Chinese Trumpet Creeper
The unbearably hot days slipped by, and before I knew it summer vacation was drawing to a close. Aunt secretly hoped Mother would call, but Mother—having discovered just how happy life could be without her older sister’s interference—had become a free woman in every sense of the word.
Aunt had money to spare, and even if they weren’t her own flesh and blood she had three sons. She also had a wealthy husband who sought her out with almost frightening devotion. Mother, by contrast, had watched her income shrink after a new salon with modern equipment opened nearby; the side job she once took on for amusement she now had to beg for.
When Aunt had been looking after me, Mother had sent me off to the reading room in town without a second thought. Now she asked me to study only at home for the time being. It was true I kept my grades up without cram school, yet the little room was nowhere near as good an environment as the downtown reading room.
Watching the two of them live their lives made me turn over and over the question of what happiness really meant. Even with money like Aunt’s, even with a beloved child like Mother’s, neither of them looked particularly happy. If I entered a company as a full-time employee the way Mother wanted, if I married a man with decent prospects the way Aunt wanted—would that neatly complete the conditions for happiness?
“Hey.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you finish studying for today?”
The word “Oppa” had not yet fully settled on the man’s ears or on my tongue. About ten days remained until school reopened on the twenty-fourth of August. The GED exam also fell in August, but the man had already decided he would take it next April. He had poured a great deal of time into mathematics. When I asked whether that meant he was heading for the sciences, he said he still didn’t know where he wanted to go.
“Not yet.”
The man never lifted his eyes from the book, like a true bookworm. In sheer talent for finding interest in studying itself he already outstripped me. Someone had forced him to begin, yet thanks to that his life seemed to have brightened.
“Language is a bit…”
“Huh?”
I had finished watching him and was about to concentrate on my own exam prep when he picked up the thread of conversation. Looking up, I found him with his eyes lowered in embarrassment.
“I’m a little stuck.”
The man who had once found final consonants so hard that he rarely read books still struggled with expressions and reading passages. But time would take care of that soon enough.
“Listen.”
“Yeah.”
“Want to take a test this Saturday?”
“A test?”
“Like the real thing. I’ll pick out the questions.”
Once summer vacation ended I would not be able to come over as often as I did now. There was night self-study at school, and if I ran even a little late Mother would come to fetch me. We might still meet on free Saturdays and Sundays, but with classes to consider, careful scheduling would be essential.
“It’s not enough. I still need to study more.”
So, secretly, I was stacking bricks of farewell inside my heart. Look at him—he had no idea, not even in his dreams. A person’s true feelings are known only to that person. Just then, as I turned my head, my eyes caught an orange flower that had bowed all the way down to the wall. It was only a single bloom wilting under the heat, yet the sight of it lit my heart with joy.
“There’s a Chinese trumpet creeper blooming here too.”
“Chinese trumpet creeper?”
The man followed my gaze to the flower that had climbed over the wall. His eyes held little interest.
“I heard that if you touch one of those and rub your eyes you can go blind. Be careful.”
To look at the same flower and feel so differently. The man calmly picking up a rice cake and eating it without ever lifting his eyes from the passage suddenly struck me as funny. The glutinous rice cakes he was eating were the ones Mother had brought home in a whole bundle from the factory. She had told me to call friends later and share them; instead they had all become his. A fatal flaw of glutinous rice cakes is that they are almost impossible to eat neatly. Sure enough, white powder clung to the corner of his mouth. A snicker escaped my lips; at the sound of that breath he raised his head.
“What.”
“Is the rice cake good?”
“Yeah.”
“They said it’s from a famous shop. But, um, your lips… a little.”
I pointed exactly to the spot, yet he only shook his head.
“It’ll just get on again anyway.”
“Brush, eat, brush, eat.”
“Eat and brush.”
“Ha.”
You had to give him credit for his single-minded devotion to food. He never coveted what belonged to others, but he clung tenaciously to his own. Stuffing an entire rice cake into his mouth and puffing out his cheeks, he looked exactly like a squirrel preparing for winter. I tried to hold it in, but empty laughs kept leaking out.
“I’m really sorry, but it’s too funny.”
“You too.”
“I’m the boring type. Model student.”
“You’re not a model student.”
“Then what am I?”
“You come here and hang out with me. So you’re not a model student.”
“Am I a delinquent?”
The man who had suddenly stopped chewing stared straight at me. Living in stopped time, he hurriedly clapped a hand over his own mouth.
“Ha!”
Then he collapsed onto the table, covering his face. His trembling shoulders measured exactly how hard he was laughing. Amazing—to make that man who seemed to be missing a screw laugh this much. Whenever my friends called me the boring model student Yang Ji-eon, I would have to tell them today’s episode: that I had made the strangest, most taciturn man in the world clutch his belly laughing.
“Haha!”
To swallow the rice cake he drank the orange juice in his cup. Wiping his mouth with a tissue as if I had ordered him to, he went around dropping little laughs everywhere.
“You should have seen the look on your face just now when you asked if you were a delinquent.”
Talking to himself, laughing by himself, the man had a full-blown fit of laughter. You know those moments—when no one else is really laughing and you’re the only one rolling on the floor. He was stuck in exactly that state.
“Ha…”
After watching him for five full minutes I caught the laughter too. The hot summer was stepping back, knowing its turn was over. Yet we blushed on both cheeks and laughed like children splashing water in a valley stream. Whenever one person’s laughter faded the other’s began, so it was as if we had been trapped inside an endless cycle of laughter.
And then I did the one thing I should never do. You must not make promises at the moments when emotion overwhelms reason—when you feel your best, or your worst, and so on. But that day, because I had seen the flower I loved, because the weather was as mild as spring, because the man laughing with his eyes crinkled was beautiful—because of all that, I made a promise.
“If you take the test and score above average…”
Still carrying the remnants of laughter, the man looked across at me with a bright gaze. His mouth, wearing an expression that said let’s see what you’re talking about, was tinged with playfulness.
“If I do. Will you buy me a meal or something?”
That was too ordinary. We had eaten meals yesterday and today as well. A desire to give him something more special than that rose in my mind. Just because. No reason.
“I’ll give you a bicycle.”
“A bicycle?”
“When the bus doesn’t come you keep walking. And you’re impatient by nature.”
Aunt had just bought me a new one, so my old bicycle had become a problem to dispose of. No one needs two bicycles. Even if it was the one I was used to, if I fixed it up a little and gave it to him, wouldn’t that be fine?
“It’s the one I used to ride, if that’s okay with you.”
“That must be expensive.”
Better to give it to the man I might see coming and going than haul it off to the scrap dealer.
“It’s not expensive at all. You can change the color however you like—paint it or whatever.”
I thought it was fine even if he didn’t particularly want it. Offering a used bicycle as a prize was more or less the same thing. These were only words I had blurted out on impulse because I was in a good mood. I also remembered the time the bus never came and he had walked an hour and a half. With those complicated feelings I held out the bicycle as a reward; he accepted it with utter simplicity.
“Okay.”
“Great.”
“Dinner.”
“Yes.”
“How about omelet rice.”
When I nodded he abandoned the book and headed for the kitchen. Soon a savory smell filled the house, and in thirty minutes he brought out a mounded plate of omelet rice. I had thought I wouldn’t be able to eat after the rice cakes so soon.
“It’s delicious.”
“Eat a lot.”
Winking one eye as if out of habit, he picked up his own spoon. He ate like a growing teenager in his prime and took a nap when the time came. I wondered if that was his private secret for healing so quickly.
“In middle school Eui-joo said he was hungry, so I made it for him once.”
Around the time half the omelet rice was left, the man suddenly brought up an old memory. The rice that had been going down smoothly caught in my throat. Barely managing to swallow the grains, I nodded in agreement.
“I bet he liked it. It’s delicious.”
“It wasn’t tasty then. I was a middle-schooler too, and it was my first time cooking.”
“But Eui-joo would have eaten it happily, right? Because he was kind.”
“Kind.”
The man who had returned from beyond the memory scooped the omelet rice with slowed hands. His gaze fixed on the yellow rice was extremely cold and lazy.
“So I don’t know about other times. But every time I eat omelet rice I think of him.”
“…Did you want to think of him today?”
After all, he was the one who had first suggested omelet rice. As if he hadn’t thought that far, a vague longing rose in his eyes. Perhaps the mourning and blank expression that had once seemed abnormal were simply the result of a grief too large to bear. Someday, if I ever met Eui-joo, I wanted to tell him:
Your older brother missed you terribly.
That day’s omelet rice was delicious. It was omelet rice in which the salty taste of salt, like tears, came through clearly.