All people were different , Mina knew that, but the young woman she met on the bus that daywas utterly different from anyone else she had known.

Mina noticed her the instant she got on.She was Korean and stood out from the rest of the passengers because she smiled, not at anyone or anything in particular, just smiled, and Mina was drawn to her as irresistibly as if she had called out, “Come please! Sit here, please, next to me!”

Her face was an open invitation, harmonious and clear: young, beautiful and wise at all once, the way Korean faces often are. And Mina could not believe her own boldness, passing several vacant seats and sitting next to her. She had never done anything like that before, and was sure the other passengers were smirking and thinking they had guessed her motives.How could they? She did not really know them herself.

The bus resumed its journey and the young woman rocked comfortably beside Mina, holding a slim briefcase on her knees. This bus serviced the university, meaning, more than likely she was a student too. That mean she would have to say something profound or clever to start up a conversation. With a complete stranger? On a bus? What was she thinking?

The bus was lurched away from the kerb and the driver accelerated through the afternoon traffic snarl, braking hard and often. Most people reached for the safety rails to keep themselves from being tossed from their seats. Unknowingly, Mina found herself leaning towards the young woman as she tried to balance herself.She whispered, by way of apology, “I’m sorry”.Her dark head swayed with the motion of the bus and her thin arms remained at rest across her briefcase. It looked as though she was going to ignore her.

“Apology accepted”, Mina heard she whisper. She had leaned likewise in in her direction, to answer in a discreet, confiding voice. Mina’s mind raced, trying to concoct a reply. She also added a further quiet comment and suddenly they were talking – like old friends! And continued to do so for the rest of the journey into town. She was studying Science at the university. Mina was on holiday and on her way into town to pay some bills.

“Have you been in Australia long?” Mina asked.

“Three years,” she said.Her English was good and pleasantly stilted.

“How did you get here?”

“A boat. Terrible boat, she smiled, “almost sinking .Too many people and sharks.”

“I bet you’ve got a story to tell” she commanded.

“I could tell you stories if you wished,” she answered, with such a calm voice, Mina said, “That’d be great..if you don’t mind!”

She had not meant it as a request. But seeing the woman had offered!

Her name was Yoo Jeongyeon, and she was on her way on her way home, to the house she shared with four other students. She had no plans for the evening other than cooking himself dinner. They got off the bus at her stop and went to the Arnold Café which she claimed that it’s the best café in town. Surprisingly, it’s also Mina’s favourite place to hang out with her bestie. My DNA wants you from the beginning! Mina thought, wondering how she had swung it.

Jeongyeon was charming. She ordered Mina milkshake for her, and a cappuccino for herself, then carried both to a small corner booth where they sat opposite each other.Mina looked directly at her for the first time, and it was a fascinating view to watch yet made her forgot to breath for a second. It was round and boyish, with sharp jawline and high cheekbones.Her eyes was sparkling. The big, dark irises were like dark stains.

“What would you like to hear?” she asked.

“Whatever you like to tell me,” Mina answered.

“Very well.” She rested her arms on the table. Like her faces, her arms were frageless: frail and covered with tight copper skin, and marked with fine white lines like cross-hatching. She stirred two spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee and began. “They killed my brother in the middle of town and they hung it with head was on top, brought around the village.”

“I beg your pardon?” Mina asked.

She looked up and repeated “They killed my brother.”Her gaze was direct, yet easy to meet.

“I’m sorry.” She gasped.

“We were forced to watch. That is, not forced, but if we had not watched, they would have known we were family and killed us too.”

Mina did not know what to say, having said “sorry” already. Not that Jeongyeon waited for her to commiserate again.

“The terrorist came over the border,” she said. “I was thirtheen.”

She worked out the latter’s age in her head: twenty-four.The latter still did not look it. Sometimes, she looked younger- when she grinned. And when she grinned too much, her eyes turned into puppy eyes and creased her skin into a craze of fine lines, she looked incredibly weathered.

From her shirt pocket she took a slender pen, as thin as her fingers. “I lived near the border, here,” she said, and she proceeded to draw a map for Mina on her lecture pad- a diagram with neat geometric lines for borders and perfect circles for towns – rehasping her country’s geography into a delicate sketch, almost a work art.

“We decided to go south: my mother, my little brother and me.Our father been a soldier.For that we could also be shot. We had to flee.”

“Where was your father?” Mina asked.

“Father dead,” she answered.

“I’m sorry,” Mina said again.

She nodded and went on, leaving the father behind, “We moved many times, many times until finally – Seoul.” She marked the distance on the map: three hundreds and twelve kilometers. “Seoul, very big. No one knew us there. We felt … safe?” She paused. “No, in Korea , never safe. You understand?” She smiled.

Mina understood everything – except that her hearts couldn’t stop beating faster than usual and felt some butterflies in her stomach when she stared at Jeongyeon’s smile.There was nothing haunted about his face or the hollow about her eyes.She must be one of the lucky ones, she thought, who had escaped the horrors you heard of.

“I was in Seoul, one month” she said, “then prison.”

You – in prison?” Mina asked.

“Yes!, It was the law. From every family, the oldest child was sent for re-education. My brother was dead and my little brother is too small to be sent off.”

“Come back later,” my mother told them, “when he is older.” But the bus was waiting and the soldiers did not want to come back, so they took me. One day with my family, next gone.”

She wrote the date she was taken, and the distance from home to the prison camp – four hundreds kilometres, recording it like history.

“It was called re-education, but really it was prison,” she said.”There was no education, only work. Planting rice, twelve hours a day. Pretend to be a guy was also hard.” She sighed as she remembered her dark past.

“I don’t get it. Why you need to pretend?”

“They didn’t accept girls. So, I need to pretend in order to stop them from bothering my family.”

“You are potent Jeongyeon.” Mina didn’t know why she felt the urge to reach Jeongyeon’s hand. She could feel there was a certain energy exchange with her. All of this isn’t just a coincidence. Mina thought.

“We lived in a gossi, in a camp,” Jeongyeon said, sketching a rectangular building in precise 3D, its dimensions marked accurately: four metres by ten. “With platforms for sleeping off the ground, here and here.In each gossi supposed to be,” she wrote the number, “two hundreds and fifty people. But sometimes, five hundreds.”

“You must have had to sleep standing up,” Mina remarked, just to have some input into the conversation.

The observation pleased Jeongyeon, and again Mina was confronted by the same sublime smile that had drown her on down the aisle of the bus. Jeongyeon seemed to be just as pleased to be sitting silently in a bus as he was telling stories in a café. And such stories.

“Some slept on the ground and some stood. Except for the times when all were standing and no one sleeping.” She reffered back to the map on the first page, and drew a small insert diagram. “The river was here, the camp was here. The river was tidal and each month it flooded, with water rising sometimes to here.” She held her hand perfectly horizoned against her chest, at about mid-height.

“Oh dear, it must have stunk,”

“Yes, with so many people together, a very bad smell, and some with diarrhea.”

Mina had actually meant the smell of the mud, not the people. Jeongyeon did not elaborate on that part of her story. She knew what to tell and what to leave out.

“In the camp we worked all day, except for the meetings,” she said. “Every afternoon were the small meetings of twelve people, at at these meetings each person would point someone else’s bad thing secret.”

“Could you be punished if you did something wrong?” Mina asked.

“Oh, yes.” Her head went up and down.

“And if you had not seen anyone do anything?”

“You had to watch. All the time watching, so you could point. If you could not point … bad trouble for you.”

“So people had to tell on each other?” She said.

“Yes.”

“That is ghastly.”

“Yes.”

“Everyone kept spying on everyone else! Surely friends banded together and made things up? Small things you could not be too badly punished for?”

Her eyes were expressionless. “There were no friends,” she said.

Mina could not accept that. “But did not the kids in the camp help one another?” she asked, remembering that these”people” Jeongyeon talked of were children and teenagers.

She shook her head and smiled as broadly as her taunt skin allowed. “The groups were changed often, there could be no friends. No talking was allowed, not at night or while working. Never any talking or someone would see and point!” She showed the deadly motion with her fragile finger.

“And then there were the other meetings, the big meetings, her melodious voice went on. “With the whole camp kneeling first on bamboo many hours for the lecture. Then people were called up and had to point at a person from another group and tell of something they had done wrong.”

“And what would happen to that person?” Mina asked, knowing the answer.

“He would be punished.”

“And if you couldn’t point?”

“You would be punished. All the time watching. Watching,” she motioned with her hands either side of her eyes, “for people doing wrong. You had to.”

Has she ever pointed?

Just as she knew what not to tell in her stories, she had acquired, from listening to her, a gathering sense of what not to ask.

“That must have been the worst of the camp,” Mina said. “No friends.”

“No.” Jeongyeon said. As impassive as ever. The worst was no food. Never enough food. All the time hungry.” She outlined the size of the rice bowl she was given twice a day, bringing her finger closer and closer to approximate its size. “Anf for punishment,” she parted her hands, “nothing.”

Mina finished her milkshake and there was a little milk left on the tip of her lips. Jeongyeon saw that and immediately took out her handkerchief and wiped gently. “You are cute.” Mina was astonished with Jeongyeon’s sudden movement. I guess I’ve fall in love with the first sight– she thought.

“And are your family still there?” she asked. “Your mother?”

“Yes.”

“When you finish your studies and start earning money, will you send for them?”

“No.” She said.

This startled Mina so much that she asked again.”Wouldn’t you bring them over?”

“No,” she said, showing no shame. “Life is different here. The language is different, the culture. They would never get used to it.”

They could learn. You did.”

Again she answered, bluntly but gently, “No,” and began another story which contained part of the answer. “My mother one time came to visit me at the camp. She was allowed to visit on Sundays. There was a bus and she could bring food and clothes and money. There was a special room where visitors sat on one side of a table and prisoners on the other, with guards standing and listening. Listening to you talking and watching what you got. You could not say “This is a terrible place.” You had to say good things about it.”

“It must have been nice to see her,” Mina said.

Jeongyeon nodded, a response that Mina sensed did not mean “yes”.

“My mother was allowed to give me money. But only … “ she told Mina the figure in Korean coins and then converted it to Australian currency, “0.5545”.When visitors left, prisoners were taken to another room next door, and here the guards saw what you had been given and took what they wanted. They would take your clothes and food, but leave you your money. Your money they would get later when they said things back to you.

This time my mother brought a cake. She knew life would be easier for me with more money, so she gave me the 100 won I was allowed, and also baked into the cake 500 won more. She could not talk of it, but she made a signs with her hands and her face. You understood how?” Mina understood well. “To tell me the money was in there. Except I could not say, “Take the cake away!” The guards had seen. If she took the cake away, they would know something was wrong and a big trouble.

“Always the guards looked in cakes for knives and things. I couldn’t tell my mother this.” She spread her hands out, palm upward, empty. “There was nothing I could do. My mother left and I carried the things she had given me the next room. The guard took a bayonet and cut the cake open …open … open.” On the café’s table top he played out the small ceremony of the bayonet with her hand. “They found the money and beat me. And you must scream very loud. You must make noises like you are dying or they keep beating, beating,” she raised her arms to shield her head, “beating and forgetting to stop. But my mother was outside. She would hear me if I screamed and know it was me.”

Jeongyeon did not speak of the choice she had made. Instead she told Mina on her first escape, when she was taken to hospital and the guards at the hospital did not know her. She got up one day and simply walked out. And walked home, four hundreds kilometers to Seoul.

“A neighbour saw me and the neighbour knew I should be in prison. My family could not help me.” She neither smiled nor frowned. “They had to send me back.”

“And were you punished?” Mina asked.

“Yes.”

“I hate your neighbour.”

“Me too.”

There was a gap of a second, which Jeongyeon did not fill.

“I escaped again from the hospital. This time I did not go home,” she said. “I lived in cemetery, under a gravestone, by a bay, I ate prawns. Very expensive here! I ate prawns all the time.”

“How on earth did you survive?” Mina asked. “All those years with no friends, no family. Hardly any food. Punished for everything!”

“I survived. Others did not.” It was not a thing Jeongyeon questioned. Mina asked her if she would like another cup of coffee and offered to pay. She accepted and in return told her one last story. “I believe in God. Everytime, anytime. God is powerful and no one can defeat Him.He’s the one that you shoul put your trust in. Sometimes in the gossi, the person next to you sleeping would die. People often die,” she said as if telling Mina something that the latter did not know. The guards wouldn’t open the gate till morning. You had to wait. And with so many people together and everone squashed, no one would move to make room for you. You couldn’t get away from the person who was dead. You had lie next to them all the night.”

Jeongyeon was right., Mina knew nothing about dying. Whereas Jeongyeon had laid next to death, she knew death first hand, and life first hand, and was no longer afraid of it. That was what Mina noticed from the far end of the bus. And heard in every word of her tale. That was what written in every smooth plane of her face. All that life can do,it had done to her, and thus it had brought her very young to the knowledge that in living all experiences are equal, each one being simply the next thing happens to you.

Mina grabbed Jeongyeon’s wrist before she turned away, walking to her house.

“Please! Come home for dinner?” she asked.

Jeongyeon took her hands and intertwined it with her. “Let’s go.”

 

Mina believes in fate, so does Jeongyeon. But they never thought that their first meeting on the bus can make both become each other’s calico cat. Their meeting is like a mathematical formula, commandments of religion, province of the universe yet the evidence of destiny were given to them. They believe that none of this is a coincidence, from the first time Mina’s eyes met with Jeongyeon’s, because they’re the two who found their destiny.