Up until I started high school, I was the only girl in that whole neighbourhood who was attending school. I liked to read, and my grades were pretty good. There was one boy who also went to high school. Like me, he was the only male student from our neighbourhood. I don’t remember exactly when he moved there.
Everyday I would come home from school, grab a book, and head straight to the attic, where the noodles were hung to dry. I would hole up in there for the rest of the day. It was my own little world, a place where I could escape reality. My grandmother passed away a few years after we moved to Seoul, but our livelihood stayed the same. We weren’t rich or poor. My father made just enough to support the three of us.
It’s a little embarrassing to admit this, but I knew that the boys in my neighbourhood liked me. They would pretend they were fetching water from the tap just so they could hang out next to our wall, four of five of them at a time, making all kinds of noise. Most of the time it was Jaemyung and his brothers and the shoeshine boys. I also remember that the kid they called Tomak used to follow me around and pester me all the time. But I never saw Park Minwoo with them. He was different. I thought the other boys were all bums, and it shamed me to know that I lived in the same place as them.
Our neighbourhood was so poor that only a few houses had glass windows. Most windows were covered with boards that let in no light or air at all. I still remember how excited I was to get a glass window installed in my bedroom for the first time. It was a day in spring, and I’d just started middle school. My room had always been dark and stuffy, even in the middle of the day, and I couldn’t look outside unless I removed the boards. But after my dad installed a glass pane, I could lie in bed and fall asleep to the sight of the night sky bursting with stars, and the warm sunlight that dazzled my eyes in the daytime felt like a blessing. On rainy days and snowy days, I could be found glued to the window, gazing outside.
I was standing in the window the same day that Park Minwoo, the fishcake house son, appeared on the road below, walking toward our house with something in his hands. He stopped for a moment and seemed to hesitate. I stepped away from the window so he wouldn’t see me watching him. My heart raced for no reason, and I blushed. After a moment, I heard him call out, asking if anyone was home. He’d brought us a package of leftover fishcake; to this day, it is still the tastiest fishcake I’ve ever had.
After that he came over often to buy noodles or to bring us fishcake, and we saw each other all the time at the bus stop or on the bus. The first time we met outside of our neighbourhood, it rained. He didn’t bring an umbrella, so he shared mine for the three blocks to the library. He offered to carry the umbrella, his hand brushing mine, and I hurriedly pulled my hand out of the way. But his clothes ended up drenched all the same, as he insisted on keeping most of the umbrella over me.
At the North Seoul Library, I checked out Herman Hesse’s Knulp and he checked out The Brothers Karamazov. Then I waited for the due date, when he and I would see each other again. On the way back from the library, we stopped at a snack bar, where we ate steamed buns and sweet red bean porridge and talked about the books we’d read. To my surprise, he brought up the subject of our bleak, uncertain futures. I think maybe he felt anxious about hanging out with a girl when he was supposed to be studying for the college entrance exam. I had good grades and was still a year away from worrying about the test, so I was more or less relaxed. He kept repeating the fact that he wanted to get out of Moon Hollow. And that the only way out was through studying.
Getting coal briquettes into our neighbourhood in the winters was a huge hassle. The briquette vendor refused to deliver them, saying that the steep hills made it too dangerous. Each time it snowed, the roads turned to ice, and all of the families would come out to transport their own briquettes, strung two or three at a time on short pieces of rope. My father ended up dying of carbon monoxide poisoning because of those briquettes. At least one or two people got sick and died from it every winter. I got a little sick once as well, when I was in elementary school. My mother told me to drink some kimchi brine, but I pretended to be on the verge of death and badgered her to buy me a digestive tonic called Gasmyungsoo. Back then, I was hooked on carbonated drinks, like Coke, Sprite, and Fanta, and the sharp fizziness of Gasmyungsoo in particular was so good that I would feign stomachaches just to get a bottle. One morning, I woke up needing to pee, and on the way back from the bathroom, I spotted a bottle of another health tonic, Bacchus, sitting on a windowsill in the milky light of dawn. I immediately grabbed it and swigged the whole thing. I felt something oily slide down my throat. I thought I was going to throw up, but I suppressed the urge and went back to sleep. Later, I was woken by the sound of my grandmother grumbling over the mysterious disappearance of the camellia oil she used on her hair. I stuck my face over the chamber pot and vomited it all up.
At some point as I grew older, I started thinking of Moon Hollow as a snug, cozy place to live. Every family had so many kids that the alleyways were filled with the sound of raucous laughter day and night. And even when they’d screamed bloody murder at each other all night long, their frenzied voices carrying through the walls, you would still see couples being tender with each other in the morning: wives with swollen faces handing packed lunches to husbands leaving for work. Sometimes I’m overcome with longing for the sight of women gathering at the tap to do laundry and fetch water. When it rained, everyone stayed in their narrow rooms, and the neighbourhood grew quiet. With the sound of raindrops sliding down the roof and dripping from the eaves, a sweet sleepiness would wash over me.
I remember the first time he took my hand. We’d decided to go further from home for a change, and ended up heading all the way downtown to the Gwanghwamun district to watch Love Story. I still remember the snowball fight between Oliver and Jenny. I cried my eyes out when she died of leukemia. That’s when he took my hand. With one hand in his, I used my other hand to wipe the tears from my cheeks.
And how could I forget the excitement that gripped not only our fellow merchants in the marketplace but the entire neighbourhood of Moon Hollow when he found out that, after turning in his application and fretting for weeks, he’d been accepted to the best university in Korea? It was a banner day for us all. That winter, the whole world seemed to belong to Park Minwoo. And since it was winter vacation, he and I were able to see each other several times a week.
Then I, too, started my third year of high school. With Minwoo away at university, I saw less and less of him. We fell out of contact. At one point, I risked the embarrassment of calling on his parents to buy fishcake and ask when Minwoo was coming back. They told me he came home once every few months, but only to wolf down a quick lunch after which he always headed straight back to school. They added that he was working as a live-in tutor for a wealthy family and earning his own tuition. That inspired me to study hard, to try to do as well as he had. I gritted my teeth and buckled down, knowing I only had to endure one more year before I could get out of Moon Hollow, too.
Her story ended there abruptly. What was Soona trying to tell me? Why the long-winded life story? And what was it leading up to? Questions followed upon questions, and faint memories started coming back to me. Just as she’d remembered, after starting college, I became like a traveler or a tourist to Moon Hollow, dropping in only occasionally, and naturally didn’t make it back at all while doing my army service. After I got out of the army and returned to school, I was busy applying for jobs and, after graduation, I was working my tail off at Hyeonsan and barely made it home once or twice a year. Around the time I left to study abroad, my family was finally able to buy a house and get out of Moon Hollow. But my father passed away soon after the move. In the years that followed, slums all over the city were earmarked for urban renewal, and our old neighbours were scattered far and wide.
At any rate, I was lucky enough to get into a top-tier university and set myself on a new path. After getting out of the slum, my
eyes were opened to so many new things. Most of our neighbours had been from Jeolla Province, whereas Soona’s family and mine were from the rival Gyeongsang Province. We were like black beans that had accidentally sprouted in the middle of a soybean patch. I’d thought that we were all the same in our poverty, but after leaving that tiny world, I learned that being from Gyeongsang, the southeastern province, meant something very different. The generals and politicians who’d seized power and ran the country were all from Gyeongsang, and even most businessmen and industrialists were from there as well, which meant that I could walk into any company or government office and feel immediately at home thanks to my accent. It even occurred to me that I would have had a much easier time of it if I’d stayed behind in Yeongsan, rather than going to Seoul with my parents, and finished high school nearby in Daegu instead. Had I done that, I would have built a wider network, and reduced my hardships by at least half. I would have been surrounded by people who’d gone to the same schools as me, or were related to me by marriage, or had grown up near me.
No sooner did I start college than President Park Chung-hee’s Yushin dictatorship began. Everything was in turmoil, and not a day went by without riots and school closures. My classmates were being arrested left and right, and every time I went to class, there were fewer and fewer of them. I was determined not to go back to Moon Hollow. I was like a mule in blinders: I went back and forth between the library and the classroom in silence, and did not consider any other path. In my spare hours, I tutored students on the college entrance exam, and ended my days by going back to my rented room near the school and collapsing from exhaustion.
I shared the room with someone who’d come from another part of the country than me. It was uncomfortable having to live with a stranger, and even harder to have to cook together and eat at the same table. What made matters worse was that he was a wannabe activist. At least, that’s how I thought of him. He should have gone into the factories to help organise ‘the people’ or gone down to the countryside to bond with the farmers, but instead all he did was smuggle pamphlets and banned books and lead a little study group in our room. Because of him, I was forced to give up on the idea of living independently, and became a live-in tutor instead, but that turned out to be a lucky break. My father’s status as a former clerk in a township office won me the rare opportunity to be around a whole new class of people.
It’s not that I was already cynical at that age or anything. I sympathised with those who were fighting social injustices, but at the same time, by having the fortitude to just buckle down and get through it, I was able to forgive myself for not getting involved. Over time, this turned into a kind of habitual resignation, and it became second nature for me to regard everything around me with an air of cool indifference. I thought this meant I was mature. During the 1980s, when most people were finally getting a breather from the grinding poverty of before, this type of resignation became commonplace, and all of those small wounds calloused over. It was like having a corn on your toe: it pains you constantly, and you swear up and down that you’ve got to remove it, but at some point, it ends up simply being a part of you. And only now and then are you vaguely aware of that foreign intruder inside your sock.
6
I open the door with its many locks and am met with a familiar smell. Actually, it’s a mix of smells, but the strongest is the smell of mould, which seems limed with cold air. The building was built on a spot excavated out of a hillside; except for the front, the rest of the building is practically underground. My one small, rectangular window that just barely peeks aboveground is covered with metal bars, and the only view it offers is of the legs of people walking up and down the alley. The worst part is that the back wall isn’t properly waterproofed; the humidity in summer and the temperature difference between inside and outside in the winter mean that the back wall is constantly damp, and the mould has taken deep root there. It worsened after my room flooded during last year’s rainy season. Kim Minwoo had warned me that living in a place like this would make me sick, and he’d brought over a container of waterproofing liquid, which he sprayed all over the wall, then applied a layer of thin styrofoam and a fresh sheet of wallpaper for me. But the mould just came creeping back over the winter. This summer, the rains were much lighter, but the mould still left its ferocious marks. I would soak a cloth in bleach and wipe the wall clean, only to have it come right back. As I lie in bed, looking up at that stain spreading across the wall, I suddenly feel breathless, like I am suffocating, and fight the urge to scream hysterically. But at least now the air is dry, so it will be liveable for the next few months. I look around at my room anew. One mattress, a sink, a gas stovetop, a microwave, a small refrigerator, a washing machine inside the dark utility closet, a cheap desk and chair, a wardrobe, and two pale fluorescent lights, one in the middle of the room and one over the sink. That’s everything. It’s a well-equipped room for a single tenant. My landlord doesn’t complain much even when I’m a month or two behind in rent, because he knows that tenants like me aren’t easy to find, and I, too, am in no position to demand much of my landlord. So I do not complain.
I lie on my old mattress for a while, but I’m not sleepy. I get up and sit at the computer instead. I’ve been struggling with insomnia for the last few months and haven’t been eating properly, and now, my hair has started falling out, and the loose strands all over my room annoy me. How long has it been since I last came home from the graveyard shift at the convenience store and collapsed from exhaustion directly into a deep sleep?
Lately, other than my shifts at the store, I’ve been staying locked up at home, surfing the internet in a daze, or else scribbling things down at random. After our last play ended, I considered submitting something to a screenplay contest. But it was hard to think in terms of camera angles after having written for the stage for so long.
There’s so much information available online that I don’t have to leave my room to know what’s happening in the world. Whenever I feel stuck on a piece of writing, I download a movie to watch or play a game online. Writing, games, theatre — it’s all a virtual world to me. As for the new game I’ve been playing lately, I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but it’s quite creative. And a lot more fun than online solitaire. Anyway, this one is a two-player game, so I have to stay alert to avoid making any mistakes.
I open a file labelled ‘Foxtails’ that I created recently and slowly re-read what I’ve written so far. The cursor blinks over the last sentence. It was a sloppy way to end it, but I’d had a terrible headache at the time and was unable to keep going. I hit return and start to type, ‘I didn’t know it at the time, but something terrible was lying in wait for me’, but then pause to give it careful thought. If this were my own story, could I bring myself to tell it? Something is off. This next part won’t be easy to write.
I check my email. I delete some spam and then check the status of the email I sent a few days earlier. It says it has been read. But still no response. Not that I know what I am waiting for anyway.
Next, I skim the news. Times have been tough; there are more stories of gruesome murders lately. Most turn out to be over money. I read an article on construction and, as has become my habit, type the name Park Minwoo into a search window. A long list of articles about him come up. I notice an old article that says he’s taken on the Han River Digital Centre project. Articles, blogs, websites, photos, videos, tweets — there’s more information here than any one person could need. But can any of this really sum up who he is? I bought a copy of his book recently. The Architecture of Emptiness and Fullness. It cost 15,000 won. That’s a lot for someone who only makes 60,000 a day. I could have checked it out from the library. Considering that I avoid buying any books that aren’t strictly necessary and try to borrow them from the library instead, buying that book made me feel like I was haemorrhaging money. But I’m glad I bought it. It’s not limited to just architecture, but touches on a lot of diffe
rent subjects. He covered some of it in the lecture I went to, but seeing his actual writing makes it easier to see what kind of architect he is, what he thinks about, what his philosophy is.
I’d wanted to draw a connection between him and Kim Minwoo, seeing as how they shared the same name. But when I jumped to that conclusion, Kim Minwoo’s mother laughed at me like I was pathetic. That’s the best your imagination can come up with? she’d said. You better start writing soap operas instead of plays. I turn my eyes back to the computer screen, close the browser and open another file on the desktop. ‘Black Shirt.’
*
Last summer, my semi-basement room flooded. I couldn’t bring myself to go inside. I called him, and he rushed over in his jeep. Without a word, the two of us went to work bailing the muddy water out of my room and kitchen. Everything was damp, including all of my bedding, so I had to spend a few days away. I got an air mattress and camped out at the theatre, which was also in the basement. When Minwoo saw my setup, he suggested I stay at his mum’s place instead. So I decided to go ahead and impose on her for a few days. It was kind of funny to stay at a man’s mother’s house when we weren’t even married, but I had no other option.
His mother lived in Bucheon, between Seoul and Incheon. She had a small, 14-pyeong apartment with one small room and a combination kitchen-slash-living room. She wasn’t home when we arrived. Minwoo boiled up some ramen and set the table with a side of kimchi. We were up on the twelfth floor; a cool breeze wafted through. It was far more liveable than my little semi-basement room. A long bookshelf that looked out of place sat against the wall that led from the front door to the kitchen and living room. I was surprised to see it so stuffed with books. There were some I’d read, and some I’d been wanting to read.
At Dusk Page 8