A Distant and Beautiful Place

The Last Land

47 The Last Land For nearly ten days the wind blew relentlessly. The spring cold snap had arrived. Pedestrians scowled at the plastic bags and candy wrappers that littered neighborhood streets. Garbagemen collected the rubbish and burned it in the vacant lot, producing black smoke that rode the wind and ashes thinner than rice paper that fluttered through the air like swarms of moths. Once the garbagemen had lit the fires and left, it was the children’s turn. Sangsu, eldest son of the wallpaper shop people, Kyôngok, youngest daughter of Kim who pushed a garbage cart, and that little rascal Chinman swarmed out to throw stones in the fires and toss cinders into piles of dry grass. The children of Wonmi-dong never had learned to play quietly at home. They dashed outside each morning as soon as they opened their eyes, and played until dark, filling the streets with the sounds of their rollicking and crying. So you could hardly expect them to remain calm when presented with the thrill of playing with fire. Their faces soon were black with soot. Occasionally a child would singe a hand and burst out crying, at which point Mr. Chu from the Wonmi Wallpaper Shop appeared. Originally, Chu had made his living as a plasterer in Pusan, but somehow he had ended up in Puch’ôn’s Wonmi-dong, right next to the empty lot. One spark on the spring wind and his wallpaper shop would go up in smoke, so when Chu dashed out to scold the children, they skittered away in an instant. Invariably one of the smaller kids, like three-year-old Mi, youngest daughter of the Happiness Photo Studio, would trip and lose a shoe and start wailing breathlessly. Mr. Ôm, the proprietor of the photo studio, had three 48 Yang Kwija daughters and proclaimed himself a happy man. It had been his own idea to name the girls Chi, for wisdom, Sôn, for goodness, and Mi, for beauty. After stamping out the fires, Chu returned to his shop, and then one final character made his appearance: Kang Mansông. Everyone in the twenty-third precinct knew Old Kang. Actually, he was better known as the local landlord, and if you weren’t aware of the uproar that occurred in his field every summer and winter, you didn’t deserve to be called a resident of Wonmi-dong. Old Kang, nearly six feet tall and sturdily built, always dressed like a farmhand . His unusually large nose seemed to take up half his face; it was lumpy and red as a strawberry and somehow suited his ruddy complexion. From his vigorous stride and bulging forearms, which were always exposed beneath his rolled sleeves, it was hard to believe he was nearly seventy. His voice was hearty as well, and when Old Kang paused from his work and bellowed “Yongmun!” his youngest son came running from their back-facing two-story house across the street, some one hundred yards away. According to the woman from Kohûng—wife and business partner of Mr. Pak, who owned the Kangnam Real Estate Office—the old man was so terribly strict with Yongmun that not once to this day had she seen him exchange a kind word with the boy. By “not once to this day” she meant in the history of the twenty-third precinct , for Kangnam Real Estate had been there longer than anyone , except Old Kang, of course. Pak and his wife had contributed brilliantly to the recent skyrocketing of Wonmi-dong’s real estate prices. If Pak was to be believed, he had once been a big shot in real estate circles back in Seoul’s Kaep’o-dong and this side of the Kangnam district, but he had lost all his property in a certain scandal , which he was not at liberty to discuss. Pak left Seoul after that and moved, empty-handed, to Puch’ôn to become a small-time land broker. He called himself small-time, but no one would dispute the fact that Pak had accumulated a considerable fortune in Wonmi-dong. The empty lot where the garbagemen burned rubbish had belonged to Old Kang before he sold it under a contract drawn up by Kangnam Real Estate. Four two-story shops had already been built on the land, but the new owner had left the section closest to the road vacant for now. A building would go up in the next...