‘Look.’
The customer’s voice had grown cold.
‘I told you that my child is sick. He’s in the hospital. In a situation like this, can’t you be a decent person and let me cancel?’
‘If you’d like, we can cancel your order,’ Yona said.
‘But a refund isn’t possible, right?’ the man asked.
‘That is correct, sir.’
‘What is your name?’
‘Sir—’
‘I asked you what your name is! I’m done with all this crap. Tell me your name.’
‘Yona Ko.’
With that, the man hung up. He was angry, and so was Yona. Most of the time, customers were more forgiving of higher-ranking employees, which was why customer service passed calls up to programming coordinators. On a day like today, though, when Yona was inundated with work, she didn’t have time to be bothered by distractions. Jungle didn’t want her to waste her efforts with disgruntled customers, either. Yona was one of the brains of the company, not its lips.
She wondered if her recent role change at Jungle might indicate that she was the target of a ‘yellow card’. She had known about the company’s preferred form of discipline since being hired. A yellow card was less a warning than a siren, signalling a growing and irreparable fissure. Once you’d received one, as long as the moon didn’t fall out of the sky, you could do nothing to stop the already-widening fracture. Yona wondered if she might get an actual yellow slip of paper, by mail or email or even courier, but she knew better: that wasn’t how it worked. Yellow cards showed themselves in a discreet manner, but were unmistakable, so that the recipient could appreciate the crisis that had befallen his or her career.
Two divergent paths faced the yellow card recipient: work as diligently as possible in a newly hostile office environment, or fight back with all of one’s being. Yona had heard of someone who’d risen back to his original position, five years after a swift fall from grace. In the meantime, that person’s assistant had become his boss. Even after returning to his original job, the man worked for only a brief period of time before quitting. His health was poor. Quite possibly, the shock of the yellow card and five years of tumult had caused a tumour in his brain. Yona didn’t know him personally, but the story circulated through the office. Supposedly, the subject was the former head of the team one room over.
Recently, whenever Yona went into work, she’d felt like a dandelion seed that had somehow drifted into a building. The chair she sat in each morning was definitely hers, but for some reason, sitting in it was awkward, like this was the first time she’d ever touched the piece of furniture. She grew uncomfortable whenever she saw the new hires striding up and down the hallways, like giants already in control of the place. When Yona voiced her discomfort to a few close co-workers in the bathroom, they said that her complaints were baseless. As soon as Yona opened her mouth, their casual conversation—light as the paper towels they were throwing into the bin—took on a heaviness, and Yona’s co-workers looked at her with very serious faces.
‘Is something going on?’ one friend asked.
Yona figured that she was making the situation worse by bringing it up, so she quickly washed her hands and tried to forget her unease. But the truth was, several days earlier there had been an uncomfortable incident. She’d shown up for a meeting on time, but when she arrived, no one was in the room. A wide-eyed junior staff member had approached Yona from the hallway.
‘Isn’t there a meeting?’ Yona asked, confused, as she stepped out of the conference suite.
The man replied with a wink. ‘Today’s a foul.’
‘A foul?’ she asked.
‘That’s what they told me,’ he said.
Foul? Was this some sort of new jargon? An abbreviation? A kind of slang? As Yona racked her brains, she remembered hearing a similar sentence a few days ago, in the department next to her own: ‘It’s because of a foul.’
‘Okay,’ she replied in a fluster, losing the chance to ask, ‘But what’s a foul?’ Yona figured that she didn’t have to determine the meaning of the word; she just needed to understand the situations in which it was used. But she didn’t have any idea what those situations were. Of course, she could have just asked someone, but she felt uneasy letting people know that she didn’t know what ‘foul’ meant.
The co-worker hurried away, and Yona stared blankly at the empty conference room before stepping into the lift. After meetings, employees would crowd into the bathroom or smoking area to relieve built-up tension, but today, even without such social exertion, Yona was too exhausted to do anything but rush back to her desk. As Yona boarded the lift; so did Kim—another co-worker. Once the doors closed, he spoke.
‘Johnson is asking me to send my greetings to you,’ Kim told Yona.
‘Who?’ Yona asked.
‘Johnson. My Johnson.’
Kim pointed to his crotch. The lift was descending from the twenty-first to the third floor, and Kim and Yona were the only two people inside. Without even giving her a moment to be surprised, Kim grabbed at Yona’s bottom. The action wasn’t a mistake, it was deliberate: a brazen gesture that suggested Kim didn’t care if he was caught.
‘Are you older than I thought?’ he taunted her. ‘Why didn’t you understand what I said?’
Yona turned her body as casually as she could to avoid eye contact with Kim. Now he was pushing his hand into her blouse. Yona’s chest pounded furiously, although not because she was seeing the unsavoury side of Kim for the first time. Nor was it because her boss was sexually assaulting her. No: according to what Yona knew, Kim only targeted has-beens—employees who’d been given a yellow card, or who were about to receive one. She was horrified to think that her rejection of his advances might be the grounds for a yellow card.
Yona stepped aside, fearful of the CCTV on the wall behind her. She tried to stand still like nothing was happening. She didn’t want the episode to be discovered; the CCTV recorded tirelessly, twenty-four hours a day. Additionally, Yona wasn’t sure when the lift was going to open its door, revealing her and Kim to colleagues waiting on another floor. Kim was harassing her so shamelessly, he was almost asking for his actions to be made public. His touch felt extremely impersonal somehow: he didn’t speak to Yona as he molested her. The doors to the lift lurched open and two people entered. By then, Kim’s hand had already moved from Yona’s chest back into his pocket. He said something in a low voice that the others may or may not have heard.
‘You should pay a bit more attention to words,’ he warned Yona. ‘Not knowing the language of this day and age, that’s like going around wearing a sign that says, “I don’t care if I get left behind!” ’
When Kim got off, the other riders in the lift sneaked glances at Yona. After that day, Kim slipped his cold hands inside Yona’s skirt two more times. The important thing wasn’t the temperature of his hand, it was the hand itself, but she hated the clamminess so much that just thinking about it gave her goosebumps. Kim had been Yona’s immediate supervisor for the past ten years, and he kept her on board every time there were changes in personnel. He was a competent boss. Or to be more accurate, he wasn’t a competent boss but a competent underling, and thanks to that he could maintain the facade of proficiency. Kim’s employee performance rating was exactly fifty per cent, and his likes and dislikes were clear. He shook people he didn’t approve of until they broke. Yona was frightened by the thought of others learning that she had become Kim’s newest target. If his sexual offences remained covert, she was inclined to bear the discomfort. Yona thought about her complacency and then shook her head. No, what made her most uncomfortable right now was that she’d tolerated his actions three times without doing anything. She felt like she was somehow cooperating. But victims would understand her hesitation to act, she thought.