by Kim Sagwa
As she drifts around with no sense of direction the low clouds quickly cover the sky and before she knows it rain is pouring down. Instantly the streets turn into dark, damp, amorphous shapes like the sea on a storm-driven night, rain filling the places now emptied of people. Murky faces are reflected in streaming, rain-slicked shopwindows. Gusts of wind shred and scatter whatever is left on the street. Her arms clutched around herself, she takes refuge in a phone booth. In the next booth a man in a gray raincoat is talking on his cellphone. He looks up at the sky with a frown. Crystal turns her gaze to the pay phone in front of her but can’t think of whom she ought to call. Emerging from the booth, she flags a cab.
The taxi cruises like a submarine beneath a dark and silent ocean. The unpleasant dampness pervading the city clings to her. Clings persistently to all of her and all of the city. She tries to immerse herself in other thoughts. First comes the phone booth, and then the garbage can, rain, kimpap, vomit, woods, canned coffee from a vending machine, more woods, a boot camp for kids, and finally food poisoning—her innermost recollections of utmost humiliation.
Once the girls arrived at the educational boot camp an instructor in his mid-twenties who wore a khaki cap and orange T-shirt tore into them: they had thirty seconds to assemble on the training field. Slowly unstrapping and dumping their backpacks, the girls gathered on the field, faces half smiling and half tense. The instructor blew his whistle and the students rolled, head over heels and then side to side, and by the time they’d covered fifteen feet their nice white tracksuits were covered with dirt. Next the instructor ordered them to their feet, in horse stance. Crystal was swept with zeal: I’ll show him. She felt energy flow into her and got into a perfect horse stance. “You ladies are no longer little weaklings whining at your mommy’s breast—forget that. In three days I’ll remake every last one of you ladies, I guarantee it. So get moving. And don’t think—I’ll do that for you. Move!”
Crystal was singled out for praise by the instructor. The other girls dutifully applauded her. The joy she felt was com-plex—part furtive frenzy and part bashfulness—and it suited her just fine. It stayed with her for all three days as she tumbled around on the ground. Rebirth, love for her parents, facing life and coming out on top, comradeship, and all the rest—for three days she immersed herself in these thoughts, recording them in her diary to be treasured forever. Even as she stuffed herself with poorly steamed government surplus rice and radish kimchi that had gone bad, she thought, Wow, am I cool or what? Some of the girls got by on canned coffee from the vending machine for the first two days, but came down with stomach problems and spent the last day whimpering. Laughing at them, Crystal stuffed herself with pulgogi kimpap. But it was the other girls who had the last laugh, because the beef-filled rice rolls turned out to be spoiled. The first symptom was a faint rash on Crystal’s face. Next came a stabbing pain in her stomach. She got a high fever and kept throwing up. The chunks of unsavory radish, the spoiled beef, and the rice gushed out of her in the order they’d gone in. Face positioned over a scummy garbage can, she sobbed. Three fervent days had climaxed with spoiled pulgogi kimpap, and she crashed and burned. What did she get out of those three days? Toned calves, freckled cheeks, food poisoning and its aftermath, the school authorities’ cold, mechanical handling of her experience, and humiliation…that was all.
The rain continues to fall and Crystal comes to realize she’s been preoccupied with misguided notions. The taxi moves sluggishly through the dark and the water but the meter moves rapidly. Suddenly she hates the driver, wants to kill him. Not good, she tells herself. Maybe she’s too deep in bad memories. She always tries not to think too much. Because she knows if she looks deep down into her memories and sees the shame and humiliation, she’ll end up killing herself like Chiye. She has to learn to look away from unnecessary thoughts at all costs. Come on, girl, you need to love yourself, you need to stand tall and respect yourself. She sits up but can’t shake off the memory of the food poisoning.
Crystal’s enthusiasm for the ultimately humiliating boot camp training should come as no surprise, because she’s a perfect fit for institutional life. She’s like a nice little white mouse in a tiny silvery cage, a person who wears the same colors and eats unpalatable food and sleeps on a hard surface in a tiny space—the perfect specimen for life within an organization. Every day the city builds higher walls for its institutions and she has no interest in escaping that world. Her only wish is to reach the summit, to rise so high that no one will take her lightly, so high that she can take others lightly. She wants everyone else underfoot so she can call down and tell them they can’t come up. For that to happen, the institutions need to become even more institutional and the schools need to continue being the red-hot gates of hell. The teachers must continue to teach the students the virtues of submission and conformity. The world must continue to separate the ones who kneel from those who make them kneel, and to nurture, promote, protect, and advertise that distinction. Crystal has no interest in kneeling and isn’t about to learn how. She doesn’t want to be ordered around; she wants to be someone who doesn’t follow orders. More precisely, she doesn’t want to know what it means to follow orders; she wants to be someone who couldn’t follow orders even if she wanted to. She knows that if someone laughs at her it’s out of jealousy. The same goes for those who hate her. She knows that…knows it all too well. How then would she explain the sour sense of humiliation she feels deep down inside? Before she arrives at an answer the taxi pulls up at her apartment complex. She opens the door. The rain continues to pour down.
Dripping water she enters the apartment and makes her way from her bedroom to the living room to the kitchen to the bathroom, removing a layer of clothing at a time, and then, with a bath towel wrapped around her, she collapses onto the living room floor. The sky beyond the window is dark and menacing. The newscasters on the television keep reminding viewers that the rain will continue for days and that it contains more than the usual amount of heavy-metal particles. Crystal checks the clock on the wall. Time for cram school. She has to get up if it’s the last thing she does.
THE LIFE OF A P CITY STUDENT
Crystal’s confidence is not entirely of her own making. It’s officially acknowledged by others and reflected in her writing. Thanks to the long years she’s put into the writing class at the English Academy, her writing is extremely efficient, with well-constructed and compelling themes and flawless grammar. Superfluous conjunctions and punctuation? Forget it. She’s talented at ferreting out sentences that deviate from the main point and subjects that don’t agree with predicates. Her numerous compositions differ in detail but are alike in their emphasis on eliminating any content that falls short of exhibiting her extreme efficiency: Get rid of traditional methods that are no longer advantageous, avoid writing about experiences from which no lesson can be learned. She’s a wizard at working within guidelines to organize and reorganize content; she’s a virtual human printing press. Anybody who reads her compositions attests that nothing in them could merit a point deduction. Her writing always earns high marks, because the readers focus only on her perfect grammar and polished construction, particulars of that sort; they don’t bother with her argumentation. And so her theses are often rickety in their logic and laughably paradoxical, but she couldn’t care less. In her mind, the process is the point, and if no problems crop up along the way, then what’s there to be concerned about?
The important thing is: Can this be applied to the here and now? Considering this sentence she’s just jotted down, Crystal thinks, Wow, you’re something, girl.
Applicability…as in compatibility. Is this plug compatible with IBM, Samsung, and LG? In Crystal’s view, whatever is inapplicable about the past is a mere relic to be discarded or refabricated.
Because she has had no experiences to speak of, the notions she’s equipped herself with for academic writing are all she has…they’re Crystal herself. It’s amazing how well she can expound in English upon
Rousseau, using the appropriate tenses, prepositions, and proper nouns with correct pronunciation and intonation. And now let’s get it down on the computer—start with Rousseau, get the tense right, use the correct relative pronoun, make sure the syntax is correct—everything in proper English. The results of all this become her thoughts. It’s not important whether she’s actually thought about Rousseau, whether she likes Rousseau. What’s important is whether she can talk about Rousseau (using the correct nouns), whether she can explain Rousseau’s Confessions (using the proper tense), and whether she’s acquired the proper accent, and the intonation and sound assimilation that go with it. So if she can jabber on about Rousseau with correct grammar in a New England drawl, she can convince others she’s knowledgeable about him. The result? An exercise to satisfy standards of evaluation. And assuming the evaluator buys into this exercise, let’s hear it for Crystal!
When Crystal prances through the street flaunting her highly refined contemporary Zeitgeist, students flock to her. At first, still unsure of themselves, they sneer at her—just as Crystal, at least once in the past, sharing the same view they did, sneered at another. These students will probably cook up a way to question or challenge her. She’ll respond with a cop-out or excuse, with irritation or disregard. And in the next instant the students will wipe the sneer from their faces and replace it with a look of respect. This is exactly what happens between Crystal and her followers, it’s happening now, and it will happen in the future. They will end up respecting her. But Crystal will continue to disregard them, to treat them with contempt; she and the others cut themselves off from each other and are left with nothing in common. Identifying themselves by their age, which side of the tracks they live on, their gender, their parents’ assets, what they eat, and what they wear, they lock themselves in compartments. Inside these compartments are spacious living rooms decked out with marble floors, the freedom to open up the doors to the balcony and the kitchen with its island and make them an extension of the living room, and, compliments of a central security system, a completely digital home. The sales pitch? Simplicity is all: Let go of the view. Don’t overthink. Move in straight lines and make your life more convenient. Live in a small circle…small is beautiful.
The more compartmentalized the life, the older we get, and the longer we live, the more confined this world becomes. Those in the rear compartments look toward the front but they don’t know what they’re looking at, while those in the front occasionally look back in relief. The greater the number of compartments, the wider the gap in human relations and the more similar the compartments between us. Confined in compartments of the same size, the same thickness, the same height and color and material, we shrink, despairing, each of us, from the same number of worries and the same volume of misunderstandings. And then people are used to separating themselves from others, locking their doors, lowering their blinds, and curling up as they age. Once in a while they’ll crack a window and peep at the other compartments, but their door remains shut. They shout but no one hears. Out of shame they cover their faces and their mouths and they sob. From their pile of plastic knives they select one and slash the back of a hand, but they don’t bleed. The ones who don’t belong in the compartments linger outside the walls and grow old. We have two choices: remain outside for who knows how long, or be integrated into the world of compartments and confine ourselves inside them. There’s no other alternative. The compartments are either white or black; there’s no gray, so please don’t bother looking for it. There’s no in-between. There exist only walls with thick panels enclosing cells that divide and multiply without end.
The compartments, or more precisely the system they are a part of, directly influence the students’ lives, but if you’re a student who’s concerned about the future in that system you won’t be found within it. Saying this is the future they’ve selected, the students stick out their chests before squeezing into their compartment. The progressivism of the students who are still untainted will be crushed by the system’s conservatism, but these students won’t even realize they’ve already shot themselves in the foot. They will have nothing to inherit or hand down, no advice to give, none they want to receive. They’ll want to disappear somewhere without a trace—and even if they don’t want to disappear, that’s how they’ll end up. With nothing to show for it. Pure hearts are broken in this fashion, then they are integrated into the system. Once integrated, none of these individuals knows to look beyond her surroundings, none keeps the instinct to reach out to others. They don’t want to belong anywhere, but they begin to conveniently take advantage of the system and would rather not realize how passive they are. In this way, alone as ever, not knowing to reach out, they’re reborn as people who are perfectly individual and yet perfectly submissive to the collective. Taking only what they need, they adopt a lifestyle of shirking both responsibilities and rights—accepting the very life the collective demands of them. I don’t want the duties that come with a collective, it’s no fair that they make demands on me just because I belong here. I want to be like an anonymous consumer—pay for a service, get my money’s worth, grab the receipt, then go home and be left alone and go to sleep. Talking with other people wears me out, so please, leave me alone, please, please, even if it means I die a solitary and lonely death. And even while facing that most wretched death, isolated and oppressed by the collective, they will close their eyes with a smile, believing they’ve braved the most isolated and individualized death, a death they chose of their own free will. But the smile is not theirs, it’s that of the system, the system that has distorted their vision. Strictly speaking, it isn’t a matter of actual life or death. But what we’re describing as life and death recurs everywhere in the city—at this very moment people are slowly being drowned. No matter how desperately they try to keep their heads above water, the system and its rules slowly flood their hearts. The only way to resist is to retire their heart from service, and when that happens something dies.
This is precisely the tragedy of consumers who want convenience. They absolutely cannot protest a price hike at their favorite restaurant. Their only options are to find a place within their budget or to fish more money out of their wallet and pay up. And while people are extracting a bit more from those who can least afford it so that they can maintain their standing as consumers, boost their self-worth, and have a bit more for themselves, the system marches on.
When Crystal opens the narrow window and looks out, the image of a person who has opened a narrow window and is looking out appears. That image is the beautiful image of her mother, her mother’s mother, that mother’s mother, and so on through the generations, and it is the only possibility for revolution that is given to her. What we’re calling revolution is not far off. Getting up early, that can be a revolution. That’s what her discourse tutor said in order to convert Crystal to being a morning person. The tutor has a degree from a university in France and is well versed in modern Western philosophy. She completed an eighty-page thesis in French on the philosophical notion of the here and now, applying Lévi-Straussian social anthropology and Marxist-Lacanian left-wing psychoanalysis, but when it drew no interest she returned home in despair and dived into the discourse industry in P City. She feels at ease lecturing on Deleuze and Derrida to anyone from first graders to high school seniors. In her spare time she’s translating her thesis into English. She’s also considered Japanese but never Korean. She believes her thesis wouldn’t work well in Korean. She believes that every language has its own circumstances, its own volition. She’ll explain in Korean that Korean does not work well for the circumstances of her thesis. But most likely the writing in her thesis is simply a failure. A mess, a clumsy copy of French philosophers’ writing littered with hyphens, dashes, quotation marks, and commas. It’s imbued with the kind of claustrophobia and self-contradictions you find in Escher paintings, and although it’s true to her life it never achieves the aesthetic accomplishment of an Escher painting and instead comes across
as crude and convoluted.
This tutor is deeply impressed by the confidence in Crystal’s writing and the energy with which she pursues a chosen topic, and she holds out special praise for the quality of its final draft. But what exactly is this quality? It’s a package, that’s what. It’s like an elegant but strong glass container bearing a logo that makes you think it’s French, with product information in five languages and the price listed in five currencies, and inside is an equal mixture of cheap mineral oil and glycerin. An intuitive interface between writer and reader, a simple and beautiful logo, a swift and pleasing context-driven exchange—this is what people mean when they speak of the quality of her writing. Among other things, Crystal’s English Academy demands of the students this level of quality, and it’s this quality, and all that’s associated with it, that she’s most confident in. She is a perfect, refined soul, with no rough edges that need smoothing, and although she’s been feeling bored and numb for a while, so what? She is truly a soul of P City, which itself ranks high in finished quality, and so the residents of the city must welcome her presence with endless fanfare. Finally the city has borne fruit: the ideal human they’ve longed for is here! She’s a highly distilled, one hundred percent P City soul. She is the most finished of students—look left and right, front and back, and see if you can find anyone better. What if we put her in a sterilized pouch made of some newfangled material and set her afloat on the ocean? She’d probably wash up on the shores of New England and find her way to an Ivy League school, where she would toss off a greeting before launching right into a discussion of Rousseau and the advent of the individual in modern society. Decked out in a beautiful dress and displaying a sophisticated air, she’ll make grand entrances at cocktail parties. And at long last P City will have this refined soul whom it can proudly plug into a glittering uptown shop window in any city in the world, or into the background of a pop music video. She is truly a new and improved type of human. She can think in English with perfect grammar, she’s beautiful, she’s free of depression, insomnia, and allergies, she’s not trailing any shadows, and even as she leads those around her into a gray area she’ll still survive to the end with her head held high. And because of her aesthetic perfection, we can’t help but be enchanted by her beauty. We’re like backwater tourists who, yet to be broken in by capitalism, are overwhelmed by the offerings in the airport duty-free shops. She would be at home anywhere, whether the ritziest of Dubai hotels or a 150-year-old apartment in Poland, and wherever she might be she would adopt the same standard of living. But of course she’s not about to go anywhere for now. She knows, though, that if she were to go somewhere, anywhere, life is fixed in certain respects, and that the cost of living is based on a standard exchange rate—it’s all straightforward. Around her neck hangs a barcode and price chart listed in five currencies—a survival strategy. And to survive, she leads a very hectic life. She works like an ox and a horse combined, and when she’s not working she’s carnivorous, feeding off others even as they feed off her. When besieged by alcohol and greasy food, like overworked office drones blowing off steam at the end of the day, she smiles. Consuming and wasteful, crude and violent, leaving their surroundings barren and desolate—this is the life of the students in a city—a life often portrayed in documentaries as an adrenaline-fueled realm of risk and enticement, a kingdom laden with rape and bullying, booze and tobacco, violence and sex. Is it true that rape and homicide are on the rise among young people? Is life getting worse and worse for kids? Was life a bed of roses for the previous generation? No one’s talking, maybe that’s the problem? Or maybe it’s that everyone looks on the sunny side of the street and pretends the shadows don’t exist? Or maybe it’s simply that kids are watching too much porn?