But oddly, even after years of dining alongside these refined palates, my aversions are only getting worse. Give me ramen and tteokbokki and soondae any day. Or no food at all. I am happy with no food.
Usually Hanbin would have gotten angry if I started saying I was full this early, but he does not seem to care today. He is either excited or restless, and I ask him what’s going on.
“Not a thing,” he says, shaking his head. “Work is crazy. I don’t want to talk about it. It’s fucking depressing.”
Hanbin is working as the bellboy in his family’s hotel. It’s been a recent trend for hotel families to put their heirs to work in the trenches of their empires. He began as a parking attendant the summer after he graduated from Columbia, and after a few months was reassigned to washing dishes in the kitchen.
His mother pretends to be horrified that her husband is relegating her son to such menial labor, but according to Hanbin she’s actually quite tickled. It gives her a fresh new way of bragging about the hotel and her son and how farsighted her husband is to dream up such a grueling CEO-training program.
One would think that the management wouldn’t actually make him do any work, but recent chaebol scandals have changed a lot of people’s thinking. There are still the sycophants that grovel and fawn, but many are also contemptuously watchful—waiting for the owner families to make a mistake so they can pounce and report it to the police or the press. “Unions!” Hanbin tends to say explosively out of nowhere from time to time.
“At least you don’t have to pluck used condoms off the floor and sponge dirty toilet bowls on your knees,” I said to him the other week when he was complaining about how terrible his day had been. I was thinking about the stories that Sujin told me about working as a maid in a love motel the first few months she was in Seoul while she was attending a hair and beauty academy. The hotel she worked at charged by the hour, and the turnover was so fast that she lost six kilograms in two weeks because she had no time to eat, and also just because she had no appetite after cleaning all the condoms and multicolored stains every hour. She heartily recommended it as a weight-loss program.
When I said this, Hanbin looked at me without saying a word and I knew that he was shocked. I hastily said I’d just read an article written by a journalist who had gone undercover at a love motel as a cleaner, and then his expression eased somewhat. He laughed and said that his hotel was not like that. He actually believed it too.
* * *
—
RUBY LOVED HOTELS also. She had one of her people forward her all the hotel news—which ones were serving a new afternoon tea, which one had a new executive chef, which one had a new spa package, and she would scoop me up and off we would go.
One time she called me to a hotel presidential suite, where she had her papers spread out all over the conference table. She had ordered three tiers of mini cakes and bonbons with afternoon tea, which she was eating while typing on her laptop.
“What is this?” I asked when I walked in. The suite was breathtaking for its size alone. Every surface seemed to be wrapped in marble, and I had to pass through two foyers just to find her.
“Eh, it’s super old,” she said, rolling her eyes and pointing to the crystal chandelier. “This is straight out of the nineteen forties or something. I told them they need to close the hotel for a few years to renovate. At least.”
I wandered through room after room, touching the edges of beautiful sofas, gilded frames, satin curtains, and a real fireplace mantel. There was a bright red Steinway grand piano in the living room against a startling floor-to-ceiling view of the city. In the bathrooms, tiny crystal bottles of perfume lined the shelves and clusters of peonies were floating in crystal spheres.