Kim Donghee/His Childhood/Thursday 1-3

It was Saturday night, my father and I were in his room, him lying on the bed and I sitting on the desk next to him. It oddly seemed like we were doing some sort of a counselling, like I am his psychiatrist. However the mood was not that serious. It was both comfort and a bit awkward was; with my younger sister in the session with us. She didn't really speak but occasionally she would laugh as she listened to dad's talking.

He mentioned one or two about his childhood before, but I didn't have thorough explanation about him as a child. I know that he went through rough childhood just like most of the South Korean children in the 1970s. So I started from there, asked about his life as a childhood in the rural area. "It was a hard time. My family lived in the countryside. You, a girl living in this huge metropolis would never even imagine, there was nothing but endless rice paddy. That does not mean I had nothing to play. Kids always find out ways to play. My friends and I always found out something or somewhere. A small stream was always the best place for us."

When I asked him if he has any specific event he remembers which happened in his childhood, he sat up and paused for a long time, tracing his memory back. While deep in thougth, he said that he was always hungry and most of the time he was miserable because his family was so poor and there weere so many family members that no one cared about a little child who wasn't even the oldest boy in the family. Then he asked me, like some memory came up to him, if I know a rice puffing machine. I have never saw one by myself but heard about it so I answered yes. A rice puffing machine is literally a machine that puffs rice or other grains into popcorn-like treats. It used to be a common thing on the streets of South Korea until about twenty years ago. When he was young, the peddler with this machine occasionally visited the village and did the puffing in exchange for money. However his mother gave neither grains nor money to my father. So every time the merchant visited, he just sat there with bunch of other kids who also failed to get grains and money from their parents, and waited until it makes a huge pop sound to pick up and eat some of the puffed grains fallen on the ground. "It was one of the few occasions where I can eat some treats." He said smiling lightly. "But that is not what I am going to talk about—something really bad happened one day."

Just like other days, he was sitting next to the rice puffing machine waiting for the machine to make a pop sound. When it finally did, he rushed with other kids to grab some on the ground and that was when he got his back burned by the machine. He screamed; it hurt like hell. It was moments after that he finally was able to stand up. If it were not for his friends, he wouldn't even have gotten home by himself. His mother saw his son coming home crying, leaning against his friends, and scolded him for being so careless. However she was the only one who actually cared about my father, so it was her who also treated him, even though the treatment was nothing but applying soybean paste on the wound. "We didn't have proper medical institution, and even if we did we couldn't have afforded it. Soybean paste was the best medication we could get." Obviously the wound didn't heal well and it ended up lasting unhealed until the next winter came. He still has the big scar on his back. He showed it to me as if it was nothing, in fact he told me the whole story like it was a common thing, like he has overcome those hard days, but it still sounded bad to me and I frowned as I watch the ugly scar on his back.

I asked him the final question, "How do you feel towards your childhood? Do you feel happy? Regretful? Or angry?" "To be frank, I feel nothing. I do not believe that going through bad childhood means ending up as failure." He explained to me that what he experienced in the past is who he is today. Though the experience cannot always be pleasant, from it the strength to go on comes, like patience and courage which eventually becomes your asset. "I know these days it is different and somewhat more difficult. In my days poverty was the biggest problem. Now other things like getting job are the biggest problems. But do not let those difficulties drag you down."