Seungil had majored in art. When I chose architecture as my major and became more interested in drawing, a classmate told me about the studio where Seungil worked. He was part-timing as an assistant there. The studio had been started by someone who’d graduated from the same school before him; they taught classes to high school students preparing for the college entrance exam. Seungil hailed from one of the civilised, middle-class families of born-and-bred Seoulites. His father was a professor and his mother was a famous designer. I’d gone to his house a few times and was caught off guard to see him and his brothers drinking with their father and smoking freely. But what I envied the most was their study. It was as spacious as the living room and had books going all the way up to the ceiling. Thanks to Seungil, I grew skilled at drawing and sketching. Sadly, he died in an accident right after graduation. He’d always been a lightweight — just one drink would have him nodding off — but for some reason, he overdid it that day, and as he lurched out into the road to hail a cab, he was hit by a bus that was just pulling up to the stop. I found out about it much later from Seungkwon, who said that Seungil’s girlfriend had broken up with him that same day. To be honest, at the time, I was busy slaving away as an apprentice at Hyeonsan Architecture for hourly wages, and had missed the news of his death, let alone made it to the funeral.
One year, after I’d returned from studying abroad and was manning a department at Hyeonsan, Seungkwon contacted me. He’d looked me up for business reasons. Even back then he was like a walking encyclopedia, with no end of opinions on architecture, design, and everything in between. He was working for an advertising firm, a subsidiary of a large conglomerate. Later he worked for a foreign ad agency before starting his own company, but he shelved it all once he had made ‘enough to live on’, to borrow his own explanation. Most of his wealth must’ve been in real estate.
He’d taken two concepts that had no business being together, culture and management, and combined them to write books and give lectures. It worked, he drew in audiences. The agency he ran, which was some sort of arts and culture foundation with a poetic-sounding name slapped on it, looked just like a playboy social club. I’d gone to his events a couple of times. Everyone feasted, exchanged business cards, listened to talks by the plausibly well-known, and if the mood was right, retreated to one of the members’ fancy villas for after-dinner drinks. I was bored of their gentlemanly ways and their talk, oh-so-full of good intentions, but I had to put up with it. Because I knew that everyone there was also anxious and lonely. They all had no choice but to aim for the sunny side of the street. They had to take their tiny, precarious, hard-earned successes and make them stronger and try to grow them. There was little difference between the life I’d lived and Seungkwon’s life. The only difference was that I was a bit more cynical.
Sometime last year, I had received a call from Chairman Im inviting me to dinner. When I got to the restaurant, Seungkwon had arrived first and was waiting. We hadn’t seen each other in years, but he sounded the same as ever — as if culture was what made the world go ’round.
You’re quite the social butterfly. How do you know each other? I asked him.
Im answered, We go to the same church.
This turned into a longer explanation.
He got me and my wife to start attending dawn prayer services.
He said that it wasn’t one of the mega-churches but a small church that had been started up by others like him and a pastor that they’d invited. He mentioned a few of the churches attended by powerful political and business figures.
Those places are like social clubs for the upper crust. We, on the other hand, are a purely faith-driven community.
After that, Im had changed the subject to the Asia World project proposal, and Seungkwon gave him the rundown. Based on my experience at Hyeonsan and from starting up my own business, I knew what the deal was. The future of the project would depend on the whims of the current administration. And if it was to be built outside of Seoul, we would have to start with whoever the governor of Gyeonggi Province was and which political party he belonged to. Seungkwon had brought in the proposal and made some connections already, so I figured he would be able to strengthen those connections once the work got started. Guys like him were adept at widening their social networks and forging connections everywhere they went. Standing in the sun was easy. All you had to do was listen closely to what the person with power said, and then say the same thing, but using different words, to indirectly show that you were all on the same page. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. But even if it didn’t, you wouldn’t get shoved out to the fringes or anything, because you’d made it crystal clear that your intentions were pure and good, that you were no threat to polite society. It was inane and bourgeois, but the middle classes firmly believed it to be a sound approach.
Hiding my true thoughts was second nature to me by then. I just laughed it all off. And anyway, there was no question that I’d become one of them.
I took the company car to the outskirts of Seoul. At the edge of a broad plain studded with sporadic clusters of apartment complexes stood brand-new buildings of more recent design. In some places, the bare frames of unfinished buildings teetered like steel skeletons, while others had been hastily slapped together with concrete, metal, and glass.
A waiting employee directed me into a meeting room labeled with a sign that read Asia World Preparation Committee. Chairman Im greeted me warmly, while Seungkwon prepared for the briefing. A representative from the provincial office, the director of the Culture Ministry, someone from a financial firm, a bank executive, and a younger man that I didn’t recognise were sitting with the chairman.
I know some of you have places you need to be, Im said, so let’s get started.
The younger man murmured to Seungkwon, It’s true. I have another meeting elsewhere.
Seungkwon turned on the projector and aimed a laser pointer at the screen. The master plan and aerial sketch that had been drawn at my office appeared. He spoke briefly about the Korean Wave. About how K-pop and Korean movies and TV shows were sweeping the rest of Asia and the world, and how there needed to be a centre for the creation of such content. This kind of talk had been going on for years now, but everyone sat quietly through his pitch. His argument was that having a production base alone wasn’t enough to sustain creative enterprise, and that if they were to make the best use of the space, there needed to be other facilities, like a shopping mall, a hotel, restaurants, film sets for TV and movie studios, and shared workspaces for musicians and visual and film artists. The ground and basement floors could be used for large-scale recreational facilities, like a spa, as well as outlet stores. He then showed a domed performance arena and theatre. He said that Incheon Airport saw millions of transit passengers every year, and presented a plan for layover sightseeing tours. He mentioned the number of warehouses full of returned and overstock items for everything from apparel to electronics concentrated in western Seoul, and spoke convincingly of the possibilities for a large outlet mall. The blueprints for these plans were both detailed and comprehensive.
The briefing was done in less than an hour, and the first to get up was the younger man. Please send it to me in writing, he said and left. Later, Seungkwon told me that it hadn’t been easy to get him to come and hinted that he was from the Office of the President. He invited me to the lunch that followed, but I told him I had another meeting as well and stood to go. As a matter of fact, I’d made plans to go to the opening of Kim Kiyoung’s retrospective. The whole way back, I felt like I was exiting a tunnel from another world. It was all a dream, wasn’t it? While you chased your dreams, the truth emerged only to turn into another dream and vanish. The steel and cement structures pockmarking the land looked different to me now, like it was all just a virtual world inside of a video game.
*
At the entrance to the retrospective, I ran into Youngbin and a couple of arch
itects. Most of the visitors were students and people well known in the architecture and cultural industries. Some of them had known Kiyoung personally, but many hadn’t known him at all. The exhibits featured his sketches, drawings, and designs; one room housed his models, and another had photos and videos. One of the videos showed him talking.
Korean architecture during the colonial era was a re-copy of the pseudo-modernity that Japan had copied from Europe. This is evident in the Seoul Capitol building and Seoul Station. Immediately after the war, with money and materials in short supply, makeshift structures were erected on top of the gruesome ruins of the city. These lasted barely a decade before needing to be rebuilt. Houses built for the working class and hillside shantytowns created countless new roads and alleyways. When conditions began to improve, traditional architecture was reinterpreted, and the traditional colours of wooden architecture were applied to concrete instead. This was the work of the generation before us, whereas our generation poured its energy into redevelopment of slums and the creation of concrete mountains covered in boxlike apartments. But we paid a heavy price for it. We drove our neighbours into a space of distorted desire. Architecture is not the destruction of memory, it is the delicate restructuring of people’s lives on top of a sketch of those memories. We have already failed horribly at achieving that dream.
The interview cut to a scene from a documentary of a small project that Kiyong had worked on in a remote mountain town in the countryside. It showed him sitting on the porch of a country house, holding the hand of an elderly woman. What are you building? she asks. A township office, he answers. Don’t build that, she says, that’s useless for us. Then what would you like me to build? he asks. Build us a bathhouse. We sweat all day in the fields, and the women have nowhere to wash up, and the old folk have nowhere to soak their tired bones. Okay, he says, I’ll build it for you. Can I trust you? she asks. Of course, of course. The screen fills with their hands: his long, slender architect’s fingers that have never lifted anything heavier than a pencil clasping her hand as gnarled as dried wood.
Kiyoung was resting in the gallery office. Friends were visiting with him in pairs after taking in the exhibit. I sat next to him.
Thank you for your help, he said.
I never realised just how much you’ve done.
I meant it, too. His accomplishments were modest compared to the colourful changes the city had undergone in the past decades. My colleagues and I had been naïve enough to talk derisively about him behind his back. But though he had mostly designed smaller buildings in small towns and provincial cities and remote parts of the country, they were novel for being public buildings. In photos, they looked quaint.
Youngbin asked me, You haven’t seen his work in person, have you?
I didn’t answer.
Of course he hasn’t, said Kiyoung, his voice frail and wheezy. He’s a busy man. When would he find the time?
I did happen to see your experimental clay house project on Jeju Island, I said.
Ah, that was cancelled. As is everything that’s not profitable enough.
We had nothing else to say after that. I stared vacantly at the other people who kept butting in. Everyone knew he didn’t have much time left, so they were sparing with their words. When he switched to his wheelchair to return to the hospital, everyone scattered, as if they’d been waiting for his cue.
Youngbin invited me out for a drink, but I lied and said I had to be somewhere. When I got home, I poured myself a glass of whiskey and, on a whim, dialled Soona’s number. I don’t know why I did it. I guess I just felt lonely. It hits me sometimes, this loneliness, like when I wake up with an aching stomach after a night of heavy drinking, or when I’m eating alone, or while doing the laundry, and again when I’m hanging wet laundry on the rack to dry, and once, when I was sick with the flu for a week. It just hits me, like a wave of hunger. But when I called, a recording said, ‘The number you are calling is no longer in service. Please check the number and dial again.’
Kiyoung spent the rest of the retrospective confined to his bed, and in mid-August, when the summer heat wave was at its peak, he passed away. Now he was just handfuls of ash sitting in an urn. This gave everyone another excuse to gather and drink to excess, get rowdy, catch up on the past, and part ways again.
I’d forgotten all about my phone conversation with Soona last spring, the same day I’d gone on that outing to Ganghwa Island to see Kiyoung. I couldn’t help wondering if I’d just imagined that phone call. Already, the ginkgo trees outside my townhouse were changing colour.
I got an email notification on my phone, but these old eyes of mine couldn’t possibly read such tiny text. I turned on my laptop instead. I didn’t recognise the email address, but I knew it was meant for me because the first line said ‘Dear Mr Park.’
A lot has changed since we last spoke. Due to some unforeseen circumstances, I won’t be accessible via phone.
My mind was a mess after we talked. Memories from the past that I’d long forgotten all came back to me, as vivid as if it were yesterday. No, I take that back. I never forgot them. I’ve never forgotten a single moment from my life. After my husband passed away and I was raising my son on my own, I used every bit of free time I had to write down everything that ever happened. I guess you could call it a diary, or my memoirs. I know it’s silly to fancy myself a writer, but it was a way to alternately comfort and chide myself. And to remind myself that I’ve had a good life.
A few months ago, I’d lost my one and only son and had lost all hope when, suddenly, there you were. It was so strange. I found out by accident that you were giving a lecture right downtown. I don’t know why I didn’t go to it. I’m disappointed in myself, but also a little relieved. You looked so old in your photo. Which is why it’s good I didn’t go. You didn’t see what I look like now, so instead you can remember me as pretty Soona, forever in her twenties.
It’s difficult for me to explain exactly why I decided to write to you like this. I guess I just wanted to talk about everything that has happened to me over the years, like telling an old story to someone you’ve been friends with forever. Though I don’t resent the thought of how quickly the years of my life have flown by, I do hope you’ll humour my desire to complain about it to someone who knows me well. I hope that my sharing what I’ve written with you won’t leave you feeling put out or, worse, like I’m asking for something from you. The memories of checking out library books with you and talking about great works of literature are still fresh and new. Those days I spent with you are precious memories for me now, and I can only hope that I was just as memorable to someone else. Is that greedy of me? If you don’t want to read the attached file, just delete it. I won’t mind.
I opened the file. As I pictured her sitting at the computer, typing her life story one word at a time, an astonished smile spread across my face. Just as she said, I kept picturing her as a twenty-year-old, not as she would be now. I simply could not imagine her in her sixties. She’d said she didn’t go to the lecture because she was embarrassed at being fat; I assumed she’d filled out like all women her age do. A lot of people say they regret reconnecting with their first loves, but considering what I’d done, I was in no position to be disappointed. Moon Hollow was long gone, like a memory of some taxidermied thing. And once something is gone, it does not return.
My father was fifteen years older than my mother. He was thirty-five when he evacuated to Busan alone during the war, my mother barely twenty. Actually, I say that like he was an ordinary refugee, but in fact he’d been conscripted into the Communist army and then taken prisoner and held in a POW camp on Geoje Island. Maybe he had good connections, because he said he ended up being grouped with the anticommunist POWs and released. One day, he showed up at my mother’s parents’ noodle house on Yeongdo Island, still dressed in his threadbare uniform, and asked for a job. The factory was originally Japanese-owned, but after Liberatio
n, the owner had gone back to Japan, transferring all of the rights to the shop to my grandfather.
My mother and I were both noodle-house daughters. I had an uncle, three years older than my mum, but he was dragged off during the war and never returned. I’ve only seen him in photos. With my uncle missing, my grandfather was probably relieved to have my father show up on his doorstep right when he was in need of a worker. He never did take down the little sign that read ‘Moriyama Noodle Shop.’ It’s there in all of our old photos. As refugee shacks cropped up all over Busan, my grandfather cranked out noodles night and day but could still barely keep up with demand. After finishing middle school, my mum had to stay home to help with the work, and two more employees were hired in addition to my father. I used to wonder how my thirty-five-year-old father landed my twenty-year-old mother; to use a common expression, maybe he was a national hero in his past life, and she was his reward. My dad was very straight-laced, not much of a talker, the type who could focus solely on a task at hand until it was done. This would have earned him my grandfather’s full confidence. He was completely different from my grandfather. My grandfather left the running of the shop to my father and began spending time away from home; this naturally brought my mother and father closer together. Though my mum also said that her mother nudged her towards him. The shop was doing so well that my grandfather bought up the houses on either side, and then the house behind ours as well. He started drinking all the time and hanging out in hostess bars, and moved into his own place. He had a child, a boy, by another woman, after which he stopped coming home at all. When my grandfather abruptly sold off the shop and the houses, my father headed blindly to Seoul, with my mother and grandmother in tow. I was in the third grade at the time. Making noodles was the only skill my father had acquired after coming to the South, but it worked in his favour. They used the money that my grandmother had managed to hold onto, along with a loan, to purchase a used noodle machine. They didn’t have enough money to open a shop in a large marketplace in one of the nicer neighbourhoods, so they went instead to a slum neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city. That was Moon Hollow.
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