of miniature, exquisite dresses—but when they came home to her apartment they looked as if they had been grown there, sown from other seeds of beauty. Her apartment nourished a part of me I didn’t know I had—a desolate craving to touch and see and luxuriate in objects.
The thing about her was that she knew I was entranced by her things, but she didn’t mind. I was already firmly categorized in her mind as an artist, a creator and lover of beauty. My worshipping of her taste fed her vanity as a collector.
“Just because you buy a bunch of expensive things doesn’t mean you have a collection,” she said contemptuously once while reading an article in the Times about the latest spending habits of the new rich in China.
I understood what she meant though. Her eye wasn’t exactly a gift, but more of an instinct, as natural to her as melancholia, or distrust.
* * *
—
I MET THEM all in New York—Ruby, Hanbin, their group of friends. It had been an unfathomable step for me, going to New York to start a program at SVA. It was my first time on a plane, my first time out of the country, my first time stepping out from under the umbrella of the Loring Center, my first time following a star. Among other shocks, I had been bewildered to find so many Koreans so at home in the streets and cafés and stores of New York—and in the hallways and classrooms of SVA—for whom studying abroad and traveling back and forth by themselves were commonplace occurrences. For some, it was something they had been doing since they were children.
I was there on a SeoLim visual arts scholarship, a fact that Ruby found amusing when she interviewed me for a job at her gallery. I didn’t understand why she laughed until another girl who was there on the same scholarship told me months later that Ruby’s father was Lim Jun Myeong, the CEO of SeoLim Group and one of the most famous men in Korea. Ruby and her brother Mu-cheon were younger than his other children by more than two decades, and so it was rumored that Lady Lim was not their mother and they were illegitimate by way of a receptionist in a SeoLim office building.
I’d responded to an ad on the bulletin board in our department building—a forlorn, empty square occasionally punctuated by ads for babysitting jobs posted by our cash-strapped professors. I’d needed a job desperately—the scholarship covered my tuition, my room and board, and the plane fare but not much else—and an ad in Korean looked like a lifeline. I plucked it off the board and retreated to my room to study it.
It was remarkable not only for its contents but for its appearance—gold-foil-pressed script on thick olive-colored paper—which looked more like a wedding invitation than a student flyer.
“Art Assistant Wanted for New Gallery Opening” was the header, and underneath, in smaller script, it said, “Thorough knowledge of contemporary art and fluency in Korean and English a plus.”
I imagine there wasn’t much competition for the job, but I was ecstatic when she hired me along with four other girls from various universities throughout the city. I was put in charge of designing the gallery’s catalogs, flyers, and postcards. The printing costs alone astounded me but she paid them without even glancing at the bills I would nervously hand over.
For nearly three weeks, our small group worked into the night, Ruby and I usually staying the latest as I would help her with anything she needed, even running out to bring back coffee and croissants, all bought on Ruby’s credit card, of course. The other girls tried to befriend her, but she would only respond coolly and monosyllabically to anything that wasn’t work-related, and this bred resentment. I didn’t realize until later that these girls all came from wealthy families and didn’t need the money like I did—they took the jobs so that they could meet Ruby.
Sometimes, I would just stare at her as she was working. She cut a striking figure, no matter what she was doing. She wore only lipstick and no other makeup, although I suspected she had had her eyeliner tattooed, and her