First memory

Our house was out in the countryside, so the bathroom was outside, separate from the house.
It was a pit toilet — just two wooden planks laid across a hole in the ground.
Toilet paper didn’t exist; usually there was just newspaper cut into eighths kept inside the outhouse, and that was it.
Electricity meant one incandescent bulb in the room, full stop, and the kitchen ran on firewood.
So going to the bathroom at night took real courage.
That’s why there was always a chamber pot kept in the room, and apparently my mom’s first task every morning was always emptying it.
Whenever I tell friends stories from when I was little, they either treat me like I grew up in North Korea or joke that I must be retelling one of my mom’s stories, since they can barely believe it.
But that’s genuinely what the Korean countryside was like in the ’70s and ’80s.
My grandmother lived with us; she wasn’t able to get around well, and I remember walking her to the bathroom myself.
I don’t know why, but when I feel my way back through my memory as far as it goes, this is what I find — my earliest memory.
Falling out of the persimmon tree and getting hurt, the daily rock-throwing wars with Hyeonseok next door, coming home with a leech stuck to my leg and begging my dad to pull it off — when I bring up stories like these with my mom and dad every once in a while, it turns out that except for walking my grandmother to the bathroom, every single one of them happened after she’d already passed away, according to their memory of it.
I just found myself wondering what it was that first got imprinted in my head.
If I’d never stopped to think about it, that bathroom memory probably would have slipped away and vanished at some point, never even making the shortlist.