WELCOME TO JUKJEON, CHOI HANJUN !
your place at dream house 401 is all ready for you, we hope you enjoy your stay. citizens, let’s welcome our new neighborhood graduate student and part-time english tutor !
HOW HAS JUKJEON BEEN TREATING YOU THE PAST 9 MONTHS ?
to hanjun, jukjeon is merely a stepping stone between the dreariness of his hometown to the decadence of seoul, the place where his vast ambitions lie. for now, it’s only a temporary solution to a short-term situation; a subliminal place between the country and the city, a transition from his origins to his objectives. he absolutely has no plans to form attachments in jukjeon, to have anything tying him down, especially when everything he has in jukjeon is only temporary. it has to be. as for the suburban life, having lived in an isolated manner in boring and idyllic jeju island, the monotony doesn’t bother him. his sole aim is to finish his graduate studies before moving on to seoul anyway, and nothing should disrupt that.
TELL US MORE ABOUT YOURSELF !
tw: cheating, self-inflicted injury.
I. FAMILY.
it’s a foreign word; like sand grains on his tongue, a grittiness he can’t help but spit out in contempt. they say family is warmth, family is love, but all he sees is the privilege of those who’ve never seen otherwise.
the funny thing is, his family exists like a bad melodrama:
there was once a naive woman who fell in love with a deceitful man. it starts off like a cinderella story, as a romantic whirlwind romance between a waitress and a doctor, a country girl and a city boy who found each other against all odds against the backdrop of jeju island. she proclaims her love for him and he proclaims his love for her but she stays in blissful ignorance as he tucks his wedding band away from sight. nine months later, a little boy is born and her heart is broken from the betrayal, yet she stays with the man for the sake of love. and so, they’re tucked away in jeju island, near enough for easy access but far enough from the main island, away from prying eyes and scandalous discovery of their presence.
they play family whenever he comes by, with a monthly allowance accompanying his visit as if they’re a family for pay, made available whenever he desires it so. she doesn’t quite care, all she wants is his affection but hanjun quietly boils in his hatred for him, gritting his teeth in pretence of a grin. hanjun sees the bright smiles on his mother’s face, but then he hears her weep in the silence of her room when she thinks he can’t hear. for all the resentment he has for her, it starts from there. the way she can never stand up for herself, the resigned way she allows people to mistreat her and talk behind her back, all while being disowned from her family. hanjun watches as each monthly visit from his father turns sparser one year after another, as if they’re toys he’s simply gotten tired of. his mother slowly withers away, and nothing hanjun does is ever good enough to erase the place of his father in her heart.
can they be considered ‘family’ then, in this mess of half-hearted feelings and useless attachments?
II. COMMUNITY.
it’s a laughable concept; like the bitter aftertaste of a deceivingly sweet facade, an illusion built on a foundation of lies.
hanjun learns very early in his life how much of an unpleasant sight his presence is to many. after all, fact is fact, and single parenthood is a stigma; as is marital affairs. it just so happens that hanjun is a product of both and it’s not something that’s difficult to put together on that small island.
to hanjun, community spirit is a motley of things. it is the neighbours whispering and pointing at them whenever they think they’re not looking. it is the unconcealed sneers whenever they walk past, the blatant ostracisation. it is the way the other neighbourhood boys throw rocks at him while the adults looks away, and the way they spit out curses like “hussy” or “home-wrecker” if they see his mother as much as smile at another man. it is also the way his grandparents pretend they no longer exist, looking the other way if they so much as cross paths, and the way they’re being treated as less than human just because they’re different from everybody else. as usual, his mother endures, endures, and endures, like she does to every mistreatment. but hanjun, on the other hand, he… he sees fire.
III. POWER.
throughout his life, hanjun learns three lessons. one, the rich will always bully the poor. two, the strong always overpowers the weak. and three, only the smart and the capable will stand triumphant. to hanjun, he is the smart and the capable. the one who will rise above everyone, destruction in his wake if that is what it takes.
it doesn’t take much, but it begins like this:
he is in his boyhood. his stature is small, his frame thin, and his skin tanned. he is powerless, at the mercy of the older and bigger neighbourhood kids as they shove him to the ground, the marks on his body the tell tale signs of a recurring event. he’s holding his tears in, hands trembling from the fear and the anger as he thinks about each push and shove and hopeless fall. his mind is protesting and his body is reeling, yet, when he spots an approaching adult, he grabs the largest rock and strikes himself in the head. there are screams and then there’s blood flowing down the side of his head — a sacrificial offering — but it’s worth seeing the panic and the accusations fly. after all, at the sight of a small wounded boy amidst much bigger ones, no one would ever suspect that the injury was self-inflicted.
after that, finding people’s weaknesses becomes like a drug to him, knowing that he’s able to bring someone to their knees if he wants to. most of the time they’re secrets kept for safekeeping, but other times he wields them simply for the fun of it. fights become common to those who provoke him and situations are easily manipulated in his favour; by the time he reaches university, he studies law because he wants to know the rules just so that he can break them. to him, what is most important is that he’s choosing his own path, that he is under nobody’s control.
IV. JUKJEON
leaving jeju island is a given.
hanjun has always known that a vaster future is easily within his reach and it definitely isn’t found on that small island, so he makes his way to jukjeon, the suburb of seoul that’s a brush away from the city life he’s always despised. people say that seoul is where everything is at and hanjun doesn’t necessarily disagree, but it doesn’t mean that he’ll willingly submit himself to its madness just yet. so jukjeon is the perfect compromise: a motley of boring simplicity and understated chaos, a temporary living solution until he has to move on to larger and better things.