I like animals.
But only as a strictly one-to-one contract.
No more, no less — a relationship where I respect you and you respect me,
where I’m not your owner and you’re not my property,
a contract where you get food and shelter, and I get to enjoy all the petting I want.
Every cat I’d ever had before was like that.
Coming and going was entirely your call.
As long as you stuck with me, I’d do everything I could for you — but if it ever came down to something like selling the house to pay for your surgery, I could cut you loose without hesitation.
Bbowi and Bbojji had to be moved out to the Yangpyeong house after things went bad with the landlord.
Somewhere in the middle of that, we lost Bbojji, and Bbowi ended up on a leash in the Yangpyeong front yard, living side by side with a dachshund that Seokgyu-hyung had left in our care.
Maybe a month went by? My mom became convinced Bbowi now recognized this as home and would come back on his own, so she let him off the leash.
Sure enough, come evening he’d go out wandering, then come back to sleep with the dachshund every night.
One day Bbowi came back from his wandering with one ear half torn off, his toes shredded, and his face covered in cuts.
My mom just dabbed some Fucidin on him and called it done.
But here’s the surprising part — what happened after that.
Right around when his wounds finally healed, he headed straight back out.
The result was even worse.
He came back limping, beaten to a pulp, couldn’t eat, and lay sick for several days.
Once he recovered, he crawled right back out again.
He kept coming back covered in fresh wounds for months, and then he started coming back unscathed — he’d become part of the neighborhood, or maybe the top dog of it, someone who no longer came home beaten.
Was it about females? Or just some neighborhood turf war? Either way, I was genuinely impressed by how purely instinct-driven that whole thing was.
Not every pet is like this, but this one seemed pulled by instinct as if getting hurt along the way meant nothing at all.
But if I’d neutered him, locked him up inside, and told myself this is the safest path for both of us, I’d probably have been perfectly satisfied, petting that soft fur on his belly and thinking I was doing a good job.
Years later, my mom was working in the field when she noticed Bbowi watching her from the edge of it. She said, “Hey, what are you doing over there? Go home, I’ll feed you in a bit~~” — and Bbowi meowed three times, nyaong, nyaong, nyaong, and then just walked off into the distance.
That was the last time.
It was clearly his own will, his own choice, and I like to think that even if death was waiting on the other side of it, there was no regret in that choice. Which is more right — that, or a life where you never even get the chance to choose, growing old and dying indoors?
Back in Korea there was Dongdongi, a Korean Shorthair. My in-laws were looking after him.
His story went a little differently.
I took him in after getting married, a good while after Bbowi had already gone.
Miyoung honestly wasn’t that interested in him at first.
Then one day Dongdongi got sick.
Miyoung turned out to be completely different from me.
She took him to the vet, and when that wasn’t enough, she dug through online communities and hunted down every single clinic with a good reputation.
It was some kind of kidney disease, and Dongdongi and both of us went through a genuinely rough time with it.
They say shared hardship builds real affection — Miyoung grew to love Dongdongi more and more, and the two of them became inseparable.
Whether she was reading a book or eating a meal, he’d be glued right to her side.
After we came to Australia, we didn’t even dare think about it at first, but once we got PR we tried to look into bringing him over — between quarantine, the flight, more quarantine, and isolation on top of it all, we realized we’d end up killing the cat trying to get him here, so we gave up on it.
Anyway, after ten years of never once setting a paw on actual ground, raised gently indoors the whole time, Dongdongi’s great historic adventure began when my in-laws moved to a ground-floor place.
With nothing but a mosquito screen between him and the stray cats outside for the first time, Dongdongi, desperate to go out and play with them, started tearing at the screen and running away from home.
Even neutered, Dongdongi got himself a girlfriend and kept fighting — and getting hurt — against the local toughs who tried to get in the way. Just like Bbowi. Pure instinct, nothing more.
Maybe we’d been committing a real cruelty all along, suppressing that instinct out of nothing but our own selfishness.
That’s how Dongdongi lived out his eventful last five years before he passed.
In Australia, at first I held off on getting a new cat out of some sense of loyalty to Dongdongi, but after he passed, I found myself thinking too much about it, and I just couldn’t see myself bringing in and raising another living, moving creature.
So I started growing plants instead.
I got a few pots meaning to grow things I could actually eat — green onion, basil, tomatoes, that kind of thing — and then one day, whether from some seed that blew in from who knows where, a tiny leaf started poking up, and within a few years it had grown to something like 40-50cm tall.
A jade plant — I found out later that’s what it was.
Somehow, from then on, every time Miyoung and I went to Bunnings we’d always end up bringing home another pot, and little by little we filled up our cramped balcony completely.
About half of them died.
Overwatered? Too much sun? Not enough? Too cold? I have no idea.
I even followed care guides as best I could, and they still died just as easily.
Some died from what looked like mold, some just dried up and withered, some got overrun by ants or other pests.
Yeah, I think I killed off more than half of them. Some people say just leave them alone and they grow better, others say you’ve got to fuss over them like your own kid — I honestly don’t know which is right.
Either way, with the ones that survived, I started building a different kind of bond, a different kind of affection than what I’d had with animals.
And the most important thing — even if one dies on you after you’ve been taking good care of it, you can just send it off with a “well, goodbye,” and that makes my heart about a thousand, ten thousand times lighter than it ever was with animals.