The Temperature of Color

KBS Jeju Broadcasting Gallery
2023. 5. 2. - 5. 15.

They said it was October 3, 2005: the day I set off with my parents, with no plan, into the deep mountains of Geoje Island. The day the most intense memories of my life began.

My fight with illness began when I was seven. In the year I turned eleven, when treatment had become all but impossible, my parents took me to an alternative-medicine community.

The director, an old man who had once been an elementary school principal, always looked after me, an elementary schoolboy, with great kindness. To me he was a teacher, a grandfather, and a doctor.

Life in the community—living in an abandoned mountain school the director had bought and repaired—was based on self-sufficiency. Electronic devices were banned and electricity was kept to a minimum, so there was no internet and no mobile phone. My father, who had gone back to Jeju for work, leaving my mother and me behind, would call several times a day, but all we could ever say was that the line wouldn't connect. Once a day, at an agreed time, I spoke with my dad in the middle of the playground, where the signal was strongest. And so, going against the times, I lived in nature.

The routine given to me as a patient was to run two laps of the playground at six in the morning, climb the hill behind the school, and only then eat breakfast.

The hill behind the school: the place you had to climb to get your breakfast. Crossing the old school playground and passing a worn classroom with a sign that read ‘Museum’, you came to a bamboo grove; past an old bellflower field no one was allowed to dig, you reached the foot of the hill. I would find the stick I had carried the day before, beat back the bushes, and kick pinecones for no reason as I climbed.

The only ones who climbed the hill were the director, my mother and me. The grandfather from Busan and the lady from Seoul were too unwell to walk far. They would only come up to the entrance of the hill and sit in the sun.

Not once did we meet anyone else in the area. One day the director got lost and wandered about, and by the time he came down it was past ten when we ate breakfast.

In November the hill turned a yellowish autumn color. The director's wife called me. "Hun! Today, go and write down the birdsong on the hill." With the ballpoint pen and small notebook she gave me, I headed for the hill. Past the first ridge, as I reached the middle of the slope, the birdsong rang clear. So many birdsongs I couldn't write down what they were all saying. That day I learned for the first time that there were birds there. Birdsongs whose names I didn't know…. Hwi-bi-bi, ppi-bi-bi…. For me, who had already lived five months with no friends and no children my age, only a handful of adults, the birds were welcome friends. I lifted my head to look for them, and on lazy days when I didn't want to walk, I used the birds as an excuse to flop down on my back and play at looking for them. My friends, who never would show themselves…. Yet listening to their songs, I became friends with birds I had never properly seen.

That day my mother, who had been climbing with me, went back down for a moment to fetch a water bottle, and I was walking alone, following the director, who was far ahead. Sulking because my mother was slow to return, I was poking at things with my stick when a snake caught on it. Startled, I swung the stick, and the snake, falling off, crawled toward me. I pressed its head down hard with the stick. "Grandpa, it's a snake!" "Kill it." I pressed harder. I pressed with all my might until I could feel the snake was dead. And when its writhing stopped, I raised the stick and struck it again and again. Then I screamed at my mother as she came up with the water bottle: "Mom, go. Why don't you just leave me, why do you keep coming up? Mom, go. I'll climb the mountain by myself, go!”

In December the days grew shorter and the nights longer still. Dawn in the deep mountains was pitch dark. When I rubbed my sleepy eyes and got up for the dawn service, my mother led the way with a flashlight. The flashlight beam crossing the playground was the grandfather from Busan. And when the flashlight of the lady from Seoul, who slept across from the small chapel, flickered, everyone had gathered. Our room was around the back of the chapel, on the path to the hill, so it was all the darker and more frightening.

Because of the director's nagging to save electricity, we had to turn the lights off at eight. We ate dinner at five and gathered for the service at seven. On the way back from the service, the only lights were our small flashlights. Bored, I swept my flashlight around the whole neighborhood, while my mother's lit only the ground at my feet. The modest light across the playground meant the grandfather from Busan was at peace today, and the light in the director's wife's room was the light by which she copied out the Bible. And the light leaking now and then from the director's dark room surely meant he was secretly watching the only TV in the place—the one he had scolded me never to watch.

In the autumn of 2005, when I was eleven, I went to the mountain community on Geoje Island, spent the winter there, and came out with my health restored. This was the childhood I met after the harsh loneliness and pain of the hospital. In nature I was lonely and afraid. And yet I was as peaceful and snug as a roe deer sheltering from the rain in a gwe. On rainy days I didn't have to run around the playground or climb the hill. I simply played in the chapel all day—my mother reading the Bible, me reading comics. The sound of the rain that day, alone with my mother, was warm and snug.