Kim Ae-ran’s My Brilliant Life explores the meaning of communication through Areum, a boy with progeria. This blog post explores communication and understanding in her story.
About Areum
The parents of Areum, the protagonist of the Korean novel My Brilliant Life, start a family a little differently. She became a parent to a child at the age of a high school student, a little earlier than when others start a family. Many people said that the beginning of this family was an accident and a wrong choice, but for this young couple it was a special beginning, no more and no less. Areum was born into this world because of her parents’ mature and courageous decision. Areum is growing up fast because she wants to follow her parents, who are aging very quickly. The disease is called “Progeria”. It is a terrifying disease that causes the body to age four to five times faster than normal. However, Areum’s thoughts and feelings are no different from those of her peers because she learns and experiences at the same rate. Areum, who never went to school because of her disease, loved to read books. She was a child who could think more maturely than her age. The only means by which Areum could communicate with the world were the media, such as newspapers, radio, and the Internet, and the world outside the window, her family, and her neighbor, Mr. Jang, who was like a friend, made up Areum’s world.
The Korean novel My Brilliant Life tells all the events through the sweet but calm voice of 17-year-old Areum. This allows the reader to experience every emotion that Areum goes through. Of course, we also get to know the personality of this adolescent boy through Areum’s words, which guess and understand people’s thoughts. What is surprising is that we naturally accept the process of Areum guessing and understanding other people’s thoughts. We have an attitude of vaguely thinking that someone who has lived a life different from ours is special. However, Areum easily breaks down the mystery that many people have been uncertain about. We can relate to Areum’s story for another reason. It is because all readers are human beings who struggle to understand others.
Areum’s communication with her parents
Areum’s parents do not explain to her the difficulties and sadness she is experiencing. But Areum knows why her parents are sad and worried. When you are in a relationship with the people closest to you, you can understand without saying much. You can communicate by seeing, feeling, and hearing what the other person is saying to others. This creates a new channel of communication. However, even if a channel of communication is created, it is impossible for even her parents to communicate with Areum every moment. Just as her mother is deceived by Areum’s acting and does not know her true feelings when she sees Areum hiding her worries by focusing on the game console. Even if you are the closest person to each other, there will be more unknowns than knowns if you do not choose to be honest with each other. Even for people who spend a lot of time together, such as family, there will be a lot of information about that person that you can learn by looking at them in addition to communicating through conversation. However, if you think about it for a moment, you will realize that what you learn by looking at someone is a very subjective judgment. Whether that judgment is correct or not.
Communicating with Seoha (Communicating with Others Other Than Family)
As the days pass, Areum’s physical age increases. A small and weak body. Immunity declines, and geriatric diseases that cause organs to age and become clogged begin to affect the 17-year-old Areum. At the same time, the parents, who spend a lot of time and money taking care of Areum, reach a limit. So Areum’s family decides to participate in a “neighborhood help” program with an acquaintance as producer. Appearing on this program is Areum’s first encounter with the world. Not only does Areum get to know the world, but the world gets to know Areum. It is not that it is shameful or embarrassing to reveal one’s weakness to others just because one is suffering from an incurable disease and is in a difficult situation. However, Areum puts aside the thoughtless ideas that one can have at that age and continues the interview with a wit that she has never learned from anyone. Each answer to the question contains Areum’s 17 years of life.
By communicating with others who reveal themselves unilaterally, Areum meets a friend who makes her heart flutter. She has a friend her age named Seoha who is fighting cancer. Areum writes and deletes an email to Seoha, trying to figure out how to be as natural as possible. She is also both excited and strangely uncomfortable about Seoha’s response, which keeps her up at night. It is a very familiar picture of us. And maybe it was through Seoha that Areum first tasted the joy of communicating with a person on an equal footing, instead of one-sided interest and love.
Knowing that this is a novel, people expect Areum to find love and for a miracle, an “exciting life” to unfold. However, this novel is so realistic that it is exhausting. The character Seoha does not exist in the world, and the 30-something man who is an aspiring screenwriter wrote an email to the show in which Areum appears for an interview. Was Areum communicating with a 17-year-old girl named Lee Seoha who was battling cancer, or with a 30-something aspiring screenwriter? Or was there no communication between them at all? One thing is for sure: I can’t get over the uncomfortable feeling I have about the outcome of Areum and Seoha’s communication.
In order to communicate with others who are not family, you have to take the initiative and provide a lot of information about yourself. There is almost no way to find out whether the information you receive is true or false just from the information provided by the other party. Therefore, it is difficult to communicate with others. Since the time you spend with them is limited, you cannot look into their minds through their actions. So even when Areum found out that Seoha was an uncle in his 30s, she decided to think and understand for herself. It is possible that the aspiring writer who called himself Seoha secretly visited Areum’s hospital room because he wanted to be forgiven by Areum. The effort to understand and the act of secretly visiting the hospital room were both things they could do on their own to communicate with others. In the end, they were trying to resolve the problem in their relationship in a way that would satisfy them, regardless of the direct resolution of the uncomfortable situation.
The Importance of Communication for an Individual
What does it mean to understand another person’s life? What does it mean to communicate? To someone, Areum’s life would seem to be a pitiful life in which she was born carrying the misfortunes of the world on her back, fought against those misfortunes, and finally passed away. For Areum’s family, Areum’s life must be a heartbreakingly sad, yet funny and emotional story of a 17-year-old boy and a grandson who lived together. If there is a child named Seoha, Areum’s life must be the story of a somewhat mature friend who has gone through similar things and feels a sense of kinship with him because they can understand each other. In addition, many people who believe that they have seen and communicated with Areum through the series of events that happened to her will talk about Areum’s life based on the information she gave them.
So what was Areum-i’s life like? According to what Areum-i says in the novel, no one has ever fully communicated with Areum-i. There may have been some who communicated with her to some extent, but not about her life as a whole. For Areum-i, her life was a matter of course, and even within that there are moments when she feels a twinge of emotion, but it is impossible to share those feelings with someone every time. Even if we feel that we have communicated with each other for a moment, it is a very personal feeling, so we do not explain it one by one, and it is difficult to understand even if we do, so we will never know it exactly. However, as we have learned through Areum, even though life seems special and strange, we are human beings who want to understand each other, so we can feel the mysterious feeling of communication. The image of Areum, who lived for 17 years and died as an old person, makes me think that all the communication she had with others or the world was a preparation for her death. Perhaps the communication with others that people have throughout their lives is a process of communicating with themselves.
