During the holidays of my first year at University, an artist came to our village.

I’d also returned to see his arrival. I was thankful to be back with my family; I’d missed them dearly and my first semester had exhausted me. The hard work of farming had becoming oddly therapeutic upon my return. Though I had to admit, something about coming back to the village made me uncomfortable. As if I’d now seen too much of the world to be stuck in such a place. I’d enjoyed myself a lot there. Given the insular community I’d grown up in, it was strange to suddenly have so many friends from different places. 

One of the guys in my boarding house, a football player who people called Baro, had been puzzled as to why I kept a picture of an adolescent boy in my drawer, when he found it one day as he looked for his shaving cream. I’d brushed him off, telling him the boy was my younger brother, and I was just homesick for my family. He seemed to accept my explanation, but he always looked at me a little differently after that.

"The food's pretty good," I told Gongchan when I came back. “That’s the most important thing, isn’t it? But it's not as good as home. There are so many restaurants around too! Some of them are pretty expensive, but most are all right. You know, when it was Eunji's birthday, we all went out to this Italian place. I'd never tasted foreign food before! It was delicious! Well, I still prefer Korean anyway. I wished we'd stayed longer. We went to Karaoke later but we got kicked out for bringing our own drinks.”

"Who's Eunji?" he asked. I looked at him in surprise.

"Didn't I tell you about her before? Oh, maybe that was Bomi… Bomi’s hillarious. She does this gorilla impersonation, it’s just — well, you gotta see it yourself, it’s hard to explain.”

While Gongchan listened patiently to my stories of names he had never heard before, everyone else’s attention was on the new arrival. We knew at once he’d come straight from the army. His fresh buzz cut and straight backed stance stood out here. He’d come to visit his grandmother since he’d been discharged. I remembered him from many years back. His name was Jung Jinyoung, and he spent the occasional holiday in our village. I’d never talked to him, due to him being a few years older. However, the Jung Jinyoung I remembered was a scrawny, weak-looking boy with a skinny, pointed face and small, thin eyes like a rat. The one who returned from the army, however, was annoyingly handsome. He still appeared somewhat fragile, but now there was an elegance about it. His eyes now long and slightly slanted, his jawline could cut glass and his lightly-muscled arms showed the fruits of his labour from his time as a soldier. 

The way he talked was smooth, the refined Seoul dialect. Before going into the army, he’d studied in France, or so he told us, where he’d learnt to paint like the old impressionists. He was fascinated by the landscape of the Korean countryside and often sat in the fields sketching. In the evenings some of the unmarried women would crowd around him as he played the guitar for them.

“Your singing’s loads better than his,” Gongchan told me as he pushed his bike along the road. He was in his school uniform, dark navy and buttoned up to his neck. I was walking him home on a Friday afternoon.

“But he’s better looking, isn’t he?”

“Maybe for some people. But for me, Hyung is better,” he replied after pretending to ponder this for a while. I grinned.

“As expected, there’s no one for me but Channie!”

"But you have many new friends now, right?"

I did feel a little guilty on that note. I’ll admit there was some distance separating us that hadn’t existed before, due to our long time apart. It was inevitable, the proverbial changing of the guard. All things must pass and all that. But, stubbornly, I did want to hold on to him as much as I could. 

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