이 포스팅은 쿠팡 파트너스 활동의 일환으로, 이에 따른 일정액의 수수료를 제공받습니다.
# Chapter 9: What the Camera Remembers
Park Jihun had been in Jeju for eleven days when he stopped keeping track.
This was unusual for him. He was, by nature and by training, a person who tracked things — the number of hours of footage shot versus usable, the ratio of interviews completed to interviews needed, the slow accumulation of detail that would eventually, if he was patient and careful and lucky in roughly equal measure, cohere into something that resembled truth. He kept a running log in his notebook, dated and timed. He had done this since his first documentary, a twenty-minute student piece about a vanishing neighborhood in Incheon that had won a prize he was now slightly embarrassed to mention because the prize itself had since disappeared, the organization dissolved, the award ceremony a memory that existed only in his mother’s photograph albums and, now, not even there.
On the morning of the twelfth day, he woke before the alarm, lay on the narrow bed in the guesthouse room with its view of the tangerine orchard, and realized he did not know what day it was.
He checked his phone. Thursday.
He lay there for another moment, watching the light come through the gap in the curtains — not the flat grey of Seoul morning light, which arrived with the implicit judgment of a commute already late, but the particular Jeju light that seemed to come from everywhere at once, from the volcanic stone in the walls and the earth in the fields and the low clouds that rolled down from Hallasan and sat over the town like something that had forgotten where it was going. It was not a dramatic light. It was the light of a place that had been here long before anyone was watching.
He got up, picked up the film camera from the windowsill where he’d left it the night before, and took a photograph of the orchard through the glass.
Then he went to find coffee.
The café was not yet open.
He knew this — it was just past eight, and Sohyun opened at nine, a fact he had confirmed not by asking her but by noticing the pattern of lights: the back kitchen window went bright at five, the front room followed at eight-thirty, the sign on the door turned from Closed to 혼저옵서예 — welcome, please come in — at nine precisely. He had been watching the café from the guesthouse window for eleven days. Twelve, now.
He was aware this was slightly peculiar behavior.
He did not go to the café. Instead, he walked down through the stone-walled lanes toward the market, his jacket collar turned up against the March wind that came off the sea with the particular salt-edged sharpness that meant rain was coming, maybe by afternoon, maybe by evening. The island had its own weather logic, independent of the forecasts he checked on his phone. The forecasts said Thursday: partly cloudy. The wind said something else.
The market was already alive.
This was what he had not expected about Seogwipo — the earliness of it, the way the town was fully awake before Seoul had finished sleeping. The fish stall woman was arranging mackerel in overlapping rows, their silver sides catching what little light there was. The vegetable seller was stacking bundles of minari, the flat parsley-like herb that smelled of clean water and early spring. Someone was frying something in oil at the far end of the row, and the smell reached him before he could see the stall — jeon, the savory pancakes, batter and scallion and the particular satisfaction of something being pressed flat and made hot.
He raised the film camera and took a photograph of the mackerel.
He took a photograph of an old woman examining a daikon radish with the focused attention of someone reading a very important document.
He took a photograph of a child in a yellow raincoat following three steps behind a grandmother who did not appear to notice the child was there, both of them moving at exactly the same pace, at exactly the same angle, a perfect unconscious echo.
Then he lowered the camera and stood there with it hanging from his wrist, watching the market move around him the way it always did, the way markets everywhere did — the same fundamental grammar of commerce and need and the small daily transactions that constituted a life — and felt, not for the first time, the particular loneliness of watching.
This is your job, he reminded himself. This is what you’re here for.
He bought a cup of instant coffee from a vending machine at the market entrance, drank it standing up, and thought about Han Sohyun.
She had told him her name at the end of their second conversation — the one in the café with the three sugar packets — and then immediately looked as though she wasn’t sure why she’d done it. He had noticed this: the small retreat that followed any moment of openness, the way she would offer something and then pull back, not rudely, not obviously, but in the manner of someone who had learned, through some specific and unpleasant education, to be careful about what she gave away.
He had not asked about it.
This was partly professional habit — in interviews, the subjects who revealed the most were almost always the ones you let talk at their own pace, without the pressure of direct questions — and partly something else, something less calculated, which was that he recognized the habit because he had a version of it himself.
He took another sip of the terrible vending machine coffee and looked at the mackerel stall.
The woman running it was, he had learned, named Bok-soon. She had been selling fish in this market for thirty-one years. Her husband had fished the waters around the island and then, twelve years ago, had stopped, for reasons she had not specified and he had not asked about. She had two children in Jeju City. She called the fish by their Korean names with the particular affection of someone who had handled them every day for three decades, who knew the difference between a fresh mackerel and a day-old one the way you knew the difference between a person who was fine and a person who was pretending.
He had spent an afternoon with her last week, filming. She had talked about the sea, about the haenyeo who dove for abalone in the waters she could see from her stall on clear days, about the way the catch had changed over the years — fewer of certain fish, more of others, the ocean rearranging itself in ways that the old fishermen could feel but not explain. She had talked about all of this with the matter-of-fact resignation of someone who had been watching things change for a long time and had made a kind of peace with it.
At the end of the interview, she had given him a piece of dried squid and told him to eat more.
He had thought about that for three days.
He arrived at the café at nine-fifteen.
The sign had been turned. The lights were on. Through the glass of the front window he could see the room already occupied by two of the morning regulars — the older man he had privately designated the Morning Newspaper Man (he arrived with a physical newspaper every day, which Jihun found quietly remarkable) and a woman in her late thirties who came with a laptop and an expression of contained urgency and who had, on Tuesday, received a phone call that had made her close the laptop and sit very still for a long moment before answering.
He pushed open the door.
The café smelled the way it always smelled in the morning — roasted coffee dominant, underneath it the faint sweetness of whatever was baking in the back, and underneath that, so faint you might miss it, the ghost of the citrus that lived in the walls and the wood, the orange-peel memory of the warehouse this building had once been. Jihun had looked up the history of the building on his second day. A mandarin storage warehouse, built in the 1960s, operated by the Han family until the late 1990s when the storage facility was moved to a larger building closer to the main road. The old warehouse had sat empty for years. And then, two years ago, a twenty-seven-year-old woman from Seoul had signed a lease, stripped the interior down to the volcanic stone walls and the original timber ceiling joists, and built something else inside it.
He had not asked Sohyun about any of this either.
He went to the corner window table. It was empty, as it always seemed to be when he arrived — he had begun to wonder if this was chance or if she was holding it for him, and had decided it was almost certainly chance because she would have no reason to hold it for him, but the wondering persisted anyway.
He took off his jacket, put the camera on the table, sat down.
Sohyun appeared from the kitchen doorway with a tray — two plates of something for the morning regulars, handled with the particular efficiency of someone who could carry things and read a room and calculate three separate tasks simultaneously without appearing to be doing any of them. She set the plates down, said something to the newspaper man that made him snort with dry amusement, and then she turned and saw Jihun.
She didn’t smile, exactly. It was more that her face did something small and involuntary — a slight shift in the set of it, the way a landscape shifts when a cloud moves off the sun. He was fairly certain she didn’t know she’d done it.
“You’re early,” she said, coming to his table.
“The market was already open.”
“The market opens at six.”
“I know. I bought coffee from the vending machine.”
Her expression communicated, without words, what she thought of the vending machine coffee. It was very efficient, that expression. It conveyed a complete aesthetic and philosophical position in approximately half a second.
“Sit down,” she said. “I’ll bring you something that actually tastes like coffee.”
She said it the way she said most things — not unkindly, but without the question mark that would have made it an offer rather than a direction. He had noticed this too. She gave instructions the way people did when they had spent a long time being responsible for the comfort of others and had learned that the most efficient path was to simply tell them what was good for them and then provide it.
He sat down. He watched her go back behind the counter.
She brought him, ten minutes later, not a menu item but a small ceramic cup of something she set on the table without explanation, followed by a plate with two pieces of toast spread with something dark orange and fragrant.
“What is this?” he asked, looking at the cup.
“Hallabong pour-over. Single origin from a farm about three kilometers from here. The orange spread on the toast is from the same fruit — I make it at the end of the season when there’s more fruit than we can sell.” She paused. “It’s not on the menu. We ran out of the printed menu cards for it.”
He picked up the cup and smelled it first — the habit of someone who had learned to take in information in the right order. The coffee smelled of itself and also, underneath, of something floral and faintly sweet, as though the roasting process had retained some memory of the orchard.
He drank.
The taste was exactly what the smell had promised: coffee that knew where it came from.
“This is very good,” he said.
“I know,” she said, and sat down across from him.
He looked up.
She looked slightly surprised at herself. As though she had not planned to sit down, had found herself sitting, and was now evaluating whether to stay or to construct a reason to leave.
She stayed.
“The orange spread,” he said. “Your family’s farm?”
“My grandfather’s.” She said it with the particular neutrality of a person discussing something that had too many layers to address directly. “He’s been growing hanrabong on the same land since the seventies. My grandmother used to make the spread. I learned from her, before she died.”
“Your grandmother was a haenyeo.”
She looked at him. “How do you know that?”
“Mi-young ajeossi — the woman at the떡 stall in the market. She mentioned it when I was asking about the dive sites.” He paused. “I wasn’t asking about your family specifically. It came up.”
Sohyun looked at the table for a moment. Outside, the wind moved through the mandarin trees visible over the stone wall, and the branches made their dry March sound, not quite rustling, more like a very distant conversation being held in another language.
“Her name was Han Boksun,” Sohyun said. “My grandmother. She dove until she was sixty-three. She said the sea got colder every year, toward the end. Not the actual temperature — she meant something else. She meant the sea was different.” She stopped. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
“Because I asked,” he said.
“You didn’t ask.”
“I mentioned it. Which is close enough.” He turned the ceramic cup in his hands. “The woman I’ve been interviewing for the documentary — Bok-soon, at the fish stall — she talks about the sea the same way. Like it’s a person who changed.”
“It is a person. To them.” Sohyun straightened slightly. “To the haenyeo, the sea has a name and a temper and specific moods. You don’t go in when it’s in a certain mood. You learn to read it the way you’d read someone you love. Or someone you’re afraid of.”
She stopped again. This time the stopping felt different — less like running out of words and more like arriving somewhere she hadn’t intended to go.
“Your grandmother,” he said carefully. “She taught you the spread. What else did she teach you?”
The question sat between them.
Outside, the wind picked up and the mandarin branches moved again, and somewhere behind the café wall a door opened and closed, and the newspaper man turned a page with the deliberate sound of someone who was not listening.
“To keep the lid on the pot,” Sohyun said finally. “She used to say: you can always take the lid off later. But once the steam’s gone, you can’t put it back.”
He looked at her.
“She was talking about doenjang jjigae,” Sohyun added. “Soybean paste stew. You can’t rush it or it loses the depth.” A beat. “But she wasn’t only talking about doenjang jjigae.”
She left the table to attend to the morning newspaper man’s second coffee and to take the order from the woman with the laptop, who wanted a piece of the hallabong tart and then changed her mind and then changed it back, a decision-making process that Sohyun navigated with the patient diplomacy of someone accustomed to people who were not sure what they wanted.
When she came back, she did not sit down again.
She stood at the edge of the table with the carafe in her hand and said, “What exactly are you filming? For the documentary.”
“The haenyeo. Specifically the ones in their seventies and eighties who are still diving. The way the practice is being passed down — or not being passed down.” He turned the film camera so she could see the front of it. “This is for the personal record. The documentary is digital.”
“Then why bring this at all?”
He considered the question seriously, the way she had noticed he considered most things — not pausing for effect, but actually thinking.
“Film makes you slow down,” he said. “Each frame costs something. You can’t just shoot a thousand images and sort through them later. You have to decide, in the moment, what’s worth keeping.” He set the camera down. “I bring it to remind myself that not everything should be recorded. Some things should just be seen.”
Sohyun was quiet for a moment.
“That’s a strange thing for a documentary filmmaker to believe,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed.
She refilled his coffee without being asked and went back to the counter.
At ten-thirty, Mi-young arrived.
She came in the way she always came in — with the velocity of someone who had too much to do and was doing it anyway, her market apron still on, her hair escaping from the bun she’d made of it sometime before dawn, carrying a bag that clinked with the sound of glass jars.
“Sohyun-ah!” she called, before the door was fully open. “I brought the sikhye. The rice drink. The grandmother at the end of my row made too much and told me to bring it to you because she says you looked thin last week.”
“I didn’t look thin last week,” Sohyun said from behind the counter.
“You looked thin to Grandmother Park, which is the same thing.” Mi-young set the bag on the counter with the decisive sound of a task completed and then turned and noticed Jihun at the corner table with the directness of a woman who noticed everything and was not subtle about it. “Ah. The filmmaker is here again.”
Jihun raised a hand in greeting.
Mi-young looked at him, then at Sohyun, then back at him, with the speed of someone running a rapid and not particularly discreet calculation.
“You’re the one doing the haenyeo documentary,” she said, pulling up a stool at the counter with the ease of someone who had been using this particular stool for two years. “I heard about you from Boksoon-eonni at the fish stall.”
“She’s been very helpful with the project,” Jihun said.
“She’s been helpful because you complimented her mackerel.” Mi-young accepted the cup of sikhye that Sohyun poured for her and drank half of it in one go. “What are you going to do with the film? Who watches this kind of thing?”
“It’s for broadcast. KBS documentary series, initially. Then probably an international streaming release.”
Mi-young’s eyebrows rose with the particular appreciation of someone who understood the value of an audience. “International.” She looked at Sohyun again. “Did you know about this?”
“We met four days ago,” Sohyun said.
“And he’s been here every day since,” Mi-young said, in a tone that was entirely factual and somehow not factual at all.
Sohyun’s expression did the thing where it became very carefully neutral, which Jihun was beginning to understand was her version of an involuntary response.
“He’s a customer,” she said.
“A customer who comes every day,” Mi-young said agreeably, “and sits at the same table, and stays until closing.” She drank the rest of her sikhye. “My first husband did that too. Came to my mother’s tteok stall every day for a month before he said anything useful.”
“Mi-young ajeossi,” Sohyun said.
“I’m just saying.”
“Please stop saying.”
Mi-young smiled into her empty cup with the serene confidence of someone who had no intention of stopping.
The conversation shifted, the way conversations in the café always shifted when Mi-young was present — her attention moved from subject to subject with the kinetic energy of a person who was genuinely interested in everything, and the room adjusted itself accordingly, the way a room does when someone with a large presence enters it. She told Sohyun about the new permit application for the market expansion (complicated, probably futile, but she was submitting it anyway), about the man from Jeju City who had come last week asking about the commercial properties on the lane (she had told him nothing useful, which was a lie because she had told him everything while appearing to tell him nothing, the particular skill of a market woman who understood information as currency), and about the haenyeo grandmother who had made too much sikhye and who was also, incidentally, worried about the land.
“Which land?” Sohyun asked.
“The ridge land. The flat piece between the orchard road and the coastal path.” Mi-young set down her cup. “Someone’s been measuring it. One of the young men from the market saw them last week — two men in city shoes, walking the perimeter with those electronic things.”
Sohyun’s hands stilled on the counter.
“Measuring it,” she repeated.
“Walking the boundary. Writing things down.” Mi-young’s voice had lost its lightness — not dramatically, but in the way that voices lose lightness when they arrive at the thing they have been building toward. “Your grandfather’s land goes up to that ridge, doesn’t it? The back section, where the old greenhouse is?”
The question landed in the café like a stone in still water.
Jihun watched Sohyun’s face.
She was very still. Her right hand, which had been about to pick up a cloth from the counter, had stopped moving — suspended in the small space between intention and action, caught there by whatever Mi-young’s words had just done to the architecture of her morning.
“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was level. Too level — the specific flatness of a person controlling something carefully. “I’d have to check the land records.”
“Check them soon,” Mi-young said, not unkindly. “These city people move fast when they decide they want something.”
The café was quiet for a moment. The newspaper man had gone. The woman with the laptop had left sometime in the last hour. It was just the three of them and the sound of the wind outside and the faint creak of the old warehouse ceiling, which Sohyun had told him on some occasion was the sound of the building settling, that old buildings did it, that she had learned to find it comforting rather than alarming.
Jihun turned the film camera over in his hands.
He had not raised it. He would not raise it — not for this, not without asking, not for the specific expression that was on Sohyun’s face right now, which was the expression of someone receiving news that confirmed a fear they had not yet fully admitted to having.
He put the camera in his jacket pocket.
“Is there a public registry for land parcels?” he asked. “I can help look. I’ve done a lot of research on property records for previous projects — coastal development zones, that kind of thing.”
Both women looked at him.
Mi-young’s look was warm and assessing.
Sohyun’s look was different. It was the look she gave things she was trying to decide about — the same look she’d given the question of whether to sit down earlier, the same look she’d given her grandmother’s recipe, probably, and the conversation about the sea, and every piece of herself she had offered and then reconsidered.
“Why would you do that?” she asked.
“Because it would be useful,” he said simply.
She looked at him for another moment. Then she picked up the cloth from the counter and began wiping the surface, and she said, to the counter rather than to him, “The registry office is on Jungang-ro. It opens at nine.”
“I’ll go tomorrow morning.”
She didn’t say anything. But she didn’t say no, either, and in the specific language of Han Sohyun — which he was beginning, carefully, to learn — that meant something.
Mi-young left at eleven with the empty bag and the particular satisfaction of someone who had done a morning’s worth of useful things.
At the door she paused and looked back at Jihun with the frank directness that seemed to be her default mode.
“Come to the market Saturday,” she said. “There’s a grandmother who dove with Sohyun’s grandmother. She’s ninety-one and she still has opinions about everything. She’d be good for your film.”
“I’d like that,” Jihun said.
“Good.” She looked at Sohyun. “Feed him properly. He’s been eating vending machine coffee.”
“That’s not food,” Sohyun said.
“Exactly my point.” And then she was gone, the door swinging shut behind her with the particular energy of Mi-young’s exits — slightly more forceful than necessary, slightly more cheerful, as though doors were things that should be given a clear and unambiguous message.
The café was quiet again.
Sohyun began moving between the tables, tidying what didn’t need tidying, her hands doing the work of occupation while whatever was happening in her head did its own work.
Jihun remained at the corner table.
He should leave. It was nearly eleven. He had footage to review, notes to organize, a call with his producer in Seoul that he had already postponed twice and could not postpone a third time. He had a job and a timeline and a reason for being on this island that had nothing to do with the land registry office or the ridge behind the orchard or the specific expression on a woman’s face when she heard news that frightened her.
He did not leave.
After a while, Sohyun stopped tidying and stood at the counter with both hands flat on the surface, looking at the wall above the espresso machine where she had hung three photographs in mismatched frames: an aerial view of the island that looked like it had been cut from a travel magazine; a close-up of a hallabong blossom, so detailed you could see the individual stamens; and a photograph of an old woman in a diving suit standing knee-deep in the sea with her arms at her sides, her eyes closed, her face tilted toward something above the frame.
Jihun looked at the photograph for a long time.
“Your grandmother,” he said.
“My grandmother,” she said.
The wind moved through the mandarin trees outside. The ceiling made its settling sound.
“The land record,” he said. “When was the last time you checked it?”
Sohyun didn’t answer immediately. He waited, the way he had learned to wait in interviews, in the silence that was not empty but full of the thing the person had not yet decided to say.
“When I came back two years ago,” she said finally, “my grandfather showed me the survey map. The farm, the orchard, the back section. All of it. He walked me through every boundary marker.” She paused. “He knew every one. Every stone, every tree that marked a corner. He knew the land the way he knew the trees — by name, almost.”
She stopped.
The weight of the next sentence was already in the room before she said it.
“He might not remember where the boundaries are now,” she said. “If someone asked him. If someone came with papers and city shoes and asked him to show them.” Her voice remained steady, with the effort that steadiness required. “He might not remember.”
Jihun was very still.
This was the thing she had been afraid of, he understood now — not the measuring men in city shoes, not the development rumors that Mi-young had been circling all morning, but this: the specific vulnerability of a man who knew his land and was losing his knowing, and what that vulnerability meant for the land he had spent a lifetime keeping.
“I’ll go to the registry office,” Jihun said. “First thing tomorrow. I’ll get copies of the parcel records — the original survey, the current ownership, any recent filings. If there’s been any activity on the title, it’ll be there.”
Sohyun turned from the wall of photographs.
She looked at him the way she had looked at him several times now — with the evaluating quality that he was beginning to understand was not suspicion but something more complicated, the look of someone who had learned through specific and unpleasant experience that people offering help were not always offering what they appeared to be offering.
“You’re a documentary filmmaker,” she said. “Not a lawyer.”
“I know how to read public records. And I know what to look for.” He paused. “I’ve spent three years documenting what happens to places when development moves in without warning. I know the early signs.”
She was quiet.
“What do you want in return?” she asked.
The question was asked simply, without accusation, in the tone of a person who had learned to ask it because the alternative was worse.
He thought about it honestly.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m already here. The registry office is ten minutes from where I have to be tomorrow anyway.” He looked down at the table, at the film camera, at the empty coffee cup. “And I’d like to know what happened to your grandmother’s diving grounds. For the documentary. If you’re willing to tell me.”
Sohyun looked at him for a long moment.
Then she went to the counter and came back with two fresh cups of coffee — the hallabong pour-over again, both cups — and set one in front of him and one across from him, and she sat down.
“My grandmother’s name was Han Boksun,” she said. “She was born in 1934. She started diving at fourteen.”
Jihun did not take out the camera.
He listened.
Outside, the first of the rain arrived — a soft, insistent sound against the stone wall, against the old warehouse roof, against the mandarin trees that stood in their rows in the field beyond, patient and dark-branched and already, under the bark, preparing for the blossoms that were still weeks away.
Inside the café, Sohyun talked, and he listened, and the coffee went slowly cool in their cups, and neither of them reached for it.
She was still talking at noon.
He had missed the call with his producer. He would miss it again tomorrow, probably, and the day after, and his producer — a practical woman named Choi Yoonji who had known him for seven years and had developed a finely calibrated sense of when he was following something important versus when he was simply avoiding the editing suite — would leave a voicemail in the particular tone of someone who suspected the former and was trying not to say so.
At twelve-fifteen, Sohyun stopped in the middle of a sentence about the diving grounds and looked at the clock above the door.
“You missed your call,” she said.
“How do you know I had a call?”
“You looked at your phone twice while I was talking.”
He hadn’t noticed he’d done that.
“It can wait,” he said.
She looked at him with the evaluating quality again. Then she said, “I’ll make lunch. You can tell me what the land records are likely to show.”
She stood up and went to the kitchen, and he heard the sound of the refrigerator opening, the clatter of a pan, the particular rhythm of someone who cooked the way they moved — economically, without wasted motion, the body knowing where things were without having to look.
He turned the film camera over in his hands.
He did not take a photograph of the doorway to the kitchen, where the light from the back window fell in a specific way at noon, catching the edge of the hanging apron and the dried lavender tucked into its pocket, turning them both the color of something important.
He thought about it.
He put the camera in his pocket.
Some things, he had said, should just be seen.
He was beginning to understand that he had meant it.
She made doenjang jjigae.
He did not comment on the choice. He suspected she had not planned it consciously, had simply opened the refrigerator and made what was in it, and that the choice was the kind of thing that happened when a person’s hands knew more than their mind did at any given moment.
She brought it to the table with rice and a small plate of kimchi and the specific absence of ceremony that characterized her approach to feeding people — no announcement, no apology for the simplicity, no performance of the preparation. She set it down and sat across from him and picked up her own spoon.
He kept the lid on the pot until she removed it.
The steam rose, and with it the smell of fermented soybean paste and tofu and the dried anchovies that had been cooking underneath everything else, doing the invisible work of making the broth taste like the sea.
“Your grandmother,” he said, “the one who told you to keep the lid on.”
“Yes.”
“She was right about more than the stew.”
Sohyun looked at her bowl. “She was right about almost everything,” she said. “Which made it harder, when she was gone.”
He ate, and she ate, and the rain came down steadily now against the old warehouse walls, and somewhere in the land registry on Jungang-ro, in a filing cabinet or a database or a stack of documents that no one had looked at in years, there was a piece of paper that described the boundaries of a man’s life’s work, and the question of who had been looking at it recently, and what they had been looking for.
Jihun ate the last of his rice.
“I’ll be at the registry office when it opens,” he said.
Sohyun nodded once, the way she did when a thing was decided and she was not going to make a ceremony of it.
He watched her set down her spoon and look out the window at the rain, at the mandarin trees moving in the wet wind, at whatever she was seeing beyond them.
He thought: I have been here eleven days. Twelve. I have enough footage for the documentary. Choi Yoonji has told me three times that I have enough footage.
He thought: The registry office opens at nine.
Outside, the rain came down, and the trees moved, and somewhere on the road that ran between the café and the ridge, a car passed slowly, the way cars passed slowly when they were not going somewhere but looking at something, the way you looked at something you were thinking about buying.
Sohyun didn’t see it.
Jihun did.