Jeong Jin Wu put on the backpack again. The schoolteacher missed her opportunity to assist him.
“We’re going in the same direction. Can I help you with anything?” asked the schoolteacher.
She picked up the bucket and shovel for the judge. Jeong Jin Wu tried to stop her, but she had already begun walking ahead.
They had been walking without saying a word to each other for a while when the schoolteacher broke the silence. “Actually, I was thinking something along those lines.” She spoke in a soft voice. “It’s probably a coincidence to run into you like this, but every time I come back from this student’s house, I always feel a bit annoyed with the court for divorcing his parents.”
The mention of court jolted Jeong Jin Wu’s attention. He was at a loss for words and listened carefully to the schoolteacher, who appeared to be speaking about something that had been troubling her for quite some time.
The schoolteacher continued, “One of my students, Chae Yeong Il, has been living with his stepmother for—”
“Wait a minute!” Jeong Jin Wu interrupted. “Chae Yeong Il? How old is he?
“I believe he’s… uh… thirteen years old.”
“Thirteen? Who’s his father?” Jeong Jin Wu asked impatiently.
“His father is the sales manager at the electric power plant… uh… Comrade Chae Rim. Why, do you know him?”
Jeong Jin Wu adjusted his backpack and avoided looking at the schoolteacher. How could he not know the sales manager? The memory of that day in court six years ago was coming back to him.
That woman, who was living in the mountains with her children. The one who dreamed of raising a harmonious family. The one whose tears rolled down her freckled face in court. The one who pleaded with her husband to acknowledge her and respect her dignity. The children who were separated because of the divorce. The frightened seven-year-old boy, Chae Yeong Il.
“I know a little bit about him. I met him a few years ago,” said Jeong Jin Wu.
He made it sound like a casual remark, but he was perturbed at the very thought of the child. An unsettling memory of Chae Rim and his children, which had been buried in his mind, was haunting him again. It had haunted him a few days ago in his office, and it was haunting him now. Even so, he turned his attention to the schoolteacher’s words like a magnet to metal as she described Yeong Il’s stepmother.
Chae Rim remarried soon after the divorce. His new wife was ten years younger than he, a young woman for whom raising someone else’s child was not a priority. Like most stepmothers, she cared little for her stepson. She would wash his clothes but never buy him new ones. She would prepare food for him, but never the dishes he liked. She would scowl at him in the absence of his father, but in his father’s presence, she would coddle him and shower him with affection. Her orders to him to clean his room extended to the living room, the bathroom, and even the kitchen, while she rested. Chae Rim was Yeong Il’s father, but his stepmother was his master. Yeong Il dared not complain about his stepmother to his father lest he be forced to endure harsher mistreatment from her in his father’s absence. She cared very little for his well-being, much less his education.
Her only aim was for Yeong Il to graduate from secondary school and find work in another town, away from home, out of her sight. She wanted him out of the house as quickly as possible and wondered if secondary school could be accelerated. But she would have to wait five more years for her desires to come to fruition. This irritated her, and the irritation was made known to Yeong Il every day. Maternal love had been replaced with moral apathy, and his happiness had been extinguished by her tyranny. Yeong Il had been living in fear and oppression for the past six years, suffering in the grip of his stepmother. He was an unhappy child in dire need of parental love, in desperate need of the simplest love from anyone who would offer it.
Fear had made him an introverted student. He would sit quietly in class, aloof from the rest of his rambunctious classmates. He had no friends, and no one wanted to be his friend. His teachers had attempted to help him socialize with the other students, but by the end of the day, he would walk home by himself.
One day during the art lesson, the art teacher taught the class about the anatomy of a grasshopper so that the students could draw one. The next day, Yeong Il brought to class a wooden grasshopper, which he had carved at home, and shared it with his peers. The wooden grasshopper also jumped because Yeong Il had attached a small spring to it. The result was more than an art project; it was a piece of clever engineering.
The schoolteacher recalled that day and said, “Students like him are rare. If we guide him to the right path, then he could be a great engineer someday.”
She paused for a moment before continuing.
“But ever since last year, he has become more and more of a problem. He skips school on a regular basis and fights with his classmates. The other parents complain to me about him. He seems to cause trouble every other day. I just don’t know what to do with him.”
Jeong Jin Wu empathized with the schoolteacher’s disappointment.
“Comrade Judge, truthfully, I thought that I had done my best as his homeroom teacher. But I can’t neglect all the other students for Yeong Il’s sake.”
Self-reproach and sorrow cast a shadow over the schoolteacher’s face.
“Last Sunday, our school went on a spring picnic trip. The students had fun doing a treasure hunt, catching insects, and picking leaves and flowers. At lunchtime, I sat with my class, and we all opened our lunchboxes to eat. Just then, I realized that Yeong Il wasn’t sitting with us, so I looked around for him. I thought I saw him sitting here a moment ago… So I went looking for him around the entire park until I came upon a huge boulder next to a small brook. Yeong Il was sitting there!”
The schoolteacher took a moment to regain her composure before proceeding with the story.
She quietly approached the boulder and noticed that Yeong Il was sitting with his sister, Yeong Sun. They were sharing their lunches. Although they lived in different homes, they had been going to the same school, seeing each other every day but forced to act as strangers. Yeong Sun kept giving Yeong Il food that their mother had made for her. Rice cakes, fried vegetables, stir-fried beef, and bean sprouts. Their mother had prepared more food than Yeong Sun could eat. Yeong Il was on the verge of crying and could not control his chopsticks. Next to him was his lunch box, untouched, unopened. His stepmother had packed just rice and boiled spinach. Tears streamed down the schoolteacher’s face. She left the siblings and sat by the brook. Many thoughts raced through her mind. She realized that no matter how devoted a teacher was to her students and would, therefore, do whatever it took to help them succeed, that devotion waned in significance compared to the love between siblings. She realized that the parents had deprived the siblings of their love for each other and the siblings were the ones who suffered the most from their parents’ divorce.
“You may have used your best judgment in divorcing the parents, but I feel that separating these children was a crime. Comrade Judge, why did the court permit the divorce? Was it for the adults’ new life, their newfound happiness? Can there be happiness for parents who deprive their children of happiness?”
The backpack full of sand pressed down on Judge Jeong Jin Wu’s shoulders. He felt chills run down his back, a feeling colder than that of the river.
Did I give the wrong verdict that day? Is that why these memories keep haunting me? What if I hadn’t divorced the couple? The children may have been better off than they are now, but the wife, who was working in the mountains with her children in agony, would have had to live with Chae Rim. She wouldn’t want that. He had disrespected her, belittled her, and exploited her like a housemaid. For ten years, she had sacrificed her health and her youth for her husband. She had lost all sense of self-worth and, needless to say, her pride. After enduring her husband’s betrayal for all those years, she was not willing to forgive him.