A rice paddy that the father cared for more than his wife

Morality shares the same path with common sense, but sometimes it deviates. Jeong Ji-a's new novel titled "Bravo, Lucky Life" depicts the difficulty following such separation between the two.

The father sold off everything he had during the process except a tiny rice paddy. He thought to himself one day, looking at his son: "Maybe I should kill him and kill myself, too. That would be better for both of us." The drunken father started to choke his son. And then he could hear a weak sound coming from Adam's apple of his son he was choking: "D...Dad..." The father heard the son's voice for the first time in 13 years. The son was crying out for his life. He was a human being after all who could think even though he could not speak or move. They both cried. The father learned for the first time that tears do not just come but sometimes pour out from the eyes. The next day, the father sold, without hesitation, the last remaining rice paddy he cared for more than his wife and received a livelihood support program later in life. The father regarded even the smallest change in his son as a miracle for the next 23 years since the incident. And while he had been taking care of his youngest son, the rest of his children had to suffer from his negligence. The elder son, struggling with debt, even complained that his father was killing a living son to save a nearly dead one.

The novel reminds us of the fact that there is no creature in the world that can be given up on and abandoned because it is not complete and healthy now nor going to be in the future. That is what we call morality. Morality sometimes walks a different path to common sense. And Jeong's novel never forgets to ask that question: What would you do if you were in the father's shoes?