It happened in that most clichéd of places, the apartment complex’s playground at night. Two high school boys with shorn heads were kissing beneath the spotlight of the streetlamps, watched by a middle-aged woman. Namely: my mother, who had become an evangelical Christian twenty-five years earlier. I’d been caught so red-handed there was no room for excuses. Unlike someone in a television drama, Umma did not drop her bag in surprise or scream or cry. She simply turned away as if nothing had happened and went into the apartment.

The next day, instead of criticizing or punishing me, she put me in her tiny red car. Then, she drove me to a psychiatric center in Yangju, Gyeonggi Province, where she had me forcefully hospitalized. When I protested and tried to turn back, she grabbed my wrist, her eyes filled with sincere warmth.

—As your mother, all I can see is the rage flooding your heart. Don’t worry. Umma won’t let you suffer like this.

That’s how I was put under lock and key. Every morning I was administered a blood test, among other exams, and I had to take more than eight pills with each meal. Afternoons were mostly spent in therapy. The hospital building was old and its air-conditioning bad, my crotch and armpits were frequently drenched from sweat, but without any deodorant or shower gel, there were many days when I just sat in my own smell. I shared my room with a forty-eight-year-old man named Kim Hyeondong, who had trouble controlling his anger and minor schizophrenia. He talked to himself a lot when awake and snored loudly when asleep. He also farted a lot, maybe as a side effect of his medication, and that pushed me over the edge—thanks to my sensitive hearing. Plus, the old screen over the window was riddled with holes, so the mosquitoes made a proper night’s sleep impossible. If I did manage to fall asleep, my vivid dreams meant I never really rested.

In my dreams, there was always a woman. A woman with her hair tied up in a bun, who drove a small red car. She was driving with her eyes closed. The car went faster and faster. You seem to have a long way to go. How busy you must be.

When I woke, I was as tired as if I’d been driving all night. The fifteen days of examinations and consultations brought the psychiatrist in charge to one conclusion: that I exhibited trauma symptoms similar to those of someone who had gone to war. The cognitive therapist came to a similar conclusion. For sixteen years (my whole life), I had been subjugated to the force of my mother’s will, so I had repressed my psychological needs for all that time. The psychiatrist, after hearing everything that had gone on between me and my mother, concluded that it was my mother who needed urgent psychiatric attention, not me. I was allowed to leave the facility, so long as I was under supervision of a guardian.