Birthdays, 1962

He does not tell you about the war. He does not tell you about the years after, when the country was still rebuilding itself around him like a sentence that keeps getting revised. He does not tell you about what his parents lost, or what they carried, as they moved from village to town to city, how they came to be in the house they were in - Seoul, 1962.

What he tells you about is a boiled egg.

He was seven or eight. His mother packed his lunch every morning before he was awake: rice, kimchi, a cloth bag tied at the corners. This is what every child carried to school because this is what there was. His father taught high school. His mother raised the children, which in practice meant whatever children were in the house, because the house always had new people in it - cousins, aunts, relatives passing through. He shared a room with four of them. They slept on mats on the floor and kicked each other in their sleep. Korea was poor and the house was crowded and the food was the same every day. And he was happy.

And for his birthday, his mother made him a boiled egg.

She boiled it and put it in with the rice. He carried it to school and sat at his desk and held it in his hands before eating it, because some things you do not rush. The shell came off clean. The white was smooth and still warm from being carried against his body all morning. The yolk was dry and bright, the color of something that has been exactly and carefully made.

South Korea now has the fourteenth-largest economy on earth. It builds the semiconductors that run the phone in your pocket. Its pop stars sell out stadiums in Los Angeles, which is where you live now, in a house with a refrigerator that makes its own ice. Countries change. People leave them. People endure. He did this. He does not talk about it much.

But he told you about the egg. Once, over dinner, for no particular reason, the way he tells you everything that matters — briefly, as if it were nothing. And you now understood that he was not telling you about an egg.

Someone, in a country that had almost nothing, looked at him and thought: he is worth one extra thing.

The yolk was dry and bright. He was seven or eight. He carried it against his body all morning to keep it warm.