When I Was You

49. 내가 너 였을 때

49. When I Was You

Yu Hui Jung

To a curious 10-year-old boy living in the countryside, insects were easy playthings. As soon as I saw an ant busily crawling along the ground under the warm summer sun, I would pick it up and fling it into a banana spider’s web I had seen earlier. Sensing the delicate quivering of the ant struggling in the sticky fibers, the spider would race over to consume its prey.

As the spider’s poison seeped through its body, the ant’s movements would soon stop. The yellow- and black-striped spider would secrete threads from its tail and wrap them around the ant.

Then it would inject its digestive fluids into the ant’s body and slowly consume it. Romping through the field, I would grab butterflies, bush crickets, grasshoppers, dragonflies, and other insects to feed to the spider.

Once, brandishing a dragonfly net my father had made from onion bags, I snagged a fat, hardy dragonfly and placed it neatly into a canister I had tied to my belt. I fed it other winged insects to fatten it up and then took it over to introduce it to the spider. Sensing its arrival, the banana spider shook its web vigorously back and forth; as I approached, it skittered off into one of the corners.

Gripping the dragonfly between my thumb and forefinger, I held one of its legs out in the air while using the other hand to spread its wings and affix it firmly to the sticky web. Those dragonflies are normally vigorous fighters, but this one was now unable to move. It had been reduced to a meal for the spider.

After a few more days me of feeding it like that, the spider grew quite large. I set it on the ground and had it duel a mantis, and the other kids from the neighborhood gathered to see which one would win.

As the contest died down, the two gladiators left staggering, I lost interest and flung both of them in front of an anthill. The exhausted spider and mantis were no match for the horde of pitch-black ants that descended on them and gnawed away their heads and legs.

My foolish antics did not end there. I would sprinkle ant-killing powder in front of the anthill; tiring of that, I simply sprayed the whole thing with insecticide. The bodies of ants were littered all about. I only stopped after I’d rooted around in the anthill with a trowel.

I didn’t hesitate to stick pins in the writhing bodies of rhinoceros and stag beetles in the name of “homework.” When I dunked a live, hissing longhorn beetle in ethanol, my only concern that I might get stung. If anything, I felt proud of the beautiful “trophy” I now possessed.

I was one of those naughty boys who delighted in “punishing” pests by wrapping dead cockroaches, flies, and mosquitoes in tissue and setting them on fire, dousing them with insecticide and watching them blaze.

I marveled at mosquito spray, which could spew fire like the flamethrowers I had only seen in movies. I also enjoyed fishing with my brothers, using small Chinese grasshoppers as bait. It was all part of the rough-and-tumble life of a playful country boy.

That was then. Today, I am a middle-aged man who tries to avoid using mosquito spray as much as possible, opting instead to keep the mosquitoes at bay with rose geraniums on the windowsill or to go through the hassle of putting up a mosquito net.

When I have no choice but to use insecticide, I try to use as little as possible, and I pray for the deliverance of each insect that loses its life. That is the adult I am now.

As I have grown older, I have come to understand the principle of how I only harm myself when I treat lives as something to play with and cast aside—whether I do this out of curiosity about hunting, a desire to know who is the stronger, the simple perception that something is a pest, or a yearning to experience the thrill of capturing a fleeing insect. I did not know then what I know now: that I used to be you.

If you do not understand the origin of suffering and happiness, then even if you are fortuitously enjoying happiness now, you inevitably will lose that happiness and fall into suffering. It is just like a person who cannot distinguish between sugar and arsenic: he may by chance ingest sugar, but after repeated servings he inevitably will end up ingesting arsenic.

—The Dharma Discourses of Cardinal Master Chŏngsan, Chapter 6:35