Beauty Looks Down on Me

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Beauty Looks Down on Me Page 10

by Heekyung Eun


  Title: My Friend M is Type 9

  Do you hate traveling? Then you’re just like my friend M. He thinks travelling is the most troublesome thing in the world. I’ve often heard that people go on trips in search of freedom, but I think that’s wrong. That’s because in foreign places, there is restraint and tension with everything. You have to wander around like a caveman in search of a place to eat and sleep, and you should do a lot of tiring preparation to avoid getting lost. Above all, you have to plan out a daily schedule to fit inside a fixed framework, and M would prefer not to do this. He’s afraid of adventure, has a strong aversion to strangers, and, as the “Master of Deliberation,” he even has a hard time choosing from the menu in a bar. Maybe he’s led his whole life without trying anything new. Aha! That’s right, a typical Type 9! Like all those who aren’t good at taking care of themselves, M is an expert at rationalization. If, as he insists, we are forced to experience the extraordinary and intense when we’re abroad, it’s to some extent part of the basic package of life, in which we’re pulled this way and that every day. So there’s definitely no need for us to volunteer for adventure. And meeting new people? Since there are only a few types of people anyway, isn’t meeting new people nothing more than increasing the number of samples in the collection? M knows a lot of people, but because they’re mostly neither close friends nor mere acquaintances, he’s the type who shares his time halfheartedly.

  The pictures he takes while wandering around, diligently charging his camera or changing the film in it, taking no time to sit and rest; and once he’s soaked in a little of the atmosphere of his travel destination, the crude souvenirs he buys, his huge, wheeled suitcase bulging with them: M sees the belief that such things will last for a long time as nothing but an illusion. I’ve never seen him too concerned about pictures or souvenirs upon returning from a trip. He thinks that, despite the experiences one has while travelling, human life is actually conducted in a place called “routine,” which falls into the category of the civilized present. He’s thoroughly modern, an urbanite, quite a radical even among those people who prefer to stay in their comfort zones, the self-appointed “cocoon” people, don’t you think? Do you know what he says about those who wander through places like India or Africa in search of primitive beauty or some lost source of existence? First, why would they go to the trouble of trying to discover something most people aren’t even curious about? Second, I wonder why they go to all that trouble when they’re probably not much different than me, one who reads extensively about the world at home through the Internet, not moving a single step. Whenever M is flipping through the channels on television and finds a program about, say, polar exploration, like the one titled “Challenging Human Limitations,” a look of deep emotion momentarily appears on his face. It’s relief at the good fortune that it’s not him on the screen enduring such hardship.

  Can you guess what kind of guy he is? He refuses to go hiking. He prefers to run on a treadmill at a health club. When a trip to a vacation spot is unavoidable, he never sets foot outside the comfortably-equipped condominium he’s rented, so naturally he’s never even considered going camping. His idea of travelling is taking a walk through the streets of Soho in New York or having a delicious caffè latte at an open-air café. So you think he has no interest at all in nature? He can’t tell the difference between forsythias and azaleas, yet he’s well aware that Sansevieria, which purifies the air indoors, also has a component that helps you recover from fatigue. More aspects of nature he enjoys are: healthy organic vegetables; a vast, well-tended field of grass, wet from a sprinkler; and a dazzling white ski slope spread out behind a ski house. While wondering if all of nature is no more than fantasy to city dwellers, M maintains that he’s not unusual at all.

  That’s right. M is afraid of strangers and things that are different. He gets anxious if he’s separated from the majority. For to become isolated, or in other words, to become an individual who asserts oneself in opposition to others, is what a Type 9 fears the most. Therefore, for fear of being unsightly, he prefers not to stand out, but tries to adapt himself well enough to every situation.

  If you think M is a positive person because he doesn’t seem to demand too much out of life, you totally misunderstand him. This type gets rid of his anxiety by plunging himself into pressing work, or latching on to unimportant things in order to avoid the burden of handling a big project. He’s drawn by small returns in compensation for his inability to pursue what he really wants. Though he appears to go along with what others say, he’s stubborn and defiant on the inside. He doesn’t want his good mood to be disturbed by others, so he resists them by being quiet and unresponsive. Oh, and another thing. He’s on intimate terms with alcohol, a characteristic common to those who want to escape life’s problems. Hey, M, you’re drinking right now, aren’t you?

  As you’ve probably guessed, M doesn’t have many friends. But fortunately his close friends are all pretty decent guys, including me. We’re knowledgeable, talkative and sharp, with excellent senses of humor. Beyond our fields of specialty, we have expertise in at least one or two other areas. One friend, a reporter for an Internet newspaper, is a music and audio enthusiast; another, who works at a government corporation, something related to culture, is so immersed in weapons and mythology that he runs three Internet websites about them. Yet another is a low-paid instructor at a cram school in the suburbs, like M, but there’s nothing he doesn’t know about luxury goods, wine, and movies. He’s invariably the one who first attracts women when we go out drinking; but once that stage has been passed, the women will listen to all of us, even if we talk about things like classical music or Northern mythology.

  Even M, who always sits quietly in the corner, isn’t terribly unpopular with women. They talk about him, saying that he looks pure, or youthful; there was even one who, upon learning that he was a Korean teacher, said that he looked like a poet. M, thinking it not too intolerable to continue playing that role, fostered it and smiled gently at her. Some people say M is modest because he’s always hiding behind his friends, but those people don’t really know him. With a few effortless words, he can build up his friends and at the same time elevate himself along with them, which is a very clever way of disguising himself in humility. Perhaps he’s rejoicing inside, having discovered a way to become accepted into the same category as his friends without doing all the work needed to become a person who attracts attention: by simply being around them, without having to go through the tiring task of maintaining an image. Because he tends to depend on his friends, it’s a big mistake to expect anything like loyalty from him. He always asks them for advice and acts accordingly, which is a way to avoid responsibility.

  M is the kind of person who can’t live apart from his friends and the city. He’s completely satisfied, even moved, when he has a chance to sit around with a few old friends, tipping back glasses of draft beer on a summer evening at an outdoor table in some corner of the city. Believe it or not, I’ve even seen tears well up in his eyes at such times. I mean, he gets this look on his face like he realizes that he isn’t living his life in vain after all. He simply can’t leave this place, not even to go on a trip.

  Besides, M’s constitution is so delicate that he gets diarrhea if there’s even a change in his drinking water. There’s a phrase long used among our friends, “the truth of the class trip photo,” and even I was impressed by the image of M in each of our class pictures, his eyes slightly downcast, his uniquely milky-white face full of anguish. Do you know what M feared most about doing his military service? Not double-time marching. Not disciplinary punishment. Outhouses. And to show how obnoxious he is, he claimed it wasn’t because of a poor digestive system, but because he was of noble birth. He’s still renowned for not going to bathroom very often, and it has nothing to do with his perseverance, his stamina, or the volume and elasticity of his bladder. He’s just picky about bathrooms. Just imagine if he went to some snow-covered pine forest in North America, like
in the Rocky Mountains. He’d be thrown for a loss, unable to find a flushing toilet equipped with a bidet, having to drop his pants somewhere deep in the forest, only to end up face to face with one of the grizzly bears those parts are famous for. As a civilized being, as one who maintains the supremacy of his arrogant species, M has never thought of himself as an animal and wouldn’t even think of trying to communicate with one. His knowledge of bears is slim: he knows about Ungnyeo, the bear-mother of Korea; he knows the value of a bear’s gall bladder; and he’s heard the old story about two friends who survive an encounter with a bear while walking in the mountains: one climbs up a tree while the other plays dead; lucky to be alive, holding each other and jumping for joy, they realize the preciousness of their friendship. Poor M! It’s a good thing that it’s too cold for snakes to live in the Rocky Mountains, with the endless line of peaks rising three or four thousand meters above sea level. I heard they’re all covered with glaciers, so what if he slips and falls into a crevice and is frozen for all eternity? Ah, but this is all pointless conjecture. M never travels anywhere.

  As you’ll see in my introductory profile, I’m the complete opposite of M: I like travelling, uncommon experiences, and meeting new people. I’m a Type 7, someone whose head is full of farfetched and funny ideas, someone who always need excitement. I do have my faults: I’m a little scatterbrained, I spend a lot of money, and I grow tired of things easily. I simply can’t stand being bored. To those who think they’re Type 7’s like me or Type 9’s like my friend M, please leave a comment.

  While I was reading the post, the spirited beat of a Psy song was flowing out of the computer’s built-in speakers. B had even put some cynical rap music on to “set the mood” for my upcoming trip. As he said, I’ve never even taken a bus past the entrance to Gugi Tunnel, let alone Bukhan Mountain, but I will be weaving my way through the Rocky Mountains next week. For ten days, I’ll have to sleep curled up in a tent, cook my meals in a campsite, drive a minimum of four or five hours a day and spend even more time hiking in the mountains, and all while traveling with a complete stranger. I wasn’t upset about B’s post, of course, which expressed in B’s own way his worries and encouragement. Though his amusing irony failed to lessen my burden and fear of taking a trip, it at least enabled me to anticipate the particular happiness of seeing him again when I return. Coming back—that’s the only pleasure I expect from this trip.

  2

  THE TIME FLEW by until two days before my departure. The most difficult thing was getting permission from my boss. Since the official vacation was only three days long, no boss would want to give a whole two weeks off to a young, inexperienced teacher. Mine, a real go-getter, established his own institute after he’d mastered the structure and system while working in the administration department of a large institute with three branches specializing in university entrance exam preparation. His had a different atmosphere than those small-scale operations run by ex-instructors who call all their friends to come and teach, creating a family-like environment. He had excessively strong convictions, and his stubborn defense of his convictions made him very authoritarian. It was customary for him to suddenly fling open the back door of a class in progress and roughly rouse the sleeping students, shouting, “Did you come here to sleep? Sleep in regular school, not here!” The base pay for teachers was only a standard amount, but the actual salaries were completely different, depending on the number of students each teacher had in his or her charge. There were some who couldn’t put up with such working conditions and either quit or got fired after arguing with the boss.

  It’s not in my nature to take risks. “We must simply accept what happens in life because there’s really not much we can do about it.” According to B, this is the attitude a Type 9 takes through life. Of course, I don’t approve of the education system or the system of private institutes, and I’m occasionally filled with rage and even sadness, but it’s still my duty to do my best to raise my students’ grades, even by one point. In modern life, complex as it is, an individual performs only a very minor function. There are others who take care of the philosophical or conscientious tasks, like worrying about the future of the human race.

  A girl I was teaching ran away from home at the beginning of the school semester. I was apparently the only one she left a message for. I contacted her mother, and when she came to see me I showed her the message on my cell phone. Teacher, I’m pregnant. But there’s no one I can talk to. I don’t know where to go. When she saw the message, the girl’s mother gave me a fierce look, but the only time I’d ever talked to her daughter outside of class was at a ddeokbokki party, and that was in the break room with several other students around. Nevertheless, the persistent and imposing mother questioned me as if I were on trial. She was bent on making me the bad guy, as if in doing so she thought she could clear herself of all responsibility for her daughter’s departure. Neither the girl’s feelings of loneliness and isolation in the face of an unfortunate situation from which she couldn’t through her own strength find a way out, nor the fact that she could lay bare her private life to a novice institute instructor with whom she wasn’t very close, in spite of her shame, seemed to bother the mother at all.

  Anyway, the girl returned home safely and, because her secret was well kept, started attending classes again. Since then, perhaps characteristic of the loyalty of her age, she has consistently registered for my classes, but her grades have not been getting any better. It was later revealed that my boss had received a substantial monetary expression of the mother’s gratitude. I didn’t even get a word of thanks from her. To show herself as cultured and educated, she ought to have expressed her gratitude to me, but she probably didn’t want to bow her head to someone who knew about her disgrace. According to B, it’s not easy to find one’s way in the world because the role of schools and private institutes has changed; the coordinates have been shaken so that a mother’s job has fallen to a bachelor institute instructor who isn’t even a proper schoolteacher.

  Two fellow instructors I sometimes go drinking with late at night offered to cover the classes I’d miss over the next few days. But when I think about the classes I’ll have to teach in compensation when I get back this summer, a summer which is supposed to be the hottest in a hundred years, I anticipate a living hell. My boss put off giving me a clear answer to my request for time off and kept me anxiously waiting right up until the very last moment I had to pay for my airplane tickets. I think he believes it’s his own unique way of controlling his employees.

  When my boss finally gave me permission to leave, my mind went momentarily blank with bewilderment and I felt a tightness in my chest. I felt like a child running at full speed up to the teacher to be flogged. Why did I try so hard to get a vacation I didn’t even really want? I mean, even I know that if I said I couldn’t get any time off, then Y would no longer be able to persuade me to take a trip, no matter how strongly he pushed. A lost child will take a stranger’s hand when offered and desperately follow the stranger, even while crying in fear. Once again, the “adaptable person” in B’s assortment of types occurred to me. No one could help but be bitter upon realizing that he’s lived his life cast in a particular type. You see, even though B has claimed ninety percent accuracy with his system, there are many different standards of classification, such as blood type, birthstones, birth trees, the Chinese and Western zodiacs, and so on.

  When I received a call from Y, I couldn’t speak convincingly about what was on my mind. In other words, because I’m a person whose head and emotional circuitry are mixed up, I faced the moment I had to give him an answer still not knowing what I was trying to say. On the other hand, Y’s voice was, as usual, full of hard-to-believe friendliness and conviction. He said that adapting to a strange place was difficult for him at first, but once settled into his new surroundings, he found that he missed his friends most of all, and I must admit that I was full of doubt when I heard this. But any resistance I had to being drawn in by him wa
s broken down relatively easily.

  “I was wondering if you’d like to travel with me,” he began. “I mean, I would if I were you. Our married friends have their own families to support and are tied down by their jobs. All you have to do is show up. Hey, we should just do it. If you keep weighing your options, we’ll never get together.”

  As I listened to Y, I couldn’t help thinking about the moment we bid him farewell at the airport the year before last when he chose to emigrate after closing his failing business. All of us friends who’d come to see him off held his hand tightly and told him repeatedly to get in touch whenever he got settled and we’d definitely drop everything and rush to go and visit him.

  “Hey, new hiking boots are uncomfortable, so put them on and go hiking in the mountains in Korea a few times before you come. And you’ll really be glad you came when you compare our mountains to the ones over here. Not many people get a chance like this. Oh, by the way, do you know P, one of our seniors? He was two years above us at university, belonged to Mensa, exceptionally smart but a little ill-tempered. He’d suddenly stand up in the library and start yelling, even breaking a few desks there. Didn’t you hear about him? I actually ran into him over here. I invited him to come with us because he’s travelled a lot and would be helpful. I think you’d get along with him because you’re pretty easygoing, but if you think you’d be uncomfortable, tell me. I can still tell him not to come.”

  “You don’t need to do that,” I barely managed to respond. “You said he’s our senior, right?”

  “Ah, you haven’t changed a bit.” Before he hung up, Y said in a voice filled with pride, “I didn’t know you wanted to travel this badly.” As I listened inattentively to him, I was thinking about the call I’d make to him in few days with an excuse, that I’d broken my leg or that my mother was in the hospital, when I suddenly saw his big, bright eyes very clearly moving closer to me.

 

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