I was the first to give this dream the boot. Once I reached puberty, I realized that I was not the kind of person who was tolerated within a Christian family system. There was also a certain incident: when I was in high school, Umma caught me kissing a science-track student two years older than me.
It happened in that most clichéd of places, the apartment complex’s playground at night. Two high school boys with shorn heads were kissing beneath the spotlight of the streetlamps, watched by a middle-aged woman. Namely: my mother, who had become an evangelical Christian twenty-five years earlier. I’d been caught so red-handed there was no room for excuses. Unlike someone in a television drama, Umma did not drop her bag in surprise or scream or cry. She simply turned away as if nothing had happened and went into the apartment.
The next day, instead of criticizing or punishing me, she put me in her tiny red car. Then, she drove me to a psychiatric center in Yangju, Gyeonggi Province, where she had me forcefully hospitalized. When I protested and tried to turn back, she grabbed my wrist, her eyes filled with sincere warmth.
—As your mother, all I can see is the rage flooding your heart. Don’t worry. Umma won’t let you suffer like this.
That’s how I was put under lock and key. Every morning I was administered a blood test, among other exams, and I had to take more than eight pills with each meal. Afternoons were mostly spent in therapy. The hospital building was old and its air-conditioning bad, my crotch and armpits were frequently drenched from sweat, but without any deodorant or shower gel, there were many days when I just sat in my own smell. I shared my room with a forty-eight-year-old man named Kim Hyeondong, who had trouble controlling his anger and minor schizophrenia. He talked to himself a lot when awake and snored loudly when asleep. He also farted a lot, maybe as a side effect of his medication, and that pushed me over the edge—thanks to my sensitive hearing. Plus, the old screen over the window was riddled with holes, so the mosquitoes made a proper night’s sleep impossible. If I did manage to fall asleep, my vivid dreams meant I never really rested.
In my dreams, there was always a woman. A woman with her hair tied up in a bun, who drove a small red car. She was driving with her eyes closed. The car went faster and faster. You seem to have a long way to go. How busy you must be.
When I woke, I was as tired as if I’d been driving all night. The fifteen days of examinations and consultations brought the psychiatrist in charge to one conclusion: that I exhibited trauma symptoms similar to those of someone who had gone to war. The cognitive therapist came to a similar conclusion. For sixteen years (my whole life), I had been subjugated to the force of my mother’s will, so I had repressed my psychological needs for all that time. The psychiatrist, after hearing everything that had gone on between me and my mother, concluded that it was my mother who needed urgent psychiatric attention, not me. I was allowed to leave the facility, so long as I was under supervision of a guardian.
On the day she drove me back to Seoul in her red car, Umma handed me a note.
Leviticus 20:13. If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.
—I hope you’re feeling much better.
—Apparently you’re the one who’s sick, not me. The doctor said so.
Things with the science-track student had cooled off by the time I got back. My old cell phone had been thrown away and the new cell had only my mother’s number stored. “It’s been handled,” was all she said to me, her office-speak matched by her businesslike manner.
After two sessions, Umma refused to undergo further consultations or to take any medication. She turned down the hospital’s offer to change her therapist. She said there was no need. She had already been redeemed by Jesus, and therefore the situation had been handled. When I heard this from the doctor, I had to ask Umma a question.
—Are you sure you won’t regret it later on?
She gave me a blank, nonjudgmental look, like she would give to a bit of empty air in front of her. But then:
—Don’t tell anyone. It’s a shameful thing.
Kissing a boy two years older than me? Spending my summer vacation imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital because of it? Surviving sixteen years with a mother like her? I didn’t know which was supposed to be so shameful, and so I ended up keeping all these secrets to myself.
Having learned to give up and accept things in silence, I went back to my routine college-prep life after the end of summer vacation. I’m sure I looked ordinary and unremarkable to others, but I was keeping to myself a dark, toxic promise I’d made to the sixteen-year-old boy I was in that psychiatric hospital: when that woman I lived with under the same roof was old and weak, I would leave her out in some neglected forest of Gyeonggi Province so she’d be eaten by starving wild animals. And the only reason I survived those years was because I had repeated that same promise to myself, over and over.
I never should have abandoned that promise.
I guess she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep or something. Her marriage lament this time around was especially long and tedious. Umma was an expert at latching onto the tiniest thing and spinning it into an endless, irritating rant.
—How can you be in your thirties already and never have brought home a girl?
—I’m not seeing anyone.
—You said you were, before.
—That was five years ago, Umma. There’s no one now.
The “before” Umma referred to was him. The man who had been by my side but was now completely gone from my life. Except for this sudden reappearance in my letterbox, as if Umma had something to do with bringing him back from oblivion.
Oh Umma, you should’ve been a shaman, not a Madame Du. Then you’d own a whole building, not just a tiny bit of retail space.
?
The fourth class in the Philosophy of Emotions was about “the feeling of completely immersing oneself in something.”
Afterwards, he took me out for hwe. He said he’d pay for the fish if I got the alcohol. This was the perfect proposal, as I’d never refused alcohol or raw fish in my life. I sat across from him, determined as ever not to show my feelings for him until I understood how he felt about me. He must’ve been a regular, because a “medium set,” including flounder, rockfish, and spicy fish soup, appeared before us without anyone having to take our order. I added two bottles of soju. Behind him were several fish tanks. They must’ve sold out that evening, because the tanks were empty except for little bubbles from the circulation system. The aquarium tanks were backlighting him, and the effect was somewhat creepy. He wiped his hands with the wet wipes provided and stared off into space. His thick fingers with their snake-like tattoo, his almost hairless wrists, biceps, and triceps, his small earlobes, the curve of his ear, and his firm jawline—my eyes roamed all over his body, until they met his own. I quickly looked away and asked a question I wasn’t even that curious about.
—Why did you take so many philosophy classes?