Love in the Big City: A Novel

by Sang Young Park, Anton Hur - translator

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction; LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

Translated from the Korean by Anton Hur

A funny, transporting, surprising, and poignant novel that was one of the highest-selling debuts of recent years in Korea, Love in the Big City tells the story of a young gay man searching for happiness in the lonely city of Seoul.

Love in the Big City is the English-language debut of Sang Young Park, one of Korea’s most exciting young writers. A runaway best seller, the novel hit the top five lists of all the major bookstores, went into 26 printings, and was praised for its unique literary voice and perspective. It is now poised to capture a worldwide audience.

Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the beds of recent Tinder matches. He and Jaehee, his female best friend and roommate, frequent nearby bars where they push away their anxieties about their love lives, families, and money with rounds of soju and ice-cold Marlboro Reds that they keep in their freezer. Yet over time, even Jaehee leaves Young to settle down, leaving him alone to care for his ailing mother and to find companionship in his relationships with a series of men, including one whose handsomeness is matched by his coldness, and another who might end up being the great love of his life.

A brilliantly written novel that takes us into the glittering nighttime of Seoul and the bleary-eyed morning after with both humor and emotion, Love in the Big City is a wry portrait of millennial loneliness as well as the abundant joys of queer life.

 

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Release date: November 16, 2021

Publisher: Grove Press

Print pages: 240

Sample

PART ONE

Jaehee

1.

I took the elevator to the third floor of the hotel and went into the Emerald Hall. Had she said the guest list was four hundred people? It looked like a lot more than that. I sat down in my designated seat and looked around the table: my cohort of French majors, all of us aging at different speeds. How many of them were there? I guess this was the reward for Jaehee saying yes to every postgraduation bender and homecoming-day event. Moments like these made Jaehee’s social life seem to border on the grotesque. I was forced to acknowledge acquaintances I hadn’t talked to in five, even ten years. “Congratulations! I hear you’re a writer now.” “You should get in touch more often.” “Hey, there was a rumor that you’d died, but here you are!” “Where can I find your stories? I tried searching for them on the Internet.” “Wow, writing must be tough on you. Look at how much weight you’ve gained.” “Do you still drink as much as you used to?”

My book is about to come out, I don’t drink as much as I used to, you guys are just as old and fat as I am, and your questions are about to drive me to old drinking habits—these answers were all on the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed them, upholding the dignity of an educated contributor to society in his thirties and laughing off their snideness. I’d been ready to swear to anyone who read my stories that everything I wrote was made up—how silly of me to have prepared an answer for a question that would never be asked. An excess of self-awareness was a disease in itself.

—Please take your seats, the ceremony is about to begin.

The emcee was a close friend of Jaehee’s husband-in-progress. This friend had a sharp chin and greasy skin, not my type at all, and on top of his thick Gyeongsang Province accent, it was all too clear that this country boy wasn’t great at moving things along. And he was a television reporter somehow? I’d have been a much better choice. Who cared about these stupid traditions about whose-best-friend-does-what anymore? The green monster of jealousy was rearing its head.

Next to the platform was a large screen that was flashing photos of Jaehee and her groom. I took another sip of red wine as the low-resolution phone-camera photos flicked by. Cheolgu—who sat next to me and had apparently gotten a job at the Industrial Bank recently—poked me in the ribs.

—Be honest with me. You and Jaehee. Were the rumors true?

The rumors were true, but, dear Cheolgu, what you’re implying seems a little rich coming from the guy who asked Jaehee out only to be viciously snubbed.

◊

The summer we turned twenty, Jaehee and I became best friends.

I had a funny drinking rule back then—I would do anything I was told by whoever bought me a drink—and so on that fateful day, there I was again with a man of an uncertain age in the Hamilton Hotel parking lot, sucking face. He had bought me about six shots of tequila at some basement club. The moon and streetlamps and neon signs of the whole world seemed to be shining their lights just for me, and I could still hear the strains of a Kylie Minogue remix in my ear. It wasn’t important who the guy was. The only thing that mattered was that I existed with someone, there in those dark streets of the city, and that was why I was wrestling tongues with a stranger. Just when I thought the heat of the whole world was about to overflow, just for me, I felt a hard slap on my back. In the midst of my complete drunkenness I thought, A hate crime! And in full drama-queen mode, I detached my lips from his and turned around, ready for a fistfight—but there stood Jaehee. As always, she was holding a lipstick-smudged Marlboro Red in one hand, and the sight of her instantly sobered me up. Jaehee could barely catch her breath as she laughed at how shocked I was to see her. Then she said, in her typically brash voice:

—Just eat him, why don’t you?

Before I knew what was happening, I’d burst out laughing at her joke, and at some point I realized the man I was kissing had disappeared, and I can’t even recall his face now. But I do remember more or less what Jaehee and I talked about in the parking lot.

—You’ll keep it a secret around campus, right?

—Of course. I’m a broke bitch, but I’m loyal.

—Weren’t you surprised? Me with a man.

—Not at all.

—Since when did you know?

—Since the moment I laid eyes on you.

The usual cliché.

Up until then I didn’t know Jaehee very well; she was just a girl who wore short-shorts and was always first to run out of class, desperate for a cigarette. Actually, she was pretty close to having the worst reputation in the department.

Even if I did end up an outsider among the French majors at our college, I hadn’t been like that from the beginning, when I was still invited to parties by our male upperclassmen sunbaes just because I happened to be a taller-than-average male. These gatherings always took the same course, all the guys going to the pool hall or PC rooms first, then to a restaurant specializing in MSG cuisine to make the soju flow, then picking one of the less messy sunbaes’ rooms to drink more and talk about girls until we collapsed, snoring. Standard-issue nineteen- and twenty-year-olds talking about what a big deal they were and what great sex they were having, how well they satisfied their women, which of the French department girls were easy. And Jaehee was someone they kept returning to. Listening to their stories that were obviously at least half fiction, and fed up with wondering why I had to put up with this shit even in college, I came to a point where I drunk-shouted, “Fucking stop it with the bullshit, you all have faces like rat dicks,” and flipped the table, after which I was never invited to hang out again.

As is the nature of any group, a member who had fled the fold was inevitably fated to remain as gossip fodder thereafter. Tired of their exhaustive critiques of the female frosh, they tossed me into the meat grinder instead, saying I seemed gay and was hanging out in Itaewon doing God knows what, spreading the kind of rumors only a bunch of innocent nineteen-year-olds would care about, half of which were true. (Truth always surpasses fiction.) Barely a semester had gone by when almost the entire department knew who I was, and I’d heard the rumors myself, making me the butt of everyone’s jokes. I guess I’ll never make friends in this department, not that they can drink to save their lives, and they’re boring as hell. As I was consoling myself with such self-justifications, Jaehee veered into my life.

After my defense of her sort of outed me, the two of us developed a relationship that consisted in the first place of talking trash about boys, as neither of us had previously had anyone with whom to share such thoughts, making us both desperate for a sounding board.

Jaehee and I had very little sense of chastity, or none at all, to be honest, and we were apparently known for it in our respective spheres. Jaehee was five foot six and 112 pounds, while I was five ten and 172 pounds, both a bit taller than average but neither particularly attractive nor a complete lost cause, just enough not to embarrass any partner. (Note that when I won a New Writers Award for fiction, the judges’ comments were united in their praise of my “objective self-judgment”). The world was just not ready for the boundless energy of poor, promiscuous twenty-year-olds. We met whatever men we wanted without putting much effort into it, drank ourselves torpid, and in the morning met in each other’s rooms to apply cosmetic masks to our swollen faces and exchange tidbits about the men we had been with the night before.

—He works at a company that makes hiking gear. Small dick but good foreplay, I think worth fifty points?

—He says he went to Yonsei University, studying statistics, but I think that’s a lie. His face was a blank space, and I kept wanting to laugh because whenever he said something, it was obvious his head was just as empty.

—He tried to take a video while we were in bed, so I threw his phone across the room. He said he wasn’t going to share it with anyone, like I’d ever believe that bullshit.

And after we made fun of the men from the previous night, our eyes would begin to close and we’d fall asleep side by side, with dried-up masks on our faces. Being an early riser, I would get up first and let Jaehee rest longer, with the quilt pulled all the way up over her head, as I boiled instant pollack stew or ramen, and when it was ready Jaehee would finally get up at the smell and eat the breakfast with sides of soured kimchi and cold rice. At some point, Jaehee’s room had an extra set of my hair wax and a Gillette razor, while my room had a double of Jaehee’s eyebrow pencil and MAC powder compact. Jaehee didn’t know this, but when I was alone, I used her liner to fill in the gaps in my eyebrows and helped myself to her compact to half-heartedly apply a puff or two of concealer on my cheeks and forehead. Which made me wonder if Jaehee used my razor on her legs or armpits without telling me.

Jaehee stopped talking to her mother and father the spring she turned twenty. Neither of us had been on good terms with our parents, but that didn’t mean they were especially evil or anything more than typical middle-class conservatives. Like most people’s parents, they constantly nagged their children about propriety and how one should behave, but in their own private lives joyfully indulged in affairs, excess religion, the stock market, or pyramid schemes. I had a real parasitic streak in that as much as I hated my parents, I felt completely entitled to every coin they gave me (was that why my demeanor grew mischievous?) when I was receiving hundreds of thousands of won in monthly allowance. Jaehee, however, cut off contact with her parents after their blowout and refused any form of financial support thereafter. She really did have the heart of a lioness.

She got her first-ever job working at a café called Destiné. She picked it not because it had a large sign with a French name but because it was one of the few places in her neighborhood where smoking was allowed. The sight of her puffing away as she handled the espresso machines was a vision of oblivious nineteen-year-old cuteness. Whenever I had some man in my life, I’d bring him to Destiné for Jaehee to give him the once-over, and every time, she would tell me that the men I liked were always horny with classic asshole personalities. Thinking back, she was right.

By day, Jaehee worked as a barista, while by night she was a private tutor, and then after that she drank until dawn like it was a third job. But she never missed a class, and her grades were OK, and while she did better than average at anything she put her mind to, this talent didn’t extend to her ability to choose men who weren’t a total mess, or to dump said men when the time was right. Which was why I often ended up getting rid of her men via text messages. I, on the other hand, was very practiced in that skill—at least vicariously—because of all the lines I’d heard from men who refused to see me again, easy enough to regurgitate at a moment’s notice. I used to think of myself as the doormat of a naengmyeon restaurant: all you had to do was wipe your feet on it and be on your way (“objective self-judgment”!).

Around the time the Brown Eyed Girls’ “Abracadabra” had conquered the Korean peninsula, I received a summons for national service. Because I knew of someone who during his service had received a letter from his boyfriend that began with “My loving hyung” and was outed for it, resulting in untold torture throughout his time in the army, I instructed K, the guy I was going out with, to write to me under Jaehee’s name. She was a handy smokescreen in times like this. I asked not only K but the real Jaehee to write me funny crap while I was in there, but knowing how lazy she was about that kind of thing, I didn’t expect much from her.

Yet during the second week of boot camp, when the letters began arriving, I felt my heart rise up to my throat. Unlike K, who had acted like he’d have given me his liver or spleen if I had asked for it but in two weeks had written me only a single letter (and not even a whole page at that), Jaehee had written twelve. At first it was just chitchat about her boring day (“I was drinking at Squid Ocean and accidentally tipped over the table”) or cursing out the people in our department (“that fucking nut Cheolgu asked me to sleep with him when I know for a fact he’s talking shit about me behind my back, he’s as disgusting as his face”), but as the days wore on, she wrote more about the times we had together and how much she missed me. In her latest missive she even said, “There’s something to be said about realizing how precious something is once you’ve lost it. Like with you”—God knows where she got that from—and even though I knew she’d written it drunk, I was almost moved to tears. That made me take up a sheet of military-issue stationery and begin my response to her with “To my dear, ugly Jaehee,” trying hard to keep the letters straight.

Around the time I left boot camp and was assigned to my regiment, I heard news that Jaehee had reconnected with her parents and, thanks to them, was being sent to Australia as an exchange student. She also informed me that K seemed suspicious, and suggested I interrogate him when I had the chance. (It didn’t take long for her instincts to be proven correct.) Jaehee served as my loyal girlfriend throughout my six months of military service, up until the incident that earned me a medical discharge.

By the time I was banished back to civilian society—and back to my mother’s house—Jaehee was already in Australia. ...