Chapter 2: Sesame Oil
The subway car smelled like wet umbrellas and fried chicken, and Dojun couldn’t stop smiling.
It was Saturday morning, five days after he had woken up in Professor Kim Taesik’s lecture hall with forty years of memories crammed into a twenty-year-old skull, and the simple act of riding Line 4 toward Hoehyeon Station felt like a miracle. The seats were the same hard plastic he remembered. The announcements played in the same automated female voice. A middle school student across from him was playing a game on a chunky Samsung phone, thumbing the keypad with the intensity of a concert pianist.
2006. A world without smartphones, without social media feeds, without the constant digital noise that had filled every waking moment of his previous life. The silence was extraordinary. People on the subway were reading newspapers, actual physical newspapers, or staring out the window, or sleeping. Nobody was scrolling. Nobody was filming. Nobody was performing their lives for an invisible audience.
I forgot what this felt like, Dojun thought. Being present without a screen telling you where to look.
The past five days had been a careful exercise in restraint. He had attended his classes—Computer Architecture with Kim Taesik, Data Structures with a professor whose name he had forgotten and now relearned (Dr. Yoon, a quiet woman with a devastating talent for pop quizzes), Introduction to Algorithms, and a liberal arts elective on Korean history that his twenty-year-old self had chosen to fill a requirement and his sixty-three-year-old self now found genuinely fascinating.
He had answered questions when called upon, but carefully. After the Von Neumann incident, he had calibrated his responses to sound smart but not impossibly so—the level of a diligent student who read ahead, not a time-traveling industry legend who had literally written the textbook’s next edition.
He had gone to Professor Kim’s office hours on Wednesday, as instructed. The meeting had been brief and businesslike. Kim had explained the research project—optimizing embedded systems for a new generation of Korean-made processors—and Dojun had nodded along, pretending this wasn’t technology he could have improved in his sleep.
“You’ll start by reading these papers,” Kim had said, sliding a stack of printouts across his desk. “I want summaries by next week. One page each, no filler.”
“Yes, Professor.”
“And Park?” Kim had looked at him over the top of his glasses. “Don’t disappoint me. I don’t give second chances often.”
You have no idea, Dojun had thought, how much a second chance is worth.
Now, on Saturday, the subway slowed as it approached Hoehyeon Station. Dojun stood, gripping the overhead handle with a hand that still surprised him with its strength and smoothness, and joined the flow of passengers toward the exit.
Namdaemun Market hit him like a wall of sound and smell.
He had forgotten—or rather, he had spent forty years deliberately not remembering—how overwhelming it was. The market sprawled across several city blocks in the heart of Seoul, a labyrinth of narrow alleys and covered passages crammed with thousands of stalls selling everything from ginseng to hanbok fabric to knockoff designer bags. The air was thick with competing aromas: roasting chestnuts, bubbling fish cake broth, sesame oil, garlic, the sharp tang of kimchi in various stages of fermentation, and underneath it all, the earthy, human smell of a place where people had been buying and selling for six hundred years.
Vendors shouted over each other in a constant overlapping chorus. “Fresh mackerel! Caught this morning!” “Socks! Three pairs, five thousand won!” “Ajumma, try this! Best red pepper paste in Seoul!”
Dojun navigated the maze on autopilot, his feet remembering the turns his conscious mind had forgotten. Left at the dried seafood section, right past the fabric wholesalers, through the gap between two clothing stalls where you had to turn sideways to fit, and then—
There it was. A stall barely two meters wide, wedged between a knife sharpener and a vendor selling plastic containers. A hand-painted sign hung above the counter: Park’s Banchan — Homemade Side Dishes. Below it, in smaller letters: 30 years of tradition.
And behind the counter, arranging plastic containers of kongnamul and doraji with the precise movements of someone who had done this ten thousand times, was his mother.
Park Younghee. Fifty-two years old. Five foot two in her market shoes, which had an extra inch of sole because she refused to use a stepping stool. Her hair was tied back in a practical bun, streaked with the first threads of gray that she would later dye black because “customers don’t want to buy banchan from an old woman.” She was wearing her usual market outfit—a thick apron over a padded vest, rubber gloves, and sneakers that had been white once, in a previous geological era.
She looked up when she sensed someone standing at the counter, and her face transformed. Not with surprise—she had told him to come—but with a particular expression that Dojun had spent decades trying to recall and never quite managing. It was pride and worry and love and exasperation, all compressed into a single look that only Korean mothers could produce.
“Aigoo, you actually came! Did you eat? You look thin. Are you eating properly? I told you to eat before you came!”
“I ate, Mom.”
“What did you eat?”
“Ramyeon.”
“Ramyeon!” She said the word like it was a war crime. “That’s not food! Sit down. I have kongnamul-guk from this morning, and there’s some jeon left over from yesterday’s batch.”
“Mom, I’m fine, really—”
“Sit. Down.”
Dojun sat. There was a plastic stool behind the counter, the same stool he had sat on as a child while his mother worked, doing homework by the light of the bare bulb overhead. The stool was cracked and held together with duct tape. He had offered to buy her a new one, once, in his thirties. She had said “This one works fine” and that was that.
His mother produced a bowl of kongnamul-guk from somewhere—she seemed to have a parallel dimension behind the counter where food materialized—and set it in front of him with a pair of chopsticks and a spoon. The soup was clear and fragrant, with fat bean sprouts floating in broth seasoned with garlic and dried anchovies. Steam rose in lazy spirals.
He tasted it, and something inside him broke.
Not dramatically. Not with tears or sobs. Just a quiet fracture, like a hairline crack in glass, as the taste of his mother’s kongnamul-guk—exactly the same, exactly as he remembered it, unchanged across forty years and one death and one impossible resurrection—settled on his tongue.
“Good?” his mother asked, watching him with sharp eyes.
“The best thing I’ve ever tasted.”
“It’s just bean sprout soup, Dojun-ah. Don’t be dramatic.”
“I’m not being dramatic. I mean it.”
She studied him for a moment, then shook her head and went back to arranging banchan. “You’re strange today. You were strange on the phone, too. Is something wrong at school?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“Is it a girl?”
“Mom.”
“What? You’re twenty. It’s normal. When I was twenty, I was already married to your father.” She paused, and the practiced cheer in her voice dimmed slightly. “Well. That didn’t work out. But the point is, you should be meeting people, not just staring at computers all day.”
“I meet people.”
“Computers don’t count as people, Dojun-ah.”
He laughed. It was the first genuine laugh he’d had in—well, in forty years, really. His mother looked startled, then pleased, as if she had been trying to make him laugh for years and had finally found the combination.
A customer approached the stall, a woman in her sixties with a shopping cart and a discerning expression. His mother shifted into sales mode with the seamless professionalism of a veteran.
“Ajumma! Today the japchae is especially good. I used the sweet potato noodles from the new supplier in Cheonan. And the kkakdugi—I put extra radish this batch, just how you like it.”
“How much for the japchae?”
“For you? Three thousand won. But take two containers and I’ll make it five thousand.”
“Last week it was two thousand five hundred.”
“Last week the sweet potato noodles weren’t from Cheonan. These are premium, ajumma. You’ll taste the difference.”
Dojun watched his mother negotiate with the fluid grace of a Wall Street trader. She never lost a sale, but she never undersold either. Every price was a carefully calibrated balance between the customer’s willingness to pay and the minimum she needed to keep the lights on and her son in college.
In his previous life, he had been embarrassed by this. A market vendor’s son, in a country where status was everything. His classmates’ parents were professors, executives, doctors. His mother sold side dishes from a stall the size of a parking space.
He had never brought a friend here. He had never invited Hana, even after they started the company together. He had kept his mother at a distance, visiting rarely, calling less, building a wall of success between himself and the woman who had built him from nothing.
The customer left with two containers of japchae and one of kkakdugi, looking satisfied. His mother counted the bills and tucked them into the apron pocket that served as her cash register.
“Mom,” Dojun said. “How’s business been?”
She waved a dismissive hand. “Fine, fine. The construction upstairs is driving away foot traffic, but it’ll pass. Why?”
“I want to help. On weekends. I can come and—”
“Absolutely not.” She turned to face him with an expression that could have stopped traffic. “You are in college. Seoul National University. Do you know how many mothers in this market would kill to say their son goes to SNU? You study. You get good grades. You get a good job at a big company. That is how you help me.”
“But—”
“But nothing. I didn’t work thirty years in this market so my son could come back and sell banchan. I worked thirty years so my son could do something better.” She softened, just slightly. “Besides, you don’t know the first thing about making japchae. You’d scare away my customers.”
“I could learn.”
“Learn computers. That’s your japchae.”
He wanted to tell her everything. That he had already learned computers, learned them so well that he had changed the entire industry, built a company worth more than every stall in Namdaemun Market combined. That he had already gotten the good job at the big company, and then a bigger job, and then the biggest job, and none of it had been worth a single bowl of her kongnamul-guk.
But he couldn’t say any of that. So instead he said, “I’ll come every Saturday.”
“Every Saturday? The subway fare—”
“I’m entering a coding contest. The prize is five hundred thousand won. If I win, that’s subway fare for a year.”
His mother’s eyes widened. “Five hundred thousand? For playing with computers?”
“It’s not playing, Mom. It’s—” He stopped. He’d had this argument a hundred times. “Yes. For playing with computers.”
“Well then play hard and win,” she said, with the pragmatic ferocity of a woman who understood competition in her bones. “And when you win, save the money. Don’t spend it on nonsense.”
“I won’t.”
“And eat something besides ramyeon.”
“I will.”
“And call me more often. You never call.”
“I called you four times this week, Mom.”
She paused, conceding this with a slight nod. “That was nice. Strange, but nice. Keep doing it.”
He stayed at the market until three in the afternoon, watching his mother work. He helped where she let him—carrying boxes of vegetables from the delivery truck, restocking containers, cleaning the counter between customers. She scolded him the entire time (“You’re doing it wrong,” “That goes on the left, not the right,” “Don’t stack the kimchi on top of the japchae, it’ll leak”), but he could see the pleasure in her eyes. Her son was here, in her world, and that mattered more than she would ever say.
Between customers, they talked. Real talk, the kind Dojun hadn’t had with his mother since he was a teenager.
“Your uncle Sangchul called,” she said, wiping down a cutting board. “He wants to know if you’ll tutor his daughter in math. She’s in middle school, failing everything.”
“I’m not great at math.”
“You got into SNU for computer science. You’re great at math.”
“Those are different kinds of math, Mom.”
“Math is math. Will you do it? He’ll pay you twenty thousand won per session.”
Twenty thousand won. In his previous life, he had turned down the tutoring because he thought it was beneath him—a future tech genius, wasting time on a middle schooler’s quadratic equations. In retrospect, it was twenty thousand won per hour that he desperately needed, and a connection to his family that he had carelessly thrown away.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “Tell Uncle Sangchul I’ll start next weekend.”
His mother beamed. “Good. Family helps family. That’s how we survive.”
That’s what I forgot, Dojun thought. That’s exactly what I forgot.
On the subway home, Dojun pulled out a notebook and began to plan. Not the grand, world-changing plan he had sketched in second_chance.txt, but the practical, immediate plan of a twenty-year-old student with three hundred thousand won, a Compaq Presario, and Internet Explorer 6.
The coding contest was in three weeks. Five hundred thousand won would double his savings and—more importantly—give him a public, documented reason for his coding ability. If he was going to build anything in the next few years, he needed a reputation. Not the kind he’d had in his previous life, built slowly over decades of industry work. A student reputation, built on visible achievements that wouldn’t raise eyebrows.
The contest would be algorithmic programming. Competitive coding. He had been decent at it in his first life, but nothing special—not compared to the monsters from KAIST who dominated the Korean competitive programming scene. Students like Jang Seokho, who could solve an NP-hard problem in his head while eating lunch.
But now Dojun had forty years of experience, including fifteen years of designing systems that handled millions of concurrent users. He had a deep, intuitive understanding of algorithmic efficiency that no undergraduate, no matter how talented, could match. The challenge wouldn’t be solving the problems. The challenge would be solving them at a speed that was impressive but not suspicious.
Win, but don’t win too fast, he told himself. Be the surprising underdog, not the impossible genius.
He flipped to a new page and started a different list. This one was technical.
Technologies to watch (2006-2010):
— iPhone announcement: January 2007. The world changes. Mobile-first development becomes everything.
— Cloud computing: AWS launches later this year. Within five years, every startup will run on cloud infrastructure.
— Social media: Facebook opens to the public this September. Twitter launches in July. The attention economy begins.
— Web 2.0: AJAX, jQuery, Ruby on Rails. The web becomes interactive. This is where the first opportunities are.
He stared at the list. In 2006, most of these technologies were either nascent or nonexistent. The Korean tech industry was still dominated by portal sites like Naver and Daum, manufacturing giants like Samsung and LG, and a gaming industry built on PC bangs and MMORPGs. The startup ecosystem barely existed.
But Dojun knew that the window was opening. In the next four years, a handful of small teams would build the foundations of the modern internet. And unlike his previous life, where he had watched from the sidelines while working for someone else, this time he would be one of those teams.
First, though, he needed to build his skills in the tools of 2006. His forty years of experience were in languages and frameworks that didn’t exist yet—React, Node.js, Python 3, TensorFlow, Kubernetes. The cutting edge of 2006 was PHP, Java, MySQL, and if you were really adventurous, Ruby on Rails.
I’m a time traveler who has to downgrade, he thought with grim amusement. Like a Formula 1 driver forced to compete on a bicycle.
But there was a silver lining. He understood the fundamentals—data structures, algorithms, system design, network architecture—at a level that transcended any specific language or framework. He could write elegant code in any language because he understood why code worked, not just how. That understanding didn’t expire.
The subway rattled through a tunnel, and the lights flickered briefly, casting the car in momentary darkness. When they came back on, Dojun caught his reflection in the window—a young face, serious, with eyes that didn’t quite match the rest of him. Eyes that had seen too much.
He looked away.
Back in his apartment, Dojun sat at the Compaq Presario and opened it up. The fan whirred like an angry bee. The screen took thirty seconds to load the desktop.
He needed a development environment. His twenty-year-old self had been using the university’s computer lab for most coding work, but if Dojun was going to prepare for the contest—and for everything that came after—he needed something at home.
He opened Internet Explorer, wincing at the slow page loads, and navigated to the Eclipse IDE download page. Eclipse was the standard Java development environment in 2006, and while Dojun personally found it bloated and slow compared to the tools he was used to, it was what every Korean CS student and professional used.
While the download crawled along at his apartment’s modest DSL speed, he opened Notepad and wrote a simple algorithm—a merge sort implementation in Java. His fingers flew across the keyboard, muscle memory from a future body translating seamlessly into this one. The code appeared on screen line by line, clean and efficient, like watching someone draw a picture without lifting the pen.
He finished in two minutes. In his Data Structures class, students spent an entire lab session on merge sort. Most got it wrong on the first try.
Too fast, he reminded himself. In the contest, slow down. Make it look like you’re thinking.
He deleted the code and started over, this time deliberately introducing the kinds of mistakes a talented-but-inexperienced student would make. An off-by-one error in the boundary check. A suboptimal choice of pivot in the partition step. Small things, easily caught and corrected, that would make his performance look like genuine problem-solving rather than recall.
It was exhausting, this performance. Being less than what he was. Dimming his own light so that it wouldn’t blind anyone.
But it was necessary. In his previous life, the legend of Park Dojun had been built slowly, organically, over decades of visible work. There was no shortcut to credibility. If a twenty-year-old sophomore suddenly started producing code at the level of a senior architect, people would ask questions he couldn’t answer.
His phone buzzed. The flip phone’s tiny screen showed a text message from a number he didn’t recognize.
Hey Park, this is Minjae from Algorithms class. Group project teams are due Monday. Want to team up? I heard you impressed Kim Taesik today. Everyone’s talking about it.
Dojun stared at the message. In his first life, he had done group projects alone whenever possible, or with whoever was left over after everyone else had already paired up. He had been the quiet kid in the back row, the one who did all the work and got none of the credit, because he didn’t know how to talk to people about anything that wasn’t code.
He typed back: Sure. Who else is in the group?
The reply came quickly: Me, you, and maybe Lee Hana from the design track. She needs a CS partner for her UI project and I told her about your Von Neumann answer. She seemed interested.
Dojun’s thumb froze over the keypad.
Lee Hana.
He hadn’t expected to encounter her name this soon. In his previous life, they hadn’t met until much later—a chance encounter at a campus hackathon in his senior year that had led to a conversation, then a friendship, then a partnership, then a company, then a complicated knot of professional respect and personal failure that had taken thirty years to untangle and never quite did.
She was here. In this timeline. A sophomore in the design track, looking for a CS partner.
His hands were shaking. He closed the phone, set it on the desk, and stared at it like it was a bomb with a timer he couldn’t read.
She’s just a student, he told himself. She’s twenty years old. She doesn’t know you. You don’t know her—not this version of her. The woman you loved, the woman you lost, she doesn’t exist yet. This is a different person.
But his heart didn’t care about logic. It rarely did.
He picked up the phone and typed: Sounds good. Let’s meet Monday after class.
He hit send before he could talk himself out of it.
Then he sat in the blue glow of the Compaq Presario’s screen, in a studio apartment that smelled of instant ramyeon and sesame oil—the sesame oil from the container his mother had pressed into his hands as he left the market, insisting he take it, “because you need to eat properly”—and felt, for the first time since waking up in 2006, something that wasn’t grief or shock or the desperate urgency of a man with too much to do and too much to lose.
He felt afraid.
Not of the contest, or the professors, or the technological landscape of 2006. Those were problems he could solve. Those were code he could debug.
He was afraid of seeing her face again. Afraid of hearing her voice, young and bright and undamaged by the years he had spent breaking it. Afraid that he would look into the eyes of twenty-year-old Lee Hana and see the ghost of the woman who had walked away from him, and that the weight of all the things he had never said would crush him right there in a university classroom.
You wanted a second chance, he told himself. This is what a second chance looks like. It’s not just opportunity. It’s every wound reopened, every mistake laid bare, every person you failed standing in front of you again, whole and unhurt, asking you to be better than you were.
The cursor blinked on the Compaq’s screen. The merge sort code waited, half-written, for him to finish.
He turned back to the keyboard and began to type.
Monday was coming. And with it, a face he hadn’t seen in twenty-seven years.