Debt: three hundred seventy-six million, five hundred thousand won.
Of this, the original principal was ten million won, but with 10% deducted up front as “advance interest,” only nine million was actually loaned. Not to me — to my father.
He squandered that nine million on gambling and immediately borrowed another ten million on the spot. This time, with 20% deducted as advance interest — two million won — he received eight million won.
The result was, of course, the same: gambled away.
Kicked out of the gambling den, my father now had a total debt of twenty million won. When he failed to repay within the deadline, a loan shark company lent him fifty million won, supposedly to “settle his debt and get back on his feet.” Naturally, this loan also had 50% deducted up front as advance interest.
From that point on, my father lived in hell. Endless threats and debt collection — burly men showed up looking for him almost daily. At the time, I wasn’t attending elementary school, so I’d be digging in the dirt inside the house or out past the gate when these strange men would interrogate me.
A man covered in tattoos asked me.
“If you don’t tell us straight, your old man’s dead. Speak up properly — didn’t he say where he was going?”
I believed him completely and still couldn’t give him a proper answer.
The man’s face filled with irritation. He spat phlegm and picked up his phone. He made a loud call to someone.
“This fucking bastard skipped out and left his kid behind. What do we do?”
The man held my head in his large hand.
“That bastard’s pickled in booze, there’s probably no organs worth using. Guess we’ll just have to gouge his eyes out.”
It was a big, rough hand. A coarse hand — but strangely, I didn’t dislike that hand on my head. So I stayed still, and as he kept talking on the phone, he suddenly grabbed my cheek with that rough hand and turned my face from side to side, examining it.
“It’s a boy.”
After answering that, the man suddenly asked me.
“Kid, how old?”
If I hadn’t learned anything during those six months at the facility, I wouldn’t have been able to answer that question.
“Nine.”
“Says he’s nine.”
He stared at me intently. The phone was still pressed to his ear. The call kept going. He studied my face. He gripped my chin and kept turning it this way and that. As if he were hesitating over a purchase.
“Potatoes grow in potato fields, peppers grow in pepper fields — you think a brat sired by some shitty-looking prick’s cock would turn out any different?”
He let go of my chin, brushing it away.
“He’d need to get a bit bigger before we could open him up. Might be better to just raise him as a dog, no?”
He finished the call. Then he looked at me.
“Hm?”
Then, as if he’d just discovered something, he grabbed the back of my neck and muttered, “…thought so.” It was an unfamiliar word, so I didn’t know what it meant. The man kept his rough hand on my neck, rubbing his fingers back and forth, and said,
“Kid, let’s go see Mom.”
I didn’t believe him. Because I had a mother who’d abandoned me, but no “Mom.” Still, I nodded. He grabbed my hand and dragged me off somewhere. I left the one-room flat with no food and the cold, freezing floor, and got into a car for the first time in my life.
The man muttered around the cigarette in his mouth.
“That fucking bastard. Abandoning even his own kid… Just let me catch him.”
I heard the grinding sound of his teeth.
The place he took me to was called the Sewer. There were many children there, just like me. About ten kids lived together in a cramped room, and now I was one of them too.
Wherever you’re sent, there’s something to learn.
Just as I’d learned Hangul and arithmetic at the facility, there were things to learn at the Sewer too.
Things like measuring out the right amount of some unidentifiable powder they gave us, how to package it, how to refine it, and how to hide it seamlessly inside furniture and the like.
It was all new to me, but just as I’d been praised at the facility for picking things up fast, here too the men praised me for being quick-handed and good at it.
But it didn’t feel as good as it had at the facility.
The Sewer usually had around a dozen or fifteen kids.
Two or three would be added or disappear each month, and the number stayed fairly constant. The ones who disappeared were usually the weak ones, or the ones bad at the work. And the pretty ones. Especially the girls — they’d vanish within days, before anyone even had a chance to learn their face. Where they went, there was no way of knowing.
At the Sewer, as long as you did what you were told, they fed you well. Mostly delivered jjajangmyeon or boiled ramyeon, but it was still warm food. And occasionally, we even got pocket money.
The men called us puppies. Each of us probably had a name, but to them we were all just puppies. Among them, I was an especially obedient, clever, docile puppy.
The men were generally gentle with the puppies, but not always.
That side of them showed when a newly arrived puppy cried on their first day, saying they wanted to go home or asking for their parents, or when one was caught trying to run away. Crying on the first day usually just earned a few hits and ended there, but a puppy caught running away would be gone by the next day.
So in that place, there was no crying and no laughter — only quiet puppies, soaked through with the foul smell of the sewer.
The puppies didn’t like handling the powder.
Because your body would feel strange afterward. Hair would fall out in clumps, or you couldn’t sleep, or you’d get nosebleeds as if it were a habit. Some puppies even lost every one of their baby teeth. Even the ones who didn’t react that way would get dizzy and lose track of what was real every time they handled the powder, sometimes collapsing — so I didn’t want to handle the powder either.
The work the men gave us wasn’t just handling the powder.
There was also leaving the powder we’d packaged in certain locations, or hiding it in specific places. Especially when delivering it directly to someone, we even got to wear clean, pretty clothes. Going out like that meant good pocket money too, so many puppies wanted to do nothing but that.
I myself had done it just once — delivering something directly to another man — and that was the first time I ever received fifty thousand won. No other adult ever asked for or took that money from me, so it was entirely mine.
I kept the money I earned that way folded carefully at the bottom of an old sock, and always carried it with me.
Partly because I was afraid the other puppies would take it. But also because if I didn’t do that, I’d often forget where I’d put it.
Three years passed living as a Sewer puppy.
I was twelve.
As always, once a month, during the time when puppies came and went, that child arrived.
“Something’s wrong with their eyes.”
Most newly arrived kids looked either cowed or anxious, but that child had no expression at all. Skin and bones, with sunken eye sockets and cracked, dry lips.
Some of their fingernails and toenails were split or missing entirely, and there wasn’t a single unhurt part on their body. Like me, they’d clearly come from being beaten by someone, over and over.
So emaciated they looked almost like a skeleton — the other puppies were quick to avoid them, and the men, whenever they were in a bad mood, would often hit the child just for being unlucky to look at. Smaller than other kids their age, everything about them was slow. It was almost as if they were doing it on purpose — things other puppies picked up in two days, that child could never manage properly no matter how much time passed.
They couldn’t speak properly and didn’t know how to read Hangul. Naturally, they couldn’t do arithmetic either. Even when the other puppies were claiming their share and eating, that child would just stand there blankly, often missing mealtimes entirely.
I’d never had much interest in the other puppies, but for some reason, I couldn’t take my eyes off that child. I couldn’t stop thinking about them.
Maybe it was because they couldn’t properly look out for themselves. Or maybe it was the sight of their body, not a single part of it unhurt. I didn’t know the reason, but I couldn’t just keep watching from a distance, so I went over to where the child was curled up in a corner. I reached out my hand to the child, who looked up at me with eyes that weren’t quite focused.
The child didn’t take it.
It frustrated me, somewhere deep inside.
I forcibly grabbed the child’s thin wrist. And used my strength to help them up.
If you starve to death, won’t you suffer even as a ghost?
That was what the director had said to me, back when I’d first arrived at the facility and hadn’t eaten for days.
I picked up a rolled egg, gone cold and dried out, and set it down in front of the child. It was nowhere near as good as the one I’d eaten at the facility — sometimes it even smelled a little off from sitting too long — but even so, rolled egg as a side dish was still my favorite thing.
“It’s my favorite.”
“…….”
“I’ll give you all of it.”
“…….”
“Eat. Let’s live.”
The child stared at the rolled egg in front of them for a moment, then put the whole thing in their mouth at once. Only then did I feel relieved.
From then on, like the director once had with me, I taught the child how to use chopsticks, and helped them learn to read Hangul. I don’t know if they really remembered any of it…
By the time I was teaching them arithmetic, at the level I knew it myself, I saw the child’s eyes properly for the first time.
There wasn’t a single unhurt part of their body, but their eyes and hands alone were truly beautiful.
Their eyes especially sparkled, so lovely they looked almost like stars, or gems.
I never told the child their eyes were pretty. Because in that place, being pretty was not a good thing.
