Those Days, Those People
My name is Lee Sanha.
I was a second-generation immigrant in the United States, and because Asians were supposed to be good at math, I had graduated from Harvard with honors and was working as a fund manager on Wall Street.
And now, I was facing the two greatest trials of my life at once.
The first was terminal pancreatic cancer. The hospital had told me there was nothing they could do except complain about why I had come so late.
The second was being fired. I had just been told to pack up and leave by Black Diamond, the largest hedge fund on Wall Street, where I had spent half my life working.
Black Diamond’s system was simple.
At the end of every month, anyone who fell into the bottom 20 percent of performance was fired at the beginning of the next month.
By four in the morning, your access card was already dead.
Your things on the desk were stuffed into a big cardboard box and handed over at the entrance to the first-floor lobby by security.
“······I’ve worked here for years, and this is how they cut me loose?”
It was no use muttering to myself.
I had seen it happen to a junior manager I’d trained the year before, and the year before that I’d watched the senior who had taken me under his wing get axed the same way.
Whether you had worked there twenty years or two months, if your numbers were down over the past month, they were merciless.
With the access card itself dead, I couldn’t even get through the gate, which meant there was no one I could grab to argue with or plead my case to.
I carried the box full of odds and ends out through the building’s front doors.
Just recently, the men and women in suits who used to eat lunch and drink coffee with me were giving me a quick glance before walking right past.
That was how Wall Street worked, how it was working now, and how it would keep working forever.
* * *
An expensive serviced apartment overlooking the Hudson River.
But what use was a view like this to someone with terminal pancreatic cancer?
An audio system worth tens of millions of won, a work by a famous contemporary artist hanging on the wall, a waterfall installation running down one side of the room.
None of it gave me the slightest comfort.
Then a scene from the past suddenly overlapped with the present.
The small, shabby house in Garden Queens where I had grown up.
The smell of doenjang and cheonggukjang that had soaked the whole place.
I had hated that smell with a passion.
The greasy work clothes of my father, who ran the neighborhood’s rundown gas station; my uncle, who ran the junkyard; the grime of oil on their hands and clothes—I hated all of it.
I couldn’t stand the looks my classmates gave me when they snickered that Asians were the ones who had to do the dirty, dangerous work.
So I dreamed all the harder of making the American Dream they had failed to achieve come true.
I studied like a madman and became the only Harvard scholarship student ever produced by Garden Queens.
After that, I cut ties with my parents.
I wanted to sever the filthy, humiliating bloodline that smelled of soybean paste and kimchi.
My father’s gas station went bankrupt from bad management, and my uncle’s junkyard eventually shut down too, but I clenched my jaw and turned away.
They said Chairman Chung Ju-yung of the Hyundai Group had run away from home after stealing the family’s only cow, but at least I hadn’t stolen anything before running away, had I?
I wanted to succeed and prove it to them—prove that Lee Sanha could enter the upper class of American society, that I could wash away the kimchi smell soaked into my blood.
That was why I forced down the urge to retch and ate butter and steak every single day.
“······But I was completely wrong.”
I could never become part of America’s upper class.
To them, I was nothing more than a servant who managed their money, a man to be used, a replaceable tool.
And once I fell ill like this, I was discarded without hesitation.
What was that different from selling off an old, weak slave for scraps?
In the end, the American Dream had never come true. No—maybe it had never existed in the first place.
“Mother······ Father······”
I looked at the family photograph beside the bed.
After the gas station closed, my parents had moved to a poor neighborhood, where they were caught in a gang shootout and killed.
Now there was nothing I could do to change any of it.
I took some painkillers and lay down.
Sleep surged up through the insomnia like a tide.
My consciousness blurred little by little.
I closed my eyes and thought: if tomorrow was only going to be pain, then let it never come. Let me just fall asleep and be done with it.
***
Even if you wring a chicken’s neck, dawn still comes.
The tomorrow I had hoped would never arrive had come after all.
But that tomorrow was not as painful as I had expected.
No, it was shockingly strange—and beautiful.
“Huh?”
When I opened my eyes, I was looking at a ceiling I didn’t know. No, one I knew too well.
Part of the yellow wallpaper had peeled away, and beneath it was a bed worn smooth by years of use, along with the faint smell of kimchi drifting through the air.
What is this? Kimchi jjigae?
Food smells were coming from the kitchen outside the room.
When I lifted my head, I finally understood.
Garden Queens, in the southern United States, in 1991. The place where I had spent my school years. The very house I had run away from the moment I got into college.
Hastily checking the calendar, I saw the date: March 21, 1991.
I turned to the mirror beside it.
“!?”
I was younger.
I had gone back to the time when I had just received my college acceptance letter.
I hurriedly felt over my own body.
It was unbelievably light.
All the pain that had tormented me so relentlessly was gone as if it had never existed.
···Bang!
I opened the door and went out.
In the kitchen, startled faces turned toward me.
My father was sitting at the table. My mother was standing by the kitchen counter.
Both of them were looking at me.
“Ahem.”
My father cleared his throat and said, “Son, how can you shout like that and slam your door? Even if you don’t want to eat, your mother made all this for you······”
It seemed I had shouted about the meal and stormed back into my room before slamming the door.
That made sense.
At this age, I had been yelling that we ate nothing but doenjang, gochujang, and kimchi every day—screaming that my blood was going to turn into soybean-paste soup or kimchi stew broth.
Which was why, after I ran away, I lived on nothing but butter and steak, day after day.
But now, many things were different.
I quietly returned to the table.
Then I ate my bowl of kimchi jjigae.
“······?”
My parents looked at me, puzzled.
I bit back the tears that were trying to rise.
Spicy, sour, sweet, and rich.
Why had it felt so unbearable back then to admit that this was part of my blood?
I hid my trembling hands beneath the table.
Then I looked at my father.
My father, in his grease-stained work clothes.
I remembered.
Around this time, my father’s gas station would go completely bankrupt because of financial trouble.
It was also the time when my father’s American Dream was shattered once and for all.
I asked him, “Father, how much money does our family have right now?”
“What? Why are you asking that all of a sudden······”
My father looked a little flustered, but then he answered calmly.
“Nothing that should worry you. I can cover your first semester tuition easily enough. After that, you’ll need to take on some part-time work too······ but I can still borrow enough from your uncle to help with living expenses······”
“That’s not it. I have something I want to ask you for separately. How much is it?”
“······.”
At my question, my father fell silent.
My mother came out from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron.
“Right now······ enough to cover moving costs and maybe get a house somewhere down south.”
By “down south,” she meant the slums, the place my parents would later move to and die in after being shot by gang members.
I said to them, “Could you lend me that money for just one month?”
“What?”
My mother gasped.
“Why? That money is the last······”
Yes, even now my mother was the kind of person who asked why first instead of saying no.
“Wait.”
My father cut my mother off.
“······.”
“······.”
Our eyes stayed locked for a long time.
After a long silence, my father finally spoke.
“All right.”
He went to the cabinet and took out a paper envelope.
···Thud!
Inside the envelope he placed in front of me were crumpled bills stained with grease.
Ten thousand dollars.
At the exchange rate of that time, that was about eight million won.
My father said, “One month. Exactly one month.”
“Honey!”
“Enough. Has Sanha ever asked us for anything before?”
At my mother’s words, my father went on.
“He studied on his own without once asking us to buy him even a single notebook, and got into Harvard. What right does a father like me have to refuse this request after going and ruining the family’s only shabby country gas station by signing a bad loan guarantee?”
“Honey······”
My mother’s eyes turned red.
I bit my lip hard.
Then I took the ten thousand dollars in front of me.
“I’ll pay you back in one month, with interest.”
The heavy weight of the envelope passed straight into my hand.