The odds of winning first prize in the lottery: one in 8,145,060.
The odds of dying from a fall in a bathtub: one in 801,923.
The odds of dying in a plane crash: one in a million.
The odds of being killed by lightning: one in 4,289,651.
Experts estimate that in the twenty-first century one billion people will die from smoking, yet most who cannot quit buy a fresh pack and light up, clinging to a gambler’s groundless belief that they, at least, won’t be one of the billion.
Things that feel like they won’t happen to me.
The human habit of feeling excessive fear about some things and preparing obsessively for them, while entrusting other things entirely to luck and adopting a gutsy, optimistic faith about the future—this was not one person’s quirk but a long-standing contradiction of the species itself.
Today, which seems like it will repeat forever, does not feel as if it will connect to the future no matter how much time passes.
A fifteen-year-old boy cannot clearly picture himself at twenty or thirty, and a twenty-three-year-old cannot imagine himself at forty or fifty, having reached middle age.
Reason understands that someday such a day will come, but a situation occurs in which imagination fails to realize what reason has accepted.
We accept going from fifteen to sixteen as natural, but we cannot feel as real becoming thirty or forty, the skin losing to gravity and carving deep wrinkles, the appearance of ourselves that is no longer young.
Because it doesn’t feel real—like a very far, a very very far future, nearly a hundred or a thousand years ahead—we spend each day pretending not to know the one sure fate that we will someday lose today’s self, as if we could live forever in our current form. Perhaps that is the content of an ordinary human life.
If, for convenience, we define that as ordinary, then Ihyeon’s parents could be said to have fallen somewhat outside the ordinary.
Ihyeon’s father came from a fishing village, a top student whose grades were excellent and whose mild personality never once gave his parents grief, who entered a prestigious university and spent his school years with the expectation that in the future he would earn money to help the family.
But even a person who seems gentle can harbor inner passion. Although gentleness and lack of conviction are concepts that have nothing to do with each other, the prejudice often arises that a child who never insists or raises his voice would have nothing he wants so badly he’d sacrifice everything to obtain it.
His passion was painting.
He hid that passion thoroughly—so thoroughly that no one in his family knew he harbored a dream of painting until, at twenty-three, he confessed to his parents what he had been deceiving them about.
Perhaps it was not his thoroughness but a brutal indifference, or a self-deception that saw only what it wanted to see, that turned his passion into an unintended secret.
Having passed the entrance exam to the highly ranked university his parents hoped for and come up to Seoul alone, he hid the truth from them, filed for a leave of absence the moment he enrolled, and registered at an art academy for entrance-exam prep.
Aside from the time he spent doing private tutoring to cover the bare minimum cost of living, he devoted almost every hour to painting. Before and after class he hunted for empty classrooms at the academy and drew anything and everything. Simply being able to take formal studio classes made him happy, and in the moments he immersed himself in the process—lines turning into planes, planes into volume—he could even feel a kind of freedom, as if all other relationships fell away and only the subject and himself existed.
Ihyeon’s mother stood in the opposite situation.
Her great-grandfather, nearly fifty years after his death, was an artist whose mid-sized works still fetched bids in the one-billion-won range; he was one of the figures treated as important when discussing the history of modern and contemporary Korean art.
Her father was a painter and art critic, her mother a poet with deep knowledge of the arts, including the visual arts. She grew up surrounded by paintings and, whether by genetics or environment, naturally took an interest in them. Unlike Ihyeon’s father, she entered the painting department of a prestigious art college without difficulty, supported by parents who welcomed her interest as she progressed through arts middle and high school. It was the very department at the very university Ihyeon’s father had wanted.
But her passion was comics.
And her parents held a strictly negative stance toward every art form treated as minor.
Unlike Ihyeon’s father, she did not hide her passion through middle and high school, yet her parents tried to nail comics down as merely her hobby, even pouring the stacks of books she had collected one by one since second or third grade into the bathtub and soaking them with water.
They struggled to shake off their anxiety with the fact that she was enrolled in the painting department of the college they’d longed for, and they pressured her to become, in time, a Western painter representing Korea, following in her great-grandfather’s footsteps.
They said environment makes the person. That at a top university, studying under famous professors, once her childish wandering ended she would enter the sublime world of art.
Self-deception that sees only what it wants to see and believes only what it wants to believe occurred everywhere, regardless of wealth.
Contrary to her parents’ wishes, she founded a comics club with a classmate she met in that very department and focused more on club activities than on her coursework. The classmate, who had joined a comics circle in middle school and had been publishing personal zines since his second year of high school, served as club president; she was vice president.
The classmate argued that the spec of being from a prestigious art college would help his future as a cartoonist, but he had already declared he would live as a cartoonist and become independent, so his situation was not comfortable.
As she watched from up close how he balanced his studies and club work while also teaching middle-schoolers at an exam-prep art academy near campus to cover living and materials costs, she saw herself objectively—meek, unable to be fully faithful to her own dream. And she began to make up for that self.
She greatly increased her drawing hours and prepared seriously for competitions. She reinforced her plots and studied books and films to give her characters dimensionality.
Since she didn’t need a part-time job, she handled the club’s practical tasks in the president’s stead, frequently visited the academy where he worked, cultivated ties with the manager and director, and sometimes worked as an assistant instructor to earn extra income.
There, she came to know a man nicknamed “the drawing Julien” among the students.
A person who holed up at the academy more than ten hours a day and produced an astonishing amount of drawings. He was handsome enough that, the deputy director joked, new students were enrolling just to see him, but he had not the slightest desire to use that to enjoy his youth.
And when they talked, she learned he was someone who was about to betray his parents’ expectations for the sake of that university and that department that clung to his ankle like a cumbersome sandbag.
From the angle that one person desperately wanted what the other was trying to abandon, the two could be said to be in opposite situations; yet they were similar in that both longed for a target beyond the lives imposed on them.
They shared information, understood one another, influenced each other positively, and grew close quickly.
She looked at his paintings; he gave frank feedback on her comics. The time that had mostly included the club president gradually became time for just the two of them, and what urged them to want not only each other’s passion but each other’s bodies, minds, and futures was not the impulse of hot-blooded youth.
As comrades who would brace each other so their resolve would not fall, as lovers whose shoulders they wanted to lean on in beautiful nights, and as partners to share the rest of life with, neither could imagine anyone but the other.
If they had not had each other.
Perhaps he, guilty toward his poor parents who headed to sea at dawn with hands that never lost their fish smell, would have returned to his original university to study for a civil-service job or a major corporation.
Perhaps she, worn out by ★ 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 ★ unending conflict with her parents and the unfamiliar pinch of living costs, would have chosen the road that led to the safe future laid out in advance. She yearned more for comics, but it wasn’t as if she hated painting.
Without each other, such decisions would have been entirely possible.
Because they had each other, the two could avoid giving themselves up and could keep their resolve from scattering. They could remember that life is finite, and that the end does not fail to come just because you cannot imagine it.
Choosing each other as spouses at an age that was still young by social standards, they had to forfeit all they had, whether much or little, and turn away from hopes they carried for someone else. Of course it was not “nothing” to either of them, nor something they could toss aside lightly like a bothersome load. Disappointing one’s parents is, perhaps, among the things humans fear most.
In her wealthy household and in his, where financial strain was an everyday normal, the two families—so different in circumstances—were perfectly aligned only in opposing the marriage. The couple always used to joke about that.
These were events from before Ihyeon was born.
The fact that his mother spent weekends at a family villa and took several trips abroad each year, long and short, to see masterworks of East and West in person; the fact that his father, before coming to Seoul, shared a room with his older brother and still kept top grades while eating, year-round, flawed fish that wouldn’t sell as side dishes—these were merely “old stories” Ihyeon heard bit by bit as he grew up.
He had never met his grandparents on either side, but he never felt a lack or questioned it.
Whatever the content of the “old stories,” when his parents told them, Ihyeon could not find any light of regret or resentment in them. They were always parents who listened to his feelings, and they expressed trust and affection for each other so openly that little Ihyeon would get jealous.
To Ihyeon, his mother was represented by the sight of her sitting at the table in the living room or at the desk in the small room she used as a studio, the radio on, drawing comics. That was his mother.
His father, who worked thirty hours a week at a nearby cell-phone factory and spent the rest of his time immersed in oil painting with the goal of becoming a full-time artist, was the father Ihyeon knew.
The studio they shared looked, to young Ihyeon’s eyes, like their secret base; regardless of their warm affection for him, that space felt like one meant solely for the two of them to commune, excluding him.
Ihyeon was not a child who threw tantrums, but he hated it when his parents were in the studio together, so by day his mother used it, and after work his father did, taking turns.
This rule was set even before Ihyeon entered elementary school; back then, both parents found his jealousy adorable and would sometimes hide in the studio on purpose to make him cry.
As he reached the upper grades of elementary school and became a middle-schooler, began expressing the world he saw through drawings, and gradually stepped out from his parents’ shade to build a self, he no longer wanted to wedge himself between his mother and father the way he used to. Yet whenever people around them envied them as a couple like lovers, Ihyeon’s heart would grow heavy.
Still, it was a common-depth flaw found in any family, and Ihyeon himself, compared to his peers, felt deep satisfaction and gratitude for his parents’ optimistic and gentle natures and their educational stance of respecting his will.
The fresh green of a little jungle built on the veranda of their old villa.
Old pop songs playing low all day from his mother’s radio.
A day’s sunlight dragging its hem slowly from the bookcase to the sofa.
Posters made from his mother’s illustrations and the smell of oil paint.
Days of peace that seemed like they would continue forever with no curtain falling.
In the summer when he was sixteen, a major gallery’s contest awarded Ihyeon a special jury prize, and his maternal grandparents invited the three of them to dinner.
It was the first meeting in roughly seventeen years since his mother declared she would become a cartoonist and left home—half runaway, half being driven out.
Because of its radical nature—no age limit, no amateur/pro restrictions, no restrictions on subject or style—the contest was constantly dogged by debates over legitimacy, but since the host gallery ranked among the top three in the country, its influence had to be acknowledged.
And regardless of the debate, artists who won in the contest instantly became hot topics if they were amateurs or newcomers, receiving exhibition proposals or chances to sign as full-time artists; if they were established, their fees might jump as much as four or five times.
The contest, then in its seventh year, was famous for recruiting formidable judges with prestige. One internationally influential Korean ink painter, Sukhee Kim, a second-generation Korean American, especially praised Ihyeon’s work and left an impressive comment; later she personally purchased one of his works, which made it even more of a story.
Of course, Ihyeon’s youth—sixteen—also helped draw the art world’s gaze. Across all seven contests to date, he was the youngest prizewinner and the only teenager to win with an abstract style.
Art lags far behind in popular attention, so it wasn’t an issue known to the general public, but for a while the gallery contacted them frequently, saying multiple outlets were persistently requesting interviews with photos.
After consulting with Ihyeon, his parents asked the host gallery to keep the artist’s real name and personal details secret; and when, about a month later, a publisher in Hong Kong asked to use his painting for the Hong Kong edition cover of a world-famous novelist’s new book, they arranged for all business to go through the gallery. Thanks to that, Ihyeon could protect himself from becoming fodder for the press.
In any case, the grandparents’ dinner invitation came right after the prize announcement. He remembers that evening, his mother, very unusually, raised her voice on the phone with someone.
She had reluctantly accepted after his father’s long persuasion, but when they arrived and her parents tried to hug Ihyeon in tears the moment they saw him, she yanked his hand roughly and hid him behind her back; she still could not accept them. It was the first time she had acted like that.
A few days later she quietly came to Ihyeon’s room and, regardless of her own feelings, told him that if he wanted to keep in touch with his grandparents and spend time with them, he could—that it was for him to decide. He nodded for the moment, but even if they were grandparents, to him they were simply people who had appeared out of nowhere one day.
But he thought he understood at least this much.
Whenever his mother told “old stories,” she spoke as if recounting pleasant memories that were now nothing at all, but in her depths she resented her parents, sometimes hated them, and still loved them.
Even as she condemned them for having learned of Ihyeon’s prize somewhere and contacted them for vulgar, status-hungry reasons, he could dimly empathize with the way she—being their child—could not help but weaken before the first meeting in seventeen years and those tears.
Starting with Ihyeon’s award, the second half of that year seemed to be the season when the family’s long efforts and hardships returned to them as fruit.
His mother’s parents did their utmost to prove that they were accepting the three not merely because their grandson showed artistic talent.
They were much older than in her memories and humbly acknowledged that everything they had once deemed so important had turned out to be futile illusions—empty ceremonies that helped not at all in completing a happy life.
Now the decision to accept her or not was no longer theirs. Whether to accept their hearts or not was for her to choose, and everyone was making cautious efforts, little by little.
That fall, the longest series in her career—about ten years of serialization—came to an end. In a comics market lately dominated by provocative subjects and short webtoons, it was unusual, and long-...
