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and fell in drops down on my forehead, my body began to feel sick for no reason. At first I felt as if hot lumps of charcoal were burning inside my chest, then the lumps would shoot all the way up to the back of my tongue, come close to rolling out of my mouth, then crawl back down again. My insides were burning but my forehead was covered with sweat. One morning after a night spent fighting four or five of these attacks, I could not take it any longer and visited the hospital. The doctor hung up my chest X-ray and said there was nothing wrong. He said nothing was wrong, but as days passed, the burningwas replaced with phlegm, surging up my throat. I switched to a different doctor, who concocted a week’s supply of medication for me, but the phlegm did not go away. Taking the phlegm with me, I set out for home.
    In my bag is another packet of medication to last four days, which my younger sister, also a pharmacist, put together for me. Since I had been painfully coughing up phlegm every time Younger Sister called, she asked what was wrong. When, after hesitating, I still failed to answer, she waited to close up the pharmacy at nine o’clock and then, carrying her one-year-old baby on her back, came to see me with her packet of medication and her diagnosis that my symptoms were stress-related.
    “What’s eating you? You have what people in the old days called ‘heart’s anger disease.’ Let it out, only that will make you better.”
    In order to avoid Ha Gye-suk’s voice, I pack my bags and leave home. I think of the farthest I can get away from home within this country. I get on the plane. But in the end, here I am, sitting here gazing at the lights from the fishing boats floating on the night sea. And I write, This book, I believe, will turn out to be not quite fact and not quite fiction, but something in between. I wonder if it can be called literature. I ponder the act of writing. What does writing mean to me?
    I wonder if it could be called literature. I ponder the act of writing, what writing means to me. That is what I write. Would I be able to open, with words, that opening of my sixteenth year, that door which I have kept closed for so long? Especially here, where I have run to, away from the sentences, away from my habit of heading back home from wherever I was when a sentence came to me. Here, where all the daily routines are utterly unfamiliar, nothing like the tongue inside my mouth, here where I have never been before, here facing the crashing, splashing night sea, here where a dark hallway lies behind the door, where not even a single towel is my own.

    I ceaselessly collect certain momentswith words, in an attempt to lock them up like photographs, but the more I try, the more despair I feel. Life flows outside of words. The more I write, the more pain I feel at the difficulty of concluding that literature moves toward hope and what is right. If hope would well up from inside of me, allowing me to speak of hope in a heartfelt way, it would make me happy as well. Literature, however, is destined to be rooted in the problem of life, and the problem of life has less to do with hope and what is right, but more with unhappiness and what is wrong. After all, isn’t life about living on even when one is trapped inside unhappiness without hope?
    At times this recognition makes me give up my surgical knife. And in the end, I choose the many-layered web of meaning over a single point. And I tell myself that I should approach and confront that thickness; that it is not the writer’s, but the readers’ part to unravel every single layer and observe what she finds. Would it be best if what I write would lead ten readers into ten different directions of thought; that life is supposed to take varied forms and shapes; aren’t there some lives that do not allow literature to intercept them?

    That day, after Ha Gye-suk said to me, “Your life seems different from ours now,” if I had told her, “The reason I had