Long before Korean horror movies and shows like "Parasite" and "Squid Game" captivated the world, my mother told me Korean horror stories. Most were fables passed down through generations, like the one about a tiger who prowls villages at night to devour children, and other thinly veiled morality tales. But there was one story my mother recited repeatedly, a story that wasn't as overtly horrific as the others but which chilled me to the bone because I could tell it had been selected specifically to address my foibles.
The story was an allegory about how persistently disobeying one's mother will lead to lifelong heartache. Like me, the doomed protagonist (a rascally young frog) often tested his mother's patience, even making a game of disobeying her. When Mama Frog ordered her son to play nicely on a hillside, he would instead head to the riverbank to make mischief. His gleeful disobedience reminded me of how I routinely provoked my mother, who—to me—seemed rather uptight and in need of some ruffling.
