girls from as far away as Pyongyang copying that style.
Happy with the publicity, the organizers of the market offered Eun-Mee a gift—a glass duck. Eun-Mee, however, turned it down and asked for something else instead. They bated their breaths, hoping it wouldn’t be cash. Instead, Eun-Mee asked that she be given free rein to come in and out of every single one of the shops and stalls in the market, and to let it be known that she was “Queen of Namdaemun Market.” For a year, after school, Eun-Mee wandered around the maze of open-air alleyways. She’d go into stores to chat with the owners and play board games, knowing they could not kick her out. However busy they were, they had to stop what they were doing and entertain her.
In high school, Soo-Ja also learned, Eun-Mee had participated in several beauty-pageant contests and had tried out for Miss Seoul. At one of the early rounds, during a photo session—a rather modest one, Eun-Mee complained, taken with an old, antiquated Brownie box camera—one of the contestants had accidentally tripped and stepped forward in one of the shots. When the photo was later released, Eun-Mee had expected the woman to look disastrous and clumsy, but instead she had managed to look beautiful and to stand out, being a foot or so in front of the group.
At the next photo shoot, for a promotion connected to the renaming of the Shinsegae Department Store, Eun-Mee decided to “accidentally” trip and step forward in every one of the shots. When Eun-Mee saw that the photographer’s flash was about to come on, she’d propel herself forward, as if she were so excited, she couldn’t just wait for the film to come capture her—she had to meet it halfway.
In the final competition, Eun-Mee came in seventh. The disappointment over that ranking, however, did not last very long. After all, Eun-Mee was the kind of person who’d win even when she lost, and what she had won was something precious indeed—the interest of her future husband.
Because Eun-Mee spent so much time in the hallway, it was probably no accident that she spotted Soo-Ja one evening as Soo-Ja came out of her room wearing a dress and makeup. Soo-Ja and Hana were going to a gye meeting. When Eun-Mee found out about this, she invited herself to come along.
“I love gye! I was wondering how I could join one in Seoul, and I suppose I have the answer right in front of my face!” said Eun-Mee.
“I’m not sure if that’s such a good idea, I don’t think my gye is accepting any new members,” said Soo-Ja, trying to make her way past her.
“If they’re not, I’m sure they’d make an exception for a doctor’s wife,” said Eun-Mee, smiling. “Just give me one second and I’ll put a dress on. Don’t you dare leave without me!”
“What about your husband?” Soo-Ja asked, making another attempt at discouraging her.
“Oh, he’s working late. We’ll probably be back before he is,” said Eun-Mee, disappearing into her room.
Once a month, the women members of Soo-Ja’s gye gathered for an informal dinner at a restaurant. While they ate the sundubu and japchae and seolleongtang in the banquet-hall-style room, at long, continuous tables set up like picnic benches, lit by white and red Chinese lamps, a volunteer went around each table and collected dues from all of them. By the evening’s end, one of the members of the gye would go home with all the money collected. The next month, somebody else took home the money.
Everyone contributed to the pot religiously, and you did not dare miss a payment, otherwise you’d never be eligible to be a recipient. There was, of course, the risk that somebody who’d been a receiver in an earlier round might disappear, or refuse to continue contributing (in which case they’d say the gye was “broken”), but those cases were rare, and people did in fact pay back their loans. For that’s what they were—loans. You couldn’t rely on banks, with their excessive collateral requirements and high interest rates, but you could rely on your friends and other members of the gye.
It was a more formal extension of a common practice in extended families—Soo-Ja’s own relatives were always giving money to one another, to help cousins start businesses, to finance a niece’s education, to pay for weddings and funerals. You gave, yes, but you always got back, and some of Soo-Ja’s aunts even kept notebooks, recording how much they had received and