why he made my mother take off all her clothes. So she couldn’t go outside. There was nobody to watch her, so we had to leave her alone at times, you know? My father just stuffed her under some blankets and she stayed there the whole day. And he was right. She didn’t try to escape with no clothes on. But I swear, I could see in her face that she still hoped to figure out a way to escape.”
So that’s why she was naked when she came out of the house, thought Soo-Ja. She breathed a sigh of relief. She knew this boy was telling the truth. Besides, if this man’s intentions had been bad, there just hadn’t been enough time, what with a small house full of boys and his wife and the customers drinking next door.
Soo-Ja looked at Hana again, who looked back at her with a pained expression on her face, as if to say, Eomma, how could you leave me? Do you not know what I went through? The tears had stopped, but her face was still wet.
I know, baby. Eomma knows everything. And eomma was bad, to let this happen to you. But now you can sleep. Eomma is here. You can sleep like a child again.
When they arrived in front of her uncle’s house, Soo-Ja lingered for a moment to give either of these two men the chance to leave. Was she being considerate, sparing Yul from bad company? Or was she afraid they would ask him questions, maybe adding two and two? The boy looked at them awkwardly, and she saw in his eyes that he didn’t want to go yet. He wanted to trade as part of some parent-child swap program and come live with them. But, child, she would have to say to him, Yul doesn’t live here with me. I live with some other people. This makeshift family you experienced on our way here, with the four of us, it was as new to me as it was to you.
Yul also seemed to sense the boy’s hesitation. “It’s time for you to go home,” he said, and his firmness came as easily as his teasing earlier, and was just as effective, as the boy bowed to them and started to leave. But before he was gone, Yul reached into his pocket and gave Bae some money. “This is for you. Don’t show it to your father.”
The boy bowed again and—this is how Soo-Ja knew that what he’d told her earlier had been true—he smiled at Hana and said, “Good-bye, little sister. Be nice to your mother.”
Soo-Ja and Yul watched Bae run home, into a dark she found very foreign. After Soo-Ja and Yul could no longer make out the boy’s shape in the distance, they finally turned to each other. So this is that scene in the movie, thought Soo-Ja—the good-bye, first to the less consequential character, then to the important one.
Soo-Ja had felt this before, and she felt it again: that she was always saying good-bye to the only man she truly cared about. But she was wrong. For each time she said good-bye to Yul, he was a different man—one she knew even better, and for whom her feelings had grown deeper. Now she loved him the way a wife might love a husband after a few years—love him after watching him perform an act of kindness, love him after seeing the way he is with other people, love him for the quality of his heart. But he was not her husband; she was not his wife. It was wrong to even think that way. But what was it that counted in the end, the life you lived in front of other people, for their benefit, or the life you lived in your own heart—where she loved him and he loved her back. And could she help it if that life just felt so much more real? Yet whatever happened in that other version of her life—kisses, sighs, joy—in this one he was just a friend, standing in front of her, unsure if he should go in or not, maybe suddenly remembering he had patients, a wife, a life to step back into as soon as he stepped out of hers.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to thank you enough,” said Soo-Ja, speaking softly. Blankets of fog shifted around them, and she felt as if they were wading through clouds. She could see sliced sections