The Neighbor Who Taught Me How to Live

The child who arrived at daycare first every morning, stayed for the full-day program, and left around seven in the evening. That was little Yang Ji-eon. This was before her widowed mother found her aunt.

Mother, who routinely stumbled home at two in the morning and collapsed into sleep, staked her life solely on dropping me off and picking me up. Meals and snacks were handled at daycare; cleanliness, clothing, and basic manners, she believed, were the teachers’ responsibility.

Yet contrary to her expectations, the homeroom teacher and the director who saw a six-year-old’s filthy state treated her with cold disdain, scolded her openly, and the classmates excluded her from every game without exception. At six one might expect such things to fade, but those memories remained as sharp for me as if they had happened yesterday. Good memories lack clear color and brightness; bad ones replay endlessly, acquiring hues and intensity they never originally possessed.

Unwashed hair hung greasy and matted in places; the same clothes from the day before yesterday were worn again. The kind teacher who had occasionally scrubbed me clean left, and once the money-obsessed director took over as homeroom teacher, I was finally abandoned to neglect. The children who already shunned me began calling me a beggar to my face and pinching me, and the atmosphere simply accepted it.

Then, one winter not long before Christmas, I met my benefactor—the auntie who had just moved in next door. She happened to spot me squatting at the front door, playing with ants. A mother of three daughters, she was startled and called out to me. After careful observation she reached her conclusion:

“Little one. Want to come eat dinner at our house?”

On weekends when I did not go to daycare I nearly starved. Mother’s warning never to follow strangers could not defeat an empty stomach—especially when the stranger was the kindly-faced auntie next door.

I still do not know what moved her to take me in. Leaving the groceries she had just bought abandoned on the floor, she led me straight to the bathroom and scrubbed away layers of old grime. After toweling me dry she gave me a flower-print dress her daughters had outgrown and braided my hair into soft sheep-like plaits. Watching me laugh with a clean body and clean head, she laughed along with me.

From that day on, with Mother’s permission, the auntie brought me to her house every evening. There I learned the basics of being human: how a spoon differed from a fork, what people talked about at the table, how many times a day one ought to wash. The couple ran a bakery, so at Christmas and New Year they baked chocolate cookies and cakes for me. Without anyone telling them to, the kind-hearted pair cared for the snot-nosed neighbor child with genuine love. Saying I reminded them of their three daughters still in school, they treated me like their own youngest.

The teasing at daycare lessened. Later, when their move was decided, Mother tearfully offered her thanks. I still remember that gentle couple cradling me as I sobbed that I did not want to climb into the moving truck. The little kid next door, the auntie next door—under the simple name of neighbors they poured out kindness without stint, offered goodwill freely, and taught me the standards of the world.

Once I possessed ordinary standards I never returned to those ugly days. Even if I had to beg Mother, I washed my hair before going out and wore clothes laundered that very day. Luck was with me; around that time my capable aunt began looking after me. Mother seemed so shocked by my request to have my hair washed that she grew peculiarly obsessed with living like everyone else.

The instant urge to help that rose the moment I first saw Eui-joo was also the influence of that neighbor auntie. And Eui-joo’s older brother as well. Why did a man’s savage behavior strike me as pitiful? Why did his life—rejecting my kindness, pointed at by others—grate on me so?

When I came to my senses I felt ashamed. I had wanted to remake that man who lived without standards the way I once had—an adult who already knew everything, a man who did not even want help—throwing tantrums at him in the process.

I had squared my shoulders as if I were some savior. Yet to live bestowing kindness the way the neighbor auntie had, I possessed too narrow a heart and too cramped a field of vision. I was merely a high-school student who still had to memorize the solution steps for math problem number thirty. That man who earned his own living probably understood the world’s standards far better than I did.

Turn off the meddling button.

The moment I recognized that the interest I had shown him was nothing more than arrogance and prejudice, my heart quieted with astonishing speed.

For several days after that—no, nearly a full week—I lived as if I had forgotten the man entirely. This was when about two weeks of vacation still remained. After barricading myself in my room and conquering thirteen workbooks, Mother was the first to suggest I go out and get some air.

I answered that I would, then spent several more hours inside. Mother was working a side job and had not returned even though it was well past eleven-thirty at night. Accustomed by now to guarding an empty house, I sat with rumpled hair, previewing the next day’s studies.

Ring-ring, ring-ring—why did the phone’s knock against the door feel so ominous? Goosebumps raced over my skin and the pen slipped from my fingers. As if deliberately wounding myself, I pictured Mother’s car accident while she was out driving, an emergency-room call, all of it. Mother was the only family I had left. I grew as weak as a helpless child and stepped out into the living room.

“…Hello.”

The breath I had been holding in relief sank all the way past my navel. After apologizing for leaving me alone, Mother stated her real business.

“No.”

I knew how hard Mother was working, bending her spine to the breaking point so we could move into one of the new downtown apartments finished last year. I set aside the urge to complain and stared out at the black windows. I missed my aunt, who had not visited once since the fight with Mother. I hated being alone in the house. How much must I have hated it, to find myself missing even that man?

A thick rain of worry fell into the hollow of my heart. To drive out the useless anxiety that was making me restless, I hurried out for a night walk. I meant only to ride my bicycle once around the neighborhood. In the hour when every neighbor’s lights were already out, I pedaled, eating and drinking the hot wind.

My head cleared and the tangled thoughts sorted themselves. I realized my feelings toward the Kang brothers had been hypocrisy; I realized I had been nothing more than a clumsy imitator of the neighbor auntie; I realized I had simply needed somewhere to escape from my own loneliness.

I might never become the attractive woman Mother and my aunt imagined. Would a life of opening a beautiful flower shop beside a café, a life that made tomorrow something to look forward to, ever truly be mine?

Perhaps, just as Mother always said, the right future for me was a job at some company that issued huge schedule charts. Picturing that future that held not the slightest spark of anticipation, I turned onto the green path between the rice paddies. Without leaving my usual walking route I was just passing the alley that led to Eui-joo’s house. The house of the man who always switched on the main-hall light by four in the afternoon stood completely dark. He went out often, yet he always slept at home. I had noticed that he left the lights on even when he slept. Having watched him compulsively replace every single bulb, I had thought, He must be afraid of the night.

Just like me.

I gazed a moment toward the blue gate, then shook my head. That man was not six-year-old Yang Ji-eon in need of rescue. Knowing it was wrong and still equating us was a sickness—the sickness of trying to cover childhood wounds with hypocritical charity.

“Just stop caring.”

I spoke the words like a vow to myself and started home, yet the pressure of my feet on the pedals slowed. A premonition had seized me that I ought to check on the man’s house once more.

“Ha…”

If Mother had not chosen that night to sleep at a friend’s, if my aunt had set aside her grudge and contacted me, if I had simply wanted to fall asleep early, if the man had left the lights on the way he always did—then I would never have pushed the bicycle toward his house.

I only meant to see how he was living and leave. I dismounted so the wheels would make no sound and slipped into the alley. I was standing on tiptoe, peering over the white wall, when I saw them: one person lying with both arms flung wide on the main-hall floor, and another person by the outdoor faucet.

“Don’t take it too hard. The old man dotes on you so much it makes the rest of us jealous.”

“…….”

“Younger brothers are supposed to yield in these things. Eui-tae, you wouldn’t know—you never had an older brother.”

The thickset man with the soft, rounded body flicked his cigarette into the drain, then walked toward the gate. Startled, I dropped into a crouch and pressed my back flat against the wall. Luckily the visitor spat a wad of phlegm the instant he stepped outside and headed the opposite way down the road.

I watched the rough stride of the man in the black suit, heart pounding. He did not look like an ordinary person. Only after his footsteps had completely faded did I set my hands on the wall again.

The man on the floor lay utterly still, as if dead. Or perhaps he was only asleep. I needed to stop caring before the old sickness flared again. It was strange enough that the girl who had once thrown water on him should sneak over to worry. I told myself it was enough that I had seen he was alive, and I was just lowering my heels when—

“Kang Eui-joo.”