We are, Those People
“ 숨: Breath | Breathe
우리는 모두, 이어받든 이어받지 않았든, 앞서 산 사람들이 각자 열심히 살아낸 숨결과 흔적 위에서 오늘을 산다.”
‘Drawing_No.04’ Charcoal(with ink) on Paper, 53.5 cm x 76,5 cm
<우린, 그런 사람들> 한겨레 서울앤 → 링크
They say everything “K” is a trend these days. K-pop, K-beauty, K-food, and so on. I imagine the people who built all that from the ground up must feel enormously proud — but from where I stand, as someone on the receiving end of the phenomenon, it all feels a little strange. Probably because I remember being teased at an international school as a child. This was when we were living in Iraq, which was at war with Iran.
The kids in my class would bring a finger to the corner of one eye and pull it upward —
"Chinese is this" — then drag it downward — "Japanese is this" — and finally stretch it flat across, and conclude: "And you are this."
These days, they probably would have been taught about racial discrimination, and I would have told this to someone. But back then, at seven or eight, I didn't even know it was discrimination. What bothered me, simply, was coming from a country nobody had ever heard of. So whenever I met new friends, I would say I was from Korea —
"that small country between China and Japan."
After that, as I moved back and forth between Korea and elsewhere, Korea’s standing gradually rose, and before long, the word “K” started appearing in conversations with friends.
It must have been more than ten years ago, when a Malaysian friend came to Seoul. She arrived singing the praises of K-drama and said she absolutely had to see a palace, so I took her to Gyeongbokgung Palace. She was delighted, snapping photos at every turn — until we reached a pond, where she suddenly announced that this looked exactly like the pond where the queen drowned in that drama. Over there, she said, was definitely where the man trying to save the queen collapsed, bleeding out, and that spot was surely where the king was murdered. She practically cheered.
As I followed her around, lightly teasing her for thinking only of death scenes in such a beautiful place, it suddenly struck me that this was not just an imaginary story, that real people had once breathed here.
The realization— that life had left its trace; that breath had become buildings—returned to me unexpectedly a few days ago, after a conversation in a taxi.
From a white-haired taxi driver, I heard the story behind an intersection in Samseong-dong called “Chagwan (“Loan”) Apartment Intersection.”
"That's an unusual name for an apartment," I said.
He explained that the apartment had been built with loans from the United States in the 1970s, giving its name. Though the building had long disappeared after reconstruction, people still called the place by that name.
The building is gone; the name remains. I nodded absently at first — and then it hit me: that we could not build even a single apartment block, which is not some massive piece of national infrastructure, by ourselves, and that we had to borrow the money from abroad.
At that moment, a childhood memory surfaced: a queue at a tourist site in the Netherlands, a conversation with an elderly Western man.
Unlike my schoolmates, the old man immediately recognized Korea when I told him where I was from. His face lit up. He'd fought in the Korean War, he said. So he knew Korea well.
Even to my young eyes, his jacket looked rumpled as he rummaged through it and pulled out a worn, stained pen marked with the logo of some association. He pressed it into my hand. I accepted it not knowing what to do but felt strangely unsettled, though I could not identify what that feeling was until much later.
As I found myself lingering over things that seem eternal only because they still remain before us now—whether it is a nation's standing or its shame, a building or a place name— I thought of the words of C. S. Lewis, widely known as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations — he wrote — are finite things, no more long-lived than mayflies compared to a human life. The ones we joke with, work alongside, marry, look away from, and sometimes use — those, he said, are the immortal beings.
All of us — whether we inherited something or nothing — live our today on the breath and traces of people who came before, each of whom that got on with living as best they could. So then: my breath, my traces — would they not reach someone, too? And would the same not be true of everyone whose life briefly crosses mine?
Perhaps that is what our lives are. And we are, after all — those people.
