It was a warm spring. The first thing that came to mind when Yona thought of the season wasn’t flowers or the budding leaves, but sweat. When she had visited the tsunami aftermath in Jinhae, sweat dripped down her neck the entire weekend. As soon as spring turned to summer, Kim called Yona into his office.
‘You’ve committed a foul,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to remove you from the team’s current project. Why don’t you focus on the maintenance of existing packages for now?’
The work Yona was assigned that afternoon would normally have been given to an intern.
‘Shall we have a company dinner tomorrow, Manager Ko?’ asked Kim the next day, using Yona’s more formal title. He didn’t really want her opinion and didn’t wait for her response before going on. ‘Everyone is busy, but that’s exactly why we need to relax for a few hours. Let’s not get samgyeopsal this time—let’s try something a bit more special. Go ask everyone what they want to eat.’
Because of Kim and his love for documents, Yona’s team ran out of A4 paper much faster than other teams. Recently, they’d been using up paper so quickly that they had to print everything double-sided. Yona asked her colleagues for their opinions about the dinner menu, and she typed up the results on a page that she printed out and brought to Kim. The document and the information it contained dissipated into irrelevance as soon as Kim brashly said, ‘Actually let’s just eat samgyeopsal.’
Yona spent the next several days performing similar tasks. If she wasn’t told to man the phone, she was stationed at the copy machine. She was so bored that she started going on to silly websites, like one that calculated the user’s date of death. When she clicked the death calculator button after inputting her personal details, she didn’t react in shock: all she thought was, ‘Oh, I guess I’ve done this before.’
Yona knew this screen with its quickly decreasing numbers. She had probably visited the website a few years ago on a day similar to today. That was when the monitor’s digital clock had begun to count down. The clock, measuring the passing of time to the second, even the fraction of a second, broadcast Yona’s slowly extinguishing life. Over the past few years, during which time she had forgotten about the site, the clock hadn’t stopped once. Today, once again, Yona had satisfied her sporadic curiosity about life expectancy. She marvelled at the numbers shrinking before her.
Yona sat in front of the timer that would someday reach zero and considered how a single second could decide one’s fate. Hadn’t Yona heard that whenever a fatal fire broke out at a New Year’s Eve party, most bodies were found at the cloakroom? If a fire started, if the earth began to shake, if an alarm sounded, you were supposed to stop everything you were doing and run outside. Small actions like looking for your coat or grabbing your bag, like saving the data on your laptop or pressing buttons on your phone: they divided the living and the dead.
Yona’s current situation was a disaster, and she was going to have to treat it like one of the disasters she researched for Jungle. She needed to look back at the actions that had driven her into the situation. Maybe it was a seemingly insubstantial event, but one that she couldn’t overlook, that had led her to a yellow card. She couldn’t clearly remember the time before Kim’s sexual harassment, but she knew the origin of her current malaise was definitely Kim. After leaving work, Yona sent an email to Human Resources. She received a reply shortly after. Choi, from HR, said that she would buy Yona dinner.
Choi was one of the rare older women at Jungle. She didn’t seem like an employee, and it was easy to talk to her. When Choi asked Yona what she wanted to eat, Yona felt at ease. Choi paid attention to simple things like choosing the menu for their meal. Yona decided on Pyeongyang-style cold noodles and boiled beef. After asking Yona if she’d like any alcohol, Choi ordered a bottle of soju as well. Yona’s lips felt heavy as she began to explain her situation.
‘Like I said in my email,’ she said, ‘it’s about programme team three’s leader, Jo-gwang Kim.’
‘Oh, Jo-schlong!’ Choi exclaimed.
Yona was surprised by Choi’s response, but her familiarity with the issue allowed the conversation to continue smoothly. Choi said that she knew exactly how Yona felt.
‘Kim hasn’t just caused problems once or twice,’ she explained. ‘I’ve had to deal with him a lot.’
‘He must have a lot of enemies, then,’ Yona mused.
‘Well, he does,’ Choi replied, ‘but everyone’s too embarrassed to call themselves his enemy, so there’s no backlash. It’s like a battle between an elephant and an ant.’
‘Have you heard the rumours?’ Yona asked. ‘That the people Kim touches are already on their way out?’
That was what Yona was most curious about.
‘Well,’ said Choi, ‘I’m only familiar with the employees who’ve contacted me for help. But if the victims do end up being fired, I imagine it would be because they spoke up. How many people in the company could fight with Kim and stay?’
Two hours later, two more bottles of soju were empty, and Choi could speak frankly.
‘Yona, I’m telling you this because you remind me of my younger sister,’ she said. ‘Put the issue behind you.’
The soju stung Yona’s throat as she took another sip, but she knew the stinging wasn’t the only thing she had to ignore. Choi said one last thing.
‘This kind of incident happens all the time. You can press charges and turn it into a problem, but in the long term, that will just make things hard for you, Yona. Kim’s a snake: he’s always got away with transgressions. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.’
Yona had a tendency to bob her head when she was listening to someone speak, and the speaker inevitably interpreted the nod as agreement. That’s what happened now. Choi took Yona’s gesture to mean that Yona wasn’t going to go after Kim, and she gave her an approving pat on the shoulder. By the time they had emptied another bottle of soju together, Yona really did agree with Choi’s advice.
Complaints made to HR were guaranteed confidential, but victims who shared a harasser somehow learned about each other’s existence. Several days later, Yona began to receive messages from people who said that they were ‘in solidarity’ with her. She met four of them (three women and one man) after work one evening, at a restaurant quite far from the office. She could only guess how they had found her.
‘We have to use this opportunity to oust Kim,’ one of the other victims exclaimed. ‘We tried to do it two years ago, but we weren’t prepared and lost the case. Since then, we’ve been biding our time. We heard that you’ve been dealing with the same issues as us, Manager Ko, and of course we feel nothing but empathy for you, but we’re also reassured.’
They were asking her to help prosecute Kim, but Yona wasn’t convinced by them. As she listened, Yona wondered if rumours about the targets of Kim’s sexual harassment really were just rumours. Yona was the most senior person at the dinner. The others seemed to draw comfort from the fact that she was a top programming coordinator, but she felt just as burdened by them as she did by Kim. The group told her their stories, and she realised she was lucky that Kim had only targeted her three times. Some of the victims had suffered more explicit molestation and serious physical violations. Compared to them, Yona had scarcely been touched.