The Child Has Returned
That child had come back.
Bill Clement — a renowned figure in the film world, a master director in his own right — arrived at someone's home with his face flushed with excitement.
"Master."
"How many times have I told you not to call me that?"
"You'll always be my master to me."
The man he addressed with such reverence was his teacher — Giuseppe Argento, the director who had been hailed as a genius from his very first work in his twenties and had gone on to become famous the world over.
Past seventy, he showed no difficulty moving about and looked remarkably young for his age. Even now, he remained actively making films.
"Good news, I take it? You look like the cat that got the cream."
"Did you see this story?"
On the tablet his disciple held out, the poster for The Child sat side by side with a photograph of Yoon Jay. Beneath them, dense columns of text filled the screen.
"The print's too small — I can't make out a word. My body's fine, but these eyes of mine went old on me..."
"At your age, it'd be strange if they hadn't. I'll read it to you. 'That child' has resurfaced."
"That child? Surely not... Yoon?"
He had served on the jury at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, and he was one of those who had fallen under the spell of the young lead actor after watching The Child.
As Giuseppe Argento rose from his seat in excitement, his chair rattled. His disciple calmed him down and continued patiently.
"Truthfully, even saying he 'resurfaced' isn't quite right. Apparently he's been working under a concealed name."
"Is that so?"
"Yes. Here — let me enlarge it for you."
Giuseppe Argento's eyes filled with interest. The photo showed Yoon Jay at the Hwangryong Film Awards, holding his trophy as he delivered his acceptance speech.
"He grew up rather differently from what I imagined. How should I put it... he looks like a soldier honed to a fine edge."
"Sharp eye as always. They say he spent years in the military. He fought terrorist organizations, too."
"Did he, now?"
The revelation was as startling as his appearance was different from what Giuseppe had pictured — that a boy gifted with that degree of genius had been working in an entirely different field all this time.
I always wanted to see him in person...
He hadn't attended the festival back then, and he had only ever seen the boy on screen. Which had only deepened his curiosity.
He had believed Yoon Jae-hee was destined for greatness. With talent of that caliber, he thought, the boy would be easy enough to find in other works — and so he had waited for the next one.
But Yoon Jae-hee never acted again after The Child, and later, through Director Lee Young-chang, he heard that the boy had vanished without a trace.
"He grew up well."
Over a long career, he had watched or heard about the downfall of countless child actors.
He had seen them ruined by drugs under the crush of excessive attention, or stripped of their earnings by their own families and dragged through vicious lawsuits.
Truthfully, he had expected the same of Yoon Jae-hee after so long an absence. The Child had been famous not only in Korea but among European filmmakers as well.
"He escaped the attention in Korea, settled in America, drifted through all sorts of jobs, and then came back to Korea — it's been three years since he started acting again."
The surprises kept coming with every sentence. But the single fact that set Giuseppe's heart pounding beyond all restraint was this: the child had returned, one way or another.
Considering that he had begun acting again — and that he had chosen to work under a hidden name at that — didn't it mean that acting, to that child, was something set apart from everything else?
"Don't tell me there's no next work for me to see?"
By next work, he meant the films Yoon Jay had taken on after The Child. Bill Clement grinned.
"Two of them, actually. The one where he plays the lead has been invited to the Sundance Film Festival next week."
"Is that so?"
"Shall we go together?"
Bill Clement got along with his master famously well. He, too, wanted to see what Yoon Jae-hee had become.
"Shame we have to head out. There's more, if you want to stay."
"Plenty of time now. Come by whenever."
"What's going on behind you? You look busy."
"Ah, that's because of the TV show appearance. They've got me out on set."
Jayden, Owen, and Ryan stared at Yoon Jay on the screen. A hair clip was pinned in his hair — apparently mid-styling.
"Still hasn't sunk in, has it? You, an actor."
"It's no different from you playing a mascot, Jayden. Get used to it faster."
"Don't forget us when you're famous."
"We should get going anyway. See you next time."
"Yeah."
When the video call ended, Jayden's expression looked no different than usual.
But Owen and Ryan, who had shared life and death with him for years, sensed something off about it.
During their short stay in Korea, Jayden had been watching Yoon Jay's every change with a hawk's eye.
"Aren't you worrying too much? Since when is Ten your kid?"
"He might as well be."
"And who was it that lost every single time he went up against that 'kid'?"
"Shut it."
The truth was, Jayden's claim that his patience had reached its limit had been a calculated move to draw out what Yoon Jay was really thinking.
Ten had lived a fairly good life. Some corners of the world accused him of being drunk on attention and forgetting his duty — but he was, beyond any argument, a hero.
"You know how Isaac and Stephan died."
"That's..."
Owen and Ryan fell silent. Their two former Numbers comrades had left the world without warning.
Anyone who had experienced LIS firsthand could understand. They were still attending counseling themselves.
"After what that Lion bastard did to him — after being put through all that — does imitating the guy and acting him strike you as a sane thing to do?"
"I mean... it does sound kind of crazy, yeah."
Owen and Ryan nodded. They remembered the seizure Yoon Jay had suffered in the hospital room.
That was why watching him play Baek Jin-ri in The Garden of Evil had never sat well with them.
None of them had faced Assad Yasin Qadir — the man they called 'the Lion' — directly.
But there was no shortage of video footage of the Lion taking hostages and committing his atrocities.
The bastard had loved documenting himself, so the material was abundant — and it had been through that footage that they had analyzed his behavior all along.
Which was why, when they watched Yoon Jay replicate the Lion's mannerisms and dissolve them into his performance, it had made their stomachs turn.
"Look at it another way, though — maybe it's actually a good sign. Sounds like he overcame it, doesn't it?"
Jayden scoffed. Him? Overcame it? No. That boy was a master of hiding things.
Isaac and Stephan, both already gone, had been cut from the same cloth as Yoon Jay. All the more reason not to relax. Complicated emotions played across all three of their faces.
"Hah... let's get going for now."
"I'm so sorry. Have you been waiting long?"
"Not at all — you could've finished your call. Wow, but your voice is gorgeous."
"Thank you."
"It was English anyway, so I couldn't understand a word of it. Don't worry."
Yoon Jay smiled at the bustling energy of the staff. It felt like the set of a long-running show with consistently strong ratings.
"We're starting soon!"
The staff moved with purpose, and Yoon Jay rose from his seat to await his cue.
"Finally, he's here! After a meteoric debut in M Network's drama Along Along, this man has renewed his own legend year after year and remains at the very center of public attention!"
"And recently he made headlines by revealing a remarkable piece of his past! Yes! Please welcome — actor Yoon Jay!"
The two hosts greeted him with a flourish of applause. Yoon Jay turned to the camera and gave a slight bow from the waist.
"Hello, I'm actor Yoon Jay."
"Goodness! He's handsome!"
"Oh, wait just a moment. Could you stay standing for a bit?"
The PD hurriedly spoke up before Yoon Jay could take his seat, then positioned him to stand alongside the two hosts.
"Standing like this, Chang-jin looks exactly like a cicada clinging to an old tree."
"Excuse me, PD-nim. A cicada?"
Min Chang-jin, the male host, choked up and stepped toward the PD, while Seo Eun-young, the female host, kept twisting her head away.
"Eun-young, look to your side."
"Ah—uh, can't I stand a little farther away?"
Seo Eun-young kept stealing glances at Yoon Jay seated on her left, and the moment their eyes met she startled and jerked her gaze away.
In over five years of hosting this talk show she had met plenty of gorgeous celebrities, but her immunity had completely failed against Yoon Jay's face.
"To be honest, I got a glimpse of him during rehearsal, and he really is something else."
"Look at the writers — they've all got hearts in their eyes right now."
"Up close it's honestly overwhelming. Downright aggressive."
The two hosts flanked him and kept building him up. Yoon Jay, in turn, teased Seo Eun-young, who kept dodging his gaze — by suddenly shoving his face right into her line of sight.
"You don't have to... sneak peeks like that."
"Aaack!"
"Whoa — careful, now."
When Seo Eun-young jolted backward and nearly toppled out of her chair, Yoon Jay caught the chair's backrest and gently swung her back into place. With his arm now effectively wrapped around her waist, she went completely blank.
"I... I could die just like this and be perfectly content."
"Haha!"
"Have you watched our show before?"
"Yes — I saw last week's episode with actor Park Da-yul."
"He said he wanted to meet you, you know."
And so, trading bits of small talk, they worked through the awkwardness with the hosts.
"Now, let's get into the real talk. Yoon Jay-ssi — how have you been?"
"Busy. The bomb I set off was mine, so I've been running around cleaning up after it."
Since the Hwangryong Film Awards, Yoon Jay had only kept the handful of schedules Astra had locked in. He'd given interviews to trusted outlets and magazines, and posted messages himself on his fan cafe.
But those things only reached the people who went looking for them — which was why he'd decided to set the record straight once more through a major talk show.
"Revealing your past directly like this — it's been the talk of the town. How does it feel?"
"Hmm... before I answer that, I think I should tell you how I lived after The Child."
"We'd love that. Yoon Jae-hee's — that is, Yoon Jay-ssi's — childhood was so shrouded in mystery that everything out there is pure speculation."
Yoon Jae-hee had been nothing short of the film industry's idol. The genius child actor praised by even the most fastidious of filmmakers was famous well beyond his own industry.
The host would bring up one of the rumors floating around the internet, and Yoon Jay would correct it — that was how the segment unfolded.
"It's a little awkward saying this myself, but after The Child, the attention was enormous, wasn't it?"
"The whole nation knew your name. I still remember the front pages of every newspaper covered in it."
"The way it sounds, I vanished right after The Child — but the truth is, I was already attached to several projects."
"Oh? Then the filmography..."
"I only ever made it as far as trying. The attention was too much — I hit a slump and developed a fear of the camera. I'd like to take this chance to apologize to everyone on those sets. The shooting schedules were delayed because of me..."
"Oh, come on — you had nothing to apologize for. You were barely eleven at the time."
Back then, it had been Kwon Min-jae and a handful of other male child actors who filled the vacancy Yoon Jay left behind so suddenly.
"The claim that my biological parents tried to make money off of me is not true. It was the excessive media attention and the endless rumors that wore them down. That's why they divorced, and I left for America with my mother."
For the sake of his late biological parents' honor, he had kept certain parts of the truth to himself.
And when it came out that the elementary school classmate who had once run an anti-fan cafe about him was, as it turned out, the same person who had recently tried to spread malicious rumors, the hosts and the staff watching from the front grieved on his behalf.
Archive footage was scheduled to air showing just how many rumors he had lived beneath — and how reporters had shown up at his school and his home, clamoring for a story.
"What a drama of a family you have."
"Right? They're the engine of my life, really."
The family in America who had taken him in wholeheartedly, the twins, their mother — the hosts could barely contain their amazement at the sheer variety of his family.
"And of course, Yoon Jay-ssi, you're famous for your past careers too, aren't you?"
"Wow, seriously, it was unbelievable."
Everyone marveled, too, at the long list of jobs he'd held that had already surfaced in the media. And then, his biological father's funeral. His return to the entertainment industry.
"But the weight of the name Yoon Jae-hee turned out heavier than I expected. I figured people would have forgotten it by now."
"Haha! Forgotten? You're the original icon of national pride."
"That's why I chose to work under my American name with the old surname attached. It's not some scheme to reveal it later and milk a dramatic reveal for all it's worth."
"Like a protagonist concealing their true strength?"
"No, that wasn't the intent at all... that name is still a heavy one for me to carry."
Yoon Jay stared into the air for a moment. His expression looked complicated.
"As an actor, it was essentially starting over from zero. I didn't want to wear that burdensome name again only to have attention land on everything except the acting."
"Ah, I understand completely."
"Yes."
"But pedigree always tells, doesn't it? You drew attention from your very debut and you've been soaring ever since."
"Thank you."
Yoon Jay smiled gently. At the sight of it, both hosts momentarily lost their words.
"There was quite a lot of noise before the Hwangryong Film Awards, wasn't there? How was all that for you?"
"Our CEO, who knew my situation, went around patching things up in every direction, and that got blown out of proportion. Honestly, I'm of the school that there's no such thing as a secret forever. I always thought my past would come to light someday. It wasn't by my own will — it happened half by force — but the truth is, I'd meant to reveal it right here."
"Really? Ah, what a shame."
In fact, after the Hwangryong Film Awards ended, he had planned to tell his closest acquaintances first and then confirm everything on this very show's New Year's special.
At that remark, regret was written all over the PD's face seated in front of them.
Yoon Jay studied the shape of the man's muttering lips carefully — it looked a great deal like him cursing that son of a bitch Kang Chang-hoon. Wasn't Kang Chang-hoon the reporter who had blown the story early?
"Besides, I already had an award on my record, and Ha-jun — the friend who played Jung Yi-hyun in Intermission — I'd known him since the Baeksan Arts Awards."
"Yes — Kang Ha-jun-ssi."
"He was nominated for Best New Actor, and sadly didn't take the trophy. But a nomination alone is a tremendous feat, isn't it? Watching him gave me a great deal to think about. If I'd kept hiding, then in order to protect my secret, I'd be stealing away someone else's desperately earned chance."
"And in the end, everything worked out, didn't it?"
"Yes."
Once he revealed that he was, in fact, Yoon Jae-hee, the media and the online communities had erupted — but the acquaintances who had quietly felt uneasy about deceiving others on his behalf were the ones who encouraged him now, telling him he'd been through so much. A heavy weight had lifted from his heart.
"So how should we address you from now on?"
"Yoon Jae-hee and Yoon Jay are both me. You can call me whatever you like. But I'm used to answering to Yoon Jay, so just keep calling me that."