Chapter Fourteen
Sinchon, the Su Noraebang on the third floor of a building above the Sinchon Tonjip stew place. March 8, 2026. 10:51 p.m.
Min-ji had been planning the noraebang since Wednesday.
She had said, on the phone Wednesday morning at eight-thirty-six in a register I had not heard her use in two years, unnie. I am, by Saturday, going to be at a point where I have spent six days of the week working on what is in my body. I am giving Saturday night to what is in my life. You are bringing the sajangnim. I have already booked the room.
I had said: Min-ji.
She had said: Unnie. I have, in the small clear way of a young Korean woman with the early shinbyeong, gone four nights this week without crying in the bathroom. I am owed a Saturday. The sajangnim, by my count, also.
I had said: Yes.
The room was a dim L-shaped booth with a vinyl couch and a 65-inch TV and a microphone Min-ji had, on entering, wiped down with the alcohol pads she had been carrying in her bag since Tuesday. She had ordered a pitcher of black-sesame makgeolli, a Hite lager, a bottle of cold barley tea, a fruit plate. She had paid in advance. She had not, when Yi-jun reached for his wallet, allowed it. Sajangnim. This is the room I am the resident of. He had bowed. He had returned the wallet to his inner pocket and had not, for the rest of the evening, attempted to pay for any small thing.
Yi-jun was in a charcoal cashmere crewneck and dark jeans and the soft leather chukka boots he had worn under the navy durumagi at the Bukchon gate on Tuesday. He had been, for forty-five minutes, alternating between sips of cold barley tea and the small tactical use of the songbook tablet to discover what was, in 2026, considered a 1970s ballad.
Min-ji had been working her way through a Y2K girl-group medley. She had a strong middle register and a small uncomplicated soprano top. She had been singing without irony — the way a young Korean woman sings on a Saturday that is, by her own private accounting, the first Saturday in two years she has agreed to keep for herself.
I had sung twice, both 2010s indie tracks, well within the small Stanford-trained competence of a gyopo who had fronted the KSA karaoke after-party junior year at Coupa Café.
I was, on the eight-twenty-two-minute mark of the third Min-ji song, about three-quarters of a cold Hite lager in.
The song ended.
Min-ji turned to me. She had a small flush in the cheeks. She had her cream glove off. She was holding the microphone two-handed.
She said: Unnie. The sajangnim is going to sing.
I looked at Yi-jun.
He looked, for one second, at me.
Then he looked, very correctly, at Min-ji.
He said: Min-ji-ssi. I do not, at present, know what is appropriate to sing in a Sinchon noraebang on a Saturday in March of 2026.
Min-ji said: Sajangnim. May I make a suggestion.
Yes.
Cho Yong-pil. The 1979 single. "Han-o-baek-nyeon."*"
Yi-jun did not, for a moment, move.
Then he bowed. Fifteen degrees, the small bow of a guest receiving from a host an instruction about the form of the evening.
He said: Yes, Min-ji-ssi.
She queued it. The screen on the wall went from the small late-Y2K girl-group choreography that had been playing under her medley to the small flat 1979 video footage that was the original promotional film of "Han-o-baek-nyeon" — Cho Yong-pil at thirty, in a slim-cut suit, on a sound-stage in Yeouido that had, by the look of the lighting, been borrowed from the Korean Broadcasting System's daytime variety unit. The orchestra opened in a small clear minor key. The screen put up the words.
Yi-jun stood up.
He did not, on standing, smooth the front of the crewneck. He did not, on standing, clear his throat. He stood the way an older Korean man stands at a small low table at which a younger person has, in the same small respectful breath, requested a song from him.
He took the microphone.
He sang.
The first thing the song was, was a fact.
The fact was that the voice of the man who had, on a Sunday afternoon in a Bukchon hanok, told me he wanted, in a decade he had not yet lived through, to have a knee that ached in the cold — was, in the second bar of "Han-o-baek-nyeon," a tenor of the kind a Korean noraebang microphone, by the small unfortunate audio engineering of the 2010s, had been calibrated to handle but had not, in the average Saturday night in Sinchon in 2026, encountered.
The voice was light at the top. The voice was full at the middle. The voice was the voice of a man who had sung this song, at some point in the past forty-seven years, in private, often enough to know exactly what the song was asking of the second-line phrase, and who had calibrated his breath to the asking.
Min-ji, on the vinyl couch beside me, said: Oh.
She said it under her breath. She said it the way one says oh in a small room when the small room has, in a single instant, become a slightly different room.
I did not, on the vinyl couch, say anything.
I watched.
He was, on the small low stage-floor of the noraebang booth, not facing the screen. He had turned slightly toward us — toward Min-ji, on the couch, who had asked the song; toward me, on the couch, who had not. He was singing the song to a small fixed point an inch above Min-ji's left shoulder, which was the small fixed point a Joseon scholar had once been taught was the polite place to look at when delivering a recitation to two seated junior women, and which was the small fixed point that allowed him, by the long accumulated grammar of his body, to be looked at by us without appearing to ask to be looked at.
He sang the first chorus.
Han-o-baek-nyeon sara-nun-de... muel-keu-rok suri-eob-na...
The literal of the line was: Living a thousand five hundred years, why so many worries?
The line, by the singer's reading of it, was a small clear unembarrassed Korean question that he had been carrying, in his own version of the song, since approximately 1981, which was the year he had first heard the song on a small radio in a Seoul taxi and had, on the same radio, identified the question as the kind of question only a Korean lyricist of the late 1970s could phrase to a thousand-year creature whose patience the song would, in the singer's hearing, formally request.
He sang the line.
He sang the line as a man asking himself why, after a thousand five hundred years, he was still asking.
The voice did not strain. The voice did not press. The voice was the small even patient voice of a creature who had been, for a length of time he was not, in the noraebang, willing to count, working out the answer.
He sang the second verse.
The second verse was the verse the bridge worked off — a small minor descending phrase that, by the audio engineering of the 2010s Sinchon noraebang microphone, had a small flat compression at the bottom of the descent. He sang into the compression. He sang through it. The compression did not, on the descent, take from him the cleanness of the bottom note. The bottom note was the bottom note.
Min-ji, on the vinyl couch beside me, had begun, very quietly, to cry.
She was not crying in the small unembarrassed Korean-girl way of a noraebang on a Saturday night.
She was crying in the small quiet way a young Korean woman with the early shinbyeong cries when a song is, by the small unfair grammar of the body she is recently coming into, doing a thing in the chest the song was not, in its design, asking to do.
I did not, at her side, take her hand.
I took, instead, the small folded white linen pocket-square from the side of her bag where she had been keeping it since Tuesday night.
I set it on her thigh.
She lifted it. She held it to her face. She did not, in the lifting, look at me.
Yi-jun, on his fixed point above her left shoulder, did not, on the lifting, change his face.
He sang the third verse.
The third verse was, by the late-1970s convention of Cho Yong-pil's small clear question-songs, the verse the song answered itself in.
The answer was not, in the song, an answer. The answer was the small flat repetition of the first chorus, lowered by a fourth.
He sang the lowered chorus.
The lowered chorus, in his voice, was the small lowered chorus of a man who had been, for a length of time he was not willing to count, asking himself the question and, on the lowering, briefly, in a Sinchon noraebang on a Saturday night, agreeing not to answer it.
I knew the melody.
I knew it the way I had, in a Cupertino kitchen in the spring of my ninth year, known the melody of a song my mother had been humming at the sink as she rinsed green onions. My mother had not been humming Cho Yong-pil's "Han-o-baek-nyeon." My mother had been humming the small Chuseok lullaby of her own mother — a folk lullaby out of the Chungcheong hills the women of our family had, by three generations of not asking each other to keep singing it, kept singing.
The lullaby was not the Cho Yong-pil song. The lullaby was, however, in the same key, on the same descending bridge, with the same small minor turn on the lowered chorus.
I had not, in my conscious life, made the connection. I made it on the second bar of the third verse, in a small flat clean instant of recognition I had stopped calling recognition in any comfortable Stanford-trained sense.
The lullaby, by my hearing of it on a Cupertino afternoon in the spring of my ninth year, was my mother's.
It was also not my mother's.
It was, four hundred years earlier, the same melodic phrase set to a different five-tone scale, hummed by a Joseon court woman to her daughter on a riverbank in Chungcheong-do, where the bone stick the woman would, in another twenty years, use to apply henna to her daughter's left wrist for the journey into Gyeongbokgung was, on the same afternoon, lying flat in the bottom of the woman's basket of dried apricots.
The melody had survived.
The melody had survived because the melody had been carried, by the women of the line, in the small unmarked way the women of a Chungcheong-do line had been carrying small unmarked things for four hundred years. The melody had survived in my mother's humming at a Cupertino sink. The melody had survived in Cho Yong-pil's 1979 reading of an old folk source. The melody was, in two of its iterations, in the small dim L-shaped booth of a Sinchon noraebang on a Saturday night in March, at the same time.
I stood up.
I did not, on standing, look at Yi-jun.
I said, to Min-ji: Min-ji. I will be back. I am going to the bathroom.
Min-ji, with the pocket-square at her face, nodded once.
Yi-jun, on the small fixed point above her shoulder, did not break the line of the song.
I went out.
The bathroom had two stalls. The first was occupied. I went into the second, latched it as well as it would latch, sat down on the closed lid.
I shook.
The shaking was not the elevator's. The shaking was not the slope's. The shaking was a third shaking I had not, in four months, encountered — the shaking of a young Korean woman whose mother had, in a Cupertino kitchen in 1998, been humming a four-hundred-year-old melodic phrase the woman did not consciously know she was carrying.
The first stall flushed. The sink ran. The bathroom door opened, closed.
I was alone.
I lifted my hands. I laid the palms flat on my thighs — palm-up, the Joseon scholar's gesture of opened defense. The body, in the small space between the door closing and the next breath, had decided.
I breathed.
I breathed the long high note my mother had taught me, in the spring of my ninth year, to draw from the place under the collarbone — the place she had told me was the only honest place in a Korean woman to sing from, the place that lived, in the small unmarked grammar of three generations of Chungcheong-do women, exactly under the spot where the marble in my mouth would, in another twenty months by Inwangsan-sanshin's count, begin to warm.
I sang the long high note.
I sang it on the closed lid of the toilet in the second stall of the bathroom of a Sinchon noraebang on a Saturday at eleven-oh-eight in March of 2026.
I sang it once.
I sang it the second time, lowered by a fourth, in the small minor turn of the chorus the man at the microphone in the booth was, at that exact moment, also singing.
I did not, on the second note, weep.
I had, on Friday morning in a chairman's office, said I would reserve weeping for Sunday. I had, on Sunday afternoon at a low table, had the weeping done for me in advance by the woman in the brass cup. I was not, on a Saturday night in a noraebang bathroom, going to give Sinchon-gu a weeping it had not earned.
I sang the long note.
I let it down slowly.
I stood up.
I unlatched the stall. I went to the sink. I washed my hands. I dried them on the small disposable paper towel.
I looked, in the bathroom mirror, at the face of Han Ji-won, who had — at eight days past the brass cup, four days past the Inwangsan apricot, two days past the orange tarp in Hongdae — finally, on the toilet lid in a Sinchon noraebang on a Saturday night, sung the small unmarked note her mother had taught her to draw from the place where her line had been keeping it.
The face in the mirror was, for the first time in twenty-six years, the face of a Korean woman who looked, on second look, slightly like her grandmother.
I had, by family agreement, always looked like my father — the Cupertino math-software engineer of the Han line out of North Chungcheong who had given me his nose and the long thin Western-cut of his eyes.
The face in the mirror, on the second look, had my grandmother's mouth.
I had, until this exact moment, never had my grandmother's mouth.
I wiped the corner of my eye with the paper towel. I had not, in fact, wept. The wiping was a Cupertino habit from a childhood of Korean-church-auntie bathrooms on Sunday afternoons.
I dropped the towel in the bin.
I went back to the booth.
Yi-jun was, on the small low stage-floor, on the last chorus.
He sang the line for the second time. He sang it in the lowered-fourth, the small minor turn of the chorus the song lived in.
I came in. He saw me come in. He did not, on the seeing, change his face. He did, however, in the smallest accumulated unit of attention I had learned, over four months, to read on him, lower the volume of the next line by a fraction the small Sinchon Su Noraebang microphone could not, on its 2010s audio engineering, have intentionally registered.
He lowered the line because I had come back into the room and the room had, in the coming-back, recalibrated its small acoustic geometry. He lowered the line because I had, in the small thirty-second walk back from the bathroom across the noraebang corridor, become a different listener.
He sang to the new listener.
The new listener — the woman who had, on the toilet lid, sung the long note — sat down on the vinyl couch next to Min-ji.
Min-ji, with the pocket-square at her lap now and the small flush in her cheeks gone, took my hand.
She did not, in taking it, speak.
Yi-jun finished the song.
The screen on the wall, by the small ungenerous habit of a Korean noraebang, gave him a score of 93. The room was silent for the count of three. Min-ji, on the vinyl couch, lifted my hand and gave a small clear unembarrassed Korean-girl clap with the back of her free hand against the palm of mine, which was the small clap of approval a younger girl gives an older performer she has decided is, on the small accumulated grammar of the evening, family.
Yi-jun bowed. Forty-five degrees.
He held the bow for three breaths.
He straightened. He set the microphone on the small chrome stand. He sat back down on the vinyl couch.
He did not look at me.
He did not, in the not-looking, fail to look at me. He simply, in the moment immediately after the song, gave me back my face, the way an older Korean man gives a younger Korean woman back her face after he has, on the room's permission, briefly held it in the song.
The face he was giving back was, I now understood, my grandmother's mouth.
He had, on the second-to-last line, recognized it.
He had not, on the song, made me responsible for the recognizing.
Min-ji, very softly: Unnie. Are you all right.
I said: Yes, Min-ji.
Do you mean yes.
I mean yes. For tonight, yes.
All right.
She picked up the microphone. She queued, with great deliberation, a 2003 SES ballad. She sang it. She sang it the way one sings a 2003 SES ballad after a 1979 Cho Yong-pil cover — that is, with the small careful comic relief of a young Korean woman who has, in the right register, agreed to bring the room back down to a Saturday night.
Yi-jun, on the vinyl couch beside me, did not, for the duration of the SES ballad, look at me.
He did, however, very slowly, very deliberately, lay his hand flat on the vinyl of the couch at the small space between his thigh and mine — palm down, on the vinyl, the way an older Korean man lays a hand on a small low table next to a guest's cup when he is, in the laying, signaling availability without asking for contact.
I did not, on the vinyl, take the hand.
I did, however, very slightly, very deliberately, move my own hand, which had been in my lap, six inches to the right, so that the small back of my fourth finger lay flat against the small back of his fourth finger.
We did not, on the vinyl, look at each other.
We watched Min-ji sing the 2003 SES ballad.
Min-ji sang the ballad cleanly. She gave it a hand-flourish on the bridge and, on the last chorus, the small unembarrassed eye-roll our generation had been giving 2003 ballads since 2017. The screen gave her 89. She bowed. She sat down.
She said, in a register so dry I would have missed it if I had not known her for four years: Unnie. I am going to the lobby for ten minutes. The sajangnim, in the ten minutes, may sit on the vinyl couch and not speak. The unnie, beside him, may also not speak. I am extending, in the ten minutes, the small clear courtesy of the unmonitored vinyl couch.
She bowed to Yi-jun. She bowed to me. She went out.
We did not, on the vinyl, speak.
His hand, on the vinyl, did not move.
My hand, on the vinyl, did not move.
The small back of my fourth finger lay flat against the small back of his fourth finger.
The screen played the noraebang's default fish-tank screensaver — a ten-second loop of small Korean snapper swimming past a concrete reef. The loop ran six times before either of us spoke.
I said, on the seventh loop: Sajangnim.
He said: Yes, Han-ssi.
The melody is the melody my mother used to hum at the sink.
Yes, Han-ssi.
The melody is also the small Chuseok lullaby of my grandmother.
Yes.
The melody is also, four hundred years ago, the small folk lullaby of a Joseon court woman to a Joseon court woman's daughter on a riverbank in Chungcheong-do.
He, on the vinyl, did not for one moment move.
He said, very softly: Yes, Han-ssi.
You knew this.
I knew this.
You sang the song knowing.
I sang the song knowing.
You sang the song to me.
I sang the song to Min-ji-ssi, who asked. I sang the song, by the small fixed point I was using, to the air above her left shoulder, which was the air your face was sitting in. I did not, Han-ssi, sing the song to you. I sang the song into the air your face was sitting in. I leave to you the decision as to whether the air your face was sitting in is the same as you.
That is —
A Joseon evasion. Yes.
Sajangnim.
Yes, Han-ssi.
I lifted my hand off the vinyl.
He did not, on the vinyl, lift his.
I laid my hand on top of his.
I did not, in the laying, weave the fingers. I laid the palm of my hand on the back of his hand at the small low laminate angle between our thighs and the back of the vinyl couch and I left it there.
He did not, in the laying, breathe out.
He had, by my count, not breathed out in four hundred and three years.
He breathed out now.
The breath was small. The breath was the breath of an older creature on the small low vinyl couch of a Sinchon noraebang on a Saturday at eleven-twenty-six p.m. in March of 2026, who had been, for one minute and twelve seconds, holding it.
I said: Sajangnim. I am, in the small accumulated grammar of the evening, going to ask you a thing. The thing is not, on this evening, a question to be answered tonight. The thing is to be answered, by the small careful patient grammar of the four-day working-with-you we have been doing, when you have the answer.
Yes, Han-ssi.
Sing me, one of these afternoons in the next month, the lullaby of the riverbank.
He did not, on the vinyl, move.
He said, after a small careful pause: Han-ssi. I have not, in four hundred years, sung that lullaby. The lullaby is the lullaby of a Joseon court woman to a daughter who would, in another twenty years, walk into the inner court of Gyeongbokgung in a small white hanbok at the age of eight. The lullaby is not, in any small register I have available, a lullaby a man may, of his own initiative, sing to the daughter's descendant. The lullaby is owed to be sung by a woman of the line. The asking you have made is the asking of a thing that, on the line's grammar, is yours to ask of no one.
I am asking it anyway.
Yes, Han-ssi.
Will you sing it.
He did not, for a long moment, answer.
He said, very quietly: Yes, Han-ssi. I will sing it. I will sing it once. I will sing it at a small low table in the Bukchon hanok, in your hearing, on an afternoon you choose. I will, in the singing, be doing a thing the line's grammar does not permit. I will, in the singing, be asking the line — by way of you, in the moment, in the room — for the permission. The permission will, by my reading of the line, either be given or not be given. The line decides.
Yes.
We sat on the vinyl couch.
His hand, under mine, lay flat.
The screen, in the dim of the booth, ran the seventh loop of the small Korean snapper, the eighth, the ninth.
At the eleventh loop the door opened.
Min-ji came back in with two bottles of Pohang black-sesame makgeolli and a small look of unembarrassed Korean-girl satisfaction.
She set the bottles on the laminate table.
She said: The front-desk girl had four bottles left. I bought two. I am, in the unspent five minutes, going to queue an aggressively bad 2008 ballad. The sajangnim, in his next song, may match it or not match it, at his discretion. The unnie will sing whatever she likes.
She queued the 2008 ballad.
Yi-jun, on the vinyl couch, did not lift his hand out from under mine.
He let it stay.
The 2008 ballad, in the small fortunate audio engineering of a 2010s Sinchon noraebang microphone, was a song neither of us, on our side of the vinyl, was, by the end of the night, going to remember the name of.
Min-ji sang it.
She gave it a score of 81.
She laughed.
I let, in my chest, the small steady cold pressure that had — by Mr. Kang's rule six and Inwangsan-sanshin's small earthenware cup and the small fixed point above Min-ji's shoulder and the lowered chorus of a 1979 Cho Yong-pil cover — agreed, on a Saturday at eleven-thirty-one p.m. in Sinchon in March of 2026, to lay itself down for the rest of the evening.
I sang next.
I sang the 2010s indie track that had been the third song on my college roommate's senior-year breakup playlist.
The screen gave me a score of 92.
I bowed.
Min-ji clapped.
Yi-jun, on the vinyl couch beside me, with his hand under mine on the small space between our thighs and the back of the couch, did not, by any visible sign, applaud.
He did, however, very slightly, very deliberately, turn his hand under mine so that his palm came up to my palm.
I let it.
The room went on being a small dim L-shaped booth in a Sinchon noraebang on a Saturday night.
The line — the line my grandmother had been keeping, that my mother had hummed at a sink in Cupertino in 1998, that a Joseon court woman had hummed on a riverbank in Chungcheong-do in 1614 — did not, on the small vinyl couch of a Sinchon noraebang on a Saturday at eleven-thirty-three p.m., decide one way or the other on his asking.
The line did not, also, decide against.
The line, on the small vinyl couch, simply listened.