Neuro-divergence is not a super power: Almond by Son Won Pyeong

A week ago, I finally finished the novel Almond that took me about two months to read. I kept getting sidetracked, and then it was difficult for me to get going again, both just from a "what the hell was going on, again?" standpoint as well as an "I should really read instead of waste time on the Internet" perspective. But I got through it.

There is no English translation of this book, so for most of you, the write-up I'm about to do is the only contact with this book you'll ever get. Bridging the cross-cultural divide: just one more free benefit the world gets out of Workshop Heretic.

Almond is about a teenager named Yun Jae who has alexithymia. When I looked up what alexythmia was, I wasn't sure how it was different from Asperger's, which I've heard of before because of friends' kids. Essentially, it's a condition in which someone can neither experience emotions the way most humans do or recognize emotional reactions in others. It shares some outward traits with both autism and Asperger's.

The title has a two-fold origin: First, the novel tells us that the origins of alexithymia are in an underdevelopment of the amygdala, the almond-like structure in the brain. (If you look around on the Internet a bit, you won't actually find this to be a prevalent explanation of the origins of the condition. For the sake of enjoying the novel, I found it was best to just accept the in-book explanations of things, at least as far as analyzing the story itself goes.)  The second reason why the novel is called "Almond" is because the boy's mother, hoping to somehow get his brain to develop so he could be "normal," force-fed him scores of almonds, believing nuts were a good brain food.

The book rather reminded me of Mark Haddon's 2003 novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, a story about a 15-year-old boy with autism or something like it. Both are told by a point-of-view narrator who's got his work cut out for him if he's going to be able to communicate with would-be readers. In Haddon's novel, we are told that the narrator got help from one of his counselors to write the book, which allows us to deal with suspension-of-disbelief issues. In Son's novel, although Yun Jae himself would not have been able to write with such well-tuned emotional pitch, we somewhat accept it because Yun Jae grew up with a mother who ran a used book store. So Yun Jae has read thousands of examples of stories, although he doesn't really understand the emotions the characters are experiencing in them.

The first quarter of the novel is dedicated to Yun Jae's formative years. He lived with his mother, but not his father, because his father died in a freak accident before Yun Jae was born. After a few years of trying to raise Yun Jae, her mother realized it was beyond her, so she made up with the mother she'd stopped talking to over a fight about the boy's father. Yun Jae grows up with both his mother and grandmother. He seems to have an easier time understanding his grandmother, a straight-talking, soju-drinking woman who calls her grandson a "beautiful monster."

While I'm on the subject of autism spectrum and Korean stories, I have to take the time to HIGHLY recommend the 2005 Korean movie "Marathon," about an autistic young man who trains to run a marathon. 

Yun Jae's mother tries to brute force her son's way to her vision of normalcy. She explains the outer phenomena of emotions to him, hoping he can at least learn to recognize the signs of anger or sadness, even if he can't feel them himself. She hangs posters of the Chinese words for emotions like love or sadness around the house, hoping something will sink in by osmosis.

The novel's big turning point is when both the mother and grandmother are attacked by a homicidal lunatic at the end of his rope. The grandmother dies, and the mother becomes a vegetable. Yun Jae watches the entire attack. Soon after, he meets a new group of people he was never able to come in contact when his mother protected him, and his growth begins.

The new character with the most impact is Goni, the class bully. Goni was abducted at four years of age from his real parents, lived a terrible childhood, and then was reunited with his parents as a teenager just as his mother, worn away by grief from losing track of her son at the park, died of cancer. Goni has issues.

Being a bully, Goni immediately targets Yun Jae for torment. But Yun Jae, although he does get physically mauled by Goni, never shows fear. This fascinates Goni, who eventually befriends Yun Jae. Part of what Goni is attracted to is Yun Jae's inability to feel sadness or fear, which Goni equates with strength. Goni has been hurt, and he wants to not be hurt anymore.

Ultimately, Yun Jae, through his various friendships, does learn to feel on his own, at least in some sense. It's kind of a Pinocchio story, with Yun Jae noting that his story really ended at the point when he began to feel, because he had been replaced by a new peson.

Neuro-divergence in the world at present

There's been a movement in the last decade or so I have to confess I'm a little mystified by. It's a movement against "ableism." Some of its aims I find understandable and easy to get behind: greater access to society for those considered "disabled" in some sense. It doesn't matter if we're talking blindness, deafness, cognitive issues, or whatever. And that's great.

But along with this has come the rise of a "you must not even think of these conditions as disabilities" mindset. I get that in a certain sense: one doesn't want to concede to limitations. But it's also a little absurd to not only state that a person without the ability to hear is no worse off than one who can, but then to also police the language of anyone who doesn't agree.

Then, there's an even more extreme version: not only are disabilities not really disabilities, they're actually extra abilities. Recently, someone at my office just came back from a forum on autism saying this very thing. He really believed that in the future, autistic people would come to be very powerful, because of their superior way of viewing the world and processing information.

In the history of human evolution, there certainly have been moments where traits that were a disadvantage one moment became useful the next. So-called "deleterious genes" usually are weeded out of a population, but once in a while, they stick around, and then suddenly, those who carry them end up with an unexpected advantage when the environment changes. I'm totally willing to accept this could be the case with any type of neuro-diversity. But that's not the same as insisting that these conditions are not any kind of disadvantage in the current environment, including the sociological environment.

The novel Almond neither fetishizes Yun Jae's condition nor belittles it, which strikes me as the right position to take. The reader certainly is invited to try to understand how Yun Jae thinks--at times, the description is almost too clear, and we have to simply accept it or the whole novel will disintegrate in disbelief issues. It's easy in some points of the novel to see advantages to Yun Jae's way of processing information. For example, even while getting bullied mercilessly, he eats and sleeps as he always does and doesn't fret about something that is about to happen. It's impossible to make him suffer after the immediate physical stimulus is gone, which, as well all know, is the real hell of suffering.

At the same time, it's clear that the lack of emotion is a loss. Goni tortures a butterfly in front of Yun Jae, and Yun Jae does not understand why Goni is so upset that Yun Jae will not stop him from doing it. Yun Jae cannot comprehend why he should desire for the suffering of something that is not him to end. He does not understand empathy, and this does seem like a profound gap, however much emotional strength he might gain from not being able to worry about the things that drive most humans crazy.

The best part of the book is the dual empathy-learning that takes place. Yun Jae learns what empathy means in some sense while we, the readers, are learning to try to empathize with him. His quest to learn what it means to feel forces us to ask ourselves what feelings mean. In this sense, Yun Jae performs the same useful social role that any kind of "other" plays: His difference forces the rest of us to examine things we have always assumed could not be any other way.

Ultimately, for any outsider, the best society can try to offer is a tenuous balance between remaining different with the admiration of society and blending in. This novel offered a better statement of how that might actually work than many non-fictional statements I've seen. I'm hopeful that the level of credulity I had to give the story to make it work for me doesn't mean that such a balance is impossible in the real world.