I finally made it into elementary school — after
“flunking”
a year of kindergarten first.
The day before the entrance ceremony, I walked up to my dad — who was out in the yard sharpening a kitchen knife — and announced that from now on I wasn’t a little kid anymore, I was going to be an elementary schooler, and I’d act like one.
Apparently I really did become a different person starting the very next day.
I started elementary school.
My homeroom teacher was an elderly, grandfatherly man who was especially fond of me.
When I got home and told my mom about him, she said — get this — that he’d also been my dad’s first-grade homeroom teacher, 27 years earlier.
What.
Elementary school life back then was basically rural Korean life in a nutshell.
No money, no TV — just running around with friends catching frogs, pulling up radishes to eat raw, swimming in the river, coming home at dusk for dinner, lying on the outdoor bench watching stars, then five of us packed into a single room to sleep.
My dad brought home a TV when I was around nine.
A color TV, no less — though the only channel that came in was KBS1, buried in static.
Since it was the state broadcaster, the news was pretty much all there was.
Heating switched from firewood to coal briquettes around this time.
Lighting went from incandescent bulbs to fluorescent.
We got a refrigerator.
Around then we also bought a spin-dryer, which — in my mom’s words — was a whole new world.
My mom’s daily routine back then: cook breakfast, send us off to school, work in the field, eat lunch, work in the rice paddy, then carry a huge pile of laundry on her head and walk twenty minutes to the washing spot.
When I asked her why she went at that particular time, she said that’s when all the neighborhood women gathered there.
My husband did this, my mother-in-law did that — the washing spot was really the only outlet those mothers had to talk to anyone.
Somewhere deep in my earliest memories, I’m off in the backyard somewhere playing in the dirt, and there’s my older sister — just seven or eight years old — out weeding the field.
Really?
Did Mom and Dad actually put a kid that small to work weeding?
Apparently they did, really.
Wow — I only heard this once I was grown, and it was kind of shocking.
At some point my mom started drinking this thing called coffee.
She’d gather with the neighborhood women, drink it, and cackle away together.
I’d catch glimpses of people drinking coffee elegantly on TV sometimes, and I always wondered if it really tasted that good.
One day while my mom was out working, I went into the kitchen and looked inside the coffee box.
Four compartments: black powder, white powder, white powder, and an empty one.
Yeah?
If it’s that good, let me try it too.
I scooped up a spoonful of the black powder and tipped it straight into my mouth.
Blegh!!
What is this, and these adults have been drinking this thinking it’s delicious?
Not even 0.0001% of this made sense to me.
But thanks to that, I learned about the existence of both Prima (coffee creamer) and sugar.
In a countryside where snacks were precious, a single spoonful of sugar packed serious power, and Prima had its own considerable charm, filling your mouth with that rich, nutty sweetness.
My mom and dad never much cared for ramyeon, so the chances didn’t come around often, but whenever my mom cooked ramyeon and about half a seasoning packet was left over, that whole day was pure bliss.
I’d keep it in my pocket, and whenever the craving hit, I’d rub a tiny pinch of it out onto my palm, dab just a bit onto the tip of my tongue, and bring it to my mouth — that faint spiciness and the umami hit of MSG satisfied every one of my senses.
If I went out around the neighborhood and the other kids found out I had seasoning powder on me, they’d swarm over instantly, each holding out an open palm going
“me too, just a little, me too, just a little”
— and I’d sprinkle out just enough onto each palm that you could practically count the individual grains.
And then everyone was happy that day.
There was a stationery store in front of the school, and a hot dog stand opened up next door.
50 won!
One day my older sister, Moonhee, and I bought just one to share, asked for extra ketchup, and first licked off all the ketchup before taking a bite — and oh, what a whole new world that was.
Sweet dough coated in crispy breadcrumbs and deep-fried into a hot dog — the shock of that first bite is still vivid in my memory even now.
So it went, one bite for me, one for my sister, one for Moonhee, until we got down to the middle of the wooden skewer where the pink sausage was — and it was a thin one too, barely an inch of it stuck in there.
One bite for me, one for my sister, one for Moonhee.
An arcade opened up at the market.
One round of Galaga cost 50 won, and I wanted to play it so badly that on days off from school I’d tug at my mom’s skirt and follow her everywhere — the washing spot, the rice paddy, the field — chanting
“just 100 won, just 100 won.”
And then one day, I finally had 100 won of my own.
I went to the arcade, changed it into two 50-won coins, and started Galaga with my heart pounding — but I didn’t even make it past level five; both rounds ended in Game Over.
It was the first real defeat I’d ever felt in my life.
In those three short minutes, days’ worth of my effort vanished in an instant, with nothing to show for it.
That single defeat seems to have left a real scar on me.
To this day, I make games — but I never play them.