by Un-su Kim
“Where do you work?”
“At a hospital.”
“Do you find your work enjoyable?”
“Sometimes. I work in the radiology department as a radiographer. I guess you could say I find enjoyment in peering inside people.”
“The enjoyment of peering inside people? Well, isn’t that interesting.”
“Did you know that we have cavities inside our bodies?”
“You don’t say? I’ve never heard that before.”
“It’s true. Your body is absolutely teeming with empty cavities, and no two people are the same. I get to peek into those cavities. Sometimes when I see those cavities, I think to myself, ‘I bet that’s where people store their most private possessions.’”
“Fascinating.”
“And secretive.”
“If you have a chance, will you look at my secret cavities?”
“I would like that. Just stop by sometime. I’ll give you the deluxe package. All strictly confidential, of course.”
Forgive me if I don’t follow this conversation to the end; it was getting quite erotic. Anyway, wasn’t this conversation so very friendly, amiable, profound, and somewhat decadent? Whether or not you think it was vulgar, you must agree that it has real potential for further developments. This shows how beautiful our world can be made by going beyond perfunctory etiquette and having a bit of fundamental respect for other human beings. The conversations I encounter on the regular, however, are not so wonderful. They usually go like this:
“Where do you work?”
“I work at a hospital.”
(Somewhat surprised) “Are you a doctor?”
(Somewhat flustered) “No, I’m not a doctor.”
(Somewhat disappointed) “Oh… then what do you…?”
“I work in the X-ray room. So, I’m just an X-ray technician. One that mindlessly takes digital images with X-rays all day.”
(Now visibly disappointed) “How… interesting.”
(Rubbing foot into the ground, unsure what to say) “The weather’s been dreary lately, hasn’t it?”
(Changing the subject back to professions) “Do X-ray photographers make a lot of money?”
(A bit astonished by the forwardness) “Well, it’s nothing to write home about. If you don’t make sacrifices, it can be hard to get by.”
(Now having lost all interest) “Everyone’s having a rough time these days. You, me – we’re all hurting with the economy the way it is. But I heard specialists make at least 5 million a month?”
“Probably. Those people are specialists, after all.”
Do you see any potential for further developments in this conversation? I think it’s as good as done. She’s going to soon forget the dry conversation she had with this uninteresting radiographer who’s struggling to get by, and he thinks she’s just a shallow woman. This is like so many of the innumerable, pointless, and tedious encounters in this city.
I’m not a researcher, but against very stiff competition I was the highest scoring candidate out of 137 other applicants. Don’t misunderstand me, though; I’m not trying to say that the test was as difficult as something like the bar or the CPA. Indeed, if someone expressed doubt that a job as mediocre as mine would be that competitive, I would have to concede, “You’re right. I am mediocre.” And I could say this without a sliver of doubt.
But to get this job I had to suffer in my own way. I went back and forth like a busy ant between my small one-room apartment and the handful of cram schools I attended; I even developed irritable bowel syndrome from all the miserable food I ate at the student buffet halls. What’s more, because there aren’t any bathrooms in the cram school center where I could comfortably relieve myself, I suffered from chronic constipation. And no different from any other anemic and malnourished unemployed college graduate, I too was obsessed with hiring rates and felt a sense of dread every time the news reported on the unemployment rate in South Korea. But as a foolish young adult in a pitiful situation and with no connections, the only thing I could do (and the only thing I knew how to do) was sit on my fat ass and wait all summer and winter. But it was what it was. And in my opinion, while some might think the job I eventually landed isn’t that impressive, it wasn’t something that I got by doing nothing.
So, regardless of what other people thought, when I got the job I cheered as though I had passed the bar exam. And when I learned that this was the type of stable job that I wouldn’t be fired from as long as I didn’t cause a disaster at the first office party, I really did feel a sense of destiny as though this was the job for me. The only things in my life that ever went right were things that only went right because of dumb luck; but now I had finally accomplished something. In fact, I was so overcome with joy that I even cried. I was now eligible for the national pension, health insurance, and the general income tax; I was now someone who paid attention when the news started talking about boring things like tax deductions, unemployment insurance, and the five-day work week. Coming from that black hole of a life when every day was a holiday, I welcomed this change. Seeing the money from my paycheck go to things like utilities at the end of every month, I even giddily thought to myself that I must be more frugal. I had now become a respectable member of the workforce.
But trouble always comes from where you least expect it. My problem was that my office didn’t give me any work. In Korea, where everyone works themselves to the bone before leaving the office in low spirits, complaining about not having enough work must sound to some like bragging. But working a job that has no work to be done is mind-numbing and exhausting in its own way. At the time, all the work I had to do was as follows: At 9:30 am a truck loaded with lab supplies arrives; the truck driver unloads the supplies and hands me some paperwork; as I receive the papers, I engage in small talk, asking about sports or the weather; they’re not demanding topics, and the truck driver gives me equally cursory responses; after checking that the number of supplies on the sheet match the number of supplies from the truck, I stamp the papers; then I plod back to my office, sit down in front of my computer, and record the data into my computer. All of this would take less than ten minutes. And then I was done. You mean, done with your morning work, right? No, done with my work for the entire day.
At first, I thought things would change once my probation ended. But as the first month passed and then the second, there was no change in my workload. I spent all day just sitting in my chair. I was an ornamental plant. And the more time that passed, the more anxious I became. Everyone else was busily working at their desks, although I had no way of knowing what exactly they were doing. As for me, I just stared vacantly at the ceiling or the fluorescent lights or the fly carcasses on the windowsill. Sometimes I played with my ballpoint pen: I would spin it with my fingers, take it apart, marvel at how simple the construction was, pull the ink cartridge out with my teeth, put the whole thing back together, start pressing the button like a madman, then spin the pen around my fingers again ad infinitum. Occasionally I would have to crawl around my desk looking for the spring when it suddenly ejected from the pen as I took it apart. And if someone called my name at the inopportune moment, I would shoot up from underneath my desk as if I had been caught doing something wrong, and call back to them in a voice that was probably too loud.
I started looking for things to read when the anxiety that people might start to notice became too much to bear. I read things like schematics for a new pipeline or design proposals for new driver’s licenses – random documents that I found somewhere and which also served the purpose of covering my embarrassingly empty desk. A couple of people gave me suspicious looks when they saw what I was reading, but this only made me feel like I needed to read more. I started reading articles like “The Effects of Primary School Classroom Gender Ratios on the Sexual Identity of Young Boys” or “Comparing Average Square Footage of Apartments in Gangbuk and Gangnam” or “The Correlation between the Number of Feral Cats and the Number of Traffic Accidents in Citi
es.” A few days later, however, a woman came to my desk saying, “You shouldn’t take someone else’s papers without permission. I was looking everywhere for these!” When she finished lightly reprimanding me, she took her papers back and left.
No one gave me any work and no one took any interest in me. I could have voluntarily asked if there wasn’t something more I could be doing, but if I was going to ask that, I should have done so within the first week. It would have been a bit ridiculous for me to ask for more work after spending an entire month doing nothing. You’ll get more work when the time comes. There’s no way they’d keep giving you a paycheck like this. At least, that’s what I told myself. And just like that, the second month went by. When I received my second paycheck, my anxiety had reached its limit.
“According the management system, we have no work for you, Mr Kong. I’m sorry to tell you this, but I think it best you submit your resignation.”
This is what I was afraid they might say to me. I imagined all types of scenarios before one day carefully approaching my section chief, Mr Kim, as he drank coffee in the lounge. I thought he of all people would understand.
“Hey, Mr Kim, is there something more I can be doing?”
Section Chief Kim peered through his glasses and stared at me for a moment.
“Is something wrong?”
I confided in him everything that I was going through. I grumbled and mumbled as I told him about my concerns and about what I had been doing for the past two months at the office: how I wasn’t doing anything at the office; how I was a good person whose motto was to always be sincere; how I was embarrassed for receiving a paycheck despite having done nothing; how I thought this was such an immoral way to spend one’s youth. I even rhetorically said things that were more like philosophical questions to myself than actual questions – things like: What does it mean to ‘“feel alive”? Who am I and where am I? What does the company expect of me? You don’t think they made a mistake, do you? Perhaps they meant to buy a calendar or a coat hanger, but got me by mistake? It took a while, but eventually I confessed everything that was on my mind.
Section Chief Kim – whom I once saw make a face of deep, melancholic existential dread as if he were an unlucky man who had spent the last ten years wandering from one cramped one-room apartment to the next; as if he had failed to pass the bar exam despite making it past the first round three times; as if he often stared out the window and wondered if this place was right for him, if it wasn’t in the courthouse wearing a black robe and holding a wooden mallet where he truly belonged – looked like a man who could understand my plight. But after listening to my confession, he simply scoffed at me.
“Don’t try too hard, kiddo. Relax a little. You gotta think about ‘quality of life.’”
Oh! How could I forget? Yes, quality of life! Of all things, this is the advice he had for me. But that wasn’t all, he also went on about how we Koreans have been trying so hard for so long. “There’s never been a time in history when our people have tried so hard.” I guess it was a convincing argument, but I still had no idea what that had to do with my situation. He hadn’t given me a satisfying response to my question – a question which had taken so much courage to ask – so, I asked it one more time.
“But since I’m getting a paycheck, shouldn’t I at least be doing something?”
Section Chief Kim stared at me and gave me a look as if to say, “Are you that dense?” But for the sake of this dense friend of his, he kindly explained it again.
“Look, kid. We man our post; that’s what we do here. And besides, manning one’s post is hard work depending on how you look at it.”
And he was right. There was absolutely nothing to do here, despite how big this office building was and despite how many documents there were. In simple terms, there was nothing else to do but faithfully man one’s post. Clock in before 9 am; clock out after 6 pm; work late two days at the end of each month to settle accounts (something which I dare not pretend was difficult work for fear I might be stoned to death by this city’s salarymen); and man my post – this was the extent of my job responsibilities. That’s what my boss does, that’s what Section Chief Kim does, that’s what everyone else here does. In other words, we man our posts! And if we man our posts, we get our paychecks. You must be saying to yourself, “No way! What kind of job is that?” But that is what we do here. It wasn’t until I came here that I learned that such jobs exist in Korea. Another thing I learned while working here is that there are actually lots of jobs like this in the world; you just don’t hear about them often because it’s hush-hush.
There are places where there’s a lot of tedious work, and there are places where there’s absolutely no tedious work whatsoever. Not only do stable jobs have no work, you also get frequent bonuses from (what I guess is) taxpayer money. Didn’t I jump with joy, you ask? No. To be quite honest, my reaction was something akin to disappointment.
Just manning my post was difficult. At first, I felt anxious, worried, and nervous, but now that I was relaxing and not doing anything, it truly felt like I had become an ornamental plant. One day, Department Head Song suggested I get a hobby. In fact, he was currently into assembling model ships himself – Half Moons, to be exact, which according to him were sailboats from the sixteenth century; Section Chief Kim (who I thought had been working hard in that corner of his) actually spent his time reading up to five trashy martial arts novels every day, and Ms Park surfed the internet, made paper cranes, and chatted with the other women from General Affairs… As for me, I just mindlessly endured.
I endured for six long months sitting by the windowsill and staring out at the three trees – a chestnut tree, a cherry blossom tree, and a maple tree – which took turns blooming. Actually, I wasn’t “enduring”; I was simply and mindlessly staring out the window as the time passed. I watched how the trees changed with the seasons. And at night I would open the window and taste the smell of sperm emanating from the chestnut trees as I imagined lewd things. One time I counted how many bungeoppang the couple across the street sold in a single day: 752. I thought they must be rich. Back then, things were so surreal.
Sometimes I would lean my head against the window frame which was warm from the sunlight shining down on it and think to myself, “Is this how I’m going to spend my youth? Why is the song of my youth so desolate? Must I live my life in such utter frivolity and mediocrity? Why did such unwelcome misfortune befall me of all people? Do the citizens of this city pay their taxes knowing that I’m living like this?”
My soul was as empty as a dry cornstalk in late autumn. They say life should be a battle, so how could I mindlessly go through life like this? Day after day I idled around, and day after day I became more and more tired. By the sixth month, I got used to my job and would go with Section Chief Kim to the cafeteria for bus and cab drivers to have drinks and eat pork duruchigi. Afterwards, being too drowsy from the alcohol to last through the afternoon, we would go to the 24-hour sauna across from the lab, where I would sometimes run into Department Head Song. And when that happened, Department Head Song and I would chummily enter the Russian-style wet sauna together and have awkward conversations while seated on scalding hot rocks:
“I must be having liver problems. I’m always tired these days,”
“Me too. I wake up and don’t feel rested,”
“I’ll try to give you less work.”
Then, when we got out of the sauna, we would plop into the ice baths to cool off our bodies. After that we went to our own rooms and consummated our idle afternoon by taking a long nap. When we finally returned to the lab, it would be time to stamp our timecards and go home.
The research center was always devoid of people. The PIs never showed their faces and graduate students only came to the lab to get things that had been delivered there or on some other useless errand. They would cook ramen in the lab, play a game of foot volleyball in the courtyard, and marvel at how well kept the field was. Weirdly enough, the only thin
g that was operating in a normal fashion at this research center was the foot volleyball court.
I would sometimes be overwhelmed with anxiety. Was it OK that I was living like this? There was a time I had tried hard, and while I maybe wasn’t as hard-working as other students, I still tried my best to suffer like everyone else. More than anything else I was bored. But this wasn’t what I had signed up for. I wanted life to be at least a bit of a struggle.
I thought about looking for another job. But in the end I never did look up other employment opportunities or send my resumé. I never wanted to go back there – to the cram schools, the library, the vocational schools in Noryangjin, the classrooms where ridiculous lecturers would stand with microphones as they told us how important it was to memorize the exact height of Seokgatap Pagoda. I didn’t have the confidence. Beating out 137 other applicants and getting this job was nothing short of a miracle. I knew for certain that a miracle like that wasn’t going to happen twice. So I just stayed put.
And life passed like that for a while. Department Head Song completed one model sailboat and challenged himself to a model of the HMS Prince William, an extremely long boat with three large sails that was built in 1665. Because I didn’t have any hobbies of my own, I would either help Department Head Song with putting glue on his model ships or play FreeCell before returning back to my nest near the window. Section Chief Kim, who was sitting next to me, looked at the department head’s boat from several angles before saying, “How about building the Titanic?” To which Mr Song replied, “Modern ship designs are too simple. They’re not elaborate enough for me.” After nodding his head, Mr Kim stared into the fish tank with its two vivacious goldfish and four somewhat lifeless tropical fish for the next two hours before finally and suddenly muttering to himself, “Maybe I should read a collection of world classics.”