Bae Suah - Nowhere to Be Found

Where have you been all this time? Were you off somewhere singing, putting cats to sleep on the porch, drifting about in the rapids of time, the glow of the morning sun and the rain of a summer afternoon beating down as you pass by, your lips shut tight like a bloodsucking plant? The me that is nowhere to be found now, the me that will turn to ash and vanish, turn to darkness and rot — that me extends a squalid hand at the final moment of this crash, having entirely deserted and abandoned my life. In truth, I was not me. The me that was born into an animal body and lived as a slave to poverty and insult was nothing but the emptiness that had been momentarily bewitched out of me by an evil spirit. That distant me is precious and beautiful. No matter how decadent and corrupt my body becomes, I will, like a desert orchid that blooms once every hundred years, come to you bearing this frigidness toward life.

I tell him, “All you have is my emptiness.”

“Then where are you? The you that bleeds when I devour you like this?”

“You don’t see? I just passed by outside that window and now I’m gone. This is the first and last time I will encounter you in this life. Give me some water. Sweat pours off of me like rain. You’ll forget about me for the next hundred years. But leave your voice behind; when I come back to this place a hundred years from now, the moment I open the door a colony of bats and your voice will greet me.”

“I’m taking my voice with me to the grave. I wouldn’t leave it in a place like this. My blood is no vagrant.”

“Then I’ll become a snake and I’ll find your grave.”

“You’re too lowly. You can’t trespass upon a royal tomb.”

The rain falls, lays siege to the world, as if it has been falling that way for years. The rain will fall even after the death of time. Roof half falling down. Windows broken. Kitchen dripping rainwater. Porch covered in filth. Creaky stairs covered in cats’ paw prints. Dead rag doll, straw insides poking out. And, above all the gruesome things, our frigid relationship.

I couldn’t believe it when Cheolsu’s mother contacted me. I was working in the office at the university when she called.

“Who did you say is calling?”

“This is Cheolsu’s mother.”

I could practically see her stretching out the folds of her fat neck to make her voice sound more refined.

“Ah, yes. How are you?”

“You left so quickly the other night. You didn’t even stay for dinner.”

“I had to get to work.”

“You were in such a hurry that I didn’t have a chance to ask: What kind of work do you do? Cheolsu isn’t very sociable. He never tells me anything. He’s on leave from the army, but all he does is stay out late every night. Sons aren’t sweet to their mothers. Not like daughters are.”

“It’s just a part-time job.”

“Tutoring?”

“Nothing like that.”

“Then what?”

I sighed, worn down by her stubborn refusal to give up.

“I wait tables.”

“Oh my.”

She was quiet for a moment, then started talking again before I could even begin to think about how to end the call.

“But you said you’re a college graduate. You should be tutoring kids instead. That would be better for you. Cheolsu’s little sister is still in college, but she’s tutoring a high school student in math. She’s good at math. She was planning to work only over vacation and then quit, but her student’s mother begged her to stay. She said she’s never seen a more talented tutor than my daughter. The father is a chief prosecuting attorney, but their kids aren’t doing well in school. It worries them. Their father was a younger classmate of Cheolsu’s father when they were in college, so that’s how we know their family. And the job seemed reliable.”

“Ma’am.”

She was getting chattier by the minute, and I couldn’t bear to hear another word. I decided I had to end the phone call, even if it meant being rude. It could also be that I was too angry to take any more.

“Ma’am, I’m busy right now. I have to hang up.”

“My goodness, where is my mind?” she said, pretending to be apologetic. “Cheolsu said you’re planning to visit him?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you going this weekend?”

“I haven’t picked an exact date yet.”

“Oh, no, I was certain Cheolsu said you’re visiting him this weekend. I wanted to send him some food.”

“They don’t feed him in the army?”

I probably sounded curt. The more brusque my voice grew, the more slippery hers became, as if she were greasing her vocal cords.

“Of course they do, but you know it can’t compare to food made by your own mother. It must be so hard for him there in training.”

“He only has to serve for six months.”

If she had suggested visiting him together, I absolutely would have refused. Promise or no promise, seeing Cheolsu was not worth putting up with that much indignity and discomfort.

“If you visit him this weekend, could you stop by our house first? I made chicken. It’s not much; I promise it won’t be too heavy. You two can eat it together when you see him. That’ll be nice.”

“You’re asking me to take chicken to your son?”

To see Cheolsu, I would have to go all the way past the city of Uijeongbu, which I’d never been to before, transfer buses several times, go to a place called Yeoncheon, which I’d never even heard of, and find my way to an army base with a strange address. To top it all off, now I had to tote along a bundle of cold chicken like some kind of refugee. This was too much.

“I wish I could visit him myself.” She sounded crestfallen. “But Cheolsu told me not to come. He said the other boys all have their girlfriends visit them and he’ll be embarrassed if his mother shows up.”

“Is that so?”

“I just want to feed my son his favorite dish, so though I know it’s a burden for you, please do me this one favor. Anyway, he absolutely insists that I don’t go, for fear of making his girlfriend uncomfortable.”

She laughed. I pictured her eyes shining like a rat’s when she peeped at us in Cheolsu’s bedroom. I didn’t want to have to look at her face again, but I figured one last time couldn’t hurt. Once it was done, I would never have to see her again. So I gave in.

The last criminal sociology lecture was that Saturday night, but I requested the whole day off so that I could go see Cheolsu instead. In the end, I never got the chance to attend any of the lectures. Maybe if I had, it would have turned into a date. I pictured the instructor standing at the far end of the room, there, at the podium, while I sat in the very back in the dark, chewing on a pencil and listening to him talk about domestic violence. He would have been too far away to make out his face.

We all have many commonly held misconceptions about domestic violence. A typical example is the belief that domestic violence recurs in lower-class families or those with lower levels of education. Other examples include the assumption that the happier a family appears on the surface, the less likely they are to experience domestic violence; that when a child is abused, the abuser is whichever parent is less close to the child; that domestic violence within families is always linked to other social issues, such as broken homes, alcoholism, criminal records, and so on. These case studies show us that, just as with other social institutions, domestic violence has less to do with any inherent characteristics of the family as a primitive community of relatives and more to do with the changes wrought by modernization with its complex and diverse variables. As the causal factors, triggers, and control factors correlated with domestic violence intensify and diversify, it becomes harder for us to draw a clear conclusion.