Excerpt from Almond by Sohn Won-pyung, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Then something happened around my first birthday, which proved that she'd been right to worry.

That day, Mom had put a red kettle filled with hot water on the table. She turned her back to mix the powdered milk. I reached for the kettle and it fell from the table, tumbling down to the floor, splashing hot water everywhere. I still have a faint burn mark like a medal from that day. I screamed and cried. Mom thought I'd be scared of water or red kettles from that point on, like a normal kid would be. But I wasn't. I was afraid of neither water nor kettles. I kept reaching for the red kettle whenever I saw it, whether it had cold or hot water inside.

The evidence kept adding up. There was a one-eyed old man who lived downstairs with a big black dog he always kept tied to the post in the yard. I stared straight into the old man's milky-white pupils without fear, and when Mom lost track of me for a moment, I reached out to touch his dog, who bared his teeth and growled. Even after seeing the kid next door, bitten and bleeding from doing the very same thing, I did it again. Mom had to constantly intervene.

After several incidents like this, Mom started worrying that I might have a low IQ, but there was no other proof of that. So, like any mother, she tried to find a way to cast her doubts about her child in a positive light.

He's just more fearless than other kids.

That was how she described me in her diary.

* * *

Even so, any mother's anxiety would peak if their child hadn't smiled by their fourth birthday. Mom held my hand and took me to a bigger hospital. That day is the first memory carved into my brain. It's blurry, as if I were watching from underwater, but comes into sharp focus every once in a while, like this:

A man in a white lab coat sits in front of me. Beaming, he starts showing me different toys one by one. Some of them he shakes. Then he taps my knee with a small hammer. My leg swings up higher than I thought possible. He then puts his fingers under my armpits. It tickles, and I giggle a little. Then he takes out photographs and asks me some questions. One of the pictures I still remember vividly.

"The kid in this photo is crying because his mommy is gone. How would he feel?"

Not knowing the answer, I look up to Mom sitting next to me. She smiles at me and strokes my hair, then subtly bites her lower lip.

* * *

A few days later, Mom takes me somewhere else, saying I will get to ride a spaceship, but we end up at another hospital. I ask her why she brings me here when I'm not even sick, but she doesn't answer.

Inside, I'm told to lie down on something cold. I'm sucked into a white tank. Beep beep beep. I hear strange sounds. My boring space trip ends there.

Then the scene changes. I suddenly see many more men in white lab coats. The oldest among them hands me a blurry black-and-white photograph, saying that it's the inside of my head. What a liar. That's clearly not my head. But Mom keeps nodding as if she believes such an obvious lie. Whenever the old guy opens his mouth, the younger guys around him take notes. Eventually, I start to get a little bored and fidget with my feet, kicking at the old man's desk. When Mom puts her hand on my shoulder to stop me, I look up and see that she's crying.

All I can remember about the rest of that day is Mom's crying. She cries and cries and cries. She's still crying when we head back to the waiting room. There is a cartoon playing on TV, but I can't focus because of her. The defender of the universe is fighting off the bad guy, but all she does is cry. Finally, an old man dozing off next to me wakes up and barks at her, "Stop acting miserable, you noisy woman, I've had enough!" It works. Mom purses her lips tight like a scolded teenager, silently trembling.

5

Mom fed me a lot of almonds. I've tried almonds from America, Australia, China, and Russia. All the countries that export them to Korea. The Chinese ones had a bitter, awful taste, and the Australian ones tasted kind of sour and earthy. There are the Korean ones too, but my favorite are the American ones, especially the ones from California. They have a soft brown hue from absorbing the blazing sunlight there.

Excerpted from Almond by Sohn Won-pyung. Copyright © 2020 by Sohn Won-pyung. Excerpted by permission of Harper Via. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.