Unnae

When I went to Unnae, I went in a truck. It was a Porter, a compact size used for carrying glass panes. The grown-up who drove me to Unnae was twenty-eight at the time and he sucked his own mucus up his nose. The truck was not loaded with glass, yet he drove real slow and whenever we came upon a tunnel, he curled up his shoulders, sucked in the mucus up his nose, and swallowed. When rows of eateries appeared along the highway, each decked with signboards claiming to be “the original,” he asked if I liked barbecue ribs. These restaurants offered spacious parking and their storefronts had large windows. I ate poultry often enough but did not like cows or pigs. I ended up staying in Unnae for two months. While in Unnae, I didn’t get to taste anything special but was allowed once every few days to have poultry eggs. Whenever I got a craving for something salty and chewy, or sweets that crumbled away between my teeth, I was reminded of my family, whom I had left behind. Over the many days I spent in Unnae, I thought of the things I had been regularly fed since I was little. Mom was someone who, when handing me sweets, could plant kernels of guilt in various sizes. If I were to eat an entire 12-packet box of Choco Pie, I was capable of feeling guilt the size of a 12-packet box of Choco Pie. I knew perfectly well the texture, size, smell, and calorie-count of guilt. Back then I was smarter than I am now.

So when I later saw Seung-mi at the shop, reading price tags out loud the way she did, I have to say I was pretty stunned. I had never been to Unnae before that day, but I knew the town was famous for ribs. As the truck made its way past the barbecue strip along the highway, I thought, Almost there, and although I felt nervous, I managed to doze off. I awoke to find the truck cutting through a tree nursery. The field was covered with sheets of plastic, through which rows and rows of tiny trees were growing. Soon after, there appeared a field of towering trees, their naked branches hung with silver blossoms. The trees continued along the flat landscape for quite a while. It was the first time I had ever seen fields planted not with vegetables but trees. When the grown-up lowered the passenger seat window for me, I could smell flowers, their scent mixed with the odor of manure. Spotting flickering flashes of white, I guessed that somewhere deep inside the nursery, spring blossoms were already in bloom. The truck headed up a sloped path and stopped atop a low hill.

There, at the edge of the nursery, I saw the house.

Before Mom sent me off to Unnae, she had told me this. That the house had glass walls and a tiled roof. That this was the house that belonged to Mountain Lord. Surreptitiously I reached for the grab handle at the top of the window. The truck stalled at the top of the hill, catching its breath, then descended, arriving, in a matter of seconds, in front of Tile and Glass House.

I remember the sliding glass door had a handle shaped like a ball. And I recall thinking that the storefront made the place look like a teahouse. When I saw a girl standing in front of the display counter, I thought, So that kid’s Seung-mi. Before sending me off to Unnae, Mom had stressed this. That I should address Mountain Lord as Mountain Lord. That I should not call her Granny. That in Unnae there would be a girl named Seung-mi. That I should be friends with her. With Seung-mi. She held up one of the clay-colored pillows and read the price tag out loud. At first I couldn’t make out what I was hearing. She was reading the words as if they were random scattered syllables not intended to carry meaning. “Pillow. Stuffed. With. Medicinal. Herb. List. Price. Eighty. Thousand. Won.” She then read the tag on a sitting mat. “Crystal. Sitting. Mat. List. Price. Thirty. Thousand. Won.” Seung-mi kept reading. “All. Cotton. Energy. Underwear. List. Price. Fifteen. Thousand. Won.” “Cypress. Acu. Pressure. Rod. List. Price. Ten. Thousand. Won.”

List price. Officially listed. Official and standard. That was what it meant but Seung-mi broke up the syllables and raised the pitch, as if she were pondering a serious philosophical question. So that’s Seung-mi, I mumbled. A dimwit who doesn’t know the meaning of words nor how to read them, that’s Seung-mi.

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Two months later, when she came to take me from Unnae, Mom asked me this. Asked what I had been doing with Seung-mi. What I did was play word chain. I remember thinking, as we left Unnae, that I would never again be able to go back. And I actually have not been back. But to this day Unnae is still famous for its ribs. And I still like recalling that day when I first arrived in Unnae. I cannot stop myself from rewinding time back to that day, over and over. Those plains that we drove through for hours before reaching the barbecue strip, the trees that seemed to rise out of nowhere in the middle of the rice paddy. I could never forget that I already needed to pee by the time we reached the tree nursery but thought I could hold it, nor the first time that I gazed down, through the truck window, at Tile and Glass House. I could tell at a glance that the house had a complicated structure, comprised of several connected quarters, but that night in my journal I referred to it as “one big house.” Even as I wrote that it was older and smaller than I’d imagined, therefore unimpressive, I thought to myself that it was the largest house in the world, with an entire nursery as its garden. When I tried to get out of the truck, I couldn’t reach the ground with my feet and hesitated before jumping off. I saw Vulcan magnolias just beginning to blossom and, as I walked to the glass door, noticed a smell. The smell of paper burning, of facial cream container lids, of overripe bananas, of vinegar, of pus, of little round ink drippings from ballpoint pens. The smell you get by adding another layer of smell to a smell that was spicy, peppery, bitter-sour, and, at the same time, sweet. Seung-mi and I named this smell Unnae stench. Every chance we got, we pinched our noses and said, Ugh, this Unnae stench.

And there in Unnae, Seung-mi and I are playing word chain.

Dimwit Seung-mi doesn’t even know what list price means, as I learned the day I arrived, but when it’s my turn I end up offering, “truck.” A foreign word with consonants rarely used in Korean. Seung-mi digs the tip of her sneaker into the ground as she mumbles, “ruck, ruck…” All around the tree nursery there are people picking silver magnolias. Whenever my eyes wander off, I sense Seung-mi inspecting me. I turn my gaze to Seung-mi, who is taller than me, her legs longer than mine, her hair shorter than mine, her chest as flat as mine. Rugby, luxury, these are predictable and disappointing, I think, but who knows, so I think up words to connect, business, ribbon. I see the workers leaving the nursery one by one. Bored, I ask, “How much longer is it going to be?” which is when Seung-mi lifts her head and looks at me.

“Luckyseven.”

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Public Hall was what they called the living area of the main quarters, inside which Mountain Lord’s garden was located. Mountain Lord referred to this garden as an all-natural humidifier. The water-filled basin, built with natural stones, was large and realistic, designed to match the old pine tree with pine cones tied to its branches. A waterwheel set was also available, but she chose the pine tree, Mountain Lord said. Tiny streams flowed up and down along the waterway, carved out of gourds, and along the edge of the basin, stubby corn plants were sprouting new leaves. Under the pine tree was a mini stone-lantern post with a naked bulb inside that lit up at night. The bottom of the pond was blanketed with pebbles, above which floated two plastic goldfish the size of a pinkie, and atop the corn plants sat guitar-playing clay frogs. In the center of the basin, wrapped in the whorl of silicon water plants, stood a statue of a boy standing with his tummy pushed out, splashing his piss.

We took all of our meals at a table placed by the garden. At breakfast there were the three of us, Mountain Lord, Seung-mi, and me, and other grown-ups sometimes joined us for lunch and dinner. Mountain Lord enjoyed discussing her garden. What covered the bottom of the basin were not regular pebbles but Roxanne crystals, she said, and what filled the basin was not regular water but hexagonal vortex water. She also made sure to ask if the food was good. Seung-mi was fine with everything but had a hard time with runny egg yolk. There was this rule that prohibited consuming liquids an hour before and after eating. Soups and stews were out of the question as was bottled or tap water. The only drink we could have was Leminda, which cost two thousand won a bottle. Leminda was hexagonal vortex water.

Mountain Lord also gave us medicinal pillows to use. With covers made of one hundred percent domestic hemp cloth, and their insides filled with Indian chrysanthemums, hardwood charcoal, cassia seeds, wormwood, and silkworm mulberry leaves, these pillows were listed at eight thousand won each. For regular folks, booking a stay at Mountain Lord’s Tile and Glass House required spending many seasons on the waitlist. The Leminda drink, the medicinal pillows, they were all merchandise available only to those who paid for them. But Seung-mi and I were provided with all that by Mountain Lord. This was why we were all the more obliged to follow the rules at Tile and Glass House. That’s what you call etiquette, Mom had told me.

The grown-up who sometimes joined us for dinner lived in the back quarters and always had on a military shirt. Fifty-nine years old at the time, he called Seung-mi and me babies. At the table he enjoyed discussing blood clots. Silent killers, the source of all diseases, fast train to death, these blood clots that clogged up our veins, he said. All problems originate in blood, he said repeatedly, instructing us to spread the word about this disease. The grown-up also liked to talk about his little brother. Every time Mountain Lord was away from the table, the grown-up brought up his little brother. About how they used to run around together across plains and mountains, growing up in Unnae. The grown-up referred to his little brother as “the child.” He had been the one who had taught the child how to play with swords and guns, had saved the child when he was drowning in a stream, and had shared everything with the child, even a single apple slice. The grown-up’s stories generally gave off a whiff of Unnae stench, but Seung-mi and I always listened until he was done.

The main quarters at Tile and Glass House were shaped like the letter ㄱ, with an extra-long vertical stroke. Making a turn at Public Hall, you entered the vertical-stroke section, which was lined with single-occupancy meditation rooms. Seung-mi and I each occupied one of these rooms, the two closest to Public Hall. In each of these meditation rooms, one wall was painted with a black dot and it had been Seung-mi who told me the dot was Earth. Those who came to board in these rooms, she said, believed the dot to be Earth.

At the time, I never could imagine that, many years later, on a spring day like today, I’d find myself thinking of Unnae as I sat facing a dot on the wall, now fully convinced it was Earth. This meditation method was developed by an organization called the Mind Cultivation Center, although I still have no way of knowing if Tile and Glass House was an official branch of the organization. But the concept of Earth as a black dot, and the premise that we exit Earth in a state of death in order to gaze at it from afar, are shared by both institutions. The practitioner must recall her lived past chronologically to visualize her past. Scenes from the past that are impossible to erase, not only flashes of memory but memories that feel not quite graspable yet are undeniably present, each and every one of them, they all had to be visualized, then one by one, disposed of on Earth. Those piles of booklets in the Tile and Glass House’s shop offered detailed descriptions of this memory recollection method, one of which, I remember, was an analogy that likened this process to deadly combat. It emphasized that successful visualization ensured a complete abandonment of emotions that entail those memories. After going on and on about how emotions cause blockage in blood and energy, which leads to illnesses, the text concluded with this sentence. However, the ultimate goal of this practice does not lie in curing maladies. I used to imitate this sentence in my journal, all the while thinking, even back then, that this rhetoric was what essentially drew the diseased to Tile and Glass House.

It was not easy to sleep on the medicinal pillow. If I lay prone or on my side, the pillow brushed my cheek, and the slightest turn of the head created a crackle of crumbling dry leaves. Only if I lay on my back and stayed perfectly still could I manage to fall asleep. Some nights when I lay myself down, tears flowed until my earlobes turned cold. I missed home. Mom and Dad and Little Brother, my room and our yard, my friends back at school. Within the year, the whole family would be moving to Unnae, so I was here first, to start sixth grade, that was all. Mom had told me this. That graduating from an elementary school in Unnae would help me get assigned to a middle school here. But I still could not understand why I was in Unnae. If Mom was right, I was destined to spend most of my teen years in Unnae, but it didn’t feel real to me that this was where I would go on living.

Lying in this room with the black-dot Earth, my head resting on a pillow with a list price of eighty-thousand won, I played word chain on my own, the way one might bite fingernails. Pillow. Lonely. Leash. Shoebox. Boxing. Single. Glitter. Tattoo. Toothpick. Picnic. When I came to the word picnic, I started over. Earth. Thorough. Rowing. Intro. Tropic. Picnic. When again I came to the word picnic, I put the game aside and launched initials into the air. ㄴㄴ ㅇ ㅇㄴㅇ ㅇ ㄱㅈ? Why have I come to Unnae? Still, I would always end up at the day of the field trip, which pulled me into the idea that I had been connecting words as a means to run back to that day, and I immersed myself in visualizing the day of the school picnic.

A small lawn fenced by trees. On one end of the lawn, I stand with my friends at the start line. On the other end stand our mothers. The game calls for us to make it through several obstacles before running into our mothers’ arms. First do ten elephant spins, one arm dangling through the hoop of the other arm with one hand on the nose, bite off cookies hanging on strings, open up a folded sheet of paper and solve multiplication problems. With the start signal, I focus on my elephant spins. They leave me dizzy but I run toward the cookies. Jumping, I bite off one. My friends also begin to reach for the cookies, each biting one off. The cookie tastes better than I expected and I stand still for a while to savor it. I see my friends run toward the multiplication sheets. But there are still cookies left on the strings. A lot of them. Even after my friends all finish the multiplications and run to their mothers, waiting at the other end with open arms, I keep jumping, my mouth agape, gobbling down the cookies.

As I lay with my eyes closed, recalling the field trip, I thought I could perhaps understand how I ended up all alone in Unnae. During my early days in Unnae, this was how I put myself to sleep. Whether those scenes actually took place or were imagined, I’m still not sure, to be honest. However, what feels as clear as reality, even now, is the shape of the Butter Ring cookies that we bit off, convenient for threading; the anxiety I felt each time the cookies bounced off my nose and cheeks; and the look in Mom’s eyes as she watched me arrive after I had bitten off all the cookies. That look full of disappointment and fear.

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It was the day I played word chain with Seung-mi for the first time that I was finally able to fall asleep without recalling the field trip, that day when I failed to come up with a word that started with the syllable “ven.” Until that day I had never lost to anyone at word chain. Possessing an abundant vocabulary had been my singular source of pride. But Seung-mi had caught me off guard, tricking me into thinking Luckyseven was a single word. Now I had no choice but to be conscious of her.

We were at the cusp of flowering season. At Tile and Glass House, flowering season meant low season for the meditation rooms and high season for the nursery. Even now, when I think of early spring in Unnae, I recall expressions I wrote in my journal at the time, like “at the cusp” or “magnolia heaven.” The magnolias were picked while they were still flower buds, most of which were packaged with their silvery skin intact to be sold out as medicinal ingredients, and a small proportion was dried to make petal tea. Since it was magnolia season, workers in oversleeves were seen everywhere around Tile and Glass House and the nursery, their faces wrapped by the flaps of their sun hats. Tea leaves to be served at the meditation rooms were set aside, to be treated, dried, and brewed separately, and as long as they were not for sale, Seung-mi and I were permitted to help out.

The grown-ups working on the handmade flower tea would glance in the direction where Seung-mi and I were sitting and ask, “Seung-mi, is that you?”—surprisingly they got the two of us mixed up every time—then said, “That little toddler already a young lady!” exchanging words of lament about the passing of time. The magnolia flower buds, covered in silvery fuzz, looked like willow catkins or animal tails, and when you pulled off the skin, the white petals emerged. Some of the buds, to be dried whole, were sent directly to the clay-floor chamber, the heat going in the underfloor flues, but to make flower petal tea, we had to press the petals one by one until they were flat. From the meditation rooms, we could see out in the backyard the petals laid out on wicker trays to dry, soon to turn yellow. Outside the kitchen, an oversized bucket of tea bubbled and brewed all day long. What Mountain Lord recommended for Seung-mi and me was medicinal tea made from whole magnolias, which people called barbarian bud tea. “Peppery tea that smells like facial cream.” In my journal from back then, this is what I have on record about its taste.

The backyard of Tile and Glass House, where the petals were laid out to dry and the tea was brewed, was in itself a small garden. When I stepped out from my room to sit on the narrow veranda, I could see plantain lilies and hyacinths, their leaves growing bigger every day, and the weigela shrubs trimmed like domes. The warm vapor of the tea that had drifted from the back of the kitchen mingled with the scent of the plants in the backyard to create this smell that was unique to Unnae. When I returned from school, carrying under my arm the jacket that I had worn in the morning, Seung-mi was waiting for me inside. Her body twisting and twitching with boredom.

Unlike me, Seung-mi understood precisely why she was in Unnae. Seung-mi had been a bad girl. Worried that she’d continue down that fast lane, Seung-mi’s mother had sent her to Unnae. Seung-mi had not transferred to a school in Unnae as I had, and was taking a year off. She wasn’t destined to live in Unnae as I was but destined to return home. As she sat perched on the veranda, slowly pouring out her Leminda on the ground, Seung-mi in no way appeared like one of those bad girls. She had even demonstrated keen insight, realizing that unless she won the word chain game she’d never get my attention, which meant she could no longer be viewed as a dimwit, either. Staring into space, this was all she said, “Ah, this Unnae stench.” When I asked if she was bored, she answered with a sound instead of a word, saying she felt “dwaer.” “You feel what?” “Dwaer” “…” “Feels kinda dwaer—.” Some days she said she felt “ssrissri.” There were more days when Seung-mi felt ssrissri than when she felt dwaer, feeling ssrissri when she had a headache, feeling ssrissri when she couldn’t sleep, feeling ssrissri when the sun set. At the time Seung-mi was mostly ssrissri.

In Unnae what we had too much of was time, so almost every day, we went out to the nursery and skipped rope. We tied one end of our rubber string around the trunk of a magnolia tree, the loser in the previous game holding up the other end, and when it was Seung-mi’s turn to hold the rope, she tried to make me die by singing as fast as she could. Woodpecking woodpecker mayo, yummy mayo yummy ketchup, India India India cider, cider cider oh thank you. I didn’t die that easy. But every time we sang “Autumn Roads,” when we got to the part that went, Tralalala, without fail, I died. I’d turn and trip then die, touch the rope then die, as we kept on until dusk spread across the nursery, taking turns at holding the rope, our bodies drenched with sweat.

Red-hued magnolias had no use, either as teas or medicine, so all around we’d see these blossoms in full bloom. And not all white magnolias were picked, the aged trees that had been there since back when the nursery was a mountain left to flower. Spotting white magnolia blossoms felt lucky somehow and we’d run to stand beneath them. Some days we found the white Porter parked by the nursery entrance. If the glass rack was installed on the truck, it meant the mucus-sucking grown-up was strolling amidst the magnolia trees. He would stand between two trees, a silver flower bud pushed into each nostril, and breathe through his mouth. On weekends he came to Tile and Glass House and listened to the water streaming in the garden while eating with us and Mountain Lord. When he ate we did not hear him suck the mucus up his nose.

Magnolia buds meant money, each and every fistful of them. One hundred percent domestically grown, one hundred percent hand-picked, no pesticide, no distribution margin. Those who had experienced the effects of Mountain Lord’s barbarian bud tea on their nasal ailments never got their tea from anyone else. Never anything else but Mountain Lord’s barbarian bud tea, made only with magnolias grown in the nursery here in Unnae. All these city children in high-rise apartment buildings suffered from rhinitis and atopic symptoms, which meant their parents, and their herbal medicine healers, all needed Mountain Lord’s help. This was what the grown-ups in flapped sun hats said. That if Mountain Lord had focused only on her magnolia business, she would have become the richest person in Unnae. But Mountain Lord took the money that the magnolias brought in and took up other pursuits. Like building rooms dotted with a tiny black Earth.

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I can almost touch it with the tips of my fingers. So vivid I could take them all to Earth to be disposed. When I returned from school, the red-brown collapsible table would be scattered with eraser shavings. Seung-mi’s doing. I brush away the shavings with the back of my hand and sit down to do my fill-the-pages homework. Click, go the legs when we unfold the table. If there’s no sound, the leg isn’t pulled out all the way. On the round stainless-steel tray, the flower pattern is almost completely faded. Whenever I see one of these silvery trays, I automatically think of the song that goes How round the moon, round like a tray, a habit from when I was little. Just like the word chain game, it’s a habit no other kid still seems to hold on to, no one else but me. I’m wearing my striped knee-highs, one of the three pairs Mom bought for me when she sent me off to Unnae. All three pairs are so long they reach far above my knees. The elastics are so tight they leave marks on my thighs. My favorite T-shirt at the time had two ribbons sewn on the chest. Each morning before I left I would tie them into bows, but when I glanced down around lunchtime, they had always come undone.

What Seung-mi and I liked to get were Pollapo popsicles, the grape flavor ones.

When washing my hair, I had to bend forward to rinse the shampoo off in the basin and the water made a scorching, screeching sound. The sound scared me. Before she sent me off to Unnae, Mom had cautioned me again and again. About what to do if I should suddenly get my period. It will not be until two years later that I start menstruating but there isn’t a single day that I don’t get anxious about it. Every day I make sure I am ready.

And then there is the feeling of it approaching. This thing that is scarier than menstruation is coming. Please, not at the dining table, please, I pray and pray, but the more I tell myself not to, the more likely I am to do it, that’s how it is with this it. This thing that comes from inside of me yet is not my own.

It comes first as a vowel. Eu or ee. Then the consonant. T or g. Gak. Eut. T-eut. The arrival of t-eut is not a good thing. If it comes when we’re at the dining table, it’s even worse, far worse. That is the most dwaer thing in the world.

But even when it comes to me, this t-eut, no one acknowledges it. It comes as a sound, like a hiccup, but no one acknowledges that she hears it. Mountain Lord speaks about her garden, the grown-up in the military shirt talks about blood clots, and the mucus-sucking grown-up holds his mucus. I become invisible. I myself refuse to acknowledge my t-eut. The moment I become conscious of my t-eut, it becomes even harder to stop. I simply keep eating. Throw meaningless glances at the piss-splashing boy and the guitar-strumming frog, then dunk my head back down as I keep eating. The only person who looks at me when my t-eut has come is Seung-mi. Even Little Brother, who is a lot younger than me, knows he should not look at me when t-eut has come but Seung-mi looks at me.

Alone in the room with me, she asks one day.

“Do you feel like crying? Want me to slap you?”

“No.”

“When does t-eut come to you?” “… When it’s, kind of…dwaer?” “What does t-eut feel like?” “Just, kinda, ssrissri.” “Want me to pinch you?” “No.” “Knock-knock.” Then I have no choice but to do the word chain. “Cream.” “Important.” “Anthill.” “Hilltop.” “Topple.” “Also.” “Sofa.” “Father.” Then silence. This is where Seung-mi turns silent.

While I was in Unnae, there wasn’t a day when I did not miss my family. I would choose a time when my sister would be at school and Mom and Dad would be out at work and call home. After I dial the area code, followed by our home number, the signal starts to ring. With my ear to the receiver, I picture that familiar space where our phone would be ringing. Our phone ringing, most likely, on the round, lace mat Mom knitted herself from white yarn. Next to the phone would be the memo pad case, the one with the pen stand. More of Mother’s lace knitting, the tablecloth and the refrigerator cover. The fridge holds a Family Juice bottle refilled with chilled barley tea. The hanging hook on the wall, the pattern on the flooring. While the phone rang, I sat there without making a sound, indulging in my longing for home, every nook and cranny of it. Then when someone answered, I would startle and hang up.

I knew that Seung-mi had secretly been writing to her family. “Dear beloved Dad,” she would start, and write, then erase, write, then erase. The words that Seung-mi wrote in her letters mostly turned into eraser shavings scattered across the red-brown collapsible table.

And me, I think of Seung-mi’s mother. I’ve never actually met her, but I still think of Seung-mi’s mother, even now. Would Seung-mi’s mother think of me as well time to time?

Seung-mi’s mom and my mom were related, as aunt and niece, once removed, but only a year apart in age. They had often played together when they were little. In the company of grown-ups, my mom called Seung-mi’s mom Aunt, but when it was just the two of them she called her Sis. Once during vacation, they spend several days together at the home of a relative. This relative is closer to Seung-mi’s mom’s family than my mom’s. She’s a woman who suddenly lost her husband in an accident, someone who has been left in this world with three young children and some compensation money. Who, when that money came into danger, poured it all into buying a mountain. Who then went on to become the lord of that mountain. Who, worried sick about one of her children whose nasal ailment left him barely breathing, intuitively saw there was money to be made in magnolias. A woman whose ultimate goal, however, did not lie in curing maladies.

The two girls, with their memories in tow, of running around the tree nursery this relative owned, became adults, got married, and had children. It was Mom who told me this. That they visited each other once on Seung-mi’s first birthday, then again on my first birthday. After that the two women, too busy with their respective lives, were unable to meet and only kept in touch over occasional calls.

One day Seung-mi’s mom brings up her problem. My daughter, she’s been a bad girl. My mom speaks of her problem as well. My daughter, she cannot stand me.

Then all of a sudden the two of them think of the place from their childhood that holds fond memories for them, this place Unnae. That had been before the mountain was turned into a nursery, when the little house with a cement tile roof sat at the edge of the lot, surrounded by saplings. Now the house possessed bosoms big enough to take in ne’er-do-well siblings looking for work. Into the bosoms of Mountain Lord, where the diseased, both old and young, came to stay, we were sent off, as if to camp.

Was it the Unnae stench that had sent Seung-mi and me to that room?

Behind the ㄱ-shaped main building that housed Public Hall, the shops, the meditation rooms and the kitchen, was a path that stretched farther back, which we took one day and found ourselves there. I cannot bring to mind what the room looked like. All I have are a few words, the Unnae stench, and my journal entries to reconstruct the silhouette of the place. A bed, a clear glass cup, a pistol grip pump, a human body chart, blood, shit. We would have poked and touched this and that. All stuff we’d never seen before. Seung-mi speaks. Look, pen droppings. Yuk, stinks of poop. Not funny, I say.

Then Seung-mi and I stopped speaking, standing for a long time inside the silence that we had created. That moment when I stretched my leg out the truck door the air had been dense with it, no, it had been when I first entered the nursery, where the smell of compost was entangled with the scent of flowers, no, the smell that I had already sensed when we got to the barbecue strip along the highway, this smell, what else could we call it but this Unnae stench—and now we were somehow caught up in the idea that this place was where the smell had originated. Was it this strange mood, as we stood there unable to say anything, yet feeling the need to say something, anything, that made her say it? We’d been standing there like that when suddenly Seung-mi spilled her secret.

This is what Seung-mi said. That she could not understand how to subtract fractions from natural numbers. For example, how to subtract five-ninths from four. She couldn’t bring herself to ask anyone but it was driving her up the wall. Adding and subtracting fractions was fourth-grade math. Turning thirteen without getting this honestly didn’t make sense. When I refused to believe her, Seung-mi showed me one of her canine teeth. It was not a new tooth, she had yet to lose it. I told her to stop bluffing and Seung-mi told me this, as if she had no other choice. That she was actually eleven.

For Seung-mi, who, in anyone’s eyes, appeared thirteen—her height, her long legs, her face, the look in her eyes—this was a problem. That she was eleven. That she had stayed eleven since two years ago. That there was no way of knowing until when she would stay eleven.

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“What is bloodletting?”

I remember the time Seung-mi brought this up at dinner. Just as when t-eut started to come over me, for a short moment silence hovered over the table, then dissipated. Mountain Lord glanced at us. She looked as if she had only now realized that in every corner of Tile and Glass House there were booklets with phrases like “battling illness” and “first-hand account” on their covers, and that we were more than likely to have read them. Military Shirt Grown-up pulled out a pen and Mountain Lord looked at him. Her gaze was chilly, as if she were restraining him. Mountain Lord’s hair was white, her skin wrinkly around the eyes and mouth. A thin leathery layer of skin clung to her neck and hands, making her appear, in our eyes, a hundred and twenty years old. But her eyes, unlike other parts of her body, seemed younger than a hundred, exuding a complex energy that could make her look as young as fifty-something perhaps.

Military Shirt Grown-up ignored Mountain Lord’s gaze and pushed a needle into the pen tube, which was empty. “Little One, you’ve had your fingertip nipped with a needle before, right?” Just as nipping your fingertip relieves indigestion, discharging bad blood helps your body heal, that’s what bloodletting does, the grown-up said. He invited us to touch the bloodletting needle, as he called it, and he handed us the pen. Seung-mi and I stole glances at Mountain Lord as we toyed with the needle, touching and pressing.

When he was done eating, Military Shirt Grown-up always performed his exercise routine in the backyard. To the untrained eye, he might appear to be simply flailing about, but it was a systematic routine based on traditional methodology, he said. When performed regularly, it stabilized the bone structure and calmed the mind. The grown-up had a stout body, with broad shoulders. His hair was pitch black and almost all his teeth were missing. And he often poked fun at Mountain Lord. Military Shirt Grown-up was the only grown-up at Tile and Glass House who did not address Mountain Lord as Mountain Lord.

“This dear child, you see, he had such a tender little heart.”

Military Shirt Grown-up rolled his shoulders as he spoke of his younger brother.

“When some kid in our village picked a fight, instead of hitting back, he’d do this,” the grown-up demonstrated an embrace, grasping at the air. “He’d hold on tight like this and wouldn’t let go. That was his way of fighting. Couldn’t kill a single spider, this tender soul. Never once lost his temper, not even with his little sisters. My sisters were affectionate only to him among their two brothers. Back when I fled the barracks...”

“You were a deserter?” Seung-mi asked and the grown-up nodded. “Then you were sent to military prison?” I asked and the grown-up shook his head. “I have yet to return. Have yet to be caught.” The grown-up massaged his back against the trunk of the weigela tree, pushing and rubbing, then walked over to the veranda to sit down.

“Our country home, it’s over there beyond that valley. And on a dark night, when I heard the stomping of boots, thump, thump, I’d think, ah, they’re here again, the military police, here to get me, and I’d run to hide. You see, people never imagine a deserter goes around in a military shirt.”

“I guess…”

“When I refused to return, the only person who understood how I felt was this dear child. Let me tell you, the past thirty years I’ve been living like an escaped prisoner. And in the place of this eldest son, a deserter on the run, the dear child looked after our younger siblings, cared for our parents, and even after he got married, despite his meager livelihood, never forgot about his older brother, getting me this tiny apartment in Masan. It was there I encountered energy meditation and it allowed me to function as a human being, to maintain what little control I could on life. But…do you have any idea how heartless the heavens can be? They always take first those like that dear, dear child.”

The grown-up’s face suddenly turned sad. Each time the grown-up reached the end of his story about the younger brother and sunk into his own grief, Seung-mi changed the subject. “Why shouldn’t we drink water in the middle of a meal?” The grown-up looked as if he’d been waiting for someone to finally ask this question and explained that since food possesses the characteristics of fire, when it mixes with water inside our body it will cause a short circuit. Which meant that consuming food and water separately was beneficial for our five viscera and six entrails. The grown-up had a keen interest in our five viscera and six entrails. Being a deserter, he couldn’t even dream of getting married. To restore vitality in his five viscera and six entrails so that he could extend his youth and “fall in love with a lesser yin woman.” That was his dream. If only a lesser yin energy type could love him, he might be able to attain compensation for all the persecution and contempt that he’d had to put up with all his life. “Why a lesser yin woman?” we asked, and the grown-up answered, “A discreet cat, that’s what a lesser yin woman is.” As he spoke he shot this gaze toward me, or was it Seung-mi, or just empty space, I couldn’t quite tell. When Seung-mi and I folded up the collapsible table, he would sneak a pinch on the skin around our midriff and ask if we had any more questions. Once after watching a TV show where a blindfolded king flailed his arms in the air then pulled one of his concubines into his arms, he asked the two of us to blindfold him. When we pretended not to have heard, the grown-up, looking embarrassed, put on a melancholic smile. Then he placed an empty Leminda bottle on the boy statue’s little prick to fill it with hexagonal vortex water and carried it back to his room. What Seung-mi said next sounded as if she had just picked it up somewhere. “You know what they say, the most dwaer creature in the world is a man on the cusp of old age.” We giggled. No wonder his face was so freakingly, sickeningly stomach-churning.

▴ ▴ ▴

As temperatures rose, the red magnolias fell to the ground. The petals, now tarnished and brown, piled under the trees, and all around it smelled of rotting flowers. I wore my knee-highs rolled down to the ankles. Now Seung-mi no longer sat around waiting for me to return after school. While I was in class, she holed up in a corner of the shop and dug into the bloodletting booklets. As soon as I returned all she wanted to do was tell me everything she’d learned that day. “When static blood is withdrawn, fresh blood will begin to circulate.” That kind of thing. This kid who couldn’t understand how to subtract fractions from natural numbers had no problem reciting all this fancy terminology. Without much to do on my own, I spent my afternoon hours at the shop with Seung-mi, flipping through the books.

kim jin-suk, age 46, from cheongju, north chungcheong province, fully recovered from diabetes through bloodletting.

park seong-hwan, age 52, wonju, gangwon province. how bloodletting saved me from high blood pressure and a cerebral stroke.

lee cheol-ryeong, age 63, changwon, south gyeongsang province, The doctor gave up on my liver cancer, but this is what happened after emergency bloodletting.

These subheadings were accompanied by bloodletting testimonials. The stories told of how people with arthritis, gout, spinal disc herniation, chronic renal failure, obesity, or asthma had blood let out from their bodies, thereby instantly disposing of bad blood, sick blood, dead blood, and eventually cured their bodies and minds.

Seung-mi believed that, as we’d guessed, the room we had entered was the bloodletting chamber. “Remember, there was that body chart of a skeleton. That was a bloodletting chart, showing the sixty-one acupuncture points.” These points are pricked with a bloodletting needle then cupped, to add pressure to suck up blood, that’s what’s done. All the objects in the room were tools for bloodletting, Seung-mi was certain. The procedure results in jelly-like blood clots filling up the transparent cupping jars. Bloodletting is performed not only on the back and the belly but on the crown of the head and the temples, even on the nose and neck.

Seung-mi also told me this. “All those who’d had their blood drawn arrived at this revelation. That it is as if they’re born again. That they’ve been given new life.”

This wasn’t easy to picture, but as I listened to Seung-mi’s words I felt I could somehow understand some of the scenes that had remained cryptic in my mind. Visitors arriving to express such gratitude to Mountain Lord, clasping and caressing her hands. All those gifts being delivered. Those boarders from the meditation rooms heading to the back quarters. The slices of raw beef and spleen that were served only to these boarders. An empty bottle of albumin I remember seeing somewhere inside Tile and Glass House.

Beyond the meditation room boarders and nursery workers, outsiders were also visiting Tile and Glass House at all times. Some came to see the barbarian buds for themselves before making their purchase, but there were quite a number of people who came to offer greetings to Mountain Lord or to seek her consultation. The Eighth Division was posted in Unnae so among Mountain Lord’s guests there were also military officers. On the days when these high-rank soldiers emerged, Tile and Glass House turned a bit rowdy. After they left, Military Shirt Grown-up complained of pain and threw a freaky fit, rolling round and round on the floor, kicking over all the trays, then calling out to Mountain Lord, hollering, bellowing. On such days, Mountain Lord stayed inside one of the meditation rooms and stared at Earth, not coming out for a long, long while.

Among all the grown-ups at Tile and Glass House, the one who spent the most time in the meditation rooms was in fact Mountain Lord. Must be that she’s got things she can’t easily dispose of on Earth, offered the kitchen grown-ups. Which meant there was a moment from her past that she could not bring herself to visualize. The kitchen grown-ups, in charge of the meals for both the nursery workers and meditation practitioners, had known Mountain Lord for over fifteen years. They were more than mere employees, constantly discussing what was effective for acupuncture soreness, what should be applied to cupping blisters, what should be consumed for blood deficiency. In the lot off the back of the kitchen, they would sit around oversized wooden trays, trimming and rinsing piles of bean sprouts and wild aster, and from their talk we learned that “Dear Mountain Lord herself performed wet cupping on me” meant the same thing as “Dear Mountain Lord drew out bad blood from me,” and that Mountain Lord had yet to turn sixty. She was, indeed at the time, in her late fifties.

As we went back and forth between the backyard and the kitchen lot, the story we’d hear more often than the ones related to cupping was the one about how Mountain Lord came to buy this mountain. The kitchen grown-ups never got tired of telling this story to one another, over and over, chiming in with interjections and exclamations. When Dear Mountain Lord was left all alone, was how the story opened, and it captivated us every time. When Dear Mountain Lord ended up all alone, left on her own after losing her husband to a workplace accident, her three children were three, six, and nine years of age, which left her in despair, wondering how to go on living with the little ones in tow. Then one day her mother-in-law, who lived in the town next to Unnae, came to see her.

Daughter, said the mother-in-law as she held out her hand, and the mother who had buried her son looked so haggard the two women held each other and burst into tears. As the tears subsided, the mother-in-law said, Your father-in-law’s knee pain has worsened since he lost his son, he needs surgery but as you know, we have no money. So Mountain Lord took out some money from the compensation she received for her husband’s accident and paid for the surgery. Then several months later, her parents-in-law visited together this time and said, Daughter, your eldest sister-in-law is getting married, and Mountain Lord took out some money again from the compensation and paid for the wedding. After she had paid for the second sister-in-law’s wedding, Mountain Lord was looking for ways to make a living when they came back with, Daughter, we need to bring our outhouse indoors, Daughter, we’re thinking of farming bell peppers in the greenhouse, this, that, because, you see, for this family, never having had shit to speak of, the sum that the daughter-in-law held in her hands, the blood money for their son’s life, was an amount they’d never once sniffed or tasted, let alone laid their hands on. And in this family there was a son, the eldest but not quite fully functioning, who was so close to his dead brother that he could not endure the loss. His sister-in-law had made money in exchange for his brother’s life, this money she now used to buy meat, buy shampoo, buy summer shorts for the kids, buy them popsicles, buy lotion to rub on her face, and witnessing this was driving him out of his mind. If she so little as exchanged greetings with the hardware store owner, what a fuss he’d make, a horrid, horrible fuss, and so Mountain Lord, unable to take it any longer, found him a rental apartment far down south in this place called Masan and got him an energy meditation master.

But then when this older brother found himself in this faraway place and got to thinking, he began losing sleep. My poor little brother, born into a penniless family, all he did was work himself to death, and now if this sister-in-law should take that money and find herself some new chap, what luck for this utterly undeserving bastard—all these thoughts making him go berserk, keeping him awake through the night. In less than a year, he came crawling back to Unnae and the first place he headed was his parents’ tomb where he lay prone, wailing. Then, anxious and antsy that his sister-in-law and her children might flee Unnae, he began lurking around his dead brother’s house. Then there’d be days when he’d get drunk and barge in, sputtering obscenities, which bastard, what part of him did you suck, and whatnot, and Mountain Lord in the end went off the deep end. She went ahead and bought herself a mountain. She scraped together every single coin and bought herself a mountain.

And this is the story of how Mountain Lord came to own this mountain.

▴ ▴ ▴

After seeing Seung-mi dig through the bloodletting books, Mountain Lord presented to us a term to use in place of bloodletting, which was blood clarifying. “Spoon therapy for clear blood” was introduced in the pamphlet she had placed in the shop’s main display, which involved scraping the skin with a spoon for blood-clarifying effects. Compared to bloodletting, which sounded charged with implications, this term appeared in many ways more benign, but for Seung-mi, having already gotten a taste of the dramatic narrative of bloodletting, it was not enough to attract her attention. “All you need is a spoon, pretty simple.” To this Seung-mi would say, “Bloodletting is real simple as well. If you buy a cupping kit you can even do it at home.” “For real?” “Yup. You just need to make sure to drink your albumin while you do it.” Seung-mi sounded as if she were talking about burning fat. “Like when you give blood, you make sure to eat a packet of Choco Pie?” To this she’d reply, “Not even close. Bloodletting involves taking out a huge amount, real huge.”

Even after we got in bed, we’d continue tossing back and forth this talk about blood. I would go over to Seung-mi’s room or Seung-mi would come over to my room and as we rolled about on our backs, we heard the kitchen grown-ups say, Turn out your lights, out now. Things weren’t as strict at Tile and Glass House as, say, in a Buddhist temple, but as a rule lights-out took place early.

“I had P.E. at school today, I’m dying here. Scrape, will you?” Half-jokingly, I’d hand her the spoon and lie face down, and to my surprise, Seung-mi would start scraping without hesitation. The back of my neck, my forearms, calves, thighs. She’d pull up my T-shirt and scrape my back. As this went on, I’d start getting goosebumps, then feel I needed to pee, then doze off to sleep.

On that day, when Mucus Sucking Grown-up showed up at Tile and Glass House even though it was a weekday, by early afternoon there were sizzling oily smells all around. Meat and fish being steamed, chicken simmering, beef broth bubbling. Military Shirt Grown-up began putting on a strangely commanding presence and two female grown-ups we’d never met arrived at the house, dressed in black. Guarded by a pair of candles was a framed photo, with a folding screen looming from behind, and as soon as we saw the face of the male grown-up in the photo, we knew it was him. He who, as a little boy, almost drowned in a stream. He who, when a friend picked a fight, refused to hit back and instead would lock him in an embrace, never letting go.

Under the command of the Military Shirt Grown-up, Mucus Sucking Grown-up poured the rice wine and offered a deep bow, as we watched from afar. Mountain Lord sat at a distance from the memorial rite table, leaning against the wall, her gaze toward the faraway mountains. Sniffing at the smell of incense burning and candle drippings, we sat among the kitchen grown-ups and nibbled on pieces of fritters that had not made it to the offerings table. Giddy that lights-out would be delayed, we went poking around here and there in the garden, and, when we came back, the rite was over, the grown-ups sharing the offerings. “Over there, the one with the big round forehead is Mountain Lord’s eldest daughter, the one with the long hair the younger one.” While listening in on what one of the kitchen grown-ups was telling the flower-tea grown-up, Seung-mi and I picked through sweet treats from the ritual table. “One works at a bank and the other one is an accounting clerk at LG, did you know. Make good money, both of them.” “But what’s up with him, being all hostile to his nieces?” The flower tea grown-up asked. “You haven’t heard? He bears a bitter grudge.” “Grudge?” “The older one turned him in.” “Turned him in?” It seemed like a well-known story at Tile and Glass House, the way the flower-tea grown-up went about telling it.

“She was in middle school, I think. Took her little brother and sister, grabbing them by the hand, and went knocking at the military police in Yeonnae-ri. There’s a deserter in our house, that’s what she told them.” Seung-mi and I stopped our chewing and pricked our ears. “Instead of heading out there by herself, she took along her younger siblings, so you can tell she was already sharp.” “Then what happened?” Seung-mi and I asked at the same time. “He was taken in, of course, they came and took him, but…” Following his arrest, Military Shirt Grown-up served for about five months then was quickly discharged. He headed directly to Mountain Lord’s house, of course. He pulled his niece to her feet and demanded an answer. Why in the world did you do what you did? How could you? What is it that you want? The middle-school girl with the big round forehead looked her uncle in the eye and this is what she said.

“Our one and only wish, as the song goes, is reunification of our nation.”

I remember the kitchen grown-up and the flower tea grown-up banged their hands on the baskets as they burst into laughter, exclaiming, Damn fine line. Mountain Lord’s eldest daughter, clad in her black two-piece suit, walked over. She took a look at the two of us, our tongues crimson red from sucking on marble candy, and gave us each a ten thousand-won bill. Mountain Lord packed up food from the offerings table for her two daughters to take home and sent off a bottle of barbarian bud extract on her son’s Porter. When she was with the visitors at Tile and Glass House, she had always appeared dignified, but in the presence of her own children, she seemed somewhat daunted, I remember thinking. The sound of Military Shirt Grown-up sobbing in front of the folding screen floated around Tile and Glass House into the late hours. He held his brother’s photo in his arms, telling him, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, and wept for a long, long time.

Seung-mi came over to my room and lay down next to me. We lay side by side with the lights-out but could not sleep. Seung-mi would’ve also been thinking about those words. Before Mountain Lord sent off her children with food, right before her eldest daughter walked over and gave us pocket money, right after we heard about the eldest daughter’s killer line and burst into laughter, these words had come from Public Hall. Military Shirt Grown-up was drunk and was lashing out at Mountain Lord, or his nieces, or who knew, maybe at the entire Tile and Glass House. Illegitimacy, weak spot, these words came up in my mind as I listened to him vent. Why don’t I try listing those that never made it out of here alive, huh, Dear Sister-in-Law? Remember Choe, taken to the hospital for a fever after cupping, he died there two days later of blood poisoning? Then there’s Bak, who collapsed from anemia then croaked right there and then. So what do you say? All the stuff that everyone’s trying to keep hush-hush, why don’t I turn all of that in, huh?

Seung-mi folded one arm and rested her cheek as she turned toward me. I could smell the sticky scent of marble candy in her breath. Want me to scratch you? Seung-mi asked. Outside the paper screen window of the meditation room, I could feel the dark float about, the dark lighter than the dark inside the room. I nodded. Take off your top. I pushed up my T-shirt and pulled it over my head. The weeping from Public Hall continued, subsiding then resuming. I closed my eyes. Something cold and sharp touched my body. Seung-mi scraped, following the spine down my back. I felt like I’d pee any minute, which made me wince and flinch. You like it? Uh-huh. How much? I took a deep breath in. As much as a thirty-piece pack of chocolate Kisses. Past my armpit toward the inner fold of my forearm, past my waist toward the pelvis and thigh, How about here, you like it? Uh-huh. How good is it? As good as shoveling down a pint of Together ice cream in one sitting. My body sank, drowsy and sluggish, and my blood began to clarify. Placing her lips upon my muzzy ears, Seung-mi whispered. This here is the rope point. This the celestial pillar point. Make sure to remember them, understood? I know you’re smart. This is the yang headrope point. This the spinal transport point.

I can still feel Seung-mi’s voice tickling my ears. All you need to do is lie still, then doze off. Stop thinking and go to sleep. I’ll do it to you. This time I’ll do it to you. Seung-mi is insistent, in a cautious, tenacious way. She eventually persuades me. She does it to me again the next day, then again the next. Want me to scratch you, too? When I ask, she shakes her head and tells me this.

Mine’s not the kind of blood that any scraping can clear up.

▴ ▴ ▴

Then we went shopping for shorts. We had decided to spend the ten thousand won we got from the eldest daughter on a pair of shorts for each of us. Seung-mi had her eyes on a pair. She said they were navy blue, a real pretty shade. We took the bus into town and entered the shop that Seung-mi pointed to. There were no shorts in navy blue. There were pairs in white, pink, sky blue, and black, but none in navy blue.

Seung-mi picked up the sky blue pair and said, “Here they are. Real pretty color, isn’t it?”

“What’re you talking about, that’s sky blue,” I said.

“What’re you saying, calling navy blue sky blue?” Seung-mi said.

I was dumbfounded.

“Don’t you know what navy blue looks like? Navy blue, dark blue, midnight blue. It’s dark and murky. This is what you get when you mix blue with white, it’s sky blue.”

“You think you know better just because I’m eleven? This is a no brainer. When you mix blue with white, navy blue is what you get.”

I didn’t know what to say. I was struck by a sense of frustration quite different than when she couldn’t understand how to subtract fractions from natural numbers. The grown-up at the clothing shop was busy talking on the phone and showed us no interest. I had to get out of the place. I kept walking, past three bus stops, not looking back even once.

“Hey, what is up with you?” Seung-mi shouted as she came after me.

That was what I wanted to say. “What is up with you? What, tell me! Why are you saying it’s navy blue when it’s sky blue?”

“It is navy blue. In my box of colored pencils and my crayon set, it was marked navy blue. I’m calling navy blue navy blue, why’s that a problem!”

“Arrrrrg!”

I felt like something was about to burst inside the pit of my stomach and had to scream right there and then. The fact that I had to face Seung-mi every single day suddenly drove me mad.

“Stop following me. I don’t want to see you. Take another route!”

I made a turn toward a path that cuts through the nursery. The memory of lifting my shirt in front of Seung-mi swept through me, making me nauseous. The magnolia trees had grown thick with leaves, making it hard to tell them apart from plum trees. Seung-mi kept up after me, huffing and panting. She was stomping her feet as if she’d been wrongly accused of something. I was so pissed I could have passed out and died. I wanted to take back all of it. Just leave me alone, for once just get away from me, get lost!

I couldn’t stand listening to Seung-mi’s footsteps and began to walk faster, almost sprinting. Uuuuuugh, I heard myself moan as I shook my head. No idea, no idea, I mutter, I run. What world you are living in, I have no idea, what time you are living in, I have no idea, no idea, none!

I slip in amongst the trees. I run. I spit out everything for all the trees to hear. That thing you wrote on my fill-the-pages homework, I know what it said. You can’t ever write it on a blank sheet. Can only write it on a page that’s already filled black with scribbles. You placed the glue stick erect on our squat little collapsible table and played the sticky prince game. You’re a bad girl. I know who made you bad. Yet you write that it’s love. You beg and beg. You’re bad. Your body is filled with blood that’s dirty and tainted.

I hear the sounds that I spit out. And the one who freezes at these sounds is not Seung-mi but me. The one injured by these sounds is not Seung-mi but me. I rasp and croak as I hear the t-eut shoot up from inside of me. The magnolia trees gobble up my sounds then spit them back out, blowing them up double, triple fold. When t-eut comes I don’t feel dwaer, not even ssrissri. When t-eut comes I just want to die. Just want to die right there and then. Seung-mi runs over and shakes me. Grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me with all her strength. Calls out my name as she shakes and shakes.

▴ ▴ ▴

Now the time has come.

The time has come but I still don’t know how.

The only place at Tile and Glass House that I cannot bring myself to visualize. That room, which I can neither keep nor abandon.

Shorts, navy blue, t-eut. Several days after that evening when I was carried in from the nursery on Seung-mi’s back, on that day in May, almost two months into my stay in Unnae, Seung-mi and I fell asleep in that room, for a long, long time, that is about all.

Just once, that’s it, Seung-mi says. This once you do it to me. Hold up the pen, and like how you’d put a period at the end of a sentence, prick at exactly eight points. I look into Seung-mi’s eyes. Then we’ll be even. I slowly nod.

I am willingly persuaded. Now Seung-mi will let out her dead blood and be born anew. I know this. Now Seung-mi will fill her body with new blood and chain new words. I know this. Now Seung-mi will grow out of her eleventh year.

We will sleep for a long while then awake. As Seung-mi’s body fills up with fresh blood I will lie in the adjacent bed and wait for her. Seung-mi takes a huge dose of albumin and lies prone on the bed inside the bloodletting chamber. We have more than enough rolls of gauze. We have the ballpoint pen, the cup, the curtains.

I do it to Seung-mi.

Before she falls asleep, Seung-mi says this to me in a sleepy voice.

“I, I think I left the light on in my room.”

▴ ▴ ▴

I awoke. When I opened my eyes, Mom was by my side. I was in Unnae. I heard the sound of streams trickling in the gourd waterway. Sunlight glimmered on the glass wall of Public Hall. Everything was the same. The piles of pillows stuffed with medicinal herbs, the collapsible table, the little peeing boy, the clay frog figurines. Awakening from my short sleep, however, I felt something had changed in Unnae. I had no way of knowing what it was. I could feel it sweeping across my face like air, but that was all, I did not know that somewhere a strand had gone loose, a sheet of paper drenched and ruined, an immensely important piece missing, lost.

ㅇㅁ, ㅅㅁㄴ? Mom, what about Seung-mi?

I heard no answer. Mom wanted me to get in the car and pushed a plate of cookies toward me. The cookies were unfathomably black and big enough to cover the entire plate. They were studded with chocolate chips, hundreds of them, studded like a sudden breakout of hives. I vomited. I dashed off toward the tree nursery. I searched. I called out. I ran. I flailed about. I screamed. I floundered. I fell. I crashed. I crawled up. I tore and plucked. I was carried off. I escaped. I searched. I called out. I touched. I ate. I did. I wrote. I erased. I tore up. I took up. I wrote. I discarded. I believed.

I believed. I ended up believing, one day, that Seung-mi was sent to the hospital then back home. I believed this with certainty.

How much time has passed since then I am unsure. Twenty years? Thirty? Can’t be fifty. Mountain Lord has yet to turn a hundred years old, that I am sure of.

That spring, Mountain Lord abruptly closed down the meditation rooms. Even when there had been accidents during treatment, she had never closed the center, but as soon as we left, Mountain Lord closed up Tile and Glass House. Would she have known, that much later, she would find herself lying in yet another ㄱ-shaped house, in a room somewhere along its long vertical stroke?

This place is not in Unnae. It is not Tile and Glass House. There is a public hall as well as meditation rooms, but there are no unofficial chambers. This place is an official branch of the Mind Cultivation Institute. Four times a year I am sent to the institute’s headquarters on Mt. Sokri for branch director training. Once every year I receive a financial audit. We take in only up to thirteen meditation practitioners at a time. They take up thirteen among our fifteen rooms, and in one of the two remaining rooms lies Mountain Lord. Diaper-clad and straw-fed.

I meet Mom twice a year and see Mountain Lord every day of the year. It is expected that Mountain Lord will die here.

I remember when Mountain Lord came looking for me. I had graduated from school and was working at a cell phone store. It had been almost ten years since I last saw her and she had turned into an old granny. Mountain Lord gazed into my face as she told me that she was going to give me half of the tree nursery. The other half she probably wanted to give to Seung-mi’s family.

That day when Mom came to take me from Unnae, Mountain Lord had already known. That I would not be able to stay away for long. She had known that I would not be able to repel the t-eut, that I would not be able to reconcile with Mom.

When I declined her inheritance, Mountain Lord kept sending me money, as if there was nothing else she could do. I do not know who actually owns the tree nursery now. I met the grown-up with the big round forehead for tea a few times. Bringing Mountain Lord here was my idea. She is more comfortable with me than with her own children, which is not too difficult to understand for me, and so I keep a Roxanne crystal by her bedside and try to minimize her discomfort by moving Earth from the wall to the ceiling, that’s about all I do. The caretaker does all the hard work. The two of us, Mountain Lord and I, whatever it is we may do we feel less sorry, whatever it is we may not do we feel less disheartened, whatever it is we may reveal we feel less ashamed, whatever it is we may hear we feel less resentful.

The one who still lives in Unnae, farming the magnolias, is Mucus Sucking Grown-up. He has a daughter and a son, both of whom take after their father and suffer from chronic rhinitis.

The year Military Shirt Grown-up turned seventy, a blood clot blocked up his carotid artery and he departed this world.

Seung-mi’s mother cut off ties with my mom.

Mom was unable, even until the very end, to dispose of her fear of me.

About once a month, as if being swept by a typhoon, I am defeated by my appetite. Defeated until it feels as if my intestines will burst open. I wander about, searching for something to spike up my blood sugar, and many nights I get drunk on sugar and stagger. It’s long since my waistline has stretched out but it’s not a problem yet with my practice. On my two big toes I have hairs that grow to about two centimeters. On those nights when I feel dwaer or ssrissri, or when I feel dwaer and at the same time ssrissri, I take a ruler and measure all that continues to sprout out of my body.

As for eggs, I only eat them hard-boiled.

On spring days when the sun is pleasant, I open up the door of the meditation room and help Mountain Lord sit up. As she leans back on the pillows, I stand next to her and together we gaze out at the flowers in the garden. Neither Mountain Lord nor I can go back to Unnae but it is true that we both have left behind in Unnae a period from our lives we will never forget, so we cannot help but think about what flowers are now abloom in Unnae. The same flowers also blossom in my garden. The crisp green hosta leaves that herald the spring and the upright stalks of hyacinth hiding dark purple petals inside. The weigela trees that flower their red blossoms in May. Lilacs have been planted in the place of white magnolias to bear white blossoms each spring, and the Vulcan magnolias, planted for Mountain Lord’s viewing, create a grand sight every year.

And I know of one magnolia tree on the mountain, its height tremendous.

When I head out for a walk on the mountain, I go and stand under that tree. From under this tall magnolia, I look up, up at the flowers and the sky, look until my neck aches, then the treetop begins to spin round and round and I have to hold on to the tree, hugging it tight. As I hold on I think of the time when I died at Tralalala and get to thinking about what kind of a grown-up Seung-mi would have become. For whatever reason, it somehow seems Seung-mi would have become the kind of woman who, when she cries, wipes her chin but not her cheeks, I think. The kind of woman who wipes her tears only after she’s done crying. The kind of woman people call melancholic. She might also have become the kind of woman who out of the blue puts her ear to her watch. The kind of woman who puts her ear to her watch as if she were lacing her ear on someone’s heart when that person has been asleep for a long while. Or perhaps she would have become the kind of woman who takes short, lonely naps. Who awakes and wonders for a long while where she is.

When I was thirteen years old I went to Unnae.

Now here, where I am now, I have fifteen rooms and I always leave one of them empty. Rain or snow, night or day, I keep the light on in that room.