BAEK KYUNG Just A Human Being

Childhood

BAEK KYUNG:

As a child, his mom and dad were the two people he loved the most in the whole wide world. He always wanted to make them proud and happy. It was the result of a great childhood. He was raised in a stable and happy family. In school, he excelled in both academics and sports. He was always praised for being such a multitalented handsome boy. His mom had a very artistic look on life being a professional musician and artist. He learnt to play the piano at a young age from the day he interrupted his mom during her practice session and insisted she teach him right then and there. Growing up he was a very curious and bossy child. Unsurprisingly, things usually went his way because he was too cute and too smart for his age. He often played tennis with his dad after school and because he became very good at it in short time, he fell in love with the sport.

On a family vacation to Europe, where his paternal grandparents lived their retired life in, he was asked whether he preferred playing the piano or playing tennis. When he answered tennis without any hesitation, his mom "fake" teared up: "Kyung-ah, you're so into sports, like father like son I guess." His father teased his mom back "Honey, I think it's time we have a daughter, so I can say like mother like daughter." Every family vacation had been filled with laughters and so much fun. Blessed with his family's love and care, he was supposed to grow up to be the next CEO of his Dad's company.

Then he turned 8 and everything spiralled downhill, one thing after the other. Life decided he'd been too happy and took everything away from him. Until there was nothing left but wounds that even time couldn't heal, nightmares that came alive in broad daylight and love replaced with hatred, so much hatred.

His mom was diagnosed with cancer. Surgeries after surgeries. Chemotherapies and shitload of medications. At the beginning they misdiagnosed his mom's cancer, so they were reassured that there were high hopes of being completely cancer free within a year.

During that time, his personal chauffeur drove him to the hospital every day after school ended. In the VIP room next to his mom's there was a little girl his age. Her name was Eun DanOh. She had been hospitalised most of her life for being born with a defective heart. His father and her father knew each other and that's how they met. While the nurses and doctors were in his mom's room, he would often go to Eun DanOh's room to hangout with her. She was extremely excited to see him every time. They became best buddies in no time. He was her first ever best friend. By the end of the season, they knew everything about each other and Baek Kyung found himself contrabanding things from outside that weren't allowed in hospital rooms like house pets, just to see her surprised smile.

After the 1 year passed, his mom's condition only worsened instead of improving. As a young child, seeing his beloved mother becoming more and more sick every day terrified him and gave him anxiety. He started dreading the hospital visits: it stressed him to see his strong willed mother so thin and frail, attached to tubes and IVs, unable to move or talk with him.

Finally they sent her abroad to be examined and that's when the rare brain cancer was revealed. Then 2 surgeries turned into 4, but it was too late and they sent her back to South Korea. The huge hospital bills turned his father into a raging work alcoholic. The man completely stopped coming home to his son and going to the hospital to his wife. His mother would wait and wait for his father's visits to thank and apologise to him, but he never showed up. She fought long and hard to survive for their family's sake, but she lost the battle and died in front of his very eyes. The dead weight of her freezing cold hand in his, the long beep of the life support machine, the smell of hospital disinfectants before the doctors rushed in: a terrifying memory of death etched to the back of his mind for the rest of his life. 

Within a week of her death, his father threw all his mother's things out, including all their family pictures. That was when he started resenting his father, the father that had always been his hero, the protector of his house, the man he had always wanted to become. His mother had loved his father so much, but he didn't even come to her funeral and dared to move on so quickly with another woman. On his mother's first death anniversary, his father remarried his stepmother, a money hungry woman who pretended to be a loving mother in front of his father's eyes and turned cold and calculating when his father was gone. A new stepbrother who was favoured by his father and completely took his place in the family. It was like he was the stranger in his own house and they were a complete set, without him.

Eleven years old was too young to feel like you don't have a place in this world anymore. Only one person seemed happy about his existence anymore: Eun DanOh. Even though she reminded him too much of his mom, too much of death, too much of sadness and loss, he remembered how big his mother smiled when his father visited her, so he often went to visit Eun DanOh with flowers and gifts, because she was his best friend and probably didn't have long to live either.