15
15. Manager
Every time I filmed a Vlog, I had one thought in the back of my mind.
‘Don’t get too focused on this.’
Only recently had the number of views started to rise, and I had only just surpassed 1,000 subscribers.
To me, the Vlog was simply like a diary for my growth.
‘The comments scare me.’
Ever since I started writing web novels, I stopped reading comments even when I watched a MuTube video that I found
extremely entertaining.
I didn’t press either the like or dislike button. I simply thought of the person as another freelancer living a life
similar to mine.
‘They say bad comments are better than no comments.....’
Whether they were positive or negative.
Now, they were all things I was afraid of.
Comments were scary.
My manager would check them for me, but even so, I couldn’t hide the fact that they frightened me.
‘With the Vlog..... let’s ignore everything else and just do what I want to do.’
Of course, I couldn’t include scenes that couldn’t be broadcast.
Even so, I started putting in scenes I wanted to include, or simply began recording things about myself.
“Kyahaaaaang!”
“You’re eating well.”
At first, I only recorded things about myself, but at some point, that began to change.
It was still undoubtedly a record of my life, but I started wanting to capture the special things that happened in my
everyday life.
Things I normally wouldn’t have recorded, such as Chunsik’s story, my relationship with Emma, my life in Korea, and so
on.
Rather than just a lighthearted daily life, I repeatedly talked about the regrets I had about the life I had lived and
even blamed myself for them.
“You even eat dog food well.”
When I said that, Jeongmin told me I worried about the strangest things.
“They rummage through garbage and eat whatever they find. What difference does it make whether they eat dog food or cat
food?”
“That..... is true.”
“Kyahng?”
“No, it’s fine. Keep eating.”
With everyone’s eyes around it focused on it, the baby raccoon looked at us while holding a handful of food in both
paws.
Even an animal seemed to care when people were staring at it.
“But this raccoon seems to be a little older. It has teeth coming in.”
Since it ate the food well without needing milk, it seemed like it would be easy to raise.
However, it was still so young that I hesitated to put it out in the yard.
“We can’t put it outside..... yet, right?”
“I don’t think it’s ready yet.”
Mina, who had brought up the idea, also seemed to think that putting the baby raccoon outside was too much.
There were many predators of raccoons around here, such as bears, wolves, and coyotes, so simply letting a baby raccoon
outside would be dangerous.
“We’ll have to keep it in the house for a while. But it’s a baby, so I bet it’ll cause a ton of trouble.”
“Then you take care of it.”
“.....Me?”
“You’re a druid.”
“......”
After coming to Canada, I had experienced many bittersweet situations.
Since most of them had happened while I was drunk, I could make excuses for them if I wanted to, but most of them
involved animals.
There had been times when I was sleeping outside and a cat wandered around me, and I had even brought home a bear cub.
“The time you brought that bear cub home was the funniest.”
“Ah. That was pretty funny.”
At those words, Emma and Mina frowned.
“Why did you bring a bear cub home! Its mother could have been nearby!”
“Right! The baby bear was pitiful!”
“After you brought home the raccoon, I’m just starting to get used to this.”
There were so many dangerous wild animals in the Canadian countryside, and there had also been many cases of those wild
animals attacking humans.
Perhaps because of that, Canadian homes sometimes had mounted heads of bears, moose, or wolves that had been hunted as
trophies.
There was a lot of criticism because it involved hunting wild animals, but there was also little choice if people wanted
to protect themselves from the threat of wild animals.
“Looks like the mother bear had been killed, and the cubs were scattered.”
Apparently, a bear had broken into the fields belonging to Mr. Hans, who lived nearby.
They fired warning shots, but it didn’t run away, so they eventually shot it.
The cubs that had been there scattered, and one of them ended up at Jeongmin’s house.
Since I had been extremely drunk, I had simply brought the bear inside.
“It’s amazing it didn’t bite you.”
“The bear cub must have been confused too.”
Well, I hadn’t been that drunk at the time, so I remembered some of it.
Unlike the raccoon that had wandered around my room, the bear had been put inside a cage immediately after it was found
and then taken straight to a shelter.
“Anyway, let’s eat now.”
We stopped filming for a moment and prepared to go outside.
“But what have you guys been doing this whole time?”
Mina didn’t know that I uploaded Vlogs, so she naturally found the whole scene strange.
“I was filming a Vlog.”
“A Vlog? You?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow..... What’s the name of your channel?”
“[A Korean City Boy Who Came to Travel to the Countryside of Canada].”
“.....That’s a long name.”
“Well, it’s not like I’m particularly invested in the channel.”
“Still, you need something people can remember easily. You can use that as the title.”
“Too much trouble.”
As always, this wasn’t something I intended to make money from.
Mina quickly took out her phone and began checking my channel.
“.....What is this?”
The moment she saw the completely unmanaged channel, Mina’s eyebrows began twitching.
Her expression gradually became more and more disapproving, as if she had seen something she wasn’t supposed to.
“Come on. Let’s hurry up and get ready to eat.”
Whether she did that or not, I didn’t really care about the matter anyway, so I picked up the container of dak-galbi
from the refrigerator.
“Hey. The dak-galbi..... isn’t on a griddle?”
“How are we supposed to make that much on a griddle? We’ll grill it over charcoal. What? You don’t like it?”
“Of course I don’t hate it, idiot..... I like it.”
Honestly, I preferred griddle-fried dak-galbi.
After eating the dak-galbi, frying rice in the leftover sauce and then putting mozzarella cheese on top was one of the
happiest things in the world.
‘But..... charcoal-grilled dak-galbi has its own appeal.’
When the flavor of the marinade soaked into the chicken and absorbed the aroma of charcoal, there was nothing more
fragrant.
Food could transform into something completely different depending on how you ate it.
“Oppa......”
“What?”
As we were heading outside to get the vegetables and pickles to eat with the food, Mina called out to me.
“I’ll manage your channel from now on. No, please let me do it.”
“Do whatever you want.”
“.....Huh? Really?”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t care about it anyway, so what difference did it make?
If Mina wanted to be my manager, she could. If she didn’t, she didn’t have to.
I didn’t know what she was studying, but if it was something she wanted to do, I had no intention of stopping her.
“.....It’s really okay for me to do it?”
“I don’t lie about things like this. Just don’t ruin the channel.”
“O-of course! Yes!”
Perhaps she had always been interested in MuTube, because Mina seemed unusually excited.
“Then give me the camera. I’ll do it.”
“Okay.”
“Oh, right. Before that, shouldn’t we give the raccoon a name?”
“A name?”
Honestly, I didn’t care either way.
“Let’s just call it Raccoon.”
“What? That’s the name of the species.”
“I don’t want to get attached to it.”
If I gave it a name for no reason, I would inevitably become attached to it.
It was an animal we would have to release into the yard once it grew to a certain size, so I didn’t want to grow any
more attached to it.
“Raccoon. Stay here and be good.”
“Kyahaaang.”
It seemed to be getting sleepy now that it had finished eating the dog food.
I had heard that raccoons slept a lot, so there was nothing particularly strange about it.
“Then let’s start filming.”
---
Twenty-nine-year-old Lee Yoo-young, who lived in Seoul, had recently become completely hooked on a MuTube channel.
The channel was called [A Korean City Boy Who Came to Travel to the Countryside of Canada], which was an incredibly long
name, but it fit the videos perfectly.
There were already more than 100 videos, and the upload speed was incredibly fast, but that wasn’t why she had become so
addicted to the MuTube channel.
‘Healing.....’
Every time she watched the videos, she felt healed.
She thought the phrase “a Korean city boy” suited it perfectly.
As someone who had been watching the channel from the very beginning, she knew how its owner had grown.
‘He’s just like me.’
A life exhausted by living.
A mind unable to escape from work.
The man had been like that in the beginning too.
Even in videos that simply contained a few lines of dialogue and showed them grilling meat outside, it was obvious.
‘He’s anxious about everything.’
Not being able to trust the life he was living.
Always carrying anxiety in his heart.
Whether someone was a civil servant or an employee at a major corporation, everyone carried anxiety about the future.
The protagonist of the channel had expressed that anxiety from the very first video, talking with someone who appeared
to be his friend.
‘He’s similar to me, so I could relate to him..... but he’s also different from me.’
The protagonist in the videos had also always carried anxiety about traveling.
He hid his fear, went on the trip, and eventually fell completely in love with the country.
‘I want to go too.’
She wanted to travel to Canada, but she was anxious about whether she could actually enjoy traveling in a country where
the language and everything else were different.
Because of that anxiety, she hadn’t even started her journey, and every time she watched these videos, she couldn’t help
but lament her own situation.
‘I’m jealous.....’
She was jealous.
She wanted to go.
Fear and anxiety continued to weigh down her body, and in the end, she did nothing.
‘There’s another video today?’
Last time, a video had been uploaded of him eating a snack called BeaverTails.
There had already been plenty of videos of him eating BeaverTails, so it was practically repetitive content, but she
didn’t care.
‘The cinematography isn’t particularly impressive..... but it doesn’t matter.’
She didn’t care.
In fact, she liked those awkward parts even more.
‘There are two videos?’
They had been uploaded around lunchtime in Korea, so she watched the newly uploaded videos while eating lunch.
“How cute.....”
As always, the first video didn’t have particularly impressive cinematography. It was more like something filmed
casually as a hobby.
Seeing the raccoon on her phone holding food in both paws and munching away as if it were delicious, Lee Yoo-young
smiled without realizing it.
‘He picked up a baby raccoon..... Is he actually allowed to raise it?’
She didn’t know, but she decided that as long as it was cute, that was all that mattered.
The raccoon video was only about three minutes long, so it ended quickly.
‘The next video..... must be a mukbang, right?’
Perhaps because she was currently dieting, she swallowed repeatedly whenever she watched mukbang videos.
Still, watching them while eating chicken breast and sweet potatoes made it somewhat bearable.
“......Huh?”
As soon as the video of them eating dak-galbi began, she saw a familiar little girl and two men.
She felt happy without realizing it when the filming began with the girl named Emma, but there was something else that
strangely caught her attention.
“The video and subtitles..... They’ve gotten better.”
It was easier to watch than before, and the focus was much clearer.
Now that it was obvious what they wanted to show and what they wanted viewers to know, Lee Yoo-young smiled.