Wafers

Autobiography

Since I hadn’t been back since I left over twenty years ago, I thought I’d have a hard time finding the place she described on the phone. She said she was sorry for telling me to come all the way, but she needed to watch the store, so she couldn’t step out, not even for a moment. She then snickered for a while, finally asking, Could you have imagined me like this? Her voice had become raspy, perhaps due to age or an unhealthy lifestyle. I wondered what had managed to tame her, recalling the wild thing she’d been.

Her face came to mind. Squirting spit through the gap in her front teeth, she would challenge boys a head taller than herself. She was as skinny as a metal chopstick, yet the fastest in our gang. She was the representative sprinter for her high school until her sophomore year, but by the time I met her, she’d dropped out and was hanging around beauty and sewing schools. That was well over two decades ago. They say time is scary, but reality is even scarier. Being part of that crowd offered no help when it came to making a living. She mentioned that nearly everyone from the group had married, started families, and secured jobs.

The streets were lined with revamped government offices and what looked like every single bank in Korea. Amid fast-food restaurants sandwiched between skyscrapers, I was relieved to have given myself extra time in case I got lost. Following her directions, I navigated my car through the hectic traffic toward the residential area. I expected winding, dingy alleys hardly wide enough to accommodate a single car, but to my surprise, I found a neat network of paved roads leading to various building entrances. The once tightly packed houses that barely allowed in sunlight and wind had been replaced by towering apartment complexes and low-rises.

The industrial road, which continued all the way to the outskirts of the city, seemed to have opened recently as there wasn’t much traffic. Running parallel on the opposite side, a steel fence displaying the name of a construction company stretched endlessly. The road then transitioned to an unpaved lane, its surface marked by truck-tire tracks that converged at the entrance of the construction site. Each time I jolted over potholes and rocks, my head bumped against the roof of the car. Dust coated every window of my car.

Suddenly, the unpaved road ended, giving way to an uphill path that glistened in the sunlight, like a stream frosted over with ice. It was exactly as I remembered it. The few houses that once stood at the bottom of the hill were now gone, replaced by deep pits that looked as if created by an excavator.

From the other side of the hill, a whistle sounded. A little while later, the forehead of a boy appeared, and soon after, his whole body came into view. Having pedaled all the way up the hill, his body was drenched in sweat. Now that he’d reached the peak, he only needed to coast, resting his feet on the pedals. As his bike picked up speed, the seat bounced wildly on its springs, and he began to shout. Move! Get out of the way! It’s not my fault if you get hurt! His bike bell was long gone.

My third novel, Children of the Wind, starts this way, with a boy shouting as he rushes down a hill. Some twenty years ago, that boy and I were both seventeen. The momentum from his descent carries him all the way down to where the apartment complexes now stand. When the bike begins to slow, he stands and pedals furiously. With each push of the pedal, the bicycle tilts dangerously to the left and right. As soon as he rounds a corner, a steep path appears, eventually leading to Revival Church, located in the basement of a store. He has no plans to fix his brakes. All he cares about is getting to the church as quickly as possible. Slowing down isn’t on his agenda.

Sometimes, readers send in postcards or letters posing questions like, Is the boy on the bicycle perhaps your alter ego? Even when I wrote about a housewife spiraling into madness from conspiracies, or about a company employee finding a bloody knife on his bed with no memory of the previous night, readers asked similar questions. At what point does truth end and fiction begin in your work? Still, those sorts of questions are fine. And then there are times when fans call early in the morning, saying, I feel as if you’ve written my story.

As I drove uphill, the steepness made me feel as though I were reclining. Despite flooring the accelerator, the car wouldn’t go any faster. In the winter, this hill had become a slippery slope covered in ice. I remembered the way people would make their way down, sticking out their backsides and carefully lifting their feet to avoid falling. If someone higher up lost their balance and slipped, they would set off a domino effect, knocking others down and sending them all sliding uncontrollably to the bottom. Another hazard to avoid was the residue of briquette ash, discarded from the houses at the base of the hill. The ash, after mixing with the snow, would linger in the air, even after the snow melted.

When I reached the top of the hill, the whole neighborhood lay sprawled out below, unchanged from the day I left. Dust from the construction site had flown up even here, blanketing roofs and window frames with a thick layer of grime. The drainage pumping station lay sprawled between the sky and rooftops. Now that the rainy season was over, various parts of the station were overgrown with weeds. During the rainy season, water from higher grounds flooded the station, roughly three times the size of a standard field. The soccer goalposts put in by the local government office were regularly submerged in water and became covered in thick red rust. The water remained pooled even after the rainy season, either flowing into a ditch or seeping into the ground, and the pumping station became a breeding ground for long-legged flies. After the water drained, a bad smell lingered in the air. On humid days, the stench stayed low to the ground, settling heavily in this large basin area. I’m not sure if my mother was right in saying that the land value here wouldn’t increase until the pumping station was relocated. She sold our new two-story building, barely breaking even, and left this place without a backward glance.

As I looked around, one patch of grass was noticeably lusher than the rest. The grass was greener, denser. I was certain that was the spot. It was there that Blackie was buried. A faint scar on my right cheek began to itch.

The old pharmacy and the stores flanking it had disappeared, giving way to a large barbecue restaurant. As soon as I turned into the alley, a middle-aged waitress burst out of the restaurant and flagged me down, fervently gesturing with her tongs for me to park and come inside. Though not quite the time for dinner, the place bustled with customers. Real estate offices had sprouted where the minimart and snack bar once stood, their windows plastered with brochures. It seemed a redevelopment boom had finally hit this area as well.

I stopped before the building where my family had lived for a little over two years. The façade—made up of tiles the color of red bean—was cracked in places, and many tiles had fallen off completely. Twenty years later, the ground floor still harbored a hardware store. Dangling from the overhang, just as I remembered, were multicolored plastic brooms with synthetic bristles, dustpans, and rubber hoses, all thickly coated with dust. Judging by the dark interior and closed door, the owner had stepped out for a bit. Even the shelves hanging on the walls had hardly changed from what I remembered, loaded with boxes holding small steel parts.

This very hardware store had appeared in my latest novel. The store wasn’t entirely without customers, but it must have been difficult to earn a living selling a few bulbs or cans of paint. Rent was always late, and I was the one my mother sent every month to collect it. Even after entering the gloomy, cluttered store, it took some time before I could bring myself to call out to the owner. The owner was a young woman barely seven years older than me. Though she said she cleaned, the inside was like a giant trash bin. Yet, astonishingly, no matter what you asked for, she could easily locate it in that heap of garbage. After waiting in the dark for a while, surrounded by shovels, hammers, and saws glimmering faintly, I’d hear her soft voice, no louder than a whisper, drifting from the back room attached to the store.

I’m sorry. The baby just fell asleep, so I can’t come out right now. Please tell your mother that I’ll have the rent ready the day after tomorrow at the very latest.

But of course, it was always a lie—both the sleeping baby and the promised rent payment.

The fact that the neighborhood hadn’t changed at all felt surreal, like a movie set. I drove slowly through the alley, to avoid passing the book rental shop, as well as to pick out any changes. It wasn’t difficult to locate the shop with the somewhat long name, Stories that Grandma Tells, but I couldn’t remember what had been there twenty years ago. There must have been a salon or a rice shop with a solid cash flow. Whatever it had been, she was now running a bookshop where our gang had once cracked open a safe.

I pushed open the door to the bookshop. Except for the entrance, the four walls of the shop were lined with bookshelves, and one wall featured several specially designed bookcases that were stacked on top of each other. I had never dreamed that someone from the gang might read my work. They hadn’t even read comic books back then, considering them a waste of time. Yet, one of them now managed a book rental shop, and I wrote novels.

As I opened and closed the door, an electronic chime rang out. The wall of bookcases in front of me trembled and slid to the side, folding back like a fan to reveal a living space. Beyond the small room, I glimpsed a kitchen, complete with a sink. A small, fleshy foot appeared over the threshold, searching the floor for a slipper. It was Chopstick. She had put on weight, so her cold, jagged edges seemed to have dulled a little. She had a physique that revealed no curves, no matter how much weight she’d gained, and she now resembled a thicker wooden chopstick. She dragged her slippers noisily toward me and then peered up at my face for a long time before punching me in the chest, just as she had twenty years ago. The difference this time was that her punches didn’t push me back anymore.

Yunmi poured two packets of instant coffee mix into a cup and pushed it toward me, bursting into laughter. Her voice was gravelly, as if she were chewing rice mixed with dirt.

I’m not sure this instant coffee would be to your liking, you being a fancy writer and all.

Though she spoke informally to me as she always had, I felt awkward responding in the same way, so I just nodded. After watching me bring the cup to my lips, she let out a little snort.

Remember Kijin? He was the first one to spot you in the paper. I think about nine years ago?

If it was nine years ago, that would have been the year my debut novel was first published.

As soon as he mentioned seeing you in the paper, you won’t believe how everyone reacted. ‘So he finally landed himself in deep shit, didn’t he, enough to make the news? What was it? Robbery? Fraud?’ That’s what they said!

Yunmi cackled, hitting the table so hard that the coffee sloshed out of the cup. Quickly, she wiped the spilled coffee with her hand and rubbed it on her pants.

Those idiots. They can’t think beyond their own pea brains. It’s fucking embarrassing … Anyway, you turned out to be most successful person from Stepping Stones.

Yunmi murmured, seemingly more to herself than to me, as her gaze drifted toward the door—the shop’s only window. However, the glass in the door was covered by new book posters, blocking any view of the outside. She sighed, and a vivid image of the seventeen-year-old Yunmi flashed across my mind—petite, skinny, sporting a short haircut, which had made her look like a small boy. The sound of her quick, light steps, echoing in the night streets, seemed to linger in my ears. While I sat there sipping my coffee, several middle and high school students came in to return or borrow books. Yunmi scanned the barcodes and organized the books with practiced ease. I noticed that one entire row on a bookshelf was filled with copies of Children of the Wind.

I guess writers are different. When I was reading your book, my legs got all restless and I felt this urge to run. I’ve told them a million times, but I always knew you were different. But still, how did you manage to remember everything from twenty years ago? You didn’t get anything wrong. Did you keep a journal back then?

A journal? The things we did at seventeen and eighteen weren’t exactly what you would chronicle in a journal like typical teenagers. We were shadows, wandering the streets at night. Sure, we kept journals for school, but everything we wrote down was a lie, except for the weather. Perhaps that was when I started writing fiction.

Yunmi said the gang was getting together at our old stomping ground, but my mind kept drifting to Revival Church. The building where the church used to meet had been torn down a long time ago. Standing at the top of the hill, we gazed down at the construction site shrouded in darkness. She mentioned a large discount mart and sports center were going to be built there. Though we stood with our backs to the drainage pumping station, the wind kept carrying the stench toward us.

We figured you’d wiped this place from your memory after you left, Yunmi said. She sniffed the air, and then changed the topic abruptly. You know, this hill won’t be here much longer. If you decide to visit again, you’ll get lost for sure.

We walked down with our hands shoved in our back pockets, as if we’d gone back in time. Twenty years ago, I’d hurtled down this hill in a truck, wedged between a wardrobe and boxes full of odds and ends, convinced there was no reason to come back here again.

The stairs in our two-story house were excessively steep, and no matter how much we twisted the taps, the water trickled out ever so slowly, hinting at a possible blockage in the underground pipes. We had to collect water in the bathtub overnight to have enough for the next day. By morning, sediment resembling iron filings would have settled at the bottom of the tub. The water carried the foul odor from the pumping station. My mother would carefully scoop up some of the water for cooking, but even the rice and vegetables ended up smelling like rotten fish. When we finally moved to a new house in a different neighborhood, our family marveled at the water exploding endlessly from the taps, to borrow my mother’s expression. As we washed our faces until our shirts were soaked, my mother kept remarking how different this neighborhood was from our old one. Apart from a two-week period when I suffered from diarrhea due to the unfamiliar fresh water and couldn’t sleep because of the new environment, I quickly reverted to an ordinary high school senior. Even though I would sometimes wake in the middle of the night, memories of the stench and my old gang gradually faded. While our adventures at the pumping station occasionally surfaced in my dreams, they always disappeared with the morning light.

Without looking back, Yunmi asked, Hey, you know one of the kids in the novel, the girl Minseo—it’s her, right? Even if you changed everyone’s names, you portrayed them exactly the same, so it’s easy to tell who’s who. Well, only we would know, I guess.

She didn’t wait for me to answer. She became cheerful suddenly, clapping her hands and raising her voice. Hey, to celebrate seeing each other after twenty years, should we raid a vending machine or something?

Just like in the old days, we ran down the hill, shouting. Yunmi had gained a lot of weight over the years. Her hips jiggled as she ran ahead. I had a gut feeling that it hadn’t been Yunmi who’d been calling and hanging up without a word for the past six months. Then who was it? I would find out tonight when I met with everyone.

Once a month, the gang gathered at a large pub located in the basement of a building in a busy district. Decorated with empty beer bottles and car license plates, the spacious pub had wooden crates full of ice scattered here and there, each brimming with a variety of imported beers. Seated around a crate of ice, they waved at Yunmi when we walked in. Though the pub was clean, a unique basement smell lingered in the air.

Is that you, Jinseong? I said. Jinseong, right?

Yeah, that’s me, dickhead, though I’m Haeseong in your book, aren’t I?

As I greeted the group and confirmed their names, they responded by mentioning the new names I’d give them in my novel. Some had arrived early, evident from all the empty bottles. It seemed most of them had stayed in this place that they had vowed to escape as soon as they grew up. Far from leaving, they’d brought other people here and started families.

Man, it’s been ages, but it feels like we just met up last week, doesn’t it? Kijin shouted, raising his beer bottle.

As he continued to drink and offer toasts, his aloof demeanor melted away. His habit of spraying spittle when he talked was still the same. He mentioned he was in the business of renting out heavy machinery.

Suddenly, Jaebeom, seated across the table, blurted, Here’s to us—the Children of Darkness!

Yunmi kicked him in the shin with her plump foot.

Ouch! Jaebeom exclaimed, clutching his shin.

"It’s Children of the Wind, you idiot, not Children of Darkness! How many times do I have to drill that into your thick skull?"

Jinseong, already slurring his words, knocked over a beer bottle by accident. The liquid spilled into his lap, but he was unfazed. "Who the hell cares if it’s Children of the Wind or Children of Darkness? Same difference, since it’s all about us anyway."

You dumbasses. How is that about us? Is your name mentioned in the book? How about you, Jaebeom? I’ve told you a million times, it’s a story, not real life.

Yunmi smacked everyone’s heads within reach, causing Minho to drop his beer bottle, which shattered when it hit the floor. Minho had always gone around with a fringe of long bangs that hid his eyes. Even now, I couldn’t quite see his eyes because of his hair. Despite his pale skin, which gave him a fragile appearance, everyone knew he was the most vicious among us. Blowing his bangs aside, he finally looked up.

Even if it’s just a story, spilling our secrets like that wasn’t right. Yunmi told me to read it, so I did, but you know how it made me feel? Like a fucking worm under a blazing sun. It made me feel like shit. Why didn’t you just use our real names and places while you were at it, huh?

Back when we were seventeen and eighteen, we got up to stuff most kids our age couldn’t even dream of. Booze and cigarettes were just the tip of the iceberg. We ventured into far more forbidden territories. After getting into university on my second attempt, I got bored with alcohol, cigarettes, and girls. Time trudged forward, yet nothing ever seemed as remarkable or worthy of a book as those wild days.

It’s fine for us dudes, but her? Jaebeom chimed in, his eyes bloodshot as he gestured toward Yunmi. She’s not even married yet.

Yunmi spat on the floor and narrowed her eyes. She flicked a pack of cigarettes in her hand to get a cigarette to pop out. She stuck it between her lips and lit up.

Mind your own business, loser. If you’re so worried about me getting married, why didn’t any of you ever propose, huh? None of you gave a shit about me. You were all hung up on that bitch Sujeong. Don’t worry, people are way too busy to remember things from back then. No one’s going to link Mikyeong from the book to me. I’m not that person anymore. The problem is you guys. Look at you, flipping out and making a scene … Those people over there have been gawking at us for a while now.

At the mention of Sujeong, everyone fell silent. Soon, a waiter came by to sweep up the mess. The table became more and more cluttered with empty bottles. Before long, everyone fell back into old habits, cussing and hitting each other, like we’d been transported back twenty years.

On my way back from the bathroom, someone grabbed me by the scruff of my neck. It was Minho. He dragged me back into the bathroom and locked the door behind us. Before I knew it, his fist connected with my face. A metallic taste filled my mouth as my lip split open. His hands felt just as rough and callused as I remembered.

Hey asshole, do you even have a conscience? Didn’t you feel any shame as you were writing about us? Pricks like you deserve a beating.

He punched me again, this time hitting my side. Before I knew it, I crashed to the filthy bathroom floor.

So you think you’re better than us because you left? Do you even know what Sujeong’s life is like these days? You should’ve had the decency to take responsibility, man. You treated her like garbage and now you’re airing her dirty laundry?

Minho was no different from the occasional readers who asked what was true and what was fiction.

Man, get it together, I said. It’s fiction, all right? Just a story, not real life!

You educated folks have a way with words, don’t you? After you left, Sujeong came to me crying and said you two had gotten involved. She thought you really cared.

I was stunned. I had never been alone with Sujeong. Clearly, she wasn’t to be trusted.

Then how’d you know about that mole, huh? How’d you know if it’s all fiction?

I burst out laughing. Minho punched me again. It hurt so much that tears came to my eyes, but I couldn’t contain my laughter.