"Choco Papa`s Health Note"

   3 AM. Bathroom. 4:15 AM. Bathroom. 5:30 AM. Bathroom again. I know the exact layout of my apartment in complete darkness. Fourteen steps from bed to bathroom door. Sharp left to avoid the dresser corner. Two steps past the washing machine. I could do it blindfolded. I basically do, every single night. At my worst, I was getting up four times between midnight and 6 AM. Four times. That's not sleeping with bathroom breaks. That's bathroom breaks with naps in between. I didn't tell anyone for two years. Not my wife. Not my doctor. Not my friends. Because what kind of man talks about how often he pees? Korean men of my generation (한국 남자, hanguk namja) will discuss stock prices, golf handicaps, blood pressure, even erectile dysfunction after enough soju. But the prostate? The bathroom trips? The weak stream that takes forever to start? Silence. Complete silence. I finally mentioned it to a friend over dinner — carefully, casually, like it was no big deal. "Do you get up ...

  3:17 AM. I know the exact time because I stared at it every single night for ten years. Not sometimes. Not occasionally. Every night. My eyes would snap open at 3:17, my heart already pounding, my brain already running through tomorrow's board meeting or next quarter's revenue forecast. I would lie there, staring at the ceiling, calculating numbers that didn't need calculating at three in the morning. During my years as a corporate executive, I slept four to five hours a night and called it discipline. My colleagues bragged about sleeping less. "I only need four hours," one senior VP used to say, like sleep deprivation was a competitive sport. We were all competing to see who could destroy themselves fastest. I was winning. Then I retired at 57. No more 6 AM conference calls. No more hoesik (회식) running until midnight. No more quarterly reports. And I still couldn't sleep. That's when I realized: the problem wasn't my schedule. The problem was that t...