by Jang Eun-jin
Stages are set up here and there on the street, where cars have been restricted, and performers in special makeup and costumes are singing and dancing on the stages. The people are huddled around below the stages, and give rounds of applause in return for the free performances. Flags of all nations are fluttering in the sky like socks hanging on a clothesline.
112. There’s a festival going on in the city. It’s the kind of a festival you can see in any city. All kinds of exhibitions, events, performances, and food get people moving busily about. The events accompanying such festivals are all about the same, too. Cities themselves are all about the same. They’re places with tall buildings, a great number of people, polluted air, and all kinds of noises that keep you from understanding what other people are saying. In these places, people run like hares, focused on just getting ahead. A slow tortoise could never win the first place in a city. A tortoise is a tortoise, and a hare is a hare. The only chance the tortoise gets to win the first place is when the hare slacks off. Like in the fable. Fables always speak the truth. It’s a shame that no hare comes to the city just to slack off.
We go over to a booth where free face painting is provided. The woman points to her cheekbones, asking the painter to write “toothpaste and soap” on them.
“Are you going to sell your books?” I ask.
“It’s a festival, after all. No taboos,” she says.
I want to get a soccer ball painted on my face, but change my mind. It’s easy to give it up because soccer balls are something a lot of people have painted, and I’ve seen a lot of people with soccer balls on their faces. I ask for the word “toothpaste” on the woman’s face, “and” on Wajo’s forehead, and “soap” on my face, in big letters.
113. Toothpaste and Soap walk side by side. Then they find a suitable spot and come to a stop. “Toothpaste” plays the harmonica, “And” stands in the middle with his tongue hanging out in the heat, and “Soap” holds up a book toward the people. People begin to gather one by one to see Toothpaste and Soap.
The catch in the speech of Soap must have lifted, for he begins to spill out words like a medicine peddler. I feel as if I’m possessed.
“Today, I ate toothpaste. Tomorrow, I’ll eat soap. Why would someone eat toothpaste and soap? Aren’t you curious? If you are, buy the book and read it. Ten bestsellers don’t compare to this one book. You’ll regret it if you don’t read it. Your loss if you don’t know about this book. This one book can turn your life around. If you’re heartbroken, love will come your way, and if you’re unhappy, happiness will come your way. This book is a cure-all. That must be a lie, you say? There’s no such book, you say? That’s why you should give it a try. You’ve got nothing to lose. If you read it and don’t like it, you can take revenge by giving it a bad review on the Internet. There’s not that many left now. Soon you won’t be able to buy it even if you want to. Oh, all right. I’ll give you a 20% discount on the remainder. Oh, and you can get an autograph, too. Toothpaste, who’s playing the harmonica, is the author. You can even take a picture with her. You never know what’s around the corner in life. You should get an autograph while you can, and keep the picture for the years to come.”
Toothpaste says to me without moving her lips, “Not bad, you should go into sales later on.”
Soap, too, replies without moving his lips, “You know that’s what I’m planning to do. Open up a toy shop.”
“No, you’d be perfect as an itinerant medicine peddler,” she says.
People open up their wallets more easily than I expected. It’s because of the festival. I feel a lot less nervous than when I was shouting on the subway. That’s because of the festival, too.
A high school girl with braids asks me to take a picture of the woman and her together with her cell phone, then asks Soap in a bubbly voice, “What kind of a relationship do you have, Toothpaste and Soap?”
“A relationship between toothpaste and soap,” replies Soap.
The girl with the braids says, “That’s a good relationship.”
114. There’s only one book left now. The woman says she wants to keep it, even though we could have sold it. She hasn’t finished her new novel yet, and probably wants to allow herself some time to finish it.
We go into a nearby restaurant to eat, with the paintings still on our faces. To my surprise, the proprietor of the restaurant, a woman, doesn’t forbid Wajo. It’s because of our face paintings. We’re wearing a sign that says we’re enjoying the festival.
Today, with the taboos lifted for a little while, is a day of festival for this city.
For the first time in a while, we eat to our hearts’ content without worries, and plunge ourselves into the festival. We watch the performances at ease, follow the parades with much lighter steps, and applaud and cheer along with the others. We eat when we get hungry, drink when we get thirsty, and stop for a rest when our legs get sore. The festival continues, even when bright lights go on in every street, and the stars and the moon rise in the sky. When the sky hides its color, the festival turns into a festival for couples. There are couples everywhere, walking arm in arm. Today, even gay couples are standing confidently at the center of attention at the carnival. They all laugh to the point of debauchery. I feel that at some point, the laughter will turn into groans. After they eat and drink to their fill, the time will come for them to make love to their fill. The night has always belonged to couples.
As I walk, it suddenly occurs to me that this may be the last festival for us. Even a festival of madness is bound to end at one point. Only loneliness and emptiness remain after a riotous festival. When it’s over, the taboos that were lifted like magic will return like magic. I can hear the hour of taboos approaching step by step from far away. A lunatic, unable to deal with the aftermath of the festival, may send down a punishment of taboos. A night of madness may drive someone to madness.
115. A festival has a way of stirring up a city and people. Couples, unable to hide their excitement, get busy looking for a motel. There’s no empty room at any motel. The lights of the motel signs begin to go out one by one, before we can get there. The couples take up the motel rooms, just as they’d taken up the night of the festival. Because they’re quick, and because we’re not excited, we can’t find even a shabby room.
The place we find after walking around and around a little alleyway is a gosiwon, with rusty water flowing down the wall. There would probably be an empty room or two here. Gosiwons today aren’t literally places for people preparing for an exam. It doesn’t matter, though, if this place is for people preparing for an exam. They probably lead shabby lives too, and all we need is an empty room.
We open the gosiwon door and enter. Fortunately, there’s a vacancy. They don’t, however, rent rooms for just one night. The dozens of rooms, crowded together as in a beehive, flanking a narrow corridor with a width of less than fifty centimeters, are all rented on a monthly basis. Can people even breathe in these rooms, crammed so close together? That’s why there are some empty rooms left, because rushed couples wouldn’t come to this place. Most of the residents here wouldn’t have the leisure of mind to take part in the city’s festival. Their most urgent priority is to lay down their bodies, crumpled and crushed up with hard work. To them, a festival means sleeping.
116. Living out on the street, you often come across people who virtually live out on the street as well. Come to think of it, I’ve met quite a number of people who lived in a gosiwon. Most of them were satisfied living in a little room in a gosiwon. It wasn’t because they had no desire, but because they had very little desire. Someone who stands out particularly in my mind is 367. 367 was someone who said he was happy that gosiwons existed. They were cheap, and most importantly, great in number, and the number was on the rise. He felt relieved, he said, because it meant that the number of places that he could go to anytime, and that would receive him, was increasing.
“Isn’t it incredible how they’ve divided up the space in a single building in
to so many rooms people can sleep in?” he said.
367 even went so far as to say that gosiwons were great buildings. He said that the truly great structures weren’t buildings such as the Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona, but little gosiwons that could accommodate over seventy people; that the truly great architects weren’t people like Antonio Gaudi, but the nameless people who designed gosiwons, because they knew about the smallest and largest spaces in which humans could live, and turned them into reality.
“Even a person with ninety-nine rooms sleeps in only one room. And even in that room, the maximum space he requires is only as big as his own body. The size of a coffin. A big room only makes you greedy. Because you keep making frantic efforts to fill it up with this and that. Death? When your room is small, you become familiar with death, and are no longer afraid of it,” he said.
367 said that the most pathetic person in the world was someone who worried that he would die without having spent all the money he had. An even more pathetic person, he said, was someone who had a lot of money but ended his own life without having spent it all.
“People are greatly mistaken. Rich people who are depressed don’t need psychiatric consultations or prescriptions. What they need is a gosiwon. Tell them to try it out for just one month. If they need something stronger, just send them to a homeless shelter. There are more such places than mental institutions,” he said.
367 was also the first person I lied to. I thought he’d curse me if I told him that I was going from motel to motel when I had a 45 pyeong house, so I told him I had no home. It was the first time, too, that I didn’t regret having lied. The address 367 gave me had the word “gosiwon” on it in quite bold letters.
117. After much convincing, we succeed in getting a room. The proprietor of the gosiwon used the word “exception” in lending us the room. We’re not sure whether the word is normally used when you’re trying to take something or get rid of something, but we walk through the narrow corridor into the room of exception, thinking it was possible thanks to the festival, which has lifted taboos.
It seems that this is the first time the woman has been to a gosiwon, too, for as soon as we enter the room, she says, “It’s small.” She probably means that it’s smaller than the motel rooms we’ve stayed in. She looks around the room, sits down on the bed that I’m not sure can even be called a bed, bounces up and down a few times and says, “It’s enough.” She probably means that the room is big enough for the three of us to sleep in. I, too, take a good look around the room, which is too small for the expression, “look around,” and drift into thought. It seems more intimate somehow, probably because it’s small. At the same time, I feel that it’s quite enough, and full. The space is big enough for you to sleep in with both your legs stretched out, to eat, to watch a movie on a laptop, to drink, to fantasize, and even to have sex. The space is also big enough, of course, to write a letter in. Perhaps it’s the kind of a space where you should write a letter.
The woman, too, must have thought that it’s the kind of a space in which you must write a novel, for she turns on her laptop. We each concentrate on our work in silence. I take out some writing paper from my backpack, put it down on my lap instead of on the floor, and start writing.
Dear Jiyun,
I wonder how much you’ve changed. Whenever I spend such a long time away from you, that’s the first thing that comes to my mind. The first thing that worries me, I should say. I worry that I may not recognize you when I return home after my journey. Whenever you made a change in your face, or lost more weight, I felt as though I’d lost another piece of my only little sister. I think everyone else in the family felt the same way. How many pieces of her are left now? I wonder. What if there’s not a single piece I remember? I grow more and more nervous.
Whenever I looked at you with worry because you were changing piece by piece, you’d ask me in a sharp voice, “Do you want to live with a pretty girl or an ugly girl? Answer that, with your hand on your heart.” I couldn’t answer. I’m a guy, after all, and it’s natural for most men in the world to want to live with a pretty girl. I thought that might be why girls, by nature, want to be pretty. I understood you in that moment. You were just an ordinary girl making a dogged effort to be true to your nature.
But Jiyun, a lot of guys don’t live to be true to their nature. In the same way, a lot of girls are not true to their nature. Your question was misguided. There are many reasons, and should be many reasons, besides looks when one person comes to love another. For those reasons, men and women live without sticking to their nature. Love that’s based on looks doesn’t last long. You know that now better than I do, don’t you?
That’s why I was opposed the first time you brought a guy home, saying you were going to marry him. I asked him, while you were helping Mother prepare dinner in the kitchen, why he loved you. The first thing he said was that it was because you were pretty. So I asked him again, if he wouldn’t have loved you if you weren’t pretty. He said, without even blinking an eye, that he probably wouldn’t have. And then he asked me why I would ask such an obvious question, when I was a guy, too. So I asked him again, if there weren’t other reasons. Because you were smart, for instance, or because you were caring, or because you were good at peeling apples, at least. I waited with great anticipation, but he didn’t say a single word. He just looked over at the kitchen, looking hungry, as if no other reason were necessary. The bastard! As a brother, I can recount many things that make you attractive. That bastard didn’t know anything about you. I wouldn’t have gotten so angry if he had said at least one thing. I wouldn’t have gotten drunk and punched him on the spot, either.
I was quite shocked at the time and told you to reconsider, but of course, you didn’t listen. You were already blinded by love. But fortunately, just as I’d hoped, the marriage didn’t happen. He was the kind of jerk who would cheat on you not with just another girl, but two, three other girls. You’re much too good for a scumbag like him. I was relieved that you seemed to have developed better judgment after that when it came to guys, but was also worried because you seemed have become even more obsessed with plastic surgery.
I suddenly remember when you were little. You thought that you were adopted because you weren’t happy with your looks. In other kids’ cases, it’s the parents who tell them that they were adopted, to punish them for being bad. You thought you were born out of wedlock, through the unfaithfulness of one of our parents, because unlike your brothers, you didn’t look like either of them. In the end, everyone in the family had to take a DNA test to free you from your delusion. In any case, you were quite unusual. You even said that you wouldn’t mind stuttering at all, if it meant that you had the kind of looks that didn’t need altering. Like the Little Mermaid, who became mute in return for a pair of straight legs. Perhaps for that reason, you were the only one who wasn’t ashamed of me. You never said I looked stupid because of my stutter, or told me to try to fix it. Because no one would know any better if I just kept my mouth shut. I think I talked the most with you, because I felt the most comfortable talking to you. I think I stuttered less in front of you, for sure.
Do you ever wonder, Jiyun, what you used to look like, or miss your old self? The first thing you did after getting a nose job, despite our efforts to stop you, was to rearrange the photo albums. With scissors in hand, you cut up all the photos with your face in them, and even burned up the photos of your hundredth day celebration and your first birthday party. You cut out your figure from family photos, using a knife, leaving no photo in the albums intact. Seeing what you’d done, Mother got upset and cried a lot, and Father drank, even though he never drank. They thought it was their fault that you’d become that way. I know, of course, that you knew how they felt, and suffered more than anyone because you knew.
We were crushed when all the photos disappeared. We could no longer see what you used to look like. There was nothing left for us to do but forget. We could only see the old you by diggi
ng through our memories, and we didn’t know when those memories would vanish. The photos of you as a baby, crinkling up your forehead, you in elementary school, looking sweet and innocent, you in middle school and high school, when you looked somewhat gloomy, and you with the family, with a smile on your face . . . All of it was gone. I think you probably miss your old self more than any of us.
If you miss and want to see your old self, just let me know. Do you remember the photo of you, taken in the front yard in your high school uniform? It was summer, and the flower garden was in full bloom. It was a Saturday afternoon when the flowers were in their glory, and I felt an urge to take a picture of something, so I steered you to the flower bed as you stepped in through the gate. You fell on your rear end because I forced you in there when you didn’t want to get a picture taken. But you got right back on your feet and shook off your skirt, and smiled an incredibly bright smile when I shouted, “One, two, three!” It was a clear, vivid smile. At that moment, you were so beautiful that you made the flowers in the background look shabby. I’m so glad I snuck that picture out of the album when you were undergoing surgery.
You probably don’t look the way you used to, the way I remember, but you’re my little sister no matter how much you change. Because you’ll always go on caring about your family, caring about me, in your beautiful heart. What matters is an unchanging heart, right?
All I have for you is that one photograph. I hope you like it.
Your brother Jihun, from Hanbit Gosiwon
p.s. This place called a gosiwon . . . It’s a place I hope you’ll visit someday.
118. The woman is lying on the bed that can hardly be called a bed, and I’m lying on the floor, with Wajo, on the floor that can hardly be called a floor. The tiny window may as well not exist, so it’s really dark when we turn off the light. It occurs to me that a gosiwon is place that makes you realize what real darkness is. It seems that the compulsion that used to come over me like a habit has lifted completely, for I don’t feel afraid at all even when I’ve learned what real darkness is. I think I can endure any darkness now, for there couldn’t be a thicker, vaster darkness anywhere.