Elementary-school math workbooks

Elementary-school math workbooks are an ordinary household object that acquires unusual significance when the psychiatrist discovers his wife solving them late at night. She insists that the work is enjoyable, but also identifies it as one of the few things she can control. The books reveal a private source of intellectual pleasure while making visible the restrictions that have reshaped her life around childcare. Their pages also become a measure of the distance between what the narrator notices and what he understands.

Appearance and Use

The workbooks are designed for children, with cute illustrations and pictures in primary colors taking up more than half the pages. One problem asks the student to infer a bus number from a chart, a map, and a schedule. The wife finds the exercise interesting, even though the psychiatrist does not share her enthusiasm. Its subject is a real Seoul City Public Bus numbering system, and the problem turns everyday information into a puzzle: the learner must bring several kinds of information together to reach an answer.

The books are not simply placed before the couple’s son as assigned schoolwork. His mother explains that elementary schools do not require children to complete workbooks over vacation. She is doing them for herself, and has worked through multiple volumes. The distinction matters: what the psychiatrist initially assumes is evidence of his son’s interest is actually a sustained activity belonging to his wife.

The New Year’s Eve Discovery

On the last day of the year, the psychiatrist returns home late after a gathering with high-school friends and finds his wife at the kitchen table, still working. More than half the workbook’s pages are filled with colorful illustrations, but she is concentrating on the problems. He asks why she is doing their son’s homework; she explains that it is not homework and directs his attention to the bus-numbering puzzle. He says little and goes to bed, partly because he is sleepy and does not want to pursue the conversation.

That weekend, he finds more workbooks in the recycling. His wife has completed all of them. Until then, he had thrown away volumes because he believed their son was interested in mathematics. Discovering that his wife, rather than the boy, has been working through the books changes the meaning of the discarded stack: a routine household item has preserved evidence of an activity he barely registered. His irritation at her choice is sharpened by his awareness of her exceptional mathematical record. She won competitions and Olympiads, earned perfect scores on all twelve midterm and final mathematics examinations during three years of high school, and missed one question on the mathematics section of the college entrance examination. He cannot understand why someone with that background would choose elementary-level exercises.

A Small Sphere of Control

His wife gives a brief answer: the books are fun, and mathematics is something she can control in her life at that moment. The workbooks therefore hold two meanings at once. They are a source of genuine interest, as her attention to the bus puzzle and her repeated insistence on the pleasure of solving problems show; they are also a small, self-directed activity in circumstances where much of her time and energy have been organized by other people’s needs.

The account establishes those circumstances through the narrator’s description of her career and family life. She had been a better student than he was in medical school and had aimed for a university professorship in ophthalmology. She compromised first by moving to contract work and ultimately gave up her career. With her parents living in the United States and his parents far away, she managed childcare through a succession of nannies. When their son began school, after-school care and taekwondo gave her some breathing room, but that respite ended when the school reported serious behavioral problems. The teacher suspected ADHD and recommended a stay-at-home mother for at least the first half of elementary school. His wife left work, took on the boy’s daily care, and later canceled a planned return to a position arranged by a senior colleague because, she said, he was not improving. The workbooks appear within this larger loss of professional and personal room to maneuver; the evidence does not suggest that they replace her former career, only that they offer a controllable activity amid these demands.

Domestic Labor and the Narrator’s Blind Spot

The workbooks sit beside another account of how household labor is misread. Kim Jiyoung, caring for Jung Jiwon, observes that a washing machine and a vacuum cleaner do not complete domestic work on their own: someone must still sort, move, hang, and manage the laundry, and attend to the cleaning. The psychiatrist’s wife likewise performs the daily labor of raising a child, while the narrator initially interprets her activity through mistaken assumptions about their son. In both accounts, the work that sustains family life can disappear from view precisely because it is treated as ordinary.

The psychiatrist later admits that his wife’s career compromises helped him recognize experiences of womanhood and motherhood that he might otherwise have missed. He does not claim that this recognition makes him an expert; instead, he sees that he may have understood Kim Jiyoung’s situation too hastily. His closing wish is that his wife—and Kim Jiyoung—might do something they are good at, like, and genuinely want, rather than merely something available because other choices have narrowed. The workbooks make that tension concrete: the wife’s pleasure is real, but so is the confinement expressed in her explanation that this is what she can control. Their modest scale gives the scene its force. A late-night stack of children’s exercises reveals a capable mathematician’s continued intellectual life, while also showing how little the narrator has understood about the conditions in which that life now takes place.