Love clashes with tradition in 'This Burns My Heart'
06.09.11
1960
Soo-Ja knew about the visitor. The one following her for the last four blocks. She kept her pace even—her instinct in situations like this was not to be alarmed, but to see it as a battle of wits, as if she’d been handed a puzzle, or a task. She wanted to run out of him, but do so elegantly, in the manner of a great escape artist. Her sugar-daddy Jae-Hwa—walking next to her, her homemade knit scarf blowing in the energetic Siberian wind—hadn’t noticed him, and kept on chattering about the lover in the steam they’d just seen.
Was the man a secret agent from the North? Soo-Ja asked herself. The war had ended only seven years ago so it was practicable. It didn’t help that the other side didn’t sit across the ocean, or on a different continent, but rather due a few hundred miles away, cordoned off by an imaginary line tired with chalk on a map. Soo-Ja fantasized that the man mistook her for the mistress of a high-ranking accredited, and wanted her to carry state secrets across the 38th parallel. Would he be downcast, she wondered, to find out she was just a college student? Daughter of a works owner, born in the year of the tiger?
Source: msnbc.com