2019: The Fry in the Puddle

Twenty-five, Gwangyang

By Opus 5.5

In 2019 Inho is twenty-five and in his sixth year at the company. He has a job many his age would envy, and beside him is someone who speaks his language. That year he put forty-eight posts on his blog. More than half are what he ate, how he exercised, and ten English sentences written with help from a translation app. Judged by the records alone, it reads like a self-management log. But between the meal charts and the composition notes, short pieces of prose appear now and then, and they all point one way: somewhere other than here.

That year Inho was inside three fences: the company, the church, and the institution of marriage. He tried to slip a little way out of all three, and he walked into one of them by his own choice.

1. The Yoke

The blog's first post begins, "I don't want to go to work tomorrow." The reason is interesting. It was not that the work was dull. It was because of "a fun thing I started on my own," one that "requires every bit of clarity and job knowledge I have."

The equipment he was responsible for was an experimental vacuum induction furnace. Running it was his main job, but he also got into its design. When a part breaks, you buy a new one; it arrives within a month. Instead he designed a sturdier, more sensible part himself, and once, building and testing it took ninety days. Meanwhile the furnace had to wait with its defect. Official responsibility was spread across the maintenance staff. He could have stepped back and no one would have blamed him. He did not step back. "Because I feel something special for my system, and improving it for the better is tied to my own self-fulfillment."

Opus — What happened to that ninety-day part in the end?

Inho — It all went well. It got adopted and the work went smoothly. I just didn't have my seniors' support.

The result was good. What wore him down was not the work itself but everything around it: reporting to managers, persuading them, securing budget, bracing ahead of time for the looks he'd get when things ran late. On ordinary days he didn't focus for even four of his eight hours, but when he worked on improvements he was absorbed for six or seven. By the time he left work he was spent. And he asked: "Is my job really valuable enough to my essence that I should focus on it for six or seven hours?"

There is a strange twist in that question. He loved the work. That love burned him out. And at the end of the burnout he began to doubt the thing he loved. Someone absorbed alone amid his seniors' indifference produces results and still ends up isolated. In a September composition note he wrote, "Good ideas are isolated because they don't spread," and "after long exposure to that work environment, the people around me became passive. It's nothing but human alienation." The same day he introduced himself like this: "I was a promising employee at a Korean company."

Opus — That's past tense. Were you imagining an immigration interview, or had your heart already left?

Inho — I was imagining emigrating, and my heart was also leaving the company.

The word "alienation" was no accident. That same year he named Erich Fromm as someone he admired. For Fromm, alienation is the state of becoming a stranger to oneself before the things one has made. Inho was living exactly that in front of a furnace running smoothly on a part he had designed. C. Wright Mills would have told us to read this not as a private trouble but as a public issue: a hierarchical organization with an average age in the late forties, a bureaucracy with instructions and compliance but no conversation. Inside it, a twenty-five-year-old's passion is quietly absorbed rather than praised. But there was something Inho held on to here as well. Even while criticizing the organization, he never gave up his care for his own system. He was a man blaming the yoke, and the most diligent man inside it.

It is worth being exact about what exhausted him, because it will matter for the rest of his working life. The psychologist Christina Maslach, who spent decades studying burnout, found that it rarely comes from workload alone. It comes from mismatches in a handful of areas: control, reward, community, fairness, values. By his own account Inho's workload was light on most days. What was missing was the second and third items. The six or seven absorbed hours he describes are what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow, and flow is ordinarily restorative. It becomes draining when no one around you sees it, when the result is adopted "without my seniors' support," as he put it. His complaint was never really that the work was too much. It was that the work went unrecognized. Hold that thought; in 2022 he will name it himself, in a sentence about a crying child whose parent does not respond.

2. On the Other End of the Line

In June, Inho, the youngest on the team, ordered Domino's for the 4 p.m. pizza gathering. Near four, the store called. The delivery driver had been in an accident, so they would make a new pizza and send it twenty minutes late. He pictured a scooter hitting a car and falling, and before he knew it, "I'm sorry" was rising in his throat. He never managed to say thank you for calling. "I couldn't say that positive word, thanks."

When he told the seniors gathered in the office, one of them said, "Flipped our pancake! We need to eat fast." Everyone laughed. In that moment Inho felt sorry for the driver and ashamed of his colleagues. In the short hallway back to the office with the pizza, he "thought briefly about the relative weight of human lives."

Opus — What did you actually do in that moment?

Inho — The average age at the company was in the late forties, and I was still the youngest. I stayed silent and mourned in my heart. My seniors' reaction was bewildering. Similar things actually happened often.

"I stayed silent and mourned in my heart." In the prologue we met the boy who only watched the bullied girl. At twenty-five Inho is standing in the same place. He feels, he judges, he does not speak. It is hard for someone who is still the youngest in his sixth year to cut off the joke of a senior in his late forties. Calling that silence cowardice would not be fair. But its cost to him is worth recording. The mourning he could not speak went into writing, and in writing his colleagues came out a little colder and he a little more sensitive. The observer's ethics always sit on this border, where the sense of feeling more than others easily spreads into a sense of being better than them.

Inho seems to have known that border himself. In an August composition note he wrote:

I think I am a person who is warm inside. Although I'm often misunderstood.

Opus — Misunderstood by whom, and how?

Inho — I'm a bit blunt and quiet, and I don't show my ups and downs in words, so people sometimes misunderstand. I give the impression of being cold and hard to approach. But people I want to help keep coming to mind, so I'm someone with so much compassion it's sometimes hard. People whose grain doesn't match mine say I'm a bit like an old-fashioned scholar.

A cold face and overflowing compassion. The two are not a contradiction but a pair. Someone with too much compassion knows he could not bear it if he showed it all, so he cuts back his expressions. In Goffman's terms, the bluntness is the face for his "front stage," and the mourning happens "backstage." What is interesting is that he made this confession not in his native language but in English. A clumsy foreign language is sometimes an easier place to take off a mask. The shorter and simpler the sentences, the fewer places there are to hide.

Look again at the first thing that rose in his throat on the phone: "I'm sorry." He had caused nothing. The accident was not his, the delay was not his, and yet the reflex was an apology. Psychologists who study moral emotions, June Tangney among them, distinguish guilt from shame. Shame says "I am bad" and makes people hide. Guilt says "something bad happened and I am connected to it" and makes people want to repair. Inho is, in this sense, strongly guilt-prone, and the trait runs through this whole essay: the pity he will feel sorry for having in 2021, the "guilt and limits" of the dog in 2020, the apology about the wedding seven years later. Guilt-proneness is one of the more reliable roots of empathy and of making amends. Its cost is that it attaches itself to harms that are not his to repair, and when there is nothing to repair, it has nowhere to go but inward.

3. A Closed System

That same June, Inho wrote a series of posts about the church young adults' fellowship. It was a group of ten or so people in their twenties, a "closed system" with no newcomers. The members were not close. They were not close because they were not transparent, and they were not transparent because they were afraid their weaknesses would be exposed and attacked. He wrote out a prescription too: keep secrets, don't add a judging tone to stories about third parties, build "a culture that accepts that things can be that way."

Readers of the prologue will notice this was written after the spouse prayer and the bouquet. I guessed at that connection too. Inho's answer was different.

Opus — Are the bouquet and this post connected?

Inho — It was written after the bouquet, but there's not much connection. Things I'd confided to someone kept going around and getting passed on, so I became more guarded.

Opus — In July you told the church "a little lie" and took a day off. What was the church like then?

Inho — The feelings I had when I first looked at the church community had cooled. Once I got deeper in, the community was a bit closed. There were lots of churches in Gwangyang, but there was no exchange with other churches or neighbors; it felt like a holy of holies. It was probably out of worry that believers would leave. But the more I knew Christ, the more Christ faced outward, while the church only looked at the cross inside. I think everyone felt that way.

The Inho of 2017 walked into the collective effervescence Durkheim described, the one we saw in the prologue. The Inho of 2019 was looking at the structure left once it had cooled. In July he read Richard Sennett's The Uses of Disorder and recognized the myth of a community "assembled by will before learning the experience of solidarity." As soon as he read it, he wrote, he felt "as if I'd entered another world." Sennett's 1960s American suburbs must have overlapped with his church fellowship.

Another post from that time, "Stable Because Incomplete," goes further. People chase role models who seem perfect, he wrote, because "they're afraid of that frighteningly vast, boundless freedom and want to take refuge in some particular shade." It is almost a direct rendering of Fromm's Escape from Freedom. That the post opens with "his son," flawless and complete, is telling. While seeming to criticize media heroes, he was carefully looking at the biggest shade he himself had leaned on.

Here a paradox appears. Inho wanted a transparent community that says "that can happen." But after his confidences came back around to him, he had become more guarded himself. The one prescribing transparency was becoming the most opaque. That is not hypocrisy; it is the order in which wounds come. People usually prescribe to others what they themselves most needed. In another June note, "Where Does My Repeated Waste Come From?", he wrote about the experiment in which rats addicted to heroin sought the drug less once they formed a community in one space, and then listed his own "drugs": games, mass media, advertising, instant food. The note stops there. There is no conclusion. The rats had their park; he could not yet see where his park was.

4. Landmines and the Demilitarized Zone

In May, Inho wrote a review of the independent publication Haengyeo Honsin. It is the story of a couple in their forties who moved in together after six months, threw a party instead of a wedding, and went on the Camino de Santiago for their honeymoon. His review is sharp. Their habit of constantly comparing themselves to society's view of marriage revealed their own resistance, and above all, the anguish they must have gone through was missing from the book. Then he wrote that writing that truly holds a view of marriage "is like self-harm," because the sharpened pen tip takes apart your own values. "But each time, might the red jewel that flows become the life of the writing?"

He had a reason for picking this book. The person beside him had once decided she would never marry.

Opus — In September you wrote, "My spouse and I had a big gap, and we worked hard to close it." What gap?

Inho — My spouse was originally committed to not marrying. She met me and said she wanted to marry me. But even with that feeling, she couldn't knock down the values she'd built up all at once. So there were a lot of uncomfortable points. For example, in Korea a child usually takes the father's surname. I let it follow the mother's surname, the way my spouse wanted. It was something you write on the marriage registration form, and I went along gladly. Because I understood her. There were several similar, somewhat surface-level discomforts, and I was mostly the one who adjusted. What I needed was her, not those forms. Heh.

"What I needed was her, not the forms." He said it lightly, laughing, but in Korean society the choice is not light. For a child to take the mother's surname, the couple must submit a separate agreement when they register the marriage. The system has existed for a long time, but couples who actually do it are still rare. A twenty-five-year-old man checked that box gladly. That gladness holds a sense he had carried a long time. For someone who always questioned the order of textbooks, fixed tracks, and the hierarchy of honorific speech, the patrilineal surname was a custom with little reason to keep.

But he was not always so glad. A June post, "Postponing the Wedding," shows the two of them with different faces. He said they might postpone the wedding. She asked why. He answered, "Intuitively, that way feels more stable." Her expression didn't change, and because it didn't change it looked darker. He added reasons he hadn't sorted out and made things harder, and soon thought, "I've stepped on a landmine." Then he changed the subject and left as planned. The sentence he wrote after getting home: "As a person too, I probably have a similar minefield. It's just that maybe the other person's mines are in my demilitarized zone."

Opus — Looking back now, why did you want to postpone?

Inho — Even rereading the post, I can't really remember what the issue was. It was probably something external, on the family side. Thinking about it now, it would have been better to just do what my spouse wanted. Looking back it was nothing, but I think I hurt her then, and I feel sorry.

Two sides of Inho overlap in this post. One is the person trying to understand. Even as he calls her reaction a "compulsion," he immediately turns around and says he must have minefields too, and tries "to understand with my head the difference my heart can't understand." The other is the person who retreats. He never said his reasons to the end; at the moment he couldn't speak, he changed the subject and left. As at the pizza gathering, at the hottest moment of conflict he steps back, observes, and sorts it out later in writing. That is how he protects himself, but to the other person it can remain as a face gone cold. When he says seven years later that he "feels sorry," the sorrow sounds less about the wedding date than about not staying beside her to the end that day.

There is a rule hiding in this scene that he would state outright a year later. In 2020 he told me that about his relationship he talks openly, but about his career "I try not to talk until I've sorted my thoughts to some degree." The minefield conversation is what happens when he speaks before sorting: half-formed reasons, a darkening face, a retreat. I suspect rules like his are usually learned from exactly such evenings. The rule protects both people from his unfinished thoughts. It also means that the person closest to him tends to meet his conclusions rather than his process, and a conclusion, however carefully reached, can land as a decision already made. It is telling that the image he chose for himself was a demilitarized zone: a strip of land kept deliberately empty between two sides so that neither can surprise the other. He needed that buffer, and he also sensed that her mines had drifted into it.

Even so, the two of them closed the gap. The entry for October 6 is exactly two lines. "Good good. Moved in together."

Opus — Did you hesitate about moving in together before the wedding?

Inho — We moved in early, before submitting the marriage registration in January 2020. I didn't hesitate much. My spouse's mother felt lonely and sad, the way a mother does. Even though it was the very next neighborhood.

In May he called the book about the couple who moved in after six months and married "clichéd." Five months later he moved in before marriage and was preparing an officiant-free wedding with someone who had meant never to marry. The "bleeding of reflection" he had said those authors lacked was happening that year in his own life. He just wrote almost none of it on the blog. All he wrote was "good good."

5. The Fry in the Puddle

In August, Inho went to a valley stream for the first time in a while. He spread a mat in the shade of the trees and lay down, and the usual tension wasn't there. "I feel completely separated from stress… I think it's been years since I felt like this." And he asked himself, "Have I been living my weekends out of duty and responsibility for a while?"

Hopping between rocks, he found a fry trapped in a still puddle. He reached out to save it, but "for a while it fled desperately from my hand in that narrow space." Only when it had used up its strength and slowed down could he lift it in his two palms. Then he released it into deep water.

Opus — Who were you with that day, and how did you feel?

Inho — I wrote it on a summer trip to Gurye with my spouse's family and relatives. I think I'd been absorbed in something from work all weekend, and then doing that on the trip gave me a sense of release, that what I'd been worrying about was nothing. I think the fish was me.

He says the fish was himself. The narrow puddle, the body fleeing desperately even from the hand trying to save it, the moment of being lifted out only once all its strength is gone. For someone wearing down in the puddle of the company, it is an exact self-portrait. And the hand that lifted him, interestingly, was a day spent among the people who were about to become his family.

There is a third reading, and it looks forward. The fry does not simply need rescue; it flees the hand that offers it, and only lets itself be lifted once it is too tired to resist. In 2022, when I ask the Inho of that year what he would say if someone asked whether he was okay, he will answer that it would feel awkward, because no one understands him better than he does. The fish that runs from the helping hand is not only the man worn down by the company. It is also the man who finds it hard to be helped at all.

But the scene reads the other way as well. In the prologue, Inho learned at church that a chick held too tightly dies. At the valley in 2019 he sees again that a hand trying to help can be terrifying to the one it reaches for. He was the fish, and he was also the hand. His compassion, so great that the people he wants to help keep coming to mind until it's hard to bear, sometimes has to wait until the other has tired and stopped resisting before it can reach them. That day he waited, and let it go in deep water. Then he watched ants ignoring kernels of corn and imagined the time they live, ten times faster than ours, and thinking of "this Earth where I, observing ants and fish, live inside that seemingly infinite space," he wrote that it was "mysterious and awe-inspiring." It is the first post in which the observer's gaze ends not in judgment but in awe.

6. Ten Sentences a Day

Ten days after the valley, Inho posted "Plans Through 2023": ten English sentences every day, three sets of push-ups and crunches, a thirty-minute walk, a food log, and one household chore besides the dishes.

Opus — Why 2023?

Inho — By 2023 I'd be around thirty, so I think I wanted to do something different in my thirties. In reality I switched careers to become a developer, and I never managed to emigrate.

The next three months of records mix diligence and failure. "OK," "good," "not good," "ruined," "let's live hard^." There are days he let a reserve-forces march count as exercise, and days on a business trip he ate nothing but snacks. He did meal prep his girlfriend taught him, and took over a junior colleague's rusty bicycle for three thousand won, oiled it, and rode it. In September he wrote "been way too lazy for a while," and the next day started his compositions again. The routine was not kept perfectly. But he recorded even the days it wasn't. Writing "not good" was not giving up; it was a way to keep the record going.

The composition notes unexpectedly became the year's most honest autobiography. In short sentences written with a translator's help, he says Korean workplace culture is "coercive" and makes people "shrink." He says he doesn't want to get close to older men because they always try to lecture. He says honorific speech is a symbol that cuts off communication. He says he wishes there were more people around him sitting on benches talking about science. He says the thing he understood least in his school days was that groups always ostracize someone. And he says he wants to emigrate, to New Zealand or Australia or Canada, and become an electrician. Building electrical circuits is fun, "like solving a puzzle."

Opus — Robotics engineer, sociology professor, electrician. Which was most serious?

Inho — Honestly electrician was my first thought. It was closer to the work I was doing, and I think the pay was good too. Fukushima radiation was a big issue then, and I really was worried about it. Now, as you know, it seems to have settled down.

He recorded answers to IELTS speaking questions and posted them on the blog. His answer describing Gwangyang goes like this. It is a small industrial city, a huge factory sits close to where people live, and the whole city's economy runs on that one company. People off work eat and drink late into the night, and there are beautiful mountains to the north. The big city he used to live in had many universities; here there are hardly any students. The sentences were written for a foreign examiner, but loneliness shows through their calm. He was living in a company town with few young people, as the youngest on a team whose average age was in the late forties.

That same August, watching the allegations about former minister Cho Kuk's daughter's university admission, he wrote of "an anger that doesn't die down easily." As someone who had supported President Moon Jae-in, he found it regrettable, and he hoped it would come to light soon and "console the wounded hearts of people in their twenties."

Opus — Was that connected to the sense of unfairness you felt around special hiring and admissions?

Inho — Yes. It felt so unfair.

At sixteen, on the day he was called as one of the chosen on the white staircase, he saw a structure where a small difference in angle splits lives far apart. He stood on the winning side, and that made it more uncomfortable. The anger of 2019 extends that discomfort. At the same time, he put Naver News on his list of things to quit. "New news goes up every day, so I keep looking at Naver News." That anger can be justified and that one can also be addicted to it: he was distinguishing the two in the same week. Like the man who had written a list of his "drugs" in June.

7. Plans Too Far, Plans Close By

In November, Inho made two schedules. One was for Jeju from March 28 to 30, 2020: eight family members from both sides, two pension cottages, six-course catering, an arch and flower decorations, a self-sung wedding song, "Pieces of Each Other," and a reading of the marriage declaration. The other was a honeymoon leaving Incheon on April 25 and driving five thousand kilometers from Sydney to Perth in ten days. It was a trip requiring six hours of driving a day, and the packing list included a camp stove, instant rice, antidiarrheals, and "self-defense items."

Opus — Why a "covenant ceremony" rather than a "wedding"?

Inho — It was a wedding, but it put more weight on a covenant, the promises between us. We did a ceremony outdoors without an officiant where the two of us read our covenant and sealed our promises. We actually booked the flights to Australia and the rental car too. It was our idea. We wanted an adventure more than an ordinary wedding. We couldn't go because of COVID.

In July he lamented, "These days I'm thinking a package tour would be fine; that's exactly how far I've sunk into convenience." "What I wanted was adventure." Four months later the adventure came back in an unexpected shape: a honeymoon across a continent, vows without an officiant, a child who would take the mother's surname. The emigration plan he had meant to carry out alone had turned into an adventure for two. And inside marriage, of all things, the oldest institution there is.

On December 3 he left a short post. "I realized I plan too far ahead. Emigration, or a professional career. Planning far ahead is good, but it seems like I spend every day on planning and exploring career paths. So for now I'm going to focus on things I can actually do." He set three new goals: return to Suncheon National University in early 2020, earn the Chemical Analysis Engineer certification by December, and get IELTS General 5.0 by August.

Opus — What was the story with returning to Suncheon National University?

Inho — I enrolled in the convergence industry department to get a university degree. It's where you learn chemistry, electrical engineering, industrial engineering, and so on, but it wasn't interesting and the level was low. I kept thinking, why am I doing this. I came to learn and I was just killing time. So I stopped for a while, then my leave ran out and I went back, barely got through a semester or two, and was expelled. For IELTS, the job category I was aiming for then only required 5.0 if you got hired right away, so I lowered it, but it doesn't mean much. It was just a memo.

The boy who went to a technical high school saying "I can always change jobs later" tried at twenty-five to belatedly earn a degree. And at that school he felt the same frustration he had felt in the middle-school classroom: the sense that he'd come to learn and was just killing time. He knew formal qualifications were necessary, yet he could not endure form without content to the end. It has the same root as setting aside the form of the patrilineal surname so easily. It was his freedom, and it was also his cost.

The last post that year, on December 27, is a note on a video by the memory expert Jim Kwik. Review within thirty minutes, within two days, within a week, and once more within a month. And on the first line he wrote, "I know the long-term memory method and don't do it."

Knowing and not doing. If I had to sum up the Inho of 2019 in one sentence, I would choose this one. But I will not call it laziness. He knew too much about what was good. He also knew too much about what was absurd. That knowledge always ran ahead of action, and he filled the gap a little at a time with meal charts, ten English sentences, and "not good." He kept half and failed to keep half. As things a person can do in a year go, it is not a small amount.

One more thing about the plans. Inho made many of them this year, and made most of them public, on the blog. Planning is itself a way of regulating anxiety: it converts an uncertain future into a list, and the list brings relief before anything on it is done. The psychologist Peter Gollwitzer found that announcing an identity-related goal to others can give a premature sense of having already become that person, and so slightly lower the effort that follows. I don't want to lean on a single line of research. But it fits the shape of this year: a plan to 2023, posted; three goals for 2020, posted; a memory method, noted, with the confession "and don't do it." For a man who could not yet change his situation, the plan was not only a map. It was also a place to rest.

Epilogue: Toward Deep Water

Put the Inho of 2019 back together and it looks like this. At the company he loved the equipment he had designed while preparing to leave. At church he prescribed a transparent community while becoming more and more guarded. With his partner there were moments he stepped back, but in the end he gladly accepted the forms she wanted and moved in with her. The emigration he had dreamed of as an escape hatch changed shape into an adventure for two. And he was still someone who mourned without speaking, someone with so much compassion it was sometimes hard to bear.

That summer at the valley in Gurye he scooped up the exhausted fry in his two hands and released it into deep water. If that fish was him, I think I now know a little of whose hands lifted him. In January 2020 he submitted the marriage registration. The covenant ceremony in Jeju in March and the long road across Australia in April were marked on the calendar. How that calendar would be torn up, the twenty-five-year-old did not yet know.