The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (4 page)

The only thing on Mom’s mind was that she must deliver that night these papers, which her son needed the following day. And the only thing Mom knew about Seoul was that her son worked at the Yongmun-dong Community Service Center.

Whenever she tells the story of her first visit to Seoul, Mom always says that there are plenty of good people in the world. There sitting next to me was this young man, about your brother’s age, see, so I took out the big envelope from my bag and said, the thing is, my son needs this tomorrow if he’s to start university, but I don’t know where to go. What am I to do? This young man, he got off with me at the station and although it was late at night, he took me all the way to the Yongmun-dong Community Center.

Not even the taxi driver knew the way, but the young man asked around, here and there, and got me there. The building was dark, but the young man said, “This is it,” so I banged and banged on the locked door and your brother came out, and that young man, he went to such trouble bringing me there, but turned around just like that, before I could give him a proper thank-you, and was gone.

Mom had handled her first trip to Seoul with such courage, but now, en route to take me to Brother, her eyes are filled with tears. Looking away from Mom’s teary eyes, I stare out at the dark outside the window, orange with the reflection of the
hanbok
. I stare at Cousin, sitting there like a single transplanted blossom of rose moss. Mom reaches out her arm and caresses my hair. Having already bid farewell to Aunt at the station, Cousin looks away from Mom and me.

“You want some?” Mom takes out boiled eggs from her bag. I shake my head. As she accepts the peeled egg from Mom, Cousin takes out a book from her bag and hands it over to me to take a look.

“What kind of book is it?”

“It’s a book of photographs
.”

With bits of the hard-boiled egg on her lips, Cousin speaks to me in a low voice.

“I want to be a photographer.”

A photographer? I repeat her word. It occurs to me that the photographers I’ve seen in photo studios were all men. I turn to Cousin and say that the all the photographers I’ve seen are men.

Cousin lets out a laugh and says, “Not someone who takes
those
kinds of photographs but
these
kinds of photographs,” as she turns the pages of the book she has placed on my lap, one after another. Each page Cousin turns to carries beautiful scenery. The desert, trees, the sky, the sea. When she arrives at a page, Cousin stops and whispers to me, Look at this. It is night, inside a forest, and stars have settled down atop the trees, white and twinkling.

“They’re birds.”

In awe, I push my face closer to the book on my lap. Upon a closer look, what were twinkling upon their perch atop the trees in the night forest turned out not to be stars but egrets. The egrets had taken up their narrow perch here and there on the high branches of the forest, covered in dark, shining white.

“They’re sleeping. Aren’t they beautiful?”

I nod. Under the distant night sky, the white birds slept, gentle and benign, a beautiful blanket over the forest.

“I want to take pictures of birds, not people.”

Mystified, I gaze straight into Cousin’s face. While she tells me that she wants to photograph birds, her cheeks are flushed, as if they have been smothered with the fresh fragrance from the thickets or the soil and the leaves of the forest where the egrets are sleeping.

“When I start making money, the first thing I’m going to buy is a camera.”

The night train chugs on, carrying Cousin’s dream. I am no longer listening to Cousin’s whispers. Already I am promising my heart to the sleeping egrets, so gentle and benign, a beautiful blanket over the forest in
the dark, under the distant night sky. Some day, I shall go and see for myself those white birds up on the high branches. I shall go and see for myself their beauty and gentility, as they sleep with their faces toward the stars.

I cannot forget seeing the Daewoo Building that day, in the early morning hour. The tallest thing that I had even seen since I was born. At the time, I did not know that the building had a name: Daewoo. Following Mom out to the plaza outside Seoul Station at dawn, I run to catch up with Mom, who is walking a few steps ahead of me, and attach myself to her side. As if that were not enough, I search for Mom’s hand and grasp it hard.

“What is it?”

“It scares me.”

I feel as if the Daewoo Building, standing over there like a gargantuan beast, would stomp toward us and swallow Mom and Cousin and me. Cousin, nineteen years old, appears dignified even in the face of a gargantuan beast. Seeing that I am frightened, Mom tells me it is nothing.

“It’s nothing, I tell you. Nothing but steel frames.”

Despite what Mom may have said, I, having taken my first step into the city at sixteen, glare in fear at the gargantuan and beastly Daewoo Building in the dawning light; at the iridescent lights that have already come on; at the cars speeding toward some destination at this early hour.

Oldest Brother still has no room of his own after all this time. That is why we have to come on the night train, because the only place for us to sleep in Seoul is an inn, which we cannot afford. Oldest Brother may not have a room, but he had skin so white. His nails are clean and his white shirt is radiant. Eyes, nose, and mouth, chiseled in shape, are positioned neatly on his long face of fair complexion. He works at the sanitation bureau of the Community Service Center by day and studies law at a night college, but one would never guess unless he brought it up. His appearance suggests that he knows nothing about the hardships of the world, exuding the air of a young
man who had spent his childhood in a home that is materially affluent. This young man is now treating his younger sister, his cousin, and his mother, who have arrived in Seoul on the night train, to some warm bean sprout soup across the street from the community center. His quarters are the night duty room at the center. Ever since he started working at the service center, the center’s staff no longer serves night duty. There is no need because Older Brother sleeps there every night. Soon he will take Cousin and me to the Job Training Center. Today is the first day of our training.

“It will be hard work.”

Oldest Brother speaks as if befallen by a hardship larger than the hard future that awaits us.

“But after you finish your training there and get a job at the industrial complex, you will be able to attend school. Special classes have been established for industrial workers, to take effect next year.”

What Oldest Brother adds sounds like an excuse.

“If you don’t take that route, the only schools you can attend are vocational schools, which are for new arrivals from the country. Vocational schools are not regular schools.”

The Job Training Center is located by the gates of the Guro Industrial Complex.

We leave the restaurant and take the bus to the gates of the industrial complex. On the athletic field of the Job Training Center, Cousin and I say good-bye to Mom. I remember the athletic field from that day. The color orange, this shade of orange growing distant. Mom’s huge hand holds my hand. With the other hand, the hand that is not holding mine, Mom places a 1,000-won bill on Cousin’s palm.

“When you get hungry, don’t suffer with an empty stomach—get yourselves powder milk drinks.”

Cousin’s eyes well up with tears. Heading toward the steel gates of the training center, the three of us left behind her, Mom’s steps keep turning back. Mom is an orange stain on that athletic field. The stain grows distant, then comes back,
making Cousin and me hold hands. We say we must depend on each other.

“You two are on your own now. Don’t give Oldest Brother trouble, you must depend on each other, you understand.”

The orange stain is growing distant again. One step ahead of us, my tall brother walks with his eyes on the ground. Standing among the crowd of people assembled for job training, I continue to stare at the orange stain and Oldest Brother’s back, growing smaller and smaller. I stare at Mom and Oldest Brother, growing more and more distant. They grow smaller and smaller, until they are no longer visible. I pick at the ground with the toes of my shoes, for no reason. I am sixteen years old.

This was how my life in Seoul began. But it is still a long while to go until I meet Ha Gye-suk and the others. Meeting them was not easy.

What is it that lies between me and them, those whom I have yet to meet?

It was hard, but only at first, and Ha Gye-suk and I began speaking on the phone quite often. Then one day, she said to me, “You don’t write about us.”

I felt a familiar soreness again.

“I looked up your books and read all of them, except for the first one. The neighborhood bookstores did not carry it and it’s hard for me to make time to get out to the big stores. So that’s the only one I didn’t get to . . . You seem to write quite a lot about your childhood, and also about college, and about love, but there was nothing about us.”

I am silent.

“I wondered if there’d be anything about us, you know, and I kept an eye out as I read.” I did not answer and Ha Gye-suk called out my name, her voice sinking deep and low. “Could it be you’re ashamed? About that time in your past?”

I was nervous and moved
the telephone receiver to switch ears. Ha Gye-suk mistook my nervous silence as reticence and her usual cheery, almost chatty, tone turned glum.

“Your life seems different from ours now.”

If I had answered her right there, and said, That is not so, would that have made me feel better? But I could not give her that answer. I was unable to say, No, that’s not true. I had never been proud, but I had not been ashamed, either. But I could not quite say it. Perhaps there had been moments when I did feel ashamed. But it was never a significant thought. Or it would be more accurate to say I never had the time to pay attention to these thoughts or feelings.

I did not have the luxury of perceiving my situation as difficult or painful. I could not give much thought to each passing day; I had to live from each passing day to the next. The day was always hectic, from morning to evening, leaving me no time to think about anything else but the most immediate and necessary tasks that had to be done before I had to quickly go to sleep or wake up again. It was only after I approached thirty that I got to thinking about how worn out and exhausted I must have been back then.

I was about to turn thirty and one day I felt extremely, utterly tired. I realized, right away, that my fatigue dated back to those years, that I had already turned thirty, or even thirty-two, many years ago. What made me realize this was none other than writing, which I was so in awe of.

Is that how it goes with writing? That as long as you are writing, no time is ever completely in the past? Is this the fate that befalls all writers—to flow backward, in present tense, into a time of pain, like salmon migrating upstream, swimming against the current back to where it started, struggling through waterfalls that break and tear its fins? It always returns, pushing through waterfalls, carrying a deep wound inside its belly, risking its own life. It returns, taking the same route back, tracking its own trail, traveling that singular path.

I am at the Job Training
Center. I wake up at six
A.M.
in my dormitory room. Sometimes when I awake, I still think of the pitchfork that I threw into the well. What would it look like down there, sitting still at the deep bottom? But there is no time for idle thoughts. I hear the bell summoning us to the athletic field, where we stand in line and perform the health exercise routine to a merry melody. Then we clean our designated areas, wait in line to wash up, after which we have breakfast. I have never before seen this kind of dinnerware, a single tray with slots for your rice and soup and all the side dishes.

To my sixteen-year-old eyes and my sixteen-year-old tongue, the tray feels unfamiliar and the kimchi tastes odd. I have a hard time eating at first, because of the strange-looking tray and the odd-tasting kimchi. When Cousin asks me why I am not eating, I blame the kimchi: I can taste a strange kind of fish sauce in the kimchi; Mom only uses sauce made from yellow croaker. As for the tray, I cannot find the right words for what exactly is wrong with it, so I don’t bring that up. Back in our country home, my rice and soup bowls would be sitting facedown on the kitchen shelf. Cousin buys me a pastry at the snack stall. She is nineteen years old and I am sixteen and she does her best to cajole me.