In the story below, a grandmother has "dementia" (치매), which apparently causes her to forget when to go to the bathroom, a symptom Koreans describe as "대소변을 가리지 못 하다." The word 대변 means "feces," and the word 소변 means "urine," so 대소변 can translate as "feces and urine" or "urine and feces." The word 가리다 can translate as "to choose," "to select," or "to discriminate," so 대소변을 가리지 못 하다 literally translates as "unable to discriminate urine and feces," which implies that a person does not know when to go to the bathroom. That means that a person with such a problem will go to the bathroom wherever he or she just happens to be.
The girl in the story below, who is about to graduate middle school, talks about how her grandmother gets up in the middle of the night and turns their house into a 쑥대밭, which literally means "mugwort (쑥) and bamboo (대) field (밭)" but implies an overgrown, uncultivated plot of land or, in other words, a wasteland. Except that in this case, the girl seems to be implying that the wasteland in their house is made up of feces and urine.
The girl also talks about how her grandmother these days follows them around the house all day "whining" (칭얼대다) for them to play with her, something the girl does not remember her grandmother doing when the girl was younger. So, the girl starts to think of her grandmother as being "a strange alien being" (낯선 외계인) and wonders what happened to the grandmother she used to know, the one who used to love and take care of her and read her bedtime stories when she was a little girl.
I like this story, and I like the way it is told, though I think the use of the word 외계인 to describe the grandmother is a little immature for a girl who is about to graduate middle school. Use of the word would make more sense if the girl were only about five or six years old. A girl in middle school should be able to understand what dementia is and what it does to people. Nevertheless, this story still brought a tear to my eye.
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