by Samuel Park
“You shouldn’t be doing this kind of work, Soo-Ja,” said Yul.
“The money’s not bad. The owner of the hotel pays me above market rate.”
“Why isn’t your husband here? Dealing with drunks is better suited for a man than a woman.”
“Min wouldn’t be good at the front desk. He’d be too afraid to charge people.”
“No. I mean it. Seriously. How can your husband let you work here? Where is he? Why isn’t he here?”
“It’s not always this bad,” said Soo-Ja, hoping to sound convincing.
“You could still go to diplomat school. Put Min in charge of things. Think of yourself for a change.”
“Yul, that was more than ten years ago. I can’t tell Thailand from Timbuktu anymore. And I kind of like hearing people speaking Korean around me, instead of, say, Swahili.”
“You could still do it. A lot of people start careers in their thirties.”
“Well, that’s part of the reason. Women diplomats are common now. There’s nothing special about it. If I can’t be the first Korean woman diplomat, then I’d like to be the first something else. That’s why I’ve been taking astronaut lessons,” said Soo-Ja, smiling.
“You want to go to the moon?” asked Yul, smiling back.
“No, but sometimes I want to send Min to the moon,” said Soo-Ja, with a straight face.
Yul smiled at her again. “Promise me you’ll find something else. Anything. Promise me you’ll quit the hotel.”
“I can’t do that,” said Soo-Ja.
“You cannot work here,” he insisted.
“Please don’t say anything to Min if you see him.”
“Maybe I should introduce him to my wife. Maybe they will like each other and go off together,” Yul said ruefully.
Soo-Ja could not tell if he was joking or not. “Don’t say things like that. It’s not fair to them.”
“You’ve met my wife. Is she anything like me?”
“Why did you marry her, then?”
“I was getting old,” said Yul, as he threw away the extra strips of gauze. “And patients find it odd when their doctor is a single man, especially when they bring their children in.”
“I noticed you still don’t have children.”
Yul placed the gauze, the alcohol, and the scissors back in the kit. “Eun-Mee does not want any. She says children, especially babies, are selfish and mean-spirited.”
“Well, they’re also easily lovable and very naturally kind,” said Soo-Ja, smiling.
“What about Hana? Does she remember me?” Yul closed the first aid kit, placing it on the floor. He then reached for a clean shirt hanging from a hook on the wall. He put it on quickly, and she could hear the whooshing sound he made as he thrust his arms into the sleeves.
“I’ve told her the story many times, but always leaving out the part you played,” said Soo-Ja. “Which means I leave out the most important part.”
“Well, if I were to tell the story of my life without mentioning you, I’d be doing the same.”
Yul emerged from the bathroom and stood at the door, looking directly at Soo-Ja’s face for the first time. His eyes were as beautiful as she remembered, a light kind of brown. She gazed into them, swam in that lovely shade, rested in the round of his iris.
“How can you go about your days, knowing everything that you do?” he asked very quietly, so that she had to lean forward to hear him, almost folding into him. “It’s hard, you know, to find happiness with someone. That becomes more clear to me with every passing year. I can never forget the day I asked you to marry me, before your wedding. That day has been burnt into my brain, and I can recite things you said like lines from a favorite song. I can’t say I haven’t seen you in eight years, because I have. I’d have pictures of you in my head and I’d ration them out carefully. I wouldn’t use them up; I’d savor each sweetly. Because at one point each mental picture would disappear—I’d lose it. I’d have it, I’d see you, then I’d lose it. You were elusive even in my memories.” Soo-Ja felt the longing in his voice tear at her. “Am I going to have to spend my whole life running after you? I have so little left now, just that day, you standing in front of me, the ink on your fingers. I always ask myself, What if you had said yes? Our lives would have turned out so differently.”
“I think of that day, too,” said Soo-Ja. “You’re not the only one.”
“If I left my wife, would you leave your—”
“Please stop.”
Soo-Ja heard a hotel guest coming their way, and she moved Yul toward a dark area underneath a stairwell. They stood there quietly for a moment, and she waited for the man to round the corner. When all was silence again, she turned back to look at Yul and saw his impossibly serious face, and his sad, broken eyes, casting a shadow over her mouth.
“Soo-Ja… I love you.”
Soo-Ja felt his words caress her ears, and when he brushed his lips against hers, she did not resist. For a while, they stood still, exchanging breaths. She could feel the warm air come into her mouth from his, and though they did not kiss, she could feel his tenderness surround her, and she let it fall over her skin, like a silk sheet.
In the old stories her father read to Soo-Ja as a child, once a climactic event took place, the story would stop there for a moment, only to be picked up again the next day, or sometime later. But as she grew up, Soo-Ja realized, of course, that there were no chapter breaks in real life. Something exciting may happen to you, like getting a first kiss, or winning a race, but it may be followed by something completely mundane, like remembering to clean the earthenware jars, or to empty the chamber pot, or to pick up food at the outdoor market. The day’s big event was soon forgotten, and though it became relived in the retelling—all the emotions coming back in the descriptions of what happened—it soon turned into no more than an anecdote, like something that happened not to you, but to somebody you knew.
That is how Soo-Ja felt when Min burst into the hotel a few hours later, his face red as a ripe mango, his body shaking with anger. His buttons had come undone, revealing his white undershirt, and she could feel energy vibrating from him a meter away. He had just heard what happened, and, for him, it was as if it had just happened. How odd, thought Soo-Ja, that he arrived as drunk as Mr. Shim himself, and for all of his anger at Mr. Shim for trying to hurt her, her husband and Mr. Shim looked and sounded much the same right now; the only difference, it seemed, resting on the fact that she was married to one, and attacked by the other.
“Where is he?” Min asked, furious, almost shouting.
“He’s gone,” said Soo-Ja, after a brief pause. She knew he meant Mr. Shim, though for a fraction of a second she thought he meant Yul.
Min headed back out the door, toward the street.
“Where are you going?” Soo-Ja asked, running after him.
“To find him!” Min yelled back.
“Stop! You’ll never find him. And curfew is only an hour away. I don’t want you to get stopped by a policeman in your state.” Soo-Ja grabbed him by his arms and pulled him back in. She could hear the loud noise from the street beckoning him through the half-opened door.
“Let me go! I’m going to find him! No son of a bitch gets away with touching my wife!”
“Get hold of yourself!” Soo-Ja said, dragging him to a chair, where he reluctantly sat. Close to him like this, she could smell the chicken and beer on his breath, mixed in with the scent of his body. She could picture the last hour of his life: running from the sul-jib to the hotel, his sandals flapping on the ground, as he bumped into people in the crowded streets, worry sculpted on his face.
“How did you know what happened?” Soo-Ja asked him.
“Miss Hong told me.”
Miss Hong, the chambermaid, was a girl of twenty or so, recently arrived from the countryside. She was so shy she never looked Soo-Ja in the eye, preferring to look down at the floor and bowing slightly whenever she spoke to her. Soo-Ja had noticed Min glancing at Miss Hong a few
times, and once she overheard him telling her the plot of a movie he had seen—he went to the cinema almost every afternoon—and he described it as if he had written it himself, just for her. How charming he must seem to her! thought Soo-Ja. An older man, her employer, the “owner” of the business.
Soo-Ja was about to ask Min how and when Miss Hong told him, when the five Pearl Sisters groupies suddenly burst into the hotel, back from their concert. Their voices came in first, singing “Nima” in unison followed by their teenage bodies falling on one another’s, all arms and elbows, necks and hips, moving forward like a single multilegged spider.
Nima—my adored—who went so far away
Nima—my honey, my love—are you coming back?
The full moon rises, then sets again
The day you promised to return is long gone
All five of them wore roughly the same thing: long-sleeved black turtleneck shirts, interlocking metallic belts, knee-high boots, and sleeveless white coats with a red lining. Soo-Ja and Min watched as the girls made their way past them in the front area, keenly aware of the two of them, but without acknowledging their presence. They were not in the same room, the girls and Min and Soo-Ja; they sped by like planets. Their drunk, bouncing joy seemed to feed off the couple’s stillness and gain its certainty and power from having them there to witness it. Their happiness was of an aggressive kind, meant to evoke envy. It wanted to take something away from you.
When they were gone, Soo-Ja and Min unfroze, and Min was ready to continue his demonstration of rage. Was she being too cynical? Soo-Ja wondered. Perhaps it was real. But Soo-Ja held off on her own reentry, as she was waiting for the girls to come back in a matter of seconds. Which, with the precision of clockwork, they did.
“Where is our stuff?” Nami yelled out. Nami acted like the leader of the pack, while the others stood behind her like foot soldiers awaiting orders. Am I a fortress of some kind, Soo-Ja asked herself, with guests as invading armies trying to get to the other side? Is today some kind of battle day, as predetermined as the moment a comet hits the sky?
“Yes, where’s our stuff?” echoed her second-in-command, a girl with cat’s-eye glasses and an almost bridgeless round nose. This gave rise to the others, too, joining in the chorus, repeating the words, their voices quickly becoming indistinguishable from one another. Where’s our stuff, what kind of a hotel is this, you are low class, and this place is low class.
Soo-Ja felt adrenaline rush to her veins, her shoulders growing higher, her face becoming tighter and harder. She was not afraid of the girls at all—they were just teenagers, barely older than her own daughter.
“If you want your things back, you need to pay for your rooms,” Soo-Ja said.
“We’re not paying! The manager said we could stay for free, you dumb gashinaya!” Nami yelled. The curse word—bitch—hurt double. The word itself, of course, and the fact that it was leveled at Soo-Ja, who was so much older than they were, old enough to be a parent. You simply did not address an older person that way.
Soo-Ja tried to stay calm. “Call your parents. Or your boyfriends, if your parents don’t know that you’re here. Have them send you money.”
When she thought later about her days working as a hotel manager, she’d remember days like this the most, being yelled at by a group of guests. But it wasn’t like this all the time, nor were all the guests this bad: some left little gifts on her desk, some had children who smiled and curtsied at her, some bowed almost as low as the floor and thanked her profusely for something as small as a bar of soap.
“Are you deaf? You stupid old hag! We don’t have to pay! Now give us our things back. Or we’re going to call the police,” Nami yelled.
From somewhere down the hallway came another voice, a man’s, yelling, “What kind of a hotel is this? All this shouting all the time, keep your noise down!”
Soo-Ja looked straight into Nami’s eyes and held her gaze. “You want the police? All right, let me call them. I’ll have you all arrested for trying to skip on your bills.” Soo-Ja picked up the rotary phone and started dialing random numbers. She could feel the girls’ tough facade cracking. Soo-Ja knew how to bluff.
One time, a drunk man took a room to sleep off the alcohol, and the next morning, he told her she should let him go peacefully or else he’d beat her. At the time, another guest—a big, hulking man with almost no eyebrows—had been sitting in the front desk area waiting for his wife to come out. No Eyebrows saw her arguing with the drunk man and gave him a dirty look. Without missing a beat, Soo-Ja told the drunk man in a stage whisper that No Eyebrows was a member of the secret police and was here to protect her. He would take him to a dark room and drown him in bathwater if he didn’t settle the bill. She wasn’t sure if the drunk man believed her story, but he clearly did not want to take the chance, as he pulled his wallet out and handed her the money he owed her.
“Or would you rather just pay and go?” Soo-Ja paused for effect and put the receiver down. “I think you’d rather just pay and go.”
The girls looked defeated and seemed to debate what to do. Meanwhile Soo-Ja wondered, Was it so offensive to them, to have to pay for things? And it wasn’t just them, it was people all over the city haggling, hustling, cutting in line, and giving one another a hard time—yes, the men and women of Seoul were “on the move,” making more money, but they were so unhappy, too. It was like a virus, spreading over the crowds, every face that of someone trying to take what’s yours. They made up for it, sure, by being overly effusive to their own friends and loving to their family members, but life there did take its toll on their souls.
But the girls hadn’t used their trump card yet. Nami finally turned to Min, as if she had just noticed him. He had been quiet this entire time. “Mr. Lee, when we told you yesterday that we didn’t have money, and we were poor girls from Inchon, and we asked you, ‘Couldn’t you be nice to us,’ didn’t you smile and say, ‘Don’t worry about it, go play, and be children’? Isn’t that exactly what you said?”
Min remained silent for a while. Soo-Ja was expecting him to explain to the girls that he had misspoken, but instead Min turned to Soo-Ja and said, “Why don’t you let them have the rooms?”
That was it, thought Soo-Ja, that was their marriage right there, in those words. Min leaned closer to her, so the others couldn’t hear, though obviously they could. “The thing is, I gave them my word. I already told them something else yesterday—I can’t go back on it.”
“These girls have the money. They’re trying to pull one on us. I know the scam—teenagers with money in their hands make a bet they can get everything for free.” Soo-Ja said this for them as much as for Min. And she could tell, by their nervous shifting and glancing at one another, that it was true.
“I’ll cover for them. I’ll make up the difference,” said Min.
Why was he so eager to help them? He didn’t even have the money to do so.
“I’m trying like crazy to get enough money to buy that land by the river, and you’re here hoping to give it away,” she said.
“We don’t need to buy that land. Things are fine here,” said Min.
Oh, how she wanted to shake him! No, that wasn’t enough, thought Soo-Ja, how could that be enough, to just have enough to eat, when elsewhere there were cities in countries she longed to visit, different shades of blue in new skies and oceans, the sound of foreign tongues whistling by—a life where she could be a mother for more hours than she was a hotel manager.
“Is the price of the room worth my honor?” asked Min. “Is it worth going back on my word?”
“You should not have said anything to begin with,” Soo-Ja said.
“I don’t know of any other wives who treat their husbands like this,” said Min.
“Lucky is the wife who never had to argue with her husband about money,” she said.
“I want us to do well, too.”
“Do you? I hear the words coming out of your mouth. But I hear something else from every
other part of your body. Even now, I think, you’re saying to these girls, I tried, but she won’t let me. It’s not my fault, it’s hers, she’s the one holding me back. When all my life I’ve waited for you to stand up and take charge. It is exhausting to me, all the fighting we have to do, just so you won’t feel bad about yourself.”
What happened after this happened so fast, Soo-Ja only fully registered it after the fact. And only later did she understand that the bottle was the same one left on the far side of the counter earlier in the day by Mr. Shim—she had been too shaken up to think to get rid of it. Later, with her eyes closed, she could slow the actions down enough to see Min reaching for the bottle and throwing it against the wall, the glass shattering and shards landing on the ground. Only later she could hear the girls shrieking and stepping back and some even putting their hands over their faces as Min was about to break the bottle. They knew what Min was about to do before she did; they had the benefit of seeing him as a stranger, while Soo-Ja’s sense of him had been dulled by their being together so long. These schoolgirls knew everything about him just by looking at him; she was used to unlearning him little by little, and she realized she knew him less year after year. Later, also, she saw the clear liquid splashing on the wall, gushing forth from the bottle, spreading out from the center. It made her think of Miss Hong, the chambermaid, of how sure she was that she and Min made love in the afternoons, and how he had come inside her, and how foolish that was. Later, too, she heard the cry Min let out at that moment, an odd, guttural, anguished cry—though she didn’t know if the cry came before or after the bottle exploded. She wondered how much pain you had to be in to cry out like that. But when all this happened, she did not see anything, did not think any of this. She simply felt a tug in her heart and thought, Where is Hana? I don’t want her to see this.
