Park Jeong-shin (1)
“A mental patient?” Yang Ho-chan, who loved gossip to an almost embarrassing degree, perked up and started chattering excitedly. “Yeah. He’s famous for it, especially among editors. They call him a psycho.”
“Ho-chan. This is a barbecue place where everyone from Paju Book City is having company dinner. Watch your mouth.” At Team Leader Lee’s warning, he lowered his voice. “Anyway, he treats editors like his personal servants. And do you know the most psychotic thing about him?”
“I wouldn’t know. What is it?”
“If he thinks an editor doesn’t understand his novel, he swaps them out.”
“My friend at another publishing house got hit with that and quit. He was so hurt.” Even Yoon Seo-hoon chimed in, which told me this probably wasn’t just a ridiculous rumor.
Kim Ji-woon asked Team Leader Lee, “Isn’t the editor-in-chief being a little too much? Assigning a brand-new rookie to such a problematic author?”
“I’m sure he has his reasons.”
“Wow. Look at you, talking like management.”
“What management? We’re salaried workers, not executives. We’re more like corporate livestock. Still, in my opinion, it’s like a lion pushing its cub off a cliff.”
“Ah—so it’s a training method to make him stronger? What do you think of this educational approach of snapping a cub’s neck?”
Well.
I was of the opinion that children should be raised with affection. “Then if you do it wrong, the cub just falls and dies.”
The seniors doubled over laughing. “See? The young guy’s got the guts to say what everyone’s thinking. All right, cheers!”
“Cheers!” Clink.
Of course, I had no intention of dying. Still, that first day ended with equal parts tears and alcohol.
I didn’t go straight home after work. Instead, I went down to the basement storage room. The shelves were packed with book stock by category.
Following the search I’d done in advance, I found the section for Korean literature.
And there it was. “Here it is. Modern House.” Park Jeong-shin’s debut work, and his only full-length novel.
After I got home, I half-lay on my bed and looked through Modern House. I was curious.
What exactly had the writer who was called a psycho written?
The setting of Modern House was a fictional wealthy neighborhood. The protagonist belonged to a respected professor’s family and lived in the finest detached villa in the district.
Then one day, a strange family moved into the house next door. Shabby in appearance, uncultured in manner, devoid of any sense of elegance. Their presence, so out of place in the affluent neighborhood, was mysterious and unsettling. Worse still, the neighboring family began copying everything the professor’s family did.
Their clothes, their speech, their behavior, even their occupations. The professor’s family tried to stop them, but all that effort did was expose their own past sins.
In the meantime, the family next door gradually began to take over the professor’s family’s place.
And just when the conflict between the two families reached its peak, the daughter of the neighboring household was murdered. That was when the real story of Modern House began. It was the sort of novel you couldn’t put down.
There was the mystery’s taut urgency,
and the professor family’s secrets, revealed like a blow to the back of the head.
All of that came together to cut painfully at the vanity of the upper class. I closed the book with a soft thump. “…It’s good.”
It was a little funny, maybe, to be impressed by my own writing.
But so what? I liked it.
“Phew… that was refreshing.” Maybe because I’d written for so long, I felt as if I’d just stepped out of a sauna, every cell in my body replaced with a new one.
“I think I wrote quite a lot, but how many pages did I… huh? Ten pages?” No wonder my fingers hurt.
To think I’d written ten A4 pages in one sitting.
But something even more surprising than that was what was happening in my head right now.
It was as if fluorescent lights had just snapped on, one after another. In that dazzling light, words burst out in every direction.
As much as I’d enjoyed reading Modern House, there were irresistible and fascinating words waiting there.
I wanted to catch them.
Even if no one had asked me for a review, I wanted to drag those words out into the world somehow. I hurriedly opened my laptop.
The beginning would be… vanity.
Vanity begins with imitation. But what vanity truly desires is singularity. The tragedy of vanity begins there.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap… My hand flew across the keys.
How was the professor family’s vanity expressed?
In what ways did the neighboring family expose it?
How sharply did the novel satirize the vanity of the upper class in the process?
Then an image flashed in my mind.
A clown.
There was no need to hesitate. Write it.
(…) In the end, the neighboring family’s role is no different from that of clowns. A clown imitating a king is ridiculous. But in that foolish performance, the only person in the world who cannot laugh is the king himself. And so the professor family (…)
I tried to write as simply as possible.
I didn’t want to write something difficult. Vocabulary anyone could understand.
And yet, the precise, high-level phrasing surfaced almost automatically. I’d covered vanity thoroughly.
Then next came the novel’s structure.
(…) The development of Modern House itself resembles these two families. The two households are constructed like mirrored images of each other. The way the novel unfolds works the same way. It alternates between the two families’ narratives in equal measure (…) In this way, the exquisite harmony between content and form (…)
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap…
My fingers were starting to ache, but I couldn’t stop.
If there was such a thing as a state of complete absorption, this must have been it.
I was utterly immersed in the moment. And then I realized something.
I was already controlling the ability I’d gained completely.
As if it had been mine from the very beginning.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap…
I poured everything I had into the page, writing furiously.
And finally, the closing line.
(…) Vanity, from the start, is only a sweet dream that will burst like foam.
Bang! I slammed down the final Enter key.
“Good.”
Was it weird to be impressed by my own writing?
Well, whatever. I liked it.
“Hoo… that feels great.” Maybe because I’d written so much, it felt as if I’d just come out of a sauna.
I felt like every cell in my body had been swapped out for new ones.
“I think I wrote quite a bit, but how many pages… yikes, ten pages?”
No wonder my fingers hurt.
To think I’d written ten A4 pages in one go.
“Wait a second.”
Ten pages.
The method of analyzing a novel, the perspective I’d mixed into it…
That was, in a word…
“This… is criticism, isn’t it?”
Literature. Film. Fine art. Music. Dance.
Anyway, every art form in the world.
The kind of writing that threw a heavy, meaningful message at that art—that was criticism.
And criticism was also an important pillar of literature.
Right.
I shouldn’t be satisfied just because I’d published a short review.
I had the ability to try something far more substantial.
I imagined it.
Editor and critic.
Not bad.
No, it was good.
If I balanced it properly, the two could influence each other in positive ways.
This criticism I’d whipped up today was proof of that.
And above all else… “Couldn’t I make a living just talking about literature for the rest of my life?”
Wasn’t that the life of an elite literature nerd?
Just imagining it made me happy.
Let’s do it.
The first gate to becoming a critic: I’d try my hand at the Shinchun Moonye.
To celebrate my new goal, I hurried to the fridge and grabbed a can of beer.
Chiii-psst. Clink.
“Glug, glug… ahh.” I set the half-empty can down next to my laptop.
“If you want to make your dream come true, you have to move.”
The Shinchun Moonye traditionally took submissions at the end of the year and announced the winners in the first months of the next.
Since autumn was already drawing to a close, I checked the submission deadlines first.
“Hmm… most of them are due in a month. The places I can submit to are…”
I counted the newspapers one by one.
“One, two, three… six, seven papers.”
I wrote down the newspaper names and deadlines in a memo.
And then the most important thing.
“Prize money, prize money.”
If you won the Shinchun Moonye, you got prize money.
“Four million, five million, five million, ooh! This one gives seven million?”
I added up all the prize money.
I knew it was a pointless thing to do,
but wasn’t that exactly the kind of nonsense people ended up doing anyway?
“Forty million won? If I got all of this, I could pay off my loan in one shot.”
I chuckled at my own ridiculousness.
That was because being published was something many people never managed even once in their entire lives.
“For now, I’ve got at least one thing drafted.”
I saved the Modern House critique carefully.
And then I suddenly became curious about something.
Park Jeong-shin, the man who had given me my first-ever criticism piece in life.
Was he really a mental patient?
─┼
The next day.
I ended up doing an unexpected out-of-office visit. I called Park Jeong-shin, partly to greet him and partly to ask about his manuscript progress.
But after listening to me all the way through, he said, “-Please come to my house.”
Click.
He hung up on me.
When I reported back, Team Leader Lee shook his head as though he’d known this would happen.
He slipped a corporate card between his index and middle fingers and held it out. “Take a taxi there and back. Use this to eat, too. Head home whenever you want.”
“Yes, sir. Understood.” I took the card respectfully.
If I was going to eat anyway, I might as well eat something expensive.
“I’m jealous of you, Mok. I’m about to go blind from proofreading typos.”
That was Kim Ji-woon, who was checking manuscript corrections.
Yoon Seo-hoon snorted. “What’s there to be jealous of? That’s the start of a rough road.”
Yang Ho-chan grinned. “You know we made a bet, right? Whether you could get the manuscript from Park Jeong-shin or not.”
Oh-ho, so that’s the kind of thing they were doing?
“Who bet on what?”
“All three of us put down 100,000 won each that you wouldn’t get it. Three to zero. So the bet’s basically dead.”
“Seriously, stop wasting your time on useless bets and do some work.” Team Leader Lee gave them his usual scolding.
But he probably didn’t mean it.
Even with the atmosphere like this, the Editorial Team 1 unit in Periodicals had the best results of all.
From my point of view, they were probably just blowing off steam through idle chatter.
Anyway. “No, I’ll make the bet.” Three to zero? I couldn’t just let that insult slide.
I declared it boldly. “I’ll put 300,000 won on bringing it back.”
A little while later.
In front of an officetel in Seocho-gu, I got out of the taxi and looked up at the building.
I’d even bought two cups of coffee. Mostly because I wanted one myself.
…Not bad, this officetel.
A full-time novelist who hadn’t published a book in years.
And yet he lived in a place like this? Was he rolling in money?
Following the address, I rode the elevator up to the eighth floor.
Before long, I arrived in front of Unit 812, where he lived.
“…Interesting.”
The door was cracked open just enough to peek through.
As if telling me to come in on my own. I stepped inside and called out, “Mr. Park Jeong-shin? I’m Mok Hyunsun. I called earlier.”
No answer came back.
The living room was a mess of clothes and delivery food trash.
It wasn’t bad enough to call in a professional cleanup crew, but
I could tell right away that Park Jeong-shin was a lazy man.
Since the bedroom door was open too, I peeked in carefully.
A man was sprawled face-down, tangled up in his blanket.
So that was how he’d answered my call.
Knock, knock. I tapped on the doorframe. “Writer.”
Park Jeong-shin slowly lifted his head and looked at me.
…He was handsome.
With his smooth face and lean frame.
At a glance, he looked like someone who should have been an idol.
“Pffft—what, you really came when I told you to come?” He buried his face in his pillow.
Yeah, he was definitely a mental patient.
You were the one who told me to come.
“You brought the corporate card, right? Order me some food. I haven’t been able to eat anything since yesterday.”
“You can order it yourself after I leave. I already ate.”
“Just order it. I’ve got depression.”
“Yes.”
“I’m saying I have no energy. You know burnout, right? Burnout?”
“Yes. Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s talk about the manuscript.” If I bought him food here, I’d be at his mercy the whole time.
And with a guy like this, you could never afford to take a submissive tone.
“I didn’t come to feed you. I came to receive the manuscript.”
“Huh? I entrusted you with the manuscript?!”
“You said you’d accepted the winter issue commission from Gyeongseong Geul. You signed it and sent it back. That counts as entrusting it, doesn’t it?”
“What!” Park Jeong-shin shot upright in bed. “What are you, some thug? Did you come to collect a debt?”
“Don’t speak informally. Come out to the living room. I brought coffee, not food, so drink it and wake up a little.”
“You bastard—how dare a mere editor—!”
He flung his pillow at me.
But with arms that thin, the result was obvious. Thump. The pillow fell to the floor in front of me.
“Hmm.”
What a sight.
So this was how he wanted to play it?
No choice, then.
I’d have to use his fear against him.
I knew very well what Park Jeong-shin was afraid of.