The Words Beneath the Water

Three years ago, I had a nightmare. It has come back to find me once more.

Around what looked like a long-abandoned orphanage, strawberry bushes had grown wild and unruly. My mother, father, and I each held a basket, picking strawberries in silence. As I reached into the thicket, I caught sight of two small white hamsters nestled among the leaves. Gently, I placed them in my basket.

A moment later, my mother said she would rinse the strawberries and moved toward the large jar of water. I hurried to stop her—mine had hamsters in it. But she barely acknowledged me. My father, waving it off, plunged the basket deep into the water. I could only watch, helpless.

By the time I retrieved it, the damage had already been done. I spilled the strawberries onto the ground and searched frantically for the hamsters. One—the larger one—was lifeless. The smaller one was barely breathing. I woke up in tears.

Not long ago, my parents visited our new home for the first time. The air that day was unusually crisp, so I suggested a walk to the park. We sat at a wooden table, light filtering through the green shimmer of midsummer leaves. At the time, I had been interested in bond investments and began asking my father a series of questions. He responded with enthusiasm, drawing graphs to explain the relationship between bond prices, interest rates, and yields. My mother, too, began to share things she'd picked up from an economics book she’d been reading.

Then my father frowned and said sharply:

“If you don’t know something, you should stay quiet.”

It was a line I had heard countless times as a child. My mother fell silent. And once again, something small inside me cracked—like a fragment of glass snapping under pressure. It was a quiet kind of violence, the kind that flattens a person’s existence.

As an adult, I found myself reacting viscerally to any hint of condescension. I would grind my teeth, determined to prove that the other was the ignorant one. Always watching, always on guard.

Then, one afternoon at a bookstore with my husband:

“There are so many anthologies of foreign poems,” I said. “But very few that collect a wide range of Korean poets.”

“There’s a Yun Dong-ju collection here,” he offered.

“No, I mean not just one poet’s book—a collection that brings together many voices.”

He grew quiet. When I asked what was wrong, he said my eyes had turned cold—like they were asking, ‘Why can’t you understand what I mean?’

I flinched. Not because he had seen through me, but because I saw my father in myself. I had spent years vowing to push back against men like him, to never become him. And yet, here I was, a mirror of what I resented.

I do not resent my parents. I truly believe they did their best, and that perfection is too much to expect from any human being. But perhaps my unconscious thought otherwise. The anger I had tucked away as a child came bursting out like a child’s sob—sudden, uncontrollable, and loud. Was Lacan right when he said that un-mourned emotions always return?

When the nightmare returned, I found I could finally read it.

The water jar that drowned the hamster—my father’s words. The dead one—the larger hamster—was the voice I had longed to raise but never could. My mother, who stood by and watched, was a reflection of the grief I carried toward her silence. And the smaller hamster that survived? That was me—small, fragile, powerless.

That wounded child still writhes within me, surfacing through dreams, pleading to be seen. Maybe that is why I write. As my essay teacher once said, writing has the power to heal.

To write pain raw and unvarnished is to bear a particular kind of shame. But I endure that shame, because I don’t want to use my wounds as weapons to wound others.

So today, again, I write.

And from the depths of the water, I retrieve my words, one by one.