Idol - Chapter 1
One lonely night, somewhere in the middle of a grove of oak trees that were slowly losing their yellowed leaves amidst the advent of winter, a young woman dressed in a red flannel coat and light-pink scarf stood looking closely at a tree trunk.
The fallen leaves crunched and bristled under the woman’s black, fashion-conscious boots that were peculiarly out-of-place in the pastoral landscape. She had flowing brown tresses that fanned out over the top of her coat, and long, slender legs that seemed slightly too thin for her body. Altogether she was in perfect health, with perfect body proportions save from that slight malformation.
The whistling wind caused her to tighten the scarf across her neck, and her white breath fanned out from her slightly pouting mouth and disappeared into the frigid air.
A brown leaf fluttered down from one of the trees, shaken by the wind. She plucked it out of the sky as it fell and smoothed it out, the dewy precipitation clinging to her mittens.
After a few seconds of walking, she seemed to have found her destination and crouched down, careful not to let her coat touch the musty ground, in front of the most regal oak tree. The branches above her head bowed down slightly, as if in respect to the anonymous guest.
The guest reached out a mittened hand and traced over the tree’s aged and gnarly trunk, where she was able to make out the faintest of indentations. Her finger found the slight groove and followed it along in a shape of a heart, eventually ending back where she had started.
Although the shape had disappeared long ago, due to the passage of time and a tree’s natural inclination to heal wounds, she could barely make out the rough outline of a crudely-drawn heart.
It had been drawn ten years ago, more than a decade in the past. She remembered because she was the one who had carved it.
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Seo Joo Hyun was 30 years old. She was proud of her life so far and intended to keep it that way. She had completed her education at a middle-tier college - it wasn’t exactly a name-value university, but it wasn’t one of the dregs of the system either, and it suited her just fine - and had gone straight to the public sector, where she had survived the rat race that ensued and had, after years of playing the game, managed to come out nearly on top. She wasn’t the biggest winner, exactly, but she hadn’t lost, either, and it suited her just fine as well.
She had majored in journalism in college. She had chosen the path because she grew up reading the paper every day and couldn’t really think of anything else to do. Also, it had held a certain cachet at the time, since public opinion had turned against politicians and in favor of the ‘investigative journalists’ that had ratted out the most corrupt ones in public office.
She read the articles and thought she would like to be one of those people who sat silent behind her desk, working quietly in silence, preparing for the next devastating kill.
That was what she had in mind when she enrolled into the School of Journalism.
For the next three-and-a-half years, she was taught how to conduct interviews, the difference between a ‘lede’ and a ‘graf’, and the proper way to format a news story. She wrote for the school paper, covering things like the resignation of a professor and the latest news from the Capitol regarding campaign finances. She even participated in one of the protests in front of the Capitol against the governor at the time, holding up placards against the repeal of collective bargaining for unions. She didn’t really know what it meant, but it was fun and her friend was going so she followed along.
It was exhilarating, but a small voice tugged on the back of her head, saying this isn’t what you signed up for.
The voice grew until eventually, she couldn’t ignore it anymore and decided to take matters into her own hands.
By that time, she was on the Board of Editors for the school newspaper, and she led a boardroom coup against the managing editor at the time and installed herself as Editor-In-Chief. It wasn’t particularly a conscientious thing to do, but she sought relief in the fact that the previous editor had been an idiot (and most everyone agreed to this fact).
One of the first policies she set as her role in the big chair was to establish clear guidelines for future coverage. No more “human-interest” angles where the articles were usually no more that fluffy pieces of semi-journalism that could hardly have been sold to Perez Hilton, let alone published at a reputable college paper.
The second thing she decreed was that every journalist on the payroll will refrain from having political opinions in public. From her years of working the beat, she knew what a dangerous thing party membership meant - it opened some doors, but closed many others. And in her eyes, it was a roadblock against her goal of expanding “whistle-blowing” coverage.
That was her third and most important decision she made as EIC - from now on, the paper would devote most of its space to investigative journalism. She hired competent writers and paid them well, not hesitating to dig into the coffers of the emergency fund to do so. She kept the lights on 24/7 and kept the employee break room filled with snacks and drinks.
Although there had been some outrage from the other members of the board, particularly from the ones who had opposed her election, but she soon shut them up when the paper scored its first big hit, against a Vice Chancellor who had been embezzling money towards his private funds. He was caught and sentenced to ten years in jail, and Seo Joo Hyun soon found herself on the other end of the interviewing table as other news organizations sought to get the scoop on this obscure college newspaper which had risen to stardom.
Over the next year, until her graduation, the paper cranked out one scandal after another, not hesitating to expose people in the highest places to ensure that its investigation would be 100% sound. Joo Hyun was particularly a stickler in this regard; if one of the claims couldn’t be backed up by at least three sources of information, it wouldn’t be published. This led to several frustrating situations where the entire editorial staff knew something to be true, but couldn’t publish thanks to the three-sources rule.
It was a shame, but Joo Hyun knew that the slightest slip-up could cause catastrophe.
Catastrophe came less than a week before her graduation.
The paper had published a particularly scathing story about some professors and how they were purposely causing their students to fail, thereby raising their own pay in the process (their pay was decided by tenure, not by success rate). The article seemed to be perfectly sound, and in fact, no one caught the mistake for a week, but when someone did, the newsroom came upon a veritable shitstorm.
One of the sources the newspaper had interviewed had fervently declined to make his face public, so the interview had taken place with a sheet between the two sides of the table. The source was credited as ‘anonymous’ and had gone out as such. Since his claims had been backed up by two other sources, Joo Hyun hadn’t been too worried - until someone found out that the ‘anonymous’ source had, in fact, been one of the newspaper’s writers, who was teased into the role by one of the assistant editors (whom Joo Hyun had never fully trusted) into ‘dressing up’ for the part.
The newspaper immediately went into damage control mode; Joo Hyun fired the editor immediately and put the writer on administrative leave (it hadn’t been his fault, and Joo Hyun knew all too well about the pressures that greenhorn journalists faced on the job). It wasn’t enough, however - the circulation dropped by a precipitous 30% and advertisers cancelled one space after another.
When she received her diploma, there was a chorus of boo’s from the crowd, and some of the professors turned away from her when it was time to shake their hands.
It was the worst day in her life.
She left the newspaper in shambles and it never fully recovered. By the time she had taken her first job, it had settled into third place in the circulation race and had cut half of its staff.
Joo Hyun never mentioned this incident in her resume and subsequent job interviews. It was a time better left covered under the darkness.
Because her resume was stellar - a cum-laude GPA, various extracurricular activities, and no major infractions of any kind, she had no problem landing a job at the Joongang Ilbo, even amid the turmoil that was currently rocking the newspaper industry. She was hired and placed into the Department of Culture and Media, where she began a spectacular rise amidst the ranks. She had reached the position of Editorial Chief before she resigned, tired of the political infighting that she had vowed to destroy in the first place.
She left with a perfect record and five-figure pension, and she was successful enough that she would never have to work again at the age of 30.
However, that wasn’t what Seo Joo Hyun was trained to do, and she immediately sought new work in the form of a public-sector job. She found it in the Korean Communications Standards Commission, who called her in for an interview. She was sufficiently polite and calm enough to get in the interviewer’s good graces, and she was phoned a day after and told that she would be hired, as the new Vice-President of the KCSC and its subsidiary, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.
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The day after she got the call confirming her position on the KCSC and MOGEF board, she visited the oak grove in the middle of a park she had frequented since her college days. The Han River flowed a few meters away and the water taxis blared their horns as the swan boats that plied the river kept out of their way.
She ran her finger along the heart one final time. “Yun Ho,” she murmured quietly. “I wonder what you’re doing.”
---
Jung Yun Ho had been one of the editors at the newspaper during the time that she had been Editor-In-Chief. He was also the one behind the interview scandal and the one who had been subsequently fired.
He had also been her first love.
The first time she had met him, it had been on accident - he had spilled coffee all over her notebook at the local coffee shop, and she had looked up into a pair of strikingly hazelnut-brown eyes.
He had apologized, paid for her own coffee, and spent the next five hours engaged in an intellectual discussion about the benefits of small government.
Joo Hyun found him fascinating, and over time he became the kind of person you always went to when you had personal problems, because you could trust him to always give you useful advice. They were often on point, blunt, and when needed, criticizing.
He also introduced Joo Hyun to marijuana. Although she frowned at his near-constant imbibing of the weed at first, she relented after reading through professional studies that claimed that marijuana did not have serious negative health effects on the body, and even served as a brain stimulant. They smoked together about once a week, and Joo Hyun found that her best writing often seemed to come out on the wake of their pot stints.
When Joo Hyun suggested that he join her newspaper, he jumped at the chance - he started out on the bottom rung, and made his way near the top, just as she had done. This fact pleased her and she permitted him to kiss her on the cheek afterwards.
Although Joo Hyun trusted Yun Ho with a lot of things, she refused to have sex with him on principle. He protested at first, saying that sex was a normal, healthy part of a relationship, but she disagreed. The closest they ever got to intimacy was that kiss on the cheek.
The whole heart incident had been one of their crazy ideas, borne out of a liberal quantity of marijuana and not a small amount of alcohol on his part. It had been very dark, very late, and they were on the Han River Promenade, strolling as they always did after their smoking sessions to clear their heads a little. The tree had caught their eye for some reason (there’s not always a reason behind everything you do when you’re high), and Yun Ho just happened to have a pocketknife with him at that moment. Together, they crouched down and carved their initials into the trunk - SJH and JYH, wrapped around each other with a crudely drawn heart encircling both names.
This was when they had thought they’d be together for the rest of their lives.
Then, the scandal broke, and Joo Hyun’s image of Yun Ho - both personal and professional - sank to their lowest depths. When she had no other choice but to fire him, she did it with a heavy heart. She knew he had done it only to not disappoint her, and it was a reminder as to how personal relationships could screw up professional ones.
The last time she had heard from him, five years ago, was when he had left a very drunken voice message on her home phone about how he was going abroad to California to study.
She hadn’t let another man into her life since.
---
A few feet away, oblivious to her presence, a lone man was strolling with a guitar strapped around his back. He paused at the water’s edge and stared at the reflection of the city lights below. Everything was quiet except for the occasional drone of a water taxi, making its final rounds of the night.
He was tall, but not exceptionally so, and had jet-black hair that he had teased into spikes, although it was tastefully done and fit him perfectly. His face was slightly bony, his eyes a little too far forward, but he was handsome, nonetheless. He had a gold bracelet around his right wrist and the slightest hint of a henna tattoo that was currently covered by his blazer.
From somewhere behind him, a car horn honked. It came from a giant, grey van with blacked-out windows, and it was currently idling in the parking lot a few meters away.
The man with the guitar turned away from the river and half-jogged towards the open passenger door, shoving his guitar in the back seat. He closed the door and the van soon sped off.
His name was Jung Yong Hwa, and he was an idol.