3
My father was fired from his clerical post at the Yeongsan township office during the rapid social upheavals of the 1960s. He was accused of accepting a bribe from someone who’d built an unlicensed building, though I can’t say that the bribe did very much for us. Given the state of things at the time, it couldn’t have been more than a carton of cigarettes. That was probably the best that a self-taught man who’d never been properly educated could hope for. My father made a couple of scouting trips to Daegu and Seoul, and then sold our shabby country house along with the rice paddies that we’d inherited from my mother’s family and moved our family to Seoul.
We unpacked our things in a hillside slum outside of Dongdaemun. It was a monthly rental, a tiny, two-room house built from cinderblocks. There was no yard, and the kitchen door opened directly onto the alley. The windows of both rooms also faced the alley, and the back of the house butted right up against the wall of the neighbouring house. Hanging next to the kitchen door were two keyrings, each of which held a key for the front door and a key for the outhouse. My parents, my little brother, and I had to share those two sets. We also shared the outhouse with our neighbours. To use it, you had to remember to take the keys with you. The outhouse itself faced right onto the street; the wooden plank door was so thin that you could hear people breathing as they walked by while you were doing your business. Though I was young, I still felt embarrassed whenever I ran into someone on my way to and from the bathroom. I can’t imagine how much more uncomfortable it must have been for the elders, and especially for my mother.
We had one lifeline in the city: a notary near the district office in Seoul who’d come from the same hometown as my father. He, too, had started out as a minor government employee in the countryside. My father went to work for him as his assistant. The wages my father made were just enough to put food on the table and soju in his glass.
Once we were living in the big city, my mother surprised us with her remarkable flair for making money. She started frequenting Dongdaemun Market and somehow sweet-talked her way into setting up shop right in the middle of a passageway. She peddled socks, underwear, and undershirts.
In my first year of high school, things took a turn. My father had a stroke. He eventually recovered, but his left leg was never the same. Despite that setback, we somehow managed to make ends meet.
We left the hillside slum near Dongdaemun and moved to Dalgol, or Moon Hollow, which turned out to be much worse. It was not yet a proper neighbourhood. Everyone there either had been living near Jungnang Stream and Chonggye Stream before being pushed out by developers or had spilled over from the other slum right across the street. Running water was only available at a public tap in an empty lot, and since there were many houses without indoor plumbing, shared outhouses were clustered along the main road. Our house had two rooms and a longish, skinny yard that ran the length of the narrow, wrap-around porch, and the location wasn’t bad: just over the block wall was the roof of the house down the slope from ours, the rest of the neighbourhood, and even a view of downtown in the distance. But best of all, we had our own private outhouse. We were so far uphill that we didn’t get running water until I graduated from high school. Though it was a shabby house with wooden boards instead of glass in the windows, my mother had bravely taken out a loan in order to pay the jeonse deposit, a large lump sum that we would get back at the end of our rental contract.
A market had been forming near the entrance to Moon Hollow, and my mother acquired the right to set up shop there. She knew that no one would be interested in buying underthings in a slum market and figured she’d do far better with food, so she poured her heart into the arduous task of selling fish. She started out buying seafood wholesale at the Dongdaemun Fish Market to sell in our neighbourhood. The most she could handle were a few crates of mackerel, saury, hairtail, and pollack that she would display on her tiny stand; whenever customers came, she cleaned and gutted the fish for them. While the rest of us were fast asleep, my mother would rise at dawn to fetch her wares. As the market grew, vendors chipped in funds for their own cargo truck, which meant less hardship and more goods to sell. It was around that same time that my father began working for her.
None of us thought that my father, who’d worked behind a desk all his life and was now crippled, to boot, would be of any help at my mother’s fish stand. But to our surprise, he took the fish that didn’t sell and turned it into eomuk, savoury strips of deep-fried fishcake. He used soy meal that he got from the tofu vendor across the street and added it to the ground-up fish meat, then mixed it with a little starch; the result tasted better and was more nutritious than fishcake made with flour. Pretty much every single person in Moon Hollow was a fan of our fishcake. My father researched and experimented on his own to come up with different types of delicious fishcake, and many was the day that we sold out and had to close shop early. It was a natural transition from fishmonger to fishcake vendor. That was how my parents spent the next dozen or so years, making a living at the Moon Hollow market. The rental house became our house, my parents bought themselves a proper shop, and sent me and my brother to university. They never actually made enough to buy a middle-class house, though.
But I didn’t depend entirely on my parents. After we moved to Seoul, I threw myself headlong into studying. There wasn’t much to do besides study, but also, I was determined to get out of the slum. I was admitted into a top-ranked university, where I did what a few of my other classmates were doing and worked part-time as a tutor, until I lucked into becoming a live-in tutor for a wealthy family, which enabled me to move out of my parents’ house. After completing my army service, I continued to live on my own, and later studied abroad. I didn’t live with my parents until marriage like other people did.
*
When did I first meet Jaemyung? I guess it was the summer vacation of my first year of high school, just a few months after we’d moved to Moon Hollow. From the big, three-way intersection at the entrance, where the marketplace was, the main road led uphill, right through the middle. Countless alleyways branched off it on both sides. But not all of the streets were alleys; there were also paved two-lane roads that led to four-way intersections, with public taps or toilets or small shops filling out the corners. Our house was in an alley to the right of the third intersection. Jaemyung lived at the end of a narrow alley on the other side of the intersection. Though we called his the last house, the road didn’t actually stop there but continued uphill, narrowing into a steep path topped off by a staircase hewn from stones dug from the mountain. Before getting to know Jaemyung’s family, I never had any reason to venture up his alley. Usually, after helping my parents out in the market, I would follow the main road back, past the public tap and the toilets, and turn at the corner tobacco shop into our own alley.
Whenever I trudged down to the market in the evenings, a group of four or five raggedy-looking boys would often be standing at the entrance to Jaemyung’s alley. A few of them would be smoking. Each time I passed them, I’d feel an odd tug at the back of my head and would turn to look, only to be met with one of the smoking boys saying, What’re you lookin’ at, man? But then one day, one of them snatched my school uniform hat right off.
Give it back.
Got any money?
I said give it back.
Ha! Look at the glare in his eyes!
Just then, from the dark alley came a shrill voice, yelling, Hey, give him his hat back! The owner of the voice was — to put it in the same terms those boys back then would have used — no taller than a dick. He was so short and stout that I was practically looking down at him. He grabbed my hat from the other boy and handed it to me. Let’s box sometime, he said. I took my hat and walked away without responding. The kid was none other than Jaemyung’s younger brother. His real name was Jaegeun, but since he was the youngest and the shortest, he’d ended up stuck with the nickname ‘Jjaekkan’, which meant ‘runt
’ in their southern dialect. The rest of the group all worked as shoeshine boys for Jaemyung; there were ten of them in total.
On warm summer evenings, the whole neighbourhood would pour out into the street, the grown-ups doing their own thing — men gathered in clusters to drink and play janggi, women sitting in circles with their skirts or pant legs hitched up just above their knees, cackling and gossiping — while the smaller kids raised a ruckus, playing games of tag and red light, green light. The kids like me, teenagers who were neither grown-up nor child, either ganged up and headed downhill or hiked up to the peak to get some fresh air. Our house was close to the top of the hill. All I had to do was turn right at the end of the main road and hike up the path to the top, where a few trees still remained and the grass grew thick. From above, I could see another neighbourhood on the other side of the hill, the lights in their windows glowing against the night sky. I could also see Mt Bukhan, and beyond that, the red neon glow of downtown spreading to the horizon. At the very top of our hill were a few boulders, and below those, a wide open space.
I climbed to the peak one day to find a group of kids and even a few adults cheering and hooting as they watched some sort of fight. I sat on a boulder and watched, too. I don’t know where they’d found them, but two of the guys were wearing boxing gloves and going at each other. Duck! Yeah, in, out. Extend that arm, man! Jab, jab, uppercut! That’s right! One of the guys got knocked down hard, and the referee-slash-coach called a time-out.
You. Come here.
The winner called me over. It was the same boy who’d challenged me to a fight a few days earlier.
You’re the schoolkid who just moved in up the hill from us, right? Want to spar?
I didn’t want to, but I was no coward either. I joined the group, feeling bashful, but also a little proud that he’d acknowledged my existence. I was no fighter, but after moving to the slums outside of Dongdaemun, I’d had my share of run-ins with all sorts of characters. Back then, the primary schools were overcrowded: there were over twenty different classes per grade, and the student body was divided into a morning shift and an afternoon shift. Middle school wasn’t as bad, but there were still at least a dozen classes with over seventy or eighty students in each class. When I first got there, I was bullied for being a hick, but I learned from it. I learned that if anyone messed with me, I absolutely could not back down. I had to fight every day, no matter how overpowered or outnumbered I was, until my opponents gave up. No one ever took pity on the loser. If I lost a fight, then I challenged the kid to a rematch after school the next day, and the day after that, I waited in front of his house to challenge him again, and again, until he finally begged for mercy. I could not stop until he apologised or begged me to stop. There was no point in running home to Mummy and Daddy; neither of them gave a shit if my lip was busted or nose broken. Besides, I had to look out for my younger brother; I couldn’t expect anyone to look out for me. That was why I did not back down from Jjaekkan’s challenge. I knew all too well how hellish my life in that neighbourhood would be if I did.
While Jjaekkan, who’d already gotten the taste of one victory, danced around, tapping his gloves together, I held my hands out politely so the referee could put the other pair of gloves on me. I stood there awkwardly, wearing boxing gloves for the first time in my life. The referee gave us a pat on the back and said, Go! Instantly, I saw stars. I learned later that it was called a straight jab. Luckily, I’d boxed just enough to know to put my head down, my fists up, and to start moving. I threw a punch, and Jjaekkan dodged it easily and returned it with a jab. I took several more hits. If you get mad, you lose, I muttered to myself, and grit my teeth. Then Jjaekkan socked me right in the face, and I staggered, my nose streaming with blood. I crouched, came in close, and swung my fist up hard in an uppercut. My glove hit something solid and heavy. Jjaekkan fell on his ass. He sprang back up, danced around, and came towards me again.
Hey, that’s enough.
The referee separated us. My nose was still bleeding, staining the front of my undershirt. That’s a lot of blood, the ref muttered, and wiped my face with the towel slung over his shoulder. I caught a strong whiff of sweat.
It’s only round one. Why’d you stop us? Jjaekkan panted.
It’s a draw! You fell on your arse, and he’s bleeding.
Jjaekkan must have figured that my busted nose meant he’d saved enough face, because he stopped arguing and took off his gloves.
Tell your parents you got that while exercising, the referee said. I’m guessing this wasn’t your first match?
I told him it was.
That’s one hell of an uppercut for your first match. You’ve got talent. What’s your name?
Park Minwoo.
I’m Jaemyung. You can call me Hyung. Hey, Jaegeun, this guy’s name is Minwoo. Shake.
We awkwardly shook hands.
I was impressed by Jaemyung’s handling of the situation. He smoothly accepted me as one of the neighbourhood boys without hurting anyone’s pride.
I ended up being really tight with Jaemyung and his brothers, up until my second year in high school. Jaemyung was twenty, and the middle son. The oldest was Jaesup, who must’ve been around twenty-two at the time. Every few months, Jaesup would return home and stay for a few weeks before disappearing again. Jjaekkan, who was one year older than me, was the third son. He was the youngest of the boys, but the true youngest of the family was Myosoon, the only girl. She was two or three years younger than me.
They had no father. Jaemyung was effectively the man of the house. His mother and Myosoon took care of the housekeeping, while Jaemyung earned a living by managing shoeshine stands in front of Hyundae Theatre, Manseok Grill House, and Hometown Coffeeshop. All of the brothers had dropped out after a few years of primary school. Jjaekkan proudly referred to himself and his brothers as Third Grade, Fourth Grade, and Fifth Grade. When I asked which of them had made it all the way to the fifth grade, I was not surprised to learn it was clever Jaemyung. They added that their father, who’d been a farmer, had passed away immediately after moving the family up from Jeolla Province, but even if he had lived, he still wouldn’t have had the means to keep all of the boys in school.
During that summer vacation, I spent two or three evenings every week at the top of the hill. I was determined to learn how to box from Jaemyung. He taught me proper footwork, to stand with one foot forward and shift my weight back and forth, to generate power from my legs, to keep my head down and use my fists and elbows to protect my face, my sides, my stomach, while throwing punches, uppercuts, hooks, and jabs. Though we had no gym equipped with sandbags, I practiced my breathing and strengthened my body and agility by doing things like jumping rope and running in place.
After dropping out of primary school, Jaemyung had gone to work for someone else’s shoeshine stand on Jongno Street downtown, working his way up through the various ranks, from jjiksae, the lowest-ranked boys who fetched shoes from customers, to ddaksae, the ones who cleaned the shoes, and finally gwangsae, the ones who actually shined them. He started boxing as a way to defend himself. He figured out early on that real fights were different from sparring in class, so he worked on perfecting a repertoire of techniques, taking hapkido for half a year, judo for three or four months, and boxing for a year. He learned how to instantly recognise an opponent’s individual fighting style. He said that he was invincible even against martial artists with advanced belts who’d been through scores of matches. The owner of the boxing gym recognised Jaemyung’s skills in the ring and put him through intense training to try to debut him as a professional boxer.
Why’d you quit? I asked.
Jaemyung chuckled and said, That’s when Supsup was thrown in the clink. Someone had to put food on the table.
‘Supsup’ was their nickname for their oldest brother Jaesup. That was how I learned that Jaesup was an ex-con. He’d been put away for stealing. Every f
ew months he would show up at home, stash stolen record players or television sets in the cramped room where the boys slept, and make a nuisance of himself before selling off the goods and disappearing again. Jaemyung said that Jaesup had recently joined a company, since being a company man was safer and paid better. I asked what kind of company would take someone with no schooling, but Jaemyung explained that ‘company’ was what they called a team of pickpockets.
Relax your shoulders, and your arms, too. When you move in — bam! bam! — that’s when you clench. Got it? My coach used to use this one word all the time, like the something-ship, maybe agro-ship, agro-ship. You’re studying English, so you know it.
I had no idea what he was saying at first, but after racking my brain to think of an English word that sounded similar, I realised the word was ‘aggressive’.
The first time I went with Jjaekkan to his house, I was surprised. It was just like all the other houses in the neighbourhood, with walls made from cinderblocks patched over with cement, and it had no yard or toilet and butted right up against the street, but it was big, twice the size of my family’s house. They’d knocked out a wall between two small houses that had been built against each other and turned it into one decently sized house. There was one large room, two smaller rooms, and even a spacious breezeway in the middle. The dozen or so shoeshine boys all slept in the big room, Myosoon and their mother slept in the room next to the kitchen, and Jaemyung and Jjaekkan slept in the other small room. The back of the breezeway faced the hillside, which had been reinforced for the house uphill from theirs, the eaves of which hung low and kept their home in shadow. But they had a large clay jar that the children took turns refilling with water from the public tap and used to wash their faces and keep their hands and feet clean.
At dinner time, they placed a long table fashioned from wooden planks in the breezeway; as soon as Jaemyung sat, the rest of the children filled both sides of the table. I sat across from Jaemyung, and Jjaekkan sat beside him. Their mother ladled up bowls of sujebi that she’d cooked in a large pot, while Myosoon carried the bowls from the kitchen to the table. Once Myosoon and their mother were seated at the end of the table, dinner began. Instead of the usual firm dough torn by hand, their sujebi was made with a runny dough that was scraped with a pair of chopsticks into a pot of boiling water; as you ate it, the dough flakes quickly turned soggy and loose until you were basically eating flour porridge. The flour must have been of poor quality to begin with, as it was yellowish in colour, and the broth wasn’t made from beef or anchovy stock but was just plain water with a little soy sauce and sliced squash. It barely qualified as sujebi. To my surprise, a single bowl of white rice was placed in front of Jaemyung. His mother, Myosoon, and Jjaekkan all got sujebi, but he was served a proper meal of rice and kimchi. Of course, the kimchi wasn’t the properly fermented kind, but rather a handful of outer cabbage leaves salted and sprinkled with a bit of ground red pepper. Jaemyung lifted his spoon and hesitated, then offered me his rice.
At Dusk Page 4
