Chapter Five
The social creature that even he was, if he were not to hear a voice for long even those boats in the lake would have been a discomfiting image—interspersing his conceptualization of them in depersonalized momentum. He wanted to call Kwang Sook to hear her voice but also to cancel his classes. He didn't need so much money. His former boss had deposited some of the owed money after the issue had gone to the Department of Labor. He wanted to go back to Seoul but classes were his equanimity. They personalized his world in a professional and impersonal manner that gave him fortitude to float through the expanse of his existential turns where it seemed that there were no other sailors.
Maybe, he thought to himself, he would go into a video pang later and let drama absorb him in a personal intimacy with a fictional entity of depth and substance. He had no misgivings. His life was a stunted one. Still, back in Chongju, he made the call and cancelled his classes. Then, near the bus terminal, he went to a restaurant. He ordered some bogum bop, a thick mixture of rice and vegetables that one mixed into a thick brown gravy that stood off aside on the plate and the appetizer of kimchee maundu. Alone, eating and reading a Newsweek he pulled out of his bag, he began to wonder of the lives of those that owned or managed the restaurant. Their area was shielded only behind sliding doors. Behind the tables and the chairs, their living area consisted of just one space. A girl came out and he could see within it clothes drying on a plastic rack and a small television that was on the floor. Then a man came out with a baby in his arms. He wore an undershirt and boxer underwear. The women cooked. Then, after they served Sang Huin a second helping of kimchee maundoo, they put breakfast on a table for the family. They all ate together. Like Yang Lin at Toksugum Palace seeing newlyweds and the wife he should have been, Sang Huin saw his alter ego in the man. His life was probably limited. A wife and children pinned him into a small existence with family commotion and responsibilities. It floated in non-ambitious swaying like a plastic boat on ripples in a bathtub. It probably droned on in its unaware and insignificant tedium through the years, but it had its connections.