짐: The Little Case

📘 The Little Case

When he was eight, Young-Seok’s mother packed him a small blue case with a plastic handle and a zipper that caught on its own teeth. It smelled faintly of dried seaweed and shoe polish. He didn’t want to take it, but she pressed it into his hands the morning he boarded the bus to Gwangju.

Inside: one undershirt, two pairs of socks, a pencil case with a cracked ruler, and a folded note. The note didn’t say much—just eat well and study hard. The handwriting was careful and upright, the way she always wrote when trying not to show worry.

The case followed him through years of rented rooms—goshiwon, semi-basement, mold-prone one-room studios—always tucked away on a shelf or behind a curtain. The zipper broke eventually, and the lining split, but he never threw it out.

When he was appointed professor of history and given a real office, he bought a tall bookcase with glass doors. His colleagues filled theirs with journals and monographs. Young-Seok placed the little case in the center of his shelf, where the most important books were meant to go.

Students sometimes asked if it was an artifact from the colonial period. Visiting professors assumed it contained letters or rare photographs. Once, a cleaning ajumma asked if her grandson could have one like it.

He never opened it. Not even once.