Free Our Happy Time by Gong Ji-young Page B

death penalty, and how I learned about Gary Gilmore. He had shot and killed two complete strangers, and in interviews with the press, he smirked and said calmly,
If you kill me, then you will be assisting me in my final murder.
He was beyond the reach of the system. He mocked the incompetence and contradiction of trading a single murder for all of the violence that he had committed. Many young people wrote songs and made films in his memory after he died because of what he represented. And they weren’t clichéd about it. The shock of his execution moved us and made us think. But this trite scene playing out before me would have merely bored us and, to be honest, it would have bothered us a little, too, deep down inside. I wanted to get up and leave.

Tell me what kind of person you are. And I will tell you what kind of god you worship.
    – Nietzsche
B LUE N OTE 7
    There were two other boys at our mother’s house, three and four years older than Eunsu and me. Our stepfather was quiet most of the time, but whenever he drank, the house would be turned upside down and smashed to pieces. What was wrong with our mother that she couldn’t free herself of the fetters of violence and alcohol? Her face was as black and blue as ever. The one good thing was that our stepfather got up every morning, strapped rolls of wallpaper to the back of his bicycle, and went out to wallpaper houses. But that was just the beginning. It was as plain as day that the two boys, the ones who had been living in that house from the start and who were now our mother’s so-called stepsons, did not like us. And I was already like a wounded porcupine, my body bristling with electricity, quills rippling like ears of rice in an autumn field at the slightest touch. Our mother started hitting us, too. Even when they beat up Eunsu, she hit us, and when I punched them back, she hit us some more. One day, our stepfather packedup our things. We were tossed back into the orphanage.
    We were taken back, as crushed as empty cardboard boxes. The morning we left, I watched the way our mother shoved Eunsu toward me and stalked off into the kitchen as he cried out for her, flailing his arms around, trying to find her through his blind eyes. We were abandoned again, and this time, it was different. It was, in a word, irreversible . Now we had nothing left to wait for. All of the light in the universe blinked out, not just for Eunsu, but for me as well. No sun would ever rise for us again.

P ART 7
    I was having a relaxed breakfast when the telephone rang. It was Aunt Monica. In an urgent voice, she said she had to go somewhere and asked me to pick her up. I checked the clock. It was not yet noon, and there was plenty of time before I had to be somewhere that evening. I picked her up at the convent in Cheongpa-dong, loaded a side of ribs that she had purchased into my car, and together we headed for Samyang-dong. There was nowhere to park, so I left the car in a pay lot near the entrance of a marketplace, and we began to walk. Since I could not ask my elderly aunt to carry the ribs, I was soon huffing and puffing. We walked quite a way through the market, but the address she had told me was nowhere to be found. In every alleyway, the snow that had fallen a few days earlier had lost its luster and was dirtied; in some places, it was mixed with the beige ash of used coal briquettes.
    I knew without asking that it was a poor neighborhood. Was this really Seoul–part of the same city I had marveled over after returning from France and thought of as even more beautiful than Paris? Even in a place that looked like it was stuck in the 1960s, there were still swarms of people! I wasn’t entirely unmoved by it, and yet strictly speaking,I felt nothing, and even if I had felt something, it was still just one part of a larger landscape.
    Aunt Monica explained that we were on our way to visit the family of the housekeeper Yunsu had killed. She had tried to visit them several times