People You Cannot Despise

31. 미워할 수 없는 사람

31. People You Cannot Despise

Life as a gosiwon manager was tedious. Once a month or so, I would be visited by the building’s young owner, a fellow in his early 30s who worked in the semiconductor project division at Samsung Electronics. His mother would also stop by from time to time to look over the rooms and brag about her son.

There were students studying to retake the college entrance exam, girls who had run away from home, graduate students, aspiring appraisers, people looking for a cheap place to stay the night, and one man I remember who had been kicked out of his house for smelling bad.

The office measured just over three square meters (32 ft2), I believe, and it was deadly quiet apart from the occasional telephone inquiry.

I saw my cell phone’s light flickering. It was my friend Choi, who had led a club of “film addicts” before eventually pursuing a graduate degree at the School of Film, TV & Multimedia at the Korea National University of Arts.

I went out to the stairwell and flipped open my phone. He told me that he was working on a submission for the Mise-en-scène Short Film Festival and asked me to join his cast.

“This is unbelievable. I’m not even talented. And it’s the lead part!”

I asked him why he wanted to cast me, and he told me, “I don’t think you’d drop out midway through.”

He had a point; in addition to the time commitment, I wouldn’t be receiving any compensation for my acting.

Still, he told me he had a younger sister who was studying to be an interpreter at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies who was going to put together some English subtitles, and who knows? Maybe if he did a good job, it would get shown overseas and we’d get to walk on a red carpet. It all sounded quite appealing, and I finally agreed.

The actor Roh Ik-hyun played my roommate, a hired thug. A person from Myanmar named Mujo played a migrant worker, while I was cast in the role of a student involved in a political movement. Filming would be taking place back and forth between Gunpo and Seoul.

We were shooting a scene where my character, who shared a small apartment with Ik-hyun’s, had prepared a meal for his birthday and was singing the song “Your Birthday” by Kim Sung-jae.

I was somewhat thrown—to my dismay, I had been told they were a gay couple. Because it was a short film, we had to imply their relationship concisely, through our voices and the looks we exchanged.

At the time, I was unaware that there were men who loved other men. This may explain why the scenes of me gazing fondly at him came across as quite awkward.

I vaguely trusted that Choi would edit the film in a way that would make me seem less clumsy, and with the filming of a few additional scenes, production quietly ended. I never heard anything about it winning any awards. I also heard the film itself disappeared.

Later in life, I would share the ups and downs of life in a dormitory with someone who actually was gay: Johnny, a Korean-American pre-minister. As a fellow practitioner, I’d never understood why he seemed to get so red in the face and awkward at the public baths; I only learned the truth after he came out.

He was a cheerful person, kind to everyone, and it was not as though he had violated any major precepts. He had merely shared his sexual orientation. This changed nothing about him, yet people began to look at him through a harsher gaze.

The lack of understanding among some of the older figures caused him great anguish, and he finally decided to leave Iksan, feeling deeply wounded. His mother’s inability to accept her son being gay was also a source of unendurable sadness for him.

Today, same-sex marriage has been legalized in the US, and while I met quite a few lesbian and gay people while I was living there, they remain incomprehensible to me.

Yet I cannot simply call them “weird” or “abnormal” simply because they are different or unfamiliar to me—to say nothing of saddling them with the yoke of transgression. Their private activities in the bedroom have never been of any interest to me.

Our lives are precious without distinction; all of us are capable of becoming buddhas. The only discrimination exists in between the wise person and the foolish one. I cannot despise gay people when the Buddha so earnestly entreated us to become each other’s teachers and students, joining hands as we proceed forward together.

Despite the longstanding hatred, contempt, and exclusion, gay people are a part of us whose impact reaches far into our lives—for example, through companies such as Apple, Calvin Klein, Gucci, Tom Ford, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Giorgio Armani, and Dolce & Gabbana.

Anyone who has loved another person deeply knows the truth: that love is nothing unless it cannot be helped. The same is true for their love. I respect both their hearts and their minds.

I don’t love because I love. I love you because I can’t help loving you.

—From the film Bungee Jumping of Their Own