Romancing on Jeju

As soon as . . .

As soon as Chakyung arrived at Nol that evening and spotted Romi and Hadam, she asked breathlessly, “So you mean to tell me the guy actually had amnesia all this time? Like—like in some kind of K-drama?”

“I told you it was a possibility,” Romi said. She was lying on a beanbag chair, hands folded over her stomach. Chakyung couldn’t see her expression, but she couldn’t imagine Romi was feeling all that proud to have correctly guessed this secret.

“And it turns out,” said Hadam cautiously from where she sat on the edge of the sofa, casting a glance toward Romi, “he was also a married man.”

Chakyung sighed.

“I suppose any of our guesses could be true. He was interested in me. He wasn’t interested in me. He was interested in me but had no confidence. And he was a married man. One who also has amnesia.” Still staring at the ceiling, Romi spoke as if she were reciting the lyrics to a song. Her voice betrayed no upset feelings. She seemed lost in thought.

Hadam painstakingly relayed the information they had gathered about the guy. His name was Seo Kyungwoon. He was thirty-six years old. He’d studied animal husbandry at a university in Seoul and was working a regular job before he moved down to Jeju with his wife, who was pursuing a PhD. They had been living on Jeju for three years, running all sorts of experiments to refine the traditional beekeeping process, when they got into the accident that killed his wife. The beekeeping work had been left to someone else while he was being treated in Seoul, but a few months ago, he’d returned to Jeju at last.

Chakyung also chose her words with care. “And, Romi, you recognized him right away, didn’t you? Even though he couldn’t remember you.”

Romi unclasped her fingers and tried to push herself up on her elbows, groaning as the beanbag chair shifted. Hadam went over and reached out a hand to pull her up.

“Phew.” Romi sat up properly in the chair. “It’s been three years, so he’s changed a bit. It was hard for me to recognize him right away. His face was scarred from the accident. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure at first, but—there was that hallway leading out of the café. With all the photos on the wall.”

“It was already evening when I got here, plus I was rushing to check in. I didn’t even know there were any photos,” Chakyung said.

“There are—of all the people who’ve ever stayed here. I saw him clear as day in one of them, the way he looked three years ago. Wearing the same clothes he wore the first day he came to see me, that same jacket, and standing in front of the same car he’d been driving initially. And then there he was, sitting in the garden.”

Romi remembered the moment she had spotted Kyungwoon earlier that day. Her looking down, him looking up. The two of them facing each other like that, the sun shining on the strands of hair that fell over his forehead. He set down the English journal he had been reading and opened his mouth. His low, heavy voice sounded strange but familiar.

“Do we know each other?”

For a while, Romi couldn’t respond. Has he forgotten me? She thought she hadn’t been expecting anything, yet a sense of disappointment bloomed inside her. There hadn’t been a concrete shape to her anticipation, but she realized this disappointment was now taking up the space once held by her secret hopes.

Kyungwoon seemed to pick up on that.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was in an accident and lost my memory.”

His tone was apologetic enough, but there was also a hollowness to his voice that gave away nothing more and nothing less about his own condition. Romi felt his voice like a bass in her heart before she heard it in her ears.

“When I heard his voice, my heart started racing. Not jumping up and down, either, but leaping all over the place. I felt like it was darting everywhere. I remembered. I remembered him,” Romi said.

Chakyung and Hadam exchanged a look. It wasn’t some complicated thing for a single woman’s heart to race because of a single man. But there was still one loose end that remained.

“Romi,” Chakyung said, “are you okay with the fact that he was married when you met him three years ago?”

Hadam looked sharply at Romi too. “Right. Aren’t you upset?”

Romi lay on her back atop the beanbag chair again. “Hmm ...” The room fell silent once more as she drifted into her thoughts. After a while, she answered, “I’m not sure.”

“What?” her friends asked.

“It’s like I’m upset, but I’m also not.”

Hadam raised her voice. “Still, this man deceived you. Showing an interest in you when he was already married.”

“But we can’t know that’s what really happened,” Romi whined. “He never said he was married, but he never said he wasn’t either.”

“Was he wearing a ring?” Chakyung asked, raising her finger.

“I didn’t notice one three years ago—I don’t think he was.”

Chakyung studied her own hands, absent of any rings, and considered this. There were lots of married people who opted not to wear theirs. There were also those who intentionally removed theirs before they went out.

“He could have taken it off before coming, since he came from work,” Hadam murmured to herself, as if reading Chakyung’s thoughts. But Chakyung could detect a trace of dissatisfaction in Hadam’s voice. She felt the same thing herself. Still, this wasn’t something she could meddle in. It wasn’t easy to meet someone who could set your heart racing three years ago and even now. It suddenly occurred to Chakyung that she had felt that same thrill recently, but she tried to suppress that thought.

“And there’s a chance we shouldn’t have read his coming to see me as being interested in me,” Romi said evenly. “If our analysis of his signals was all wrong, then he didn’t lie about anything. I wasn’t deceived.” She said this last sentence with emphasis, as if putting a period on the whole situation.

Chakyung knew it would be better to believe that had been the case. But she didn’t.

Our analysis wasn’t wrong. He definitely had feelings for her.

But there was no way to know, because Honeyman in his present state couldn’t remember anything. Even if he’d liked Romi, and even if he had been deceiving her, or if he had just been reasonably curious about her, the past had been permanently sealed away in a bog of the unknown.

Were feelings you couldn’t remember having no different from feelings you never had? Could you simply say there had never been any feelings now that they’d been completely forgotten?

These were questions to which no one had the answers.

Hadam and Romi decided to stay at Nol for a few days. Hadam planned to gather as much information as she could about the co-op to include in the documentary. She’d asked Romi whether it would be uncomfortable for her to stay there, too, but Romi calmly waved off the concern. Nol didn’t usually rent out rooms for such a short period of time, but peak season was over and people were leaving, so there’d been an empty room available.

“Chakyung, you should stay here with us too. This unit was meant for a family, so it has two bedrooms. We heard the previous occupants were a mom and her elementary school–aged kids. The living room is huge too. We could hang out together at night.”

Chakyung considered the suggestion. Spending the trip with her friends did seem like it’d be more fun and a boost to her mood, but it wouldn’t be easy to share a two-bedroom place among the three of them for several days. She said she needed to think more about it.

Ayoung came to let them know dinner would be held in the courtyard. Folks usually cooked in the shared kitchen and ate separately or else brought out meals to share, but once a week, Ayoung provided a meal, and all the residents helped out.

So this was the sort of space that was worthy of the label “hip,” Chakyung thought, looking around the interior of the building and at all the people there. The gallery hall that connected the café to the courtyard, the small door that led through the back of the shared kitchen beside the cafeteria, and the door to the residential complexes—they were all connected by three paths. A grass field spread out from the buildings as a kind of yard with several small benches throughout. In the summer, the courtyard got a lot of sunlight, and in the winters when it snowed, the space transformed into the picture of quaint elegance, but the indoor air-conditioning and heating seemed incredibly difficult to manage. It was a good idea, though, having the glass roof over the courtyard garden so it could double as a sunroom. A new sort of energy was flowing through this place, one that could easily appeal to the public. It was a place a person would want to try living in at least once in their life. Rather than any personal longing for that lifestyle, Chakyung had a practical interest in the space. She could see her company forming a partnership with the co-op later on and making it into a project.

The current residents of Nol—the Nollers—were a couple in their forties preparing for the opening of their bookstore and book-art exhibit near the Seogwipo Maeil Olle Market; two women somewhere in their late thirties to early forties who worked for a company in Seoul but were spending a month on Jeju on sabbatical; a man in his twenties who had quit his job and was traveling—and then there was their Honeyman, Kyungwoon.

As Ayoung came out with that day’s meal of grilled salmon over rice, a man in his thirties stood to help her, bending down a bit to take the tray from her and bring the food to the table to share. When he set a bowl down in front of Chakyung, she bowed slightly in thanks and noted the burn marks on his hands. Based on what Hadam had said earlier, this had to be Kyungwoon.

“Thank you,” she said.

So this was their Honeyman. As she ate, Chakyung kept stealing glances at him where he sat, diagonal from her. There were traces of the accident on his face, too, but he must have had surgery, and the scars themselves were almost completely faded, so they didn’t stand out. Chakyung couldn’t tell whether his melancholic expression was due to the accident or his natural disposition. She’d heard he hadn’t lost his memory completely, but that he was missing scattered memories of incidents from the year or so before the crash. He didn’t seem like much of a talker, but when people spoke, he focused on listening, nodding and even smiling gently as he did. The handful of times he opened his mouth, his voice was calm and unhurried. Chakyung could see what Romi had liked about him. Still, an uneasy feeling spread out beneath her heart like sand.

When Chakyung tuned back into the conversation, Hadam was in the middle of asking about the Nollers’ lifestyles on Jeju. What had brought them here, how they felt about their lives on the island. They were the kind of questions you would expect to hear on a show like Documentary Three Days , but everyone had their own history.

“This place is pretty huge, but how many people usually stay here? There are probably tons of folks here in the summer, right?”

Ayoung answered, “It depends, but there are lots of people who stay here for two months in the summer. A lot of them come here for marine sports. We also run a surf shop, after all.”

“It seems like there’s a lot that goes into overseeing Nol. It’s amazing you’re able to run a shop alongside it.”

Chakyung thought of Sumi, whom she had met yesterday at the Honeycomb Guesthouse. She couldn’t help but admire the absolute vigor of the people who moved to Jeju.

“A friend of mine runs the surf shop with me,” said Ayoung. “I don’t know the first thing about surfing. He’s in Hawaii at the moment. Meeting surfers and making purchases.”

The bookstore owner cut in. “Oh, Taylor went to Hawaii? To surf?”

Kyungwoon, not Ayoung, responded. “Not just to surf, but on business. He said he would stop by Seoul on his way back too.”

“Oh, is Taylor the owner of the surf shop?” Romi asked. “Is he American? Does he live in Hawaii?”

The people at the table suddenly burst out laughing. Chakyung and Hadam looked at each other, also confused. A man in his twenties with a goatee said teasingly, “He’s not American. That’s just his nickname. It’s related to his job. But right now, he’s running the shop, which has nothing to do with his main line of work. You’ll know him when you see him.”

Ayoung pointed to Kyungwoon. “He’s Kyungwoon’s younger cousin. I know everyone’s different to a degree, but those two are total opposites.”

The man in his twenties chimed in again. “Taylor is Kyungwoon’s cousin?”

Kyungwoon nodded quietly. “Yeah. He’s my mom’s sister’s son. That’s why our last names are different.”

Chakyung silently listened to this conversation. Hawaii and surfing. Two words that reminded her of someone. A sense of foreboding crept up on her like someone approaching her from behind and grabbing her by the shoulders. But there was no way, right? Jeju may have been an island, but it was still an entire province in itself. A big place with tons of people. It stood to reason lots of surfers were there too.

“At any rate, Taylor’s still a newcomer to the world of surfing, so he has lots of friends who help him with the work. Depending on the season, they’re all roaming the seven seas, but he has another young friend staying here now,” Ayoung explained. Chakyung kept trying not to look back at the premonition she felt tapping her on the shoulder.

“Oh, speak of the devil—here he is.” The wife from the couple in their forties pointed out the person coming through the kitchen door. This time, Chakyung couldn’t resist turning around.

Jeju was huge. But on the map of chance and destiny, nowhere was that huge. Jeju was suddenly small enough that you could run into someone you had seen that morning again that afternoon.

The kitchen door was low, so Soo-eon had to hunch over a bit to step through it. Chakyung recognized him at once. Straightening his back, he gave Ayoung and the Nollers a nod of his head and a bright smile. It seemed like an incredibly long time passed before his eyes came to land on Chakyung.

“Oh?” His grinning face briefly took on a look of surprise, but he was soon back to smiling. Chakyung recalled what Romi had said earlier. My heart started racing. Not jumping up and down, either, but leaping all over the place. I felt like it was darting everywhere.

If she had understood those words in her head earlier, she now could feel them, palpable, in her chest.

Romi had never thought of her observational skills as being one of her strengths; they really weren’t. Nonetheless, she was confident she had a decent ability to read the room—and that ability always went in unusual directions.

Today, her room-reading ability was fully focused on Chakyung and the surfer guy who had just arrived.

First of all, they didn’t seem like strangers or two people who’d never met before.

“What brings you here?” the surfer guy asked, taking the empty seat across from Chakyung.

“My friends are staying here. I’m not, though.”

Romi remembered Chakyung mentioning earlier that she was still thinking about whether to stay there or not—though it was possible she had made up her mind in the meantime.

“Oh, how do you two know each other?” Ayoung asked, setting a plate in front of Soo-eon and looking back and forth between them.

“We met on the same flight to Jeju, er, well, from Hawaii first,” Chakyung answered quickly.

“Ah, so that’s the nature of your relationship—crossing the Pacific together,” the husband from the bookstore couple in their forties joked with zero subtlety.

The surfer guy picked up his chopsticks right away and dug a piece out of the grilled salmon. “We also ran into each other this morning on Jungmun Beach,” he added.

Chakyung spoke up quickly yet again. “Right, by chance.”

Before the surfer took a bite of his fish, he glanced up at her and broke into a grin. “Yes. By chance that time.”

Hmm. What a strange way to word it, “that time,” Romi thought with interest. Did he plan on their having another run-in—on purpose?

Second of all, there was a distance between them that didn’t seem friendly but also didn’t seem like the distance between two people who didn’t know each other at all.

Romi knew Chakyung was by nature an adherent to social etiquette. They had been friends for a long time, but even now, she still spoke formally with Romi and Hadam. Despite that, Romi had never thought of Chakyung as being stiff. She could even carry on a friendly conversation with someone she was meeting for the first time. But it seemed like she was maintaining an odd distance between herself and this surfer guy. He was on friendly terms with all the other people staying at the co-op, but with Chakyung, he seemed unusually careful. All throughout dinner, they didn’t look directly at each other, chatting instead with the people next to them. But even this didn’t seem like how strangers would behave, Romi thought. Rather, if they were strangers, wouldn’t they have talked to each other even more, feigning an appropriate amount of friendliness?

“Now that you brought up Hawaii, I remembered—my friend was apparently on the same plane as you, Soo-eon. She’s a flight attendant. She asked me if the name of the place where I was staying was Nol and whether I knew you,” said the twentysomething guy whose name Romi didn’t remember as he stacked his cup of water in his empty bowl. He had that goatee that didn’t suit him, so Romi mentally nicknamed him Goat Guy.

“Oh, really? Who’s your friend?”

“She’s a stunner, the type you won’t easily forget once you’ve seen her. She has something of a baby face.” Goat Guy was grinning, clearly insinuating something. It was a look that said, You get my drift . But Surfer Guy didn’t have the quick wit to play along.

“Maybe it was the person who served the meals on my side of the plane? But how did she know I was staying here?”

“You had to fill out the arrival form on your way back. She must have seen it then. I think she said you had written the Nol Community House.”

“Oh, I see.”

“A flight attendant shouldn’t look at a passenger’s personal information like that. And it’s especially unprofessional to share it with other people,” one of the women who looked to be in her midthirties chimed in, sounding stern. She had her hair tied up in a bandanna and was wearing bohemian-style clothes, but ironically the shape of her mouth made her look somewhat like a teacher.

Another woman at the table in a black-and-white-striped T-shirt with three-quarter sleeves, whose long arms made her look like an elegant spider, furtively elbowed her friend. Romi inwardly gave her the name Ms. Charlotte—the name of the spider in a children’s book she liked. Her friend, Romi decided, would be called Ms. Bandanna. She had already long forgotten the names she’d heard earlier.

“She probably just saw the information by chance and mentioned it since he was staying in the same place as her friend,” Ms. Charlotte said generously, glancing between Ms. Bandanna and Goat Guy.

“Right, right, you have to understand. I don’t know whether my flight attendant friend looked at Soo-eon and took an interest in him. But anyway, she had nothing but compliments for the guy.”

“What kind of compliments?” asked Moana—no, Ayoung—as she paused in the middle of getting up to collect the empty bowls. Everyone else at the table seemed deeply interested in this story. Even Ms. Bandanna, who’d criticized the flight attendant’s professionalism before, showed keen interest. Only Chakyung seemed not to be paying any attention, getting up and helping to tidy up the table too.

“Apparently, he was way too nice yet again. He saw some poor person in a bad situation and couldn’t pass them by. He sat next to a Chinese woman on her way to see her daughter, and this lady had all sorts of different allergies, so she couldn’t eat the flight meals. Soo-eon noticed and interpreted all that for her in a note to my flight attendant friend.”

“Oh, Soo-eon, you’re amazing. You speak Mandarin?” the book-artist wife from the bookstore couple said, hands clasped in appreciation. Surfer Guy shyly scratched at his cheek.

“No, I only know a little bit of Mandarin, so I didn’t do a great job—I even had to use a translator app. They’re pretty decent nowadays, you know.”

“He handed my friend a note, so at first, she thought he wanted something from her,” Goat Guy said, cutting a look at Ms. Bandanna as he spoke. “That would have been against regulations, so she felt flutters—I mean, flustered, but when she looked at the note, that was what it said. She was relieved after that and thought, What a sweet guy. ”

“I guess even that sort of thing happens on planes. Like in the movies,” Hadam said, looking at Chakyung.

In a dry, formal tone, Chakyung replied, “I suppose so. I was so exhausted, I kept falling asleep, so I didn’t see any of that happen.”

At that, Surfer Guy’s eyes returned to Chakyung. She refused to meet his gaze.

“Well, it’s a relief you didn’t see anything. Because it was nothing like a movie. I was just trying to help, and the flight attendant was just doing her job.”

Surfer Guy’s tone was so firm that it seemed to embarrass Goat Guy. Only then did he stop talking, but who knew whether the conversation would continue later when only the two of them were there?

Romi thought she saw the corners of Chakyung’s lips twitch. Was she mistaken? Was she not? But she didn’t have long to muse on it, because Honeyman spoke up.

“Soo-eon is a warmhearted guy. If he sees someone having a hard time, he doesn’t know how to look the other way. He’s scared of bees, but he still helps me transport the hives around my bee farm.”

Kyungwoon wore a gentle smile. Romi realized that day was the first time she had seen his smile. It was one that gently swept up the subtle emotions floating around inside her heart like a broom.

Soo-eon shuddered exaggeratedly.

“Ugh, still, I really am terrified of bees. When I was little, I got stung by one on a field trip.”

“Oh, come on. Forget about that. And if you’re not busy, help me out on the farm tomorrow. We wouldn’t be doing anything where you could get stung.”

Without thinking, Romi raised her hand. “I’ll do it.”

The others turned their attention to her, but she stared directly into Honeyman’s eyes.

“I’m going there anyway, so I’ll help you. I’ve always been ... really interested in it.”

A suspicious glint shone in Kyungwoon’s eyes. “In beekeeping?”

Romi nodded. “Yes. In beekeeping.”

Kyungwoon studied her, and Romi suddenly felt like he was a stranger. And it was true that he was, considering he didn’t remember a single thing about her. The feeling was strange enough to overshadow her own excitement. She lowered her hand slowly, unconsciously. A moment later, Kyungwoon nodded as if to say he understood something now.

“Sure. Why not? Then let’s go there together tomorrow. I’ll be heading out around ten in the morning, if that’s all right with you?”

“Of course,” Romi answered before the question was even fully out of his mouth. She didn’t ask what they were going to be doing or where. She didn’t even try to comprehend why she was agreeing to tag along with this man. Hadam and Chakyung each shot her a look, but neither of them had anything to add.

When dinner ended, everyone got up and busied themselves with cleaning. The men carried the plates to the kitchen, while the women wiped down the table and cleaned the floors. It was an awkward position for anyone who was left sitting still with nothing to do. The bookstore couple brought out some beer. It was the new brand from a Jeju distillery whose owners they were on good terms with, so they’d gotten it as a gift. Chakyung volunteered to make a few quick snacks to go with the drinks.

“When I was in school, I worked part-time at a bar,” she explained.

Romi had already known this, but each time she heard it, it seemed as surprising as it had been the first time. It was hard to imagine Chakyung working at a bar. Chakyung consulted with Ayoung about the available ingredients and decided to make a non-spicy sea-snail salad and some stir-fried bacon and mung bean sprouts.

After three or four rounds of drinks, everyone was red in the face. Their volume in decibels had increased steadily as well, and because of the glass ceiling, their voices reverberated. The first person to pick up on the sound of other guests outside was Ms. Bandanna.

“I think you have customers?” she said. “Isn’t the café closed?”

“Yeah, I thought we wouldn’t have any customers today, so I closed up the shop, but I must not have locked the doors. I should go out and tell whoever it is that we’re finished serving for the day.” Ayoung set down her glass and hurried inside to the café. The muffled sounds of conversation followed shortly after.

At first, Romi didn’t pay much attention to what was going on outside. What was happening inside was far more interesting. First, she thought, she had to figure out whether the calm expression on Kyungwoon’s face reflected his true feeling or whether he was displeased. She was also interested in the scene playing out as Surfer Guy quickly took plates of bar food from Chakyung and locked eyes with her. Romi noticed that Chakyung didn’t meet his eyes. But when Ms. Charlotte stuck out her neck to see what was happening in the café, Romi found herself turning toward that direction too.

“Is it a customer for the café?” Ms. Charlotte asked. “Maybe someone looking for a room?”

They could faintly see people at the end of the gallery hallway that connected the café and the courtyard. Romi stuck her head out like Ms. Charlotte had. The customer appeared to be a man. His voice traveled down the hall.

“I was interested, so I wanted to see ...”

At the sound of that, Chakyung—who had been chatting with Surfer Guy—flinched and looked over. Her senses were unusually sharp. Her ears perked up like a cat’s upon hearing a noise in the dark. A moment later, Ayoung and the customer came up the hallway together, the customer’s voice growing closer. All the people who had been sitting around chatting turned to look. The voices in the courtyard quieted to a hush.

“If you’re not planning to stay here right away, you can take a look around first. To help you decide later on ...”

Standing behind the petite Ayoung, the new customer was strapping and tall. Romi’s first impression was that he looked like a true-blue city guy. Her next impression was that with those glasses on, he looked familiar. Where had she seen him before?

“Oh?”

Chakyung came out from around the table and approached the newcomer. As soon as he saw her, his mouth opened halfway, but no sound came out. He just adjusted his glasses. Like he couldn’t believe his eyes.

“Chanmin. What are you doing here?”

Chakyung’s voice was dripping with suspicion, which soon spread to the people around her.

As soon as she heard his name, Romi remembered that this guy was Chakyung’s fiancé. She had seen his face at some point in one of the photo albums on Chakyung’s phone. In the pictures, he’d looked composed and coolheaded, but she was surprised to see that he was capable of the expression he wore at that moment. How to describe it? He looked like someone trying to pretend he hadn’t been completely caught off guard, the gears in his brain turning at full speed to figure out how he would explain his way out of this situation.

Romi was curious about what he would say. But she wouldn’t get to hear his answer, because at that moment, Chakyung’s cell phone started to ring.