The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (28 page)

“Looks like it’s never been cleaned,” I mumble.

She approaches and says, “Look at that,” pointing to the ground under the window. I look to find a chopstick sticking straight up in the mud.

“It looked so soggy so I tried shooting a chopstick, like shooting an arrow. That’s how it ended up like that.” Smiling faintly, she closes the window and puts the bottles of lotion and toner back on the sill. Next to them, also the jar of moisturizing cream. The seascape vinyl wardrobe; wooden floor table; small radio; the seashell necklace hanging on the wall; the brand-new iron, which she got for ironing the collars for her uniform, still inside the box.

When I think of Hui-jae
eonni
’s room, I seem to remember more about the objects than the person inside the room. Things like the photograph pinned on the wall of her younger brother or the plastic dish the size of a hand, filled with hairpins. The yellow laminated paper flooring, the sugar scoop. Probably because it was so new. I remember the iron more vividly than any other object in her room. “I bought it to iron my uniform collars”—her voice from back then is also just as vivid, as if she were talking to me here by my side.

Vivid, I write, which is a surprise for me. To think, I have come to use the word “vivid” to describe her. She was always faint. All of her routines were mute, like freckles hidden under the chin or under the ears. The reason that Cousin, frank and outgoing, felt uncomfortable around her was probably because of her quiet ways. She was so quiet that at times it made people nervous.

And it did, even for me. When she sat on the roof enjoying the sun, or was in her room, unmoving, I was compelled to approach and shake her. Thinking back now, her quietness might have been her balance, but at the time, when I saw her small body captured by this quietness, it seemed as if her soul had left her body and I would feel compelled to shake her to get her to come to her senses.

I shake her up and we play the Sure Game.

“I want to be a phone operator.”

“Sure.”

“I want to be a certified operator and work at a bank.”

“Sure.”

“What do you want to be?”

“Sure.”

“No, what do you want to be, I asked.”

“What?”

“I want to be a novelist.”

She echoes, “Novel?” And dozes off in the heat of the summer night.

She awakes from her dozing and murmurs. “The first factory I worked at was in Bongcheon-dong. I was fifteen or something. And the factory was tiny. We made bags, less than forty of us in all. We ate and slept in the rooms at the factory, where I met So Yong-tak, this boy from Jin-do Island. It was really nice to have him around. I unstitched seams in the attic and he worked on the sewing machine in the room. He was a guy but he was very good with the sewing machine. He looked like a girl. I liked that about him, but he seemed to hate his girlish looks. He consciously tried to act tough and manly but I knew everything. The attic where I unstitched and picked seams had ceilings so low that it touched my head when I stood. We had just come back from summer break and he climbed into the attic and handed me something wrapped in white paper. I opened it to find a seashell necklace. He had made it out of shells he collected on the beach back home on Jin-do. We got a room at the top of the hill in Bongcheon-dong and lived together for about four months.”

“Are you surprised?”

“I am.”

She stops her story and says nothing.

“Then what happened?”

“What? . . . I ran away.”

“Ran away? How come?”

“You see, I have a younger brother back home in the country. He was coming to visit me. I was scared. I didn’t want him to see me that way. No, that’s an excuse, I felt like I was suffocating. I had the feeling that if I continued to live there with the boy, I would never again be able to come down from that hill. Never again. So one Sunday, while he was napping, I said I was going to the store for some
ramyeon
and never went back.”

“. . . ”

“I took nothing with me when I walked out. Nothing but that necklace in my pocket.”

I, seventeen years old, gaze at the seashell necklace on the wall.

“You never saw him again?”

“No. I can’t say for sure, but he probably wept terribly. He’s no taller than me.”

“Don’t you miss him?”

“It was all years ago.”

After talking in a faint voice, as if she were mumbling to herself, Hui-jae looks right at me and asks, “Can a story like this make a novel?”

Our summer vacation is almost over. We are suddenly told that we have to ship more than a thousand stereo systems at the end of the month. Overtime and all-night shifts continue day after day. One day as we are about to have our late-night snacks, I tell Cousin that I cannot possibly pull another all-nighter.

“But vacation’s almost over . . . What can we do, everyone else is going to work all night . . . They won’t allow any exceptions.”

“Really, I’m not just saying I can’t. I’m dying here.”

“Are you sick?”

“It’s like my back is about to snap and my tummy as well.”

“I wonder what the matter is, out of the blue.”

“It’s not out of the blue. I felt bad yesterday and the day before as well, but it was bearable. But now it’s impossible to bear.”

Cousin stands up and goes to talk to Foreman.

“He wouldn’t hear it. . . . Just hold on a little longer. He said after tonight, the really urgent stuff will be done.”

Dawn arrives. Grasping my aching, twisting tummy, I rise from my workstation and head to the bathroom, and Cousin sets out after me, following close behind.

“What can this be?” I ask, leaning my painful back against the bathroom wall, Cousin bursts into a giggle.

“You must’ve been having menstrual cramps. Stay right here. I’ll go and get a change of clothing and pads from the locker room.”

After Cousin leaves, I turn back to look at my hips in the mirror. Startled, I collapse to a squat. Worried that someone might come in, I lock myself in one of the toilet stalls.

Summer vacation is over, but Kim Sam-ok does not show up at school. Every time he checks attendance, Teacher Choe Hong-i glances at Kim Sam-ok’s seat. He asks those of us who work at the same factory as Kim Sam-ok to raise our hands. Without raising her hand, someone says, “The company went out of business.”

“Which company is it?”

“It’s YH.”

The entire class turns silent. Teacher Choe calls Mi-seo, the class president, to the office. Would he pay a visit to Kim Sam-ok’s
home as well? Back from the teachers’ office, Mi-seo once again opens the Hegel.

“What did he say?”

“He asked me to find out what happened to her.”

“Will you be able to do that?”

“I don’t know. There’s someone in our company who used to work at YH, so I guess I’ll try asking her.”

“What kind of a company is it?”

“It’s a wig factory. Haven’t you heard of this woman who jumped off the New Democratic Party headquarters building? Kim Gyeong-suk! Hey, they have the same name.”

“Kim Sam-ok worked there?”

“Yes.”

“How did this woman die?”

“From the fall, but the artery on her left wrist was slashed. She cut it with a soda bottle shard.”

The next day when I meet her at the shoe locker as we’re arriving at school, Mi-seo suggests that we go get a snack at the stall.

“You know, about Kim Sam-ok.”

I stop in the middle of drinking my water and gaze straight at her.

“She’s missing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It sounded like things got pretty intense while school was out. Kim Sam-ok was also at the New Democratic Party headquarters. Even the lawmakers and the reporters were soaked in blood, so imagine how the protesting factory workers got treated.”

“How?”

“The police raided even the party chairman’s office. Saying they’re going to kill everyone if they don’t behave. Kim Sam-ok also got beaten up and was taken away by the police . . .”

“And?”

“She was released, but she was going about crying day in and day out, that it was she who should have died, not Gyeong-suk, the younger one.

“She was taken into custody, then was deported back home to the country.”

“So she’s home now, then?”

“That’s not it.” Mi-seo puts down her pastry.

“Why aren’t you eating?”

“I don’t feel like eating, thinking about Kim Sam-ok. When they were taking her away, she tried to resist by jumping out of the window of the riot police bus and hurt her leg, which made her limp.

“Now her younger brother is in Seoul looking for her. When she was sent back home, she sat crouched in the attic day after day, then one day she disappeared.”

“Where could she have gone?”

“The girl who told me all this said we must keep it a secret. Whether you participated in the sit-ins or not, if you ever worked for YH, nobody will hire you now. That girl sent around her résumé, trying to get a job somewhere else, but failed for no clear reason. She found out that a list of those who had been at the New Democratic Party headquarters, and anyone who had participated in the sit-ins, had been handed over to all the other companies.”

“Then how was she able to get a job at your factory?”

“She covered it up by submitting her sister’s papers.”

Upon returning from the snack stall, Mi-seo once again starts reading the Hegel. I, seventeen years old, stretch out my neck toward her and ask.

“How old was Kim Gyeong-suk, the girl who died?”

“Twenty-one.”

While the parts that I could overlook, I remember in great detail, some parts that should resurface naturally are in a void, like a street
in ruins. What became of Kim Sam-ok after that? No matter how I hard I try to find her, she is nowhere to be found.

All I can find now, in the archives at the
Dong-a Ilbo
or
Hankook Ilbo
newspapers, is this:

A car horn tooted three long honks. This signal launched the so-called Operation 101. With six fire engines lighting the scene, the fire squad laid out mattresses outside the party headquarters to prepare in case the factory girls attempted to jump off the building, while the police raided through the main entrance and over the wall behind the building, gaining access into the fourth-floor auditorium and the chairman’s office and press room on the second floor using two tall ladder trucks. The police clashed with the New Democratic Party’s administrative staff, who had built a barricade with chairs and desks, and the building quickly turned chaotic as the police moved up to the second floor, throwing tear gas bombs. Inside the fourth-floor auditorium, where the factory workers were staging the sit-in, a group of plainclothes policemen were the first to pour in, shutting and blocking the windows, after which hundreds of riot police entered, wielding their clubs as they dragged out the factory girls one by one down the staircase and into the police bus parked outside the main entrance of the building to take them away. Chairman Kim of the New Democratic Party had dissuaded the factory girls from leaping to their deaths, but they panicked when the police stormed in, crying and resisting with broken soda bottles, and several tried to break the windowpanes with their fists and jump
out, but were stopped by the police. In just ten minutes, all the protesters were pulled out of the building. In the course of the raid, some of the factory girls attempted suicide, using shards from the broken windows and soda bottles. Kim Gyeong-suk, the deceased, was found collapsed by the basement entrance at the back of the building, her left wrist artery slashed, and was taken to the Green Cross Hospital across the street. In teams of four, the police carried the female workers by their hands and feet, taking away every single protester in ten minutes.