13. 수레바퀴 아래에서
13. Underneath the Wheel
My feet felt heavy beneath me as I walked to the store. I was working night shifts for a month straight, having seemingly fallen afoul of my manager Sun, whom I had suspected of appropriating inventory. The place was Ingye-dong, a neighborhood near Suwon City Hall.
Underneath the dusky sky, bright neon signs flickered among the buildings. Whenever I set foot in those side streets, with all of their dives, hostess and host bars, sleazy massage establishments, and exclusive entertainment rooms with karaoke and women, I felt like I had entered the pages of the Book of Genesis and the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the midst of everything, there I was—managing a Family Mart convenience store.
My first customer arrived and casually asked, “Am I coming from or going to work?”
“Going to,” I replied. One look was enough to know that she worked at one of the nearby adult businesses. Some of my customers, with their done-up hairstyles and makeup, worked at host bars.
I often heard them talk about how the girls in adult professions dated the guys from host bars and how they would go to each other’s businesses to relieve the stress they suffered from their customers in the same ways.
One by one, the touts began appearing along the streets. A group of men came in to buy hangover beverages—said to “make even a dog into a man”—before heading off on their way. A hostess bar employee bought an armful of strawberry-flavored milk drinks, which he said they handed out before the whiskey.
Sewing kits were surprisingly strong sellers, thanks to the working women who sometimes had to quickly sew their clingy dresses back together after they split apart while they were dancing.
As the night went on, the drunks began to offer their own spectacle. Vomiting was a regular occurrence. Often, they would break out into fistfights in front of the store. I once met a customer who, in the middle of handing over her money, asked me to zip her dress back up; later, I met the embarrassed gaze of another whose girlfriend was urging him to buy some of the condoms displayed on the counter.
Suddenly, a young woman burst in and urgently asked me to hide her. She was obviously fleeing from a nasty customer. I pointed to the way to the storeroom and told her to go inside. Not long afterward, a striking fellow in a black suit with an onyx ring on his finger—apparently the bouncer at one of the adult businesses—came looking for her.
I played dumb. He appeared unconvinced and looked around before finally leaving. The young woman stayed for a little while before eventually heading back; she seemed to have no other choice.
It was now late into the night. A soused and staggering middle-aged man leaned against another fellow, husky and menacing, as he took money out of an ATM in the back of the store. I sensed they may have been doing so to receive a discount for people who paid for drinks and services with cash instead of credit cards at a nearby business.
Since it was “White Day” (a counterpart to Valentine’s Day), he also picked out a box of candies from the rack—presumably to give to his wife. He wanted a discount on it as well. They say that merchants can’t be choosy about their customers, but I really did not feel like bargaining with someone who had just spent a wad of money on adult entertainment and was now asking for a deal on a gift for his wife. I told him “no sale” and sent him on his way.
At 3 a.m., the same young woman from earlier returned. She was a regular, and I handed her her Dunhills, knowing that she always bought the same brand because they gave her less phlegm. Every day, she also purchased exactly one bottle of calcium-fortified milk. She added up that and a few other purchases, and as she was about to give her father’s telephone number for a tax deduction receipt, she saw that I had already entered it myself. She flinched.
Then she asked me for a favor: she was going to tell her parents that she worked at the convenience store, and she wanted me to print out an employment certificate for her. I shook my head, feeling bad. She sourly turned to leave, and then spun back around as though she had forgotten something. She went over to the ATM and deposited h day’s earnings.
All night long, I stood behind the counter watching money passing through the ATM. The money flowed continuously in and out of the different businesses: the ones selling drinks, the ones selling smiles and consolation to lonely people, the ones selling bodies.
It’s been over a decade since then, but people still get money from the ATM to buy pleasure today, only for others to put that same money right back into the machine.
Now I understand that this is the life of the sentient being, aching under the weight of the wheel of samsara, bound by the heavy chains of desire. And I give the name of “Buddha” to those who take away those chains and roll away that wheel.
The Buddha said that they are all inside of me—the sentient beings who cycle through the path where money flows through the pull of desire, and the Buddhas who lift them back up. All things, he said, are created and received by us according to our karma, based on what we do with our bodies, our mouths, and our minds.
So while we may be crushed underneath the wheel today, we may also dream of driving the chariot tomorrow. The Buddha’s dharma is a message of hope.
When we are pulled by karmic force in this life, the requital will return to us in the next life; when we command karmic force in this life, that requital will not occur in the next life.
—The Dharma Discourses of Prime Master Daesan 12:7