Well, I’m back.
You can see we missed a year there. I’ll try write about Year Four in there, but, well, things got a bit crazy. Who knew, having a toddler around would make things crazy. And then having a toddler at home with us full time during a pandemic. But, well, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Year Four
A lot happened in Year Four, that is, October 2018–October 2019.
For one thing, your mom and I were going through something. Well, “something” here is just the kind of strain that develops when a couple has a kid, is busy with work, is struggling with depression and family issues of their own, and health problems. (A recurring theme that both does and doesn’t become even more pronounced in Year Five.)
In Year Four, your personality boiled up to the surface. Finally, we were able to have coherent conversations with you. We were able to talk with you about things. Well, especially your mom: you were attending a small daycare just outside in Jochiwon, named __________, and since you were immersed in Korean all day long, five days a week, your Korean language ability was far more developed than your English.
You struggled, at times, with this: there was a day when you started telling your mom, “I hate dad.” We finally figured out that it was because it’d finally dawned on you that I was not exactly like the other dads at the daycare.
You had a very close friend at that daycare, named Juhan. He had a younger brother and a somewhat older dad—about the age that people tended to assume he was Juhan’s grandfather. That guy was great: kind, friendly, attentive and patient with the kids. I was happy about the fact you got to be around kids with such a loving dad, because, well… some of the other parents at the daycare were more the type to hit their kids, shout at them, or ignore them in favor of their cell phones. Seeing those parents reinforced for me the need to wean myself off my phone, not to mention the need to really put up boundaries in terms of phone usage for you someday.
Your love for dinosaurs continued, and deepened. Your mom and I took you to a lot of dinosaur museums in 2019, visiting and revisiting the same ones, and occasionally finding new ones. Your fascination deepened when we got even more dinosaur books for you at a second-hand bookstore called Ebony and Ivory Books in Cheonan. Your book collection was massive already, but more dinosaur books were always something you wanted. By the end of 2019, you were teaching us the names of dinosaurs, correcting us about their diets and habitats occasionally, and so on. Your mom and grandma took you to a Jurassic Park exhibition in Incheon that, seriously, even two years later, you are still talking about.
You moved to a new daycare in 2019, by the way. I think it was in March that you moved, and it was much better: it was only after we moved you that we realized how unhappy you were at the first one. We’re not sure why, we have some suspicions about grumpy workers and issues with the food, but can’t say for sure.
In 2019, our arguments affected your behavior. This was the year when, especially thanks to your mom’s alertness and effort, and some help from your grandma, we reduced your TV exposure. That was tough: I was teaching a more-than-full load (18 hours is far beyond a normal university teaching load in most of the world), your mom was working crazy hours with KTV—she’d shifted from filming and editing various special interest series about work and education to editing footage of the Vice President’s official business around the country, and there was a lot of hurry-up-and-wait work involved for her—and though it was good for our family’s income and finances, it was not really good for you.
On top of that, your mom and I are both people who need some alone time each day. I can’t be sure, but I expect you’ll develop that too, as you get older and start to sort of establish a strongly distinct identity of your own.
For me, it also hard because as a writer I tend to work best with long stretches of uninterrupted time… something that becomes impossible with a small kid around, especially when both parents are working (more than) full-time. I had taken up RPGs as a hobby to make up for the lack of creative outlet in writing. I was also working on that RPG adventure book, Fermentum Nigrum Dei Sepulti, which I assume you’ve at least seen at some point. The writing was done, and I’d had high hopes it would make some money for us, but everything was stalled multiple times, regardless of my efforts. Fiction writing was completely out the window. That’s absolutely not your fault, by the way. It’s just how it worked out.
But anyway, we spend evenings watching TV, looking at “Green Box Monster Game” (that is, an old Gamma World 7th Edition game that I put together to play with your someday), and No Thank You Evil, a kid-targeted RPG you enjoyed for its standees and many monster cards. You were too young to actually grasp playing the game at that point, but looking through the boxed sets fascinated you. Monsters in general fascinated you, but you were also a huge fan of The Berenstain Bears, of robots, The Power Rangers, and more.
Sometime in the summer, you had another surgery. This one was for an inguinial hernia: when I was washing you one day, I noticed that your scrotum had a kind of odd bulge in it that hadn’t been there before. Apparently it’s not terribly uncommon in little boys: something about how the muscle wall closes after the testes descend or something. For us, it was terrifying: this was your second surgery in your early years, and having to let doctors put you under general anaesthetic again was really, really hard to do. That said, you woke up fine, recovered quickly, and had no complications at all. Within a day or two at the most, you were back to being the cheerful little boy who wanted to do nothing more than run through the house at high speed. Like your earlier surgery on your ears and mastoid bone, this was performed at the South Chungcheong University Hospital in Daejeon.
For your 4th birthday, we got you a cake, had a little party and home, and gave you way too many presents. It’s all too fuzzy in my mind now to recount in detail, but I know you had a good day. I’m pretty sure we got you a Totoro doll around that time: the Ghibli movies had been playing in cinemas, and I’d taken you to many of the ones that played, as well as anything involving dinosaurs, robots, dinobots, or animals. We also got you some animalbots: the Metalions were a particular obsession for you in 2019, which… well, all I’ll say is that they were not designed for a three/four-year-old to be handle, in terms of the complexity of their transformations between animal and anthropic robot forms, much less the bewildering methods for combining them. I can still hear you saying the words 변신! and 트렌스포메이션! as you played with them.
You had some behavioral problems in 2019: fear, anxiety, anger issues. I’m not sure how unusual they are among toddlers at that age. Some of it was probably down to your mom and me arguing in front of you. Some, the day care issues. Some was probably normal. We all thought of 2019 as a “tough year.” We had no idea what lay in store for us in 2020.
Year 5:
We decided not to travel to Canada for Christmas 2019, because we were scheduled to fly to Quebec for a big family reunion in the summer of 2020, and felt two trips to Canada would be too much money—plus, of course, the fact that Korea University’s winter intensive classes start the week before Christmas, end two weeks after, and pay about W4,000,000 extra (about $4000 US in 2019 dollars).
Little did we know that this meant we would be unable to travel at all until… well, who knows? We still don’t really know! I’m writing this in early 2021—yeh, Year 6, technically—and we’re supposed to be getting vaccinated for COVID-19 in the summer or fall. We’ll see whether it happens on schedule.
But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.
October, November, December: things were, well… “normal.” Your mom was still working at KTV, and I was still teaching students who essentially were little better than zombies, but we were both making a living, and sort of stalled out in our thinking and planning for leaving Korea.
In January, the news here in Korea covered a mysterious illness that was spreading in China. Yeah, just like in movies, it started with news reports from abroad, and a vague sense of, “Oh, that’s interesting.” I was a little nervous—South Korea is just next to China, after all—but not seriously concerned until February. By the middle of that month, the illness had been discovered among the South Korean population, and some of the risk factors for serious complications were starting to come out in the news. Overweight… high blood pressure… respiratory illness… my first thought was, “I don’t want Noeul to grow up without a dad.”
Seriously, more important to me than surviving for myself was surviving for you. I could feel my responsibility to you, the importance of my duty to raise and take care of and provide for you as best I could, for as long as I could.
I’m sure I’ll talk about this with you over the years, but… 2020 was sort of a hell year for the world. Planetwide, over a hundred million people were confirmed to have been infected (but the numbers were likely much higher); the official numbers say something like 2.5 million people were confirmed to have died from it—but, again, the numbers have been wildly underreported in some places. Officials have started to just try calculate the death rate based on excess death rate numbers—how many more people than average died last year—to get a little clearer picture. This isn’t perfect: far fewer people caught the flu last year, because, lo and behold, half the world wearing masks, social distancing, and washing their hands faithfully reduced the normal number of deaths from the flu. Still, it’s turned out to be a better measure than just counting on governments to report the numbers honestly—especially governments like the U.S. and China, where the handling of the crisis was less than humane, and optics matter more than, you know, facts.
But, again, I’m getting ahead of myself. By Valentine’s Day 2020, we understood that COVID was circulating in South Korea. South Korea didn’t lock down—even now, in late February 2021, we still haven’t yet locked down—but the government started pursuing aggressive track-and-trace measures, and warning people to minimize outings as much as possible, and to wear masks when they did go out in public.
Ha, we were scheduled to move house in March. That was absolutely nerve-wracking, having a bunch of strangers in our home while eyeing the escalating numbers of infected people countrywide. (Especially thanks to a moronic cult who defied government rules and seriously worsened the outbreak here. I don’t know what it is with religious cults and South Korea, but… well, it’s a thing here.)
We were scheduled to move a few days into the Spring semester, though of course the university postponed the start of semester, and shortened the semester as well. Your mom was still going to the office pretty regularly at first, but then it became clear it was safer to stay home, so she began to work from home. I was working from home, too. We weren’t sure at the time whether there might be an outbreak at your daycare, and nobody knew how COVID-19 affected young children, so we pulled you from daycare and kept you home with us. Since your grandma was a fanatical church-goer at the time, we also told her she couldn’t come visit us regularly, as she had been doing before the outbreak.
All of which meant that, much as we regretted it, Netflix kind of became your babysitter for a few months. I was working on powerpoints like a madman, and then on recording prerecorded lectures for my students. Your mom was still going to the office a few times a week for pointlessly intensive marathon video-edits. We didn’t really have much choice. I messed with my schedule a fair bit, so that I could spend time with you in the afternoons and evenings, but that meant staying up late to record lectures.
To be honest, it was all a blur, a struggle to keep up with work and then try to get ahead of things a little. At some point my external hard drive failed on my decade-old computer, and I couldn’t work for four days while I waited for a replacement to arrive, and struggled to recover the lost files. And played with you. I got an inkling, then, that I’d been doing online work wrong: that I should have been able to have more time with you. Ah well, I consoled myself, at least I’ll have my lectures prerecorded for next semester! It’ll be smooth sailing next semester, and for the rest of this pandemic!
(Spoiler: It was not. But before I get to that…)
About a week before the end of my teaching duties for the semester finished, your mom’s back gave out. We still don’t know what really caused that, beyond the long marathon sessions of editing bullshit pseudo-propaganda videos to make an inept politician look good. All we know is that she was experiencing a certain amount of back pain, getting some very ineffective treatment for it from a typical older doctor who didn’t bother to, you know, check her condition much, and then one night, kablooey, she was in agony. We got her to the hospital the next day, and they did X-Rays and scans and so on. Then doctor looked at the X-Ray in shock, and told her he’d never seen a case that bad. When I saw the X-Ray, I was shocked, too. It was obviously serious.
Your grandma got a COVID-19 test, and then came to help us for a week or ten days. At this point, you’d been at home with us for most of the past four or five months. We were worried—she was still going to church regularly despite the risk—but with your mom unable to stand or walk (or cook for herself or you, or do much of anything, and needing some care herself), and me working full time, it was pretty hard to keep the wheels on the cart. Honestly, the few days I kept the family going while working full time were a blur.
But then the end of semester had come. The university announced classes would be offline for the summer—despite the infection rate not having dropped—so I asked them not to schedule me a summer class. By the time our administrative morons announced that classes could be (optionally?!?!) held online, it was too late to schedule one for me, but… well, despite the lost income, it was actually all for the best: I needed a break, and was able to use the time constructively bonding with you, and trying to do what little I could to help your mom recuperate.
It was a summer of trips out into the countryside to fly drones and look at birds and pine cones. There’s a reservoir just outside of Sejong City, called the Jungheung Reservoir (중흥저수지) where we often went to fly my little pocket drone, and collect flowers and pine cones for you to bring home to your mom. You found the reservoir area scary in the evening, but liked going there in the afternoon, even if it was too difficult to fly a drone around in the area.
We also visited various playgrounds around our apartment building, though especially during the summer, that became a bit difficult: there was a cluster outbreak that occurred in connection with a few gay nightclubs in the Itaewon district of Seoul, which is to say, gay clubs in the “foreigner” ghetto in Seoul. Never mind that the neighborhood had long since been gentrified and was not a place foreign people actually went much more than Koreans; never mind that, as a responsible adult with a full-time job and a family, I hadn’t been to Itaewon in many years—probably close to a decade. Moms in our neighborhood began to freak out anytime you and I showed up at the playground; they were fine with their kids playing in a big crowd of “pure Korean” children, some with masks and some without (because masks weren’t mandatory in public until the autumn), but they would tell their kids directly not to play with you, and were not particularly secretive about it, either.
There were less-obvious incidents, too: cases where moms would suddenly tell their kids it was time to go home when we showed up, but who might have done the same if any family had shown up—people who might have been keeping their distance from all unknown people. Still, it was hard not to perceive bigotry, especially since some people were so obvious about it.
This was something you were starting to notice, starting to realize was happening. I remember you once looking up into my eyes with a sad face and saying, “I just wanna play with other kids, papa.” As angry as I was at these bigots for how they were hurting you, I struggled to put that aside because I was worried you might not become so hurt that you might start developing a more defensive, closed approach to people. “Already?” I thought. “Not yet… he’s so small…”
Well, you’re five years and four months old, and we did have to have a conversation with you about racism, but… I’ll get to that.
Not everyone was terrible. There was a little boy who lived in the apatrment complex where we used to live, who loved playing with you. He’s a little ahead of you, developmentally, though, and sometimes your emotional outbursts are a little hard for him to process. We haven’t seen him in a while, but he’s still a friend you mention from time to time. We also had a great encounter with an older boy and his mom, who both treated you… like a person. As you and that boy, maybe a couple of years older than you, played together, chasing one another onto the play structure and gathering pine cones, I brimmed with pride: you know why? Because you hadn’t hesitated to walk up to the kid; you hadn’t been at all shy or reluctant.
I was shocked. After so many awful playground mom experiences, so many encounters with badly parented little racists-in-training, someone treating you or me like a human being was a bit shocking. (I actually had happy tears in my eyes when I told your mom.) If you ever wonder why we left Korea, or why I always felt we should, well, that’s a big part of why.
Anyway, all this brings me to something odd: I wrote earlier that 2020 was a hard year for the world. But… in a lot of ways, it ended up being an incredible year for us as a family.
Which says something. It was a year when many families were torn apart, when many people started filing for divorce after being cooped up with one another for so long. But for us, it was when we started working through some of our problems, and when we finally had the chance to really spend time with you—setting our phones aside, trying not to just turn on Netflix. Listening to you and asking your questions, answering your questions. I can’t even guess how many hours we spent walking with you—”flashlight walks” was one thing you came to love. How many books we read to you… though I know I’ve read every single one of the Berenstain Bears books to you, and leafed through both the Dinotopia picture books you have, your Usborne books about night and about animals, your holographic books about dinosaurs and jungle animals, so many pop=up books, and countless Korean-language books as well.
(The Korean books are kind of tough: I can’t completely read most of them, and you didn’t know until recently—here in Year 6, when I am writing this—that I can’t really read them very well. I mean, I can sound things out, but there’s vocabulary that you know and I don’t, and sometimes you end up correcting me about the story in the books. But, anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.)
What I’m saying is, the second half of 2020 was tough in some ways—not the least because the idiots at my workplace demanded that we not reuse teaching materials from Spring 2020, and piled more work onto us—but in terms of the time your mom and I spent with you, getting to know you, getting close to you, it was an absolute blessing, a joy, one of the happiest times I can remember. Your love, your trust, your sweetness are all a constant revelation to us. It’s not that your not sometimes difficult: your long-running campaign to receive the last of the Metalions transformer robots—”Eagle, Mammoth, and Giant Elf” (you were trying to say “elk”) was endless, and, ultimately, irresistible.
Your birthday, in 2020, was like our birthdays, like everyone’s birthdays this year. In 2019, you’d had a party at your daycare and had fun with your friends, dressed up and had cake with the other kids and gotten a huge pile of presents so that we had to send thank-you cards. In 2020, we stayed home, and your mom go a cake with… was it Pororo on it? I think it was Pororo. We got you some books and some Metalion robots, some dinosaur puzzles.
But we also had fun, and played a game, and you were happy.