Who talks about their mother’s alcoholism to someone they’ve just met? How was I supposed to react?
—She’s even showing signs of early Alzheimer’s brought on by alcohol poisoning. It’s getting harder and harder to deal with her. Every four days or so she escapes from the ward, and I have to chase her around the hospital trying to catch her.
Jesus, what is wrong with this guy? Just how weird is he?
I felt a sudden pressure to lay out my own family saga. Our family is extremely ordinary, and like any ordinary patriarch, my father had so many affairs that my mother eventually divorced him, my mother is now suffering from the number one killer of middle-aged Koreans, aka cancer—was that what I ought to say at this point? Or should I come up with something even more elaborate? In the end, I stuck to the basics.
—My umma is sick, too. Uterine cancer. She’s been hospitalized, and I’m taking care of her.
—Ah, I see. We have a lot in common.
It hit me that this was the first time I’d mentioned my mother’s sickness to someone else. The man spoke again.
—This is your first time taking a class at the institute, right?
—Yes. How did you know?
—I’ve taken almost every humanities and philosophy class there. I’d never seen your face before. I’d remember such a cute face.
I still remember his expression when he said this. He acted all cool and nonchalant, but his trembling eyes and the hesitation in his lips showed how nervous he was. I was taken aback. No one had ever called me cute, not even as a joke, at least not since I was a baby. My complete and utter un-cuteness was the key to my cuteness, at best. Was he flirting with me? Was this some kind of (very unsmooth) courtship situation? That couldn’t be right. I had a mirror at home, I knew all too well that I wasn’t worth a whole cup of coffee. I was so stumped, I couldn’t think of anything to say. I was trembling and was so nervous I couldn’t look him in the eye, and I was trying my best to hide it. Then, in a tone so light as to mock me, he added:
—If you don’t have anything to do after class, let’s have dinner together each week.
And so we ended up wandering around the area after each class, picking a place to have dinner. He was the one who knew the shops and restaurants well, introducing me to all the hot spots (which mostly served rice and side dishes, the kind of homestyle places frequented by middle-aged men), while I luxuriated in the false sense of being invited into his intimate spaces (I later learned that he liked pretending to be knowledgeable to any random person).
When I was with him, I became someone who spoke and ate little. I was completely intent on observing him, squirreling away within myself the sight of his short, unkempt hair, the warm air that flowed between his front teeth when he laughed, the way he raised an eyebrow when he felt shy, and the slight whistle whenever he pronounced an s. After dinner, I had to scramble to keep up with him on my at-least-four-inches-shorter legs as he strode along with his gaze straight ahead. I was often thrown into despair over the fact that he never once looked back at me on that long walk to the subway station.
Whenever I sat staring at him, all kinds of thoughts ran through my head. I wanted to know him as a person, and more than that to know what he thought of me, and even more than that, I longed to understand how he managed to keep jerking my emotions around. My thoughts, my feelings kept racing ahead at hundreds of miles per second, and I hadn’t a clue as to what to do with this kind of energy. So, I turned the spiralbound notebook I had bought for the class into a diary and wrote about him and the changes in my emotions that he brought on, recording and examining my feelings.
The more I wrote, the less I understood.
He shared very little about his life, but I knew he did not have a job that demanded regular hours, and he seemed to meet up with almost no one apart from me. From time to time he sent me meaningless text messages (Today is a good day for a walk) and articles about foods that were good for your immune system and battling cancer, much like an old uncle. These would spark a conversation that covered his very boring day (Today I read Kant and fed some stray cats), the situation with his alcoholic mother (She escaped from the hospital, got a hold of some alcohol, and fought with a taxi driver), and photos of his one-person dinners (I cooked some spicy mackerel). To these I barely managed to reply meaningless answers like Ah, yes; How bad for you; Have a nice meal. If the conversation threatened to break off because of my lackluster replies, he sent smiley-face emojis or fat-cat stickers to prolong our awkward exchange. A few more meaningless messages and my mood would end up like a deflated balloon, with me believing that he wasn’t talking to me because he was interested in me (for whatever reason), but that he was simply so lonely it was either talk to me or talk to the walls. I knew the temperature and the smell of such loneliness all too well.
Because back then I was exactly the same kind of person.
2.
One Saturday afternoon, when my mother had just finished her Healing Yoga session, she goaded me into taking another walk together. It was the same route we always took, but my mood was a different shade than usual. That ream of paper he had sent me had completely upended my life. My emotions were swinging up one second and down the next, just like they had five years ago. I couldn’t concentrate or do any work. I sent an email to my publisher asking for a week’s extension on my next manuscript.
Umma and I headed for Olympic Park. It was just across the street from the hospital. She leaned on me, and we crossed the street slowly, arm in arm. From afar, we probably looked like a mother-son pair on very good terms. As on any other day, we talked for about ten minutes before sitting down on a bench near the reservoir.