by Suah Bae
As Kyung-hee carried her coffee away from the counter, she passed a table at which a middle-aged East Asian man was sitting on his own, looking somewhat lonely. He caught her eye and asked, where are you going? The man’s hair was almost entirely grey, but his face, voice, and gestures revealed a self-assurance rarely seen among those who could truly be considered elderly. His brisk, decisive attitude made him seem more like a young man who had dyed his hair and eyebrows grey. He looked to still have a little while left before he reached the age of ninety. He was wearing a colourful striped shirt, neatly ironed, and brown cowboy boots that came up to his knees. He didn’t look at all like an ordinary tourist, more like an artist or actor from some foreign country, here on a long-term stay. Kyung-hee answered as she always did whenever she was asked a question of this type; in other words, she blurted out the first thing that popped into her head, which in this case was that she was going to China. Because there were four young Chinese women, almost certainly university students, clattering out of the Starbucks right at that moment. Each of the students had their long, smooth black hair tied up in a ponytail, and none were wearing any makeup. Zipping their thick winter jackets right up to their throats, they headed bravely out into the flash of energy from the solar wind that had travelled there through the vast reaches of space. Perhaps, at precisely the moment they stepped outside, the girls would feel a silent sound wave pass through their bodies, a wave of melancholy that would feel, as it had once done for Kyung-hee, as though their hearts were breaking. For such a brief time that none of them even realised it had happened, the girls’ bodies were soundboards resonating with the empty universe.
A stream of people poured out of the underground station, out of the buses which pulled up at the side of the street, all of them heading for the opera house. The East Asian addressed Kyung-hee again. Are you waiting for Parsifal to begin? Kyung-hee shook her head. She couldn’t make up her mind whether to get the letter out of her bag and continue reading it, or whether to simply ignore it, which is what she would ordinarily have done, knowing that it was no different from any other form of long-winded international correspondence, i.e. reams of florid language with no meaningful content. Several people, probably tourists, got up from their seats around the same time and bustled towards the exit, chatting amongst themselves; the fragment of a sentence grazed past Kyung-hee’s ears: “I stayed in a city that, in principle, I didn’t know…” Which made Kyung-hee turn towards to the East Asian and inadvertently come out with the following.
“…the thought only came into my head just now, but this is a city that I don’t know in principle. But, mightn’t cities have some original form made up of sensations, like stories and feelings do? Sensations like, for example, the ominous gloom which all young people have in common, or the impression given by some bleak, melancholy suburb when an abduction is about to take place. Mysterious déjà vu. The phrase ‘wandering aimlessly’ must mean going somewhere entirely of your own accord, right? One day I’m walking along in the city where I live, when I bump into a European. As he brushes past me it occurs to me that we know each other. It seems as though that middle-aged man with the small frame and sandy-coloured hair is someone I met at the theatre at some point, who my German teacher introduced to me and with whom I shared a brief exchange, and it seems that the man also remembers this. But I can’t comprehend what on earth he could be doing rambling around this Far Eastern city, alone, not attracting anybody’s attention, and not paying anyone any attention either, truly wandering aimlessly. Perhaps with the same thought having occurred to us both, we each turn to the other in simultaneous recognition. We open our mouths at almost the same time, and produce almost exactly the same sentence. Saying, I don’t know where, but we met one time. At that moment, the thought struck me that the woman who used to work in that same theatre’s cafeteria had also brushed past me somewhere. That woman probably would have asked me, would you like some tea, or, would you like some coffee?”
At some point while she was speaking, the thought briefly flashed up inside Kyung-hee that this meaningless speech was a kind of fluttering bridge helping their conversation not to grind to a halt.
They exchanged a few desultory remarks. They sat at adjacent tables and drank coffee. Kyung-hee said something about it being a good thing this is a Starbucks, because Starbucks is somewhere that people from China, Europe, or wherever, can feel equally at home—somewhere that literally feels as familiar as their hometown. It’s the same with McDonalds, the East Asian supplied, nodding in agreement. “And that means wanderers must come to realise that their ‘hometown’ isn’t a specific place in, say, China or Europe, but simply ‘a big city.’”
“But if, after travelling many thousands of kilometres to a distant continent, wanderers were to arrive in an unfamiliar city only to encounter, of all things, an incredibly familiar cultural sign, appearing in an identical guise, and make a beeline for it, like a shipwrecked sailor swimming to an island, is that because they’re sad or happy? I mean, what had they walked all that way to see?”
At that, the East Asian replied that it was simply discovery, not sadness or happiness, just as the beauty of a young woman whom you meet in one city or another is neither good nor bad, it is simply beauty; or, to put it another way, just as when we meet the same young woman in this city and then another, we feel as though she is two separate individuals, as though she can in actuality be separate individuals.
“But the young woman is a part of nature whereas the woman in the Starbucks logo is a man-made construct, a deliberately devised symbol, a contrivance of civilization like the Virgin Mary drawn on a shield! And not only is it artificial, it’s actually a standardised sign like those used by the UN or international ships carrying radioactive waste material. You could even call it an international ideograph.” This was Kyung-hee’s reaction to the excessively placid look on the East Asian’s face.
But the East Asian remained unruffled, saying “Starbucks is an attribute of the city, part of the city’s nature, like the underground or the bus. If we fly to another city, many thousands of kilometres distant from this one, it would be easy to find a screening of the same film we saw here just before we departed, but that sort of thing doesn’t make me feel any sense of loss.”
“I’ve been to a big city that didn’t have a Starbucks, but it did have an opera house, as beautiful as the one here,” Kyung-hee said. The East Asian smiled, and said to her, “We could call such things the exceptional occurrences of this world. If I were you, I would try to simply enjoy those exceptions, not complicate them by over-thinking.”
“Up until that winter, I lived a life entirely devoid of such ‘exceptional occurrences.’” Kyung-hee continued to make conversation as she picked up her second latte. The coffee had gone cold, and the froth was giving off a faintly sour smell. “Because I was born and raised in a big city. Not that things are any different now, but I was an extremely ordinary woman back then, in many ways. As a child I took singing lessons twice a week after school. I wasn’t dreaming of becoming some great artist. It was simply something I enjoyed. And people told me I had a beautiful voice. But the truth was that it didn’t have much of a range, and my lung capacity was nowhere near sufficient to become a singer. Besides which, my pitch was unstable, a weakness which sealed my fate conclusively. Not even several years’ harsh training was enough to fix it completely. And, as I got older, my tone gradually became covered with a film, similar in character to the ‘blurriness’ of a lightly-misted bronze mirror, or the ice of early spring. So from a certain point onwards, those who heard me sing would comment only on how ‘very lyrical’ my singing was. Nothing more. I was born with a voice that was doomed to fail. I was perfectly aware of that even as a child, and yet, oddly enough, it didn’t feel like a major setback. Probably because my hope of becoming a marvellous singer and thus making those close to me happy—my family, for example—was unusually faint, especially for a child.
Ah, my parents wer
e both professors, they employed a maid at home, and I also had one sister, who was around ten years older than me. No, maybe more than that. She might have been twenty years older, even. I can’t remember exactly how it was; it’s been such a long time since I saw her last. I have to admit, I can’t even be sure of her name anymore. Perhaps this name is the origin of the doubt and unease that have clung tenaciously to me since my girlhood, the origin of the clammy fear, the obsession which pursues me, and that’s what made me promise myself that my sister’s name would never again come out of my mouth, that I wouldn’t even allow the thought of it to enter my mind.
It’s strange, but in my memory she was always an adult. As though she had been born with the fully-mature body of a grown-up. A body that was, in fact, larger than that of an average grown-up. Of course, that might all be down to the wild illusions about mature femininity which often affect young girls who have much older sisters. I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m confusing her with my mother, don’t you? But that can’t be right, because to me my mother was never anything but an old woman. That’s one thing I can be certain about, at least. Not only my mother, but my father too; I remember them as always having looked and acted like people who didn’t have long to go before retirement. Late sixties, at the youngest. Small, round eyes behind thick glasses; short, stubby limbs like scraggy old branches; thin, lifeless lips, irritably pursed; pale, slack cheeks; mouths that looked so dark and damp as to be unhygienic, as though some kind of moisture was constantly collecting there; and on top of all that, they were unfailingly conservative and fastidious in their tastes. From my earliest memories, they existed not as adults in the prime of life but simply as the physical embodiment of old age. How I’ve described them, that’s not just how I pictured them at the time—that’s what they actually looked like, in the flesh. The kind of flesh nature would describe as ‘waste material’, that is. And, in keeping with their physical appearance, they were rule-bound sticklers, obstinate and intransigent. So it’s not likely that I’m getting them confused with my sister. Anyhow, what comes to mind when I think of her now is that she was much older than me, and that throughout my childhood she seemed barely present, bizarrely so. She was always slow, or indolent and quiet, to be more precise, seemingly melancholy. There must have been occasions when I heard her speak, but I can’t remember her voice, and whatever she said must have been nothing but a string of words which I couldn’t understand. We didn’t share a room, unlike a lot of sisters, so with that and the age gap I never even felt particularly close to her, like sisters generally do. It wasn’t as though we were friends, you see. Though of course, I didn’t feel especially unfriendly towards her, either. Unlike my mother, who was supposed to look after me, or my father upon whom our livelihood depended, she didn’t have any particular role to play in my life. It was through skin-on-skin contact that I would have begun to be aware of her existence, as an adult with whom, though we lived in the same house, the precise nature of my relationship was unclear. So it was all somewhat perplexing, you see. Difficult to make sense of.
The way I remember her, she never actually did anything. Neither went to school nor had a job, that is. Thinking back on it now, it seems like she was one of those unemployed, unmarried women, incredibly common at the time, who, lacking the wherewithal to be financially independent, or at least lacking the courage and will, were unable to move out of the family home, and whose entire social identity could be summed up as being on standby for marriage, a kind of ‘bridal reserve troops’! But we probably wouldn’t have been all that pessimistic about her situation. Back then at least, the prevailing opinion was that young unmarried women—if indeed she was young at the time—were merely in a state of transition, temporarily pacing up and down the platform before finding their proper place, and so it wasn’t strictly necessary to try and expedite the process. Because our mother also went out to work, we had a maid who came every day to do the cooking and cleaning, meaning my sister didn’t even have any housework with which to occupy herself. As our parents were ruthless, frightening people, there was no way they would overlook even the smallest mistake. If I came back from school having lost a pencil or some money or if I came home late after going to play at a friend’s house without permission, if I skipped my homework, if I told the kind of fib that little children are wont to tell, if I deliberately asked for more money than I needed to buy school supplies, then bought myself some secret treat with the surplus. They would threaten me, saying I would end up in a juvenile detention centre, then, once I was an adult, be transferred to prison straight from juvenile reform; that the punishment for children who were bad—ill-bred and ill-mannered—was being made to strip naked and stand in the school yard for an entire day. They even showed me some gruesome photos, saying that they were of convicts being harshly punished for their crimes. As well as my own sins of lying, frivolity, and carelessness, these crimes apparently even stretched to theft, meaning the perpetrators had to spend their entire adult lives in prison. The wretched, unsightly subjects of these hair-raising photographs were thin as rakes, staring at the camera with the blank, hollow gazes of corpses. My parents told me that part of their punishment was to be put on starvation rations. ‘Just one more lie from you…’ they would intone, boring into me with their gazes and striking horror into my young heart. ‘We’ll call the police and they’ll come and take you away to a prison just like this one. There, you’ll also be whipped three times a day.’ This is something I only found out later, but the photos they showed me were actually of inmates at Auschwitz. It strikes me now that they had a great many of these albums, full of prisoners in blue-striped uniforms. My parents also made threats about what would happen if I didn’t do certain things; for example, that if I didn’t walk around the house on tip-toe, as befitted a modest young lady, they would tie me to the radiator with a piece of rope, and I would have to eat out of a dog bowl. Much later, I chanced across an article in National Geographic which described steppe nomads doing something similar, securing their babies to the central pillar of their tent. Because the adults all have work to do, so they need to prevent their children from tumbling into a pot of boiling milk or crawling outside to get gobbled up by wolves. I was reading this article, and before I realised what was happening the tears were streaming from my eyes. Because it said they did it to stop their babies being gobbled up by wolves, which made them sound so incredibly kind and loving. Like someone saying they always make their baby wear a knitted cap so they don’t get struck by lightning.
Don’t misunderstand me; I don’t hate my parents, or bear them any grudge. From their own perspective, they probably believed that they were doing the right thing. In their own way, they thought they were sparing no effort in raising their child. They probably knew no better than I what it was all in aid of, and that fact in itself qualifies every human being to be the object of pity. And yet, even though they were so strict, my sister was left entirely to her own devices. Even when I was being whipped in the kitchen she never paid any attention, just wandered around the house in her chemise, making herself some instant coffee or watching something on the black-and-white TV. What’s more, she was a smoker, though only in the privacy of her own room. For the time, at least for a family who prided themselves on their respectability, this was eye-poppingly scandalous. And I’m certain that my parents knew this was going on, because every time she opened her door the smell of smoke wafted out. She kept a candle constantly burning in her room, but the popular belief that candle flames get rid of smells and smoke is mistaken. Unlike me, she slept in as late as she liked, wore whatever she chose, and came home late at night—not often, but certainly more than once. As a young child, I regarded her with a vague envy. Our lives were so different that I thought of her as an altogether different breed of human. It really wasn’t easy to accept that she was someone who shared the same blood as me, whose status as my sister meant that society regarded it as perfectly plausible that the two of us might go out to
see a film together, walking hand-in-hand.”