CUIZON, Dianne Z.

11-ABM Maxwell September 30, 2019

This critical reading argues that Jeong I-Hyeon’s story, “Sampoong Department Store,”
signifies that we don’t meet people by accident, they are meant to cross our path for a
reason.

This argument is supported by the critical theory of mimesis (Adams) which

considers a text or poem as an imitation, representation, a copy, and is definable in terms of
whatever it copies – nature, the world, or reality.

The story began with a girl, narrating what happened on June 29, 1995, Thursday
5:55 pm. She went from the Q brand outlet and left the lobby at 5:43 pm and been in the
front door at 5:48. She arrived at her house at 5: 52 and opened her zebra print diary at
5:55 but upon writing her first phrase, a great explosion distracted her. It was the fall of
Sampoong department store. The infrastructure began to collapse from the fifth floor down
to the basement. It took less than a second to collapse from the upper floor going down to
the preceding floor. The main character was once a child prodigy or basically grew up with
a great mind. She also remembered that most of the time she got late in school when she
was four years old, she didn’t understand and acknowledge why somebody would force her
to wake up early from a good morning sleep. She also remember her experience with her
dad, one time, her dad called her to go to the living room to read the newspaper with a loud
voice. She couldn't distinguish the left side from the right side. But when she turned eight,
her left wrist was sliced on the glass door, and this issue was naturally resolved. She also
remembered her friends S and R in whom S is a woman with a job and has a boyfriend
while R is also a girl that was her high school mate that works at the Sampoong department
store. She also remembered how she seeks a job and immediately runs into a film company.
R and the main character were classmates then during high school. R worked at the Q
brand outlet inside Sampoong department store, she recalled how they became friends and
the moments they shared with their various experiences from their past life after they
came across each other. She came to Q brand outlet every time she got bored and helped R
out. R also gave her the key of R’s house. The main character worked also at the Q brand
outlet as a part timer, R’s assistant. Living and improving yourself apart from someone you
once were near to is unusual. You’re holistically attached and comfortable already with the
person. The lease for spring is running out, summer will took place. At the latter part of the
story, the main character narrated the actual and detailed information on how she luckily
escaped from the harmful collapse of Sampoong department store. It was the department
store in Sampoong that collapsed. Few years before the towering complex of apartments
arose there, she left the place, still, she always remember how lucky she was on that day
every time she passes that place. She often felt being down and lonely for what had
happened that day and she was still pretending that R is one of those survivors in the said
incident. She often visits the house of R but doesn’t open the door because she is afraid of
the truth that might hurt her. Lastly, she was able to fill her diary again and write stories
when she left the area.

The narrator is not that close with R because they don’t have anything in common even if
they are classmates but days goes by in their works they became friends and even if they
were not in the same job as revealed in paragraph 19, 25, 26, 30, 33:

R called out to me as I was turning away. ‘Write down your pager number for me. I’ll let you
know in advance if we’re having a sale with special offers.’

I emptied out my bag as I searched for the page R had given me. I entered a phone booth in
the store’s first-floor lobby, elegantly decorated like a street in Paris, and phoned up to R on
the second floor. ‘Ah, it’s you.’ R got my name right, too. ‘Only wait two hours more. If I
hurry up, I can get out by eight.’ Once 1995 had faded into the remote past, I sometimes
used to wonder why she replied so calmly to my call. Had she been counting on me to make
the first contact? Or had she too been feeling the need for a new friend, someone who knew
nothing at all about her?

‘I’m starving, let’s go.’ She slid an arm through mine in an utterly natural gesture. We
walked down toward the express bus terminal. We had already entered a noodle shop and
ordered before I recalled that I had had noodles for lunch. ‘Wow, I’m crazy about noodles,
and it sounds as if you are too! Still, you ought to avoid eating flour-based food two meals
running. Otherwise your stomach gets all messed up, like mine is. People with our kind of
job eat at irregular hours, we all suffer from indigestion.

As we were leaving, she was carrying the bill. I quickly pulled four thousand-Won bills from
my purse. That was the cost of my share of the noodles. Going Dutch, with even the small
change being shared exactly, was the usual custom among girl students in the 1990s. R
stubbornly refused to take them.

Perhaps because all twenty of my other friends were busy, my green Motorola pager never
rang. Also, I never made the first move to contact friends apart from R.

‘If you have nowhere to go during the day, shall I give you a key to my place?’ I had no other
friend who would ever have said such a thing. I just laughed. ‘Since it’s empty in any case,
you can make yourself at home, cook some instant noodles, read books. So long as you
wash up the dishes you use.’ It was certainly a very simple condition for the loan of a
house.

If I was at a loss, I used to go to the Q-brand corner and assist R. Since I seemed to be a
customer just like them, women who emerged from the changing room wearing clothes
they were trying on would trust my comments more readily than those of R, she being a
salesperson.

‘I think you have a special talent for this kind of thing.’ She used to praise me.

‘You don’t have any money.’ She used to try to stop me but I could never imagine letting
someone else treat me regularly. In actual fact, my financial situation was not so bad.

After supper, we would go to R’s place and watch a video or drink beer.

She said she could not stand to see the dried squid squirming around like that when it was
put on top of a gas flame. I urged her to shut her eyes, ‘It’ll be ok if you don’t see, surely? I’ll
roast them,’ but she pretended not to have heard me.

This closeness makes them both more concerned with each other as revealed in paragraph
34, 35, 36:

Composing my voice, I left her a message: ‘It’s me. I dropped by but there’s no sign of you.
Are you having a snack? Are you okay? I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch more often. It’s
what happens when you’re working in an office. Get back home, wash, and you’re asleep in
a flash. Today I managed to escape in the middle of things. I got out, only there was
nowhere to go. Take care. I’ll come by again later.’

‘Having people work here who weren’t wearing uniform was a mistake, that’s all.’ ‘But she’s
only a student, and she’s my friend, so she’s helping me out today for one day. Let her be for
just this once, please.’

R did all she could to cover for me, but when she was off fetching stock from the storeroom
or dealing with another customer I was at a loss as to what I should do. While I was
inserting pins to mark the hemline for a customer who had come in first, another who had
come in after would do her best to distract me.

‘What damned idiot added up this bill?’ She swore without so much as blinking. The insult
was directed at me, but I did not realize it. R stepped between us, ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘What’s
wrong?’ ‘It wasn’t you just now, it was that girl there who dealt with it.’ ‘Why, she’s just a
temporary assistant. I’m the one you need to talk to.’

The narrator’s curiosity of where R is after the collapse made herself more worried and do
all her best to search where R now as revealed in paragraph 47:

As I began to write this, I did a search for R’s mini-homepage using Cyworld. There were
twelve girls born in 1972 with the same name as R. I clicked on the names one by one. The
twelve Rs mostly seemed not to be maintaining their homepages, too busy perhaps. At the
age of 33, we seemed to be passing through what might prove to be the most real moment
of our lives. At the entrance to the eleventh mini-homepage there was the photo of a little
girl. She looked to be about three or four years old. I enlarged the photo and gazed at it for a
long time. Her eyes were gentle and large. On closer inspection, the rounded line of her jaw
looked like R’s, too. I longed to see other, clearer photos but that was the only one there
was. I sincerely hoped that the girl might be R’s daughter.

Thus, Jeong I-Hyeon’s story, “Sampoong Department Store,” signifies that we don’t
meet people by accident, they are meant to cross our path for a reason.