Keep Up the Good Work, No, I Love You
My language output device runs on a legacy operating system called “Busan Man.” It has a fatal bug. It cannot process sincere emotional expressions.
Busan is Korea’s second city. Its men are culturally known for being tough, blunt, and deeply uncomfortable with anything that sounds like a feeling. Input works fine, but output never loads.
Once, my wife and I were on speakerphone with my parents. As the call wound down, my parents and my wife exchanged warm packets of data.
“I love you.” “I love you too.”
Then it was my turn. Silence on the line. My wife turned to look at me. Logically, this was the exact moment to respond with the same protocol. My lips moved as my system attempted to load the phrase. Then it crashed and returned a completely irrelevant default value.
“Yeah, keep up the good work.”
In Korean, there is a phrase called sugohaeseo. You say it when someone has been working hard. You say it to coworkers, to delivery drivers, or to anyone leaving after a long shift. It is polite. It is warm in a generic and distanced sort of way. It is absolutely not what you say to your own parents at the end of a phone call. But that is what came out.
After hanging up, I got a smack on the back from my wife. She told me that was a terrible thing to say to my own parents. She made me promise to do better next time.
Now I hold a child of my own. He is two hundred days old and small enough to fit in the crook of one arm. That awkward phrase keeps coming back to me. Looking into his eyes, I realize something. Thirty years ago, my parents must have felt exactly this. This same weight of responsibility. This same weightless happiness. They must have carried both at once, the whole time, and said nothing much about it.
Only after having a child do I begin to understand the backend of being a parent. I finally see the countless exception handling, the invisible debugging, and the processes running quietly in the background that I never once thought to check.
My output device is still buggy. My spoken words are still clunky. I will probably always be a blunt son. But a rough UI doesn’t mean the data inside is wrong.
Since I still can’t say it out loud, I’m leaving a comment here. Deep in the source code.
// Mother, Father.
// You worked hard.
// No. I love you.
ta.fo