Our house in the countryside had a pretty big backyard.
One day my dad built a fence and brought home three deer.
Two does and one buck — the buck was so skittish I barely ever saw it up close.
From then on, I’d go up the mountain with my dad to cut kudzu vines to feed them.
We’d cut off the buck’s antlers to sell, and I remember being horrified watching the neighborhood men catch the blood that dripped out and mix it into soju to drink.
A few years later, the deer we’d bought for 5 million won had grown to be worth 15 million, and apparently that became the seed money for our move to Seoul.
Seoul.
Too many houses, too many people, too big a school — I’d become a Seoul kid.
I’d only ever seen traffic lights and pedestrian overpasses in books, so they fascinated me — I’d raise my hand, wait for the light to turn green, cross, and then cross back again, over and over, more times than I could count.
At my new school, introducing myself, I glanced around at the other kids — every single one of them had pale, pretty faces.
No runny noses, no crusty eyes on anyone.
I got paired up with a kid named Daeho, and we threw punches at each other every single recess.
I don’t remember why at all.
Daeho, Dohee, Jeongrae — I became friends with kids like that and went out to play with them every day.
The adults kept saying things like the air in Seoul wasn’t good, that people were cold and distant — but to my eyes, nothing about it seemed wrong at all.
The concrete pavement was actually more fun to play on than the muddy country roads, and I didn’t have to spend fifteen minutes running errands for my mom anymore — the store was right under our building, packed floor to ceiling with everything you could want.
The toy section of the stationery store became a window-shopping destination that could hold me captive for hours.
My mom started doing sewing work — making car seat covers.
Our living room floor always had a mountain of car-seat fabric piled up.
In the evenings, my older sister, Moonhee, and I would spend countless hours turning the triangular doll ears my mom had sewn right-side out, gently pushing the tips into shape with an awl.
A year after we moved to Seoul, my mom made a decision that still sounds insane to me even now — she bought a house.
60 million won, more than half of it a loan, and the interest rate on loans back then was something like 15 to 16 percent — practically loan-sharking.
Looking back, that was probably the last window of opportunity, and my mom caught the very last train out.
House prices doubled the following year, and to pay off the loan, my mom dug out the basement of the new house and built a sewing factory in it.
When they excavated the ground, a 4-ton truck showed up, and a husband-and-wife pair hauled out all that dirt with nothing but two shovels between them.
Just watching them, my own back ached.
Two or three years later, my mom did an expansion, and the same couple came back — this time with a small excavator loaded on the back of the truck.
Even to my young eyes, there was something that welled up in me watching that.
I think that’s just what our parents’ generation was like — grinding their way up from the very bottom, one hard-packed step at a time.
Dohee’s parents were rarely home.
It was a rooftop unit with a wide roof deck, a ping-pong table up there, and one small room.
I don’t think there was ever a better hideout for kids.
By middle school, we’d still gather at that place — learning poker, swinging nunchucks around, covering Metallica’s
“Enter Sandman,”
and during breaks, working all day at Dohee’s dad’s factory stripping the insulation off wire ends for pocket money.
Sometime around the middle of first year, I started walking to school with Gwangjin, who loved soccer, and we switched from taking the bus to running instead.
It took about 30 to 40 minutes to get there, and I ended up with 120 won of bus fare money in my pocket every day.
Someone from the local credit union came to school and made every student their own passbook — once a week, a class monitor would collect the money and get it stamped in the book.
That 120 won piled up day after day, and by the time I graduated middle school, it had turned into a real sum: 150,000 won.
With that money I was able to buy an acoustic guitar — a Fender, real or fake, I still don’t know — the one I’ve since handed down to my nephew Jinhyeong.
Thanks to Slam Dunk, sometime around ninth grade, the school field emptied out completely.
Everyone started playing basketball.
On weekends we’d play from morning to night, all day long.
Even when you were completely dying, slumped on the ground, someone would say
“one more game?”
and another one would just automatically start.
God, I was young.