The Aphasic (Work by Han Jiang, Winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature)

There were no words in her body now, but the blood was still flowing and the tears were still welling up. Without any reason or warning, a woman becomes speechless. The first time was in the winter when she was 17 years old. She felt that the sentences emitted from her tongue and hands were tied up like white spider webs, and she was very ashamed. She could hear and read every word clearly, but she couldn't open her mouth to make a sound. What made her speechless lips tremble again was a strange foreign language—a French word. Her mother passed away half a year ago and she got divorced a few years ago. After three lawsuits, the woman finally lost the custody of her nine-year-old son. After sending the child away, she suffered from insomnia. The unbearable weight of the crystallization of words was placed in the middle of her beating heart like cold explosives. She sees a psychiatrist once a week. The psychiatrist who was over fifty years old judged that she was temporarily aphasic due to the stimulation of recent life circumstances, but she just wrote "No, it's not that simple..." Over and over again on the table. The man was 40 years old. His eyesight gradually weakened due to fate, and the doctor declared that he would lose his sight forever in one year. He left his family in Germany and returned to Korea alone more than ten years later to teach Greek. Among the students at the academy, she noticed women who didn't speak or smile. When the silence of a woman who is gradually losing her language meets the light of a man who is gradually losing his light, everything may be allowed to change.