Read Online Escapology by Ren Warom - Free Book Online

his mother in the kitchen and tossing her the morning paper and mail. Remembers struggling to survive in neighbourhoods of corridors crawling with other Korean brats who hated the very fact of his existence. Made it their business to corner him at every opportunity and pound their disapproval into his flesh.
    He went to school with those selfsame brats in a schoolhouse created from thirteen apartments knocked together on the seventeenth floor, under the iron rule of their form teacher, Eun-ji, a forty-something mother of seven who was perpetually furious with the world and the most unnatural mother he ever met bar his own.
    Pulling shaking hands through messy bi-coloured hair, he aims for the strands of memory beneath, attached by sinewy strings of scar tissue too tender to sever, too raw to bear. Growing up in the warren was the nine circles of hell and then some. If he could, if the future were populated by wonders the past promised and never fulfilled, he’d wipe the whole memory of his childhood clean away.
    Back then he was considered some sort of demon-child. A pariah. As if centuries of once-forgotten superstition found a new home on his shoulders. A Min-seo who wanted to be a Min-jun, refusing to wear the sprigged cotton dresses her mother, Ha-eun, sewed from fabric bought from Cheongparo blockstreet market, and wondering what the hell her body was doing growing all the wrong goddamn parts. No one else understood the parts were wrong, they thought it was the mind.
    Ha-eun spent a frightening portion of the meager wages she made washing floors and sewing clothes on quacks and crooks all over Korea-town and beyond, none of them Korean, all of them liars who promised to sweat, bleed, chant or coax by whatever means the demons from Min-seo’s mind. A good deal of the memories between three and twelve are coated in the sticky stench of incense and shot through with pain sharp as the scalpels used to carve egress for bad spirits.
    It’s not hate he feels for Ha-eun precisely—the drugs deal with that—more a low-grade, seething sense of abandonment. Of having had the right to expect more and never getting it. His father, Hoon, was never more than background noise, a disappointed shadow haunting the corners of their rooms. Not a talkative man, he stopped trying to communicate altogether when his daughter insisted she was his son.
    In the end, Min-seo was left to deal with the problem alone. That’s where luck, that arbitrary twister of chance, came in. Blessed with ability above the top 0.5% in Tech, little Min-seo was hired at nine by Fulcrum’s Outreach Programme, a sure-fire highway, barring any Psych-Fail issues, into Corp work. Such an achievement would have earned the forgiveness of her family if she hadn’t spent her wages on a gender reassignment.
    Thing is, you learn a lot in the city; you learn that drugs can hide the worst hurts and exchanging wrong parts for right is only a matter of flim or cred. So that’s what little Min-seo did. At a mere twelve years of age, after two years of secret hormone treatment, and earlier than most surgeons would allow, Min-seo became the boy he always knew he was, re-christening himself Shock in an ironic nod to the reaction of the entire community at Hanju’s Songpa blockstreet.
    Ha-eun refused to speak to her daughter-son ever again. Shock didn’t care; like father, like mother. It made no difference, just removed an aggravating frequency of motherly white noise corrupting his head. Having the right parts, being able to bear living inside himself, was more important. Even suffering to live in Korea-town after the change was a walk in the goddamn park by comparison to the alternative, but that didn’t stop him saving to get out.
    Paid less than a tenth of the salary full-time adult employees could boast, and flat broke after the surgery, it took him another three years to escape the maze. He relocated to Sendai District, amongst the trees and towers, when he was fifteen