When the Wind Is Cold

8. 찬 바람이 불면

8. When the Wind Is Cold

When the wind is cold, I develop a frequent cough, and it doesn’t stop until the warmth of spring. For quite a long time, I spent every winter nursing a cough. Ven. Damtawon may have taken pity on me as she saw me hacking day and night, because she allowed me to spare some time to visit Acupuncture Clinic.

In spring 2003, my father was bedridden with a serious cold that eventually sent him to the emergency room with tuberculosis. There was no isolation ward there, so after some inquiry, he was transferred to Seobuk Hospital, which is run by the city of Seoul.

There was a ward there exclusively for patients with serious TB symptoms. It was filled with the harsh sounds of coughing from deep within the lungs, and when my mother and I came to see him, he would tell us, with great difficulty, about the patients across from him who were passing away one by one.

Fortunately, he made it through the danger, but in his weakened condition, he was forced to quit his job. The divide between my father and me ran deep at the time; we had been butting heads on many things, and I was largely indifferent to his suffering.

Beyond the matter of my father’s illness, I was also preparing that fall for the big companies’ hiring season. All I wished for was to be an ordinary middle-class citizen, able to care for myself and provide for a happy home with a wife and children.

To be able to “sell” myself on the job market, I went about carefully filling in the spaces on the application forms: my school, my major, my credits and English scores. I felt somewhat sad about my own life, circumscribed as it was by the sorts of numbers the companies’ sought—without any room for the values and interests that had been such an important part of my 20s. In my sadness, I would drink by myself every time I sent off a document.

My mental struggles were not in vain. Toward the end of October, I received word from one of the companies, telling me that I had passed their final interview. They wanted me to start work on December 1, before my final semester was finished.

I was worried, but my professors were happy to grant me permission. Feeling less emotionally burdened, I began treating my friends to drinks. I was going to be a salaryman, which was not exactly considered the peak of success and status, but my parents were proud enough that I would be a full-time employee at one of the major companies along Seoul’s Teheran-ro.

However, my first day on the job never came—I was diagnosed with an apparent case of tuberculosis at the employment physical when the doctor showed me an X-ray image in which around two-thirds of my left lung appeared as a cloud of white.

My mother was distraught that this misfortune had been passed now from her husband to her son. The medicine they gave me was strong and left my head feeling fuzzy; my urine came out orange.

My parents began pressing me to find some small companies that didn’t have exacting physicals. They wanted me to get a job somewhere, anywhere. I didn’t have anyone to turn to at the time, someone who would understand and assuage all of my anxiety and fear.

I was unable to accept what a sorry state I was in, sick and unemployed. It left me feeling unbearably sad, and I was unable to attend even my own graduation, lying in bed zoned out on tuberculosis medication.

From the living room, I could hear my father’s thick, phlegmy coughing. In addition to my mother’s nagging about why my father wasn’t taking his medicine at the times he was supposed to, I could hear my father becoming more and more irritated.

Finally, all my pent-up anger came bursting out. I kicked open the door to my room and began to yell. “Why won’t you take your medication? You’ve already ruined my life,” I shouted. The scars we inflicted on each other that day were deep, and I carried that anger with me for a long time.

When the wind is cold, it awakens memories of the past and my illness, the coughing that once spewed from my sickened lungs. I feel the sadness, the anger, and the sense of guilt. But when the wind blows again, I embrace my foolish younger self. “It’s all over now,” I say. “I am no longer my sadness or my anger.”