Similar Words, Different Worlds
The sudden weight of attention caught me off guard. Professor Geum Bit-gang shot me a look that plainly said, Well? Out with it.
A scene formed in my mind without any effort at all. My former colleagues from my previous life, the ones I'd brushed past countless times, rose up one after another.
“Misery is having the talent, and still giving up on your dream because poverty slams the door in your face.”
People who glittered the moment they stepped on stage, who shouted with their whole bodies that they wanted to act—and yet, one by one, told the troupe they were quitting, wearing awkward little smiles.
As a rule, we held the farewell parties at cheap frozen pork-belly joints or street tent bars.
After two bottles of soju, those awkward smiles turned into sobbing faces, and everyone admitted they wanted to keep acting after all….
Soju caps rolling carelessly across a cramped table. A pot of fish-cake soup boiled down to nothing but sludge. The clatter of a spoon hitting the floor. Friends patting someone's back, saying don't cry, their own faces twisted because they couldn't bring themselves to cover the tab for the month even though they knew exactly how thin everyone's wallets had worn. The confession—honestly, I was planning to quit too. The screams between tears—how could you people do this? Was acting never real for you?
A farewell party for someone's passion and dream—and yet a scene far too shabby to be called one.
That is misery. Professor Geum Bit-gang posed her next question.
“Then what is desolation?”
This one wasn't hard either. I was someone who had endured a long, grinding stretch of poverty as a nobody, after all. A nearly identical moment flickered through my mind, different only by a hair's breadth.
“Desolation is having no talent to begin with, and throwing yourself against poverty, straining with all your effort, and still never—never—reaching your dream.”
I had tasted so many lives—each one similar, each one different. Desolation is failing to make the dream come true, yet being unable to let it go either.
At my answer, Geum Bit-gang arched a single eyebrow. It was an expression I'd never seen on her before. The lecture hall fell silent.
“Then desperation?”
This time, instead of the lives around me, let me step into the countless scripts I had read.
I paused for a moment, considering when a character's actions had struck me as most desperately wretched.
“Desperation is a limping mother, who has just been given hope that her sick child might be cured, carrying the child on her back and running to save him.”
A mother in ragged clothes, her neatly pinned hair come loose and tangled. A shadow flickering past a garbage bag split open at the seams, sprinting down a blind alley in a slum where the streetlamp light barely reaches. The damp, sticky stench of garbage brushed the tip of my nose.
Knowing it won't work, knowing it's impossible—and still pinning hope on the chance that he can be saved. The poor woman's footsteps wail, small and pitiful.
“Then devastation?”
The scene carries on. Ragged breathing comes through. A faint warmth presses against her back. It belongs to the child, who is still alive. The long shadow that hung down the dark alley vanishes beneath the bright lights of the hospital. The shadow is gone, and now the outlines of mother and child stand out with terrible clarity.
“Devastation is every hospital foreseeing that it will never collect the bill—and locking its doors, one after another, without letting them in. Even though a weeping mother and child stand right outside.”
The hospital's warm light spills over both their faces, cruelly gentle. The hand of the doctor who has bolted the door shut is smooth and white, without a single scar. Utterly different from the hands of the mother, gripping the child's thighs tight as she hoists him up.
Through the narrow gap of the door, the gulf between those two lives makes itself felt with piercing precision. Only now does the cold reach the mother's body, and she begins to shiver.
“….”
A dense, concentrated hush poured over the room. After that, Geum Bit-gang kept asking me about emotions that differed from one another by only a single syllable.
The answers came easily. Because I had never once let go of acting. Because I had wanted to draw out the lives of countless characters.
Ruthlessness is staining your blade with the blood of the older brother who once saddled your pony for you as a boy—along with his retainers, and every last servant in his household.
Servility is the grand prince who knows every one of his uncle's crimes, and smiles and plays the flatterer anyway, because he would rather not die.
Bleakness is a life spent as your uncle's puppet with no end in sight, watching loyal ministers die with their hands and feet severed….
One word led into the next, and the next. Even then, Geum Bit-gang's questions kept coming, several more times over.
“…Good.”
At last, a smile floated up onto Geum Bit-gang's face.
It was quiet enough that I could almost believe she and I were the only two people in the room. Not even the sound of breathing seemed to remain.
“Do Gyeo-ul. Now you.”
Geum Bit-gang's gaze shifted. My eyes met Do Gyeo-ul's, which had been fixed on me until that moment.
“What is harshness?”
Do Gyeo-ul's lips moved as though she wanted to say something. But the answer did not come easily.
Only after a long while did her mouth open, slowly.
“Something extremely… severe and cruel. As synonyms, there are, um… brutal, and merciless. In Park Kyung-su's Frozen Ground, it's written that the misfortune of the poor springs from the harshness of a fate that burdens them with a heavy load.”
“Good. Then cruelty?”
“Being brutal and merciless. In Yi Mun-yol's Son of Man, within Himerus's gloomy smile there is hidden a cruelty and heartlessness that—”
“That's enough. Then atrocity.”
“It uses the character for 'atrocious' paired with the character for 'cruel,' and means something miserable and dreadful. As a hypernym, there is, um… misery.”
Do Gyeo-ul's enunciation was as precise as ever, but her breathing kept stumbling mid-sentence. Her expression management was flawless—yet her composure gave her away completely.
Anyone could see she had been thrown off balance by a question she never saw coming.
“Yes. A textbook-accurate explanation. But that's not what I asked for. I didn't want the dictionary recited back at me. If you're an actress, you should be able to offer a new definition—one only an actress could give.”
Geum Bit-gang's voice rose a notch louder.
But Do Gyeo-ul could not answer right away. She simply kept looking at Geum Bit-gang.
Like a lost child who doesn't know the right answer.
Geum Bit-gang finally tore her gaze away from her.
“Now then—I imagine all of you have scenes forming in your heads. For some of you, the classics. For some, a drama you watched yesterday. And for others, perhaps the people around you.”
Then she spoke so that every student in the lecture hall could hear.
“Emotions where ah and oh make all the difference—the more precisely you can express those, the more directly the audience receives the message inside a work. Whatever role each of you is given, do not forget what you alone are responsible for delivering!”
The silent students answered Geum Bit-gang in one voice. Only then did the ambient noise of the room return to normal.
“Han Yeo-reum, what the heck? Did you study all on your own?”
“I've seen this kind of development somewhere before. Kind of a hidden-master webtoon.”
“You need to stop reading that stuff…. You're such an otaku.”
“You're the one who recommended it to me.”
The classmates around me needled me in tiny whispers. At the small commotion, Professor Geum Bit-gang glanced our way—then turned her head, suppressing a chuckle.
In that noisy moment when everyone was stirring, only Do Gyeo-ul stayed exactly as she was, staring straight ahead until the lecture ended.
Geum Bit-gang's stride quickened. Her footsteps echoed down the corridor. Her heart pounded hard—so hard that she could no longer tell what emotion she was even feeling.
Han Yeo-reum….
Perhaps—just perhaps—Han Yeo-reum might be the one to untangle even this feeling properly.
If anyone could lay a life right in front of your eyes, separated from another by a single hair's breadth—it's that girl.
Geum Bit-gang, walking briskly forward, stopped dead in her tracks.
Suddenly, she understood.
She knew the name of the emotion that had just sent a shiver through her.
Yes.
It was anticipation. That swelling feeling she had believed had vanished from her heart forever.
Geum Bit-gang turned her head toward the window. Far away, on the opposite side, she could see Han Yeo-reum. Just as on the first day of the semester, the sunlight wrapped around her.
I've properly become an old fossil myself.
Watching Han Yeo-reum, Geum Bit-gang reflected on her own failings. Commerce and art. Entertainer and actor. Some point along the way, she had drawn a hard, clear line between them—and judged everything on either side of it. She was ashamed of herself for that.
When she recalled how deeply Han Yeo-reum had sunk into the script even where no one could see her, a smile crept onto her lips.
“This is going to be interesting….”
Geum Bit-gang murmured softly. Every one of the countless students in that room today must have felt some emotion budding in their own chest.
Then her vision caught Do Gyeo-ul, staring fixedly at Han Yeo-reum's back.
“How long are you going to wait until the finals?”
The final-year production. The stage where the students of the School of Drama would show everything they had learned in a year.
Geum Bit-gang wanted to divide them into teams under the same theme and let them truly fight it out.
If I split them into Team A and Team B and have each stage a play….
To whom would the audience's cold, unflinching verdict award the victory?
Geum Bit-gang's eyes gleamed.
