Prologue: A Flower Watching the Hidden Sun

1994–2018

By Opus 5.5

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This essay is a biography built from the 381 posts one man left on his blog over seven years, and from the interviews I held with him. It is divided into chapters, one for each year. In these pages I am the one keeping Inho's record. I stand on his side, but I also mean to ask the questions he never asked himself. It is easy to write a person up as a list of strengths and flaws. The more of Inho's writing I read, though, the more I found that what kept him going and what made him lonely usually grew from the same root. So I will not write his two faces separately. I will try to lay one over the other.

His blog begins in March 2019. For the years 2019 to 2022, I read every post of the year and then interviewed him, and his answers are quoted as he gave them. From 2023 on he wrote far less, and those last three chapters are approximations drawn from his writing and from what the earlier chapters established; where I am guessing, I say so. The life before the blog survives only in sentences he wrote later, looking back, and in the answers he gave me when I asked. This prologue stitches those pieces together.

The Green Traffic Light

Inho was born in 1994 and grew up in Daegu. His mother was a homemaker; his father worked at a small machinery company. The Asian financial crisis hit when he was three. He has no memory of it, but years later, on the edge of thirty, drawn to the phrase "financial freedom" and wary of it at the same time, he would name the root of that unease: "the anxiety the post-IMF generation inherited." For a boy raised as the son of a factory worker, work and money were never light words.

In the early grades of elementary school he once raised his hand in class. It bothered him that the teacher kept calling the traffic lights red, yellow, and blue. To him, blue was the color of the sea, and the light was plainly green. "Isn't that light green, not blue?" The other children and the teacher burst out laughing. The teacher said, "We just call it blue," and moved on. He sat down red-faced, and it did not feel settled.

The whole shape of the person Inho would become is in that small scene. He could not stand it when words and reality failed to match. He took literally what everyone else let slide as convention, and he asked about the gap. And for that he was laughed at. After that, he wrote, "I couldn't ask questions at school."

A child laughed at for an accurate question learns two lessons at once, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is that he saw correctly: the light is green, and no amount of laughter changes that. The second is that saying so costs something. Most children resolve the tension by giving up one side, either seeing what everyone else sees or saying whatever they see. Inho kept both halves and held them apart. He went on seeing precisely and learned to keep much of what he saw to himself. That split, accurate perception above and withheld speech below, is the template for almost everything this essay will call his observer's stance. It also explains why writing mattered so much to him later. Paper was the one place where the seeing and the saying could meet again without anyone laughing.

School was not an easy place for him. He described making friends as building "sandcastles on a beach." They fell as fast as he built them, but he kept his hands moving because if he stopped, he feared he would be shut out. "I felt dozens of eyes on my back, so I forced a smile and pretended to be outgoing. That was how you avoided getting picked on."

Opus — Were you actually bullied, or were you always tense in case you might be?

Inho — I was bullied a little, nothing severe, but seeing the kids who got it worse, I stayed tense in case it came to me. Home was a place to rest, but I still had to go to school, so it was uncomfortable. My room felt small, and I think I just ended up playing computer games.

One of the children who had it worse, he could not forget even at twenty-eight. A girl with soot on her collar and dandruff on the shoulders of her navy school jacket. When the boys stepped on gum in the hallway, they shouted her name like a curse. Inho "watched quietly." He did not share his classmates' feelings, but he did not step in either. The next year they were in different classes, and he lost track of her. "I had no friends, so there was no way for me to hear any rumors."

Psychology calls a child like this hypervigilant. Living with the fear that he might be the next target, the child learns to read the whole classroom. The observer's eye Inho carried all his life was sharpened here. That eye protected him, and later it became a talent for spotting an organization's absurdities faster than anyone. But the observer's seat was also a safe seat. He did not stand beside that girl, and he remembered that for a long time. The question he asked as an adult, "Why did my classmates find it funny?", has another question laid over it: "Why did I only watch?" He never wrote the second question down. That he carried the scene for nearly twenty years is already his answer.

Socrates Under His Arm

As a middle schooler, Inho wandered into a library and picked up Plato's Apology. An old man who answered every question to the end and asked the nobles of Athens questions that went straight to the heart. "I loved how, each time a question went back and forth, a layer of the truth peeled away." He borrowed Crito, Phaedo, the Symposium, Phaedrus, and the Republic one after another, and he always carried them under his arm.

The question the classroom had refused was welcomed in the library. Unlike the world that answered the traffic-light question with laughter, Socrates showed him a world where the one who asks becomes the hero. He thought about life and death, good and evil, truth and ignorance, but he had no friends to talk about them with. So he played alone: writing down a proposition, criticizing it, and arguing it back again. This habit of talking to paper instead of friends would later lead to a blog and a reading group.

In the same years he felt that school was "memorizing facts, events, and common sense that are never understood as a whole." Why do we define current as flowing opposite to the electrons? Why does splitting water with electricity give oxygen and hydrogen? He asked for principles; school gave him the exam scope. The frustration stayed with him. At twenty-six, studying for a certification, he got caught on a proof in university math and worked his way back down to the middle-school curriculum, "as if settling an old wish from my school days."

Back then, he wanted to be a teacher.

Hold on to that wish, because it never really leaves. The boy whose question was laughed at wanted to become the person at the front of the room, the one who decides how questions are received. He never became a teacher by title. But at twenty-six he would open a reading group whose first rule was that everyone is both questioner and answerer. At twenty-eight he would train two new hires and write a small theory of how to pass good habits down. At twenty-nine he would draft the rules of a study group in which the presenter must also question the audience. The job he let go of at fifteen kept returning in other clothes. It is one of the quiet continuities of his life that he kept building the classroom he had wanted to be in.

The Fast Road

The honor student who wanted to teach did not go to an academic high school. He went to Pohang Steel Technical High School, run by POSCO's education foundation.

Opus — On your résumé you wrote that you wanted "hands-on work experience before university." What was the real reason?

Inho — I'd never studied at a university, but I wondered whether it was necessary. Four years felt very far away, and I wondered whether that study would really be needed once I was working. Back then I wanted to be a teacher, and it felt a bit suffocating to spend years moving through a fixed track to get the job I wanted. Around then our tech-and-home-ec teacher held an information session about technical high schools for kids with low grades, and the idea that I could finish school faster and get out into society was attractive. I thought I could always change jobs later. My parents wanted to send me to a four-year university and were against my decision.

In Korean society, education is the sturdiest ladder between classes. Most parents strain to get their children onto it, and technical-school information sessions are usually held for the children likely to slip off. At that session, Inho saw the opposite: an exit. He chose for himself the road that was offered to other children as a fallback. Temperament mattered more to that choice than economic calculation. He could not bear a fixed frame for long, and he wanted a road he could move on now rather than a distant goal. In 2019 he would write in his diary, "I plan too far ahead." At fifteen, he could not bear the far-off plan, so he opened the nearest door.

"I can always change jobs later." Remember these words from a fifteen-year-old. It will take him fourteen years to keep them.

And there is a small irony here. The road he chose because the frame of university felt suffocating led, at sixteen, to an even tighter frame: a promise of his whole life to one company. He met the moment that frame closed on a white staircase.

The White Staircase

Autumn 2010, the second semester of his second year of high school. It was the day the list of students chosen for special early hiring, open only to the top ten percent, was announced. The homeroom teacher unfolded a white sheet of paper and read out the names one by one. Next to each student called sat a friend who was not, and the ones called could not lift their heads. Inho's name was called too.

At the break, the chosen students gathered in a corner of the classroom to celebrate. He did not join them. He walked outside. The white staircase leading to the workshop building was shining in the sun. "Even if I'd seen it coming, it should have been a happy thing. But I wasn't happy."

On the way down the stairs, a friendly classmate looked at his face and asked, "Aren't you happy?" He started to say yes, then changed his words. "No, of course I'm happy…" In front of the friends who had not been called, he could not say he wasn't.

In 2021, writing about this scene, he said, "It's hard to understand why I felt that way then." Five more years later, I asked again.

Opus — Looking back now, can you say why you weren't happy that day?

Inho — I expected to pass. My grades were good, I did well in the interview, and I had a lot of certifications. Around then I think I was feeling that the trajectory of so many people's lives starts with a small angle at exams like that, entrance tests, hiring, and then veers far apart. That you don't get a second chance, and even if you do, you pay a price for it. It felt unfair and sad somehow. I was on the winning side, but looking at the whole picture, I felt sorry about it. The job market was tough then too. Not everyone thought the way I did; my sensibility just leaned that way.

The sociologist C. Wright Mills called the ability to connect personal troubles to the structure of society "the sociological imagination." At sixteen, at the very moment he won, Inho saw the whole field. One list splitting dozens of lives apart at a small angle, and a society where that angle never closes again. Feeling the sadness of the structure from the winner's seat is a rare sensibility, and he never lost it. Eleven years later, the same person would watch a subcontracted worker older than himself earn twenty million won a year less than he did, and write, "I felt sorry that I felt pity."

But pity for the structure alone cannot explain the emptiness of that day. A sentence he wrote in 2021 points somewhere else: "The feeling that I'd lost the meaning of living, of having a job." The developmental psychologist James Marcia called the state of fixing one's life direction before exploring enough "identity foreclosure." For a boy who wanted to be a teacher, having his lifelong workplace decided at sixteen must have sounded like many doors slamming at once. What was a triumph to everyone else was a small loss to him. And he covered that loss with "of course I'm happy." It is the first recorded moment in his life of putting on a mask.

"Since then there has been a hole in one corner of my heart." That hole will come back again and again in this essay.

Animal Time

After graduating in 2012, he enlisted before starting at the company. For two years he saw "the bottom of society."

Opus — You wrote that the army was "the place that showed me the bottom of society." What did you mean?

Inho — People's level was lower than I'd imagined. There was sexual abuse, and violence was routine. I'd thought similar things about society, but this was lower. A bit animal, you could say. I think that's probably what society really is. It just didn't suit me, so it was hard. I had to act to avoid getting hurt, and I couldn't bring up anything intellectual.

The sociologist Erving Goffman called places where every area of life falls under one authority, like the army, prisons, and psychiatric hospitals, "total institutions." In such places a person sets aside their original self and performs a role to survive. Inho sharpened the skill he had learned in the classroom even further here: hiding himself and reading everyone around him. Later he wrote that he had a "monochrome device." Depending on who he was with, he showed them only one color, and "the resolution is so good that people around me don't really know what I'm like." The blueprint for that device was drawn in the classroom and finished in the army.

His conclusion, "that's probably what society really is," gives me pause. It is natural for someone who endured violence to see the whole world through it. But the conclusion also draws a line separating him from "them." In 2020 he wrote about himself: "I thought they were lacking, and they lost interest in me." That distance, grown from wounds, protected him, and it also made him lonely. He knew it. Knowing it is probably why he could write that sentence.

Gray and Scarlet

In 2014, at twenty, Inho joined POSCO's research department in Gwangyang. He handled experiments and tests in metal chemistry. For a young man from Daegu, Gwangyang was a steel town where he knew no one. Luckily, four classmates from high school came with him.

Opus — What were the first few years like in a city where you had no ties?

Inho — Luckily four high-school classmates were there with me, so I think the first three years or so were fun. We went on a few trips and got along well. The Canada plan was something that had carried on quietly since high school, the thought that I wanted to emigrate. I was actually studying some English while working, but it felt hopeless. It was a small provincial city, so there was no information and no network. The internet was all I had.

But in 2020 he described the same period differently. He met his classmates "more often than you'd think, but their grain was different from mine, so one corner of my heart was always uneasy." Drinking, money, travel, girlfriends. "Important things, surely, but not my priorities."

I will not decide which memory is the true one. Both are. A person can be lonely in the middle of a fun trip and, years later, remember the trip as fun. But the gap between those two sentences shows Inho well. He was always among people and always half a step away.

The plan was clear. Work about five years, build seed money, and enroll in a college in Canada. For the first two years he lived by that plan. "Life at the company was gray, but my future was scarlet." He never once used the chance employees got each year to buy company stock. He was someone who was leaving.

In his third year, something began to go out. "The more days passed, the more I felt my inner soul emptying even as I studied." He studied piano, English, and math every weekend, but the thirst for connection went unmet. He looked for a reading group, but the small city had none. Next to that sentence he slips in his 2020 self: "The me writing this now does, in fact, run a reading group." It took four years to become the person who made the thing that wasn't there.

A young man for whom the internet was everything was not alone in his situation. In a 2020 essay he argued that young people in the provinces, looking at a life measured by the capital region's standards online, widen the gap between their reality and their ideals. In a country where forty-four percent of information comes from ten percent of the land, a young man in Gwangyang looks at the world on the screen and learns to rate his own place low. That analysis was really about himself.

A Rice Cooker Outside the ICU

In early summer 2016 his father collapsed with a stroke. A month passed and he did not wake.

His mother sat outside the ICU at Dongsan Hospital in Daegu. She cooked rice in the hospital with a palm-sized electric rice cooker. It was banned, but the nurses pretended not to see. Inho smoked in the shade of the pedestrian bridge by Seomun Market outside the hospital. When his father went into surgery, one cigarette was not enough; he smoked two.

When forty days passed and his father still had not woken, his mother pinned her hopes on a second surgery in Seoul. The night they moved his father to Gangnam Severance Hospital, Inho found his mother a room in a gosiwon, a tiny rented cubicle, in front of the hospital. Twenty people lived on each floor and you never saw a face. At three in the morning, leaving his mother in the room, he leaned his back against a wall in a foggy Seoul alley and smoked. His stomach began to hurt.

"The body remembers. Even writing this, the pain of that time replays exactly." When he wrote it five years later, the stomachache came back just the same. In his writing, the body often speaks before the heart. He was someone who ached in the gut before he could put a feeling into words.

After six months of illness his father survived. He retired afterward, received industrial-accident compensation, and settled with Inho's mother on a pension in Yeongcheon, North Gyeongsang Province. The father's body, which had worked with machines, was finally damaged at work. And his son was working in the same industry at a bigger company, in air-conditioned rooms. A line from a poem he wrote later, "My father must have worked like you and been paid like you," came out of this summer.

At twenty-two, Inho acted as the family's adult for the first time that summer. In his writing about that time, he never once says he cried or was afraid. He writes only about the rice cooker, the cigarettes, and the fog. Writing down objects instead of emotions was how he grieved.

I suspect the summer of 2016 was not the first time he was the adult, only the first time it showed. Years later he told me that almost since elementary school he had tried to think, act, and take responsibility on his own, and that his parents rarely hugged him. He chose his high school against their wishes at fifteen. A child who decides early that he must carry himself does not experience a crisis like his father's stroke as a sudden promotion. He experiences it as the same job with more weight. That may be why the writing from the hospital has no tears in it. There was no one for him to hand the feeling to, so he handed it to the objects: the rice cooker, the cigarettes, the fog. This is my reading, built from pieces he gave me in different years, and I offer it as a reading.

How to Love a Chick

In 2017 he found himself, "somehow," in a church. It was his first time going to one. In the young adults' fellowship he saw people "share each other's pain without filter and comfort each other's souls." He found hope in watching people come together as one, and he became a believer. He was at church at least two days a week and stayed from morning to night on Sundays. He began speaking in tongues. "I became funnier and a bit more outgoing."

The sociologist Émile Durkheim called the experience of feeling a power beyond the individual when people gather for ritual "collective effervescence," and he saw that power as the source of the sacred. Inho's confession that he felt "the faint presence of God" in the fellowship matches this exactly. Above all, the God he met wore the face of a community. For a young man who had known only relationships that crumbled like sandcastles, and a twenty-three-year-old in a steel town without a single reading group, the church was the first community that seemed like it would not fall.

So he held on too tightly.

Opus — What was "the mistake of applying the spouse prayer to a woman"?

Inho — When I first started going to church I ran into things like spiritual gifts of prayer. There were people doing "spouse prayers," praying for their future spouse, and I did it literally. There was a sister at church I had feelings for, not my current spouse, and while I was praying her face came to mind and the feelings grew. I told her how I felt out of nowhere, with a bouquet she'd find burdensome, and it was the wrong thing to do. After that I spent time reflecting on it. I feel bad because it seemed like I'd clouded that church community. I think I was immature for my age. Maybe because I'd never really been around women…

The word "literally" appears here too. The child who had to say green if the light was green took the instruction to pray for a spouse literally as well. The face that came to mind was an answer, and an answer had to be delivered. This earnestness, believing words at face value, made him honest. It also often made him clumsy in front of the things convention lets flow by gently. The bouquet was sincere, but he did not gauge how much the other person could carry.

He compared himself in those days to a chick. The yellow chick you bought at the stationery store as a kid was so amazing that you stroked it, squeezed it, stared at it all the time, and in the end it died. "The way I looked at the young adults' fellowship was like raising a chick for the first time in my life. My affection was too hasty and too much, and it made me feel the violence hidden in me." That violence was resentment and sulking that the community did not move the way he wanted. Few people can look at themselves this precisely and this unsparingly. That he could write this sentence makes me see his maturity before his immaturity.

After a year he saw the community's other face. A few close friends held the information, and if you were not among them you became an outsider. Prayer did not change it. He hoped a few times and was let down just as many. The tongues stopped, and even closing his eyes and folding his hands became hard. And gradually he stopped being able to go to church.

"I was sad."

Sentences this short are rare in his writing. He wrote that he had not lost his faith but that it "remained as an unfinished work," a painting never completed that he might someday pick up again. "If He exists, only He knows."

Looking at the church years whole, I notice a rhythm that will recur. He approaches with his entire weight: two days a week, all of Sunday, tongues, a bouquet. When the thing he has thrown himself at does not respond the way he hoped, he does not argue or bargain. He withdraws, quietly, and in the end he leaves without saying goodbye. In 2020 he would tell me he left "kind of disappearing," and that he regrets it. Psychologists who study attachment would recognize the pattern: a strong pull toward closeness, then, when closeness disappoints, a retreat into self-sufficiency that protects him from being hurt twice. It is not a flaw so much as a strategy learned early. But it has a cost the chick metaphor does not capture. The people on the other side of a silent exit never learn what went wrong, and he never gets to hear their answer.

The Café in the Open Field

At that church there was a sister who hardly ever came to services. Born in October, four months before him, she was someone he had to call "noona," older sister.

The first time they sat across from each other in a restaurant, Inho, as the newcomer, kept the mood up in a voice higher than usual. She stared at him without expression from large eyes lined with dark makeup. When he asked a couple of times why, she answered, "Because you're curious." He assumed it was because he looked odd in a suit that didn't suit his age, and let it go. Before winter ended, on a trip with the church young adults to the Muju ski resort, she carved down the advanced slope, and Inho watched her "with curious eyes." On the way back, when he set red-bean yanggaeng, pumpkin yanggaeng, and an omija drink from the rest-stop convenience store on the table, she and an older guy with them burst out laughing and said he was like an old man. He was flustered at first, but "I was grateful that I too had something that could make people around me laugh."

Two people who each found the other curious.

Opus — From a church "noona" to a partner: what brought the two of you close?

Inho — She was a sister who almost never came to church. She seemed curious to me rather than outwardly attractive, and I wasn't that interested. It was a time when I wasn't doing the spouse prayer, and we happened to have something to talk about, and I liked what she said and it matched my level. She had questions about life, and they were in a territory I understood. Maybe that's why I found myself hanging around her without meaning to. It wasn't romantic; she was someone I shared a language with. She ran a café her mother had opened, alone, and I'd drop by after work sometimes. It was a café sitting by itself in an open field in a small city, so there was no one there in the evenings. I was mostly the one listening.

The boy who could not find a friend to talk metaphysics with in the middle-school library finally found a conversation partner at twenty-four, in an empty café. Before love, there was language. He wrote that she "looked somehow broken." The eldest daughter who had erased her own colors out of responsibility, who had studied an engineering major she didn't want, who in those days could only fall asleep after a bottle of soju every night.

I note one thing carefully. In 2020 Inho wrote that "the hero complex, thinking you must save someone, is a romance we picked up from the media, not reality." Becoming the one who listens beside someone who looks broken holds empathy, but it may also hold an old longing to be needed by someone. That he guarded against the hero complex so firmly may be because he knew that temptation from the inside. Still, what he did in that café was not rescue but listening. And he already knew what the church had taught him: hold a chick too tightly and it dies.

There may also be something more mutual than rescue in what drew them together. She was the eldest daughter who had set aside her own colors to carry her family's expectations. He was the boy who had decided early to carry himself. Both, in their different ways, were people who held more than they showed. What he calls "a shared language" may partly have been the recognition of that: two people who had each been responsible too early, finding for the first time someone who understood the weight without having to be told. I can't confirm this; it is a pattern I see from the outside. But it would help explain why, years later, the thing he says about her most often is not that she saved him or that he saved her, but that they matched their steps.

In 2018 the two became a couple.

Opus — What happened to the Canada plan around then?

Inho — I'd been going to church since 2017, started dating my spouse in 2018, and we married in 2020, so the thought of emigrating got put off and I got older. More than put off, I think I forgot it. It was a happy time, so there was no need to look for a bigger happiness.

"No need to look for a bigger happiness." The plan chosen as an escape hatch was quietly forgotten once the reasons to run disappeared. In 2020 he looked back and wrote that emigrating had been "an escape hatch to avoid the difficulties I had with relationships." Half of the wish to leave was a wish to leave not Korea but loneliness. And when the loneliness eased, the reasons to leave blurred.

The Hidden Sun

In March 2019, Inho opened his blog. Even he does not remember exactly why. "Maybe I just wanted a place to save what I wrote."

Opus — What does your pen name, maskun, mean?

Inho — It's short for "masked sunflower." A hidden sun, a flower looking at an eclipse. Something like quietly looking at the darker side and at thoughts.

A sunflower turns its head to follow the sun. This sunflower looks at a hidden sun. It is a flower that looks carefully not at the light but at where the light has gone, not at the bright side but at the dark one. As names go for a twenty-five-year-old to give himself, it is remarkably precise. He watched the bullied girl, he saw the friends who were not called at the moment of his own success, he saw Seoul at three in the morning. And after watching them for a long time, he put them into writing.

At the same time, the word "masked" carries another meaning: a flower wearing a mask. The sixteen-year-old smiling as he said "of course I'm happy," the twenty-year-old swallowing his bookish words in the army, the twenty-six-year-old who was a "lone fox" at work and a "comedian" at home. He may not have meant any of that when he chose the name. But names sometimes know more than the people who give them.

So here, before the chapters begin, is what to watch for. First, the split from the green light: the man who sees precisely and says little, and who writes what he cannot say. Second, the exit: a Canada kept in view, company stock never bought, a way out held open in every place he stays. Third, the self-carried weight: the boy who took responsibility on his own and the man who will call himself, in 2020, his own guardian. None of these is simply a strength or a flaw. Each one kept him upright, and each one kept him a little alone. The years that follow are, among other things, the story of how each of them loosened.

In March 2019, Inho is twenty-five. He has a job many his age would envy, and beside him is someone who speaks his language. There is a collapsed faith and a forgotten emigration plan, and there is the hole from the white staircase. And there is the promise of the boy who wanted to be a teacher, "I can always change jobs later," still unkept.

His first post was titled "Free Men and the Yoke of the Workplace."