Like Summer
Watching Han Yeo-reum struggle and flounder over the past few days, Geum Bit-gang had found her gaze drifting toward the little chick more and more.
She kept wondering about Yeo-reum's acting. Kept wondering where it was headed next.
Will she manage to fill in that last ten points, or won't she?
Geum Bit-gang turned her head toward Yeo-reum, who stood a few paces away, and spoke again.
"So? Did Seo-ryeong find her?"
"Not yet."
"Hm. Fair enough."
Ever since they'd started, things Yeo-reum had never once shown in lecture kept bubbling up without end.
Even in a state where she can't get her bearings at all….
So many different expressions layered themselves, one after another, across that unripe twenty-year-old face. Geum Bit-gang let out a short laugh and walked over to Yeo-reum's side.
"Where did you learn theater? I distinctly remember you saying you had all of six months of acting experience."
"…I never studied it anywhere, formally."
"Don't bother thinking up a lie. I can tell from the breathing alone."
As Yeo-reum turned her head to look at Geum Bit-gang, a deep shadow fell across one half of her face. Then, at last, she answered with a mischievous grin.
"I'm pretty good, aren't I? Maybe it's because I'm a fan of our Professor Geum. Is it that obvious? That the moment I decided to act was when I saw one of your plays?"
"Save the flattery for people it works on."
"It's not flattery, it's the honest truth. I'm just borrowing a bit of this dawn-morning mood to say what I've never had the chance to say."
"Fine, I'll grant you that. Then when did you see this play of yours?"
"Third year of middle school. December. The school took all of us to see a play together."
Yeo-reum's eyes met Geum Bit-gang's, heavy and unflinching. It was a perfectly transparent light — not a single lie anywhere in it.
"Everyone kept groaning — why are we going to a play, we should be watching a movie. I was thinking the same thing."
Han Yeo-reum spoke as if murmuring to herself.
"But then the theater lights went down, and the pinpoint spotlight lit up the middle of the stage, and the moment I heard the actor's footsteps thudding through the floor, the stage just… pulled me in like something possessed."
It was a work Geum Bit-gang remembered too.
Just this once more. Just this once more. A stage she had stepped onto vowing those words to herself more times than she could count.
"I was watching the scene you performed, Professor, and my heart nearly beat itself to death. It was a scene where you flew into a rage… and right then I understood. I had to act. There was no other path."
Manseon was a play that depicted, with unflinching realism, the barren lives of fishermen living on a small island.
It traced the tragedy of a poor family — a man who had spent his whole life hauling up the catch against merciless waves, yet owned no boat of his own and was ground down daily by the abuse of the shipowner he answered to.
It's not the kind of play a middle schooler would call entertaining….
Still, Geum Bit-gang supposed, the climax might be the one scene that stayed in a young memory. It had been a work of experimental staging that nothing before it had attempted.
Roughly five liters of water came pouring down onto the stage.
A wind machine and buckets of water, deployed to make the audience feel the poverty-stricken fisherman's family in their bones.
Perhaps that was why the old memory had been stirred. Geum Bit-gang's heart grew strangely, unreasonably hot. Even though the bone-cold winter wind filled the space between the two of them.
Her heated heart pounded and raged in her chest. Geum Bit-gang threw out a question.
"Do you still remember Manseon?"
"Of course. Naturally."
Half afraid the pounding might actually be audible, Geum Bit-gang folded her arms tight against her chest. Then she spoke to the junior standing so far beneath her.
"Then do it. Here, right now. I'll decide after I've seen it whether I believe you or not — that flattering little claim of yours. That I'm the reason you started acting."
At that, the junior turned her back without a moment's hesitation and walked a few paces ahead. Her small footprints pressed themselves cleanly into the damp earth.
Han Yeo-reum ruffled through the hair she'd tied up carelessly with one hand.
And in that instant she became something else entirely — a fisherman's wife, hair cinched tight by a life of exhaustion, worn down to the last thread.
"Aigoo, you know it as well as I do."
The Manseon Geum Bit-gang had performed in had been newly adapted at the time. The setting was relocated to Mokpo Harbor, and every performer's dialogue was delivered entirely in dialect.
And Han Yeo-reum wielded that dialect like it had been her mother tongue all along.
"Where d'you reckon rice grows on trees, eh? In times like these you be thankful there's any at all, and eat it down without a word!"
The voice of a hard-bitten mother, waiting on the docks for her family's little fishing boat, rang out into the cold air.
"Quit your yammerin', I say! The words out of that mouth, that mouth, that mouth…! Agh. Not one single day goes by you don't turn a person's stomach inside out!"
Han Yeo-reum shuffled away, step by unsteady step. As if to put distance between herself and the son who had been grumbling about poverty out of pure habit a moment before.
…Is she limping on one leg right now?
Geum Bit-gang noticed that Yeo-reum's whole body was subtly tilted to the right. As if it had been broken down by a lifetime of brutal labor.
Because her back was turned, the stooped spine and bowed neck were all the more visible.
Thud.Thud.
The sound of Geum Bit-gang's own heart grew louder, as vivid as if it were ringing directly in her ears. The lungs that had been drawing in cold winter air and exhaling frost seemed to be burning from within.
"What'd you do, boy? I'm askin' you what you did! I'm the one who's been breakin' my back my whole life, workin' till the sun goes down so your belly wouldn't go empty — workin' till my hands swelled up raw and blue!"
Standing beneath the tree, Han Yeo-reum drew in one long breath. Even that single breath was steeped in bitterness.
The heat spread through Geum Bit-gang's chest and out along her veins.
"And you, you wretch… you go an' carry on, carry on, like all this ruin in this house is somehow my fault…!"
A woman who had thrashed through her entire life trying not to pass poverty down to her children — and still, poverty refused to die, ruling their lives all the same.
"I look like I've got nothin', don't I…? Like I'm hardly a person at all…?"
In a voice choking with tears, Han Yeo-reum screamed as if fighting for her life.
"Those long, long years I lived for the sake of the likes of you…!"
Crash—!
Yeo-reum kicked the tree trunk in a furious vent of rage — and the rainwater that had pooled there all night came pouring down over her head.
Just as it had on that stage, all those years ago.
The sight of a poor wretch flailing in rough, merciless waves, scrabbling for one more day of life, was wretched beyond description.
"All of it! Every last bit! Was it all just nothing?!"
Her life must have scattered as hollow as sea spray, salt water streaming down her eyes day after day. The sons who had drowned filling their boat to the brim with fish must have crashed over her heart like the tide, again and again.
Because that was the picture Manseon had set out to paint.
…Han Yeo-reum….
Han Yeo-reum turned around, slowly.
Her face, drenched as if she'd just climbed out of a fishing boat, looked exactly like poverty itself.
"…."
Confronted with that face, Geum Bit-gang momentarily forgot how to speak.
It felt as though she had been dragged back onto the stage of Manseon — the one she herself had performed on, that day.
The performance was over. And still Geum Bit-gang could not climb out of its afterglow.
"…Answer me one question."
Straining to keep her voice from trembling, Geum Bit-gang spoke to her. It was a question born of sheer impulse — but she needed the answer, badly.
"What is acting to you?"
Yeo-reum opened her mouth without a second's deliberation.
"Survival."
"Survival…. And the reason?"
"Watching the stage… I realized you were allowed to burst out with everything you felt, like that. That you didn't have to just sit there holding it in. From the moment I understood that, it felt like I would die if I couldn't act."
Han Yeo-reum pressed the words out, one deliberate syllable at a time, like a vow.
"So to me, acting is survival."
Beyond Yeo-reum's back, the sky was slowly brightening.
Dawn was slipping away, and morning was arriving.
"Then… will you believe me now?"
Where had that face from moments ago gone? Yeo-reum had returned entirely to her usual self, and she smiled.
The sun was rising.
"…Yes."
"Then I'll head in first! Brr, it's freezing—"
Shaking out her wet hair, Han Yeo-reum practically sprinted inside. Left alone, Geum Bit-gang still felt the ground beneath her feet like a stage.
And sometime in those moments, a sun bright enough to illuminate the whole world had settled squarely over Geum Bit-gang.
Like the pinpoint spotlight on a stage.
"That girl…."
And then Geum Bit-gang understood. Why Han Yeo-reum kept pulling at her curiosity, drawing her gaze, making her want to see more.
It was almost funny that she'd only just realized it.
"She's a raw gem."
Anyone but Geum Bit-gang would have thought exactly that.
Even in the teeth of the harshest winter weather, Geum Bit-gang's heart burned like something gone mad. Like summer itself.
Like Han Yeo-reum.
Click.Click.
In this room where the hard mechanical sounds never stopped — the editing suite of Faster Than the Law — Director Gong was once again plucking petals off a flower today, consumed by anxiety.
"They say it's good… no, they say it's bad… they say it's good… GYAAAH! It's not!"
His editor, well practiced by now, simply turned the headset volume up. The film happened to be an action movie, so with the sound cranked loud, the director's wailing buried itself neatly under the soundtrack.
"Could this be some kind of… omen? Right? Am I right? Hm? Am I right?"
"Answer yourself on the way out…."
The editor pushed one side of his headset up off his ear and glanced over at the fretting Director Gong, who stared back with the eyes of a wounded puppy.
"What do I do. I can already see them… I can see the comments, I can see them…."
"Then let's just look at the comments already!"
"GYAAAH! Anything but that!"
"LOOK!!!"
Finally unable to bear the irritation a second longer, the editor pulled up the internet on the spot. Director Gong buried his face in both hands. The editor's fingers flew across the search bar.
🔍 Search: Faster Than the Law
Today was the day the teaser trailer for Faster Than the Law would be released to the world.