This may explain some of my 'issues'

When I was seven or eight I was sent off with my little sister to my grandparents' house in the middle of rural nowhere for a summer holiday.

My grandparents lived in a traditional Korean house. It was a wooden bungalow raised on great wooden beams a couple of feet above the ground with a thatched roof, surrounded by a fence and a vegetable patch filled with corn, carrots, onions, pumpkins and spinach. The layout of a traditional Korean house is that you have the maru, the equivalent of the living room, in the middle of the house flanked by the rooms of the occupants. The kitchen would be on the far end of one of the sides of the house, and the dark, unlit, primitive toilet would be a separate shed somewhere in the yard. So entering the house would go something like this: you would walk up the yard and then climb one big stone step (and leave your shoes there) onto the well-worn varnished wooden floor of the maru. There is no door separating the maru from the rest of the world - you can see the front and back yards at the same time. If you wanted to go into a room you would have to walk the length of the maru to open the wood-framed and papered sliding door of the room. The floors of the rooms are always covered with jangpan - thick, lacquered paper - and are heated by the hot air pipes underneath the floorboards.

I don't really remember much else about the house but during my stay I learnt about how we get the food we eat. My grandparents got up at the crack of dawn to go to their vegetable patch to tend to their plants. During the day, my grandmother would take me to the vegetable patch and make me pick corn with her. I would have to take off the husky silky hairs and the outer sheaf of the corn. She would make me pick off the ends of red peppers so that we could lay them out to dry in the yard before grinding them into chili powder. I enjoyed this random agricultural experience. Having the cooked rice with the corn that I had helped to pick made me feel very proud.

But I was not prepared to see the butchering of cows and pigs at the local market. The stench of the abattoir was overwhelming on the summer's day we went. I remember being startled by the red blood and the dripping entrails. And the smell! Oh, it was like being in a washroom filled with socks from a football team that had been left to rot. Or someone being sick then throwing cheese around the place. Or worse. My grandmother was annoyed at my screams.
"It's all right - it's only meat," she said.
"I'm going to be sick," I said. So we moved to the fishmonger's stall, which wasn't that much better. The fish were being gutted and filleted in just as much of a malodorous state as the cows and pigs. I saw the dark insides of the fish being torn out against the white flesh and shuddered.
"Do you want to eat the mackerel?" my grandmother asked.
"No, I want to go home," I said, with tear-filled eyes. I was so agitated that my grandmother, usually stern and unforgiving of sentimental displays, decided we should leave the market empty-handed.

Back home, my grandmother gave me some chicken soup.
"Grandma, did you kill the chicken?" I asked her.
"Not this one. But when you were a baby I killed some chickens to make you lots of soup," she said. I don't remember whether I ate the soup or not. I think I probably would have - my grandmother would not have tolerated any refusing of good, wholesome home-made food on account of some animals dying. I didn't become vegetarian as a result of the experience, either. Instead, on market days I refused to obey my grandmother's call to join her on her excursion.