I Hear Your Voice

by Young-Ha Kim

  “You’re pretty skilled. You have a girlfriend?”

  He began telling her about everything that had happened to him on the streets. The teenagers who beat people up; the lawless, animalistic violence and sex; the abused girl and the kids who lived off her money. She stiffened with shock at the stories he recounted so calmly, and said, “I hadn’t believed it when I saw things like that on the news.”

  Jae said sincerely, “Someone said that anything a human being can imagine eventually happens.”

  “Who said that?”

  “A scientist on television.”

  “I assumed those kinds of things could happen,” she said. “I just never imagined I would meet someone who’d been through it.”

  He said, “But you said you don’t know even if it’s growing inside you. Cancer, I mean. Kids like us, no one ever notices us either. We’re invisible men—people just pass us by. It’s probably because we make them feel disgusted and uncomfortable. If they can’t take it, they just get rid of us.”

  Jae swept back his hair. She decided that she would take him to a hairdresser the next day.

  “It’s not good to belittle yourself,” she said.

  “What does ‘belittle yourself’ mean?”

  “To put yourself down.”

  Jae smiled faintly. “I put it more mildly than what it’s really like.”

  “You’re a tough guy.”

  “I don’t know about that, but I can’t let myself be weak.”

  “My brother’s stopping by soon,” she said. “My younger brother.”

  “So someone is really coming over.”

  “We live together. He was out of town for a few days and is returning today.”

  She tucked her exposed breast back into her shirt. She felt irritable. It felt like a cold, alien object.

  “Then, I’ll leave now.”

  “Just stay.”

  “Really?”

  “You guys might even get along. Or truly clash. You can say you’ve come to take art lessons from me. Oh, and also ​—”

  “Yes?”

  “Can you stop calling me ajumma?”

  “What should I call you?”

  “Everyone calls me Teacher Jean. My last name’s Jean.”

  This is how her letter began. It kept going, with her brother coming home, Jae working part-time at her brother’s store, and so on. I’m occasionally surprised at how people are so honest with fiction writers. What was it that made them feel as if they could trust me with their stories? Did they believe that once you crossed into the territory of fiction, their entire self became relative and newly defined? Or did they want to become a part of the cloud of myths surrounding Jae? The only certain thing was that she’d focused only on Jae in her writing—and for some reason she hadn’t continued writing. Maybe her cancer spread, or maybe she’d come to think that what she knew of Jae wasn’t enough.

  Her Jae was slightly different from the one I’d imagined. The Jae that she knew and the Jae that Donggyu had known could only be different. At the time she’d written about him, Jae had left Hanna’s house and had essentially been homeless. And before Jae had shown up in front of Donggyu, chewing raw rice with the appearance of an ascetic, he had experienced a peaceful period at Teacher Jean’s house .

  I jotted down questions I wanted to ask her and e-mailed them off. Grouped together, they resembled a liturgical confession, especially the last question: “Do you believe that Jae is still alive and will return someday?”

  She never replied.

  Not long after, Mokran called me out of nowhere and told me she was soon leaving for Vancouver. I happened to be in Seoul for business. Her father wanted her to continue her studies before it was too late, and she had agreed. She asked me if I had time to briefly meet at the airport, and apologized for disappearing on me the last time without a word.

  At Incheon Airport I saw that Mokran had put on some weight and her face had filled out. It suited her. She had on sunglasses to hide her glass eye. A large man, Mokran’s father, appeared relieved that she was departing for Vancouver. In a low voice, he said, Nothing good ever happened for her here. He said he needed to exchange money and do some shopping, and then he left us alone.

  Mokran said, “You asked me where Donggyu was last time we met.”

  The Mokran I’d written about in my novel was a teenager, but the Mokran in front of me had matured into a woman, so I responded using a polite, formal tone.

  “Donggyu betrayed Jae,” she said. “That’s why he stayed behind, since he knew there was something waiting ahead.”

  “No, he wouldn’t have known about that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I met the policeman that Donggyu was working with. Donggyu only texted him about where Jae was heading.”

  “Really? Then why did you want to meet me, when you already knew the story?”

  “How did you know that Donggyu betrayed him?”

  “Donggyu told me. After what happened to Jae, he showed up and whimpered to me every day at the hospital. There I was without an eye, and I was so angry seeing him whine like that. Once I even lost my temper. I wish I hadn’t.”

  “Do you think Jae is still alive, somewhere?”

  “Jae believed he could split his consciousness and enter someone else’s—Donggyu thought that Jae was hiding somewhere inside a machine. He said Jae kept trying to speak to him. But I don’t buy it. I think Jae killed himself. I think he knew that Donggyu turned him in.”

  Mokran’s leg was shaking uncontrollably, and she kept crumpling up a napkin on the table.

  “How do you feel when you look back on your motorcycle-riding days?”

  “It was amazing, fucking amazing. But now, with only one eye, I’ve got no sense of spatial distance. When I think about how I’ll never ride again, those times seem even more amazing. I still dream about them. But for some reason Jae never shows up in those dreams. I’m always riding alone, bending down like this and staying close to the bike . . .”

  Her arms moved forward excitedly and she leaned low for me as if she were on a motorcycle. She grinned. “If I knew I was going to die tomorrow, I’d get on a bike now.”

  I checked my watch. It was getting close to her departure time, so I asked her about Jean. I summarized the contents of the e-mail she’d sent me, and asked, “Did Jae ever tell you about that period of his life?”

  Mokran thought about it for a second. “I think so. He told me about an ajumma, but her name wasn’t Jean or anything close to it. What was it . . . Anyway, I heard that after what happened to Jae, she joined an organization that counsels teen motorcycle gangs. She also knew Donggyu well.”

  The puzzle was solved. Jean was Y. I recalled her hollow cheeks as she gave Donggyu a warm hug. When I’d complained about the writing not going well, she advised me to “just listen.” Was this actually what she had been telling herself?

  I said, “I think I know her . . .”

  Mokran asked, “Is it someone you know well?”

  It wasn’t an easy question to answer. “Hmm . . . I can’t say I know her so well . . . yet it feels like I’ve gotten to know her well . . .”

  With fiction, just because you begin with the truth doesn’t mean you have the truth, and just because it’s fiction doesn’t mean it’s made up. I read only her one letter, and maybe I knew her now even less than before.

  “Why’s it so complicated?” said Mokran. “If you know her well, you know her, and if you don’t, you don’t.”

  That was when Mokran’s father showed up. He barely spoke to me—whether it was because he was always reserved or because he didn’t like me, I couldn’t tell. She grabbed her unfinished coffee and stood up. As I walked to the parking lot after we parted, I fiddled with the cell phone in my pocket. I debated whether or not to call Y, but finally I decided not to. She had said everything she needed to in her letter, and my novel was my reply.

  I got in, started the car, and returned home. As I exited
the airport expressway and entered Seoul, I began spotting motorcycles. Delivery service men in black helmets and protective gear sped ahead as soon as the lights changed. They looked like cyborgs. When I was nearly home, a pizza delivery guy suddenly zoomed out from a side street. The guy in a blue uniform met my eyes briefly with cool indifference. As soon as he realized that I’d hit the brake and was slowing down, he leaned forward and sped ahead. The white exhaust of burning engine oil blinded me for a moment, and then it dissipated. The motorcycle had vanished.

  Few people still remember that massive motorcycle rally. The motorcycle rallies have continued annually, but they never replicate the madness of that year. Instead they became duller and duller. Lieutenant Pak’s report focused on preventive measures rather than cracking down on the rallies. After implementing the changes, the police response became more efficient. They drew up a blacklist with the kids who took part in rallies. An official warning note was sent to them the night before a major rally, pressuring them to stay home, and the police texted warning messages repeatedly to kids who had a record of participating. The game changed further when the courts deemed motorcycles an accessory to crime and began confiscating them. For the teenage bikers, having their motorcycles confiscated equaled losing their entire inheritance. But most biker groups blamed the waning popularity of motorcycle rallies to Jae’s absence. The massive rally that Jae had led became legend. The nights before every Independence Movement Day and Liberation Day, rumors would circulate that Jae was still alive, and people prophesied that he would reappear the night of the motorcycle rally.

  The worst of winter is passing and the most impatient of trees have already started budding. Late at night, as the northwesterly winds rattle the windows, I sit down at my desk to write “The End” on the manuscript that I had struggled with for so long. Looking back I see how much help I had finishing it, and I want to acknowledge those people and thank them here. But if there is only one person I could thank, it would be Donggyu. Because of him, I was able to discover the infinite, invisible wilderness spinning out from beneath us. I pray he rests in peace.

  1

  WITH HIS HEAD THRUST into the swamp filled with swaying weeds, many things swarmed before Ijeong’s eyes. All were pieces of the scenery of Jemulpo that he thought he had long ago forgotten. Nothing had disappeared: the flute-playing eunuch, the fugitive priest, the spirit-possessed shaman with the turned-in teeth, the girl who smelled of roe deer blood, the poor members of the royal family, the starving discharged soldiers, even the revolutionary’s barber—they all waited for Ijeong with smiling faces in front of the Japanese-style building on the hill in Jemulpo.

  How could all these things be so vivid with closed eyes? Ijeong was mystified. He opened his eyes and everything disappeared. A booted foot pushed on the nape of his neck, shoving his head deep into the bottom of the swamp. Foul water and plankton rushed into his lungs.

  2

  FEBRUARY 1904. Japan declared war on Russia. Japanese troops landed in Korea and seized Seoul, attacking the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. In March of 1905, 250,000 Japanese troops fought at Fengtian in Manchuria, losing 70,000 men but winning the battle.

  Admiral Togo Heihachiro’s Japanese combined fleet held its breath and waited for the Baltic Fleet under Admiral Rozhestvensky, which had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and was heading for the Far East, unaware of its fate.

  In the spring of that year, people flocked to Jemulpo Harbor. The crowd included everyone from beggars to short-haired men, women in skirts and Korean jackets, and runny-nosed children. Short hair had been in fashion since ten years before, when the king, Gojong, had cut off his topknot due to pressure from the Japanese and issued the Hair Cutting Edict in 1895. In that same year, he also lost his queen to assassins sent by his father and by Japan, her body ruthlessly stabbed, then burned by Japanese thugs. In one stroke, he lost the hair that he had grown from his youth and the queen who had long been by his side; the king fled to the Russian legation and attempted to stage a comeback, but it came to nothing. A few years later, in 1897, the kingdom became an empire and the king became an emperor, but he was impotent. It was in that year that America won its war with Spain and gained the Philippines. There was no end to the ambitions of the powers that surged toward Asia. The powerless emperor was plagued by insomnia.

  But in 1905 Jemulpo was a desolate harbor. With the exception of the Japanese settlement and the Japanese consulate, which had been built magnificently in the Renaissance style, it was hard to find even a single decent building on the sloping hill. The coastal islands and inland mountains were treeless; they looked like piles of peat. There were quite a few private houses. Their thatched roofs, though, squatted round and low to the ground, so they weren’t very noticeable. The Korean burden bearers, wearing white cotton headbands, walked along in single file, barefoot children running along behind them. Near the Japanese consulate a group of Japanese women walked with mincing steps. The spring sunshine was dazzling, but the women walked with their eyes on the ground, as Japanese soldiers in black uniforms stood guard. Holding rifles with fixed bayonets, they glanced sidelong at the procession of women. The kimono parade passed in front of a European-style wooden building. On the front of the building hung a wooden sign on which were written the words “British Consulate.” A Westerner came out of the building and went down to the pier.

  The Japanese imperial fleet, which had participated in the siege of Port Arthur, could be seen heading south, flying high the flag of the rising sun. The black guns on the sides of the ships glistened with oil.

  3

  THE BOY TOOK A SPOT in the cabin in the bottom of the boat; there was room for him in a corner. He curled up as much as he could and covered himself with the clothes he had brought. Then he looked around the cabin, gloomy as a cave. Those who boarded as families gathered in circles. Men with buxom daughters were on edge, the whites of their eyes bloodshot. There seemed to be five times as many men as women. Whenever the women went anywhere, the eyes of the men followed them secretly and persistently. Four years. That’s how long they would stay together, these people. If a girl reached marrying age, might she not become a wife? This is what the single men thought. The boy didn’t think that far ahead, but he was at a hot-blooded age and sensitive to everything. For several days his dreams had been troubled. Girls would appear and set his head spinning. Dreams where a girl caressed his earlobes and disheveled his hair with her delicate hands were fine, but sometimes a girl would rush at him naked and wake him from his slumber. After nights like those, his chest pounded even when he was awake, and he had to pick his way between the sleeping people and go out onto the deck to get a breath of the dawn’s cold sea air. The SS Ilford was stuck in the harbor like an island. How far would they have to go to reach that warm country? No one knew for sure. There were those who said that, surprisingly enough, it would take a half year, and there were those who said they would arrive in ten days at most. No one aboard had ever made the journey before, so confusion was natural. Everyone swung back and forth like pendulums between vague hope and unease.

  Leaning on the side of the ship, the boy carved the three characters of “Kim I Jeong” into the oaken railing with a knife from his pocket. He had gained those three characters here in Jemulpo, right at this pier. A strapping man with a long scar on his wrist asked, “What’s your family name?” The boy hesitated. The man nodded as if he understood. “Your name?” “People just called me Jangsoe,” the boy said. The man asked him where his parents were. The boy didn’t exactly know. He didn’t know if it was the Military Mutiny of 1882 or the Donghak Rebellion, but his father had been caught up in one of them and killed, and his mother had gone off somewhere as soon as his father died. He was taken in and raised by a peddler. The only thing the peddler ever gave him was the name Jangsoe. When they stopped near Seoul, the boy ran away while the peddler slept.

  “What sort of land is Mexico?” This was at the Seoul Young Men’s Christian Association. An A
merican missionary spoke, his black beard covering his neck. “Mexico is far. Very far.” The boy narrowed his eyes. “Then where is it close to?” The missionary laughed. “It’s right below America. And it’s very hot. But why are you asking about Mexico?” The boy showed him the advertisement in the Capital Gazette. But the missionary, who did not know Chinese characters, could not read the advertisement. Instead, another young Korean explained the contents of the advertisement in English. Only then did the missionary nod. The boy asked him, “If I were your son, would you tell me to go?” The missionary did not understand right away, so the boy asked again. The missionary’s face grew grave and he slowly shook his head. “Then, if you were me, would you go?” The missionary was lost in deep thought. The boy hadn’t been long at the school, but he was bright and unusually quick to understand. He had been raised as an orphan, but had not grown timid, and he stood out from the other students with similar stories.

  The bearded missionary gave him some coffee and a muffin. The boy’s mouth began to water. The peddler who had taken him around the country had taught him: “If someone gives you something to eat, count to one hundred before eating. And if someone wants to buy something of yours, double the price that comes to mind. That way no one will look down on you.” The boy rarely had the opportunity to follow these instructions. No one gave him anything to eat, and no one wanted to buy anything he owned. The missionary opened his eyes wide. “Aren’t you hungry?” The boy’s lips moved slightly. Eighty-two, eighty-three, eighty-four. He couldn’t bear it any longer. He took the sweet-smelling raisin muffin and began to stuff it into his mouth. When he had finished the muffin and coffee, the missionary brought him to a room with a lot of books and showed him a map of the world. On it was a country that looked like a sunken, empty belly. Mexico. The missionary asked him, “Do you really want to go? You’ve only been attending school for three months . . . How about studying more before you go?” The boy shook his head. “They say that chances like this do not come often. I heard that boys with no parents are welcome.” The missionary could see that his heart was set. He gave the boy an English Bible. “Someday you will be able to read it. If you earn some money in Mexico, go to America. The Lord will guide you.” Then he hugged the boy. The boy held the missionary tightly. His beard brushed the nape of the boy’s neck.