So I was walking one day drinking in the smells and taking note of the streets. It was a beautiful fall day with a perfectly blue sky and I was just about to cross the avenue when a streetcar stopped right in front of me. A girl hurried over to get on it—and a moment before boarding for no apparent reason she turned around and looked straight at me. That split second just took my breath away. She looked almost nothing like when I last saw her, but I knew it had to be Jade. I hurried over and queued up behind the other passengers and got on the streetcar. It was packed as always and I was anxious that I wouldn’t be able to find her but after some jostling around I saw that she was seated with a friend near the back. As they kept whispering to each other and smiling I noticed that they were both wearing their hair in the braided updo of married women. But based on their gold-embroidered blouses and skirts and white powder and rouge I put two and two together and figured out that she’d become a courtesan. It immediately led to a sort of sinking feeling which I brushed aside.
The girls soon got off the streetcar and I followed them. It turned out that they were going to the Grand Oriental Cinema and I spent the last remaining money I had on buying a ticket while worrying that I would lose them inside the dark theater. How was I going to find her in a crowd of a thousand people? But the crazy thing is that even though it was packed I found a seat just a few rows in front of them. Every few minutes I turned my head around to look at her face, which was lit up by the light of the black-and-white projection on the screen. That look of concentration as she followed the film was so cute, so familiar. It made me miss her all over again. After her aunt told me to stay away I had never run into her no matter how hard I tried. She was grown up now and her makeup made her look even older but her eyes still looked exactly the same. It was a lot for me to take in and my stomach dropped ten feet into the ground and I felt like shouting or punching something just to think this through although I stayed in my seat quietly like everyone else.
After the film ended I got anxious that they would take the streetcar and disappear into the city but I managed to catch up to her just outside the front doors of the cinema and tapped her lightly on the shoulder. She turned around and fixed her bright eyes on me and it was like when on summer nights I used to lie down by the canal and look up at the sky. The dizziness of stars. I didn’t know looking into another person’s eyes could feel like that.
“Jade, it’s me. It’s JungHo,” I said finally.
She looked confused and apologetic and I was starting to think that I got a wrong girl but then her face lit up and it was like when birds start singing in the morning.
“JungHo! It’s you!” She laughed and grabbed my two hands in her own and jumped up and down like a little girl. “It’s been so many years. You look so well. I’ve missed you so much.”
Now it was my turn to be confused because she looked so happy to see me and I couldn’t handle the fact that the most beautiful girl in Seoul was holding on to my hands in broad daylight in front of hundreds of people.
“We have to catch up, JungHo. You remember Lotus, right?” She signaled at her friend. They whispered for a bit and Lotus shot me a funny look before leaving on her own and it made me conscious about what I was wearing. They were some things I picked up at one of the tailors in our territory—fairly new but not clean and a bit too big for me.
“Let’s go for a walk.” She linked her arm in mine which was something she’d never done when we were little. She was so close I could smell her hair combed with some perfumed oil. I tried to keep my cool as we made it out of the city center and up a little hill. The stores turned to houses and kitchen gardens and finally a bit of empty plot of pines and underbrush. She sat down on a rock and patted the spot next to her.
We didn’t say anything to each other for a while and just looked down at Seoul bathed in pink from the setting sun. I was wondering how I could even begin to tell her how much I missed her. She opened her mouth first.
“You look well. I can see things worked out for you.”
It wasn’t as though I looked rich or even like a normal person but just that I no longer looked like someone who slept outside. I blushed.
“We made it work, somehow. I do this and that,” I said and then changed the subject. “And you’ve become . . . blindingly beautiful.”
She laughed her morning-bird laugh. “I’ve become a courtesan. We all look like this.”
“No. Not all. Definitely not all,” I said. I wanted to take her hand again but she didn’t seem to want to do that. Instead she looked far down at Seoul like she was thinking of something else.
“I’m so sorry about how my Aunt Dani treated you. And for never saying goodbye.”
“It’s okay. It’s in the past,” I said because I didn’t want her to ever feel bad on my behalf. I’d rather get my heart stabbed a thousand times than see her unhappy because of me.
“Aunt Dani forbade me from going outside the house for three months. If I got caught talking to you, I would’ve been kicked out. Now that I’m older, I can see she was trying to protect me. But it was still . . .” She hesitated and I realized she didn’t like to say anything bad about her aunt. “She’s a talented, stunning, formidable woman. You can’t help but admire her no matter what.”
“I understand,” I said. It didn’t matter what Aunt Dani did because now we were together. I already forgave everything.
“But even when I was under house arrest, I knew you came by. Didn’t you throw pebbles into the garden?”
“So you saw them?” I was so happy my whole body felt jittery and light.
“Yes, and there was even one really pretty green one, wasn’t there?”
This was why Jade wasn’t just beautiful. She was special like nobody else in the world. If only I could I would pluck off the stars from the night sky and toss them all into her garden and that wouldn’t even be enough. This was a thought that came to my head long afterward but in the heat of the moment I just really wanted to hold her.
“Yes, I meant that one especially for you. Green like your name,” I managed to say and she smiled.