Behind the Glass
At eleven seventeen, I was still standing behind the glass.
The reception hall of Guiyun Town was cool and dim compared with the square outside, where the September sun fell hard across pale stone. Families crossed toward the entrance carrying children, umbrellas, suitcases and plastic cups of iced tea, and every few seconds I checked my phone.
His train had arrived at Guiyun North Station at 10:45. I knew because I had booked the ticket. From the station, he only needed to take a Didi into the hills. By my calculation, he should already have arrived.
I opened WeChat and typed:
Can you find the place?
His reply came almost immediately.
I just get off the taxi. I can see big screen. i’m in
Big screen?
I looked through my own reflection in the glass and finally noticed the enormous LED display outside the reception building. Moving closer to the window, I tried to see past the glare.
The ridiculous thing was that I was not entirely sure what I was looking for.
I had photographs of Joon Seo somewhere, or at least I had once had them. There were photographs from Korea in 2004 and photographs from London in 2005, but at some point I had put them away carefully—too carefully, perhaps. They had travelled with me through countries, apartments, hard disks, computers, storage boxes and different versions of my life until I could no longer remember exactly where I had hidden them.
After London, whenever Joon Seo and I met again, we somehow never took photographs together—not in Wuxi, and not in Singapore. There were no newer pictures waiting on my phone to tell me what twenty-two years had done to his face.
The young man I remembered had softly curling hair, slender glasses and a face I had once known without needing to study it. Over the years, however, memory had softened the details. I could remember how I had felt when I looked at him more clearly than I could reconstruct exactly what I had seen.
His hands were different. Those I remembered.
I could no longer summon every detail of his face from 2004, but somewhere in my body remained the memory of his hands—always warm, capable, familiar in ways I could not yet have explained.
So I stood behind the glass in sunglasses, studying every man approaching the building and wondering whether I would recognise the person I had come all this way to meet.
A father carrying a sleeping child passed first, followed by a tour guide, an elderly couple and a man pulling two suitcases. Then someone stepped out of the sunlight with a simple black backpack over his shoulders.
His hair was much shorter than I remembered. His face was fuller, and there were lines across a forehead that had once been smooth. For half a second, I looked at him as though he were a stranger.
Then my body recognised him before thought could interfere.
I raised my hand.
He stopped. Even through the glass, I saw recognition reach his face, and he waved back.
Twenty-two years collapsed without making a sound.
He walked toward the entrance. I did not run to him, and he did not open his arms. There was no cinematic reunion, no music and no embrace rehearsed by memory. The automatic doors simply opened, and Park Joon Seo stepped inside.
“How have you been?” I asked.
“Good.”
“You look tired.”
“Yes. Very tired.”
His voice was almost unchanged, and that surprised me more than his face. Faces surrender to time; voices sometimes refuse.
He rubbed the back of his neck. “I was drinking last night. Set alarm in the morning. From hotel to train station.”
“You still made it.”
“Yes.”
“Let’s check you in first.”
We had thirty hours.
I had not calculated them that way when we arranged the trip. At first there had only been train times, hotel rooms and the practical problem of finding somewhere compatible with his work schedule and mine. But by the time I was standing there beside him, I knew precisely what we had been given: Saturday morning to Sunday evening, followed by two cars, two stations and two lives continuing in different directions.
Even the fact that we were standing there together felt improbable.
When Joon Seo first knew me, I was a Chinese university student on exchange in Korea, still young enough to believe that countries, careers and futures could all be rearranged without much consequence. Korea was supposed to be temporary. So was Joon Seo.
Neither of us knew then what our lives would eventually become.
He would remain Korean. My life would root itself elsewhere. After university, I made Singapore my home, built my career there, had my children there and became a citizen. By the time Joon Seo walked through the glass doors of Guiyun in 2026, almost everything important in my adult life had happened in Singapore.
Even my name had changed along the way. In Korea, I had used a different English name. Clarie belonged to the life that came later.
The Hotmail address through which we had once arranged our lives had disappeared years ago. Computers had been replaced, countries had changed, jobs had changed, and so had I.
Yet some strangely ordinary things had remained. His mobile number, as far as I knew, had never changed. My Singapore number had never changed either. Once WeChat entered both our lives, neither of us ever changed that account.
We had lost emails, photographs, cities and versions of ourselves, but somehow we had never quite lost the door.
In 2019, when Joon Seo was travelling frequently to Singapore for work, we had mostly used WhatsApp. That was how he contacted me when he came to Singapore, and how we arranged the Sunday afternoon when he visited my apartment.
Then the world changed. Travel stopped and years passed.
Around Chinese New Year in 2023, life had become more difficult than I usually admitted. For reasons I did not examine too closely at the time, I found myself wanting to find Joon Seo.
I sent him a message on WhatsApp.
Happy Chinese New Year. How have you been?
No reply came.
I noticed. Of course I noticed.
But I did not send another message.
There comes an age when silence begins to feel like something you should respect. I knew he had a family, and I knew that lives moved forward even when old connections did not formally end. Perhaps he had changed numbers. Perhaps he no longer used WhatsApp. Perhaps he had seen the message and decided that whatever had existed between us belonged where we had left it.
Perhaps silence was finally an answer.
So I accepted it as one.
Three years later, in 2026, I opened WeChat. I could not have explained exactly why I did it that day. His account was still there, unchanged enough to feel oddly familiar, and I stared at it for a while before typing:
How is going recently?
I did not know whether he would answer.
Then the screen changed.
好久不见。(It means long time no see)
And beneath it:
nothing special. work, travel.. recently had a lot of travel to China..
what about you? How’s your business?
There was no explanation for the intervening years and no dramatic return, only work, travel and China. Yet a door I had assumed was closed turned out not to have disappeared at all.
The conversation reopened. Eventually there were schedules, cities and train times.
And then there was Guiyun.
