August 1948
On August 15, 1948, the American military government regime in Korea came to an end. That was when everything between Min-hwan and me ended, too. Nothing had changed from the outside; I was still a coquettish girl whose whereabouts after work were suspect, and he was still my secret lover. But invisible cracks had begun to form. The collapse of a relationship doesn’t begin on the day you part ways; it builds gradually, starting on the day you witness each other’s truths.
As a parade was being held in the plaza of the capitol building to commemorate the establishment of the government of the Republic of Korea, I lay entwined in our bed sheets, reading a short story of his that had been published in a literary magazine. It was the first work of fiction he had produced in two years, during which time he had written nothing but political critiques and published translations.
“She is ruled by animalistic instinct … it would be better if she were biased, but her intellect doesn’t reach that level … her pathetic, immature nature …”
The story had nothing of the quality of his earlier work. It skipped equally over ideology and artistry, but I detected an element of honesty in it. I was embarrassed and angry; I had to put the magazine down several times. The story centered on a boring male labor activist who led a life on the lam, but I spotted myself in a dancer of a music troupe, whom he is trying to reform. The half page describing the dancer was all about me. The passage didn’t include identifying markers, so he could certainly insist that I wasn’t his inspiration, but I could tell that this was how he felt about me.
“Just as I cannot leave this place, the same is true with my relationship with her. She will twine herself around me and never let me go …”
The woman in the story was placid but lustful. Yet despite her many flaws, she was the woman the protagonist loved the most. She wasn’t respectable but she was adored. That was true in real life, too. Min-hwan was my protector; our relationship emitted a strong whiff of incest. Once, Min-hwan had asked me about my father, and I told him he had been as kind as he was. He wrinkled his nose, looking hurt. I pretended I didn’t understand what I was doing, but of course I did. I could be the adult daughter he never had. I was the sole flaw in a man who acted as if he was a paragon of morality. I stayed by his side despite understanding this truth at the heart of our relationship. In a pitiable attempt at revenge against what I perceived to be his self-centeredness, I refused to worry myself with whether he would feel guilty about our love affair.
To be sure, I was just one small part of all of his concerns. Long before the Republic of Korea was established, Min-hwan quit working for the American military government. I never understood why he worked for the Americans in the first place, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t puzzled when he quit.
“I guess you should have studied Turgenev, not Wordsworth,” I teased. “You would have been on the right side, then.”
“Learning a language isn’t something to joke about,” he admonished me seriously. “I chose to learn English as a rebellion against having to learn Japanese when they were in charge, but then I was drawn to it. I don’t think it’s necessary to speak many languages. It’s like believing in more than one God.”
“What are you talking about?” I protested. “Knowing English guarantees your future.”
“You say that because you don’t know what it’s like in America. They’ll teach you their language but they’ll keep everything else for themselves.”
I didn’t understand how he could feel so conflicted about America. He left his post as matter-of-factly as if he had concluded an experiment in which he was the subject. He quit working for the Americans, unwilling to compromise his beliefs any longer. At that time both the left and the right were stealthily gearing up for battle. With the victory of the right wing, the suppression of the Communist Party became more visible. Min-hwan’s fellow writers who belonged to the Workers’ Party of South Korea began to head north.
“I’ll go with you,” I offered. Several of his friends were disappearing north with their mistresses, not fully understanding what their abandoned wives and children would face in the coming years.
Min-hwan snapped at me for the first time. “Stop! This is the best place for you, even if it isn’t perfect.”
“My mom is up north, I am not religious, and I’m not wealthy anymore. I could have a nice life up there. Why won’t you go with me? Is it because of your family?”
Min-hwan sighed and looked at me pityingly for a long time. In the following years I would miss that gaze. I liked that dark, damp gaze so much that I would purposely bring out his sadness. I knew it was cruel. But I liked how solitary and bereft he looked when I mentioned his family, and so I tormented and teased him just to see that gloomy expression. I would take his family photo out of his notebook, put it on the table, and pretend to drop it.
“Remember last year, when the women’s director in the military government talked about how patriotic groups were mobilized during Japanese rule to find people with concubines? I heard it’s the same now; they won’t hire officials with concubines. Your luck has run out,” I would tease, comparing myself to a concubine.
He didn’t laugh and I didn’t either. My teasing didn’t contain irony, the most important factor in creating laughter. His situation was so banal that even a cheap weekly magazine wouldn’t be interested in it as a story. Here he was, a well-educated man in an arranged marriage, who left his wife and child in his hometown to keep a young mistress in the city. I looked and acted the part of a modern woman but my persistent innermost desires were far from modern. Although I shouldn’t have wasted time thinking about the aspects of his life I wasn’t privy to, I imagined his wife’s pale neck, his daughter’s chubby feet, and their tea table glowing with domestic harmony. His wife never came to Seoul and he visited Chonju to see them only once a month.
When he went home, I tagged along to Seoul Station to see him off, even though he hated it when I did.
“Have a good trip,” I would say, pretending to weep. “Think about me from time to time.”
He would give a dispirited laugh and we would sit apart on a bench as we waited for the train. Day students in school uniforms and old-fashioned aristocrats wearing traditional hats and frightened country girls balancing bundles on their heads, who would eventually become maids or prostitutes, would stream past us. They were rooted in the reality of the train station, while we resided in the romantic realm. When the train pulled into the station, he would give my hand a hard squeeze then go out through the gate without looking back. I would quietly stroke the place he had been sitting, touching the guilt he left behind, feeding the fluttering in my heart.
In an affair, guilt is an aphrodisiac. Were we really that sad and despairing? Did we suffocate each other, savoring those emotions? All I know is that we wanted each other until we grew tired, and we didn’t stop even when we did. He was by my side during that time of my life; a foolish time that everyone should experience at least once.
And then someone else entered our relationship.
Joseph, the man who named me Alice.
But I still don’t know his real name.