Remember the Lanterns

Young Ho

I really have no idea how some of the business people in Korea do it. Men and women both. It's not a great situation for either of them: the men have usually got to stay later than their boss if there is no 'drinking party' after work, and then they have to drink what their boss tells them to if there is. The women get paid much less for the same work and never reach the upper management levels and no matter what their job, they always do the cleaning up after work lunches or coffee breaks or whatever. Both of the above work long hours everyday and often on the weekends as well, with very few holidays to break up the monotony.
After several months of working my own six-day a week schedule, it has been made very clear to me that I would never be able to properly function in a Korean company environment. No matter how much money they paid me, I value much too highly my personal time, despite the fact that lately, I probably haven't used it very productively.
Today, I walk down the six sets of stairs to the GS 25 convenient store to grab a drink. Lately, I've favoured the hot soy milk: it's delicious. On the way down, I end up walking next to shiny suit guy.
I venture: Hello.
He knows me of course, and says.
Oh hello Hannah.... Where are you going?

To get some breakfast.
You always walk the stairs?
Recently, I'm trying to as much as possible.
Me too. He smiles.
We chat the rest of the way. Actually, his English level isn't bad at all. He's just a little slow.
The rest of that week, and every day of the following weeks, after his class finishes at 8:20am, we walked downstairs everyday together. Six flights of stairs actually allows for a nice, little conversation. Once at the bottom of the stairs, I would 'drop him off', where he would spend 15 minutes or so chatting with three others, two of which were having a smoke. I suppose this was a kind of highlight or tradition of the day, being able to hang out with peers. On my way back up from getting my soy milk, we'd often chat together. At some point, I got shiny suit guy's phone number, whose name was Young Ho. Actually, at this point I was thinking about him all of the time and secretly looking forward to our daily stair walks. One Saturday afternoon, I bumped into him after my morning classes. He was there for an English club. We ended up having our first quasi-date over lunch, and then coffee and frankly, it was wonderful. It was choc-a-bloc full of flirtation and laughter and sexual tension. It was a major crush and that kind of thing makes anyone happy I think. Not once did I think of YS (at least until

afterwards), I went home smiling and happy. It had been awhile. To top things off, he was away for a month on a business trip while I was going to be travelling. Which reminds me, I only had three weeks left before I was leaving. In between going out with Young Ho and working, I was reading travel guides and planning my trip! It was pretty exciting and I was especially looking forward to doing all of the exploration by myself. But back to Young Ho. He and I started spending a lot of time
together. We had ice cream and waffles at the next meeting and we tried a cow intestine barbeque the next Saturday night, we had a mid-week dinner. We were enjoying each other's company to say the least, and he knew I liked him, I knew he liked me, but he was a student at BYO, and I was going to be back to work in a few months. We still had a couple of plans left before he was leaving for Singapore on business and I was going on my South-East Asian trip. Here's the thing about Young Ho though, he was 12 years older than I am and married with three kids. We talked often about his family and his kids so it was no secret, but he also had told me that he had had girlfriends, which kind of said to me that he was open to some fun. I also found out that he was the CEO of a huge copper wire producing factory and company. In fact, he offered to take me on a tour of his factory someday, which I gladly accepted – although I postponed until after our return. With only a little over a week to go, I had stopped thinking about him as much, and was instead getting ready to leave.

Since I was only going to be gone for two or three months, I was going to keep my apartment during that time and only had to pack, take care of my flights and visas. And spend time with a bunch of people that seemed to want to see me, despite the fact that I was coming back in a little while. I spent time with my colleagues at work, had another lunch with the housewives (this time at a Korean restaurant down the road), and texted a few of the old dates to let them know I was going. Chris and I had dinner one night, and we went out for drinks with Mr. Kim. It was an exhausting and fun week, and I was glad it was over for no other reason than I had spent the entire week stuffed full of junky food from lunches and coffee dates. On my last night in town, I went through my backpack one last time, and threw out a few things to ensure that it was light enough to carry, and got into bed at around 9pm, so that my 5:45 alarm the next morning wouldn't be too much of a bother.
Naturally, YS calls. The guy's timing was impeccable. For the first time ever, I ignored his call.
But I gave in the next day and emailed him from the Daegu Bus station saying that I was travelling for the next while and would be back in Daegu in a few months. I sent the email and regretted it immediately. By doing so, I was bringing myself back into the vicious cycle of waiting for him to reply. Fortunately, I was in a pretty good space at this point, being excited about travelling, being happy with