Paradise || San (A Treasure Tale)

Growing Up

San remembered the mainland. He would play with the other village children and watch his father teach martial arts and attend school like he was told. It was a busier and louder place than the island he lived on now.

San never expected to come home to the cottage swarming with doctors and their stinky medicines. The day he did was the beginning of the snowballing changes that defined every day since.

From the look of things, San had no choice but to assume someone had died. One of his classmates had come home to a similar scene a few years ago and told him the next day that it had been his grandmother, and the chaos was caused by funeral arrangers and distant family members looking to auction off her things.

San was only seven, but he knew what death was. He had buried the dead birds that flew into his bedroom window and he knew they weren't coming back. People did the same thing, sometimes just as unexpectedly.

He swallowed down a thousand worrisome thoughts and entered the house. There weren't strangers rifling through their silver but a mysterious tray of metal instruments and a couple of nurses waiting next to it.

San was small and sneaky enough to escape their notice and slip past them while they focused on their work, into his noona's room where he finally got his answers.

"San? What are you doing here?"

His father spotted him and went to scoop the little boy up, but not before he saw what would be engrained into his mind.

His half-sister Haneul in bed, sweating and pale as the sheet she lay on, coughing into a bloody handkerchief with eyes glazed over and deathly hollow.

He shook with fear from the sight and let his father console him where they sat in the garden until he could muster the courage to ask what was going on.

Haneul had contracted a contagious disease. San couldn't properly pronounce the name of it but he knew it was one that reared its ugly head in crowded towns such as his and that for his own safety, he wouldn't be allowed near her.

At first San was jealous. All his noona had to do was cough some blood into a handkerchief and suddenly there was no schoolwork for her.

Then, he was bored. His favourite playmate wasn't allowed to leave her room even if she wanted to, and San wasn't allowed to go in under any circumstances.

Next he became nervous. Because this wasn't the average winter sniffles, it was months of feverish nights and painful coughing that San could hear from the other room, and it kept him up with the worry that the medicine wasn't working.

Like most children, San knew more than anyone gave him credit for about the declining state of household affairs. He was quite shrewd for a seven year old and he knew that something was wrong by the way the lady who cleaned their clothes stopped coming to work. And the lady who watered their plants. And the lady who cooked their meals.

Soon it was just the three of them, and it still wasn't enough. Haneul's health continued to decline and now their father was spending extra long hours away, making money to afford the doctors.

San didn't like the doctors. It was always one after the next, they never paid any attention to him, and they charged for everything. Services, bloodletting, medicines— everything. One of them even had the audacity to return to their front door to beg for funding for a research trip in the west long after they'd dismissed him.

By the time San turned nine, he was angry.

Birthdays had passed with little more than a pat on the head, Father never cooked any of his favourite foods anymore, and he still wasn't allowed to visit Haneul.