The Liver Transplant
When they took my liver, the youngest was still in elementary school.
Min Dajeong.
The late-born child of parents who, between the two of them, actually got along rather well. In a sense, she was the most beloved child of all — more even than our older sister. Min Dain, at least, had carried the pressure to attend a better university than her parents had, to land a better job than they'd ever dreamed of. But Min Dajeong, the baby of the family, had only ever needed to be adored. Our mother, in particular, doted on her far more openly than she ever had on Dain.
My relationship with Dajeong wasn't catastrophically bad, either. Even now, we could manage a short text exchange.
Min Dajeong was a professional golfer — a promising one, though she was still grinding it out on the second-tier tour. The mere fact that she had zero complaints about me running with the number two slot on the ballot made her an angel by this family's standards. By Min household measures, that much qualified her as a perfectly normal human being.
And yet blood will tell.
'A warning?'
Not the sort of thing you say to the brother who carved a piece of his liver out for you. It wasn't that I regretted the donation. It was that regret itself was impossible — because I had never given it voluntarily in the first place.
I had my organ taken from me in my first year of university. I was wiping down the grill plates at a barbecue joint when my mother called, and a voice shrieking past the edge of reason stabbed straight into my ear.
"Seojun!!! Where are you? Whatever you're doing, drop it this instant and run to Ajou University Hospital... hurry!"
"I'm at my part-time job."
"That's what you have to say right now? Are you insane?"
"You'll have to tell me why, Mother. What happened—"
"What happened? Your sister — Dajeong! She's been rushed to the hospital, and she's on the verge of dying right now!!"
Min Dajeong was already a junior golfer by then. It felt like the household spending my parents had reined in once Dain entered university was being funneled wholesale into Dajeong's golf. My first guess was a car accident on the way to or from the course. I asked why, again and again, but my mother only wept. Come quick, your sister is dying, come quick.
And so, gullible fool that I was, I headed for the hospital. The mere thought of my little sister dying made the rims of my eyes sting so hot I couldn't bear it. What if she died before I got there... my stomach lurched the whole way.
At the hospital, Dajeong really was in critical condition. But the cause, contrary to my guess, was no car accident.
"They're saying it's drug-induced acute liver failure...! Her bilirubin levels are far too high right now!"
"Drugs?"
"Is the cause what matters right now? It's your sister!"
"..."
"Her liver is melting away!"
Acute liver failure — in an elementary school girl. The culprit who had reduced Dajeong to that state was my mother. It didn't appear to be deliberate. In her own mind, she'd simply been taking loving care of her darling youngest, diligently feeding her green tea extract and herbal tonics... In moderation, the stuff might actually have helped — boosted the metabolism, or whatever it claimed on the label. The problem was that Dajeong was an elementary schooler. One under constant stress from training, at that.
"Have you lost your mind?"
"Hng—!"
"Min Seojun, you little punk — how dare you talk to your mother that way!"
I had never once been on the receiving end of health supplements or herbal tonics. But my little sister, who had received that support in reckless overdose, was dying of the side effects. I stood there in a daze, hollowed out and seething — when suddenly my parents each seized one of my hands. As if they'd secured me in advance so I couldn't run.
"Seojun. Forty-eight hours... that's all she has left, it seems."
"Forty-eight hours?"
"If she doesn't get the transplant surgery, the hepatic encephalopathy alone will kill her. That's what the doctor said. There's no time, Seojun. Okay? Okay?"
They said they needed someone, urgently, to give Dajeong a piece of their liver.
"Seojun. Let's start with the tests, right this minute."
"Listen to your mother, Min Seojun! The situation is not that simple right now!"
"And what about the two of you?"
"Tested? Of course we got tested! What do you take your parents for...!"
"Honey, let it go. For one thing, I've got fatty liver, so I'm out. Your mother's a mismatch."
My parents were in a position where they couldn't give Dajeong an organ even if they'd wanted to. Dain was hovering nearby, so I fixed my gaze squarely on her — and my father stepped smoothly into her path, eyes blazing, as though warning me not to so much as conceive of such an outrageous idea.
"Min Seojun. Your sister is out of the question."
"And I'm available, then?"
"The situation is urgent, don't be absurd... Do you not know your sister has midterms next week? If she wants a top-tier law school, she has to hold at least a 4.0 through all four years of undergrad. But you, you're only headed to Hanjin Heavy Industr— ...it's not as if anything that urgent or important is going on with you, is there?"
Your sister is off-limits. Absolutely. Even with the youngest of the family dying, Dain remained inviolable territory in my father's eyes. Which left the easy target: me.
It wasn't that I wanted my sister to die. We weren't close, but she was still family — and unlike our parents, the little one had never once been insufferable to me. But to be summoned out of nowhere and told to hand over my liver... I understand it now, but back then it felt like a fucked-up-ness whose true shape I couldn't yet see, coiling around my whole body.
And then my parents began to bear down on me, pinning me in place. If you don't give your liver, Dajeong won't survive tomorrow night. How can you call yourself a human being? Do you really think you can live with yourself after letting Dajeong go like that? And when none of it worked, they dissolved into phlegm-thick sobbing, wailing in their wretched state — until, in the end, the two of them were kneeling before me.
"Seojun!!"
"Save my daughter! I'm begging you!"
Saying no was simply too hard. It was an ironclad fact that my sister would die if I didn't give up my liver. And I had no faith I could survive the resentment and fury that would come raining down on me from that day on. If this were the present day, I'd have cut ties on the spot and walked out of that hospital. But back then I was a damn idiot too. And so, in the end—
"I'll... take the tests. For now."
"Thank you!!"
With the mindset of a cow being led to the slaughterhouse, I submitted to the follow-up testing. Blood type, antibodies, electrocardiogram... Even processed as an emergency, it took roughly six hours. The results, regrettably, were a perfect match across the board.
Last of all, someone called a transplant coordinator asked me a question.
"Are you making this decision of your own will? Has anyone in your family or around you pressured you, even subtly?"
If only I could have answered, even there, that the decision had been made under duress. But I couldn't bring myself to imagine it. Too much time had bled away while the tests were run. Dajeong was dying with the whites of her eyes and her skin all turned yellow. So twice I pushed out the words "Yes, it's voluntary," as though I were being shoved forward, and with my own hand I signed the papers the hospital handed me.
"KONOS has granted approval. We'll proceed with the surgery right away."
And that is how I gave my liver to my sister. Thankfully, the surgery concluded without incident. Though "without incident" wasn't quite how it felt from where I lay.
"Khuck— khuck—!"
Pain like a boulder pressing down across my whole abdomen; with every cough, the sensation that my organs were about to spill out of me. I was dying of thirst, and I couldn't even have water. Was I actually going to die like this? As I lay there shaking with fear, my family appeared.
"The surgery went well. Anyway, you've been through a lot this time."
Why the anyway? I didn't have the energy to ask, so I let it go. And then, gathered around my wheezing body, the family started chattering.
"But Dad. Seojun — he's still not going to the army, right?"
"Right. I'd forgotten about that."
"If he files for a change in his service classification, doesn't it come out as a Grade 5 exemption?"
"Did you hear your sister, Seojun? ...Think of it positively. Just positively. People cut off their own fingers and pull their own teeth to dodge the draft, but you get to save your sister and honorably skip military service. For all we know, Dajeong opened the road to your exemption for you."
"That's true, Dain's dad. Looking at it long-term, this is a win-win."
Win-win. A road to exemption.
In their own minds, I suppose, they were comforting me. But to me, lying there freshly gutted of an organ, it was nothing but a teabag. Why were these people like this to me?
After they left, I cried alone for hours. It wasn't only the pain churning through my upper abdomen.
Even now, after all the years that have passed, the surgical scar on my belly remained vivid. It would probably never fade, not until the day I died. The scar embarrassed me now and then, too — every trip to a sauna or a water park, at least one person would ask about it. Each time, my self-esteem took a nosedive, because it dredged the wretched truth back to the surface: even after surrendering my liver to my family, I was still treated like garbage.
'Never thought I'd get the chance to put it to use like this.'
Even now, my military exemption was busy generating buzz. All thanks to the Shorts clip of me getting grilled by the Together Democratic Party's Pyeon Seongyeop and scurrying away like a pathetic little rat, now spreading across every feed. This was exactly why I loved short-form video. It was really all in the editing, but it looked for all the world like my true colors had finally been caught on camera.
A pro-government civic group in a region the Together Democratic Party had locked down held a press conference in front of my campaign office, and the local paper ran an editorial.
Nobody actually reads editorials, but the public-relations staff at party headquarters were a different story. Their superiors still took the things seriously.
And then, at last—
Im Hyeonho, the National Assembly member for Maesan City — Together Democratic Party, naturally — had also seen fit to lecture me on social media.
'Was this enough?'
It would be hard to draw more attention than this in a municipal mayoral race. And there was no time left to build the hype any higher anyway. The televised debate was closing in — the one-on-one hosted by the National Election Commission, me versus Pyeon Seongyeop of the Together Democratic Party. Naturally, there was no chance in hell it would end as a mere policy debate.