Everyone has his or her own best friend and usually their first meeting happened at an early age. But in my case, my best friend and I met when we were university freshmen. My best friend's name is Yoon-Jung Jang who graduated from Daejin University last year. Our first meeting happened like that of teenagers.
        When I was a high school student, one of my friends made a pencil case with a thick paper, covered with some photos of Hong Kong movie stars. One of them was so handsome that I remembered his name, Kwok Bu Sung, whose English name was Aaron. When Yoon-Jung and I met in the bus for the first time, she happened to speak about some Hong Kong stars, including Aaron, to other students. Wow, I was surprised because it was very rare that someone knew about Hong Kong's pop stars, which is different from nowadays. So we started to talk about them although we didn't know each other's name.
        From that day, we were close very rapidly. Both of us were interested in Hong Kong's popular music and movies and liked the Chinese language. We registered for a Chinese language course together and talked in simple Chinese. If students spoke in simple English, most students could understand it because they learned English for about six years. But if we spoke in Chinese, nobody understood what we talked about. We loved that. At that time, we saw Hong Kong movies and dramas almost every day and used the Chinese we learned from that day's movies or dramas and taught each other. Those were the most interesting days of my school life. After one and a half years, we couldn't register for Chinese courses anymore, because there were none that we had not taken. In addition, our enthusiasm for Hong Kong stars became faint. Our topic gradually moved from entertainment to ourselves.
        Actually, she and I were so different in character though we were closest friends. For example, she could get good grades without studying any subject. She always knew what to memorize for a test. In my case, however, I couldn't memorize anything without understanding the subject completely. So if I didn't study, I used to give up on the test. But she was different. Characteristically, she couldn't give up anything. She tried to memorize handouts or some summaries until the test began. Eventually, if we played together and didn't study at all, she got a 'B' or sometimes an 'A' though and I got a 'C' or a 'D'. Because of her, I often felt that the world functioned unfairly.
        There's one more important difference between us. She is a little bit manipulative. What I mean is she can usually get people to do whatever she wants to do. For example, one day she and I and two other persons were in Dae Hak Ro and one of us had a car. At 8 o'clock, she suddenly said that she'd better go then because her home was far from Dae Hak Ro. Of course, one of us who had a car suggested that he give her a ride home even though his home was in Inchon. First, she refused that offer but finally accepted it. I really felt disgusted by her action. If she really intended to go home alone, I wouldn't be angry, but she didn't have any intention to go home at that time. She just knew what kind of person he was, just as she knew what to memorize for a test, and that he would take her home. Those kinds of things might be useful skills to live in this world. However, I couldn't endure those kinds of actions. If I were her, I might have asked him to give me a ride to my home frankly, or more likely I would have gone home alone after finishing our meeting.
        How could we be close friends in spite of these differences? It's very strange, I think. Although we are so different in our characters, we are on the same wavelength somehow. And most of all, we are trying to change our thinking to understand each other. Well, if I think of someone as my real friend, it's not because of her good points, but in spite of her weak points. She would think the same way. Nobody's perfect in this world.