His criteria for selecting a job had been simple. It had to be a place where he could wear a suit and be at work by 9:00 a.m. every day. That was all. His father, a manual laborer who’d been dead a long time now, had always had to check the weather before heading out to work. As long as it wasn’t that, Su-ho was fine with any type of job.
He’d gotten lucky. He’d been unemployed for several years after finishing his military service, until one day he got a call from one of his army buddies. At the barbecue joint in Mapo where they met, his friend showed up in a business suit. He fit right in on that neon-lit street crowded with high-rises and noisy with cars racing endlessly toward Mapo Bridge and the Gangbyeon Expressway.
With his suit wrinkled just so, his necktie loosened, and the sleeves of his white button-down rolled up to his elbows as he brought pieces of undercooked pork ribs to his mouth and downed shots of soju, Su-ho’s army buddy had looked unbearably cool. The place had been packed with other office workers who looked just like him. Every one of them was audibly cussing about someone, the air filled with “fucks” and “goddamns” and “sons of bitches.” He’d envied them. The only person Su-ho had to cuss about was his own inept self.
In the army, his friend had been teased and called a girl. He was shy and timid, and each time he got a dressing down from a superior officer he would run to the bathroom and weep until his eyes were bloodshot. “You’d be a good fit,” he said to Su-ho between bites of pork. “Maybe really good.” Su-ho had thought to himself, If this jackass can do it, then of course I’ll be a lot better at it.
How happy he’d been when he passed the interview with flying colors. Considering how most of the luck that had rolled his way so far in life had been bad luck, landing a job at a company in a twenty-five-story office building in Mapo where he got to wear a suit and report to work every morning at 9:00 a.m. sharp was just about the best luck he’d ever had.
And that was where his luck had ended. Given his shit resume, it was hardly surprising. He’d had his doubts when they threw him straight into work without any training, but it did not sway his faith in the suit. A business suit would never steer anyone wrong. When he found out that his job required him to routinely deploy verbal abuse, intimidation, mockery, and scorn, and when he witnessed the team leader doing the same, he did his best to hide his fear.
Right up until their first house call, with the team leader ringing the doorbell as gently as a church elder who’d come to spread the gospel, Su-ho’s hopes had not yet faded. He still clung to the idea that his job would consist of nothing more than politely shaking hands with the debtor, giving them their letter of notification, pointing out the part about fulfillment of payment, and finalizing it all on paper.
Afterward, he’d met his friend again. He was righteously pissed but didn’t know who he should get angry at. So this is why office workers do nothing but bitch about their jobs the moment they get together, he’d thought. He was ready to confront his friend and ask, How low do you think of me that you’d recommend me for this job? I’d be really good at it, you say? His new job was more crooked than being in the Mob.
“What? It suits you,” his friend had said with a smirk. His shirt was badly wrinkled. It looked like someone had grabbed him by the front of it.
“How so?”
“You really don’t know?”
“How the fuck does it suit me?”
“Think about it.”
“Think about what?”
“The pricks with good luck all do well at it. It’s like that proverb: Seventy percent luck, thirty percent effort. That’s you.”
“You son of a bitch, what the fuck do you know? I have the worst luck in the world.”
His friend had stared at him for a moment and then broke into a grin. Su-ho knew that look well. He’d seen it before. If not on his friend’s face, then on his own. The look that said, Think again.
He remembered something. Back in the army, their foul-tempered senior officer used to punish them by rolling him and his similarly-sized friend up in blankets and ordering the other recruits to switch them around and mix them up like pieces on a game board. Then the officer would choose one of them at random for a beating. The officer claimed it would be unfair to select one of them on purpose, and that by doing it randomly, whoever got beat was simply unlucky. Every single time, Su-ho’s friend was the one picked. Seventy percent luck, thirty percent effort. That was what their officer used to say right before beating him.
Each time his friend had exploded into anger, Su-ho had mocked him and called him a luckless bastard. It was partly to hide his own remorse. Luck was the reward for Su-ho’s efforts. In order to secure his luck, Su-ho had done anything and everything he could for their superior officer behind his friend’s back.
He’d been born into this world with nothing, and so it made sense to cover his own ass at all times. While his friend relied on luck, Su-ho learned to make his own luck. He’d thought his friend didn’t know anything about it, but maybe, Su-ho thought, his friend had known all along.
“Try to hold out for three months,” his friend said, switching to a cajoling tone. “It’s called the devil’s triangle—if you can suffer through the first three months, you’ll make it three years, and then, just like that, thirty years will have passed. It works better if you tell yourself that it’s your money they borrowed.”
“But it’s not my money, so how could I? You’ve got a fucked-up way of encouraging a person.”
Su-ho jeered, but his friend’s advice did the trick: he understood at once the gist of the job. He had to be tenacious, and cruel. He had to tell himself he was only getting back what he’d loaned.
The cold sweat he’d shed that first day turned out to be an important lesson. He did as the team leader had taught him. If he was able to make his own luck back in his army days, then there was no reason he couldn’t do the same now. He showed up at people’s homes unannounced, surprising his targets, interfered with their daily lives within legal limits, and casually let it be known what he was doing there. He refused to smile, raised his eyebrows often, bared his teeth. Now and then he spoke gently, smiled warmly, and casually mentioned the names and information of their family members, which he’d acquired illegally.
It did not take him long. The realization that he wasn’t just okay at his job but was actually very good at it filled him with self-loathing. But that, too, was momentary. Just as the team leader had said, scorn and mockery, intimidation and verbal attacks were David’s stones. Like a lumberjack chopping down perfectly good trees in order to thin the forest, Su-ho chipped away at himself, readily, for the sake of money.
As his friend said, it was easier once he thought of it as having loaned his own money to the debtors. It wasn’t inaccurate, either. If he didn’t collect, then he didn’t get a paycheck. But that didn’t mean all he did was harass people. Depending on their circumstances, he might give them a month or two. Sometimes he smiled and said things like, “We have to help each other out. Isn’t that what being a human being is all about?” He only said that to those from whom he might salvage something. When he gave them a second chance, those once-frightened people readily trusted him. They consulted with him about how they might pay down their debt. They wanted to try. They thought of him as a good person.
Once he had something to collect, however little, his attitude changed at once. He became merciless. People in debt could not rely on anyone and had to be ready to flee at a moment’s notice.
Even while missing each and every one of their due dates, the debtors all grumbled about unfairness and said the same thing: “Money lies, not people.” But that wasn’t true. People were liars. They scoffed at credit. They never once kept their promises to pay off their debts or to meet their due dates. They didn’t give a second thought to taking out loans, and when the time came to pay them off, they blamed their creditors for not considering the unpredictability of time.
They used other people’s money and had
the nerve to yell, “You think you can treat me this way just because I have no money?” When Su-ho quietly responded, “Yes, I do,” they shouted, “You think you have the right? You scum!” To which Su-ho responded simply, “That’s right, I am scum.”
It was the same with Ki-in Ku, who lived in Gojan-dong. Ku had started out indignant and then apologetic, but now he seemed to be saying, So what? He had almost nothing left to his name. This wasn’t unusual. It was always the case for debts the company had purchased from lower-tier banks.
Debtors who’d found themselves unjustly penniless. People who had nothing left but the change in their pockets. Their stories were regrettable, but Su-ho had heard those same sob stories over and over since joining the company.
In Ku’s case, he most likely had fallen on hard times and was unable to pay off his loans, resulting in a provisional seizure of his property. So off he went to a lower-tier bank to mortgage his house. Because that’s what those banks were for. Ku knew he was borrowing more money, but thought, once the seizure was lifted, he would be able to sell his house and pay off his debts. He didn’t think this way because he was especially stupid. Anyone in his position would have thought the same thing. And he nearly did manage to sell his house. Several times. It was old, but the lot was big—big enough to consider knocking down the single-family house and putting up a multi-unit building for rental income. This is where it goes without saying that the loan officer at the bank refused to sign off on any of the purchase agreements. They abused their authority: without the consent of the mortgagee, the mortgage could not be closed or canceled. And so Ku’s debt grew, his house did not sell, and he was forced to take out yet another loan.
Just like that, it was over for him. He lost everything. The bank sold his debt to David. Most of Su-ho’s cases had lost everything this way. Banks never sold a customer’s debt until they’d reached the point of diminishing returns.
Su-ho knew all too well how debt happened. The debtors did not. They did not know as well as he, how being careless with money could turn into debt, and how debt could snowball, and how quickly it could bury you. All they did was act puzzled, then aggrieved, then angry, then defiant.
Sending a notice demanding repayment and taking the debtor to court when he didn’t comply was pointless. All it did was legally confirm that the debt still existed. It was the same with compulsory execution. In most cases, there was nothing to salvage. And if the debtor filed for bankruptcy, everyone was left with a headache. Pushing for repayment only led to more legal fees, and the money recouped ended up being less than the principal and interest. You had to do whatever it took to grab whatever bit of money you could before it reached that point.
Su-ho had performed due diligence on Ki-in Ku and determined that the only thing there to salvage were some measly household goods that wouldn’t be of interest even to a junk shop. Ku had promised to submit payments, albeit in tiny amounts, each time his daughter brought home her paycheck from her part-time job in a restaurant, and in fact he’d kept his word for a good two months. Of course, it was only fifty or a hundred thousand won each time. Which meant that Su-ho’s cut was no more than five or ten thousand won. It was barely enough to cover the cost of traveling all the way to Ansan to collect payments from Ku.
“How do you figure these people end up like this?” the team leader had asked Su-ho after his first week with the company, while handing him his first assignment.
“Uh, w-w-well . . .” Su-ho stuttered.
The team leader got impatient.
“If you say it’s because they’re losers, then you’re the true loser.”
Su-ho, who’d been on the verge of saying exactly that, clapped his mouth shut and looked dumbly at the team leader.
“Debt collectors need to know at least this much: ‘I get it, it’s not your fault. The world has tricked you, and I can explain how.’ That’s the attitude you need to have. Why? So you don’t get your ass handed to you. It’ll boost your confidence.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ugh, you’re such a yes-man. No matter what I say, it’s yessir, yessir, from you.”
Su-ho hung his head, and the team leader stroked it, his big hand caressing Su-ho’s hair as if it belonged to a tamed animal. It usually made him angry to have someone touch his head, but when the team leader did it, Su-ho felt nearly teary-eyed with gratitude.
“Listen. This is what the experts say. The real problem is unregulated finance. It gets everyone addicted to low interest rates. They drop the rates and lend money to just about anyone. Then people can’t pay it back and wind up in debt. They mistake those loans for their own money and buy themselves cars and houses. That cash is not their own, but you know what they tell themselves? No worries. Because there’s something they can always trust. Real estate. Land doesn’t lie, they think. So they buy apartments and they buy land. It’s true. Land doesn’t lie. But the market does. When the market freezes, real estate is the first to freeze with it. Stagnant consumption, weakened household finances, real estate slumps—they all go together, like gears, turning each other. Those gears turn and turn until the working class is ruined.”
“Sir?”
“The government always bails out banks before families. And the bailout stops just as soon as the system is restored. They line each other’s pockets and don’t give a shit about the little people. They don’t care if they go under or even if they die. Do you get what I’m saying? People don’t end up poor because they’re stupid. They end up poor because the system is fucked.”
“Yes, sir.”
“‘Yes, sir,’ what? Are you even capable of repeating any of that back to me? If not, then you still have no idea. So just remember this. Some of the more educated debtors like to get up on their high horse and go on about how it’s not their fault, it’s the world’s fault. But remember: no one made those assholes do it. They fucked themselves over. They got greedy and borrowed money and fucked themselves. Got it? It’s even in the Bible. ‘The wicked borrow and do not repay, but the righteous give generously.’ Would God have said that if it weren’t a big deal? Those assholes who don’t pay off their debts are evildoers, every single one of them.”
Of course, knowing that changed nothing. The best method was to stop being greedy while you still had something worth holding on to. If you wanted to cancel your debt, you had to be willing to let go of your house. But debtors were always angling for a way to hold on to their stuff while having their debts forgiven.
Ki-in Ku was no different. He pretended not to know that clinging to his house had caused him to lose everything. He was convinced he’d been hoodwinked by a society that drives people into debt. Su-ho’s plan was to remind Ku he still had something worth protecting after all. All he had to do was mention the name of the restaurant where Ku’s daughter worked, and Ku would think long and hard about “what he had left.” There was only one piece of advice Su-ho could offer him. To do whatever it takes while you’re still alive. Because once you’re dead, you can’t do anything.
He rang the doorbell.
“It’s me, Su-ho Lee.”
There was no sound. It was as quiet as an abandoned house. That’s how it usually went. In a crisis, everyone plays possum. But when threatened just a little bit, they squirm and run away like rats.
Su-ho still remembered most of what the team leader had told him, but there was one thing in particular that he remembered with perfect clarity.
“When it comes down to it, everyone deserves pity. Is it okay to hit someone and threaten them and take advantage of their weaknesses just because they’re a debtor? Of course not, right? Of course not. That’s not how people should treat each other. Is it okay for a human being to strike another human being? To curse at them? To take their things? Of course it’s not okay. Got it? That’s not how people should behave. That said . . .”
The team leader had paused there and stared at Su-ho. Su-ho swallowed. The team leader smiled. It was a very puzzling and contradicto
ry smile. In a word, a human smile.
“It’s okay to treat an animal that way. For us, I mean. We throw frogs against rocks to kill them. We crush bugs to death with our bare hands. We kick dogs. We even roast or boil them for food. Debtors are not people. If they were truly human, they would never be so irresponsible and incompetent. They’re bugs. They’re rats. They’re frogs. They have to work to qualify as dogs.”
Su-ho hawked up a gob of phlegm from deep inside, spit it on the ground and rubbed it in with the sole of his shoe, then loudly kicked the front gate. The animal in the house would cower at the sound. If the gate opened, Su-ho might step inside and kick the animal the same way. If it didn’t open, he would climb over the wall and do it anyway, and if he climbed the wall but the animal was gone, he would do whatever it took to track it down and do the same.
He kicked the door harder. Su-ho Lee was setting a rat trap. He was spraying bug spray. This was not a human being’s house he was calling at. He was knocking on the door of a doghouse.
12
When does evil intent become evil itself? Is it evil simply to imagine and harbor an idea? Does it begin when a thought is put into action? And if that action fails, then did evil never exist to begin with?
If indeed there was no evil, then is it okay to allow bad intentions to make you change your behavior, move to a new place, transform your life? Does that mean evil thoughts are no worse than a daydream, a mere fantasy? Even fantasies and daydreams can sometimes alter reality.
In Se-oh’s case, when did she first harbor ill will? Was it when she heard that man’s name from Detective Kim? Was it when she saw her father wrapped in bandages, or when she never got to show him how she looked in the purple coat he’d bought for her? Perhaps it began the day after she’d spent those nights alone in the charred hull of #157. Or maybe it started much later than that, such as the moment she set her chopsticks down, unable to finish eating the ramen that refused to taste the same as the ramen her father had made for her, no matter that it was the same stuff. Or during one of the many random echoes of her father’s nagging that would ring suddenly in her ears.
The Law of Lines Page 7