Almond(5)

She could be so full of swagger sometimes.





7


Mom blamed stress during her pregnancy, or the one or two cigarettes she had smoked in secret, or the few sips of beer she couldn’t resist in the last month before her due date, but it was obvious to me why my brain was messed up. I was just unlucky. Luck plays a huge part in all the unfairness of the world. Even more than you’d expect.

Things being the way they were, Mom may have hoped that I would at least have a large computer-level memory like in the movies, or some extraordinary artistic talent in my drawings—something to offset my lack of emotions. If so, I could’ve been on TV, and my sloppy paintings would’ve sold for more than ten million won. Unfortunately, I was no genius.

After the Mickey Mouse Hairband Incident, Mom began “educating” me in earnest. On top of its tragedy and misfortune, the fact that I didn’t feel much basically implied serious dangers ahead.

No matter how much people scolded me with their angry looks, it didn’t work. Screaming, yelling, raising eyebrows . . . I couldn’t grasp that all these things meant something specific, that there was an implication behind each action. I just took things at face value.

Mom wrote down a few sentences on colored paper and pasted them onto a larger piece of paper. She put them all over the walls.

When cars come too close to you → Dodge or run away.

When people come too close to you → Make way so that you don’t bump into them.

When others smile → Smile back.


At the bottom, it said:

Note: For expressions, try to mirror the expression the other person makes.


It was a little too much for seven-year-old me to grasp.

The examples on the paper got longer and longer. While other kids were memorizing multiplication tables, I was memorizing these examples like studying the chronology of the ancient dynasties. I tried to match each item to the appropriate, corresponding reaction. Mom tested me regularly. I committed to memory each “instinctive” rule that other kids had no problem picking up. Granny tutted that this kind of cramming was pointless, but she still cut out the arrow shapes to glue onto the paper. The arrows were her job.





8


Over the next few years, my head grew bigger, but my almonds stayed the same. The more complex relationships got, the more diversions I encountered that hadn’t been covered by Mom’s equations, and the more that happened, the more I became a target. By the first day of the new school year, I had already been marked as the weird kid. I was called out to the playground and made fun of in front of everyone. Kids often asked me strange questions, and I answered straightforwardly, not knowing how to lie or why they were laughing so hard. Without meaning to, I stabbed a dagger into Mom’s heart every day.

But she never gave up.

“Don’t stand out. That’s all you need to do.”

Which meant I couldn’t let them find out that I was different. If I did, I would stand out, which would make me a target. But learning rules as basic as move-aside-when-a-car-closes-in was no longer enough. It was now time to master exceptional acting skills to hide my abnormality. Mom was like a playwright and never tired of using her imagination to come up with different situations. Now I needed to read the true meanings behind words, as well as memorize the proper intentions behind my responses.

For example, when kids showed me their new school supplies or toys and explained what they were, Mom said what they were really doing was “bragging.”

According to her, the correct answer was: “That’s awesome,” which implied “envy.”

When someone said positive things like I was handsome or I did a good job (of course, I had to memorize separately what “positive” statements were), I should respond as follows: “Thank you,” or “It’s nothing.”

Mom said “Thank you” was the sensible answer and “It’s nothing” was more laid-back, which could make me look much cooler. Of course, I always chose the simpler answers.





9


Because of her poor handwriting, Mom printed out each hanja for happiness, anger, sadness, joy, love, hatred, and desire from the Internet on letter-size paper, one big character at a time. With a tsk-tsk sound, Granny scolded Mom that everything should be done with effort and care. Then she traced those letters big as if she were drawing pictures, even though she couldn’t read hanja at all. Mom took the letters from Granny and pasted them all over the house like family creeds or talismans.

Whenever I put on my shoes, the character for happiness smiled at me from above the shoe rack, and every time I opened the fridge, I had to see the character “love.” At bedtime, “joy” would look down at me from the head of the bed. The words were randomly placed around the house, but Mom superstitiously made sure the negative characters, such as the ones for anger, sadness, and hatred, were all pasted on the bathroom walls. As time passed and with damp bathroom air, the paper creased and the negative letters faded. So Granny would rewrite them regularly, eventually learning them by heart and polishing them in stylish calligraphy.

Mom also created a “human emotion game” where she would suggest a situation, and I’d have to guess what the related emotion should be. It went something like this: What are the correct emotions when someone gives you tasty food? The answers were “happiness” and “gratitude.” What are you supposed to feel when someone hurts you? The answer was “anger.”