It was only early June, but the midday temperature was already pushing close to thirty degrees, and the franchise café, just past the Saturday lunch rush, had the air-conditioning running cold enough to feel chilly. I rubbed the bare skin below my short sleeves and pulled my chair in closer to the laptop.
A man perched on a gray rock against a backdrop of long-neglected, lifeless, frizzy brush. Black makeup blurred around his eyes. He stared into the camera with an intense gaze.
As with most photos of this mood, they hadn’t gone for stark black-and-white. It was in color.
Paradoxically, that made the barrenness of the background stand out even more. With nothing but the colors nature already had, the backdrop in the photo was plenty dark, rough, desolate.
Just as I’d first seen it in Phantom’s underground storage, Juhan—pulling the neckline of his sweater up to his chin and staring, or glaring, straight ahead—looked like a model in the photo.
To someone like me, his pose and expression, and the atmosphere he spun out of them, came off no different from a professional model.
Old Future.
An old future.
The site Yuni and Juhan ran wasn’t a simple, casual hobby-level clothing shop, the way they’d brushed it off.
Updates didn’t look frequent, what with Phantom keeping them busy, but alongside the product catalog there were photos they’d taken, photos of the two of them, and short pieces recording and describing moments from trips and daily life, with thoughts that spun off from there.
Even in Hong Kong, my personal favorite Old Town spans the facing neighborhoods of Noho, Soho, and Poho along the steep incline up to Victoria Peak. It’s both a sleek, hip “hot place” and the spot where the most ordinary, everyday face of Hong Kong breathes.
Butcher stalls in the traditional market with unrefrigerated cuts skewered and hung; dai pai dong crowded with locals trying to get by on a bowl of noodles; fifty-year-old narrow buildings braced with bamboo scaffolding for renovation, their backs to Michelin-starred restaurants and cutting-edge galleries showing the most avant-garde works—this is a district that never changes, yet is always new.
Like meeting an old friend who keeps their core—pure energy, passion—while never stopping, privately and socially, to become a better person, it always gives me a pleasant jolt.
The unexpected harmony created when colors that shouldn’t fit collide in the streets, the exotic smells that seize your nose, the babble of languages from all over the world braided into the Cantonese lilt.
Hong Kong’s particular newness—most international in sensibility while brimming with local character—shows a different face every day, and it stirs curiosity and interest even in travelers who’ve visited the city many times.
I barely smoke a pack a year, and so does Gwon Juhan, hardly enough to call either of us smokers, but after a drink at a Soho pub, we end up racing to a convenience store for cigarettes and a lighter without either of us saying it first. A little debauched, or a little generous, we want to drop the tension we keep to maintain our everyday selves and look around us.
Being the most Hong Kong and the most international at once.
Being inclusive without losing yourself.
In the way it encourages me not to give up on that subject, Hong Kong is a city I want to visit again anytime—even if it’s a grueling three nights and four days on a work trip.
In a photo striking a pose in a narrow alley on a steep hill, Yuni and Juhan looked comfortable, unexaggerated and unhidden, just as they were, and like part of the city rather than visitors.
Just as Bali stands in for Morae and Han I’s paradise, I found myself thinking that maybe Hong Kong was that kind of city for Yuni.
And for the first time while reading that post, I felt the urge to visit a city I hardly knew. Even after years of hearing Morae and Han I go on about Bali, I’d never quite managed to reel that in as something I might experience.
To look at a thing with curiosity, to want to experience it with my own eyes and hands rather than through photos or books—those desires unsettled me.
I’d thought every desire to want anything had faded on its own.
It was as if, from a single moment in the past, they’d dried out and withered on their own like unwatered plants and gone back into the soil.
I’d never tried to kill them. If anything, doing nothing was the reason they dried up.
So before I could be pleased or afraid of the reactions I’d been showing lately to what was around me, I was, first of all, flustered.
Like opening eyes I’d kept shut, convinced they no longer worked, only to discover they could still sense light and dark.
I couldn’t make out clear shapes yet, but my eyes were slowly catching that the world had light and shadow, and that those made tone and depth.
I wanted to go to Hong Kong. I wanted to stand with them in the streets from the photos and smoke a cigarette.
Hong Kong, which had meant nothing to me—just a city that had been a British colony for a long time and was returned to China at the tail end of the twentieth century, that still maintained its own language, culture, and customs distinct from the mainland, a city often listed with Singapore and New York as among the most expensive in the world—now came at me with a living charm, with a face, a smell, a quirky habit, and its own way of speaking.
I scrolled to the end. In the last photo in the post, the two of them faced each other close, smoking with a blaze of city lights at night behind them. It wasn’t a posed shot; it looked like someone had caught a natural moment.
As if they’d spotted something eye-catching, they were both looking in the same direction, eyes open a little wider than usual. It must have been a moment someone who’d kept watching them trapped in the lens.
In the right corner of the photo, it read “Photo by Kun.”
Lau WiKun.
Only after he formally became the “director” of the organization I belonged to did I finally learn his full name.
I picture him on this side of the camera lens, capturing the two of them. It wasn’t hard to imagine the three of them in that Hong Kong street, photographing one another, sharing the moment, enjoying it. People with the strongest individuality who could coexist without wasting themselves trying to change each other.
Thinking of their peculiar bond—coexistence without splitting into superior and subordinate despite differences in age, background, or place in the organization—I raised the mug to my lips. The coffee had gone cold. A small sigh slipped out.
That scratchy feeling I’d had that night in the Spanish-style hideaway bar wasn’t just my not-so-cheerful disposition.
All this time, I’d tried to protect myself by “choosing nothing.” I believed that by refusing to move on to somewhere beyond, I could stay where I was, that I could hold on to °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° myself.
But doing nothing couldn’t keep things as they were.
A brick, a plastic cup, an eraser—if you do nothing, they mostly keep their shape.
But living things aren’t like that. If you don’t water them, don’t feed them, don’t open a window and air them out... they grow meager. Mind, feelings, even your native character and gift.
Morae and Han I, Yuni, Juhan, the teacher, the director. Even Inwoo, at the very least. They all shone. People who filled their lives with their own certainty and passion.
I was surrounded by their abundant light, but I myself was dried mud without the nutrients to sprout a single blade of grass.
That was the result of my “choosing nothing.”
I took another sip of coffee. I exhaled long, like a deep breath to clear my head. This wasn’t going to change just because I brooded on it.
I closed the window I’d been reading and pulled up an illustration program instead. The piece that used only black and white was the result of a week’s quick study.
Obviously, I had almost nothing you could call a social weapon. The work I could do at Phantom was almost all odd jobs: helping deliver sold pieces, carrying heavy stuff, simple visitor guidance when others were away or busy.
Thinking I should at least learn the basics of Illustrator or Photoshop right away, I borrowed a laptop from the manager, and on Yuni and Juhan’s recommendation I bought a few books. They came with video lessons, so I could pick up the very basic functions quickly, but I still wasn’t at a level that would help with work.
But just because it wasn’t useful now didn’t mean I could stop at updating customer address lists, sorting returned mail, cleaning, or driving. I had to be more helpful. I wanted to be.
That everyday life that continues even if you do nothing—I’d all but given that up myself the rainy dawn I stepped over the threshold of the gate and left my father behind.
“What’s this, Seo Ihyeon, studying illustration these days?”
Someone came up behind me, set a hand on my right shoulder, and slid his face over my left. It was Juhan.
He took off his sunglasses and peered at the screen. I was embarrassed by the clumsy work, but I didn’t go out of my way to hide it.
“Huh? Did you maybe try a draft for an ad?”
Yuni hopped up on the stool beside me and angled the laptop more her way.
We’d chosen to come in on Saturday of our own accord to shave down Monday’s load a little. Yuni wanted to buy a few plants to decorate the gallery, so we’d planned to meet here, stop by the flower market, then head to Phantom. I hadn’t expected them to show up twenty minutes before the meeting time.
Letting someone else see what was lacking brought as much tension as showing someone a drawing.
“It’s not that... just practice...”
“Not bad... Honestly I’m more impressed you pulled this much with basic tools.”
She tapped my shoulder and said it in an unshowy tone. It didn’t sound like mere politeness.
Lately, all the work at Phantom had been focused on preparing for Shushu’s solo show, moved up by a week.
Because Shushu was one of Phantom’s flagship artists, they’d decided to place ads for the exhibition in art magazines, and Yuni and Juhan had to draft those ad layouts while handling other tasks.
It wouldn’t help much, but I’d squeezed out an idea to practice the tools I’d learned. I felt like I had to do something.
“You’ve been studying Shushu’s work, huh?”
Juhan gave my shoulder a couple of friendly pats and laughed.
“I like how clear the concept is. Simple overall palette with dynamic imagery—that’s exactly the artist’s style. We could keep this part as-is and use it. That okay?”
Yuni pointed with her index finger at the flexible, wave-like image made of black text.
“If you’d do that, I’d be grateful...”
“Then I’ll have you send it to my email now?”
While Yuni opened a browser and signed in to her email, Juhan stepped away to order drinks.
I fidgeted with my cup and waited for her to finish.
The front of the bar was a full window, so you could see the Saturday afternoon street. Sitting in a place like this watching people go by felt unreal, like watching TV. With how fast my surroundings had changed over the last month or two, there were plenty of times when my present life didn’t feel real.
That first day I went to Phantom, in the taxi I took home after work, I’d had this feeling that if I went back there, Phantom would be gone... Something like that.
“As if someone would grab me by the scruff and say, ‘It was all a dream, Seo Ihyeon. Time to go back to reality.’”
“Oh? You were looking at the Old Future site?”
Yuni said it and smiled at me, and that let me relax a little. This was still reality. At least for now.
“Yeah, the site has a lot of content, so I browsed for a while. By the way, Yuni—there’s a pair of pants I want from Old Future... this one.”
I pulled up the thumbnail I’d saved earlier on the Old Future site and showed it to her.
“Could I... maybe pay you directly and get it from you?”
“What, trying to return the favor for the gift?”
“No. I mean, not entirely no, but... I just thought they were nice.”
At my answer that was neither yes nor no, Yuni laughed and pressed the piercing in her eyebrow.
