If AKMU went to regular schools, could they have made Han Kang cry?

‘How could I, to you / Our love so deep as the ocean / Waiting till it runs dry will be our farewell.’ When this song was released, Lee Chan-hyuk and Lee Su-hyun of AKMU, a sibling duo, were just 23 and 20, respectively. It was surprising that the lyrics were not written by someone middle-aged with life experience in love, loss, and death, but by siblings in their early 20s.

AKMU, the duo who made Nobel Prize winner Han Kang tear up, didn’t attend school for long. When they were in elementary school, they moved to Mongolia with their missionary parents. They were homeschooled there instead of going to regular school. The main reason was their financial hardship; they were so poor that they often ate meals with just soy sauce and couldn’t easily afford a pair of skinny jeans.

However, thanks to this environment, AKMU's creativity flourished. Although the brother couldn’t write music scores, his younger sister turned it into a melody when he hummed. They even created a song about a fried egg spilling over a bowl of rice, called ‘Fry’s Dream.’ Instead of attending school with zero periods and make-up classes, they had freedom. Instead of studying from textbooks chosen by the school, they could read novels. Their parents initially started homeschooling with a strict schedule, but later tore it up. Instead, when the siblings wrote about icicles or hummed, their parents praised them excessively, which excited them and encouraged them to do more.

According to Han Kang's father, writer Han Seung-won, she enjoyed daydreaming while lying alone in her room. She didn’t hang out with friends, and when he looked for her, he often found her staring into space, lying down. When he asked what she was doing, she would say, “daydreaming.” Impatient parents today might take her to cram schools or taekwondo classes, worrying that she wasn’t social, but Mr. Han never pressured her to study or go out and have fun. Instead, he wrote as a writer, and his daughter grew up watching him write.

The Nobel Prize isn’t awarded to the number one in the world. It’s given to those who contemplated, empathized, failed, and tried again, over and over. We don’t need the next Han Kang or the next AKMU—nor can they be created. Every person is unique, and we don’t need 'the next' of anything. If we trust in children’s true nature, one day they will bloom like flowers in their own lives. It doesn’t have to be a Nobel Prize.