I'd like to tell you all something about Incheon's Chinatown today.
I can't say for certain it's true. It's just a story that used to pass quietly among delivery workers in that neighborhood — but everyone who'd heard it told it the same way, so I'm going to put it out there.
Deep inside Chinatown, just one alley off the main road where the tourists walk, there's supposed to be a Chinese restaurant. Ordinary-looking sign, jjajangmyeon on the menu, takes delivery orders — nothing unusual about it. There was a delivery driver who used to go there regularly, a young man in his mid-twenties. That particular day was supposed to be a normal run. Around eight in the evening, he pulled up on his motorbike with two orders, rang the bell, handed over the food. That should have been the end of it.
But that night, the manager came to the door himself. A man who looked to be in his forties — not the part-timer he usually saw. The man said something was off with the order, that there was a discrepancy, could he step inside for just a moment to sort it out. It seemed like a hassle, but nothing worth worrying about, so the young man followed him in.
The ground floor was just a restaurant. Grease smell, kitchen noise, a few customers. But the manager led him toward a staircase beside the kitchen. As he climbed, the young man noticed the temperature change. The ground floor had been stifling from the kitchen heat, but with each step upward the air grew colder — not the kind of cold that comes from air conditioning, but something heavy and still. Cold enough that he felt it at the back of his throat when he breathed.
At the end of the second-floor corridor, there was a door. The manager opened it.
From what he said, the room inside was nothing like it should have been. Far too large for the second floor of a restaurant, and the light was red. Not from a bulb — something flickering, like a thing burning, casting that deep red glow. And inside the room, six young men were kneeling with their foreheads to the floor. Not a sound from any of them. At the far end, something had been laid out — it looked like a ritual offering table, or perhaps not quite. The smell wasn't incense. The young man described it as sweet and faintly rotten, like something being burned with cooked food mixed into it. The six of them lay prostrate in that smell, perfectly still. No one was directing them. Not one of them lifted their head.
The manager spoke to the young man.
"Bow three times and I'll give you a hundred thousand won. It's nothing difficult."
In that moment, the young man said, every part of him knew something was wrong. What struck him most was that six people were lying there and none of them were making a sound. With six people in a room, you hear something — fabric shifting, breath. But the silence in that room wasn't ordinary quiet. It was as if sound itself was being swallowed. He said the only thing he could hear was his own heartbeat.
He refused, and he left. Didn't say a word — just turned around, walked down the stairs, and out of the restaurant. His hands were shaking when he started his motorbike.
But another driver who worked the same neighborhood had taken the hundred thousand won. That was where the trouble began.
What happened to that man afterward — the details are unclear — but he started seeing things in his dreams. Figures shaped like people, but with no faces, standing in the corners of his room. And each time, there was one more than before. First one, then eventually six. His health deteriorated, nothing in his life would go right, and he finally went to see a shaman. She told him that bowing once before an evil spirit was enough — that it counted as an offering of his youth, his vital energy. If he had eaten anything from the offering table, she said, he would have been drawn in even deeper. There's a rumor that the shaman told him if he had gone back to that place even one more time, he would have died in an accident. I can't verify that.
And later, when the young man who had refused started telling people this story, he received a call from the restaurant's manager. No one knows exactly what was said. But after that, the young man stopped talking about it. Even when people asked.
I don't know if any of this is true. It's just a story that circulated quietly in the delivery community around Chinatown.
But every time I hear about that room, one thing stays with me.
Six people, face-down on the floor, and not one of them making a sound.
Were they bowing — or had they already become something else?
