“Miss, do you have kids?”
“No, you lot are enough trouble for me.” (my students giggle)
When I left South Korea, one of the main reasons was: I don’t want my child to go through this.
A high suicide rate, endless hours for study and work, compulsory military service, rampant corruption, low human rights and women’s rights, and constant competition. I couldn’t find hope in my childhood or early twenties.
A long time ago, I read an interview with Haruki Murakami’s wife, who is also the editor of his works. She described his stories as their children – “that little guy didn’t really take off, but we still love him (the story).” The interviewer later noted it must be because they don’t have children of their own, so they’ve made their work their children. In one of Murakami’s short stories, through a character, he mentions why they chose not to have children—he couldn’t guarantee what kind of world they’d inherit. In an interview, he also admitted he simply didn’t share the confidence his parents’ generation had, that the world would keep improving after the war.
Being in your forties with a female body is strange. Something growing inside me that shouldn’t be there needs to be removed, I’m told. Some of my friends are still trying to have children, some have lost theirs. A few even asked me if I would donate eggs for them. Doctors say there’s only a 2% chance of survival if we freeze eggs at this stage.
After working in a genetic engineering lab for some time, I’m left with mixed feelings. I don’t know whether to accept this as a miracle or turn religious when I see small black bars in an X-ray film, realising that something coded as G, C, A, and T can become a living, breathing child with a bright smile who sings and dances. I feel like I’ve passed the halfway mark of the life that’s been given to me.
As you get older, memories return with a different sentiment. Mine are always somewhere between a sci-fi fantasy film, K-drama soundtracks, and dark, still images. This year, I keep seeing blobs of monsters in my nightmares. They swallow me whole, and I can’t escape. They resemble a cross between The Mutant Inky from video games and Marvel’s Venom.
It reminds me of a memory lodged in my mind from a school trip to a royal tomb in South Korea. We were walking up a mountain track in spring, with blossoms falling around us like snow in some romantic film or anime. Outside, it was all bright colours, flower scents, and the beauty of the forest. But inside the dark, cold museum in the tomb, I saw a crown. It was decorated with eighty curved jade pieces, possibly meant as a death mask for a Silla queen. The jade made a sound when the wind moved them. To me, they looked like crescents, or half of the Korean taegeuk, or like an embryo.
That shape stayed with me for no particular reason. It’s one of the few things from that trip that did. Recently, I started carving that shape into a piece of jade I was given. In the end, it looked somewhere between an embryo and a baby seahorse. When I asked my students what they thought it was, they all gave different strange answers. Maybe this is just my mutant mind, trapped in that tomb, waiting for spring to wake it up.
“What are we making?”
“I don’t know. Do you always know what you’re making? Or where, and how, your child will turn out?”
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top two image reference : https://artsandculture.google.com/story/silla-the-golden-kingdom-of-korea-gyeongju-national-museum/EgWRWdOzJ9IAJA?hl=en
https://www.gyeongju.go.kr/tour/page.do?mnu_uid=2515&chaNo=339&cmd=2