This is how I’ve been able to keep all of us fed and clothed. We have saved up quite a bit of cash since we can go to any of “our” restaurants and eat a good meal. It’s the same thing with clothes and shoes and alcohol. But again I warn my guys not to go overboard with squeezing the businesses too hard. Since about a year ago I’ve even been paying rent to the Chinese restaurant though we still occasionally eat black bean noodles and sweet-and-sour pork for free. I’ve noticed though that whenever we order food there YoungGu looks deeply uncomfortable and it probably has to do with the owner’s young daughter, who brings bones and scraps to YoungGu’s dog and then shyly runs away.
This brings me back to why I came to the bridge tonight. My feet lead me here unconsciously whenever I need some time to think. I rested my forearms on the stone railing and gazed down at the matte black surface of the canal. It undulated like the back of some sea monster. The yellow lights of the nearby bars and shops could not reach the water and I had the strange feeling that I was the only one to ever see it like this. I felt very alone but I wasn’t craving the company of my guys or even Loach, who is at the end of the day my best friend. I can’t really talk to him about what’s been bothering me. We were all teasing YoungGu about that girl and making dirty jokes and asking when he’ll finally lose his virginity and I noticed that only Loach wasn’t filled with the same mixture of envy and fascination as the others. He went along with it wearing that sly smile—he still smiles the same way—but as if he wouldn’t keep that conversation going on his own. Loach never hoots at women or gets shy around them which are really the only two ways we know how to act around females. I get the feeling that my confession about a girl will get the same kind of cold reaction from him and so I’d rather keep this to myself.
Here’s what happened. Last week I was taking a walk by myself near the Great East Gate and looking around the different shops and establishments in the area. Since I first came here Seoul has become a completely different place. Where there used to be little straw-roofed cottages there are now bars, cafés, dance halls, restaurants, banks, offices, and shops reaching up to four or five stories. Before there were plenty of men in suits but hardly any women in Western clothes. Now the streets lit brightly by gas lamps are filled with these so-called Modern Girls with their cropped and waved hair and red lips and short skirts. Of course we try to get their attention but they speed away either like they can’t see us or they’re scared of us. Above all the people walking or riding their bicycles or spilling out of the streetcars, there are electric wires crisscrossing dangerously close to the tiled roofs. The air in Seoul smells of rain, cooking oil, garbage, pine trees, persimmon, perfume, red bean paste, hot metal, and snow. It changes by the season and the time of day and the neighborhood.
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.