The Club
"Where have you been? I've been looking everywhere for you..."
Yongjin came running up to me, sweat streaming down his face. I pulled a packet of pocket tissues from the front of my bag and held it out. He took one and wiped his face and neck; little scraps of tissue clung to his chin and throat.
"Because of that? The club?"
He nodded and shoved me forward by the back.
"Thirty minutes—no, ten. Just ten minutes..."
I really didn't want to, but turning down a request from my senior was harder than it should have been. Letting my reluctance show, I let him steer me toward the small auditorium. Inside, club introduction sessions for the new freshmen were already in full swing.
We slipped in through the back door to the waiting area. Backstage was pure chaos—noisy, crowded, frantic. The samulnori club members were already in costume, pounding their instruments. People with PowerPoint decks hunched over laptops, still rewriting slides at the last second. The dance club had packed into one corner, running through their choreography in place. School band members shook out their long hair and tuned their instruments.
My club—well, Yongjin's club—was the History Research Club. Yongjin had been my senior in high school. The moment I entered university and ran into him, he'd been hounding me from the alumni freshmen welcome party onward, determined to get me to join. I had no interest in history, and no interest in clubs at all.
The only reason I'd forced my name onto the membership list was a woman I'd seen the first time I visited the club room with him. She had a pure, soft face with gentle lines, as if she'd stepped straight out of a romance comic—and she turned to look at me. In slow motion. That first impression completely undid me, and I signed up on the spot.
So why drag someone like me—someone who'd only joined under duress and still felt nothing for the club—to a freshman recruitment session? That reason is the beginning and the end of everything I'm about to tell you.
From my earliest elementary school days, kids always gathered around me. At lunch, once they'd finished eating, a few would drift over to my desk. Sometimes it started there; sometimes they would pull me outside to sit on a bench, eyes wide and bright, staring only at my mouth. To live up to the expectation written on those faces, I did the one thing I could: I opened my bag of stories. I took tales I'd heard somewhere, layered my own imagination on top, and kept adding flesh until they were whole. The kids would lose themselves in my words.
Scary stories made them tremble as if they'd seen a real ghost. Sad ones made some of them fight back tears. Watching them fall into my stories, I grew proud of myself and added still more flesh to the tales, reading their faces, finding the itch they wanted scratched deepest and scratching it. Young kids were always moved by my stories; they always marveled. They got angry at the villains and desperately hoped the good protagonists would win.
To meet those expectations I needed more material. I read a lot of books. I watched a lot of TV. Not to cultivate myself—just so I could tell stories in front of kids. And so I could feel my own private satisfaction watching their emotions rise and fall on a single word of mine.
That unintended training, started so young, continued through middle school and high school. I developed a knack for sensing what people wanted, and I learned how their hearts would move once I scratched that itch. Without my noticing, that accidental talent piled higher and higher until I became what people call a smooth talker—a kid with a gift for words.
I never lost a verbal fight. Even the school delinquents who picked fights with me turned into gentle lambs the moment I spoke. They even started protecting me on campus; in return, whenever they had worries or conflicts with other groups, they'd call me over for counsel. When I spun out a long, detailed story, they would light up as if they'd grasped some great truth and run off.
But my grades weren't as good as you might expect. I spent more time on miscellaneous reading than on studying, and I went to a lot of movies and plays. When a teacher called me in for a talk about my marks, by the end of the conversation the teacher would sometimes press money into my hand and tell me to go buy books. The more we talked, the more the teacher sided with my thinking and came to empathize with my difficulties.
I couldn't go around persuading every admissions officer in the country, so with my abysmal entrance exam score and school grades I failed my first year of college applications. Still, the essays I'd written brought admissions officers from various universities looking for me; there were even rumors they'd held emergency meetings over my writing. In the end, absolute shortfalls in scores meant I couldn't reverse the results, but the university people told me that if I simply cleared the basic cutoff the following year, I could get in.
So my re-take year began. I enrolled in a comprehensive prep class and went to hagwon the way I used to go to school, but my fundamental study habits and passion hadn't really changed, so my scores didn't rise easily. Still my room filled with books, and still my tablet filled with e-books.
In the second application cycle I still didn't score high enough for the schools that had shown interest, and I couldn't do a third year of retakes, so I applied to a school in Gyeonggi Province. It was a place that had often made the news over fairness issues in its admissions process. My grades were still terrible, but on the strength of my essay I was accepted on the spot.
"Alright... it's our turn. Go up, say a few words, and come back down."
Yongjin shoved me in the back. I climbed onto the stage. The small auditorium was full of students—freshly enrolled, sitting with bright, eager eyes, looking for a club that might interest them.
Yongjin had been two years my senior in high school. After finishing his first year of college he'd taken two years off for military service, so now he was taking classes in the same year as me—different majors, of course. We'd gotten to know each other through various twists and turns, and I never expected we'd end up at the same university. Once he returned from leave and found out I was there, he pulled me into his club and stuck to me almost every day. More accurately, he was the one following me around.
Gu Yongjin. He was a strange man. He seemed to see the world through different eyes than everyone else. He would fixate on things others dismissed as nothing, and he held odd expectations for things no one else even thought about. On top of that, he was the type who would do whatever it took to achieve what he set out to do. The methods didn't matter to him. From the day I met him, I never once saw him give up on anything.
Talking like this makes him sound like someone who just bull-headedly forces his way forward, but he had excellent connections and knew how to use the right people at the right time. I hated to admit it, but from my point of view he was Zhuge Liang; he was Zhang Liang.
I stepped up to the podium. Behind me, a deck showing our club's name and introduction was projected on the screen. I swept my gaze across the crowd. Less than half of them looked ready to care about my words or lend me their ears. Reading a room is the start of every speech—one of the long-honed specialties I'd trained since elementary school. In my head, the shape of what I needed to say was already coming into order.
I took the microphone and began.
"We must conquer the world. We must turn them all into our colonies, and their politics, their culture, their economy—everything—must be brought into line with our nation's global policy."
The murmuring auditorium fell silent. I could almost see the words What the hell is this guy? written across most of their minds. A smile touched the corners of my mouth. I'd captured their attention. From here, it was as good as done.
"When you study history, the method becomes clear. You have to see that method."
I began explaining, step by step, why we needed to study history and what we stood to gain from it. The idle chatter from people who'd been frowning at me faded away.