I became alone.
Well, not entirely — Bongguk was still next door, completely absorbed in Diablo — but I was more focused on the band and still doing the Jeju gig, so I muddled along one way or another.
Giyoon and I stayed in occasional contact, not quite friends, not quite anything — just fine, in a low-key way.
The summer of 2002 was such a blur because of the World Cup that I barely remember how it went, and around that winter, Giyoon’s shop started struggling.
She’d opened a second location in Nonhyeon-dong but got scammed on the lease deposit and lost a big chunk of money before the place even opened.
Cash stopped flowing well through the Hongdae store, so I threw whatever help I could at it using my Samsung Card and LG Card.
The pattern was: charge 3 million won on my card, and once that 3 million came back in cash, use it and pay the card off before it went overdue the next month.
That worked fine for about a year, no problems.
But at some point the pattern started slipping — 3 million became 1.6 million, 2.8 million became 1.2 million — and before I knew it my card debt had ballooned to 30 million won.
I scraped together what I could and managed to pay off around 10-something million, but with roughly 20 million still tied up, Giyoon went bankrupt.
For the next four or five years I’d run into her occasionally and watch her sink further into the hole, which was hard to see, but honestly I wasn’t in any position to judge — all I can say is those were rough days.
Most of the money coming in from the Jeju watercolor-instructor gig went straight to covering the card debt, and between interest and late fees I was just barely scraping by.
Then out of nowhere, Bongguk — who’d heard about it from somewhere — said:
“Hey, you know about the government-funded training program?”
“Huh? What program?”
“If you go to some school and take classes, they pay you living expenses.”
“For free?”
“Not just free — they actually pay you.”
“Wait, what? Seriously?”
We signed up without a second thought and started attending classes.
This guy quit within a week saying it was boring, but I stuck it out for two months.
We learned HTML basics, some Illustrator, some basic Photoshop — nowhere near enough for actual professional work, honestly, just a string of time-filler classes.
Still, I got a little money and could eat cheap lunches at the nearby civil servants’ cafeteria, so for me at the time, it wasn’t a bad deal.
Discipline: Half Brothers
-
Alone
-
Half brothers
I met Bongguk in the same major at Hakshow.
We just clicked.
He was a pretty skilled skateboarder, actually had a name for himself in that scene, and thanks to him I got into skateboarding too, and got exposed to that whole side of music.
Not long before I went into the army, we started a band together, and it was genuinely great.
After I got an early discharge from the army, we got back in touch and made it official.
Jongwook-hyung joined on drums.
We were all in the studio watching a snowboarding video one day, and a song in the soundtrack titled
“Brothers from Different Mother”
inspired the band name — Half Brothers.
Within just a few months we’d written a dozen or so songs together and started making the rounds of Hongdae, auditioning wherever we could find a place to play.
There was a club near a subway station — could we play every Wednesday?
Pay was unlimited beer plus 5,000 won cash.
We played there with other bands for a few months, though honestly there were so few people there it felt embarrassing to even take that 5,000 won.
We’d just watch each other’s sets, cheer each other on, drink flat free beer, and hang around goofing off, then head back to the studio for a round of soju and talk through the night.Around then, Lee Sungwoo from No Brain reached out and asked if we wanted to join a label called Munhwasagidan (Culture Con Artists).
No reason on earth to say no.
Shows Munhwasagidan put on would still pull in around a hundred people — I got my first real taste of the thrill of being onstage, we started touring outside Seoul, and life took on that broke-but-somehow-vibey shape you’d expect from an indie band.
Then Jongwook-hyung went missing.
Seokyul — now the vocalist of Kingston Rudieska — moved to bass, and I moved to drums.
Later, Haewon (drummer from Beach Valley) joined on guitar, Myeonggwon joined too, and I moved back to bass.
We released a split single and kept going.
Right around when I would’ve called it smooth sailing, Rage Bone stole Haewon from us.
Bastards.
Genuinely, actual bastards.
No matter how powerless or unknown a band is, poaching someone else’s member like that makes you a bastard, full stop.
Anyway, I moved back to drums, but something wasn’t the same anymore — some kind of drive had drained out of me, and I just lost steam.They say everything comes down to timing. The band, which had been limping along in a half-hearted state for years by that point, suddenly got a jolt when Bongguk snapped out of it right around when I was getting married — he was suddenly thrashing to make it work for real. And, wouldn’t you know it, that was exactly when I became unable to meet that expectation.
Such is the life of a married man, hahaha.
Miyoung and Bongguk fought over it for a long stretch too. From Bongguk’s side, he felt like Miyoung had stolen me away; from Miyoung’s side, she felt like Bongguk had been the one hogging me.
The popularity of one man, hahaha.
It took the two of them more than ten years to patch things up, and around that same time I left the band.
I went through plenty of bands one way or another after that — some more fun, some more exciting, some more profound — but Half Brothers was, I don’t know, just me. Myself, distilled.This year, late summer 2026, Bongguk came to visit Australia with his best friend Eunbyeol. We’ve all gotten old.