Yona quietly looked at the ground.
‘Why don’t we do this—I’ll give you a month’s break, and for the first couple of weeks you’ll go on a trip,’ Kim announced. ‘Not as an employee, but as a customer. Several of our packages are currently in the middle of review, and we’re trying to decide if we’ll continue to offer them or if they should be discontinued. You pick one of these, and we’ll cover the entire trip like it’s a business expense. After you come back, all you have to do is write a one-page report about your travels. You’ve been working here for ten years—you must be tired.’
‘Can my position be vacant for a month?’ Yona enquired.
‘It’ll be a break for you, but Jungle sees it as a business trip, so don’t worry. I’ll use your report to decide whether or not to terminate the package.’
‘Are any of the trips I designed at risk of termination?’
‘Um, no.’ Kim looked irritated.
‘So I’m making a final decision about someone else’s project?’
‘Can anyone objectively judge a trip that he or she designed? We have to perform evaluations like this sometimes. I’m in charge of the trips in question. Aren’t you a top programming coordinator, someone I can trust? Your time away might be a holiday, but it’s still part of your work duties. Understand?’
Yona looked at Kim with wide-eyed surprise, and he softened his tone.
‘When I’d been at Jungle for about ten years, my boss did this for me, too. I accepted the offer for a free trip, of course, but I’d realised by then what a cold-blooded company this place is. Thankfully, the timing works out well with your attempted resignation. Just think of this as a thank-you gift for your years of service.’
Yona hadn’t submitted her resignation letter with the absolute intention of quitting. It just seemed like if she didn’t send Kim some sort of signal, he would bully her even more. At Jungle, a holiday didn’t mean a brief, comma-like pause. It was an action that indicated finality: the full stop at the end of a sentence. Only when someone was on the brink of exhaustion did the company start to throw days off at him or her in all sorts of circuitous ways. Otherwise, you never knew when you’d get time off. Occasionally, though, the full stop was a comma: a break between intervals of feverish devotion to one’s work. If you were a necessary employee, someone Jungle wanted to hold on to, they didn’t just let you wallow dissatisfied until you resigned. Before granting her a break, Jungle needed to find out whether Yona really was considering leaving. Finally, she thought, they’d reached a silent agreement. Kim was trading in his wrongdoings for the offer of a no-strings-attached business trip. If only he hadn’t brushed Yona’s waist twice as the conversation ended, she almost could have forgotten his earlier remarks about his Johnson.
Yona glanced over descriptions of Jungle’s current destinations. Experience the Ashen Red Energy of a Volcano! Feel Mother Earth Tremble. Ride Noah’s Ark and Be the Judge of the Seas. Tsunamis: Calamity and Horror Before Your Eyes. Not one of the ten most popular trips was attributed to Yona, even though the Jinhae expedition was obviously hers. After planting and nurturing the seeds for the trip, undergoing all sorts of hardship as she fertilised its field, she didn’t even get to experience the fruits of her labour. Right before she could harvest the crop, the trip had been handed over to another employee. Just looking at the description of Jinhae and its cherry blossoms made Yona’s blood sizzle with anger. That trip now ranked seventh in sales. Yona’s replacement had essentially been given an already-complete project. He was probably dilly-dallying about right now, oh-so pleased with himself. She got even angrier.
Yona had five trips to choose from. Fortunately, none of her own projects were at risk of removal, even if she wasn’t getting credit. Yona’s trips usually lay somewhere in between the most and least popular destinations. She tried to learn more about her holiday options by speaking with an adviser in the customer service centre. As soon as Yona said that she was trying to decide among five trips, the adviser unsurprisingly suggested the most expensive one.
‘I’m going to recommend Desert Sinkhole,’ the adviser said confidently. ‘The accommodation is why it’s more costly than the other trips. You’ll be staying in a newly constructed resort—it’s very clean. The trip doubles as an opportunity to relax. It’s rare, too, that you can see volcanoes, deserts and hot springs all in the same location. Desert Sinkhole may be twenty per cent more expensive than the other trips, but you’ll be twenty per cent more satisfied.’
The adviser’s poise betrayed her ignorance. Clearly, she didn’t know that a twenty per cent decrease in revenue had put the package she was advertising at the crossroads of life and death. But since Jungle was paying, it seemed appropriate to pick the most expensive option.
The desert sinkhole trip was a six-day package, its destination a place called Mui. Yona had to search on the internet to find where it was. Mui was an island nation about the same size as Korea’s Jeju Island. You had to cross the southern part of Vietnam to get there. First you flew to Ho Chi Minh City airport, then you rode a bus to the seaside city of Phan Thiet and finally you took a thirty-minute boat ride. Yona understood why this package wasn’t more popular. It took a day to get there and a day to get back, and the scenery upon arrival was significantly less exciting than that of other disaster packages. There was a desert sinkhole like the name suggested, and maybe it was as ‘frightening and grim’ as the promotional materials claimed, but the problem was that rain had turned the sinkhole into a lake. It didn’t really look scary any more, or like anything special at all. When people heard the word ‘sinkhole’, they at least expected something like the 2010 Guatemala City hole, a five-hundred-metre-deep tumorous pit that had demolished the city’s entire downtown. Yona was growing suspicious that Mui wouldn’t fulfil her already low expectations. She looked up the flights she would take if she went on the trip.
Desire and interest go hand in hand. When your eyes first scan over a place name on a map, that desire is as small as a bean. But as your interest in a place grows, the bean sprouts into something much more substantial. For the first time in a very long while, Yona remembered that she’d started working at a travel company because she enjoyed travel. Yona had gone on a few international business trips with Jungle, but she primarily worked domestically. She could have taken personal trips during her days off, but whenever she had the time, she no longer wanted to go anywhere. As she thought about the prospect of leaving for another country, even for work, it was like pushing open a window that had been closed for a long time. An unfamiliar, chilly breeze blew through.
Yona pulled out her long-untouched passport. There were actually four passports in her drawer, three expired and one valid. In the first and oldest passport, Yona’s photo was as earless as a Paul Klee self-portrait. The photos in her newer passports progressively showed more and more of Yona’s ears and eyebrows. She didn’t know if it was evolution or regression, but regardless, they showed more of Yona’s face. Yona hadn’t even decided the dates for her trip yet, but she pulled out a suitcase and pre-emptively put her passport and camera inside.