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Your Utopia
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Synopsis
The new story collection from the author and translator of Cursed Bunny, a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award in Translated Literature!
Your Utopia is full of tales of loss and discovery, idealism and dystopia, death and immortality. “Nothing concentrates the mind like Chung’s terrors, which will shrivel you to a bouillon cube of your most primal instincts” (Vulture), yet these stories are suffused with Chung's inimitable wry humor and surprisingly tender moments, too.
In “The Center for Immortality Research,” a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a fancy gala for donors, only to be blamed for a crime she witnessed during the event, under the noses of the mysterious celebrity benefactors hoping to live forever. But she can’t be fired—no one can. In “One More Kiss, Dear,” a tender, one-sided love blooms in the AI-elevator of an apartment complex; as in, the elevator develops a profound affection for one of the residents. In “Seeds,” we see the final frontier of capitalism’s destruction of the planet and the GMO companies who rule the agricultural industry, but nature has ways of creeping back to life.
Chung’s writing is “haunting, funny, gross, terrifying—and yet when we reach the end, we just want more" (Alexander Chee). If you haven’t yet experienced the fruits of this singular imagination, Your Utopia is waiting.
Your Utopia is full of tales of loss and discovery, idealism and dystopia, death and immortality. “Nothing concentrates the mind like Chung’s terrors, which will shrivel you to a bouillon cube of your most primal instincts” (Vulture), yet these stories are suffused with Chung's inimitable wry humor and surprisingly tender moments, too.
In “The Center for Immortality Research,” a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a fancy gala for donors, only to be blamed for a crime she witnessed during the event, under the noses of the mysterious celebrity benefactors hoping to live forever. But she can’t be fired—no one can. In “One More Kiss, Dear,” a tender, one-sided love blooms in the AI-elevator of an apartment complex; as in, the elevator develops a profound affection for one of the residents. In “Seeds,” we see the final frontier of capitalism’s destruction of the planet and the GMO companies who rule the agricultural industry, but nature has ways of creeping back to life.
Chung’s writing is “haunting, funny, gross, terrifying—and yet when we reach the end, we just want more" (Alexander Chee). If you haven’t yet experienced the fruits of this singular imagination, Your Utopia is waiting.
Release date: February 13, 2024
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Print pages: 240
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Your Utopia
Bora Chung
“Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny mines those places where what we fear is true and what is true meet and separate and re-meet. The resulting stories are indelible. Haunting, funny, gross, terrifying—and yet when we reach the end, we just want more.”
—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“If you were the kind of child who was enthralled by Scary Stories to Read in the Dark, Bora Chung writes for you. Like the work of Carmen Maria Machado and Aoko Matsuda, Chung’s stories are so wonderfully, blisteringly strange and powerful that it’s almost impossible to put Cursed Bunny down. In short, this collection may, in fact, be a cursed object in the best possible way.”
—Kelly Link, bestselling author of Get In Trouble
“Disturbing, chilling, wrenching, and absolute genius. I wanted Chung to write a story about a reader getting a deep look inside her fantastic swirling mind. I had to take breaks and gulps of air before plunging back into each story. Magnetic, eerie, immensely important.”
—Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face
“Cool, brilliantly demented K-horror—just the way I like it!”
—Ed Park, author of Personal Days
“A collection of exquisitely crafted, spooky and unnerving tales that haunted me long after reading. Each story is a macabre gem, shot through with visceral horror, wry humor, and subtly profound insights on human nature. These stories convey how the traumas and transgressions of the past, individual and collective, . . . erupt into the present, distorting and eroding our perception of reality. Bora Chung is an amazingly inventive and daring writer. I will revisit these stories whenever I need a reminder of how fresh and vital prose can be.”
—Kate Folk, author of Out There
“Like a family in a home, fantastic stories gather together in this book. The stories not only take their revenge, but also love you, and comfort you. You’ll end up completely endeared to this fascinating collection.”
—Kyung-Sook Shin, New York Times Bestselling author of Please Look After Mom and Violets
“Fables of frightening moral clarity told in calm, bell-like prose, Cursed Bunny aims to unsettle. It’s as assured and brilliant as a nightmare. With an unflinching gaze and a sly humor, Chung has built a world both unfamiliar and eerily familiar, whose truths echo into our own. The indelible work of a master.”
—Shruti Swamy, author of The Archer and A House is a Body
“Nothing concentrates the mind like Chung’s terrors, which will shrivel you to a bouillon cube of your most primal instincts.”
—Rhoda Feng, Vulture
“Anton Hur’s nimble translation manages to capture the tricky magic of Chung’s voice—its wry humor and overarching coolness broken by sudden, thrilling dips into passages of vivid description. Even as Chung presents a catalog of grotesqueries that range from unsettling to seared-into-the-brain disturbing, her power is in restraint. She and Hur always keep the reader at a slight distance in order for the more chilling twists to land with maximum impact, allowing us to walk ourselves into the trap.”
—Violet Kupersmith, New York Times Book Review
“Sharp, wildly inventive, and slightly demented (in the most enjoyable way, of course) . . . All we can say is buckle in, because when these stories take their horrific turn there’s no setting them down.”
—Chicago Review of Books
“Whether borrowing from fable, folktale, speculative fiction, science fiction, or horror, Chung’s stories corkscrew toward devastating conclusions—bleak, yes, but also wise and honest about the nightmares of contemporary life. Don’t read this book while eating—but don’t skip these unflinching, intelligent stories, either.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Chung debuts with a well-crafted and horrifying collection of dark fairy tales, stark revenge fables, and disturbing body horror. Clever plot twists and sparkling prose abound. Chung’s work is captivating and terrifying.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[These] stories are beyond imagination: breathtaking, wild, crazy, the most original fiction I have ever encountered . . . each more astounding than the last.”
—Louisa Ermelino, Publishers Weekly
“The 10 stories, written between 1998 and 2016, span a variety of genres, flowing seamlessly from futuristic cautionary tales to surrealist, fable-like allegories inspired by Russian and Slavic tales.”
—Maya Homan, The Boston Globe
“[A] get-under-your-skin collection”
—LitHub
“This short story collection is like a car crash you can’t look away from: grotesque in the best way . . . Each story is fantastically unique, and unlike anything I’ve ever read before”
—Kirby Beaton, Buzzfeed’s Best December Books of 2022
“This Korean debut collection is a stunner. The stories included are absurdly unique, delightfully monstrous, horrifically insightful and chillingly satisfying.”
—Ms. Magazine
“If you want a spooky set of stories that will crawl under your skin and burrow into your marrow and stay there forever, Chung’s collection is a freaky, unforgettable outing. There’s a folkloric quality to this collection, like these are urban legends that have finally been put to paper.”
—Wired Magazine
“The strange and everyday are melded in these startling and original tales . . . Cursed Bunny is [Chung’s] first book to be translated into English, and hopefully not the last.
” —Connie Biewald, San Francisco Chronicle
“A unique and chilling collection”
—We Are Bookish
“Chung’s genre-defying collection breathes life into literary horror as the stories incorporate common fears and societal flaws with elements of the fantastic in the most chilling ways. The tales in Cursed Bunny will draw readers in with familiar themes and genre tropes and leave them pleasantly surprised, if not disturbed by the monsters within.”
—West Trade Review
“Bora Chung’s stories succeed at being deeply visceral experiences that do what the best fairy tales do: convey the unspeakable in a way that is nevertheless collectively understood . . . Perfect for fans of Bong Joon-ho’s films or Helen Oyeyemi’s fiction.”
—Alice Martin, Shelf Awareness
“You know, I think I’m being stalked?”
That’s what an unni at the Center confided to me two months ago, right in the middle of preparations for our anniversary event. Apparently, some man had called up the Center saying he was such-and-such and had come from the same region as my work unni and they were extremely close friends and he was running for the National Assembly and he would like to know the unni’s phone number. Of course, our receptionist had immediately picked up on the fact that calling oneself “extremely close friends” with someone was extremely suspicious in itself, but when the mention of his political ambitions was followed by a presentation of his clearly fraudulent campaign promises, she cut him off, saying the unni was not at her desk right now and, furthermore, she was hardly in a position to hand out personal information such as phone numbers to strangers. Still, as a common courtesy, she had asked if he had any messages. This led to his “I’ll call again later” follow-up calls, which made all other work almost impossible for the receptionist. Well, not that the Center had all that much work to be made impossible, normally, and this was the reception desk at that, but it was a very busy time. Everyone was frantic with the anniversary event, and how annoying that these calls, that could’ve been made during any of the vast expanses of emptiness in our calendars, were instead being foisted on us during this inopportune epoch.
If you were to ask what the Center for Immortality Research does, we do exactly what it says on the label: research immortality. In 1912, not long after Korea was forcibly annexed by Japan, the Center opened with the hopelessly silly slogan of “Our Country May Fall but We Shall Live Forever,” and it was now the ninety-eighth year of its founding, which occasioned a huge blowout party. I still have no idea why we settled on ninety-eight for such an occasion instead of ninety or ninety-five or one hundred, but none of my older sunbaes at the Center know either, nor do the Center’s board members, no doubt. I mean, whatever, I’m at the bottom of the hierarchy in this establishment, and it’s my job to do the work they give me, and if the work involves an anniversary party in a random year, that’s what I’ve got to do.
I may be at the bottom of the hierarchy, but my title happens to be gwajang—“middle manager”—which of course is also part of a long chain of fluffed-up titles going right to the top. The board members are at the highest echelons, with a slew of bujangs and chajangs and other titles going down, and I’m the lowest-ranking, with not a single sawon below me, to say nothing of a daeli. Why, despite our designation as a research lab, we have such corporate titles instead of “primary investigator” or some such is also beyond me.
I mean, that’s all well and good, especially when I get my monthly salary, but the problem is that because there are no sawons, all the tiny little chores that a sawon would do simply fall to me. And among the silly little chores I was given was to somehow get Movie Star B to come to our anniversary event.
Who was Movie Star B? He was in fact quite handsome and a good actor and had won some award and his name was well known; what did he have to do with our Center and its ninety-eighth anniversary? Well, nothing, except for the fact that a long time ago, before he became a big star, he had been in a fantasy movie that had to do with immortality. A movie that bombed so spectacularly that people these days hardly remembered its title, and the actors in it probably wanted to erase it from their CVs, but in any case, it was a movie about immortality, and the event would be filled with doctors and professors and fancy academics, which is why they thought having a movie star in the mix would make the atmosphere less rigid and the Center would look more glamorous, as it were, hence we decided to bring in Mr. B.
A good idea, but as all such planning goes, there was no way it was going to pass a board vote, and since all the bujangs and chajangs of the lab were experts in immortality in their own ways, there had to be a battle of what constitutes immortality as a concept before we moved forward. The Korean word for immortality is a combination of “long youth” and “forever life,” and did “long” and “forever” really mean the same thing? Of course not, because “forever” lasted a lot longer than “long.” Therefore, “long youth” was tawdry compared to “forever life,” and for the actor to have starred in a movie about “long youth” was, according to detractors, not a good fit to the Center’s mission. But when we then looked for movies dealing with the strictest sense of “forever life,” there were almost no such films in Korea, and it would be absurd to think an actor like Hugh Jackman would bother to come to a Center for Immortality Research’s ninety-eighth anniversary celebration event in Korea (there was also some debate as to whether the movie Hugh Jackman had starred in, The Fountain, was a movie about immortality or reincarnation, or whether it might actually have been about parallel universes, but when we decided to watch the film as a group in order to determine this issue, the board members all began to snore fifteen minutes into the film, making the whole point moot). Then, as an alternative, there was a Russian film trilogy that was extremely successful at the box office and won some impossible-to-pronounce award, but there was no one at the Center who could speak Russian and therefore this suggestion was also rejected.
And so, it came down to the actor Mr. B. When not a chajang or a bujang, or not even a board member, but the sojang himself suddenly called me, I ran to his office with my heart pounding; he handed me a Post-it with an email address and phone number scribbled on it and said such a famous movie star would probably have a busy schedule so I needed to call him early and nail him down, and that his assistant had already called them once and got a “We will look into the matter,” and that this was the actor’s manager’s phone number and I needed to call them and get a sure answer, and he then proceeded to give me an exact script of what I was to say over the phone. I was to say I was the gwajang of a “large pharmaceutical company” and how we would appreciate it if you would grace our ninety-eighth anniversary celebrations with your presence, to be polite but firm, and to emphasize how we were a “major pharmaceutical company” and that I was a “gwajang.” And that they’d understand they were being treated with a certain respect if they understood a gwajang was calling them, and also if I mentioned we were a big pharmaceutical company, they might think we would eventually offer him a commercial, which would make them hesitate to refuse the offer.
Of course, we were not a pharmaceutical company, but a research center attached to one, and we didn’t do commercials, but in any case, this was the task I was given and I did it to the best of my abilities and it resulted in a complete and utter stonewalling from B’s manager.
I made thirty-eight calls and sent twenty-two text messages and even fifteen really polite emails, but there was no answer, which made me anxious at first and then angry and, finally, resigned to the fact. Even if I was the lowest-ranking person and there was no possibility of moving up in this organization until the end of time, I had managed to hold on to this job all these years and it just riled me that I was suddenly faced with an obstacle that had nothing to do with my office work or research, but something as silly as a manager refusing to take my calls, it was all just incredibly unfair.
As I sat in the Center lobby, fiddling with my phone and wondering if I should try again, suddenly I heard a voice.
“Excuse me, you don’t happen to know where Kim Segyeong bujang’s office is?”
The man was very polite and his tone very calm, and when I looked up and met his gaze I had a feeling I had seen his face somewhere before, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
“Do you know what floor Kim Segyeong’s office is? I am a childhood friend of hers, Park Hyukseh, I’m running for the National Assembly . . .”
That’s when I thought, Oh, it’s the stalker, words that almost left my mouth, but I stopped myself. Whereupon I frantically rummaged through my mind to find something else to say but came up completely empty. And since I simply stared at him, the man spoke again.
“I was very close with Kim Segyeong bujang since we were children and grew up in the same place, and I do have some connection with the Center. As a candidate for the National Assembly, I am working day and night for the betterment of my country and fellow countrymen. If you pick me as your National Assembly member, I will make everyone in our country live forever, and that would make the Center for Immortality Research the foremost research center in the land . . .”
Make everyone in the country immortal? I’ve heard all sorts of things from politicians in my time, but this took the cake. However, my academic curiosity forced me to keep listening to his spiel no matter how ridiculous it got.
At the end of it I blurted, “But how exactly are you going to achieve immortality for all?”
I’m sure I was the only person in this entire century who had showed that much interest, little as it was, in his campaign promises. He got all excited and began to speak in a louder voice, his eyes positively sparkling.
“The twenty-first century is the age of technology, is it not? Concentrating all our technology to compress the sun’s rays and shoot them onto Earth to make our ancestors come alive again would be my first task. The method was already developed in mid-nineteenth-century Russia and was thoughtified to be impossible to bring to fruition at the time . . .”
Thoughtified? Was he making up grammar now? I loathe people who go to great lengths to keep talking in the passive voice, but there was no way of stopping the deluge that was coming at me now.
“Of course, our ancestors who have been deceased for relatively longer periods of time and are skeletons now might be thoughtified to be difficult to revive, but the ones who have just died and whose bodies are in passable condition will not be too difficult to bring back, I should think. To restore our dead ancestors and put them on the path to immortality in its own way can be thoughtified as a form of ancestral piety and befitting our country’s traditions that speak of respecting our elders, and it is also a way of maintaining and even increasing our population which is decreasing rapidly due to declining birth rates—”
“Excuse me.” The campaign promi. . .
—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“If you were the kind of child who was enthralled by Scary Stories to Read in the Dark, Bora Chung writes for you. Like the work of Carmen Maria Machado and Aoko Matsuda, Chung’s stories are so wonderfully, blisteringly strange and powerful that it’s almost impossible to put Cursed Bunny down. In short, this collection may, in fact, be a cursed object in the best possible way.”
—Kelly Link, bestselling author of Get In Trouble
“Disturbing, chilling, wrenching, and absolute genius. I wanted Chung to write a story about a reader getting a deep look inside her fantastic swirling mind. I had to take breaks and gulps of air before plunging back into each story. Magnetic, eerie, immensely important.”
—Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face
“Cool, brilliantly demented K-horror—just the way I like it!”
—Ed Park, author of Personal Days
“A collection of exquisitely crafted, spooky and unnerving tales that haunted me long after reading. Each story is a macabre gem, shot through with visceral horror, wry humor, and subtly profound insights on human nature. These stories convey how the traumas and transgressions of the past, individual and collective, . . . erupt into the present, distorting and eroding our perception of reality. Bora Chung is an amazingly inventive and daring writer. I will revisit these stories whenever I need a reminder of how fresh and vital prose can be.”
—Kate Folk, author of Out There
“Like a family in a home, fantastic stories gather together in this book. The stories not only take their revenge, but also love you, and comfort you. You’ll end up completely endeared to this fascinating collection.”
—Kyung-Sook Shin, New York Times Bestselling author of Please Look After Mom and Violets
“Fables of frightening moral clarity told in calm, bell-like prose, Cursed Bunny aims to unsettle. It’s as assured and brilliant as a nightmare. With an unflinching gaze and a sly humor, Chung has built a world both unfamiliar and eerily familiar, whose truths echo into our own. The indelible work of a master.”
—Shruti Swamy, author of The Archer and A House is a Body
“Nothing concentrates the mind like Chung’s terrors, which will shrivel you to a bouillon cube of your most primal instincts.”
—Rhoda Feng, Vulture
“Anton Hur’s nimble translation manages to capture the tricky magic of Chung’s voice—its wry humor and overarching coolness broken by sudden, thrilling dips into passages of vivid description. Even as Chung presents a catalog of grotesqueries that range from unsettling to seared-into-the-brain disturbing, her power is in restraint. She and Hur always keep the reader at a slight distance in order for the more chilling twists to land with maximum impact, allowing us to walk ourselves into the trap.”
—Violet Kupersmith, New York Times Book Review
“Sharp, wildly inventive, and slightly demented (in the most enjoyable way, of course) . . . All we can say is buckle in, because when these stories take their horrific turn there’s no setting them down.”
—Chicago Review of Books
“Whether borrowing from fable, folktale, speculative fiction, science fiction, or horror, Chung’s stories corkscrew toward devastating conclusions—bleak, yes, but also wise and honest about the nightmares of contemporary life. Don’t read this book while eating—but don’t skip these unflinching, intelligent stories, either.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Chung debuts with a well-crafted and horrifying collection of dark fairy tales, stark revenge fables, and disturbing body horror. Clever plot twists and sparkling prose abound. Chung’s work is captivating and terrifying.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[These] stories are beyond imagination: breathtaking, wild, crazy, the most original fiction I have ever encountered . . . each more astounding than the last.”
—Louisa Ermelino, Publishers Weekly
“The 10 stories, written between 1998 and 2016, span a variety of genres, flowing seamlessly from futuristic cautionary tales to surrealist, fable-like allegories inspired by Russian and Slavic tales.”
—Maya Homan, The Boston Globe
“[A] get-under-your-skin collection”
—LitHub
“This short story collection is like a car crash you can’t look away from: grotesque in the best way . . . Each story is fantastically unique, and unlike anything I’ve ever read before”
—Kirby Beaton, Buzzfeed’s Best December Books of 2022
“This Korean debut collection is a stunner. The stories included are absurdly unique, delightfully monstrous, horrifically insightful and chillingly satisfying.”
—Ms. Magazine
“If you want a spooky set of stories that will crawl under your skin and burrow into your marrow and stay there forever, Chung’s collection is a freaky, unforgettable outing. There’s a folkloric quality to this collection, like these are urban legends that have finally been put to paper.”
—Wired Magazine
“The strange and everyday are melded in these startling and original tales . . . Cursed Bunny is [Chung’s] first book to be translated into English, and hopefully not the last.
” —Connie Biewald, San Francisco Chronicle
“A unique and chilling collection”
—We Are Bookish
“Chung’s genre-defying collection breathes life into literary horror as the stories incorporate common fears and societal flaws with elements of the fantastic in the most chilling ways. The tales in Cursed Bunny will draw readers in with familiar themes and genre tropes and leave them pleasantly surprised, if not disturbed by the monsters within.”
—West Trade Review
“Bora Chung’s stories succeed at being deeply visceral experiences that do what the best fairy tales do: convey the unspeakable in a way that is nevertheless collectively understood . . . Perfect for fans of Bong Joon-ho’s films or Helen Oyeyemi’s fiction.”
—Alice Martin, Shelf Awareness
“You know, I think I’m being stalked?”
That’s what an unni at the Center confided to me two months ago, right in the middle of preparations for our anniversary event. Apparently, some man had called up the Center saying he was such-and-such and had come from the same region as my work unni and they were extremely close friends and he was running for the National Assembly and he would like to know the unni’s phone number. Of course, our receptionist had immediately picked up on the fact that calling oneself “extremely close friends” with someone was extremely suspicious in itself, but when the mention of his political ambitions was followed by a presentation of his clearly fraudulent campaign promises, she cut him off, saying the unni was not at her desk right now and, furthermore, she was hardly in a position to hand out personal information such as phone numbers to strangers. Still, as a common courtesy, she had asked if he had any messages. This led to his “I’ll call again later” follow-up calls, which made all other work almost impossible for the receptionist. Well, not that the Center had all that much work to be made impossible, normally, and this was the reception desk at that, but it was a very busy time. Everyone was frantic with the anniversary event, and how annoying that these calls, that could’ve been made during any of the vast expanses of emptiness in our calendars, were instead being foisted on us during this inopportune epoch.
If you were to ask what the Center for Immortality Research does, we do exactly what it says on the label: research immortality. In 1912, not long after Korea was forcibly annexed by Japan, the Center opened with the hopelessly silly slogan of “Our Country May Fall but We Shall Live Forever,” and it was now the ninety-eighth year of its founding, which occasioned a huge blowout party. I still have no idea why we settled on ninety-eight for such an occasion instead of ninety or ninety-five or one hundred, but none of my older sunbaes at the Center know either, nor do the Center’s board members, no doubt. I mean, whatever, I’m at the bottom of the hierarchy in this establishment, and it’s my job to do the work they give me, and if the work involves an anniversary party in a random year, that’s what I’ve got to do.
I may be at the bottom of the hierarchy, but my title happens to be gwajang—“middle manager”—which of course is also part of a long chain of fluffed-up titles going right to the top. The board members are at the highest echelons, with a slew of bujangs and chajangs and other titles going down, and I’m the lowest-ranking, with not a single sawon below me, to say nothing of a daeli. Why, despite our designation as a research lab, we have such corporate titles instead of “primary investigator” or some such is also beyond me.
I mean, that’s all well and good, especially when I get my monthly salary, but the problem is that because there are no sawons, all the tiny little chores that a sawon would do simply fall to me. And among the silly little chores I was given was to somehow get Movie Star B to come to our anniversary event.
Who was Movie Star B? He was in fact quite handsome and a good actor and had won some award and his name was well known; what did he have to do with our Center and its ninety-eighth anniversary? Well, nothing, except for the fact that a long time ago, before he became a big star, he had been in a fantasy movie that had to do with immortality. A movie that bombed so spectacularly that people these days hardly remembered its title, and the actors in it probably wanted to erase it from their CVs, but in any case, it was a movie about immortality, and the event would be filled with doctors and professors and fancy academics, which is why they thought having a movie star in the mix would make the atmosphere less rigid and the Center would look more glamorous, as it were, hence we decided to bring in Mr. B.
A good idea, but as all such planning goes, there was no way it was going to pass a board vote, and since all the bujangs and chajangs of the lab were experts in immortality in their own ways, there had to be a battle of what constitutes immortality as a concept before we moved forward. The Korean word for immortality is a combination of “long youth” and “forever life,” and did “long” and “forever” really mean the same thing? Of course not, because “forever” lasted a lot longer than “long.” Therefore, “long youth” was tawdry compared to “forever life,” and for the actor to have starred in a movie about “long youth” was, according to detractors, not a good fit to the Center’s mission. But when we then looked for movies dealing with the strictest sense of “forever life,” there were almost no such films in Korea, and it would be absurd to think an actor like Hugh Jackman would bother to come to a Center for Immortality Research’s ninety-eighth anniversary celebration event in Korea (there was also some debate as to whether the movie Hugh Jackman had starred in, The Fountain, was a movie about immortality or reincarnation, or whether it might actually have been about parallel universes, but when we decided to watch the film as a group in order to determine this issue, the board members all began to snore fifteen minutes into the film, making the whole point moot). Then, as an alternative, there was a Russian film trilogy that was extremely successful at the box office and won some impossible-to-pronounce award, but there was no one at the Center who could speak Russian and therefore this suggestion was also rejected.
And so, it came down to the actor Mr. B. When not a chajang or a bujang, or not even a board member, but the sojang himself suddenly called me, I ran to his office with my heart pounding; he handed me a Post-it with an email address and phone number scribbled on it and said such a famous movie star would probably have a busy schedule so I needed to call him early and nail him down, and that his assistant had already called them once and got a “We will look into the matter,” and that this was the actor’s manager’s phone number and I needed to call them and get a sure answer, and he then proceeded to give me an exact script of what I was to say over the phone. I was to say I was the gwajang of a “large pharmaceutical company” and how we would appreciate it if you would grace our ninety-eighth anniversary celebrations with your presence, to be polite but firm, and to emphasize how we were a “major pharmaceutical company” and that I was a “gwajang.” And that they’d understand they were being treated with a certain respect if they understood a gwajang was calling them, and also if I mentioned we were a big pharmaceutical company, they might think we would eventually offer him a commercial, which would make them hesitate to refuse the offer.
Of course, we were not a pharmaceutical company, but a research center attached to one, and we didn’t do commercials, but in any case, this was the task I was given and I did it to the best of my abilities and it resulted in a complete and utter stonewalling from B’s manager.
I made thirty-eight calls and sent twenty-two text messages and even fifteen really polite emails, but there was no answer, which made me anxious at first and then angry and, finally, resigned to the fact. Even if I was the lowest-ranking person and there was no possibility of moving up in this organization until the end of time, I had managed to hold on to this job all these years and it just riled me that I was suddenly faced with an obstacle that had nothing to do with my office work or research, but something as silly as a manager refusing to take my calls, it was all just incredibly unfair.
As I sat in the Center lobby, fiddling with my phone and wondering if I should try again, suddenly I heard a voice.
“Excuse me, you don’t happen to know where Kim Segyeong bujang’s office is?”
The man was very polite and his tone very calm, and when I looked up and met his gaze I had a feeling I had seen his face somewhere before, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
“Do you know what floor Kim Segyeong’s office is? I am a childhood friend of hers, Park Hyukseh, I’m running for the National Assembly . . .”
That’s when I thought, Oh, it’s the stalker, words that almost left my mouth, but I stopped myself. Whereupon I frantically rummaged through my mind to find something else to say but came up completely empty. And since I simply stared at him, the man spoke again.
“I was very close with Kim Segyeong bujang since we were children and grew up in the same place, and I do have some connection with the Center. As a candidate for the National Assembly, I am working day and night for the betterment of my country and fellow countrymen. If you pick me as your National Assembly member, I will make everyone in our country live forever, and that would make the Center for Immortality Research the foremost research center in the land . . .”
Make everyone in the country immortal? I’ve heard all sorts of things from politicians in my time, but this took the cake. However, my academic curiosity forced me to keep listening to his spiel no matter how ridiculous it got.
At the end of it I blurted, “But how exactly are you going to achieve immortality for all?”
I’m sure I was the only person in this entire century who had showed that much interest, little as it was, in his campaign promises. He got all excited and began to speak in a louder voice, his eyes positively sparkling.
“The twenty-first century is the age of technology, is it not? Concentrating all our technology to compress the sun’s rays and shoot them onto Earth to make our ancestors come alive again would be my first task. The method was already developed in mid-nineteenth-century Russia and was thoughtified to be impossible to bring to fruition at the time . . .”
Thoughtified? Was he making up grammar now? I loathe people who go to great lengths to keep talking in the passive voice, but there was no way of stopping the deluge that was coming at me now.
“Of course, our ancestors who have been deceased for relatively longer periods of time and are skeletons now might be thoughtified to be difficult to revive, but the ones who have just died and whose bodies are in passable condition will not be too difficult to bring back, I should think. To restore our dead ancestors and put them on the path to immortality in its own way can be thoughtified as a form of ancestral piety and befitting our country’s traditions that speak of respecting our elders, and it is also a way of maintaining and even increasing our population which is decreasing rapidly due to declining birth rates—”
“Excuse me.” The campaign promi. . .
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