“She really wanted to go to the teacher training college. She slept with the school brochure. Look—it’s falling apart.”
Only after flipping through the brochure with the dog-eared parts worn down and starting to tear did the mother stop her tears.
“You’re right.”
“You still don’t know her, after raising her for twenty years? You think she’d ever do something she didn’t want to? She made the decision because she really wanted it. So don’t be sad.”
The mother left the room with a load lifted off her chest. Jiyoung, now alone in the room, felt strange and empty and so elated that she felt she could fly, at least up to the ceiling. She’d never had her own room before. She thought she should get rid of her sister’s desk immediately and get a bed. She’d always wanted a bed.
Eunyoung’s entering college was a good thing for the whole family.
The father chose early retirement in the end. He still had years ahead of him, but the world had changed too much—while there was a PC for every employee, as a member of the pre-computer generation he still typed with his index fingers only. He’d already reached the number of consecutive years at his job to be eligible for a pension, and his severance pay was a decent sum. He declared it was time for his “second act” to begin before it was too late. Still, even to Jiyoung, who didn’t know much about the world, quitting work at a time when one child had just started college and two younger ones were guzzling money seemed like a risky choice. It made Jiyoung feel nervous, but the mother didn’t chastise, fret or dissuade.
The father chose to start a business with the severance money. A work colleague who quit around the same time was starting a China import-export business with his college friends, and asked him to be a partner. The father told the mother that he was going to invest most of his severance money in the business, and the mother was adamantly against it.
“You’ve worked so hard to support a family of five. Thank you. So now enjoy yourself. Take that money and enjoy yourself. I don’t want to hear another word about China. The second you invest, I’m divorcing you.”
As a couple they weren’t expressive in their affection for each other, but they went on a trip by themselves at least once a year, and had nights out from time to time, to see a late-night movie or have a few drinks. They’d never had a big fight in front of the children. Each time a big family decision had to be made, the mother advised with caution and tact, and the father generally took her advice. The first thing the father decided unilaterally in twenty years of marriage was the retirement, and now that he was riding the momentum to push for investing in a business, an unbridgeable rift opened up between the mother and father.
The tension between them was still palpable when, one day, the father was riffling through the closet getting ready to go out. He asked where “that thing” was, and the mother handed him a blue cardigan from the drawer. She found him his black socks when he asked for “that other thing,” and brought him his watch when he asked her to “hand me that thing.”
“I know you better than you know yourself,” she said as she put the watch on his wrist. “There are things you are good at, but this isn’t it. So drop the China thing.”
The father gave up on the China idea, and said he’d open a business. The mother sold the apartment she had bought as an investment and had let out, and made quite a profit from it. Adding her husband’s severance money to this, she purchased a lot on the first floor of a newly constructed commercial building. The price was not low, considering the place wasn’t facing the roadside and its location wasn’t great, but she seemed to think it was a worthwhile investment. Her reasoning was that the shabby residential areas around the building were being transformed into apartment complexes, and it’d be better to buy a place in a new building rather than renting an existing shop with a premium to pay. They needed a vacant unit to open a business anyway.
The first place they opened was a chicken stew shop. Chicken stew chains were enormously popular in those days, and the father’s shop had customers lined up in the street. But the fad didn’t last long. He hadn’t lost money, but hadn’t made much either when it folded and he opened a fried chicken place instead. This was more of a bar that served fried chicken. The father’s body, programmed to a lifetime of nine-to-five workdays, aged rapidly due to the late hours he kept. The business folded quickly because of his health issues. The next venture was a franchise bakery, but similar bakeries popped up indiscriminately in the neighborhood, and a bakery of the same franchise opened up right across the street. The bakeries all failed after a period of more or less equally slow business. The father’s bakery held out a bit longer since he didn’t have the burden of a monthly rent, but he admitted defeat when a large café/bakery opened nearby.
The atmosphere around the house was about as tense during Jiyoung’s last year of high school as it was during Eunyoung’s. Amid the scrambling to keep their business afloat in order to secure their children’s future, the parents couldn’t manage the children’s present. Jiyoung spent twelfth grade washing and ironing her and her brother’s school uniforms, packing their lunch from time to time, sitting her straying younger brother down and making him study, and getting her own studying done. Sometimes, when she was so exhausted she felt like giving up, Eunyoung’s clichéd words of encouragement—“Once you get to college, you will lose weight and get a boyfriend”—truly inspired her because Eunyoung actually did lose weight and get a boyfriend in college.
Once the college entrance exam was over, Jiyoung wondered if her parents would be able to afford the tuition fees. She cautiously mentioned shop sales, the father’s health, and the family bank balance to the mother who’d dropped by at home to make dinner for Jiyoung and her brother. Jiyoung was frankly nervous that bringing up the question of money would prompt her mother to burst into tears, or to tell her to take care of the tuition herself. The mother allayed Jiyoung’s fears with five words: “Get in first, worry later.”
Jiyoung was accepted into the faculty of arts and humanities at a university in Seoul. No one in the family had the time to interfere with Jiyoung’s future, so it was the result of her weighing up her options and making the necessary preparations all on her own. Now that she was in, it was time to worry. The mother told her very honestly that they had tuition covered for the first year.
“If things don’t change in a year, we’ll sell the house or the shop or something, so you don’t need to worry about next year, either.”
On graduation day, Kim Jiyoung got drunk for the first time. Kim Eunyoung took her younger sister and two friends out for soju, which Jiyoung found surprisingly sweet and tasty. She drank shot after shot until she passed out and was practically carried home by Eunyoung. The parents shook their heads at Eunyoung for corrupting her little sister, but didn’t have much to say to Jiyoung.
6 “Statistical Indicators and Ratios in Demography,” Statistics Korea.
7 Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.
EARLY ADULTHOOD, 2001–2011
Kim Jiyoung was determined to get good grades in college and receive a scholarship, but it turned out to be a pipe dream. Even after perfect attendance, handing in all her assignments on time and studying hard, she only averaged 2.0 in her first semester. She’d maintained good grades in middle school and high school, and she could bomb one test and still pull her grade point average (GPA) up by buckling down and applying herself for the next exam. But in college, it was hard to stand out when in competition with students of a similar level. Without study guides to help decipher the textbook material, or practice test books to help understand the format of the test questions, Jiyoung couldn’t figure out how to study for a test.