Kim came into existence on an unassuming evening in 1932, his birth entirely uneventful to the wider world but life-altering and completely incredible for the two human beings who suddenly realised that they had created something so much greater than themselves, something they would be entirely responsible for shaping and moulding into what they hoped would resemble a decent person. In the coming years, they would be forced to raise this boy, alongside his sister who would be born soon after, through war and chaos and depression and starvation, during which the children would lose their father and a loving, passionate wife would lose her equally devoted husband. Somehow, through it all, the child would survive, scathed and scarred and bruised in ways he could not fathom, but still breathing, growing and changing day after day.
Kim became an adult in early 1950, when winter raged in South Korea and families fought angrily for any source of warmth they could acquire, certain that once the cold passed, they could survive any threat the universe thrust in their direction. In the summer of the same year - June 25th, to be precise - the entire world cracked open, and misery and darkness never known to these people spread across the country like a plague. It tore through every man, woman, and child unfortunate enough to lie in its path. Violence and war became contagious, and soon there was no one who had not seen death with their own eyes.
Kim sat by idly, silent, as extravagant home-cooked meals gradually depleted to a single loaf of bread alongside a rubbery slab of butter to be shared amongst his entire family. He soon came to miss not only his mother’s cooking but also how she moved around the kitchen, how she became so bright and alive as her hungry children pestered her for just one bite, just one spoonful, just one slice. Being a mother had made her so much happier, so much warmer. As the war drew closer and eventually consumed them, there was simply not enough food for her to continue cooking. As their rations grew increasingly stricter, as three meals a day eventually became one, Kim felt his mother grow colder and colder, a light within her that was fuelled by loving and caring for her children dying out. He wanted so desperately to argue with her, to scream and cry for his mother’s dumplings, her kimchi stew, her cold noodles in the months when they were the only thing that would ward off heat and hunger at once. But by now he knew better than to complain about something as trivial as a home-cooked meal. At least the war had not taken his family.
In July of 1950, Kim was conscripted to the South Korean army, tasked with the alleged honour of protecting his family and liberating his country. A simple burden for an eighteen-year-old to bear.
Kim did not know which illusive power figure he was fighting for, or for which ideological manifesto he sought to defend and which he sought to destroy. Such details were never actually specified amongst the various rallies and cries drilled into the minds of the younger, more insignificant recruits. These masses were taught loyalty, taught obedience, taught that their superiors were supreme, and the people commanding them were gods.
He did not particularly care for politics, nor for religion. Before the war there had not been much for him to care for, aside from a few school friends, an almost-complete education, and a fractured family that had almost managed to piece itself back together. If he had to pinpoint a reason for his participation as a cog in this mass machine of chaos — one that was personal, one not enforced upon him and every other young man in the country by unnamed figures who would never face the chaos themselves — it would be exactly that. His friends. His school. His mother, shattered by the loss of his father in a conflict recent enough to live in his memory but too distant to make any sense to him. The ghost of that man who had meant so much — to his wife, and to Kim, in a time before he really understood the world around him. His sister, born amid violence, too young to exist in a world already ripped to shreds.
Kim did not know about warfare or strategy or political affiliations that somehow valued certain lives above others. But he did know his family. His mother, most alive when she prepared her children’s food, when she held their hands across the road, when she washed and dried and folded their clothing. His sister, younger than Kim but mature beyond her years, although he would never care to admit it, sitting beside him buried in an elementary textbook while he prepared for his college admission test. His family is what he knew best. Their light. Their warmth.
Those early months of the Korean War felt as if they occurred in a kaleidoscope, shifting colours and shapes that never quite came together to form a complete picture. Kim quickly realised that he was one of the youngest among his platoon members, less experienced in all facets of life. Despite his obvious naivety, Kim was grateful to be young, to not yet feel the ache in his muscles after hours of standing and marching and following whatever orders were barked in their directions.
Kim came to understand that there were men with much more at stake than him — wives who would have to survive without their husbands, children who would be forced to grow up without their fathers. Kim spoke to these men animatedly, excitedly learning about their families, how they met their wives, what they named their children, and how happy and relieved they would be when they returned home. He had hoped these conversations would ease the sadness living inside the men, the despair constantly growing behind their eyes. They never did.
Kim liked the men he worked with, the students, the husbands, the fathers, the workers, although he learned soon enough not to grow too fond of any. The first time their platoon had faced the enemy — the first time battling the strange faceless men in a small skirmish that should have cost them nothing — they had lost three men. One of them, Park, had been barely older than Kim and had taken to offering him advice as an older brother might. He had taught Kim how to find a job after they returned home, how to style his hair so that he could look older, how to speak to girls so that they could not tell how nervous he was.
“You are at the prime age, Kim. All the girls will go crazy for a man like you, who has already been out and seen the world,” Park drawled one night after all the older recruits had taken to their beds and only the two of them, kept awake purely by youth and a bottle of soju conveniently located from the mess hall, remained.
This is how most of their conversations went, unsolicited advice over a shared bottle of alcohol neither was legally allowed to have, about love and sex and relationships or some other topic Park had deemed himself an expert in despite only being a few years Kim’s senior. Being forced to live without a father for too many of his growing years, Kim realised he had never had someone to teach him these things, the small lessons that had seemed so insignificant before.
“Trust me, Adeul, as soon as we’re back in Seoul, the ladies will be obsessed with you.”
The nickname had caught on quickly — adeul, meaning son — born of the older men’s jokes that Kim was young enough to have been their child. Many of the recruits had garnered their own nicknames as the war dragged on, but none had stuck with quite the tenacity of Adeul.
Every time the name was spoken, Kim’s stomach lurched angrily, bile rising in his throat. It was not like the feeling of drinking too much stolen alcohol with Park, or of imminent punishment when he made a mistake in his drills, or of the arrival of a new telegram containing the names of those men who had not made it through the night. It was the feeling of buried memories resurfacing, dizzying, nauseating. Some were of his mother or his grandparents, but most were of his father, fractured pieces of the past he could not fully put back together. Kim could almost imagine him here, transported to a different time but imprisoned in a war nonetheless, talking and laughing and desperately trying to ignore that the world was collapsing all around them, just like the rest of the platoon.
When Park called him Adeul, Kim did not feel quite so nauseous, quite so broken. It was as if they were lifelong friends, and it was simply a young boy’s nickname that had stuck since childhood. It was as if they were brothers.
Park had filled a chasm Kim had not even realised was growing within him. So, when the bullet had torn right through him, something had shattered in Kim, too.
November melted into December, autumn into winter. Soon 1950 became 1951 with no pause to recognise that another year had passed. No celebration for those who thought such things were important in a time like this. Kim no longer bothered remembering the date, did not waste his breath on whether it was Monday or Thursday or whether the entire calendar system had been abandoned in the midst of war and chaos. After all, the day of the week seemed an entirely arbitrary concept when real human lives were on the line, strung out for evil, faceless men to pluck off as they pleased.
And then the cold came.
It was not familiar despite the countless winters the men had endured, nor was it something new or strange or surprising. It was simply all there was, all that there had ever been, and there was no space to imagine what warmth was or what it used to be or if it had ever existed at all. All that there was was cold, and ice and snow and wind, and that was all that there was forever and ever and ever.
When they slept, which they barely could, the men would huddle together, press their bodies close so there was no space for the cold to creep through. Privacy and intimacy were no longer questions of choice or preference - it was simply that everyone knew what would happen if you did not. Kim would hear men at night begging, screaming for the enemy to shoot them, to kill them, to take them rather than leave themselves to the cold. In the worst of it, when night was black and the cold would devour you if you allowed it, Kim had to fight separately to stop himself from thinking the same thing. He would not let the winter take him, and he could not allow it to hollow him out the way it had the other men.
Every few days, another man would simply vanish, and an unspoken understanding would settle amongst those who remained. A numb acceptance. And then they would move.
Kim did not remember how long it had been winter, no longer bothered hoping for it to pass. It was simply another day in the cold, and he could sense the fire of his spirit slowly, slowly dying out with the rest of his weak, frozen body. As desperately as he fought against it, Kim began to fear that the weather would at last demolish any warmth he had left within him as they went on trekking through the snow.
The enemy met them far earlier than anticipated. An evidently outdated telegram had warned the platoon that they were nearing a strange establishment, a suspected camp of some kind, but that they would have ample time to prepare and take the enemy by surprise. Instead, the faceless men had met them off the path, weapons firing before any life could even be seen among the trees. Bullets already meeting their marks.
Kim felt it then, at last. Seeping out from where the bullet had ripped through him, but also spider-webbing throughout his entire body, surging through his veins. Warmth — a sensation he had craved so desperately for far, far too long. It was his mother and his sister, happy and safe and alive. It was the memory of his father in a time before war had even existed, a brilliant smile splitting his face. It was his home, small and fragile but more than enough for Kim, his friends and family milling around a table erupting with his mother’s soup, noodles, and dumplings. It was the joy and comfort that could only be found surrounded by the people you know and love, and who know and love you in the same, unconditional sense that surpasses any war or violence or hatred that existed outside your own, private world.
In that moment, he almost understood those men who had cried out at night for a bullet to take them, those few men who had gone so far as to do it themselves. Kim had not quite realised how much he had missed the warmth, had missed feeling anything at all. It was red, hot, searing pain — but it was something. The sensation had returned to his limbs. He could feel his fingertips, even move them if he willed his muscles to. He could feel his heart pumping, even as it moved blood right through the hole in his chest. Even his own blood was warmer than anything he had touched for months on end, so starkly in contrast to his frigid flesh that it almost burned him.
If his family was still alive, Kim hoped that they would forgive him. For giving in, for allowing the enemy to take him. As the other men around him fell, men he had lived with and slept beside in the deathly cold for so long, he did not feel as if he were surrendering. He hoped his mother and sister could understand that — that he had been cold for so, so long, and that at last he was warm.
