#cursed bunny
I could finally understand the horrific and cruel clarity of what he considered to be meaningful. The desperation and immense fear that your life, as well as the future to come, hinged on a moment. I could also understand how, in a situation where there was a single person who could kill you but also save you, all your survival instincts would be used toward satisfying that one person.
- Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur.
For some people, their lives are ruled by one shocking event reverberating through their survival instincts. Life shrinks into a trap made up of a shimmering moment in the past, a trap where they endlessly repeat that singular moment when they were surest of being alive. That moment is short, but long after it has passed, good times as well as bad slip like sand through their fingers as they meaninglessly repeat and confirm their survival. Those who are unaware of their lives slipping away while they are ensnared in the past—him, his grandfather, his mother, me—are in the end, whether alive or dead, ghosts of the past.
- Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur.
I had no hope anymore for good times, but I didn’t want to wish for bad times, either. I was waiting for something but didn’t know what to hope for. There was no future. All of our survival skills were trapped in the past.
- Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur.
Parents who destroy their children’s lives, who suck the life out of their children’s futures, not only for the sake of maintaining their own illusions but also to zealously expand them into the lives of their children—such parents can almost be understood from the perspective of obsession. Following the words “Be grateful I raised you” is the implied clause “instead of killing you or leaving you for dead.” They probably mean it, too. My parents and their parents’ generations, after surviving the Korean War, had always, just like the generation that survived World War II, set their purpose not to live a human life but to have an animal’s instinct for survival.
- Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur.
Once you experience a terrible trauma and understand the world from an extreme perspective, it is difficult to overcome this perspective. Because your very survival depends on it.
- Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur.
