“Oh, hi, teacher! How are you? Do you live in this area?”

“Yeah. I moved here a while back. Do you live here too?”

“No. I just … have business to take care of.”

“This early in the morning? What kind of business?”

“You know … stuff.”

“Ha, okay. What are you looking at so intently?”

“Is this really a hat?”

“Ha!” He laughs. “Of course it’s a hat. Does this look like a shoe? You still are an oddball.”

“Did I seem like an oddball missing a screw back then?”

“Yeah, I guess. That’s your charm.”

I stay quiet.

“Do you still paint? Speaking of hats, that reminds me: Have you seen the Max Ernst painting The Hat Makes the Man?”

“Of course, you put that up on the wall of the art studio at the school. Twenty or so hats forming a shape of man. It was a low-quality print.”

“I don’t remember putting that up.”

“Well, you did.”

“Well, let’s stop standing around like this, let’s get tea. Do you have time right now?”

“A little bit.”

The teacher walks ahead of me and I see that the heels of his shoes are worn. His jeans are wrinkled. If he takes off his black jacket, there will be suspenders. He keeps pulling up a shoulder bag strap that keeps sliding off his slumped shoulders. The bag is stained with a speck of blue oil paint.

We arrive at Jasmine, the coffeeshop at the Gwangbok intersection. The shop must have just opened, and the server reluctantly gets up and welcomes us. He takes us to the sofa next to a dying tree. It looks like it might’ve dried or frozen.

“This tree is a jasmine tree.”

“Oh yeah?” I follow with a question: “Teacher, how’s school?”

“I quit.”

“When?”

“The semester after you guys graduated. It’s been less than a year but it feels like forever ago.”

“Why did you quit? Teaching is a stable job.”

“Well, after ten years or so of doing the same thing, it was becoming stagnant. I had no time to make my own art.”

Gwangho Lee, my teacher, is a fairly well-known up-and-coming artist. I heard he even got a sculpture into an international biennial art festival somewhere, but, weirdly, here in Busan, not many have heard of him. They say even Jesus wasn’t a prophet in his own hometown.

But now I’m remembering hearing a rumor about him being fired for being inappropriate with a girl in his painting class. Was it Hyunmi who told me that? I don’t feel like asking him about it, it would be a cruel thing to do. As the person I knew, he wouldn’t do things like that. He also didn’t have a great relationship with his coworkers, so who knows what happened.