Choi Bak
Choi Bak grabbed my hand hard.
It was slick with machine oil and sweat, and my own hand quickly turned damp beneath his grip. “Sob... sob, thank you. Thank you, sir... I really, if it weren’t for you... Hah, you truly saved a life.” Not only did Team Leader Yi and I look startled, but the employees in the lobby were also whispering to one another. It was an awkward sight.
What kind of first day at a new job began with this much crying? Team Leader Yi hurriedly led him inside. “All right, all right, writer. Let’s go to the reception room first. Calm down, please.”
“Sob, yes. You’re coming too, sir, right?” Choi Bak asked me with bloodshot eyes, still holding my hand in a death grip.
A little later, we sat across from one another in the reception room. “Sniffle, first the documents... hic, I’ll, um, hand them over.” Even while crying, he got everything done. I received his family registry, ID, and bankbook copy.
The publisher had a duty to verify an author’s identity. All the more so for a newcomer.
Still, this man was twenty-six, the same age as me.
It was rude to say it, but I had thought he was at least five years older.
Team Leader Yi said, “Please fill out the consent form for the personal information section here as well.”
“Sob, yes...”
“Take your time. It’s fine. Haha, people who debut through submissions sometimes get very emotional like this. You must be deeply moved.” Choi Bak nodded, swallowing back tears with great effort.
Only after I had collected the consent form too did I ask him, “You kept thanking me earlier. May I ask why?”
“Ha... Of course, yes.” Then he began to tell me his story. “My family was poor all my life, so I barely graduated high school and got a job at a factory. I’ve been working there for six years now... but what I always truly wanted to be was a writer.”
Only then did the oil stains on his hands and his weathered appearance make sense.
And the calluses embedded all over his hands.
“It’s embarrassing, but I couldn’t give up on my dream, so for six years I kept submitting novels to the Shinchun Moonye and every other contest I could find. But I was rejected every time... I knew I had no talent, but I still couldn’t let it go.”
“Wipe your tears first.” Team Leader Yi pulled out a tissue and handed it to him.
He blew his nose into it with force. “Thank you. Snrrk! Hngh! Phew... The truth is, last year I happened to meet a famous novelist. I gathered my courage and showed him my story, and he said this.” Choi Bak’s face darkened. “No one in the world could ever understand a novel like this. Your mind is too grotesque, too monstrous. How dare you, a guy who works in a factory, even think about writing? G-give up. Hic, sniffle, ha... At the time, it really broke me.”
He had chosen words like that?
It was strange.
If he was a famous novelist, he should have recognized Choi Bak’s potential.
And if he still hurled abuse at him, there could only be one motive.
He wanted to crush a promising sprout before it grew. What a piece of shit. I’m curious now. “Who was it? That writer.”
“Oh... I’m sorry. I said something I shouldn’t have. Please pretend you didn’t hear it. I’ve only just been chosen, after all...” He seemed to be trying to avoid making a big deal out of it.
I could understand that.
If the other man was a famous writer, of course he’d be scared. “All right. Then we’ll pretend we didn’t hear it too. Please speak comfortably.”
“Thank you. Anyway, after that happened, I was ready to quit writing, but I decided to try one last time and wrote The Man Who Looks for Ghosts. I thought that if this was rejected too, I’d never even look at novels again. But then...,” Tears were welling up in his eyes again. “N-not only did it get accepted, but I never dreamed that you, Mok Hyunsun, would understand my writing so well.” He grabbed my hand again. “Do you know what it feels like to be understood ‘completely’? Your writing is exactly like that.” Completely.
I repeated the word to myself.
It meant to be understood wholly, without leaving a single thing out.
“The moment I saw your writing, I felt completely understood. Not as some man looked down on for being poor or uneducated, but as one human being who could tell his own story.” It was strange, and somehow moving.
For my writing to affect a grown man to the point of tears like this.
My chest swelled with something like pride.
Someone else might have called this feeling being moved. I also felt something I hadn’t understood before. Choi Bak was a writer who had lived fiercely.
The protagonist of The Man Who Looks for Ghosts had, in the end, resembled the writer who created him.
I don’t believe in things like sincerity or heart hidden inside writing.
But this writer’s sincerity... I thought I could believe in that.
“Thank you for saying that, writer. Then, Team Leader.” I looked at Team Leader Yi, meaning that it was time to move on to the next step.
And yet. “Sniffle.” Team Leader Yi discreetly wiped at his eyes. “....”
“...Something just got in my eye.”
“....”
“Don’t look at me like that, you punk.”
Well, there was no helping it.
In the end, I explained the revisions and editing process to him. “We’ll handle the basic editing on our side. But if anything is too vague or ambiguous, we’ll recommend revisions. Right now, readers would have trouble understanding that the ghost symbolizes humanity.”
“Ah, yes.” He etched each of my words into his mind like a model student.
I hesitated over whether to say this, but...
It seemed better to say it.
“Don’t worry about making it look old-fashioned. Make the meaning clear. Even if you do, it only takes one keyword, one subtle line.”
“Oh, how did you know? I was being careful because I was worried it might seem tacky if the meaning came across too clearly.” It was a difficult question to answer.
I simply smiled and said, “It shows in the writing.”
After the meeting ended, we escorted Choi Bak to the lobby.
He thanked us again and again, and just before leaving, he said cautiously to me, “Do you know what surprised me most when I read your review?”
“What?”
“The writer I admire most... is Hemingway.”
“!”
Choi Bak laughed brightly, his face far more confident than when I had first met him. And like that, he left Gyeongseong Publishing.
In more ways than one, he was the kind of person who made me curious about his next work.
If he could write more comfortably than he had until now,
I was certain he could produce a masterpiece that would remain in the literary world.
“Mok-ah.”
“Yes.” Team Leader Yi sniffed hard. “You really are something. I’ve worked here ten years, and this is the first time I’ve seen an author cry like that.”
“Team Leader, you’re more of a softie than you look.”
“...That’s a secret from your seniors.” I thought of those seniors who were always clowning around.
...They probably already knew better than anyone.
Team Leader Yi gave my back a light slap. “Come on, let’s go eat. Everybody’s already gathered for your welcome lunch.”
---
The place Team Leader Yi took me to was a famous galbi restaurant in the publishing district.
My seniors, Yoon Seo-hoon, Kim Ji-woon, and Yang Ho-chan, were already seated and eating beef. It was our first meal together, but it didn’t feel awkward.
I’d already gotten to know their faces during my internship, and after surviving that mad presentation and the author’s tears, we’d made it this far.
A meal with my seniors was nothing.
Kim Ji-woon, the most senior of them, glanced at me and said, “Mok.”
“Yes?”
“Can we ask you something?”
“What is it?”
“Are you really a parachute hire?” Direct as ever. The three seniors stared at me with faces that practically screamed their curiosity.
Team Leader Yi only gave them a halfhearted scolding. “Hey. What kind of tacky question is that?”
He didn’t bother stopping them any further.
So he was curious too.
Yang Ho-chan jumped in. “No, seriously, by the time Song Min-hoon got dragged out of the office, he was screaming that Mok Hyunsun was the son of writer Mok Pilhyun. But look, we’ve already agreed on this. If you’ve got talent like yours, then even if you’re a parachute hire, it’s fine.”
“That’s right. The son of writer Mok Pilhyun.” I answered while chewing galbi.
I’d already told the editor-in-chief, so why wouldn’t I tell the team members?
If necessary, I could even have it sent out as an internal notice.
“But I’m not a parachute hire. I don’t even see my father.” How about that. My curveball. As expected, they all made stunned noises.
Yes. That was the normal reaction. The editor-in-chief was the strange one.
“My father was obsessed with fiction his whole life.”
“Well, of course he was. He’s an incredible writer. I heard he won several awards overseas too. And that he even turned down a university professorship just to keep writing.”
“That’s right. When I was young, I just thought he was cool... but one day I realized something. My father was shut away in his studio and didn’t take care of us at all.”
“Come on, writers are always a little-”
“When my mother had terminal cancer.” I picked up some shredded radish and ate it. It was salty. “He was writing novels, so he didn’t even see her final moments. Or maybe I should say he refused to see them.”
“...!”
“I was in the army then, and when I heard about it later, I cut ties with him after I was discharged.”
Hiss, hiss... For a moment, the only sound was the meat sizzling on the grill.
They all wore the same troubled expression, as if they didn’t know what face to make.
Well, that was fine.
I’d always expected that, sooner or later, this story would come out.
“Still, I do find it a little surprising.” As Team Leader Yi set more meat on my rice, he asked, “If you hate your father that much, how did you end up coming to a publishing house?”
“Ah, I’ve thought about that too.” I tucked rice and meat into my mouth together.
Come to think of it, it had been a while since someone had piled food onto my rice like this.
“I think I didn’t want to be influenced by my father. It seemed silly to give up the path I wanted because of someone I hated.”
“Wow... You really are someone else.”
“Hey. Yang Ho-chan.”
“Ah. Sorry. My mouth runs away with me.” He slapped a hand over his mouth.
I waved it off. “It’s fine. It’s old history.”
“Then how did you live after you left home? You must have had no money once you were discharged.” Yoon Seo-hoon asked.
“I moved into a goshiwon with the money I’d saved, and after that I just did construction work. Lots of part-time jobs too.” Yang Ho-chan jerked in surprise. “Construction work?! Man, even our generation wouldn’t have done that... How long did you keep that up?”
“Until just before I came in as an intern.” I’d said it casually, honestly,
but the three seniors were, quite literally, floored.
Team Leader Yi silently filled his beer glass and passed it around, saying, “No wonder the kid’s got some spine.” The three seniors nodded. “I thought you were some prince who rode in on a white horse, but you were a tragic prince instead.”
“But isn’t that story even cooler?”
“Mok Hyunsun is seriously impressive. It’s not easy to live like that at your age.”
“Right. He’s younger than us, but I kind of respect him. I was only twenty-six and all I did was sleep all day.”
“You hung in there, Mok. So let’s keep doing well from here on out. All right, cheers.” Clink! The beer glasses met with a bright sound. Drinking at lunch on the first day of work. Was this really okay?
Well, if anybody complained, I could just hide behind my seniors.
I liked the team leader and the seniors.
They got along well, they were funny, and unlike the construction sites, they didn’t play territorial games.
It seemed I really did have luck when it came to company life.
“Team Leader. But you said I’d be in charge of an author right away.”
“Our youngest gets assigned a writer from day one? Incredible.”
“A real talent.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourselves.” Team Leader Yi said something pointed.
Right. I had been about to ask that first.
“Who exactly is the author I’m supposed to handle?”
“Park Jeong-shin.”
“Ah, I know him. I haven’t read his books yet, though.” Park Jeong-shin.
He had burst onto the literary scene like a comet a few years ago,
then disappeared after leaving behind only his debut work.
If he had accepted the commission for the winter issue of Gyeongseong Geul, then that meant he was still writing novels. “Then why do you all look like that?” Yang Ho-chan said with a face that practically asked what planet I was from. “Mok. Do you know what Park Jeong-shin is called around Paju Book City?”
“What do they call him?”
“...A nutcase.”
---