Taro

Hi, I’m working on ludic social systems which reframe society into a series of plays. I believe we can shape our own social conditions. My biggest fear is the vicious cycle of ignorance. I start from what is most significant. Excellence is my priority.

• Alfred North Whitehead
• Autopoiesis
• Axel Honneth
• Cultural evolution
• Cybernetics
• Damon Centola
• Daniel Lieberman
• Donna Haraway
• E. O. Wilson
• Emmanuel Levinas
• Elinor Ostrom
• Elixir programming language
• Eternal return
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Gilles Deleuze
• History of life
• Hypermedia Systems
• Johan Huizinga
• John Dewey
• John Stewart
• Laozi
• Line of flight
• Ludics
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Max Weber
• Meg Wheatley
• Niklas Luhmann
• Panta rhei
• Posthumanism
• Process philosophy
• Rosi Braidotti
• Sapir keyboard layout
• Seth Godin
• Social philosophy
• Sociocybernetics
• Tamim Ansary
• Yuval Noah Harari

Blood

My grandfather was conscripted during the imperial period, meant to be used as little more than a piece of meat, and survived only because the transport ship carrying him ran aground. He stripped off his clothes in the sea, swam several kilometers back to land, stole clothes from a civilian house, and made his way back to the colony. Life, naturally, was harsh, and he was poor in body, heart and spirit. Even so, as was common at the time, he fathered many children, and all the labour of the household fell to the women. My grandmother died young.

From as early as I can remember, my grandfather did nothing but sit at home and smoke. My father said that, as the eldest son, it was his duty to care for him. By the time my grandfather had become wholly old, and especially after part of his colon had been removed, he often took out his temper on my mother. He could no longer control his bowels, so excrement was smeared here and there, and my mother scrubbed tirelessly to get rid of the smell. By the time I entered middle school, my grandfather was dead.

My father came up to the big city as a young man during the rapid economic growth. Drivers were in short supply then, and he wanted so badly to become one that he would sneak into cars he didn’t own just to try driving them. He worked hard enough to land a job at a media company, but for someone without connections, the world offered only discrimination and betrayal. Later he went back to driving commuter buses, and that was when he met my mother.

At some point, the whole family have come to the city. They were so poor they lived in a plastic greenhouse, or so I was told. I never heard the full story, but around then my father seems to have begun thinking of himself as the head of a large extended family, and he lived under the weight of that burden. The deaths of my aunt and grandmother around that time became the seeds of a lifelong guilt, mistrust of self, anxiety, and fear.

My maternal grandfather had been born into the head house of the clan, only to lose the family fortune to swindlers during the Japanese occupation. My mother, born into comfort and forced to watch her family slowly come apart, dreamed of a home that would be solid, stable, and harmonious. I do not know for certain, but I imagine she came to Seoul following her eldest sister, who had come up with her husband. My mother held a job and then met my father, who drove a commuter bus. They were married at the transportation centre. After suffering two miscarriages, she gave birth to me.

When I was little, my father supposedly tried his hand at things other than driving—a butcher shop, and various other jobs—but failed at them. When he began drinking and becoming violent, my mother considered divorce, but my eldest aunt talked her out of it. Once sober, my father was the sort of man who cherished his children above all else. A greater fear than that, though, was sustenance. My mother simply could not imagine raising a family alone. Perhaps she also believed that a harmonious family, by definition, had to include two parents.

For a while when I was young, I lived at my eldest aunt’s house. I only learned later why: my father had caused the death of an elderly woman in a traffic accident and was serving time for negligent homicide. One day my maternal uncle took me fishing somewhere along the river. I imagine that, because he had to look after a child, he brought me along to a place he would otherwise have gone alone.

There were many places along the river where fishing was forbidden, so even after entering the riverside area, we had to drive farther inward. Once we had settled in at the fishing spot and made our preparations, my uncle asked me to go buy instant noodles from a shop we had passed on the way. He said it was about ten minutes away. So I retraced the road we had driven in on. But the longer I walked, the less sure I was where the shop had been, and I began to feel I might get lost.

I went back to the fishing spot and told my uncle there was no shop. He said that could not be right and walked back with me along the same path. What he realized, as we went, was simple: what was only a short drive was much farther on foot than he had imagined, and I had turned back before getting there, assuming there was nothing ahead.

Then he apologized to me. He said he had misjudged things, that because of his mistake a small child had been sent alone on a long walk. “It feels far even to me, and I’m an adult—how far must it have felt to you?” In any case, the shop did exist. That day I learned that adults, too, can be mistaken—and that they can admit it and apologize.

When I thought back on this years later, I realized that if my father had ever shown that kind of honesty, I would not have been so afraid, even when things went wrong. My father never once told me he was sorry.

I never felt especially seen or cared for at home. My father wanted to appear impressive in my eyes. Rather than stooping to a child’s level, he preferred to ask me riddles no child could possibly answer, then explain the answers to me himself. If that managed to give him even a little self-respect, perhaps that was something.

My mother, worn down by family troubles, would scold me if I had to stay late at school because I was slow in class and had to do extra work. One day, when many of her friends were gathered at our house, I stood outside sobbing because I was afraid that if I went in, she would reprimand me in front of all the other adults.

My mother was startled and tried to soothe me. I was young; I did not yet understand that people change their behavior when others are watching. That was when I learned that my mother did not first think about how I felt—she first thought about how other people might view the situation.

I think it was when I was in high school that my paternal uncle sat me down in the master bedroom and said we needed to talk, just the two of us. He told me that my father’s side of the family was my “real family”, while my mother’s side—my aunts and maternal uncle—was not. One must stand with one’s real family, he said, and together withstand the harshness of the world. Put charitably, that was what he meant.

I, on the other hand, knew perfectly well that without my eldest aunt, our family would have fallen to pieces long before then. She was my mother’s emotional pillar, and she supported their marriage. When all our property had been destroyed by fire, she lent my father a large sum of money so he could get back on his feet. One day, for my maternal uncle’s sixtieth birthday, my aunt chartered a cruise boat on the river and threw a party. That was my image of what a splendid family looked like. My younger uncle, by contrast, had worked my older cousin mercilessly without even paying him properly, until the relationship between them finally collapsed.

Wrath

What stands out most vividly in my memories of my family of origin is my father’s violence after his mind began to give way, the person beneath it who, in ordinary life, wanted to be a good man, and the fracture between those two selves. From the 1990s, when I was growing up, until 2004, when my only sibling was born, being drunk was simply my father’s everyday state. I used to run errands to the neighborhood shop and come back carrying two bottles of drink. The lane was all cement, lined with four-story red-brick flat buildings.

One day my mother fled to a southern beach, taking me with her. She did not know what my father might do if we went to my eldest aunt’s house, and her own heart felt so cramped she wanted to go somewhere far away; it only happened that the place was the beach. She often had to make phone calls to someone or other. I do not remember what had happened just before that. I only remember that she was deeply hurt, confused and exhausted. Even so, wanting to cheer me, she took me to the beach, and that image remains with me as the opening scene of domestic discord.

In the next scene, my father arrived driving his bus, dressed more neatly than usual in his driver’s uniform. Inside the bus, freshly cleaned, my parents clung to each other and wept. My father was a man who tried. He wanted to be a good person. At least, he was that way once he had sobered up. He cared for his wife. He loved his children. Or at least he laboured to show that he did. I thought then that perhaps such things simply happened in life. Up to that point, I thought so.

My father had grown up by the sea and loved seafood. The sashimi restaurant he liked in our neighborhood felt, to me as a child, dark and desolate. Once you stepped inside, it was hard to believe it was still daytime. Harsh industrial light fell across cold steel tables, lonely against walls and floors slathered in rough cement. There was more dampness than light. “Why does Dad always choose places that make you sadder?” I would ask my mother. Rather than think about the question and answer it, my parents seemed only to marvel that I had asked it at all.

In the house where we used to live, the kitchen counter was made of plywood. I remember that because once I saw where a knife my father had brandished had bitten deep through the waterproof sheeting and exposed splinters of wood beneath. When I picked at the wood with my finger, my father, sober now, said, “Things like this are shameful. They ought to be covered.” and laid a dishcloth over the wound.

I was terrified.

Bad things can happen in any life. But when the person who holds the most power decides to hide what happened, to forget it, that means it will happen again forever. I thought it would be more fitting to preserve such a wound and put it on display.

One day I went with my father to a PC cafe. I was probably the one who begged him to come. We had a computer at home, so I did not know much about PC cafes, and in those days they were still places where adults sat in dark rooms chain-smoking, the sort of place that made you feel a child had no business being there. But that was precisely why I wanted to go. I was a little excited and dragged my father along.

I opened one of the computer games my friends had taught me and showed it to him. My father disliked being bad at things, so he had little interest in trying the computer himself. Watching characters smash and fight their way to victory, he asked, “Isn’t there a game where you become a monk and help people?” It seems he wanted, without condition, to be of use to the world.

Around that time, someone set fire to my father’s bus and burned it to a shell. He had parked it on a wooded hillside to save on parking fees. They never found the culprit; all they established was that it had been arson. What did my father think when hope was trampled for no reason at all?

One day I came home from school and the whole house smelled strange, the floors slick beneath my feet. Even the comic books I had rented were half-soaked in oil. My father had doused the entire house, saying he would burn it down. The cleanup, of course, was my mother’s responsibility. We were expected to count ourselves fortunate that he had not actually lit the match.

One day a chair he threw narrowly missed me and struck the bookcase instead. Another day, angry that my mother was doing housework instead of watching the World Cup, he overturned the dining table and left a great bruise on her thigh. On another, he slammed himself into the window in the stairwell and tore open his lip and his hand. Oil could be cleaned. Wounds on the body could not. The reason, for example, might be that he had gotten drunk and announced he would take me and my friends camping, and my mother had tried to stop him, wounding his pride.

And yet, little by little, my parents saved money, bought a house, and moved. My father worked hard, and my mother kept the household going. It was, in its own way, a business with assets, and my father had a sharp sense for what people wanted, enough to command a premium. My mother had dependable sisters, so on weekends she took me up to where they lived and came back with side dishes and daily necessities. Every week she also prepared a whole box of food for my father’s passengers.

The drink, the wrath, the anxiety continued even after I entered middle school. In one scene from those years, relatives are standing around my father, who is too far gone even to speak, clucking in dismay. We are in the new house we had moved into. I am screaming at him until it feels my throat will tear apart. “Everyone is trying so hard to live—what on earth is wrong with you?” My eldest aunt looked at me and said, “Oh, what will become of that child?” I remember nothing at all of what had happened or why.

My mother helped my father in almost all of his work, travelling with him constantly. One day, after a route was finished, he must have drunk heavily somewhere along the mountainside. Driving a forty-five-seat bus, he sped down a twisting mountain road, smashing into guardrails and then lurching forward again, over and over. He had to drive the bus back home, but he was too drunk, so his wife gave him water instead of more liquor. That, apparently, was what enraged him.

When the bus finally crashed to a halt, my mother jumped from the rear window and injured her back. She did it to save my younger sibling, who was still in her womb. She caught a taxi and made it home in one piece, and later she told me the story. There were now even more hospitals she had to visit, but a few months later my sibling came into the world. My father spent his own money taking elderly people from the area on free day trips. He arranged newspaper coverage. He appeared on television. He struggled desperately to prove that he was a good man.

By the time I became an adult, my family was able to move into an apartment in a new town. As though this home were something that could not be left out of his reckoning, my father drank through the night for tens of hours and then came home carrying a gas cylinder. This time his ambition was to blow up the apartment. When he opened the valve, gas began to hiss out. My mother and I had to beat him down in order to shut it off.

To any eye he looked far from ordinary. His whole body had gone red, as if he were made of flame, and he reeked of alcohol in a way words cannot quite describe. The moment he could move again, he erupted. My mother knew private emergency workers who dealt with people like this, and when she called them, a group of sturdy men appeared and hauled my father away. The human fireball writhed and fought with all his strength, kicking an aquarium as he did so and tearing the skin on the top of his foot to pieces. Because that had happened, it seemed my mother had to pay the men even more.

My father was confined in a psychiatric hospital for a time. The only thing that healed was the wound on his foot. He raged that his wife had had him locked in a madhouse. I was attending art school then, and I finally granted my childhood self the plea it had once made: I photographed each wound on my father’s body, printed the images on banners, and exhibited them. It did not feel like healing.

I learnt the source of his wrath only after my education and conscription. My youngest aunt, my fathers little sister, had been beaten to death by her husband. My grandmother, shattered by the shock, stopped taking her medication and soon passed away. My father, the eldest son, lived burdened by loss and guilt, under the shadow of elders in the family who blamed him.

I pitied him, but I was also furious with him for the betrayal. Once he married my mother, the most important thing should have been the family who lived skin to skin under one roof. Instead, the ghosts of the agrarian extended family disordered my life. Whenever my father shouted or showed any sign of darkness, I felt a violent fight-or-flight response, as though some vast calamity were bearing down on me.

One day, when he shouted at me, I handed him a knife and threatened him. “Don’t raise your voice at me.” If I had to keep enduring him in that state, I thought I would rather die. I wanted him to understand that pain. Or perhaps I wanted to become, like him, a person covered in wounds of body and mind, so that I might finally understand him.

My father was startled and did nothing but keep hitting me. In that instant I realized it was no more than the tantrum of a child. There was no sense of sovereignty in him. My father’s mind was still out there begging for the love of the dead. I packed my things and left home.