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By
Kim Yeon-su
That spring, Jin-gyeong resolved to go
study in New York, even though it meant risking a
breakup with me. Since she failed to tell me she was
going to study abroad until after she had received an
offer of admission, I had no way of stopping her, so I
said goodbye, remarking half in jest and half in
earnest, “That’s great! After all, there’s so much you
don’t know that you’re in need of a lifelong
education.” But the moment Jin-gyeong passed through
immigration on her way out, it became clear that
without her my life had no meaning at all. Still, I
held out for a few months. Then, once I finally
received mail from her after a long silence, I could
not take it anymore. The message went rambling on
about all the Korean men she was meeting at school and
at church. A week later, when Jin-gyeong returned home
to her Korean boarding house in Flushing and found me
sitting at the kitchen table talking with the landlady
about the impeachment of Korea’s president, she
screamed as if she was going to faint. It was the
happiest scream I ever heard. Hearing that scream, I
felt certain that she was going to be my wife. Within
three months of going to live in New York, Jin-gyeong
had changed from being an ambitious, cold-hearted
woman to being a sweet creature longing for human
touch. So my most beautiful summer vacation began. We
rented a car and set off away from New York.
Southward, ever southward, without stopping! We went to visit
my Aunt Pam in Sebastian, a small coastal town in
Florida, mainly because we were in a somewhat abnormal
state, a kind of trance, one might call it, a
boundlessly positive state, feeling able to accept
anything the world might throw at us. Otherwise, I
would never have thought of driving a hired car all
the way to Florida during that short vacation. Apart
from sleeping in a motel at night, I drove almost
nonstop for two whole days. I took Highway 95 and
drove down the east coast of the United States. During
the more than twenty hours of driving we talked a
great deal. Without that time, we would not be where
we are now. All the time I was driving, I even felt
grateful that Aunt Pam lived in Florida, not in New
Jersey or Maryland, close to New York. Her husband
Paul said I was crazy when he heard we got there in
only two days, driving from New York, but Aunt Pam
just laughed and was glad. “These two are so crazy
about each other, they’d be capable of going all the
way to Patagonia, let alone Florida, talking all the
while,” she chided Paul. The day before I left, my
mother had said that since it was hard to get to the
U.S., once I was there I should visit Florida and see
how Pamela was doing. At that time, I had no thought
of seeing my aunt, so I asked sarcastically if she
thought that the United States was the size of
Gyeongsang Province and got a talking-to from her. For a while after I came
back from America, every time we met, Mother would
tease me: “I don’t dare think of going to Florida.
Gyeongsang-do is good enough for me, so please offer
me a trip down there.” When it came to settling scores, Aunt Pam
deserved to be considered Mother’s equal; she was the
youngest daughter of seven siblings in my maternal
family. Mother used to say she was a strange child
because, although her real name was Cha Jeong-sin,
once she was in high school she adopted the name
Pamela for herself. My mother, who was her second
eldest sister and had once been like a natural
adversary to my aunt, used to say, clicking her
tongue: “Ever since his middle school days Kim
Young-sam put on his desk a sign saying “Future
President,” so in the same manner your aunt’s hope
since middle school was to become the wife of some
American guy.” When I reminded her, “After all,
Auntie’s dream came true,” she replied, “Why only her
dream? Kim Young-sam’s came true, and mine, too.” So I
asked her what her dream had been and she said it was
to be a good wife and wise mother. Did I really have
to ask whether Mother had achieved that dream? When I
openly expressed my doubts, Mother hit me on the back.
So, if she was really a good wife and wise mother,
Mother was a good wife and wise mother with a firm
hand. We stayed with Aunt Pam for two days and
drank a lot of different kinds of wine. Paul had built
a wine cellar in the basement with refrigeration and
ventilation, and he bought wine by the case every
year. When Paul said that since he had bought the
cellarful of wine, he was going to drink it all before
he died, Aunt Pam asked if he meant he was going to
keep drinking wine until the day he died. The two of
them were all the time bickering like that. Aunt Pam
said that by drinking as much as we could, we young
folk would be helping them get rid of it, and piled
this and that kind of wine on the table every night,
opened one bottle after another and urged us to taste
the different kinds. Paul complained that he would
have no wine left for himself, but following Auntie’s
orders he brought wine up from the cellar, took one
sip, then left the table. At first, I thought it was
his way of being considerate and giving us some
quality time to spend recounting old stories. However,
every time we opened a new bottle, Auntie freely told
us things she had never told anyone, although she was
seeing us for the first time. We learned that before
she left for the States Auntie had acted in a movie,
and also that Paul had been operated on for pancreatic
cancer that spring. Word of his pancreatic cancer was
unexpected enough, but that she had been a movie star
in her youth was really astonishing. When I asked what
kind of movie it was, it turned out to have been the
last movie of a director I had heard about, who died
relatively young, in his early forties. “But why did Mom never tell us that?” “Even now, if I go out anywhere, women
young and old all leer at me. If I’m in a women-only
group it gets really oppressive. After all, ever since
we were children, your mother has been fretting about
not being able to kill me. Still, luckily you’re not
like your mother.” “I’m really shocked. To think you were a
film star . . . Well, that’s one thing, and then you
say it’s lucky I’m not like Mom. She would beat you
up.” “Does she still go around boasting of her
fists?” I knew full well that my mother’s family
all had the gift of the gab, but the way one word
after another came pouring out . . . I admired the way
that such a person could willingly forfeit
opportunities for chattering in Korean and choose to
become an American’s wife to fulfill her middle-school
dream. Later, Jin-gyeong insisted that she had sent me
that e-mail because she missed chatting with a close
friend about minor things that had happened while she
was away and that she had absolutely not written about
all those men to provoke my jealousy. However, when
she found me sitting at the table in her boarding
house a week or so later, she had been deeply moved
and then, seeing Aunt Pam and me competing to demolish
my mother, she decided to marry me. For, if a conflict
between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law were to
arise, this man would not get things wrong and take
his mother’s side. You could call it her own one-sided
guess before ever having a taste of Mother’s fist.
Joking aside, it is true that all the tales told by
Aunt Pam that day and the next evening had a big
influence on our marriage. “I really wondered whose face would be
the last I’d see at the moment of death. What would it
look like? Don’t babies in the womb have the same
thought? If I go outside, what will the face of the
person I see first look like? Questions like that must
arise when you’re rolling around in amniotic fluid.” “I presume only for babies that are like
you.” “Stop prattling. Anyway, in that case, I can
tell those babies in the womb. Why, fetuses are all
the time listening. They like you to say ‘I love you,’
they hate you to say ‘I hate you.’ I will tell them
this. The most important thing is getting out of there
in good health, and then, once you’re out, like it or
not, there’ll be a face you see for the first time.
Whose face? Your mother’s. And when that mother is
dying, your face will probably be the last she sees.
It seems life is fair like that. I mean, so long as
your mother’s life does not have too much pain and too
many tears. So, if the last face you see at the moment
of death is not the face of a person you’ve loved for
your whole life, then no matter what kind of life that
person lived, you cannot help but say that his or her
life has been unfortunate. So marry without
reservation, then have babies. That’s all I want to
say.” “What
about all those other things you’ve been saying?” “You
want me to kill you?” Two years later,
my wife and I used an annual vacation to returnto New
York, and since we both were definitely secreting
fewer pheromones, we had no energy left to rent a car
and go speeding down to Florida. After all, the U.S.
is not Gyeongsang Province, is it? Instead, I took a
roundtrip flight to Sebastian alone, interrupting a
busy schedule; if I said it was only to drink wine,
everyone would treat me as an out-and-out alcoholic,
as my Mom, who heard me, said. But so what? It’s true.
One year after our visit, we heard that Paul’s cancer
had recurred. Aunt Pam called Mom, who reported that
she was crying as she said that the whites of Paul’s
eyes had turned yellow. When I reached the white house
in Sebastian, Aunt Pam grabbed my hand, led me down to
the wine cellar and showed me the remaining boxes of
wine. “Life is so short,” she sighed, “one person is
born and can’t finish this much wine before he dies.”
On that day, I had been intending to drink all the
remaining wine but, judging by the amount left in the
cellar, if I had done so my life would really have
been shortened. That evening, as we sat on chairs in
the portico with its stone pillars, which I learned
had been a decisive factor when they bought the house,
looking up at the night sky as we drank the wine, my
aunt, somewhat drunken, suddenly rose from her seat
and began to recite in the resonant voice of an
actress: “O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
the vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the
vacant.” One might have thought she was reciting a
prologue to a very long and amazing story. Actually, it was part of
T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”. I said to my soul, be still, and wait
without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong
thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong
thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope
are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not
ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and
the stillness the dancing. My aunt told me
that she had read this poem to Paul, when he was
holding out day by day by the sheer power of
narcotics. As she said that, she added that she was
absolutely not someone whose dream had come true. My
aunt’s dream had not been to become an “American guy’s
wife.” My aunt’s dream was simple. It was to die while
looking into the face of a loved one. However, all the
people she loved had died before her. I looked at my
aunt’s face, ravaged by far, far, far too much pain
and far, far, far too many tears. The poem that my
aunt read to the sick Paul was a poem that the
director who had originally made the movie she starred
in had asked her to read. First he died, and then the
baby in her belly breathed its last without knowing
that there was light in the world and not only
darkness. And finally Paul had met his end. Now Aunt
Pam had no face left to look at as she lay dying. Like
a baby realizing the moment it’s born that it will
never have a mother’s face in its life, when Paul
breathed his last, she felt desolate and pitiful, as
though she had been orphaned. “You know the Buddhist teaching that
suffering and illusion give birth to reincarnation?” After telling about Paul’s last moments,
my aunt asked me. I nodded. I knew about the Eightfold
Path as well. “Paul believed that implicitly; it must
be true since it’s something the Buddha said, right?” “Why? Was my uncle a Buddhist?” “Before he died, he was a sort of
Buddhist.” “A sort of Buddhist?” “Before he died, Paul kept saying we
should go to Seogwipo. Yet he could not so much as go
to the next room in the hospital by himself. I asked
why, but he simply said we should go and see how big a
city it is, what the people look like, look at the
shape of the terrain, and explore the overall feel of
the city, so that he might be reborn there. Yes,
reborn. He would live once again. So I looked around
and there was a book that I used to read. A Buddhist
book written by a monk from Cambodia. He had
completely misunderstood one sentence in the book,
‘suffering and illusion give birth to reincarnation.’
He thought that he himself had a lot of suffering and
illusion, so he felt sure he would be reborn; from
that day on, he would be a Buddhist believer — that’s
how it was, for him. I was ready to tell him that life
in this body passes just once; we can’t live twice in
this body; we live once in this life, then we are dead
forever — that’s what I was about to say but I could
not spit out the words. Your eyes show that you’re
also the sort of person who can never say things that
people do not like to hear, even if they’re true. So
instead I said: That’s what the Buddha says. Right.
You have a lot of suffering and many illusions, you’ll
surely be born again. I’ll be waiting for you, so go
on, be born again. Funny, isn’t it? Then Paul said
that he will surely be born again. He’ll be born again
with a young, healthy body and have sex with me. Oh my
God! What will he do if he alone is born again with a
young, healthy body? While I’m a withered old hag.” “But why on earth did he think he would
be reborn in Seogwipo?” “When you came here from New York the
year before last, driving for ten hours a day with
your future wife, it awakened old memories; I told
Paul about them afterwards. You see, after making that
movie, when it was already showing in the cinemas, one
day I met the director at a Chungmuro coffee shop, and
suddenly he grabbed my hand and said that there was a
place we should go to. So I followed him and went to
Seogwipo on Jeju Island. Yes, it was an elopement.
Nowadays, we would probably run away to somewhere like
Patagonia or Macedonia, but in those times we could
not travel overseas, so we went as far as we could go.
We spent more than three months looking at the sea
from 136-2 Jeongbang-dong, Seogwipo. It was a house
with a galvanized tin roof; the rain made a really
nice sound. In April, when we first set up house, it
was mi then
it gradually rose up the scale, until by July it was
at sol. If his wife had not arrived bringing
their child with her, it might even have reached ti. For those three months, every night I
lay in the director’s arms listening to the rain. I
had no regrets, bearing neither grudge nor resentment;
I would not have minded if his wife had killed me, but
she merely took her husband gently by the hand and led
him away. “After a meal
with the wife and child and the director in a Chinese
restaurant that the two of us had often eaten in, we
parted, and it was such a peaceful farewell, I was
like an innkeeper seeing off a family that had come on
vacation and was returning home. It was even sadder
because I grew up being beaten by my sisters. I felt
she was not treating me as a human being. As I watched
him leave with his family I waved like crazy, then
went back to the Seogwipo house alone and cried my
eyes out, feeling that I was the only person left in
the world. It was only later that I learned he was
already very sick then. Somehow, his eyes looked like
a deer’s; he was timid and attentive to what people
thought, yet he found the courage to run away to
Seogwipo. That was all because he knew he did not have
long to live. In that case he shouldn’t have given me
so much affection.” Later, putting
together the story I heard from my mother, who called
Aunt Pam “that crazy girl,” and the story told by my
aunt, who called my mother “a sister like Cinderella’s
cruel stepmother who was worse than her ugly
daughter,” I realized it was Mom who took Aunt Pam to
the obstetrician. She went bravely as far as the
hospital gates, then clung to a telephone pole
swearing she would never go inside, leaving her sister
at a loss. Mom said it was the first and last time
that she did not hit her disobedient sister. She said
she sat kneeling on the ground, begging and begging my
aunt. Then Aunt Pam also knelt down and begged. It
makes me feel sad when I imagine the scene of the two
sisters kneeling at the foot of a telephone pole in
front of a maternity clinic imploring one another.
Finally, after holding out for a long while, my aunt
relented and Mom led her into the clinic. Aunt Pam
could never forgive my grandfather, my mother, and all
the rest of the family who had aided and abetted them.
My aunt got a job in a bank and doggedly saved money
for a few years, all the while rejecting many suitors
just like Penelope in the Odyssey,
before finally receiving an invitation to work in the United States through the
introduction of a broker. It was then that Cha Jeong-sin became Pamela Cha. On becoming Pamela
Cha, she broke completely with her past. And for a
long time my aunt never visited Korea, and at first
did not even contact her family there. Even when
Grandfather died, she just said she would pray for him
in Florida. “That crazy girl said she would pray in
Florida, ha!” That was something I heard my mother say. “Whose fault was it that I married an
American, even saying that it had been my dream?” That was something I heard Aunt Pam say. Last summer, after coming to Korea and
spending a month on Jeju Island, my aunt told me that
she had found a house she liked in Yerae-dong near
Seogwipo’s Jungmun Tourism Complex. In the autumn she
sold the house in Florida and returned home
permanently to Korea. “That woman’s whims are going to
be the bane of my life,” my mother grumbled as she and
the other family members went down to Seogwipo one
after another and helped her settle in. When I called
my aunt from time to time, I could hear everyone
singing noisily, all drunk. At such times I had to
shout desperately into the phone. “Please let me talk
to my mother! Tell her to come home!” My aunt said she
seemed to be living a second life. It certainly seemed
like that, judging from her voice. My aunt’s return
home could be considered a success. Once the news had
been transmitted in the course of meeting old
acquaintances, the information that my aunt had
returned to Korea even appeared in movie magazines.
The seasons changed, winter passed. Sometimes I
wondered if the winter was colder in Seogwipo or in
Sebastian, but beyond that I could not give much
attention to her. My wife had a second baby, and I was
promoted to section chief. As soon as I passed
thirty-five, my life, which had been running along
peacefully like a carousel, began to speed up like a
roller coaster. One such day, my aunt called me and
asked why I had not come to visit her in Seogwipo.
After I had been down there with my wife in the autumn
of the previous year, I only made three or four calls
during the winter. However, my aunt’s voice seemed to
be so subdued that instead of saying I would go or was
too busy to go, I asked if there was anything wrong. “There’s
nothing wrong. I’m having a great time here every
night with Paul,” Aunt replied. “If you put it like that, it makes it
sound as though something extraordinary is happening.
What the hell do you mean? Having a great time with
your deceased husband?” “Umm. Well, there’s something only I
know. I’ll show you when you come down. By the way,
can you come down next Saturday? Someone is supposed
to come to see me, but I feel a little bit awkward to
meet that person alone.” “Hey, why are you talking like this,
Auntie? Who is it that’s coming? I’m sorry. I’ll go
down sometime soon.” “You know him very well ... Why, back in
the old days, movie director Jeong . . .” “Auntie! Is Seogwipo some kind of
heavenly paradise?” “That’s what I
mean . . . Why don’t you come down to this wonderful
place? Come down next Saturday. I’ll never be able to
meet director Jeong on my own.” So the following
Saturday I went down to Yerae-dong with my wife and
son. The house was a two-story villa built for
foreigners, with a view of the sea, located to one
side of the village, lacking nothing, but the
architectural style that exists in the notions of
local builders really offended the eyes. In front of
the entrance hall four stone pillars were set like a
Greek temple, so that from a distance it looked like a
community hall painted white. “What’s that,
Greek Ionesco-style stone columns?” I pointed to the
roughly finished cement stone pillars. Bounded by the
stone pillars was an iron table covered with a white
tablecloth, holding a vase of daffodils and a basket
of fruit, and some iron chairs. “Surely Ionesco,
as you say, is the name of a French dramatist? If
you’re talking about stone pillars, you mean Ionian.” Jin-gyeong scolded
me. By now she had gotten used to our family’s way of
talking. “You came to the
Sebastian house, so you know how much Paul loved this
kind of portico. His life’s dream was to sit beneath
it, drinking wine, reading magazines, and dozing. He
never even imagined that he would fall ill as soon as
he bought a house in Florida with a fine portico.
Really we never can tell. We can’t see beyond the tip
of our nose. Do you remember all that wine? I sold it
back to the wine shop, a whole truckful. I kept just
one case and sold all the rest.” It was a 1984
Dominus Estate wine with a sketch on the label by the
American artist Larry Rivers. Nineteen eighty-four was the year
when Aunt Pam and Paul married. To commemorate it,
Paul bought a case of that year’s wine. All through
the winter, every time she felt lonely, Auntie would
drink the wine, sitting under the portico looking out
at the Washington palm tree in the garden. Since it
would be too hard to drink a whole bottle, she would
prepare two glasses, one for Paul, one for her, like
that. That was what she had meant by having a great
time with Paul. It was a way of letting go of Paul
completely. Now there were only two bottles left. When
we went down, Aunt uncorked one of them. While my aunt
read the vintage information Paul had written on a
scrap of paper, my wife and I enjoyed the wine. “Winter
precipitation was slightly low at 35.68 inches, but it
went down to 25 inches in November and December.
Temperatures were moderate in May, June, and August,
but July and September were so hot that there were
twenty days at above
100 degrees Fahrenheit. In July it was six days, and
in September it was eight. That only makes fourteen
days, so where did the other six days come from? I
don’t know. The harvest began on September 2, 1984,
and ended on September 12, 1984.” As I listened to
my aunt reading out information about the weather in
Napa Valley in 1984, haltingly translating it into
Korean, it seemed that the hot summer sunshine of that
year was sliding intact down my throat. My aunt said
that in that year she had been so beautiful that
people could not look at her straight. I would have to
ask my mother about it before I could judge whether it
was true or not, but perhaps because I was drinking
rare, expensive vintage wine beneath exotic stone
pillars, Ionesco-style or Ionian-style or whatever, it
was the first time in my life that my aunt’s boasting
sounded true. As for my aunt in her youth, I had often
seen a photo of her sitting between my mother and
grandmother, leaning forward and saying something,
taken at Gimpo Airport just before she boarded the
plane for the United States, and in it she was wearing
a pink hairpin like Donald Duck’s girlfriend, Daisy
Duck, and had her lips pouting forward, but I still
felt I knew how beautiful my aunt had been. After finishing
the bottle between the three of us, my aunt and I sat
watching our child playing with his mother, spraying
water from a hose in the garden. The child was now
four years old. A small rainbow appeared and
disappeared above the water he was spraying. As I
prepared to draw the cork of the last bottle, my aunt
caught my hand. “You want to
enjoy it all alone?” “No, I’m putting
it aside for someone else.” “You’ve given up
drinking alone, then?” My aunt laughed,
saying I was funny. If it had not been Aunt Pam, it
was a joke that I would never have made, but my aunt
laughed. That’s why I like her. “No more crying.
I promise you.” “What about
getting a dog? The garden’s big, the house too.” “Well, I only
want one that says funny things like you, and suddenly
goes flying off to New York, not otherwise.” “A dog you have
because the house is big doesn’t need to be like me,”
I wailed. “If I get one
it has to be the best kind.” “A dog to keep
you company can be any kind of dog. And now, please
send Uncle Paul away. Surely you haven’t come
to Seogwipo because he said he’s going to be born
again here?” “What do you
think? Does it look like that?” “My mother said
that you’re someone who is more than capable of doing
something of the sort.” “You’re married
now, too, so you’ll understand; we lived together as
long as we could, didn’t we? So if I can live my life
one more time, it will have to be with someone else,
won’t it?” “You mean you
can’t be like Chunhyang?” “I’m older than
Chunhyang’s mother. I don’t have time to live as a
devoted widow. I have no time to go messing about with
chastity or faithfulness or whatever.” If she could
live her life over one more time, maybe my aunt would
go back to 136-2 Jeongbang-dong, that tin-roofed
house. The house where two lovers without a future
spent three months. I asked her what had been so good
about her life in that house, and my aunt replied that
the sound of the rain had been good. The rain that,
when they rented the house in April, had been at mi and by July had gone up to sol. That evening, on the way to Seogwipo with
my aunt to meet “Director Jeong,” we stopped by that
house. My aunt said the roof had been fixed and the
house enlarged, but that the original shape of the
house was not changed. She said everything else was
alright, but it was a pity that the thin tin roof had
been replaced with colored steel sheets. To my aunt,
who had gone halfway round the world and spent half a
lifetime away, and had now come back, it was a miracle
that the house was still standing there at all. When I
asked my aunt if it was true that the rain in April
was tuned to mi but then went up the scale to sol in July, she looked up at the sky
and seemed to think for a while, then nodded as she
replied that yes, the sound of the rain changed. After
that, she had never heard rain make such a sound. The
sound of that rain she heard every night, as she lay
with her head pillowed on Director Jeong’s arm, while
she worried in case when day broke he might have
vanished, sleeping briefly, then waking, sleeping
again, then waking and looking into his face, then not
being able to get back to sleep, lying motionless for
fear of waking him. Still as vivid as rain that fell
the previous day, yet it was a sound she would never
hear again. From there we
walked to the Chinese restaurant called Deokseongwon.
Aunt said that Director Jeong was waiting there. It
was something that happened about two weeks ago. One
night my aunt received a phone call, and when she
answered the phone unthinkingly, a middle-aged man’s
voice asked, “Is Mrs. Cha Jeong-sin there?” Hearing that voice, Aunt
thought her heart had stopped. It was the voice of the
dead director. She was sure. How could she have
forgotten his voice? She was so surprised that she
hung up and turned off the phone. The next morning she
turned it back on and saw on the call list a number
starting with 010. There was almost no possibility of
it being the mobile number of someone in heaven. But
she did not think of returning the call, simply
waited all day for another call to come. The call came
late at night. When she replied, once again she heard
“Is Mrs. Cha Jeong-sin there?” That voice from the past. That
voice my aunt had loved. “This is Cha Jeong-sin.” She choked up. “I am Jeong
Ji-un, the son of the director Jeong Gil-seong. I saw you in Seogwipo once before,
but I don’t expect you will remember. I saw in a
magazine that you have come back to Korea.” Finally
she realized that she was not completely crazy after
all. My aunt recalled that last meal in a Chinese
restaurant. The couple, their son, and my aunt, the
four of them sitting down at a square table and eating
spicy noodles. My aunt was feeling sorry for the wife,
and was thinking about breaking up, at which tears
came bursting out; she had bowed her head and eaten
the noodles without knowing where they were going. My
aunt still remembered that the husband and wife had
talked about the health of a sick relative, as if they
were simply having a meal out. I’d heard a lot about the director called
Jeong Ji-un. He made about four films, all of which
had been well reviewed and box-office successes. Once
I saw him being interviewed on a TV show introducing
new movies. His eyes were large and his face looked
sensitive, so that at first sight he seemed to be a
delicate, artistic type. His voice was low and soft. I
could guess the personal appeal of the man that my
aunt had loved. He told my aunt that he was very fond
of his father’s last work and really liked my aunt’s
performance in it. So he wanted to meet her once, and
added that he had some things to give her. When my
aunt asked what kind of things, he explained that in
going through his father’s materials he had found
images and photos related to her. In order to record
his father’s life objectively he had put all his films
in order, and he wanted to give that to her. Finally,
the place where they decided to meet was Deokseongwon,
the Chinese restaurant where she ate with Director
Jeong for the last time. It was about ten minutes’
walk from the house where the director and my aunt had
lived to the restaurant. As we prepared to go in, my
aunt grabbed my arm. She meant that she was nervous,
we should wait a moment. After we had waited a while
my aunt said she was okay and we went inside. As we
went in and looked around, a man in his early forties
sitting in one corner rose and greeted my aunt. As she
approached him, Auntie greeted him with a dignified
expression, but her voice was shaking. I also greeted
him and we sat down together. After exchanging a few
awkward greetings, he took out an envelope from his
bag. Inside were videotapes and photos. “These are all
mixed up. There are some photos that he took while he
was making the movie, others he shot when he wasn’t.
This one is on the set. I don’t know where this is.” “It’s Seogwipo.” As soon as she
saw it, my aunt spoke up. In the photo he was pointing
at, my aunt in her early twenties, with bobbed hair,
her hands stretched out on both sides with fists
clenched, was seemingly charging toward the camera. In
the next photograph she was sitting cross-legged at a
low desk, her chin propped on one hand, her head
turned and looking at the camera. My aunt in the photo
was amazingly young, and her face was completely
devoid of fear. Faces from the days when she still
lived as Cha Jeong-sin, before she turned into Pamela Cha.
Scraps of youth, not realizing that she was living the
happiest days of her life, her head pillowed on her lover’s arm, passing the
nights listening to the rain. Auntie looked closely at
the pictures one by one. After a while, she spoke,
taking off her glasses. “I never dreamed
I might see myself again as I was in my Seogwipo days.
To think that I looked like this. I was really pretty.
Now my nephew will believe how pretty I was.” “She was a very
beautiful woman in her youth. There are still a lot of
people who talk about her,” he said, looking at me as
if wondering how it was I did not know that, despite
being her nephew. “You see, my
aunt’s beauty is very western; I graduated from the
Korean department.” He looked at me
once again and suggested we eat. He picked up the menu
and explained to my aunt about this and that dish. As
he began to pay attention to her, Aunt moved her chair
closer to his and they chose the food together. “The Korean
department will eat rice and kimchi?” My aunt
addressed me. “We also study a
lot of Chinese characters in Korean department
courses.” While we were
eating the various dishes, he talked about what
happened from the moment they left the Chinese
restaurant 27 years ago up to the death of Director Jeong in hospital. Then, going
backward in time, my aunt talked about the days they
had spent in Seogwipo and what had happened when she
first met Director Jeong. Since his purpose was to
collect data about his father, he recorded all of my
aunt’s words, sometimes asking questions to check. By
the time all the talking was over, I was full to
bursting. But the two of them insisted that they had
to eat spicy noodles. He asked the waiter to divide
one serving into two. “Back then,
while I was eating the noodles, I kept looking at you,
but you never lifted your head. All the time while I
was eating, I could see nothing but the crown of your
head, and I felt a kind of sorrow I could not explain.
I felt so confused. Because I loved my mother. That
was the first time that I felt I wanted to make
something like a movie or a novel. As I looked at the
crown of your head. I don’t know if the noodles will
taste as they did then.” On the way back
to Yerae-dong after parting from him, Aunt Pam, who
had happily shared the last bottle of Dominus with
Director Jeong Ji-un, sat in the back seat and began to talk
about how similar father and son were in their
appearance, tone of voice and bearing; about how lucky
she had been to have loved someone worth loving; about
how she should watch the films of Director Jeong Ji-un right away. Then, since I made no
reply, she fell asleep. While my aunt was muttering to
herself, I was looking at the asphalt in the
headlights, the road sometimes lit by streetlights,
and the darkness beyond the lights. And I thought of
the sea, the forests and the mountains somewhere out
there in the darkness. And I thought of lakes, mist
and clouds, and typhoons, showers, rain, the mi of April and the sol of July, and finally spicy
noodles. Noodles, and Aunt’s voice saying, “That only
makes fourteen days, so where did the other six days
come from? I don’t know.” I imitated my aunt’s voice
as I muttered to myself. “That only makes
fourteen days, so where did the other six days come
from? I don’t know.” Then, perhaps
thinking I was talking to her, she spoke as if
answering me. “So how bright a
future do Korean movies have?” I do not know
what the future of Korean movies will be, but I felt
sure that the road ahead of us was bright. The night
road followed the sea as it gently passed over black
hills and led us toward the bright lights of Jungmun.
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