Since then, the black car, which he had purchased from a French gold mine owner, was always waiting for her at the end of the night. Most of the time, they made love hastily in the car before he drove back home to his wife and three children. When this first happened, Lotus was mortified; they were parked on a side street, there was the balmy light of a spring dusk, and anyone could have looked inside. But she eventually realized that this impropriety gave him a special thrill, much like how he loved driving fast with the top down. It was the kind of thing he would neither ask nor want from his wife—she knew this instinctively and was proud of being the one woman who could give him what he needed. But whenever Lotus managed to convince him to spend the night in her room, and he slept soundly with his arm reassuringly around her, she forgot any bitterness or resentment she’d ever felt and was sorry for others who could not experience such happiness.
IT WAS TEN O’CLOCK AT NIGHT and JungHo was standing outside his mentor’s door, half listening to the voices inside and half drifting away to sleep.
“. . . Send support to the tenant farmers who are rising up against the Oriental Colonization Company . . .”
“. . . But are we giving up on Primorski? We should never have trusted the Red Army . . .”
When he’d first moved to MyungBo’s guesthouse, these phrases were meaningless to him as though they were in a foreign tongue. He wasn’t even interested in knowing these windy words and cloudy ideas; he liked to reserve his thinking for Jade, his friends, food and shelter, and other tangible things that made his heart warm, stomach full, and feet firm and heavy on the ground. Then MyungBo started explaining things to him one by one, using the words that he could understand. Primorski was just the Russian word for Yeonhaejoo, a frosty northern land that horse-riding Koreans conquered two thousand years ago. They were hunters, mountain people, warriors—and their capital was PyongYang, which was close to JungHo’s own village. When JungHo listened to these tales, he felt a strange yearning and pain. It was a pain that originated outside of him and seeped through his skin, like the pale blue moonlight, the howling of wolves, and the sound of snow crunching under his feet.
The door opened; several men dressed in suits came out, along with a few women in hanbok. They barely nodded at JungHo while passing by and whispering among themselves. JungHo flushed a little, remembering how deeply MyungBo bowed to him at their first meeting. These revolutionaries all talked about abolishing class, but MyungBo was the only one who treated everyone—including JungHo—with equal respect.
“Comrade JungHo, I’m sorry the meeting ran late,” MyungBo called, and JungHo walked inside.
His mentor did not get up; that was the one gesture of informality that he allowed himself as the months passed. Instead, he busied himself with spreading out a book, sheets of paper, and a pencil over a low table. JungHo sat down across from him and peered down at the book. Instantly, he lost all memory of the shapes of characters he’d learned. Instead, his mind let the black marks turn into cranes flying across the page, then strips of charcoal scattered in the snow, and he shook his head firmly to get rid of these unhelpful associations.
“Let’s start from the top,” MyungBo nudged gently. “You remember this syllable . . .”
JungHo searched in the innermost depths of his being for the answer. His eyes felt watery from the effort, but he came up to the surface with the correct name: “It’s dae.”
“Very well done! Excellent! And then the next one?” MyungBo said, brimming with excitement. JungHo forged on in order to not disappoint his mentor, diving into his mind and bringing back answers one by one.
After an excruciating hour, MyungBo closed the book. “That’s enough reading for today I think,” he said, then smiled, as if to reassure JungHo. “I know it’s very difficult, Comrade JungHo. But my instinct tells me you’ll play a large part in our independence, and that’s what I’m preparing you for. Now let’s try writing.”
For the past several months, MyungBo had been asking JungHo to copy all the dozens of consonants and vowels from their workbook. Instead, MyungBo now wrote out just three syllables on the sheet of paper and asked JungHo to read them out loud.
“Nam . . . Joong . . . Jung . . .” JungHo looked up at his mentor, who was beaming. “It’s my name.”
“I haven’t been teaching you the right way—that was hampering your progress. Let’s first learn the most important word. Everything you write henceforth under your name has to be done in honesty and good faith. That’s what it means to have a good name—not who your family is or how rich or famous you are.”
JungHo copied from MyungBo’s example, writing the first syllable again and again, then the second, then the third, until he filled the page. Then he turned that sheet facedown, took a blank sheet of paper, and shakily wrote out the three syllables of his name together for the first time. When he finished, he looked up eagerly like a schoolboy and saw that MyungBo had tears in his eyes.
“Well done, my friend,” MyungBo said, trying to conceal the breaking of his voice. “You have a lot of strength in your penmanship—it’s like your personality.”
The childish letters were overlarge and uneven, but JungHo knew it was a genuine compliment and not a mockery.
That night, JungHo inwardly promised himself to live his life as to make MyungBo proud; before, he’d only wanted a way to improve himself in order to win Jade. MyungBo was connected to him through neither blood nor love—it was honor that bound them irrevocably together. Upon this realization he added MyungBo to his list of people to keep safe, no matter what.