The backyard table was big enough to seat approximately sixteen adults, assuming you didn’t mind brushing elbows with your neighbors each time you reached over to grab a napkin or a cup, big enough to squeeze in an additional half dozen kids if you packed in tight and didn’t mind someone else breathing on you. This handcrafted table was too heavy even for four or five brawny men to pick up and move—its smooth tabletop was coated in varnish so glossy that you could almost see your face in it, its hefty corners were roughly hewn, and its legs, five thick pillars practically drilled into the ground, showed off the bumpy musculature of the wood used to make them. It was unknown who among the architects of this small apartment building had thought to install something like this in the backyard. But the table obviously wasn’t an afterthought; a regular person with an ordinary job would never be able to afford such an extravagant custom piece.
With only seven adults and six kids, three of whom were on their dads’ laps, there was plenty of room around the table right now. It would become more challenging to accommodate everyone once all twelve units were fully occupied, but Yojin figured the families would rarely gather to eat as a group.
“All right, has everyone poured themselves a glass of wine?” Sin Jaegang, who had dashed out to greet Yojin’s family the moment their moving truck extended its ladder to reach their windowsill, stood up. “Welcome, Mr. Jeon Euno, Ms. Seo Yojin, and six-year-old Miss Jeon Siyul!”
“Welcome!”
“Nice to meet you!”
All the adults got up and raised their glasses, bowing in greeting, except for the dads with kids on their laps, who managed only to lift their arms. They clinked glasses and nodded at their neighbors across the table, and the kids imitated them, holding up their biodegradable plastic cups of tangerine juice before taking a gulp. Earlier, Jaegang had introduced Yojin and Euno to the other residents: “Calling someone So-and-so’s mom or So-and-so’s dad is no fun at all, don’t you think? Here we prefer to be called by our given names.” Now, reeling from the strangeness of hearing someone uttering her name outside of the doctor’s or a government office, Yojin murmured her own name like an immigrant savoring the rarely used pronunciation of her native language, then ran her tongue across her gums.
Still holding his sleeping child awkwardly, Go Yeosan turned toward Euno. “We thought you’d be tired after moving in, so we figured we’d just do some snacks and refreshments. I’m afraid it’s not the most enthusiastic welcome.”
Euno’s expression was grateful as he batted Yeosan’s words away. “Not at all. It’s best to keep things simple. We aren’t short-term guests or people who need to be wined and dined. We’re just...” Here, he clinked his glass with Yeosan’s without finishing his sentence; he figured he would come across as bristly, even if his tone were pleasant, if he said, We’re just the three newest residents joining this communal housing pilot program.
The clinking of dishware, the murmur of conversation, and the whining of children hung in the early evening air. Gang Gyowon, Yeosan’s wife, had pushed her glass away and was trying to feed their four-year-old son a late lunch. Even her flashes of irritation seemed to embody the pleasure of an affection-filled afternoon. Nobody coming across this scene would want to ruin this picture, this wholesome moment between mother and son. Living communally meant recasting noise as background music and messy scenes as frameworthy.
“Yojin-ssi, did you put the sheet of paper I gave you somewhere safe?” asked Hong Danhui, Jaegang’s wife.
Yojin had only a faint recollection of accepting something from Danhui during the chaos of the move, but didn’t let on that she was flustered.
“It’s nothing too important, just some house rules,” Danhui explained. “I wrote down the recycling days and things like that, so all you have to do is follow the schedule.”
Realizing what Danhui was talking about, Yojin let out a sigh of relief like a bride who’d finished bowing to her new in-laws during the pyebaek ceremony. “Oh, that’s right. We’re not fully unpacked yet, so I just stuck it on the fridge. I’ll give it a read as soon as I get home.”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday, so you have plenty of time. Anyway, Sangnak-ssi, is Hyonae-ssi super busy these days?”
Son Sangnak gave a brief nod and, preoccupied with giving his drowsy baby a bottle, muttered, “Oh, she’s always busy.”
Eight adults should have been present to account for every couple, but Yojin realized that Sangnak’s wife wasn’t there. Oh, she’s always busy. It was an honest if terse response, possibly even insincere depending on how you looked at it. Maybe his answer was an effort to curtail the line of questioning, but Danhui added another weighted question.
“Even if she’s on deadline, how hard is it to come out for a quick hello? We have a new family moving in. And you had to bring Darim out on your own.”
“It’s just that she barely managed to meet her deadline. She passed out right after. She didn’t sleep at all the last three nights, so she won’t wake up even if someone tried to haul her away right now.”
“Well. I guess there’s nothing we can do if she’s sleeping. Yojin-ssi, you’re not upset, are you?”
“Of course not!” Yojin waved away the suggestion. “Everyone has stuff going on, and we’re no VIPs.”
As Euno had said earlier, they weren’t guests and there was no need for formalities. Their relationship with their neighbors would be casual. In any other apartment building, they’d share a passing smile at most, and even now, having become a defined group of sorts due to the circumstances of their housing situation, knowing one another’s names was more than enough. But the way Danhui kept needling Sangnak felt loaded; Yojin wasn’t unaware of how the demand of “a quick hello,” such small, seemingly trivial moments, could pile up and harden, encroaching on one’s life. There were plenty of people who found it impossible to stand up for a quick greeting and plenty of situations in which doing the simplest thing for someone else was impractical.
On closer examination, Danhui, who appeared to be a few years older than Yojin, seemed like the type of person who would lead a women’s association, driven by a preternaturally outgoing personality and love for appraising and organizing various matters. Yojin found it curious that someone like her had decided to live in such a remote village. This was the kind of place you’d move to in order to cut social ties, the kind of place where you measured quality of life by clean air and clean water.
“Now that your family has moved in, it finally feels like a community,” Danhui said, her tone friendly. “I mean, it wasn’t like we were lonely by ourselves or anything. But since Hyonae-ssi is some kind of freelancer and works at night and sleeps during the day, it felt like there were just two of us women. It’s great that we now have another! Let’s have tea after we send our husbands to work and get to know each other.”
Yojin merely smiled, figuring she didn’t need to correct Danhui right this second, but Euno spoke up. “Actually, she’s the one who goes to work while I stay home with Siyul.”
“Oh?”
Euno chuckled. “I’m pretty unimpressive, so she’s the one who works outside the home.”
Euno enjoyed using self-deprecation as a way to praise Yojin, but this habit of his sometimes made her feel awful, even though she knew he was trying to be nice. She didn’t want him to cut himself down to boost her up—nothing sparkled in the light of comparative put-downs, and, more importantly, none of it ever sounded like a compliment to her.
“Oh... I see. So Yojin-ssi was making more, and that’s why Euno-ssi decided to stay home.”
“Well, not exactly,” Yojin said vaguely, not wanting to get into how her husband was moping around like a bum after several of his films had fallen through, at least not during their first encounter with the neighbors. But she found herself worrying that Danhui might keep asking questions the way she had with Sangnak earlier, unable—or refusing—to read between the lines.
“Then Yojin-ssi—well, I’m not sure if I should ask you this when the unemployment rate is so high and it’s so hard to get a permanent position, I mean, it’s really hard for everyone right now—where do you work?”
Thankfully, the interrogation at least moved toward Yojin instead of staying on Euno. Though she didn’t know why someone would say she wasn’t sure if she should ask a question and then go ahead and ask it anyway, Yojin had at least expected this one, a question always added on like a surcharge whenever people learned that her husband stayed home and she went to work.
Euno beat her to it once again. “She works at a pharmacy. It’s right next to a neighborhood pediatrician’s office.”
“Euno-ssi, you’re quite the spokesperson! You’re not letting your wife speak. So, a pharmacist! How impressive.”
Jaegang jumped in. “Euno-ssi, you must be one of those lucky fellows we’ve heard tell of! A man whose wife provides for him!”
Yojin swallowed a mouthful of bitter, tart wine. “No, I—” Yojin was reluctant to divulge too much about her personal life, but she was a firm believer in the power of clarity. It helped quash potential misunderstandings. “I’m just the cashier.”
Yojin was an assistant to her pharmacist cousin, who had opened her own pharmacy. Her main duties were filling the scrips patients brought from the medical building next door, handing over herbal teas and nutritional tonics customers sought, and ringing up organic grain snacks and kids’ vitamin drinks as well as bandages, masks, and other personal hygiene products at the counter. She also swept and mopped inside and out, cleaned the medicine cabinets and the shelves, sorted the trash, kept up with the inventory, checked manufacture dates, removed expired medications and reorganized them.
She wasn’t a pharmacist or a specialist in medicine and didn’t have a wealth of pharmaceutical knowledge, but she’d still memorized the active ingredients of commonly requested medications just in case, and, as a mother, learned the differences and the alternating dosages of Tylenol and ibuprofen; some of the tasks she handled technically violated the Pharmaceutical Affairs Act, but patients and guardians rarely took issue with her involvement, especially when there were hundreds of scrips to be filled in a day. Most importantly, she was efficient with the computer, and though it made her blood run cold to imagine misreading the name of a medication she gave a patient, she’d never made a grave mistake like that; she didn’t even need to type in the correct spelling or chemical formula of a medication since she used a pharmacy-exclusive system that handled most of the process with a beep of the POS terminal.
If she were to amend any part of what Euno said, it would be the leisurely descriptor of “a neighborhood pediatrician’s office.” As the pharmacy was in a bustling neighborhood next to a medical building filled with all kinds of practices, Yojin didn’t even have time for a lunch break on Mondays or on a day after a holiday. Still, they had it better than the pharmacy housed inside the medical building, which was busy enough to employ three pharmacists; she and her cousin could at least take breaks from time to time.
“Oh... I see.” Danhui was now embarrassed, and as she trailed off, Gyowon jumped in.
“What’s wrong with working as a cashier? All that matters is working hard and making an honest living.”
“Of course not, there’s nothing wrong with it!” Danhui recovered. “I mean, I had a part-time job at the front desk of an English hagwon when I was a student.”
“That’s just a part-time gig, so it’s not the same as a real job,” Gyowon countered. “A long time ago, when my mom told people she worked at K Apparel, people thought she was a designer and were impressed. She couldn’t bring herself to tell them that she was a salesclerk. Growing up, I always thought, what’s wrong with retail? What’s wrong with having only a high school degree?”
“Nowadays things are so different. You can get clothes at chain or discount stores if they’re not designer,” Danhui said. “It would be more like this—a friend told me that her daughter’s classmate was bragging about how her dad worked at S Group. Turned out he was an AC technician for the subcontractor’s subcontractor, going all the way down like a Russian nesting doll. Anyway, the point is, there’s nothing wrong with being an AC technician. His business card has the same S Group logo on it, right? I told my friend it’s basically the same thing.”
Yojin had only shared a few dry facts about her life, but her new neighbors were now going back and forth, assuming she was insecure about her job, taking turns digging up examples that were neither consolation nor encouragement. Yojin gave a curt nod and a wry smile. Her neighbors weren’t the first to be surprised by the uncommon but increasingly less rare situation of a man staying home and his wife going to work. This had caused her to build up an inferiority complex, layer by layer, over the four years she’d been working for her cousin, a cousin she used to only see at weddings and funerals. She hadn’t imagined that, even here, this would be the first question she would have to field; then again, it would be the same wherever she went. The only difference was the degree of people’s nosiness.
“Take some time to really think about it first. Once you leave the city, it’s going to be hard to make it back. Look what happened to me. The building boom in my planned city is over and things are getting bad. The prices in Seoul are so high that it’s impossible for me to go back, but if I could... Still, I can at least get to Seoul by subway even if I have to make a transfer or two. What are you going to do out there in the middle of nowhere?”
This had been her friend’s first reaction when she heard that Yojin and her family would be moving into the Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments.
The Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments was a small, twelve-unit building way out in the tranquil mountains without any urban amenities, a good distance from the homes that had been halfway developed about a decade ago during a modest building boom. At first glance, it appeared to be a random inn built on a vacant lot, without even a creek nearby. Still, it was brand-new and had been built with care by the government; it was clean and the decently sized units had a good floor plan, and, most crucially, it was public rental housing. But the conditions of residency were strict and you had to handwrite a pledge as part of the twenty-odd documents required for your application.
The ad seeking potential residents had claimed the building was “just twenty minutes to city center,” but that turned out to be the same fiction as listings touting an “incredibly transit-friendly area, three minutes to the subway,” which described every apartment Yojin and Euno had encountered since they got married. In reality, they would have to drive at least thirty-five minutes to even get close to Gangnam and Songpa, and there were no public transit options. Beyond the remote location and lack of infrastructure, the handwritten pledge was the most stringent requirement, and depending on your values, one of the prompts could be considered insulting. The pledge itself had fanned social media discourse; in the end, two hundred and forty couples applied for the twelve open spots. Those who made it through the review and interview stages were entered into a lottery, which didn’t give preference to low-income families, but rather took into account current residential status and family situation and employment.
At least one adult in the family would have an impressive job, even if they worked on contract, and both adults probably held higher degrees than the average person. It wouldn’t be at all unusual for at least several of them to be open-minded and progressive on various social issues while still susceptible to looking down on a cashier. Even so, the neighbors’ words rattled in Yojin’s ears and crushed her chest, and that sensation morphed into the conviction that she might not quite fit in here. She felt like a transfer student joining a classroom after the friend groups had already formed.
Yojin glanced at Siyul, wondering if her daughter was also feeling that way. Siyul was the oldest child here, and she was silently drinking her juice as she studied the other kids. Yeosan and Gyowon’s son, Ubin, was now sitting between five-year-old Jeongmok and three-year-old Jeonghyeop, Jaegang and Danhui’s two sons, and they were crashing their wooden cars together.
“Ubin, I told you to finish eating before you play,” scolded Gyowon, her irritation rising, and Yeosan whispered that she might wake Seah. In his arms, Seah was frowning, smacking her lips as she slept.