A romance mystery set in the fictional Empire of Korea. Oh Sunny is just an ordinary girl who has harboured a crush on the fascinating and charming Lee Hyuk, the Emperor of Korea, for years. He is unattainable, or so she thinks, but Fate would have...
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Two years passed, and life went on in much the same way as it had before I came face to face with the Emperor. We are creatures of habit, after all, and the fact that I had fallen in love with my Emperor did not deter me in any way from my old routine, and so I hugged my secret to myself, and continued to eat and sleep and shower and search for a job. I had finished high school with average results and had to forego college; we were financially tight, and if my mother had not died, perhaps, things would have been vastly different, and I would never have met Hyuk, and my life would have taken a safe, predictable path: meeting a nice boy in college, getting married, raising a family of two, having a safe, comfortable office job. But I didn't go to college, and instead, took on one part-time job after another, for a high school graduate has only so many options. Such was life.
Hyuk, meanwhile, had seemingly recovered from the grief of his wife's untimely passing, and had assumed all of his public duties again. He had moved on, I assumed, because he was seen in the company of several beautiful women: an actress, one day; a model the next. The paparazzi had a field day photographing his social life, and the tabloids came up with a list of possible future empresses, descended of the purest, bluest blood, from a host of countries all over the world.
I felt a queer pang every time I saw a picture of his latest date, the latest conquest.
My first encounter with him seemed surreal.
Sometimes, I wondered, staring at the walls, lying down on my bed in the dark, whether he remembered me, the silly girl who had fainted at his fan meet. Would he smile, amused, remembering? Would he remember my name? Would he remember me if he saw me again? It was at this juncture that I would always sigh. Because, of all the uncertainties that lay ahead in my future, this was the one sure thing, the one unwavering, sad truth that I knew could never be disputed, even to a foolish dreamer like me : I would never see him again, not in the flesh, anyway. I would have to be content with his images on the Internet and television, in the papers and magazines. Such was reality, harsh though it be, and, like it or not, I would have to be content with that.
In October 2014, I landed myself a job as a backup singer in a musical company. This wasn't as grand as it sounded, because what I was was basically standing in the shadows, and singing with a host of other backup singers, totalling four in all, including me, while the star of the musical hogged the limelight. We were the props to her performances, and apart from singing, we had to dance as well, in unison, which was quite tough, and dangerous, too, considering the tiny stage and the dim lighting. The musical ran every night, and the audience wasn't very encouraging, comprising shadowy sihlouttes in dark corners; I suspected that some had chosen the obscurity of the shabby theatre hall to hide from whatever it was that they were running from, while others were engaged in dubious acts at some dim, secluded corner of the hall.
But I needed a job, and this one did afford some security, and its higher pay meant that I could cut down on my part-time jobs - I was juggling four part-time jobs at one point - and I could do something that I liked: singing. I am not the greatest singer in the world, but I love to sing, like my father, something that my younger sister frowned upon, being the hard-nosed, practical girl that she was. She said that we were dreamers, my father and I, that singing wouldn't put money in our pockets, and that the cruel, hard world out there had no place for people like us.
