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Chapter 2. Move to a Market Place
When I was in fifth grade, our family moved from the mountaintop village to a single rented room in a house nestled in the flatlands below, right in the heart of a bustling marketplace. At the time, we were five–my parents, myself, and two younger sisters—all squeezed into that one room. My parents rented the shop attached to the front of the house and opened an egg store to make ends meet.
The move changed everything. No more climbing up and down the mountain each day. School was closer now, and instead of gazing out over the Han River as we trudged along steep paths, we spent our days watching the ebb and flow of people bartering and buying in the market. Life grew a little more comfortable. With eggs to sell and better food on our table, our nutrition improved, and so did our spirits.
Stil, the new life came with its own discomforts. The building housed four families—including the landlord’s—and yet there was only one toilet for all twenty of us. Every morning, a line would form, toilet paper in hand, patience thinning with every minute. It wasn’t easy, but we adapted. That’s what you do when comfort is rationed.
There was only one water tap, planted squarely in the middle of the yard. Four families shared it. It wasn’t much, but it was enough—for cooking, for laundry. What it couldn’t offer was a bath. No showers, no soaking tubs. Just a splash to the face in the morning, or a rinse of the upper body when summer heat pressed down. To wash properly, we’d make the pilgrimage to the public bathhouse once a week, maybe every ten days. Still, it was a step up from the mountaintop house. No more lice and no more bedbugs. That alone felt like a small miracle.
After school, I’d help my mother sell eggs. Three hours each afternoon, handing them over to customers with practiced politeness. In return, I earned pocket money, enough to send me sprinting to the neighborhood cartoon shop. I’d sit there for hours, devouring the weekly releases like they were sacred texts. I didn’t just read them; I consumed them. Three times a week, sometimes more. I must’ve been addicted. The stories came out in serials, like television dramas, each cliffhanger stretching the week unbearably long. I remember the ache of waiting, the thrill of return.
Sometimes I’s stay too late. My mother would send my younger sister to fetch me, her small feet padding into the shop, her voice tugging me back to the real world. We didn’t have a television at home, so cartoons became my window: my escape, my entertainment, my obsession. I clung to them all the way through the first year of middle school.
Funny thing is, I don’t remember s single title. Not one storyline. Just a vague impression of robot cartoons—metal bodies shaped like men. Back then, they were pure fantasy. Now, standing at the threshold of my seventies, I’ve heard that Tesla coaxed them into motion—those metal phantoms from my childhood—parading across stages beneath the banner of “humanoids.”