A Distant and Beautiful Place

Our Daily Bread

178 Our Daily Bread For the people living in Wonmi-dong—no, to be precise, for the people of the fifth subprecinct of Wonmi-dong’s twentythird precinct—a particularly thorny problem arose this winter. Depending on your point of view, you might think it a trifling matter, easily overcome with a little common sense, but in any case, it was clearly a most unfortunate situation. It all began at the end of last year. In summer the streets of Wonmi-dong bustled until midnight as residents escaped the sweltering heat of the one-room living quarters attached to their shops; but once the cold came, things were different. The neighbors all hunkered down on their heated floors and were perfectly content watching television, without a thought to the dark streets, where a chill wind whistled. Circumstances weren’t much different during the day, when temperatures rose only slightly with the sun. Because cable television, a recent fad spreading from house to house through the neighborhood, showed movies at all hours of the day, the local people remained glued to their sets, carefully budgeting their time in the bathroom and banishing noisy children to the outdoors . Some families said they received the broadcast without ever connecting a line, no doubt because of the forests of antennas on every roof. The weather was cold, the floor was warm, and the television took care of the entertainment. As winter deepened toward the end of the year, the neighbors whispered about the love affair of Mr. Ôm of the Happiness Photo Studio every time they got together , but once the Ginseng Tearoom closed its doors, Ôm’s relationship with the tearoom woman lost its appeal. Our Daily Bread 179 And then, as if timed to coincide with their fading interest in that affair, the new situation arose. As with all things, no one thought much of it at first. The Kimp’o Rice Shop simply changed its name to Kimp’o Supermarket. Originally the rice shop had sold only rice and yônt’an briquettes, cornering the market on those commodities in the twenty-third precinct, and the proprietor, Kyôngho’s dad, appeared to have amassed quite a fortune. He and his wife had expanded the shop to include the empty lot next door, and now, as Kimp’o Rice Shop made the leap to Kimp’o Supermarket , it was only natural that its shelves were filled with all manner of staples as the new name implied. The former rice shop’s conspicuous success, with the bags of rice on one side, the “mini” supermarket on the other, and the neat stacks of yônt’an out front, astonished the neighbors. Dreaming of a better life, Kyôngho’s parents had first moved to the capital from a mountain village in the heart of Ch’ungch’ông Province. With money earned working as day laborers, they had come to Wonmi-dong and set up the rice shop four years ago. At first they sold only rice, which they brought up from their home village , but they were an honest, hard-working couple, and the next year they began delivering yônt’an as well. They were also gentlenatured people, respectful to elders and always smiling, and consequently everyone in Wonmi-dong thought highly of them. So on the day Kimp’o Supermarket opened, many people made a special trip to encourage the diligent couple by buying something, if only a package of cookies or a cake of tofu. And afterward the neighborhood children all ran around with mouths smeared with red bean crumbs as if to prove that the proprietors of the store really had handed out two whole steamers of red bean cakes to commemorate the opening of their new business. It wasn’t a large, fancy supermarket on the main road, but it wasn’t shabby, either, and the couple was so happy, smiling all the time, that the woman from the dry cleaning shop next door told everyone she felt rich just watching them. The woman from Kohûng who ran the Kangnam Real Estate Office with her husband, Mr. Pak, envied the success of Kyôngho’s family, as did others in the neighborhood, and felt sure they would make even more money now that they had such a large store. It was a rare sight—someone actually expanding a business in Wonmi- 180 Yang Kwija...