My breasts started to grow when I was only in fifth grade. I guess I just developed faster than the other girls, but all I felt was terrible guilt. In gym class, I had such a prominent chest you could make out my breasts through my running shirt. I was so embarrassed and ashamed I didn’t want to go to school on days when we had PE. Sometimes I’d pretend to be sick and stay in the classroom by myself.
If my changing body scared me, it was because of my mother’s influence. She was sure that women with large breasts were only treated like cheap sluts by men. She never let me wear anything that might show off my breasts—like T-shirts. So even in summer, I had to wear clothes that buttoned all the way up to my neck, and even those had to be drab and colorless.
Being pretty enough to attract attention, playing with boys, dressing in a feminine way—I believed all of that was sinful. If my skirt was even a little disheveled when I sat down, if my knees or thighs were exposed, my mother would get upset and scream:
—Girl, you’re ruining your life!
That was what she would say whenever she was mad at me. She’d been a bar girl when she was young, and so she was sick with the fear that I would repeat her fate, having to raise an illegitimate child without a father.
Running away down here to this coal mining town and working at a café, I sometimes remembered my mother’s words. And I wondered if I hadn’t, on my own, somehow found the path my mother was so afraid of, the path of that cursed fate.
When I first decided to take this job, I thought it was all about selling laughs and flirting, but I was so naive! It wasn’t until I got here that I realized that a mining town café waitress also has to be a bar girl and a prostitute.
They say that down here a woman is more effective than ten policemen for maintaining law and order. Because women are the only outlet for the frustrations and desires of the oppressed miners exhausted from hard labor. There were at least twenty cafés in town, and with five girls employed at each of them, that made around a hundred girls. And since there were another hundred or so women working in the bars and the little hotels, that made nearly two hundred girls to service the miners. At Café Yonggung there were five girls, including myself, who came down here to do that kind of work.
Do you know what a “ticket” is? Here, instead of serving customers in the café, we usually go out on deliveries. Not just to offices but to restaurants and bars and even hotel rooms. I had to deliver coffee whenever a phone order came in. Of course, we take coffee, but we also have to spend some time with the client. That’s what we call “taking a ticket.” A “ticket” has a fixed price of five thousand won. Men aren’t just buying coffee but also the time of the girl who delivers it. For us, it’s about flirting with the men and listening to their silly jokes, or sometimes, when they drink, we’d sing or keep time with chopsticks.
But a “ticket” was selling our time, not our bodies. That was different, and it was after the café closed. For that, we would take the ticket during the day, and after we came to an agreement, we would meet in a hotel room that night. The other girls at Café Yonggung did it almost every night. They came to this mining town to make money, and they were working hard to achieve that goal. They were basically just being faithful to the role created for them in this town. If you told a girl that prostitution was the most degrading form of capitalism because it was about commodifying her body, she would have just snorted, “So what?”
But I couldn’t go out at night like they did. There were lots of men who asked me when I went out on deliveries during the day. Some men tried to seduce me secretly, and there were others who tried to bargain like they were buying something at the market, but I used all my skills to protect myself. For what reason? Did virginity mean so much to me? Or was it that I didn’t need the money desperately enough to sell myself?
Once, I asked Seol how she felt after sleeping with a man—if she had any feelings.
—Feelings? What do you mean, feelings?
She answered with a question, as if she were mocking me. But then she had a blank look for a moment, like she was thinking about it.
She said that at first she was miserable and cried a lot, having to live like that, but now she must have gotten used to it because it didn’t bother her anymore. She even added:
—Sometimes, when I meet a decent guy, I really have a good time. Then I think I must have been born for this.
What she said shocked me. Until then, I thought that women who sold their bodies did it out of desperation. It never occurred to me that a woman could have fun doing it.
When Seol asked me if I’d never had an experience like hers, I told her that I’d never slept with a man before. Her mouth hung open in disbelief, and she said:
—What! You’re still a virgin? At your age?
She was staring at me as if the fact that I was a virgin made me belong to a different species than her. And yet I took no pride in that fact in front of her. I was ashamed of not having any experience with men and even embarrassed that I was stubbornly guarding my virginity even after coming out here. I knew I was bothering the other waitresses. Sometimes they would even talk loud enough to make sure I could hear them.
—So there’s a gilded bitch in this coal town? Bring her out so we can have a look.
They said I had come to sell my body to earn money just like them. So what made me so special that I refused to sleep with men? What gives you the right to protect your virginity?
I had nothing to say. Just like at the night school last month, I was different from everyone else. What is virginity, anyway? It can’t be touched. It can’t be seen. But it clearly separated me from them.
To keep it, to believe that it was necessary to protect. Maybe it was just my vanity? Just like my not canceling my registration at the university. Wasn’t it also a shackle that bound me? More and more, I suffered from these doubts.
Shinhye was looking at a color photo, a portrait of President Chun Doo-Hwan, hanging on the wall opposite. The face in the frame stared at her with such eerie coldness it made her shudder. Bald, the corners of his lips downturned, he always looked anxious about something. Looking at him, Shinhye remembered the nicknames people called him because of that physiognomy, nicknames full of contempt and ridicule: “Octopus” and “Rock Head.” But there was absolutely nothing to ridicule about that face now. It represented frightening authority, as cold as the barrel of a gun, and she realized, for the first time, exactly how much she should fear it.
“Kim Gwang…who did you say?”
It wasn’t that she didn’t know that name, it was rather that she hoped she could hide her surprise.
“Kim Gwangbae. Do you know him or not?”
“Yes, I know him.”
“What’s your relationship with him?”
“What do you mean? He’s just a customer at the café.”
“Listen, bitch, you don’t get it, do you? Answer me straight! Or do I have to smack you some more before we go on?”
He growled, raising his head as if to strike her, and seeing his eyes open wide again, Shinhye immediately submitted.
“I’m sorry, I was wrong…”
“Alright. So you know this guy, then? Kim Gwangbae…now tell me everything you know about him.”
Shinhye felt her heart pounding again. She was certain he had ulterior motives for suddenly bringing up Kim Gwangbae.
“He’s a miner. He works at a small coal mine in Gohang.”
“What else?”
He waited for her to answer, still staring into her face.
“And…I think I heard he was one of the leaders of the 1980 uprising in the mines.”
“Who did you hear that from?”
“It’s something everybody knows, so I don’t really remember who I heard it from.”
It was about a week after she started working at the café that Shinhye met Kim Gwangbae for the first time. That night, a man abruptly pushed open the door of the café. In the middle of her habitual “Welcome,” she had been startled into silence. The man who walked in was black from head to toe. It was only after regaining her composure that she realized he was a miner covered in coal dust. Nearly all the young men who frequented the café were miners, and anyone who came from working underground in one of the shafts would look like that, but this was the first time in her life Shinhye had seen such a thing. The man was out of place amidst the garish lights of the café, a frightening image, as if he had just risen out of the earth from the cursed underworld.
“What the hell is this?” said the madam. “You want to come in here in that state?”
“What’s the matter? Is something wrong? I was passing by and I wanted to come inside to see my friends. To have a drink with my miner brothers.”
He grinned at the madam, who blocked his way. His whole body was black except for his eyes, which had a strange gleam, and he was so drunk he staggered precariously on his feet.
“You have to change before you come in here. Look at yourself!”
“This? I’m wearing my suit. My mourning suit! How could I not wear it when another one of my brothers departed to the other world today? This is how we miners dress for mourning.”
It was only then that Shinhye remembered what she had heard that afternoon: an accident at the mine. Customers had told her that the ceiling of a shaft had collapsed, killing a miner on the spot. Two others had been taken to the hospital with injuries. And yet, despite the accident, nothing had changed. The miners finished their shifts as usual, and afterwards they looked for a bar or a café where they could go to watch soap operas on TV while laughing over silly jokes with the girls.
“Hey, my brothers! What are you doing here? How can you have coffee on a day like today? We need to celebrate with a real drink! One of our comrades just left Hell to go to Heaven by the grace of God! We have to celebrate! I’ll buy a round! Hey, madam, a glass of whiskey for all my comrades here!”
He was loud and drunk, slurring his speech.
“Brothers my ass!” someone spat. It was one of the young miners sitting in front of the TV with the others.
“Hey, Kim Gwangbae! Stop acting like a fucking idiot. If you’re drunk just quietly get your ass to bed and sleep it off.”
Kim Gwangbae’s expression was twisted and hard. It was less an expression of anger than pain from a wound that had reopened. Shinhye was sure a fight would break out, but instead, Kim Gwangbae broke out in a wide smile, baring his white teeth.
“Come on, guys, let’s just have a drink! I’m buying…” he said, approaching the men.
The young man immediately pushed him away.
“What? You think we’re gonna go nuts because we can’t afford to bum our own drinks? You got no business with us, so get lost.”
Kim Gwangbae was still smiling even as he let the much younger man push him this way and that all the way to the door.
“Come on, my brothers, let’s have a drink together, alright? This human being, Kim Gwangbae, just wants to buy you a drink!” he cried out, as if he were pleading with them.
Shinhye couldn’t understand why he was being so submissive, like a stupid clown who keeps trying to be funny even when he knows he’s despised.
“He’s like this sometimes. He’s a strange one,” Seol told Shinhye after he’d been kicked out. Then she said, her voice low so no one could overhear: “You know, the miners rioted around here a few years ago. I heard about it when I started here. It was a huge uprising.”
Shinhye knew about the uprising in that region in the spring of 1980. She had read in the newspapers that even the women in the miners’ families had joined in the riots, that they had ransacked the home of the corrupt union president, kidnapped and assaulted his wife, and that the whole city had descended into anarchy in a pitched battle with the police. It had taken three days to crush the uprising, which had shocked everyone with its suddenness and violence and ended with the arrest of many workers.
“You know, they say Kim Gwangbae was one of the leaders,” Seol said.
“No, how could that be?”
“It’s true. There’s nobody around here who doesn’t know about it.”
Even after what Seol told her, Shinhye still had her doubts: First of all, she couldn’t believe that the leader of such an uprising could continue to work as a miner in the same place. Then, his strange behavior earlier was hardly in keeping with someone who could be a leader. And what was the reason for his submissiveness and the blatant contempt from the other miners?
In any case, it was after this incident that Shinhye became interested in Kim Gwangbae. She wanted to know more about him and, if possible, just to talk to him.
“So once you knew about his past, you deliberately approached him, is that it?” Detective Cheon asked.
“I didn’t really approach him. I was just interested in him.”
Before she could even finish what she was saying, he grabbed a fistful of her hair, and she screamed in pain. It felt like he was tearing all of it out—it hurt so much she couldn’t close her mouth.
“You fucking bitch! Are you playing with me? I told you again and again. You answer me when I ask you nicely if you want me to treat you the same. I treat you like a human being and you answer me like one. I’ll tell you one more time. When I ask you for one thing, you show your cooperation by giving me two, alright? If you think I’m gonna go easy on you because you’re some female comrade, then you’re the loser here.”
He added another stern warning:
“I’m crueler to women.”
“What is it you want me to say?”
“Just answer my questions truthfully. Don’t get me mad for nothing. You decided to get closer to Kim Gwangbae because he was a leader in 1980. Otherwise, he would have been of no interest to you. Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“So you admit that you deliberately approached Kim Gwangbae because you already knew who he was?”
Shinhye felt she was slowly approaching an invisible trap. But unfortunately, she did not know how to avoid it. She told herself she had to come to her senses, but the longer it went on, the more it seemed like a dream in her head. Could it be that her body was already exhausted from his beating? As inappropriate as it was, she was beginning to nod off.
“Is what I’m saying correct?”
“…Yes, that’s correct.”
“So why are you twisting your words around and making a nice guy like me angry? Tell me now—how and when you approached Kim Gwangbae—without leaving anything out.”
He returned to the café a few days later. Someone had just walked in. Seol poked Shinhye in the ribs and said:
“It’s him—the one who caused the ruckus the other time!”
Shinhye didn’t recognize him at first. He looked like a different person. Unlike the last time, when he’d been entirely black and covered in coal dust, he was clean and well-dressed. He was sitting in a corner alone, gazing vacantly at the large poster hanging on the opposite wall. An image of a half-naked blonde foreigner on a beach: a young woman always there in the same place, exposing herself for free to the people in the café, her naked body tanned golden and well-proportioned, wearing a smile made more seductive by her squint and her slightly protruding tongue. Shinhye served Kim Gwangbae a cup of green tea and sat down in front of him.
“It’s really cold out, isn’t it?”
“I was freezing my balls off.”
Those were the first words they exchanged. He lifted his eyes slightly and looked at her.
“I haven’t seen you before.”
“I’ve seen you before,” Shinhye said. “The day you were in your mourning suit.”
He frowned. “Mourning suit,” he repeated. Then he grinned silently. It was a strange expression, as if he were laughing at himself, his lips quivering without really being able to smile.
“Can I buy you a cup of tea?” she asked.
He looked bewildered. “You’re offering to buy me tea? The sun’s gonna rise in the west! What’s the world coming to? Till now it’s always the girl who asked me to buy her a drink. This is the first time a girl wants to buy me one. Do you like me? You want to go out on a date with me?”
“Sure, why not?”
But then she remembered that asking a café girl to go out on a date had a particular meaning. It meant to sleep together at a hotel. Of course, lots of girls were paid for it, but regardless of how much money was offered, the girls didn’t go out on dates with men they didn’t like. According to Seol, that was the last bit of pride and self-respect a woman could hold on to in this world.
“When?” he said. “How about tonight?”
“No, not that kind of date. I mean a real date.”
“A real date?”
He stared at her as if he didn’t understand what she was saying, and then, all of a sudden, he blushed. He looked at her for an awkward moment, silently, his face red. She saw the doubt and suspicion in his eyes: Was this girl making fun of him?
“You’re not a spy, are you?”
She burst out laughing.
“Hey! Open your eyes!”
Shinhye opened her eyes at the sound of the detective’s voice. She must have fallen asleep for a few seconds. She didn’t know how much she had said. Since dawn she’d only been able to sleep for an hour on the sofa in the police station. She found it hard to believe that she could have nodded off under these circumstances.
“So you seduced him, is that it? And he fell for it?”
She had to think hard about his question—And he fell for it?—as if it were a problem written on a blackboard. But she didn’t immediately understand what it meant. Why is he asking me that? Sleep crept up on her from behind like a shadow touching her shoulder.
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“When you tried to seduce him, asking him for a date, how did Kim Gwangbae respond?”
Concentrate! She heard a faint alarm go off somewhere in her head as she struggled to keep her eyes open.
“I didn’t seduce him.”
“Bitch! Haven’t you understood anything yet? With your own mouth! You just confessed that you offered to go out on a date with him!”
“I didn’t seduce him. I was saying I was interested in getting to know him.”
“It’s the same thing, bitch! Even one single lie out of you and I won’t forgive you. I can find out everything by asking Kim Gwangbae himself.”
Shinhye wondered if he’d already been arrested. From the way the detective spoke, it seemed not yet. But even while she was thinking that, she was again overcome by sleep. She strained to open her eyes. The detective’s head was bowed as he busily wrote on the interrogation form. She suddenly noticed a poisonous red pimple on his forehead. It was probably very annoying and painful. She was both surprised and comforted that, in her current predicament, she was still aware of that kind of detail.
“You want to sleep?”
Detective Cheon looked at her with a mocking smile. She nodded without being aware of it.
“Just answer my questions truthfully and I’ll let you sleep. You must have met with Kim Gwangbae a lot after that? What did you talk about at those meetings?”
“I did see him a lot. Because he came to the café regularly. But…”
The next day, Kim Gwangbae appeared at the café again. He was wearing a suit and tie and looked like he had just had a haircut. Shinhye sat down across from him.
“What’s going on? Before you were in your mourning suit but today it looks like you’re getting married.”
He blushed. He sat for a long time, embarrassed and tense, without saying a word. He didn’t look at Shinhye but at the poster of the foreign blonde on the wall behind her.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“I go by Miss Han here, but my real name is Jeong Shinhye.”
He fell silent again then said:
“Why don’t you ask me my name?”
“I know your name. The truth is I heard lots of stories about you.”
“What stories?”
“Lots! I heard about how you suffered in 1980 and…”
Before she even finished, she realized it was a mistake to bring up that incident. Kim Gwangbae’s expression had hardened noticeably. In a choking voice, he asked her:
“What the hell do you want out of me?”
“Nothing. I just want to get to know you a little…talk to you…” She tried to smile, but the more she did, the more his face seemed to stiffen. He suddenly stood up from his seat.
“I don’t know what you want to hear, but I have nothing to tell you. So go look somewhere else.”
Shinhye suddenly came to her senses, alarmed. Detective Cheon, his eyes still bulging, was looking right at her.
“Excuse me,” she said, “but I didn’t hear what you were saying.”
“I asked you if you had sex with Kim Gwangbae.”
“Nothing like that ever happened.”
“You’re sure? I’m going to confirm this with Kim Gwangbae, and if it turns out you’re telling even one lie, you’d better be prepared…”
“I’m not lying.”
Detective Cheon began writing something diligently on the paper. Like a schoolboy practicing his penmanship, he would periodically look over what he had written, shake his head in disapproval, crumple up the page, throw it away, and start over. Shinhye had no way of knowing what he could be making up to put on record. What the hell did I say to him? Have I told him things I shouldn’t have? She searched her memory but found nothing specific. At least while he was brandishing his ballpoint pen, she could have a moment’s respite. But sleep silently encroached on her again, and succumbing to its temptation she felt an almost perfect contentment. Just leave me alone like this, she thought in the comfort of that brief and precious silence. Just leave me alone so I can sleep. The urge was so intense she wouldn’t have objected if they had framed her and sentenced her to life in prison for being a North Korean spy.
“Here, read it. It’s your statement so far.”
She opened her eyes to the detective’s voice. He had spread a few sheets of paper in front of her.
“Read this and sign it with your thumbprint. Then you can go down and sleep.”
The handwriting was so bad she had trouble making out what it said. But what made it hard to understand wasn’t just the handwriting, it was that she was half asleep and unable to fully comprehend the content of those crammed pages. No, it wasn’t even a matter of understanding the content—it was all just a bother. The only thing she wanted at that moment was to sleep. She dipped her thumb in the inkpad and pressed the red print on the spot the detective pointed out.
“I could’ve kept you awake all night, but I’m quitting now out of special consideration for you. Understand?”
He stood up and yawned, his mouth open wide. At that moment his face was completely different—he was just a good-natured normal man, worn out and tired. But then, as soon as he closed his mouth, his face was hard and expressionless once again.
The clock on the opposite wall indicated it was already past midnight.
“Follow me.”
Shinhye staggered momentarily as she stood up. Her shoulders and legs felt as if they were being pricked with needles. Detective Cheon took her down to the office on the first floor. It was much larger than the other room, full of people, and noisy. There was a steel-barred holding cell in one corner. It was divided into two sections: one for men, the other for women. As Shinhye walked past the men’s section, where they all sat hunched over, they lifted their heads and eyed her up and down. Their faces were oily and grimy from not having washed in days. Only their eyes shone vividly. Detective Cheon opened the barred door of the women’s section and shoved her inside.
A woman in her thirties, her hair in tangles, began to move around as if she’d just woken up. She looked up at Shinhye.
“Miss, where are we?”
Her breath reeked of alcohol. Her eyes were unfocused under puffy lids. She was still drunk.
“We’re at the police station,” Shinhye said.
“Police station? But what am I doing at the police station?”
Shinhye didn’t answer. All she wanted was to be left alone to sleep for a while.
“Those bastards! They put me in here! Evil bastards! Cowards! I’ll get you back for this!”
The woman wouldn’t stop cursing. Shinhye was shivering because the floor was so cold. If only she could sink her whole body into a hot bath, that would be the ultimate luxury.
“Tell me, miss, why are you here?” the woman asked.
Shinhye found her annoying, but she forced herself to answer:
“I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m here.”
“You, too? Then you’re just like me!” She laughed. “Where do you work? A bar? Café?”
“Do I look like I work in a bar or café?”
“Of course! I’ve been kicking around this place for years. I could tell at a glance.”
Shinhye grabbed a dirty blanket she saw and wrapped herself in it. It stank, but she decided to endure the smell because it was preferable to the cold. During the interrogation she could barely stay awake, but now that she was locked in the cell, she found it hard to sleep. She heard the woman muttering beside her. Shinhye thought of what she’d said, how she’d immediately taken her for a café waitress. And yet here she was, accused of being a fake café waitress, a labor organizer in disguise. Which is the real me? she thought, and in the next moment, a cold shiver ran through her body as she remembered what she had said to the detective about Kim Gwangbae, putting her thumbprint on the statement. Why didn’t I check the statement before signing it? How did I end up like this? Until now I lived without knowing who I really was, and now I let them make up whatever they want and give them my thumbprint. Eyes tightly closed, head pressed to the floor, she groaned, choking with unbearable shame.