お元気ですか? 私は元気です

 

お元気ですか... お元気ですか... 私は元気です...

There might be still her echo and sounds that Nakayama Miho was yelling, staring into an empty space.

It has been twenty years since I knew S first. When I started my first job, he was my colleague. Because I am getting older and staying in China, it is pretty hard for me to meet Korean friends and others. I lost touch with many people and sometime met them once or twice a year after making contact with them. He and I worked a promotion planning company, but he changed a job within an advertising company, and I established this company.

When I first met him, I could see him have much to learn as a good senior and colleague.

He also transferred to a drinks industry and to an internet company again, but I was in the same position. When he changed into the alcohol industry, we became alienated. After then, I heard of the news of him in the internet company, but I didn’t know exactly what company he was working at.

 

Twenty years later, he does work with a yacht. I am still working in this company. It has been six or seven years since I have met him last. I think that people sometimes forget the important things in life for some reasons. I suddenly got a call from one of my friends in China early in the morning. He asked after me and my business. He said he is running a bar. He added that he wanted to see me in Guangzhou, so I just said to go there some time. As getting older, I feel that old friends just drift apart, and it is hard to get close to strangers. I have a difficult time meeting with new people.

 

I had talks and had some drinking parties with several strangers whenever I left and went back to China by plane, but later then, I couldn’t have a very good relationship with them. I just decided not to meet friends in China in that way.

Korean people usually ask age first and decide who is older and younger, but in China, all people are just friends. Mr. Kook in 29-year-old grasped a fifty-year-old man’s neck and tapped him on the shoulder. I think that only South Korea was influenced by the Confucian culture, but Mao Zedong’s all-in-one strategy saved China from Confucius. Only South Korea did fight desperately and protected three duties that women must follow. In fact, in China, people have not fulfilled them from the remote past. I think China is more reasonable.

I can be a friend about the same age with Mr. Kook or anyone, so I have more friends in China than in Korea. Korean immigrants who moved to and settled in China can speak Korean, but they sometimes do ill-mannered words or behaviors towards elder people because they don’t know the Korean culture fully. Nonetheless, I think it is more natural than Korean people who are surly. Getting a call from my Chinese friend in the morning, I suddenly came up with each of all people who I have met and known each other before and with a relationship with them… I sometimes kept a great relationship with them and sometimes had some leftover bad feelings.

 

Anyway, I don’t care about their lives. I have several old buddies that have known each other for over 40 years. They are my elementary school classmates. They all work in different fields and live in different places, but we definitely meet once or twice a year, two years, and three years…

I miss them all… Good is not always great after all.