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He was born in the early 1950s, in a countryside village where winters were long and electricity arrived late. His earliest memories, I imagine, were of rice fields and the way steam rose from his mother’s morning soup. He didn’t talk much about those days — only that the mountains were close and the neighbors,
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I didn’t always notice it when it happened. But over time, I started to recognize the pause that followed when my mother told a story from her past. She would say something about her childhood, or a moment from her early years in Seoul, and then there would be this silence. It wasn’t dramatic or