The man had apparently been president of the student council, had been arrested protesting a few times, and was now some research professor at a historical organization. The woman, who had written short stories of their student activist days and received a prize given by a left-wing group, was currently a very important author. Being friends of friends, he worried that he would probably keep bumping into them in the future.
—Look, do you really have to care so much about what they think? So what if he used to be in the student council and she’s a writer? They were being shitty to you and putting you down. Even I was annoyed about it. Why should you stand there and take that from them? Who cares about their opinions, who cares about what they think? Shouldn’t you be grateful to me instead? We almost had to have lunch with them! And what kind of activists have such a horrible understanding of human rights? They’re just a couple of champagne socialists—
—Don’t . . .
—Don’t what?
—Don’t fucking talk about them like that.
That was the first time he had used informal Korean in my presence. It hurt enough to silence me. Without saying another word, I grabbed my bag and left his house. I hoped he would run after me. He didn’t. I was more angry than sad, more despairing than angry. That was probably the first time he hadn’t waved goodbye to me.
He gave me a call at dawn the next day. In a drunken voice, he demanded I come see him that minute. I dropped the formal language.
—I’ve got nothing to say to a fucking drunk.
—Language.
—Fuck your own language.
—When I say come, come.
—Fuck off. Am I your fucking dog?
—Please come.
I was his fucking dog. Off I trotted on my little puppy legs to his apartment, where I found him sitting on the floor on some spread-out newspapers, drinking soju with some banchan of octopus and rockfish. As soon as he saw me, he kissed me. The stench of alcohol made me push him away.
—Hey, stop that.
He said nothing as he silently started to take my clothes off and caress me. Looking down at his peach-like head and his face that looked like a dumpling gone cold, my resolve melted away, and I held him close.
After we had sex, he talked more about his past.
—My back isn’t so good. I was incarcerated a few times.
—For drugs?
—No, for activism.
That was the day he went into his whole thing about being a student activist in his twenties. Smelling the odor of fish mixed with the soju on his breath, I curled up beside him as I listened to his voice.
He had been president of the humanities college student council. Now that I knew, it amazed me how the words “student council president” explained so much about him. The way he kept striding forward as if someone were after him, his constantly paranoid attitude, his tendency of letting others speak before saying one final thing as if he were the leader making a decision. He had been part of the leftover student activist generation of the mid-nineties and after graduation had briefly dipped his toes in the labor movement. The Misun-Hyosun incident demonstrations had also been during his time, as well as protests against the abolishment of the National Security Act and the anti–Chosun Daily movement, which caused him to be arrested a few times. His back and neck, he claimed, had never been the same since.
When he got down to the details, it turned out he had spent maybe seventy-two hours behind bars over four stays, he was never tortured, and all that happened there was some lying around in a cell with a heated floor. A bit of a stretch to say you got a lifelong condition from that—maybe your back pain is just from bad posture? These were the thoughts I didn’t speak aloud.
The endless recounting of little incidents he experienced in the student movement made me feel drowsy and adrift. I listened to how he got a new tattoo every time he left lockup, and how he covered each tattoo whenever he had some new epiphany. Only half listening, I searched on my phone for information about the student council at his university and learned it had once been infamous for being hardline left-wing nationalist. I suppressed a smile at the eighties cliché of it all—listening to a former student council president reminisce about his activist days while we lay together in a basement apartment in the afterglow of sex.
—So I only use iPhones now. Not even the CIA can hack them.
His iPhone 4 looked tiny in his hand. He talked about how obsessive he was about security because he had been on the police blacklist during his peak activist years and his phone had been tapped and he himself followed. At that point in the story I thought, What is this bullshit? and realized he and I had never communicated through Korean messaging apps like KakaoTalk but only through iMessenger. Messaging apps with offshore servers, apparently, were safer.
—I’m anxious these days because I keep thinking someone is watching me.
I tried hard to keep a straight face.
—You still think there are people following you?
—Even at this very moment, there are people being wiretapped. And people who are killed for being activists.
—Well, yes. I know people are dying right this minute, people who are fighting for justice. I know that much.
It’s just that I don’t think you’re one of those people. It’s not that I don’t believe you, or that I refuse to believe you, but I don’t think you’re that important a person. Today, you’re just a run-of-the-mill guy sitting in his room all day and cursing out writers as you fix their spelling mistakes. You’re as ordinary as I am. And what does that make me, who likes this loser so much?
I wanted to say all of these things, but I kissed him instead. Just so he couldn’t say anything more.
?
Olympic Park that fall was more beautiful than it had ever been.
Umma’s cancer treatment was entering its final stages. To keep her strength up, she forcefed herself meals despite a complete lack of appetite. She also made herself go on walks. Despite all the food being stuffed into her mouth, her face became as gaunt as a skull. On a walk one day, she picked up a fallen leaf from the ground and said to me:
—I keep thinking of the time you were in high school.
—Jesus, now what?
—That time when you were sick. I don’t know why I keep thinking about how I wasn’t able to take care of you.
—I wasn’t the one who was sick, you were. The person you weren’t able to take care of was your own damn self.
Umma didn’t seem to be listening and walked toward a flower patch instead. “Oh, look at this,” she exclaimed, bent over a patch of decorative kale. They were shaped like ordinary kale, but their purple and red tint made them look almost alien.
—Ew, it looks weird. Umma, don’t touch that.
—I used to really hate this plant.
—Why? You love anything that’s a plant.
—This type of kale was the first thing I noticed after I failed to get into college. They were planted all along the street outside the school gates I’d walked out of after seeing my name wasn’t on the acceptance lists that were posted. The purple color made me so nauseous, I had to hold down vomit. Such incredible disappointment. My whole life felt like it had ended back then, but look at me now, still alive.
—I’m impressed they even had kale back then.