Shin Woojin had opinions about milk temperature.
This was, he understood, an absurd thing for a two-week-old infant to have opinions about. And yet. The bottle that his father prepared at 6:47 AM on a Tuesday—Woojin had developed a rough sense of time based on the light filtering through the bedroom curtains and the pattern of Dongshik’s alarm clock, which played a tinny electronic version of Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” that made him want to weep for entirely non-hormonal reasons—was approximately three degrees too warm.
He knew this not because he owned a thermometer (he owned nothing; he was two weeks old) but because he had spent two years researching the role of a single father in a 2038 indie film called Half a Spoon, during which he had learned that the ideal temperature for infant formula was between 36 and 37 degrees Celsius, matching the human body. What was currently being inserted into his mouth was closer to 40, which was not dangerous but was uncomfortable in the specific way that only someone who had once sent back a cup of coffee at the Shilla Hotel for being “aggressively tepid” could articulate.
The problem was articulation.
The problem was that he could not articulate anything.
He tried. He pulled his mouth away from the nipple of the bottle—an act that required the coordination of muscles he was still learning to identify—and produced a sound that, in his mind, was intended to convey: The temperature is slightly elevated. Could you run it under cool water for approximately fifteen seconds?
What came out was: “Euuuaahh.”
“He does not want it?” Dongshik held the bottle up to the light as if it contained evidence. “But I measured the water. I used the thermometer.”
“You used the meat thermometer,” Sooa said from the doorway. She was already dressed for work—Woojin could make out the blurred shape of her department store uniform, navy blue with a name tag that caught the morning light. “The one from the barbecue set your mother gave us.”
“A thermometer is a thermometer.”
“A meat thermometer measures from 40 to 200 degrees. It is not designed for—”
“It said 37!”
“It said 37 because anything below 40 just shows 37 on that thing. I told you to buy a baby thermometer.”
“I will buy one today.”
“You said that four days ago.”
“I will buy one today today.”
Woojin, who had been following this exchange with the resigned patience of a theater critic trapped in the back row of a bad matinee, felt the bottle return to his lips. It was still too warm. He drank anyway, because the alternative was crying, and he had cried enough in the past fourteen days to fill what he estimated was a small but not insignificant percentage of the Han River.
In my previous life, I had a personal assistant named Mr. Kang who knew the exact temperature of every beverage I consumed. Green tea at 75 degrees. Americano at 62. The glass of water I kept on set at exactly room temperature, 22 degrees, because anything colder made my vocal cords tighten.
Now I am drinking formula prepared with a barbecue thermometer by a man who thinks Polonius was Hamlet.
And somehow, despite everything, it is not the worst meal I have ever had.
The milk settled in his stomach like a warm stone. His eyes, traitors that they were, began to close.
No. I just woke up. I need to stay conscious. I need to—
He slept.
The rhythm of a newborn’s life, Woojin was discovering, was a kind of prison designed by a particularly sadistic playwright.
Act One: Wake up. Duration: unpredictable. Sometimes twenty minutes of alert consciousness, sometimes two hours. No pattern, no schedule, no logic.
Act Two: Express need. Method: crying. Variations: hungry cry (short, rhythmic, building in intensity), tired cry (whiny, trailing, accompanied by eye-rubbing that he could not yet control), dirty cry (sharp, offended, immediate), and what Sooa had started calling the “existential cry”—a low, sustained wail that seemed to have no cause and no cure and usually occurred at 3 AM.
She has no idea how accurate that name is.
Act Three: Need is met. Feeding, changing, rocking, or some combination thereof.
Act Four: Brief window of wakefulness during which Woojin attempted to exercise his mind, observe his surroundings, and maintain the cognitive faculties of a man who had once memorized a 47-page screenplay in a single reading.
Act Five: Sleep. Sudden, involuntary, absolute. Like a curtain dropping mid-scene with no warning.
Repeat. Sixteen to eighteen times per day. Forever.
The worst part was not the helplessness. The worst part was not the indignity of the diaper changes, though these tested his dignity in ways that even the most humiliating audition of his previous life had not prepared him for. (He had once, at twenty-three, auditioned for a commercial in which he was required to dance with a cartoon bear. That audition had ended his brief flirtation with advertising forever. The diaper changes were worse.)
The worst part was the forgetting.
It happened in small ways at first. He would be lying in his crib, methodically reviewing the filmography of Kurosawa—a mental exercise he had performed daily in his previous life to keep his analytical faculties sharp—and he would reach Ran and suddenly realize he could not remember whether the film was released in 1985 or 1986. A trivial detail. A detail he had known with certainty for decades. Gone.
Then it was bigger things. The name of the actress who had played opposite him in The Return. He could see her face—round, with a distinctive mole near her left ear—but the name swam just out of reach, like a fish glimpsed through murky water.
Kim… Kim something. Kim Yeon? Kim Yena? Kim—
“Woojin-ah! Look at Appa!”
Dongshik’s face filled his field of vision, enormous and blurry and beaming with the unrestrained enthusiasm of a Labrador retriever who had learned to speak.
“Who is the handsomest boy in Mangwon-dong? You are! Yes, you are!”
I was trying to remember something important.
“Look at those eyes! Sooa-ya, has his eyes always been this focused? He is looking right at me. Right at me!”
Kim Yeona. The actress’s name was Kim Yeona. She won the Blue Dragon in 2004. We had terrible on-screen chemistry but she was technically flawless.
“I think he smiled! Did you see that? He smiled!”
That was gas. I have been alive for a hundred years and two weeks, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that was gas.
But even as he catalogued the moment with his characteristic precision, something else was happening. Dongshik was close—close enough that Woojin could make out the individual features of his face for the first time with any clarity. The slightly crooked nose (broken during a stage fight rehearsal in 1998, Woojin would learn later). The laugh lines that were too deep for a thirty-year-old, evidence of a man who smiled more than the world gave him reason to. The eyes, dark and bright and utterly without guile.
He looks like a man who has never told a lie in his life. Not because he is virtuous, but because it has simply never occurred to him that lying might be useful.
In my previous life, I lied for a living. I was paid extraordinary amounts of money to make people believe things that were not true. I was the best in the world at it.
And this man—this grinning, Shakespeare-butchering, meat-thermometer-using man—is more honest in his ridiculous baby talk than I ever was in my finest performance.
Something tightened in Woojin’s chest. Not gas, this time. Something more dangerous.
No. Do not get attached. You are an observer. You are a consciousness trapped in an inconvenient body. These people are—
Dongshik scooped him up with hands that were slightly too large and immensely gentle, settling Woojin against his chest in a position that placed Woojin’s ear directly over his father’s heart.
—these people are your parents, and you have already failed at not getting attached, and it has been two weeks.
On Saturday mornings, Dongshik did vocal warm-ups.
This was, apparently, a non-negotiable part of his routine, performed rain or shine, regardless of whether he had a performance scheduled or not. Woojin learned this on his third Saturday of existence, when he was startled from a perfectly adequate nap by a sound that his infant brain initially classified as an emergency.
“Mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-MIIIIIII!”
His eyes flew open. His arms—those useless, flailing appendages that moved according to a logic entirely divorced from his intentions—jerked outward in the Moro reflex, the startle response that every newborn possessed and that Woojin found personally offensive every single time it happened.
“Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-MAAAAAAA!”
What is happening. Is someone dying. Is there a fire.
“Mo-mo-mo-mo-mo-MOOOOOOO!”
He is doing scales. My father is doing vocal scales at—
Woojin attempted to turn his head toward the window to gauge the time. The light was pale, grey, barely there.
—at what appears to be dawn. My father is doing vocal scales at dawn in a 15-pyeong apartment with a two-week-old infant.
“Pa-pa-pa-pa—”
“SHIN DONGSHIK.” Sooa’s voice, from the bedroom, carried the specific frequency of a woman who had been woken from insufficient sleep by an avoidable cause. Woojin noted, with professional admiration, that she could project without raising her volume—a skill most trained actors took years to develop.
“Oh! Sorry, sorry. I forgot—”
“You forgot you have a baby?”
“I did not forget I have a baby! I forgot that the baby sleeps.”
“All babies sleep. That is literally the main thing babies do.”
“I will be quieter.”
“You were doing the diaphragm projections. The walls in this apartment are made of cardboard.”
“I know, I know. I will do lip trills instead.”
“You will do nothing instead. You will come here and take your son, because he is awake now and I have not slept more than two consecutive hours in eighteen days.”
The apartment fell into the particular silence that follows a domestic negotiation in which one party has achieved total victory. Woojin heard footsteps—Dongshik’s, apologetic and slightly shuffling—and then he was being lifted from his crib with the care of a man handling an unstable explosive.
“Sorry, Woojin-ah,” Dongshik whispered. “Appa woke you up. Appa is sorry.”
You should be. That was a C-sharp you were aiming for on the ascending scale, and you hit a C-natural. Repeatedly.
“Let us go to the living room. Quietly. Very quietly.”
They relocated to the living room, which in an apartment this size meant traveling approximately four meters. Dongshik settled into the couch—a structure that sagged in the middle and smelled of the same floral detergent as everything else—and arranged Woojin in the crook of his arm.
For a moment, silence.
Then Dongshik began to hum.
It was not the vocal scales. It was not Beethoven or Shakespeare or any of the performance-adjacent sounds that Woojin had come to associate with his father. It was a melody—simple, slow, in a minor key that gave it a quality of melancholy sweetness, like looking at a photograph of someone you loved before you knew you loved them.
I know this song.
The recognition hit him like a spotlight snapping on in a dark theater.
“Borit-gogae.” The barley hill. A folk song about poverty, about hunger, about enduring winter with nothing but the promise that spring will come.
His grandmother had sung it. Not this life’s grandmother—the previous one. A woman he had not thought about in decades, whose face he could no longer fully reconstruct from memory but whose voice, apparently, had survived a hundred years and a death and a rebirth to find him again in the humming of a stranger who was also, impossibly, his father.
This is not fair. This is not—
The tears came. Not the hormonal tears, not the oxytocin-triggered response to physical contact. These were something else. Something older. His infant body shook with them, tiny convulsions that alarmed Dongshik into stopping mid-hum.
“Hey, hey. What is wrong? Are you hungry? No, you just ate. Cold? You are wrapped up like a kimbap. What is it?”
I am crying because you are humming a song my grandmother sang, and she died when I was forty-seven, and I did not go to the funeral because I was filming in Morocco, and I told myself it was because the production schedule could not accommodate a three-day absence but the truth is I was afraid. I was afraid because she was the last person who had known me before I became The Thousand Faces, and with her gone there would be no one left who remembered what my real face looked like.
And now you are humming her song, and I have a real face again, and she is not here to see it.
“Shhh, shhh. It is okay.” Dongshik rocked him gently, the motion transferring the steady rhythm of his body into Woojin’s. “Appa is here. Whatever it is, Appa is here.”
You are not my father, some part of him protested. The hundred-year-old part. The professional. The man behind the masks.
But the protest was quieter than it had been a week ago. And the arms holding him were warm. And the humming resumed—softer now, almost subvocal, a vibration more felt than heard, transmitted through Dongshik’s chest directly into Woojin’s body like a secret only the two of them shared.
You are not my father.
But you are holding me like one.
And I do not know how to tell you that the difference between those two things is getting smaller every day.
At three weeks, Woojin achieved his first deliberate physical accomplishment: he held his head up for four seconds.
This does not sound impressive. In the grand catalogue of Shin Woojin’s achievements—Daejong Award, Blue Dragon, Cannes Palme d’Or (the real one, Best Actor, not the honorary kind they hand out to directors who have run out of original ideas)—four seconds of cervical stability barely registers as a footnote.
But those four seconds represented a victory over physics, biology, and the cruel mathematics of infant development that he celebrated with a satisfaction usually reserved for successfully delivering a monologue in a language he did not speak.
It happened during tummy time, a practice that Sooa enforced with military discipline twice a day. Woojin was placed face-down on a blanket on the living room floor—a position he found deeply humiliating, like an actor forced to rehearse in a position that serves the director’s vision but not the performer’s dignity—and instructed, through the encouraging coos of his mother, to “lift that big head up.”
My head is not big. It is proportionally large relative to my body, as is standard for human infants, but in absolute terms it is—
He pushed. His neck muscles, tiny and undertrained and entirely unequal to the task, trembled with effort. The blanket was rough against his chin. His arms, which were supposed to provide support, splayed uselessly to the sides like the wings of a bird that had given up on the concept of flight.
Come on. I once held a handstand for forty-five seconds for a martial arts film. I trained with a Korean national team gymnast for three months. I can lift my own head.
His forehead cleared the blanket. One centimeter. Two. His field of vision, usually limited to whatever surface his face was pressed against, expanded to include the living room floor, the legs of the coffee table, and—in the far distance, as blurry and magnificent as a mountain range viewed through fog—his mother’s slippers.
Pink. Her slippers are pink. With rabbit ears.
“Oh! Dongshik-ah, look! Look!”
“What? What happened?” A crash from the kitchen suggested Dongshik had dropped something in his haste.
“He is lifting his head! On his own!”
“Already? The book says four to six weeks—”
“Forget the book! Look!”
Woojin held. Three seconds. His muscles screamed. The effort was absurd—this was the equivalent of bench-pressing his own bodyweight with a muscle group the size of a pencil eraser—but he held, because he was Shin Woojin, and Shin Woojin did not drop a scene until the director called cut.
Four seconds.
His neck gave out. His face returned to the blanket with a soft thump. He breathed hard—infant breathing, rapid and shallow and entirely insufficient for the exertion he had just performed.
“Did you see that? Did you see?” Sooa’s voice was electric with something Woojin recognized instantly: pride. Not the performative pride of award show speeches. Not the calculated pride of a parent displaying a child’s achievements for social validation. This was the real thing, raw and immediate, the pride of a woman watching her son do something extraordinary for the first time.
It was four seconds. It was nothing. Any infant will accomplish this within the normal developmental timeline.
But his mouth—traitor, collaborator, co-conspirator with every hormone his infant brain produced—curved into something that might have been a smile.
“He is smiling! He did it and he knows he did it!” Dongshik was on his knees now, his face at floor level, inches from Woojin’s. “You are a genius, Woojin-ah! You are the strongest baby in Mangwon-dong!”
I am not smiling because I am proud of lifting my head for four seconds. I am smiling because—
Actually, I do not know why I am smiling. And that, perhaps, is the most honest thing that has happened to me in a hundred years.
The first month passed in a blur of milk and sleep and the slow, incremental conquest of his own body.
By week four, he could track objects with his eyes—a development he exploited mercilessly to study his surroundings. The apartment revealed itself in degrees, like a set being built around him in real time. The living room, where most of his waking hours were spent, contained: one sagging couch (brown, floral pattern, vintage in the sense that no one would voluntarily purchase it new), one coffee table (scratched, bearing ring-marks from cups and the faint impression of a script that Dongshik had apparently edited with a heavy hand), one bookshelf (overflowing with plays, acting manuals, and a surprising number of romance novels that Woojin suspected belonged to Sooa), and one television (a CRT model that took fifteen seconds to warm up and displayed colors with the approximate accuracy of an impressionist painting).
The television became his window to the world.
Sooa watched dramas in the evenings—her one indulgence after a day of selling cosmetics to women who wanted to look like the actresses in those same dramas. She would settle into the couch with Woojin in her lap, his head supported by the pillow she had shaped specifically for this purpose, and they would watch together.
“You do not understand any of this,” she said one evening, as the lead actress of a weekend drama delivered an impassioned speech about family honor.
Her emotional arc is inconsistent. In episode twelve she established clear boundaries with her mother-in-law, and now in episode fifteen she is capitulating without any precipitating event. The writer changed, or the PD intervened. Either way, the performance is compensating for structural weakness in the script—you can see it in the way she is overacting the tears to sell a motivation that does not exist on the page.
“But you always get quiet when the sad parts come on. Dongshik-ah, have you noticed? He stops moving during the emotional scenes.”
Dongshik, who was in the kitchen pretending to clean while actually reading a play, called back: “He is a baby. Babies respond to tone of voice. It is in the book.”
“It is not just tone of voice. He—” Sooa paused. On screen, the lead actress was crying. Woojin, in Sooa’s lap, was utterly still—his eyes fixed on the screen with an intensity that even his 20/400 vision could not fully explain. “He watches it. Really watches it. Like he is… studying it.”
“You are projecting. You always wanted him to like acting.”
“I did not always want—”
“You signed him up for a ‘Baby Mozart’ class before he was born, Sooa-ya.”
“That is music, not acting.”
“You also bought him a puppet theater.”
“That was on sale!”
The argument continued, following its familiar pattern—thesis, antithesis, comedic escalation, mutual retreat into affection. Woojin had begun to recognize it as a structure, a two-person play that Dongshik and Sooa performed nightly with the ease of long practice. They argued about everything and agreed about everything that mattered. It was, he thought, the healthiest relationship he had ever witnessed from the inside.
Chaeminjung and I never argued. We negotiated. Everything was a transaction—screen time for home time, career events for family events, public appearances for private space. When Yunho was born, we negotiated his schedule like a production calendar.
We were very efficient. We were also, I now realize, completely dead inside.
On the screen, the drama reached its episode climax: the male lead, standing in the rain, declaring his love. It was badly shot—the rain machine was visible in the upper left corner, and the actor’s hair was suspiciously unaffected by the downpour—but the performance was genuine. Raw. Imperfect in a way that made it more convincing than polish would have.
He is not good, Woojin assessed automatically. His technique is crude, his voice placement is wrong for the microphone distance, and he is telegraphing the emotional beat three seconds before it lands.
But he means it. He means every word. And in this industry, meaning it is rarer than being good.
Dongshik would have played that scene better. Not more skillfully—Dongshik’s technical range is limited, based on what I have heard of his warm-ups—but with more truth. Dongshik does not know how to lie.
Which is why Dongshik is doing vocal exercises at dawn in a 15-pyeong apartment instead of standing in the rain on a soundstage.
The industry does not reward truth. It rewards the appearance of truth. And there is a difference—a vast, unbridgeable difference—that I spent a hundred years pretending did not exist.
Sooa shifted him in her lap, adjusting his angle so that his head rested against her shoulder instead of the pillow. The TV screen receded into a blur of light and sound. Her heartbeat, steady and close, replaced the drama’s soundtrack.
“You know what is strange?” she said quietly, not to Dongshik, not to anyone in particular. Just thinking aloud, the way she sometimes did when she thought Woojin was sleeping.
“When he watches the TV—when the actors are performing—he gets this look. I cannot describe it. It is not the way a baby looks at bright colors or moving shapes. It is… critical. Like he is evaluating what he sees.”
She paused. Her hand moved to Woojin’s back, the gentle circular motion she always made when she was thinking.
“And sometimes, during the emotional scenes, I see his mouth move. Just slightly. Like he is… mouthing along. But that is crazy, right? He is four weeks old. He does not know what words are.”
I was not mouthing along. I was noting that the actress’s lip movements did not match the dubbed audio in the close-up, which means they reshot the scene and the original take—the better one, almost certainly—was lost in editing.
But you noticed. You noticed something that no one should be able to notice in a four-week-old infant.
You are dangerous, Park Sooa. You are a former actress with a trained eye and a mother’s intuition, and you are going to figure me out long before I am ready to be figured out.
Woojin closed his eyes. Not because he was tired—though he was always tired, the bone-deep exhaustion of a body that was building itself from scratch—but because meeting his mother’s gaze required a kind of courage he had not yet found.
In the darkness behind his eyelids, a thought formed. Not a memory, not an analysis, not a professional assessment. Just a thought, simple and terrifying in its simplicity:
What if she already knows?
Not what I am. Not the impossible truth of a hundred years crammed into a skull the size of a grapefruit. But the other truth—the smaller, more dangerous one.
That her son is not ordinary.
And that whatever he becomes will be because of the way she holds him now—close, warm, with her hand making circles on his back and her heartbeat saying I am here, I am here, I am here—in this unremarkable apartment in Mangwon-dong, on an unremarkable evening in March of 2001, while a bad drama plays on a television that takes fifteen seconds to warm up.
The drama ended. Credits rolled. Sooa did not reach for the remote.
She held him, and she hummed—not a song, not a melody, just a vibration, a frequency, a sound that meant nothing and everything—and Woojin let himself be held, and for the second time in two weeks, he did not dream of the stage.