The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (6 page)

Over spring and summer, my sentences left me and there was only this voice, dripping like drops of water, into my heart.

“You don’t seem to write about us.”

“Could it be you’re ashamed? About that time in your past?”

“Your life seems different from ours now.”

Whenever I awoke from a cozy nap, her voice would without fail turn into icy water and fall in drops from the ceiling, drip,
drip, drip, down on my forehead.
Y. O. U. D. O. N. T. S. E. E. M. T. O. W. R. I. T. E. A. B. O. U. T. U. S. C. O. U. L. D. I. T. B. E. Y. O. U. R. E. A. S. H. A. M. E. D. A. B. O. U. T. T. H. A. T. T. I. M. E. I. N. Y. O. U. R. P. A. S. T. Y. O. U. R. L. I. F. E. S. E. E. M. S. D. I. F. F. E. R. E. N. T. F. R. O. M. O. U. R. S. N. O. W.

Oldest Brother has come to visit and is staring into a piece of white paper. Written on it are names of factories that we are eligible to apply for upon completing our training. After staring for a long time at the factory names, Oldest Brother puts a circle where the name
Dongnam Electronics, Inc.
is written.

“At an electronics company, the work shouldn’t be too messy, at least.” As Oldest Brother hands me the paper that he has circled, I, sixteen years old, look up at him.

“I heard that I’m too young to apply, so I have to submit the papers under someone else’s name.”

“You’re how old?”

“Sixteen.”

“Sixteen,” Oldest Brother repeats, his expression turning glum. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.” Oldest Brother lifts himself up from the chair at the snack stall, dusting off his clothes with his hands.

Among the trainees at the center, some twenty or more have chosen Dongnam Electronics, Inc. We share no previous ties, but the fact that we got our training together and will leave for the same place gives us a sense of intimacy. Our group of twenty-something sits around together and thinks about Dongnam Electronics, Inc. What kind of a place it is, what kind of things will happen there.

On the day we leave the Job Training
Center, our teacher, Mr. Kim, writes down a poem on the blackboard in the auditorium. How beautiful, to behold from behind, one who goes, knowing clearly when it is he should go. He has curly hair. He holds the chalk in his right hand, his left hand supporting it from underneath. Such a sad poem. Cousin’s eyes well up with tears. Mr. Kim recites the poem for us and says his good-bye. “You are the hope of our nation’s industry . . .” Mr. Curly Hair, even he, in the end, lets out the word “industry” from his mouth. The hope of our nation’s industry.

“Now you shall leave this place and start your lives on the job. Your workplaces will be the foundation of your lives . . .”

We have lived together as trainees for only a month but we swap our names and the names of the companies that we will be working for. We part. Repeating to ourselves, How beautiful, to behold from behind, one who goes, knowing clearly when it is he should go.

Dongnam Electronics, Inc., is located inside Guro Industrial Complex No. 1. Those of us assigned to Dongnam Electronics, Inc., some twenty trainees in all, now take our step from the entrance of the industrial complex onto the grounds of the complex. After being assigned the companies, we are given a week-long break. Oldest Brother takes Cousin and me to the room he has rented in the residential block of Industrial Complex No. 3, near the subway station.

Is the house still there? The house that I have never been back to since I left. The rooms in that house. I have never been back, not to the house, not to the room, not even in their vicinity, but the house is as vivid as a well-preserved photograph and emerges so vividly in my mind. The room in that house.

After passing through the subway station in this neighborhood, the Suwon-bound train enters Gyeonggi Province. If you are headed for Suwon on the subway
, this subway station is the last station in Seoul. This is what I wrote down six years ago. The subway station where the Suwon-bound trains pass through is where the neighborhood starts. From the subway station, the road splits into three. Yet although the road split into three, whichever road you took, it took you to the industrial complex. The one road to the left, which led to the house, branched into an alley between the photo shop and the Barley Field Teahouse, and there were houses, with the alley between them. But when you got out of the alley where the houses stood, and crossed the elevated walkway that led to the market, on the other side of the market you again found yourself at the industrial complex. The house with the thirty-seven rooms, all located inside a labyrinth. Up the stairs and take the winding path deeper into a corner where, it seemed, nothing more could exist, there was yet another room, with a small kitchenette attached, inside this three-story red brick house.

“This is it.”

Oldest Brother takes Cousin and me through the open gates.
This is it
—Oldest Brother’s voice flows into my ears now, just as it did then. That was it. One of the thirty-seven rooms, our lone, remote room. The house was surrounded, to the front and back, by other houses with just as many rooms, but when we opened our window, we could see a countless number of people pouring out of the subway station. The path or the elevated walkway that led to the corner store or the market were always crowded with people, but why is it that, both then and now, whenever I think of that room, the first thought that occurs to me is that it was so very isolated? We would live in this lonely place, remote and alone.

I am writing once again. I envision three meters from the staircase to the second floor, in the middle of a courtyard, and I see that the surface, when seen from above,
was covered with cement. There was a tap planted directly in the ground. To the left of the staircase were two yellow wooden doors. The windowpane on the wooden doors is thick with dust. Underneath that dust was written, in white paint, the Chinese characters for male and female,
and
. Each morning, the people in the house, awkward in one another’s presence, acting as if they were each there for some other business, would stand around the tap. This was the only time they could see one another’s faces. Without smiling, without acknowledging one another, they washed. Behind the door second from the right . . . Hui-jae lived there, alone.

Hui-jae . . . the name that, finally, pops out. Cousin and I, along with Hui-jae, make up a genre painting of the industrial labor force from the late years of the Yusin regime. I am looking at a collection of Kim Hong-do’s genre paintings. It is fascinating how, when Kim Hong-do takes up a seat facing the streets or the ferry point, the schoolhouse or the pub or the wrestling grounds or the laundry spot by the stream, and simply lifts his brush, the people of the eighteenth century are rendered more real in his paintings than in reality. How does one reach that level of artistry, everyone is said to have lauded, applauding in awe. I wonder—how would he portray Hui-jae?

The characters in this genre painting will mostly be captured in motion, but Hui-jae will be captured as a faint smile. I think of genre paintings from back in the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo. The tomb murals and the paintings that depict scenes of hunting, of battles, of dancing, of wrestling matches, of acrobatics. And of grain mills, butcher shops, stables and cow houses. We, or Hui-jae, cannot be placed inside an air of dynamic movement, within powerful brush strokes. We, along with Hui-jae, positioned in front of the constantly moving conveyor belt, or in front of the needle, always threaded, on the sewing machine, our eyes weary, never round or wide. We will always exist, not as the delightful and loving sentiments of everyday life, soaked in merry humor, but as pale shadows, barely
able to afford a chance to bask in the sun on rooftops at lunch break. From the perspective of fashion history, we will be dressed in blue work clothes, the back of the shirt gathered in a yoke.

Unable to bear it, I stand from my seat.

I am running. I catch myself as I run. Sit down, you can no longer run. Then or now, and always. Sit down now.

During those solitary days, I would often, with difficulty, conjure up in my mind the birds in the books of photographs that Cousin showed me the night we came to the city. The birds, asleep facing the stars under the distant night sky, high and beautiful. I would make a hard effort to promise myself that there would be a day when I would go and see them with my own eyes, as I lived my days inside this genre painting. Later, even when I became devastated by loneliness amidst the exhaustion of everyday life and the absence of meaningful ties, I never abandoned the thought that I would one day go see for myself the birds from Cousin’s photo book.