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the horses in yunnan were my alibi
I am a city journalist, part-time photographer, freelance traveler, and I had the privilege to visit Yunnan for a good reason.
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I am a city journalist. Part-time photographer, freelance traveler, full-time overthinker. Last spring, a client called asking if I could take a short assignment somewhere “a little offgrid.” They wanted a story on something warm, human, easy to read between sips of coffee—they put it all together under the topic of rural sustainability. I said yes before I checked the weather, or the map. By the time I realized what I’d agreed to, I was already on a bus headed to Yunnan, China, toward a small town that smelled like rain.
And I’ll be honest: I’m not a fan of rain. It’s clingy, oftentimes intrusive—they tend to force you to slow down when you’re not ready to. I came with a hope and I had my camera bag wrapped in a poncho, my jacket zipped up to the neck, mentally preparing to be drenched at any moment.
Frankly speaking, it wasn’t my first time in China. I’d been there in 2022, working on a piece in Beijing. I fell in love with the city almost instantly, precisely with the night lights and how the city always lived in motion. Beijing made loneliness feel cinematic. You could walk down the street holding no one’s hand and still pretend you were part of something grand. You imagined yourself falling in love just by turning a corner. Romantic, tragic, perfectly excessive. Just right for someone like me, who has always found comfort in isolation.
So when the new offer came—Yunnan, not Beijing—I didn’t know what I was walking into. My client mentioned something about a three-day stay at a ranch that rehabilitates retired racehorses. I spent the week before my flight cramming everything I could about rural economies and sustainable agriculture. Now, for the record, I knew absolutely nothing about horses—except that people bet on them. But the more I read, the more fascinated I became. There was something unexpectedly graceful about the idea of a creature built for speed learning to slow down.
That might be why I almost missed my original deadline. I ended up sending in my research at the very last minute, and then told myself I’d make up for it by writing a better story. What I didn’t expect was that the story I’d end up writing would have very little to do with sustainability at all.
The ranch was owned by the Wen family. Mr. Wen was a quiet man, mostly soft-spoken. He enjoyed silence just as much as I did. He didn’t care much for the city and preferred his tea brewed three minutes too long. In my attempt to be thoughtful, I’d brought him coffee from home—he smiled, thanked me politely, and said he’d pass it on to his son, who drinks coffee sometimes. His wife, on the other hand, was warmth personified. She took me out for Steam Pot Chicken on my first night, and I swear it was one of the best meals of my life and to this day, I believed it was comfort disguised as broth.
Mr. Wen was too old to take me around the ranch himself, and his English ran out about as fast as my Chinese did. I’d practiced a few polite sentences before the trip, but they sounded robotic even to me. So he sent his son instead—mercifully, I think.
His name was Wen Junhui.
I was surprised to learn we were the same age. He looked younger—though maybe that says more about me than him. Years of deadlines and insomnia have a way of adding invisible weight. He spoke better English than I expected, but every now and then he’d pause mid-sentence to check a translation app on his phone. I didn’t mind. I would’ve done the same if our roles were reversed. He told me to just call him Jun, because I kept stumbling over his name, and I did.
Remember this detail: Jun was tall. Not intimidatingly so, just tall enough that he blocked the morning light when he stood next to you. His nose was sharp, his mouth soft, shaped like a perfect curve that would’ve made any painter feel the honor of drawing him. A few moles dotted his lips like punctuation marks. Sometimes, when he blinked too slowly, I wondered if he had been a cat in another life. When I told him that, he laughed.
“Do you think cats befriend horses, Wonwoo?” he asked, and I wanted to disappear into my own idiocy. But that was Jun, by the way. He was gentle, teasing, grounded in a way that made you forget you were supposed to be observing him for a story.
The next morning, Jun found me loitering outside the guesthouse porch. I was holding my camera in hand, pretending to look for the right light but actually really just killing time. The air smelled of damp soil and I tried not to be bothered by it. My first night of staying there was filled with heavy rain, and by the moment I woke up I was greeted by the aftermath.
“You’re early,” Jun walked toward me with two paper cups in hand. “I thought city people slept longer.”
“I don’t sleep well in quiet places,” I said. “It’s too deafening.”
He laughed softly, and I realized that was his thing. He laughed so beautifully that you tend to forget what was next in your words. What should be said, how your brain becomes tangled with nonsense. There was some sort of small release of breath whenever he did that, and I felt like looking at the thing that I’ve been missing out on for almost thirty years of my life.
He handed me a cup of coffee and served it according to my preference, which we had talked about yesterday when I handed him the gift. “Since my father said you brought this,” he said. “Figured I should brew it before it expires in the cabinet.”
The stables sat a short walk from the main house as I expected it to be. Because occasionally, staying at Wen’s place was also enjoyable. You hear the slow shuffle of hooves every now and then, and it gets louder when you walk closer. When that happened to me, I expected a strong smell coming from a place like that, but I was quickly proven wrong. Still, I was right about the stillness. Everything there moved at its own pace, even the horses. Like time slowed down when you stepped foot in there.
When we reached the place, I saw a vision of someone who had his soul merged into one territory. That happened with Jun. Every step he took, every reach of his hand toward a horse’s muzzle, everything felt like he belonged to it. He liked to speak with the horses in Mandarin and I could only catch fragments. At this time, I felt the regret of not pushing myself on getting my HSK certificate during college days.
“This one’s name is Luo,” he said while brushing the mane of a dark mare. “She used to race, but her leg never healed properly. She’s gentle, but sometimes she gets restless when she hears thunder.”
“She remembers?” I asked.
“I like to believe it that way. It makes it easier to forgive her when she gets scared.”
He said it so matter-of-factly that it took me a second to realize how human that sounded. How much it applied to more than just the horse.
Naturally, at my job, I take pictures. I waited for the cue and this was the perfect one to start, but I put myself too much on a pedestal when I ended up taking pictures for Jun instead of the horses. One of the pictures was when this man leaned forward, his hair brushing against the horse’s neck, and I captured it perfectly when he tilted his head to whisper something against Luo.
“Do you always take pictures of people?” he asked without looking at me.
“Not really. I prefer landscapes.”
“Why?”
“Because they don’t look back at you.”
He turned to me then, half-smiling. “But I think you like it when they do.”
Usually, I’d beg to differ, but I realize that he wasn’t wrong only because he was the exception.
By the time the sun broke through the clouds, Jun had introduced me to half the horses by name. I was met with Ming, this brown horse was retiring early so he was relatively younger than the rest of the racehorses there, and there was Lian as well, who was deemed as injured—but Jun also said that Lian had simply become too stubborn to race anymore. Jun treated every one of them like the way people treat their old friends, so much filled with familiarity.
When one of the younger horses jerked its head suddenly, startled by a noise, Jun steadied it with both hands on the bridle. “Hey,” he murmured, in English this time, glancing briefly at me. “Easy now.”
It struck me then, that he didn’t just take care of them. He listened to them. And I wondered what it would feel like to be listened to that way.
“Do you ride?” he asked after a while.
“I don’t even drive,” I answered jokingly.
He smiled again and I swore time paused in a moment. “That’s fine. Horses don’t like overconfident people anyway.”
We walked back in silence after that, the air already cooling into the evening. Even on the first day, I’d learned more than I expected. I learned that the horses were gentler than they looked. They were just another curious creature, if anything, almost shy. They nudged your sleeve when they trusted you enough.
And I learned that this tends to happen to humans as well. Someone who’s curious, sometimes shy, and spoke softly even though he worked with precision. Someone who smiled more with his eyes than his mouth, someone who enjoyed silence just as much as I did. At this point, you see, this idea has become the greatest distraction of my initial topic to write.
That evening, when I checked the photos on my camera, I found one I didn’t remember taking. It was a picture of Jun with his forehead pressed against the horse’s, having his eyes half-closed. It looked like a conversation caught mid-prayer. I didn’t touch the contrast or the tone and let the result be. But it was the most beautiful thing I have ever taken with my camera for the whole time of my career.
The next morning started with fog, and again, I was not a fan. For the record, I am a man who has the worst eyesight in the world and I tend to be dramatic about it. My glasses had gotten foggy quickly and naturally, I couldn’t see anything perfectly without it. So when the fog blurred everything beyond a few meters, I felt like it was my cue to rest for a while. Unfortunately, I woke up before the alarm, and when I opened the window, the smell of wet grass drifted in, and that was the time how much I preferred this more than the freshness of city air that could never replicate all of this.
Jun was already outside. He had his jacket half-zipped with a strand of hay between his teeth. I suspected that he had woken up much earlier than me because of how composed he looked. Or he really did wake up that pretty. I had so much jealousy about that—not on waking up pretty—but to anyone who bears the privilege of waking up next to someone that pretty. I picture how you’d live in a cinematic reels, and begin to explore the rest of your life like a movie.
“You’re up early again,” I said, stepping out with my camera slung over my shoulder. It was a shame that I couldn’t get myself to look as pretty as him even with my hair brushed.
He nodded toward the barn. “Well, horses don’t wait for journalists.”
“Neither do deadlines,” I muttered, and he smiled—barely.
He asked if I wanted to help feed the horses that morning. I said yes, even though I had no idea what that entailed. I never really fed any animals in my life, except stray cats, very rarely dogs. He handed me a bucket of feed that looked heavier than my week’s worth of groceries. “You can take it to Luo,” he said. “She’s on the far left.”
When I approached her, I believed that Luo recognized me. Her ears flicked forward as I approached, and when I held out my hand, she nudged it gently. Jun watched from a few steps away.
“You’re not bad,” he said.
“For someone who just met a horse yesterday?”
“For someone who looks like he overthinks how to hold a pen,” he replied.
I laughed. “That’s not inaccurate.”
After that, everything really just fell into an easy rhythm. I told him that my focus for the day was to observe his rhythm so I let him work quietly. Every now and then, though, he’d pause to explain something to me. The first topic was how horses communicate through posture, then it continued with how they sense emotion through tension. “They know if you’re scared,” he said. “Or pretending not to be.”
Unprofessionally, I asked him if that was true for people, too.
He thought about it. “Maybe. But people talk too much to notice.”
Funnily, it made me think of all the times I’d filled silence with words, just to avoid hearing myself think. I didn't want to be too intrusive with conversation that day, so while he repaired a section of the wooden fence, I found myself photographing him again.
“You really like to take that many pictures?” he said without looking up.
“I’m afraid I’ll forget what it looked like.”
He glanced up then, eyes meeting mine. “Maybe some things are better remembered, not recorded, Wonwoo.”
He wasn’t wrong, and it stayed with me longer than it should have. But I didn’t tell him that half the reason I take pictures is because I don’t trust my memory like horses would. I figured that I am a human with flaws, my memories shift, betray, and it may turn tenderness into something half-imagined. My camera, at least, lies beautifully and consistently.
By afternoon, the fog had lifted. The sun came out sharp and golden, spilling across the fields. Jun suggested I ride with him to the edge of the property. Honestly, it wasn’t really a ride. It ended up with him leading the horse while I awkwardly tried to balance on it.
“Hold on,” he said, glancing up at me as he adjusted the reins.
“I thought she was gentle.”
“She is,” he said. “You’re not.”
I laughed nervously that time. I was always told by many I was one of the soft-spoken, but I had forgotten that horses could sense your tension, and probably Xiao felt a glimpse of my baggage. The horse flicked her ears as if to agree. Jun only looked at me with that same small smile, and I didn’t know if it was helping anything with my heart beating faster every time he did so.
That evening, when I returned to my room, I opened my notebook and tried to write about sustainability. As you can tell, I wrote nothing, but I slept with a smile.
By the third day, I’d started to forget that I came here for work.
My camera stayed in my bag more often. My notebook was half-filled with notes that weren’t about sustainability at all. Instead, there were sentences that began with Jun said or Jun laughed or Jun looked like he knew something I didn’t.
The morning was colder than usual. It wasn’t as foggy, but the mist hung low over the fields. I found Jun standing by the fence, holding an apple in his hand, offering it to one of the horses. I noticed his hair was damp, probably from the earlier fog, with the ends curling slightly.
“You’ve been here all night?” I asked jokingly.
He shrugged. “I just don’t sleep.”
“Bad dreams?”
“No. Just too many thoughts.”
He continued with a faint smile. “You probably know the feeling.”
Of course, I knew it too well. My mind was racing back and forth between finishing the deadlines or settling in this ranch forever and figuring out my future with the horses, which had become my greatest alibi by now. I thought about saying that, risked my career, and probably my embarrassment in front of the Wen family—but I nodded instead. Likewise, this was one of the things that was better to admit in silence.
We spent the morning walking the pasture. He told me about the horses again, but he avoided the technical stuff. We had gotten more intimate with their stories of how each one had arrived. The first time Lian came, Jun knew how anxious she was and it took her months to be familiar with Jun’s touch. The old one even used to bite, but now only pretended to.
At some point, we stopped by a wooden post near the far end of the field. It overlooked a small stream that cut through the grass like a line drawn by a trembling hand. The air was still, but you could hear the faint trickle of water underneath.
“Sometimes,” Jun said, “I think about what they’d do if we just opened the gates. Letting them run again, roaming free.”
“And?”
“They wouldn’t go far,” he said. “Freedom doesn’t always mean leaving.”
Jun was quite evil sometimes. He knew how much of an overthinker I was, and his words tend to bait me—or that says more about me more than anything—because I’d built my whole life on leaving. I am a journalist, after all. I am bound to explore new cities with different stories told by different people. So the concept of staying felt so strange, if not almost unfair, and it made me question how someone could be so sure of it.
I asked him if he’d ever wanted to live somewhere else.
“Once,” he said. “When I was younger, I wanted to see what the city looked like at night. She said it was so loud that I’d forget how to sleep. I was rebelling from it, so my family took me to Shenzhen, and when I was a teenager, we travelled to Macau.”
“Did it change your mind?”
He turned to look at me, squinting against the light. “Now I think maybe she was right.”
We stood there for a while, sharing other pieces of our silence. I remember the sound of the grass brushing against our boots, the distant call of a bird, the way the air shifted when he exhaled. When he moved closer to pet one of the horses, I caught the scent of his shampoo—something faintly herbal, like green tea and rain. I wanted to ask him what brand it was, but that felt ridiculous.
When the sun began to sink, we walked back to the stables. The sky went from gold to lavender, and the horses turned their heads toward the fading light, as if following an old instinct. Jun paused to close the gate slowly.
“You leave tomorrow, right?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Early morning.”
He nodded. “Then you should come by before you go. They eat at sunrise. It’s worth seeing.”
“I’ll try.”
“You won’t,” he said, and I swore I almost killed myself with that smile. “But I’ll be here anyway.”
My instinct wanted to tell him that I would come—or at least, that I wanted to. But I didn’t know why it suddenly mattered so much, and I couldn’t gather a reason when the words got stuck somewhere between my chest and my throat.
That night, I sat by the window again. The ranch was dark except for the faint lantern light near the stable. Somewhere out there, Jun was probably still awake, maybe brushing down the horses, or simply thinking. I tried my best to write a line in my notebook before bed, but all that came was one sentence that read: Some people stay because they have nowhere else to go. Others stay because they’ve already arrived. Though I didn’t write it with his name, I think I knew who it was about.
So, if you’ve read up to this point, I know you’d bet that I’d be sucker enough to stay.
The truth is, I didn’t. I left. The deadline was looming, my inbox was an avalanche, and the city was calling me with urgency.
I caught the flight early in the morning, sat by the window seat, and watched the land below blur from green to gray. By the time I landed, I had already slipped back into my mundane. I got a better dose of my caffeine, finishing my untouched drafts, attending scheduled online meetings, and rewriting all my finished writings because lately I couldn’t focus without having my mind drifting back to Yunnan. I managed to submit the article on rural sustainability a week later. Personally, it wasn’t anything terrible, but it wasn’t good either. It was competent enough, but I knew I could’ve done better.
I admitted, privately, that I’d gotten unprofessional. I should’ve felt guilty for it—and I did, for a while—but part of me was quietly grateful. If my focus had scattered, it was because I had found something worth being distracted by. I should’ve thanked my client, really, for sending me there in the first place. For letting me meet Wen Junhui.
Two months later, I went back.
This time, there was no assignment, emails, or any professional reason that I could use to justify to anyone but myself. I booked the flight on a whim after too many nights rereading my own notes, after finding a stray horse hair caught in the strap of my camera bag. I told myself I just wanted to see the ranch again, maybe take a few better photos. But the truth was simpler and far less poetic: I missed him.
Yunnan hadn’t changed much in two months. The town was still quiet, still damp around the edges, still smelled like rain—which I begin to associate Jun with rain, not out of hate or spite, but how much it turned out to be my newfound comfort—then I arrived unannounced, which in hindsight might have been foolish. Mr. Wen looked mildly surprised when he saw me standing by the fence with a suitcase in hand.
“You came back,” he said.
“I did,” I replied, smiling like I was trying to convince myself it made sense.
He called for his son. A few seconds later, Jun appeared from behind the stable, sleeves rolled up, a smudge of dirt across his cheek. He looked almost exactly as I remembered—just a little more sunburnt, a little more real. For a moment, he didn’t say anything. He just looked at me, and then at the suitcase, as if deciding whether to laugh or scold me.
“I thought you had deadlines,” he said finally.
“I finished them.”
“That’s not the same as saying you’re free.”
He was right, of course. I wasn’t free. I still brought my laptop, but I had changed all my schedules to anything remote-friendly. I paid more for data just in case the WiFi got ugly. All that for the sake of standing there, watching him run a hand through his hair, and my freedom came in the form of proximity. Toward something, or someone, that makes you want to stay still for once.
He told me I could stay in the guesthouse again. Jun helped me with my suitcase and he promised to clean the place but I refused. I looked at him so long that he began to think that there was something wrong with him, but I was wondering if the last two months spent without him hadn’t stretched into something resembling longing.
That evening, we walked down to the stream again. The light was always gentle, but I never realized how soft it looked when the streak touched Jun’s cheek. The horses grazed nearby, their bodies moving like slow tide. Jun skipped a small stone across the water and said, almost casually, “I didn’t think you’d actually come back.”
“I didn’t think I would either.”
“So what changed?”
I looked at him, then at the horizon where the sky was beginning to bruise with twilight. “I think I wanted to see if staying would feel different the second time.”
He smiled, faintly. “And does it?”
“I’ll let you know tomorrow,” I said.
I heard that familiar laugh again, and for the first time since I left, I felt like I’d arrived somewhere again. In that small stretch of land where my silence is respected, I wondered if I have the privilege to borrow a lifetime.
The following morning, the air was colder than I remember. The mountain fog had settled low enough that you could barely see the horses grazing by the fence. I woke up to the sound of something metallic clinking, and it always meant that Jun was already outside, refilling the water trough.
There’s something about waking up early in a place that doesn’t ask anything of you. It felt rewarding, calming, less terrorizing. Pardon me, for how much I am used to waking up over the sound of pings or calls of meetings. Now that I have a better reason for waking up early, the way it touched my senses just made it more indifferent to your presence, but not unwelcoming.
I sat by the window, wrapped in a blanket, and watched him move. He had that unbothered focus that only people who genuinely like their work possess. It made me feel strangely small, and also safe.
When I finally stepped out, he looked up, squinting against the pale light.
“You’re up already,” he said, and I can tell from his eyes that he was faintly amused.
“I thought I’d help.”
“You thought wrong,” he said, handing me a mug of tea instead.
Usually, Jun added ginger to his tea in the morning. It had the effect of warming, a perfection during the cold season. But today, it was jasmine. It smelled divine, but it had a slightly bitter taste before it turned soft. I took a sip, leaning against the wooden post beside him.
He gestured toward the field. “They remember you.”
I looked at the horses, at the familiar brown one who had nudged my sleeve the first day we met, if you still remember the name, Ming. “Do they?”
“Animals don’t forget people who move gently,” he said. Then, after a pause, “Not many do.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant people, or me.
Later that day, I helped him brush one of the mares. It was mundane work, just as repetitive as how my days would go, but so much more grounding. Though I had seen how Jun treated his horses, I couldn’t stop writing and telling everyone about how reverent he was. How his voice had gotten lower when he spoke to them. I found myself wanting to ask him things I had no right to ask: whether he ever felt lonely here, whether he missed the city he said he once lived in, whether he thought about me after I left.
At some point, he asked about my work.
We were sitting by the fence with a pair of mismatched mugs between us. I told him the truth—that I hadn’t written anything worth reading in weeks. That everything I produced lately felt like filler text, placeholders for thoughts I couldn’t name. I confessed that I had been unprofessional, too distracted to care about the structure of a paragraph or the beauty of a sentence. I said it half-jokingly, hoping the humor would make it sound less like a confession.
Jun didn’t laugh. He just nodded once, his eyes fixed on the mare a few feet away. “I actually read some of your work while you were away,” he said after a pause.
I blinked, surprised. “You did?”
He nodded again. “You wrote about Beijing, didn’t you?”
My heart sank for a second. I thought of that article where I talked about city lights and loneliness in Beijing. It was written during a sleepless week in a rented apartment in Xicheng District, which was beautiful, but should’ve been better if I wasn’t alone. “Ah, that one,” I said, trying to sound casual. “That was three years ago.”
He smiled a little. “I liked it. You wrote it beautifully. I’ve never been to Beijing, but reading your piece felt like being there. The lights, the streets, the way you said the city never lets anyone be lonely for too long.”
I froze a bit. The article wasn’t meant to be flattering. It was about how loneliness could still thrive in a crowd, how people can be surrounded and unseen at the same time. “You really think so?” I asked.
Jun shrugged lightly, brushing the mare’s neck. “I think you make places live,” he said. “So I don’t believe you when you say you haven’t written anything worth reading.”
I pressed my lips together. It made me feel nervous, or hyperaware now, that Jun actually read my work. I suppose he had looked at my name on the search bar, probably trying to find the promised rural sustainability column which—sucked. I wish he didn’t read that, and I felt so ashamed that he had to be presented that way—but I promised to myself to give him better writing with this one essay instead.
He glanced at me then. “Maybe you’re just writing the wrong things,” he said simply.
“What does that mean?”
I didn’t know what the right thing was, even to this day. And I know my reader would’ve scolded me for this, so I do appreciate any comments or critics coming through this essay. Jun didn’t offer me further explanation as he’d already turned back to the horse, murmuring something soft in Chinese I couldn’t catch.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about what he said, wondering what the right things could be. Maybe that’s what drew me to him in the first place. The way he carried the world with both hands, and still looking so gracefully on doing so, because of how unhurried he seemed. He didn’t need to be extraordinary to be memorable.
So I sketched all the possibilities of the right things, because I used to think I wanted to write about places, systems, change—the grand things. But maybe what I really wanted was to write about a person who made everything else quiet down. Someone like him. Still, I didn’t know if it was right.
It’s been two months since I left Yunnan again. I couldn’t stay long in the city when my brother called me to go home for his wedding, so family duty was definitely quite an exception—but it took everything in me not to wonder if I could ask Jun to accompany me and come to Korea, witnessing my hometown, Changwon, which wasn’t as extravagant as Beijing or as showered in neon as Macau, but I could take him to witness the cherry blossom later in spring. Took him to beaches and wondered if he had the same fondness when it comes to the sea. I begin to incorporate his presence, his vision, his name in all of the things I associate with beauty.
Simply to say, I felt the change in myself drastically during twice of my visit to Yunnan, though it wasn’t in any way visible to the untrained eye. My editor told me that my latest article read just ‘fine’. I told her that I was tired, and she told me that was because I took too many detours.
I think she was right, but it was probably because she never met someone like Wen Junhui.
I tried to keep in touch with him every now and then. Neither of us were phone people, which made it easy to fall out of rhythm. We didn’t text much, and my schedule rarely allowed me to stay glued to a screen anyway. Sometimes I wanted to call, but I’d sit there staring at his name for minutes before talking myself out of it. And yet, on the rare days I pushed through that hesitation, it always felt worth it.
Once, we managed a video call. I wanted to show him the beach near my hometown when the sky was bleeding into the water in the late afternoon. He smiled and said it looked just as beautiful as the fields back at the ranch. The connection lagged a little, but for a moment, it almost felt like we were standing in the same light.
Everything took me further into reflection. When I got back, I couldn’t shake off the image of the ranch even before I landed there, but mostly about the sound of Junhui calling out to the horses as if they understood him. I’d try to write about something else, and somehow, his face would appear between the lines. It wasn’t romantic in the way novels want you to think it is. It was the kind of attachment that sneaks up on you while you’re too busy pretending you’re still the same person who boarded that flight.
I started thinking about the way he brushed the mare’s neck, how he’d pause and listen before moving again. It wasn’t just about him. It was about the life he built—something self-contained, unbothered, gentle but disciplined. It made me want to do things slower. It made me want to do things right.
So that’s why I’m writing this essay.
It isn’t because I’ve found new enlightenment or because I want to romanticize a man with horses. It’s because I’m trying to prove—to myself, to whoever’s reading this—that maybe I am finally writing the right thing—please do correct me if I might have done it poorly, again—but I knew that all I needed all along wasn’t a stronger thesis, but a pulse.
So, to my readers, specifically if one of you happens to be Wen Junhui from Yunnan, I hope you’ll know that this isn’t an attempt to make you into fiction. You were always too real for that. But if you do find this—if by some strange coincidence your hands scroll past this page—I’ll probably be back in Yunnan around November.
They say it snows there and probably colder, and I know that I didn’t do well with cold as fog bothered me more than anything, but I’d like to see that. I’d like to learn how you take care of horses in the snow, how you keep them warm when the ground turns to frost. And probably, I’d learn how to love the cold just like how much I begin to fall for the rain.
And if it doesn’t sound too foolish, I’d like to see you again. The second time—unprofessionally—as Jeon Wonwoo, the man who departed from Changwon, boarded on a flight from Seoul. An individual who has been thinking about that morning in the fog longer than he should have. Someone who still remembers the taste of jasmine tea and the way your laughter carried past the fences.
If I’m lucky, and if time is kind enough to let me return, maybe by then I’ll be brave enough to do what I didn’t the first time. To stand in that same field and tell you that I liked you. Because that thought was the only thing I carried home with me long after Yunnan faded behind the plane window. I’d tell you how I kept rewriting you into every sentence that was supposed to be about something else. How I remembered the shape of your laugh before I remembered the outline of the hills. And maybe—if the air is still and the horses are calm, and you look at me the way you did that morning by the fence—I might find the courage to lean in and kiss you, as proof that for once, I am writing the right thing.
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Comments (23)
@seoultype · this is heartbreak disguised as journalism and i love it.
@bluehorses_93 · “proof that for once, i am writing the right thing” — sir that line destroyed me.
@yunnanlocal · i know that ranch! can confirm it really smells like rain this time of year 😭
@diamondheart · journalism ethics: ✖️ feelings: ✅
→ @jeonwonwoo · I promise the ethics were fine until the horses showed up.
@riverhearts · Whoever this man is… Tell him he’s lucky!!!!!
→ @jeonwonwoo · He’ll probably read this before I do that myself.
@litandpoetry · you sound softer here. i hope he reads it.
→ @jeonwonwoo · Me too.
@horselover2005 · finally some real reporting on the emotional impact of horses 🐎
→ @jeonwonwoo · The horses were professionals. Can’t say the same about the journalist.
@kimgyureads · So when I said “take a break,” I didn’t mean fall in love on assignment, bro 😭
→ @jeonwonwoo · Noted. Next time i’ll bring you a horse instead of feelings.
@xuminghao · You always write better when you miss someone. You should visit again.
→ @jeonwonwoo · I think I just might. Thanks, Hao.
@kwonsoon.txt · can we get a photo next time?? asking for… research purposes. 🐴
→ @jeonwonwoo · If the “research” involves horses, maybe.
@substackreader_17 · waiting for the november sequel 🫡
→ @jeonwonwoo · If November comes gently, maybe there’ll be something to write about.
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