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

Now I will tell you my secret how to eat them.

First, you hold the package and feel the shape of the almonds from the outside. You need to feel the hard, stubborn kernels with your fingers. Next, you slowly tear the top part of the package and open the double zipper. Then, you poke your nose inside the package and slowly breathe in. You have to close your eyes for this part. You take it lightly, occasionally holding your breath, to allow as much time as possible for the scent to reach the body. Finally, when the scent fills you up from deep inside, you pop half a handful of them into your mouth. Roll them around in there for a while and feel their texture. Poke the pointy parts with your tongue. Feel the grooves on their surface. You have to make sure not to take too long. If they get bloated from your saliva, they will taste bad. These steps are all just a lead-up to the finale. If too short, it will be dull. Too long and the impact will be gone. You have to find the right timing for yourself. You have to imagine the almonds getting bigger—from the size of a fingernail to the size of a grape, a kiwi, an orange, then a watermelon. Finally the size of a rugby ball. That's the moment. Crunch, you crush them. You will taste the sunshine all the way from California, flooding right into your mouth.

The reason I bother going through this ritual is not because I like almonds. At every meal of the day, there were almonds on the table. There was no way of getting around them. So I just made up a way to eat them. Mom thought that if I ate a lot of almonds, the almonds inside my head would get bigger. It was one of the very few hopes she clung to.

Everybody has two almonds inside their head, stuck firmly on somewhere between the back of your ears and the back of your skull. In fact, they're called "amygdalae," derived from the Latin word for almond because their size and shape are exactly like one.

When you get stimulated by something outside your body, these almonds send signals into your brain. Depending on the type of stimulation, you'll feel fear or anger, joy or sorrow.

But for some reason, my almonds don't seem to work well. They don't really light up when they are stimulated. So I don't know why people laugh or cry. Joy, sorrow, love, fear—all these things are vague ideas to me. The words "emotion" and "empathy" are just meaningless letters in print.

6

The doctors diagnosed me with alexithymia, or the inability to express your feelings. They figured that I was too young, my symptoms different from Asperger's syndrome, and my other developments didn't show signs of autism. It's not necessarily that I was unable to express feelings, but more that I was unable to identify them in the first place. I didn't have a problem with making sentences or understanding them like people who'd damaged the Broca or Wernicke areas in the brain, which dealt with primary speech functions. But I couldn't feel emotions, couldn't identify other people's feelings, and got confused over the names of emotions. The doctors all said it was because the almonds inside my head, the amygdalae, were unusually small and the contact between the limbic system and the frontal lobe didn't function as smoothly as it should.

One of the symptoms of having small amygdalae is that you don't know how it feels to be afraid. People sometimes say how cool it'd be to be fearless, but they don't know what they're talking about. Fear is an instinctive defense mechanism necessary for survival. Not knowing fear doesn't mean that you're brave; it means you're stupid enough to stay standing on the road when a car is charging toward you. I was even more unlucky. On top of my lack of fear, I was limited in all my emotional functions. The only silver lining, the doctors said, was that my intelligence wasn't affected despite having such small amygdalae.

They advised that, since everyone has different brains, we should see how things go. Some of them made rather tempting offers, saying that I could play a big role in uncovering the mysteries of the brain. Researchers at university hospitals proposed long-term research projects on my growth, to be reported in medical journals. There would be generous compensation for taking part, and depending on the research results, an area of the brain might even be named after me, like the Broca area or Wernicke area. The Seon Yunjae area. But the doctors were met with a flat refusal from Mom, who was already sick of them.

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.