Youth, Courage, and Naivety Theme Analysis

“Let’s go home,” she says. You give your wrist a violent wrench, trying to shake free of her grip. The insistent, desperate strength in that grip is frightening, somehow, making you think of someone drowning. You have to use your other hand to pry her fingers away, one by one. “The army is coming. Let’s go home, now.”

[…] You turn around and call back to her: “We’re going to close up here at six, Mum.” […] You call again, louder this time: “Once we've closed up, I'll come home. I promise.”

[…] “Make sure you do,” she says. “Be back before the sun sets. We’ll all have dinner together.”

Burning my tongue on a steamed potato my sister gave me, blowing on it hastily and juggling it in my mouth.

Flesh of a watermelon grainy as sugar, the glistening black seeds I didn’t bother to pick out.

Racing back to the house where my sister was waiting, my jacket zipped up over a parcel of chrysanthemum bread, feet entirely numb with cold, the bread blazing hot against my heart.

Yearning to be taller.

To be able to do forty push-ups in a row.

For the time when I would hold a woman in my arms.

She could have pressed her hands over her ears, could have screwed her eyes tight shut, shook her head from side to side or moaned in distress. Instead, she simply remembered you, Dong-ho. How you darted away at the stairs when she tried to take you home. Your face frozen with terror, as though escaping this importunate plea was your only hope of survival. Let’s go together, Dong-ho. We ought to leave together, right away. You stood there clinging to the second-floor railing, trembling. When she caught your gaze, Eun-sook saw your eyelids quiver. Because you were afraid. Because you wanted to live.

It wasn’t as though we didn't know how overwhelmingly the army outnumbered us. But the strange thing was, it didn't matter. Ever since the uprising began, I’d felt something coursing through me, as overwhelming as an army.

Conscience.

Conscience, the most terrifying thing in the world. The day I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of my fellow civilians, staring down the barrels of the soldiers’ guns, […] I was startled to discover an absence inside myself: the absence of fear. I remember feeling that it was all right to die; I felt the blood of a hundred thousand hearts surging together into one enormous artery, fresh and clean…the sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own. I dared to feel a part of it.

Kids crouching beneath the windows, fumbling with their guns and complaining that they were hungry, asking if it was OK for them to quickly run back and fetch the sponge cake and Fanta they'd left in the conference room; what could they possibly have known about death that would have enabled them to make such a choice?

Looking at that boy's life, Jin-su said, what is this thing we call a soul? Just some nonexistent idea? Or something that might as well not exist? Or no, is it like a kind of glass? Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That's the fundamental nature of glass. And that's why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped, then they're good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away.

Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn't be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. Though what we really were was humans made of glass.

Middle-school boys all had their hair cut short back then, didn’t they, but it seems to have gone out of fashion now. That’s how I knew it had to be you—I’d know that round little chestnut of a head anywhere. It was you, no mistake. Your brother’s handme-down school uniform was like a sack on you, wasn’t it? It took you till the third year to finally grow into it. In the mornings when you slipped out through the main gate with your book bag, and your clothes so neat and clean, ah, I could have gazed on that sight all day. This kid didn’t have any book bag with him; the hands swinging by his sides were empty. Well, he must have put it down somewhere. There was no mistaking those toothpick arms, poking out of your short shirt sleeves […] It was definitely you.

“I don’t like summer but I like summer nights”: that was something you came out with the year you turned eight. I liked the sound of those words, and I remember thinking to myself, he’ll be a poet. Times when you three boys sat out on the bench in the yard, sharing watermelon with your father on hot summer nights. When your tongue groped for the sticky sweet remnants smeared around your mouth.

There was something meek and gentle about those single-lidded half-moon eyes. The traces of infancy still lingered in the soft line of his jaw. It was a face so utterly ordinary you could easily have mistaken it for that of another, a face whose characteristics would be forgotten the moment you turned away from it.

As it turned out, none of my relatives died; none were injured or even arrested. But all through that autumn in 1980, my thoughts returned to that tiny room at one end of the kitchen, where I used to lie on my stomach to do my homework, that room with the cold paper floor—had the boy used it to spread out his homework on its cold paper floor, then lie stomach-down just as I had? The middle-school kid I'd heard the grown-ups whispering about. How had the seasons kept on turning for me, when time had stopped forever for him that May?

Permission? Yes, you have my permission, but only if you do it properly. Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again […]

Whenever we had a toe war, I always won.

He was really ticklish, you see.

All I had to do was poke his foot with my big toe and he’d start squirming.

At first I couldn’t tell whether he was grimacing like that because he was ticklish, or because it really hurt…

But then he would turn bright red and laugh.