tender joint, Sun Park

Content note: this essay includes descriptions of bodily pain.
After a sharp, electric shock pain in my finger joint, I made up my mind to see a doctor. The swelling had started weeks ago, shifting from visibly puffy fingers to itchy redness around the joints. At first, I thought it was a bug bite or an allergic reaction. Pollen, food, something passing. Then one morning, I woke up with severely swollen fingers, the pressure squeezing my joints, pressing against my bones. The pain was piercing, like shards of glass lodged in joints or a ball of needles rolling around under my skin.

While waiting for my GP appointment, I prepared by looking up English words for pain I was experiencing. Do you remember how you first learned to describe pain as a child? I don’t.

A sore throat

In Korean, 따갑다 (dda-gab-da)

I must have learned it through association, my mother telling me, “That’s sore throat/따가움” when I coughed and winced.

Now, in English, I was a child again, grasping for words to name my own bodily sensation. Being legible as a patient required a different kind of fluency. Healthcare was a labyrinth, and pain itself had to be calibrated to speak the right language that will unlock the doors of the maze. I found myself rehearsing: throbbing, sharp, burning, aching, stabbing. Preparing new phrases and vocabularies as a map to locate my pain in the closest yet most invisible terrain that is a body.


From this process of re-learning, I first came across the term "tender joint". My symptoms fit the textbook definition of Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), said doctors, friends with RA, and my mother, who also has arthritis. One of which was the sensitivity and fragility of joints to the external pressure. The first time I said "tender joint" out loud to my GP, my ADHD brain dissociated, thinking of chicken tenders. Crispy outside, soft inside. A thought spiral, a disjointed tongue, memory, body, sensation. Is my finger tender? Is my finger… delicious? Can tender meat be painful?

I had used "tender joint" to describe my symptoms so many times, but it always felt wrong. There is nothing tender about RA. There is nothing tender about deformed knuckles. My joints weren’t sensitive; they were screaming. They weren’t shrinking under pressure. They were violently acting out, kicking against it, sending an SOS.

I once tried to be authentic, and told a detailed story of my pain to my GP. Apparently this narrative arc is called “suffering”. I described my joints as twisting wires cutting into cartilage, the dread of going to bed knowing I would wake up to pain. I spoke of mourning my own body as well as a loss I was going through. She summarised my story in two words: "joint pain" and "insomnia". I was not referred to a specialist.

Despite my fear of needles, I love acupuncture. In Korea, describing your pain isn’t just about symptoms. It’s about your whole life. Your sleep, stress, diet, family drama, quarrels with your neighbors. Migraine would be treated for anxiety. Heartburn was diagnosed through a bad posture and life pattern. In contrast, Western medical system operates under dualism that separates mind and body, seeing symptoms as isolated problems.

Like many East Asian languages, Korean weaves physical and emotional pain together, utilising onomatopoeia and mimetic words to give a form and sound to the invisible, like 마음이 찢어지다 (my heart is tearing). One of the clearest examples of the mind-body connection is the idiom 배가 아프다 which means I have stomachache, but also refers to jealousy. You are jealous, therefore distressed, which leads to a stomachache. We know the stomach is highly sensitive to stress, hence, jealousy is a root cause of IBS. The inseparability of mind and body in Korean language allows pain to speak for itself, offering a holistic navigation through the puzzle of suffering.

After months in the NHS labyrinth, clearing missions such as blood tests, endless retellings of my symptoms and getting referrals, I was eventually discharged from rheumatology. The reason was because no inflammation was detected on my MRI scan. The doctors’ logical language gave way to abstractions: “Strange”, they said, when describing my condition. Now, they have entered the realm of the unknown, unable to navigate the foreign terrain of the bodymind / mindbody.


“This increasing reliance upon imaging technologies and clinical expertise to determine a condition is an extension of a historical ‘alliance…forged between words and things, enabling one to see and to say,’ in which diagnostic medicine penetrates beneath the flesh to unearth its pathological secrets that even the patient himself does not know or may even work to conceal. After all, the body does not lie, but the patient does.” — The Crip Poetics of Pain by Elaine Scarry

I had spent months translating my pain, only to be told, in my final session with the rheumatologist, that my testimony was untrustworthy. If pain is subjective, then so too is the language that describes it. My body, seen through medical equipment, revealed no illness. This visual evidence rendered my expression of pain invalid. As Scarry writes, I became the patient who lies – though the doctors would never say so outright. In this rational stage, the patient’s words stand no chance of rebuttal. It’s a heavy blow, leaving the patient with a psychic wound, forced to surrender without ever getting to fight.

“We know it when we know it because we know it; in our veins, in our guts, in our bones, and then we never know it alone.” — ‘Anta(h)shira’ by Raqs Media Collective, from Untranslatable Vocabulary

In her 2007 essay "The Pain Scale", Eula Biss recalls what her father, who was a doctor, told her, that the pain scale helps doctors detach, despite its limited ability to accurately communicate pain.

I have experienced the case of empathy clouding judgment. When I had a cut on my skin and had to keep the wound clean and dry, my extremely sympathetic mum couldn’t resist plastering ointment on it while I was asleep. I woke up screaming from new pain. In a group chat trauma-bonded over heartbreak, we all share our love stories but they are in fact pain stories. We felt each other’s pain, amplified and reimagined through our own personal pain scales.

I resist the "tender joint" because I resist its passivity. What if my joints aren’t weak, but hyper attuned? Not fragile, but powerful in their ability to detect? What if pain isn’t failure, but a command, a demand?

In Korean, "tender" is 연하다, used for food texture. To describe the kind of tenderness employed in tender joint, you must add one more syllable, 약 meaning weakness, making it 연약하다. In Korean, tenderness and weakness are not interchangeable.

My tender joint is never soft or fragile. It is my strictest, hardline commander who tells me to stop. To rest. To listen. It is love, speaking through pain.

Sun Park writes, makes art and works as a cultural worker in London. Moving image and language are her favourite materials, and improvisation and open ended conversations are her frequently used processes for thinking out loud. She is currently interested in gossip, friendship, and risk while researching topics like Cosmotechnics, Asian Futurism, and feminist remembering of war, with positive obsession. She is actively studying and dreaming with Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR) and Carefuffle Working Group.