The Man’s Circumstances
The wallpaper in the bedroom was faded floral print.
The window frame had warped with moisture and age, so every time the wind blew outside, it gave off a creak.
“······.”
Lee Seonggeun, who ran Lee’s Gas & Service on the outskirts of Garden Queens, had the face of a typical American immigrant—weathered, with wrinkles etched deep like scars from decades of hard labor.
His wife, Yoon Seokeun, was much the same.
Yoon Seokeun took her husband’s rough hand in hers as he lay in bed.
“Honey, if we sell the house, the gas station, and even the land it sits on, we can still pay off the debt. We can find a smaller place and start over from scratch.”
“······.”
After a brief silence, Lee Seonggeun answered.
“Yeah. I got back on my feet after being thrown out of the company with nothing, didn’t I? So what’s the big deal? I’ve still got my skills.”
“No. Those skills are sealed forever. You promised we’d work honestly from now on.”
“Hey, who said anything different? I mean I can live off gas station work. Just go into any station and work hard as an employee—that’s all I meant.”
“I thought you were getting nostalgic.”
When Yoon Seokeun laughed, Lee Seonggeun gave an embarrassed laugh too.
Then, for a while, silence settled over them.
With a sigh, Yoon Seokeun spoke carefully. “But was it really the right thing to give Sanha all that money? The full ten thousand dollars?”
“He must’ve had a reason.”
That was what Lee Seonggeun said, but unease still lingered in a corner of his heart.
As though trying to shake off that anxiety, he went on. “What kind of kid is he? He’s the same one who delivered newspapers until the soles of his sneakers wore out, all just to earn his own allowance back in elementary school. He knows better than anyone how precious money is. He wouldn’t do something stupid.”
It was a statement filled with trust and pride in his son, but there was no strength in his voice.
Because business didn’t thrive simply because one man was smart and diligent.
Just like the time he had guaranteed the debt of a friend he trusted, only to be dragged down into the abyss in an instant.
It was right then, as the couple’s worries deepened, that they heard—
Knock, knock, knock.
A knock at the door.
Lee Seonggeun’s eyes widened at his son’s sudden visit.
And then his son said something he had never once heard before.
“Please help me, Father.”
It was the first time his son had ever asked for help.
No matter what he did, he had always handled it himself and never once held out his hand.
Lee Seonggeun and Yoon Seokeun understood very well that it wasn’t because he hated burdening his parents, but because he secretly felt ashamed of his parents’ lower-class, blue-collar life.
So they had only ever worried from the sidelines; they’d never once been able to help him directly.
And yet...
Lee Seonggeun felt joy first—that his son was relying on him and needed him for the first time—and then anxiety, at the thought that if he failed to live up to his son’s expectations, it would only prove how useless he was.
So he asked as calmly as he could, “What do you need me to help with, son?”
“Did you by any chance blow through the ten thousand I gave you last time?” Yoon Seokeun asked anxiously.
But their son, Lee Sanha, shook his head.
···Thud.
A grease-stained paper bag was set down on the bedside table.
Inside it, the ten thousand dollars was still untouched.
Relieved that their son hadn’t done something he couldn’t handle, Lee Seongeun and Yoon Seokeun let out a breath they hadn’t realized they were holding.
Lee Seonggeun coughed awkwardly and tried to brush it off with a joke. “Ahem—so the money scared you once it was actually in your hands, huh? Fair enough. Making money is scary, but spending it’s scary too...”
“Father.”
Lee Sanha cut him off.
Then he went on, “Could you come with me to the storage shed for a moment?”
* * *
Creak—
I opened the shed door.
The air inside was thick with the mingled smell of old oil, iron, rust, and freshly hauled crude.
I flipped on the switch on the wall.
···Flicker! ···Flicker! ···Flicker! Pop—
The dangling bulb on the ceiling coughed out a wash of light.
My father and mother both went wide-eyed.
“!?”
In one corner of the shed sat several massive pieces of heavy equipment.
And ten steel drums, each filled to the brim with crude oil.
“W-what is all this?” my father asked, stumbling over the words.
I answered calmly. “An oil field blew in the backyard.”
“What? An oil field?”
“Yes. I drilled it. Behind the gas station lot, over by the zelkova tree. You know, the one under which white supremacists used to hang black people in rows back in the day.”
I went on in an even voice. “After my own investigation, it looks like the reserves are substantial. I’m sure there’s at least a hundred million barrels down there.”
“That’s nonsense. How could something like that...”
“Please believe me. That’s crude oil we hauled up from there. I borrowed the equipment from Uncle’s place so we could refine it.”
I showed my parents the drums.
My father, almost as if under a spell, opened one of the lids and dipped a finger into the black liquid inside.
···Plunk.
It was like some country bumpkin lifting the lid of a clay jar and tasting the soy sauce with his finger.
My father rubbed the crude between his fingers, brought it to his nose, and in the end even tasted it.
“······It’s real.”
“Told you.”
From that moment on, my father’s eyes changed.
The look of a technician who could read a site at a glance.
“How deep did you dig?”
“About three meters.”
“You dug three meters by yourself? With no braces and no equipment? How? It poured rain all yesterday, too.”
“The ground there was already a hollow depression. The rain softened it up.”
“So this really came from our land?”
“Yes. I already went through the contract thoroughly. You own both the surface rights and the mineral rights. Legally, there’s no problem at all.”
“······.”
My father fell silent.
My mother said, “Sh-shouldn’t we report it first?”
“No.”
My father said the words I’d been about to say myself.
“The process is too complicated and it’ll take too long. And the government, or one of the major oil companies, or maybe even the creditors, will try to swallow it whole.”
It was 1991 now.
The America of this era was so backward and savage that people in 2025 couldn’t possibly imagine it.
No BTS, no K-pop Demon Hunters, no K-pop at all—and a world that didn’t even know a country called Korea existed.
In a world like this, if an Asian family said they’d discovered an oil field, it was obvious what would happen to them.
White capitalists would bury us under lawsuits and accusations, tie our hands, and take every last right we had.
That was the optimistic scenario. At worst, armed thugs might simply show up, shoot us dead, and bury us somewhere out of sight.
And the local paper would run a tiny little piece—something like “The Tragedy of a Lucky Asian Family”—and that would be the end of it.
This wasn’t me being paranoid. It was a fear based on real events that had actually happened across America.
In Oklahoma, when oil was discovered on Native Osage land, white Texans poisoned, shot, and assassinated the rightful owners until the Osage had all been wiped out and the oil stolen from them.
In this world, if you were a person of color, your nose could be cut off while your eyes were still open.
My father, who knew that truth all too well, had already reached his answer from the start.
“We’ll have to refine it ourselves.”
“Exactly. That’s why I borrowed the equipment from Uncle.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Not yet.”
“You can tell him. He’s a trustworthy man.”
“I know.”
At my answer, my father let out a long breath.
“So this is what you meant by asking for help, son.”
“Yes. We’ll refine the crude into untaxed gasoline and diesel, and sell it from your gas station.”
“How do you plan to refine it? And where will you sell it?”
“That’s the part I wanted to ask you for help with most.”
I didn’t have hands-on field experience.
I’d made my own efforts to understand the business—interviewing field workers while trading oil company stocks and the like—but in the end I was only a desk man.
What we needed was someone who could actually do the work on-site, and the only person I trusted enough to lean on was my father.
“If we remove the sludge with a centrifuge, boil it in a heating furnace to distill it, and then cool it through a fractionating column and a heat exchanger, we should be able to pull out gasoline and diesel, right? The rest we can dump off cheap as heating oil...”
“It’s not that simple. If you tighten one valve even a little too loosely, you’ll get a massive explosion. This shed alone would disappear without a trace. And selling untaxed oil is a serious felony.”
“That’s why I’m telling you, Father. I can’t do this scale by myself. How many people would we need to run the process? Are there any people you know who could help?”
“······.”
There was no answer for a long time.
My father’s gaze moved from the equipment to my face, then from my face back to the equipment.
At last, he spoke.
“We don’t need anyone else. I can handle it by myself.”
“What?”
It was me who was thrown off balance.
I tried to talk him out of it. “Father, this isn’t like running some rural gas station. It’s an insanely dangerous job.”
“I know.”
“Then how can you do it alone?”
“I can.”
“No, I mean—”
My father said nothing else.
I started to say more, then shut my mouth.
The father I knew had always been the kind of man who bent his head to others, failed at things, ran from debt, and wore himself out with repetitive hard labor.
But the expression he had now, as he stared at the equipment in the shed... that was, without a doubt, a face I had never seen before in my life.
Then my mother, who had been standing quietly beside us all this time, reached out and took my arm.
“Sanha.”
Her voice was trembling faintly.
“I think it’s time I told you about your father.”
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