The Sindaebang House Part Two: The New Roomate

When I was living in the Sindaebang House, my circumstances were not ideal but generally stable.

The Ex-Boyfriend was serving in the Korean military, far away in 평택 at Camp Humphrey - he was a KATUSA soldier, due to high English scores on his exams and incredibly good luck. Though this meant he had more leave than a typical Korean soldier, the military doesn’t leave much space for spontaneous meetings and we had to make plans on a week to week basis, ready to cancel at the last minute if he was required to train for something or attend a meeting.

The Ex-Boyfriend’s military shirt.

As for me, I was working at The Agency* as a full time employee on top of being a signed model. When they offered me this position, I was told I would be a normal office worker but could be excused whenever I was booked for a job, seeing as they were now my model agency. In reality, I was held in their power, the promise of a bright career and talent development dangled in front of me. Being a new, naive model + new, inexperienced employee at a major entertainment agency = lowest rung of the Korean office hierarchy. Simple math.

There’s plenty to say about my time at The Agency later.

For now, it’s only necessary to have an idea of how my daily schedule went.

Because of the low pay I received as an office worker at The Agency, I took out extra english tutoring jobs in the mornings.

Every morning at seven am, I taught English classes to senior-level businessmen at Samsung and Amore Pacific, wrapped at eight am, caught the subway to Apgujeong Rodeo and made it to The Agency by nine am.

I typically arrived one hour earlier than the required punch-in time because my Korean business speaking skills were raw and I needed the extra time to decipher emails, write reports and prepare for the day.

Work began at ten am and was officially closing hour by six pm, but I left the office most days about nine or ten pm, depending on the office atmosphere and when our team manger chose to leave.

Home about eleven pm after eating something on the way. Washed up and in bed by midnight. Wake at six am to do it again.

For those first few months at the Sindaebang House, coming back to my room after the day was heavenly. I would quietly open the front door to avoid waking 할머니, sneak upstairs past my roommate’s door and happily collapse on my bed. I remember looking at the white painted ceiling, feeling relief to have made it through another twenty-four hours and knowing I had my own little space to come back to each night. Sometimes 할머니 would catch me coming in and she’d cut up some fresh fruit for me. Eating chilled watermelon with a kind grandmother at midnight was something I really needed back then.

As I mentioned in the first installment of this story, my room was a double-occupancy. I would lay on my side, look over at the empty bed and smile contentedly. I hoped no one would move in, especially if they knew I was already here. Maybe I would have this place all to myself until I decided to move out in a year or two.

Like most things in life, you can never expect the unexpected. And also like most things in life, you never know what’s going to get you in the end.

I came back to The Sindaebang House after a difficult day.

I dragged my feet upstairs, past the closed door of my Indonesian roommate (she was a student and stayed holed up in her room whenever she wasn’t out) and opened the door to my room to reveal someone sitting at the previously vacant second desk.

She was a small woman, with a rough pixie cut that made her look boyish. I remember she had very pale skin, extra-whitened by her makeup, and was dressed in a casual business suit as if she had just come back from the office herself. When I opened the door, she turned and gave me a wide smile.

“You are Becky?” She asked.

I nodded and said, “I’m guessing you’re the new roommate.”

She also nodded. We each were quietly making judgements of the other to determine how the relationship was going to go. As in all new meetings in Korea, you have to feel out where you stand. After a short, polite conversation, it was revealed that she was in her 30s, an 언니 to me, and worked at an office in Gangnam. “I’m not home often,” she assured me, “I’m usually in the office all day and on the weekends I visit my parents.”

“No problem,” I said, adjusting to the new living situation with some resignation, “I also work late and usually am out on the weekends, too.”

We smiled at each other again and then individually prepared to go to bed. That night I stared at the ceiling, hearing her breathe deeply in her sleep, and sighed. My comfort and freedom had been so short-lived.

Over the next few days, however, any reservations I had about Roommate Unnie were dissipating. As good as her word, she sometimes came home even later than I did, quietly getting ready for bed to avoid waking me. She was gone most weekends and would eat out of the house almost every day. It wasn’t uncommon for us to not speak to each other at all for days because one of us would either already be asleep or out of the house. I was considerate of her space and she was of mine.

The Indonesian roommate and I were on good terms. We started ordering in and ate together on the rare occasions we were home at the same time. It was fun having someone to talk to who didn’t consider herself better than me (i.e. some office mates and other models). We’d chat and laugh in the living room over 떡볶이 and 순대. Roommate Unnie would come upstairs, see us and wave, then disappear into our room. She never joined us; maybe because we were speaking in English, though I could happily translate for her - a duty I took on whenever she and the Indonesian roommate needed to communicate. She chose to keep isolated from us, which wasn’t unusual given she was older than both us.

But I was growing more uncomfortable around Roommate Unnie as time went by.

I stared to notice that she never looked me fully in the face. If we had those few moments where we would chat a little, just the usual “how was your day?” she would oblige with polite conversation but her eyes would dart left and right, never settling on my face, as though trying to keep me from seeing into her mind.

She kept a strange trophy under her pillow and slept on it every night. She showed it to me one day when we were talking, taking out a long, clear plastic trophy that had a strange poem written on it. I couldn’t understand what it said - lots of flowery language congratulating her for being faithful to whatever the organization was.

“This is very precious to me,” she told me, before slipping it back under her pillow. I don’t think she was showing off - I think she was warning me not to snoop through her things.

Something I never did. I’ve had many roommates over the years and crossing the boundary between Mine and Yours was not something I was interested in testing with anyone. But I did clean our room, living room, kitchen and shared bathroom every week. In a weird way it might have made her suspicious of me.

I started cleaning the whole second floor on Sundays once I noticed that no one besides myself ever cleaned. Not at all. Not when they left hair in the shower. Not when they left fruit peels that clung stickily to the sink. Not even until Roommate Unnie’s laundry spilled all over the floor, blocking the bedroom door from opening all the way.

But I haven’t mentioned the extra roommates that I discovered on the second floor. The kitchen was a tiny space, with an old fridge that buzzed loudly at all hours, a gas stove with two, blackened coil tops, and pitiful counter space. When I first moved in, I told myself that I would cook at home as much as possible but due to my wretched work schedule I hadn’t stepped foot into the kitchen once - and such a small kitchen would only allow one foot in at a time. It didn’t take too long to find out that the shoe-box kitchen was not suitable for cooking.

It also didn’t take long to notice that, to my complete and abject horror, anytime I turned on the single kitchen light, tiny cockroaches scurried for cover. They lived in the sink, under the sink, in cracks in the walls, in the windowsill, under the unwashed dishes.... At first, I thought I had imagined seeing them but cockroaches aren’t modest creatures - they make their presence known.

It astonished me that my human roommates didn’t seem to care at all.

“Did you see the cockroaches in the kitchen?” I asked Roommate Unnie one day.

She shrugged, “I’m not bothered by some bugs,” she said.

“Did you see the cockroaches in the kitchen?” I asked the Indonesian roommate.

“Yea…” she said, almost apologetically, inching back towards her room, “We should probably do something about that.”

I immediately ran for Daiso and returned armed with cockroach traps to stick around the house. I changed them out every other week, tiny cockroach carcasses piling up like little mounds of black stones. I vacummed as often as I could, finding dead bugs crumpled beneath the sofa in the living room, under my bed, beside the fridge. It was a skin-crawling battle but I’m proud to say that I finally won. It took nearly three months before my traps started turning out empty and I accepted that the second floor was finally vacated of the many-legged squatters.

Things began to change when Roommate Unnie started spending more and more time at home. At first, she would be away all day, sometimes at night and on the weekends, but as time went by, I would come home to her laying in bed, looking very much how I’d left her in the morning. She started watching tv in the living room in her pajamas, playing variety shows loudly at all hours of the night, laughing riotously as if she were an audience member in the theater and not a roommate of two other girls who were usually asleep at three am.

When she wasn’t in the living room or watching tv, I’d catch her sitting on her bed, staring at the wall. The first time, her blank face heavily whitened by her makeup, frightened me.

I asked her cautiously, “Unnie… are you alright?”

At my voice, she shook herself suddenly and turned to smile at me.

“Oh,” she said, “everything’s fine.”

Once I walked into the room to see her shaking her head violently, facing left and right, making a low “ahhh” sound. She ignored me, next shaking her hands as if flicking off water, then finished her strange routine by closing her eyes and sighing loudly. I didn’t say anything and just crept past her to my side of the room. She opened her eyes and turned her head in my direction.

“Had a nice day?” she inquired with a smile, her eyes staring at the wall.

I nodded wordlessly. I began to find her smiles unnerving.

The story will continue in my next post “The Sindaebang House: The Knife”

*Name hidden because this is a very well-known company.