At Dusk

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  Are these all yours, Minwoo? You must read a lot.

  My mum likes books … Luckily, I take after her.

  He turned on the vacuum cleaner, and I helped out by giving the kitchen sink and bathroom a quick scrub. His mum didn’t get home until after 11 p.m. I found out later that she worked at a big retail store in downtown Bucheon. She was pretty and girlish; I would not have guessed that she was in her early sixties. Her roundish figure was the only thing that really gave away her age. She seemed happy that I was visiting, and immediately went back out to buy beer and snacks from the nearest convenience store, then set to work peeling fruit. The three of us sat around an old-fashioned, aluminium tray table.

  Her room flooded, Minwoo said, asking permission for me to stay. It’ll only be a few days.

  His mother readily agreed.

  You and I hardly see each other anymore these days, she said. It’ll be nice to have someone in the house.

  She did not pry as to where I worked, where my family lived, or what our relationship was. The only thing she did ask was how old I was. When I told her I was twenty-eight, she said it was a good age to be. She said that twenty-eight means you’re old enough to be mature and know something of how tough life can be, while still being young and full of energy.

  Not her, Minwoo interjected. She knows nothing about life. She quit her job to go into theatre.

  His mother studied my face and nodded.

  That’s a brave choice. So you’re getting by while doing plays?

  Minwoo glanced up at the clock and stood.

  I better get going, he said.

  Already? You’re never here, and already you’re leaving? We have a guest.

  I have a job that starts early tomorrow. Woohee will be here the whole time. That’s okay, right?

  Of course.

  After he left to return to his goshiwon in the city, his mother and I finished the last of the beer and stayed up talking until after midnight.

  When she asked me out of the blue, Aren’t you ever getting married?, I took it in stride. Lately, all of the older people in my life had been asking me that same thing. I just chuckled.

  My generation has given up on that, I said.

  All you have to do is love someone, she said. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor. Everyone acts like everything is fine, but on the inside, we’re all lonely. It’s always the same for people like us. Nothing gets any better, and nothing ever changes.

  But you don’t seem like someone who has suffered, I said. You look young and pretty, like a wealthy lady.

  She laughed hard at that.

  Thanks for saying that, she said. I did get a lot of compliments when I was your age.

  I stayed for four days. Meanwhile, Minwoo called up a friend of his and fixed the drain in my apartment and even redid the wallpaper in my room. Though his mum wasn’t much of a talker, she was always cheerful and friendly. When I told her I wrote plays, she seemed to open up to me more, because she started telling me all kinds of stories. She told me that she’d once got an essay published in her high school magazine, and that Minwoo’s father was a bookworm as well. He’d died young, after being injured in an accident. They’d had Minwoo at a relatively old age for the time. She’d had a daughter before she met Minwoo’s father, but she’d lost that child to measles. She told me the area used to be all peach orchards, and that in the spring, when the peach blossoms were in full bloom, there were more honeybees than flies.

  The day I was getting ready to leave, she suddenly said, I wish you lived here with me.

  Thank you, I said. I’ll come over often.

  *

  One day, Minwoo asked me, Why theatre?

  It took me a while to answer. I wasn’t used to being asked that so bluntly and was caught off guard.

  Well, I guess, because it’s what I like to do …

  You want to do theatre, but it doesn’t pay the bills, which is why you work so hard at your part-time job. I get that. But then, what am I working for?

  Isn’t it the same for both of us? We both have things we’d rather do, but none of it adds up to a livelihood?

  Minwoo spoke slowly, stumbling over his words as he often did.

  No, we’re not the same. I’m not like you. I don’t have ambitions. I think I’m just doing one thing after another, at random, trying to convince myself that there really are people like me in this world. Everyone else lives for today while gauging what will happen tomorrow, but I’ve spent nearly a decade constantly on the move, my feet barely touching the ground. Each year, I signed another contract, worrying about what would happen if I didn’t, while all around me, the guys I worked with kept disappearing. And eventually, I was laid off, too.

  He talked about how male bees, or drones, get kicked out of the hive in autumn. He said you could find them clinging to walls or trees in the chilly mornings, as still as if they were dead, but at midday, when the autumn sunlight finally warmed up, they would stagger off to fly among the wilted chrysanthemums. They were expelled from the hive by worker bees to avoid wasting food on them, and the no longer useful drones, with nowhere to go, would wander for a day or two before dropping dead on the frost-covered ground. Then he talked about a Western he’d watched. Settlers raced on horseback toward the horizon and stuck flags into the earth to claim acres and acres of land. Could you imagine, he said, what would happen if all of Korea did that? If everyone gathered on Jeju Island or along the southern coast and raced each other to claim their homes, individual flags raised high? He said he would probably do no better than to race like mad for his mother’s apartment and lie in the tiny room shared by mother and son, exhaling in relief.

  Minwoo’s last assignment before he was fired from the construction company was to assist a section chief at a demolition site. Everyone there, from the other contract workers like him, to the regular employees, to the hired muscle sent from an eviction service company, knew how the project had come to be. The construction company had its fingers in everything — the consulting office, the city planning committee, the municipal council, the district office, and more — and had nominated the head of the development committee and its members in order to push the project through at lightning speed. The slum residents were forced to leave because they couldn’t afford the new apartments that were being built. Some had already been pushed out of several other neighbourhoods that had gentrified, and they had nowhere left to go. Most said they’d lived in ten different places before barely managing to set down roots there. They made clumsy protest banners and stood in rows — women, children, and the elderly — to shout at the eviction company’s hired muscle, but gave up after only a few minutes in the face of those terrifying men charging at them with hammers, metal pipes, and bulldozers.

  In the past, when slum neighbourhoods were rebuilt, construction company employees would go door to door to offer some form of appeasement and get their signatures, but nowadays the process went no further than a reconstruction committee’s approval. The construction companies warned their workers to refrain from violence and avoid any physical contact in order to limit bloodshed, but later, that too ended up as little more than a formality, a way to assign blame. Burly men yanked and shoved, cursed and ridiculed, tore women’s clothes, slapped people’s faces, and knocked them down. Perfectly good buildings were ruthlessly demolished, the excavators letting out their terrible roars, while helpless shouts and cries rang out from among the protesters. The families would hold out for three or four days, but as the streets filled with wreckage and rubble, they would start to leave, one or two at a time, and the community would fall apart, as splintered and fragmented as their demolished homes.

  While the demolition was taking place, Minwoo moved into one of the abandoned houses with the men from the eviction service company so they could keep an eye on the site. After the neighbourhood was reduced to rubble and looked
as if a bomb had been dropped squarely on it, a line of dump trucks came in to clear away the wreckage, and the once sprawling neighbourhood returned to its original form as a small, shabby, fallow plot amid the towering buildings of the city. During his month on-site, Minwoo naturally became friends with the men he bunked with. He grew especially close with one guy in particular, the leader of the eviction crew, a scrappy type who spat out a curse between every other word. Minwoo’s friend had a rap sheet for assault. The eviction service company provided both demolition experts and so-called security guards, the latter of which were known for being well-built and good fighters. They were routinely deployed not only to demolition sites but also to labour strikes. One day, while the two of them were drinking, Minwoo’s friend asked him to guess what his dream in life was.

  Minwoo said, You’re telling me you still have a dream? Now that’s something.

  I had this cellmate in prison. He was kind of a pretty boy, like a gigolo? I thought maybe he’d sung or played guitar at a hostess bar or some place like that. He was always drawing something after lights out. I grabbed it from him once to see what it was. It looked like a blueprint. He said it was the racetrack in Gwacheon.

  Your cellmate’s dream was to strike it rich at the tracks?

  You could say that. He was planning to rob it.

  After he got out, he never saw the musician again. But he couldn’t forget the guy’s plan and went down to the racetrack to have a look around. There were a dozen ticket booths, each of which collected tens of billions of won every weekend. Each booth was staffed by a female ticket taker and a security guard, and the door was equipped with an electronic lock. The code to the lock was changed every time someone entered and would automatically shut down in an emergency. It’d be an easy job if you could get one of the ticket takers in on it, he said. He added that you would need at least four accomplices.

  Sounds to me like you’ve watched too many movies, Minwoo said.

  The guy said nothing in response, but showed him several mobile phone photos he’d taken of the racetrack. Minwoo bunked with the guy and his big dream for a month.

  One day, the excavator operator alerted Minwoo to a problem. One of the families was still holding out in a house at the very top of the hill, making it difficult to clear the area around it. Minwoo took some of the eviction crew with him and ran up the hill. The excavator had already taken down the courtyard wall and was stopped in the yard with the engine running. An elderly man was lying on the ground in front of the excavator, and a middle-aged man who looked like his son was holding a two-by-four. Two women and three children stood nearby. One of the children, a tall, skinny boy who looked like he was in his teens, shouted something and kept twisting his body this way and that. The crew leader gave his usual instructions.

  What’re you standing around for? There are only four adults. Pull them out of there!

  The goon squad were used to this sort of thing and went in slowly. They were in no rush. They reasoned with the family, each of them saying things like, Just calm down, and, You wouldn’t want to get hurt now, and, There’s no point in fighting anymore, it’s all over. They dragged the adults away one at a time. The women and the elderly man were dragged out kicking and screaming, but the middle-aged man, who appeared to be the head of the family, swung the two-by-four and refused to leave. The crew leader who’d bunked with Minwoo caught the two-by-four with his hand, twisted it out of the man’s grasp, and tossed it away. The children cried as they followed the adults out, but the skinny teenager let out an awful shriek and ran towards the excavator that was just that moment swinging around like a giant hand. Before anyone could shout a warning or stop him, the boy ran head-first into the metal arm of the machine as it turned. The boy’s frail body flew into the air, as limp as wet laundry on a line, then slammed down onto the ground. Too late, the engine shut off, and the operator stepped down. He took one look at the bloodied boy lying on the crushed cement and yelled into the faces of the crew.

  You all saw that, right?! He ran straight into me!

  One of the women who’d been muscled off the lot wailed and ran back to throw herself over the boy.

  The crew leader said to Minwoo, Rotten luck. Better call an ambulance.

  Minwoo called an ambulance and contacted the head office. The family, now covered in the boy’s blood, raved at them. The boy had died on the spot; they said he was intellectually disabled. Reporters swarmed, and construction was put on pause. Minwoo returned to the head office and spent nearly a month on standby before being let go. He never saw his friend, the crew leader, again. The racetrack in Gwacheon bustled with crowds every weekend, but nothing ever happened.

  7

  The thing about memory is that two people can end up with different versions of the same event. Either the storyline gets distorted because of your emotional state at the time, or you inadvertently forget that it happened once time has moved on. That was the case for Soona and me. She made it sound like I’d waltzed off to college and all too easily forgot her and Moon Hollow, but it wasn’t quite like that.

  I pored over Soona’s letter again and thought about my first trip home after starting college. I’d been stuck either at school or in my rented room the whole time and wasn’t able to get away until the semester ended. I spent several afternoons at my parents’ shop, frying fishcakes so my father could take a break. One of the employees had quit after burning her hand on the deep fryer, and the shop was understaffed. Summer was always a slow season for us anyway, so my father had decided to wait until the weather cooled off to hire someone new. Between the hot, sticky weather of the rainy season and having to stand in front of a vat of boiling oil, I was drenched in sweat front and back. Adding to my misery was the sheer physical exertion of kneading ground fish into the soy and starch dough. It only took me a few days to understand, to feel in my very bones, just how hard my father, with his lame leg, had been labouring for years.

  I think it made my parents uncomfortable to accept my help. My mother was busy bragging about having a son in college to all of the other vendors, but once evening rolled around and the shop began to get busy, my father would silently shove me away from the deep fryer.

  One day, I wrapped up the leftover fishcake with the torn edges and headed to the noodle house, just as I had in the past. When I opened the door, Soona’s mother greeted me.

  Oh, my! Look at how grown up you are now! I wouldn’t have recognised you on the street.

  She made such a fuss that Soona’s father came out too, followed by Soona poking her head around a door. But Soona’s face looked haggard, and her expression was dark. She gave me a curt nod and disappeared back into the room.

  I grew up without any sisters, and coeducation still wasn’t much of a thing at the time, so I knew nothing about girls. I was completely taken aback; I had no idea why Soona was being so cold to me. At the same time, I felt embarrassed to realise that I’d let myself get distracted by a pretty girl and squandered precious studying time on her, and I dealt with the disappointment by reminding myself that I had to snap out of it if I was ever going to make something of my life.

  After Soona’s house, I stopped by Jaemyung’s shoeshine at Hyundae Theatre. By then, the brothers had built the business up and acquired a small, seven-pyeong workspace on the first floor of a building in the alley. They’d gone from working under a tent on a street corner to having an actual shop. The shop was divided into an office space for Jaemyung, with a desk and chair, and a workspace where the boys could clean shoes, complete with a row of folding chairs and stools. The chairs were for customers who came in person to have their shoes shined, so they could sit and leaf through newspapers or magazines as they waited, while the shoes that had been fetched from off-site customers were lined up in order to one side. Jaemyung managed around ten shoeshine boys, while Jjaekkan oversaw eight. Now that they had a proper base right in the entrance of the market, they
no longer had to worry about guarding their turf near the theatre and coffeeshop and could wander freely all over the neighbourhood, collecting shoes for shining.

  That was where I finally heard the rest of the story of the taekwondo master. Everything had been quiet for a while after Jaesup knocked the guy out. But then the master sent Tomak to challenge Jaemyung to an official match. His conditions were that they would fight in the elementary school playground across the street at six in the evening, but only the actual fighters, the teacher and Jaemyung, could come, along with one observer each. Jaesup had vanished after beating up the master; he had a criminal record and had never been the type to stay home for very long anyway. Tomak probably figured that without Jaesup around, Jaemyung would be no match for him. What Tomak and his master didn’t know was that Jaemyung had more martial arts training than his brother and was far more skilled at actual street fighting. But they did know his weakness: he was responsible for keeping his family fed and sheltered and could not leave the neighbourhood. He was in no position to start any trouble. They figured the master’s mistake was in meddling with Jaesup, an ex-con and a runaway who fought dirty and flew by the seat of his pants. When Jjaekkan and Jaemyung saw me, their faces lit up and they told me the whole story, acting out the fight scenes as they went.

  It was last May, right? Jjaekkan said. He closed up his taekwondo studio so fast, he must’ve bet both his livelihood and his reputation on beating us in that fight.

  At 6 p.m. that day, the only people on the playground were a few kids kicking a ball and a couple of elementary school students dragging an adult-sized bike around and falling off it as they tried to learn how to ride. Jaemyung and Jjaekkan met Tomak and his master, who were waiting for them in front of the school gate. Let’s go somewhere else, the master said, too many eyes on us here. Jaemyung suggested the back of the school. It was blocked off by a wall and had a sizable yard that would later be turned into a parking lot.