Discipline: Hobby

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.

I really wanted sashimi.
Me, Miyoung, Sharon, Edang — all of us wanted it badly.
Sashimi from Japanese restaurants here isn’t live-fish sashimi, so it’s always just a little short of scratching that itch.
Alright, if there’s none around, let’s just catch our own. We went to Anaconda and each bought a fishing rod, plus bait.
Time just crawled by and there wasn’t a bite in sight. Next time, and the time after that, and the time after that — still nothing.
We went camping and a friend brought a little inflatable dinghy. We rowed a few hundred meters out and the fish actually started biting.
Ah, so that’s it, you’ve got to get further out. So I bought a boat too. Turned out that had just been luck though — nothing was biting for me.
I did some research. Apparently you need to know the tide times, know exactly where the fish show up, put real effort into your bait, and upgrade your gear.
So I poked around fishing communities online, and it was all like, meet up somewhere at 3am, be at some spot in Newcastle by 5am — that kind of thing.
I didn’t have that kind of passion for a plate of sashimi. I just wanted to eat it — I had no interest in dragging myself out there at that hour.
On another camping trip, a bunch of little kids were swarming the jetty at Lake Macquarie.
“What are you guys doing?”
“There’s an octopus!”
“Where, where?”
“Right down there.”
One of the boys had a hand spear and even knew how to use it, but they were all hesitating because they had no idea what to do once they’d actually caught it.
“Hang on a sec, guys, I’ll go grab a container with a lid.”
The container was ready.
“I’ll handle the cleanup, you just focus on catching it.”
The kid fired the spear. It landed a solid hit — I could practically feel it myself — and the spear handle shuddered in his grip. He had no idea what to do next, so I hauled it up myself. The spear tip was barbed so it wouldn’t pull back out, which gave me some trouble, but I wrenched it free, dropped it in the container, and slammed the lid shut.
Phew — the kids clearly had never seen a live octopus before. Half curious, half scared, they were staring at the whole scene like it was something completely alien.
“So what are you guys going to do with this?”
“We don’t know.”
“I’ll cook it up — want to come eat it together?”
“Yeah, yeah!”
The kids, not really knowing what they were getting into, just followed me out of pure curiosity.
I stunned the octopus first, cleaned it, and scrubbed it hard with salt to work out as much of the slime as I could. I filled the biggest pot I’d brought camping with water, brought it to a boil, and lowered the legs in first. A little while later, one of the kids’ dads showed up at our campsite.
I told him we’d caught an octopus and I was cooking it up, and he seemed quietly thrilled about it.
I could tell he was supposed to be watching the kids himself, and now that their attention was locked on me, he was itching to go somewhere and knock back a few beers instead.
The octopus cooked up nicely, and I cut each kid a piece of leg. Isn’t this what real hands-on learning looks like? Hahaha.
Not one of them liked it. Of course they didn’t — this, kids, is the taste of adulthood.
That’s when it hit me — this is it! A spear! I could use a spear instead of a rod. That way I’d actually be catching what I could see.

Edang and I planned a trip to Balmoral Beach. Before heading there I stopped by a spearfishing shop and bought a $20 yellow hand spear. The rocky area on the left side of Balmoral is a permitted fishing zone.
I started scouting the water. Oh — Sydney’s ocean is a bit rough, but not bad at all, fish were popping into view here and there, and something called turban snails, kind of like conch, were absolutely everywhere.
I dove down, maybe 5-6 meters. Tucked in a rocky corner, a stonefish was sitting dead still, pretending it wasn’t even there. Shoop! Thwack — clean hit. On the way back up I was picking up a few decent-sized turban snails when something moved in a gap between the rocks, and looking closer, it was an octopus.
I wrestled with it for a good while but couldn’t land it, and my body had gotten too cold, so I told myself I’d get out, warm up, and come back. After about thirty minutes baking in the sun and getting back in, I couldn’t find that same spot again.

For a while I got sucked into the world of freediving.
I practiced breathing techniques and studied how to hold my breath longer. I downloaded an app and followed its program for a week, and my times started climbing fast.
From a max of 45 seconds, I went to 1:30, then 2:00, then 2:30, and eventually well past 4 minutes.
Brimming with confidence, I bought a wetsuit, added some weights, and headed to Kurnell. The water wasn’t calm, but there were quite a few other divers around.
Alright, just like I’d practiced — breathe-up, final breath, and down I went. The water wasn’t bad. Around 7-8 meters down, it suddenly went ice-cold and my body just sank straight down.
I got scared. Getting scared made me want to surface. Wanting to surface made it impossible to hold my breath. I didn’t even last a minute.
Same thing happened the second time. Once I lost my composure, all that static-apnea practice turned out to be completely useless.

Some time later, back at Balmoral. I’d decided the hand spear was too clunky underwater, so I bought a short air-compressed speargun I could clip to my waist. I was scouting near the surface when thousands of baitfish rocketed past just 1-2 meters below me. Before I could even go “whoa,” twenty or thirty kingfish came racing right after them. I figured it was just a nice show to watch, but then the school of kingfish I thought had already passed suddenly circled back around me and started swimming in loops. No idea what behavior pattern that was, but for me it was a hunting opportunity. I went to aim the gun, but there were so many of them it felt like I could hit something firing at random.
I fired at random. A dull jolt hit the fish’s body and traveled right back to me. No idea which one I’d hit, but I’d definitely hit something. The kingfish school vanished in an instant, and one that looked to be about a meter long was just floating there motionless, stunned, bobbing. Whoa! What is even happening right now — this is the kind of thing pro spearfishers rent boats, go way out, and risk sharks for, and here I was pulling it off right off the shore, pure luck I guess. Getting closer, I saw the spear hadn’t gone all the way through — it was only halfway lodged somewhere between the head and back — and on a hunch I grabbed it and pressed down hard, which woke the fish right back up. I was so startled I ended up wrapping both arms around it. Now awake, it thrashed side to side with everything it had, and I pulled it in toward my body with everything I had. In a flash it landed seven or eight hits on my stomach, legs, face, and neck before slipping free of my arms. The spear came out with it too. If I hadn’t been wearing a wetsuit, its fins would have torn my body to shreds.

Little Bay. Past the shallow rocky area, about 200-300 meters out, the water goes calm and a sheer cliff face appears, dropping a good 30-40 meters straight down. The whole scenery changed in an instant — a dark, quiet ocean. As I moved up and down along the rock face, staying within about 10 meters, I locked eyes with two decent-sized rockfish tucked in a crevice. They didn’t even bother fleeing. I aimed the gun and fired! Pfft — the gun must not have had enough air in it, because the spear just drifted limply and dropped right in front of me. “Oh, come on, seriously?” I muttered, deflated, while the two fish just stared right back at me like they were mocking me — what exactly are you even doing?
Whatever, I was tired anyway, so I surfaced, and since there was a rock shelf right there I climbed up onto it to rest for a bit. While I was doing that, a wave suddenly slammed in and knocked me flat, dragging me 4-5 meters in across the rock shelf. Right as I was thinking I should stand up and walk toward the beach, the next wave hit. I should have made a quick call, but I froze up for a second in a mini-panic, and ended up getting rolled this way and that across the rock shelf by the waves for a good while. Every time I saw a chance to swim, the water would drain out from under me before I could; every time I tried to stand, my fins would catch and I couldn’t get up; every time I reached down to pull the fins off, the next wave would roll me over again. If anyone had been watching from above, they must have gotten a good laugh out of it.

In high school, aside from the stuff everyone read — Dr. Slump, Slam Dunk, that kind of thing — I wasn’t much into manga. While the art club kids were tracking down Newtype magazine from somewhere and going on about Gundam this and Evangelion that, I think I was off sketching church bulletin covers instead. Sure, I’d fallen for the look of it enough to build a few of the Academy-brand Gundam kits, but I didn’t know the story and didn’t even know it was Japanese.
Back in the practice room, when downloading absolutely anything off torrents or P2P channels like Napster felt completely normal, I happened to spot someone had zipped up the original First Gundam and posted it. I was bored, curious what on earth had everyone so worked up about it, so I clicked download and waited about a week. Despite ’70s-era animation and cheesy sound effects that should’ve undercut the whole thing, I found myself getting pulled in anyway. That was the day I met Amuro. No melodrama, no forced heroics — just this ordinary, solid kid named Amuro, and what was I supposed to do with him? He goes all-in the second something grabs him, sulks like an actual teenager, gets flustered over his first crush, flails around trying to earn people’s approval, and still keeps trying to see the world clearly through all of it. I wanted to belong to that world — the one that belonged to him alone.
While I was at the language academy in the Philippines, my teacher asked what my English name was. I said I didn’t have one, so she just used my real name — but it sounded off, every time. Same with Australian and American accents later: none of them can nail the “Dong” sound. Ten times out of ten it comes out as “Ddong~” or “Ddeong.”
So when I’d say “I’m Donghoon,” what came back was “Nice to meet you, Ddonghoon.” And 똥 means poop, so that’s not great. I spent a few days thinking it over — David? James? Philip? Alex? If I had to pick one of those, I might honestly be better off just going with “Ddongi.”
Around then I noticed every single Japanese student at the academy just used their real names. Maybe because Japanese doesn’t have closed syllables, but the foreign kids had no trouble pronouncing them at all. That’s when Amuro came to mind. Right — Amuro, that’s going to be my English name.
The next day I told my teacher, from now on I’m Amuro. And it went:
“Amarou?”
“No no no, Amuro.”
“Ah, Amaro.”
“No no no — A. Mu. Ro.”
“Ah, Amuro.”
Anyway, even this one turned out not to be that easy. Still, it beats Ddong, it beats James, and it’s Amuro — a name I actually like — so I was satisfied then and I’m still happy with it now.