an Asian superstition until I went to America, where they have an aversion to the number 13 because of some horror movie with a clown. Or a vampire, I forget. Anyway, the owner can’t hide the fourth floor of a four-story building like you can in tall apartments by just skipping the elevator buttons from three to five, and so I’m one of the small group of girls living in the two tiny apartments on this floor, grateful for the zip code and the subway station two blocks away.
As a child, I could not have imagined that I would one day live in the busiest part of Seoul, with its shimmering skyline and whimsical sculptures that stand guard outside each skyscraper. It is still amazing to me how comfortable people my age look as they walk in and out of marbled lobbies with disposable coffee cups in hand and employee passes dangling from their necks.
My life before I went to New York was a small restaurant in a field of flowers and then an orphanage in the middle of a forest. A provincial arts school in the mountains.
When Sujin wrote to me to come live with her after my New York fellowship ended, I leapt at the suggestion. She had left the Loring Center shortly before I had and we’d corresponded avidly over the years, swapping stories of Seoul and New York. We did not talk about the past much.
Sujin had told me that as office-tels go, hers was very small—usually they are dense high-rises with hundreds of units—and I told her to keep an eye out for a room opening up, so that I could book my plane ticket as soon as she gave the word.
She had been worried that I would be let down after my New York experience, but I told her I love the building, and it’s true. It was built for the unfettered.
It’s mostly girls who live here—apart from a married couple who live in the apartment below us. All day long girls go in and out in clean, pretty outfits. I think I’m the only girl in the entire office-tel who doesn’t wear full makeup or have dyed or permed hair. The first time Ara saw my hair she gasped and she hasn’t been able to stop touching it whenever she sees me. I took it for flattery (usually people in the States would exclaim how much they envied my hair) until I saw her shaking her head sorrowfully at Sujin as she ran her fingers through it. So raw, she wrote in her small notepad.
* * *
—
BECAUSE MY BEDROOM is next to the front door, which is next to the stairs, which echo loudly, each morning I hear the conversation of the married couple downstairs when they leave for the day. They are older, in their thirties, and the husband is desperately affectionate to the wife, who always sounds like she is somewhere far away.
“Wonna, do you want me to pick anything up from the store today?” he asks eagerly. “Are you craving anything in particular?” Three seconds later the wife responds, “What? Oh, whatever,” before they clickety-clack down the loudest stairs in the world.
Sometimes, I see the wife sitting on the steps when I come back late at night from the studio. She never raises her head as I walk past. It’s all very rude but I am used to her.
I listen to the rain a little while longer, trying to remember why I feel more agitated than normal this morning. Then it washes over me—today I’m supposed to meet my boyfriend, Hanbin, for lunch. At his parents’ house.
It is a momentous occasion of epic implications.
His mother will be there, and perhaps—and I can’t spend too long thinking about it as it makes me so anxious—his father too, who is usually busy playing golf or meeting famous people from other countries.
“I want to show you the Ishii, it finally came last week,” Hanbin said last night, when he came to pick me up from my studio at school. It seems indecent, somehow, that someone can just own an Ishii fish sculpture to put in their house, to touch if they want, whenever