The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (10 page)

Over spring and summer, ever since the day Ha Gye-suk’s voice turned into icy water and fell in drops down on my forehead, my body began to feel sick for no reason. At first I felt as if hot lumps of charcoal were burning inside my chest, then the lumps would shoot all the way up to the back of my tongue, come close to rolling out of my mouth, then crawl back down again. My insides were burning but my forehead was covered with sweat. One morning after a night spent fighting four or five of these attacks, I could not take it any longer and visited the hospital. The doctor hung up my chest X-ray and said there was nothing wrong. He said nothing was wrong, but as days passed, the burning
was replaced with phlegm, surging up my throat. I switched to a different doctor, who concocted a week’s supply of medication for me, but the phlegm did not go away. Taking the phlegm with me, I set out for home.

In my bag is another packet of medication to last four days, which my younger sister, also a pharmacist, put together for me. Since I had been painfully coughing up phlegm every time Younger Sister called, she asked what was wrong. When, after hesitating, I still failed to answer, she waited to close up the pharmacy at nine o’clock and then, carrying her one-year-old baby on her back, came to see me with her packet of medication and her diagnosis that my symptoms were stress-related.

“What’s eating you? You have what people in the old days called ‘heart’s anger disease.’ Let it out, only that will make you better.”

In order to avoid Ha Gye-suk’s voice, I pack my bags and leave home. I think of the farthest I can get away from home within this country. I get on the plane. But in the end, here I am, sitting here gazing at the lights from the fishing boats floating on the night sea. And I write, This book, I believe, will turn out to be not quite fact and not quite fiction, but something in between. I wonder if it can be called literature. I ponder the act of writing. What does writing mean to me?

I wonder if it could be called literature. I ponder the act of writing, what writing means to me. That is what I write. Would I be able to open, with words, that opening of my sixteenth year, that door which I have kept closed for so long? Especially here, where I have run to, away from the sentences, away from my habit of heading back home from wherever I was when a sentence came to me. Here, where all the daily routines are utterly unfamiliar, nothing like the tongue inside my mouth, here where I have never been before, here facing the crashing, splashing night sea, here where a dark hallway lies behind the door, where not even a single towel is my own.

I ceaselessly collect certain moments
with words, in an attempt to lock them up like photographs, but the more I try, the more despair I feel. Life flows outside of words. The more I write, the more pain I feel at the difficulty of concluding that literature moves toward hope and what is right. If hope would well up from inside of me, allowing me to speak of hope in a heartfelt way, it would make me happy as well. Literature, however, is destined to be rooted in the problem of life, and the problem of life has less to do with hope and what is right, but more with unhappiness and what is wrong. After all, isn’t life about living on even when one is trapped inside unhappiness without hope?

At times this recognition makes me give up my surgical knife. And in the end, I choose the many-layered web of meaning over a single point. And I tell myself that I should approach and confront that thickness; that it is not the writer’s, but the readers’ part to unravel every single layer and observe what she finds. Would it be best if what I write would lead ten readers into ten different directions of thought; that life is supposed to take varied forms and shapes; aren’t there some lives that do not allow literature to intercept them?

That day, after Ha Gye-suk said to me, “Your life seems different from ours now,” if I had told her, “The reason I had not been able to write about you is that my heart was still aching,” would that have made a good excuse? That I had not been able to write about them because just the thought would fill my chest with pain? If I had told her that I was sorry, that I was only sixteen years old then? It was not that I was ashamed of them. It was that I had not walked out of that place in a natural manner. I had run from that place, aghast at the turns of a fateful life. I had run and had never taken even a step toward that direction ever again. Without realizing what I was doing, I stepped over the other side of the stepping stone. But
I could not say I had really crossed to the other side.

Wherever I was, at whichever point in time, the loneliness lived inside of me, taking up the same amount of space as the village where I was born and grew up, but opposite in meaning. The only reason I was not able to directly address them through my writing was because it allowed not even a glimpse into the sense of happiness that I get when I think of the village where I was born. It only allowed memories of the crammed room that I had to share with Brother and Cousin, of the feeling of desolation, like being locked in the attic, or the sound of heavy footsteps that one makes when the only thing that keeps them walking is the determination to live on—and finally, there would be Hui-jae, blocking my way.

As long as Hui-jae was there, looking the way she did, I could not figure out how I could go back to that place or how I should approach these girls who had been my friends.

I was sixteen years old when I walked into that lone room and nineteen when I ran out from it.

I could not quite find a way to make peace with those four years of my life. I did not know how to accept the fetters of life that had bound me, who had walked out of nature directly to the factory without any connecting bridges in between. Nor could I accept the young women, around my age, some perhaps five or six years older than me, whom I saw there . . . and this city, where nature’s breath could no longer reach.

I remember lunch break on our first day at work. One by one, Foreman hands out meal tickets stamped with the word “Lunch.” The cafeteria is located on the roof
. Cousin and I walk side by side up the stairs. People in blue uniform shirts form a queue that starts from inside the cafeteria all the way out on the roof. A spicy aroma spills from the kitchen. After a long wait, I receive a food tray containing a lump of rice with a strange substance poured over it.

“What is this?”

“It’s curry.”

Cousin pronounces the word aloud, “curry,” and glances at me with eyes that seem to ask what the problem is. Curry? I have never heard of this food before. What kind of food looks like this? I am doubtful about its dull yellow color. I spoon up a small amount and take it to my mouth. It’s nauseating.

“I can’t eat this.” I put down my spoon.

“It can feel that way at first, but you’ll learn to like it after a few tries. Try to bear it.”

I try another taste but I feel like I might lose my breakfast. “You’ll have to finish on your own.”

Unable to sit through the meal because of the smell, I empty the tray into the food trash pail, return the tray and leave the cafeteria. I stand around on the roof for a while and come back to the assembly line. At the number one seat, I rest my head on the conveyor belt, which has come to a stop for lunch break. Then Cousin shakes my shoulder.

“Have this then.”

A pastry bun with red bean filling.

“Where did you get this?”

“Where do you think? I went outside and bought one.” Cousin opens the wrapper and puts the bun in my hand. “You sure are strange. Making a fuss about nothing at all.”

A life different from ours. A person different from me. When I heard Ha Gye-suk say the words, Your life seems different from ours now, I felt blank, thinking
of Mom. Could it be that I had been ashamed, as Ha Gye-suk asked, of my high school years or my illiterate mother? Perhaps I had known earlier that Mom could not read. I probably made no effort to really find out because I did not want to know. Saying to myself, “See, she has a sutra open in front of her,” or “She’s reading the Bible.” All the while perplexed or hiding her in the mothers that appeared in my writing.

Meanwhile, in real life, I would pour tender affection on Mother, enough to puzzle her, as a means of offering my apology. Perhaps that was what I was doing. At least with Mother, I was making an effort as I continued to open up and shut down my heart, but what about my high school years? The manner with which I handled those past years in real life was rather odd. Actually, I did not even realize I was being odd until a certain moment would approach and announce, “You are being odd.”