I Want to Be a Proud '병신'

📖Just, Human_Hong Eun-jeon

Living as a non-disabled person, I very easily expressed discomfort and complaints. Because there are people like author Hong Eun-jeon who record the pain of a world I don’t know, I live with deep relief and gratitude for my own situation.

I cried many times while reading this book. Although helpless tears may not improve the situation, now I will look at my surroundings and act with a slightly clearer perspective and a slightly sharper awareness.

📝 Thoughts and Sentences I Liked

pg.12

‘Where do I go now?’ It was only upon reaching my destination that I truly realized I was lost. I desperately understood then that the arrow-like presences that had guided me were no longer by my side, and that I was a person who had never lived without arrows and lacked the ability to do so. Among the excited travelers who had arrived in Santiago, I felt extremely anxious, afraid, and depressed. In the end, I moved up my return flight ticket, which still had two months left, and rushed back home.

pg.44

In a society that relentlessly speeds, pain is relentlessly passed on. Insisting on one’s own pace and maintaining a safe distance often invites criticism, so people push others, if only to avoid becoming an obstacle themselves. Those with nowhere left to pass on their pain cling to the edge of a cliff, and uncomforted souls throw themselves off. Death has become commonplace, yet assigning blame is futile. Comfort or forgiveness is something money settles. People ruin others’ lives at the lowest cost and start their engines without delay. The living must run.

pg.117

Seoullo 7017 transformed an aging Seoul Station overpass into a park, and the Seoul Metropolitan Government advertised that it had employed five ‘excellent’ homeless individuals as gardeners in this park. However, on the other hand, it prohibited lying down or begging in the park and stationed sixteen private security guards to monitor these ‘less excellent’ homeless people. This kind of duality is very ‘Seoul-like’.

pg.127

“You cripples.” Good citizens spew cruel words. At that moment, Park Kyung-seok shouts: “Alright. We are ‘병신’ (cripples). But we want to be proud ‘병신’. Let’s show them that ‘병신’ also have the right to live like humans.”

pg.150

When asked what’s good about living outside the facility, Sangbun answers: “I like the cold. Jeongwoo (my husband) hugs me. It’s warm. Like a blanket.” Then she shows a poem, carefully written in pencil. ”. Lee Sangbun. Last night / snow fell softly / on the roof and the road and the fields / because they were cold / it must be a blanket covering them / that’s why / it only falls in the cold winter.” The recorder’s heart trembles at Sangbun’s poem. Later, after submitting this story to a literary magazine, they receive a tip from a reader that the poem is not Sangbun’s, but by the poet Yun Dong-ju. Along with these words: “Sangbun’s heart must have been like the poet’s. Yun Dong-ju would have liked it too.”

pg.160

‘What makes me, me?’ Jeong In-suk, who suffered 86 percent full-body burns, didn’t look in a mirror for over a year. If the person in the mirror is no longer the me I’ve known, am I still me? Song Young-hoon, an electrician, had his left arm amputated after an electric shock accident and lost his job. If the muscles of life he had trained his whole life melted away in an instant, is he still him? Kim Eun-chae, a social worker, hated the pitying gazes of people and moved back to her hometown, but even there, she locked her door and met no one. If everything that made me, me, has become endlessly unfamiliar and frightening, then who am I?

**

pg.190

“Noona, I have a dream.” When he said this in an excited voice, as if the emotion of that day had revived, I became a little tense. I thought twenty-four was, I’m sorry to say, a bit too old to decide to become a pianist. But then he said: “I’m going to become someone who fixes pianos.” I was flustered by the completely unexpected turn of events. “That piano, it wasn’t tuned. If an untuned piano could move people that much, imagine how many people a well-tuned piano could move?”

pg.212

The son, who had cried for a long time after hearing the news of his mother’s head-shaving on the news, saw his mother’s bald head late at night and said: “Mom, you’re beautiful.” I absolutely love this scene. I don’t dream of a ‘society where pain disappears.’ Because this isn’t heaven. (Omission) I wish for the people I love to take care of themselves, to be moderately cowardly, and to live by my side for a long time. Therefore, I bear some responsibility and have certain duties regarding the pain that occurs in this world.

pg.218

When vague thoughts, after days of wrestling, became clear sentences, the writing flew to very distant places and reached people I didn’t know.

pg.242

I was speechless for a moment. A name is the first gift one receives from the world, but he hadn’t received it. So he gave himself a gift. It was a strangely legendary and somewhat cool story.

pg.253

My writing teacher advised me not to use expressions like “it cannot be explained in words.” This is because writing is ‘the very act of explaining in words.’