Hyung’s Life - Jin-in-Seoul

My hyung died.

Late one night, while I was at the office reviewing our division’s marketing plan for the new year, the detective in charge called to tell me. I was not surprised. Everyone who had known my hyung, myself included, had assumed that he had died a long time ago—more than ten years ago, in fact.

“What was the cause of death? Was it suicide?”

My voice was trembling. The detective said he had suffocated when food became lodged in his airway.

“The body had been left undiscovered for a long time, so determining the cause of death was difficult, but there were no signs of suicide or homicide.”

“Left undiscovered?”

The detective said the body had been found a month after his death, after a neighbor reported it. A violent shiver ran through me. He asked whether I could come down to Cheonan the next day, and I said I could.

“How did you get my number?”

The detective said I was the only person listed in the deceased’s phone. I could not understand it. My hyung. His life.

Jang Cheolsu was not my biological brother. We were maternal cousins. He was two years older than I was. He was born in a southern seaside city where the sea ended and the land began, but after my aunt and uncle divorced, he came to live with us when he was twelve, and we grew up together. There were somewhat complicated circumstances behind it. Neither of us knew the truth at the time. The adults kept it from us and said nothing. Even though they tried to keep it secret, as we grew older Cheolsu hyung and I came to understand the reason naturally. Adults often forget that children are always listening. No matter how quietly they whispered, I heard everything while pretending to sleep, pretending to play, pretending not to pay attention.

I kept it secret from Cheolsu hyung that he was not my uncle’s biological son, but at some point he had figured it out too. At the time, I did not know that this was the reason my aunt and uncle had divorced. My ears may have been open, but I was still too young to know anything about the world. Cheolsu hyung may have known even that. Looking back, I think Cheolsu hyung had already finished growing up before he turned thirteen.

“Are you sure this is Jang Cheolsu?”

The detective in charge asked me.

“I don’t know.”

The face in the photograph he handed me was so badly decomposed that it was almost impossible to recognize. There was nothing that allowed me to connect the person in the photograph with the tall Cheolsu hyung I remembered, with his sharp eyes. The long hair and beard were part of it, but the man in the photograph looked too far removed from Cheolsu hyung, who had always kept himself neat. The detective handed me another photograph. Tears ran from my eyes. It was him. It was Cheolsu hyung’s foot. Three black moles beneath the ankle bone of his left foot, and his unusually long little toe. I could not stop crying. The detective stepped away for a while. Was it relief that the body of the hyung I had believed dead long ago had finally been found, so that I could give him a funeral? Or had something collapsed inside me—the small hope that somewhere, somehow, he was still living well? Tears ran down my cheeks.

The detective returned and handed me several documents, and I signed each one. He gathered the papers I would need for the funeral and the certificates required to register the death.

I left the police station and went to the hospital morgue where the body was being kept. I discussed the funeral arrangements with the morgue manager. I decided not to receive mourners and to have the cremation the next day. According to the manager, it had been years since they had seen a body in such an advanced state of decomposition. No one asked me what had happened to my hyung. I asked my hyung nothing either. I left the morgue and put on a black tie.

During the first year after Cheolsu hyung came to live with us, my aunt visited him about once every two months. Whenever he returned from an outing with her, he would usually be wearing new clothes with a Nike or Adidas logo, or a new pair of sneakers. Strangely, once my aunt left, he never wore those clothes or shoes again. He would put them back in their paper bags and hide them deep in the wardrobe. I could not understand him. Once, I secretly wore Cheolsu hyung’s Nike sneakers outside and got into terrible trouble. He searched the entire neighborhood for me, and the moment he found me, he shouted at me to take them off at once. He was usually quiet and mild, and the anger in his eyes frightened me so much that I took the shoes off right there. Without saying another word, he clutched them to his chest and disappeared. I walked home crying, with a shard of glass stuck in the sole of my foot, only to be scolded by my parents all over again. I felt so miserable that there was no one in the house on my side that I sniffled through the entire night, but neither my parents nor Cheolsu hyung paid any attention to me. For a while, I refused to speak to him or answer him when he spoke to me. He was exceptionally good at school. He did not merely come first in his class; after transferring to our school, he never once failed to rank first in the entire school. By comparison, I spent my time flipping through comic books and collecting baseball player cards, and at school I was an invisible boy with no presence at all. The few people who remembered me or knew who I was thought of me as something like Cheolsu hyung’s idiot little brother. When Cheolsu hyung came to live with us, my comfort and peace disappeared. His very presence made me uneasy. That uneasy coexistence, which lasted more than three weeks, ended with the autumn rains the year my aunt came to see him for the last time. When Cheolsu hyung returned from an outing with her, there was a faint smile around his mouth as he held out a baseball glove to me. Even now, just thinking about that glove makes my heart beat faster. It was a first baseman’s mitt used by a professional baseball player. It was about a finger joint longer than the gloves used by infielders or outfielders. At the time, Cheolsu hyung had absolutely no interest in professional baseball. And yet he gave me a first baseman’s mitt made of real leather, not synthetic leather. In return, I gave him the baseball card I treasured most, the one with a photograph of my favorite professional player. That was how we became friends.

I booked a room near the hospital and went into a restaurant for a late lunch, but I could not eat anything. The face and foot of Cheolsu hyung in those photographs kept appearing in my mind, and hunger vanished, replaced by nausea. My head felt empty. I could not bring myself to return to the room, so I walked through the unfamiliar city. Why had my hyung come down here, a place where he had no ties at all, and chosen to live here? The slip of paper with his address, which the detective had given me, grew damp with sweat inside my pocket. I thought about going to the place where he had lived, but somehow I did not want to. I needed time. A little time to accept his death. And the courage to face reality.

My aunt, who had visited Cheolsu hyung roughly once every two months, died in a traffic accident at the beginning of that winter. I secretly overheard the adults saying that she had been working in a drinking establishment to make a living, and that one night, drunk, she had crossed the road illegally in front of Yeongdeungpo Station and been hit by a taxi. At that age I did not understand what the word bar meant, so it meant nothing to me. For Cheolsu hyung it was different. I think he was more shocked by the fact that my aunt had worked at a bar than by the fact that she was dead. And he hated all the relatives who had allowed her to end up working there. Cheolsu hyung did not cry at her funeral. My uncle was nowhere to be seen. When we returned home after the funeral, I secretly watched Cheolsu hyung cut apart the clothes and shoes with the Nike and Adidas logos. Tears were running from his eyes. He stopped speaking. It was not aphasia, but unless something absolutely had to be said, he almost never opened his mouth. He locked himself in his room all day and did nothing but study. He appeared only briefly for meals, then went straight back inside. My mother would sometimes hug him for no reason at all. Each time, he simply stood there with an expressionless face.

One day, my father took Cheolsu hyung to a cafe near our house. Childish as I was, I felt resentful toward my father. I wanted to go to a cafe too. There were pretty young women there, and somehow I imagined that if I went inside one, I would become an adult faster. I still do not know what my father and Cheolsu hyung talked about there. Strangely, though, after that night Cheolsu hyung began to speak again. He did not become the playful, smiling boy he had once been. But he smiled in front of people, and he said what needed to be said.

My father was a broad-minded man. Even in those days, when one group of people was devoted to changing the world and another group was determined to keep it from changing, my father never leaned too far in either direction. When I was in university, neglecting my studies, spending my time in clubs, and throwing myself into protests, my father told me that if I looked at the world only in black and white, everything became ridiculous. I understand what he meant now. Suddenly I missed my father, who had died so many years ago. If he were alive now, I would not have had to bear my hyung’s death alone like this.

I walked without direction, completely lost. Two girls walking ahead of me were laughing at a black plastic bag that seemed to be following them. Filled with wind and puffed up, the bag rolled along beside the girls. They walked with the black bag between them. When the traffic light changed, the girls crossed the street. The black plastic bag did not seem to know what to do. The wind had stopped.

There was no one in the twenty-five-seat minibus carrying my hyung’s body except the driver and me. The crematorium workers and the driver helped carry the coffin. I tried to give them some money, but they refused, so I thanked them with some bottled drinks instead. People die on weekdays and weekends alike, so we had to wait more than three hours. The cremation began well after lunchtime. Only the crematorium workers showed proper respect to the dead. I had contacted our relatives, but no one came down. During the cremation, I sat in the waiting room. I had slept badly the night before and was exhausted. The youthful face of Cheolsu hyung in the funeral portrait—made by enlarging the photograph from his identification card—made my chest ache. I closed my eyes.

Cheolsu hyung dropped out of high school. Because of problems with drinking and smoking, my mother was called to the school almost every week. My father took him to a cafe several times to talk to him, but that method no longer worked. Cheolsu hyung had entered high school ranked first in the school, but by the time he dropped out the following spring, his grades had fallen to the bottom. Drinking, smoking, grades—none of those were much of a problem compared with the fighting. He could not control his anger over even the smallest things, and whenever a quarrel started, he tried to settle it with his fists. If fists were not enough, he swung whatever he could get his hands on. The more opponents there were, the more violent he became. In the end, my father decided not to send him to school anymore, and Cheolsu hyung readily agreed. He no longer tormented my parents by running away from home or getting into violent trouble, but he shut himself in his room again. He killed time listening to loud music and reading strange books.

During that period, Cheolsu hyung and I hardly spoke. I was not afraid of him. What I could not stand was the way he made my parents suffer. But my parents told me that no matter what happened, I must never fight with Cheolsu hyung, and they made me promise. For their sake, I kept that promise. About a month after he dropped out, Cheolsu hyung enrolled in a college entrance academy in Noryangjin. He began studying again. That winter, he was accepted by a university in Pohang. His tuition and even his dormitory fees were fully waived. The day before he left for Pohang, he asked me to come outside with him. He took me to a pub in Sinchon and told me he was sorry for everything, that he wanted to apologize for what he had done, and that he was grateful I had endured it without getting angry at him. Then he gave me a book of poetry and a CD. They have both disappeared now after several moves, but I read that book and listened to that music countless times.

There was one thing I always wanted to apologize to my hyung for too. For a while, I had secretly read his diary. In the diary he kept hidden in the bottom drawer of his desk were pages filled with disgust for the world and for human beings. He never named anyone in particular, but I knew at once that the person being cursed in those pages was his biological father. My aunt’s sudden death had turned the secret into a mystery that could never be solved, but Cheolsu hyung cursed that unknown man and longed for him at the same time. There was no affection in that longing. Around the time Cheolsu hyung began studying for the entrance exams, I stopped reading his diary.

I opened my eyes because of a group of women in mourning clothes who were wailing loudly. Tears were also streaming from the eyes of a boy holding the funeral portrait of a young girl who looked to be about middle-school age. The cries continued for some time. I left the building to escape them. I drank coffee and smoked a cigarette. When the cremation was finished, I placed the urn in the columbarium. The driver had pulled the minibus up to the entrance and was waiting for me. We returned to the hospital morgue.

Back at my room, I filled the bathtub with hot water and soaked myself. Exhaustion came over me all at once. I collapsed onto the bed, tossed and turned, and when I finally got up, darkness had fallen outside the window. I was hungry, but I still had no appetite. I ordered a meal at a restaurant and left before I had eaten even half of it. I went into a bar near the hotel and drank several glasses of whiskey. The alcohol hit me quickly. I think I called my wife in Seoul, but I could not remember what I said. My wife knew nothing about Cheolsu hyung. I had never told her that he existed. So she could not possibly understand why the detective had called me first, or why I was here alone arranging my hyung’s funeral.

The next day, before returning to Seoul, I took a taxi to the address the detective had given me. It was a badly run-down apartment building near the Independence Hall of Korea. I stopped at the security office and collected the key. I gave the guard the money I had brought for him. He refused again and again, so I finally forced it into the pocket of his coat. According to the guard, my hyung had lived alone and no one ever came to visit him. When they happened to pass each other, Cheolsu hyung would give a small bow, but they had never really spoken. His neighbors did not know who he was or what he did for a living. They only knew that he was a quiet man. As I stepped into the elevator, the guard said,

“The smell was terrible, so we turned off the heating and left the windows open.”

After entering university, Cheolsu hyung rarely came to visit our home in Janganpyeong. We left his small room exactly as it was, but even on holidays he would greet my parents and leave almost immediately. I learned much later that every time he came to our house, memories of his wounded childhood returned and caused him pain. I first heard what was really inside him when I was serving in the army. Cheolsu hyung came to visit me. Drunk, he told me the secrets he carried in his heart. Whenever he left our house, my mother used to press an envelope of spending money into his hand, but he always refused it. He said he earned enough money tutoring and did not need it. He said he could not remain indebted to them any longer. Indebted. That was when I understood that the word defined the relationship between Cheolsu hyung and our family. My father and mother treated him as family, but to Cheolsu hyung, their kindness was a debt that would someday have to be repaid. Drunk in a shabby bar in Inje, he told me that he had turned down a national university in Seoul and gone all the way to Pohang because he no longer wanted to depend on my parents. That day, Cheolsu hyung also told me that when he was in his first year of high school, my uncle had come to see him at school once. Waiting for him by the school gate, my uncle handed him a bankbook in Cheolsu hyung’s name and a small wooden seal. Then he told Cheolsu hyung that no matter what happened, he must never come looking for him. My uncle walked away. Cheolsu hyung remained standing there, watching him disappear into the distance. He said he saw the sorrow rising inside his chest turn into a tiny dot. He said he felt that tiny dot lodge in his bone marrow. Someday, he said, it felt as if that dot would devour him. At the time, I did not understand what he meant. Cheolsu hyung told me many things that day, but my thoughts kept drifting elsewhere. I kept thinking of the senior soldiers I would have to face again when I returned to the base. At that time in my life, I did not have the space inside me to truly listen to the hyung sitting in front of me.

The moment I opened the front door, the stench of a rotting corpse struck my nose. I covered it with a handkerchief and stepped inside. It was a small apartment with two rooms, a little living room, and a kitchen. Because of the bitter midwinter wind, the place was as cold as a freezer. A single bed stood alone in the smaller room. The yellowed mattress brought back the horrifying image of my hyung’s body. The larger room had been turned into a study. A black-and-white photograph of an empty bench hung on the wall. Books and records were neatly arranged on the shelves. On the desk lay open the book he must have been reading last. Beside it was a notebook covered with incomprehensible symbols, and next to that lay a fountain pen with dried ink. There were rice and flour in the cupboard and several bags of snacks whose expiration dates were still some time away. In the refrigerator were two half-finished bottles of water and several neatly arranged containers of side dishes. Everything was in order. Everything smelled of my hyung. Of my hyung rotting away.

There was a pile of unopened mail on the living-room table. I opened several of the envelopes. One was a bill from a telecommunications company. Another was a letter expressing regret that my hyung’s paper could not be published in an academic journal. There was nothing valuable in the apartment. I gathered the mail and his laptop and went back into the study. I opened the book that had been lying on his desk. It was a physics book filled with difficult symbols and notation. His handwriting covered the pages here and there. As I tried to put the book back on the desk, an old card slipped out and fell at my feet. Tears burst from my eyes. It was the baseball card I had given him thirty years earlier. The player in the photograph wore an awkward smile. My tears fell onto the card.

After a long while, I pulled myself together and began searching the study. The diary was where it had always been, in the bottom drawer of the desk. I opened it. My hyung’s life was there. As I read, I called his name silently.

After graduating from university, Cheolsu hyung went to the United States to study. His tuition was waived, and he even received living expenses. He never asked my parents for money. During all his years abroad, he never once returned to Korea. At the end of each year, he sent my parents a New Year’s card by airmail. Whenever he could not concentrate on his studies, he would carve pictures into wooden boards with a chisel. Once, he sent me a woodblock calendar engraved with paintings by Lee Jung-seob.

My parents did not learn until much later that Cheolsu hyung had married in the United States and divorced the following year. When he told me about the marriage, I did not tell my parents. I no longer remember why. I think I no longer wanted to involve myself in his life. At the time, I was having enough trouble carrying my own. I also barely reacted when I learned that he had lost seven teeth while studying abroad and had dentures made as soon as he returned to Korea.

When Cheolsu hyung was appointed a professor of physics at a university in Seoul, my parents cautiously broached the subject of finding him a match. He refused. He said he had already failed at marriage in the United States and that living alone suited him. Then one day he simply disappeared. To ease my parents’ worries, I went to the university where he had worked, only to be told that he had resigned from his professorship six months earlier and gone back to the United States. Our relatives cursed Cheolsu hyung as an ungrateful bastard. My parents said nothing. Cheolsu hyung did not attend my father’s funeral. He did not attend my mother’s funeral either. There was no way to tell a man who had evaporated from the world that my parents were dead. I did not blame him. I simply let him fade slowly from my memory.

His diary said again and again that he wanted to begin a new life somewhere no one knew him. It also said that he wanted to go back to being twelve years old. But Cheolsu hyung never returned to twelve. He died alone in the unfamiliar city of Cheonan. I could not understand him. But I could not hate him either. I wanted to tell him that I had loved and missed him as much as he had loved and missed me.

I hired a cleaning company to clear out the apartment. Everything my hyung had used was thrown away. We removed his smell, repapered the walls, and replaced the flooring. I left the inheritance matters to a lawyer introduced by someone from the legal team at my company.

A month has now passed since the funeral. I still see my hyung in my dreams. But he no longer appears as the grotesque figure in the photograph. I am grateful for that. My hyung is dead. Only now have I begun to accept it. My ordinary life is pushing him a little farther away from me each day. And yet, whenever I think of Cheolsu hyung, I still return to thirty-five years ago, to the day he came to our house holding my aunt’s hand. While my aunt was asking my parents to take care of him for a little while, Cheolsu hyung suddenly disappeared. The adults, so absorbed in their conversation that they had not even noticed he was gone, finally realized his absence and went searching through the neighborhood. Even the neighbors joined them, but they could not find him before the sun went down and the moon rose.

In the empty house, with all the adults outside, I heard someone quietly sobbing. Cheolsu hyung was hiding alone behind the old car parked in our garage, crying. I did not shout to the adults that he was there. Instead, I crouched down beside him. Then I held out several of the professional baseball player cards I had collected. He did not take them. That was when he told me he wanted to disappear to a place where no one else existed, that he wanted to live there alone forever, and that place was not in this world. At the time, I had no idea what he meant. The memory of that day is no longer clear, but I can still hear the sound of my hyung quietly sobbing deep inside my chest. I hear that sobbing—the sound of sorrow gathering into a tiny dot and lodging deep in the boy’s chest.