Sample Translations
Beom-shin Park Business E ng l i s h
Book Information
Business (비즈니스) Jaeum&Moeum Publishing corp. / 2010 / 31 p. /ISBN 9788957075364 For further information, please visit: http://library.klti.or.kr/node/772
This sample translation was produced with support from LTI Korea. Please contact the LTI Korea Library for further information. library@klti.or.kr
Business Written by Park Beom-shin
The Old City
The city of M is tucked inside a bay that curves like a virgin’s waist. Located where the mountains suddenly dip into the sea, where a few good-sized peaks taper off from the main branch that cuts across the southwestern plains from the Baekdu mountain range all the way down to the West Sea, the city of M was long overlooked when it came to economic development. Had the breakwater not been finished, no, if China had not become the nation’s greatest trade partner, M would have remained a sleepy rural town along the West Coast. Known for its hospitality and natural beauty, it had long been the pride of the townspeople that almost nobody had been harmed there even during the rough years of the war. In better times it could have easily become a tourist destination or a center for fish trade. But now M is poised to become the most important city on the West Coast. The city has shot up in a remarkably short period of time since completing the landmark construction of dozens of miles of breakwater. M is divided into the old town and the new town. The completion of the breakwater marked the beginning of the new town. The breakwater was originally part of a plan to reclaim land for farming that dragged on over several administrations, but when it was finally completed the land was used to build an industrial zone on the grounds that the town was a forward operating base for the Chinese trade. Glittering houses of vice and commerce followed, as did towering apartment buildings. Then all the government agencies fell over themselves to move to the new town, from City Hall to
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the police station to the tax office. To the southwest side of the new freshwater lake are the shipyard and numerous other factories, while City Hall and other government buildings are on the northwest, with shops and amusements for tourists and apartment towers behind. Outside the industrial zone a new group of luxury high-rise apartments collectively known as Gangnam are going up at record speed. From one of these Gangnam high-rise areas, a nouveau riche neighborhood, it is said that one may see as far as Shandong, China, or even catch a glimpse of the buildings in Shanghai. The skyline of the new town is, in a word, spectacular, thanks to all the apartments and buildings that have gone up in just a few years. From a distance it looks like a futuristic city from a science fiction film. The old town and the new town are divided by the Yellow River. The Yellow River basin area is about an acre wide, and runs about 120 miles in length. Modest in size, it flows south of the mountains, curving around the muddy plains and skirting Mt. Unryu before running out to the West Sea. It is said that the mud flats near the port of the old town where the river and the West Sea meet used to yield the country’s best small octopus, oysters, and Manila clams. The waters of the river are always mud-colored thanks to its detour around the plains. Over the muddy waters of the Yellow River dividing the old town and the new town lie three bridges. The first is a railway bridge for the freight train that crosses over the local line many times a day, the second an old cement bridge sagging with age, and the third is the new arch bridge hanging over the coastal highway that leads straight to the landfill and incineration plant. The arch bridge is the gorgeously named Grand New Century Bridge. In front of the Grand New Century Bridge, an enormous billboard bears a photograph of the mayor in a hard hat directing construction, recently re-elected for spearheading the booming development of the new town. As the man behind the new town, the mayor is practically hailed as a hero by the townspeople wherever he goes. Legend has it that he lived
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in a tent that he pitched at the site of construction. His catchphrase is a memorable one: “M, 21st Century City of New Dreams.� The old town is so run-down it is embarrassing to even call it a town. Located 3,200 feet above sea level at the northern base of Mt. Unryu, the old town was once frequented by naval ships and merchant ships bearing grain or pottery from the south, a real hub for maritime traffic and the shipping industry, but it has long become an abandoned port that only sees the occasional small fishing boat or two, if any. Nobody ever talks about how it was already a mok1 in the Goryeo dynasty, or how it had become so important to the district that King Taejong of the Joseon Dynasty expressly ordered a port to be built there. Around the port are three- and four-story buildings first built during the booming 1960s, but even those are mostly empty now that a modern port has been built in the new town, turning the old town into a ghost village. Certainly nobody ever comes to have a good time at the bars or eating places. The same goes for the residential area, a hodgepodge of tenements, affordable housing units, and old houses. Even the old hyanggyo, a locally designated cultural treasure, is as good as abandoned. This despite the fact that it is a historical institution that still preserves old lecture halls and a shrine dedicated to Confucius, Mencius, Yan Ying, Zengzi, and Zisi, as well as the 18 great sages of Korea including Choe Chiwon. The archery range behind the hyanggyo has been taken over by the house next door, to keep dogs raised for meat. The practice range is long gone and there are only traces of where the targets once stood. A rank smell from the dogs and their excrement dominates the area around the archery range and the hyanggyo. For those who would seek creature comforts, leaving the old town is the only way.
1
Administrative name given to fairly large towns during the Goryeo dynasty (A.D.
918-1392) –Trans.
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The successful are those who have left; the failures those who remain. It is dead quiet even during the daytime around the apartment complex with its cracked walls and peeling paint, or around the residential alleys that twist and turn like the guts of a beast. So many houses are empty in the old town. The few houses with people living in them are mostly occupied by day laborers who go to work in the new town in the morning and come back only in the evening. The old town in the middle of the day, therefore, is practically empty. Potholes dot the cement-covered streets, paved a long time ago, while plastic bags and other rubbish blow about in the wind. The grounds of the hyanggyo and the archery range are no exception. At the northern end of the old town is a landfill and incineration plant, built the year before last. A permanent cloud of unpleasant smells from the landfill combined with the stink of the abandoned port hangs over the sky. “It’s only fit for animals!” Such is the description not infrequently applied to the old town. The right thing to do would have been to consider the long history and pristine nature of the old town and plan how to incorporate it into the new before anything happened, but the thought seems to have occurred to few people, if any. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent on development by the government, it has been said, since the long-neglected breakwater was finished. All for infrastructure and development projects in the new town. Of course, the happy coincidence of China becoming the nation’s biggest trade partner at the same time the new town was conceived made it easier to justify the astronomical funds dedicated to the development plan. Rumor has it that a National Assembly member from the area, who was deputy speaker at the time, hatched the plan for the new town so that the ruling party could secure funds for itself, but this has never been verified. Calling the new town the forward operating base for the Chinese trade has always sufficed to quell any whispers. In cahoots with the influential assemblyman is the current mayor, who burst on the scene as a
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loyal worker dedicated to building the new town up from scratch. He refers to himself as a businessman. He argued that using funds from the central government to build a new town was more economically beneficial than reviving the old town, and apparently few disagreed. The central government backed the cause of building a “forward operating base for the Chinese trade,” and the mayor, the businessman, backed the central government by cajoling the townspeople into believing that the new town meant a better life for them. If their quality of life could be improved by building a new town, who cared if the ruling party was stockpiling secret funds in the process? As the man responsible for coming up with the fantasy that building a new town would make everyone happy, the mayor was the number one champion of the plan. He was also the one who had come up with the slogan “City of Dreams.” By the time the people of the old town realized how the new town would destroy their lives, the situation was already over. The new coastal highway runs across the coast of the old town. Leading all the way to the freeway interchange, the coastal highway runs over the mud flats at the northern end of the old town, desecrating its hitherto pastoral landscape. Once teeming with all kinds of edible marine life, the mud flats have long since turned into barren stretches of gravel thanks to the construction of the coastal highway. If it provided the people of the old town with one benefit, it would be that they could now drive to the new town in 20 minutes flat instead of having to deal with traffic jams every day. Housekeepers, janitors, porters, deliverers, plasterers, painters, drivers, daily contractors, and watchmen—every morning they take the coastal highway to do all the menial work for the people of the new town.
In contrast, those who live in the new town rarely take the same road to come to the
“village of animals,” the old town. The only thing that comes from the new town to the village of animals is its garbage.
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When the garbage trucks zip along the coastal highway, the people of the old town shudder at the realization that they live in a place that exists solely so that the people of the new town may live in a pleasant, civilized manner. The 20 minutes’ passage between the old and new towns is not so much a journey in space but in time. It is still the 1960s or ‘70s in the old town, the 2000s in the new. So for the people of the old town, going to the new town is like taking a time machine 30 or 40 years into the future, and when the people of the new town come to the old town, they find themselves transported back to the outmoded village of the past that they so hurriedly left behind.
Businesswoman
“My sakes, what’s with all them police?” Mr. Kim from the supermarket exclaimed this with a frown. I had just got a delivery of rice from him. I stopped taking the plastic bag containing eggs and tofu and greens and Jeong-woo’s snack and shaded my eyes, following his gaze to the coastal highway. The morning sunlight hit my eyes. I live pretty far up the hill, so I have a view of the Grand New Century Bridge that runs across the Yellow River and part of the coastal highway. A police car was heading a fleet of police buses across the bridge. The mayor in his hard hat watched over them from the billboard. “They must be coming to get that thief in the papers,” Mr. Kim said, as if to himself. “What thief?” I asked. “Tarzan, who else?” “Tarzan? I don’t follow…” “Land sakes, haven’t you heard? Why, only yesterday that thief shimmied down a gas pipe
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from the fourth floor of an apartment and they say he was up and running before you could blink an eye. Say they shot at him, too, not that it did any good. Quick as a cat, you see, the police got their hands tied with him. What I don’t see is how people can say that Tarzan is from these parts of town, now those are some empty claims.� I paid him for the groceries without comment. Tarzan. The name sounded as pretentious and out of place as the Grand New Century Bridge. The old town didn’t get city gas yet, but the pipes that ran up the walls of every highrise in the new town were plain for anyone to see. They were made of steel, strong enough to bear the weight of a healthy young man. Considering that all men in this country served in the military and received intensive guerilla training at some point, climbing pipes was probably not too much of a feat. On the contrary, I found it refreshing that there was a hidden path up those towers that, were it not for elevators, would be as inaccessible as islands. Tarzan, they called him. All the people of the new town could talk about these days was Tarzan. One night he robbed three luxurious flats in the same building. In one month a whole string of burglaries had occurred in rich households, and a few of the owners had been raped. Actually, it was not certain if the burglar and the rapist were the same person. The police announced that out of the rape victims, only one had been robbed of valuables. To make things worse, two cases of child rape were reported around the same time, one
a child of
elementary school age and the other an early teen. Reasonable people agreed that the thief could not be the same person as the rapist, but as the cases kept piling up, most people were convinced that Tarzan had a hand in all of them. Bullets could not stop Tarzan from slipping away without a trace; Tarzan dismantled security systems and could break into any safe. If one believed the rumors, Tarzan thieved, raped, and murdered without hesitation. The murder case had broken the previous night. A woman known to be a loan shark had gone missing for
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two days before her body had turned up outside the industrial zone of the new town. “It’s Tarzan.” People said. The rumors were getting out of hand. Some people said that Tarzan was over seven feet tall, while others said he was less than five feet. According to some, he was a broad-shouldered man who wore a baseball cap, while others swore that he was a slender man whose long hair slicked back into a ponytail made him look like a woman. These alternate descriptions gave him the names of “Baseball Cap” and “Longhair.” One person claimed to have seen him in person at Mt. Unryu, and went so far as to say that he leapt from one oak tree to another. Naturally, people took to keeping indoors at night, and changed their locks or called their security companies, and the luxurious high-rises reinforced their ranks of watchmen by hiring the maximum number. The old town remained untouched throughout the whole affair. And so most people of the new town assumed and believed that Tarzan was from the old town or was hiding there, at the very least. The police were silent about the stolen items. This was because all those who had been robbed were of the elite ruling class or the famously wealthy. There were whispers that millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds were stolen from a CEO’s house, and that a stash of gold bars had gone missing from a highranking official’s. Stacks of foreign currency had gone missing from another’s. Among the prominent households that were robbed was the mayor’s. What had been stolen from the mayor’s house was not disclosed, of course. Nor were the items that were missing from other wealthy individuals. There were only rumors and more rumors. I knew for a fact, however, that an emerald ring and necklace set were among the stolen items. For one of the three flats that was robbed on the same day belonged to Juri. Juri and I went to university together, and she came down from Seoul to the new town last year with her husband that managed a branch of a securities company. The apartment his company
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found for them was on the third floor, 860 square feet, top of the line. Juri’s son had just started a middle school in Seoul, so she was often away. The day her apartment was robbed had been one of those days she was at her house in Seoul. Juri had said, “The guy’s a pro. He didn’t take anything fake or cheap, only the real stuff. What I hate is losing the emerald set my husband gave me for our tenth anniversary.” Two young policemen were standing in front of the door. “Lots of empty buildings in the neighborhood, ma’am. We’re conducting door-to-door searches in case the suspect is hiding somewhere. May we come in?” Our house was made up of the main building and a shed. It had belonged to my in-laws, and after they passed away the house had stood vacant for two years before we fixed it up and moved in three years ago. My husband said he liked it because it looked down on the sea. It was the last house on the northeastern side of the old town. The house was run-down but stood on high ground so we had a view of the sea, which was nice. Behind the back yard there was a narrow stream with barely any water in it except when it rained, while the tracks that ran around the foot of the mountain curved towards the city; to the northwest, right up to the coast, there were all the refrigerated warehouses that were used to store frozen fish when the old town was booming. Some of them were now used for fermenting fish sauce, but most of them were empty. Back to back, they went all the way to the very deepest part of the bay. It was said that the sea used to come right up to the refrigerated warehouses, but now they were surrounded by makeshift sashimi restaurants built on the bit of land that had been reclaimed from part of the mud flats. The police were also searching the mountains and empty warehouses on the other side of the tracks. “Suit yourself,” I said, none too pleased.
They took a quick look inside the shed and around the back yard, saluted smartly, and left.
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It was almost eleven o’clock. I had to hurry if I was going to be on time for my noon date. I turned on the hot water and went to the bathroom to undress. I would be 40 after this year. Thanks to years of yoga practice, my body in the mirror still looked firm and youthful. My breasts were perky and my waistline was the same as when I was a young girl. I stepped under the erratic jets water to take my shower.
He was pulling over on the west side of the crossroads, as agreed. I checked to see if the car was the same make as described in the text message I received earlier and peeked in, prompting him to ask, “Calla?” He was wearing oversized sunglasses. I nodded and climbed into the passenger seat. I noticed he had Buddhist prayer beads hanging from the rear-view mirror. I could not see much of his face because of the sunglasses, but he seemed to be younger than I expected. “You’re really holding a calla lily,” he said. I looked down at the single white bloom I was holding. “It’s the signal we agreed on,” I answered, to which he said, “Do you know what it stands for?” “The white ones probably stand for purity, cleanliness, something like that,” I replied. “Isn’t that funny,” he said, but his voice was serious, as if he didn’t think it was funny at all.
We didn’t speak after that. He seemed to be the quiet sort. His speech was polite enough,
his expression composed, if slightly on the glum side. The car entered the coastal highway. The radio was playing an old song. The car was old. He probably wasn’t very rich. The coastal highway we were on was an expressway going south, past the commercial district and industrial zone of the new town. The man passed the freeway interchange without comment.
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Apparently we were going to the city of P, which was a hot springs town about 30 minutes by car from M. I made a show of looking at my watch. “I’ll pay you extra if we go over time.” He looked uncomfortable in his tie, and I guessed he was no run-of-the-mill office worker. Most of my white-collar clients used their lunch break to see me, so two hours was the most they ever took for their “appointment.” I assumed today would be another one of those, as our meeting was set at noon, so this was a surprise. It would take at least an hour from here to P and back.
At least the man did not appear to be the dangerous type, if not the warmest sort
of person. The car sped along the coastline towards the outskirts of P. I had been to a sashimi restaurant in the area with my husband, but I never knew there were so many motels there. The steep hill was practically bristling with them, all looking brand-new. The car pulled into a parking lot in one on top of the hill. It was one of those places where you don’t have worry about the staff. You put your money in a machine that dispensed room keys automatically. The room was pleasantly warm and had a picture window looking down over the sea. Below was a cliff. The man immediately closed both sets of curtains before finally taking off his sunglasses. Perhaps he was just very shy, coming all the way out here and closing a double layer of curtains without even turning on the light. “You can shower first,” I said. “I took a shower just before I came. Go ahead.” “I took a shower, too.” “Let’s get right to it then.” He avoided looking me in the eye. I spotted an amateur a mile away. Turning his back on me, he undressed quickly. He had a lean body, a bit on the wiry side, but nicely muscled. Someone who enjoyed sports, no doubt. I picked up his clothes and carefully hung them up in
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the closet. It was dim inside the room. His yellow tie caught my eye. I remembered then that his username had been “Yellow.” “Married, I suppose?” he said, still gruff. “I guess I look like an old married woman,” I said. “Young women don’t pick up clothes like that. It’s a habit of married women, or divorcées.” He affected in his best impression of a player. What a newbie, I thought. “What about widows?” “Are you a widow?” “No comment. Are you an office worker?” “I’m a businessman.” Lately, it had become a thing for everyone to call themselves businessmen, after the mayor had popularized the word. Unable to stop myself, I snorted lightly. He whipped around and looked at me then. “Excuse me, it’s because I like to call this my business.” “Aha, so you’re a businesswoman.” “Let’s attend to our business then, shall we?” I turned around to undress, still giggling. He did not laugh anymore, however. I lay on my back on the bed and he bent over me. His skin was firm and smooth and warm. First he kissed my eyebrows. An artistic beginning. Most men were in a hurry. They usually went straight for penetration or put their mouths on my breasts. Kissing my eyebrows, however, was a new one. A beginning fit for a sophisticated businessman. “Your body doesn’t look like you’re married,” he whispered, stroking my arms. He meant it as a compliment. His lips were dry and chapped. They slid diagonally from my cheekbone towards the lobe of my ear. Again, an unexpected move, and a sensitive touch. I felt myself shivering involuntarily. The feeling that I had met a good partner, however, was
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also a red flag for me, the businesswoman. From a business point of view, the best partners were those who were generous with their money and took little time to finish. My own pleasure was not a concern. I stiffened my body, trying to bring myself out of the mood. But I need not have worried. Just after his lips had passed over my jaw, he bit into my nipple savagely. It felt like broken glass. “You’re hurting me…” I tried to twist out of the way to no avail. Suddenly he was moving faster. If he had been an old, doddering businessman, such behavior would have been most unwise indeed. He was shifting gears from first to fourth or fifth, so to speak. My body responded like an engine turning in place, rocking from the impact. This wasn’t what I expected, but nothing I couldn’t handle. It was better, actually, because it meant that now he would finish quickly. I had enough experience to know that when a driver steps on the accelerator, matching his pace is the best way to go. This was going to be a wild ride. “Ah, Y-yeobo!”2
he cried in a strangled voice right before he climaxed.
It had taken less than ten minutes for him to go over the top. His forehead dropped onto my chest like a straw fire that had burned out. Something sticky touched my skin. At first I thought it was sweat, but it was tears. I knew then, because of his tears, that he was not a “businessman.” Pity welled up in me. I felt like I had glimpsed some intimate part of him, the shadow of an affair that had not run its course. I stroked his hair gently, like a dutiful yeobo, or a shrewd businesswoman. I had never been with a man that unconsciously called out for his wife at his climax. “I’ll pay for you to take a taxi. I-I’d like to go back on my own.”
2
Yeobo is a gender-neutral endearment in Korean for one’s spouse. –Trans.
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“You must love your wife very much.” He didn’t say anything. He set down an envelope on the table instead of answering. This was also a first, for someone to bring the money in an envelope. It was a plain white envelope. Counting the generous cab fare on top of that, I had definitely made a lucrative business deal, but suddenly it felt like receiving condolence money. Like a man on the run, he threw his clothes on without bothering to shower. Was he really that shy? I lay under the covers of the bed and stared at him directly. I could count the bumps on his spine that protruded out of the darkness. Whatever it was he was thinking, his expression was blank, as if he did not remember calling out for his wife just minutes ago. His beard was already darker, I thought. Did men’s beards grow faster when they were having sex? Almost all men had darker beards afterwards. “Yellow” left the room without ever giving me another look. I drew a bath after he left. The bathroom had a big window, too, with a view of the sea. The window was positioned so that you had an unobstructed view of the ocean even when you were in the tub. The sea gleamed as white as muslin under the autumn sun. In my mind’s eye I could still see the man’s protruding backbone. It was the lonely, determined sort of backbone of someone who had decided to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. At one time my husband had a backbone like that, although it had melted away to nothingness since then. It was still only half past one. He had purposely come all this way from M, yet he had still left using only half of his time. I felt ridiculously abandoned. It reminded me of the time when my husband and I were still dating and one day, while we were sitting on a bench in the park, he suddenly took off with no explanation other than, “It’s over between us. From this day on, I don’t exist for you.” I was only nineteen. My husband in his youth had been angry at the whole world, with a
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backbone as fresh as the glistening back of a mackerel. It always made me want to rush up to him and cling to his back. For me, to be abandoned was to be struck lame. I sat there long after he’d disappeared, until night fell, afraid that standing up from the bench would confirm my affliction. It had been a sunny autumn day like this one. There were still three hours left until I had to pick up Jeong-woo at five o’clock. I settled deeper into the warm bath and gazed down upon the sea. The sea was as empty as a white wooden casket. I had received condolence money; perhaps I was as good as dead. A tear rolled over my cheek before I could stop it. Well, there wasn’t any rule that a businesswoman couldn’t have a good cry in private, I thought. I slid down into the tub until my head was under the surface. The sea blurred out of my vision. Jeong-woo showed up at the school gates 20 minutes later than our usual time. His hagwon3 started at six and it took at least 20 minutes to get there, so there would be no time to feed him dinner. “Why were you so late?” I asked accusingly. Instead of answering, Jeongwoo asked, “Mom, do I have to go to hagwon?” “What is it this time?” “Nothing. It’s just that I’m not so sure going to a hagwon is going to improve my grades.” “You haven’t been two months there. And you’re having your midterms soon……” And it’s much more expensive than other hagwon, but the words stuck in my throat.
3
Private academy for children offering after-school lessons, where they usually
study the school curriculum months in advance of when it is actually taught in schools. –Trans.
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I parked the car in front of a snack shop and bought kimbop4 and fishcakes. If we were going to be on time by six I had no choice but to feed him in the car. Jeongwoo was in his last year of middle school. He would have to make at least second or third place in his class to get into a foreign language high school,5 but he was not even in the top ten. Just a little bit more, I thought. He had been first in his entire school during the first year, so he was smart enough; he just needed a bit of willpower to reclaim his spot at first place. Fortunately, Jeong-woo ate his kimbop without further protest. The traffic was thick with people getting off work. We were in the hagwon district. Countless hagwon signs passed by, a veritable Republic of Hagwon.
Jeong-woo’s classes
from six to ten were for English and math, two hours each, in special groups limited to five pupils. They were taught by star instructors, I was reassured. I played down the exact number of the tuition to my husband, but in reality the cost of those special classes was astronomical compared to regular hagwon. From half past ten, Jeong-woo received Korean or second language tutoring on alternate days. That cost a lot, too. The tutoring sessions finished at half past midnight. My husband did not understand why Jeong-woo had to attend hagwon. He had been accepted by a second-tier university straight out of a rural high school, and graduated in excellent standing. He had never even been to a hagwon. “If he sticks to his classes and studies before and after, why should he have to go to a
4
A roll made of dried seaweed, rice, and fillings such as spinach, egg, pickled
radish, and meat. –Trans. 5
In South Korea, foreign language high schools are considered to be the inside
track for entering elite universities. –Trans.
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hagwon, too? You can’t cram information into someone’s head. It’s not like the mind is a shelf you can stuff full with information,” my husband said. What he said was true in principle. Reality, however, was not governed by principles. “That’s because you don’t know what it’s like out there. Do you think that there’s anyone that doesn’t tutor their kids?” I said. “What do you want to tutor him for? So he can go to university and be like me?” “What about you?” “Do you have to ask? Look at me,” my husband laughed self-deprecatingly. He had taken the bar exam no less than ten times. His scores were good enough, but he always failed the final interview. “It’s guilt by relation, to this day and age,” he said bitterly. His uncle, who had defected to the North during the war, had been subsequently sent back to the South on a mission that ended in his arrest and execution as a spy in 1965. That year the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea had been signed by the military dictatorship in the absence of an opposing party, and that summer the South had agreed to deploy troops to Vietnam. That summer, with tensions running high under garrison decree, my husband’s uncle was incarcerated for espionage and quickly executed, and my father-in-law was forced to undergo questioning as well. The anachronistic practice of guilt by relations, which held family members responsible for the crimes of relatives who had been executed, banning those related to the guilty from holding public office or traveling abroad, was only officially abolished by the Fifth Republic in 1981. For my husband, however, whose multiple attempts at the bar exam continued until a democratic administration was in office, guilt by relation was merely an excuse. He finally gave it up in his mid-thirties. By that time nobody would hire him because of his age. He still did the best he could as head of the family. He went through a few small-scale jobs, and for a while operated his own stationary
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factory. Then he seriously injured his knee while checking some factory equipment. The operation went well, but too late to save his knee from becoming permanently bent at about ten degrees. He acquired a slight limp after that, and the factory suffered. By the time it shut down the only thing we had left was debt. He was simply not cut out to be an entrepreneur. Even our apartment was repossessed. “I don’t know if I’m capable of supporting a family anymore. You’re still young, if you want a divorce I’ll understand,” he said, and I cried. After that we had come to the city of M, my husband’s hometown. Not just because we had nowhere else to turn to, but to get out of Seoul. “Seoul is a monster. If we stay here, it’s going to suck me dry,” my husband said, and I agreed. Jeong-woo plodded into the hagwon. His shoulders could not have sagged more if he had been bearing the weight of a millstone. I felt my heart ache. But I quickly shook my head, careful not to be overcome by sentimentality. I dropped out of college after two years. Academic pedigree was everything in the real world. If my husband had gone to a firstrate university, he would have had plenty of good opportunities despite his age, I thought. The first step to going to a good university was to get into a foreign language high school. When the time came, Jeong-woo would understand that in this country, the university you graduate from dictates the rest of your life. His tutoring classes were not far from the hagwon, so the only thing left was to pick him up at half past midnight and bring him home. I made a U-turn and set out for the coastal highway. The traffic was at a standstill with everybody coming back from work. The car I usually took was an old Avante. I used my cell phone to call my husband. He said in a colorless tone, “I’m having dinner here tonight. We’re having a meeting and a company dinner afterwards. I can get back home on my own.” The traffic had not budged on inch. The meeting was with an
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association for companies that made sporting goods. I had zero interest in my husband’s work. A high school friend of his who was now deputy mayor had gotten the job for him, and the salary was about 800 dollars a month. They called him account manager. They couldn’t have given him a more generic title than that. When I imagined the alternative, however, him moping at home all day, I was grateful for small mercies. 19 It took an hour to cover the distance that usually took 20 minutes. The police were conducting spot checks on both sides of the Grand New Century Bridge. Did they really think that this so-called Tarzan was from the old town? I felt very tired. The minute I got home I lit a cigarette and sat in front of the computer. The only way for me to maintain contact with my clients was through the internet. I used “live chatting” or “meet girls” websites, and my private profile page. On the internet I passed for 33, the age that Jesus died, and nobody seemed to question it. “I’m a businesswoman.” I said it out loud. The title sounded good to me, and felt good, too. I inhaled deeply as I checked my messages. There were a few, some from repeat clients. One of them was from “Terminator,” suggesting that we meet tomorrow at noon. He called himself that because he was a car crash survivor whose body was now riddled with steel bars, he said. I sent an approval his way and deleted the rest of my messages. My cigarette dropped ashes on the keyboard. I started smoking after I got used to taking a puff or two of my husband’s cigarette on those occasions we shared a drink together. Until this summer I taught yoga at the local community center. My monthly pay for teaching three classes a week added up to less than a single subject’s worth of tutoring. And then the men working at the community center were always after me, citing the many people who would gladly take my job. My face would burn
with humiliation. In the end I quit, and once I did I found myself wondering what to do. When I sat by myself on the rooftop of our two-story building with its unobstructed view of the sea, I could not shake the feeling that there was a hole gaping in my heart. My nerves settled down only after having a cigarette. I smoked it down to the filter before I stood up, wadding the stub in a tissue before throwing it in the bin. The sea was dark behind the old plum tree in our neighbor’s garden. I remembered then that I had ordered a few heads of cabbage that morning. I should probably get started on them before my husband came back, I thought. There was half a bowl of leftover rice in the refrigerator that would do for my supper. I finally turned on the lights of the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. But the rice was not there. I knew I had wrapped it in plastic and put it in the fridge, but the empty bowl was now resting in the sink. Could I be mistaken? I frowned as I tried to think. Lately, I was often wrong about memories that I had been so positive about. The leftover rice in the fridge could have been from yesterday or the day before that. Yesterday, I had thoroughly embarrassed myself by pestering my husband and Jeong-woo about whether they had eaten some eggs I thought had disappeared. In my mind, there had been about five, but when I looked for them to make steamed eggs for dinner, there were only two left. “You’re getting old,” my husband had said sympathetically, with a sigh like air escaping from a flat tire. I was nearing 40 so the idea was not implausible. Juri was the same age as me and she had just gotten her first pair of reading glasses. I sighed and looked back inside the refrigerator. My eyes fell on the tofu and sausages. I remembered ordering three squares of organic tofu to make the tofu cakes my husband loved. But now there were only two squares. It seemed like some of the sausages were missing, too. I dashed to the bedroom and found the receipt from the delivery. It clearly listed three squares of tofu. I called the supermarket.
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“About the delivery this morning, I ordered three squares of tofu, but could you have sent only two by mistake?” I asked. “Oh, no ma’am. I wouldn’t write down anything I didn’t bag with my own two hands,” Mr. Kim chuckled. The number of sausages and string cheese didn’t match up with the receipt, either. Not counting those left over from the last time I bought them, they were both one short. A chill ran down my back. The first thing I did was to turn on all the lights in the house. I was shocked to see that the back window was half open. I’d opened the front door with my key when I got home, so the intruder had not entered from there. I must have forgotten to latch the back window. Whatever desire I had to clean the cabbages left me completely. Fortunately, nothing else was missing. I could not imagine what sort of burglar had been to the house if we’d been robbed. We may not have anything valuable, but surely the robber could have found something more expensive than sausages or tofu. I sank down on the living room floor and lit another cigarette. I had heard people saying that many children went hungry in the old town. Then there were the homeless that drifted from one empty building to another. The mayor’s ”City of Dreams” referred strictly to the new town. It seemed very likely that some hungry child or homeless person had entered the house, seeing the unlocked window. I shuddered at the thought.
Businessman
I saw it in the dead of night. My husband was usually asleep before ten. He had gone to bed around ten that night, and it was about one by the time I brought Jeong-woo home and fixed him a late-night snack, so it must have been after two in the morning.
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The fall deepened every day. Maybe it was the chirping of the crickets, but I didn’t feel sleepy at all. I was sitting on the rooftop on the second floor with a can of beer. The house was built with a pent roof, so there was a lot of space on the rooftop. A makeshift addition had been built on the north side, and the rest was empty space. This was where I usually sat to smoke by myself. To the rear I had a view of the train station, the roof of the hyanggyo, and Mt. Unryu, and to the front I could see part of the old town, coastal highway, and the sea. In front of the addition were some metal folding chairs and a parasol, partially faded with age, and a long wooden bench press. When we first moved to this town we had barbecues up here a few times, looking down on the sea, but these days it would be unusual to find my husband or Jeong-woo on the rooftop. I sat in a chair and slowly drank my beer. The brightly lit coastal highway was completely empty. So was the old town, which looked hemmed in by the coastal highway. Only the mayor, the self-styled businessman responsible for infecting the entire city with business fever, beamed from the giant, floodlit billboard that bore the legend, ”City of Dreams.” On the other side of the old town, the old port was as quiet as a tomb, although at one time it must have buzzed with revelers deep into the night. The few signs blinking here and there looked more sinister than inviting. Above it all, the sky glimmered with stars. I stubbed out my cigarette and stood up from my seat. Or rather, I was about to stand when I ducked, instinctively.
A shadowy figure had
appeared out of the foot of Mt. Unryu, crossed the tracks and the hyanggyo, and darted in between the tangle of weeds. Actually, there were two of them. The person in front seemed to be dragging the other one by force. That person was holding back as hard as she could, while the taller figure held the other by a steady grip by the waist. Was it a kidnapping? The thought flashed across my mind. It was late at night and off the road. I could feel my heart pounding.
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The shadows of a possible kidnapper and victim were already disappearing into the shadowy rows of refrigerated warehouses. Taking care to not make any noise, I ran down the stairs as quickly as I could. There was no time to think of a specific plan. I heard a low moan that clearly came from the person being dragged along by the other. To my dismay it was a child’s voice. It was abruptly stifled as if the other person had clapped a hand over her mouth.
Only recently
they’d found the corpse of a girl who had been kidnapped and raped. The perpetrator had not been found. It has to be a kidnapping, I muttered to myself. All of my senses were engaged to their fullest, while my limbs seemed to follow their command instinctively. I pursued the two figures, my body moving automatically as I silently vaulted over the low stone wall that only came up to my waist and ducked into the shadows of the refrigerated warehouses. I used to be a sprinter when I was in middle school, had done yoga for over ten years since I was married, and in fact used to teach it. My body was still as light and nimble as it was when I was 20 years old. Stalks of drying fleabane brushed my waist. Where the warehouses ended, there were the makeshift buildings of the landfill just around the corner. The two people in front of me were heading there. The coastal highway that led to the incineration plant was literally in front of my nose. Only one out of every two of the streetlamps in front of the makeshift sashimi restaurants was working, it seemed. Other than a few cars parked here and there, the road was deserted. I had followed them here because I had clearly seen them come this way, but now that I had arrived at the landfill there was no sight of a moving figure at all. I stood there catching my breath for a moment. Judging from the fact that the child was no longer screaming, the kidnapper might be armed. I futilely wished that I knew at least what direction they had taken, but I seemed to have lost them completely. Most of the sashimi restaurants were shut down. The reclaimed
23
land of the old town where the landfill was built was a bay that dipped sharply inland, with sand piling up anyway, so that when they built the breakwater it had practically come along by itself. Before the coastal highway was built the place had been known for its unobstructed views of the bay, so much so that it had attracted more people than the sashimi restaurants around the old port. In front there had been well-preserved mud flats that yielded plenty of seafood. But since the coastal highway had been constructed it had become a ghost town, its mud flats gone, with only bits of rubbish flying about. Even in the daytime there was rarely anybody there. Should I go back and call the police? I stood there on the road, thinking. That was what I should have done from the beginning. Actually, I was not even sure it was a kidnapping. I thought I had heard a child’s voice, but the size of the figure suggested otherwise. It could have been someone helping a drunk friend. As for why they came to the back of the refrigerated warehouses where there was no path, well, that was the shortest way from Mt. Unryu to the coast. What could I possibly say, anyway, now that I had completely lost trace of the two people I had followed? I must have overreacted. I didn’t sleep last night, and had just had two beers, so it was a distinct possibility. If I did call the police they were more likely to suspect me of some tomfoolery. I had definitely gotten myself into a mess. I no longer had the courage to go back through the refrigerated warehouses the way I had come. Not only was there no path, but it was pitch dark. I had been foolish to follow a pair of strangers through a place like that. I must have been out of my mind, I thought. Of course there were no taxis about, and I had no money anyway. I would have to walk along the highway to go back home. It would take at least 20 minutes that way, even if I walked as fast as I could. I finally felt the fear sinking in. That was when a light went on the second floor of one of the sashimi restaurants.
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The building was the last one at the edge of the landfill, backed by the mountains. It was a faint light, like a candle. I turned at once to look up at the light on the second floor. There was a streetlamp right in front of me. Its powerful light struck my eyes first. I felt my brow crumpling involuntarily. With the glare from the streetlamp right in my eyes, I could not see the light on the second floor behind it very well. I could barely make out the letters on the rusty shopfront spelling out, Dongbaek Sashimi. There could have been the shadow of a figure on the other side of the window, and I sensed more than saw that someone was looking down at me. But that was all. By the time I had ducked my head out of the glare and stepped aside, the shadow inside the window had disappeared. There seemed to be nobody there at all. The only thing I could do was go home as fast as I could. I had never been all the way out here. The landfill had been abandoned not long after we had moved to the old town. Cars honked on the coastal highway day and night, and the smell from the incineration plant filled the entire area. There was no reason for anyone to come down here, even if they chose to eat sashimi at the old port. To the left of where the landfill ended was a two-lane road that went to the old town. It served as the main road of the old town and led to the old bridge going over the Yellow River. The old street lamps glimmered faintly. I walked briskly, almost at a run. It was almost three o’clock. The two-lane road was as empty as the coastal highway. A lone taxi zoomed by and I crossed the road. I was practically running. I passed the old abandoned shops and the district office. Sweat began to break out on my forehead. I came to the residential area with its tenement units. Just a bit more and I would be at my usual supermarket. At least now I was on a familiar path. The streetlamp in front of the shuttered supermarket was dark, probably broken. I turned left at the supermarket and went into an alley. It was just wide enough for a single car to
25
scrape by. I was in the poorest area of the old town. One by one, I passed the laundry, Chinese restaurant, and beauty parlor. Or rather, I stopped in front of the beauty parlor and looked behind. I had the sudden sense that I was being followed. The dimly lit road was completely empty. I walked past the beauty parlor and had turned right when I heard footsteps following me. My hair stood up straight and my heart thudded against my chest. I walked faster. The steps behind me matched my pace. It could be a drunk. I remembered that there was a police station nearby but I had already passed it. The footsteps behind me stopped when I paused, and speeded up when I did. I was sure that someone would grab me from the back at any minute now, but could not bear to look around. Overcome by fear, I finally broke out into a run. I could see the lights of the alley going up to my house. Sweat poured over me like rain. Finally I reached my door and only then did I turn around. There was no movement at all on the shallow incline of the alley. I cocked my head to the side. Had I been mistaken? I walked around the fence and entered the house, stepping over the stone wall in the back yard. There was almost nothing left of it. I should talk to my husband about putting a new concrete fence in.
“I’d like to put a new fence in the back yard, with concrete blocks,” I said at the breakfast table. “I thought you liked the stone wall,” my husband said, with a weak smile. “But it’s almost broken. Anybody could come over it.” “Do whatever you want.” That left me with nothing more to say. Since we had moved here, that had become my husband’s answer for everything. “Do whatever you want” had become his all-purpose response to every situation. Except for going to work, he took no interest in anything whatsoever, about the house or elsewhere.
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In his younger days he used to be a man of strong opinions. We first met when I was in my last year at an all-girls’ high school. He was finishing college and studying for the bar. I was walking out the rear gate of my school after late study hall when I saw a young man with a split lip, weaving unsteadily on his feet. I found out later that he had been beaten up by some high school kids whom he had started to tell off for throwing their cigarette butts in the street. He was wiping at the blood with the back of his hand, so I gave him my handkerchief. That was our first meeting. At the time he was living in a goshiwon6 not far from my school. “I’m sorry about your handkerchief,” he said, looking down at the blood-soaked square of cloth in his hand. “That’s all right. You can keep it,” I replied, and went my way. The next day I saw him again, around the same time. He was standing in front of the rear gate. “I wanted to thank you for yesterday,” he said, offering not one but two handkerchiefs to me. One was my own, freshly laundered, and the other was new, a gift for me. “I’m Seo Min-young. Min as in quick, young as in lucky,”7 he
6
Single room occupancy designed for students studying to take exams, usually
the bar, the Foreign Service, or other civil service. Each room is typically just large enough for a narrow cot and desk. –Trans. 7
Most Korean names are composed of three Chinese characters. The first is the
family name, and the next two are one’s given name. The two characters for one’s given name are chosen for their meaning rather than their sound, so even people with names that sound the same will often have different meanings.— Trans.
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introduced himself. I learned that day that he was living in a goshiwon. He roomed in a building that was only about 50 yards away from the rear gate of my school, facing north. From his window he had a clear view of the rear gate. There was a large Chinese fringetree next to it. On my way home from school, after I walked out of the shadow of the tree, I would see him waving to me from his window. Not many other girls used the rear gate, so more often than not I would walk to the bus stop by myself. When he saw that I was alone, he would come down as quickly as a cat and walk me to the bus stop. “Don’t worry. I just came down for the exercise.” I liked his white, even teeth that showed when he smiled. We started dating seriously after I began university. He pegged away at the bar exam. Those were the times that seemingly not a day went by without demonstrations calling for the truth about the Gwangju Uprising or people being arrested for breaking the National Security Law. So many students and labor activists were arrested every day. He said that he wanted to become a human rights lawyer. I was thrilled just at the sound of it. At the time, I believed it was the honorable duty of young students to do whatever it took to uncover the truth. For me, university was like a freshly paved road to the unknown where the truth was to be excavated from the rubble of falsehood. My dream was to become a documentary photographer who would fearlessly navigate jungles or war zones. I thought I was on a path towards becoming a photographer who captured the truth. My dream would not come true, however. I had just finished my second year of university when my father drowned himself after his business failed. My younger sibling was still in high school and my mother was practically out of her mind. Our house and everything inside it was repossessed, and we were reduced to living in a one-room bedsit in the basement. Suddenly I found myself at the head of the
28
family. I quietly forgot my dreams. I dropped out of school, of course, and somehow finagled a temporary position at a credit union. I saw him only on weekends. The only thing I could do for him, as he failed the bar year after year, was to give him a little spending money. I truly hoped that at least he would achieve his dream of becoming a human rights lawyer. He called himself a coward, and said that he loathed himself sometimes when he was stuck reading the same old tomes over and over again while I was working for a living. Once he told me he wanted us to break up. It was right after my mother died. I wept profusely, and after a while he came back. It was his parents who pushed for our marriage, and so we were married when I was 23. I persuaded him to keep on studying for the bar, that I would earn the money. I believed that his dream would come true someday, for wasn’t he quick and diligent? But life didn’t work out that way. It took ten long years for him to completely give up his dream of becoming a human rights lawyer. When I think of that time, he feels like a stranger now. Ever since we moved to M, in particular, he seemed to have completely let himself go. He took no interest in the house, and would not even plant a single bush or shrub in the garden. He expressed no interest in Jeong-woo, either, or how he was doing in school. He did not ask how much Jeong-woo’s private tuition cost, nor where the money came from. He would not even change a light bulb. He lived his entire life, it seemed, by telling me to “do whatever you want.” After the meal, I drove father and son to the new town. It was my decision to send Jeong-woo to a middle school in the new town, of course. There were two middle schools in the old town, but the standards and facilities there could not compare with the schools in the new town. And it was no longer just an issue of how good the school was. Where you went to school and what town you were from was what mattered in this country, I thought. It was a world where a man’s life was determined by what
29
kind of people he knew, and a woman’s life by what kind of man she married. The world had become so different from the one I’d known. Sometimes I even thought that things were better under the shadow of dictatorship. Now the world was ruled by capital, and your life was determined by how good you were at business. Even love and marriage were nothing more than business. The oppression of capital knows no boundaries, so the Molotov cocktail-throwers of today have no target should they take to the streets. In the embrace of that cunning and cruel dictator, capital, people are categorically divided into those who have succeeded and those who have failed. Education was business, people said. It was true. Without any background to fall back upon, Jeong-woo’s success depended not just on his education but the connections he would make at the right school. If he went to school with the losers in the old town he would have no chance at all to make friends with children from successful families. That was why I faked our address so that Jeong-woo could attend school in the center of the new town, not just because of his studies. “You’re like Jeanne d’Arc,” was all my husband said. I sensed his sarcasm but did not care. Sarcasm was the pitiful self-defense of those who’d failed. We may have failed and been driven out of Seoul, but I would not let our only child live like my husband or myself. The thickening clouds had finally given way to rain. I went home, did the dishes, and sat in front of the computer. My appointment with ”Terminator” was at noon, so I still had time. My private business was a secretive one, and whatever money I made went almost entirely to the greater business of raising Jeong-woo to be a success. The phone rang. It was Juri. “Come to the studio later on. I’ve got something to tell you,” Juri said, without preamble. Juri had a studio apartment in the new town with view of the sea that she used as a workroom. She had a workroom in Seoul as well, so it was really a studio in name only. Its
30
value had doubled since she had bought it, she said. Money was easy to come by for those who already had it. Juri had impeccable business sense in all things. “Business is about having the right information and a killer instinct. Then you just need to be quick and decisive when you call the shots,” she said. She was far from the only one who had made a killing in real estate when the new town was built. The people who had no cares whether the economy was up or down. On weekends they went to Seoul to shop for designer goods or hopped on a plane to Southeast Asia with their golf clubs. Shopping and leisure were their way of life. Department stores specializing in luxury goods were popping up like mushrooms in the shopping district of the new town. In terms of spending power the new town of M was second only to Seoul, it was said. I browsed my new messages. There was one from Yellow, the man I’d met the other day. Yellow apologized for not driving me back, and wrote that he wanted to see me again sometime. That was nice of him. He wrote that he could make whatever time that was convenient for me. I remembered the view of the sea as I sat in the tub of that motel room on the outskirts of P. His voice calling “Yeobo” when he’d reached his climax, and the vague emptiness in his eyes. And his backbone that hunched out of the darkness. Perhaps he’d been recently widowed. I could meet Yellow after taking Jeong-woo to his hagwon, but I had a rule about not working two customers a day. I wrote back to Yellow suggesting that we meet tomorrow at noon, same place. The rules of my business were simple: never more than one appointment per day, never at the customer’s residence, and never see the same customer more than three times. I hadn’t thought I would see him again, from his lack of reaction, but apparently our encounter had pleased him.
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