The Taste of Lies Chapter 13

What Sangtae needed was protective coloration. Even if his insides were different, he needed to wear camouflage to at least look similar on the outside for life to become easier.

Youngmin also wore camouflage. And it wasn’t just him—everyone hides one or two fatal secrets and lives pretending to be ordinary.

Unless you’re a physiognomist or a police officer, you rarely look into another person’s eyes. Just like the baseball cap Sangtae refused to let go of, a neatly cut hairstyle would protect him, at least somewhat, from others’ gazes—Youngmin firmly believed that.

On one of his days off, Youngmin made up his mind. He gently coaxed Sangtae with the lure of a seaside drive and grilled East Coast fish. Sangtae, wary like a stray cat encountering a human for the first time, eventually fell for the bait. Youngmin drove over two mountains, followed the coast south for an hour, and pushed Sangtae into a barbershop in a town where the dialect was thicker in Gyeongsang-do than in Gangwon-do.

Good intentions are just that—they are not a necessary condition that guarantees good results.

Watching Sangtae throw a wild fit, Youngmin realized that proposition all too painfully.

The elderly barber, with cloudy eyes and equal treatment for everyone, without even asking “How would you like it cut?” simply ran his palm over Sangtae’s head, picked up the scissors, and gave him a close-cropped cut—or, in Sangtae’s words, a “glans cut.”

The barber, the potbellied man who had gotten his hair cut just before Sangtae, the grandfather in hanbok reading a newspaper on the sofa waiting for his turn, and every man they encountered on the way to the grilled fish restaurant while trying to calm down the enraged, frantic Sangtae—except for the balding men with no hair to cut—all had the exact same hairstyle. That egalitarian hairstyle was a tragedy for Sangtae.

Saying it was pretty, not just to soothe him but because he genuinely thought it was pretty, Youngmin earned twice the anger. It was then that he first learned that Sangtae’s blue eyes could turn purple when he was angry.

Even as they sat in the grilled fish restaurant and Youngmin placed flaked flounder on top of his rice, Sangtae’s scolding continued.

For a moment, Youngmin wondered if the reason Sangtae was ostracized might actually be his terrible personality, but at that age, kids live and die over a single strand of hair, so Youngmin listened in silence. And for nearly a month, he bought white-fleshed fish, seasoned and grilled it himself, and served it on the table with kimchi washed clean of any red pepper powder.

Sangtae’s anger finally subsided when he gained weight and his pallid cheeks took on a rosy hue.

“Haah…”

Youngmin sighed. If he hadn’t cut it in the first place, that would be one thing, but once cut, it had to be maintained regularly. It had been a month since the haircut, and only three days since his anger had subsided. It had taken over three weeks just to cool his temper. And now the time for another trim was approaching.

Should I learn hairdressing myself? He was troubled.

“Why are you sighing?”

Sangtae, mid-floss, caught Youngmin’s eyes in the mirror. If his thoughts were exposed, another storm of nagging would rain down. Maintaining a bland expression, Youngmin grabbed the first thing that came to mind.

“I was just amazed. That you actually use dental floss.”

“Well, of course I use it—do I use it fake?”

Fortunately, Sangtae didn’t read Youngmin’s mind. He laughed lightly and looped the thread around his fingers.

The synthetic fiber slid between his white, neatly angled molars. Scrape, scrape. It sounded like a smooth friction noise.

The sound also came from inside his own throat. Startled by the sound of himself swallowing, Youngmin rubbed his ear with his palm.

“Where did you learn that?”

“Learn what?”

“Using dental floss.”

After saying it, he realized the question was strange. Where did you learn to use dental floss? Why would he be curious about that?

Even an interrogation would fail if done this way.

Since being with Sangtae, Youngmin felt like he was getting dumber and dumber. Or perhaps he had always been dumb and was only now realizing it because of Sangtae. It was a continuous stream of things he shouldn’t say or do. He added a clumsy excuse.

“I tried it a couple of times out of curiosity, but it was hard. I prided myself on not having clumsy hands, but…”

“No wonder. The amount left seemed ambiguous.”

Sangtae muttered, looking at Youngmin in the mirror. Since his attempt at using floss had actually happened, Youngmin kept his mouth shut.

“I learned it in Kindergarten. You’d know it as preschool, I guess. What about you, Mister?”

“Kindergarten? Preschool?”

“Did I not mention it? I lived in Germany until 7th grade. So… in Hamburg.”

It was the first he’d heard of it. Youngmin was inwardly shocked enough to forget all his worries about the haircut. Just as Youngmin only revealed parts of his past, Sangtae, too, only offered scattered clues.

Putting together his past remarks: the guardian who passed away last year was his maternal grandmother, and his mother had sent Sangtae to her grandmother’s house when he was young. His blue eyes came from his paternal line. He’d never heard where his father was from.

It was extremely rare for Sangtae to talk about his past without getting agitated. Youngmin used interrogation techniques to naturally play along.

“Hamburg—so Germany? Is that your hometown?”

“If you can call the place where you were born and raised that.”

“What does that mean?”

“Even when I ran around the playground with friends as a kid, I felt a wall. It’s hard to explain… but anyway, that’s how it was. Born and raised, my mom, my dad, our house—everything was there, but I didn’t feel like I belonged to that town. You know, it’s all over the newspapers these days. Fake address registration. Exactly that. I had everything there, but I felt like I was treated as a fake resident. And when you feel that every day, every moment, every time you meet someone… in Korean terms, you lose affection.”

He wrapped the used floss in tissue and threw it away as he answered.

For Sangtae, that was quite a kind explanation, but Youngmin didn’t understand. Some emotions can only be understood by experiencing them firsthand. Without that experience, Youngmin couldn’t figure out what to say in response.

The two were both similar and different. People did not welcome their identities, but at least for one of them, keeping one’s mouth shut meant the identity wouldn’t be exposed. Because they looked similar on the outside.

Had he made a mistake cutting his hair? Or should he have bleached it blonde to make him look completely foreign, like a poisonous dart frog full of toxins?

Youngmin wanted to hear more of Sangtae’s story.

“So you came to Korea? To your mother’s country?”

“No.”

He shook his head.

“I came without knowing a single word of Korean. I didn’t even know I had a grandmother. I think my mother hated Korea. Though looking back now, maybe it wasn’t Korea but Mukhyeon she hated. Don’t you think? You’ve only been here three months, Mister, and you’re already sick of it.”

That was true. It definitely was.

Mukhyeon had a way of making people feel sick of it. Youngmin agreed.

“I was pushed here.”

At Sangtae’s words, Youngmin recalled the sea he’d seen on the day they went to get his hair cut. It meant that not only did he not particularly like his birthplace, but not even a fingernail’s worth of his own will had been reflected in the process of coming to his mother’s hometown. Like a foreign glass bottle washed up onto the sandy shore by the waves.

His blue eyes sank deep. Perhaps he, too, was thinking of the same thing, Youngmin thought.

“Tell me more. How did it end up like that? …I mean, if you’re okay with it.”

“It’s a boring reason, Mister. The man my mother was going to remarry hated me. You know, even animals do that? They say a new lion king kills the cubs before mating. Because if there are no cubs to care for, the females will bear their own.”

“Humans aren’t lions.”

“That man was.”

Despite the valid point, Sangtae just shrugged his shoulders up and down.

“He falsely accused me of touching his things, beat me up. My mother didn’t believe him… but she must have thought it wasn’t good to keep us together. She couldn’t send me to an orphanage, so she handed me over to blood relatives. I nodded a few times in front of a lawyer, and next thing I knew, I was on a plane. Unbelievable.”