From the day the encyclopedia took its place in one corner of the room, Seoha’s daily life changed completely.
As if overjoyed by the wealth of knowledge waiting to be explored, Seoha was always opening a book and reading.
At first, he started with the sections on insects and animals, which contained plenty of illustrations.
He was astonished to learn that every tiger had a different pattern, and sometimes tilted his head in puzzlement as he read that birds migrated across continents.
‘How do they know which way to go? Do they have pheromones too?’
On the very next page, he read about the principles of the Earth’s magnetic field and tried to understand them.
He asked himself questions as he read and enjoyed the process of finding the answers within the books.
Normally, when a young child encounters an unfamiliar word or concept, they either skip over it or lose interest. But that did not apply to Seoha. He immediately searched through other chapters of the encyclopedia and doggedly hunted down the answer, moving on to the next page only after completely resolving his doubts.
The day he read the word “photosynthesis,” he opened the section on plants and followed the processes of light, chloroplasts, and energy conversion one by one. Sometimes he read an entire chapter in a day, while at other times it took him a month. More important than that, however, was the fact that he remembered everything by connecting it all together.
In his parents’ eyes, it seemed as though the books were difficult and he was reading slowly. But Seoha was weaving all the information together and creating a vast map of knowledge inside his head.
It took Seoha two years to finish reading the entire set of twenty-nine volumes of the encyclopedia.
* * *
“Yu Seoha! Did you have fun at school?”
Seoha, now seven years old, entered elementary school.
His parents had worried that he might lack social skills since they had never sent him to daycare or kindergarten, but Seoha always came home with a smile on his face.
“Yeah! I played soccer with the other kids.”
He barely answered before tossing aside the chick-shaped backpack from his shoulders and dashing into his room.
Seoha’s attention was now focused on his newborn little sister.
After washing his hands, Seoha returned and gazed intently at his little sister Seo-eun, who was squirming at the edge of the bed, unable even to open her eyes properly.
“Is she really that cute?”
At her mother’s question, Seoha nodded repeatedly.
“Yeah! She’s so pretty. I’m really going to be good to Seo-eun.”
Perhaps awakened by the noise, Seo-eun frowned, but then she saw her older brother and broke into a delighted giggle.
It was a heartwarming sight. Miyeong thought that having a second child had been absolutely the right decision. Seoha had always been a child who required very little attention, but the second child was different. Perhaps because she was a girl, Seo-eun cried as though the world were ending whenever she was separated from her mother’s arms, leaving both parents perpetually sleep-deprived.
Yet as the days passed, the little girl smiled brightly whenever she saw her older brother. As a mother, Miyeong could ask for nothing more to be grateful for.
“Seo-eun, I’ll show you something fun.”
Seoha squatted beside the bed. He took the tiny Seo-eun’s hands in his own and covered her eyes.
“Where did I go? Big brother disappeared!”
In an instant, the little hands sprang open, revealing her older brother’s radiant, smiling face.
“Peekaboo!”
Seo-eun burst into laughter. At the sight of his little sister kicking her hands and feet and laughing so hard that her gums showed, Seoha wore a proud expression.
Seo-eun stretched both arms toward her brother, as though saying, ‘Do it again!’
“Okay, this time I’ll really disappear.”
Seoha slipped beneath the bed, and Seo-eun looked left and right in bewilderment.
“Peekaboo!”
When her brother suddenly popped out beside the bed, Seo-eun widened her eyes in surprise before bursting into laughter once more.
‘A big brother who plays with her this well would be utterly devoted to her.’
Miyeong shook her head as she watched the two children.
She and her husband were completely drained of energy and felt that they could never play like that with her all day long, even if they died trying.
After playing for a long while, the tired baby gulped down her formula and fell asleep. Only then did Seoha gently stroke his little sister’s head before quietly rising and heading to his room.
Seoha’s room had changed from before.
The lone bookshelf that had once sat in a corner now occupied an entire wall. Of all the subjects in the encyclopedia, Seoha had found mathematics particularly interesting. Once there was nothing left for him to read, his parents had begun buying him one or two books at a time whenever he asked. When those books ran out of room, they had expanded the bookshelf.
Standing before it, Seoha slowly ran his fingertips along the spines. Every one of them was a wonderful friend that had given him the joy of gaining knowledge. His fingers gradually moved toward the heavier, thicker hardbacks. Then they stopped at a book with a black hardcover and silver lettering.
《Linear Algebra and Its Applications》
Linear Algebra and Its Applications.
It was the original English edition, not a translation.
Seoha deftly turned the pages until he found the section he had been reading. Soon, he was lost in his own world.
* * *
“Haah… There are parents like this here, too.”
Kim Yun-mi, the newly appointed homeroom teacher of Class 2 in the first grade at Dodam Elementary School in Chungbuk, removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes with her thumb and middle finger, looking exhausted.
“I came all the way here because I didn’t want to see this sort of thing anymore…”
Yun-mi let out a sigh and swallowed the rest of her words.
It had been only three months since she had left her hometown after teaching children for years at a prestigious elementary school in Gangnam.
The “four-year-old entrance exam” for English kindergartens, and the “seven-year-old entrance exam” for mathematics academies attended by preschoolers aiming for medical school or science high school…
That place was a hell on earth.
Those years had been far removed from anything rewarding.
Children subjected to that kind of education were perpetually anxious and exhausted. Eventually, they grew into adolescents who could solve nothing without their parents. Since all they ever did was study, their parents took care of everything else.
If that were all, it might have been tolerable. Some of them would grow into destructive adults who looked down on others, fueled by an intellectual superiority born from racing ahead with their studies.
Elementary school teachers who had graduated from science high schools were rare.
Thanks to that, she had become the kind of public elementary school teacher most coveted by the Gangnam mothers. She had chosen the profession despite everyone trying to dissuade her, simply because she loved children. She had never imagined she would come to feel this disillusioned.
Intellectual abuse born of parental desire.
It had been unbearable to watch seven-year-olds repeatedly copy and memorize equations they did not even understand, their tiny fern-like hands clutching their pencils. Then, after seeing a child sobbing because it was too difficult, she had lost her temper and gotten into a major argument with the parents.
‘And yet here I am…’
At the principal’s suggestion, made to prevent the problem from growing, she had accepted a transfer and reached the ending she had hoped for. She had thought she would never have to see anything like that again, but she had been mistaken.
Yu Seoha.
The child was cute-looking and smiled so brightly that Yun-mi had thought his parents must be delighted. Had she been wrong?
The moment she saw The Standard of Mathematics inside Seoha’s chick backpack, Yun-mi felt her PTSD flare up. She had immediately requested a parent-teacher conference, and today was the day Seoha’s parents were coming.
Rattle.
The classroom was empty after dismissal when the door opened cautiously.
The fussy cry of a newborn could be heard through the gap.
“I’m sorry. Just a moment.”
The woman entered while soothing the baby, her face entirely free of makeup.
Her skin was slightly tanned by the sun, and her hair was roughly tied back as though she had not even had time to brush it properly.
Even so, Yun-mi could catch a glimpse of her intelligence in her black horn-rimmed glasses and demure manner. The gentle way she patted the child coaxed a warm smile from Yun-mi.
“Hello, Teacher. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to visit until now. I’ve been so busy.”
The parent bowed excessively, making Yun-mi uncomfortable, so she hurriedly returned the greeting.
“Ah… yes! No, it’s all right! The reason I called you was…”
As she spoke, Yun-mi noticed the woman’s clothes. A large pale cream-colored stain had spread across them.
It was difficult to tell whether it was formula or something the baby had spit up, but the area around the spot where it had apparently been hastily wiped was still damp.
The tired face, the kind eyes, the expression that seemed to worry that her child might have caused some sort of trouble—it was the same face Yun-mi’s mother had always worn whenever she came to school, busy as she was with running her shop.
Yun-mi unconsciously pressed her lips together.
The woman before her did not match the image in her mind at all: a parent who abused her child out of an obsession with early education.
“Mother, I saw The Standard of Mathematics in Seoha’s backpack yesterday. Do you send him to an academy that teaches things like that?”
Her initial tension had eased somewhat, but she still needed to confirm the facts. Rather than sounding her out, Yun-mi decided to ask directly.
The woman flinched.
It was the reaction of someone who had committed a crime.
Yun-mi thought her suspicions had been correct after all, but the words that came from the woman’s mouth were completely unexpected.
“That… must be a book his father bought for him. Seoha was curious about what high school students studied.”
“What? He doesn’t learn it at an academy?”
“You sent such a tiny child to an academy? Seoha didn’t even want to go to daycare or kindergarten, let alone an academy, so we didn’t send him.”
Were they even talking about the same subject?
They were completely missing each other’s point.
Yun-mi decided to retrace the matter from the beginning.
“Mother. So Seoha just carries The Standard of Mathematics around out of curiosity? He doesn’t actually solve the problems?”
Children often tried to show off.
Yun-mi had frequently seen elementary school students carrying around difficult works of classical literature, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy.
“I don’t think that’s it. I haven’t been able to pay much attention to Seoha’s studies lately because of my second child, but I’ve seen him take that book with him to solve problems whenever he gets bored.”
He solved them when he got bored?
A first grader studying high school mathematics for the science track?
“So you’re saying that Seoha taught himself and solves high school mathematics problems?”
At Yun-mi’s question, Miyeong nodded.
“Seoha has always been unusual in some ways. He learned to read Hangul on his own without anyone teaching him, and he was quick with calculations, too. So his father and I discussed it and bought him an encyclopedia. After that, he did nothing but read it all day… And these days, he keeps asking us to buy him this book or that, so I believe his father has been getting them for him.”
“Waaah!”
Perhaps sensing the seriousness of the atmosphere, Seo-eun suddenly began to cry.
As Miyeong soothed the baby, Yun-mi abruptly came to her senses.
There were still so many things she wanted to ask, but Yun-mi realized that she knew almost nothing about Seoha.
‘That’s right. I’ll talk to Seoha first.’
When it came to their children, parents lied as easily as they ate.
After returning home from work, Yun-mi took out the books she had studied back in her science-high-school days for the first time in years.
“How nostalgic.”
An Introduction to Analysis, The Standard of Mathematics, Algebra, The Beauty of Mathematics, Geometry and Vectors, a collection of past Mathematics Olympiad problems…
Back then, merely opening those books had made her feel like vomiting. But now that she looked back on it, they had all become precious memories.
When the dormitory lights-out time approached and she still could not solve a single line of a problem, she would cover herself with a blanket to keep the light from escaping and secretly continue working by flashlight.
‘How far should I test him?’
No matter how intelligent a child was, there were limits to what could be accomplished through self-study.
“I’ll start with the middle school curriculum.”
Scratch, scratch.
She had no intention of blaming a precocious child for putting on airs. In any case, everything was simply part of growing up.
Yet there had been no sign of such behavior in Seoha’s mother, who had spoken calmly despite her apparent bewilderment.
“Let’s just confirm it. Just confirm it.”
She had intended to go only as far as trigonometric functions, but as she continued writing, she ended up including calculus, geometry, and vectors as well. They were advanced problems that could never be solved through memorization and required a perfect understanding of the underlying concepts.
It had been unconscious, but she could not ignore even the tiny possibility that she might be about to encounter a genius beyond all standards.