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\”Fire! Fire!\” I was six years old. One night my mother grabbed the doorknob and screamed. She was trying to hold the door shut to protect everyone inside, pulling it hard so it wouldn’t open. My sibling and I cried, not knowing what was happening. My mother already had a loud voice, but no one arrived for a long time. The front door opened straight into the kitchen, and another door led from there to the bedrooms. Someone had climbed in through the kitchen window, and my mother noticed. My father wasn’t home that night. Fortunately, the intruder gave up and left. The memory is still hazy, which tells me it was a deep shock. Ironically, I learned then that shouting \”Fire!\” can be the right alarm when a break-in happens.
After years in the city, I kept the front door and the car locked at all times. I even lowered the shop shutter for my mother and grew used to securing entrances. After we moved to the countryside, an elderly neighbor came by in broad daylight and pounded on our door. I opened the locked door and greeted her; she looked puzzled and asked why I had locked it. I, who thought locking doors was normal, found her reaction surprising. Living in the countryside taught me that people there generally don’t lock doors. They leave house doors and car doors open and sometimes even leave the car keys in the ignition. They assume no one will steal in a sparsely populated area. Some villages have fences, but many don’t. In the countryside you end up knowing even how many spoons a household has.
Recently, valuables were stolen from a car in the next village. CCTV showed a person walking in at dawn and targeting only cars with open doors. By then I had already settled into country habits: locking the house but not the car. After hearing about the theft, I grew more alert. The incident also reminded me of when I found the storage door open with the light on. With population decline and many empty homes, I realized someone might take advantage. So now I make sure to lock the car before going to bed. Living on constant alert has become a tiring routine.
I come from a large family, but an elderly woman who lives alone told me she locks her door at night because she’s afraid. In the morning she unlocks it and goes about her day. If she feels slightly unwell, she sometimes leaves the door unlocked so someone can find her quickly if she collapses. When her son visits on weekends, she sleeps without locking the door. For her, her son is a large protective fence. Being with someone can bring comfort.
In the countryside, people mark the boundary between inside and outside with a word called sapjak. The path right outside the house is the sapjakgeori, and the larger road beyond that is the sinjakro. Those physical boundaries reflect boundaries in the heart: you can loosen your sapjak or shut it tight. Rural generosity isn’t what it used to be. The days when neighbors fed passing strangers or shared makgeolli in the fields are stories of the past. I only hope the countryside’s sense of boundary doesn’t start to imitate the city.
One morning, driving my youngest to school, my child sang a song from Frozen.
\”Do you want to build a snowman? … I always wait, please open the door for me. Now it’s just the two of us, my sister and me—what will we do from now on…\”
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