Even a Flea Has a Face to Show…

A Letter from Your Cleaners

-A Shinchon Love Song, Part 2

The schools back then were far too cramped to accommodate all of us, the very first generation of the post-war baby boom. A single classroom crammed about seventy students, and we even had to split the school day into morning and afternoon shifts. Just inside the main school gates, in a temporary barracks building on the right, hung a completely separate sign that read “Changcheon Civic Elementary School.” These were classrooms dedicated to older, late-blooming students who had missed the regular age for enrollment. Classrooms were in such short supply that there was even a branch campus of Changcheon Elementary School over toward Daeheung-dong. As we moved up to the third grade, our school finally split up. Using the newly paved main road running from the Shinchon Rotary to Yonsei University as a boundary, the children living on the left side—the neighborhoods of Seogyo-dong and Donggyo-dong—were transferred to a brand-new school called Changseo Elementary School. That was the very school my wife attended.

During my elementary school years, I was the kind of child who made no difference whether I was there or not. I wasn’t particularly mischievous, nor was I remarkably brilliant at studying. I was just one of those perfectly ordinary, average kids who never stood out. Whenever school let out for the day, my father’s printing shop became my playground. Around that time, my father held a complete monopoly on making all the various business forms and rubber official stamps used by the administrative offices of Ewha Womans University and Yonsei University, and the job of delivering them fell entirely to me.

It happened when I was in the fifth grade. My father set out on a business trip that lasted for several days, and of course, I tag-along as his trusted assistant. In a corner of the main lobby at the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (Nonghyup) headquarters, located at the Seodaemun Intersection, my father set up a temporary stamp-engraving stall. I am not entirely sure what the exact occasion was, but it seemed there was a new set of documents that everyone doing business with the bank had to fill out, which required a brand-new official stamp to be stamped on them. From the moment he set up his stall in the morning until the bank closed its doors for the evening, my father spent several days engraving basic name stamps without a single moment of rest. Right beside him, I took down the names of the customers, handed them to my father, collected the money, and gave them their change. It was solely thanks to that grueling work that our family was finally able to escape our long years of living in rented rooms.

We finally got a home of our very own in Nogosan-dong, a house that boasted a total of four rooms, with a water well and a cherry blossom tree right by the main gate. Although running water hadn’t been connected yet, meaning the chore of carrying water on a shoulder yoke fell entirely on my shoulders, that wasn’t a very big deal to me. More than anything else, what truly thrilled me was the fact that I now had a room completely to myself.

However, the joy of having my own space lasted only a brief moment. Because when winter arrived, my cohabitation with my grandfather—who loved nothing more than enjoying his cheap, strong tobacco—began.

In the diary of my adolescence spent in Shinchon, my grandfather is someone who absolutely cannot be left out. If my father were to read this today, he would fly into a great rage, but as far as I know, my grandfather was a lifelong farmhand—a man who spent his entire life wrestling to break free from the heavy shackles of being a servant.

Born in the year 1901, my very first memory of my grandfather was his sudden appearance one day as an incredibly strong, dead-drunk old man. He would spend about three or four months of the winter season sharing a single room with me, vanish into thin air when the weather warmed up, and then, as soon as the cold winds began to blow again, he would return to share my room once more. Every single time he came and went, a massive commotion turned the household upside down. From around the time I entered middle school until his passing, a period of about ten years, my grandfather shared a room with me during the winters. He was the youngest of three sons from a deeply impoverished farming family in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province.

“How on earth did you boys end up taking after your maternal side so much… sigh.” This was a phrase my grandfather would constantly repeat, directed at both my father and me. While my father and I possessed small, frail frames, my grandfather was built with what we call “heavy, solid bones.” He was incredibly strong, and in his youth, he had once taken home the championship bull from the wrestling rings of Pyeongtaek and Yongin.

At the age of twenty, he entered the Moon family clan in Yusil Village, Yongin, as a son-in-law who lived with his wife’s family. Hard labor was second nature to him, and he was a supreme farmhand unmatched by anyone. The real trouble, however, was his immense strength and his love for alcohol. He would drag the prize bull home from the wrestling ring, only to blow it all on a massive drinking party that very same day. Before my father had even turned ten years old, and when my aunt living in Yaksu-dong was just two, my grandmother passed away. That marked the true beginning of my grandfather’s wandering life. My father and aunt were left to grow up under the care of their maternal grandmother in Yusil Village, Yongin.

Years later, while sharing a room with me, the stories my grandfather told me about his simple, brave, and uneducated life of wandering were deeply heartbreaking, even to my young ears. His wandering spirit remained completely unchanged even during the years he shared a room with me. On bright spring days when the warm haze began to rise, he would leave with just a single sentence: “I’m off to tend to the family graves.” Then, with the hem of his traditional overcoat fluttering in the wind and a sharply ground sickle tucked into his waistband, he would disappear to somewhere unknown. He would only return around the time the autumn winds blew and the kimchi-making season arrived, appearing once again as a dead-drunk old man.

One particular winter—I believe it was during my freshman year of college—there was no word from my grandfather long after he was supposed to return. Following my father’s memories, he and I set out to search for him, traveling through Yusil Village and Gwemil Village in Yongin, as well as Pyeongtaek and Jincheon. “Ah, so you’re Jaebong’s grandson!” every grandmother and grandfather we ran into would say to me. My grandfather was remembered by so many people exactly as he had described himself to me.

When we finally gave up the search and returned to our house in Shinchon, there he was—lying in my room, completely intoxicated. Cleaning up his summer and winter traditional clothes fell entirely to my mother, and the person who would fetch a basin of water to wipe down his drunken, sleeping body was my father.

In the spring of 1976, my grandfather fell ill and took to his bed in my room in Nogosan-dong for what would be his final month. To be bedridden for over a month was something entirely unprecedented in his whole life. Right by my grandfather’s bedside, my father knelt down, offering endless prayers and singing hymns without ceasing. “Father, please, believe in Jesus before you go. You must, so you can go to Heaven,” he pleaded repeatedly.

That was when my grandfather uttered those words: “You rascal! Even a flea has a face to show… How could I dare turn to Him now at the very end?” It was a traditional way of saying, ‘Even a creature as lowly as a flea has some sense of shame and conscience. How can a man like me, who lived such a reckless life, shameless turn to God only on my deathbed?’

I do not know if he simply found my father’s singing—which was practically tone-deaf—utterly unbearable, or if God had truly answered my father’s desperate prayers. But three days before his passing, my grandfather finally relented, saying, “Alright, let us believe.” With those few words, a pastor was called, and my grandfather’s initiation into the church took place. Later, a bright red cross was drawn onto his tombstone—by my father.

Pastor Kim Yong-jin of Daehyun Church, who had prayed for my grandfather’s final moments back then, later served as the officiant for my wedding.

Now, I am rapidly approaching the very age my grandfather was back then.

Perhaps that is why. Lives and struggles that I completely failed to understand or notice back then are now making their way deep into my own heart.