Almond

Yunjae describes the incident that led to his mother’s hospitalization and his grandmother’s death. He says that six died and describes each of the six—a college student, two men at the front of a parade, a police officer, Yunjae’s grandmother, and the perpetrator of the crime himself. Yunjae says he watched the entire bloodbath blankly.

Yunjae jumps back in time narratively to his childhood and describes the first major incident that demonstrated his alexithymia. When he was six, his mother was late picking him up from kindergarten and he wandered off on his own, coming to a bridge. He spat down onto a car, unafraid of the height. He stumbled upon an alley and found a middle school boy being beaten to death. Yunjae goes to a corner store and tries to get help, but because of his expressionless face and lack of vocabulary, the shopkeeper ignores him.

In a horrifying twist, the dying middle schooler was the shopkeeper’s son. The police investigate the incident and bring Yunjae to the station, where he is reunited with his mother, who is overjoyed, in sharp contrast to the grieving shopkeeper. The shopkeeper yells at Yunjae for not communicating seriously enough. Yunjae’s mother grows concerned when she learns he is not scared to see the boy’s death.

Later, Yunjae doesn’t help his friend up when she has tripped, assuming she will get up on her own and growing confused when she just cries. His grandmother scolds the girl’s mother and the other children and tells Yunjae that he is “special” and “a monster,” neither of which Yunjae believes she means as an insult.

Yunjae explains that he never smiled as a child; his mother tried everything to get him to smile to no avail. His lack of fear further concerns her; he burns himself on a kettle but does not develop a fear of kettles and is completely unafraid of their neighbor’s dog with a track record of biting children. Eventually, his mom brings him to a doctor who shows Yunjae a picture of a crying child and asks him how the child feels. Yunjae is unable to answer.

Yunjae’s mother brings him to a bigger hospital, where he gets an MRI to examine his brain. While he doesn’t understand the diagnosis, as he is a child, he remembers his mother crying all day until an old man in the waiting room yells at her.

Yunjae breaks the narrative of his past to describe the different types of almonds he has eaten and the way he eats them. He explains the complex way he eats almonds for the best experience of their flavor and sensation, even though he does not like almonds. He explains that his mother believes that his amygdala—a part of the brain that is almond-shaped and named after almonds—would get bigger if he ate almonds regularly. His amygdala does not function typically, making emotions meaningless to him.

Yunjae explains that he has alexithymia, or the inability to identify emotions because his amygdala is too small to properly function. He doesn’t know how to be afraid, meaning he throws himself into dangerous situations, but he has deeper complications that make him unable to identify any emotion he experiences. While the doctors want to perform further tests on him for scientific progress, Yunjae’s mother eventually grows frustrated and angry and ends the visits, insisting she knows what is best for him.

Yunjae’s mother blames herself for his development, even though Yunjae does not. She grows frustrated that he is not a savant to offset his emotional growth and decides to take things into her own hands and educate him about his emotions herself. She writes out proper responses to situations and puts them all over the house, forcing him to memorize them and testing him on them regularly.

As Yunjae grows, his classmates and their parents mark him as the weird kid in school, which bothers his mother more than it bothers him. She insists that he should work to come across as normal and learn to not stand out. She comes up with increasingly complex situations for him to “master” to hide his true nature. Yunjae increasingly chooses the simpler answers to her scenarios.

Yunjae’s mother and grandmother trace and paste the hanja, or lettering, for different emotions all over the house. His mother insists on putting the negative ones only in the bathroom, meaning they must be constantly remade. She makes a “human emotion game” to teach him the proper responses (27), but Yunjae’s questions often stump her with the complexity of human responses in comparison to societal expectations. Eventually, she just tells him to ignore the complex things and work on coming across as a normal person.

Yunjae blends in by the time he reaches fourth grade, mostly by staying silent. He struggles to express his interests and desires, however, such as when he buys things from a counter. His mother tries to get him to express himself, insisting people usually act on their emotions, but it frustrates him. He comments that his mother’s form of love was more a desire for him to be “normal” than anything else, but notes he knows better than to say that out loud.

Yunjae explains that his grandmother and mother do not share any similarities except enjoying plum-flavored candy, which they like for the “sweet and the blood taste” (11). Granny only entered his life because his mother became desperate after the death of her husband; Granny had wanted his mother to be an exceptional, and single, writer, but she fell in love with a man who sold accessories at a street stall and their relationship fell apart. Yunjae never met his father; he explains that while he was still in the womb, a drunk motorcyclist crashed into the stand and killed him instantly. It took seven years for his mother to lose the ability to handle Yunjae alone.

Yunjae describes first meeting his grandmother in a McDonald’s when he was seven. He describes her as gigantic in size and voice. Yunjae’s mother barely holds herself together until his grandmother yells at her for being a mess, after which she starts crying and confessing all she has been through and everything about Yunjae’s condition. Granny calls Yunjae a monster but notes that he is adorable and smiles at him.

Yunjae’s mother opens a used bookstore in Suyu-dong, as she doesn’t have the bravery to write but believes she has good taste in books. They live in a small house adjoined to the store, and despite the odds, make just enough money to afford their life together.

Yunjae explains that he felt comfortable in the bookstore and enjoyed reading, especially more than television, as television left nothing up to his imagination. He treats reading with the same sacredness as eating almonds, using words he does not understand the meaning of to imagine the possibilities of emotion. Eventually, however, the words begin to lose meaning.

Yunjae notes that his mother had a few boyfriends during his childhood, but none of them were permanent. He describes her as beautiful, almost agelessly beautiful; neither she nor his grandmother seem to change or age. The year of her injury, however, he notices wrinkles on her face, which seems to please her. In grim, but inaccurate, foreshadowing, Yunjae notes that she will not have the chance to age.

Yunjae describes how his grandmother sold sweet potatoes when she was younger and developed an attachment to Buddha’s Birthday and Christmas. Now that she has the money, she decorates everything with both lotus lanterns and Christmas ornaments and celebrates them both religiously, pausing only for the additional celebration of Yunjae’s birthday on Christmas Eve. The family goes out for his birthday, even though Yunjae does not want to.

The family goes out for food, but their usual restaurant is closed. They go to a subpar restaurant and enjoy the food; Yunjae takes a plum-flavored candy from the counter and delays going outside to enjoy it. Outside, the snow and choir music make his mother and grandmother smile. Tragedy immediately strikes, however, as a man swinging a knife and a hammer charges at Granny and Mom. He hits Yunjae’s mother on the head four times and stabs his grandmother, who blocks the glass door to keep Yunjae safe. Yunjae watches, completely helpless and frozen.

Only Yunjae’s mother survives the incident, but she is in a coma with little chance of waking. Yunjae explains that the murderer was a relatively “normal” man whose family left him after he fell into debt. He spent three years shut in his basement. The police found books in his basement about self-help and wielding a knife, as well as a note indicating he planned to kill anyone he saw smiling before his suicide.

After 10 days, the discussion of the massacre ends. Yunjae is emotionless at the funeral, which many people regard with suspicion. Internally he asks himself endless questions about the outcome; when he expresses these questions, nobody can answer him. Yunjae eventually realizes he must adapt to being completely alone.