mystery of the korean figurine

The remaining 6 boxes from Tokyo had finally arrived. The earlier 2 which were books were flown in via SAL, that took only about a week. Since my room has no space for 8 boxes' worth of memories from Japan, I had to do a major spring cleaning.

The headache is not only because I have to choose what to throw out, but also something akin to taking out everything from all the cupboards and shelves and tables, put them together with the Tokyo things, then decide what can go back into the room. It's like having at least 30 boxes of items laid out all over the room (which is smaller than my Tokyo room!), and being forced to decide which gets to stay and which has to be recycled or given to the garbage man.


While trying to clear the computer table, I noticed an old name card box which I kept some pieces of "loose ends", miscellaneous stuff that don't quite belong anywhere. From afar it looked like any other transparent plastic box with stuff in it, but when I tried to lift it up from the table, it seemed to have gotten stuck on it.


Apparently some of the plastic had melted onto the table. Upon closer inspection, the dough figurine I had gotten as a souvenir from Korea seemed to have pushed its way out of the casing too. The head was jutting out, penetrating through the cover of the box.



The little ornament on its left hand seemed to have made its way out at the side of the box too. That was how the box got stuck on to the table.

Very strange, I thought. How could a figurine like that manage to melt the plastic on the outside? It's as if it grew while living in the box and somehow got parts of its body pushed outwards. Because the sides were melted together with the figurine, I couldn't even open the box without having to smash the whole thing.


As I peered inside the box to see how this mystery came about, I noticed the legs also melted the plastic key-chain that was just beside the figurine. The left leg looked as if it could also push its way out of the box had I left it there even longer. Maybe give it another year?!

This figurine must be some heat conductor for it to be able to absorb so much heat and melt everything around it! Either that, or my room must have been like a sauna that the air inside the casing heated up, allowing the cover to sink through the doll's head, pushing it down and making it melt all the plastic around it. And the place where this box was found was not even under direct sunlight to begin with.