Seoulmates (Seoul 2)

Every cut of meat imaginable is available, from entire slabs of ribs to wafer-thin sirloin that they serve with shabu-shabu, the hot pot soups you can order at counters in food halls in the basement of the Lotte department stores. Vendors advertise the use of an upstairs grill for only five thousand won per person. I bypass what feels like a hundred beef butchers and finally land on a pork one. While Soyou watches silently, I ineptly haggle with the butcher until my poor Korean frustrates her so much that she shoulders me to the side and arrives at a price well below the advertised one. The butcher even throws in free bones. She shoves the bag in my face.

“Are we done?”

“Not yet.” I walk down the entire alleyway, cataloging the various merchants, documenting prices, getting ideas. Soyou follows. At the end, I buy two Milkis and a paper boat full of beef bites wrapped in perilla leaves. “I hope you’re with him because he’s awesome and he really cranks your engine and not because he’s promising you a promotion.”

“Cranks my engine?” she says in a small voice, nothing like the Soyou who always looked at me with narrow eyes and spoke to me with a sharp tongue.

“Hot. He makes you hot. Turns you on.” God, this discussion about my former boss is the worst. I try again. “Be with him because you want to be with him, not because of some fucked-up work dynamic.”

“Oh.”

“I want better for you, Soyou. You’re gorgeous and smart and you deserve more than a middle-aged middle manager with two kids.”

Her head comes up defiantly. “You don’t know how hard it is. There are thousands of women who are smarter or better credentialed. If I ever got let go from IF Group, who would take me? I am not Samsung or Kakao material. I do not have a family like Chaeyoung who will find me another job. I need job security. I cannot become a baeksu.”

She means a person with white hands, one who isn’t working, or, in more base terms, a loser. I pass her the paper tray with the beef bites. “Here. You’ll miss lunch.”

She takes it with a grimace. “When I first came to Seoul, I felt out of place. I wore the wrong clothes, my accent was too strong. There are many different dialects in the country, but Seoul dialect is the standard. If you speak satoori, people will look down on you. I still remember my first days, and so when we were told we always had to speak English around you, I hated it. My English isn’t good, and if you’re not good, someone will think you’re ignorant, someone will judge you.”

“Meaning me?”

She nods. Her lips tighten and she blinks rapidly, as if she’s trying to stave off tears. Soyou is not the type to cry for sympathy. She’d much rather curse you out, so her show of emotion convinces me of her sincerity. Or I could be a sucker.

“I would not have ever judged you for that. I was embarrassed to speak Korean.”

“But you tried. We all admired it. Then when you spoke it so well that night at the dinner, it scared us. We could not remember all that we had said in Korean believing you could not understand us. I am sorry. Very sorry.” She bows, one hand holding the paper tray of food and one hand pressed into her stomach, deep enough that I can see her spine.

My first instinct is to say she doesn’t have to be sorry, but she did make my life difficult and I don’t need to dismiss that. The times that I felt left out, put down, and criticized by her and Chaeyoung in the last few months are too numerous to count. I could let it go and say that it doesn’t bother me, but that would be a lie. I can let it fester or I can drain the wound and allow it to heal.

“You weren’t great to me, Soyou, and sending me to the wrong place for the hweshik was really terrible, but I’m not going to hold a grudge. I’ve got some good things in my life and I’m going to focus on those. I suggest you do the same.”

I hand her the drink and the umbrella. “Take this. Sometimes you need to not let your insecurity drive all your decision-making. I haven’t told my mother or Yujun about what I saw. You should come clean about that. If he’s harassing you, he should be fired. If you’re sleeping with him to get ahead, that’s not going to end well for you. If you’re with him because you love him, you might remember he has two kids who would be devastated by their family breaking up. You’re a good worker, Soyou, but I don’t think you’re proud of yourself.”