A few years ago, when I was playing in a band, a friend suggested that we write a song together about playing catch.
He told me about his childhood memories of playing catch with his younger brother. But I couldn’t relate to it at all.
I can’t write a song about something I can’t feel.
Playing catch….
Why would you even do that?
While he was playing baseball with the neighborhood kids, wearing gloves and throwing a ball around, what was I doing?
I grew up in a place called Secheon Jakgol, a tiny neighborhood with one little shop and maybe eight kids in the whole area.
I lived there for about five years, starting when I was six.
It took about thirty minutes to walk home from school. If we were lucky, we could stop a passing truck and ride in the back.
If one of us managed to stop a truck, the other kids walking behind would come running to get on too.
If you were already sitting in the back, you could watch the other kids running after the truck.
Their faces were full of happiness.
(Thinking about it now, I really miss that.)
But those were really lucky days.
Most of the time, we walked.
We had to walk along a brutal two-lane road with no traffic lights, with huge trucks thundering past us, and then cross one last mountain before getting home.
Before the mountain, there was a place called Guttang.
I never saw a pigsty anywhere around there, but the smell of waste was strong enough to numb your nose.
My friends and I would start holding our breath before we even entered the place.
But eventually, we had to breathe it in.
All my life, I thought the place was simply called Guttang.
But lately I’ve wondered if its original name might actually have been Gujttang—a name that sounds like “a foul or unpleasant place” in Korean.
There was a group of mudang, Korean shamans, living there.
Sometimes I could hear drums beating somewhere in the distance.
As a child, I had absolutely no curiosity about what was inside that place.
I just wanted to get through it as quickly as possible.
It felt like something might follow me if I looked back….
After Guttang, we had to climb a hill where the road had been cut through the mountain.
We called it Gobau.
The road curved gently like an S, so from the bottom you couldn’t see where the climb ended.
At the entrance to the hill, I would turn around again and again, listening carefully for the sound of a car.
Maybe one was coming.
Because once you started climbing the hill, no car would stop to pick you up.
There were always snakes on that road.
Snakes that had been run over by cars, flattened against the asphalt like jwipo, the thin dried fish snack we eat in Korea.
I remember seeing them especially often in spring.
In spring, I would leave the road and go into the grass to pick wild raspberries.
In autumn, I would pick up chestnuts, step on their shells, and eat them raw as I walked up the hill.
But in summer, there was nothing except the sun.
Summer was hell.
4Dwonjung Music-사차원정 