Chapter 28: An Albatross in a Chicken Coop (1)
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 28: An Albatross in a Chicken Coop (1)
“Oh, what’s this? Guk-shin, what brings you here?”
Lee Guk-shin turned his head at the sound of his older brother’s voice calling him.
“Father said if I didn’t show up this time, he’d strike my name from the will entirely. I’m so busy I feel like I’m dying, but I’m squeezing out every last drop of my life span to—uh… uh…?”
His eyes, which had been fixed on his brother, suddenly swiveled.
His gaze was snatched away by a tall, slender young woman walking with a trail of nieces and nephews following behind her.
It wasn’t that he chose to look over there.
She had forcibly seized his attention, so there was no other way to describe it but to say his gaze had been stolen.
“…”
In that moment, his breath simply stopped.
She was so beautiful that his lungs felt like they were going out of business, his liver felt like it was melting, and his heart seemed ready to refuse resuscitation.
Is she… even human?
“Guk-shin? Guk-shin! Hey! Breathe, man, breathe!”
His family members pounded on his shoulders, and Guk-shin finally snapped out of his respiratory paralysis. He had been so lost in admiration that he’d simply forgotten to breathe.
Only then was he able to look at the subject before him with a bit more composure.
Long, straight black hair.
However, there was a subtle sense of incongruity. It was as if the color wasn’t natural.
It was partly due to the alien hue reflected by the hair, and partly because it gave off a strange mismatch with her exotic, porcelain-white skin.
Her age? He couldn’t tell.
She looked like she could be in her late teens or early twenties.
Guk-shin suddenly began to imagine.
What if she were wearing something else instead of that plain white shirt and black slacks?
For example, the signature outfit of the female villain in the movie he was currently working on.
“Uh… she’s truly a beauty. But who is she? Is she the one Joo-hyuk is going to marry?”
“…What?”
Guk-shin had offered what he thought was a perfectly logical deduction.
Lee Joo-hyuk was the youngest of the brothers and the only one still unmarried.
He was quite handsome and a smooth talker, making him popular with the opposite sex. It made sense that he might have brought his fiancée to a family gathering.
Considering the difference in their looks, it was a complete collapse of probability, but why else would a woman like that be wandering around a family gathering with a gaggle of nieces and nephews in tow?
“What kind of nonsense is that! That’s my daughter, Yu-jin. Yu-jin!”
His brother slapped him on the back with a resounding thwack!, snapping him back to reality.
Guk-shin turned to his brother with the eyes of an intelligent dinosaur witnessing a meteor strike.
“Yu-jin? That’s Yu-jin?”
“Yeah, Yu-jin. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? But still, there’s a limit to how much you can misunderstand. Bringing up Joo-hyuk is taking it way too far, don’t you think?”
“That’s really Yu-jin?”
Only then did he remember.
The niece he had seen when she was very young—the one he thought would grow up to make many men cry.
“Oh, but her hair color… Was Yu-jin always like that?”
“She dyed it. Ever since first grade, boys kept bullying her and trying to pull her hair out.”
“Ah… Is it really you, Yu-jin?”
“I didn’t realize it was you either, Uncle. You look so different from my memory.”
“Oh, well, I’ve put on some age weight. It’s easy to not recognize someone after a long time.”
“Age weight?”
“Has it been about ten years since I last saw you? I’ve gained over twenty kilograms since then, so I probably look completely different from what you remember.”
“Aha, no wonder.”
The moment Lee Yu-jin giggled, Guk-shin felt a thrill vibrate through his central nervous system.
An impulse to immediately run to his car, grab his camera from the trunk, and point it at her swept through his entire body.
“Yu-jin, your daily life must be quite exhausting, isn’t it?”
“Pardon?”
“I imagine men won’t leave you alone. Let’s see… you must be hounded by casting offers, too. Don’t you get scouted every few minutes when you’re out walking?”
“No. There’s nothing like that.”
She gave a small smirk and shook her head lightly.
Bewitching.
A subject who could enchant people with just a minor expression, or even just by existing.
She was an asymmetric strategic weapon that could blow the hearts of the audience wide open just by being tossed onto the screen.
Guk-shin chuckled.
“Oh, come on. Unless everyone in the Korean entertainment industry is blind, there’s no way they’d leave a subject like you alone.”
“It’s true. Anyway, it’s been a long time. How have you been?”
“Just living like everyone else, I suppose.”
“Then I’ll go pay my respects to Grandfather.”
“Oh, right.”
Guk-shin thought to himself.
Grandfather? Did Yu-jin always call his father that? It had been nearly ten years, so he couldn’t quite remember.
As Lee Yu-jin moved, the young nieces and nephews swarmed after her.
The way they scrambled and struggled just to grab a piece of her clothing or the tip of her finger reminded him of chicks fighting for the coziest spot under a mother hen’s wing. He couldn’t help but smile.
In an instant, Guk-shin’s mouth moved on its own.
“Yu-jin.”
“Yes?”
Lee Yu-jin paused and looked back.
From the profile of her face as it turned to the full frontal shot, every single moment was perfectly sculpted.
Is she really my niece?
No matter how he looked at her, she didn’t seem to share a drop of the Lee family bloodline. It would be more convincing to say his brother and sister-in-law had kidnapped and raised her.
“Would you like to try a camera test sometime?”
*
At first, I didn’t even realize he was my uncle. His appearance had changed so much.
In my memory, he was thin and sharp, like someone suffering from a nervous breakdown, but now he had a chubby build that gave off a generally comfortable vibe.
A person’s entire face really does change when they gain over twenty kilograms.
Anyway, I was moving to greet Grandfather when I was caught off guard by what Uncle said.
“Would you like to try a camera test sometime?”
“Oh, what does that mean? I don’t really know difficult terms.”
Actually, I knew exactly what it meant, but I played dumb on purpose.
Uncle had definitely said he worked in the movie industry.
“Well, you see, your uncle works on movie sets.”
“Ah, are you a movie director?”
“No, nothing as grand as a movie director, but I work in film. I’m a staff member, something like that.”
“A staff? Like a walking stick?”
“No, no, what I mean is…”
“I’m not interested in that kind of thing, so I’ll pass. I’ll go greet Grandfather now.”
“Wait, Yu-jin. Yu-jin? Yu-jin! Just give your uncle a moment of your time…”
I quickly moved toward the study.
I felt a sense of pride in my seasoned ability to time my escape perfectly.
“Noona! Noona! Are you going to be in a movie?”
“Didn’t you just hear me? I said I’m not doing it. And Uncle said he’s not even a movie director.”
“Unnie, I want to see your face in an IMAX theater!”
“Yeah, that’s not happening. Do you think just anyone can be a movie star? If you go to where the actors hang out, faces like mine are as common as weeds.”
“Really? Really? No way! You’re so pretty, Noona!”
“It’s true. Believe me.”
I quieted the kids down in front of the study and knocked cautiously.
Knock, knock.
“Grandfather, your granddaughter Yu-jin is here.”
“Come in.”
Creeeeak. I opened the door and stepped inside.
The scent of books mixed with the smell of ink wafted through the air. The room was filled with shelves packed tightly with books in every direction.
Grandfather, wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt, stood up from his large executive desk.
His indifferent eyes behind his reading glasses swept lightly over my face.
“Right, so you’ve entered high school?”
“Yes.”
“Have you made many friends?”
“One girl.”
“Friends are important. At your age, meeting the wrong kind of friends can greatly derail the direction of your life.”
“She’s a good friend. Her family is wealthy, too. They live in a detached house in Cheongdam-dong.”
“A family’s wealth does not determine a person’s character. Never forget that, and always be on your guard. If only for the sake of your parents.”
“Yes.”
“Right, now that you’re a high schooler, you’ll have plenty of things to spend money on…”
In an instant, expectant dopamine began to pool in my mouth like saliva.
It was allowance time!
“Don’t share this with Yu-seok. Use it all for yourself.”
“Thank you!”
Grandfather handed me a book.
It was always the same pattern; he always gave me my allowance tucked between the pages like a bookmark.
Thanks to that, the other relatives thought I was receiving a book as a gift rather than money. It was perfect security.
“It’s a secret from your parents.”
“Of course! Thank you!”
“Right, you may go. I expect you’ll have a hard time looking after the children today as well.”
“See you later!”
Why give me the allowance as soon as I arrived? Usually, he’d call me back to the study to give it to me before I left.
As I stepped out of the study, my younger cousins swarmed around me, chirping like chicks.
“Noona, Noona, what’s that book?”
“Unnie, is it a difficult book?”
I let their chattering go in one ear and out the other as I hurried away from the study. My only thought was to lock myself in the bathroom and check the amount.
How much will it be this time? A million won? No, since I’m a high schooler now, maybe it’s two million?
I holed up in the bathroom and tried to open the book…
Wait, this isn’t a book?
As it turned out, it was a box cleverly disguised as a book.
Not only the cover, but even the texture of a bookmark was replicated on the surface, so I hadn’t noticed at all until I tried to open it.
“Gasp!”
W-what is this?
Inside were two thick bundles of 50,000-won bills. I removed the paper bands and counted them carefully…
“Ten million won? Wow, incredible.”
Just by upgrading from middle school to high school, my allowance increased tenfold?
I’d felt it ever since he lived in that two-story detached house with a garden in Samseong-dong, but just how rich was Grandfather?
But then why did we buy our apartment with a loan?
*
His parents and siblings thought of Lee Guk-shin as a bit of a loafer.
In reality, however, he was a very successful Camera Director.
There were well over ten films that had reached ten million viewers thanks to his touch.
Unlike movie directors, Camera Directors rarely have public exposure. They are famous only within the industry.
He was in a position where no one knew him, yet he made excellent money.
Of course, a Camera Director’s pay is fixed regardless of whether a movie becomes a massive hit, but because his skill and career were top-tier, movie directors would practically beg him to work with them.
His schedule was always backed up like cars on a highway during a holiday, so he hadn’t been able to find time for family gatherings.
After he became famous, he was busy because he had so much work.
Before that, he was busy trying to become famous.
While a movie director might have a gap of several years between projects, as soon as Guk-shin finished one project, another waiting director would practically kidnap him.
—Guk-shin, as a Camera Director, you truly have a devilish talent.
—How do you capture things exactly the way I imagine them, and then some? Your sense is insane.
—Director, my debut film was able to shine because of you. Thank you so much.
Originally, Lee Guk-shin wanted to be a movie director.
Anyone who enters this field would feel the same way.
Since he was young, he had received many compliments for taking incredibly striking and flavorful photos and videos.
In middle and high school, he won many awards for the ultra-short and short films he made for his college entrance exams.
So, after graduating with a degree in film, he stepped into the industry with confidence. He showed promise from the start, and everyone praised him.
However, as the years passed, he realized a bitter reality.
His talent as a movie director was severely lacking.
He was born with the talent to capture a subject beautifully on camera, but directing a story that audiences would find interesting was a completely different matter.
A director didn’t just have to film well.
They had to oversee the set, keep a close eye on the budget, persuade investors, and coordinate with distributors—they had to be good at everything.
Above all, they had to know how to command the audience’s emotions. That was a talent heaven had not granted him.
In terms of classical music, he could be a lead pianist, but he could never aspire to be a master conductor of an orchestra.
After realizing his limits, he actually became happier. The end of his misery only came when he accepted the final destination of his talent.
Many movie directors sought him out, and he never ran out of work all year round.
His family thought of him as a loafer, but he actually found that comfortable.
It meant he wasn’t hounded by requests to get autographs from famous stars or to set up video calls.
However, today was a miserable day for him.
“Yu-jin, Yu-jin. Uncle is a really successful Camera Director, I’m telling you! Please, believe me.”
“Hey, Yu-seok-mon. Do something about Uncle.”
“Yeah! Uncle Guk-shin, my noona is going to get into Korea University’s physics department and win a Nobel Prize in Physics someday. She’s not doing movies or anything like that.”
“Are you mocking me for getting a level 3 on my mock exams right now?”
Slap!
At Lee Yu-jin’s back smash, the mountain-sized Lee Yu-seok went flying.
Look at Yu-seok’s reaction. Those siblings really get along.
Lee Guk-shin never imagined that what he had just seen wasn’t WWE, but UFC.
When his repeated persuasion failed to work, Guk-shin finally decided to pull out his trump card.
“Yu-jin, you know Yoon Se-rang, right? Korea’s top actress.”
“Is there anyone who doesn’t know Yoon Se-rang?”
“Want Uncle to give her a video call?”
“Pardon?”
“Would that be enough to prove my professional integrity?”