Prologue
Past the slope, beneath the sunken stone steps, there was a green gate. Beyond that gate was a three-pyeong house heated with coal briquettes, with a pit toilet outside.
A place where you couldn’t breathe in summer, and couldn’t catch your breath in winter.
At night, you could hear the rustling of bugs crawling along the walls, and during the day, the shabby, rotting wooden floor creaked. Not a breath of wind came in properly, so when you opened the door, a musty smell greeted you, and mold could be seen everywhere in the room.
A three-hundred deposit, three hundred thousand won a month. That was the one-room flat I lived in.
I grew up unfortunate.
My father was an alcoholic and a gambling addict, and my mother abandoned me when I was still a nursing infant and ran off — I don’t even know her face. Every time my father looked at me, he must have thought of her, because one day he struck my head with a liquor bottle. Drowning in drink, barely able to hold his own body up, he kept muttering crazy bitch, crazy bitch.
I was nine years old at the time.
To me, bleeding from a split head, my father threw a thousand won. Then he shouted at me to go buy soju. Strangely, I didn’t even register that I was in pain — I just grabbed the money and ran to the nearest corner store. Because if I was even a little late, I felt like I’d be beaten to death.
The liquid running from my head seeped into my eyes.
At first I thought it was sweat. Then my eyes stung, and I thought it must be tears. It was only when I wiped it with my worn, dirty sleeve and saw what came off that I realized it was blood. But it didn’t bother me. Blood was something familiar to me. I’d been abused by my father so consistently that having my nose burst or a tooth knocked out and bleeding freely wasn’t a one-time or twice thing. I’d been hit too many times to be startled by something like this.
But it seemed other people were different. A passerby on the street saw me, ran over in alarm, and asked if I was okay. I couldn’t get a single word out properly, like an animal with its mouth bound shut. It wasn’t because it hurt, and it wasn’t because of my father who’d beat me for being late. It was simply that I’d never been properly taught or shown anything, so my speech was clumsy and my thinking slow.
Anyway, my life changed a little after that incident. As luck would have it, the passerby was a journalist overflowing with a sense of justice, the type who exposed all kinds of corruption. Thanks to his active connections with police and people in the legal world, he reported my father for child abuse, and after my wounds were treated, I was sent to a facility.
It was there that I ate warm rice for the first time. Having always just drunk something dried-up and shriveled mixed with hard gochujang and water, I encountered something called rolled egg for the first time.
It was a strange side dish — yellow, soft and fluffy, even faintly sweet. I’ll never forget the rolled egg I ate that day for the rest of my life.
I wore good clothes, too.
Nothing torn, nothing that smelled, nothing with a stretched-out collar that kept slipping off my shoulder… clothes that actually fit my body properly.
I learned so much at the facility. I loved it there.
From how to wash myself to how to eat properly. And I learned Hangul, and arithmetic too. I stayed there for as long as six months, and people never held back their praise, saying I learned at a different pace than other kids. Later on, I could solve arithmetic problems even the older boys (hyungs) struggled with, easily, and was even given crayons as a reward.
That’s not to say I was completely at ease the whole time — that wasn’t true either — but at least at the facility, I didn’t get hit. There was no bloodshed. I wasn’t cold or hungry. I thought I wanted this life to last forever. So for the first time, I tried something like praying, but God didn’t listen to the prayers of someone like me.
As always, misfortune flips my life upside down in an instant.
The effect of a single report lasted only six months.
My father came to get me. With a clean, presentable face I’d never seen before, he smiled gently and held me.
My father said it would never happen again.
He said he’d finished his treatment, and that we should live well together now.
I didn’t believe him.
Unlike six months before, I could now read Hangul and solve arithmetic better than the older boys, but my father hadn’t changed one bit. His eyes were bloodshot, and a foul smell came from his mouth every time he opened it. It was the same smell I remembered from our one-room flat.
My father hadn’t changed.
“You fucking little shit.”
The moment we got home, my father grabbed me by the throat and threw me onto the cold floor.
He kicked my stomach, carefully choosing only the spots that wouldn’t show on the outside. I’m sure I couldn’t breathe while he was hitting me, but strangely, I can’t recall the pain from that beating.
We moved.
Without even filing an address change, we drifted around until we settled somewhere similar to the old one-room flat we used to live in. There, too, my father acted like a dog. Before, he’d only get like that when he was drunk, but now he’d turned into a dog regardless of alcohol.
I was beaten almost to the point of death.
My father fondled my cock and told me to be grateful I was born a boy. At the same time, he also said a boy like me was useless. Looking at my face, swollen from the beating, he spat and said I looked like shit. At the time, I didn’t understand why I was being hit for reasons like that, but there was one thing I came to understand.
It’s fortunate I was born a boy, and even more fortunate that I look like shit.
