The idea came to me while I was going through my divorce.
I was forty-seven and overweight. I had no child who would occupy my lone, silent days. I wasn‘t one of those independent modern women who decided not to have babies early on. I wanted to have one but my husband couldn‘t - due to his oligospermia, he told me. I wanted to try IVF treatment but he refused, saying the whole process felt too demeaning to him. I was furious later when I learned that he had already signed up to a famous fertility clinic in Gangnam with that new girl, twelve years his junior, a month before our divorce was finalized. For weeks I had the occasional dream of hammering him to death. In reality, of course, I possessed neither the courage nor the penchant for violence to do it. Yet I did imagine myself bursting into his office in Gwanghwamun,
like an angry ajumma in Korean Morning Drama might do to attack her cheating husband, hands busy filling the air with leaflets that detail his treacherous deeds, all the while shouting the list of his sins in front of his coworkers, who would ostracize him for what he‘d done. Of course I never executed this fantasy: submitting to such a hysterical course of action would be too demeaning to my dignity. Entertaining the thought of it, though, was quite thrilling. - P2