“Ni ju-sen desu,” HanChol replied—twenty cents. She nodded, and he helped her climb inside the carriage. He almost never had Japanese customers, who were mostly concentrated in MyungDong and Honmachi and didn’t venture outside, even somewhere as close as Jongno. But money was money. And the woman seemed pleased—perhaps it was the novelty of riding a Josenjing rickshaw. She broke the silence a few times to murmur about the weather, which could have been directed equally toward him or herself. The trailing sleeve of her kimono flapped rhythmically against the side of the rickshaw as they gained speed. HanChol stayed quiet until she got off at Honmachi and pressed a one-won bill into his palm, refusing change. He watched as her embroidered obi disappeared into the crowd. She didn’t move him; nevertheless, he was instinctively cataloguing her in his collection of women.
HanChol was only nineteen years old. Yet he had long ceased to consider himself young or to give in to juvenile fancies. He was proud of the businesslike attitude he had toward everything, which was necessary to make any progress. What he thought of, day and night, was first success and then much later, duty. As for love, he never regarded it as something valuable to himself. Love felt to him like a distant and mysterious mountain, which was potentially real only because others spoke of it with reverence and conviction. He just had no particular impulse to see the mountain himself; it had as little bearing on his reality as the idea of heaven and hell. The only time he thought of women with longing was when he masturbated quietly in his room, not even daring to breathe freely, since his mother and two sisters slept in the next room. Then, he would close his eyes and recall a beautiful woman he’d driven that day, perhaps a flirtatious courtesan who had called him “as handsome as a prince,” or a Modern Girl whose shapely legs encased in silk stockings were clearly visible if he just turned his head around.
And yet. As he turned west out of the Japanese district, his thoughts turned to the one woman whose image wasn’t confined to these nightly indulgences, who surprised him with her strange relevance to his being. When he first saw Jade outside the theater, he’d also had a sensation that he’d never had with the others: the strongest urge to talk to her. At the same time, HanChol had gotten the distinct feeling that she too wished to speak to him intimately, although the presence of her friend prevented too much openness. They had exchanged a hidden, subtle, and precious mutual understanding with fleeting glances and twinkling eyes, the way young people communicate only in the first few loves of their lives. At home that night, he had touched himself and come more powerfully than ever before.
Yes, at the beginning it had only been a physical desire and a curiosity, and nothing more—he was certain of it. Nevertheless, as he became her favorite driver and saw her several times a week, his regard for her began to acquire a specificity that he’d never felt before. To HanChol, all people belonged to certain categories: family, schoolmates, close friends, other rickshaw drivers, customers, people from whom he might benefit, and so on. He behaved toward anyone according to his or her category without any partiality. But how he thought of Jade defied his normal attitudes toward courtesans, customers, or women in general. She was all those things, but she looked and acted nothing like the others and he only thought of her as Jade.
HanChol caught himself drifting into a reverie and shook his head forcefully. It was close to five; he’d stop by his house and eat a meal, which would be both his lunch and dinner. When he pulled inside the front yard of their thatched-roof cottage, his mother rushed out of the room where she was sewing with one of his younger sisters. The other one was out washing laundry at a creek; the three women together made a meager income by cleaning and mending laborers’ clothes, a sum that amounted to only half of HanChol’s.
“Hurry up and fix your brother’s meal.” His mother turned sharply to his sister, who was still seated inside the open door. The girl was used to their mother’s abuses, but now she looked frightened. There was no more barley after their morning meal; as the oldest daughter, she was continuously called upon to make food out of nearly nothing, yet even she couldn’t make miracles happen. Before sharper rebukes could fall upon his sister for his sake, HanChol stepped in.
“Mother, don’t worry. I already had a bowl of soup at a tavern. Here, that’s for dinner,” he said, handing her the two won. She creased into a smile. “Aigoo, my son. My firstborn.”
She urged him to stay and rest, but he shook his head and went back out with his rickshaw. His mother doted on him as she never did on his sisters; she respected and even feared him as the head of the household since age fourteen, when his father passed. Nonetheless, her constant fixation upon his bloodline, which was some obscure cadet branch of the mighty House of Andong-Kim, made him uneasy around her. Her common refrain was “If your father were still alive, his cousins would have taken us in . . .” and “You must restore our family’s name, you must live up to our honor . . .” The clan still lived in prosperity in the wealthy enclave of Andong, but their family had been living apart since HanChol’s grandfather’s time. They were now no better than peasants, except in their strict observance of formalities and the expectation that HanChol would go to university and enter into a respectable career, lifting them all out of their misery.
The sun was still shining above the buildings, but its warmth was being replaced by an earthy coolness, as happens on fine spring evenings.