Kim Ae-ran’s ‘My Brilliant Life’ explores the meaning of communication through Areum, a boy with progeria. This blog post examines communication and understanding within his story.
Introducing Areum
The parents of Areum, the protagonist of the Korean novel ‘My Brilliant Life’, started their family in a somewhat unconventional way. They became parents to a child while still in high school, a bit earlier than when most people start families. Many called this family’s beginning an accident, a wrong choice, but for this young couple, it was simply a more special start—nothing more, nothing less. Thus, Areum came into this world through his parents’ somewhat mature and courageous decision. Perhaps wanting to follow her parents who had embarked on parenthood at breakneck speed, Areum aged at an accelerated pace. The diagnosis was ‘progeria’ – a terrifying disease where the body ages 4 to 5 times faster than normal. Yet, the time for learning and experiencing was the same, so Areum’s thoughts and feelings were no different from her peers. Never having attended school due to her illness, Areum loved reading books. This made her a child who could think more maturely than her years suggested. Areum’s only means of communicating with the world were media like newspapers, broadcasts, and the internet. The world visible outside her window, her family, and her neighbor, Grandpa Jang, whom she treated like a friend, comprised Areum’s entire world.
The Korean novel ‘My Brilliant Life’ conveys all events through the tender yet matter-of-fact voice of 17-year-old Areum. This allows us to experience every single one of Areum’s emotions about the things he goes through. Furthermore, through Areum’s words as he guesses and understands people’s thoughts, we naturally come to know the personality of this adolescent boy. What’s surprising as we listen to Areum’s story is how we come to accept, almost without realizing it, the process by which Areum guesses and understands other people’s thoughts. We tend to have an attitude of vaguely thinking that people who have lived lives different from our own are special. But Areum effortlessly dismantles that specialness many people have vaguely held onto. What allows us to empathize with Areum’s story isn’t some unusual reason. It’s because every reader is a human being who struggles to understand someone else.
Communication Between Areum and His Parents
Areum’s parents don’t explain to him the difficulties and sadness they experience because of him. Yet Areum knows why her parents are sad or worried. When forming relationships with those closest to us, there are things we understand without many words. Seeing, feeling, and overhearing conversations with others creates new channels for communication. But even with these channels open, it’s impossible for even her parents to communicate with Areum every single moment. Seeing Areum focus intensely on her game console to hide her worries, her mother fails to understand Areum’s heart and is deceived by Areum’s act. Even with the closest person, if both parties don’t resolve to be honest with each other, there will be more that remains unknown than what can be known. Furthermore, for someone like a family member who spends a lot of time together, the information gained about that person through observation, beyond communication via conversation, would be considerable. Yet, upon reflection, one realizes that what is perceived through observation is an extremely subjective judgment. Whether that judgment was correct or not.
Communication with Friend Seoha (Communication with Others Outside the Family)
Day by day, Areum’s physical age advances. Her small, frail body. With weakened immunity and aging organs, diseases typically associated with the elderly begin to afflict 17-year-old Areum. Simultaneously, the limits of her parents, who pour immense time and money into caring for Areum, are reached. So Areum’s family makes the difficult decision to participate in a ‘Neighbor Helping Neighbor’ program, where an acquaintance serves as producer. Appearing on this program is Areum’s first encounter with the world. It’s not just what Areum knows, but the world getting to know Areum.
Having an incurable illness and facing financial hardship certainly makes revealing one’s vulnerability to others a matter of pride and embarrassment. Yet Areum sets aside the naive thoughts typical of her age and carries on with the interview using wit she never learned from anyone. Each answer to the questions holds the weight of Areum’s 17 years of life.
Through this one-sided self-revelation to others, Areum meets a friend who makes her heart flutter. She gains a peer, a girl named Seoha, also battling cancer. Areum agonizes over emails to Seoha, writing and deleting, racking her brain to present herself as naturally as possible. Seoha’s replies make her so happy she can’t sleep, yet also strangely unsettle her. This is a very familiar picture of us. And perhaps, through Seoha, Areum tasted for the first time the joy of communicating with another human being in an equal relationship, not one tilted by one-sided attention and affection.
Knowing it’s a novel, people hope love will find Areum, that a miraculous, literally ‘heart-pounding life’ will unfold. But this novel is exhaustingly realistic. This Seoha girl never existed in the world. It was a 30-something man aspiring to be a screenwriter who watched the broadcast featuring Areum and sent an email for research purposes. Was the person Areum communicated with a 17-year-old girl named Seoha battling cancer, or was it this 30-something aspiring screenwriter? Or perhaps there was never any communication between these two people at all. However, one thing remains certain: the unease about the outcome of Areum and Seoha’s communication cannot be erased.
To communicate with someone who isn’t family, above all, both parties must take the initiative and share a great deal of information about themselves. There is almost no way to determine whether the information provided by the other person is false, like what Areum received, or truthful, based solely on what they give. This is precisely why communicating with others is so difficult. With limited time together, one cannot even glimpse into the other’s heart through actions. So, even when Areum learned Seoha’s true identity was a man in his thirties, she chose to think and understand for herself. Perhaps the aspiring writer who called himself Seoha secretly visited Areum’s hospital room because he wanted her forgiveness. The effort to understand and the act of secretly visiting the hospital room – these were his own ways of doing what he could to communicate with another person. Ultimately, separate from directly resolving the uncomfortable situation, he sought to solve the problem in the relationship by convincing himself in his own way.
The Meaning of Communication for an Individual
What does it mean to understand another person’s life? What does it mean to communicate? To some, Areum’s life might appear as a pitiful existence, born to bear the world’s misfortune alone, fighting that misfortune until finally leaving this world. To Areum’s family, his life is the heartbreakingly sad yet joyful and tearful journey of a beloved 17-year-old son and grandson, a life full of ups and downs.
If this child named Seoha actually existed, to that child, Areum’s life would be one of feeling a sense of kinship toward a fairly mature peer who went through similar experiences and thus believes they can understand each other. Beyond that, many people who observed the series of events that happened to Areum and believe they communicated with her will each tell their own story about Areum’s life based on the information Areum gave them.
So what was Areum’s life like to her? From what Areum says in the novel, no one ever fully communicated with her. Some may have communicated partially, but certainly not about her entire life. To Areum, her life was simply what it was. Within it, fleeting emotions unfolded constantly, everywhere. Sharing those every single time with someone was impossible. Even if one moment felt like mutual understanding, it was an intensely personal emotion—not something easily explained, nor easily grasped even if spoken. It would forever remain incompletely known. Yet, just as we came to know through Areum, no matter how unique or strange a life may seem, we humans yearn to understand each other. That is why we can feel the profound emotion of communication. Seeing Areum live for 17 years and then die in the form of an old man makes one wonder if all her communication with others, or with the world, was perhaps preparation for facing death. Perhaps all the communication humans have with others throughout their lives is ultimately a process of communicating with themselves.
