#0.5. Promise
Sim Seowoo had a habit of gazing at distant mountains from time to time.
He would go so quiet it seemed as though he could stay like that for hours on end, perfectly still. At one point, Park Dongju, who had left him alone like that for half a day, had asked with curiosity what on earth he was thinking about. It was a question delivered with an impressed expression — from the boy who had sat in the library from noon until the moment the sun set, not moving a muscle, staring out the window the entire time.
To that, Sim Seowoo answered in a remarkably even tone.
‘I’m trying not to think about anything.’
‘Huh? If you just don’t think, then you just don’t think — what do you mean you’re trying not to?’
At the time, Park Dongju had been genuinely puzzled, and sent him a look that said you really are a strange guy — but Sim Seowoo had simply told the truth.
He repeated it to himself endlessly.
Don’t retrace when things started going wrong. Stop the rumination of looking back on situations he couldn’t have done anything about. Let go of the reminiscing that digs through the past. And even so, when he found himself trapped in the cycle of thought again, he would grow fed up with himself — and then remind himself that he had already grown thoroughly sick of even that cynicism, so let it go. He repeated this process of calming himself down, again and again.
It was something like the process of emptying his mind, and at the same time, something like a resignation that killed himself off. The conclusion of the hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of thoughts was always one and the same.
Nothing in the world goes the way one thinks it will — and so one simply has to live without thinking.
But sometimes. Very rarely.
The meaningless doubt that crept up like an inflammation — it would have been better if my parents had been villains from the start — was one he could never quite shake off.
***
Sim Seowoo’s childhood was peaceful.
His parents’ business had done well, and he grew up lacking nothing financially, and emotionally he was raised in an abundance of love. His parents, who had been in the business of selling medical equipment, had seen a flood of clients come in from the very year the child was born, and even built an additional factory — and they would say, out of habit, that all of this good fortune was thanks to their son.
As much as their business flourished, his parents were busy — but they made sure to go on family trips at least a couple of times a month. They made time, insisting that nothing was more important than the three of them spending time together. He doesn’t remember all the trips from his days as an infant, but the fleeting warmths of each moment were more than enough to be etched into the heart of a child.
The quiet laughter of his parents as they watched him doze off under a parasol after playing in the sea, the gentle hands carefully smoothing his hair, the soft sensation of a blanket being draped over his belly……
Peaceful memories aside, chaotic moments remained as well, if only in fragments. He must have been around three or four — Sim Seowoo had wandered off on his own while playing at a valley, following the stream and exploring the woods, and come back to find his parents pale-faced and surrounded by police. They had filed a missing persons report, believing they had lost their child.
A large number of police officers had mobilized and combed the mountain, but not a single trace was found until the sun began to set. And then the child had returned, perfectly fine, in front of his bewildered parents. With the light of the sunset at his back, looking remarkably peaceful.
At the time, Sim Seowoo thought he would be scolded harshly, but surprisingly, his parents simply pulled him into their arms and repeated, over and over, how relieved they were. Looking far worse than he did themselves, they stroked his face again and again as though wiping it clean, and gave thanks to the heavens.
“It seems like there’s a guardian angel watching over our Seowoo.”
Young Sim Seowoo at the time didn’t know exactly what a guardian angel was, but he guessed it must be something warm and comforting in form. Something like the embrace of his parents’ hands around him, he thought.
Raised in an abundance of love, Sim Seowoo grew up healthily.
A gentle and kind child was welcomed by any group. His lovely face and neat appearance were more than enough to earn the goodwill of people around him, and in elementary school, he had been class representative several times thanks to his classmates’ nominations. People always gathered around him.
The child believed that this good fortune was thanks to being together with his family, and trusted that it would support him firmly forever.
But one day, a crack appeared in the peace.
“Ah, no……. How could that younger fellow betray us like this.”
“We shouldn’t have trusted that guy!”
Around the time Sim Seowoo entered middle school, his parents lost a large sum of money through investment. They had invested heavily based on the advice of a younger associate they had grown close to through a golf club, and in an instant suffered losses great enough to make their business stagger. They had to liquidate the factory and let go of employees.
In truth, there was an unfortunate backstory to this incident.
His parents had been on a winning streak ever since Sim Seowoo was born. The business grew, additional factories were built one after another, and clients expanded overseas. Intoxicated by the repeated fortune and success, they began putting their hand into investments.
At first, they made a profit. They earned several times the amount they had invested, and grew confident that they had a natural talent for it. Before long, they had begun neglecting the business itself and thrown themselves into investing, and handled things boldly, believing that in order to make big money one had to be willing to take on risk.
But a self-made businessperson, as it often goes, inevitably attracts dangerous hands. Having never experienced failure since the birth of their son, they were naive, and lacked the discernment to tell apart those who went by the name of ‘swindlers.’
They poured large sums without hesitation into investment opportunities proposed by people who had grown close enough in a short time to even become sworn brothers — people who had been flattering them and carefully accommodating their every whim — and the result came crashing down on them in the most devastating way.
Seeing the money vanish overnight, they were left reeling. The shock of having been betrayed and the sense of loss from having lost such a large sum were immense — but they resolved to return to their roots. They cried as they made a vow to throw themselves back into the business they had originally been doing.
And as a first step toward that.
“Seowoo-ya. How about coming along to the gathering this time?”
“Director Kim, whom we met last time, said he really likes our son, you know.”
They took Sim Seowoo along to attend the gathering. It was a venue for networking among local businesspeople — a place where they would come together to talk and build connections. When he was young, Sim Seowoo had occasionally accompanied his parents to these gatherings.
Strangely enough, on days when he came along, the business’s client base would grow. Hands would reach out offering to help in areas that had previously been stuck, and new paths would open up. His parents cherished him, calling him their lucky bluebird, and after the failed investment, clung to him almost blindly.
Because of this, Sim Seowoo’s plans with friends were cancelled more and more often — but he followed his parents without complaint. Whenever he went to the gatherings, his parents would become noticeably warmer, and on top of that, he could feel that they were genuinely grateful.
His parents had fallen into a deep depression after the failed investment, and if accompanying them helped at all, he wanted to do as much as he could. The ‘luck’ they talked about seemed like mere coincidence, but regardless, the two of them were full of vitality whenever they were with him. He saw that as something that earned the goodwill of other businesspeople.
But as they say, once someone has had a taste of big money through investment, they can never escape that swamp.
His parents kept sticking their foot back into investing and blowing through their savings, over and over. They forgot the memory of having lost money and threw themselves back in again, swallowed by the sensation of having earned several times over in an instant.
If they just read the graphs right, if they just read the flow of the market well, if they just grasped the changes in business well……
If they’ve failed this badly, they’re far from doing things ‘well’ — so why do they keep looking for ‘well’?
Around the time Sim Seowoo graduated middle school, he began to quietly harbor doubts about his parents’ rational judgment.
They would take their son along to revive the business just enough to earn money again, only to blow it away shortly after — then take him back out to the gatherings to find new investment opportunities, only to blow those away too. The more this pattern repeated, the more widely it became known that their business kept staggering, and eventually even the helping hands dried up.
In the end, the business closed its doors.
After several rounds of moving, they settled into a small villa in a small provincial town, and could no longer even dream of events like the family trips of the past. His parents fell into a deep depression and spent every day shut inside the dark house, eating only sporadically.
Sim Seowoo’s heart ached at the sight. He too felt the sting of having to keep moving far away and parting from friends over and over — but he never let it show.
The child simply wished for his parents to be alright, and so……
“Seowoo-ya. We’re going to go pray for mom and dad a bit.”
“There’s a late-night prayer tonight, so we’ll be back late. Eat dinner first and go to sleep. Okay?”
“Yes, don’t worry about me.”
From a certain point on, he simply accepted his parents’ religious activities with relief. It was strange that they, who had never gone to a church, cathedral, or temple before, had suddenly fallen into religion — but it was common enough for people going through hard times to find solace in religion, he thought. It was far better than them staring at monitors all day, fixated on investments.
However, there were things that nagged at him — the fact that the place his parents frequented was a hall at the very edge of the neighborhood; that the pitch-black scripture they carried bore strange markings he had never seen before; and that the prayers they chanted in their room every dawn were unfamiliar……
But Sim Seowoo couldn’t bring himself to look too deeply into it. After all, his parents were no longer sighing heavily and shutting themselves inside the house. And he no longer had to watch their awkward performance — the way they would frantically wipe away tears and pretend everything was fine the moment he came home from school.
He consoled himself with the thin comfort that, whatever that group truly was, as long as his parents were less depressed, it was a good thing. He believed he simply had to hold firm as their devoted only child until they were okay again.
This was a somewhat precocious state of mind for a high school student to have — but on the other hand, it was also a childlike optimism, in that he never imagined their reach would extend to him as well.
“Seowoo-ya, why don’t you come along too.”
“It really is a wonderful place, you know. You remember Mrs. Kang, who visited us at home last time? The woman who kept praising you, saying you were really lovely looking, and that your energy was pure. You felt it too, didn’t you — she really is a kind teacher. She’s organizing a winter gathering where we study together…….”
His parents’ active recruitment began half a year later. They started inviting people to the house little by little and introducing their son, and before long began coaxing him to come to the hall together.
Even when he declined, saying he was a high schooler and had to study, they persisted — and on top of that, said some truly strange things.
“You don’t have to go to school anymore. What’s the point of the academic credentials society pushes on you. You can’t just blindly follow a set of standardized criteria. It’s precisely because people live trapped by such standards that they suffer in society too. It’s the sight of people desperately trying to force on clothes that don’t fit them at all.”
“Now that we have the power to govern the suffering of that kind of world, there’s no need to go to school anymore.”
Sim Seowoo was confused, but tried to understand his parents. Perhaps what they were saying was simply this: if one had an interest in something other than studying, one was free to forge a new path — that the world’s standards didn’t matter.
Unfortunately, that was not the case.
“This society is sick. Competition and comparison seep in like poison, and people end up envying each other so much they try to harm one another. When someone does well, on the outside they congratulate them, but on the inside they’re jealous. They wish for the other to fail, and are constantly looking for chances to take things from them. Society made it that way and encouraged it. Now no one wants everyone to be happy together anymore — they only want themselves to do better than the other.”
“And so, we are going to awaken ‘God’ and save the world!”
It was genuinely unfortunate that something so convincing was followed by absolute nonsense. Unfortunate enough to regret having taken even a moment to listen seriously.
