He suddenly stopped in his tracks. Someone was waving to him from a distance. A middle-aged couple so tightly arm in arm that one seemed to have placed the other under arrest. This four-legged wall approached us with alarming speed and greeted him warmly. He suddenly became very anxious, took off his hat, and bowed to them as I reflexively took a step back. They sounded like they had gone to college together. From a short distance, I shuffled my feet as I looked out at the end of the reservoir, enduring their incredibly boring conversation. A lot of blather about how someone from their student council days had been designated by a progressive party to stand for city council election somewhere, how someone else had written a political bestseller and was a panelist for a cable news show. We took up jogging as a couple and are reading Haruki Murakami, do you still like Nietzsche, what were you thinking when Park Geun-hye won the presidential election, darling, remember how I cried, who knew that such a terrible world would be possible in the 2010s after all we did as student activists, it was really beyond imagining . . . In any case, don’t you meet up with your cohort anymore, look at you being all lazy. You were class president, it’s up to you to set the tone for them. Darling, stop it, everyone is busy now. Yeah, kids these days have no discipline. Are you still with that publisher, the one that does theory books? I kept listening to their conversation/interrogation and saw how their torturous questions made his expression grow darker.

Suddenly, the male section of the middle-aged-couple-wall turned its head toward me.

—And who might this be?

—Oh, I’m just an underclassman.

—From school? Then you must be my underclassman as well. What year is your entering class?

—(Why was this asshole, who just met me, using informal Korean?) Not school, just from the neighborhood . . .

—I see. You live in Apgujeong in Gangnam?

—Uh, sure . . . (Mind your own business.)

—So how do you feel about Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye?

—Look at my husband go. Please, pay no attention to him.

—Why? Isn’t that something I can ask a young person? Tell me, do kids these days like Park Geun-hye?

—Well . . . She’s kind of been around at this point.

—Kind of been around. What a refreshing perspective.

What about my perspective was so refreshing? Everyone in the world knew that Park Geun-hye was someone who had kind of been around. Why did these haggard oldsters, whenever they met someone young, namedrop a hundred people, spout tons of political views, and ask me what I thought? What would knowing what I thought change for them? Did they think that if we had similar thoughts and knew similar things, our differences in age would lessen? What were they going to do if I thought differently from them? Feel better about their ugly faces by proving to themselves how young and ignorant I was, how the years they’d lived hadn’t been in vain?