Chap 4
The first wall

The first night of my 100-day plan was spent with *The Standard Textbook of Mathematics. Naturally, I was arrogant, assuming I would remember everything. However, the moment I opened the book and faced the practice problems, I realized something. Understanding something with a mind in its fifties and solving it with a 19-year-old’s hand are on completely different levels.

Damn it, I can’t remember the formula.

In my mind, the process of solving the problem was painted like a picture.

‘This is a problem that can be solved by using this concept, approaching it this way, and then substituting that formula. However, the actual ‘formula’ was as faint as fog. It had been buried in a corner of my brain unused for over 30 years, covered in a thick layer of dust. My body remembered basics like the quadratic formula and the Pythagorean theorem, but as soon as I moved on to slightly more complex sequences or calculus, my hands froze.

Eventually, starting with the set theory unit, I began to memorize every concept and formula again, copying them one by one into my notebook like a child learning math for the first time in their life. As the comprehension of a 50-year-old combined with the memorization skills of a 19-year-old, progress was astonishingly fast. Having finished half of Math I in a single night, I smiled wryly as I looked out the window at the rising sun. This was the beginning of a miracle, yet at the same time, it was the prelude foreshadowing just how terrible the remaining 99 days would be.

My change caused immediate repercussions at school as well.

Kim Min-jun.

Morning English class. The English teacher, who always looked at me like I was a bug, suddenly singled me out.

“Explain question number 5 there.”

All eyes in the class tuned to me. Nine times out of ten, it was a surprise question thrown at me with the mindset of, “Let’s see how long this guy lasts,” after seeing me sitting perfectly still during math class yesterday. If it had been the me of the past, I would have stammered and been humiliated, but not now.

I rose from my seat and began to interpret the sentences in the textbook fluently, using the distinctively smooth intonation honed by business English in a past life. At my interpretation-which went beyond simple literal translation to pinpoint the hidden nuances and key grammar the expressions of the children, who had been preparing to mock me, began to harden. A look of bewilderment also flashed across the eyes of the English teacher who had been glaring at me.

“Sit”

A brief remark There was no praise, but I could sense the subtle surprise mixed in his voice. From that day on, the teachers no longer treated me as a sleeping student. Instead, they began to regard me as an interesting subject of observation, or an incomprehensible oddball.

The real problem was my friends. During every break, every lunch break, and on the way home from school, they tempted me.

“Minjun, just for one hour Seriously, let’s go to the arcade for just one hour. I need to finish the games I couldn’t clear yesterday.” “Do you want to go to the new movie theater downtown this weekend? I’ll make the reservations.”

I had to reject all those temptations. First firmly, then with a apologetic expression. Eventually, after a few days, no one approached me. I became a voluntary loner. Eating alone in a comer of the noisy school cafeteria, I held a spoon in one hand and a palm-sized English vocabulary book in the other.

I was solitary. But I was not lonely. This was because a clear goal and the face of my wife, who would be waiting for me at the end of the road, were always together in my mind.

My rented room was gradually toming into a ‘war command center Along with a D-day countdown calendar, self-hypnosis phrases like the ’10 Commandments of a Perfect CSAT Scorer were plastered on the walls. Scattered on the floor were subject- specific error notes I had compiled myself, along with Post-it notes summarizing key concepts. At night, I chased away drowsiness by listening to EBS lectures on a faint radio
frequency.

My body was in extreme pain. Four hours of sleep a day brought on chronic headaches, and my buttocks felt as if they were being pressed flat against the chair. Yet, my mind was strangely clear. The pleasure of feeling as if my brain cells were being reborn every time a gap in my knowledge was filled. And the euphoria of finally solving a difficult problem that I couldn’t solve yesterday. For the first time in thirty years, I was feeling the sensation of ‘growth’ again.

A week passed like that. Seven red X marks were drawn over the number ‘100’ on the calendar. D-93.

That night, for the first time, I decided to give myself a small reward. I took a hot shower and cooked kimchi stew with pork I had spent my entire month’s allowance on. With the stew bubbling away in front of me, I opened my diary and briefly wrote down my thoughts on the past week.

It was a terrible week. But I survived.

And on the next page, I wrote a new motto for myself.

Overcoming yesterday’s me is my only victory.’