Aoi (あおい)

아오이

10. Aoi (あおい)

Yu Hui Jung

A month’s worth of tuberculosis medication cost 9,900 won, or about 8.70 US dollars today. Part of that was thanks to the Christmas Seals we’d bought when I was young. I boarded the bus with a thick packet of medicine, taking a seat where the sunlight filtered in. At my wits’ end, I stared blankly out the window.

Should I go to graduate school? Should I sit for the government employees’ examination? Or perhaps pursue another official certification? Whatever I did, I would need money. But I was broke and I didn’t have anyone to turn to.

The medicine made my body feel heavy and languid. When I went to the bathroom, my urine came out orange. The doctor urged me not to “overdo it” for a while. TB was just another disease, one that would get better as long as I ate and slept well and remembered to take my medication. But it was going to be some time before it did get better.

To get my mind off of this unwelcome torpor, I rented a copy of the movie Calmi Cuori Appassionati from the video store. I knew the story from the book, but I was curious how the movie version would be.

Resting my arm behind my neck, I lay crosswise over my bed. The female lead was a character named Aoi who worked at a jewelry shop in Milan. I suddenly found myself wishing that I could work with jewelry like she did.

I raced over to register for the appraisal certification program at the Korea Gem Institute at Namdaemun Market. I also immediately applied at the Korea Intellectual Property Office to trademark the name “Aoi”—without the help of a patent attorney.

In Japanese, the word aoi means “blue.” My mind drifted into visions of its being a leading brand name for blue-colored gemstones like sapphire and aquamarine. I had to get this in motion somehow.

For my first class project, I bought 0.5-carat and 0.3-carat cubic zirconia pieces for 500 won (about 45¢) each from an accessory shop in the market’s basement. When these cheap gemstones were placed next to expensive diamonds, they were difficult to tell apart.

The reason the two stones are assigned such different values can be easily understood: cubic zirconia is mass-produced in factories and is common enough for anyone to buy, whereas you have to dig through 200 to 250 tons of earth and stone in a mine to pick out single-carat diamonds (0.2g).

If you ever have to tell the two apart, you can by placing them upside-down over a line drawn on a sheet of paper. As light passes through different materials, it is refracted at different angles. Goldsmiths use the Tolkowsky technique to angle the diamond so that all of the light that passes over it from above is reflected upward.

So if you turn it over, the black line underneath should not show through. Cubic zirconium merely mimics a diamond’s form; the rate of refraction is different, so the line is visible. But the fakes grow more sophisticated by the day, driven by an arms race of sorts between those who try to pass the fakes off as real and those who seek genuine diamonds.

Fraudsters make their living by mocking the desires of those who wish to have precious things without paying much for them. What makes such people appear all the more like common hoodlums is the grisly reality of the places where diamonds are produced.

The everyday acts of violence, exploitation, and corruption, the bloody civil wars over mining rights, and the diamonds themselves, shining brightly in show windows, heedless of the horrors of the human world.

That fall, I was certified as a gem appraiser. My job involved distinguishing genuine gems from fake ones and assigning them grades. But fate did not keep me on that path for long. Both my certification and the “Aoi” name ended up going unused.

It was when I accepted the words of the Buddha that I discovered a new meaning in diamonds, things that I had simply regarded as little beads of avarice. In Buddhism, the diamond is seen as something too hard for anyone to scratch, something whose surface cannot be dented.

In this sense, it signifies the nameless true mind, which is neither noisy nor deluded or wrong, and the self-nature that destroys all defilements. The human path illuminated by the Buddha is a life of mutual respect and sharing of grace as we discover the true mind present within all of us: the “diamond self-nature.”

On the day of my minister’s robes acceptance ceremony, before beginning my Won-Buddhist graduate studies, Rev. Hwang came to share her congratulations. “I remember hearing someone say back then that I was as pretty as a gemstone,” she remarked to herself. I told her, “You are already a beautiful gemstone. You can trust me: I’m a gem appraiser.” She responded with a smile, and in her I saw the Buddha.