Discipline: Miyoung

Screwed.
Nam Giyoon:
“I don’t need you, put Lee Donghoon on.”
I had no idea what to do — never been through anything like it in my life — but one thing was clear: I was the reigning champion of spinelessness.
Ask literally anyone on the planet how to handle a call from your ex the night before your wedding, and there’s exactly one right answer.
I dodged it and tried to fumble my way through vaguely instead.
The bare minimum would’ve been
“hey, are you out of your fucking mind? What the hell do you think you’re doing calling me right now”
— and I couldn’t even manage that.
For the five-ish years between our breakup and meeting Miyoung, we’d run into each other occasionally and talk, and whenever I subtly hinted at maybe getting back together and trying again, she wouldn’t even give it a second thought — and then the night before my wedding, THIS is what she pulls?
You absolute — argh, argh.
Miyoung already knew I was tangled up with Giyoon over money, and figured, well, what’s done is done, let’s just leave it in the past — she didn’t make a huge deal out of it.
Some time later I deleted a text thread with Giyoon — I think it was one of those
“let’s just end this nicely”
kind of conversations, and even then I apparently couldn’t get my act together enough to just tell her flat-out to get lost.
I figured there was nothing good that could come of Miyoung seeing it, so I deleted it.
Except Miyoung found out anyway.
All hell broke loose.
That’s it, this girl’s done, you’re done too — I’ll handle every bit of this myself, she said, and sent Giyoon a formal notice and started actually collecting on the debt.
After a dozen-plus emails back and forth, Nam Giyoon was made to wire 500,000 won a month into Miyoung’s account until the whole debt was cleared.
As I remember it, that went on for maybe 7-8 months, close to a year, and then the payments started coming in irregular amounts — 300,000, 200,000, 270,000 — at which point Miyoung said, fine, that’s enough, we’ll call it even, get lost — and the whole affair wrapped up more or less there.
I ended up feeling about two inches tall.

Wedding day.
Out front of the wedding hall, Hyeonbeom, Sharon, and Jongjae were asleep.
They were supposed to sing at the ceremony, and apparently they were so worried about drinking too much and oversleeping that they just slept out there in front of the venue.
Bongguk emceed, and otherwise it went off just like any ordinary Korean wedding — smooth and fast.
The mix in the room — punks, painters, my students, elderly relatives from the countryside, all jumbled together — made for a genuinely strange scene.
One little kid actually started crying at the sight of smoky eye makeup and someone’s wild rooster-red hair.
For the wedding song, Hyeonbeom sang
“Drinking and Drive”
by Business.
Miyoung looked especially beautiful that day.
She’d gone to the salon at dawn — after the nightmare from the wedding photo shoot two weeks earlier, where the damn salon had wrecked her makeup so badly I barely recognized her and walked into the wrong room.
“You’re supposed to actually look at the person’s face — instead they just slapped it on like some assembly-line formula, like a claw machine spitting out dolls.”
So at dawn she called Yeonkyung, who showed up with her own makeup kit and did a simple, precise job hitting just the points that made Miyoung look her best.
We skipped the reception — if we’d done one, we wouldn’t have made it to the honeymoon flight.
We left all the cleanup to our friends and family, and headed straight from the wedding hall to the airport.
In the limo to the airport, cold in her wedding dress, she’d thrown my jersey on over it and was going through the gift envelopes with a dead-serious face — and watching her, it hit me: oh.
Oh.
I’m married.
This is my wife.
This is the person who, over the not-quite-a-year we’d been together, pushed me so hard and drove this whole thing forward so fast I never even got the chance to stop and think about what was happening — you.
You’re my wife.
I think that’s probably exactly what I fell for — that force, that drive I don’t have myself.
That’s clearly what got me.

My third girlfriend, and my last.
There’s something I’ve always said: a crazy bitch is fine — a fucking bitch, never.
Miyoung’s a crazy bitch.
That’s exactly why I like her.
Miyoung was a web designer, working a contract job, decent salary, at the SK Tower in Jongno.
One day I called her and said I was heading out to Yangpyeong that day to see my mom and dad — and she said she was coming too.
Why?
Why not?
No, I mean, why would you come to my parents’ house?
What’s weird about a friend visiting a friend’s house?
Hmm…
I thought about it and had nothing to say back.
I called my mom.
Mom, I’m coming today.
Okay, drive safe.
Yeah, and I’m bringing a friend.
Oh, who?
Bongguk?
No, someone else.
Who?
I said, someone else.
I hung up.

I went to Jongno around when Miyoung’s workday ended, met up with her, and we got on the subway toward Yangpyeong.
We got off at Guksu Station, and to my surprise, my older sister was there waiting to pick us up.
We drove together and pulled into the yard at my mom’s place, and there were my older sister, Moonhee, my mom and dad, my brothers-in-law, my nieces and nephews — everyone had gathered.
My mom had figured it out.
Damn it.
She’d spread the word that I was bringing a girl, and everyone had come all the way out to Yangpyeong to gawk.
I could’ve died.

A few days later, Miyoung’s parents called my mom’s place in Yangpyeong, saying something like,
“our daughter had no manners at all, going all the way out there empty-handed,”
and sent a huge box of abalone, crab, and premium Korean beef out to Yangpyeong as a gift.
And then they wanted to meet.
While I had absolutely no idea how or why any of this was spiraling the way it was, my brother-in-law announced he knew a good Japanese restaurant in Samseong-dong and just went ahead and booked it as the spot for the formal parents’ meeting.
I got some genuinely good sushi out of it by sheer accident, so no complaints there, but I had absolutely no idea how I was supposed to calm any of these people down.

That fall, Miyoung went ahead and booked a wedding hall.
Said dragging things out never ends well, let’s just knock it out fast — lured me out with
“let’s go get free food at a wedding buffet,”
took me to Cheonggiwa Wedding Hall, and signed the contract right there on the spot.
Around September we found a place and moved in as newlyweds-to-be.
Without telling me, she took my official seal, went down to the district office, and finished filing the marriage registration herself.
Yeah, she’s crazy.
No question about it.
And yet somehow I couldn’t put up any resistance and just kept getting dragged along — but I liked it, so I couldn’t say no.
Can’t really explain it beyond that.

The night before the wedding, me, Miyoung, Hyeonbeom, and Yeonkyung were having drinks at our place.
A call came in for me, and Yeonkyung picked it up.
“Hello? Who is this? You want to talk to Lee Donghoon?”
Miyoung asked Yeonkyung,
“Who is it?”
“Says her name is Nam Giyoon.”
“Who?”
“Nam Giyoon. She wants Lee Donghoon.”
Miyoung got up and took the phone.
“Who is this?”
“It’s Nam Giyoon. Put Lee Donghoon on.”
I’m screwed!

One day in late summer, I heard someone was playing a show at Rolling Hall in Hongdae and went out to check it out.
I was chatting with a friend about this and that when something at the edge of my downward line of sight kept nagging at me, so I looked down.
There was some small, pretty girl crouched down smoking a cigarette, and when I looked down at her she looked up at me and — whether it was because of me or the sunlight — scrunched up her face and said something I don’t really remember.
All that stuck with me was a vague, intense impression, and then I forgot about it.
The following summer, the moment I finished paying off the debt to Moonhee, I quit GST — handed the practice room off to a junior, and moved into a rooftop room in Gwangheungchang.
I’d been at GST a year and a half, and my plan was to stretch the 5 million won severance payout over a year or two.
Since the rooftop room had been paid for out of the money from clearing out the practice room, I had no rent to worry about, so as long as I didn’t go out drinking and acting like an idiot, it was plenty.
That summer was brutally hot, and the rooftop room was basically a sauna.
I’d soak about ten towels in water, fold them into brick shapes, and stack them neatly in the freezer.
Around 5pm, once the radiant heat really started pouring in, I’d pull one frozen towel out and unfold it — it’d crack open, still holding its shape, into a wide towel-sized sheet.
Take your shirt off, drape it over your shoulders, and the heat would back off for a while.
You had to run the fan on low with it, though — on high it’d just drag hot air along with it and cut the effect in half.

I was holed up in that rooftop room studying JSP and Flash more seriously, investing in myself for whatever my next way of making a living would turn out to be, whenever that ended up happening.
One night I got a call from Sharon.
What are you doing?
Studying.
I’m coming over.
No.
About an hour later, the iron stairs up to the rooftop went clanging and banging.
Ugh — I told her not to come.
Sharon, Yeongran, and some girl I didn’t know showed up at my door completely wasted, each holding a plastic bag stuffed with a few bottles of soju and beer.
The drinking went on for a while.
Sharon and Yeongran passed out, and I ended up talking with the girl I didn’t know until almost morning — the two of us eventually fell asleep in front of the kitchen.
That winter, after a show wrapped up and we were at the afterparty, that same girl showed up.
We drank together for a while and went our separate ways.
She said she still had my drumstick bag and asked when the next show was.
After that she started coming up to the rooftop a lot.
It felt like a lot of pressure.
I was in the middle of studying, and I figured it was an important stretch of my life, so I wanted to cut back on drinking and going out — and honestly I had no money either, and wasn’t in any headspace for a relationship.
When I kept telling her to stop coming by so much, she started talking mutual friends of ours into it instead, showing up with 7 or 8 people at a time.
There was no turning them away once they showed up loaded down with samgyeopsal.
Ugh.
Am I getting dragged into this again?
One morning, the guys who’d all crashed at my place started peeling off one by one to head home, until it was just her and me left.
I told her straight: don’t come anymore!
She left.
That same night, the iron stairs went clanging and banging again.
It was her.
Both hands full — suitcases.
And that’s how we ended up living together.
Still are, to this day.
My wife, Miyoung.