You-jeong Jeong - The Good Son

I was so annoyed, I wanted to scream into the phone.

Only when someone said, ‘Doctor?’ behind her did she reluctantly wrap up the call. ‘If you talk to her, ask her to ring me, okay?’

‘Sure.’

‘And you’re still taking your pills, right?’ she asked.

‘Of course,’ I said, pulling out the medicine bag I’d shoved in the bottom of the drawer to check. There was still ten days’ worth in there.

‘Isn’t it about time for another prescription?’

‘No, I have about a week left.’

‘Are you sure you’re taking the right amount? I think you should have three days’ worth at most.’

‘Well, maybe you can check my charts,’ I suggested.

‘I will,’ she said, and hung up.

I threw the phone onto my desk and flung the medicine bag down. Mother and Auntie had unleashed the medicine into the centre of my existence, even though the pills had made me feel numb at every single important moment of my life. I’d started taking medication when I began swimming competitively, the spring I turned nine, when I won the junior Seoul City Children’s Swimming Competition.

I suffered from severe side effects at the beginning. Once, I had to be hauled off to hospital because I began to slur my words, my body was covered in a rash and I was burning with fever. After switching medications several times, I was put on Remotrol, which was what I still took now. Auntie hadn’t chosen badly; at least I didn’t have to be carted off to hospital at regular intervals. The only thing was that Remotrol slung a metal ring around my head and shackled my hands and feet, taming me. I was flattened by horrible headaches, and a constant ringing in my ears made it impossible to find quiet. Sometimes I’d find that there were gaps in my memory. I became sluggish and less fit. I’d come home from training practically a corpse. But Mother and Auntie didn’t give up on the regimen, saying that the side effects weren’t fatal. The same way I didn’t give up on swimming.

I’d learned to swim in second grade, in the spring. I’d joined an extracurricular programme at school to keep up with Yu-min. He was better than me at everything – school work, drawing, piano – but he was awful at swimming. He hated it and ended up giving up only a term later, while I learned and mastered all the different strokes in the same time frame. The following spring, I won a schools competition, and the year after that, I represented my school and won us a gold medal.

It was my coach who suggested that I swim competitively. Mother wasn’t keen on the idea, but she didn’t stop me either. Later, she admitted that she’d thought I would quit soon enough, either because I got bored of practice or because I realised that I wasn’t all that good at it after all.

Unfortunately for Mother, I didn’t get tired of it. I began to distinguish myself in national youth competitions. When I look back, I can see that I was fully myself, the way I was created, during those two years. It was before I was sent to Auntie for treatment and before I had to start taking medication – these two things happened in May of 2000, a month after Father and Yu-min died.

In October of that year, Mother and I moved from Bangbae-dong to Incheon. My new school didn’t have a swimming team. Mother suggested that I give it up. But I liked water more than anything. I liked every moment of reaching out with my arms, slicing through the liquid, embracing and pushing it away. I liked the moment I shot forward like a shark. I liked competing with everything I had against someone else or even myself. I liked that moment every night, just before I fell asleep, when I saw myself standing in an Olympic stadium, on the tallest podium. I was free underwater, unlike on the ground, and I felt more comfortable in the pool than at school or at home. It was the only place Mother couldn’t barge into; it was exclusively my world. I could do anything underwater. Anything, the way I wanted to.

So I insisted, and Mother acquiesced on the condition that I’d have to give up if I couldn’t fight off the side effects of the drugs. She enrolled me in a swimming club called KIM, and began to stick close to me to watch over my condition. The coach probably thought she was dedicated to making her son the best athlete possible. My teammates figured I was coddled and spoiled, judging from my comfortable family situation, my devoted mother, and my natural talent. Nobody knew that my insides were rotting.

Since I wasn’t on the professional athlete programme, I had to combine studying and training. On top of that, I had to deal with the side effects of my medication, of course. Things didn’t improve in middle school or high school. In fact, the side effects grew worse. I nearly forgot what I’d been like when I first started swimming, when I had more energy than I knew what to do with. That was until I entered a national swimming competition on Jeju Island in March of my tenth-grade year.

I lost my bag on the first day. I’d left it on a chair to go to the bathroom and it was gone by the time I came out. In it were my pills, my iPod and headphones, games console and wallet. It was annoying not to have the other things, but the pills qualified as a real problem. The correct solution would have been to call Mother and ask her to bring me some more. She was in a nearby hotel; it wouldn’t have been impossible, although she would have had to get on a boat or a plane to go all the way home to Incheon.

One doesn’t always choose the right path, as it turns out. I saw a simple solution to my problem: I didn’t have to take the pills. What could go wrong in a few days? What Mother was always worrying about had never happened, and I would be able to avoid the unjust situation of being berated over something that wasn’t technically my fault. I didn’t tell the coach about it either; if I told him I’d lost my pills, I’d have to tell him why I was taking them in the first place. They didn’t screen for Remotrol in the sport, so there had been no reason to disclose it. He also didn’t know I was seeing a psychiatrist. Mother had decided that he didn’t have to know about it. He was led to believe that I was receiving sports psychology consultations at Auntie’s clinic.

That night, I slept more deeply than I ever had. In the morning, my head was free and clear of headaches. I felt light and joyous. I was confident and ambitious. The day was peaceful for once. Thanks to my renewed joy, I beat my personal best by an astounding seven seconds in the 1,500-metre preliminaries and set a new record. Honestly, I wasn’t sure even at that point: was I flying high because I hadn’t taken the pills, or was it a coincidence? Although I wasn’t fully able to shake off my worries about having a seizure, I enjoyed that dangerous edge I had throughout the competition, taking gold in both the 800-metre and the 1,500-metre freestyle. Even the coach was stunned. I was hailed as a rising star who’d arrived like a comet.

When I got home, I became certain that it was my medication that was making me feel so awful. My body returned to its sluggish self when I started popping the pills again. I stopped them once more to test my theory out, and by the second day I was back in an energetic, manic state. I felt the same as I had during the swimming competition. I remembered what I’d been like when I was in the junior division, before I started the medication. I soon grew confident that being off the meds for a couple of days wouldn’t cause a seizure.

A month later, Mother and I went down to Ulsan for the Dong-A swimming competition and the trials for the Doha Asian Games. Everyone was interested in Han Yu-jin; would this boy who’d broken all records in the preliminaries prove his worth here too? Would he end up qualifying for Doha at the tender age of fifteen?