These Sainted Seouls | ongoing

interlude two: the So brothers, late 1998

So Hyun-ki only knew half of the song, but he insisted on singing along anyway, the kitchen island his makeshift stage, and his brother and their babysitter his sole audience. Admittedly, they were not a very good audience: his brother was reading some thick, leathered book and the older-girl who supposed to be watching them was working frantically at a school essay though she still had the wherewithal to be mumbling along to the lyrics blasting off the boombox she'd lugged in with her. The So family had an exquisite stereo system, of course, but it wasn't as if they'd let this girl with her bubblegum-sticky fingers mess around with something so above her; the girl, who was around sixteen, smiled at these insults, calmly collected her hourly wage, and then brought her crap stereo system to her babysitting jobs; heaven forbid she existed without music.

"Noona," Hyun-ki whined. "Noona, look at me. Hyung."

"Fine," the girl said, and she snapped her gum. "Do it again."

Hyun-ki started up with his warbling singing; the girl rolled her eyes and laughed. "You're ruining the song," she said. "You're never going to have my Jae-won oppa's voice, so don't even try."

"I'm going to be in H.O.T. when I grow up," Hyun-ki said. "Then you'll call me oppa too."

"Aish," the girl said. "Just be quiet so I can finish this. I don't care what you do, as long as you don't join Sechskies. I may be flunking out of school, but I am loyal to my band."

"Hyung," Hyun-ki said. "Did you hear--I'm going to be famous. Girls are going to scream and fall at my feet because I'll be so beautiful."

His brother looked up levelly. "I wouldn't count on that if I were you," he said. "You can't sing. You can't dance. You don't even have any friends. Why on earth would people like you?"

Hyun-ki stamped his foot against the marble countertop, but the girl was immersed in her music again, and she didn't look up. His brother was giving him an oddly blank stare; there was something so young and green and horrible in his eyes that it made Hyun-ki think of unwinding snakes. He looked toward the nursery, where his younger siblings were somehow all asleep; his eyes went toward the door, where his parents had slipped away three hours earlier, en route to yet another black-tie corporation dinner; he was alone, then; alone with his weirdly quiet hyung and the oblivious noona.

"I will too be famous," he pouted. "Besides, you don't have any friends either."

His brother closed the book and looked toward the girl, cautiously. When he saw that she wasn't listening, he leaned in toward his brother, almost smiling. "But I can make people like me," he murmured. "I know lots of things. Do you want to know what I do?"

He made a striking picture: just past his eighth birthday, his eyes big and dark against his face, his fingers perched birdlike over the cover of his book; he was already horribly self-confident, unlike Hyun-ki, who was two years younger and still scrappily growing into himself. But his brother had the presence of an identity; as if by being so young he'd found a secret discourse into his soul, and he was dictating his boyhood by his mind. The air was sparkling in the kitchen, and the girl was humming to herself, the base of her music so heavy it made Hyun-ki shake. There was a liquid darkness in his brother's face, and to calm himself, Hyun-ki remembered how sensitive and weak his brother could sometimes be. Yesterday, they'd found a dead sparrow in the garden, its innards stripped out by some malicious cat, and his brother had sobbed.

But he was not crying now. "남동생," he said. "This is how I made a new friend. There was a new boy coming to our class, and we all had to write letters to greet him. I wanted him to like me. So I wrote to him about how lonely I was, and how none of the other boys understood me. How they made fun of me. How I understood what it was like to be new, and to be different, and that we could be friends. I told him I'd be his hyung--and watch out for him."