The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness Read Online Free Page B

industrial complex, you will be able to attend school. Special classes have been established for industrial workers, to take effect next year.”
    What Oldest Brother adds sounds like an excuse.
    “If you don’t take that route, the only schools you can attend are vocational schools, which are for new arrivals from the country. Vocational schools are not regular schools.”
    The Job Training Center is located by the gates of the Guro Industrial Complex.
    We leave the restaurant and take the bus to the gates of the industrial complex. On the athletic field of the Job Training Center, Cousin and I say good-bye to Mom. I remember the athletic field from that day. The color orange, this shade of orange growing distant. Mom’s huge hand holds my hand. With the other hand, the hand that is not holding mine, Mom places a 1,000-won bill on Cousin’s palm.
    “When you get hungry, don’t suffer with an empty stomach—get yourselves powder milk drinks.”
    Cousin’s eyes well up with tears. Heading toward the steel gates of the training center, the three of us left behind her, Mom’s steps keep turning back. Mom is an orange stain on that athletic field. The stain grows distant, then comes back,making Cousin and me hold hands. We say we must depend on each other.
    “You two are on your own now. Don’t give Oldest Brother trouble, you must depend on each other, you understand.”
    The orange stain is growing distant again. One step ahead of us, my tall brother walks with his eyes on the ground. Standing among the crowd of people assembled for job training, I continue to stare at the orange stain and Oldest Brother’s back, growing smaller and smaller. I stare at Mom and Oldest Brother, growing more and more distant. They grow smaller and smaller, until they are no longer visible. I pick at the ground with the toes of my shoes, for no reason. I am sixteen years old.
    This was how my life in Seoul began. But it is still a long while to go until I meet Ha Gye-suk and the others. Meeting them was not easy.

    What is it that lies between me and them, those whom I have yet to meet?
    It was hard, but only at first, and Ha Gye-suk and I began speaking on the phone quite often. Then one day, she said to me, “You don’t write about us.”
    I felt a familiar soreness again.
    “I looked up your books and read all of them, except for the first one. The neighborhood bookstores did not carry it and it’s hard for me to make time to get out to the big stores. So that’s the only one I didn’t get to . . . You seem to write quite a lot about your childhood, and also about college, and about love, but there was nothing about us.”
    I am silent.
    “I wondered if there’d be anything about us, you know, and I kept an eye out as I read.” I did not answer and Ha Gye-suk called out my name, her voice sinking deep and low. “Could it be you’re ashamed? About that time in your past?”
    I was nervous and movedthe telephone receiver to switch ears. Ha Gye-suk mistook my nervous silence as reticence and her usual cheery, almost chatty, tone turned glum.
    “Your life seems different from ours now.”
    If I had answered her right there, and said, That is not so, would that have made me feel better? But I could not give her that answer. I was unable to say, No, that’s not true. I had never been proud, but I had not been ashamed, either. But I could not quite say it. Perhaps there had been moments when I did feel ashamed. But it was never a significant thought. Or it would be more accurate to say I never had the time to pay attention to these thoughts or feelings.
    I did not have the luxury of perceiving my situation as difficult or painful. I could not give much thought to each passing day; I had to live from each passing day to the next. The day was always hectic, from morning to evening, leaving me no time to think about anything else but the most immediate and necessary tasks that had to be done before I had to quickly go to sleep or