The Good Son

There are some people you just can’t love. Even when they smile, they make you want to pull on either side of that smile and rip their mouth off.

Mother knew exactly how to get under my skin, what to take away from me in order to get me to submit. The guilt coming from one part of her heart would have been offset by confessing in her journal just how painful it was to bully me. I turned the page.

Every organism learns from the moment of its birth how to survive and how to wait, learning how to eat and how to forge on until it can eat again. But modern-day humans don't learn how to be hungry. We eat all kinds of things without regard to time and place, indulging ourselves in restaurants and never learning to delay gratification. This obsession over consuming food isn't any different from psychopath porn. From that perspective, it seemed that humans were the most impatient about their desires out of all living beings on earth.

Everyone knew that you couldn't gain something if you were allowed nothing, but Mother, who knew everything about everything, didn't seem to know that.

Everyone knew that you couldn’t gain something if you were allowed nothing,

Happy stories aren't usually based in reality." That was what Hae-jin had said after we saw City of God. I wanted to ask him what truth he was hoping to find in Rio, but didn't. The train was already crossing Han River; we had to get our things together.

He stared out of the window, looking blank for a moment, the way he did when he thought about his grand-father. "I read once that there are three ways to protect yourself from the fear of death. One is repression, forgetting that death is approaching and acting like it doesn't exist, which is how most of us live. The second is never forgetting about it, living every day like it's the last day of your life. The last is acceptance: people who truly accept death aren't afraid of anything. You feel peaceful even when you're at the point of losing everything. But do you know what the three approaches have in common?" I shook my head. It would be easier to just keel over and die rather than worry about this. "They're all lies. They all are manifestations of fear." "Then what's true?" "Fear itself, I guess. That's the most honest emotion.

The swing was empty. Mother seemed to have left for good. I didn't know why she'd been there or why she'd gone, but I felt a strange sorrow, as though the umbilical cord was finally cut, as if I'd crossed over an inviolable border and become an orphan or something more, perhaps a monster. I'd probably left myself on the other side of the border: the me who lived with people in this world, who believed myself to be average. There was no way to return once you'd crossed a line you shouldn't. There was nothing you could do about it other than to keep moving forward.

Veintisiete huesos, veintisiete articulaciones, ciento veintitrés ligamentos, treinta y cuatro músculos y diez huellas dactilares. Mis manos, con las que había sostenido comida, tocado las cosas que amaba, nadado, las manos que había lavado tantas veces, se habían vuelto armas de matar la noche anterior.

I slept in his room for the rest of that year and continued until the spring I turned nine, the year he died.

Me pareció que según el autor la moralidad consistía en pintarlo todo de un modo que beneficiara al acusado.