Scholars of the Rocks by Yoon Chung

Seo-woo lay flat on the floor of the shrine. He didn’t know what the g(x) was for equations f(x)=7-4x and f(g(x))=-1. He didn’t really want to because it was only fifteen minutes away from twelve. The four of them were supposed to arrive by noon. Pillowing his head on the book, he went to check their group chat for the fifth time in five minutes. It was quiet, which was good—no one was flaking. He was about to ask where they were staying again when he stopped himself. He’d already asked twice. They had chosen a cheap motel in the fishing village a few kilometers away from his place. They could have stayed at his temple, and he’d said as much, but they were determined not to bother his mom or the visitors.

He let it go. They were being nice. They were also lying. He knew what they were really up to—staying up and drinking all night by the beach. One of their many freshman fantasies. He’d have to join in next year. He tried not to feel left out. It was his own fault.

At least he got to have his phone for the day. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on his phone past breakfast. He’d jumped around from porn to cartoons to Youtube all morning, volume turned all the way down. The colorful pictures and videos made up for the silence. He wasn’t allowed to listen to music from nine to midnight, so he listened to the sea instead. From its distant roar, he tried to guess what the waves looked like today. Roiling blue tongues, high with white crests. Lots of foam, like beer. That reminded him—he was dying for a glass. His only drink had been half a year ago, when he turned nineteen along with the rest of his friends. He often thought back to that cold night on the first of January, the tangy steam of their drunken breath rising above their heads into the clouds.

He asked if they were bringing the drinks.

They were.

Bless them.

They could drink by the rocks near the water, as far from the temple as possible. He rolled onto his belly and got up to leave.

This particular shrine was the farthest one from the shore and, naturally, the least popular one in the temple. Few people crawled all the way up the hill just to see a dingy room for a sea god that didn’t exist—probably.

Not that he’d ever admit it, but he had his doubts. His mom was slowly getting to him. She’d been getting to him for the last nineteen years.

Sacrilegious little entrepreneur.

She made a living off of tourists by building Buddhist temples by the sea—and she didn’t even believe in Buddha. “First built in 1905, Geumgyesa Temple was robbed of its treasures and razed to the ground during the Japanese occupation. It was reconstructed to its former glory in 2015. Its towering front gate is said to be one of the largest temple gates in Korea,” lied the sign outside. Seo-woo still remembered the dizzying smell of fresh paint when they first moved in in 2005, when everything from the floorboards to the beams had been new.     At some point Seo-woo wondered if she hadn’t turned into an actual believer somewhere down the line, but that never really happened. She loved the world too much for that. In the empty moments between accounting, managing, cleaning, and cooking, she kept up with it as best she could, and by the world, she meant the people that ran it over her head. Their marriages and affairs and divorces, their jobs and yearly incomes, their houses and children and fashion, were all subjects of endless fascination and conversation for her. Seo-woo could have told her about social media, but he kept quiet and left her scrolling through the slow, ad-infested news sites. He felt no need to fuel the fire. He already heard enough about them as it was.  

That wasn’t to say she wasn’t spiritual at all.  

“The Sea Emperor lives at the bottom of the trench near our coast.”

She always said “our coast” with such intense satisfaction.

“When I was your age, there were half a dozen shamans doing prayers and rituals and fortune-telling right along those rocks by the shore. Your grandmother used to come here all the way from Ulsan just to pray for your grandfather.”

His grandfather was a drowned fisherman whose body only turned up after thirty days of non-stop, non-refundable praying.

“You don’t see anything like them now, all chased off the land to make room for parking lots. Can’t say those cars are bad for business, though!”

She never forgot to add the most important bit of all: “Study hard and pray hard and the Sea Emperor will hear you. He heard my mother.”

It was why she made him study in the shrine all day.

“Why didn’t you just build a Sea Emperor temple or something?”

“Then we wouldn’t have so many donations now, would we? Always count on Christians and Buddhists to open their wallets.”

Her favorite part of the day was counting the offerings, dropped in a humble wooden box beside the large golden Buddha. His painted eyes would glint in the dark as she counted the bills by his toes and whispered sums into the dark.

What did you fetch us today, Siddhartha?  

Seo-woo was glad she didn’t make him help her. But he never confronted her about it, either. By the time he was old enough to know she was lying, he was also old enough to know she was lying for him. Where else would they get his tuition and rent for college? Because surely, those things went together. He needed both to move to Seoul, as he surely would next year. He would fly far, far away and no less.  

He flew past the shrine as he ran downhill. His mom was sweeping the grounds in her monk get-up.      

“Don’t stay out too late!” She called after him after casting an eye about the place. No visitors. “No later than eleven, got it?”

“Got it!”

“No drinking!”

He pretended to be out of earshot.

#

He hadn’t seen Chan-hee and Ki-yoon in months. They’d gone to Seoul for the semester and just returned a week ago. He took in their freshly permed hair, their jeans, their button-ups with logos. He could see them shopping before the first day of school. He had to admit they cleaned up pretty nicely without the thick glasses and the acne, god knows how it didn’t get worse with all that drinking.

“How’s the girlfriend?” He asked Min, slapping him on the back. Min went pink and said something about a date on Saturday. Barely out of their all-boys school and already dating. Seo-woo didn’t ask any more questions. He would learn about all that stuff for himself next year, anyway.

Min-joon hauled a bag of chips and cans and bottles into his arms.

“All yours, my man.”  

Seo-woo happily took the load and led them to the coast. It was a glaring summer day, and he knew just where to hide away.

He led them down a flight of dirt-packed steps, onto the rocks where the water lapped at chunks of mussels and barnacles. The crag threw a wide shadow across the ground below that rolled out smooth as a tabletop.

Two hours later, they were spread and sprawled like seals. Grease lined the corner of their mouths.  

“Did I tell you about the time we got locked out of our dorms?”

“You and Park Chan-hee?”

“Yeah. There was this get-together for psychology freshmen. Our table had all the pretty girls, and—”

“He’s just saying that coz his crush was there,” Chan-hee snickered.  

“You wait and see, she’s gonna be more than my crush,” Ki-yoon retorted. “Anyway, we drank till like two in the morning at three different bars and those animals still wanted to go to Karaoke! Those people, I swear . . . we were like nope, we’re crawling out if we have to. So we crawled out of the bar . . .”

“Into the streets . . .”

“Past the bars and cafes and all the stores . . .”

“Right to the other side of town.”

They guffawed. Min clucked his tongue.

“You had to walk all the way back?” Seo-woo asked, trying not to sound impressed. Ki-yoon shrugged.   

“You think there’s transit three in the morning? It took us a whole hour to get back.”  

“And he threw up twice along the way,” Chan-hee added. “Gross, but at least I was too drunk to care.”

“You were too drunk to find your way around your own dorms,” Min reminded them, scandalized. He’d heard the same story twice. “They got lost again after the front gates.”

“Which means,” continued Ki-yoon, “it was five in the morning by the time we got to the dorms and we still couldn’t get in because curfew’s till half past six. We had to sleep in our parkas under a lamppost! You have any idea how cold it is in March up there?”

“Yeah, we have this amazing invention called the weather forecast on cable TV.”

It was out of his mouth before he knew it. Seo-woo quickly darted a look at the others. Luckily, someone else was already talking.

“On second thought, maybe it’s a good thing you drank all that alcohol.” Min-joon murmured. He had been quietly making his way to his third bottle. Min opened his mouth for another speech, but Seo-woo just laughed and dropped his eyes to his own cup.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a familiar tabby hanging about the edge of the group. She sometimes came to the temple for tuna. When it became clear she wasn’t getting anything from them, she slunk away before anyone could pet her. She settled closer to the steps, where someone had left half a slice of apple and a whole dried fish on a paper plate. He wondered if it could have been his mom, offering up meat and fruit to the Emperor. The tabby picked at the bones.   

They went on with their games and stupid dares—quietly, so they wouldn’t get kicked out by the local fishermen. I dare you to drink seawater. I dare you to eat a mussel. I dare you to take a bite out of that apple. Fuck you! When that left them with nothing to do, they just watched the sea.  

“What’s that?” Asked Min-joon.

They looked. Some ways ahead there were stone steps that led into the waters and up a steep crag. The crag stood high above the waves, topped with a tiny temple like a hat.

“Orangdae,” Seo-woo slurred. “It’s just a shrine for some sea god. Sea Emperor. Whatever.” 

Min-joon got up for a walk. Bored and tipsy, everyone joined him, even Seo-woo, who had seen the thing a million times. His mom had made him follow her till he was eighteen. After that, she just built him a whole new shrine inside their own temple, complete with a desk and a chair and a lamp in the corner where random visitors could wander in and see if he was snoring or studying. Most days it felt like living inside a box inside a box inside a bottle lost at sea.

But this year, this year he was getting out, and once he did, it would all be thanks to himself and not some barnacle-pimple fish-brain brine-breathing geezer.

They almost fell into the sea only twice before making it to the shrine. Chan-hee read out the sign in a loud voice.

“Orangdae takes its name after five scholars of old who visited their friend in exile by the sea. Legend has it that they all shared a drink and enjoyed the sunset on these very rocks.”

Next to the shrine, there stood a small brick shelter fitted with glass doors. Behind the doors burned dozens of wax candles, each flame flickering with a wish that a wind or a drop might have put out, if not for the glass. All around the shelter, there were lucky pennies and figurines of fat Buddhas stuck along the dents in the rocks. Most were covered in gull shit.   

Ki-yoon poked at the figurines.

“They’re cute.”

He began fumbling with a key chain on his fanny pack. His hand came away with an Iron Man figurine. He placed it between two little Buddhas. Then he clasped his hands together and raised his voice.  

“O great Sea Emperor! May you look after our good friend Kim Seo-woo in his exile. There’s just four of us now, but you’ll let him get into college this year so we can come back and really be the five scholars of the rocks, won’t you? Get him somewhere in Seoul, won’t you?”  

Then he tied it off with a little bow, hands folded across his stomach and all. Someone laughed. Seo-woo couldn’t tell who, but he sounded a little nervous. He glanced around and saw Chan-hee’s ears turn bright red.  

“He’s drunk,” Chan-hee muttered in his general direction.

A sudden tension had sliced through their drunken haze like an ax. Seo-woo could feel their eyes on him, gauging his face for a smile, a frown, a tear. He hated it.

So he laughed. He laughed until everyone laughed with him. Chan-hee, ears still red, suggested they go back. Seo-woo told them to go ahead.

“I’ll join you in a bit.”

“Want me to stay with you?”

He waved Min away.

He watched the back of their heads as they bumped down along the rocks.

Then he grabbed Tony Stark and flung him far out to open sea.  

Breathing roughly, he swept his eye over the rest of the saints, imagining he could pick out the one from his mom. But they all looked the same—baby-faced Buddhas sporting bulbous paunches dressed in colorful clothes, some balancing coins on their knees like some cancerous bellybutton. He lobbed each and every one of them over the banisters and across the waters to smash into the rocks below inside his head.  

By the time he found them again, the sky was glowering orange. Some of them had fallen asleep. Ki-yoon was on his phone. Seo-woo sat beside him.

“You think the Sea Emperor likes Iron Man?” He asked quietly.

“What?”

Ki-yoon looked at him, eyes half closed.

Seo-woo realized they were right. The kid was way too drunk. And not just on the booze. For a split second, he thought he could see a pinprick light in each of those hazy eyes, a light that reflected the zinc edge of a hard clear outline that separated the two of them. He blinked and they were gone. He blinked again and they were there. He surprised himself by clenching his fists. He was surprising himself many times today.

He let it go.

 “Never mind.”

#

It was just after nine when he got home. He didn’t stumble once as he took off his shoes. After Orangdae, he hadn’t felt like drinking much. His mind still roamed and his body buzzed, but not enough to light up the long night ahead of him. First up in line was a long bath. Don’t forget to mix in the sea salt—blessed by Brine Breath himself, remember? And don’t make the water too warm or you’ll fall asleep before twelve. That would still leave you two hours before bed. Better get back to that math exercise. Now you wish you hadn’t slacked, don’t you? Only means more work tomorrow. And then you’ll say your bedtime prayers. Mom will whisper a dozen mantras, every one of them about you, and you’ll mouth them along with her because she’ll make you if you don’t and her superstition’s starting to get to you anyway, and you’ll do anything to be better this year, won’t you?

Won’t you, my darling?

He groaned and rubbed his face.

His mom must have heard him. She was coming up to the front door. She went off the moment she smelled the booze on him. Didn’t he know how important it was to keep in shape with the entrance exam just two months away? Wasn’t a nosebleed every now and then enough for him? She went on for a while, expecting him to cut her off midway, as he always did.

He didn’t. He merely stripped off his socks, pulling at the tips to tug it off outside-out the way she always asked him to.

“Mom?”

The subdued glaze over his eyes made her stop and look him up and down. It was then she realized—he didn’t seem re-energized at all. Sweat tiredly hung about the hairline along his forehead. His cheeks were flushed from the heat but the color didn’t help his complexion. He looked feverish. It jarred against his cool, low voice. The slope of his shoulders dipped in a way that struck her as odd.

 “What’s wrong?”

Seo-woo looked down at his bare feet.

Fives toes on the right, five toes on the left.

He looked at his hands.

Five fingers on the right, five fingers on the left.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he murmured. He raised his fingers to his face and touched his mouth as he spoke. The upper lip and lower lip moved to form the words.

“Nothing’s wrong.”

She looked at him, worried. She called his name.

Seo-woo blinked deliberately. His eyes closed and they showed darkness. They opened and showed light. He smelled her shampoo, fresh out of the shower. He heard his own breathing, and the sound of crickets out in the summer night. He took a deep breath. He felt his lungs swell inside him. He could even make out his own heartbeat, steady and in time.

And yet, he could never be sure.  

But he said it anyway because there was only one way he would hear what he wanted to hear. Not two or more months later, but now.

“Aren’t I perfect?”

He asked his mom’s toes.  

For a moment, they were still.

Then they curled and uncurled, curled and uncurled and drew nearer.  

He felt thin arms around his shoulders.

“Of course you are.”

She lied, gently and tenderly.

Yoon Chung

Image: Buddhist temple with ornate decoration and a flight of stairs leading to the shrine. Gold crown on the roof