Far East in May: A Korean Crowd-Pleaser

Baek Sehee: I want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, trans. Anton Hur, Bloomsbury, 2022.

This book is a very modern type of memoir. It originated as a blog and features the transcript of interviews with a psychiatrist from when the author was in her 20s, interspersed with her personal reflections, conclusions and lessons learnt. It became a massive bestseller in South Korean when one of the members of BTS recommended it, and I think it speaks particularly to millennial or Gen Z readers who are looking for an honest non-fictional account of what it feels like navigating your professional and personal path in today’s world.

Although outwardly successful (working as a social media manager for a publishing house, pretty, popular, often in a relationship), Baek suffered from a persistent low-level depression, a sense of hopelessness and lack of self-esteem. She was perhaps not in immediate danger of suicide, but she found it hard to motivate herself to keep going, was often hypercritical of herself and found herself in co-dependent relationships which often drove her to despair.

The therapist was perplexed when Baek asked for consent to record the sessions, and was embarrassed when they read the book, as it made them regret some of their counselling choices. Certainly from my experience of Western-style coaching, CBT and Samaritan-style listening, it felt quite interventionist, but I have to admit that I’m not familiar with how psychologists/psychiatrists work. I did like the very candid comment made by the psychiatrist at the end of the book:

This is a record of a very ordinary, incomplete person who meets another very ordinary, incomplete person, the latter of whom happens to be a therapist. The therapist makes some mistakes and has a bit of room for improvement, but life has always been like that, which means everyone’s life has the potential to become better. To our readers, who are perhaps down and out from having experienced much devastation or are living day-to-day in barely contained anxiety: I hope you will listen to a certain overlooked and different voice within you. Because the human heart, even when it wants to die, quite often wants at the same time to eat some tteokbokki, too.

Written in plain, sometimes quite clichéed language, but with a candour and immediacy which is refreshing and compelling, particularly in East Asia, where mental health issues and feelings of failure are very much still swept under the carpet. It feels quite revolutionary because it preaches individualistic values which run counter to the traditional collectivist values of Korean society.

What matter isn’t what people say but what you like and find joy in. I hope you focus less on how you look to other people and more on fulfilling your true desires.

…but I really don’t know how to tell the difference – between what I really want and what others want for me.

Of course, you could argue that a lot of misfits appear in fiction from China, Japan and Korea, but it takes a lot of courage to discuss directly what authors often portray aslant via their (often quite problematic) characters – I’m thinking of Dazai Osamu here, for example. Hearing the following said aloud (or written on paper) feels quite brave even in Western society:

It is impossible to fathom the sadness of those who are left behind, but if life gives one more suffering than death, shouldn’t we respect their right to end life? We are so bad at mourning in our society. Maybe it’s a failure of respect. Some call those who choose their own death sinners or failures or losers who give up. Is living until the end really a triumph in every case? As if there can be any true winning or losing in this game of life.

Although this sounds very dark – and I’d have hesitated to share this with my recently deceased niece or with my younger son when he was going through the worst of his depression – the author does finally figure out a way to live with her possibly lifelong condition. It may seem very obvious, but after her therapy, she realised that she should share her feelings and thoughts not just with one paid person, but also with family and friends, to balance out her own self-pity and self-consciousness, while also listening to their own concerns and stories. She also learnt to move away from her black-and-white thinking, and to accept that we are able to experience contradictory feelings simultaneously. It is a message of hope, but not unrealistically upbeat – everything will be fine now – either.

My initial thoughts while reading the book was that it felt rather simplistic both in term of ‘teachings’ and language. Less memoir and more self-help book (which are never stylistically ambitious). But after some conversations with my sons and others of their generation, I realised that they perceive the complexity and subtlety that my generation appreciate and take for granted as needlessly vague at best or insincere at worst. There are many, many more reasons to have low self-esteem nowadays, when everything is up for scrutiny and comparison online. This book addresses the younger generation’s concerns in their own language. It might not be entirely to my taste, but if it can help them forge their identity and get through the dark times, then I’m all for it.

I am always at war… Life is as messy as a bag whose owner never clears it out. You have no idea when you might reach in and pull out a piece of old trash, and you’re afraid someone is going to look through your bag someday… Their eyes seem to be looking down right at my phone screen. I’m afraid they’ll be reading my thoughts… I consider my public persona as the cover for what is underneath, a membrane no light can seep through.

By the way, I asked Anton (the translator) when I saw him at London Book Fair what tteokbokki was exactly, apparently it’s a popular street food, a kind of pasta (chewy rice cakes in fact) stewed in a spicy sauce.

On Depression, Privilege and Staying Strong

I finally worked up my courage to write this post after reading Matt Haig’s outstanding book ‘Reasons to Stay Alive’ and David Mark’s article a few days ago about access to mental health services in the UK.

Image from socialworktutor.com

‘Well, the blood tests seem fine. It’s just age – you’re not getting any younger, you know.’

And my French family doctor smiles ruefully, as if to apologise for being so ridiculously young and glamorous in the face of my galloping infirmity. I had been complaining of weight gain, migraines, insomnia, lack of energy, occasional palpitations. She suspects menopause or a shade of hypochondria.

I cannot complain that she is not helpful. After all, I am not entirely honest with her as a patient. I am reluctant to share my whole story, and not just because I fear breaking down in tears and using up all of the tissues from the box she has so thoughtfully placed on her desk. I also fear being labelled, once and for all, as mentally deficient or unstable or somehow missing that even keel that most people seem to be able to find. If most people can balance on choppy waters and tack against strong winds, why can’t I?

My mother tells me off each time we speak on the phone: ‘You’re just too bloody sensitive. It’s all in your head. Stop dwelling on things.’ This comes amidst many other helpful suggestions on how to fight obesity, be a better parent, earn more money and be more docile, loving wife. Unsurprisingly, our telephone conversations often end in shouting matches, so are becoming less and less frequent. But I fear she may be right (about the sensitivity bit) and I chide myself for being so weak, so helpless.

The other thing I fear is being given pills to dull my senses and make me gain even more weight. Pills speak of lifelong dependency rather than a temporary measure: it’s about acknowledging a long-term condition rather than a momentary blip in the system. Visions of 1984 hover in the sidelines. Fears of being sanitised and lobotomised swim towards me like shark fins. How will I be able to keep up with my children’s sprightly chatter and constant requests if I am dull as a cow laid out in pastures with grass too high for her to comprehend?

When I was younger, the periods of grim depression beset me mainly in winter, and were offset by manic bursts of activity for the rest of the year. As I get older, those moments of frenetic energy have become too strenuous and it’s greyness evermore. Everything is slowed down to the point of unbearable. I cannot think of more than one thing at a time and I’m forever forgetting what I was supposed to be searching for, where I left my papers, whether I’ve paid a bill or not. I leave everything for later because it is too difficult to do immediately or today or tomorrow or … soon. I get caught out without winter tyres when the snow begins to fall, so my car lurches and sloshes from kerb to ditch.

A sunny day makes me want to crawl under the duvet. You don’t even want to know or imagine what a rainy day makes me feel like. Above all, I want to dig my nails into my flesh, to escape this inner pain which seems to find no release, day after day after day.

When the self-pity has had its play with me, guilt and sneering take their turn. Middle-class ‘woman of leisure’ problems! The world is burning and this here woman can think of naught else but combing her hair! There are hundreds of people starving or dying or losing their homes all over the world at this very moment, while I’m boo-hooing about getting old, failing to live out my childish dreams of being a writer and an academic, being stuck to a faithless husband who doesn’t understand me – the oldest cliché in the book -, children grunting their way towards their teens, a family life which seems as alien to me as if I’d been parachuted somewhere in Papua New Guinea. Only the cargo cults don’t worship me – they despise and can’t wait for my ship to sail away.

My shepherd ancestors – tough cookies one and all – would despise my whingeing. They witnessed the rise and fall of empires, tyrants, wars, forced collectivisation, betrayals in the name of the fatherland or the Communist ideal or simply greed for one’s neighbour’s land or herd. ‘Life is hard, yes, but grit your teeth and carry on! Don’t expect anyone to help, love or understand you. Go up the mountains, all by yourself, find some peace and a mountain stream.’

But I’ve always been a weak urban sapling. The mountains I climbed, the streams that I found, I wanted to rejoice in them with others. I needed to believe that someone cared, that I could be my anxious, failing self and still be respected and loveable. Now I know that all love is conditional. And compassion is not an endlessly renewable source of water. Sharing is a weakness and each one of us is alone – that is the only thing we can count on in life.

‘My therapy is writing and reading,’ I used to say in my twenties with a faraway look in my eyes, hoping I resembled Emily Dickinson rather than Sylvia Plath, Jane Austen rather than Virginia Woolf. But, in truth, it has become more reading than writing now. How can I give voice to my grief and doubts without becoming annoyed with my privileged, spoilt self? How can I deal with the confetti of time left after anxieties, night sweats, endless To Do lists, yet another last-minute catch-up for work, yet another change of plan regarding parents’ evening? What words (other than swear words) will come when I tremble with fury after yet another point-scoring conversation drowning in logical circles? I cannot trust my own thoughts, my own words. I have to feed on the words (and pain and grapplings) of others. It gives me perspective, it makes me feel less alone.

Meanwhile, other than my compulsive reading, all I can do is flounder and flail. Now I understand my childhood nightmare of drowning. It was in fact not water but ash and sand in my mouth. The struggle to appear normal and smiley. The need to carry on.