A man in a white lab coat sits in front of me. Beaming, he starts showing me different toys one by one. Some of them he shakes. Then he taps my knee with a small hammer. My leg swings up higher than I thought possible. He then puts his fingers under my armpits. It tickles, and I giggle a little. Then he takes out photographs and asks me some questions. One of the pictures I still remember vividly.
“The kid in this photo is crying because his mommy is gone. How would he feel?”
Not knowing the answer, I look up to Mom sitting next to me. She smiles at me and strokes my hair, then subtly bites her lower lip.
*
A few days later, Mom takes me somewhere else, saying I will get to ride a spaceship, but we end up at another hospital. I ask her why she brings me here when I’m not even sick, but she doesn’t answer.
Inside, I’m told to lie down on something cold. I’m sucked into a white tank. Beep beep beep. I hear strange sounds. My boring space trip ends there.
Then the scene changes. I suddenly see many more men in white lab coats. The oldest among them hands me a blurry black-and-white photograph, saying that it’s the inside of my head. What a liar. That’s clearly not my head. But Mom keeps nodding as if she believes such an obvious lie. Whenever the old guy opens his mouth, the younger guys around him take notes. Eventually, I start to get a little bored and fidget with my feet, kicking at the old man’s desk. When Mom puts her hand on my shoulder to stop me, I look up and see that she’s crying.
All I can remember about the rest of that day is Mom’s crying. She cries and cries and cries. She’s still crying when we head back to the waiting room. There is a cartoon playing on TV, but I can’t focus because of her. The defender of the universe is fighting off the bad guy, but all she does is cry. Finally, an old man dozing off next to me wakes up and barks at her, “Stop acting miserable, you noisy woman, I’ve had enough!” It works. Mom purses her lips tight like a scolded teenager, silently trembling.
5
Mom fed me a lot of almonds. I’ve tried almonds from America, Australia, China, and Russia. All the countries that export them to Korea. The Chinese ones had a bitter, awful taste, and the Australian ones tasted kind of sour and earthy. There are the Korean ones too, but my favorite are the American ones, especially the ones from California. They have a soft brown hue from absorbing the blazing sunlight there.
Now I will tell you my secret how to eat them.
First, you hold the package and feel the shape of the almonds from the outside. You need to feel the hard, stubborn kernels with your fingers. Next, you slowly tear the top part of the package and open the double zipper. Then, you poke your nose inside the package and slowly breathe in. You have to close your eyes for this part. You take it lightly, occasionally holding your breath, to allow as much time as possible for the scent to reach the body. Finally, when the scent fills you up from deep inside, you pop half a handful of them into your mouth. Roll them around in there for a while and feel their texture. Poke the pointy parts with your tongue. Feel the grooves on their surface. You have to make sure not to take too long. If they get bloated from your saliva, they will taste bad. These steps are all just a lead-up to the finale. If too short, it will be dull. Too long and the impact will be gone. You have to find the right timing for yourself. You have to imagine the almonds getting bigger—from the size of a fingernail to the size of a grape, a kiwi, an orange, then a watermelon. Finally the size of a rugby ball. That’s the moment. Crunch, you crush them. You will taste the sunshine all the way from California, flooding right into your mouth.
The reason I bother going through this ritual is not because I like almonds. At every meal of the day, there were almonds on the table. There was no way of getting around them. So I just made up a way to eat them. Mom thought that if I ate a lot of almonds, the almonds inside my head would get bigger. It was one of the very few hopes she clung to.
Everybody has two almonds inside their head, stuck firmly on somewhere between the back of your ears and the back of your skull. In fact, they’re called “amygdalae,” derived from the Latin word for almond because their size and shape are exactly like one.
When you get stimulated by something outside your body, these almonds send signals into your brain. Depending on the type of stimulation, you’ll feel fear or anger, joy or sorrow.
But for some reason, my almonds don’t seem to work well. They don’t really light up when they are stimulated. So I don’t know why people laugh or cry. Joy, sorrow, love, fear—all these things are vague ideas to me. The words “emotion” and “empathy” are just meaningless letters in print.