Recommendation

Prologue: Mom and I met again in the water.

Oh Chun-sil's Spring

Jongno 2020 “I ate it because it was poisonous!”
Jongno 2020 “I know.”
Yeongdeungpo, 1978 “My heart is pounding.”
Mapo 2021 “It’s Oh Chun-sil’s world.”
Mapo 2021 “It’s cold and my back hurts.”
Mapo 2021 “When I first came here, this place was exciting.”
Anyang, 1984 “I guess I lived because it was good.”

Oh Chun-sil's Summer

Mapo 2021 “Where does it hurt?”
Mapo 2021 “Swimming is the most fun these days.”
Anyang, 1985 “I chose it because I liked it, so it’s not that bad.”
Anyang, 1985 “I didn’t want to raise my daughter without a father.”
Mapo 2022 “I don’t want to do that.”
Mapo 2022: “There’s nothing you can do about the water you’ve already drunk!”
Mapo 2022 “I don’t know.
“It happened on its own.”
Ansan, 1993 “That man probably couldn’t have died a pretty death either.”
Jongno 2022 “There’s nothing you can’t do with flat feet!”
Ansan, 1998 “I was bright yellow in my 40s.”
Ansan, 1998 “I still smell that way.”

Oh Chun-sil's Autumn

Mapo in 2023: “It’s nice that there are no people.”
Mapo 2023 “Is happiness something special?”
Ansan, 2002 “I lived with pride.”
Songpa, 2023: “It’s not like you get full on the first drink.”
Ansan, 2005 “Am I really that great?”

Oh Chun-sil's Winter

Mapo, 2024 “It’s nice to float on the water and meet this person and that person.”
Jung-gu, 2024 “Live happily.
“Life is fun to live.”
Ansan 2015 “He has his own circumstances.”
Mapo 2024 “They look down on me because I’m a woman.”
Mapo 2024 “Time went by well today too.”
Jongno in 2024 “If I go, will God do that?”
“Our Chunsil has arrived safely.”
Mapo 2024 “She’s not the Chunsil of old.”

Epilogue: This whole story began a long way back.

Mom and I met again in the water.
They started talking because they had something in common: they were both working women.
After quitting her job of 165 months, my mother has now been swimming for 43 months.
As my mother held and released the water, it trickled down like a story, and I followed her, following her words.

“Was life hard?”
“Even if it’s hard, I can’t help it.”

Even if I like it, I can't do it, and even if I don't like it, I can't do it.
My mother says it like a habit.
My mother lived waiting for things she couldn't do to pass.
My mother, who often fell down, started over again from the spot where she had fallen and broken her body.
My mother has never been so fortunate as to be able to swim with her feet on the ground.
Even when the wind and rain blew, Mom did not lose heart.
I want to record that blessed face.
_From "Prologue"

A heartwarming hymn dedicated to "Our O Chun-sil"
“You have lived a great life.”

The book is divided into four chapters: spring, summer, fall, and winter.
From the time Oh Chun-sil began learning to swim, the years at the pool pass, and the long years intertwine: “Instead of going to middle school, she stayed alone in a mountain house” to help with housework and come to Seoul to get married (spring); the difficult times after giving birth when she moved to factories, restaurants, hospitals, and orchards and started working as a low-level laborer (summer); middle age when she worked as a cleaner (autumn); and old age (winter) when she collected waste paper and enjoyed swimming.
Like swimming, which rarely improves, there are no great twists or developments in Oh Chun-sil's life.
I just “made it through the twists and turns of life to the swimming pool.”

Yet this insignificant journey comes to life with surprising clarity in the “real world.”
Instead of simply summarizing the mother's life as "a universal misfortune in Korean society," the author recreates it as an incredibly rich and detailed drama.
Oh Chun-sil, who grew up being hit by the “angry and unfair” anger of Noh Soon-il, who lost her husband twice while moving to South Korea, meets a “smooth, dark-skinned” man who is blunt but has a sensitive side, and they become a couple after a wedding ceremony where the officiating pastor keeps calling the groom’s name wrong.
There is a brief period of “contentment” where she “boils knitwear until it is pure white” and waits for her husband to come home from work, but soon the “spicy and sour real life” begins, where she has to take responsibility for the livelihood of her husband who is addicted to gambling and cannot stick to one job.


However, Oh Chun-sil is not ashamed of her slippery life.
Moving from one room to another, where a large sewer pipe ran through the basement, where the floor was not level so pencils would roll away, and where earthworms, like those seen in nature books, crawled out through cracks in the walls, she did not complain, but was moved by the washing machine she got much later than others, and when the housekeeper told her not to touch the toothbrush “given to her as a gift from the dentist,” she turned it down without hesitation even though she was offered a raise.
In the mother, who found small happiness even in desperate situations and never gave up her pride no matter how desperate she was, the author reads “the will to live” instead of failure.
“How to take hold of life without running away from it” is “written down instead of inherited.”
The reason why Oh Chun-sil, who is just someone's mother, leaves us with such a deep presence and such a touching impression is probably because she reminds us of the 'extraordinaryness of ordinary people.'
“You are great, you have lived a great life.”

My mother neither hoped for nor waited for revenge.
I learned how to take life in my hands without running away from it.
Mom's secret recipe, I plan to learn it over time.
Page 217

"are you okay.
“Because someday I will be able to breathe through my wounds.”
“We can swim without being healed.”

When Oh Chun-sil was injured while doing physical labor, the writer was injured mentally while doing desk work.
“I drank seven times a week, drank until 5 a.m., closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them, it was back to work.”
I carried a bottle of soju in my bag and cooled my burning heart in the pool.
When told that she was seeing a psychiatrist, the mother said, “I know my daughter is a good person.”
Those words save the writer.

When my mother said that, I realized what I had been foolishly trying to prove by holding on.
Whether others disliked me or not, I didn't want to be fooled by those words and hate myself.
If it was annoying, I wanted to live with less hatred for myself.
Page 32

As I listened to my mother's words, my eyes opened and I saw the scenery she was seeing.
There were frail and wounded bodies there, with all sorts of stories and circumstances.
In a world of older women where each person's life and ups and downs are intertwined and where the question "Where does it hurt?" is a common greeting, the author learns that she can breathe through the cracks in her wounds and speak through the gaping void.
Readers, wandering far and wide, picture a swimming pool scene where a daughter, “filled her broken heart with anti-anxiety medication,” and a mother, “whose broken bones were mended with a hammer,” lie side by side in the water, and can truly believe the author’s words, “We can swim without being healed.”
The idea that we can move forward without recovery is more comforting than the idea that we can recover, and it reminds us of the simple truth that no one's life is easy.