Alienation 1

The probability of winning the lottery jackpot: 1 in 8,145,060.

The probability of dying from a fall in the bathtub: 1 in 801,923.

The probability of dying in a plane crash: 1 in 1,000,000.

The probability of dying from a lightning strike: 1 in 4,289,651.

Experts estimate that smoking will kill a billion people in the twenty-first century, yet most smokers who can't quit simply buy another cigarette and light it with the baseless, almost gambling-like conviction that they won't be among that billion.

Things that feel like they could never happen to me.

The tendency to feel excessive fear about certain events — preparing obsessively against them — while in other matters surrendering one's future entirely to luck and clinging to a boldly optimistic faith: this was no one person's failing but an age-old contradiction inherent to humanity itself.

Today, which seems like it will repeat forever, appears incapable of leading anywhere, no matter how much time passes.

A fifteen-year-old boy cannot concretely picture himself at twenty or thirty, and a twenty-three-year-old cannot imagine reaching forty or fifty, stepping into middle age.

We rationally understand that such days will inevitably arrive, yet imagination fails to realize the very concept that reason has already accepted.

Moving from fifteen to sixteen feels natural enough, but we cannot truly feel the reality of becoming thirty or forty — of skin yielding to gravity, forming deep wrinkles, no longer young.

It feels as remote as a future hundreds or thousands of years away. And so we consume each day feigning ignorance of the one certainty we all share: that we will inevitably lose who we are today. We live as though we could exist forever in our current form. Perhaps that is the substance of an ordinary human life.

If, for convenience, we define that as ordinary, then Yeehyeon's parents could be said to have deviated somewhat from the norm.

Yeehyeon's father came from a fishing village. A model student — excellent grades, gentle temperament, never once causing his parents any grief — he spent his school years carrying everyone's expectation that he would enter a prestigious university and one day provide for his family.

However, even a seemingly mild person can harbor an inner passion. Being mild-mannered and having no convictions are entirely unrelated, yet it was a common misunderstanding — a prejudice — that a child who never argued or raised his voice couldn't possibly have any burning desire worth sacrificing everything for.

His passion lay in painting.

Until the year he turned twenty-three — when he finally confessed his long deception to his parents — no one in his family had known he harbored any dream of it. He had hidden his passion with that kind of thoroughness.

Perhaps it wasn't his thoroughness at all, but rather their extreme indifference — or a self-deception that saw only what it wished to see — that had inadvertently turned his passion into a secret.

As expected, he was accepted into a prestigious university. As soon as he moved to the city alone, he hid the truth from his parents, submitted a leave of absence on his first day, and immediately enrolled in a private art academy for entrance exam preparation.

Except for the hours spent tutoring to cover his minimal living expenses, he devoted almost all his time to painting. Even before and after classes, he would seek out the academy's empty rooms and draw whatever came to mind. Simply being able to receive proper practical instruction was happiness enough, and in the moments he was absorbed in the process — where lines became planes and planes became three-dimensional forms — he felt a kind of freedom, as if all other relationships had fallen away and only the subject and himself remained.

Yeehyeon's mother was in the exact opposite situation.

Her great-grandfather was an artist whose major works commanded auction prices in the range of a billion won even nearly fifty years after his death, making him one of the key figures discussed when speaking of Korea's modern and contemporary art history.

Her father was a painter and art critic, and her mother a poet with profound knowledge of various arts, including painting. She grew up surrounded by art, and whether by genetic predisposition or environmental influence, she naturally developed an interest in it. Unlike Yeehyeon's father, she had her parents' enthusiastic support: she moved through arts-focused middle and high schools and entered the Painting Department of a prestigious university without much difficulty. It was the very university and department Yeehyeon's father had once longed for.

Yet her passion lay in comics.

And her parents held a strictly negative stance toward all forms of art considered minor.

Unlike Yeehyeon's father, she hadn't hidden her passion through middle and high school, but her parents tried to confine comics to a mere hobby — going so far as to dump her entire collection, painstakingly gathered since second or third grade, into the bathtub and soak it through.

They desperately tried to calm their anxiety by reminding themselves she was enrolled in the Painting Department of the university they had always dreamed of for her, pressuring her to one day follow in her great-grandfather's footsteps and become one of Korea's leading artists.

Environment shapes a person, they said. Under the guidance of famous professors at a top-tier university, they believed that once her youthful wandering ended, she would enter the sublime world of art.

This foolish self-deception — seeing only what one wishes to see, believing only what one wishes to believe — was playing out everywhere, regardless of wealth.

Contrary to her parents' wishes, she co-founded a manhwa club with a classmate from her department, devoting far more energy to the club than to her actual coursework. Her co-founder was already a veteran of the scene — having joined a manhwa circle back in middle school and had been self-publishing his own comics since his sophomore year of high school. Naturally, he became the club’s president, and she took the role of vice president.

He was the one who insisted that her credentials from such a prestigious art university would pave the way for her future career as a manhwaga. Having already resolved to live solely by his craft, he was entirely self-funded, paying his own way through school—which meant his day-to-day circumstances were far from comfortable.

Watching him up close—balancing his studies and club duties while teaching middle schoolers at a prep academy near campus just to scrape by — she came to see herself objectively. She was simply too soft to throw herself entirely into her dreams, and so, she began looking for ways to compensate for that weakness.

She significantly increased the time she spent painting and seriously prepared for art competitions. She strengthened her plots and studied books and films to give her characters greater depth.

Since she didn't need to work part-time, she handled the club's practical administrative tasks in place of the president. She also frequented the art academy where the president worked, building rapport with the instructors and director, and occasionally earned extra income working as an assistant teacher.

It was there that she got to know a man the other students called "Painting Julien."

He was someone who chained himself to the academy for over ten hours a day, producing an enormous volume of work. The vice director jokingly said new students enrolled just to catch a glimpse of him — he was that handsome — yet he showed not the slightest inclination to use his looks to enjoy his youth.

And after talking with him, she discovered he was also fighting to defy his parents' expectations. His official enrollment at that prestigious university hung over him like a cumbersome sandbag shackled to his ankle — a weight he was desperate to cast off.

In a way, they were exact opposites: what one was desperate to discard, the other deeply desired. Yet in their shared yearning for a life beyond the one thrust upon them, they were remarkably alike.

As they shared their stories and found mutual understanding, a deep bond grew rapidly between them.

She critiqued his paintings; he gave her candid feedback on her manhwa. The hours they spent together—which had once included her club president as well—gradually narrowed down to just the two of them. When they finally reached for each other, wanting not just each other's passion, but their bodies, minds, and futures, it was no reckless impulse of youth.

Neither could imagine anyone else as the colleague who would keep their resolve from crumbling, the lover whose shoulder they could lean on through beautiful nights, or the lifelong partner with whom they would share the rest of their days.

What if they hadn't had each other?

Perhaps he would have returned to his original university — crushed by guilt over his poor parents who went out to fish before dawn with hands that never lost their smell of the sea — and studied to become a civil servant or land a position at a large corporation.

Perhaps she, too, worn down by the unending conflict with her parents and the unfamiliar hardship of making ends meet, would have chosen the predetermined safe path. She didn't dislike painting; she simply yearned for comics more.

Without each other, either outcome would have been entirely possible.

Because they had each other, they kept from giving up on themselves and held their resolve steady. They reminded each other that life is finite — and that the end will come, whether one can imagine it or not.

Having chosen each other as lifelong partners while still so young, they had to give up everything they had, whether little or much, and turn their backs on the expectations of everyone around them. It was certainly not something either of them did lightly, as if tossing aside a burdensome weight. After all, disappointing one's parents is perhaps one of the things humans fear most.

The two often joked about how her wealthy family and his family — for whom financial hardship was a part of daily life — had reached the exact same conclusion. Despite their vastly different circumstances, both sides opposed the marriage just the same.

All of this happened before Yeehyeon was born.

As he grew up, he gradually pieced together these "old stories." On one side was his mother, who had spent weekends at a family villa and traveled abroad multiple times a year, viewing masterpiece artworks in person. On the other was his father, who, before coming to Seoul, had shared a room with his hyung while studying to keep his high marks — all while eating the cosmetically damaged fish that couldn't be sold at market as a daily side dish year-round.

Although he had never met either set of grandparents, he never questioned this or felt any particular sense of loss about it.

Whatever the reality of those old stories, Yeehyeon never heard a trace of regret or resentment when they told them to him. They always listened attentively to his feelings, and they expressed their trust and affection for each other so readily that young Yeehyeon would sometimes feel a pang of jealousy.

To Yeehyeon, his mother was defined by a single image: sitting at the living room table or the desk in her small studio, the radio playing softly in the background as she drew her manhwa.

His father — who worked thirty hours a week at a nearby mobile phone factory and devoted every remaining hour to oil painting with the goal of becoming a full-time artist — was the father Yeehyeon knew.

To a young Yeehyeon, the studio they shared looked like a secret base. No matter how deeply they loved him, that room always felt like an exclusive world belonging only to them — a place of quiet communion from which he was gently shut out.

Yeehyeon was a child who rarely threw tantrums, but he intensely disliked it when both parents were in the studio together. So they established a rule: his mother used it during the day, and his father used it after work, taking turns.

The rule had been in place since before Yeehyeon even started elementary school. Back then, his parents found his jealousy so endearing that they would sometimes hide in the studio on purpose just to make him cry.

As Yeehyeon grew older, moving into the upper grades and then into middle school, he began to express his own world through painting. As he gradually built an identity outside of his parents' shadow, his desperate urge to wedge himself between them faded. Yet, whenever everyone around them marveled at what a couple they still seemed, like lovers even now, Yeehyeon's heart would grow heavy.

Still, it was the kind of ordinary flaw found in any family, and Yeehyeon felt deeply satisfied and grateful for his life. Far more than most of his peers, he appreciated his parents' optimistic, gentle natures and the way they raised him with total respect for his choices.

The lush green of the miniature jungle his mother had cultivated on the veranda of their old villa.

The vintage pop songs drifting softly all day from her radio.

The daily sunlight slowly crawling across the floorboards, stretching from the bookshelf all the way to the sofa.

The heavy scent of oil paint mixed with the posters made from his mother's illustrations.

These were peaceful days that felt as though they would go on forever, with no final curtain call in sight.

The summer Yeehyeon turned sixteen, he won a Special Jury Award at an art contest hosted by a major gallery. Upon hearing the news, his maternal grandparents reached out and invited the three of them to dinner.

It was the first time they had met in about seventeen years — since Yeehyeon's mother had declared she would become a manhwa artist and left home, almost as though she had run away or been kicked out.

The competition itself was highly unconventional, often sparking debate over its legitimacy. It boasted no age restrictions, made no distinction between amateurs and professionals, and placed no limitations on subject matter or style. Yet its prestige was undeniable, backed by one of the top three major galleries in the country.

Furthermore, regardless of any controversy, a win in this competition instantly transformed an artist's career. Amateurs and newcomers became overnight sensations, flooded with proposals for solo exhibitions or contracts to sign as gallery-backed artists. For established figures, their market value could skyrocket four or five times higher.

Then in its seventh year, the contest was renowned for attracting highly distinguished and authoritative judges. It generated even greater buzz when Suki Kim — a United States-based, second-generation Korean American painter of international renown — specifically singled out Yeehyeon's work, leaving a glowing review and personally purchasing one of his pieces.

Of course, Yeehyeon's youth also played a major role in captivating the art world. At just sixteen, he was the youngest award recipient in the competition's history, and the only teenager to ever win with an abstract piece.

Because the high art world was far removed from popular culture, the news never quite crossed over to the general public. Even so, the gallery contacted the family frequently for a time, relaying a steady stream of persistent interview requests from various media outlets wanting photographs of the young prodigy.

After consulting with Yeehyeon, his parents requested that the gallery keep his real name and personal details strictly confidential. A month later, when a Hong Kong publisher reached out wanting to feature Yeehyeon's painting on the cover of a globally renowned novelist's new edition, all correspondence was handled through the gallery — allowing Yeehyeon to avoid the media frenzy entirely.

The dinner invitation from his maternal grandparents arrived right on the heels of the award announcement. That evening, Yeehyeon remembered hearing his mother raise her voice on the phone — a shocking rarity in their quiet household.

Though she ultimately gave in after lengthy persuasion from his father, she was far from forgiving them. The moment her parents laid eyes on Yeehyeon and rushed forward in tears to embrace him, she roughly pulled him back, shielding him behind her. It was the first time Yeehyeon had ever seen her act that way.

A few days later, she came quietly to his bedroom. She told him that if he wished to have a relationship with his grandparents, he was entirely free to do so, regardless of her own feelings — the choice was his alone. He nodded to reassure her, but in truth, his grandparents were just strangers who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

Yet, there was one thing Yeehyeon felt he understood.

Although his mother always spoke of the past as if it were a harmless memory that no longer held any power over her, deep down, she still resented, sometimes hated, and still loved her parents.

Yeehyeon felt he could vaguely understand his mother's conflicted feelings: how she bitterly accused her parents of reaching out for selfish reasons only after hearing about his award, yet how, being their child, she couldn't help but soften during that first meeting in seventeen years — moved by the sight of their tears.

Following Yeehyeon's award, the second half of that year felt like a season when the long efforts and hardships of his family finally began to bear fruit.

His maternal grandparents did everything they could to prove they weren't welcoming the family back solely because of their grandson's sudden artistic success.

They looked much older than his mother remembered. They humbly admitted that everything they had once prioritized was ultimately a futile illusion — nothing more than pride and face-saving that did nothing to help build a happy life.

Now, the decision of whether to accept her no longer rested with her parents. It was up to her whether to accept their goodwill, and they were all making small, careful efforts, little by little.

That autumn, the longest serialized work of her career as an artist — something she had been working on for about ten years — finally came to an end. This was a rare feat in the modern comics industry, which was heavily dominated by provocative, short-form webtoons. Despite its long run, her work received widespread praise for its masterful conclusion and achieved massive commercial success.

In November, her work won the grand prize at an event hosted by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism alongside the Korea Creative Content Agency.

Although she had won various awards throughout her life, the weight and meaning of this one felt entirely different. While the prize itself wasn't definitive proof of her passion or her work's artistic completeness, it was deeply comforting to feel that someone had truly witnessed and validated her decades of struggle.

The awards ceremony was held on the second Monday of December, just two weeks before Christmas.

Yeehyeon's father, unable to attend due to an unyielding work schedule, had prepared a small plan instead to celebrate her.

He knew that while she wanted to accept her parents' efforts, the love-hate she had harbored for so long was getting in the way. He could sense — even if no one else could — that the moment she heard the news of the award, she had wanted to tell her parents right away. Yet at the same time, she hesitated to contact them, unsure whether they would truly be happy about an award for a comic rather than a traditional painting.

So, he secretly reached out to her parents first to break the news. Just as he had expected, their joy was unmistakable even over the phone. No — they were practically ecstatic.

When he suggested they all surprise her together on the evening of the ceremony, they accepted instantly, thanking him profusely for the idea.

At the time, her parents were on a brief stay in Europe for her father's art exhibition, but they immediately contacted a travel agency to move up their return flights, paying hefty fees to cancel all their remaining hotel reservations. All of it, just to celebrate their daughter who had won an award for "just some comic." And they did so gladly.

Yeehyeon's father truly believed she deserved every ounce of this happiness.

She had never regretted giving up the immense privileges her parents' wealth and prestige could have easily handed her. Rather than simply stepping onto a life already planned and laid out by others, she had chosen to live a life as a process of discovering who she truly was.

The young girl who had sparkled with raw passion in her early twenties was now approaching forty, standing on the threshold of middle age.

She was a woman fully deserving of congratulations and support: from her aging parents who deeply regretted their past, from her husband who was a steadfast colleague, a tender lover, and her most ardent fan, and from her beloved son, whose abundant talent had been shaped so beautifully by his parents' influence.

He reserved a table at an upscale restaurant, a rare indulgence compared to their usual spots. His plan was to pick Yeehyeon up after school and head to a hotel near the express bus terminal, while she would meet them there straight from the ceremony. That very morning, her face bright with anticipation, she had jokingly complained that she couldn't remember the last time she'd eaten at a hotel buffet, vowing to stuff herself with king crab and Peking duck. She had absolutely no idea her parents were currently flying in from Berlin to surprise her.

The plan was modest: her parents would arrive at the restaurant first and be seated. Then, the three of them would meet in the lobby downstairs and head up together. Once guided to their reserved table, her parents — fresh off the plane from Berlin — would surprise her with a bouquet and their heartfelt congratulations.

However, the flight out of Berlin was delayed due to severe weather, and by the time Yeehyeon's grandparents touched down at Incheon, an hour had already slipped past the scheduled meeting time. Hurriedly, they began making their way toward the city.

Fortunately, the awards ceremony ran longer than expected. Even so, it became clear that her grandparents, traveling all the way from the airport, would never make it to the Gangnam hotel before she did.

Yeehyeon's mother was already in a taxi on her way. After hearing that a mechanical breakdown at Seongsu Station had caused massive delays across the entire Line 2 subway, she had splurged on a taxi, a luxury she rarely allowed herself.

Recognizing the timing conflict, Yeehyeon's father quickly changed the plan. He moved the dinner to a location where her grandparents, coming straight from the airport, could manage to arrive just a few minutes ahead of her.

He called her and asked if she mind switching to the local Thai restaurant the three of them always frequented. She agreed immediately, calling it a wonderful idea. It felt even more meaningful, she added warmly, since that was the very place where they had celebrated Yeehyeon's award.

"Should we take the Route 3 Tunnel, or go past Seoul Station?" the driver asked after the destination changed.

She simply answered, "Seoul Station"—she had always disliked the stuffy, claustrophobic feeling of tunnels.

Heading from Tongil-ro in front of Seoul Station toward Samgakji, the light changed just before the taxi crossed the stop line, forcing it to wait. The driver grumbled that if the car ahead hadn't dawdled at the previous light they wouldn't have been caught, but she merely smiled, far too happy to care.

Wham!'s "Last Christmas" was playing softly on the radio. Humming along to the warmly nostalgic melody, she leaned back against the seat.

For about a month since hearing the news of her award, she had been mulling over how to spend the substantial prize money. Sitting in the audience earlier that afternoon waiting for her name to be called, she had finally made up her mind: she was going to take the three of them on an art museum tour of Europe during Yeehyeon's winter break.

She planned to suggest it over dinner tonight. Just imagining their surprised and delighted faces made her smile as if she could already see the joy in their eyes.

"Huh? What's that? What's wrong with it?!"

The driver's sudden, panicked voice snapped her out of her thoughts, and she reflexively looked straight ahead.

The oncoming traffic, obeying the green light, was moving in a gentle, sweeping arc from Hangang-daero toward Tongil-ro. And in the very next instant, a blue one-ton truck charging at high speed from Sejong-daero tore into her field of vision — barreling straight toward the line of cars.

Then came a roar as if the world had stopped.

It wasn't merely a loud noise. It was a sound deeply laced with violence and misfortune — entirely different from the harmless clamor of a construction site or the roaring cheers of a sporting event.

Both she and the taxi driver watched the blue truck charge toward a mid-sized sedan. The rush looked like nothing less than a deliberate act of self-destruction.

She clapped both hands over her mouth as screams erupted from the driver as well.

The silver sedan, struck violently on its rear passenger door, spun out of control — thrown backward, lunging directly toward the backseat of her taxi alongside the truck that had hit it. The taxi driver sustained serious injuries. She died instantly.

From the moment the driver shouted and she looked up, everything had unfolded in less than thirty seconds.