The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (11 page)

When a poet friend who was a few years older, after reading the bio in my first book, said to me, “Hey, you graduated from Yeongdeungpo Girls’ High, I had no idea. I went there, too. We’re alumni,” her delight was genuine, but I got nervous. I was worried that she might start asking which classes I was in, whom I studied language arts with.

As soon as I got the chance, I left. My high school years made me treat myself as someone who had a big secret to keep, and changed me from a natural-born optimist to a withdrawn introvert who refused to speak about those years except with those who were very close. And now Ha Gye-suk was flatly reprimanding the gag order that I had imposed on myself. Telling me, You don’t seem to write about us. Your life seems different from ours now.

After we hung up, I paced the room, letting out my anger toward her. How dare she treat me like someone who had shut the door on her first true love in order to live a different life. Ha Gye-suk was right, however. I did not write
about them. Only once had I made an attempt. It was published as the last story in my first collection, the one book that Ha Gye-suk had not yet read.

But even if she had read it, she would not think it was about us from back in those days. I was not honest. I was trying as hard as I could to feign innocence. About my youth, about my own being. An omission committed by vivid pain, which was all that prevailed in the absence of the self. This is fiction, I told myself, but all the while my heart ached enough to kill me. In order to appease this aching heart, I concluded with a rushed ending, fast-forwarding to what happened ten years later. Unsure that I could confront it face to face, I quickly closed the lid and that was when I realized the truth. That those years had not completely passed for me. That I was carrying those years on my back like a camel’s hump. That for a long time, perhaps for as long as I was here, those years would be part of my present.

Six more years have passed now, and during that time, whenever those years tried to leap out through my sentences, I took a breath, pushed them back down, and closed the lid. It was not because I was now living a life different from the people I knew then. I had not even known what kind of life they were living. It was that, even if the years were pulled out somehow, I had no idea where I should stand amidst them. Whatever you do, once you lose your confidence, it is difficult to recover.

When closing the lid no longer worked, I fled home, but Ha Gye-suk’s voice persistently followed me here, dropping icy water on my forehead—drip, drip, drip—and whispering, Whatever excuse you might come up with, the truth is that you are ashamed, you are ashamed of us. Even now, trying to lift the closed lid as I gaze out at the fishing boats on the night sea, my confidence does not return. I cannot tell what shape this writing will take when I am done. Here I am, sitting face
to face, but even as I write I have a feeling that I might continue to run. I have a feeling that every chance I get, I might try to cross over into another story. See how I am already letting go of conventional narrative form. What am I trying to do by abandoning the most approachable form of storytelling? The truth is, I am not actually trying to do anything. All I can guess is that as I keep attempting my escape and then come back, I escape again, and then come back again of my own accord, as if the writing might somehow be completed in the meantime.

This is something that has been fermenting inside of me for such a long time that I have nothing to add or take away from it. In the time that I do stay seated between my escape attempts, I imagine that the weft and the warp yarns will somehow weave together.

For a long time I contemplate the present. In these times, when things as simple as songs are so fast it is almost impossible to sing along, what is the present that I should hold on to? I would like to get past things, but could I really get past anything? Unless one has her mind set from the beginning to write a story set in the future or an imagined world, isn’t writing always about looking back? In literature, at least, aren’t all memories that came prior to this moment subject to examination? Isn’t literature about excavating the past that flows through to the present? To find out why I am here at this moment in time; to find out what it is that I am trying to do here and now? Today will again turn into yesterday and flow through to tomorrow. Isn’t that why literature is able to keep flowing on?

History is in charge of putting things in order and society is in charge of defining them. The more order we achieve, the more truth is hidden behind that neat surface. Truth, for the most part, lives behind the orderly surface
. I believe that literature flows somewhere behind order and definition. Amidst all that remains unsolved. Perhaps literature is about throwing into disarray what has been defined and putting it into order to make it flow anew for those in the back of history, the weak, the hesitant. About making a mess of things, all over again. Is this, in the end, an attempt at order as well? Is it now my time to look back?

The first payment we received at the end of our first month, which was actually a few days short of a month, was a little over 10,000 won, I recall. Cousin and I went to the market and bought thermal underwear for our parents and mailed them to the country.

It is September. Cousin and I are now quick with the air driver. Sometimes, after hurrying through our share of the work, we can even afford to chat while Number Three finishes. We have become skilled workers.

Cousin whispers in my ear. “We are so lucky we weren’t assigned to a soldering position.”

I have no idea what she means and ask, “Why is that?”

“Look at Number Thirteen’s face.”

I stretch my neck and glance at Number Thirteen, who was assigned to Dongnam Electronics with us from the Job Training Center. Smoke rises over Number Thirteen’s head with a sizzle. After three months at the job, Number Thirteen’s bright complexion has given way to a dull yellowish pallor.

“I wonder if it’s lead poisoning.”

I check my face in the mirror. Your complexion has turned lighter since you started drinking tap water here, our landlady had said. As I look into the mirror, Number Thirteen’s dull yellow face glides over my light-toned face. I agree with Cousin that we are lucky we were not assigned to lead soldering.

After work Cousin and I stop
by the market to get groceries and, after returning home, we start dinner on the kerosene stove. Today is my turn to cook and tomorrow will be Cousin’s turn. The person who is off cooking duty does the laundry and cleans the room.

Breakfast is the only time we get to eat with Oldest Brother. Before leaving for work in the morning, Cousin and I clear the breakfast dishes and set the table again for dinner. Oldest Brother goes straight to school from his job at the Community Service Center and has dinner upon returning home late at night. No matter how exhausted he is, he enters the room only after washing his face and feet with a bowl of water in the crammed kitchenette, then washing his socks in the same water and hanging them on the laundry line. Even when I offer to wash them for him, he refuses, saying, “It’s a habit for me,” already rubbing the socks with soap. Habit. Washing his socks every night and hanging them to dry is a habit that Oldest Brother acquired in the city, while refusing to eat a meal without soup is a habit that Mom instilled in him back in the country. Mom’s meals always included both a stew and a soup.

Having to choose between the stew and the soup, Brother was unable to give up the latter. He will do without stew but will not eat his meal without soup. When Cousin and I cook stew, we make sure to cook soup as well and serve it to Oldest Brother. On days when this feels like too much of a hassle, Cousin grumbles, “Brother is a soup fiend.”

At night Cousin sleeps next to the window, Oldest Brother next to the wall, and I in the center. Cousin and I usually fall asleep first while Oldest Brother sits at his desk until he also retreats to the floor, although I never know exactly when. Oldest Brother pays the rent, which is 20,000 won a month with a 200,000-won deposit, and also gives us money to pay for food and expenses. We try to be as frugal as we possibly can, but there is never enough money. Cousin and I take out some of our earnings and contribute to household expenses as well.

More and more workers leave
the job because of low wages, which results in more and more new employees and frequent changes in the people sitting at the conveyor belt. People leave just as I am beginning to get familiar with their faces, and new faces are hired. Whenever new employees start work, the head of the administration department offers them a word of warning.

“Make sure you don’t join the union. Union fees are used for no other purpose but to keep the wheels rolling on the chairs of the union leaders,” he says.

The words low wage spread an ache through my heart. Low wage. Low wage . . . Could my memory about our wages be correct?

When the restaurant owner learned that I was a writer, she said she would ask me just two questions. “Just two,” she said, which made my heart sink. What was it that she wanted to ask? And why this condition: “Just two?”

“The first question . . .”

Of her two questions, the first was about what level I write at. What level?