"If North Korea and Japan went to war with each other, I would be glad to side with the North."
These words were confidently yet sluggishly uttered by my pudgy friend with a bowl cut – Kim Jin-yeong. His hair looked as if it had been painted on and guided by a ruler. Like the rest of us four men who sat at this plastic fire red apple table, he was in his late 20s.
We were on the terrace just outside of a hof or Korean style bar in the lively Haeundae neighborhood of Busan - the second largest city in South Korea, located on the southeast coast. It was just around the corner from a famous lighthouse, and about a 20-minute drive from the commercialized beach that just a few years back had been featured in the silly yet touching film North Korean Guys; the plot was two DPRK naval soldiers who had survived a storm and been whisked away to this drastically different place – a capitalist paradise lined with tents, barbecues, women in bikinis, and South Korean rock music blaring from all angles.
"What the hell is the matter with you?" My skinnier friend with a shrimp shaped hairdo, a mullet if you will, glared across the table. His name was Lee Byeong-ho, and he held an unlit cigarette in his right hand, with a bright yellow translucent lighter in his left. Just behind and above him, a 75-inch television was suspended with the Japan - Paraguay soccer match playing. The 2010 World Cup in South Africa had finished five months ago, but for some reason they were replaying this intense matchup that had gone into penalty shots. This is what prompted the conversation about hypothetical geopolitical conflicts.
"North Koreans are more like us, man. They are fellow Koreans..our brothers!" Kim Jin-yeong said this in a now slightly gentle fashion, but Lee Byeong-ho was not swayed or any less perturbed.
"Brothers?" Lee Byeong-ho raised his left eyebrow; his mouth hung open like an alligator waiting to catch its prey.
Our table was littered with peanuts and cockle shells, a tray of half-eaten don katsu – breaded pork cutlet, a pitcher of Max beer, two empty green glass bottles of soju, a third that was three quarters full, and of course five shot glasses. The conversation at hand made me visualize it all as a battlefield. The soju bottles in particular looked like soldiers, and the shot glasses land mines. The snacks were the debris from an explosion.
The faint white scratches which danced across the surface of the red table were war scars from many other drunken nights outside. Compared to Seoul, the warmer Busan air made late November a tolerable time for patrons like us to still decorate the outdoor area, especially if the inside was packed as it was. Furthermore, after a few drinks our young Korean blood was always warmed up.
"Brothers...." Lee Byeong-ho said this a second time, emphasizing his disbelief at the comment as he leaned across to grab the partially full soju bottle and began pouring it in each of the five shot glasses. He finally lit that cigarette, inhaled and exhaled the first puff of smoke through his nose and continued his thought, like a sophisticated dragon in the night.
"Is that what you call people who sunk our submarine last spring? They killed 46 of our 'brothers' you know that right?"
My two other friends and I watched in silence, not wanting to take a side. Park Tae-young and Shin Jin-woo wore matching buzz cuts and green Adidas jackets with white stripes, a coincidence that we had joked about in the earlier hours of the evening. Shin Jin-woo had a fatter face and a tiny but noticeable mole on his left cheek. And me? Well in those days I had a blanket of shaggy hair that comfortably and coolly sat atop my ovular head. My camel colored, suede jacket remained open with a navy blue Uniqlo shirt, the top three buttons down. I quickly became self-conscious that I was wearing a Japanese clothing brand and then wondered if any of the others including Kim Jin-yeong unknowingly and ironically were.
Like a calm break in an old war movie, we each raised our glasses and turned away from the appropriate parties. Since Shin Jin-woo was the oldest of the group, he didn't need to turn away from any of us. He smiled through the surrounding splashes of neon with an evenly distributed stare, his seemingly perfect teeth glowing in the night in place of the stars that nobody could see through the light pollution. “Dynamic Busan” was what they called this place to attract all the tourists. That was one way to look at it, I suppose.
Waves of cheers erupted each time that a Paraguay player made each of their five overtime shots, and then a thunderous applause swallowed up the entire atmosphere when Yuichi Komano's shot hit the crossbar, a miss that sealed Japan's fate and Paraguay's victory. It now made sense why the bar owner decided to replay this match. Any chance at reveling in Japan's misfortune was a crowd pleaser. And of course, it had then become the catalyst to this “debate” amongst my frenemies.
Kim Jin-yeong raised his fists to the sky at the Japanese soccer team’s recycled demise, took another drag of his cigarette, and carried on. "They say it wasn't them."
At this comment the rest of us laughed in unison. This was a typical North Korean alibi that South Korean politicians on both sides of the aisle knew was ridiculous. Clearly, the North had sunk that submarine last March. There was simply no other explanation.
"How do we know it wasn't Japan?" he then asked as he shook his head from left to right. No matter how much he moved it, that painted on hair never budged a millimeter.
Park Tae-young, who was just one year younger than Mr. Lee, chimed in. "Older brother, they don't even have a proper military anymore. I don't know that they could even – ”
An empty plastic chair skidded towards the steps which led to the bustling sidewalk, clinking and clanging on its way down. Lee Jin-yeong had kicked it with a medium level of might in his frustration. And that is when things started to get blurry for me.
"You remember who you're talking to, little punk!"
Lee Jin-yeong withdrew a pencil-thin cigarette from a shiny pack and viciously lit it.
"They're not supposed to have a military because of all the rotten things they did."
He cocked his head back and shot out three separate streams of thick, white smoke, then continued his rant.
"But you actually believe that worm Naoto Kan? Japan finally has a liberal in office but that's even worse! He stepped in for the Alien after he already didn't have the balls to remove the US troops."
Mr. Lee was referring to the recently disgraced Yukio Hatoyama, whose nickname was due to his antennae-like hairdo who had reneged on his campaign promise to remove a US Marine Corp Air Station from Okinawa, a hot button issue for decades.
"Liberal, conservative, it makes no difference. The Japanese raped our women and don't feel sorry for it. They still want to take the Dokdo Islands..and that's probably why they sunk that submarine."
That last line about Dokdo..that pile of mineral rich rocks that the Japanese referred to as Takeshima and claimed to be their own. That was my last lucid memory of the night. It was my last lucid memory before I somehow got lucky enough to meet her.
When I awoke on my couch, my shirt was off, but my jeans and shoes were still on. Highlights of the 2010 Korean Series – the SK Wyverns defeating the Samsung Lions flickered off the TV screen, and a bowl of an unbroken, dried block of ramen sat on the coffee table, undisturbed. Last month, the Wyverns had won their third baseball championship in four years. I had tried to wipe this from my memory, as my Lotte Giants continued to be on an 18-year title drought, not having won since I was just a boy. And if only I had known back then how much longer that title drought would continue for!
Oh, brother. Was there nothing exciting happening in the world, or in South Korea for that matter? Between last night and today, why were people just replaying old sports games? What a time to be alive!
My head was slightly throbbing, but nothing to write home about. I opened my itchy left palm, revealing to myself a wrinkled, bent Dunhill cigarette. I felt some butterflies arousing in my stomach since I could not recall how the night ended. But I did make it back to my humble abode, after all so perhaps things couldn’t have been so bad. I lit my sickly looking yet likely functioning cigarette with the yellow lighter that I remember Lee Byeong-ho had in his possession. It instantly calmed my nerves as I exhaled a handsome cloud of smoke. That's when I decided to check my phone, and how I saw her text messages.
Apparently, someone had a pleasant time meeting me. My friends were funny but dumb, and I had done a “fabulous job of keeping them cool headed.” The words reflected sweetness, and I began to imagine what this woman may look like. I had somehow saved her name – “Shin Shin-young.” I could only assume that was her correct name. Was she a student from one of the local colleges, or simply a townie? I pictured a tiny woman with a black bob. Tiny like the way her texts danced across my flip phone.
And so, I agreed to meet up with this presumable woman who was allegedly named Shin Shin-young. She could have been 21 or 51. For all I knew this could have been someone’s grandfather playing a prank on me or trying to act on his own desire. Perhaps it was the soju still lingering in my system, but my curiosity was far too great. The old me would never have dared to engage in such a blind adventure as this.
I was a late bloomer, if you will, and used to be more conservative. Not politically per say, but socially. And I never would have even been in the situation where I did not remember someone I met from indulging in too much alcohol. Something had changed around age 25. But nonetheless, here I was two days later, exiting Jagalchi station like it was the most normal thing in the world to be on the other side of town to meet some stranger in Nampodong – that exploded neon glitter bomb crawling with giggly school girls, businessmen, Indy rockers hauling guitar cases, university students who banded together to make a cornucopia of dyed hair, vagrants, fishermen, and the occasional drunk GI or foreign English teacher.
I needed to find the entrance to the Jagalchi fish market, as that was where Shin Shin-young wanted to go. I had even sent the text to clarify that I hadn't misunderstood what she meant:
“A fish market date?”
“Ha ha yes! A fish market date” she had confirmed.
Shin Shin-young arrived in front of the subway exit at 2:17 PM, just 2 minutes after our scheduled time to meet. I had eyed so many other young women who walked past, since of course I had no real idea who to look for. Luckily, Shin Shin-young gave me a mischievous stare, and shouted my name as she edged closer towards me.
“On time, what a good boy.”
She was indeed tiny, but with dyed chestnut hair that was neatly tied up in a bun. So, I was right about her size and the bob, just not the color. Just a touch of violet mascara caked her eyelashes, almost as an afterthought. Shin Shin-young wore a sporty blue and white wind breaker but left it unzipped with attitude, revealing her loose, casual beige top that contrasted well with her black tights. Her shoes were essentially roller skates without wheels, dazzled in white and bubble gum pink stripes. It was unfair how cute she was, and absurd that I had not even remembered her or our very encounters. It was as if she knew this and was showing up to make sure that I never forgot her again.
My same suede jacket from the other night was also open with a thin, black, wool sweater underneath. My blue jeans were faded, torn, and snug, with low cut black imitation leather boots below the cuffs.
Shin Shin-young’s lips were juicy and plump, and their light pink hue glowed and somehow competed with the bright Busan sun that continuously stabbed through any of the autumn clouds.
“So, do you know the way?” she asked.
“I haven’t been here in a while, but I think I remember.” I uttered the words as confidently as I could and already sensed that the ice was being broken at a rapid pace. While her style and demeanor were slightly intimidating, she immediately gave off this playful vibe, and I loved that it already seemed like we had known each other for longer than we did. Within minutes, this initial impression would expand exponentially.
“You come here often?” I asked her. It was not just a question to spark up conversation, as I was genuinely curious. It was one of the most unique requests I had ever been asked or heard of for a first date, and I couldn't help but wonder if this was her usual move with men.
“I come here all the time,” Shin Shin-young affirmed with an almost serious look on her face. But that serious expression was soon cancelled out by the right corner of her mouth rising into a half-moon of a smile. Everything this girl did gave way to an act of impishness.
“Remember, I studied Marine Biology in school. And I work at the aquarium!”
“Right! It does make sense that you would love a place like this,” I said. Completely relieved that she had filled me in on conversations we already had the other night, I quickly gathered that she had likely gone out to that hof with her friends shortly after finishing her shift. The aquarium was right on Haeundae Beach, so it was logical that she had ended up where she did.
“But…”
Shin Shin-young paused, and I looked straight into the beautiful black berries that were her eyes. I tried to look charming by raising my left eyebrow as I awaited her punch line.
“I’ve never asked a guy to go with me here on a date. I usually just nerd out on my own and study all of the seafood on display and try to identify where it all came from.”
“Well, I’m honored.” I chuckled.
“I mean, you seemed like you wouldn’t mind. The smell and all..”
“I’m not too sure what that means, but I’ll take it.” I flashed a toothy smile, and she shrugged her shoulders as two adorable dimples popped out below her full, meaty cheeks.
“So, this is a date.” I announced, almost too anxiously.
“Duh, you imbecile.” She threw the words right into my face.
“A fish market date,” and she exposed her healthy-looking white teeth and gums, blowing my previous smile out of the East Sea. While a little crooked, those teeth meshed so well with her pretty lips, and I honestly preferred them to perfectly symmetrical ones. A skilled cartoonist couldn't have crafted this girl’s profile any better.
Shin Shin-young and I walked in between the various stalls of seafood on display and the sing songy sales pitches from the merchants hummed around us like a family of cuckoos.
Sonya Shidae's "Run Devil Run" blared from speakers on the street as snow white octopuses and their science fiction-esque tentacles stared up at the top of a market umbrella – naked and exposed, save for the desperately gleaming suction cups that were somehow one shade whiter.
Tubs of grotesque eels swam at the speed of a Maserati to the point that I wondered if they were aware of their destiny. A vast array of fish – carp, croakers, mackerel, black porgy, red seabream, and silver galchi or “hairtail” all sparkled in the southeast Korean sun like precious jewels. Army green crabs danced in piles in wooden buckets alongside mountains of orange or gray shrimp resting on beds of fresh ice.
In the midst of being swallowed up in Shin Shin-young’s professional world and life passion, we asked each five personal questions – a game that she had proposed.
One of the questions that Shin Shin-young asked me was hypothetical. She asked if I would rather have my dream career or dream relationship. This one was easy for me, and I explained to her that if my life partner was happy with me then the career would not matter as much.
“Good answer…” she thought for a moment and then reconfirmed “Good answer!” And she winked at me, adding an extra layer of cuteness.
I asked her about the meanest thing she had ever done. She claimed to have convinced her high school boyfriend to transfer to her college, and that about two months later she then dumped him.
“But he still made that decision” I told her, trying to defend her from her own guilt.
“You don’t understand,” Shin Shin-young countered.
“I…” and she made some gesture with her hands that I still don’t totally understand.
“...completely controlled him.”
I decided to let it be, and her mannerisms were so comical that I just couldn’t picture any slice of evil being the case.
Now that this game was over without any serious emotional disruptions, moments of embarrassment, or traumatizing visuals, I decided to focus on some of the sea creatures. I noticed some jellylike, bumpy, ruby red and yellow splotched critters that I had seen before but never knew about. Why not ask my dream girl who happened to be a marine biologist?
“What is that?” I asked and was immediately shamed.
“Meongge! Sea pineapple!" She proclaimed in both Korean and English. "You’re not a Busan native, are you?” She teased me.
“I grew up here..”
“But…” she knew there was a disclaimer.
I smiled, loving her so much more than even 10 seconds prior.
“But I was born in Daegu.”
“I knew it. You must be a Lions fan.”
“Absolutely not!” I shot back, almost losing my affection.
“Then prove it and take me to a Giants game some time.”
My heart warmed up like slabs of hanwoo beef sizzling on the iron grid. She wanted to see me again!
“You bet I will. But first we must finish this – ”
“Fish market date” we both said in unison.
It was at this point that she moved closer to me and held my hand tight. Another surge of warmth wrapped itself around me like an electrically heated blanket, and my now red hot heart crawled up inside my throat.
I badly wanted to smoke a cigarette to try and bring me down from euphoria, as I was afraid of somehow messing this up. But what could really mess up this date was if Shin Shin-young was repulsed by smoking, so I refrained. And when she casually pulled out her own pack of Mild Sevens and lit one with a large purple Bic, I was convinced that this was a dream.
Bear in mind that at the time, it was still relatively taboo for females to smoke cigarettes. The shame and heavy double standard were certainly starting to wear off in South Korean society, but it was due to rebels like Shin Shin-young breaking the barrier.
“Where are your cigarettes?” she calmly asked.
Right! Surely, she and I had smoked together the other night, and now I had to hide my surprise for fear of her realizing that I had blacked out during the first night we ever spent together.
I withdrew one of my Dunhills and with Lee Byeong-ho’s translucent yellow lighter lit it as coolly as I could.
Without even communicating, we spotted a curb between stalls, walked towards it hand in hand, and sat down. We finished our cigarettes in peace, staring into each other’s eyes the entire time. Sympatico, we crushed them out on the pavement, staring into the cores of the universe which were our matching black eyes. Of course, hers were much prettier. I simply mean that the colors were identical.
“Close your eyes,” she commanded.
Without even thinking about it, I obeyed.
I felt those slightly inflated, moist pink lips press against mine. The red hot heart that was previously in my throat rose up to the clouds, and a tingling sensation shot all throughout my 28-year-old body.
That kiss could have lasted 10 seconds; it could have lasted 10 minutes. I honestly couldn’t tell you. But what I do know is that while it was all happening, everything and everyone around us – the various types of pedestrians, the rumbling motorbikes, the shouting merchants, and the fresh, slimy seafood all froze and vanished into oblivion.
But I was brought back to earth when an old lady with a broom – an ajumma if you will, began shouting at us to get up and keep moving. We laughed and skipped back in the same direction as before, our arms linked as one.
“Let’s go get some ice cream.” I said, ignoring the fact that we were approaching the time when one might start thinking about dinner.
“I know a great place,” said Shin Shin-young.
And then as we turned the corner towards this apparent ice cream place, a blood curdling scream erupted from somewhere in her cute juicy face. I hadn't even noticed that she checked her phone – a Samsung Galaxy S, far more advanced than my bare bones flip phone. But she stared at the phone screen with her mouth gaping open and her skin as red as the sea pineapple in the market. I barely recognized her. Before I could even ask what was wrong, this wildly transformed version of Shin Shin-young dropped her phone in the street and collapsed. She rested on her knees with her face in her hands and pieces of her now broken phone surrounding her in the street. I gently put my hand on her shoulder, and she batted it away faster than a drop of oil crackles on a burning hot pan.
It was the most amazing 92 minutes of my life, followed by the worst, and most permanently confusing 5 minutes of my life. It felt like the world had stopped, at the very least the city of Busan. In a very opposite fashion to the recent kiss, everything around me had once again froze and vanished, including her desire to be with me and her very physical presence. Shin Shin-young was literally nowhere to be found, and to this day I don’t understand how I didn’t even catch a glimpse of her running in any direction.
It did seem like some other pedestrians were panicking or gossiping about something, but nobody was reacting the way that she was. What had just happened? For a while I ran around like a toddler trying to find his mother in a crowded Lotte Mart, certain that she could not be too far. I picked up the shattered pieces of her phone as a desperate way of clinging to her memory or a sense of where she might be. When I was in high school World History class we once learned about the assassination of the US President JFK, and how his wife – Jackie Kennedy had tried to pick up the pieces of his brain. This is how I felt, taking whatever I could with me in hopes of keeping our relationship and her existence in my life alive.
But by a certain point, at a loss of what to do, I ducked into a PC Bong or internet café. The customers in there – mostly men in their 20s and 30s seemed unfazed, deep into their Starcraft games like neoguri - raccoon dogs in the garbage. The employee behind the counter was fiddling with his phone, his face looking like a worn-out mask plastered on a block of wood, with his hair sloppily parted down the middle, doused in cheap gel. It was hard to tell what he may have been looking at on his device, but he didn’t seem to have any emotions similar to those on the street, and certainly not like Shin Shin-young. I thought about asking him if he knew what was happening but decided to find out for myself.
I walked over to the fridge and grabbed a can of Hite beer. I popped it open and the sound of it was like a gun shot that I could feel in my gut. I drank that Hite beer faster than I would have a glass of water in the middle of the Golbi Desert on an August afternoon.
And as my shaky clammy hand clicked the mouse to open the desktop, I saw the headline on the default Korea Herald browser:
“N.K. ARTILLERY STRIKES S. KOREAN ISLAND.”
Maybe my friend Lee Byeong-ho was right after all.
I drank and drank, absorbing every ounce of the ice-cold beer and violent brain freeze that accompanied it. As my vision grew fuzzy, I couldn’t escape from the painful reality that Shin Shin-young’s phone was shattered into little pieces and that she would have no way of reaching me. If she got a new phone, would she have the same number? I mean she should..right?! I pondered this as the fingers in my left hand dug into my pocket, hopelessly caressing the dead organs of that obliterated device.
Perhaps! But would she want to speak with me again? I could always go back to that hof in Haeundae. I was there often enough to begin with…but I had never seen her there before.
The aquarium! That was where she worked after all.
Okay, the possibilities were there. But I needed to kill the anxiety which strangled my now bitter cold heart through my stomach. For a moment I grew disgusted with myself, realizing I hadn't the slightest concern for any killed or injured people in the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island by North Korea, but rather how the tragedy was impacting Shin Shin-young and indirectly myself.
Ever since that day, things were never quite the same with Kim Jin-yong and me; it took very little for him to agitate me during our group hangouts for reasons he never quite understood. This was the case for the next seven years, right up until the day he died in a fatal car crash on the Gyeongbu Expressway.
I grabbed another Hite and lit a Dunhill, wishing that I could enjoy this one with Shin Shin-young like I had my last. I took the largest drag of my life, followed by the largest gulp of my life. I closed my eyes and replayed the highlights of today – from the moment that I first saw her arrive, to the to the moment that she playfully called me an imbecile, to the moment that she squeezed my hand, to the moment that we kissed and comically got chased away from the curb. For now, and forever, I would savor those memories.
Tomorrow was another day, and I would take a trip to the aquarium, followed by a night out at that Haeundae hof. And if neither situation brought me to her, I would rinse and repeat again and again, for the rest of my days on this planet.
