The Wife Everyone Envied
Yoo Kang-soo hung up.
He drove toward the gym, which sat in a commercial building in a residential stretch on the outskirts of the city, where apartment complexes stood packed together in dense rows.
Weight Loss · Special Forces Martial Arts
A large sign hung out front, and in the corner, in small lettering, the word Hapkido had been added almost as an afterthought. The gym's master, though, was a Hapkido man through and through. Nobody wanted to learn Hapkido anymore, so he had hung the disciplines kids actually liked these days — jiu-jitsu and boxing — as the main attractions.
"Damn. It's been a while."
Kang-soo said it as he looked at Oh Han-joong, the gym's owner.
"The hell you come rushing over for? It's almost lunch."
"Came to suck your dick. Just order some jajangmyeon."
"You're buying, right?"
Han-joong asked, looking at him.
"Fuck. The guy on a pension's buying."
"Then I'm getting the mixed rice bowl and the sweet-and-sour chicken. You get the jajangmyeon."
"For fuck's sake. Get me something with broth. Jjamppong rice… no, wait. Order the three-seafood jjamppong."
"Okay."
The two of them sat down together in the gym office and started eating.
They had been friends since they were boys, training side by side at the same neighborhood Hapkido gym. Oh Han-joong had been studying sports science at a junior college when he volunteered for the Special Forces. After five years of service he went back, finished his degree, and scraped by as a swimming instructor, a gym trainer, a golf coach — anything that involved moving a body for money. Eventually he opened a Hapkido gym, went under once, switched disciplines, and opened this place: a jiu-jitsu and boxing gym.
The surrounding apartment complexes meant plenty of middle and high school kids as members, and of every sports venture he had ever run, these days, he liked to say, were the most livable. He was Kang-soo's closest friend — his brother in all but blood — and the man he had trained Hapkido with his whole life. Both of them were 5th dan. They had learned from the same master, in the same neighborhood, all through their school years.
These days, though, almost nobody wanted to learn Hapkido. Judo was the same story. Among martial arts gyms, the only one that could actually keep the lights on was Taekwondo — and Taekwondo was an oversaturated market too. Too many people graduating from university Taekwondo programs, and there wasn't a neighborhood in the country without a studio.
"Fuck. I should've stayed in the military back then. Done my twenty and gotten out. Like you. Then I'd have a pension coming in like clockwork until the day I die."
"Hey. The pension's not even two grand a month. Gym does well, you'll make a lot more than that."
"Catering to those little brats is a nightmare. You say one thing they don't like and they run straight home to tell their moms. Fuck. When we were kids, if the master said something, we treated it like the law. I miss that old man. He died so miserably at the end. Sometimes I wonder if I'm walking the exact same path."
Oh Han-joong said it with a bitter smile.
The Hapkido master who had taught both of them had never married, running his gym his entire life. When Kang-soo and Han-joong were in their mid-twenties, still serving in the military, the gym stopped making ends meet. He shut it all down and went back to the coastal city where he had been born. There he bought a small boat and made a living fishing, until just past sixty something went wrong with his liver and he died young.
He had never married. No family, no children — a martial artist who knew nothing but Hapkido. When nobody wanted to learn it anymore, he gave the art up, went home to the sea, drank every day while he fished, and his liver gave out. He was gone before his time.
Kang-soo and Han-joong had gone down together, kept vigil at their master's deathbed, and served as chief mourners at the funeral. The memory was still vivid. A little over ten years ago now — they had both been in their mid-thirties.
Kang-soo held a deep respect for the man who had taught him Hapkido without even collecting monthly dues, knowing his family was struggling. But the final years of a martial artist who had never married had been wretched and pitiful. Almost nobody came to the funeral. Back when the master ran the gym, Kang-soo and Han-joong had watched him suffer through a bitter feud with the people at the Hapkido Association. Whenever they thought of him — a man who had never taken a wife, who had walked the path of a martial artist and nothing else — both men's chests grew tight.
But Oh Han-joong, now forty-seven, was privately worried that his own life was flowing in the same direction. He was still unmarried. In his late thirties he had almost gotten married once, but the woman he had promised to marry had been hiding a mountain of debt, trying to sneak into the wedding. He had only found out after the date was already set. In the end he had called it off with tears in his eyes, and the wound from that had kept him from meeting anyone else. At forty-seven, he was still alone.
What Oh Han-joong envied most about his closest friend was Kang-soo's wife, Ji Hye-in. She was pretty. She had a slim, elegant figure. And above all, she was obedient and kind — he had watched it firsthand, from their twenties all the way until now.
"Your wife doing well? I saw her last year. Haven't seen her even once this year. Doesn't she ever say she misses me?"
"Yeah. Not even a little."
"If it's not a woman like your wife, I'm not even thinking about marriage anymore."
"Aigoo…"
Kang-soo's chest felt tight. He too, just as his friend believed, had thought of his wife as the best wife there was. But that wife had changed. No — it had not been sudden. Over the past few years, God only knew what she had been getting up to.
"Where are you gonna find a woman like your wife? Back in the day I'd come crashing in at night after drinking with you, and she never once made a face — she'd just throw a stew on the stove and set out the drinking snacks. Seriously, women like yours barely exist. I can still see it clear as day — before your mother passed, hugging your wife and thanking her. How grateful must she have been to her daughter-in-law to do a thing like that…"
At Han-joong's words, Kang-soo's eyes grew hot.
"Ah, fuck. Why'd you have to bring up my mom all of a sudden…"
Kang-soo let out a long sigh as he said it.
He was thinking that everything in this world changes.
The wife who had seemed, to everyone around him — even to his closest friend — the very model of a good wife, was having an affair. Running around doing God knows what. It hurt Kang-soo more than he could say. He could not get a handle on which direction he was supposed to go.
Another week passed, and the weekend arrived. His son Pil-jun did not want to stay home. His best friend Gyeong-sik, who lived on the hill behind them, was also an only child, and that household was dual-income too, so the two of them always stuck together on weekends. Maybe it was because they were both only children, with no siblings of their own.
"Want to go out for dinner? Let's go just up the street. Have a drink."
Kang-soo said it to his wife, Ji Hye-in. Things were a bit stiff between them, after all. It was not the warm, easy atmosphere of before. Too many things had happened over the past few months.
"What's the occasion? You actually want to have a drink… with me?"
"Hye-in. Don't. Just don't. I'm struggling too. We need to talk this through. Why do you have to be so snide?"
"I'm not being snide. It's because you refuse to see how I really feel, and you keep pushing me so hard. I don't have a choice."
"Alright. Let's go out. Want to get sashimi? Soju and sashimi."
His wife Ji Hye-in's voice softened a little as she said it.
The two of them walked toward the alley near the apartment complex that was packed with bars. Hye-in casually slipped her arm through Kang-soo's. He just stayed still. Truth was, it was little gestures like this that made it impossible for him to hate her. And the past nineteen years they had spent together — twenty, if you counted the dating — he could not just throw that away. She really had been a wonderful girlfriend, a wonderful wife, a wonderful daughter-in-law, a wonderful mother.
They ordered rockfish sashimi — Hye-in's favorite — along with soju. She preferred rockfish to flounder; it had more of a chew to it.