My hometown… You asked me about my hometown. But did I ever really have a home? I said that if by hometown you meant where I was born, then the answer would be Yangpyeong in Gyeonggi Province outside of Seoul, and I waited for your next question. But you didn’t ask me anything else. It was a poor village, I said. There was a reservoir just past a small grassy knoll and our house was always cold. I stopped there. It’s okay, you said, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. But it’s not that I didn’t want to—I couldn’t. When I dig up those memories, it feels like a black clot of blood fills my mouth.
My little brother Eunsu and I used to play in the sun at the edge of the reservoir. One day, Eunsu was spanked by the woman next door. He had gone over there to beg for some rice, but she said he spilled it. So while she and her husband were out working, I took a long wooden stick from an A-frame carrier and used it to beat their kids until their noses bled. After that, none of the other kids would play with us. So it was always just the two of us. Sometimes, if a kind-hearted person gave us a lump of cold leftover rice, we would sneak into a neighbor’s barn so as not to wake up our father who was passed out from drinking, and we would take turns taking bites of the frozen ball of rice. The reservoir was always sunny, and when luck was with us, we even got instant ramen from the fishermen who came there from Seoul. On even luckier days, we would go to a store about five miles away and bring back cigarettes for them in exchange for a few coins.
It took me a long time to realize that we were waiting for our mother, who had run away from home. It was only after a very, very long time that I realized that, even though all I remembered of her was her swollen face and the bruises that covered her body from our father’s beatings, I was waiting for her to come home, bruises and all, and kill our father who would start beating us again the moment he woke from his drunken slumber in that unheated room. I was waiting for her to rescue us. My very first memory in life is of wanting to kill. But since my mother was out there somewhere, in some faraway place, that feeling of waiting—even when I didn’t know what I was waiting for—never went away entirely. I think that was when I was around seven years old.