Discipline: Infancy

I don’t know — I don’t really remember this one — but apparently I used to lose it completely wherever we went, and my mom hated taking me anywhere because of it.
On the bus, I’d throw myself on the floor screaming until someone gave up a seat for me.
If I spotted a ppeongtwigi (puffed rice snack) vendor, I’d throw a fit until it was in my hands.
If someone wanted to take my picture, I’d throw a fit because I didn’t want to.
According to my mom, I basically didn’t need legs — rolling around on the ground got me everywhere just fine.

Kindergarten showed up in the Korean education system in the late ’70s.
The usual pattern was: kindergarten at 7, then — assuming no problems — elementary school at 8.
My older sister, even though her birthday fell in September, got into kindergarten at 6 thanks to some string-pulling by my dad, and started elementary school at 7.
She kicked off her
“career”
a full year ahead of everyone else.
My dad, wanting to repeat his daughter’s success story with me, sent me to kindergarten at 6 as well.
But when I turned 7, elementary school rejected my admission.
The reason: out of control.
Lol.

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.

I was born