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The question of whether he would be allowed to stay up until midnight had not technically been asked.
This was Sooa’s approach to certain negotiations: not raising the subject until the hour made it unavoidable, at which point the circumstances themselves had decided and the question was moot. He had been watching her do this for six years. He found it, as a technique, admirable.
At nine-thirty, she said: “A-jik jal su iss-eo?” (Can you still sleep?) Not go to bed—can you sleep. The distinction was precise. Can you sleep acknowledged that sleeping and going to bed were separate things and that insisting on the latter when the former was impossible was counterproductive. He had not thought she had noticed this distinction. She had noticed everything.
“A-ni-yo.” (No.) Honest.
“Geu-lyeo-myeon iss-eo-bwa.” (Then stay.) Simple. Case closed.
December thirty-first. The last day of 2007.
The apartment had the specific texture of New Year’s Eve, which was different from Christmas Eve in the way that the two holidays had entirely different social grammars: Christmas Eve was couples and anticipation; New Year’s Eve was families and retrospection, the specific mood of a year being assessed before it ended. The TV had been on since seven with the countdown programming—the 보신각 coverage, the performers at various stages around the city, the commentators noting what the year had been.
He had watched some of it. Not with the attention he gave to theater or to his father rehearsing—half-attention, the attention you gave to background, which still received and filed things. The year had been noted: economically this, politically that, in entertainment such-and-such. Numbers. Faces he recognized from his father’s industry, briefly.
He had his own accounting.
His father was on the sofa with his feet up and his script in his lap, which was the position of someone doing two things at once—New Year’s Eve and the second act of the February production—because the February production was still happening regardless of December thirty-first, and the second act had a problem in the blocking that he’d been working on since the Saturday rehearsal. Woojin could tell it was a blocking problem rather than a line problem from the way his father’s hands were moving: the hands moved when it was blocking, tracing the paths, the stage in the air.
Sooa was at the kitchen table with her phone and a cup of tea. The phone had its yearly rhythm: the messages arrived in batches on December thirty-first, the year-end greetings that the Korean social calendar required and that she answered methodically. He could hear the specific tap-tap of the responses.
He was on the floor between the sofa and the TV with a book he wasn’t reading.
This was the apartment’s New Year’s Eve geometry: his father’s feet, his mother’s tea, his book that wasn’t being read, the TV with the 보신각 coverage, the year concluding in the usual way.
He closed the book.
What was 2007?
He thought about it the way he thought about things that mattered—with the full attention, not the half-attention of the TV. He lay on the floor on his back and looked at the ceiling and thought about what the year had been.
The year had been:
June. His father coming into the kitchen on a Saturday morning—the rain starting at two o’clock—and saying dae-sa and handing him the text he had written that morning, printed on paper that still smelled of the printer. The persimmons in the text, Kim Boknam’s hands, the beauty of a thing fully used. The August rain on the window and his mother in the kitchen starting dinner and the two of them on the living room floor with the pages between them. Geu-go-ya. That’s it.
November. The theater. Twenty rows back. His father on stage carrying everything he had, and the thing going somewhere, arriving in the audience like his father had described in August, going to the somewhere that the audience was. The empty stage with the chair gone and the table gone and the warm square of light. Na-do jeo-gi seo-go-sip-eo. Said to the air, then said to his father’s face in the lobby. Al-a. I know.
December. The rehearsal room in Mapo with the green wall and the tape on the floor and Cho Minsu who had recognized what Woojin said about his father. The year-end play and the three seconds and the calibration going. The kitchen conversation through the wall on Christmas Eve. His father at the edge of his bed: fine, and also not fine. That’s living.
These were the things of 2007. The year had also been: kindergarten Wednesdays with tangerines, Siwoo spinning, Jiyul’s grandmother-shuffle and the smiling sun, the drawing table with the house that had deliberate wrong lines. It had also been: Mangwon market in the autumn, the persimmons arriving the way they always arrived, the fish stall, the specific smell of the Saturday mornings. The bus to Mapo. The 분식집 떡볶이 his father ordered without looking at the menu.
All of that was 2007.
He lay on the floor and held it.
In a hundred years, he thought, I have not had a year like this one.
He turned this over. It didn’t seem right—a hundred years was a long time, and he had lived substantially in all of it, had had years of first things and last things and things he’d spent decades processing. And yet. The specific quality of 2007, seen from the floor of the apartment on its last night: something here that had not been available in the previous hundred years, in all that living.
I was a child this year, he thought. For the first time in this life, I was actually sometimes a child. Not the performing of it. The thirty seconds in the courtyard. The three seconds at the year-end play. The moments on the living room floor when the text was right and the observer left. There were actual moments when I was six years old without performing six years old.
He hadn’t had that before. He had managed and calibrated and monitored for six years before that. The being-without-performing—that was new.
That is what the year was.
“Eong?” His father, looking up from the script. Looking at Woojin on the floor.
“Mwo saeng-gak-hae?” (What are you thinking about?)
He had not realized he’d made a sound. Something—not a word, just a sound, the sound of arriving at something.
“Il-nyeon.” (The year.) He said it to the ceiling.
His father set the script down. He had the look from August—the one that meant: this is a real conversation, not a side conversation. He was giving it his full attention.
“Eo-ttae-sseo-yo, il-nyeon-i?” (What was the year like?)
He thought about how to answer this in the available language. “Everything” was true and insufficient. He found the part that fit in words.
“Gong-gi-ga eo-di-it-neun-ji—jo-geum al-at-eo-yo.” (I found out a little where the air goes.) The language from the rehearsal room, applied to the whole year. The year was the year I found out a little where the air goes.
His father looked at him.
“Eung.” (Yeah.) Then: “Appa-do.” (Appa too.)
This was unexpected. He looked at his father.
“Appa-do ol-hae?” (You also, this year?)
“Woo-jin-ah—” His father paused. Chose the words. “Appa-do hana bae-woss-eo. Neo-han-te-seo.” (Appa learned one thing. From you.) He said it simply—not performing sentiment, just: true. “Cheong-jung-i eob-seo-do gayal gos-i iss-dago.” (That there’s somewhere it has to go, even without an audience.) The line from August. Woojin’s line. Returned.
He looked at the ceiling. His father had taken the August conversation and carried it for five months and was returning it now, at the end of the year, as something he had tested against the world and found to still be true.
“Geu geo—appe-ga han mar-i-janha-yo.” (But that’s something you said.) In August. The conversation about the audience and the meaning.
“Eo.” (Yeah.) His father’s voice with the slightly-embarrassed quality of someone being caught in an acknowledgment. “Geu-laen-de—neo-ga han mar-in-de appa-ga ol-hae jin-jja-ro al-at-eo.” (But—you said it, and appa really understood it this year.) He looked at his son on the floor. “2월-e il-gop sal-i dwae-janha.” (You’re turning seven in February.) The observation that meant: you are still six. And you said that in August. When you were six.
“Ne.” (Yes.)
“Geu-go-ya.” (That’s it.) His father. The acknowledgment that needed no elaboration.
Sooa came in from the kitchen at eleven. She brought three cups of sikhye—the sweet rice drink, the New Year’s Eve drink—and set them on the low table. She sat beside Woojin’s father on the sofa. She looked at Woojin on the floor.
“Il-eo-na.” (Get up.) She patted the space beside her on the sofa. “Bae-gga an-a-ppa?” (Isn’t the floor hurting your back?)
He got up and sat on the sofa. Sooa on one side, his father on the other. The TV with the 보신각 coverage, the countdown approaching.
“Myeot-si-gat-eo?” (What time is it?) He knew what time it was. He asked for the ritual.
“Sip-il si ban.” (Eleven thirty.) She handed him the sikhye. The cold sweetness of it, the small grains of rice at the bottom, the specific taste that was only ever this drink and nothing else.
He drank. The apartment was warm. Outside, Seoul was doing its year-end thing—the city louder than usual in a specific way, the accumulated sound of a million people deciding how to mark the turning of something.
“Appa.” He looked at his father.
“Eung.“
“Mae-nyeon i-raet-eo-yo?” (Is it like this every year?) Meaning: the three of us, the apartment, the sikhye, the TV.
“Eung.” His father said it with the warmth of something confirmed. “Dde-ro gat-eo.” (Pretty much the same.) Then: “Neo ga tae-eo-na-gi-jeon-e-do.” (Even before you were born.) He and Sooa in this apartment on New Year’s Eve, before February 2001, before the child on the sofa between them. The same sikhye, probably the same TV channel, the same city outside.
“Geu dde-do jo-ass-eo-yo?” (Was it good then too?)
His parents looked at each other over his head—the look between them that he had learned to read as: we have discussed this before, in our private language, and the answer is yes.
“Eung,” Sooa said. (Yeah.) Then: “Geu-laen-de—jig-eum-i deo jo-a.” (But—now is better.) She said it the way she said true things: without decoration, just true.
He sat between them and drank his sikhye and felt the specific warmth of that—jig-eum-i deo jo-a—land in him and stay.
The 보신각 coverage shifted. The crowd in Jongno was visible from the aerial camera—the mass of people, the specific Seoul winter crowd, bundled against the December cold, looking up at the bell.
He had been at the 보신각 once in his previous life—not on New Year’s Eve, not for the bell, but on an ordinary afternoon in his fifties, walking through the area between shoots. He remembered the bell as a physical object: large, bronze, older than any building around it by several centuries, the specific quality of an object that had survived by being too heavy and too important to destroy. He had looked at it for two minutes and walked on. He had not thought about what it was for.
He looked at it now on the TV. The aerial shot pulling back to show the crowd and then the city behind the crowd, Seoul in the dark with its lights, the density of it, the specific pattern of a city that had built itself at speed and had not stopped building.
This is the city I’m in, he thought. This specific city, in this specific century, in this apartment, between these two people. He had been in many cities in his previous life—had lived in and traveled to and worked in the places that film and theater required. He had been in Seoul for all of it, the backdrop constant, but he had not been in it the way he was in it now.
I am from here, he thought. Not from the year I was born in—not from the time before. From here. The apartment. The Mangwon market. The bus to Mapo. Kim Boknam’s hands. The year-end play and the three seconds. His mother’s sikhye. His father’s script in his jacket pocket.
This is where I am from.
He had not thought this before—not in these words, not with this specific weight. He had been managing the two things: the hundred years before and the six years here, the previous life and the current one. He had been managing them as two things. And somewhere in 2007, without deciding to, he had started thinking of here as from, not as in-addition-to. Not the place I ended up. The place I’m from.
The countdown on the TV. Numbers descending.
Sooa reached over and touched the back of his head—the small contact, the New Year’s Eve gesture, nothing required of him. He leaned into it slightly. The achy impulse toward his mother that the first few years had embarrassed his hundred-year-old self, the impulse he had stopped fighting because fighting it was the performance and accepting it was not, and the not-performing was the direction of things.
“Yeol, a-hop, yeo-dul—” The TV’s countdown, the anchor’s voice.
His father put his arm around Woojin’s shoulders. Light. Present.
“—il-gop, yeo-seot, da-seot—“
The three of them on the sofa in the apartment that was theirs.
“—net, set—“
The city outside building toward the bell.
“—dul—“
Everything that was 2007, he thought, received.
“—hana—“
The bell rang.
The sound of the 보신각 bell coming through the TV was not the same as being there—he understood this, had always understood this about mediated sound—but it carried enough. The specific frequency of bronze, the duration of it, the way it spread rather than stopping, the wave of it going out.
The crowd at Jongno cheered. The city made its year-end sound.
He sat between his parents and heard the bell.
There it is, he thought. 2008.
His mother said “sae-hae bok man-i ba-deu-syo” (may the new year bring you much good fortune) in the formal register, which she used once a year at exactly this moment. His father said it back. They said it to him. He said it to them.
Then the formal register ended and the apartment returned to itself.
“I-je jayo?” (Now sleep?) Sooa, looking at him.
He thought about whether he could sleep.
He probably could, now. The year had been accounted for. The bell had rung. The thing that needed marking had been marked.
“Ne.” (Yes.)
She stood up. He stood up. His father remained on the sofa—he would stay up a little longer, the script still in his lap—and looked at his son with the look that was the year-end look, the specific look of a man who had learned one thing from his six-year-old and was seeing the six-year-old at the year’s last moment.
“Ja-la.” (Sleep well.)
“Ne.” He hesitated. Then: “Appa—ol-hae-do—” (Appa—this year too—) He didn’t finish the sentence. He wasn’t sure exactly what the end of it was. Something about: thank you for the August lessons. Thank you for coming to the year-end play. Thank you for sitting at the edge of my bed on Christmas Eve and saying fine-and-not-fine. Thank you for the text about Mangwon market that you wrote for me on the morning it rained.
His father looked at him and received the unfinished sentence.
“Geurae,” he said. (Right.) I know what you mean. Me too.
He went to his room.
2008.
He lay in the dark and held it.
February: seven. The birthday that ended the sixes, the year of the living room floor and the year-end play and the thirty seconds in the courtyard. March: school. The elementary school that was three blocks away, which he had walked past every day since he was old enough to walk three blocks, and which had a specific smell of its own that was different from the kindergarten smell—more serious, the smell of a building used by older children. And the 극단. Whatever that was becoming.
Three things coming. Three things to navigate. All of them requiring the thing he had been learning this year: where the air goes. And better than yesterday. Only that.
He thought of the bell.
In his previous life he had heard the 보신각 bell approximately ninety-five times, give or take. He had been present for three of those and the rest had been through television or radio or the ambient sound of a city marking its year. He had never, in any of those ninety-five hearings, felt it the way he had felt it tonight on the sofa between his parents.
Because I was actually here, he thought. Not performing being here. Actually here.
The Christmas tree lights in the other room had been turned off. The apartment was dark. His father was still in the living room, probably—the script, the blocking problem—but quietly, the quiet of someone working in the new year’s first hour.
This was a good year, he thought. The thought arrived as a fact, not a performance. This was a genuinely good year. Not perfect—the 극단, the September thing, the under-conversation his parents were having—and not without the ongoing difficulty of the role that nobody asked him to play. But good. The August rain and the text written for him. The theater in November. The thirty seconds and the three seconds.
The year I found where a little of the air goes.
The year I started from here.
He let his eyes close.
Outside, Seoul was continuing its year-end work, the city doing what it did regardless of any one person’s accounting of it—the bells already fading, the crowd dispersing, the new year already underway with no particular fanfare, the same city one second later, no different, and completely different.
He was six years old for forty-seven more days.
Then seven.
Then school.
Then whatever came next.
Better than yesterday, he thought.
That is all it has to be.
He slept.