“What should I do?” I asked. I was eager for her advice.
“Don’t leave her side,” she said.
“Being with her gives me strength.”
Her face brightened, and a warm smile spread across her freckled cheeks. Her eyes wandered over my face.
“I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “It must have been quite a shock to hear from me this way.”
I thanked her for telling me. And I meant it. If she weren’t Yoon’s cousin, I would have left immediately to run to Yoon’s side.
—Brown Notebook 8
CHAPTER 9
If We Hug A Hundred Strangers
To my students,
He took the letter that Professor Yoon had written to us before he resigned, read the first line out loud, and handed it to me. Copies of the handwritten letter had been distributed to each of us. It had been a long time since I’d seen Professor Yoon’s handwriting, which I had grown so familiar with. I didn’t understand why Myungsuh was handing me the letter, so I just looked at him.
“Read it to me,” he said.
“You’re still carrying that around with you?”
“I take it out and read it whenever I feel anxious,” he said, smiling.
“Then you must have it memorized by now … Why do you need me to read it out loud?”
“I never get to hear your voice nowadays. Please. Read it out loud for me.”
He must have read the first line out loud in order to prompt me to read the rest. I unfolded the sheet of paper and pictured Professor Yoon’s eyes, the way they used to shine behind his glasses. “Read it,” Myungsuh said as he lay down on the bench. He rested his head on my lap. He was so tall that his legs hung off the edge of the bench and his feet touched the ground. Two quails sitting nearby startled and took to the air. It had taken us two hours to walk up Namsan Mountain to the base of the tower, which I had so far only looked at from my apartment, so he must have been tired. White blossoms from a nearby acacia tree fluttered down and landed on his face.
“Read it,” he said again.
His eyebrows rose, and he closed his eyes. I looked down at his black eyebrows for a moment. He reached out his hand and wrapped it around mine as I held the letter up. When was the last time I had read anything out loud? As my heart began to race suddenly, I took a deep breath, but it did not help. Feeling shy, I brushed away the petals that had landed on his face. He opened his eyes briefly to peek up at me and then closed them again. I cleared my throat.
To my students,
No doubt you have all heard by now, but I have decided to resign from my post at this university where I have taught for many years. These suffocating times, and my worsening health, make it difficult for me to continue taking the podium. I have already submitted my letter of resignation to the university president and, after sending a brief separate missive to the board of directors at the foundation, I am now writing to you.
As I leave this post where I have served and that I have regarded as my calling, it is only natural that I should feel a number of conflicting thoughts and emotions. But what weighs on my mind the most at this moment is what you all must think of me. Your gazes press down on me from a different angle than those of my family or colleagues. Your eyes contain your censures, your silent requests that urge me to stand strong, or preferably, to step forward and take action.
For me, a poet who has made it his profession to deal in words and to wrestle with words, our era has been one of continuous trials and tribulations. In this age when words have lost their value, this age that is therefore dominated by violent words, by words swollen and yellowed with starvation, I have lost the will to speak any more of words. My despair over words is not an admittance of defeat in life. Though I step down from the lectern, I will continue to work hard, look after my health, and, most of all, resume writing the poetry that I put on hold for so long. I accept that as my given duty and my calling. But please do not think of me as a fighter throwing in his resignation as a token of resistance to the current state of affairs. Nor am I a recluse who nihilistically spurns worldly values and sets off in search of some lone nobility. Though I leave the school, I will be with you in spirit, and though I may be discouraged by the rough language of this age, I will endeavor to continue creating poetry. I hope that you take my decision to leave the school as a sign of my desire to see you all again someday, in another place, in some other capacity.
In that spirit, I ask you to ruminate one last time on the story I once told you about Saint Christopher crossing the river.
Right now, you and I are crossing a deep, dark river. Every time that enormous weight presses down on us and the waters of the river rise over our throats and we want to give up and slip beneath the surface, remember: as heavy as the load we shoulder is the world that we tread upon. Earthbound beings unfortunately cannot break free of gravity. Life demands sacrifice and difficult decisions from us at every moment. Living does not mean passing through a void of nothingness but rather through a web of relationships among beings, each with their own weight and volume and texture. Insofar as everything is always changing, so our sense of hope shall never die out. Therefore, I leave you all with one final thought: Live. Until you are down to your final breath, love and fight and rage and grieve and live.
Warmth radiated from Myungsuh’s head onto my lap. I read the last line out loud again. The wind sent acacia blossoms pinwheeling through the air. We got up and left the acacia wood. As we walked toward the tower, I murmured the last sentence of Professor Yoon’s letter to myself several times.
“In the house I grew up in,” I started to say, “there was a well. The water in that well is the very first water I remember.”
I brought up the well so abruptly that Myungsuh just stared at me blankly. We walked beneath more acacia trees. As we got closer to the tower, acacia blossoms blew toward us, floated in the air in front of his eyes, and clung to my face.
“We began every morning at that well,” I said. “My mother would rise at dawn and draw water. My father and I would wash our faces and brush our teeth next to it. Nowadays, the whole village has converted to tap water, and the well has been covered up. But whenever I go home, I lift the cover and peek inside. It’s still full of water. It makes me happy each time I see it. It’s reassuring to know that the first water I ever tasted has not dried up.”
He listened quietly as I spoke.
“I love you as much as looking into that well.”
He stopped short at my unexpected confession. Belatedly, he realized that I was echoing his story about the sparrow he had told me at the old fortress wall a long time ago, and he laughed out loud.
“Back when every house was using well water,” I said, “drainage pipes were buried beneath the courtyard to draw the runoff away from the house. At all hours of the day or night, you could hear the murmuring of water. The water was channeled out of the houses and into a small ditch that ran outside of the front gates. Because of all that water, yellow flowers that looked like daffodils bloomed in the alleys every spring. Even after the petals dropped, there would be a thick colony of green stalks. All year round, except for winter, the alleys were teeming with yellow flowers and green stalks. Our house was right in the middle of the village. The runoff from our house was the start of that little watercourse. As you followed it, it joined up with the runoff from another house. And if you kept going, all of that water fed into a bigger gully, which flowed into a canal. But don’t think that the water was dirty because it came out of all those houses. The well water was mostly drawn and used in the kitchen. Since all we did at the well was wash our faces and rinse vegetables, the water was clean. It may not have looked like much, but it channeled off all of the rainwater during the monsoon season in summer as well. Once, I wondered where the water went and tried to follow it all the way to the end. It led me across fields, over train tracks, and into more fields that continued on without end.”
He stopped walking and turned to look a
t me.
“I love you as much as that endless water.”
I used to wonder where the water in the big gully came from and would walk along the embankment to see where it led. It truly was endless. But no matter where I went in the village, I was never alone. Dahn was always by my side. We would walk along the gully until we reached a place that was called the upper waterway. That seemed to be where the water began. When we peered at where the water gushed out, all we could see was a long, dark channel. The water never stopped pouring out of it. We couldn’t go any farther and never did find out the source of the water. But the water never stopped flowing, past village after village, past the banks where women washed laundry on the rocks, along the banks of rice paddies, until it reached the canal where it continued on without end. I had a memory of following the water downstream in search of a single sneaker that got swept away only to return home, frustrated and sobbing, because I did not know where the water ended. Though I could hear the water the moment I stepped out of the front gate, I had no way of knowing where it began or where it ended. Only that it flowed without restraint.
Before we realized it, we had reached the base of the tower.
“In spring, after the seeds have been sown in the fields, and the rain comes, farmers are so happy. Have you ever seen their faces then?”
“No,” he said, and smiled apologetically.
“Whenever there was a drought in the spring, people used to climb into the mountains, carrying containers of water on both shoulders, to sprinkle it on the hillsides. The source of that water was the spring rain. When the spring rain came, people walked around in it without an umbrella. And they didn’t just say it rained, they said the rain graced us. Even now, when it rains in the spring, I get an urge to collect the rainwater. That’s what we did every year when I was little. Whenever my mother made soy sauce, she would first catch rainwater in a huge clay jar big enough to hold two adults. She would leave the jar open when the weather was good to collect the good energy and shut it tight when the weather was bad to keep out the bad energy. And though it was too early to plant seedlings in the rice paddies, my father would build up the banks around the paddies to flood them with rainwater anyway, as he said the spring rain was too precious to just let it run off. Even the grapevines, which were all dried up and looking dead at that time of year, would grow green shoots when the spring rain touched them. The barley shoots turned green, and even the spinach sprouted up like weeds in the early spring.”
“What did you do with the rainwater you collected?”
“There wasn’t much, barely enough to wet the tongue of a thirsty dog lying under a porch.”
“Let’s collect the rainwater that drips off the eaves someday,” he said with a smile.
“Someday?”
“Yes, someday.”
On some such day—not a day still to come but a day long past—Dahn and I had placed a washbasin under the eaves to catch the spring rain. I pictured it: Dahn feeding the rainwater that overflowed the basin to the rose bushes and the persimmon tree; the spring rain that brought dead-looking things back to life. Sap rises in spring—Dahn and I soon understood those words. Once, before spring had fully arrived, he and I had stood in front of a tree and gouged out some of the bark so we would know the exact moment the sap began to rise. My face suddenly felt feverish.
“Let’s go to the top of the tower,” I said, and walked ahead.
Myungsuh called out to me in surprise. His voice sounded faint.
“What’s wrong?” he asked me.
Why did Dahn have to die? I stifled the words I felt like shouting. Did anyone have an answer to this question? We stood in front of the railing at the top of the tower and looked down at the city. People kept coming out of the woods and heading for the tower.
“Yoon.”
“What is it?”
“I have an idea.”
I looked at him, my hands gripping the railing.
“Let’s stand here and count the people.”
He was not pointing to the forest path below but to the stairs on the other side.
“When we get to ten, twenty, thirty, and so on, let’s run over and hug that person.”
“Hug them?”
“Yes.”
“Hug strangers?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t understand what he was up to, so I just stared at him.
“They’ll think we’re crazy, right?” He was saying what I wanted to say.
I looked down at the city and wondered what on earth he was thinking. He wanted to hug a bunch of strangers? At first I was surprised by the suggestion, but then I felt a surge of anger rise up in me. Would doing that bring Dahn back? I felt like thrashing Myungsuh with my fists. Would that bring him back …? I wanted to shake the trees on Namsan Mountain. Claw the faces of those smiling people. Even as my anger flared, a chill deep inside me made me shiver.
“Are you okay?” Myungsuh asked.
I nodded. I pressed my feet hard into the ground to keep from shaking.
Back when I took a break from school and lived at home with my father, I had spent some time in the hospital. My whole body had broken into a fever. Red splotches, like flowers of fire, bloomed on my skin every half hour, and when they subsided, the chills followed. It was harder to bear the rising fever than it was the onset of chills. I couldn’t open my eyes; even my fingernails felt heavy. Sweat poured from my forehead, and I drifted in and out of consciousness. When my hands looked like boiled crabs, my father put me on the back of his bicycle over my protests, rode me to the hospital, and had me admitted. The cycle of fever and chills continued in the hospital. I didn’t get better right away. Instead, as the fever worsened, I stopped recognizing people. My body felt like a ball of fire, and I was covered in tiny red spots the size of millet seeds. On my second night in the hospital, I was giddy with fever and lost in agony when I felt someone put a hand on my forehead. That hand was as cold and refreshing as ice. It might sound like a lie, but after the hand touched my forehead, the fever that had been raging for days came down at once. I came to and saw my father asleep on a folding chair. In the morning, I asked him if he had touched my forehead in the middle of the night. He said no. I asked the nurse, too, thinking it must have been her. She also said no. I had no idea whose hand it was that had felt so cool against my skin, but after that hand touched me, the fever and the chills died down. If only I could feel that hand on my forehead once more.
“So, shall we begin?” he asked.
“You really want to do this?”
“Yes.”
I looked up at him silently.
“Maybe if we hug a hundred strangers,” he said, “something will change.”
He kept his eyes on the stairs leading up to the tower and started counting the people as they came up—one, two, three … A breeze blew up from the woods and ruffled his hair. His dark eyebrows rose each time he ticked off another number. After he counted nine, a child came running up the stairs. The child’s mother was running after him several steps below. Myungsuh was about to take off and dash over to the boy. Before he could count ten, I threw my arms around him and held on tight.
The phone rings in the middle of the night. It rings and rings, but when I pick it up, it stops. I told Yoon about these nightly phone calls, and her eyes got big.
“I get them, too,” she said.
“You do?”
She said it hangs up when she answers. We stared at each other, our moods bleak. We were both quiet, then Yoon asked, “Do you think it’s Miru?”
“Why would Miru hang up on us?”
“That’s true,” she said.
She asked if I had ever been out of contact with Miru for this long before. Never. I tried calling her parents, even though I knew there was no chance Miru would have gone to them. From the way her mother said my name, I could tell she had not heard from her, either, and was hoping for news from me.
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Now we stand before a sto
rm. I take to the streets nearly every day to join the demonstrators. I can’t leave Yoon on her own, so she goes with me. We marched on City Hall, locking arms with the other protesters and advancing toward Shinsegae Department Store.
“When we work together like this,” Yoon said, “it feels like we can make change happen, and it doesn’t feel so weird to hold hands with strangers.”
Whenever we get pushed apart and I lose my grip on Yoon’s hand, I reach right out and grab hold of it again. I want to define my own values. I want to stop drifting from one phenomenon to another. Right now, my only strength is this feeling of solidarity. When I take to the streets, the fog in my head and even this bottomless despair seems to lift. Let’s remember this forever.
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Yoon smells of chocolate. There was a hole in the back fence big enough for a person to slip through, and on the other side was a small store. I didn’t feel like studying, so my friends and I ditched school and slipped through the hole. As we were walking past the store, someone yelled, “Chocolate!” A type of candy I had never seen before was on display, each piece in its own little compartment. One piece of the chocolate cost the same as an entire bag of regular candy. We pooled our money, bought a few pieces, split them up among us, and tasted them. We were all very tense and eager because the one who recognized it as chocolate said it would taste amazing. The candy melted smoothly and easily on my tongue. I had no idea anything in the world could taste like that. I thought I would turn to stone right there.
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On the bus, the radio was playing Blue Dragon’s “My Only Wish.” Blue Dragon was a college band that had won a prize for this song after performing it on one of those music programs they show on TV—Beach Music Fest, or maybe College Music Fest. When Dahn came to the city to visit Yoon, and we were staying together in the old house, the four of us sang this song together, accompanied by Mirae’s old guitar. I rested my forehead against the window of the bus and sang along.