6
The doctors diagnosed me with alexithymia, or the inability to express your feelings. They figured that I was too young, my symptoms different from Asperger’s syndrome, and my other developments didn’t show signs of autism. It’s not necessarily that I was unable to express feelings, but more that I was unable to identify them in the first place. I didn’t have a problem with making sentences or understanding them like people who’d damaged the Broca or Wernicke areas in the brain, which dealt with primary speech functions. But I couldn’t feel emotions, couldn’t identify other people’s feelings, and got confused over the names of emotions. The doctors all said it was because the almonds inside my head, the amygdalae, were unusually small and the contact between the limbic system and the frontal lobe didn’t function as smoothly as it should.
One of the symptoms of having small amygdalae is that you don’t know how it feels to be afraid. People sometimes say how cool it’d be to be fearless, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. Fear is an instinctive defense mechanism necessary for survival. Not knowing fear doesn’t mean that you’re brave; it means you’re stupid enough to stay standing on the road when a car is charging toward you. I was even more unlucky. On top of my lack of fear, I was limited in all my emotional functions. The only silver lining, the doctors said, was that my intelligence wasn’t affected despite having such small amygdalae.
They advised that, since everyone has different brains, we should see how things go. Some of them made rather tempting offers, saying that I could play a big role in uncovering the mysteries of the brain. Researchers at university hospitals proposed long-term research projects on my growth, to be reported in medical journals. There would be generous compensation for taking part, and depending on the research results, an area of the brain might even be named after me, like the Broca area or Wernicke area. The Seon Yunjae area. But the doctors were met with a flat refusal from Mom, who was already sick of them.
For one thing, Mom knew Broca and Wernicke were scientists, not patients. She had read all kinds of books about the brain from her regular visits to the local library. She also didn’t like that the doctors saw me as an interesting specimen rather than a human being. She had given up hope early on that the doctors would cure me. All they’d do is put him through weird experiments or give him untested medicines, observe his reactions, and show off their findings at a conference, she wrote in her diary. And so Mom, like so many other overprotective mothers, made a declaration that was both unconvincing and clichéd.
“I know what’s best for my child.”
On my last day at the hospital, Mom spat on a flower bush in front of the hospital building and said, “Those hacks don’t even know what’s in their own goddamned brains.”
She could be so full of swagger sometimes.
7
Mom blamed stress during her pregnancy, or the one or two cigarettes she had smoked in secret, or the few sips of beer she couldn’t resist in the last month before her due date, but it was obvious to me why my brain was messed up. I was just unlucky. Luck plays a huge part in all the unfairness of the world. Even more than you’d expect.
Things being the way they were, Mom may have hoped that I would at least have a large computer-level memory like in the movies, or some extraordinary artistic talent in my drawings—something to offset my lack of emotions. If so, I could’ve been on TV, and my sloppy paintings would’ve sold for more than ten million won. Unfortunately, I was no genius.
After the Mickey Mouse Hairband Incident, Mom began “educating” me in earnest. On top of its tragedy and misfortune, the fact that I didn’t feel much basically implied serious dangers ahead.
No matter how much people scolded me with their angry looks, it didn’t work. Screaming, yelling, raising eyebrows . . . I couldn’t grasp that all these things meant something specific, that there was an implication behind each action. I just took things at face value.
Mom wrote down a few sentences on colored paper and pasted them onto a larger piece of paper. She put them all over the walls.
When cars come too close to you → Dodge or run away.
When people come too close to you → Make way so that you don’t bump into them.
When others smile → Smile back.
At the bottom, it said:
Note: For expressions, try to mirror the expression the other person makes.
It was a little too much for seven-year-old me to grasp.
The examples on the paper got longer and longer. While other kids were memorizing multiplication tables, I was memorizing these examples like studying the chronology of the ancient dynasties. I tried to match each item to the appropriate, corresponding reaction. Mom tested me regularly. I committed to memory each “instinctive” rule that other kids had no problem picking up. Granny tutted that this kind of cramming was pointless, but she still cut out the arrow shapes to glue onto the paper. The arrows were her job.