Half Moon Above Seoul Central Park by Yejun Chun

Everyone needs to cry. Everyone needs to cry because it is not easy to live by simply breathing in this modern world. Everyone becomes upset by something, usually the smallest things that went wrong. Something that was out of their control, something that was not scheduled. An argument with a lover on the morning breakfast table. A sudden insult from a close friend that went too far and the thoughts following the insult going even further inside the mind. It’s the small things. Usually.

Often people cry because they are reminded of a tragic event. These events are diverse in their duration. What is fascinating to me, is that the duration of the weeping does not correlate with the duration of the tragic event. A feature film can produce a sniffle by the end credits, while an old pop song about grief could make one bawl on and on.

The time and place are also important.

When I was about ten years old, our family moved back to Seoul from the United States. Because of the semester difference between the school systems, according to the local middle school advisor, I had to take another semester, one more semester in a local Korean elementary school for proper entrance. To be precise, it was two months, but I had always condensed those two months at the elementary school as two days. Two days.

The first of the two days that still linger in my memory. It was my first day at the elementary school. I could barely speak Korean, let alone do an introduction. The teacher had to do the talking for me, but she wasn’t really interested in the new student. She was, after all, going to let me go soon, and to be honest, the students in her class seemed to care about her as much as she seemed to care about the students. One other fact I remember about the teacher was that she was just recently married.

My first music class on my first day was my last one. The music room was twice the size of an ordinary classroom, which was still small, considering the fact that two classes would join together for music class. I don’t remember our class number, but I remember the class number of the other class that joined us for music class. It was class three.

The music teacher didn’t do much teaching but just turned on a musical movie for the class and quieted the students down whenever their chatter became too loud.

I remember paying attention to the screen, scooched up to the front. Not because the film was fun but because I wanted to be away from the crowd. I don’t remember the title of the musical and I certainly didn’t notice the girl who scooched her chair next to mine.

“Are you the new kid from America?”

I jumped at her voice. This was the first time someone asked me something in English and she wasn’t even from my class. She was from class three.

She wasn’t fluent but I didn’t care.

“Yes, I’m the new kid.”

She gave a sly smile. “Why’d you come here, just before graduation?”

I shrugged.

“Must’ve sucked to come here.” She nodded her head towards the screen. “I love this movie. I used to watch this movie all the time at night, snuggled in sheets.”

“Me too,” I had said, “I mean, I love this movie too. I didn’t snuggle in sheets. But I watched this movie all the time in America.”

She laughed at my words as if I had told her a joke. Her laugh was a high-pitched one.

We continued to watch the film, sitting in front of the class. All the other kids behind us were loud, but we didn’t care much.

When class ended, I asked for her name. Her response was “Hailee.” She said that it was the name her English teacher gave her.

I saw Hailee more time after that class, on graduation day. The second of the two days of elementary school that I remember.

It turned out, our classes were a hallway apart. But I felt that something was wrong. I didn’t see Hailee in school. Not in class three, not in the hallways, not in the school field. Not even during the graduation ceremony. Our class was seated next to class three during the ceremony, yet no matter how much I looked, she wasn’t in sight. She was never in sight for almost two months.

I saw her after the ceremony in the school auditorium.

She was standing in front of the bathroom. She was crying, and her hair was soaking wet. A teacher kneeled in front of her, trying to calm Hailee down. But the more the teacher tried to calm her down, Hailee sobbed harder with her whole body shaking. She was crying like mad.

I still don’t know what happened to her. At that time, I wanted to say something to her. I wanted to do something for her. But I couldn’t. I was scared. I didn’t know what happened to her, but I was scared of what it might have been. I watched her from a distance. Then, I quickly walked out of the place before her red puffy eyes could meet mine.

There is no way for me to get back to her and lend a helping hand or offer some words of comfort. There isn’t.

On lonely late nights in Seoul, while walking on the streets, the scene would sometimes pop up inside my head like a cursed painting. The white lights and floors. The lockers emptied out in the empty hallway. Sometimes the cheering continued from the nearby auditorium. Before I see the silhouettes, I would turn the scene off and cry. Sometimes the crying would be simply my eyes being watery for a few minutes. Sometimes it would be something much longer.

Yejun Chun