There are some good memories and bad memories in our lives, but some bad childhood memories never leave our minds.

My worst childhood memory stays somewhere in the corner of my mind and creeps out without warning when I’m alone. This unpleasant guest of mine has changed the way I am and the way I see the world, slowly but steadily. As the memory had gotten blurrier as I grew older, I didn’t realize that it had had a great influence on me. But when I had a drink with my brother about two years ago, he brought up the memory of our grandfather, and that helped me to recall a clear image of him and the painful abuse that my family and I had had to go through.

My grandfather was quite tall for a man of his generation and weighed about 90 kilograms. I remember his big body, which seemed to be as hard as a rock. He had a husky, resonant voice and his breath smelled of cigarettes. His penis had been amputated because he had had urinary tract cancer, so he used to carry an empty glass bottle in his hand when he was home, which was connected to his bladder with a hose. Nevertheless, he liked to go out drinking in the daytime, and I used to sneak into his room to see if there was anything interesting to play with. The room was always filled with the odor of stale cigarette smoke mixed with a musty smell of satin curtains. By the window, there was an ashtray with a couple of cigarette butts in it. I liked to smell the burned cigarettes and play with ashes that crumbled with only one slight touch of my finger. When I got tired of that, I used to look at the dagger he used in the war, which was placed at the head of his bed with some letters to his mother and photos of him in his uniform. I could see that he had black hair like me when he was young and his right arm was just the size of any ordinary man’s before the injury.

My grandfather had served as a private soldier in the Korean War. He had fought against the North Korean army and had been hit by a grenade fragment on his right arm, which had made his forearm swollen like Popeye’s. It looked ugly, but he was proud of it and he regarded himself as a hero who had protected his country from the communists. The problem was that he always wanted to be treated like a hero by everyone, including his family members and friends, and even store clerks whom he didn’t know. That was why he always had problems with people. When he was in a bad mood, he always took his anger out on my mom, brother and me on the pretext of not being treated as he should.

One night, he got really mad at me for calling him not “grandfather” but “father,” which was just a simple mistake, and he tried to chase me with a wooden stick to hit me on my head. I couldn’t ask for help from my parents since they were out for their anniversary. My brother tried to stop him, but that made him get angrier. We ran out of our house with our feet bare and bumped into Mom and Dad, who were getting home just in time. Dad rushed into the house after he found out what was going on. The sounds of things breaking, them yelling at each other and two big bodies bumping together continued for a while. After that, it was so quiet that we thought everything was OK. As we opened the door, we could see Chinese ceramics and the television smashed on the floor, and framed paintings shattered into pieces. And then we heard the slam of Grandfather’s hand, hitting my dad’s face. That was the first time I had seen my dad being hit by someone, and I haven’t been able to look him straight in the eye since that day.

It has been 10 years since my grandfather passed away, and now I am mature enough to understand how he must have felt toward others after the war. Even though he deserved to be appreciated for his sacrifice, nobody really thanked him and nobody cared about him. I still can’t deny that he is one of the worst memories of my childhood, but I can’t blame him since he was also one of the victims of his generation. War leaves scars on soldiers, and those scars are passed down through generations. That is the lesson I have learned from the memory of my grandfather.

By Choi Ho-jin

Choi Ho-jin is a student of English literature at Soongsil University. -- Ed.