by Yun Ko-Eun
Her daughter cut into the conversation, unable to wait for her to finish talking.
‘Mum, look at that yellow truck—where’s it going?’
The child’s mother didn’t know where it was going. Even if she did, her answer wouldn’t have been any different.
‘I don’t see it,’ she said.
‘Mum, look there—the truck stopped for a moment and now it’s going again. It’s really fast.’
‘I don’t see it.’
‘Look there, Mum. Now there’s a second car.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
The vehicle accelerated hurriedly and disappeared, relieving the teacher of having to deal with the situation. The others had closed their eyes. They were sleeping, or pretending to sleep. The girl kept repeating, ‘Why, why, why?’
On a disaster trip, travellers’ reactions to their surroundings usually went through the following stages: shock → sympathy and compassion, and maybe discomfort → gratefulness for their own lives → a sense of responsibility and the feeling that they’d learned a lesson, and maybe an inkling of superiority for having survived. The stage someone reached depended on the person, but ultimately, adventures like these reinforced a fear of disasters and confirmed the fact that the tourist was, in fact, alive. Even though I came close to disaster, I escaped unscathed: those were the selfish words of solace you told yourself after returning home.
But with this desert sinkhole package, Yona wasn’t experiencing any of the typical responses to a disaster trip. All she had to look forward to now was the one-night homestay. It was an experience meant to mimic the two days of the 1963 head-hunting tragedy. Here, travellers had to choose between two options.
‘You can do the homestay from the Unda perspective, or you can do it from the Kanu perspective,’ the guide told them. ‘The locations are a little bit different. You just pick which one you want.’
The teacher and her daughter chose Unda, and the writer and college student chose Kanu—just to get away from the girl. The writer urged Yona to come with them, but his pleas made Yona pick the Unda group. They divided up and got into two cars that would take them to their respective homestays. The Unda home was on the course of a river that flowed right by the white sand desert.
When the Unda group arrived at their destination, the guide presented their temporary home. ‘This is an Unda residence—from the tribe whose heads were discovered in the sinkhole we saw yesterday. The house is propped up on stilts over the water. It was built to earn tourism revenue that helps provide education and healthcare for Unda children. Don’t venture away from the building, to ensure that we don’t have any problems and that no one from the village gets hurt. Our little princess shouldn’t go too far from Mum, either, got it?’
The girl pouted her lips and hid behind her mother. She then shouted something utterly nonsensical.
‘Mum, the guide said she was going to cut off my head!’
They’d been excited about spending the night in a local house, but the accommodation wasn’t much. No longer did the travellers have access to Belle Époque’s air conditioning, nor its ample bedding. The biggest shock was the bathroom, which was a lot closer to nature than they would have preferred. But considering that it was constructed especially for tourists, they couldn’t complain.
An Unda woman introduced the three to their new surroundings. ‘The TV runs on a battery. It doesn’t use electricity. Oh, and see that house sitting on a boat over there? During the rainy season, people put their houses on boats like that and move. Rainy season just started.’
Out the window, a beauty salon floated by, as did a boatful of kids in the middle of the school day. Another child, a boy criss-crossing the water in a black plastic washbasin, made eye contact with Yona’s party and instantly formed a ‘V’ sign with his fingers.
‘Pretty!’ the boy shouted, in Korean, to Yona.
Several children approached the women and brushed the dust off a chair in front of them. It looked like the children cleaned the chairs around here so regularly that there was no time for dust to actually collect.
‘How many languages do you think the local kids know?’ Yona asked.
The teacher looked at the children compassionately and answered.
‘They probably just know the most beautiful words in a lot of languages. The words tourists want to hear—wouldn’t that make sense? “Pretty”, “cute”, “handsome”: compliments like those.’
One of the kids saw that there was a Korean girl his age and came up to her, whispering, once again in Korean, that she was pretty. He said this while pointing to her eyebrows, and then the teacher’s daughter looked a little bit fearful.
Cheerful children draw attention regardless of where they are, but the child receiving the most interest here wasn’t acting cheerful. His eyes were as wet as a lake. When he glanced at Yona and then the teacher with waterlogged eyes, he asked each woman, ‘Mum?’ The Unda woman hugged the child, looking disillusioned as she explained.
‘His mother died recently. The boy hasn’t realised it yet.’
The Unda woman explained that the boy’s grandmother had just barely survived the sinkhole incident while pregnant, but ultimately, her daughter—his mother—had died of a genetic disorder. Yona and her fellow travellers absorbed the heavy fact that the source of all tragedy was that hole in the ground. The teacher held out her hand to the boy, which prompted him to ask again, ‘Mum?’ before weakly hugging her. Her daughter approached a dog lying on the ground a little way away, like she found this entire situation too strange to deal with.
It was an old dog that spent most of the time lying prone with its belly in the dirt. The blue hammock that hung behind the animal kept looking like it might brush against the dog’s back, but even when the teacher’s daughter climbed on to the hammock and rocked in it several times, the dog didn’t move a bit. Of course, it wasn’t old enough to have experienced the events of 1963, but the dog appeared frozen in time. Even if you pointed a camera at it, its expression didn’t change at all.
The Unda woman who’d been acting as their guide introduced herself as Nam. Nam led them around for half the day, explaining how to prepare and eat an Unda meal, from catching a fish to cooking it. When evening came, she brought nail art tools to the lodgings and sat down in front of Yona. Nam’s English wasn’t bad.
‘Unda woman have been skilled with our hands since long ago,’ Nam explained. ‘We’re good at this kind of thing.’
The woman was memorable for her expressions. One person used to scrutinising the hands and feet of strangers, and another who felt awkward entrusting her hands and feet to someone unfamiliar, sat face to face. The task proceeded, and Yona’s fingernails and toenails were coloured pink, one by one. Outside, the darkening sun seemed to be spinning round and round, and inside, the wind from the fan rotated around the room at a similar speed.
Night came. Yona carried her camera around and captured images of the inside of the house. Damp bedding, a naked light bulb that drooped like the tongue of someone who’d hanged herself, the rusted roof and a door that looked like it had decided the day it was installed that it wouldn’t fit into its frame. Yona couldn’t lie down to sleep, maybe because the bedding was wet, so she kept sitting for a while. The biggest drag was, of course, the toilet. Yona didn’t believe that she would be able to pull her pants down and expose her buttocks in those dark and clammy unkempt facilities, not even to relieve the past four days of constipation.
Misfortune befell the teacher, too, although not due to the toilet. Her daughter had left a toy at the resort, and it was an error on the teacher’s part to think that she’d be okay for one night and two days without it. The girl’s toy was nowhere to be seen, and the teacher was stretched thin. The child needed something age-appropriate to play with. The guide held out a pen emblazoned with the image of Pororo the Little Penguin, but to a five-year-old, Pororo was already passé. Maybe she would have accepted it if it had
been Tayo the Little Bus or Robocar Poli. But since neither Tayo nor Robocar made an appearance, the child began to grow more and more distracted, and when they went back to their individual rooms after dinner, her lack of focus became even more extreme. She kept looking for a remote control in this house on stilts, to lower the eyelids that she was sure were affixed somewhere outside. Dog-tired from trying to calm her ever-moving child, the teacher slept like a rock. She let out a few loud shrieks in her sleep that may have been caused by nightmares or may have been the sounds of slumber. No one approached the house to see what caused the noises.
The next day, the Unda group had to pack their bags right after dawn. The house on stilts that had harboured them for the night looked like a wreck. A re-enactment was under way: everything had been made to resemble the famed night in 1963. A fake head that supposedly belonged to the leader of the massacred Unda tribe now hung in front of their window. Farming tools covered with blood were scattered across the desert sand, and cut-off heads rolled about. Unda women in dishevelled dress approached the travellers and warned them to avoid the heads. Yona began to walk, careful not to step on the heads scattered here and there like jagged stones. The teacher and her daughter started the trek along with Yona. There were several others behind them, mostly people carrying the Jungle party’s luggage. The porters didn’t even look ten years old. As the sun rose higher and higher in the sky, the desert heated up. Yona had worn sandals with thick heels, but the bottoms of her feet felt as hot as if she were standing on a grill.
They stood at the highest point of the white sand desert and watched a performance unfold below. The Unda were being stabbed, pushed, and tripped by the weapon-wielding Kanu. Of course, it wasn’t just the Kanus overpowering the Undas. At one moment, everyone fell into a sand crater made especially for the re-enactment. The crater looked frightful thanks to the sound effects and props and lights, but it didn’t seem that dangerous, even as people slid down into it and the play came to its chaotic end. On the other side of the impromptu stage sat the writer and the college student, with a Kanu woman.
When the Jungle travellers reconvened, they realised that their accommodation and meals and activities had been almost identical, regardless of whether they’d chosen Unda or Kanu. They’d met several locals inside a house on stilts, eaten some simple snacks, and then, after watching a traditional performance, they’d slept in similar rooms. The massages and nail art and fishing were the same, too. One other thing was similar: everyone seemed to have been bitten over half their bodies by mosquitoes.
They all wanted to return quickly to the resort, but Yona was the reason they were delayed. One side of the window in the room Yona had stayed in was broken, and it was unclear if had been shattered before they arrived or if it got that way during the night—or if it had been tampered with during breakfast. Thanks to the broken window, the room was now filled with exotic winged insects, and Yona’s camera was gone. The writer scrutinised the glass and said that it seemed like someone who knew what they were doing had cut it with a knife. The guide looked uncomfortable, but she dealt with the situation like an expert. First they rummaged through the other houses on stilts, one by one. They looked, of course, at the room where they’d stayed, and then they searched the houses lined up next to it. They discovered three cameras.
‘Miss Yona’s camera must be one of these,’ the guide said.
Before she could even take a look at them, a fourth camera appeared. The fourth was Yona’s. The teacher’s daughter brought it over.
‘This morning, she said I could carry it around with me …’ the child said, as if she was tattling on Yona.
Yona’s face turned red, and then she remembered she had done exactly that. As soon as Yona’s camera was discovered, the Unda child who’d been in possession of one of the three others burst into tears. It was the same kid who’d made a ‘V’ sign with his hands while floating by on a plastic washbasin. Yona lowered her burning face.
‘I’m sorry,’ she told the child. ‘I’m embarrassed to have made such a disturbance because of my carelessness.’
Because she was speaking Korean, the crying child couldn’t understand, but the important thing for Yona was that her fellow travellers heard. Yona took a small bag of candy out of her bag and held it out to the tearful boy. Then she got in the car like she was running away. The teacher broke the silence flowing throughout the inside of the vehicle. She seemed to be mumbling to herself: ‘How could so many kids have cameras in a place like that?’ This statement upset the college student. He’d looked uncomfortable ever since the camera hunt began.
‘Did we really have to search the homes like that? It was so awkward,’ he exclaimed, clearly angry. ‘This goes against the whole point of the trip. I’m just saying, we have to keep track of our own things.’
Yona closed her eyes and sat in silence. She did feel apologetic. If she’d lost something smaller than a camera, she wouldn’t have bothered to say anything. The college student began to argue with the guide, and Yona watched. The student gave a monologue about the aim of an ethical trip, and finally the guide rebutted that this trip didn’t fall under the category of ‘ethical tourism’. To stop the two, Yona said, ‘It’s all my fault. I’m sorry.’ The fight quieted, but curses kept coming off the college student’s tongue. He was still upset by what the guide had said.
‘Mum, what does “fuck” mean?’ the teacher’s daughter asked, briefly taking a break from drawing.
‘You don’t need to know,’ the teacher replied.
‘Mum, Mum, what does “fuck” mean? What does it mean?’
‘You know, don’t you? Are you really asking because you’ve never heard that word?’
As she got to the end of the question, the teacher’s voice grew quieter, but the child seemed to enjoy listening to her mother’s timid explanations, so she answered even more sonorously to taunt her.
‘Yeah, I do know what it is!’ she shouted. ‘It’s a bad word, a bad word.’
The writer tried to change the subject by bringing up the Unda skull-shaped decorations he’d bought from a vendor, but no one was interested. The guide just stared at the itinerary. Everyone kept their mouths shut.
‘Mum, I want to eat a rice omelette!’ the teacher’s daughter yelled tactlessly, instantly wrapping up the ‘fuck’ situation.
The car stopped in front of a restaurant, and soon a lunch that specifically included a rice omelette had been prepared. The college student pounded his chest like he had indigestion. A rash that hadn’t been there a few hours ago welled up on Yona’s forearm. The unfamiliar water here probably wasn’t the only reason for the rash’s appearance.
The resort was the sole place in Mui that didn’t have a shortage of drinking water. Judging by their experience last night, the travellers had realised that a guest in the resort used more water per day than all the houses on stilts together. After the group ate lunch, they plunged into four hours of volunteer work, drilling a well. The team on the trip right before them had done some work on the well already, and progress continued with the new visitors as if they were competitors in a relay race. The now-silent party dug into the earth as diligently as they could. After four hours, they enjoyed a moment of contentment when, like compensation for their labour, water leaked out of the ground. It wasn’t just a reward for the work they’d undertaken; it also seemed like compensation for the emotional toil that had been plaguing everyone since the morning.
Before returning to the resort, they bathed in nearby hot springs to dissolve their fatigue. It was hard to judge the water quality, but because the springs were near a volcano, someone kept loudly claiming, the water had special properties. After two hours, they emerged with skin that was definitely a bit softer, and commemorative stamps on their foreheads: mosquito bites.
After a brief burst of rain, the earth quickly dried out again. Under a sign that said ‘Mui Market’, the travellers encountered a line of tents and street stalls. They purchased their desired
souvenirs, then entered a nearby pub and sat down. The walls were shabby, but it was crowded with locals and had a pleasant atmosphere. There were no menus, so you couldn’t know exactly what they sold. The guide ordered food and drink for the group. At the end of the alley outside the bar, locals knelt as they braided clients’ hair, and others gave people tattoos. A huge bundle of balloons came into view. The bundle looked like a bouquet of flowers, ready to shoot up into the night sky. The guide bought two balloons and gave one to Yona and the other to the teacher’s daughter. The writer came back to the group holding a dragon fruit, which he began to cut in two. After spooning out the flesh and eating it, he filled the remaining pink skin with nep moi, a local spirit.
‘These are dragon fruit shots,’ he said, pouring the alcoholic creation into cups for the others. ‘Let’s drink it all in one go! Days like today make us all feel on edge, don’t they? Let’s drink and unwind a little.’
The teacher’s daughter touched her tongue to the dragon fruit alcohol and then pretended to be drunk, which took some members of the group aback and made others smile. Soon, even the college student’s expression had softened. They didn’t want to accept that they’d gone on a trip to a disaster zone only to create a disaster of sorts on their own, by disrupting the lives of the locals. Yona felt exactly like her fellow Jungle travellers did. She wanted to forget the discomfort of thinking about that Unda child, so with the help of alcohol she erased the day’s events from her mind. At the bar, Yona and her fellow travellers reflected on the simplicity of their identities here: they were just tourists.
‘Hey, at first glance, doesn’t this place look like Khaosan or De Tham Street?’ the writer asked his travel mates. ‘The famous tourist streets in Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City. You know, Bangkok isn’t a city to be lonely in. It’s the sort of destination for tourists without any innocence, for people who are really explicit about what they want to do. And then Ho Chi Minh City is a bit more unsophisticated, and haggard, really. And Mui, it’s, it’s something like …’