The closer he became to MyungBo, the less intense JungHo’s yearning for Jade became. The occupation of his mind and body to all that he needed to do in order to be worthy of her left him with very little time or energy to spend with her. He was going to her house once a week for a while, then once every fortnight, then just once a month. The worst part of this was that Jade no longer seemed to mind that he’d stayed away—she seemed preoccupied with rehearsals, performances, salon appointments, photo shoots, interviews, shopping, cinema, and a hundred other obligations and amusements. She always greeted him warmly, looked more and more beautiful each time they met, and talked breathlessly about some artist or a new novel of which he had zero knowledge. It seemed she always had something to do after ten, fifteen minutes. She was sometimes not home when he came by at noon.
So JungHo made a promise to himself that he’d stop calling on her until he was as important to her as she was to him. If he was being honest, he didn’t know if he could ever take the place of her work, her art. Just from watching her dance once, he’d seen that this was a place in her soul that men couldn’t touch. But he wouldn’t even wish for that—he would only wish that he’d be the first among the people that she loved. That seemed possible so long as he could prove his worth as a man, although how he might do that was completely beyond his imagination. These thoughts came to him suddenly as he went about his day doing unrelated things, eating with his friends, delivering messages for MyungBo, getting up in the morning and shaving. Most often, it was when he felt the caress of the spring breeze or glimpsed the crystals of white moonlight salting the Han River. Then he would wonder how she had changed since they last saw each other, and whether he was now good enough for her.
IT WAS A WARM SPRING afternoon when the atmosphere shimmered under the quick-drying sun and everything from trees to grass to houses had a secret air of movement, of growing. HanChol narrowed his eyes against the white light, leaning against a wall and resisting the urge to put his hand on his stomach. Looking doubled over in hunger wouldn’t exactly help attract customers. He had only made one won since dawn, when he broke his fast with steamed potato and barley. He’d decided not to go home for lunch until he hit the one-won fifty-cent mark, and now it was past four.
A woman in a kimono was walking toward him, and he straightened up. It was hard to know how old she was under her white makeup, but her coquettish gait and mannerisms looked young.
“Koko kara Honmachi made ikura kakarimasuka?” she said, smiling. How much to go to Honmachi?
“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.