit trousers into his socks and pushed up the sleeves of his jacket. The reason why no people were seen was not that they had disappeared. It was that they had started leaving for work last night. That the front door of his building was open was also the result of a determined someone having pushed it forward all night long. The man picked up the shovel, kicking himself for his complacency and incompetence.

Those who compare snow to candy floss or a cosy cotton quilt don’t really know about snow. Try some shovelling, and you will realise that you have

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only scratched the romantic surface of snow. Frozen snow is as sharp and dangerous as shards of glass. Just bumping or scratching against it can make you bleed. The man licked the blood off the back of his hand, and then thrust down on the shovel with his foot. Removing knee-deep snow during his military service had been easier than what he was doing now. Heavy as wet sand though it had been, the snow then at least hadn’t stood in his way or suffocated him. The man felt as though it was his life rather than this city that had been hit by the heavy snowfall. The weaker his arms and legs felt, the more he felt like a mole.

‘Where are you now, Mr Kim? . . . Why are you still there? I didn’t know what was going on here, either, until I came to work just in case. I would’ve been in deep shit if I hadn’t come. Who’s with you?’

On hearing the man say that he was alone, his section head heaved a big sigh. ‘You can’t act alone in an emergency like this. Do you think I gave you the list of emergency contacts for nothing? I gave it to you so you could use it in this type of situation. Why can’t you be flexible? Don’t you wonder how the others have made it to work on time? They’ve done it by digging individually for two days and then together with the colleagues they met up with in their neighbourhood. That’s social life. That’s office life. There’s work you should do alone. And there’s work you should do with others.

You should know which is which without being told. . . . Anyway, hurry up. Everyone’s waiting for you.’

He said that the man and Yoo, from another department, were the only two in the whole company who hadn’t come to work.

‘I think Yoo will be OK, at least until tomorrow, because he’s been getting good reports and his department head is soft. But as for ours, you know he’s a dog. Besides, you’re on his blacklist. He’s saying he’s going to put you in a blender and drink you up once you get here. Don’t you know that bastard hates losing? Haven’t you learned things like that yet?’

His section head, having come to work but with no work to do, preached on and on. ‘How many times have I told you? Office life is 99 per cent about relationships. Use some tact. Bow your head to people. Try to please them, even if you don’t want to, OK? Honestly, it’s not like we’re here because we feel like it.’

Seo Yoo-mi

The man’s body was getting cold as the sweat cooled. He had to try to work the shovel clumsily with his one hand while holding his phone in the other. The only thing fortunate about this situation was that Yoo’s home was about halfway between the man’s home and the office.

What appeared before the man’s eyes a little after noon was not his office building. It was another shovel diligently clearing snow. It was green and looked bigger and more robust than his own. The green shovel was ceaselessly clearing snow. It wasn’t until he reached the path the man had been digging that the other person looked up and caught his breath. It was a young man who looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties. Armed with a functional jacket bearing an outdoor brand-name and logo, the fellow looked like he could survive even if he were thrown onto Mount Everest. The sun glistened off the goggles that the fellow was wearing. The man was ashamed of his wrinkled suit that had repeatedly got wet and dried out, but so glad to meet someone in the snow-covered wilderness, that he awkwardly gave a nod.

‘On your way to work?’ The young man spoke first, wiping off the sweat.

‘Yes, my bosses are raising hell with me for being late, but my body doesn’t seem to move as fast as I’d like it to.’

‘Same here. My boss grilled me when I asked him if I should still come to work when a natural disaster had struck. I can’t believe I’m shovelling here.’

While the younger man took a sip from a bottle of water, the man lit up a cigarette. They exchanged a few words about the golden holidays that had left them feeling worse off than others, and the heavy snowfall that even the national weather centre hadn’t seen coming. They also talked about how life was hard and the world was becoming a more difficult place to live in.

‘Our salaries stay the same, but prices keep rising. Working years are limited, but average life expectancy is increasing. Medical costs keep rising, and crime is increasing. And the weather is going crazy all the time. . . .’

Listening to him go on and on as if reciting rap lyrics, the man nodded.

He thought that it had been a long time since he had shared an honest conversation with a stranger, and felt comforted by the unexpected fact that they spoke the same language. The conversation livened up instantly.

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‘Exactly. Life is war. With all this pressure from above and competition from below and all around, just holding on is hard enough as it is. On top of that, a heavy snowfall has made it so hard to go to work. Who would have known? At this rate, I’m not sure if I’ll ever make it to work today.’

‘You know what? I got into a big company by working hard at school and all so I wouldn’t have to slave away like this. But I don’t think anything much has changed. Basically, I’m leading a life with little time for myself. I should have joined the ‘A’ group instead. They don’t go to work today. That is a big company I’m talking about.’

At the words ‘big company’, the man’s warm, sweaty body began to cool down rapidly. As it had turned out, it was neither his rusty shovel nor his wrinkled suit that he should be ashamed of.

‘I think we were meant to meet. Give me a call when you’re in the area, so we can have a drink together. I think we’re speaking the same language, and in similar positions, too.’

The man took the business card handed to him. The familiar logo of a big company was clearly printed on it. The man hurriedly grasped his shovel after saying something vague about how he had run out of his own cards.

His heart had turned cold because, even though they might speak the same language, he didn’t think they were in similar positions. The young fellow in goggles receded to the left. From behind, he looked like a snowboarder at a ski resort. The snow felt as though it had become about twice as hard and heavy as before.

He discovered things like a toppled-over food waste bin and a No Parking sign in the snow. Every time his shovel hit something, the man found himself spitting out a curse. The snow alone was enough of an obstacle to his way to work. He tried to reach Yoo by phone a few more times, but Yoo wasn’t answering.

It was unbelievable that Yoo, normally so passionate and committed to his job, hadn’t come to work yet. But whatever was keeping Yoo, it was fortunate for the man that there was still a co-worker left to go to the office together with. I’ve got to get hold of Yoo. That’ll make it easier for me to get to the office. Judging from the fact that Yoo hadn’t been answering the phone,

Seo Yoo-mi

he was most likely also clearing snow. The man became anxious that Yoo might beat him to the office.

As the man approached the city centre, he began to notice people making their way forward, clearing snow. Yoo’s apartment wasn’t very far away from where he was. Last spring, the man and several other deputy section heads had been there, drinking into the night. The relatively new studio apartment had been clean and the interior luxurious. How much is a place like this? What’s the actual floor space? They had asked these questions while looking around the flat. I wish I lived alone in a place like this, the man had murmured, drunk. Even then, as they emptied one bottle after another, Yoo had been frowned at for worrying about getting to work.

The driveway of the building had been swept clean, probably because it was in the city centre. The man pressed the flat number at the front door, and waited for Yoo to answer. It was ringing and ringing but no one picked up. He can’t be home. The man prayed with all his heart that Yoo hadn’t gone very far. He pressed the Call button several times as he dragged on another cigarette, but Yoo wasn’t answering the phone.

What’s keeping you so long? A text message from his section head had arrived. It was already two in the afternoon. The man grasped the shovel and worked it mechanically. He was clearing the snow more and more quickly. But he was getting tired out just as quickly. While he was taking another break, sitting in the snow, he felt a desire to lie down and take a nap. At that moment, the snow didn’t feel hard or cold. Instead, it simply felt like a wooden bench in a park. It even felt so cosy that it made him want to dig forever into it. Crouched down, the man nodded off until the chills made him wake with a start.

The man’s shovel hit a bundle of waste paper. The frozen bundle was as heavy as rock. He began to push it to one side when a Chinese restaurant leaflet fell from between the sheets and landed on his shoes. The palm-sized leaflet had pictures of three kinds of food printed on it: jjajangmyeon (black bean sauce noodles); jjamppong (noodles in hot and spicy broth); and fried rice. The black and red colours of the dishes couldn’t have looked more vivid against the white snow. The man realised that he had been shovelling through breakfast and lunch. The smells of jjajangmyeon and jjamppong rose inside his head. They had the kinds of flavours that filled him with a

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nostalgic longing, as though he hadn’t tasted them for a long time. His mouth began to water. He felt that eating a large bowl of jjajangmyeon would give him enough strength to make it to the office. When it comes right down to it, we all work for food. He took out his phone as if possessed.

He doubted that they could deliver, but dialled the number anyway, thinking that it wouldn’t hurt to try. As it was taking so long to get through he was convinced that they would never pick up the phone. He felt as though he were making this call to confirm that he couldn’t have jjajangmyeon. So the man was struck speechless when a deep voice said, ‘Hello.’ Not until there was another ‘Hello?’ did he manage to ask, ‘Is this a Chinese restaurant?’

‘Yes, Jinseonggak.’

‘Can you deliver now by any chance?’

‘What’s your address?’ asked the owner of the Chinese restaurant casually, as if he had no idea that the city had been covered in snow. My address is. . . .

The man looked around. ‘I’m not in a house. I’m on a street. Can you still deliver? . . . . There’s a hospital and an estate agent’s around here.’

‘Oh, I know where that is. Yes, we can deliver. One large bowl of jjajangmyeon? OK.’ The man hung up, but stood there, gaping blankly. His stomach was growling. Only this hunger felt real, whereas the conversation he’d just had over the phone felt like a joke. While he was waiting for the delivery, time was piling up on his shoulders instead of passing him by. At this rate, he felt as though his shoulders were going to snap under the weight. He took a handful of snow and put it into his mouth, only to spit it out. He thought he must be crazy to be standing there, waiting for something that wouldn’t arrive.

Then he saw a person wearing a helmet appear at the mouth of an alley to the right. That person walked briskly towards him across the untrodden snow. It seemed as though that person was shovelling away soft, light flour.

His movements were fluid and rhythmic. As a result, the distance between the two men closed quickly. ‘Speedy Delivery’ was written on the helmet.

The deliveryman with the helmet saw the man and raised his right hand high in the air. The man stood blinking, unable to believe his eyes. As the writing on the helmet declared, it was indeed a speedy and efficient delivery.

Seo Yoo-mi

The deliveryman put down his metal box and took off his helmet. To the man’s surprise, he turned out to be a middle-aged man with greying hair. As he had come through the snow, his shoulders and shoes were covered in it. ‘Once you’ve finished eating, just throw away the bowl.’

‘Amazing. You deliver under these conditions?’

‘Snow or not, I’ve got a living to make.’

As soon as he’d been paid, the deliveryman handed over the bowl, put his helmet back on and strode away. A coupon had been left neatly on top of the bowl.

The man split the disposable chopsticks with his frozen hands, ending up with two uneven halves. The smell of the jjajang sauce and the warmth of the disposable bowl were so vivid that they seemed surreal. The man sniffled as he held the chopsticks and began to mix the sauce with the noodles. Standing awkwardly in the snow as he ate the jjajangmyeon, the man wondered if he was on The Truman Show and the world was watching him, not because he was a celebrity worth watching but because they simply wanted to have fun laughing at a random bloke doing stupid things in a panicked situation. If that was actually the case, the man thought that he was doing a terrific job of meeting their expectations. After all, he was simultaneously using his chopsticks and wiping his runny nose with the back of his hand, and in so much of a hurry to devour the whole bowl of noodles that he dropped one of the chopsticks in the process. He searched the snow in vain, and eventually ended up scraping the last of the jjajangmyeon into his mouth using the remaining stick. In any event, the bowl was clean.

There wasn’t time to feel shame or self-pity.

There was an unlit corner shop across from him. On seeing the sign, the man wanted to drink one of those tins of hot coffee. Things that used to be part of daily life not long ago were now out of reach. In front of the corner shop there was a snowman as tall as the man. It was a snowman with round eyes and a smiling mouth. The man paused to look at it. Who had put it there? It seemed an ironic joke to find a snowman with a smiling face standing in a world where snow was wreaking havoc and life had fallen apart because of it. The man imitated that smile in spite of himself. His dry lips cracked and a drop of blood fell onto his chin.

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As he continued to plough ahead, the man’s shovel again hit something hard. In a hurry and having no time to lose, he pushed the shovel down hard with his foot, but the blade wouldn’t go in any deeper. He put his shovel in a different spot, about a metre away. But again it stopped getting through. Not a toppled-over newspaper stand or bicycle, but something much larger seemed to be buried there. He turned to one side to dig in another spot. Then the sound of music came from somewhere, like an echo.

It was a woman singing in a faint voice, and the melody sounded familiar.

The man stopped for a while to listen closely. Though he realised it was only a ringtone, it was still the first music he’d heard all day. The man’s phone vibrated in his pocket but he ignored it. The music stopped, but it resumed when the man began again to clear the snow. It was the same melody as before and growing louder the more he cleared the snow around the buried object. The man worked his shovel, following the sound rather than the path. It wasn’t until he had wiped away the snow with his hands that he located the source of the sound. It was the mobile phone of someone buried in the snow.

The man knelt down and started digging out the remaining snow with his hands. There emerged from the snow black shoes, feet, and a pair of woollen suit trousers, in that order. Sniffling, the man carefully dug through the snow with his frozen hands. Steam puffed out of his mouth. The person’s suit jacket and white shirt were frozen stiff with their creases intact. His dark red silk tie was frozen solid, like caked blood. Both of his hands were clutching snow, hiding the fingers from sight. He was curled up in a ball, and part of his upper body was still buried in the snow. The thickness of the snow suggested that snow had continued to bury him even after he had fallen down.

The sun was going down fast. The man was cold but his face was sweaty.

Wiping away the drops trickling down his face, he carefully cleared the last of the snow. His hands were shaking, as if he were digging up an ancient relic. He exposed shoulders, a neck, and then a bespectacled face. The man was about to check for a pulse when he sank to the ground. It was Yoo, who had been neither at home nor answering the phone.

Hey. The man shook Yoo’s body. A bead of sweat fell from his chin. Wake up. The song with that familiar melody played again on the phone. Hey!

Seo Yoo-mi

The man’s voice trembled as he called out to Yoo. The man picked up Yoo’s phone and held it to his ear but couldn’t say anything. Here, in the snow, I’ve found Yoo. In the man’s mouth, those words solidified into ice instead of coming out as sound.

The sun had set and dusk was falling. I think I can make it to the office if I keep shovelling like this for another hour or so. The man looked in the direction of his office. And he looked back at the path he had been digging.

There was quite a distance to go, whether he moved forward or went all the way back. Besides, the man was much too exhausted. He crouched down beside Yoo to catch his breath. He was becoming drowsy, but opened his eyes wide to prevent himself from dozing off. The snow didn’t feel hard or cold but simply like a wooden bench in a park. Before his eyes, everything began to crumple like crushed paper.

Wang’s Whole-Chicken Stew Wang’s Whole-Chicken Kim Yi-s eolStew

Kim Yi-seol translated by Eun Kyung DuBois and Nathan A. DuBois

W

ang stuck his head between my open legs and sniffed. Plip, plipplop, plop. The branch outside the window dropped its burden of snow. A recent storm had laid a white blanket over the countryside and we were due for more cold weather despite the onset of spring. Business had been slow on account of the weather, so Wang sent Imo and Eonni home early. Then he and I screwed until long past dark. Wang was in no hurry to leave. The raunchy stench of aged kimchi left on the dinner table near the door filled the dark room.

Afterwards, I fumbled in the dark for my balled-up knickers. Outside, clumps of white spattered across the black darkness. Snow was falling from the roof. Could I quench this thirst even if I gulped down a shovelful of snow? I stopped dressing and opened the window. The air tore fiercely at my bare skin, freezing my whole body. I shut the window again.

Wang smoked one cigarette after another as he drove me home.

‘Stop smoking,’ I said.

He lowered the window for a moment, then rolled it up again. As if that was enough to purify the smoky air. ‘You’ve got a daughter, haven’t you?’

Wang asked.

‘Yes.’ ‘Fuck, is every kid like mine?’

‘Like what?’

‘He treats me like an ATM or something. You should try it and see how it is.’

‘Don’t try to unload your troubles on me.’

Kim Yi-seol

Now that I thought of it, it had been more than three months since I’d last seen my daughter. Something hot wriggled in the pit of my stomach.

It was after midnight and the highway was completely deserted. ‘Welcome’: the road sign marking the border between one city and the next flashed in the darkness. I crossed this intangible barrier every morning and every evening. Each time I looked at the sign I thought of when I first went to work at Wang’s restaurant a year ago. The wind was howling, and the sign bucked against it. Now leaving. It made me feel like I was passing into another world.

‘I’m sorry about this,’ my husband mumbled, almost inaudibly.

‘Don’t be,’ I said with a grin. Our infant daughter was in her cot, shivering in the cold air that rushed in through the open door.

‘Be careful. Come back soon.’

I nodded and held my daughter’s tiny hand one last time before turning away. It was an oddly sad moment, as if it were the last time we’d ever be together. The bluish stubble on my husband’s chin, and my baby’s thin cheeks, made me feel that way. I shut the door behind me and heard my husband calling through it.

‘Don’t worry about Ayeong and me. Come home safe.’

I couldn’t pull myself away. My husband had been following me around all morning. When our daughter woke up, he walked in circles around me, holding her. I started the rice, warmed up the soup, and used the breast pump one more time. He gazed at me as I washed my face, applied toner, and changed my underwear. That’s how I got ready in such a tiny room, where turning around was the only way to conceal myself. Only a little more than a hundred days old, my daughter gazed blankly up at me. I finished dressing and put up my hair.

‘Shouldn’t you put on some lipstick?’ my husband suggested over my shoulder. I thought for a moment, then smeared Vaseline on my lips. I didn’t have any makeup. I took the baby from him and put her to my breast. I was about to explain how to give her the milk I had prepared, but I stopped myself. I’d already told him more than a dozen times.

‘Have lunch while I’m gone. There’s soup in the pot, and in the fridge there’s. . . .’ I stopped. I’d said that more than five times. My husband

Wang’s Whole-Chicken Stew

assured me that they would be fine. He held our daughter’s tiny hand and waved it at me.

‘Ayeong, say goodbye to Mummy.’ I caressed her bony cheek as she gurgled and cooed.

Just two weeks after giving birth I had started work again. My husband couldn’t even try to keep me home. There was no other choice. Since I hadn’t fully recovered, I couldn’t do any physically demanding work. First, I managed to get a job handing out flyers at the underground station and sliding advertisement cards under the wipers of parked cars. I also walked around blocks of flats stuffing loan brochures into letterboxes. I handed out every kind of leaflet there was. Cram schools, restaurants, bathhouses, bars, kissing-rooms, motels. It wasn’t difficult to work a couple of hours and then return home to feed the baby, but I wasn’t making enough money. I had to make a decision.

I had misgivings about leaving the baby with my husband when he should have been studying for the civil-service exam. He would have to warm up milk for her every couple of hours and change her nappy, and that would distract him from his studies. I had worked every day since I was seventeen, and struggling to make ends meet wasn’t a new experience. But I had never felt so uneasy about setting out from home.

My feet felt like lead that day. The steep, narrow stairway from our one-room rooftop flat was treacherous. I hurried through an alley and ran down a steep road to the nearest crossroads. I was completely out of breath when I saw the crossing light blinking green. I ran with all my might to make it. On the other side of the street a van pulled up behind me and blared its horn.

‘Hey, crazy lady! Are you nuts or what, running across the street like that?’ the driver said, grinning at me through his open window. It was Wang. I bobbed my head politely at him. The side-door slid open and I got in. The van took off even before I’d shut the door, jolting me into another passenger’s lap.

‘Is that how you greet people, bum-first?’ she asked gruffly. Awkwardly, I bobbed my head in greeting as I sat across from her.

‘She’s new. It’s your job to show her the ropes!’ Wang explained over his shoulder.

Kim Yi-seol

‘I can only teach people who know how to learn,’ the woman replied coldly. ‘Anyway, this lady here works in the kitchen. You can call her Imo. I wait on tables. Just call me Eonni.’

I bobbed my head once again. Imo appeared to be in her fifties, while Eonni was in her forties. At every little bump in the road the van rattled and jostled us.

‘Wang drives like shit,’ Imo muttered dryly as she wiped the foggy window. Since my seat was facing backwards the ride was even more jarring for me. There was no heater either, so each time I breathed, white mist blew from my nose. A snow flurry began to fall. It was the first of the year.

I thought of my daughter. I always thought of her when I saw pretty things. That was around her one-hundred-day-old mark. A special threshold.

All my thoughts were directed towards her. I was still a good mother then.

I ate and slept so that I could feed and care for my infant daughter. I had to eat well to make good milk for her, and I had to sleep well so I could smile for her. Even leaving her with my husband while I worked was, in the end, for her. We would starve otherwise. It made sense for me to work instead of my husband because he was preparing for the civil-service exam.

Once he’d passed, he would make a good living for the baby. So everything I did was for my daughter. I had given birth to her, and I couldn’t let her live as I had done. My husband felt the same.

The scenery changed noticeably as we drove past the city limits. The buildings became lower and the road narrowed. Suddenly, a large building came up along the roadside opposite the highway. Peering out, I saw the river, with all sorts of waterbirds living peacefully among the tranquil reeds.

Soon, fancy buildings began to appear. Signs that read ‘Garden’, ‘Duck Stew’, ‘Rabbit Stew’, or ‘Chicken Stew’ lined the riverside. There were many restaurants and cafés. Motels stood here and there, something that I hadn’t noticed the last time I had been there, when I went to apply for the job.

‘Do you know this area?’ Eonni asked.

‘No.’ I couldn’t afford any of these places. I couldn’t even guess how expensive the restaurants were. In a suburban resort town like this, the food prices would be even more exorbitant. How much could it cost? I seldom uttered the words motel, restaurant or café. My husband lived on instant coffee. Just one cup of the stuff was enough to keep me up all night. Before

Wang’s Whole-Chicken Stew

we moved in together, we used to meet up on the roof of the hostel where we lived, or we’d hide away together in his room or mine.

As the van pulled up, I wondered what sort of people would come to this out-of-the-way place, where the buses didn’t even run because nobody actually lived there. What sort of people would come here to spend money eating, drinking, and getting tangled in the sheets for a few hours? There must have been a lot of them to sustain these long rows of restaurants, motels, and cafés. What a different world!

‘Everybody out!’ Wang shouted.

‘Are you trying to make me deaf? And anyway, what’s the matter with this girl you picked up off the street?’

I was struggling to open the door. Imo tapped my shoulder, beckoned for me to get the hell out of the way and swiftly slid the door aside. It was snowing hard, and I could hear flowing water nearby. Wang, Imo, and Eonni went on to the restaurant. I scurried after them. Everyone walked quickly, breathing heavily as if they were angry. Before I went in, I looked back at the sign standing at the entrance to the parking lot. ‘Wang’s Whole-Chicken Stew’. The black text stood boldly against the white background. I clenched my fists and went into the restaurant.

I’d had no idea how busy a chicken-stew restaurant could be in the winter.

It was my first day and I was new at everything; and that only made things worse.

Eonni said, ‘I’ll take day duty since it’s your first time.’ Day duty meant staying behind at the restaurant to clean up afterwards. Eonni was going to share this burden with me. I was told that Imo always left first. She stopped at home briefly, and then went on to work at another restaurant. ‘When do you sleep?’ I asked.

‘When I can’t stand erect,’ Imo replied.

‘Erect, eh?’ Eonni cackled.

‘What’s the matter with you so early in the morning? Are you that excited about the new help?’

No matter what Imo said, Eonni wouldn’t stop cackling. Eonni had a son who was studying for college, and she said she would give up work when he left for school.

Kim Yi-seol

‘Oh, please – pack it in.’ That was Imo. She didn’t share anything personal, and she hardly ever smiled. It was Eonni who pointed out that it was only Imo who could answer back to Wang.

She took a uniform from a cupboard by the kitchen. It was too big for me. It was only when I put on the orange apron that I finally settled into the new situation.

‘You did bring make-up, didn’t you?’

I shook my head.

‘What kind of place do you think this is?’

Eonni held out her own make-up bag. ‘Put some blusher and lipstick on, for heaven’s sake. You can’t greet the customers with a naked face. You’re so clueless.’

I did as I was told. I used the same colour of lipstick that Eonni wore and put on the same modern style of hanbok. I tied up my hair and put on a hairnet. Eonni put her face right up to mine and inspected me.

‘You’ve got some charm now that you put your face on. Wang wouldn’t have hired you otherwise, I suppose. But he didn’t tell you what we do here?

You really don’t know anything about it?’

‘Hurry up!’ Wang shouted through the doorway.

I wanted to ask what it was that I didn’t know, but I was set straight to work, cleaning. Wang nagged Eonni again and again to be sure to teach me well.

I began with the restaurant building. I swept and wiped the floors in five rooms with short-legged tables where people sat on the floor, and then I cleaned the main hall where there were more than ten tables with chairs.

With a cloth, I wiped the window sills and even the leaves of the potted plants. Next were the outbuildings, five little bungalows that overlooked the water. They were one-room huts with en suite bathrooms. In each bungalow there was a TV, a karaoke machine, a large table, a deck of cards and some cushions. In one corner there was a folded-up blanket. Again, I swept and wiped the floor. I was also told to sweep around the low wooden bench in front of the restaurant now and then, even though it wasn’t used in the winter. Next, I cleaned the bathroom in the main building. It was important to use bleach and air-freshener. I poured bleach into the toilet, brushed the bowl, and flushed it. Eonni was behind me the whole time,

Wang’s Whole-Chicken Stew

making sure I did things properly. When I finished cleaning and returned to the main building, I smelled the sweet aroma of cooked rice. It was already eleven. The table nearest the kitchen was set for our lunch so we could eat before customers began to arrive.

‘Go and get the rice. Since you’re the youngest, that’s your job, too.’

We ate our early lunch, and as soon as I finished clearing the table, the first customers came in. It wasn’t particularly busy, but since everything was new to me I was clumsy. There were many new rules to learn. Everything I did was awkward and laboured. Many guests came in with group reservations. It was the New Year season. I scurried about refilling side dishes, getting toilet paper, emptying the rubbish and serving coffee. After they’d eaten, middle-aged couples went out to the bungalows. Both places were bustling with their own clientele.

The hardest work for me was carrying the piles of heavy dishes. My shoulders strained under the weight of just a few. I started work at nine in the morning and finished at nine in the evening. Twelve hours. I ate two meals at the restaurant, and called home three times a day to find out how the baby was doing. Each time, my husband told me not to worry.

After saying goodbye and getting into Wang’s van, I groaned with exhaustion as I slumped into the seat.

‘What’s wrong? Too tough for you?’ Wang asked, roughly shifting the van into gear.

Eonni was on day duty, so she stayed behind. Wang would drop me off at the crossroads where he’d picked me up in the morning. Perhaps because it was dark, the bumpy road felt like a rough mountain path. The snowcovered trees swayed in the wind. Each time the van bounced I smelled the chicken broth on my clothes. Just thinking of the greasy soup made me nauseous.

Wang spoke as he lit a cigarette. ‘Tomorrow, make sure you bring an extra bra.’

I felt my face and ears flush. He was referring to something that had happened during the day. Eonni had nudged me as she passed by, her glance falling to my breasts. When I looked down I saw that my blouse was soaked with milk. As I laid out the dishes, I caught the man at the table staring at me. He hurriedly looked away. When I was out of earshot, the whole table

Kim Yi-seol

burst out laughing, and the man laughed with them. I covered myself and went into the back room where I changed into the new uniform that Eonni had tossed onto the floor.

It was as cold in the van as it was outside. My shoulders shivered, and my teeth chattered. But I couldn’t tell Wang that I was cold. I huddled up as much as possible, though the cold air pierced my body. It had been a long day. I missed the smell of my child. I wanted to rub my cold feet against my husband’s warm feet and fall asleep. As soon as I entered our flat the first and last thing I did was sprawl out on the bed. My husband laid the baby next to me and put my swollen breast to her mouth. The milk flowed out faster than she could drink and made her choke.

The dense river-fog made for a regular spectacle on the way to work each morning. The water flowed slowly. Birds floated across it and dived through reflections of trees and mountains. The river, indifferent to the people who stood gazing at it, was quiet and serene. At night it stank of putrefaction, and the moisture that rose from it instantly dampened your clothing. It was a very different place in the morning from what it was at night.

Even though people complained that times were tough, the area still came to life after nightfall. Every restaurant was lit, turning the river and its banks into one giant Christmas ornament. It was no different at Wang’s, except it was busier at lunch than dinner. After the Christmas party season was over, the New Year’s season began. But the bungalows were busy all year round. The main hall was primarily occupied by social gatherings for the wives of notable persons, while the bungalows were used by card players and middle-aged couples.

The latter had ulterior motives for spending the afternoon in the bungalows. Ordinary married couples don’t eat chicken behind locked doors at noon on a weekday. Our guests rarely managed to finish their expensive meals. Lipstick smeared the bones, hair floated in the bowls and crumpled tissues and wet condoms were scattered about. Every bungalow was saturated with a treacherous fishy stink instead of the savoury aroma of chicken stew. As I wiped away the semen that was splattered on the walls like chicken grease, I thought that life was cruelly unfair.

Wang’s Whole-Chicken Stew

There was one other thing I noticed. Sometimes, one or two men would casually settle in a bungalow, and Eonni would stealthily slip in with them.

These customers were regulars at the restaurant and knew each other’s business. Men also came with Wang’s business card, saying that other people had recommended it.

Eonni came out of the bathroom after brushing her teeth again and, as she fixed her make-up, she asked, ‘You really didn’t know what kind of place it was?’ She seemed to be more surprised than anything. ‘Are you naïve or just thick?’

What intrigued me was that many people came for lunch, and that they all seemed perfectly ordinary. They had faces like my neighbours. The only difference between them and me was that they were better dressed. Apart from that, I couldn’t detect anything that set us apart.

Once in a while, middle-aged men came in with young women. It made my heart sink. The girls reminded me of my sister Minyeong. I observed these women so intently that Eonni couldn’t help but notice. I couldn’t look away from them. They were the same age as Minyeong and had youthful bodies like hers.

It was because of the money that Minyeong stole from the family that we couldn’t pay our bills and lost the shop. That’s when I started living in cheap hostels. It had been five years since Minyeong disappeared. It was unlikely that we would meet again unless she contacted me first. From time to time men called our number asking for her. They swore and demanded that we tell them where she was. ‘Excuse me,’ I told them, ‘but she fucked me over too. I also want to know where she is. Give me a call when you find her.’

The men would end with another curse and hang up. It’s not that I didn’t understand how they felt. I too wanted to find Minyeong and strangle her.

I might call her sister again if she returned the money she’d stolen. Still, I had worried about her for a while. I couldn’t help the tie of blood that connected us. When people the world over called looking for her, at least I knew she was alive.

Now and then, a policeman who was a distant relative of Wang’s would visit the restaurant. Wang himself would serve the food with Eonni at his side. I witnessed this many times.

Kim Yi-seol

‘Thanks for the meal.’ One day, as the policeman was leaving, he glanced at me. ‘You’re a new face.’

Wang nudged me forward. I bobbed my head.

‘Why didn’t you introduce us earlier, Wang? She’s much better looking.’

‘You’ll have to visit again sometime soon.’

‘If you insist.’ The policeman flicked his toothpick away, winked at me, and got into his patrol car.

‘Son of a bitch!’ Wang looked at me and took a deep breath. Eonni cackled behind us.

I worked twelve-hour shifts at the restaurant. I got paid less than 40,000 won a day. Even worse, during the trial period of the first three months, my monthly pay was reduced by 200,000 won. Wang said that it went into a retirement fund that I would have access to once I’d worked for more than a year. When I began to protest, Wang cut me short by clearing his throat, and continued as if he were doing me a favour. I would get the 600,000 won when I finally stopped working. He stressed that he wasn’t a bad employer. I didn’t understand how keeping some of my pay made him generous, but I wasn’t in a position to argue. I had been rejected by a number of places before I got the job at Wang’s. The factory where I used to work before the birth had cut back on employees. There was no place for me. I didn’t know any of the new faces, either.

There weren’t many places for an unskilled thirty-three-year-old mother to work. I couldn’t even get kitchen jobs because I didn’t have any experience.

I bobbed my head a couple of times, thanking Wang for giving me the job even though I was inexperienced. He said I could make more money if I worked hard. That sounded promising.

The cheapest dish on Wang’s menu was the whole-chicken stew. It came with crunchy rice, three types of kimchi and four side dishes. It cost more than I earned in a day. People had so much money. They spent wantonly for a few hours of food and sex. That amused me. As I looked at their leftover food, which was more than what my family needed to survive, I imagined what I would do if I had that much money, if I could save up bit by bit and put together such a large sum.

The first thing I would do would be to get a new flat. In the winter the one we lived in was too draughty to raise a child in, and in the summer it

Wang’s Whole-Chicken Stew

was baking hot. The roof itself could be used like a courtyard, but it was a dangerous place for a child who would soon walk and run. Two rooms would be enough. One of them would be my husband’s study. Another room for my daughter would be good too, but that wasn’t immediately necessary. It wasn’t an absurd dream. I wasn’t trying to get rich quick. It would be better if I owned a house, but my primary goal was to get away from the monthly rent. I had to save up a large enough sum. It wasn’t impossible.

It was in a hostel that I first met my husband. We would often run into each other in the kitchen area where I ate dinner. Stepping aside turned into nodding, turned into sharing kimchi and, in the end, frying two eggs instead of one. We started cooking ramen in one pot and drinking the soup together. By the time it was natural for two spoons to go in and out of the same pot, we had decided to move in together. I couldn’t tell Mum. My belly was already growing.

After living in the tiny hostel where we could hardly stretch our legs, my husband and I were delighted with the rooftop flat. Our combined income was barely enough to pay for it, but the room was three times bigger than before. There was also a kitchen and a bathroom. The steep stairway and the extreme temperatures weren’t important. We packed up and moved in immediately. That was last summer.

Our household grew when I gave birth in the autumn. The baby couldn’t even hold up her head, but she needed so many new things. What had seemed a spacious rooftop flat turned into a tiny room. I couldn’t believe that we’d been excited about having a private bathroom. Now it was just a small space where I could barely manage to wash my child. As I dried the water that had splashed onto the floor, I wished that there was just a little more space. Not much, just a little. It was hope, not greed. But if we were to afford a little more space, my husband would have to pass the exam.

Until then he had to study, and while he was studying I had to make money.

I knew how to work. I could do anything. I liked it that my husband wasn’t a common labourer but a scholar who used books. We had hope, and that was hope enough.

Kim Yi-seol

Wang’s Whole-Chicken Stew was famous and the customers came in a constant stream. Wang provided them with women and, thanks to his relative in the district police station, he avoided trouble with the authorities.

I heard that Wang held a quarterly get-together for the local policemen.

‘But we all need to be careful. If just one person tips off the police, everyone is screwed,’ Eonni whispered in my ear. Whether customers were regular people or police, we had to have some kind of relationship with them. There was a certain standard to maintain.

Her breath smelled like kimchi. ‘Imo, the kimchi is a bit too salty today.’

‘Drink water.’

The kimchi was made fresh each day. Eonni kept eating it even though she said it was salty.

‘Serve it a little at a time because it’s salty, and leave the rest for later.’

Wang wouldn’t allow us to eat the leftovers. The same went for untouched side dishes. Imo didn’t give a damn. When Wang wasn’t looking she’d eat her fill then pack the rest in plastic bags and slip them into her handbag.

‘How old is your baby? Do you want the chicken broth for her to drink?’

Imo asked.

‘But Wang. . . .’

‘Are you trying to tell the world? Take it on the quiet.’

‘I heard that,’ Eonni cut in disapprovingly.

‘That’s good. You go ask Wang. He doesn’t yell at you for taking meat home every day for your husband. Go and ask if a bowl of chicken broth for an infant is OK. Go on, ask him.’ Eonni sulked.

‘Then did you get permission? Somebody here is feeding her son, I hear.’

‘That mouth!’

Wang ushered in a new group of customers. Eonni and I went mechanically to work. Putting on a pleasant expression, I bowed and greeted them.

Eonni pulled out cushions, seated them, and set water bottle, cups, and moist towels for each person. Three types of kimchi were provided: aged, cubed radish, and fresh cabbage. The big group was made up of school teachers, about a dozen gentle-looking men. A middle-aged couple came in after them. I approached them with two sets of table settings. The food was served. Other customers came in. I greeted them, served food, cleared

Wang’s Whole-Chicken Stew

the table, greeted, served, cleared. The day passed rapidly as I hurried to serve the customers in the bungalows as well.

I quickly got used to the work. After two weeks, I had grasped the flow of the day. I couldn’t open my eyes in the morning for the first two weeks because of the pains all over my body. Swollen legs and ankles were part of the daily routine. My neck, shoulders, and wrists ached. According to Eonni, the pain wouldn’t stop, even after a month or a year.

‘Imo says she’s been suffering for more than a decade. Eight years for me.

It hurts the whole time I’m working.’

I nodded to show that I understood.

Wang constantly nit-picked. He nagged at Imo for not re-using the disposable plastic gloves that she used to make vegetable side dishes. How could he afford for her to use new plastic gloves for each and every vegetable dish?

‘Then I’ll do it with my bare hands.’

‘That sounds good too.’

Imo looked askance at him, but Wang didn’t even glance at her. She grumbled that he would make up things to complain about to give her a hard time even if there was nothing wrong.

He grilled Eonni about her weight each time he saw her. He openly derided her by saying that he was embarrassed to use her in the bungalows.

I was included in his nagging. He yelled at me to work faster. Even when there were no customers, even when it wasn’t busy, he harassed me. I avoided him by rushing into the kitchen or wiping tables that were already clean.

The pot for boiling the chicken was at the back of the kitchen. It was near the fridge where we kept the kimchi. Wang stewed the chickens himself.

Since it was a waterfront restaurant and the stew was well known among gourmets, the customers never stopped flowing in. Rice chicken stew and seafood chicken stew were most popular, but I never had the chance even to try it.

‘Waitress!’ The teachers’ table called out. ‘Another bottle of soju!’ Several of them already had red faces. One of them grabbed my hand.

‘You look very nice.’ He stuffed a 10,000-won note into the pocket of my apron. Startled, I pulled the money out and dropped it on the table.

Kim Yi-seol

Another man laughed. ‘Playing innocent? Ten thousand isn’t enough?’

I turned to Eonni. Take it, take it, she mouthed.

‘See? She knows how things work. She says to take it.’ He grasped my hand and pressed the note into it. I involuntarily lowered my head in thanks.

As I stood, the man grabbed at my skirt.

‘Since I gave you a tip, you can afford to make us feel good. Pour a shot for me. It’d be better if you let me hold your hand, and it’d be even better if we matched our lips and bellies. Now that I’ve got a closer look at you, you are even prettier!’ The men continued their sport.

I turned once again to Eonni. What are you doing? her look said. Pour it! I knelt and poured. The man on the opposite side watched me keenly.

He pulled out his wallet and stuffed a 10,000-won note into my pocket.

His hand remained in my pocket and began stroking my thigh.

‘My children don’t even listen to me, but you listen. I’m so grateful I could cry.’ He held out his shot glass.

‘Only your children? Wives are worse. So get a mistress. You’re a cripple if you don’t have a lover at this point.’

‘It’d be good if you became my mistress.’

Laughing, they added to one another’s comments. The first man held out his shot glass. There were two crumpled 10,000 won notes in my pocket.

Is it a big deal to pour drinks for people? I kept pouring. The bottle was empty in no time, and I was released after pouring another one. Wang had been watching me from behind the counter.

It’d been almost a month since I started working at Wang’s Whole-Chicken Stew, but my husband still looked tenderly at me each morning. He wouldn’t stop saying that I was suffering because of him.

‘Don’t distract yourself with worry. Just focus on your studies. That’s how you can help me.’

My daughter could roll over and hold herself up with her arms now. It stung my heart to see.

Many times the customers stared at my breasts. I had breast-fed for barely half a year. I had just got over the mastitis but milk sometimes still came out. Why hadn’t I stopped breast-feeding before I started work? Eonni

Wang’s Whole-Chicken Stew

prodded my hard, swollen breast and clicked her tongue, saying I was making my life more difficult.

The baby closed her eyes as my husband held and comforted her. Even though I carried heavy plates all day, and even though I felt like I was going to collapse from cleaning, I forgot it all when I looked at my child. I had to make money to buy nappies and clothing. To buy shoes and a rattle. She was growing, and each time I turned around, she needed something else.

Soon I would have to start giving her baby food. After that I would need to feed her beef as well. I needed to save more to afford beef, which would cost more than 10,000 won for 600 grams. Now that she had stopped breast-feeding, there was more to pay, for milk powder and nappies. It cost more than 200,000 won a month to keep her. Nothing in the world is cheap.

Even if I only ate grass, feeding my daughter would account for more than half my income. Making money is hard, but keeping it is harder. I made about a million won in those first three months. It was a fantastic amount of money considering how long I had gone without income.

But my husband couldn’t focus on his studies. We were surviving, but we were no nearer to achieving our dreams. Our bellies were full, but having our own home was still far off. Though my husband said he could study sitting beside the baby, his books remained open on the same page day after day. He failed the exam in the spring, and again in the summer. I began to wonder whether this was the right path for him.

He was a student when I’d first met him at the hostel. He said he lived off the money his old mother sent from the countryside. He said there was no one more desperate to pass the exam, though other people would say the same. I cheered him up by saying that his determination would be rewarded by good results.

Now that we had a child together, his desperation should have become truly sincere. There was a stack of thick exam-preparation books on his short-legged table. Korean and English language, Korean history, administrative law, administrative science . . . I felt dizzy just looking at them.

Every time I looked at my husband’s books standing neatly in a row I felt suffocated. He had failed the exam even when he was alone. I was worried that it might have become impossible for him to concentrate on his studies because he was worried about his wife and child. It was obvious that

Kim Yi-seol

continued failure would grow into him. Some people are addicted to exams.

Watching my husband relentlessly fail, time after time, I began to doubt whether he had it in him to be a civil servant. I wished that my husband would change. It wasn’t about us – it was about our child. He didn’t have to become a government worker. I didn’t need to be rich. I needed a regular monthly pay packet and a husband who would support his family. I needed someone with a regular income who could be the head of the family.

It turned my guts inside out when he cooked dinner. When did I ever ask him to cook? I work at a restaurant! That’s what I wanted to scream, but I bit my lip. Only when I picked up my spoon, seeing his attempt at dinner, did he lift his. It was nearly midnight.

‘You didn’t eat earlier?’

‘I didn’t want you to eat alone.’ Famished, my husband stuffed his cheeks with rice. There was kimchi stew, fried eggs and a spinach dish that I had brought from the restaurant.

Imo would secretly pack up leftovers for me. If Wang found out he would harass us for half the day, but Imo didn’t give a damn and did it anyway.

Even so, I had to wait for Imo and Eonni to take what they wanted, so there usually wasn’t much left. Neither of them bothered with the spinach, saying that it seemed to have gone sour. As I put it hesitantly in a plastic bag, Imo glanced at me expressionlessly.

‘What did you say your husband does?’

‘He’s studying.’

‘To become a judge?’ Eonni interrupted abruptly.

Peering at the spinach as I packed it, she embarrassed me by asking why I was taking spoiled food. Then she quickly changed her tone.

‘Lawyer is good too. I’d better be nice to you. One day you might become middle class.’

‘What are you talking about? Is she any better off than me?’ Eonni asked.

Without responding, Imo left the kitchen. As usual, she would go home, prepare dinner for her family, and set off to a twenty-four-hour restaurant that served a soup known for preventing hangovers.

‘She’s like that because she’s jealous. She once used to be middle class herself. But is she the only person that took a tumble during the Asian financial crisis? She has bad arthritis, but now that she’s supporting her

Wang’s Whole-Chicken Stew

unemployed husband, what can she do about it? Then again, there is no woman working at a restaurant whose body doesn’t ache. I’m only in my forties, but I’m already dying. Really. You be careful. You need to spare your body when you’re young. But who are we to spare ourselves? We only survive because we have bodies.’

Grumbling, Eonni packed her own leftovers. She had prepared a plastic container just for them. Sensing me watching her, she quickly added, ‘Don’t look at me like that. I got permission from Wang.’ She pursed her lips and looked askance at me. She was all love-handles, but she looked very feminine when she pouted. When she flirted with the customers I was too embarrassed to look at her, but the men liked it. Her tight bum was her pride and joy.

‘How did you get permission? I’d like. . . .’

‘Should I ask him?’

‘Would you? I collapse with exhaustion when I get home, so. . . .’

Coming out to work at nine in the morning and getting home at around midnight, I didn’t even have time to shower. I couldn’t go shopping or cook.

But when I got home there were always three or four dishes in addition to the ones I’d brought. My husband bought bean sprouts, radishes, fishcake, or tofu from the little shop across the road. When he’d been to the market place, he sometimes grilled or boiled fish. At first I thought he was thrifty.

But as time passed I became increasingly unhappy. I felt a surge of resentment each time I noticed the untouched books spread open on his desk. What in the world did he do all day? While my shoulders sagged under the weight of dishes, was he just sitting next to the baby in the kitchen cleaning bean sprouts? But I still didn’t criticise him openly. I bit my lip and held it back.

When I got back from cleaning the bungalows, Wang was in the kitchen.

Normally he would have been going over the accounts or flipping through the channels on the TV while nibbling on crunchy rice. I went into the kitchen. Wang suddenly threw a plastic bag at my face.

‘Are you stealing?’ It was the bag of spinach. ‘You look innocent on the surface, but. . . .’

‘It’s just leftover food, and it was about to go bad.’

Kim Yi-seol

‘What is it to you if it goes bad or not? This is my business, being run with my money. Everything is mine for me to eat or leave to rot as I choose.

Don’t touch it. What are you glaring at me for? You think I’m tight? Yes, I’m tight. That’s why I can enjoy a comfortable life. You bitch, you’re just a penniless beggar. I give you a hand and you get uppity! You’ll always be a beggar!’

He was clearly being malicious for the sake of it, but my face still turned red. I couldn’t answer back.

‘That’s enough,’ Eonni said flirtatiously from behind Wang. She was holding the plastic food container in her hand. ‘Put the light out and let’s go!’

Wang went outside. Eonni tagged along beside him. Wang pinched her bum as they walked. I picked up the plastic bag from the floor and hid it under my shirt. I had to take it since I had been called a beggar; otherwise it would have been even more unfair.

This was the spinach that my husband was eating now. I put my spoon down on the table.

‘What’s wrong?’ His face had fattened over time. The baby was sleeping.

The desk was just as it had been in the morning. If I was going to do something about it, today was the day.

Abruptly, I tipped over the dining table. Rice dribbled from my husband’s gaping mouth.

Family was something that I’d always had to endure, but I’d endured more than enough. I wanted to get rid of unnecessary family members like leftover side-dishes. I had thought about this every day until my bedridden father died. I didn’t want to see his shadow in this husband, who just ate the food that I earned, who just pretended to be a man by riding his sleeping wife after she passed out every night from sheer exhaustion. And it was all the worse because it was family.

My anger surged up and I found myself throwing things before I realised what I was doing. But once I’d thrown one thing, it wasn’t hard to throw another. When I lost my temper like that, my husband couldn’t do anything, but stood quietly, holding the child. I wanted to cry because I had to feed them and keep them alive.

Wang’s Whole-Chicken Stew

As I gathered the scattered plates and food and cleaned the floor, I remembered the night I had first undressed for my husband. If only I could go back in time and not sleep with him; if only I hadn’t told him that I was pregnant and had had an abortion instead. Would I be living differently now? The day I found out that I was pregnant, I asked my husband, ‘You can pass the exam, can’t you?’

‘That’s the only way that we can live together. So I’ll pass no matter what.

Don’t worry. I’ll do my best.’

The hand resting on my waist abruptly invaded my clothing and grasped my breast. The hostel roof was open to everyone. I began to sweat even though it was spring. I noticed my husband’s trousers were bulging.

‘It sounds like you need some money, and quick.’ Wang’s friendly voice was frightening. ‘You want me to help you?’ Eonni and Imo peered out from the kitchen. Eonni nodded her head.

‘Wang, I’m back. Are you busy?’ It was the policeman. He glanced at me and smirked. ‘I’ve been feeling weak these days, so I came to rejuvenate myself. The summer season is only two days away, and you don’t have any customers? You should be packed round the clock. Isn’t that right, Ma’am?

Or is it Miss?’

‘Ma’am. Isn’t she pretty?’ Wang smiled.

‘Can I eat before you open?’

‘At this place you eat when you’re hungry.’

Eonni brought out a water bottle and a cup and put them on the table.

The policeman pushed the cup away.

‘When have you seen me eating in the main hall?’

Wang nudged me from behind. ‘Set the table in the bungalow.’

‘Yes.’ My voice trembled.

The policeman’s eyes followed me. My legs were weak and my whole body shook. Wang followed me to the bungalow.

‘Just close your eyes. It’s not a big deal once you’ve done it. You’re not even a virgin. I can get the money ready straight away.’ Wang set the table for me. Water, spoon, chopsticks, kimchi, side dishes. ‘Many customers don’t like Eonni because she’s fat. But you, you’ve got a nice body.’ Wang looked me over from breasts to thighs.

Kim Yi-seol

I couldn’t look at the policeman. He ate the chicken by himself while I sat opposite him. The only sound was his slurping.

‘First time?’

I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t say anything. When I looked up, the policeman leant over and put his greasy mouth next to mine. ‘The meat is tastier the longer you soak it.’

He grabbed me by the waist. I took a deep breath and shut my eyes.

Poetry

Min-jeong Kim translated by Won-Chung Kim

Min-jeong Kim

Finale Because I watched blankly as he choked my neck with his belt, he left me.

As a poet might with a chicken, he could eat me but he couldn’t grasp me; he was too sensitive.

And today my right hand came back, which I had pushed into his pocket as a gift.

Its palm has grown three centimetres on both sides and was bigger than my left one. The fingernails have been trimmed into the shape of a hat so that it would be easy to squeeze juice under the hot, orange-fattening sun.

Min-jeong Kim

Because it was really good to squeeze the fat blackheads that got pushed up after I scraped off the chicken meat, I forgot the infinitesimal death in me.

I sway like that – how are you, my new self?

Poetry

To Red: A Declaration Red Shoes I put on the red shoes you bought for me for the first time.

I went into the game room with my lover whom you knew.

‘Dance Dance Revolution’ I dance a wrong step, and somebody lands painfully on my feet.

Why do you call my name endlessly?

You were standing there with a downcast glance; you were the hand exchanging coins at the counter of the game room.

Sorry, I am having an affair!

Red Panties You simply asked to hold my hand and sleep by my side.

It was after my lover whom I know had made his confession.

‘Eli Eli lama sabachthani!’

I thought you had fallen into a dream while snoring, but why do you call my name endlessly?

I wore a white wing-shaped sanitary napkin on my red panties and my hips were aching from sitting on the toilet for too long.

Sorry, I am having my period!

Min-jeong Kim

Red Radish You asked me, ‘What’s this desire blazing up?’

My lover whom you knew was good, for he was an impotent, married man.

‘A hundred miles, a hundred miles. . .’

To make five hundred miles, you need to call out at least three more times, but why do you call my name endlessly?

While I picked up the morning newspaper outside the door with no clothes on, I came across the man living next door; he was a red radish bitten by me.

Sorry, I am having breakfast!

from Seven Cat’s Eyes from Seven Cat Choi ’ s Ey esJae-hoon

Choi Jae-hoon translated by Yoonna Cho Tonight I got home and opened the door To see seven cat’s eyes in the darkness I have but three kittens White, black, and calico Is it any wonder I left the light off?

The Sixth Dream

G

o on, then. Mustn’t fall asleep. I’m tired now. I don’t know who I am or where I am. What’s the point of hanging on by repeating the same story over and over again? The point . . . well, at least you feel boredom.

And you’re not repeating the same story over and over again: it changes every time. A little bit at a time. Really? I’m not so sure . . . I am. I’m looking forward to how the story is going to change this time. I see. We’re losing our memories, aren’t we? Don’t worry – we can just keep refilling them.

Their memories are never going to change, no matter what we do. The only thing we can change is our story. We have to wait inside our story. Well, I guess I can’t complain. To think how I earned this boredom. . . . Yes, think of that. Oh, all right. Here we go again.

That Saturday night, the six of us were gathered in the lodge, though the Devil that had invited us wasn’t there. We were introducing ourselves to each other with our online handles, polite smiles fixed on our faces. Really

Choi Jae-hoon

just putting faces to the images we already had of each other. Oh, so you’re so-and-so. Nice to meet you. Nobody gave their real name or occupation.

But that was natural for us. Besides, the secrecy added a touch of excitement to the gathering. What would any of us do with that information, anyway?

Right. I really didn’t feel like talking about my offline self, either.

By the time we had grown tired of nodding at each other, taking care not to make physical contact as we wandered round the small living room, people started eyeing the wooden cabinet with its array of whiskies and brandies. Someone opened it, reminding us of what the invitation had said, and another quickly brought ice and glasses from the kitchen. A third sheepishly produced some tinned nuts and beef jerky from a bag. We sat in a circle with some Jack Daniel’s Black Label and Camus VSOP in the middle.

We were making the best of our host’s hospitality, without opening anything so expensive that he might feel put upon when he did turn up. The sound of ice clinking and of glasses shyly nudging one another lent an innocently festive air to the proceedings. After a few rounds, people began to relax. No sign of our host yet. What else were we supposed to do? We began to chat pleasantly among ourselves. About murderers.

‘I think Jack the Ripper is overrated because he was never caught. Did you know they even have guided tours visiting the scenes of his crimes in London? I give you that his methods were cruel but, after all, he killed only five prostitutes in those three months. And there’s no proof that they were killed by the same person, either. Yet people still persist with these theories that the murderer was a mad surgeon, a butcher, that the whole thing was a conspiracy to get rid of a royal bastard. . . . There’s even a theory that it was Lewis Carroll. Supposedly, he recorded his crimes in detail in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in anagrams. Anyway, I suppose it is remarkable that Jack still appears in films and novels featuring serial killers. It gives the wrong impression, as if he invented serial killing or something. But serial killers have always been around; it’s just that the tabloids at the time made him a star. Where else do fairy tales like Bluebeard or Red Riding Hood come from?’

Min-gyu tilted his glass experimentally. Bits of ice slid against each other, swirling into his whiskey the melted water that had been floating on top.

He could feel the eyes of the four other people in the room following his

from Seven Cat’s Eyes

every move. That wasn’t so bad as an opener, he reflected with satisfaction.

Unless Jack the Ripper was too tame for this crowd? Anyway, the important thing at this sort of gathering was to speak up first and set the tone of the conversation. Min-gyu knew very well how hard it is to insinuate yourself into a conversation once other people have decided you are a quiet one.

‘I agree. It’s the discovery that makes it complete. Don’t you think that discovering the killer was somebody completely unexpected is even more terrifying than murder itself? Take John Wayne Gacy, the “Killer Clown”.

He was a successful businessman and a pillar of the community. He even volunteered at children’s hospitals as a clown. Who would have dreamed that he had more than thirty bodies buried under his house?’

Hyun-sook felt herself emphasising the words ‘a successful businessman and a pillar of the community.’ She imagined how the face of her husband, eleven years her senior, would look in a clown’s makeup. He was the kind of man everybody trusted: steady, thoughtful and sociable. He was the kind of man who had everything a wife could ask for, and that made it impossible to complain about the loneliness she felt in her life with him. What if he were secretly a serial killer? Wouldn’t that be a thousand times more shocking than the time he surprised her with a diamond bracelet hidden inside a black plastic bag? What if, one day, she discovered the naked body of a teenage boy in the trunk of his Lexus? Imagine the days slipping by as she wrung her hands, unsure of how to deal with the discovery that her husband was a killer. . . . Hyun-sook smiled wryly at her own fantasy as she assessed the other people in the room. There were three women, including herself. Bloody Mary looked barely out of her teens, an aspiring actress-type.

Pretty enough to be the centre of attention at any gathering, but not so polished yet. She was definitely enjoying how the two men couldn’t keep their eyes off her as she played with her long, straight hair. The girl who introduced herself as Deadlock hugged her legs to herself and had little to say. She looked like a teenage boy, all sharp edges and no makeup. Both girls looked at least ten years younger than herself. Hyun-sook resolved not to mention her husband or child.

‘I’m more interested in what kind of sick and twisted things they do than how many they kill. If it’s just numbers we’re talking about, “Dr Death” – Harold Shipman – would be the best. They say he killed over 200. But it

Choi Jae-hoon

was all by lethal injection, nothing special. I think he was more like a salesman trying to meet his quota than a psychopathic killer, no?’ Sena said.

She was enjoying the attention aroused by the contrast between her ingénue looks and bloodthirsty tastes. Her first-ever taste of cognac was giving her a tingling flush in the neck and cheeks. Sena wanted to be different from the other girls who dressed according to whatever was in style. She hoped to be more distinctive than that: a haunting, slightly spooky charm would do. Lots of girls in her acting class were prettier than she was.

So many girls flocked to the class like sheep, with nothing more than their looks to recommend them. The boys were the same, busy pulling moves on any girl who would listen to them. It was a boring and predictable ritual with no higher motive than trying to get into a girl’s knickers. Sena was no tame sheep, however: she was a mountain goat. If they wanted to be her equal they would have to be prepared to jump over the fence and brave tortuous, rocky hills.

‘In that sense there’s really nobody like Ed Gein. You know he was the inspiration for the killers in Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs? You’ve seen the police photos of his farmhouse, right?

Such a dazzling collection! A vest made of human skin, soup dishes made out of human skulls, a human heart in a frying pan, severed noses and vulvae. . . .’

‘Would you call that a dazzling collection if you saw it with your own eyes?’ Young-su interrupted from his place against the wall.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Don’t you think you’re taking murder and mutilation a little lightly? It’s not the same as a collection of hair clips.’

Sena glared at him, her mouth pinched. Her face, already flushed from the alcohol, grew even hotter. What a prick. Losers like him always had to walk over other people.

‘So what? I’m sure you joined Silver Hammer because you’re into that sort of stuff, Hannibal.’

Young-su gave his horn-rimmed glasses a shove up his nose with a sharply extended index finger.

‘I am more interested in the psychology and early background of human beings who commit such crimes than how twisted their actions are.

from Seven Cat’s Eyes

Can we dismiss these acts of unimaginable cruelty as complete madness, or is it society that turned them into monsters? For instance, Ed Gein was driven by the desire to become a woman. Wouldn’t it be more useful to examine how this connects to the fact that he lived as a recluse with his religious fanatic of a mother, before we talk about how dazzling his “collection” was?’

Young-su glanced in Sena’s direction. She was pouring herself a drink and avoided eye contact.

‘As you all know, serial killers are merely people who have acted upon their fantasies. They are the bold doers, not listless dreamers. And where do they get their fantasies from? Fantasies that go beyond taboo, that are purely destructive? Can we really claim to be so different from them, once we get to the bottom of their psychology?’

Young-su paused to make eye contact with each of the four people in the room.

‘The reality principle that separates us from them is not as solid as you may think. You can pull a trigger in the blink of an eye. This is such a serious, grave issue. We would be no better than those cold-blooded monsters if we acted like serial killing was some kind of cutesy trend.’

Young-su allowed himself a smug internal smile, watching the girl’s face turn red as she seethed. His instinct had been right. A systematic serial killer chooses his victim with care and acts strictly according to plan to fulfil his fantasies. Young-su’s decision had been made when the girl with long, shiny hair, wide-open eyes and a glowing, rosy complexion introduced herself as Bloody Mary.

Young-su always knew, from when he was a child, that his short, stubby, and utterly unremarkable appearance would never be enough to impress anyone. So he developed his own approach, guaranteed to make an instant impression. His strategy was to target the most attractive person in the group and break them down with logic. In this way he insinuated himself into an equally competitive position, that of reigning intellectual. True, it might make him look like a jerk, but his ordinary looks got a boost from his intellect and wit. Negative attention was better than no attention at all.

‘Aren’t you going a bit far?’ Min-gyu leapt to Sena’s defence. He made sure to use his deepest voice.

Choi Jae-hoon

‘This is a friendly gathering for the club, not some international symposium. Let’s not try to attack each other; it’s not as if Bloody Mary said anything untrue.’

Young-su merely rolled his eyes dismissively. Min-gyu smiled at Sena to see if she had noticed his successful intervention. She had not, as she was busy gulping cognac, her eyes screwed shut.

I shouldn’t have come, thought Yeonu from her place slightly outside the circle. All this petty fighting, posturing, and posing. Though she hadn’t expected to make friends at this gathering, the others were making her feel increasingly uncomfortable. When she discovered the invitation from the moderator of Silver Hammer, the Devil, buried in her spam box, she could hardly believe it. She, one of ‘Silver Hammer’s most active members’? The word ‘active’ as a descriptor for her seemed as out of place as ancient Sanskrit. But then she remembered – her lack of enthusiasm in speech and manner, the glum look on her face that depressed other people – these were invisible online. She had posted and commented more industriously than anybody, and had never missed a Wednesday Debate or Friday Quiz, so of course she was one of the club’s most active members. In the end, the reassurance that she was one of the ‘most active’ had given her the courage to attend.

What was it that drew these people to the world of serial killers? Surfing Silver Hammer in the darkness of my room, I grew more curious about those on the other side of the bloodless computer screen who shared my secret interest. Why serial killers, instead of ball-jointed dolls, or recipes for delicious pies? Don’t take it so seriously. Everyone wants something to lose themselves in. It takes their minds off their problems. After that it’s just a matter of taste. Like picking a flavour of ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. Like picking a flavour of ice cream. . . . You think that’s it? Why are you interested in serial killers, then? Well . . . I don’t know. Sometimes I look at pictures of victims on Silver Hammer and imagine some psychopath like Ed Gein or John Wayne Gacy has caught me and I’m begging for my life. I’m weeping and begging them to please let me go, let me get back to my damned shitty life. It’s like picking a flavour of ice cream. Somewhere, somebody is weeping and begging to be given the secret to the world’s best blueberry pie. By the way, why are there only five people at the lodge? Didn’t you say

from Seven Cat’s Eyes

six? I told you one person came late. There was a knock on the door by the time we had drunk about half of the liquor . . . I don’t remember who it was. It’s all a blur.

Min-gyu rose and opened the front door. A blast of cold air blew in as Tae-sik entered the room, preceded by his sizeable belly. The neck of his sweater strained around his throat, as thick as his wide face. He bent over laboriously to untie the laces of his hiking shoes. Min-gyu looked down at the back of his head and its mess of short, curly hair and asked, ‘Are you . . . the Devil?’

‘No, I’m the Mole.’ Tae-sik laughed as he patted his belly. ‘I was about to ask the same thing. I guess our host hasn’t turned up yet. So there is a cabin this far up the mountain, huh? I thought I’d lost my way. . . .’

The circle in the living room widened considerably as Tae-sik sat down.

Min-gyu introduced the rest of the group.

‘Nice to meet you. I’m Deep Sedation. This is Hannibal, and this is Bloody Mary.’

‘Hey, I knew you would be the kind of girl who gives me the shivers.’

Sena smiled modestly and inclined her head. Why couldn’t I say something like that, Min-gyu thought discontentedly, as he remembered fumbling and missing his chance to praise Sena’s beauty when they were introducing themselves to each other.

‘This is Insomnia, and this is Deadlock.’

Why am I always the last? Yeonu grimaced as she nodded towards the newcomer.

Tae-sik gave the other five members of the group a careful look as he accepted a drink. He was the oldest, for sure. It was a relief, though, to see that at least they were all adults over twenty. He had been prepared to turn back immediately if they were bratty teenagers like the ones loafing around his internet café every day. Buried in huge swivel chairs, batting insults at one another as they called for instant noodles, snacks, ashtrays. . . . All he wanted was to get away from the little monsters for a while. He emptied his glass in one go.

‘Ah, that’s more like it. How’s the game going?’

‘We haven’t started yet. The Devil hasn’t come yet, so we don’t even know what we’re playing.’

Choi Jae-hoon

‘It’s starting to snow, so I guess it’s going to take a while if he’s still on the road.’

Six pairs of eyes went to the window. Thick flakes of snow shone in the lone light hanging over the porch.

We talked until late that night. We grew bolder in our selections from the drinks cabinet as the night wore on, opening an eighteen-year-old Macallan, a Hennessy XO, and a Johnnie Walker Blue Label. We talked about all kinds of colourful characters, too. Edmund Kemper, who mutilated and raped the bodies of his ten victims, including his mother; Ted Bundy, ‘Prince of Serial Killers,’ who received love letters in prison despite being a notorious murderer and rapist; Charles Manson, the deranged hippie guru who mixed up the Beatles with the Book of Revelations and behaved as though he were the second coming of Jesus. . . . Deep Sedation’s nose was out of joint because the Mole was so much better at being the life of the party. Yes, it was fun to see them tear each other down. That was Bloody Mary and Hannibal. They were into it so badly all night that people started egging them on. At some point somebody came back from the kitchen complaining that there was plenty of drink but nothing to eat.

Maybe the Devil went hunting because he’s out of food, somebody joked, and we all had a good laugh. Who was it who went even further, saying that they wanted the thigh steak? That was when we started talking about the Devil. Exactly what kind of person was our host?

The Devil was a cipher. He never left a single clue about himself in any of his posts. It was impossible to guess his age, sex, occupation, tastes, or indeed what he thought about anything. He was knowledgeable in history and psychology; wrote in an intelligent, logical voice; and that was it. Where did he get all the information he posted on Silver Hammer, with its database of the bios of hundreds of serial killers from around the world, detailed accounts of their crimes and testimonies, recordings of their voices, pictures they drew in prison, graphic crime-scene photos, 3D video re-enactments of notorious crimes, even serial-killer action-figures? Rumours abounded.

The Devil was a former FBI agent, or an eccentric professor at Oxford whose area of study was the history of murder, or a Zainichi property tycoon who was also a sexual deviant, an actual serial killer. People like to say that this kind of website idealises murder, but Silver Hammer was different. The

from Seven Cat’s Eyes

Devil never tried to glorify or attach some greater meaning to a serial killer’s actions; he merely provided proven facts from the most neutral position possible.

Of course, that only added to his mystique. The website was famous among enthusiasts, but the Devil vetted potential members carefully and only chose a few. The fact that the six of us had been chosen out of this already select group was a source of pride to us and soon we were going to meet the Devil, the mysterious host of Silver Hammer.

He – or she – however, had still not turned up by the time the night was ready to give way to day, and the number of empty bottles resting against the wall had grown substantially. One of us expressed concern, saying that the snow had grown worse, but everyone was too drunk and having too much fun to care. A group of total strangers, brought together by chance: the fact that we would probably never see each other again was enough to turn our initial nervousness into something close to hysteria. We only scattered into the six well-appointed rooms prepared for us when the first rays of sun reached over the mountaintop. Up to that moment, everything had gone so well. . . .

Min-gyu was half asleep when he heard the deep horn of a boat. He pulled the covers over his head but the sound dragged on obnoxiously. The whistle grew weaker and then turned into a single, sharp cry. It was followed by the sound of a door slamming, and someone running up the stairs.

Min-gyu roused himself and pulled on his clothes. After all that whiskey and without anything to eat, his stomach was raw.

The others were gathered outside the central room on the second floor.

Min-gyu stood on tiptoe and saw Hannibal lying on the bed. He was on his back, hands clasped on his stomach, glasses still on. You’d think they’d never seen anyone sleeping, yawned Min-gyu, rubbing his eyes, when something made him look again. There was something wrong with Hannibal’s pillowcase. It was bright red.

‘Is that . . . blood?’

‘I don’t think he’s breathing.’

‘Shouldn’t we call for help?

‘Nah, he’s just playing dead. So this is the game. He’s in on it with the Devil.’

Choi Jae-hoon

Nobody seemed eager to step into the room. Min-gyu brushed past the others and approached the bed. Hannibal looked as resolute as he had last night, his chin down, mouth grimly closed. Min-gyu felt for his carotid artery with one hand and opened Hannibal’s eyes with the other to check the pupils. They were as lifeless as the eyes of a stuffed animal.

‘He’s dead.’

The others fell silent immediately upon Min-gyu’s short pronouncement. Hyun-sook staggered and fumbled at the doorknob for support.

Min-gyu gingerly turned the body on its side, holding it by the shoulders and hips. The pillowcase, wet with blood, stuck to the back of its head. He was trying to pull it off with one hand when he lost grip and the body fell on its face. Somebody screamed. He was used to seeing blood and bodies at the hospital, but this was the first time he had ever seen the mutilated corpse of a murdered person. The back of the head was bashed in, hair matted with dried blood.

‘He was hit on the head. With a hammer or something.’

With a trembling finger Sena pointed to a pewter figurine on the bureau.

A naked, muscular man sitting in a hunched-up position with his chin in his right hand stared pensively at Young-su’s body pensively. Min-gyu grasped the figurine by its head and held it up carefully. The square base of the statue was stained with blood. Four pairs of eyes immediately turned to Sena. She staggered backwards, overwhelmed by the silent accusation directed at her, and sank to the ground.

‘W-what the. . . . It’s not possible. . . . It was a d-dream. It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it!’

The others looked at each other blankly. Min-gyu approached and squatted down in front of her, saying, ‘What are you talking about? Calm down, and tell us from the beginning.’

Sena stared off into the distance as she mumbled. ‘Yesterday, I was drunk and fell asleep . . . and I had a dream. In my dream . . . I saw someone, some guy, going into that room.’

‘Hannibal was sleeping on his stomach, when the man picked up The Thinker with both hands . . . and hit him on the back of his head. Four times, no, five times. The body was shaking all over until it . . . stopped.

from Seven Cat’s Eyes

Then he laid him on his back, put his glasses back on, and left the room.

It was such a horrible dream that I came here as soon as I woke up. . . .’

‘Did you see his face?’

‘His face?’

Sena bit her lower lip and frowned.

‘He was wearing a long, black robe. Like a monk from the Middle Ages in a film. He had the hood pulled over his head, too . . . and a mask. Yes, he was wearing a black mask that covered his face completely. It just had holes for his eyes, nothing else. . . .’

‘So you couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman?’

‘Well . . . it was too big to be a woman. . . .’

Min-gyu turned around to look at the others. Three tense, stiffly-set faces looked back at him.

‘Are you sure it was a dream?’

Sena nodded frantically.

‘What were you doing, in your dream?’

She could not answer. Her eyes were empty as she stared off into space, mouth half open.

Their predicament seemed to grow more confusing the more they tried to do something about it. It did not take long for them to realise the seriousness of their situation. First they tried to call the police, but their mobile phones all showed that they were in an out-of-service area. But I talked to Sumin just last night, Hyun-sook thought, as she clutched her phone. The picturesque snowflakes of the night before had turned into a full-blown blizzard. Tae-sik went out to see if he could get his car to start and came back covered in snow.

‘My battery is dead.’

The batteries of the other five cars turned out to be dead as well.

‘I don’t understand. It is cold, but all five in one night. . . ?’

‘Somebody disconnected them on purpose,’ Tae-sik suggested, a conspiracy theory that brought out the worst in everybody’s imaginations.

‘Even if they were working, it would be too dangerous to go down the mountain in this snow.’

‘We can go on foot.’

Choi Jae-hoon

‘In this storm? We’d never make it. We’re not even sober yet.’

‘It was a long way up from the highway, wasn’t it?’

‘Damn. Then what are we supposed to do?’

Panic settled in as they realised how isolated they were. They could feel the world drifting far, far away, and they watched the snow beat against the window.

‘I suppose we have to wait until the snow lets up. Let’s take a look around.

It’s a lodge. There might be a walkie-talkie or some kind of rescue equipment. Or. . . .’

Min-gyu was about to say they might search for clues relating to the murder, but thought better of it. Now it felt blasphemous even to pronounce the word ‘murder’ that had been tossed around so lightly last night.

Min-gyu and Tae-sik led the way. Sena followed the others like a ghost, still looking as if she had seen one herself. Hyun-sook glanced nervously back at her over her shoulder. The interior of the lodge was all bright wooden surfaces, neat and clean. Something about it felt hastily put together, though, like the set of a TV show. Nowhere was there any sign that it had been lived in. It was a two-storey building with three rooms and a bathroom on each floor, and a spacious living room and kitchen on the ground floor. The front door was locked from the inside, as was the back entrance to the kitchen, and there was no sign that anyone had tried to break in. All the bedroom windows were closed.

‘The owner of the house wouldn’t have to break in,’ Tae-sik grunted.

‘Has anyone noticed there are exactly six bedrooms in this house?’

An insidious sense of dread crept into everyone’s heart the moment Yeonu made her innocent observation. They would have been seven, if their host, the Devil, had come. . . . Or was he here already? Nobody voiced the question that had now occurred to all of them. They searched the lodge from bottom to top, but there was no walkie-talkie or rescue equipment that might help them escape. Nor did they find any clue to the murder.

Instead, it became clear that they had another problem: there was nothing to eat in the house: just the whiskey and brandy in the well-stocked living room cabinet.

In the winter, daylight doesn’t last very long in the mountains. The weather showed no sign of improving and before we knew it darkness had

from Seven Cat’s Eyes

fallen. After a weekend of unconventional fun we should by now have forgotten all about serial killers and returned to the routine of our respective lives. But instead, we were once again sitting in a circle in the living room.

The circle was smaller because there were fewer of us. Did you see how people kept looking into the middle room on the second floor? Pretending not to look, but really, everyone was just taking turns. We were all so tired.

The body lying up there scared us. No, disgusted us. Our stomachs grumbled one at a time as if we were singing a round, but nobody complained. Hunger took second place to the question that was bothering five minds. Was the killer somewhere outside in the snow, or inside the lodge?

‘Let’s get some sleep, shall we? We can walk down to the highway tomorrow morning when the snow lets up. We won’t be good for anything if we collapse from exhaustion.’

The others exchanged looks after Min-gyu’s suggestion, but nobody said anything. They were afraid to sleep alone in their rooms. Nobody was sure that sleeping together was a better idea, either. Tae-sik glared at Sena out of narrowed eyes. She was still staring at knots in the floorboards with a dazed look on her face.

‘Are we going to leave her like that all night as we sleep?’ Tae-sik jerked his chin towards Sena.

‘What? What are you talking about?’ Sena lifted her head and blinked.

Four pairs of eyes looked at her chin but avoided eye contact.

‘Are you suggesting that I . . . killed him? Are you insane?’

‘You said you saw it happen. You’re the one who described it so vividly,’ Tae-sik was not even bothering to use the formal register now.

‘I saw it in my dream! It . . . it must have been coincidence.’

‘Coincidence? Are you kidding me? You think this is a joke?’

‘Why would I kill him? I don’t even know him.’

‘You were arguing all the time last night,’ Hyun-sook interjected calmly.

‘I don’t believe it. . . . You think I’d kill someone over that? Do I look like a murderer to you?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t even know you,’ Tae-sik jeered.

‘I said it was a dream!’

Choi Jae-hoon

Finally, Tae-sik said decisively, ‘There’s a clothesline in the kitchen. Just in case.’

The others half-dragged, half-carried the struggling Sena to the central bedroom on the first floor. Each of them gripped an arm or leg and lashed it to the four posts of the bed with the clothesline. I don’t know about this, Yeonu thought uncomfortably, but the consequences of ‘what if ’ were too great to forego precautions. One of them was already dead. Yeonu bit her lip and tied the clothesline firmly around Sena’s slender left wrist. Sena rolled her eyes and gnashed her teeth. The killer was going to come for her tonight, she was sure of it.

‘We’ll be in the living room all night. Try to get some sleep and don’t worry, we’ll untie you in the morning.’ Min-gyu tucked the covers under Sena’s chin and left the room.

Each of the remaining four each picked a corner in the living room to settle down for the night, taking care to lie down as far away from one another as possible. After some minutes of blinking at each other across the room they burrowed into their blankets with the lights still on. The snow continued to pile up outside the lodge. The sound of people turning in their beds amplified as loudly as if there were a megaphone.

Tae-sik was using his backpack as a pillow. His right hand was inside it, clutching a Swiss Army knife. He planned to whip it out at the slightest hint of any funny business. Dammit, I just wanted to get away for a day. I don’t need this mess. . . . Entering the smoky, grimy internet café in that basement was like entering a sci-fi movie. Like a crack house from some futuristic slum. The addicts in their cubicles, faces bathed in the pale blue light of computer monitors. His eyes dimmed and his throat felt as if it were caked in soot after a twelve-hour shift down there, where he and his cousin took turns to look after the place. The underground life was turning him into a mole, or at least making him as blind as one. The sound of gunshots and sword-fighting, the screams of online characters in their death throes, monsters screeching, cars roaring, gamblers making reckless bets. . . . Taesik curled up like a prawn as a fresh wave of hunger washed over him.

Yeonu unfolded the creased sheet of paper she had been carrying in her pocket.

from Seven Cat’s Eyes

Dear Deadlock, I am hosting an intimate party for Silver Hammer’s most active members at my cabin this weekend and look forward very much to making your acquaintance. I will be showing rare footage too sensitive to be posted online, and will also provide amusing games. There will be plenty of food and liquor for all, so please do not feel you have to bring anything.

Directions to the house are attached to the invitation.

The Devil.

The ‘rare footage too sensitive to be posted online’ had exceeded her expectations. She had certainly never seen a murdered body before. And not just anybody, but the body of someone she had been drinking with only this morning. She peered at the invitation again. Games? The word pulsed on the page as if it was alive.

We hoped that the girl we’d tied up was the murderer. That would neatly take care of our fear and revulsion. She was the only one who had a grudge against Hannibal, although maybe not enough to kill him. Right. The dead man had pounced on her every word to hurt her pride. She’s not used to being treated like that; you can tell she’s a little princess. And he was treating her like some dumb bimbo! The drink didn’t help to make her less angry, either. I remember she was purple in the face at the end, staring at him as if she wished looks could really kill. It’s a blink-of-the-eye decision, pulling the trigger. Yes, it could happen, if somebody humiliated you enough. Take someone like Ed Gein, who murdered people and skinned them for no reason, so humiliation was a definite motive.

Hyun-sook lay her head on her arm and looked out the window. Dawn was breaking but the snowstorm still showed no sign of letting up. The other three were still rolled up in their blankets on the floor. She tried to remember whether they had given Bloody Mary a blanket. Must have been cold in the night. . . . Heaving herself to her feet, Hyun-sook swayed with dizziness.

The sight in the room knocked the breath out of her. Bloody Mary’s skirt was flipped up over her waist, her sweater pushed up to her neck, ripped stockings clinging to her legs like strands of seaweed, pink panties stuffed

Choi Jae-hoon

in her mouth. Her wide-open eyes stared at Hyun-sook. ‘I’m more interested in what kind of sick and twisted things they do than how many they kill.’ Hyun-sook backed away unsteadily, as unable to look away as if she were a fish on a hook. She roused the other three in the living room, running from one to the other. Her throat refused to produce any sound other than a wheeze. She dropped down in the centre of the living room floor and pointed a trembling finger at the middle room.

Min-gyu staggered toward the bed. The ritual of human sacrifice was over. The deep abrasions on the victim’s wrists and ankles reproached them balefully. Her face was puffed up and blue, red specks of blood surrounding her eyes like freckles from the blood vessels bursting. All classic signs of strangulation. A set of fingerprints stamped on her neck corroborated this answer. What the hell. . . . Min-gyu felt his blood run cold. His right hand inched towards the blue-black bruises on the victim’s neck.

‘What happened? What’s wrong?’

The clamouring voices behind him made him pull his hand back quickly.

He wiped the cold sweat from his brow with his sleeve.

‘She’s . . . somebody strangled her.’

Min-gyu struggled with the bonds on her arms and legs as he tried to untie them. The knots made by four different people were hopelessly tangled. He gave up after a few tries and pulled her sweater back down over her breasts. The panties he took out of her mouth and tossed between her legs before pulling her skirt in place. He was picking up the blanket that had slipped off the bed when his eyes met the staring eyes of the corpse.

‘Do you think I really killed that man?’ Min-gyu drew the covers over her face and left the room.

‘She was raped, wasn’t she?’ Hyun-sook shrieked hysterically, glaring at each of the men in turn.

‘What? Do you even hear yourself? You were right there in the living room with us all night!’ Tae-sik shot right back.

‘How do I know, everyone was sleeping.’

‘Oh yeah? How do you know everyone was sleeping? What were you doing up all night, Miss Insomnia?’

‘When did I say I was up all night? I said that because I was sleeping, too.’

from Seven Cat’s Eyes

Hyun-sook turned to Min-gyu this time but found she did not have the heart to berate him. His face was paler than a corpse.

‘W-we were just by the door. . . . How. . . .’ Min-gyu stuttered, head bowed.

Yeonu clenched her teeth to stop them from chattering. She could hear the others talking, but in distorted flashes, as if their voices were coming through a broken speaker. The breath of a vast, unknown being seemed to surround her like heavy fog. Clutching the Devil’s invitation in her pocket, Yeonu mumbled in a barely audible voice, ‘The game . . . we’re already playing it.’

The snowstorm grew worse by the hour. A blast of icy wind blew violently across the threshold when Tae-sik opened the door to look outside; it was so strong that he struggled to shut it again. The cars parked in front of the house were now six neat white mounds in a row. Back in the living room, four haggard faces stared at each other.

‘Let’s say that the Devil did it. . . .’ Hyun-sook began. ‘Where is he hiding outside in this snow before he comes to kill us? There’s nothing out there.’

‘There was something funny about this place from the beginning. Who builds a lodge this far off the trail?’

‘Do you think it was true, what she said about seeing a man in a black mask in her dreams yesterday night? Do you think he came to get her because she saw him?’

‘Shit, all I know is that if this is a game, somebody else’s turn is coming up.’

‘If it’s a game there should be rules.’

Min-gyu held the gaze of the other three, one at a time.

‘We came here as members of Silver Hammer. This guy is the owner of Silver Hammer. There has to be a clue somewhere there. Let’s try to put together everything we know. From what we’ve seen so far it’s very likely that this Devil fellow is a highly systematic serial killer. Systematic serial killers pick their victims according to specific rules and goals they have set out first.’

‘And they get pleasure from controlling and dominating them,’ Hyunsook threw in.

Choi Jae-hoon

‘Precisely. If he’s playing the serial killer, he wouldn’t have invited us at random. There must be some kind of connection, something that the six of us have in common. Why don’t we go from there, and see if we find any clues to solve this game?’

‘What difference would that make when we don’t even know where he is?’ Tae-sik retorted gruffly.

‘I don’t know. What I do know is that sitting here doing nothing is not going to solve anything.’

The others looked at Min-gyu quizzically.

‘So what are you saying we should do?’

‘Why don’t we start by introducing ourselves. We still don’t know who each other is. My name’s Kang Min-gyu. I’m twenty-eight years old, and I’m working as a resident anaesthetist at a university hospital.’

Min-gyu looked at the Mole expectantly after he finished.

‘Min Tae-sik. Thirty-seven, I run this crummy Internet café.’

‘My name is Kim Hyun-sook. I’m thirty-four . . . I’m a housewife. I have a two-year-old son.’

‘Thirty-four? You’re a damn fine-looking woman for your age, aren’t you, Miss, I mean Missus.’

Tae-sik actually licked his lips in approval. Min-gyu and Yeonu openly showed their disgust but Hyun-sook only made a little pout, apparently not displeased by the coarse compliment.

‘Lee Yeonu. I’m twenty-six, and I do freelance translations.’

Everyone was silent for a minute. All eyes went to the two rooms with tightly shut doors shielding their former occupants from view. Min-gyu heaved himself up with a sigh to collect their bags and coats.

‘Do us a favour and see if you can find any chow while you’re at it, will you?’

Min-gyu gave Tae-sik a withering glance. Take a look yourself, wise guy.

He discovered nothing to eat in their bags, although he did find their wallets.

‘Hannibal’s name was Oh Young-su, age twenty-four. Here’s his student card. Department of Law, Seoul National University.’

‘Huh, that’s why he thought he was better than everyone else. What a nerd.’

from Seven Cat’s Eyes

Tae-sik sneered, causing the others to look at him reproachfully. Slightly chastised, he glanced up at the room on the second floor and coughed awkwardly.

‘Bloody Mary’s name was Han Sena, age twenty. Looks like she was an aspiring actress. She has a card for acting classes.’

Again everyone was silent.

‘There’s no connection. It looks like he just picked us at random,’ Hyun-sook said tiredly.

‘The Devil is not just some guy; we know that from his posts on Silver Hammer. He’s still controlling us at this very minute. Let’s be patient and keep looking.’

We spent hours swapping information about ourselves. Within half a day we knew more about each other than friends who had known us for years. No matter how well acquainted we became with each other, however, we could not find anything we had in common. It was as if the Devil had taken special pains to select people who had absolutely nothing in common.

We were truly complete strangers, as we’d suspected from the beginning.

‘I’ve had enough. All this talking just makes me hungry,’ Tae-sik complained as he lay back on the floor. ‘Maybe he sent invitations at random.

The six of us just had nothing better to do.’

‘He wants to control the situation: he would have limited the number of people to invite. There are only six rooms,’ Min-gyu retorted in a tired voice.

‘Fuck, I didn’t think about it but six is the number of the Devil,’ Tae-sik muttered.

‘The sun is already setting.’

All eyes turned to the window at Hyun-sook’s words. Once again darkness was settling over the snow-covered valley. The sky was turning a dark grey over the mountains, leeching the colour out of their faces as well.

Four pairs of eyes followed the fading of the light.

Children in the Air Children in the Kim AirSeong J oong

Kim Seong Joong translated by Stella Kim

T

he girl was sitting on the porch, swinging her legs back and forth in the air as if they were immersed in the ocean. With the serious and contemplative expression that had often crossed her face since she was a child, she watched the world around her. The afternoon sunlight reflected brightly from her eyes.

The girl’s mother had liked The Great Gatsby. She’d always said she bought this house for the porch that was mentioned in the book. To live in a house with an American-style porch and long, low steps leading to a roofed entrance had been a long-cherished dream. She decorated the porch with begonias and put out a wicker chair. She’d knitted lace covers sitting in that chair, moving the knitting needles as if they were extensions of her fingers.

Now the girl was alone. In an empty house without her father, who used to come home late, and her mother, who used to sit and knit, the girl quietly waited for annihilation.

The ground below her was littered with holes, large and small. A black temptation flowed out from them and coiled around the girl’s dangling legs.

The girl peered into what she thought was the deepest hole as if solid earth and the people who had disappeared would be there if she jumped in. . . .

She stood up and took a firm hold of the railing.

The boy swung the bat for the umpteenth time. Although the rest of the baseball team had vanished, the boy still ran seven kilometres and swung the bat at an old tyre every day. His body felt heavy when he missed a day

Children in the Air

of practice, and he had nothing else to do to pass the time. An ardent but untalented substitute – that’s what the boy had been. The coach’s compliments had been tinged with sympathy, but the boy didn’t give up his dream of becoming a starting outfielder – once he’d grown another ten centimetres.

He kicked up his bicycle’s stand and pedalled slowly around his house to inspect it. There had been cracks all over the house before, but when the house began to rise into the air, one crack between the window and the wall had widened enough for a fist to pass through. Father had always been away building other people’s houses but he’d never taken care of his own. It didn’t matter anymore. All the houses in the world were empty anyway. The boy followed his simple routine and tried not to dwell on problems that could not be resolved.

As the boy roamed through the alleys between low- and high-rise blocks of flats, he rode past dozens of holes. A huge, gaping cavity had formed where a tree had been forcefully uprooted. Little landslides crumbled earth into the holes, causing a commotion down the length of the street. The holes grew ever deeper.

The boy went on for four blocks and arrived at an estate full of identical houses. As he slowed the bicycle, he imagined living in one of them.

Everything in them was unchanged, though no living thing stirred.

The boy braked as he passed the sixth house. Piano. It was definitely the sound of a piano. The pianist wasn’t very good, but all the same he marvelled at the music. He hadn’t heard any sound other than his own voice for two months.

The boy balanced the bicycle with one foot on the ground until the music ended. He felt an impulse to ignore everything and pass on by, but the thought of meeting another person froze every muscle. He got off the bicycle, took a deep breath, and knocked on the door.

The girl had sat at the piano because she was exhausted by the anxiety of enduring the unending silence. She had vaguely hoped that someone might find her if they heard the piano.

Who . . . who is it? the girl stuttered in surprise. She had never expected that it might be a boy her age. He had swollen eyes and thick lips and was dressed in a dirty school uniform; and he had a vacant look.

Her guest widened his eyes. It really is another person, he thought.

Kim Seong Joong

The two stood at the door and talked for a while until their wariness wore off. The boy’s heart pounded as he learned that the girl was fifteen years old, just like him, and that she had attended the same school. It hadn’t been easy to talk to girls since he’d started middle school. When he told her that he hadn’t seen anyone else until now, the girl replied, There could be other people, don’t you think? I wish there was an adult who could explain this . . . what’s happened.

Even if we do figure out what’s going on, it wouldn’t solve anything. And it wouldn’t change anything.

But not even being curious about it all, that’s just . . . irresponsible.

The children turned to gaze at the twelve detached houses hovering in the air. It was a familiar scene, but everything looked completely different when it was a metre above the ground.

Their conversation eventually turned to trying to understand the sequence of events that had resulted in this disaster. The girl described the early morning when all the trees had been uprooted.

I heard a strange sound, so I went outside, and all of a sudden I was covered in dirt falling down from the air above. That was the last day I saw birds flying. All the animals have disappeared, you know.

Yes. I came back inside, and something was just not right. I didn’t know what it was at first, or why it felt so strange.

When the girl had re-entered the house, she’d noticed that something was slightly off in the rhythm of her day. Tilting her head questioningly to one side, she’d walked outside again and realised that she had gone down five steps instead of the usual four. The last step was invisible, in mid-air.

Our house is floating! The girl called out to her parents, staring at a gap the width of a hand between the ground and the house. Her father, who’d never had much presence at home, had seemed even fainter that day. She hadn’t noticed it at first, but the girl’s parents were gradually fading, as everyone else in the world had eventually done.

In the end, only their voices remained.

My mother’s body had vanished and all that was left was her clothes, suspended in the air. Then I heard her say, ‘Don’t go outside.’ Those were her last words.

Children in the Air

The girl dropped her head to her chest. She was still gripped by the shock of becoming an orphan.

Disconcerted, the boy changed the topic. Do you want to come outside with me? Let’s go find something to eat.

I have food for the next few days. And anyway, I’m going to . . . be like them soon, too.

Her face turned cold as she stressed the words ‘like them’. The girl didn’t call her parents’ annihilation ‘death’. There had been no disease, accident, or murder. They had simply vaporised, like dew at the touch of sunlight.

A week later, the girl went to the boy’s place to help him move out. It was a small two-bedroom flat with a kitchen and a bathroom. No more, no less. There was a gigantic crack in the wall. Possibly because the house was located on a hill, on high ground, wind blew in through the crack. The wind tousled the boy’s hair, picked up and twirled a tissue he had left in the house after blowing his nose, whistled about above the boy’s blanket, and escaped through a different crack. The distinct sounds – like crying – that the wind made as it passed through smaller cracks, filled the house. It was as if all the winds in the region had decided to sweep around the boy’s house.

The boy kicked to one side all the things that lay strewn about the floor.

He should have said no when she’d asked if she could come along. His sweat-soaked clothes and the newspapers stained with ramen noodles and scattered here and there made the house look much shabbier than it had seemed when he was alone.

Feeling bold, the girl examined the inside of the flat. She noticed mould on a loaf of bread that lay on a pile of microwavable rice containers.

So, mould is alive. That dull boy, mould, and me – the three of us – is that it? The thought made the girl frown unconsciously.

Aren’t you worried? asked the girl. You don’t know what will happen to us in the future?

For some reason, the girl felt combative. The boy stood up and scratched his head, as if carefully choosing his words.

That gym bench there, the one you’re sitting on, he said finally.

Yes? I do 200 reps a day. I mean, I used to. Now I no longer need to.

What are you talking about?

Kim Seong Joong

If I couldn’t be in the starting line-up, then I might not have been able to play at secondary school. So I thought that maybe it was better for me that the whole world just disappeared.

The boy smiled awkwardly and put his glove and bat in a sports bag.

Is that all you’re going to bring with you?

Yes. I can just take anything else I need from the supermarket.

But after he moved into the house next to the girl’s, the boy kept up his morning exercises. The girl would look down from the second floor with sleep in her eyes as the boy headed out for a run. The two children had their own spaces, but they were always aware of each other. As time passed, they began to eat together and go to the supermarket together more frequently.

The enormous shop was a twenty-minute walk away. Before, air conditioners had cooled the late spring heat. But the shop now had a damp darkness and was a graveyard of manufactured goods.

The boy put on a headlamp and handed one to the girl. Like miners, they began to wander through aisles stacked with goods. The boy swiftly filled the trolley with socks, T-shirts, processed food with distant expiry dates, and tools. The girl put wet-wipes and canned fruit in the trolley.

When the boy wasn’t looking, she quickly slipped in some underwear and sanitary towels.

At the far end of the supermarket there were enormous heaps of decomposing food. Fish that had become bluish-purple and frozen meat that had turned black wore coats of mould. Fruit that had disintegrated into liquid no longer held their shape. Because all insects had disappeared, the mountains of decay seemed even more desolate.

When they went back outside, the girl took a deep breath to rid herself of the horrid stench. Then she sat down in the shade.

Want a drink?

She took out cans of different types of beer she’d brought from the supermarket – Heineken, Leffe Brown, Carlsberg, Sapporo and San Miguel – and lined them up. Since the life she’d led as a good girl and conscientious student no longer mattered, she was free to be as reckless as she chose.

I’d never done anything on my own. My mother decided everything for me.

Children in the Air

Smiling bitterly as she realised her real problem, she opened each can and took a sip. Although they were different makes, they tasted the same to her: lukewarm beer. The boy hesitated for a moment, and then took a can and drank it. The girl giggled. Dimples appeared under her eyes. Her face creased each time the dimples flashed, making her look pretty. The boy felt cowed by her giggle and the fact that she was taller than him. But he was glad not to be alone.

Every day, the girl measured the height of the space between the house and the ground. She attached a paperweight from her father’s library to the end of a tape measure and dropped it to the ground. A hundred and twenty centimetres, 135 centimetres, 156 centimetres. Like a fisherman drawing in a net, she wound the tape back to check the length. The space between the ground and the house was growing much faster than she was.

At first, the girl indulged herself by not wearing the same clothes twice.

But since the only person who looked at her was the boy, who was shorter than she was, she quickly grew tired of new clothes. Pilgrimages to the dark and deserted supermarket began to pall. Seeing the mannequins in the shop windows was especially terrifying, as if they were the ghosts of vanished people.

The girl had adapted to her new life, but still she couldn’t work out why only she and the boy had been left on earth.

The boy tried in several ways to lift the girl’s spirits from the sudden waves of depression that overcame her. He dragged her out for a game of catch. He withdrew a wad of cash from the ATM and taught her how to play poker. Gambling with a pile of cash that had lost its value, like useless Monopoly money, was nevertheless fun in its own way.

One of the most exciting things that the boy had done was set fire to the house he once lived in. They had to use two boxes, one on top of the other, to get into the house that was gradually rising from the ground like a hot-air balloon. The boy brought a container of gasoline from the petrol station, poured it over the furniture and floorboards, and lit it. As the fire whooshed and began to rage, he leapt from the porch. Then he winked at the girl.

The burning house floating in the air was a splendid sight. Flames and smoke lashed out from between cracks like screaming people with snarling red tongues.

Page 162 ALR-30 26 April 2016

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Kim Seong Joong

Nothing good had happened in this house anyway, said the boy, as if to justify his action. If he could, he would have liked to find the house where he was born and burn that down, too. Her face flushed red from the flame’s heat, the girl egged him on, excited by the thought that there were still things left to be destroyed.

Let’s burn down this whole lane! she cried, not hiding her exhilaration.

They were happy not to have to listen to the crumbling ground as the flames swallowed the house and everything around it.

The two children grew hungry after a day of setting fires. The boy made ramen noodles in an enamelled porcelain pot painted with blue flowers.

Neither the girl nor the boy spoke as they ate, concentrating on the food almost to the point of worshipping it. Although the world was crumbling, they still had the voracious appetites of teenagers.

They could no longer wander as they pleased. The buildings were floating more than two metres above the ground and the roads were traps where they might easily fall into an abyss. Small holes that they had once jumped over had widened so much that they had to walk round them. The street looked as if it had been bombed. Each trip outside turned into a dangerous adventure. But the children nevertheless continued to go out and prowl the streets. When they grew tired after hours of aimless walking, they curled up for a nap wherever they happened to be.

In the early summer, when the sun had shortened the shadows, the two children found a small hotel. They chose beds with clean linen sheets and collapsed upon them. The world still rumbled with the sound of the earth crumbling as if in an eternal quake, but the boy sank into a deep sleep as soon as he lay down. With him by her side, the girl fell asleep easily, too.

But that ease did not fully drive away her nightmares. She always had the same dream: a white hand reaching out from a hole in the ground and grabbing her by the neck. The hand had appeared in her dream so often that she gave it a silly name: ‘Sid’. She was terrified that if she had simply called it ‘Hand’, it might have strangled her at any moment.

But it was a mistake to name it at all. Once it had a name, it acquired a life of its own, along with a personality and habits. It didn’t go away. Sid pushed its nail-less fingers between the bedroom wall and the window and

Children in the Air

between the cracked tiles in the bathroom, widening the gaps. While the girl slept, Sid was destroying the world. It was a god bent on demolishing this world and building another.

The girl opened her eyes in a cold sweat and shook the boy awake.

Have you ever thought that maybe all the people who disappeared are now being settled somewhere else? So this isn’t really the end of the world, but a Genesis, the beginning of a whole new world? If that were the case, do you think we were chosen, or left out?

I think it’s a good thing that people faded away rather than died, the boy murmured without opening his eyes. We don’t need to deal with corpses.

There’s no evidence that people are dead, the girl argued. They’ve become transparent and invisible. Or maybe the two of us have become invisible, while everyone else is the same. That would make a lot more sense.

Well, there’s only one thing that’s true. Death is the end.

With that, the boy fell back to sleep, but the girl went on.

I threw stones into the holes. I never heard anything hit the bottom.

Sooner or later, those holes will devour the Earth.

Intermittently, the sounds of crumbling and collapsing ground rumbled through the air, as if in response to the girl’s remark. Terror, as thin as a wire, tightened around her neck. The girl covered her ears and said whatever words came to mind.

Citrus, cypress, Minotaur. . . .

She had developed a habit of saying random words, as if she couldn’t otherwise handle the silence. The girl’s voice ringing out against the collapsing earth seeped into the boy’s dream.

Citrus, cypress, Minotaur. . . .

The boy and the girl made wooden rungs from broomsticks and tied them to two ropes to make a ladder that was longer than the one they had been using. The space between the ground and the house had increased to a point where it could no longer be measured with the tape: about three times the children’s height.

After the boy had climbed down, the girl stepped onto the shaky ladder.

At the bottom, she stamped on the ground a few times as if to test a layer of ice, then let go of the ladder. Walking at the boy’s side, the girl stared at their shadows and had a sudden realisation.

Kim Seong Joong

You’re taller than me!

The boy smiled triumphantly, implying, ‘You just realised it now?’ and then pulled up his trouser leg.

My back and my legs hurt so much these days. Look at these.

There were several stretch marks – scars from a rapid growth spurt – on the boy’s calves.

The children’s maturity had also evolved by some sort of instinct, as if in order to survive. Like an immigrant preparing to move to a faraway country, the girl constantly wrote down lists of necessary items, threw out surplus furniture and organised a pile of daily necessities, going through them over and over. The master bedroom was piled from floor to ceiling with bottles of water, and the first-floor living room was turned into a storeroom for canned goods.

At the beginning of the rainy season, the boy moved into the girl’s house.

As heavy rain washed away the remaining soil, the children’s anxieties, which had only been vague, crystallised into distinct reality. Now was the time to decide whether they should live in the air or down on the ground. If they decided to stay in the continuously rising house, then at some point they would become completely isolated. On the other hand, living on the ground was also dangerous since they weren’t sure when it would all crumble away.

It was also possible that they themselves might begin to fade before any of that happened.

It was easy for the two of them to come to the conclusion that being inside the house was much safer than staying on the ground. But as for their future, their opinions differed.

Think about it. Why do we have to take all the trouble of bringing everything from the supermarket? It would be much easier to live there.

That place stinks. And it’s not built for people to live in.

One day, we won’t be able to go anywhere. Do you think we can hold out with what we have here? Let’s just take what we need and go to the supermarket.

Who knows? Maybe one day, everything will return to the way it was.

Just as all this started out of the blue, it’s possible everything will suddenly return to normal.

Children in the Air

The boy was flabbergasted by the girl’s ridiculous optimism. If you just let go of your hope, then everything will be OK. You live on, day by day, and one day – snap! – just as a filament breaks, you pass away.

But the girl stood her ground. I don’t want to die in a strange place. I want to be in my room when the moment comes.

The girl focused on the moment of death while the boy kept in mind the days spent living. The girl had a strong attachment to her room, but the boy needed lots of food and space to exercise. The boy became troubled, wondering whether he should stay with the girl or leave her and prolong his life a bit more.

I’m going to go when the rain stops.

His words were followed by the fierce beating of cold raindrops.

Though the rain eased up, a light drizzle continued to fall. Still, the boy slung over his shoulder the bag he had packed in advance and opened the front door for the first time in weeks. He then realised he could not take another step. While they had been inside to shelter from the rain, the space beneath them and the ground had grown to more than twenty metres.

Looking down at the distant ground, the boy yelled out. Shit!

The hole that had formed beneath the house had turned into a huge pool churning with muddy water. Even if he lengthened the rope ladder, there was no way to escape the strong current. To avoid the maelstrom, the boy considered leaping across to one of the neighbouring houses that had risen to the same height. But the houses on the estate were set too far apart from each other. The buildings had maintained their structural integrity even without the streets and ground underneath, making them look even more eerie. Golden graves in the air – that’s what the girl called them.

Furious at being pent up in this house against his will, the boy repeatedly stamped his feet and punched the walls. His taut muscles bulged, ready to fight against annihilation, or at least rage against this injustice. But there was no enemy to fight and his strength and fury were to no avail.

A patch of blue sky appeared momentarily between the clouds. For that instant, the boy’s anger was the only anger in the world, and the girl’s helplessness the only sorrow. The girl sensed that the only thing that tied the two of them together was the prospect of a future that would never come.

Kim Seong Joong

Later, when a heat wave struck, the children began to argue more often.

The girl knitted her brows whenever she saw the boy wasting water; the boy didn’t hide his contempt for the girl’s idle hopes. At times they screamed ferociously at each other or threw precious objects out of the windows. Yet, as the scorching days continued, they learned to avoid touching on the most sensitive issues. Since it was impossible to ignore each other completely, it was better for them to make up their differences.

The boy threw out all the calendars and clocks to rid himself of the anxiety of calculating the ratio of time spent bored to the decreasing number of canned goods. The girl swept her hand over the uneven surface of a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. The two-hundred-piece puzzle was a picture of a dog; the five-hundred-piece puzzle was Van Gogh’s ‘Café Terrace at Night’; the thousand-piece puzzle was a picture of Germany’s Neuschwanstein Castle. When she had completed half the puzzle, the girl reshuffled all the pieces and began to put together the other half.

Though the boy had reduced his diet to half of what he used to eat, he continued to grow taller. Since the disaster, he’d grown over three inches.

Even in a world facing imminent destruction, the pace of the boy’s growth did not slow. And the girl didn’t miss her period. Growth required them to recalculate the quantity of canned goods they could consume and how long their supplies would last. It also interfered with the level and the degree of desire they felt, even though a world where boys would have to work and girls would have to bring up a child had disappeared. The girl found herself addressing a big question of a god she’d half given up on: What’s the point of growing up in a gradually vanishing world?

When the fierce sunlight eased and the breeze turned cool, the boy began to exercise again. He planned his workout: 120 push-ups, eighty sit-ups, and so on. The girl admired how the boy looked when performing a handstand. His boxy T-shirt slid down to reveal a slender figure and ribs.

As she watched the boy, the girl felt a tension that could only be sexual.

When the two of them sat on the porch to enjoy the early autumn weather, they noticed in the distance a green expanse that had no cracks or holes.

Narrowing her eyes, the girl abruptly stood up.

It’s the sea!

Children in the Air

God, how far up have we risen? the boy grumbled, but he too could not take his eyes away from the sea, which he hadn’t seen since before the catastrophe. At sunset, ribbons of pink and orange cloud hung across the sky. Although the world around them was coming to an end, it was still beautiful.

It’s like we’re looking down from an airplane, said the girl. She thought of the day she had sat on the porch with her mum, who had become half transparent, looking up at a plane. The passengers had probably been fleeing, flying desperately through the expanding sky and over the crumbling earth. Would they find firm ground? Or would they also meet their end and become transparent, even at high altitude? Before she knew it, the plane had disappeared, leaving behind only a long trail of vapour. The girl had remained on the porch until hope scattered into the blue sky, leaving only despair.

When the girl missed her mother, she read Fitzgerald’s book. There, beautiful upper-class girls, men in flannel suits, and fragments of broken dreams lived and breathed. Hungry for feelings she had never enjoyed, the girl pushed terror aside with the romance of the 1920s – times already past.

Prosperity had once existed; that was what was important.

The cold season began to approach again, and the boy concentrated on rearranging all the supplies they had to make them seem more plentiful.

He piled up tins of food into a pyramid. But no matter how cleverly he arranged them, it was impossible to hide the fact that their food supply was dwindling.

For the past few days, they’d been wrapped in cloud and mist. Cold wind blew through the living room as layers of cloud, like billows of wet tissue sped past more distant layers below.

Eventually, the rooftops of floating houses began to appear through the clouds. After a few more days, half of their own house had blossomed out from the cotton bud of cloud. The boy called out for the girl to come and enjoy the view. Together, they gazed at a new land of clouds with houses built upon them.

It’s like heaven, the girl murmured dreamily. Wisps of white breath rose from her dry mouth.

Kim Seong Joong

It began the moment they emerged from the clouds. The girl felt her body adjusting to a different rhythm, as if it were the first day of her period. When she pulled up her sleeves and stretched her arms out towards the sun, she noticed that the ends of the soft hairs on her arms were beginning to fade.

Goosebumps rose on her skin as she realised what was happening to her.

Encased in a body that could still react to stimulus but was gradually fading, the girl’s spirit became lonelier than ever.

She cleared the mess from the table top and took out a 3,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. It was an image of an old steam train and people on a picnic, waving.

The girl sat with her back to the sun and filled the empty spaces with puzzle pieces, as if to replace her fading body. The boy felt heartbroken each time he looked at completed parts of the puzzle, but he couldn’t say anything.

The girl’s future was also his.

As she lay naked in bed next to the boy, the girl for an instant imagined her parents glaring at her. But her parents were now merely a memory from her past life. In the air, there was no ethics, no taboos. For some time now, the boy and girl had been able to touch each other without guilt.

I like you, the girl murmured one night. Her voice was small and faint, fading like her body. There was no wind; the moon had risen; all was quiet.

Her voice was the loudest noise in the world.

I like you, the girl repeated clearly, to make sure he understood. The boy was elated, but soon became engulfed in fear. He knew this happiness was a spell that would summon hell when he found himself alone in the world, without the girl. A hell of missing her – until he, too, faded away.

The girl’s eyes were gradually becoming transparent. Even when she closed them, the boy could see their pupils through her fading eyelids. The boy clutched the girl to his chest until his fear subsided.

Does it hurt?

It doesn’t hurt. It just feels like there is thick cotton over all my senses.

You look blurry, and your voice sounds like you’re under water. When the cotton fills me up, then. . . .

The silhouette of her face trembled a bit. The boy thought the girl was smiling, that pretty smile that made dimples below her eyes and creased her face.

If I fall asleep, please wake me up. I want to know how it ends.

Children in the Air

The girl’s last wish was that she should be fully aware of the moment of her annihilation. She didn’t want to be asleep when she vanished completely.

So every time the boy dozed off, he woke himself immediately and held the girl more closely in his arms. Insomnia became a habit.

The air grew colder and the boy put on all the clothes he could wear, with thick gloves and two hats. The girl, whose voice was virtually the only thing that remained, didn’t feel the cold as much, and made do with a light sweater.

There’s probably some sweets left on the shelf. Eat them when you miss fruit.

Thinking of green, yellow, and red-coloured sweets, the girl said. The green ones are green grapes. The yellow ones taste like pineapples, and the red ones are apples. White ones . . . I can’t think of what the white ones taste like.

The boy didn’t respond. For several days, he had struggled against the brutal cold, his growing lethargy and the terror that he would soon be left alone. Yet the moment he relaxed, sleep threatened to swallow up their parting. His nose was blocked, making him breathe heavily through his mouth, which made the boy even more sleepy, though he resolved to not give in to his fatigue.

After another day and night, the boy stretched his arms and legs. His whole body suddenly felt full of energy, as if he could do anything. Yet memories of the past and thoughts of present tragedy remained.

A completed three-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle lay on the table. As if it were the girl’s corpse, the boy couldn’t bring himself to touch it. He couldn’t even go near it. Instead, he took out four tins of food and devoured them: Spam, yellow peaches, edible pupae and corn salad. He threw the empty tins out of the house as if throwing a ball to the shortstop. In long arcs, they disappeared into the clouds.

For a moment, the boy thought about throwing himself out into the air after the tins. When he looked down, there was only an endless void, and when he looked upwards, the same. Every hole has a black eyeball, the girl had said. If he fell into one, he might fall forever. In his thoughts, a life ahead flashed by, filled with nothing but falling in different ways: becoming an adult, getting wrinkles and, finally, meeting death.

Kim Seong Joong

After a few days, the boy came out onto the porch with the jigsaw puzzle.

With one arm wrapped around the railing, he sat on the porch, dangling his feet, just as the girl had once done. He flipped the puzzle board over and shook it but, to his surprise, the puzzle pieces remained stubbornly locked in place. He took off his glove and removed a piece from the centre.

It was a piece from the middle section of the train. The boy threw puzzle pieces one by one into the ashen sky. After all but one of the pieces was gone, he threw the puzzle board out into the air. Now, all that remained was the first piece he’d removed. A piece that could no longer be part of any larger picture. That was him.

The boy was lying curled like a prawn when he heard the sound of things colliding. He looked out the window. The house was passing through an amazing forest of dried-up roots, a place where plants that had disappeared from the earth were floating in the air. There were bundles of roots, like bouquets of flowers, some fine and delicate. A little further skyward were leafless trees. The boy felt sad that he couldn’t share this vision with the girl.

Everything in the world is floating in the air, the girl had once said. Every single thing is being transported to a different world. What would she have said if she’d now seen the floating trees?

The boy stretched out his hand and snapped off a twig. He was planning to gather them up and make a fire. Finding a tin bucket, he filled it with paper and twigs, and lit it. The smoke was acrid, but even that was a welcoming warmth. As the flames heated the house, the boy thought of an afternoon when he had embraced the girl, who had become more than a span shorter than he was. They had been gazing out into the trackless emptiness of space. A sudden, distinct fear had gained a voice and reverberated throughout his body. The girl will fade and you’ll be alone. That dreaded moment had finally arrived.

Caught up in memories, the boy cried for a short while and saw all the holes close up, the paths regain their shape, spring haze rise again from the ground, and his younger self, riding a bicycle along one of the paths.

He felt as if he had aged suddenly. If there is nothing left but an ending, then I’m almost there, he thought. The girl had faded, the boy would fade, and the memory of these moments would fade, too. The taste of fruit sweets; people in books; golden graves in the air; carefully-pronounced words like

Children in the Air

citrus, cypress, and Minotaur; the girl’s blossoming breasts. All these things would fade with him. The boy was now a kingdom of memories, hanging in the expanse of a vast space.

From somewhere far below, he heard the sound of the remaining land crumbling away. He then heard another sound. It was a sound he had been hearing over these few months as he’d grown taller.

It was the sound of his bones growing.

Wonderboy Wonder boy Kim Yeonsu

Kim Yeonsu translated by Sora Kim-Russell 1984: When All the Stars in the Universe Stopped in Their Tracks

T

he year I turned fifteen, I learned that time can stand still. If I had told people what I meant by that, they would have thought I was crazy.

But I didn’t breathe a word of it to anyone. When time started moving again and I finally opened my eyes, the first words out of my mouth were, ‘The spoon broke.’ The nurse in charge of the intensive care unit told the reporters camped outside, and the next day those words appeared in all the newspapers. According to one article, I had been ‘declared clinically dead after a week in a coma’, but ‘thanks to the ardent prayers of citizens from all walks of life, including Our Esteemed President and First Lady, a miracle happened’, and I ‘was revived after ten minutes’. The spoon was mentioned at the end of the article: ‘His first words upon awakening were, “The spoon broke,” ’ and then, ‘From these unconscious words, we can fathom the immense patriotism with which the late Kim Gi-shik charged into the suspect’s vehicle.’

I don’t remember saying those words, but I thought I knew why I might have. 1984 had begun with Nam June Paik’s video art installation, ‘Good Morning, Mr Orwell’. On the first of January, through a satellite feed linking TV stations in New York, Paris and Seoul, Paik showed 25 million viewers that the earth could shrink to the size of a bean. In the autumn of that same year, an Israeli psychic named Uri Geller visited Korea and appeared on a KBS television show. As countless viewers watched, he bent a

Wonderboy

spoon and fixed a broken clock using only his mind. Through radio waves and telekinesis, the two men showed us how wonderful our world really is.

And then it was my turn. I showed everyone that if they put their minds together and wished strongly enough for something, they could make miracles happen. The news report did not exaggerate. Every Korean from every walk of life really did come together as one to pray for my recovery.

The headline read, ‘Wonderboy Opens Eyes of Hope’. After that, everyone started calling me Wonderboy.

The person who turned me into Wonderboy was Colonel Kwon. Called ‘Colonel’ to his face but ‘The Mole’ behind his back, he was forty-something years old, wore sunglasses even at night, had long hair and was always dressed in civilian clothing, quite unlike other soldiers. He was a two-faced member of the elite minority that ran Korean society, with an extra face always at the ready, the way other people might have a double chin. Since his face was the first thing I saw when I awoke from my coma, I could tell at once how my new life was going to unfold. Colonel Kwon put his hand on my forehead and comforted me, feigning attentiveness, but his voice was low and dug down deep into the weakest roots of my heart.

‘Son, stop your crying. You are now the mascot of hope for this country.

If you feel that you’re about to start crying, picture a monkey in a zoo.

Hordes of people walk past that monkey, but all the monkey does is hang from his branch and watch them go by. You are that monkey, son. The things that are happening to you right now are like those people walking by. It will all pass. Whether you laugh or cry has nothing to do with those people. Tears are nothing more than a bodily fluid to wash the dust out of your eyes.’

At the time, having just awakened, I questioned everything. Where was I? Who was this person? Was I alive or dead? Why was the monkey hanging from a branch, and where was everyone going? Most of all, why wouldn’t these tears stop falling from my eyes?

‘What do you mean I’m the mascot of hope?’ I asked, as the tears continued to flow from my swollen eyes, with my head wrapped in a bandage and tubes coming out of my nose.

‘You’re like the Olympic mascot. You know how Hodori is always smiling and twirling the streamer on top of his cap? Now that you’re a mascot, too,

Kim Yeonsu

you have to model yourself after Hodori, the cartoon tiger: smile all the time and never show your tears. That way, you can fill people with hope.

We need hope in this world because there are too many people who are weak. After all, who needs hope if you have strength? But do you know what those powerless people have done? They have raised over 200 million won in donations while praying for your recovery. A boiler company even pledged to pay your fees until you finish college. And another boiler company has not only offered to pay your tuition but has also promised you a job after you graduate. Maybe now you can understand just how much the people of this nation are hanging their hopes on you.’

Why boiler companies? But it didn’t matter. Instead, I asked, ‘Why didn’t they leave me to die?’

‘Just because we live in the fatherland of Free Korea doesn’t mean that you are guaranteed the freedom to die whenever you want. If you feel like sending anyone a thank-you card, send it to the Blue House. The president showed a particular interest in your survival. You even took the top spot on the nine o’clock news every night. The president yielded that spot to you.

When he heard you were out of your coma, he said that the fatherland had created this miracle so that you might do great things for our nation. Those words left a deep impression on me.’

‘This is considered a miracle? Where has the fatherland been all this time, and what does it want from me now? Things must be going pretty well in the world if there’s nothing better to report on the nine o’clock news. . . .’

I was still fuzzy from the drugs and wasn’t making much sense.

‘Son, you showed us that our country can overcome any difficulty if we put our minds to it. Your body is proof of that miracle. This country will take care of you.’

‘Barely surviving a car accident, and coming out of it alone, without my father, is proof of a miracle?’ I protested.

‘What an odd thing to say.’ Colonel Kwon stared at me.

I was afraid of the dark sunglasses that hid his eyes, and began to cry again.

‘Surely no one has told you yet that you were the only survivor. How did you figure it out?’

Wonderboy

‘I know something happened to my dad. No one needed to tell me. He’s the only family I had.’

‘I, too, have a son . . . but he wouldn’t know if I was alive or dead. Too busy kicking his soccer ball around. I’ll admit that your situation is sad. But that’s not why we’re treating you this way. We’re doing it because your father did something great, on a level with the great martyr An Jung-geun, who assassinated Hirobumi. You are the great son of a patriot. The mascot of hope who conquered death and was reborn.’

If that were the case, I really should have been spinning a streamer on top of my cap, but there I was, with my neck in a brace. When Colonel Kwon talked about my father, I felt something start to burn in my chest.

‘Your life is going to be very different from now on. But regardless of what happens, you can be sure that it will be a great deal better than when you lived with that alcoholic father of yours. You’ll be able to do things that you couldn’t even imagine before. You’ve earned it. And in exchange, all you have to do is trust and follow me, just as you would a father. Understand?

From now on, I will think of you as my son.’

Before Colonel Kwon had finished I was crying even more loudly. I didn’t just weep: I kicked the sheets and thrashed my arms and legs. I ripped the oxygen tube from my nose and tore off the bandage that secured the IV needle to my arm. Colonel Kwon held me down with one arm. I heard someone ask, ‘Is something wrong?’ over the intercom next to the bed.

Colonel Kwon said something in response, but his voice was drowned out by my screams.

I bawled at the top of my lungs, ‘What’s going on? I don’t know what’s going on! Where is my dad? I’ll do whatever you tell me to do, just please bring me my dad! Hurry up and bring him to me! Why did you save me?

Hurry—’ That was as far as I got. Colonel Kwon pressed down hard on the pit of my stomach with his right thumb. With the wind knocked out of me, my body went limp. I was like the Energizer Bunny after someone had pulled the batteries out. I wondered if I was dying, but the tears that kept streaming down my face told me I wasn’t. To tell the truth, I had somehow known from the moment Colonel Kwon entered my hospital room that my father was dead. When the two cars collided head-on, the steering wheel crushed

Kim Yeonsu

my father’s chest and his ribs splintered like twigs. Each of those shards became a needle to rip his heart and lungs and stomach to shreds. Pop! Boom! Bang! I felt like I was looking up at the night sky as it exploded with fireworks, standing alone in my hospital gown at the grand opening of Seoul Grand Park packed amid the crowds. The tears that would not stop were the dregs of my loneliness.

The reason I am so prone to crying is because I am my father’s son. My father – who was, as Colonel Kwon said, an alcoholic – cried whenever he got drunk. When I think about the fact that he started drinking in order to hide his weaknesses from me, it’s so funny I could die. I used to think that my dad was the coolest man in the world. That is, as long as he wasn’t drunk. When he was in a good mood, he talked about his wishes. So as not to be left out, I told him my wishes too and, after a while, it became a game – one in which we took turns telling each other what we wished for.

Winning a 100-million-won Olympic Lotto jackpot, pitching for the OB Bears, driving a Daewoo Lemans all the way across Asia to Paris, running a thousand metres in two minutes and three seconds in a pair of Nikes, and so on. The key to the game was to name only wishes that could absolutely never come true. My father swore that if we kept talking about things that seemed impossible, they would gradually become possible. He had a point; and after a while, we moved on from naming our wishes to talking about what we would buy with 100 million won, or how to sign an autograph to make it look like a professional baseball player’s, and other such things, as if those wishes had already come true. Other people would have said we were counting our chickens before they hatched but in our minds we could already hear the chirping of baby chicks. One of my wishes was to go to the grand opening of Seoul Grand Park in May and watch the dolphin show, but I never told my dad for fear he would say, ‘Offside! It doesn’t count as a wish because there’s nothing impossible about it.’ Did he really think my wish was just to go watch a dolphin show? I also had to have my mum and dad by my side. Now that was a wish!

Whenever I brought up the subject of Mum, my dad looked at me as if he had no idea who I was talking about. He would ask me, ‘Do you know

Wonderboy

why I started drinking?’ How could I know what was in the depths of my father’s heart?

‘No, why?’ I would ask.

And after a moment he would say, ‘Hmm. I used to know, but now I forgot.’ Once, he said he remembered the reason. It was when I asked him what my mum was like. ‘Come to think of it,’ he said, ‘I started drinking so I could forget someone’s face.’ I knew whose face he was talking about.

After one bottle of soju, my father had what it took to be a great man who could do anything and everything for his son; opening his third bottle meant that the face came back to him no matter how hard he tried to forget it. I never asked, but when I look back on it now, I think that’s what happened. As he got drunker, my father would turn into the weakest man in the world. When I was younger – that is, up until I was in year four at school – my father would get drunk and cling to me, and I would cling right back and cry with him. I didn’t cry because I was sad – I was sad because I was crying. I had never known my mother. I was told she died straight after giving birth to me. We had no photos of her. The only person who remembered what she looked like was my father, and he drank soju every day to try to forget it. According to our relatives, my father had turned up in his hometown, out of his mind, a total wreck, and with a baby in tow.

I was breastfed by village women. Most of the time, I did not miss my mother. But whenever I got upset because of my father’s drinking, I thought about her. I guess thinking about my mother was the same thing as feeling upset. If she had been here, she would have soothed my father in my place.

Of course, if she were here, he would not have been drinking to forget her face.

My father used to get through three bottles of soju at a time, until the day I finished off his soju while he was in the toilet and proceeded to collapse on the floor and experience first-hand just how fast the earth was spinning.

Those three bottles of soju were like Dr Jekyll’s mysterious potion, and in short order they would turn Dad into Mr Hyde. Violent when drunk, Dad would yell that he was too tired to go on living, and that I would be better off if he died right then and there. Then he would get even more worked up and pull a medicine bottle out of the wardrobe. He told me that the bottle, which was no bigger than his thumb, contained poison. At the time,

Kim Yeonsu

I did not understand why he had to hold on to something so terrible, but when I look back on it now, I am struck by the irony that perhaps that bottle was why he was able to go on. Since drinking the poison would kill him immediately, maybe, paradoxically, it was his way of telling himself to keep going until he absolutely could not go on any longer.

Whenever he was drunk to the point of passing out, he would become very weak and convince himself that that moment was the decisive one.

Without a second to spare in telling him just how stupid that idea was, I would pin his arms so he couldn’t move, and I’d yell, ‘Dad! Don’t die!’ I would drop to my knees in front of my dad as he was holding the bottle of poison and I’d rub my hands together and beg. The racket from our room would become so loud that the landlord would fling open the door and curse at us: ‘Shut the hell up! Take the damned rat poison and drop dead so we can all get back to sleep!’ In fact, it was our landlord who warned me that when my father got drunk like that he was no longer my father but a mangy son of a bitch who crept about in alleyways and therefore I shouldn’t even think of getting near him; and it was he who taught me the trick of cutting off my father’s disgusting drinking problem with a single stroke when I was in year seven. My father only came to his senses after seeing me projectile-vomit my meagre dinner and the soju I had guzzled earlier on the landlord’s silly advice. After that night, my father stopped drinking to the point of threatening to kill himself, and only drank enough to lament that we were the loneliest, saddest, and most pathetic father and son in the world.

The blue, one-tonne van, which they said crumpled like a piece of paper, was my father’s mobile shop. He sold fruit year-round from the back of his van. He worked in the street all day long and around ten o’clock at night when all that was left were drunks getting drunker he began to pack up his goods. On the night that Colonel Kwon told me about, I had met my father at ten to help him pack up the unsold apples and pears and other fruit.

Since fruit bruises easily if you handle it too roughly, I sighed as I worked, but my father stopped me, saying that even fruit has ears. It took almost twenty minutes to pack everything up.

‘What’s that you’ve got in your hand?’ my father asked as he put the van in gear. ‘A student like you should be holding a pencil!’

Wonderboy

I didn’t know what he was talking about and stared at him for a moment before remembering the spoon in my hand.

‘Oh, this? I saw a psychic on TV named Uri Geller who can bend spoons by rubbing them with his finger and chanting, “Bend, bend”. He bends them with his mind. They call that telekinesis.’

‘Television lies about all sorts of things. Don’t believe anything you see on TV. It’s all a trick.’

‘But the whole country was watching, not just one or two people. How can he fool everyone? It’s not a trick. He said when he focuses his mind, energy comes out through his fingertips. Even if I try to bend it using both hands, like this, it doesn’t work.’

As I spoke, I squeezed my hands hard and the spoon actually did bend a little. If I’d squeezed harder, I probably could have bent it just as Uri Geller had done.

‘I’ve got superpowers, too. Give me that. I’ll snap it in two for you,’ Dad said.

‘The important thing is that all he did was rub it gently. He bent it using his mind. His mind! He just thought about it. He also fixed a broken clock using telekinesis. He said that with practice anyone could do it. Do you think that’s true?’

‘Even without practice, you can do anything as long as you have money.

If you have superpowers, you should use them to pick a winning number in the Olympic Lotto. Who cares about bending a perfectly good spoon?’

Dad drove out of the marketplace and onto the main road. There were no other cars out at that hour.

‘It’s not true that you can do anything you want with money. No matter how rich you are you can’t go back in time. And I want to go back in time.’

As I spoke, I held the stem of the spoon in my left hand and gently rubbed the metal right below the bowl between the forefinger and thumb of my right hand. The spoon would never laugh at me, would it?

‘You’re barely fifteen. Why are you going on about the past as if there’s something dark in yours?’

‘I mean before I was born. Don’t you ever wonder, Dad? I’m so curious.

For instance, where were you and who were you with and what were you doing?’

Kim Yeonsu

My father coughed several times as if something had got caught in his throat. I pretended not to notice and focused on the spoon. Bend, bend.

‘What do you think I was doing? Getting drunk on soju, that’s what.

Shall we have a drink when we get home?’

‘I told you, I quit.’

‘You have to have been a real drinker before you can say you quit. That time didn’t count. Let’s have a drink later, and I’ll teach you how to keep on drinking without being sick.’

‘No thanks. I can’t stand the thought of having to learn something.’

‘But if you learn how to drink, you’ll have a trusty friend for life. . . .’

Dad roared with laughter. I raised my head and rolled my eyes at him.

Beyond his laughing face, the road was dark. There were few street lights.

But the lamplight spilling from the windows of every house in the distant hillside villages full of darkened buildings that we passed glittered like the Milky Way. A speck of light, another speck, and then sometimes a cluster.

Against that backdrop, my father looked like an astronaut making his way across the galaxy. An astronaut laughing so hard that the entire universe bounced with excitement.

‘By the way, about that article you read to me,’ I asked, and I lowered my head again to concentrate on the spoon.

When I had met my father at the van earlier, he had been reading his notebook by the light of a carbide lamp. It was a large notebook that he used to record what happened every day, and he also pasted articles into it that he had cut from newspapers and magazines. Each time he filled up a notebook, he would buy a new one and write something on the front cover.

I asked him what it said, and he explained that the characters meant ‘A Record of Things You Should Remember No Matter How Time Passes’.

That night, Dad read to me from his notebook a news article entitled ANIMALS IN EXILE: 237 DEATHS OVER 11 MONTHS IN SEOUL GRAND PARK. Two hundred and thirty-seven animals of various species housed at Seoul Grand Park have died due to neglect and poor conditions, park officials admitted. These deaths took place over the past eleven months, after the zoo began importing animals from foreign countries in September. The largest number of deaths was among the ‘Gentoo

Wonderboy

penguins’. Five of these rare animals were imported last November.

Three were already dead when the park officially opened on May 1, and the remaining two died soon after due to the hot weather. One orangutan, a favourite of young visitors, died late last month when it started a fight with the other orangutans and drowned in the moat surrounding the animals’ enclosure.

‘What are you trying to remember by saving that article?’ I asked.

‘Someone told me a long time ago that ‘orangutan’ is Malay for ‘person of the forest,’ and I don’t want to forget that someone,’ he said.

‘So you’re not saving it because of the orangutans. The people of the forest would be sad to hear it. Whoever taught you that must have done something really nice for you.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘Because people always say things like, “I’m forever grateful to you.” Since you don’t want to forget this person, you must’ve been really grateful. What else do you write down in there, in your notebook?’

‘I write down things that will happen in heaven.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as, hmm, let’s see. Going on a hot date with a young lady before I die?’

‘You can’t die in heaven!’

‘If you can’t die whenever you want, then what kind of heaven is that?’

‘Are you starting another wishing contest?’ I asked, still rubbing the spoon.

‘Sure. Tell me your wish.’

‘I want to go on a hot date with a young lady, too.’

Dad snorted.

‘Young lady? No matter how young she is, she’ll still be an older woman to you. That’s your loss. How about someone at primary school?’

‘What difference does it make? None of this will ever come true anyway.’

‘Why do you say that? I’m single. It could happen for me. Fine, then. My wish is to cross the Pacific Ocean in a yacht with that young lady from my other wish.’ He started to sing, ‘One fine spring day, Mr Elephant was riding a fallen leaf across the Pacific. . . .’

Kim Yeonsu

My father was always going on about young ladies, and I hated it.

‘My wish is to go to Seoul Grand Park on Sunday and watch the dolphin show!’

‘Miss Whale saw Mr Elephant and fell in love at first sight. . . .’

‘While holding hands with you and Mum.’ Dad stopped singing. As soon as I said it out loud, I regretted it. I knew I shouldn’t have, but the milk was already spilt. Embarrassed, I rubbed harder at the spoon. Hard enough to rub the tip of my finger raw.

‘Is that really so impossible?’ he mumbled.

That’s when it happened. I began to feel a strange heat in the tip of my thumb. The neck of the spoon slowly began to bend. My eyes widened. I was so focused on it that I did not hear what my father said next. It might have been, ‘The thing about your mum. . . .’ Or maybe he said, ‘What’s that guy doing?’ Anyway, what I do remember clearly was that the spoon miraculously started to bend. But when that moment finally came, what I felt was not so much awe at having bent the spoon with my mind but rather the feeling of my whole body breaking out in goose bumps.

‘Oh, oh, Dad, look . . . Dad! Dad!’ As the neck of the spoon snapped before my eyes, I shouted for my dad to look. But by then it was too late. I had missed the opportunity, for the first and only time in my life, to tell my father that I didn’t want him to die.

The last I saw of my father’s face was his profile, like an astronaut’s, as he flew into the light.

After a few days, I admitted to myself that the wishes my father and I had taken turns telling each other would never come true now. During those few days, I couldn’t stand how pathetic I felt for stupidly believing in ridiculous things like supernatural powers while my dad was dying. Telepathy was useless. I was an orphan now. When Colonel Kwon brought me the bowl of the broken spoon that had been found in the van, I wanted to throw it out the window. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that. That object held my last memory of Dad. Colonel Kwon told me that the driver of the car that collided head on with our blue truck was an armed spy. That strange and stupid spy, who lived on the outskirts of Seoul and worked as a boiler repairman, took a pistol fitted with a silencer into a local restaurant and

Wonderboy

murdered the owner; then he broke into a neighbouring beauty salon and fired three shots at the lady who worked there, leaving her in a critical condition. The owner of a nearby shoe shop heard her screams and came running. The spy threatened him with the gun and then tried to strangle him, but the shoe-shop owner kicked him in the leg and knocked him over.

The spy leapt up, ran in front of a passing Bongo truck, stopped it and pulled the driver out, stole the Bongo, and fled downtown.

When Colonel Kwon got to this part, he examined the look on my face then pushed his glasses up. He said that if I didn’t understand any part of it, I should go ahead and ask.

‘I don’t understand any of it,’ I went ahead and said.

‘Of course. All sorts of things happen in this world that you can’t understand,’ he said.

‘If he was a spy, then why did he only shoot a local restaurant owner and the lady at the beauty salon?’

Colonel Kwon looked annoyed at my question, but he said, ‘According to the joint investigation, it seems that the North sent him here on a mission to kill the restaurant owner. The fact that they target ordinary citizens just goes to show how vicious the North Korean puppet regime really is.’

‘If he was sent here to kill the restaurant owner, then he would have escaped right after killing him. Why did he also go into the beauty salon and shoot the employee?’

‘Your teacher should have taught you this in school! Spies are brutal, cold-blooded killers who view a human life as lesser than a fly’s. That’s why we have to eradicate them.’

‘But why didn’t he shoot the shoe-shop owner? Why did he try to strangle him instead?’ I went ahead and asked again.

‘Guns aren’t the only way to kill a person. Spies are killing machines.

Their entire bodies are deadly weapons. They can kill someone using a single plastic bag and not leave a trace.’

‘But the shoe-shop owner kicked him in the leg, and he wasn’t able to kill him even though he had his hands around his throat. Why is that?’

Colonel Kwon raised his voice. He sounded annoyed.

‘There is no logic to killing a person. It transcends logic. When it comes to killing, I know this better than anyone. Now listen very carefully: you

Kim Yeonsu

are now an orphan. Do you know what that means? If you laugh, the world laughs with you, but if you cry, you cry alone. So you have to make a choice.

Do you want to laugh with the world? Or cry alone? I’ll explain what happened one more time and then we will never speak of it again. The spy went into the beauty salon and murdered the employee. Then he tried to strangle the shoe-shop owner but got kicked in the leg. At that very moment, your father was passing by in his van and witnessed that awful crime. And out of devotion to his country and to his people. . . .’

If you asked me what my father loved best, I would probably say orangutans. His country and his people? Please. I realised for the first time that I was Wonderboy because my father had knocked out a spy with his van.

‘Hold on a second,’ I interrupted Colonel Kwon. ‘We didn’t see any of that. We were just on our way home.’

‘You said you had your head down when it happened. You had no way of knowing what was going on. Just because you didn’t see it doesn’t mean that your father didn’t. According to the investigation, your father served in the front rank during his military service, so we believe he grasped the situation instantly. Furthermore, all the witnesses, including the owner of the shoe shop, have already testified that the van driven by your father charged headfirst into the oncoming Bongo. Think about it. Did you see it? Did you witness your father’s death?’

I stared at Colonel Kwon. I tried to remember the details of that night, but all I could recall was my father’s wish to go on a hot date with a young lady. And how he told me that his wish would never, ever come true, even though it could have if only he put his mind to it. I missed him so much.

Not only had I not been able to say goodbye to my father before he died, but I wasn’t even looking at him when it happened. Goddamned spoon.

‘I can’t remember. We were just driving fast down a dark road.’

‘Take your time. There’s no rush. Your father clearly saw something. Just never forget that you have only one choice to make: laugh with us, or cry alone. Now then, that’s enough for today. Get plenty of rest, and think about what I told you. And don’t forget that you’re an orphan now.’

Yes, I was an orphan. My fate was my own to determine.

‘Can you do me a favour?’

Wonderboy

Colonel Kwon turned and asked, ‘What is it?’

‘I’m anaemic. The medicine I usually take for it is at home. Could someone bring it to me?’

‘You’re in a hospital. Why do you need to go all the way home to get medicine? That’s like looking for a tree to hang yourself from in the middle of a minefield.’

‘It has to be those pills.’

Colonel Kwon looked at me as though he smelled something fishy. I was shocked by his comment about the minefield.

‘I also need my schoolbooks and my notebook. Oh, and if you look through my notebook, you’ll find an essay on anti-communism that I wrote for a school assignment in June. I could probably put that essay to some good use now.’

‘Makes sense. If you show your essay to the reporters, it will probably help them to further explain your father’s splendid feat. Okay. Where can I find your anaemia medication?’

I told him exactly where in the wardrobe my father had hidden the box that held my father’s poison. After jotting this down in his notepad, Colonel Kwon said he had to be going and walked to the door. But before he got there, he suddenly stopped and turned to look at me.

‘By the way,’ he said. He stared at me, and my heart jumped. ‘Your anti-communism essay. That’s a great idea.’

Korean Literature Comes of Age Korean Lit erature Deborah Comes Smith of Age

Deborah Smith

A

s with most national literatures, it is both useful and not so to define South Korea’s current crop of new and recently emerging writers as a collective. There’s as much variety in contemporary Korean fiction as anywhere else, and it’s not unusual, even for writers like Han Yujoo and Ae-ran Kim, who are the same age and whose careers have developed in tandem, to be poles apart in terms of what and how they write.

Korean critics often take 1987, the year which saw South Korea’s first democratic elections, as a cut-off point when defining their country’s ‘contemporary’ writing, a choice that feeds directly into characterisation of this writing as apolitical. In this rather lazy binary, literature pre-1987 gained its purpose – and value – from being strongly yoked to the ideological goal of resisting and critiquing authoritarian rule; therefore, once this was (seemingly) achieved, writers were left rudderless, and literature became ‘merely’ cultural. There are several problems with this characterisation. The first is the idea that if contemporary writers move away from established concerns and styles – which in the Korean case meant ‘national’ themes such as ideological struggle and the trauma of division, and a staunch realism whose ‘journalistic’ feel was intended to demonstrate the writer ‘facing up’ to reality with a laudably unflinching gaze – this means that they are entirely sundered from, or wilfully ignoring, everything that has gone before. But perhaps the break demonstrates not amnesia or indifference, but precisely the opposite – a far more fraught relationship, and thus a more actively creative one. Within it, writers reject and/or repurpose tradition alongside, and as a means to, exploring new possibilities. Also important is

Korean Literature Comes of Age

the realisation that what’s being broken with is the established mainstream.

Thus, part of the break involves reclaiming and repurposing earlier modes of experimentalism. Han Yujoo counts among her influences Yi In-seong, now an elder statesman of the Korean avant-garde, and contemporary fiction’s concern with mediated reality (video games, television news) finds a shadowy prefiguration in 1930s modernists like Park T’ae-won and Yi Sang, who confronted the new technologies of their own time (the cinema, the shop window) with a similar mix of unease and fascination.

Another major issue is the critics’ narrow conception of politics focused on national ideology and armed struggle. Though these themes are less pertinent for contemporary writers, their work should nevertheless by no means be dismissed as apolitical. One recent focus, particularly among very young writers, is on the politics of the Other, which includes admirably balanced, empathetic explorations of the North Korean refugee experience as well as what is commonly recognised as multiculturalism – a new and exciting trend, given South Korea’s extreme ethnic homogeneity, albeit one that, for that same reason, doesn’t always come across so well in translation.

At the same time, younger writers are increasingly committed to themes of direct relevance to their own lives, all the more so at a time when critics (inevitably much older) are pontificating as to whether Koreans should write more with an international audience in mind. And on a larger scale, this shift in concern from Korea’s internecine struggles to its place in the globalised world is playing a big part in opening it up to that same world audience – contemporary writers from Han Kang to Hwang Sok-yong, Jung Young Moon and Bae Suah are currently finding stronger readerships in translation than any previous Korean author.

This new-found popularity stems equally from the extraordinary fecundity of the younger writers’ imaginations. The Korean reverence for intellectualism is deeply rooted in its history, as can be seen from the pre-twentieth-century neo-Confucian scholars to the modern obsession with education. In the literary realm it produced somewhat austere prescriptions as to what constitutes ‘proper’ literature – a rulebook that the younger generation have been all too happy to tear up. Kim Young-ha and Park Min-gyu are known for blurring the boundaries of genre, the former applying a distinctly literary sensibility to tropes from spy thrillers and historical metafiction, while the

Deborah Smith

latter melds sci-fi staples such as crop circles with steampunk bathyspheres, talking animals, and a fridge than can swallow China. Irreverence is the name of the game, and this is more than merely punk posturing. In the 1990s, when these writers debuted, it was a search for a new aesthetic, in direct reaction to the dead-seriousness of the eighties. Pop culture got a look in too, with Kim Kyung-uk rattling off a string of books featuring Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, and Hong Kong actor Leslie Cheung. In the 2000s, dystopia became a trend, exemplified by Pyun Hye-young’s gutted cityscapes piled up with stinking garbage and overrun by rabid dogs. In recent years, environmental apocalypse has been a concern across East Asia, and the Korean strain has thrown up such intriguing examples as the flooded countryside of Ae-ran Kim’s ‘Goliath Underwater’, where the conditions of the labouring classes and the scourge of political regionalism form an oblique but insistent background to the Hollywood-scale catastrophe.

Finally, in the time-honoured manner of teenagers frustrated by the hide-bound ways of their elders, some of the younger writers are pushing against the mundan, the South Korean literary sphere. This is still a much more strictly controlled and stratified space than what writers in the UK or US are used to – for example, the practice of a writer formally ‘debuting’ by getting a short story placed in one of the big four publishing houses’ influential quarterly journals. Moreover, it is a space in which the literary gatekeepers and arbiters of taste are too often older male critics, whose ideas about what literature can and ought to be haven’t changed much since they wrote their seminal books in the 1970s. It’s thrilling, then, that the past couple of decades have seen female writers rise from barely-there to dominating both bestseller lists and prize shortlists – a domination which renders obsolete the need for a women-only prize.

Many of the reasons that have underpinned what diversity and dynamism can be found in modern Korean literature still hold true for its contemporary practitioners. The short story has retained the prominence it has had since the early twentieth century, when masterpieces by the likes of Maupassant and Chekhov became (through Japanese translations) many Korean writers’ first encounters with the European canon. Today, the Yi Sang prize is still the most prestigious of South Korea’s literary awards, and is given for

Korean Literature Comes of Age

short stories only (though as with Japanese, these are usually quite a bit longer than contemporary European and Anglophone stories, and many are long enough to be considered ‘short novellas’). Despite a handful of writers like Kim Young-ha bucking the trend, the majority still debut with short stories, following the traditional path of publication in a journal leading to a story collection being commissioned by that journal’s publisher.

The authors then ‘graduate’ a couple of collections later to publishing a novel. Crucially, though, this isn’t a graduation in the sense of a step up, but simply adding another form to the repertoire. Rather than abandoning short stories in favour of the novel, most writers will move back and forth between the two over the course of their careers. This is in stark contrast to the situation in the UK and US, where novelists and short story writers are by and large considered separate breeds, and where the latter is still (despite the Nobel win for Alice Munro) seen as a minor pursuit. One consequence of this specialisation is that Koreans write some of the best short stories in the world.

Another is a thrilling cross-pollination, resulting in novels quite different from those that pad out European and Anglophone libraries. Whereas the Western novel has traditionally been a somewhat monolithic form, favouring a linear chronology to demonstrate the social and political progress that the nineteenth century believed to be, if not an established reality, then at least a worthy goal, the modern Korean novel is far more fragmentary and usually much shorter. In fact, many Korean ‘novels’ are not strictly novels at all, but linked fiction (one of the four main designations you can expect to see printed on the cover of a Korean book, the others being fiction collection, i.e. short stories, long fiction, i.e. what we would call a novel, and, for those others that refuse to be shoehorned into categories, simply fiction). Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is one such work, originally published as three separate novellas which were later collected and published together, with the page count still coming in at something that could, in English, be termed either a long novella or a short novel. Even her latest book, Human Acts, though given the long fiction stamp, consists of seven chapters which, though they move forward in time and involve characters responding to the same initial event, are nevertheless self-contained, distinct tone-pieces that

Deborah Smith

benefit from being considered alongside each other, almost like the panels of a church painting, rather than being read as a straight continuation.

Visual art can be an apt reference point when considering Korean literature – there’s something of that painterly quality in the privileging of tone and atmosphere over action. Much seems to have been influenced by the fact that, prior to the twentieth century, when the phonetic Hanguel alphabet had yet to take over and Koreans still wrote in Chinese characters, the visual quality of the writing on the page added another layer to the content itself.

But, of course, contemporary writers continue to add new characteristics to Korean fiction while retaining something of the old. Dialogue, not traditionally a strength in Korean writing, has come in from the cold, with younger writers in particular making deft use of it to capture the ever-changing ways in which adolescents express themselves. One challenge for translators is the increasing prevalence of English (most often American English) loan-words, which marks the speech of young people as distinct from that of their parents’ generation. There’s a lot of agonising about ‘Konglish’, in part because so much of South Korea’s identity involves a tension with what’s going on across the DMZ, where the ‘purification’ of the Korean language symbolises the ruthless excising of Western influence.

It would be foolish to suggest that contemporary Korean writing is uniformly outstanding. Rather a lot of it gets written in the so-called ‘naïve first person’, in which the first-person address is adopted with barely any lively distinctness of voice, affording the character no more of a personality than a third-person narration, yet sacrificing the wider scope of the latter for an extremely narrow perspective. Particularly popular among writers in their early twenties, the first person is partly a choice to express the feeling, common to recent graduates, that their options are more limited than they’d been led to believe. Too often, though, it can be a default option excusing the need to think too much about style.

Nevertheless, some of the younger writers have also proved to be the most experimental, due in large part to an expanded range of influences. Han Yujoo, for example, adds to the domestic avant-garde of Yi In-seong through her passion for German literature, particularly that of Austrian

Korean Literature Comes of Age

misanthrope Thomas Bernhard, and her work translating English-language authors such as Geoff Dyer and Michael Ondaatje.

Despite all the dynamics surrounding contemporary Korean literature, one thing seems certain: the tide has well and truly turned, and these writers have the strength to the stay the course.

Contributors Contribut ors Contribut ors

CHEON MYEONG-KWAN was born in Yong-in, South Korea, in 1964. Prior to becoming a novelist, he worked as a screenwriter. His literary debut, the short story ‘Frank and I’, earned the Munhakdongne New Writer Award (2003). His first novel, The Whale, received the Munhakdongne Award for Best Novel in 2004.

YOONNA CHO studied English literature at Yonsei University and conference interpreting at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies GSIT. Her translation of Youn Dae-Nyeong’s The Camel Pouch was shortlisted for the 2008 Korean Literature Translation Award for New Career Translators. She has worked on numerous Korean novels and children’s books, as well as on subtitles for Korean films.

CHOI JAE-HOON was born in Seoul in 1973 and graduated from the School of Management at Yonsei University and the Department of Creative Writing at Seoul Institute of Arts. He made his literary debut in2007 with his short story ‘Baron Quirval’s Castle’. His works include the short-story collection, Baron Quirval’s Castle, and the novel, Seven Cat’s Eyes, The Butterfly Sleep. Choi Jae-Hoon received the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award in 2011.

EUN KYUNG DUBOIS is a Korean literary translator. She received translation grants from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea in 2010 and the Daesan Foundation in 2012. She studied at LTI Korea and earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Boston College.

Contributors

NATHAN A. DUBOIS is a seasoned editor of Korean literature and non-fiction.

He received a master’s degree in development policy from the Korea Development Institute, and a bachelor’s in political science from Boston College.

HAN YUJOO has written three short-story collections and the novel The Impossible Fairy Tale, which will be published by Graywolf Press in 2017. She is a translator of Michael Ondaatje and Geoff Dyer, among others, and teaches at the Seoul Institute of the Arts and Korea University’s Department of Creative Writing.

JANET HONG’s fiction and translations have appeared in Words without Borders, The Malahat Review, Kyoto Journal, Azalea, and The Korea Times. She received PEN American Center’s PEN/Heim Translation Fund for her translation of the novel The Impossible Fairy Tale by Han Yujoo, which is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in March 2017.

SUNNY JEONG is currently studying media and theatre at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Having been raised in both Korea and the United States, she considers both Seoul Nowon-gu and Columbus, Ohio as hometowns. Apple Kim’s Butterfly Book is her first work of literature translation.

AE-RAN KIM’s literary debut, ‘No Knocking in This House’, a short story published in 2003, won a Daesan Literary Award. Her first collection, Run, Daddy, Run, was awarded the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award in 2005. In 2008, her short story ‘Knife Marks’ won the Yi Hyosok Literary Award and her 2011 novel The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child was made into a film by E J-yong as My Brilliant Life.

Contributors

APPLE KIM’s first story, ‘02’, won the Changbi New Writers Prize and in 2010 she was shortlisted for the Munhakdongne Young Writers Prize. Kim has published four novels and two short-story collections. In 2016 ‘It’s One of Those the-More-I’m-in-Motion-the-Weirder-It-Gets Days and It’s Really Blowing My Mind’ became her first work published in English, in the collection The Future of Silence: Fiction by Korean Women (Zephyr Press).

CHI-YOUNG KIM is a Man Asian Literary Prize-winning literary translator based in Los Angeles. She has translated works by Shin Kyung-sook, Hwang Sun-mi, Kim Young-ha, Kyung Ran Jo, and J. M. Lee. Forthcoming in 2016 are her translations of Hwang’s The Dog Who Dared to Dream and Lee’s The Boy Who Escaped Paradise.

KIM KYUNG JU is a Seoul-based poet and performance artist whose work has been widely anthologised and translated. He has written and translated numerous books of poetry, essays, and plays and received the Korean Government’s Today’s Young Artist Prize and the Kim Su-young Contemporary Poetry Award. Kim’s first book of poetry, I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World, sold over 15,000 copies in Korean. Black Ocean Press released Jake Levine’s Englishlanguage translation in early 2016.

MIN-JEONG KIM was born in 1976 in Incheon and majored in creative writing at Chung-Ang University. She won the Prize for New Figures in Poetry hosted

by Literary JoongAng, a quarterly magazine, with poems including ‘Black Nana’s Dream’. She was also the winner of the 2007 Pak In-hwan Literary Award. Kim has published two poetry collections, Flying Miss Hedgehog and For the First Time, She Began to Feel.

KIM SEONG JOONG was born in Seoul in 1975. She made her debut with the short story ‘Please Return My Chair’ in 2008, which earned her the Joongang New Writers Award. After her debut, she published two short-story collections: Comedian in 2012, and Border Market in 2015. Her first novel is currently being serially published in the renowned Korean literary magazine, Munhakdongne.

Contributors

SORA KIM-RUSSELL is a literary translator based in Seoul. Her translations include Shin Kyung-sook’s I’ll Be Right There (Other Press, 2014), Gong Jiyoung’s Our Happy Time (Short Books, 2014), Bae Suah’s Nowhere to Be Found (AmazonCrossing, 2015), and Hwang Sok-yong’s Princess Bari (Periscope, 2015).

She teaches at Ewha Woman’s University and at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.

SOYOUNG KIM is a freelance translator who translated Survival of the Sickest

by Dr Sharon Moalem into Korean. She also translated Korean literature into English, including Park Min-kyu’s bestselling novel The Last Fan Club of the Sammi Superstars and Kim Jung-hyuk’s short-story collection The Library of Musical Instruments. Currently, she is focused on translating Korean fiction and nonfiction into English.

STELLA KIM is an avid reader who works as a freelance translator and interpreter. She was awarded the Korean Literature Translation Award for New Career Translators in 2014 and has since translated a number of short stories featured in ASIA (Magazine of Asian Literature) and published in book form.

She is currently working on her first book-length translation.

WON-CHUNG KIM is a Professor of English Literature at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea. Kim has translated twelve books of Korean poetry into English, and John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra and Thoreau’s Natural History Essays into Korean. His first book of poetry, I Thought It was a Door was published in 2014.

KIM YEONSU is a Korean novelist born in a small town where his parent ran a bakery. He ate a lot of bread. When he was twenty-three, several poems were published in literature magazines. The following year, he won a prize for his first novel, Larvatus Prodeo. In the past twenty years he has won additional literature prizes, and published some eighteen books. He is currently writing a novel about the early Christians in Nagasaki.

Contributors

KIM YI-SEOL was born in the small city of Yesan and studied creative writing at Myongji College. She has a chilling talent for depicting individuals trapped by society and made her literary debut in 2006 with the short story ‘Thirteen Years Old’. Her stories have an intimacy with reality that is rare among young writers.

JAKE LEVINE has translated Kim Kyung Ju’s I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World, Tomas Butkus’ God / Thing, and a chapbook of poems by Kim YiDeum. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including funding from LTI Korea, and Korean Government and Fulbright scholarships. Levine is also an editor at Spork Press, the author of two poetry chapbooks and is currently doing a PhD at Seoul National University.

SUSANNA SOOJUNG LIM is an associate professor of Korean Studies and Russian Studies at the University of Oregon. Her scholarly work on Russian Orientalism and East Asia, China and Japan in the Russian Imagination: To the Ends of the Orient, 1685–1922, was published by Routledge in 2013. She is currently working on a book on national identity in Pak Kyoung-ni’s multivolume novel Land (T’oji).

SEO YOO-MI majored in Korean literature at Dankook University. She won the Fifth Munhaksoochup Writer’s Award with Fantastic Ant Lion’s Pit and the First Changbi Literature Prize in 2007 with A Cool Step Forward. Other works include Your Monster and several books of children’s fiction.

DEBORAH SMITH’s translations from the Korean include two novels by Han Kang, The Vegetarian (longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize) and Human Acts, and two by Bae Suah, A Greater Music and Recitation. In 2015 Deborah completed a PhD at SOAS on contemporary Korean literature and founded Tilted Axis Press. In 2016 she won the Arts Foundation Award for Literary Translation. She tweets as @londonkoreanist.

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Poster illustration ‘Nomads 2015 (detail)’ by Mongolian artist Baatarzorig Batjargal, courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art’s 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art and Griffith Review.

Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing The Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing is the first and currently the only one of its kind in China for teaching and promoting creative writing in English as a second/foreign language. It combines the teaching of English with creative writing techniques to enable students to write about China from an insider’s perspective.

Under the Sun Yat-sen University Creative Writing Education Program, the Center organizes readings by international writers and a book club to promote the reading and writing of world literature. From October 2015, it will start the Sun Yat-sen University International Writers’ Residency, which moves from the campuses of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and Zhuhai to Jiangmen in Guangdong Province and Yangshuo in Guangxi Autonomous Region, and gives between ten and fifteen writers the time and space to write as well as providing them with the opportunity to get to know Chinese people and culture. Contact: daifan@mail.sysu.edu.cn

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The hallyu Korean pop-culture phenomenon of music, TV and online gaming has been sweeping across the world for two decades. But what about its contemporary literature? This issue of the Asia Literary Review spotlights writing by and about Korea’s younger generation. The talent and content are vibrant, engaging and unflinching.

Asia Literary Review | Essential Reading Featuring: Fiction by Cheon Myeong-kwan, Choi Jae-hoon, Han Yujoo, Ae-ran Kim, Apple Kim, Kim Seong Joong, Kim Yeonsu, Kim Yi-seol and Seo Yoo-mi Poetry by Kim Kyung Ju and Min-jeong Kim Essay by Deborah Smith ‘The ALR fills an important gap. We’ve grown used to reading about Asia. But through a kaleidoscope of stories, essays, poems, polemics and photographs, finally we can hear Asians talking about themselves.’ – David Pilling, former Asia Editor, Financial Times asialiteraryreview.com