Beasts of a Little Land(46)

In the past three years I’ve been expanding our territory as much as possible while not upsetting the careful checks and balances of the Jongno underworld. Every day I send out my guys in groups of three or four. They hit up the same joint about once a week and we’re careful not to bleed anyone dry because that’s when real resentment sets in and you have to know how to not make people desperate. That’s another thing that makes me a great fighter and if you’re interested in learning my secrets to winning every fight then forget everything else and just remember that desperate people are the most dangerous.

Occasionally some owner of a bar or an apothecary will refuse to pay up and that’s when I’d be called in to put him in his place. There was an unfortunate instance of an old and rich herbalist who somehow believed that I wouldn’t actually dare harm him and after my guys repeatedly failed to get paid I had to show up to his joint. The old man had a snowy white beard and was dressed in a traditional white jacket almost like a gentleman. He looked at me straight in the eyes and shouted something about how he was old enough to be my grandfather and how he had no fear of hooligans like us. Behind him stood his son with his young and pretty wife and their little child. A handsome and prosperous family. But if I didn’t make an example out of him then all the neighborhood joints would defy me and we’d go back to living under the bridge or worse. With a flick of my hand all of my guys picked up and smashed the jars of herbs and medicines on the ground and the pretty daughter-in-law and her baby started screaming at once. The son threw himself in front of the wall of little wooden drawers, which I took to mean that they held the most expensive ingredients. I knocked him down to the ground with a single punch to his nose which broke with a satisfyingly loud crunch. Then I started pulling out the drawers and dumping their contents on the ground as the old herbalist stared with his mouth open. Even I knew that some of these leaves and tiger bone powder and bear gallbladder and wild ginseng were worth their weight in gold. Before long the old man was on his knees begging me to stop while the daughter-in-law scrambled to get us the money.

This is how I’ve been able to keep all of us fed and clothed. We have saved up quite a bit of cash since we can go to any of “our” restaurants and eat a good meal. It’s the same thing with clothes and shoes and alcohol. But again I warn my guys not to go overboard with squeezing the businesses too hard. Since about a year ago I’ve even been paying rent to the Chinese restaurant though we still occasionally eat black bean noodles and sweet-and-sour pork for free. I’ve noticed though that whenever we order food there YoungGu looks deeply uncomfortable and it probably has to do with the owner’s young daughter, who brings bones and scraps to YoungGu’s dog and then shyly runs away.

This brings me back to why I came to the bridge tonight. My feet lead me here unconsciously whenever I need some time to think. I rested my forearms on the stone railing and gazed down at the matte black surface of the canal. It undulated like the back of some sea monster. The yellow lights of the nearby bars and shops could not reach the water and I had the strange feeling that I was the only one to ever see it like this. I felt very alone but I wasn’t craving the company of my guys or even Loach, who is at the end of the day my best friend. I can’t really talk to him about what’s been bothering me. We were all teasing YoungGu about that girl and making dirty jokes and asking when he’ll finally lose his virginity and I noticed that only Loach wasn’t filled with the same mixture of envy and fascination as the others. He went along with it wearing that sly smile—he still smiles the same way—but as if he wouldn’t keep that conversation going on his own. Loach never hoots at women or gets shy around them which are really the only two ways we know how to act around females. I get the feeling that my confession about a girl will get the same kind of cold reaction from him and so I’d rather keep this to myself.

Here’s what happened. Last week I was taking a walk by myself near the Great East Gate and looking around the different shops and establishments in the area. Since I first came here Seoul has become a completely different place. Where there used to be little straw-roofed cottages there are now bars, cafés, dance halls, restaurants, banks, offices, and shops reaching up to four or five stories. Before there were plenty of men in suits but hardly any women in Western clothes. Now the streets lit brightly by gas lamps are filled with these so-called Modern Girls with their cropped and waved hair and red lips and short skirts. Of course we try to get their attention but they speed away either like they can’t see us or they’re scared of us. Above all the people walking or riding their bicycles or spilling out of the streetcars, there are electric wires crisscrossing dangerously close to the tiled roofs. The air in Seoul smells of rain, cooking oil, garbage, pine trees, persimmon, perfume, red bean paste, hot metal, and snow. It changes by the season and the time of day and the neighborhood.

So I was walking one day drinking in the smells and taking note of the streets. It was a beautiful fall day with a perfectly blue sky and I was just about to cross the avenue when a streetcar stopped right in front of me. A girl hurried over to get on it—and a moment before boarding for no apparent reason she turned around and looked straight at me. That split second just took my breath away. She looked almost nothing like when I last saw her, but I knew it had to be Jade. I hurried over and queued up behind the other passengers and got on the streetcar. It was packed as always and I was anxious that I wouldn’t be able to find her but after some jostling around I saw that she was seated with a friend near the back. As they kept whispering to each other and smiling I noticed that they were both wearing their hair in the braided updo of married women. But based on their gold-embroidered blouses and skirts and white powder and rouge I put two and two together and figured out that she’d become a courtesan. It immediately led to a sort of sinking feeling which I brushed aside.