When I re-enrolled as a third-year student, I ended up going out to Jeju as a watercolor instructor for Chorok Danggeun — weekends only, 1.5 million won, cha-ching.
Money aside, Jeju was genuinely great, and I got to fly as much as I could ever want.
The routine was: fly out Saturday, take the first flight back Monday morning, and make it to my first class Monday.
Sometimes a storm would hit and shut down Jeju airport, and whenever a small plane managed to take off, people would flip their standby tickets over and stack them in a pile so they could board in order.
I was in and out of that airport so often that I got friendly with the staff, who’d sometimes slip my standby ticket to the front of the line, and I’d fly back up in business class on a free upgrade, eating a Jeju wheat-and-barley bun for breakfast.
That fall, Half Brothers took part in the street art festival — which basically meant setting up a stage in front of Hongdae’s main gate, screaming our lungs out, and getting off.
Same day, my classmate Suyeon did a performance with her friend Giyoon.
Not all that different from us, really — they doused themselves in paint, danced, and got off, and apparently that counted as a performance too.
The afterparty went to a club called Jaksal where Giyoon worked part-time.
Jaksal became our hangout for the next year or so — a place to drink through the night and then finish the day at a small bar called Yennalgip for one last round as a hangover cure.
One day Bongguk and I were drinking soju at Jaksal and came up short on cash.
Giyoon must have noticed, because she came around back and slipped seventeen thousand won into my back pocket.
She told me later she did it so I wouldn’t feel embarrassed about being broke.
Then around winter, it got so cold that everyone ended up crashing at my studio all at once.
We had the heater running, all huddled up drinking together, and one by one people passed out and found a spot to crash.
Giyoon and I stayed up chatting, and she asked me to go out with her.
And that’s just how it started, from that day on.
Not long after, Suyeon and Giyoon had been living together in a studio in Sangsu-dong, but Giyoon moved out and came to live at my place.
And so began the slightly odd cohabitation of Bongguk, me, and Giyoon.
When spring came, Giyoon started saying strange things.
She said she wanted to run a shop, started poring over the flea-market listings every week, and eventually signed a lease on a storefront on the ground floor of Sangsangmadang, down the parking-lot alley.
It was a sublease with rent north of 3 million won a month, and since she wasn’t the actual leaseholder, she couldn’t even register a card reader in her own name — she had to borrow the original tenant’s registration to use it.
It was genuinely unstable, reckless, the kind of move that wouldn’t have been surprising to see collapse and leave us out on the street the very next day.
Every night at 1am we’d stop drinking, catch a taxi to Dongdaemun, and sweep through the wholesale markets.
The shop filled up with stock fast — I put up the signage and lighting, and went to Euljiro to have a custom 4-meter circular clothing rack made and set it up in the center of the store.
One early morning while we were still getting ready to open, a group of girls, wasted from the club, wandered into the shop while we were still sorting clothes and asked if it was open for business yet.
A bit later, another group came through and bought stuff too.
From the very next day on, it was insanely busy.
The place did incredibly well.
Rent wasn’t even a worry anymore — after hitting the wholesale market at midnight every night, every day started to feel like some kind of pipe dream, and I was eating premium beef short rib — the kind you’d maybe get once or twice a year — basically every single day.
That’s how I became someone juggling a clothing shop, the Jeju watercolor gig, the band, and clubbing all night.
About a year later, maybe things had just grown distant, but we broke up.