At Dusk

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  The master was dressed in a taekwondo uniform and a windbreaker. Jaemyung was in a cheap business suit. He was a boss now, after all. The master took off his windbreaker and handed it to Tomak, loudly cracked his neck to the left and right, jumped around to warm up his muscles, and tightened the knot on the front of his belt. Jaemyung took off his suit jacket and handed it to Jjaekkan, then unbuttoned the top two buttons of his dress shirt. They both got into a fighting stance and started circling each other. The master came in first with a roundhouse kick. Jaemyung dodged it and, in a flash, grabbed the master by the collar and flipped him. The master struggled to get up as Jaemyung rained a flurry of punches down on his face. Biff, pow, bam, and he was knocked out again. The taekwondo master never even had the chance to put any of his taekwondo moves to use.

  It was over in less than five seconds! Jjaekkan said.

  Jaemyung had turned to Tomak, who was standing there looking stunned, and said, That’s the guy you trust to have your back? Better watch yourself from now on.

  Jjaekkan crowed about how he didn’t believe in belts, and how only those who’d been in actual street fights were unbeatable, as if he’d won the fight himself instead of Jaemyung.

  Jaemyung was convinced that the master had only challenged him to a fight because he was already planning to skip town. Maybe the guy thought that he’d use his skills to break Jaemyung’s arms and legs and then close up shop. But in the end, it became even harder for him to find students willing to learn taekwondo from him, and he had to leave town anyway with his tail between his legs.

  Tomak was not so easily daunted. Whenever he bumped into Jaemyung, he would greet him halfheartedly and quickly make himself scarce, but whenever he ran into Jjaekkan, he’d say, Tell that brother of yours he better watch his back.

  After the fight, Jaemyung told Jaekkan to start giving a little money now and then to Tomak and his friends. When Jjaekkan protested, saying that it was beneath him and that Tomak didn’t deserve it, Jaemyung explained, Kids like him are just hungry. It’s like the saying, give an extra rice cake to your enemy. It pays to be kind.

  But then, right before the start of summer vacation, Tomak went and committed an unforgivable sin.

  Jaemyung took me to a small shop nearby and bought two bottles of beer. He’d been acting a little differently towards me, speaking a little more politely. It wasn’t just that, now that I was in college, he was acknowledging that I was no longer a child. He seemed awed by the fact that I had ascended one step into a world that he and the others couldn’t enter.

  You know who Tomak is, right? he asked. I’m so pissed at him. I have to teach that piece of shit a lesson. He drank his bottle of beer in one long swig. Listen up. A few days ago, Tomak grabbed Soona as she was coming home from school. He was lying in wait for her.

  He told me that several people, as well as Jjaekkan’s shoeshine boys, had seen her running toward the public tap, panicked and crying, the shirt of her school uniform torn and the skirt covered in mud.

  Almost all of the kids in our neighbourhood envied Soona for being the only girl there to go to school, but no one knew that she and I had been close. We ignored each other at home, took separate buses whenever we hung out, and on our way back, deliberately kept our distance from each other once we were near the entrance to the market. It tore me up inside to hear Jaemyung’s story. He’d heard from a kid who knew Tomak that Tomak had been so bold as to follow Soona several times and wait for her in front of the school. Jaemyung had sent some of his boys to bring the kid to him. But instead of giving him an earful, he’d taken the kid to Manseok Grill House, right across from where he worked, and plied the kid with bulgogi and soju to get him to talk.

  And now I’m going to teach Tomak a lesson. You in?

  I finally began to understand why Soona had avoided me earlier when I showed up at her house with fishcakes, why she looked so sombre, and why she had ignored me the few times we’d bumped into each other on the street before that. I was fuming and wanted to beat Tomak to a pulp. On top of which, it hurt my pride to see Jaemyung just as angry and stepping up to do something about it, as if it were his responsibility.

  Jjaekkan tried to hand something to Jaemyung. It seemed he’d already prepared a stash of implements to fight with.

  Keep it, Jaemyung said. I’m good with my fists.

  I saw a few of the smaller kids huddled together, Jjaekkan said. Let’s go bash their heads in with these.

  Jjaekkan kept a bat for himself and handed me a two-by-four. We headed towards the shack where Tomak and his gang hung out, the shoeshine boys leading the way across the main street and up the hill. We took a left at the dead-end street and followed the path down and around to the back of the hill. It was the northwestern slope, facing away from the rest of Seoul, so the neighbourhood there was even poorer than ours. The shack was in the second alleyway. We stood in front of the door for a moment and listened to the loud laughter coming from inside.

  Jaemyung pressed his ear to the door and then whispered to us, Tomak’s in there. I’ll go in and bust them up. You guys wait out here and beat up anyone who tries to escape.

  He kicked in the flimsy plank door and rushed in. The lights went out, something smashed through the window, and we heard shouting and fighting. One boy came flying out the door. Jjaekkan and I swung our weapons in the dark, not caring whether we hit his head, his back, or his limbs. As he sprawled on the ground, another boy came running out, and we went after him, too. After we’d picked off four boys that way, like smoking badgers out of a den, Jaemyung stuck his head out of the door.

  Come on in. It’s over.

  Jjaekkan excitedly asked where Tomak was.

  Flat on his back in here, half dead.

  Jjaekkan and I went inside. Jaemyung turned on the kitchen light. Tomak was bloodied and spread-eagled on the floor. The room was covered in broken glass from the shattered fluorescent bulb, soju bottles, and glasses, and clothes were strewn everywhere. Jaemyung nudged Tomak in the ribs with his foot.

  Hey, quit faking it and get up.

  Jaemyung sat him up. Tomak slowly stirred and wiped his bloody mouth with both hands. Jaemyung barely managed to suppress his anger long enough to deliver a stern lecture. It struck me then that he, more than any of the rest of us, really did look like Soona’s man.

  If you show your face around here again, you’re dead. We haven’t told the adults yet what you did, you little shit. If her parents press charges, you’ll go straight to prison. So you’re going to leave first thing tomorrow and never come back. Your father is too old and works too hard at that factory to see your arse behind bars. Understand me?

  Jaemyung took out his wallet, pulled out some cash, and tossed it on the floor in front of Tomak.

  There’s your bus fare.

  *

  That autumn, I started my job as the live-in tutor to a high school sophomore and escaped my miserable rented room. I’d inherited the job from an older friend who was going into the army. As he led me along the residential street lined with mansions tucked behind high walls, I could feel myself start to shrink.

  I met the student’s mother in a living room with a two-storey-high vaulted ceiling. My friend had told me with a sigh that he’d been tutoring him ever since the boy had started high school, but his grades and class ranking hadn’t gone up enough yet. He lacked focus and could never seem to carry what he’d learned over to the next day’s exam.

  The boy’s father was an army general. If I remember right, he had two stars and was an infantry division commander. He had one son and a much younger daughter. The officers and enlisted men who came and went from time to time would all stand at attention and salute the general’s wife.

  I had my own bedroom there, which looked out on a hill thickly wooded with deciduous and evergreen trees, but while teaching or doing my own studying, I was allowed to use the general’s libra
ry. Between all of the teaching and studying I did, I put Moon Hollow out of my mind completely. When the general’s wife asked where I was from, I told her Yeongsan.

  As for my student, I’d wanted to be both a trustworthy big brother to him, and a friend to whom he could open up. He was only two years younger than me, but he was as immature as a middle school student. That was probably due to his being an only son who’d been spoiled his whole life. Nevertheless, he was so uncomfortable around his father, the general, that he could barely get a word out. When the tutoring began, he flat out ignored me and sat there with a contraband Playboy magazine spread open on his desk instead of his textbook. I let it go at first.

  After a month of that, I took him with me to Moon Hollow. Noting the reproachful looks from my parents, I left him sitting in the store while I took over at the fryer for an hour to give my dad a break. After that, we went to Jaemyung’s shoeshine. Jaemyung took a break from working to buy me some alcohol. He poured a glass for my student as well.

  I could tell that Jaemyung’s mannerisms and style of talking made the kid nervous. His usual bravado was gone, and he was red-faced and short of breath after just a few shots of alcohol. Clever Jaemyung started to exaggerate.

  You have no idea what a big deal Park Minwoo is around these parts, do you? Anyone who doesn’t know his name is bound to get their skull bashed in. And to think that he just up and decided one day to turn his life around, and then got into one of the best colleges. I swear! It’s weird to picture that hand of his holding a pen instead.

  The kid tried hard to hide his surprise that I was from a slum and was friends with thugs. I hadn’t taken him there to try to scare or intimidate him. I just thought that if I showed him my true self first, then he would open up to me. Regardless of how he took it, I wanted him to realise just how privileged and advantaged he was compared to me. I don’t know if he ever got that, but the visit to the slum paid off, even if the day didn’t go quite the way I’d planned.

  We decided to keep the trip a secret. If his parents found out that I’d taken him out drinking when I was supposed to be making him study, he and I would have both been in a world of hurt. He told me what he really wanted to do with his life. He said he wanted to become a movie director and travel around the world. To put it another way, he meant that he hated studying and wanted to spend his life playing. I told him it was a great idea and gave him this really cliched speech about how making his dreams come true would take some work, and that the only way he’d be able to do whatever he wanted was to first get his grades up. I used the idea of studying abroad as bait. I told him to work hard at his English so he could qualify for studying abroad, after which he could travel, study cinema, and gain experience to become an international film director. I suggested that we go hiking or camping once a month in exchange for studying hard the rest of the time. It would give him a chance to get away from home and school, and us time to develop our relationship as mentor and student.

  I guess he really did come to think of me as a big brother, because he started telling me about things that happened at school, and even his grades gradually improved. During exam periods, he stayed up with me, studying late into the night. When his grades reached a certain level, I had a discussion with his mother about his future. She was shocked to hear that he wanted to become a movie director, and said that the general would never allow it. I told her that they had to respect their child’s opinion if they expected him to feel motivated to do anything for his own future, and I convinced her that film studies had many other practical uses besides directing. I tutored the boy until his third year of high school, when he was accepted to university. That was how I laid the first stepping stone towards my own career.

  After finishing my third year of college, I decided to fulfill my army service. The general retired from active duty and, following Chun Doo-hwan’s coup d’etat, rounded out his career as chairman of a state-run firm. I benefitted greatly from the general’s largesse, starting with being able to complete my military service without leaving Seoul, and also studying abroad after graduation. He has since passed away, but his wife is still as healthy as ever and living with their son.

  The general’s son and I ended up becoming like brothers. He went to work at a TV station after college and now runs his own production company. I can’t really take any of the credit for how well his life has gone, but I definitely benefitted from knowing his family. What I learned from him was that being born with a silver spoon in your mouth meant you could do pretty much whatever you wanted. As long as you weren’t a complete fuck-up, your life would stay more or less on track. For me, escaping the poverty of that terrible hillside slum and living a completely different life was a miracle in and of itself — you can’t help but get a little more complicated on the inside when that happens. People like me need something to soothe the discord. I mean, truth be told, most people are like me. I see them whenever I look out the top-floor window of a hotel lounge in the heart of the city, down at the high-rise apartment buildings, red neon church crosses, and streets filled with the light of shops and restaurants. During the days of dictatorship held together by oppression and violence, we must have sought comfort in those churches, in owning the luxuries sold in those department stores. Or maybe we fell back on the media’s constant deluge of ‘justice through strength’. We needed the props and people that we’d made together to pacify us endlessly, to tell us that we’d made the right choice in the end. I, too, was just one small piece of the machine, just another cog that had narrowly managed to find comfort in their midst.

  *

  From the time I started working as a live-in tutor up until I left to study abroad, I saw Soona several more times and still remember each of those occasions clearly. That’s because each one corresponded with a change in my life. One day I got a call from her at the general’s house. The housekeeper told me there was a call for me, and I assumed it was my mother. We didn’t talk on the phone very often, but whenever something important came up, she made a point of calling. I said hello, but there was no response. Then, after a moment, I heard her quiet voice say, This is Soona. She told me that she’d gotten my number from my mother and was at a café nearby. When I found her, she seemed out of place, almost scandalous, in that ritzy neighbourhood. Her outfit looked sloppy, and she was sitting in the corner facing the wall, restlessly fussing with a cheap vinyl bag that she’d stuck on the seat next to her.

  Where are you going? I asked.

  I left home, she said without hesitation. Before I could say anything to that, she continued: I heard you’re going into the army.

  I had heard that she didn’t get accepted to any colleges on her second try, so I tried to ask indirectly whether she was going to try for a third time.

  How’ve you been? I asked. How’s the test prep going?

  I’m giving up on college. My dad told me to get a job.

  Is that why you left home?

  I was so much in the habit of being a live-in tutor that I couldn’t help slipping into a teacherly voice. Soona let out an abrupt, unnatural-sounding laugh.

  What’m I, a kid? We’re barely a year apart.

  I was just worried …

  She asked me to buy her a drink. She seemed like she’d been waiting for this moment. She even threatened me, saying that she wanted to spend time with me and might just up and die if I refused her. I got nervous. I couldn’t decide what to do. Maybe it was the anxiety of knowing that, even though I thought I’d escaped the slum, Soona had been there all along, ready to drag me right back. I still wanted her, but I was in a different place emotionally, and had used my tutoring job as an excuse to avoid her and put distance between us. It might have also been the discomfort of having crossed over into a new world only to be suddenly confronted with your old, familiar world. Or, to put it more precisely, while watching Jaemyung take the initiative to punish Tomak for his evil deeds, I’d felt like m
y own precious emotions had been sullied. I didn’t want to take any further part in the ridiculous shenanigans of slum kids.

  And yet, there was Soona, who’d sought me out and was sending me all kinds of signals. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about her every minute of every day since the first time we met in Moon Hollow. I pictured her body every time I masturbated. My selfishness took her by the hand and escorted her to a bar. Well before the government-imposed midnight curfew — when all citizens were supposed to be indoors, and which young couples would conveniently break as an excuse to spend the night together — we went straight from a drink at the bar to a motel, and that night I was clumsy but passionate.

  The next day, under the bright glare of the sun, she told me she’d see me when I got out of the army, the cheer in her voice sounding forced. The street was filled with people, buses, and cars as everyone was heading off to work. For some reason it all looked strange and unfamiliar. I frowned, as if from the sunlight, shaded my eyes with my hand and said,

  I’ll drop by sometime.

  *

  And then the years passed. I finished my army service, went home to see my parents, and bumped into Soona at the corner of the market. Well, I didn’t exactly bump into her. She was walking home from the bus stop, and I was coming down the pedestrian overpass when I spotted her. I’d been back before that but had deliberately avoided looking her up. She didn’t see me. Soon she was walking away from me, the distance between us growing. I hesitated for a moment and then called out to her.