I'll Be Right There by Kyung-Sook Shin

silly that I could not stop laughing, even as my tears kept flowing. Is the root of laughter also sorrow? As I laughed, I was filled with both joy and sorrow. People walking by stared at us.
    “Jung Yoon laughed!”
    The paving bricks scratched up in the demonstration, the glass windows on the buildings, the stairs, the pillars, and the railings all stared at us.
    “I made Jung Yoon laugh!”
    Had I ever wanted that badly to make someone laugh? I pictured my father’s face and realized that I had not made the best use of my time while I was home. Not even once had I tried to cheer up my father, who had lost his laughter when he lost his wife. I pictured Dahn’s sad face next. My tears would not stop falling. I wiped them away with the back of my hand and finally took a good look at Myungsuh. He looked as badas I did. The bottoms of his jeans were soaked, and the back of his shirt was in tatters. I stopped laughing, but we had already grown closer.
    “What happened to your shoes?” Myungsuh asked.
    He looked down at my bare feet. I looked down at them, too. I was already starting to forget the details of what had happened. The only part I remembered clearly was being swept into the underground passage with the other people, getting knocked down, and falling on my face. The pain in my knee flared up again, and I unconsciously wiggled my toes. He stared at the bloodstains on my knees.
    “Does it hurt?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    “You have to arm yourself properly if you’re going to demonstrate. Make sure your shoelaces are tied tight, and wear a mask.”
    “I wasn’t trying to demonstrate.”
    He gave me a look.
    “Let’s just go over there and look for your shoes,” he said.
    “My bag first!”
    I was worried about the copies of We Are Breathing that were in my bag. If he’d known I had lost my bag as well, he probably would have added that it was a bad idea to bring it to a protest.
    “Jung Yoon, you look like a beggar.”
    At that moment, I was. I didn’t have so much as a thousand-won bill on me. At that moment, he was all I had. He stopped teasing and got serious. It turned out that I was not the only one. When we walked into the alley and foundthe empty lot, there was a small mountain of ownerless shoes, bags, hats, and jackets. Having been blasted with tear gas and water cannons, everything was wet and smelled. Only then did he take his arm from around my shoulder. He looked me over and gazed down at my feet again. This city was full of surprises. I would never have guessed that I would one day be standing in the middle of it while someone stared openly at my bare feet. And not even at clean feet, but at bruised, chafed, dirty feet.
    “I see why you were crying,” he said.
    “I wasn’t crying over my shoes.”
    I had begun talking back to him without realizing it.
    “What were you doing here?”
    “Walking,” I said.
    “Walking?”
    He didn’t seem to understand what I meant, because he stared at me for a moment.
    “I need to find my bag,” I said.
    One by one, other people like me who had sought shelter somewhere began to emerge. At first it was just the two of us, but soon there were many harried-looking people searching for their belongings. Many of them were barefoot, and one was in just an undershirt, while another clutched his arm as if it was broken. We all looked dazed. I joined the crowd and started digging among other people’s belongings in search of my own.
    “They were sneakers, right?” Myungsuh asked.
    “Yes.”
    “White?”
    “Yes.”
    “And a brown bag with a long strap.”
    “How did you know that?” I asked.
    “Because they’re yours,” he said.
    His words drummed in my ears like rain. He became engrossed in trying to find my shoes and bag. The camera hanging from his neck swayed back and forth. Something seemed to strike him, because he took it off and snapped a picture of the pile of lost objects. He started to hang it around his neck again but handed it to me