6
6. Four Months Later
“Let’s stay one more day before we go.”
“Let’s rest one more day and then go.”
“Let’s put it off just a little longer and do it later.”
Thinking like that and spending each day one after another, I suddenly realized that four months had already passed.
“Wow..... You’ve completely become a local.”
“Yeah..... Do you think I’ve put on some muscle?”
“Could you really build muscle in just four months? Look. This is what real muscle looks like.”
Flex!
I ignored Jeongmin as he flexed his arm and showed off his muscles, instead looking at the piles of grass in front of me.
“Whew..... This is refreshing.”
I was currently helping Jeongmin with farm work in his family’s field.
“Feels refreshing compared to Korea, right?”
“You can’t even compare them.”
I occasionally called my mother in Korea, and every time, she complained that she couldn’t live without air conditioning.
“You’ve completely gotten used to it too.”
“Well..... It’s been long enough to get used to it.”
When Jeongmin spoke in English, I answered him in English as well.
English now came naturally from my mouth.
‘I really have gotten used to it.’
I had studied English hard, but this environment had naturally helped me improve.
I could understand why people went abroad to study English.
‘The first week was frustrating, but after that, I started roughly understanding what English meant.’
After about two weeks, I began to understand simple English in my head. After about a month, I could manage basic conversations.
After two months, perhaps because I had been studying, I gradually became able to read English. And as I continued studying, by the time three months had passed, I could use English freely.
“So when are you going back to Korea?”
“Do you want me to leave? I’m helping you for free, you know.”
About a month after I came here, I had too much free time.
There were more days when I didn’t film a vlog than days when I did, and I spent most of my time studying English.
Eventually, I had nothing to do and my body felt stiff from sitting around so much, so I started helping Jeongmin with the farm work.
“Paid or unpaid..... Don’t you miss your family by now? Usually, people get homesick after staying somewhere this long.”
“Maybe this lifestyle suits me.”
Rather than saying I was suited to the countryside, I simply liked this environment.
Whenever I looked at the impossibly high sky and the wide-open grassland that seemed to stretch forever, my heart would tremble with a strange, wistful feeling.
It was more than just feeling refreshed. There was a strong sense of longing.
‘I don’t know what this wistful feeling actually means.....’
It could have been an easy emotion to understand, or perhaps a difficult one.
I had been unable to leave until now because I wanted to understand the identity of this feeling.
“Korea..... I still have time left on my visa, so I might as well stay a little longer.”
I sat on the ground like that and stared blankly at the sky.
“Is that an eagle?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
As I blankly watched the sky filled with flying birds, I gradually became bored.
“Shinyong!”
As I stared absentmindedly at the sky, I saw a familiar little girl running toward me from far away, waving her hand.
“Slow down!”
She wasn’t running away from anything, but seeing her running toward me with such a happy expression made me chuckle.
“Huff, huff..... Shinyong! You’re supposed to come meet me when I come!”
“Sorry. I was tired too, so I was resting.”
Emma puffed out her cheeks, but soon she saw the work Jeongmin and I had done and let it slide without saying anything.
“More importantly, you wrote it, right?”
“I did..... I did, right?”
“Then hurry and show me! I want to read The Woman of New York already!”
She had once spoken formally, even if awkwardly, but now she had completely dropped the honorifics.
I didn’t particularly mind.
There were plenty of people who spoke casually even after going into the city, so I simply accepted it.
“Ugh. Fine.”
Eventually, I stood up because of Emma’s persistent urging.
“I’ll head inside first. Call me if anything happens.”
“Okay.”
I left the rest of the work to Jeongmin and went into the house with Emma.
---
The Woman of New York was not a web novel.
I had continued trying to write web novels, but strangely enough, nothing came out the way I wanted it to, and eventually, my break continued.
In the end, Emma, who couldn’t stand watching me like that, suggested that I slowly try writing an English novel while studying English.
‘I thought about it a lot.’
Since I was also studying English, I had to write while thinking about words that were easy for me to use in everyday life.
That wasn’t the only problem.
‘I had to be careful with the accents and vocabulary too.’
Korea had regional dialects, so why wouldn’t Canada have them?
I carefully avoided the peculiar accents and vocabulary unique to Saskatchewan as I built the story.
‘And Emma liked The Woman of New York more than I expected.’
Once I had completed a certain amount, I showed it to Emma.
Emma apparently liked the story, because she came to Jeongmin’s house every three days and asked me to show her more.
“Whoa..... I really love this chapter! You did great, Writer!”
“.....Yeah.”
I couldn’t help chuckling at how Emma suddenly reverted to formal speech whenever she was looking at my writing.
“Is this story really that interesting?”
I placed the lemonade I had prepared while Emma was concentrating on the story on the table and sat beside her.
“It’s really interesting!”
“What’s so interesting about a story with this many typos.....?”
The Woman of New York was a story I had come up with after seeing Emma.
Inspired by Emma’s past, in which she had come to Canada carrying many wounds, I wrote a story in my own style about a woman who travels from Mexico to New York to succeed in America.
‘The biggest strength of my writing is that it flows naturally.’
I incorporated the techniques I had learned from writing web novels directly into this story.
The method of web novels, which needed to provide a new stimulus in every chapter, and the method of a standalone novel, which provided a large-scale stimulus throughout a single book.
Since writing in a new way felt awkward, I simply wrote the story the way I wanted to.
“No! Other people think it’s interesting too!”
At those words, I stopped the cup just before bringing it to my mouth.
“.....Other people?”
“Yes!”
“Have you shown my writing to other people?”
Emma tilted her head as if she didn’t understand what I meant.
“I keep uploading it to my blog.”
“......What? Without my permission?”
“I got permission.”
“You..... got permission?”
When I looked confused, Emma picked up her phone and showed it to me.
“Here.”
A video was playing on her phone.
‘When was this?’
The video showed Jeongmin’s living room, where a small group of people had gathered and were casually drinking.
“Shinyong. Can I upload The Woman of New York to the internet?”
“Who’s going to read that typo-filled story if you upload it? Go ahead, upload it! Hahahahaha!”
“Are you really saying it’s okay for me to upload it?”
“I told you it’s fine! Just upload it! Put it out into the world!”
“......”
The video showed me drunk.
As I watched the video, memories slowly began to return to my mind.
‘This was definitely..... the day we had a party with the chicken our neighbor gave us after I finished writing The Woman of New York.’
Our neighbor ran a chicken farm and had given us some chicken.
Since Jeongmin had been looking after the children, they had given him a lot of chicken as thanks, and Emma, who happened to be at the house, had eaten chicken with us too.
Since the next day was also a day off, I had gotten pretty drunk, and I had never imagined I had said something like that.
‘Well, does it really matter?’
After all, I had written the story for someone to read.
The only difference was that the one person had become several people, and unlike my main profession, I had written this purely as a hobby, so I wasn’t particularly embarrassed.
“But where did you upload it? Your personal blog?”
“Yes. I uploaded it to the blog I had been using since I was in America.”
Emma hadn’t had much to do in America.
She usually spent her time reading books in the hospital, and when she didn’t have anything to read, she apparently worked on her blog.
“Did you do things like vlogging?”
“That too. I also reviewed the books I read.”
‘Book reviews.....’
Reviewing and evaluating works.
It was something anyone could do, something open to everyone.
‘I’d like to say it’s because she’s just a child.....’
But Emma’s eye for books, having read them since she was young, was more accurate than I had expected.
No, honestly, Emma was practically a genius to the point that I sometimes wondered why she was even here.
‘More than anything..... I’m tired of living a life where I’m constantly judged by others.’
While working as a web novel writer, I had been hurt more times than I could count.
Comments, reviews, ratings, and recommendations.
The evaluations that followed me in various forms had, at some point, become the standard by which I measured myself.
‘It even felt like people were judging Kwon Shinyong the person, not just Kwon Shinyong the writer.....’
Of course, we are always judged as we live in society.
No matter what kind of work you do, being evaluated had become one of the standards of modern life, but this particular world of web novels had made that aspect especially intense.
“Still, I didn’t make Shinyong’s work completely public. I set it to private so only people close to me can see it.”
“Well, I guess..... I don’t really mind.”
I brought the cup of lemonade to my mouth.
Gulp..... Gulp.....
As the refreshing, sweet, cool scent of lemon stimulated my head, my thoughts became a little clearer.
“So what was the reaction?”
“They said it was interesting and are threatening me to bring them the next chapter!”
“.....Threatening?”
“Yes!”
Proudly!
Despite saying she was being threatened, Emma somehow looked extremely proud.
“You seem..... pretty happy about it.”
“It’s a good thing when the writer I raised gets praised!”
“......Yeah.”
I couldn’t really deny that.
‘She’s not wrong.....’
Emma was the person who had helped me the most when I was studying English.
Jeongmin was often busy focusing on his work and exercise, and whenever he was, Emma would come over to the house and teach me.
She had consistently taught me everything from how to read English to how to write and speak it, so I wondered if that was why my English had improved this much.
“Well..... It is nice that I’ve been writing consistently.”
For the first time in a long while, I had focused on writing.
It was short, but I felt like I was writing consistently.
It wasn’t the same passion I had felt in the past, but I was starting to become interested in writing again.
It felt good to experience that excitement I hadn’t felt in a long time once again.
“If the response is good, that’s great. Anyway, with this, The Woman of New York is finished. I’ve done everything I needed to do.”
Now I had to return to Korea.
I still planned to stay for about another month, but I was thinking that I should gradually start getting things in order.
‘I don’t know when I’ll come back.’
I didn’t know when I would return to Canada, and I might never come back for the rest of my life.
That was why I had finished The Woman of New York as a gift for Emma.
“Oh. And there’s someone from a publishing company among the people on my blog. They said they want to sign a contract with me.”
“Who?”
“A publishing company contacted me. They said they want to sign a contract with me.”
“Oh. Really..... Huh?”
Did I hear that correctly?