I still don’t know how to talk about dramas or actors, nor do I understand jokes from those reality shows. My husband thought this was charming when we first met and he would always try to work it into conversations somehow until I asked him to stop. Everyone who heard that small fact about me, though, assumed it was because my parents were focused on education—apparently there are many young parents these days who don’t allow televisions in the house because of their children. I understand how reality TV can damage your brain, because the way they replay the same punch line scenes with the laugh tracks over and over is enough to make one go mad. But when they hear the name of the provincial university I graduated from, they look at each other as if to say, See, this is why progressive parenting is risky.
* * *
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IT’S NOT an original thought perhaps, but I think people watch so much TV because life would otherwise be unbearable. Unless you are born into a chaebol family or your parents were the fantastically lucky few who purchased land in Gangnam decades ago, you have to work and work and work for a salary that isn’t even enough to buy a house or pay for childcare, and you sit at a desk until your spine twists, and your boss is somehow incompetent and a workaholic at the same time and at the end of the day you have to drink to bear it all.
But I grew up not knowing the difference between a bearable life and an unbearable life, and by the time I discovered there was such a thing, it was too late.
* * *
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UNTIL I WAS EIGHT, I lived with my grandmother in a small stone house in Namyangju, northeast of Seoul. It had a low stone wall that ran around it, an outhouse with a leaky roof, and a pair of raised urns by the front door that my grandmother used to keep goldfish.
My grandmother slept in her room and I slept in the living room, on the floor next to a small white statue of the Virgin Mary, who had tears of blood painted down her cheeks. At night, when the rest of the world was asleep, the statue would seem to glow as it stared down at me, with the tears turning black. When my grandmother’s prayer group from church would meet at the house, she would sometimes tell the story of how I once tried to scrub the blood off the Virgin’s cheeks with a kitchen brush, and she’d had to get the tears repainted.
The churchwomen chuckled and patted my head. But what she didn’t tell them was that it had taken over a week for the cuts to fade from the backs of my legs after she beat me that night with a branch from a tree in the garden. I had loved that tree very much.
* * *
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IN THE WINTERS, the house would get so cold that I would wear three or four sweaters at once and burrow under several of my grandmother’s coats that still had the tags on them. Every fall, my aunt and uncle would send a new winter coat from America as a gift for my grandmother, but they were always too big for her, even though they were the smallest American size. Whenever she had company she would bring out the coats to show them off, and if the guests expressed admiration, she would shrug and say they weren’t her size and she was hoping someone would buy them. I was always terrified that someone would rise to the bait, but I guess everyone thought a coat from America would cost too much.
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OURS WAS NOT a wealthy neighborhood but the children who went to our school were usually dressed in neat clothes and had things like siblings and haircuts and change to spend in the stationery store. I didn’t know this then, but when I look at the few photos I have from my childhood, I see I am dressed poorly, in my grandmother’s old undershirts. I have never seen a photo of me wearing children’s colors. It was not something I missed or craved or