The Jar I Kick on the Road
Much harm isn't born of malice, but of a failure to imagine how hard someone else is trying to live.
When I was a child, there was a classmate I could never quite catch up to, SunKi.
She was quiet, almost invisible in the way she moved and spoke, yet there was something in her that kept rising—an upward force of mind that I couldn't name at the time, only feel. It drew people in without asking for attention. She was not beautiful, but attractive for she like the warm wind in spring.
Her father drank and gambled. Her mother, people said, had left and never came back. Money in her home was not tight; it was missing. One summer or early autumn, a teacher found the jar of pickled vegetables she had brought for the week at school. The vegetables had molded. I remember the moment not because of the smell, but because it made pity feel simple and heavy—like a stone you suddenly realize you've been carrying.
Then there was an evening.
After dinner, on the way back to the classroom for evening study, I saw a bottle standing upright in the middle of the road—one of those small jars of sweet porridge. If you've ever been a boy, you know what an upright can on the ground feels like: an invitation. A ball placed there for no reason. A game offered to your foot.
So I kicked it.
At the last instant, I thought I heard someone call out—softly, almost swallowed by the air. But the kick had already left me; I didn't stop.
You can guess the rest.
When I realized what I had done, embarrassment rose in my throat like heat. Not the kind that passes in a minute, but the kind that stays for 20+ years—because it isn't really embarrassment. It's the sudden knowledge that a small, careless moment can land on the one person who least deserves it.
That night I wanted something impossible: to go back and erase the boy I was at that second—before the foot swung, before the jar lifted, before the world taught me how easily thoughtlessness turns into cruelty.