큰일났다 똥이마려워 continued

Click here for the first part.

During class one day 진우 finds himself having to pee, and he holds it as long as he can but in the end he wets himself. The pee trickles down his leg and onto the floor where 민영 discovers it. The teacher treats him kindly, washing out his pants for him, but 진우 feels humiliated. He resolves to be even more careful about what he eats.
One day his mother is late picking him up from school. He watches a mouse cautiously inch its way out of its mousehole. As he waits for his mother he realizes that he needs to go to the bathroom -- but this time it is diarrhea. He evaluates his options -- go in his pants? go on the ground? go in one of the pants? He finally decides he will, like the mouse, inch his way to the bathroom using his arms to move his legs forward. He backs up the stairs, one at a time. As he nears the bathroom he is suddenly afraid, thinking of ghosts and the story he heard about a boy who fell into the toilet and died. 진우 has always had someone help him to the bathroom but this time he must do it alone. The bathroom (this is, I gather, a rural school, and in any case this description could fit some modern city bathrooms as well) is dark and smelly, and many of the stalls are dirty. 진우 is concerned about keeping his shoes clean because his mother has to carry him on her back and he doesn’t want her clothes to get dirty.

He finally makes it to a stall and releases the diarrhea. Then he realizes that there is no paper (or in this case, torn up newspaper) to wipe himself. The bell rings, sounding the end of 5th period, and other children enter the bathroom and 진우 waits quietly, keeping the door closed. Then he emerges and tries to find some toilet paper.
After this (I’m realizing I meant to summarize this more succinctly) as he is inching his way back down the steps some older kids make fun of him. 진우 realizes that he was brave and strong enough to make it to the bathroom and back and he doesn’t need to be afraid of some teasing.

He then runs into 민영, who gives him a pencil as a gift and confides that she is not from a rich family after all. She lives only with her mother who sells goods (illegally) from the American military (PX, I believe). 진우 then tells her his secret -- that he went to the bathroom by himself.

In the end his teacher and then his mother come and 진우 resolves not to be ashamed and to pee in a bottle during class.

* * *
I was really impressed by this book. I was a little skeptical upon reading the title; there are an awful lot of picture books about poo in Korea and, quite frankly, we have enough household conversations involving farting, pooping, and other bodily functions. I don't feel the need to add the topic to my reading list. But I think the book made the topic of a disability very real and comprehensible to my son. 진우's polio wasn't something abstract, but described in terms of everyday problems that my son could relate to.

My son's 2nd grade teacher had very strict rules about going to the bathroom and since he likes to go rather frequently this made his adjustment to classroom life really difficult. Reading this book, with its very good descriptions of 진우's thought process as he tries to deal with his problems in the ways he (as a child) can think of, made me remember how big things like going to the bathroom are at that age. (I think I'm probably not the only one to go through a stage of holding it all day long because I felt embarassed to ask the teacher to go to the bathroom.) We think of toilet training as something that happens in very early childhood, but even in the early elementary years children are learning to control and understand their bodies and that's often a source of shame, discomfort, and confusion. We know that toddlers are often afraid of the flush, but elementary school children also have fears of the bathroom which I think reflect that fear of shame or loss of control. (My husband scared the bejezus out of me by telling me the stories he heard as a young kid of a bloody hand reaching out of the toilet. Since he lived in a hanok and had to go to the bathroom outside in the middle of the night, I can imagine how very scary that story must have been.) The book is about having accidents pooping and peeing, but it's also about how 진우 learns to accept that he's not like the other kids, and learns how to step back and let the pooing and peeing become less of a problem in his mind.

So, to respond to Cat's comment, it is a rather heavy topic, but really well done. Maybe I should start rating these books? 5 고추s!

And perhaps I should also add a reading level indicator for those of you who read kids' books for Korean practice. (I'm making this up as I go along, comments are welcome.) My second-grader read this pretty easily. The vocabulary (aside from polio) was not, I think, that difficult, especially if you have some familiarity with the Korean school system. But it is 109 pages so it's not beginner level. It's easier than the Magic Treehouse because there isn't much specialized vocabulary. Hmm, I will have to think more about how to describe reading level.