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# Chapter 6: The Man with the Film Camera
The first thing Sohyun did when she got back to the café was wash the insulated bag.
This was not strictly necessary — the container had been sealed, nothing had spilled — but her hands needed something to do, and the bag’s cartoon polar bears were looking at her with their mild, indifferent faces in a way that felt, just then, like an accusation. She ran the tap until the water was hot enough to matter, squeezed in the dish soap, worked the cloth into the corners. The kitchen smelled of doenjang still, faint and fermented, and underneath it the sharper smell of the cleaning solution she used on the counters every morning. These were the smells of the café’s back room, the private room, the one that no customer ever saw. She had come to love them more than the front-of-house smells — the roasting coffee, the orange peel, the warm bread — precisely because they belonged to no one but her.
He knew exactly where he was. That was what she kept returning to. He knew the trees. He knew which branch had been grafted in 1987, he knew which hanrabong had survived the typhoon in 2002. He knew all of that and he could not find his own front door.
She wrung out the cloth and hung it over the edge of the sink.
This was the shape of it, she was beginning to understand. Not a continuous forgetting, not a fog that descended and stayed. A patchwork. Some things held, some things slipped, and the terrible part — the part she did not yet have words for — was that she could not predict which would be which on any given day. Today he had known her name. He had known the trees. He had not known how he’d ended up in the back row of the greenhouse in his socks.
She could work with the things he knew. She could not work with the spaces between.
Jungah had left the café in its usual end-of-afternoon state: chairs tucked in, surfaces wiped, the day’s leftover pastries boxed and labeled for the morning regulars who expected them. She had also, as she always did, left a small handwritten note on the counter with the day’s summary. Not because Sohyun had asked her to. Just because Jungah was twenty-two and had decided that notes were part of doing a job properly.
3/15 Wed. 11 customers after you left. Two hikers from the Olle trail asked about group bookings. Hanrabong scones sold out by 1pm. Refilled the citrus tea display. Mi-young ajeomma stopped by at 2:30 to drop off rice cakes (the green ones, not the sesame ones, she said to tell you specifically). One man came in around 3 and asked for the menu but didn’t order anything and just sat for a while. I gave him water. He left around 5. Did not seem like trouble, just quiet.
Sohyun read the note twice.
The rice cakes were on the counter in the flat plastic container Mi-young always used, the green ones, the mugwort kind with the bean paste inside. She picked one up and ate it standing at the counter, still in her jacket, and the bitterness of the mugwort and the sweetness of the filling were exactly the right combination for a day that had been too much of one thing and not enough of another.
One man came in and asked for the menu but didn’t order anything.
She put the note down.
This happened sometimes. The café attracted the occasionally lost — hikers who came in off the Olle trail wanting to rest their feet, tourists who had taken a wrong turn looking for the more famous cafés closer to the coast, people who had read about Healing Haven on some travel blog and arrived expecting something glossier than what they found. They usually ordered something eventually, or they didn’t and they left, and it was fine either way because Sohyun had not built this place to be exclusive.
But the detail nagged at her. Just quiet. Jungah had a good instinct for people; she would not have noted it if it had been ordinary quiet.
She was pulling the chairs down from the tables the next morning — Thursday, not a Wednesday, the routine different — when she heard the door.
The café did not open until eight. It was seven forty-three. The door was unlocked because Sohyun was always there before eight, always, and she had decided two years ago that a locked door before opening felt like a refusal, felt like the café saying not yet, not you, and she had not been willing to say that to anyone who had made their way down the lane at seven forty in the morning needing something warm.
She turned around.
The man standing in the doorway was not from Jeju. She knew this the way she knew most things about people who came through her door: not from a single detail but from the accumulation of them. He was wearing good boots — not hiking boots, but the kind of boots a person buys in Seoul when they’ve decided to spend a week somewhere with uneven ground and want to be prepared without looking unprepared. Dark jacket, the kind with too many pockets that outdoor gear companies made for people who spent most of their time in cities but liked to feel ready for conditions. He was carrying a small canvas bag over one shoulder and, in his other hand, a camera that was not a phone and not a DSLR but something older — the compact rectangular shape of a film camera, the kind that had to be wound between shots.
He was looking at the café the way people looked at things they were trying to memorize.
“We don’t open until eight,” Sohyun said. Then, because the door was open and he was already inside and she was not actually going to make him stand in the morning cold over seventeen minutes: “But come in if you want.”
He stepped inside. His eyes moved across the space in the particular way of someone who was used to looking — not the unfocused sweep of a tourist taking in the general vibe, but something more deliberate. Ceiling beams. The old wooden floor. The row of small succulents on the windowsill that Mi-young’s daughter had given Sohyun last summer and that had, against all probability, survived. The chalkboard menu behind the counter. The two haenyeo diving suits hanging on the wall, the ones that belonged to Grandma Hyun, who had asked Sohyun to keep them for her when her hands got too bad for the water.
He looked at the diving suits for a long time.
“They’re real,” Sohyun said. “She still comes in every Tuesday for the citrus tea.”
The man turned to look at her. He had a quiet face — not blank, but quiet the way certain landscapes were quiet, where the stillness was a result of things being settled rather than empty. Late twenties, she thought. Maybe just thirty.
“I was here yesterday,” he said. “I didn’t order anything. I’m sorry.”
“The girl who was working mentioned you.”
“I meant to order. I just—” He stopped. Started again. “I kept trying to decide what I wanted and then I ran out of time.”
Sohyun looked at him for a moment. There was something true in the way he said it — not apologetic, not performing embarrassment, just accurate. Like someone describing a fact about themselves they’d noticed but hadn’t yet figured out what to do with.
“You can sit,” she said. “I’ll bring you the menu. This time you don’t have to decide anything.”
His name was Park Jihun. He told her this when she brought the menu, not because she’d asked, but because the alternative seemed to be sitting in someone’s café for the second day in a row without having introduced himself, and he had apparently decided this was slightly worse than volunteering the information.
“Han Sohyun,” she said.
“I know. It’s on the sign outside.”
She had forgotten about the sign. It had been there for two years and she had stopped seeing it.
He ordered the citrus tea. Not the coffee — and Sohyun’s coffee was, she knew without vanity, worth ordering, because she roasted the beans herself in the small roaster in the back room and she had spent eight months getting it wrong before she got it right. But he had ordered the citrus tea, which meant either he didn’t drink coffee or he was paying attention to something else. She made the tea and brought it to his table — the corner one by the window, the one that looked out at the lane and the low stone wall beyond it and, if the morning was clear, the far dark suggestion of Hallasan above the tree line.
It was clear this morning. The mountain was there.
She set the cup down in front of him. He was looking at the window, not at her, and she saw him notice the mountain with a kind of recognition that was different from the usual tourist reaction, which was to reach for a phone. He didn’t reach for anything. He just looked at it.
“You’re not a tourist,” she said.
It wasn’t a question, but he answered it. “Documenting haenyeo culture. For a series I’m working on.” He paused. “I’m a documentary filmmaker. PD. I’m based in Seoul but I’ll be here for three months.”
“Three months is long.”
“The subject is long.” He picked up the tea, held it in both hands for a moment before drinking. The steam rose between his face and the window, and through it Sohyun could see the mountain still there, immovable, the way it always was. “It’s also — I wanted to get it right. Usually I go somewhere for three weeks and leave. This time I wanted to stay long enough to actually understand something.”
Sohyun thought about this.
“What do you have so far?”
He looked at her then. The question seemed to catch him slightly off-guard — not uncomfortable, just recalibrating. “Permission from two haenyeo in Hwasun to film their morning dives. A lot of footage I’ll probably cut. And about forty rolls of film.” He glanced at the camera on the table beside him. “Not for the documentary. Just for me.”
“Film,” Sohyun said. She didn’t mean it as a comment, exactly. Just noting the fact.
“It slows me down,” he said. “That’s the point. You can’t just shoot everything and sort it out later. You have to decide before you press the shutter. You only have so many frames.”
The café filled up at its usual pace: the two hikers who had been staying in the pension at the end of the lane for three days and who came every morning and ordered the same thing — Americano, hanrabong scone — without speaking to each other or to anyone else in a way that suggested either very comfortable companionship or a disagreement that was being waited out. Then Grandma Boksun, who was eighty-one and lived two lanes over and came every Thursday for the hallabong tart and spent forty-five minutes reading the community newsletter before going home. Then a family of four from the mainland who had clearly expected something glossier and spent five minutes looking at the menu with slightly confused expressions before the mother ordered two lattes and a juice for the children and they settled in and, eventually, the children started drawing on the paper placemats Sohyun kept for exactly this situation.
Jihun sat at his corner table with his tea, which he refilled once, and watched all of this without appearing to watch it. He had a quality Sohyun noticed in certain people — a kind of peripheral attentiveness, the ability to observe without making the observed feel observed. She had seen this in the old haenyeo women too, the ones who had spent decades reading the surface of the water for what lay beneath it.
She did not think about this connection consciously. It was just something she noticed and filed away.
At half past nine, when the first rush had settled and Jungah had arrived and was handling the counter with her customary competent indifference, Sohyun carried her own coffee to the small table by the kitchen door — not a customer table, just a chair and a low stool she used for her own brief rests — and sat down.
From here she could see Jihun’s table. He was writing in a small notebook, the kind with the elastic closure. His tea was finished.
She had been thinking, since he had said it, about the forty rolls of film. About deciding before you pressed the shutter. You only have so many frames. It was not the way she thought about things — she thought about most things as revisable, as drafts, the café itself having been a series of revisions over two years, the menu changing with the seasons, the arrangement of tables adjusted and readjusted — but she understood what he meant. There was a discipline in limitation. She had seen her grandfather prune the mandarin trees in winter, cutting back the branches that looked healthy but were using energy the tree needed elsewhere, and she had asked him once why he cut the ones that seemed fine, and he had said: A tree that tries to hold everything can’t hold anything properly.
She hadn’t understood it then. She was beginning to.
At ten o’clock, when the family with the children was gathering their things to leave and Grandma Boksun was folding her newsletter with the careful precision of someone who planned to read it again later, the door opened and Mi-young came in.
This was not unusual. Mi-young came in most days, either in the morning before the market got busy or in the afternoon when the lunch rush was over, and she almost always brought something — a piece of fruit, a container of banchan, the occasional small fish that Sohyun was never entirely sure what to do with but always accepted graciously. Today she was carrying a plastic bag and wearing the expression she wore when she had information she considered important and had been physically restraining herself from delivering.
“Sohyun-ah,” she said, in the particular tone that meant she was about to say more than Sohyun was ready for this early in the morning.
“Mi-young ajeomma.” Sohyun stood up from her stool. “The rice cakes last night were perfect. Tell your sister—”
“Never mind that.” Mi-young set the bag down on the counter, glanced briefly at Jihun’s table — clocking him, cataloguing him, filing him under a category Sohyun couldn’t name — and then turned back to Sohyun with both hands flat on the counter. “You heard about the Jeong family’s land?”
Sohyun had not heard about the Jeong family’s land.
“The two parcels up past the second Olle waymarker. Jeong Gyutak’s father’s fields. They sold.” Mi-young’s voice had the tight, controlled quality of someone delivering news they were angry about. “Not to another farmer. Not to someone from Jeju. To a company. Seoul company. They sent two men in nice cars last month and now apparently the papers are signed.”
Sohyun felt something shift in her chest. Not panic — she was good at not letting things become panic — but a specific kind of attention, the kind that sharpened when something moved that was supposed to stay still.
“Which company?”
“Haneul Construction. You know them? Big mainland company. They’ve been buying up land all over Jeju for two years.” Mi-young picked up a rag from the counter and wiped the surface that Jungah had already wiped that morning, not because it needed wiping but because she needed something to do with her hands. “They’re building something near Seogwipo coast. Some resort thing. But this land — the Jeong land — that’s not coast land. That’s Olle trail land. That’s inside the village.”
“Maybe it’s just—”
“Don’t say maybe,” Mi-young said, sharply enough that Jungah looked up from the espresso machine. Then, lower: “Sohyun-ah. That land is five hundred meters from here. From this café. And I heard — I heard from Jeong Gyutak’s wife, who heard from the man at the Seogwipo city office who handles permits — that they filed a preliminary survey request for this whole stretch of the Olle trail corridor. Preliminary. Meaning they’re looking. Meaning they’re already looking.”
The café was quiet except for the sound of the espresso machine and the muffled conversation of the hiking couple, who were pulling on their jackets to leave.
Sohyun looked at her hands on the counter.
Five hundred meters.
She thought about the lane outside. The low stone wall. The way Hallasan looked through the corner window on a clear morning. She thought about the haenyeo suits on the wall and Grandma Hyun’s Tuesday citrus tea. She thought about her grandfather’s farm, which was not five hundred meters from here but which was, she knew without looking at a map, within the general geography of this stretch of the Olle trail corridor.
“Who else knows?” she asked.
“Everyone will know by this afternoon. But I wanted you to hear it from me first.” Mi-young picked up her plastic bag. “I brought perilla. For the kitchen.” She said this with the particular Mi-young efficiency of someone who could discuss the potential destruction of their community and still make sure you had fresh herbs for the week.
After she left, the café felt different. Not louder. Not quieter. Just — different in the way a room felt different after someone said a true thing in it.
Jihun was still at his corner table.
She hadn’t forgotten he was there. She was, in fact, acutely aware that he had heard everything — Mi-young was not a quiet woman at the best of times, and she had been standing three meters from his table. Sohyun looked at him now, not accusingly, just frankly, the way you looked at someone when you’d been overheard and there was nothing to do about it.
He met her eyes and said nothing.
She appreciated this more than she would have appreciated him saying something.
She brought the coffee pot to his table — the good blend, the one she’d roasted herself, not the house blend she served to people who hadn’t asked for anything specific — and filled his empty tea cup without asking. It wasn’t the right cup for coffee and they both knew it, but neither of them mentioned it.
“Haneul Construction,” he said. He was looking at his notebook, not at her. “They’ve been acquiring land in three coastal counties. I know their name.”
“From the documentary work?”
“From paying attention.” He turned a page in the notebook. “The haenyeo in Hwasun told me last week that a man in a suit had come asking about the fishing rights on the eastern cove. They’d said no, but he’d come back twice.”
Sohyun sat down across from him. She hadn’t meant to sit — there was a list of things to do before the lunch service, the bread dough was resting and needed folding, Jungah was covering the counter but the delivery from the market was due — and yet she sat.
“Did they say what company?”
“They said a man in a suit. The haenyeo in Hwasun don’t distinguish much between companies. To them it’s all the same category.”
“They’re not wrong.”
He looked up at that. Something moved across his face that she didn’t have a name for yet — not quite a smile, not quite something heavier, just a quick adjustment, like a shutter opening and closing.
“No,” he said. “They’re not.”
The morning light was coming through the window at a low angle, the way it did in March before the sun climbed properly, and it fell across the table between them — across his notebook and her coffee pot and the wrong cup full of the right coffee — and for a moment the café was very still, the way it sometimes got between rushes, when all the previous noise had settled and the next noise hadn’t started yet.
“You said you wanted to stay long enough to actually understand something,” Sohyun said.
“Yes.”
“What do you do when you understand something and you don’t like what you understand?”
He was quiet for a moment. Outside, a motorbike passed on the road, its sound Dopplering away toward the coast.
“I film it,” he said. Then: “Usually.”
She noticed the usually. She thought he had meant her to notice it.
The bread needed folding. She stood up, excused herself, went to the kitchen. She punched down the dough — hanrabong zest folded into a basic white loaf, the zest from the fruit her grandfather had pressed into her hands yesterday before she left, three perfect hanrabong that she had taken without being able to say anything because what was there to say, you don’t say anything, you just take the fruit — and she worked the dough with her palms and the heels of her hands, pressing and turning, pressing and turning.
Five hundred meters.
She thought about the twelve-minute drive. She thought about her grandfather in his socks in the back row of the greenhouse. She thought about the half-eaten bowl of rice on the table with the chopsticks balanced across the rim.
She thought about a man in a suit who had come back twice.
The dough was elastic now, slightly warm, the zest releasing its smell as she worked it — sharp and citrus and clean, the smell of the farm, the smell of something that had been growing for three generations on the same ground, tended by the same family, through typhoons and price drops and the long slow change of the island’s relationship with the mainland and all of its money.
A tree that tries to hold everything can’t hold anything properly.
She shaped the loaf, covered it, set it to rise.
When she came back out, Jihun was still at his corner table. He had taken out the film camera and was holding it in his hands, not raising it, just holding it the way she had noticed him hold the tea earlier — both hands, a kind of steadying. He was looking at the diving suits on the wall.
She watched him for a moment from the kitchen doorway.
He had said he wanted to understand something. She believed this was true. She was less certain what it meant to have a person like that — a person who watched, who recorded, who made documents of things that were ending — sitting in her café at this particular moment, when the things she had built her life around were possibly beginning to be threatened.
Useful, she thought. And then, because she was honest enough with herself to follow a thought to its uncomfortable end: And I’m not sure I’m comfortable with how quickly I thought that.
She was wiping down the counter at a quarter past eleven when Jungah leaned over and said, quietly, “The man in the corner. He’s been here since before we opened. Should I — do you want me to say something?”
“No,” Sohyun said. “He’s fine.”
Jungah accepted this with her customary lack of further comment. She went back to the espresso machine.
Sohyun looked across the café to the corner table.
Jihun had his notebook open again. He was writing something, and then he stopped writing and looked out the window, and then he wrote something else. The film camera sat on the table beside him, untouched. On the other side of the window, the lane was in full mid-morning light now, the stone wall casting its short shadow, a cat she recognized as belonging to the pension at the end of the lane sitting on top of the wall and washing its face with an air of complete self-sufficiency.
She thought about what Mi-young had said. I wanted you to hear it from me first.
She thought about the Jeong family’s land. Five hundred meters. A preliminary survey request. A man in a suit who came back twice.
She thought about her grandfather’s farm and the way he had stood among his trees with his hands in his pockets, the trees he had known by name since before she was born, and she thought about what it would mean if someone came for those trees with papers and nice cars and the language of development.
She picked up her coffee cup and held it in both hands.
The warmth of it was grounding. Specific. Real.
At his corner table, Jihun looked up from his notebook and found her looking at him, and she didn’t look away, and neither did he, and in the silence that followed there was something that was not yet named but was beginning to take the shape of a question neither of them had asked yet.
Then the door opened.
The man who walked in was wearing a suit.