Episode 9:In the Pitch Dark Room
It's been ashamed of me as I made a guilty mention of the retrieval of a previous job. A teaching profession couldn't be had like we used to recapture a lost territory. It shouldn't be. It's been so brazen of me to leave and recapture the earlier job of elementary school teaching in such short span of time.
Of course I had not been restored to the same job of the same school. I had presented myself to the local education board and submitted a suggested document in order to be reappointed to a teaching job at an elementary school. As a result, I got my job back at the fall semester of 1968 at Kilan Elementary School about 16 kilometers far from the Jeomgok Elementary School for which Willows had been serving.
This is a very awkward moment. Really. I have to give my readers an apt explanation for my retreat, that is, why I had plunged down to a rustic town again. The one reason: I was not able to register at the administration office of Chungang University for the first semester of the sophomore year, and I was not resourceful enough to withstand an urban life in the national capital.
The gang, really Samaritan, who had been armed with worried considerations, mobbed me, giving out ideas for my salvation. To which I thought it's time I blew a whistle for myself and for them also. I also had to fight an iota of an urge to take advantage of the others' good intentions. (We're willing to finance your whole academic courses!) I said good bye to my love on a winter night and cried all the way home trudging along the long river bank.
I also take this moment to give you readers an insight to the way in which I was and I would be unraveling my story. I am actually writing my story for the third time. And that in a book form. The previous one is on sale in www.textore.com about how many copies have been sold I have no knowledge.
Although I have rewritten the whole story of mine for the third time, what I seek your understanding, about which I am very proud, is that I have never compared notes with the earlier ones. There will naturally be omissions and new additions. I have from time to time been tempted to look into the previous descriptions, but I have fought the urge. So I can assuredly say that no line, sentence or paragraph is identical with each other.
It's been a really torturous process to have taken a fresh route of writing, but I think there's been a reward in its own way: I have experienced and experimented with a wide expanse of an expository prose. And I casually confess that Google has been truly instrumental, that is, I have consulted Google, particularly through its image searches, about the most recommendable lexicographical option out of a lot of conceivable expressions. If this were to see the global light as a successful writing piece, the half of the credit is Google's.
-------------
My class, which I now vaguely guess comprised 60-some students, of which the boy students were dominant, came from valley and riverside villages. They were a very jovial and active group, who were getting along with one another. I saw to it that there would not be a bully or bullies who would keep harassing their classmates.
The parents of my students were mostly farmers, among the rest of whom were merchants, a postman and the holders of other mercenary jobs. The local people were a quite hilarious lot, of whom the Three Cannons of Kilan were famous, three humorous exaggerators, that is.
Kilan, to which my young man had taken a visit as an elementary school teacher, was eight kilometers far from Sun Valley to the south, in which he had spent eight childhood years, and 12 kilometers far from Jeomgok Elementary School, over a hilly pass. Kilan is an intermediary town linked to Cheongsong to the east, Euiseong to the west, and to Andong City to the north west.
Kilan was a sane rustic town. At the time of my residence, the town folks enjoyed exchanging gags. They also enjoyed throwing fishnets over the river but they were optimistic over the catches as they threw and pulled them up.
Kilan, a small cozy town, which is built along a tributary of a great river, the Nakdong River, collects tributaries of its own and is merged into the Nakdong River proper. Kilan could be named as a sort of souvenir town because my young man collected souvenirs of his own.
The thought that my young man had collected a souvenir or two of some sort might be a mistaken notion. Why? In a certain sense, the young man had been collected by a young lady as a souvenir for her, who had premeditatedly ambushed him, snaring him.
The siren, who had long made a transmorphosis of a fatigued young sea man into an obedient pig, assuring herself of the state of the pig's powerlessness and loyal bondage to her, confided to the charmed animal that she had followed a fortuneteller's recommendation: "Go east, and you'll run into your mate."
Taking the fortune teller at her word, she had come to Kilan from Pungsan, opening a seamstress' shop by a roadside on the way to Kilan Elementary School. In the summer of 1969 Cha Hee was 21 years old, and the young man that had been me was 27. In linguistic terms, she had been attracted to me, but in physiological and Freudian terms, she had been in heat, that is, at the peak of her libido, and I might have been at my peak age, too.
She was just like Wanda in the movie Wanda Nevada. She was as young and brilliant as Wanda, as street smart as Wanda had been in the movie, and more beautiful than Wanda herself. I liked the siren in purple dress. I wanted to be the air going inside her dress.
----------------
In the leftist-dominant society, the wording is rampant that everybody is equal, people are the same, things of this kind or that are similar. No way. In the strict sense of word, no people are equal, nothing is the same with each other. All is different, people and things
People are different, in color, gender, age, length and weight, their tastes and job capabilities. People could be ranked in millions of tiers of monthly income and social status, and could be listed in files of intelligence, even in amorous abilities.
In brief, people are different, and things are different, too. Like the sky and earth are different. From the olden times, it's been a commonsensical idea that this is the world of "thousands of differences, and tens of thousands of categories..."
In the leftist-dominant society, the members of the communities have been trained so long by the ideology of identicality and equality and so much influenced by the ill-conceived routines that they have been hampered to think rightly. So it's time we the people are supposed to enhance the awareness of the differences of people and things.
Willows and Cha Hee were different. Whereas Willows reminded to me the contagiousness of my depression to her, Cha Hee was out to stoke its surface. She had a lot of funny stories to tell, of which the story entitled "May I come in naked or fully clothed?" made me laugh.
How she came to hold a fat sack of funny stories was really interesting. Her father, a farmer by profession and a chief of a district political party chapter by pastime, liked to take her second daughter Cha Hee with him to the adult gatherings. She naturally acquired a large repertoire of funny stories.
Her father was different as to how he bestowed an audience with a would-be son-in-law. Unlike a large number of the worldly parents, he was not trying to be difficult to the young visitor. Cha Hee's father, who had been in his late fifties at that time, after greeted by me on an early morning of an early winter day, smiled at me and said, "I am rich in daughters. She is up for grabs. for any young man."
My wedding, which was celebrated by the whole teaching staff of Kilan Elementary School and several fifth-graders of my class, and some friends including Brother Paragon at Euiseong, took place at Andong Wedding Hall, four months after I had met Cha Hee. The wedding car stopped rattling the empty cans at its tail at the borderline hill between Andong and Euiseong.
I am greatly indebted to my parents-in-law, whose benevolence, generosity, and tolerance had embraced my faults and follies of youth endlessly. Both of them have passed away, with their six daughters and one son doing well with their spouses and offspring.
I am also greatly indebted to my great uncle and aunt for my wedding reception which they had held for their nephew and his wife because my parents had gone back home in Taejon after having attended their son's wedding.
-----------------
To make a long story short, my parent's move to Taejon had everything to do with my insecure plan and Chungang's subsequent repudiation. I had negotiated my way, through correspondence, with Chungang University's academic administration office, into the full scholarship benefits for me. But they had repudiated their assured pledge at the final phase. They had mailed me suddenly one day the next spring a sorry note to the effect that they had failed to register me for the sophomore class.
------------------------
I heard and watched a tragic news yesterday on television (October 8, 2010) that "Lecturer of Happiness" Mrs. Choi Yoon Hee had died at a suburban motel room in a suicide pact with her husband. She had left a note to the effect that she had succumbed to the extreme pain from heart and lung diseases.
I shudder at an anxious anticipation at what corner the brutal army of cancer is turning. My doctor told me weeks ago that the numerical index indicating to the incidence of my intestinal glands cancer, specifically lymphatic, is so high that I have to go through the sophisticate examination at a university- level hospital.
I have no time for that. Above all things, I refuse to wear the patient's uniform and lie on the couch. I have to go ahead with this story and finish it in time. My wish is that my loving wife will be able to put my book, if it were to be published until that time, in my casket.
--------------------
Winding up the overnight honeymoon at Daegu City, making a customary three-day stay at Cha Hee's home at Pungsan, we hit the road for Taejon to pay our parents, who had been roughing up at a new place, a courtesy visit. The cab driver gave us an unashamed show of irritation at which we were equally irritated and embarrassed.
The cabbie in his early forties, who, starting igniting the engine of his ugly car grumbling, when, in 20 or so minutes, passing a river bridge, he swerved to a unpaved shallow road, having some back-breaking jolts on some pocked earth, was belching out curse words.
Cha Hee and me, who were forced to get off the cab at the entrance of a particular urban village, had to make knocks on some dwellings and ask questions, was able to enter the residence of parents. It was a ugly-looking shack. They were perplexed at the unnoticed visit. "Why not send us a telegram?" mother said.
I was annoyed at the terrible condition in which my parents had been put. I was to blame for all the troubles they had been going through. Father was really roughing up himself, getting rid of the modest peach farm and well-built wooden house of his own design. I chastised Chungang between my teeth for its distrust.
Mother got herself busy, getting in and out of the room, to feed the uninvited guests, making everything out of nothing. Steamy modest meals were set on a small dining table. Mother was saying sorry for the rough meals.
The winter night was long going. Having done with early supper, and listening to all the soap operas on radio, night was long left. Father said like an army commander's order it's time to sleep. Blankets and bed sheets were supplied for their daughter-in-law and their son, such as they had been.
Whenever I mention the "incident" my wife of 41 years blushes herself. She even negates the occurrence that night. I hold it as a fond memory of youth, and what has been missing is that she has never done me the same hospitality she had done that night again.
Because the room had no windows but the only room door, which was no glass, as mother switched off the only electric bulb, the room was wrapped in a pitch dark and death-like quiet. We were slumber mates to each other, father to mother and me to Cha Hee.
Hardly had some minutes had passed when I was about to slip into sleep. I felt a groping touch: Her left hand was gliding down my belly. My right hand caught hers in between but could not restrain hers, which thrust down to my crotch.
Her willingness to get away with some urgent needs of hers transmitted through the grip of her hand was so strong that I could not breathe much less give a decent cough. Ascertaining the hardness of erection of my staff, she got on top with agility, with her one hand pulling my stuff into her opening, thrusting her body forward deep into mine.
Locked to each other water tight, I was imagining her giving me agile pushes and sterile pulls on top of me, with her two hands around my neck and with her eyes closed, only relishing the intensity of the locking through her spine. In some minutes, the grip of her hands on me was more tightened, with liquids streaming down her loose legs and with her upper body collapsing, then me exploding inside her, with her coming again with some silent shakes, all of which was done with such agility in the wraps of bed sheets.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Novel
Episode 9:In the Pitch Dark Room
It's been ashamed of me as I made a guilty mention of the retrieval of a previous job. A teaching profession couldn't be had like we used to recapture a lost territory. It shouldn't be. It's been so brazen of me to leave and recapture the earlier job of elementary school teaching in such short span of time.
Of course I had not been restored to the same job of the same school. I had presented myself to the local education board and submitted a suggested document in order to be reappointed to a teaching job at an elementary school. As a result, I got my job back at the fall semester of 1968 at Kilan Elementary School about 16 kilometers far from the Jeomgok Elementary School for which Willows had been serving.
This is a very awkward moment. Really. I have to give my readers an apt explanation for my retreat, that is, why I had plunged down to a rustic town again. The one reason: I was not able to register at the administration office of Chungang University for the first semester of the sophomore year, and I was not resourceful enough to withstand an urban life in the national capital.
The gang, really Samaritan, who had been armed with worried considerations, mobbed me, giving out ideas for my salvation. To which I thought it's time I blew a whistle for myself and for them also. I also had to fight an iota of an urge to take advantage of the others' good intentions. (We're willing to finance your whole academic courses!) I said good bye to my love on a winter night and cried all the way home trudging along the long river bank.
I also take this moment to give you readers an insight to the way in which I was and I would be unraveling my story. I am actually writing my story for the third time. And that in a book form. The previous one is on sale in www.textore.com about how many copies have been sold I have no knowledge.
Although I have rewritten the whole story of mine for the third time, what I seek your understanding, about which I am very proud, is that I have never compared notes with the earlier ones. There will naturally be omissions and new additions. I have from time to time been tempted to look into the previous descriptions, but I have fought the urge. So I can assuredly say that no line, sentence or paragraph is identical with each other.
It's been a really torturous process to have taken a fresh route of writing, but I think there's been a reward in its own way: I have experienced and experimented with a wide expanse of an expository prose. And I casually confess that Google has been truly instrumental, that is, I have consulted Google, particularly through its image searches, about the most recommendable lexicographical option out of a lot of conceivable expressions. If this were to see the global light as a successful writing piece, the half of the credit is Google's.
-------------
My class, which I now vaguely guess comprised 60-some students, of which the boy students were dominant, came from valley and riverside villages. They were a very jovial and active group, who were getting along with one another. I saw to it that there would not be a bully or bullies who would keep harassing their classmates.
The parents of my students were mostly farmers, among the rest of whom were merchants, a postman and the holders of other mercenary jobs. The local people were a quite hilarious lot, of whom the Three Cannons of Kilan were famous, three humorous exaggerators, that is.
Kilan, to which my young man had taken a visit as an elementary school teacher, was eight kilometers far from Sun Valley to the south, in which he had spent eight childhood years, and 12 kilometers far from Jeomgok Elementary School, over a hilly pass. Kilan is an intermediary town linked to Cheongsong to the east, Euiseong to the west, and to Andong City to the north west.
Kilan was a sane rustic town. At the time of my residence, the town folks enjoyed exchanging gags. They also enjoyed throwing fishnets over the river but they were optimistic over the catches as they threw and pulled them up.
Kilan, a small cozy town, which is built along a tributary of a great river, the Nakdong River, collects tributaries of its own and is merged into the Nakdong River proper. Kilan could be named as a sort of souvenir town because my young man collected souvenirs of his own.
The thought that my young man had collected a souvenir or two of some sort might be a mistaken notion. Why? In a certain sense, the young man had been collected by a young lady as a souvenir for her, who had premeditatedly ambushed him, snaring him.
The siren, who had long made a transmorphosis of a fatigued young sea man into an obedient pig, assuring herself of the state of the pig's powerlessness and loyal bondage to her, confided to the charmed animal that she had followed a fortuneteller's recommendation: "Go east, and you'll run into your mate."
Taking the fortune teller at her word, she had come to Kilan from Pungsan, opening a seamstress' shop by a roadside on the way to Kilan Elementary School. In the summer of 1969 Cha Hee was 21 years old, and the young man that had been me was 27. In linguistic terms, she had been attracted to me, but in physiological and Freudian terms, she had been in heat, that is, at the peak of her libido, and I might have been at my peak age, too.
She was just like Wanda in the movie Wanda Nevada. She was as young and brilliant as Wanda, as street smart as Wanda had been in the movie, and more beautiful than Wanda herself. I liked the siren in purple dress. I wanted to be the air going inside her dress.
----------------
In the leftist-dominant society, the wording is rampant that everybody is equal, people are the same, things of this kind or that are similar. No way. In the strict sense of word, no people are equal, nothing is the same with each other. All is different, people and things
People are different, in color, gender, age, length and weight, their tastes and job capabilities. People could be ranked in millions of tiers of monthly income and social status, and could be listed in files of intelligence, even in amorous abilities.
In brief, people are different, and things are different, too. Like the sky and earth are different. From the olden times, it's been a commonsensical idea that this is the world of "thousands of differences, and tens of thousands of categories..."
In the leftist-dominant society, the members of the communities have been trained so long by the ideology of identicality and equality and so much influenced by the ill-conceived routines that they have been hampered to think rightly. So it's time we the people are supposed to enhance the awareness of the differences of people and things.
Willows and Cha Hee were different. Whereas Willows reminded to me the contagiousness of my depression to her, Cha Hee was out to stoke its surface. She had a lot of funny stories to tell, of which the story entitled "May I come in naked or fully clothed?" made me laugh.
How she came to hold a fat sack of funny stories was really interesting. Her father, a farmer by profession and a chief of a district political party chapter by pastime, liked to take her second daughter Cha Hee with him to the adult gatherings. She naturally acquired a large repertoire of funny stories.
Her father was different as to how he bestowed an audience with a would-be son-in-law. Unlike a large number of the worldly parents, he was not trying to be difficult to the young visitor. Cha Hee's father, who had been in his late fifties at that time, after greeted by me on an early morning of an early winter day, smiled at me and said, "I am rich in daughters. She is up for grabs. for any young man."
My wedding, which was celebrated by the whole teaching staff of Kilan Elementary School and several fifth-graders of my class, and some friends including Brother Paragon at Euiseong, took place at Andong Wedding Hall, four months after I had met Cha Hee. The wedding car stopped rattling the empty cans at its tail at the borderline hill between Andong and Euiseong.
I am greatly indebted to my parents-in-law, whose benevolence, generosity, and tolerance had embraced my faults and follies of youth endlessly. Both of them have passed away, with their six daughters and one son doing well with their spouses and offspring.
I am also greatly indebted to my great uncle and aunt for my wedding reception which they had held for their nephew and his wife because my parents had gone back home in Taejon after having attended their son's wedding.
-----------------
To make a long story short, my parent's move to Taejon had everything to do with my insecure plan and Chungang's subsequent repudiation. I had negotiated my way, through correspondence, with Chungang University's academic administration office, into the full scholarship benefits for me. But they had repudiated their assured pledge at the final phase. They had mailed me suddenly one day the next spring a sorry note to the effect that they had failed to register me for the sophomore class.
------------------------
I heard and watched a tragic news yesterday on television (October 8, 2010) that "Lecturer of Happiness" Mrs. Choi Yoon Hee had died at a suburban motel room in a suicide pact with her husband. She had left a note to the effect that she had succumbed to the extreme pain from heart and lung diseases.
I shudder at an anxious anticipation at what corner the brutal army of cancer is turning. My doctor told me weeks ago that the numerical index indicating to the incidence of my intestinal glands cancer, specifically lymphatic, is so high that I have to go through the sophisticate examination at a university- level hospital.
I have no time for that. Above all things, I refuse to wear the patient's uniform and lie on the couch. I have to go ahead with this story and finish it in time. My wish is that my loving wife will be able to put my book, if it were to be published until that time, in my casket.
--------------------
Winding up the overnight honeymoon at Daegu City, making a customary three-day stay at Cha Hee's home at Pungsan, we hit the road for Taejon to pay our parents, who had been roughing up at a new place, a courtesy visit. The cab driver gave us an unashamed show of irritation at which we were equally irritated and embarrassed.
The cabbie in his early forties, who, starting igniting the engine of his ugly car grumbling, when, in 20 or so minutes, passing a river bridge, he swerved to a unpaved shallow road, having some back-breaking jolts on some pocked earth, was belching out curse words.
Cha Hee and me, who were forced to get off the cab at the entrance of a particular urban village, had to make knocks on some dwellings and ask questions, was able to enter the residence of parents. It was a ugly-looking shack. They were perplexed at the unnoticed visit. "Why not send us a telegram?" mother said.
I was annoyed at the terrible condition in which my parents had been put. I was to blame for all the troubles they had been going through. Father was really roughing up himself, getting rid of the modest peach farm and well-built wooden house of his own design. I chastised Chungang between my teeth for its distrust.
Mother got herself busy, getting in and out of the room, to feed the uninvited guests, making everything out of nothing. Steamy modest meals were set on a small dining table. Mother was saying sorry for the rough meals.
The winter night was long going. Having done with early supper, and listening to all the soap operas on radio, night was long left. Father said like an army commander's order it's time to sleep. Blankets and bed sheets were supplied for their daughter-in-law and their son, such as they had been.
Whenever I mention the "incident" my wife of 41 years blushes herself. She even negates the occurrence that night. I hold it as a fond memory of youth, and what has been missing is that she has never done me the same hospitality she had done that night again.
Because the room had no windows but the only room door, which was no glass, as mother switched off the only electric bulb, the room was wrapped in a pitch dark and death-like quiet. We were slumber mates to each other, father to mother and me to Cha Hee.
Hardly had some minutes had passed when I was about to slip into sleep. I felt a groping touch: Her left hand was gliding down my belly. My right hand caught hers in between but could not restrain hers, which thrust down to my crotch.
Her willingness to get away with some urgent needs of hers transmitted through the grip of her hand was so strong that I could not breathe much less give a decent cough. Ascertaining the hardness of erection of my staff, she got on top with agility, with her one hand pulling my stuff into her opening, thrusting her body forward deep into mine.
Locked to each other water tight, I was imagining her giving me agile pushes and sterile pulls on top of me, with her two hands around my neck and with her eyes closed, only relishing the intensity of the locking through her spine. In some minutes, the grip of her hands on me was more tightened, with liquids streaming down her loose legs and with her upper body collapsing, then me exploding inside her, with her coming again with some silent shakes, all of which was done with such agility in the wraps of bed sheets.
It's been ashamed of me as I made a guilty mention of the retrieval of a previous job. A teaching profession couldn't be had like we used to recapture a lost territory. It shouldn't be. It's been so brazen of me to leave and recapture the earlier job of elementary school teaching in such short span of time.
Of course I had not been restored to the same job of the same school. I had presented myself to the local education board and submitted a suggested document in order to be reappointed to a teaching job at an elementary school. As a result, I got my job back at the fall semester of 1968 at Kilan Elementary School about 16 kilometers far from the Jeomgok Elementary School for which Willows had been serving.
This is a very awkward moment. Really. I have to give my readers an apt explanation for my retreat, that is, why I had plunged down to a rustic town again. The one reason: I was not able to register at the administration office of Chungang University for the first semester of the sophomore year, and I was not resourceful enough to withstand an urban life in the national capital.
The gang, really Samaritan, who had been armed with worried considerations, mobbed me, giving out ideas for my salvation. To which I thought it's time I blew a whistle for myself and for them also. I also had to fight an iota of an urge to take advantage of the others' good intentions. (We're willing to finance your whole academic courses!) I said good bye to my love on a winter night and cried all the way home trudging along the long river bank.
I also take this moment to give you readers an insight to the way in which I was and I would be unraveling my story. I am actually writing my story for the third time. And that in a book form. The previous one is on sale in www.textore.com about how many copies have been sold I have no knowledge.
Although I have rewritten the whole story of mine for the third time, what I seek your understanding, about which I am very proud, is that I have never compared notes with the earlier ones. There will naturally be omissions and new additions. I have from time to time been tempted to look into the previous descriptions, but I have fought the urge. So I can assuredly say that no line, sentence or paragraph is identical with each other.
It's been a really torturous process to have taken a fresh route of writing, but I think there's been a reward in its own way: I have experienced and experimented with a wide expanse of an expository prose. And I casually confess that Google has been truly instrumental, that is, I have consulted Google, particularly through its image searches, about the most recommendable lexicographical option out of a lot of conceivable expressions. If this were to see the global light as a successful writing piece, the half of the credit is Google's.
-------------
My class, which I now vaguely guess comprised 60-some students, of which the boy students were dominant, came from valley and riverside villages. They were a very jovial and active group, who were getting along with one another. I saw to it that there would not be a bully or bullies who would keep harassing their classmates.
The parents of my students were mostly farmers, among the rest of whom were merchants, a postman and the holders of other mercenary jobs. The local people were a quite hilarious lot, of whom the Three Cannons of Kilan were famous, three humorous exaggerators, that is.
Kilan, to which my young man had taken a visit as an elementary school teacher, was eight kilometers far from Sun Valley to the south, in which he had spent eight childhood years, and 12 kilometers far from Jeomgok Elementary School, over a hilly pass. Kilan is an intermediary town linked to Cheongsong to the east, Euiseong to the west, and to Andong City to the north west.
Kilan was a sane rustic town. At the time of my residence, the town folks enjoyed exchanging gags. They also enjoyed throwing fishnets over the river but they were optimistic over the catches as they threw and pulled them up.
Kilan, a small cozy town, which is built along a tributary of a great river, the Nakdong River, collects tributaries of its own and is merged into the Nakdong River proper. Kilan could be named as a sort of souvenir town because my young man collected souvenirs of his own.
The thought that my young man had collected a souvenir or two of some sort might be a mistaken notion. Why? In a certain sense, the young man had been collected by a young lady as a souvenir for her, who had premeditatedly ambushed him, snaring him.
The siren, who had long made a transmorphosis of a fatigued young sea man into an obedient pig, assuring herself of the state of the pig's powerlessness and loyal bondage to her, confided to the charmed animal that she had followed a fortuneteller's recommendation: "Go east, and you'll run into your mate."
Taking the fortune teller at her word, she had come to Kilan from Pungsan, opening a seamstress' shop by a roadside on the way to Kilan Elementary School. In the summer of 1969 Cha Hee was 21 years old, and the young man that had been me was 27. In linguistic terms, she had been attracted to me, but in physiological and Freudian terms, she had been in heat, that is, at the peak of her libido, and I might have been at my peak age, too.
She was just like Wanda in the movie Wanda Nevada. She was as young and brilliant as Wanda, as street smart as Wanda had been in the movie, and more beautiful than Wanda herself. I liked the siren in purple dress. I wanted to be the air going inside her dress.
----------------
In the leftist-dominant society, the wording is rampant that everybody is equal, people are the same, things of this kind or that are similar. No way. In the strict sense of word, no people are equal, nothing is the same with each other. All is different, people and things
People are different, in color, gender, age, length and weight, their tastes and job capabilities. People could be ranked in millions of tiers of monthly income and social status, and could be listed in files of intelligence, even in amorous abilities.
In brief, people are different, and things are different, too. Like the sky and earth are different. From the olden times, it's been a commonsensical idea that this is the world of "thousands of differences, and tens of thousands of categories..."
In the leftist-dominant society, the members of the communities have been trained so long by the ideology of identicality and equality and so much influenced by the ill-conceived routines that they have been hampered to think rightly. So it's time we the people are supposed to enhance the awareness of the differences of people and things.
Willows and Cha Hee were different. Whereas Willows reminded to me the contagiousness of my depression to her, Cha Hee was out to stoke its surface. She had a lot of funny stories to tell, of which the story entitled "May I come in naked or fully clothed?" made me laugh.
How she came to hold a fat sack of funny stories was really interesting. Her father, a farmer by profession and a chief of a district political party chapter by pastime, liked to take her second daughter Cha Hee with him to the adult gatherings. She naturally acquired a large repertoire of funny stories.
Her father was different as to how he bestowed an audience with a would-be son-in-law. Unlike a large number of the worldly parents, he was not trying to be difficult to the young visitor. Cha Hee's father, who had been in his late fifties at that time, after greeted by me on an early morning of an early winter day, smiled at me and said, "I am rich in daughters. She is up for grabs. for any young man."
My wedding, which was celebrated by the whole teaching staff of Kilan Elementary School and several fifth-graders of my class, and some friends including Brother Paragon at Euiseong, took place at Andong Wedding Hall, four months after I had met Cha Hee. The wedding car stopped rattling the empty cans at its tail at the borderline hill between Andong and Euiseong.
I am greatly indebted to my parents-in-law, whose benevolence, generosity, and tolerance had embraced my faults and follies of youth endlessly. Both of them have passed away, with their six daughters and one son doing well with their spouses and offspring.
I am also greatly indebted to my great uncle and aunt for my wedding reception which they had held for their nephew and his wife because my parents had gone back home in Taejon after having attended their son's wedding.
-----------------
To make a long story short, my parent's move to Taejon had everything to do with my insecure plan and Chungang's subsequent repudiation. I had negotiated my way, through correspondence, with Chungang University's academic administration office, into the full scholarship benefits for me. But they had repudiated their assured pledge at the final phase. They had mailed me suddenly one day the next spring a sorry note to the effect that they had failed to register me for the sophomore class.
------------------------
I heard and watched a tragic news yesterday on television (October 8, 2010) that "Lecturer of Happiness" Mrs. Choi Yoon Hee had died at a suburban motel room in a suicide pact with her husband. She had left a note to the effect that she had succumbed to the extreme pain from heart and lung diseases.
I shudder at an anxious anticipation at what corner the brutal army of cancer is turning. My doctor told me weeks ago that the numerical index indicating to the incidence of my intestinal glands cancer, specifically lymphatic, is so high that I have to go through the sophisticate examination at a university- level hospital.
I have no time for that. Above all things, I refuse to wear the patient's uniform and lie on the couch. I have to go ahead with this story and finish it in time. My wish is that my loving wife will be able to put my book, if it were to be published until that time, in my casket.
--------------------
Winding up the overnight honeymoon at Daegu City, making a customary three-day stay at Cha Hee's home at Pungsan, we hit the road for Taejon to pay our parents, who had been roughing up at a new place, a courtesy visit. The cab driver gave us an unashamed show of irritation at which we were equally irritated and embarrassed.
The cabbie in his early forties, who, starting igniting the engine of his ugly car grumbling, when, in 20 or so minutes, passing a river bridge, he swerved to a unpaved shallow road, having some back-breaking jolts on some pocked earth, was belching out curse words.
Cha Hee and me, who were forced to get off the cab at the entrance of a particular urban village, had to make knocks on some dwellings and ask questions, was able to enter the residence of parents. It was a ugly-looking shack. They were perplexed at the unnoticed visit. "Why not send us a telegram?" mother said.
I was annoyed at the terrible condition in which my parents had been put. I was to blame for all the troubles they had been going through. Father was really roughing up himself, getting rid of the modest peach farm and well-built wooden house of his own design. I chastised Chungang between my teeth for its distrust.
Mother got herself busy, getting in and out of the room, to feed the uninvited guests, making everything out of nothing. Steamy modest meals were set on a small dining table. Mother was saying sorry for the rough meals.
The winter night was long going. Having done with early supper, and listening to all the soap operas on radio, night was long left. Father said like an army commander's order it's time to sleep. Blankets and bed sheets were supplied for their daughter-in-law and their son, such as they had been.
Whenever I mention the "incident" my wife of 41 years blushes herself. She even negates the occurrence that night. I hold it as a fond memory of youth, and what has been missing is that she has never done me the same hospitality she had done that night again.
Because the room had no windows but the only room door, which was no glass, as mother switched off the only electric bulb, the room was wrapped in a pitch dark and death-like quiet. We were slumber mates to each other, father to mother and me to Cha Hee.
Hardly had some minutes had passed when I was about to slip into sleep. I felt a groping touch: Her left hand was gliding down my belly. My right hand caught hers in between but could not restrain hers, which thrust down to my crotch.
Her willingness to get away with some urgent needs of hers transmitted through the grip of her hand was so strong that I could not breathe much less give a decent cough. Ascertaining the hardness of erection of my staff, she got on top with agility, with her one hand pulling my stuff into her opening, thrusting her body forward deep into mine.
Locked to each other water tight, I was imagining her giving me agile pushes and sterile pulls on top of me, with her two hands around my neck and with her eyes closed, only relishing the intensity of the locking through her spine. In some minutes, the grip of her hands on me was more tightened, with liquids streaming down her loose legs and with her upper body collapsing, then me exploding inside her, with her coming again with some silent shakes, all of which was done with such agility in the wraps of bed sheets.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
अ Novel
Episode 8: I Was Crazy
It was just like you came into the real world out of the movie theater where you were watching the movie. Wisps of wind got you shuddering The army career in the waning months of my 30-some month service was, when looked from today and from the day of my discharge at that time, a cozy cocoon.
The folks at my home town were almost the same in numbers and in their jobs, but what differed in themselves was that they were getting older and nastier than ever before. The environs they were living in were almost the same as before.
I was capacitated in my district as an elementary school teacher. In easy English, I took my earlier job back and that at my home town. Cousin West. a manager at Euiseong Education Bureau, three-times-removed cousin of mine, who was 20-some years older than me, might have exercised some influence on my reappointment, which made my commuting possible to and from Jeomgok Elementary School.
It was too static a landscape..The uncles of the village were still ploughing the field using cattle. The heavy load was still on father's A-Frame. I don't say nothing did not change at all. Father built his own wooden house with his own carpenter's design. Which was a real great thing. All that was needed now was an earner of a decent income.
I went to the army to change myself. I changed of course a little bit, but I did not change much. The red eyes of snipers' disappeared, but fear settled inside me, and with me forever. I lived with fear; Fear was my companion.
Everything was fear itself. I was afraid of the school and the school staff. They looked to be smarter, wiser, and above all things, richer. Rumors had it that the school teachers were real rich, so much so that some teachers were rumored to have bought this or that real estate that had been mostly paddy fields.
The cranes were coming onto the woods mostly of the oak trees. It was April and the cranes were perched on the branches of the taller oak trees. The beautiful wood parks are gone now of course by development sort of.
The school consisted of a dozen-some classes and one teacher took charge of one class. Of the school teachers, the teachers of the Kim family clan occupied the top 5 list, who were smarter than the rest of the teaching staff.
Willows, one of the four lady teachers, didn't come from the Kim clan but she was a maverick sort of. She was medium height, which means she stood below 160 centimeters. She had an affable feature and a likable calm voice. She walked steady, spoke in a very low voice. She was two years junior to me.
Of all the characteristic traits of Willows, her penmanship was wonderful, that is, a state of the art. The characters on her lettering pad, the writing pad or on the students' grade book were touting a feat of her marvelous penmanship with the apt distance between pretty characters--sesame fashion.
She walked right, said right things, and of course wrote right characters. She was a paragon of all the virtue. She lived with her mother in a small house with the front of a black gate. I thought her in awe and I looked at the house with black gate with reverence.
She said in a calm and subdued voice, "Your depression is contagious," It was on an afternoon of my classroom of an early winter. A warm ray of afternoon sun was slanting down through the glass window on my classroom from which my students had commuted back home. I didn't say anything, but I acknowledged that she had said the right thing, by which I was going to be depressed again.
---------------
Don't blame me with Iris. I just didn't not think of Iris. I had thought of her more than a dozen times, which had racked my brains.
I liked her, and if I am allowed to speak out, I can say I loved her. But love is a bilateral thing. I didn't have a chance to go see her and say to her, "I like you!"
She was a far-away thing, that is, a revered presence. From the moment I had witnessed her at her graduation of her elementary school, she became my idol. She shined me with her own brightness. It was a bliss for me to discover her but I couldn't get to her because I had been such a trivial man.
"Please Iris, grow up fine," I had prayed. I prayed Iris would grow up to be a fine lady. It was thrilling to imagine her in her high school uniform. And I dreamed there might come some other day that I would meet her at last.
----------------------
Confrontation Day Three: Shall I be able to finish this story? On what day shall I be found out to my wife and sons? Will they blame me for my distrust of my family and abandon them? Will they cry for me to surrender so easily to death rather than fight it out, trusting the contemporary medicine and capable doctors? On what day will a serious surge of a cancerous pain begin with gusto?
My heart aches, but I think I'll have to get it over with. Thinking of Willows, I think it was odd, that is, a surreal love. I, Willows and me, or we, whosoever, did not touch each other, and didn't even shake each other's hands, either. I, Willows and me, or we, whosoever, didn't say to each other, "I love you!" We or anyone of us didn't try to propose to marry.
However, above all those lacks of niceties and intermediate procedures, I assure you, we knew it was love, and we kept to each other the commitment to marriage, and the cancellation of it was considered as betrayal. Mind, instead of language, of love found its way to each other.
-------------------
Grandma's memory was deteriorating. Too tall and too blunt, her first daughter-in-law, who had recently cohabited with her mother-in-law, casually pointed that out at first. "Mama is so strange," she started talking, first to her husband with reservations, second to her sons with some assurance, and lastly to her neighbors with some jest.
Grandma had ruled our family, that is, my parents and their offspring, dictatorially but her long dictatorship was possible because mom had been so obedient. In my hindsight recollection, my grandma's misfortune in her later years might have not developed if she had spent her final years with us, that is, with my parents.
But after we had moved to a great place from Sun Valley, that is, to the water mill house, she had moved to her first-son's. She had not liked the idea but she had had to accede to the traditional custom. The move actually meant that her departure from the world was near at hand.
Even after she moved in her first son's house, grandma commuted to our house to meet mom and talk her grumble about my great aunt. My mom then had mildly rebuked grandma, that is, her mother-in-law who had kept abusing her so mercilessly for so long.
After grandma had gone back home, such as it had been, mom had been more often than not seen to wipe her tears thinking of her poor mother-in-law's plight. Grandma's visits became less often, and in no time, I started hearing about grandma's banned outings.
------------------------
I conspired to leave the place again. My mind dictated to me that I settle, as a decent income earner, I have to lighten the heavy load of my father, and please mother, but my body led me aside from the place
Too cramped, Hard to breathe much less move. First of all, I couldn't stand father. He overworked his sons that were my brother and me. No, he overworked himself so much so that made the onlookers shriek. He knew how to work but didn't know how to take a break.
He didn't know how to say to his people about him to take some rest. He only worked himself endlessly for all to see. He didn't even raise his body but bent his to the ground. The whole parts of his body were actually glued to earth. The onlookers took the message to mean to work without stopping.
I couldn't stand mama, either. Father was too dominant and overbearing, but mother was too powerless. It was too painful of me to look at mama on the other end of the scale. Mama should have acted as an arbitrator, negotiator, coordinator, or consultant. I wanted to flee.
-----------------
Exodus is a wrong word, of course. The person who had done an exodus led a group of people, just like we see in the case of Moses' Exodus from Egypt, whereas the person who had done an escape used to do that for his own sake.
I feel incredibly ashamed of my young man who was determined to escape from the reality--from his grandma with deteriorating memory, from the pressure of his dad, from his mom's powerlessness, and finally from Willows' perfection.
Where to? I planned to go to college in Seoul at the relatively late years of 25. Nothing was set but determination, that is, an overblown determination. I had no money and no person to finance my college education, either. Even the target college was not set and I had not touched high school subjects for more than eight years. There was no home in Seoul to house or board my young man.
It would not be worthy of a comment about the severity or sincerity of the amorous feeling between Willows and me. Some might make a mockery of the presence of such emotion and the others might scoff at the mention itself.
The assertion could be feasible because the one party would keep mum while I, as a writer, such as he might be, would keep mouthing about it by myself. No one would come out to verify the enthusiasm on the verge of insanity of my love toward her.
The one party, Willows, remained an iceberg, or, seemed to be an iceberg, whereas I remained a volcano, or, seemed to be a dormant volcano which was about to erupt in any minute.
How severe? I dreamed of her so often. I was looking for her mail on a daily basis. I more often than not dashed, in the broad city street, to a wrong woman of medium height in green overcoat, met with startled eyes.
------------
I had gone to college in March, 1967. Standing on the campus ground of Chungang University, I thought back the late few months with mixed feelings. On financial and other terms, I shouldn't have come to college. So I was not devastated but understood about the fact that my parents hadn't said a word of cheers or health care at our parting.
Willows hadn't come to see me off but her mother had wished me well instead. I had overstayed a night at my friend's that had been Willows' close relative and Willows' mother had deigned to rise so early as to say goodby to me for her daughter. "Forget about any other worry, and only study hard," she had said.
Today exactly 43 years later, I feel I am indebted to her to a great deal and I am bound to say a few words of thanks to Madam Reverend, Willows' mother about her unfathomable warm considerations to me personally. And I deeply apologize to her for my repudiation.
In recollection, it had been a turbulent year with two and a half stormy months and sleepless nights. It had taken a full seven days to persuade my parents to allow me a collegial education by and for myself. A real hard cramming for a college entrance exam. The target college was decided on Chungang University.
It was winter. To stem the onrush of drowsiness, I made my room deprived of heating and even when I took to a cat sleep the room door was let to be ajar. I had imagined my proud name, during the cramming period, on the list of successful candidates for the entrance exam. Even during exam preparation, father popped his head in my room once or twice and condescendingly asked, "How about thinking twice, son?"
---------------------
Once in, I was able to forget all the worldly worries and apprehensions. A country boy, who had been badgered by bullies, got surrounded with amiable and intelligent allies. A traumatic victim, who had gotten scared and terrorized by nightmarish snipers, got himself felt cured by the therapeutic environs of college. A frontline stretcher guy, who had been bored by the routine of details, got enlivened by the lively atmosphere of the college campus.
There were not cries but laughter. There were only smiles but not sneers. There was only peace but not war. There were no arguments but low whispers.
They were not getting old. When I was sharing with my classmates junior to me sitting on one of long benches which had taken its place around the Blue Dragon Pond, the pretty young coeds, taking their fat textbooks in their arms, shot friendly glances toward the gang, me included.
If I were to select a few moments or hours or months or years as my own, and as the best of mine, I would not be reluctant to call my years at college the jewel of my life. I had thought so at that time, and I think so today. If you were to call one particular place on earth a paradise, college will be it. In there, time stops going, with timepieces stopping running, with your consciousness of passage paralyzed, shut off from the outside world.
Once outside of the campus gate, I was battered with all the gamut of noises, odors, and sights. Long faces were ganging upon me: Grandma's deteriorating memories were going worse. Second sister who had been born at Sun Valley after the Korean War left home to become a Buddhist nun.
A mail from Willows was waiting at the house of my tutoree who was going to elementary school as six-year-student going sitting for a middle school exam the next year. The home was my college classmate's at which I was actually quartered as a private in-house-tutor for his younger brother.
The letter was a kind of courtesy mail sent to my previous long letter. It was as short as possible and as simple as a business letter. The characters of the mail were as neat as blue sky and as tiny as sesame seeds. In the letter was enveloped an envelope, of all the envelopes, of Iris.
Willows described in her letter how she had happened to send the envelope which had been sent to my previous service residence, Jeomgok Elementary School. In the enveloped letter, Iris, in three years' absence, she said hello to me. She found my name in a district paper. She went to a commercial high school. She had to because she would take care of her sister and brother. At the tail of the letter, she apologized to me for the photo, excusing herself that there had been no right photo of hers then.
I thanked hundreds of times to Iris' appreciative mind to seek me who was so trivial, so timid, and so inconsiderate. I envisioned the tortuous route her beautiful mind had trailed all along--the social section of a district newspaper to Jeomgok Elementary School, via Willows' hand, and finally to me to Seoul.
I apologize this time to Iris myself. I remember very vividly now I had said some strange remarks which might have turned out brutal to her, which I shouldn't have said, and which had been so weird and surreal. Which had been a sure sign of immaturity and inconsideration.
Looking back on my young man and people about him at that time, I realize that the lack of resourceful preparations and subsequent recklessness on his part had caused them a lot of indescribable troubles and inconveniences. I am hugely indebted to Y.C. Kwon, C.S. Hwang, Y.S. Lee, D.I. Park, and others for their warm considerations. Kwon arranged an accommodation and a tutorial job for me; Hwang even sold his gold ring for my allowance; And the others chipped in to give me conveniences of this sort or that. The tuition fee for the second semester in 1967 was paid by the advance payment of the tutorial charges.
There had not just been tough days but some shiny moments in store for me. Professor Paik of the politics department of the college called me one afternoon of the early fall in his research room and praised me for the full marks he had given me. After a few amicable moments he casually asked, "Are you married?"
"Not yet, sir. But I have a girl friend, sir!" To my smooth and unhesitant answer, he beamed. Getting out of the research room and stepping down the long stone stairs of the Law College, I asked myself what it meant by Willows. I wondered aloud whether Willows was a real girl friend in the true sense of the word. She had not sent me a letter by herself unless I had. I had imagined myself for the full summer days of that year running into Willows in a street of Seoul. I was crazy.
It was just like you came into the real world out of the movie theater where you were watching the movie. Wisps of wind got you shuddering The army career in the waning months of my 30-some month service was, when looked from today and from the day of my discharge at that time, a cozy cocoon.
The folks at my home town were almost the same in numbers and in their jobs, but what differed in themselves was that they were getting older and nastier than ever before. The environs they were living in were almost the same as before.
I was capacitated in my district as an elementary school teacher. In easy English, I took my earlier job back and that at my home town. Cousin West. a manager at Euiseong Education Bureau, three-times-removed cousin of mine, who was 20-some years older than me, might have exercised some influence on my reappointment, which made my commuting possible to and from Jeomgok Elementary School.
It was too static a landscape..The uncles of the village were still ploughing the field using cattle. The heavy load was still on father's A-Frame. I don't say nothing did not change at all. Father built his own wooden house with his own carpenter's design. Which was a real great thing. All that was needed now was an earner of a decent income.
I went to the army to change myself. I changed of course a little bit, but I did not change much. The red eyes of snipers' disappeared, but fear settled inside me, and with me forever. I lived with fear; Fear was my companion.
Everything was fear itself. I was afraid of the school and the school staff. They looked to be smarter, wiser, and above all things, richer. Rumors had it that the school teachers were real rich, so much so that some teachers were rumored to have bought this or that real estate that had been mostly paddy fields.
The cranes were coming onto the woods mostly of the oak trees. It was April and the cranes were perched on the branches of the taller oak trees. The beautiful wood parks are gone now of course by development sort of.
The school consisted of a dozen-some classes and one teacher took charge of one class. Of the school teachers, the teachers of the Kim family clan occupied the top 5 list, who were smarter than the rest of the teaching staff.
Willows, one of the four lady teachers, didn't come from the Kim clan but she was a maverick sort of. She was medium height, which means she stood below 160 centimeters. She had an affable feature and a likable calm voice. She walked steady, spoke in a very low voice. She was two years junior to me.
Of all the characteristic traits of Willows, her penmanship was wonderful, that is, a state of the art. The characters on her lettering pad, the writing pad or on the students' grade book were touting a feat of her marvelous penmanship with the apt distance between pretty characters--sesame fashion.
She walked right, said right things, and of course wrote right characters. She was a paragon of all the virtue. She lived with her mother in a small house with the front of a black gate. I thought her in awe and I looked at the house with black gate with reverence.
She said in a calm and subdued voice, "Your depression is contagious," It was on an afternoon of my classroom of an early winter. A warm ray of afternoon sun was slanting down through the glass window on my classroom from which my students had commuted back home. I didn't say anything, but I acknowledged that she had said the right thing, by which I was going to be depressed again.
---------------
Don't blame me with Iris. I just didn't not think of Iris. I had thought of her more than a dozen times, which had racked my brains.
I liked her, and if I am allowed to speak out, I can say I loved her. But love is a bilateral thing. I didn't have a chance to go see her and say to her, "I like you!"
She was a far-away thing, that is, a revered presence. From the moment I had witnessed her at her graduation of her elementary school, she became my idol. She shined me with her own brightness. It was a bliss for me to discover her but I couldn't get to her because I had been such a trivial man.
"Please Iris, grow up fine," I had prayed. I prayed Iris would grow up to be a fine lady. It was thrilling to imagine her in her high school uniform. And I dreamed there might come some other day that I would meet her at last.
----------------------
Confrontation Day Three: Shall I be able to finish this story? On what day shall I be found out to my wife and sons? Will they blame me for my distrust of my family and abandon them? Will they cry for me to surrender so easily to death rather than fight it out, trusting the contemporary medicine and capable doctors? On what day will a serious surge of a cancerous pain begin with gusto?
My heart aches, but I think I'll have to get it over with. Thinking of Willows, I think it was odd, that is, a surreal love. I, Willows and me, or we, whosoever, did not touch each other, and didn't even shake each other's hands, either. I, Willows and me, or we, whosoever, didn't say to each other, "I love you!" We or anyone of us didn't try to propose to marry.
However, above all those lacks of niceties and intermediate procedures, I assure you, we knew it was love, and we kept to each other the commitment to marriage, and the cancellation of it was considered as betrayal. Mind, instead of language, of love found its way to each other.
-------------------
Grandma's memory was deteriorating. Too tall and too blunt, her first daughter-in-law, who had recently cohabited with her mother-in-law, casually pointed that out at first. "Mama is so strange," she started talking, first to her husband with reservations, second to her sons with some assurance, and lastly to her neighbors with some jest.
Grandma had ruled our family, that is, my parents and their offspring, dictatorially but her long dictatorship was possible because mom had been so obedient. In my hindsight recollection, my grandma's misfortune in her later years might have not developed if she had spent her final years with us, that is, with my parents.
But after we had moved to a great place from Sun Valley, that is, to the water mill house, she had moved to her first-son's. She had not liked the idea but she had had to accede to the traditional custom. The move actually meant that her departure from the world was near at hand.
Even after she moved in her first son's house, grandma commuted to our house to meet mom and talk her grumble about my great aunt. My mom then had mildly rebuked grandma, that is, her mother-in-law who had kept abusing her so mercilessly for so long.
After grandma had gone back home, such as it had been, mom had been more often than not seen to wipe her tears thinking of her poor mother-in-law's plight. Grandma's visits became less often, and in no time, I started hearing about grandma's banned outings.
------------------------
I conspired to leave the place again. My mind dictated to me that I settle, as a decent income earner, I have to lighten the heavy load of my father, and please mother, but my body led me aside from the place
Too cramped, Hard to breathe much less move. First of all, I couldn't stand father. He overworked his sons that were my brother and me. No, he overworked himself so much so that made the onlookers shriek. He knew how to work but didn't know how to take a break.
He didn't know how to say to his people about him to take some rest. He only worked himself endlessly for all to see. He didn't even raise his body but bent his to the ground. The whole parts of his body were actually glued to earth. The onlookers took the message to mean to work without stopping.
I couldn't stand mama, either. Father was too dominant and overbearing, but mother was too powerless. It was too painful of me to look at mama on the other end of the scale. Mama should have acted as an arbitrator, negotiator, coordinator, or consultant. I wanted to flee.
-----------------
Exodus is a wrong word, of course. The person who had done an exodus led a group of people, just like we see in the case of Moses' Exodus from Egypt, whereas the person who had done an escape used to do that for his own sake.
I feel incredibly ashamed of my young man who was determined to escape from the reality--from his grandma with deteriorating memory, from the pressure of his dad, from his mom's powerlessness, and finally from Willows' perfection.
Where to? I planned to go to college in Seoul at the relatively late years of 25. Nothing was set but determination, that is, an overblown determination. I had no money and no person to finance my college education, either. Even the target college was not set and I had not touched high school subjects for more than eight years. There was no home in Seoul to house or board my young man.
It would not be worthy of a comment about the severity or sincerity of the amorous feeling between Willows and me. Some might make a mockery of the presence of such emotion and the others might scoff at the mention itself.
The assertion could be feasible because the one party would keep mum while I, as a writer, such as he might be, would keep mouthing about it by myself. No one would come out to verify the enthusiasm on the verge of insanity of my love toward her.
The one party, Willows, remained an iceberg, or, seemed to be an iceberg, whereas I remained a volcano, or, seemed to be a dormant volcano which was about to erupt in any minute.
How severe? I dreamed of her so often. I was looking for her mail on a daily basis. I more often than not dashed, in the broad city street, to a wrong woman of medium height in green overcoat, met with startled eyes.
------------
I had gone to college in March, 1967. Standing on the campus ground of Chungang University, I thought back the late few months with mixed feelings. On financial and other terms, I shouldn't have come to college. So I was not devastated but understood about the fact that my parents hadn't said a word of cheers or health care at our parting.
Willows hadn't come to see me off but her mother had wished me well instead. I had overstayed a night at my friend's that had been Willows' close relative and Willows' mother had deigned to rise so early as to say goodby to me for her daughter. "Forget about any other worry, and only study hard," she had said.
Today exactly 43 years later, I feel I am indebted to her to a great deal and I am bound to say a few words of thanks to Madam Reverend, Willows' mother about her unfathomable warm considerations to me personally. And I deeply apologize to her for my repudiation.
In recollection, it had been a turbulent year with two and a half stormy months and sleepless nights. It had taken a full seven days to persuade my parents to allow me a collegial education by and for myself. A real hard cramming for a college entrance exam. The target college was decided on Chungang University.
It was winter. To stem the onrush of drowsiness, I made my room deprived of heating and even when I took to a cat sleep the room door was let to be ajar. I had imagined my proud name, during the cramming period, on the list of successful candidates for the entrance exam. Even during exam preparation, father popped his head in my room once or twice and condescendingly asked, "How about thinking twice, son?"
---------------------
Once in, I was able to forget all the worldly worries and apprehensions. A country boy, who had been badgered by bullies, got surrounded with amiable and intelligent allies. A traumatic victim, who had gotten scared and terrorized by nightmarish snipers, got himself felt cured by the therapeutic environs of college. A frontline stretcher guy, who had been bored by the routine of details, got enlivened by the lively atmosphere of the college campus.
There were not cries but laughter. There were only smiles but not sneers. There was only peace but not war. There were no arguments but low whispers.
They were not getting old. When I was sharing with my classmates junior to me sitting on one of long benches which had taken its place around the Blue Dragon Pond, the pretty young coeds, taking their fat textbooks in their arms, shot friendly glances toward the gang, me included.
If I were to select a few moments or hours or months or years as my own, and as the best of mine, I would not be reluctant to call my years at college the jewel of my life. I had thought so at that time, and I think so today. If you were to call one particular place on earth a paradise, college will be it. In there, time stops going, with timepieces stopping running, with your consciousness of passage paralyzed, shut off from the outside world.
Once outside of the campus gate, I was battered with all the gamut of noises, odors, and sights. Long faces were ganging upon me: Grandma's deteriorating memories were going worse. Second sister who had been born at Sun Valley after the Korean War left home to become a Buddhist nun.
A mail from Willows was waiting at the house of my tutoree who was going to elementary school as six-year-student going sitting for a middle school exam the next year. The home was my college classmate's at which I was actually quartered as a private in-house-tutor for his younger brother.
The letter was a kind of courtesy mail sent to my previous long letter. It was as short as possible and as simple as a business letter. The characters of the mail were as neat as blue sky and as tiny as sesame seeds. In the letter was enveloped an envelope, of all the envelopes, of Iris.
Willows described in her letter how she had happened to send the envelope which had been sent to my previous service residence, Jeomgok Elementary School. In the enveloped letter, Iris, in three years' absence, she said hello to me. She found my name in a district paper. She went to a commercial high school. She had to because she would take care of her sister and brother. At the tail of the letter, she apologized to me for the photo, excusing herself that there had been no right photo of hers then.
I thanked hundreds of times to Iris' appreciative mind to seek me who was so trivial, so timid, and so inconsiderate. I envisioned the tortuous route her beautiful mind had trailed all along--the social section of a district newspaper to Jeomgok Elementary School, via Willows' hand, and finally to me to Seoul.
I apologize this time to Iris myself. I remember very vividly now I had said some strange remarks which might have turned out brutal to her, which I shouldn't have said, and which had been so weird and surreal. Which had been a sure sign of immaturity and inconsideration.
Looking back on my young man and people about him at that time, I realize that the lack of resourceful preparations and subsequent recklessness on his part had caused them a lot of indescribable troubles and inconveniences. I am hugely indebted to Y.C. Kwon, C.S. Hwang, Y.S. Lee, D.I. Park, and others for their warm considerations. Kwon arranged an accommodation and a tutorial job for me; Hwang even sold his gold ring for my allowance; And the others chipped in to give me conveniences of this sort or that. The tuition fee for the second semester in 1967 was paid by the advance payment of the tutorial charges.
There had not just been tough days but some shiny moments in store for me. Professor Paik of the politics department of the college called me one afternoon of the early fall in his research room and praised me for the full marks he had given me. After a few amicable moments he casually asked, "Are you married?"
"Not yet, sir. But I have a girl friend, sir!" To my smooth and unhesitant answer, he beamed. Getting out of the research room and stepping down the long stone stairs of the Law College, I asked myself what it meant by Willows. I wondered aloud whether Willows was a real girl friend in the true sense of the word. She had not sent me a letter by herself unless I had. I had imagined myself for the full summer days of that year running into Willows in a street of Seoul. I was crazy.
पिसोदे७~ Episode7
Episode 1: The Girl on a Swing
I met the girl on a summer's day on the children's playground of my apartment complex in Seoul, South Korea. It was the middle of June, 2010. She was on a swing, riding it. She was on it, kick pushing it high up with verve.
She was tall for her age. She was thin but not skinny. She had smiling long face and wore funny glasses with no lenses. She was wearing a slung denim skirt reaching down the knee.
I was with Cyon, my grand daughter of six. She wanted to ride on a swing, so I took her to the place, trying to push her on the swing. Cyon said no to my effort. She said she wanted to kick push it by herself. She did it very well.
Time flies. It was like yesterday that Cyon had been on a sitting swing. When Cyon and her parents called on us on every other week, her grandma used to take Cyon to the place, sitting her on the swing and pushing her. On each pushing, Cyon said to her grandma, "much stronger," which meant that she wanted to be pushed much higher.
It once happened that my wife, urged by her grand daughter that she be pushed higher, had given it a real hard push. In an instant, Cyon lost the grip of the swing wire, flying into the air and making a crash landing on the playground, with her mouth full of sand dust.
Though Cyon rejected the idea of being pushed by insisting on doing it herself, push kicking it higher and higher from the ground, I was on nerves, glancing at her frail hands. Of course, she seemed to be holding tightly on the wire, but her over-confidence made me worrisome, still.
Fact is the girl of next swing started talking to Cyon, asking about Cyon's age or something. I said "five years" from the railing on which I was sitting, then Cyon was correcting it, as if muttering to herself "not five years but six years." There was something else the girl was boasting about. She said she was strong, so much so that she could beat the class in arm wrestling. I looked up at her arms which seemed no less frail.
I was worried about their safety, that is, Cyon's safety, above all things. I was wondering why they were talking while moving on the swing. "Why not concentrate?" I wondered aloud. They did not know that they could fall down to the ground with brain concussion. "Hold on, Cyon!" I shouted. And I shouted to the other girl, "Stop talking to each other, O.K.?" Nonetheless, the girl over was giggling.
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I have had a memory of an unwholesome experience as a child. I had been a loner, living as a lonely boy in a remote mountain-deep valley. So bashful and shy I had been that I hadn't talked to a girl, any girl on the village.
It was Dano, the fifth day of the fifth month in the lunar calendar. It was a happy day for all the village folks, who had a lot of things to celebrate. The sky was high and clear. I had been on a swing.
"Get on and fly it," I was told to get on the swing from uncles of the family clan, who had made the village swing for half the day long yesterday. They lifted me up and let me get on it, which was a little tough at first, but some uncle helped me get on it with my two feet.
Before I knew, a girl, who had been much older and taller than me, jumped on the swing, namely my swing, facing me. I was astonished. Shocked was the right word for the occasion. I fell from the swing to the ground as a result, with my left arm broken,
My grandma had raced to the doctor's, or the only doctor's office in the town, carrying her grandson on her back. The doctor had fixed it in a hurried and a wrong way. That's how I have had a warped left arm.
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The girl on the swing loomed large to me. I imagined for just a moment that the fearful girl on a Dano day of my boyhood years materialized. Before I knew, she got off from the swing and appeared beside me. In correct words, she seemed to appear beside me.
"May I sit beside you?" she said. I fantasized for just a while if I was dreaming. The voice sounded as if it was coming from a girl of my earlier memory farther away. I was not able to raise or turn my head toward her. She seemed to have made a metamorphosis of an old man of me into a shy and bashful boy. I found myself actually blushing. Shame on you.
I wondered why she was so immune to a stranger, that is, why she was not afraid of an adult man, regardless of whether he was young or old. I also wondered aloud whether she was cut off from the city legends, that is, the horror stories in which the rapists would take advantage of the extremely young victim's ignorance and insouciance.
I didn't know how to greet to the girl who had come suddenly close next to me just as I hadn't known it as a little boy sixty or so years ago at the remote valley and on the swing on my earlier Dano day. I was at a loss how to respond to the opposite sex. I haven't developed a skill all these years. I only said, "Of course, you may."
I was curious to know the other day just as I had been so as a boy why the girl on the swing approached me, saying hello to me, and the girl far older and taller than me had jumped on the swing, giving me a frontal jump.
Episode 2: "Live with Me, darling!"
Like air, wind is invisible, isn't it? As the wind crosses rivers and mountains, dream also crosses the rivers and mountains, doesn't it? As the wind has no borders, dream also knows no borders, doesn't it?
My earlier life before my parents, if it could have been designated as such, might have been the wind, the river and the mountain, might it not? Something, which could be called me myself, would have been without form, the limit and the border, would it not?
Who am I? Am I some existence which had been formless and traceless, or the sum of what could be termed without form, without trace, and without origin? Am I entitled to ask myself or someone else these silly questions?
As a lonely boy at a remote mountain valley, I had no peers to talk to nor peer pressure that forced me to do this or that. My grandma was busy carping her daughter-in-law, that is, my poor mom, virtually every minute of every day. My Mom was also busy excusing herself, weeping and whining. My Dad was busy, too, hitting the hills cutting the fire woods.
I was busy, too. I was too lonely, which made me busy. I paced up and down at the house ground, walking to the pear tree and touching it in front of the house ground and talking to it, and walking back to the persimmon tree in the rear garden. Then climbing and standing on the elevated footing in front of the house gate and spreading two legs apart, I got my stuff out and gave a urinal shot up far down the ground, which was thrilling.
There was another lonely man at the valley twenty or so paces away from our house who had been sick on his face or something. He of course was ugly and dirty at the same time. He was a real loner who had no family. I stopped by the uncle's house from time to time, when he waved me away, which was so sad.
You might ask me if I was afraid of him. I can assuredly say that I wasn't. To the contrary, whenever I spotted him lingering or doing something on his place, I was glad. Anyway he belonged in the valley.
I was lonely but not so lonely, I bet you. I had a lot of companions with me. Nature was my best companion to begin with. All the sounds of nature were all around me: low yet sometimes high-pitched, rhythmic and melodious yet sometimes cantankerous. The valley creeks were so cold which made me feel good, rolling and rolling among the rocks.
I missed people--cousins, uncles, aunts and grandpas and grandmas of the family clan, who were 12 kilo meters or so away. My real grandma and dad were really worried about the sorry state of my isolation. They sent me from time to time to the clan town where I could be "enlightened."
I missed people so much so that I used to run down the slope which was not so steep each and every time when I spotted the alikes of the family clan. I was really disappointed at the back heads viewed from behind which were about to turn the corner into the down village.
I was fond of people and afraid of them at the same time. In the year of 1950 when the Korean War broke out, a squadron of the Korean Army bivouacked on the peak of the valley hill. My mom took the meal baskets to the place and I dropped by the army tent which was so cozy and comfortable.
I learned to like people and things in the first place. No, I didn't learn that. I came naturally to take care for them. It seems that I wanted people and things in return for what were missing about me. Naturally I didn't learn to hate.
No one got to me to define such human emotions as adoration, hatred, or love. I missed people over the valley because I was so lonely. I needed the outside contact, but I couldn't get it, so I sought solace in nature--the sky dotted with clouds, rolling creeks with melodious sounds, the pines pondering all day and the fresh wind traveling through them.
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The autumnal mountain ritual was the one I longed to have an encounter with because the uncles and grandpas of the family clan came to the place to observe the annual rites of the ancestor worship. My parents were left with the custody of the clan farmland, by the harvests of which they could donate the seasonal offerings to the spirits of the ancestors which had been resting for decades or tens of decades on the hilly graves of the valley.
I liked the autumnal ritual better than the rest of the three seasons because it was the season of richness. I was able to eat cooked rice to my heart's content, that is, to my stomach's content. Bumper crops were stacked high on the yard.
The preparation of the ritual took several days, during which time the advance troops consisting of the dextrous brothers and handy uncles of the clan were deployed to the valley town. All kinds of fish and meat were purchased at a local market and all the gamut of vegetables and mountain herbs were collected, handled with care, cleaned, and suitably oiled, stewed and cooked.
The participants in the ritual numbered 40 to 50 members at each sitting, and the time which was needed for the solemn event took nearly a whole day, from early morning to dusk. The offerings of things and respects were duly observed, and the litany of eulogies for each ancestor trailed long into the valley.
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Just like the wind got across the rivers and over the mountain hills, did the mountains ever try to get across the rivers? Did the hills opt not to move, only desire to stay where they ever were? Just like the wind didn't know the barriers or borders, is it just that dreams do not know the bounds?
The rustic folks in the countryside didn't keep gates at the time, say, in the 1950s. They did have the gates and doors, of course, but they didn't know how to lock them. Some of them did have a semblance of wooden latches, which were mere vertical hangers which could be opened by an extended arm.
There were no barriers of any kind. Not any type of elevated stumbling blocks, or walls either. The winds whiffing of pines travelled with no hindrance. There were no fences to make good neighbors. I walked freely along the creeks, sat under the trunks of pines surrounded with iris, looked up at the sky over the valley hills.
Whereas no one came to me to teach me how to like people and things, I came to learn how to hate them by myself. The flashback tells me that Japan was not the originator of ijime, that is, the only culprit of the flagrantly bullying practice in the juvenile populace. The teenage bullies in some rustic communities in South Korea in the 1950s testify to the truth to the contrary.
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I didn't know who went after whom, but after a few days the army soldiers of the South left the hill barracks on the peak, the army soldiers of the North appeared from nowhere. The real Reds, whose red arm bands and insignia on their shoulders glistened, had asked for a meal. My grandma had given them barley grain meal, which had been husked and twice boiled.
I had been powerless, as a young boy, of course, as to the unhindered invasion of the Red army soldiers from the North, defenseless against the nasty bullying of the peer boys, and speechless about the taller and older girl who had been on a swing and determined to stand before me uninvited.
I was badly upset, giving my sidelong glances to the rifles of short length standing against the wall while the Red Army privates were gulping down the cooked barleys. I had wondered at the time why my country had been so vulnerably exposed to the invasion from the North. Looking at the backs of the young Red privates receding hurriedly from our house, I got mad at my bare arms with no weapon. I dashed to them and stabbed their unsuspecting backs with blazing stares.
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I had rudely been woken up so often at the time when I met the concerned eyes of Dad or Grandma, saying "You're having a dream, aren't you?" I wasn't crying out loud, having free falls from an elevated farm road of a paddy field down below. I wasn't gasping for breath, was I with me meeting eye to eye with a boar with her cubs, me hiding behind a pine tree?
A dream? What was it like? They didn't explain to me and I didn't ask them about it, either. They knew I knew about it, and I thought they knew that, seeing that they didn't try to mention it further.
But actually I didn't know it because I didn't ever see their signs or moves just when we the family members were watching the People's Army soldiers getting to us from across the valley hills, flying their flags. I couldn't notice any signs, sounds of footsteps, or moves.
They came anyway in no time from nowhere when I was nodding off sitting on the grass below the peak in the sunny spring afternoon, or sleeping one more time after having been to the urinal urn, listening to my dad cooking cow feeds outside the room. They came in faraway sounds, in muted footsteps, and in human shapes,
Human shapes? When they came to me especially in human shapes, they were usually attired in mature women's dress. I hadn't ever talked to any girl of my age at the time, much less adult women. They came to me anyway like the wind, and that in groups. They whispered to my solitary ears, "Live with me, dear!"
Episode 3: "Mind if You Become My Brother?"
For quite a long while, and even after many months and years had passed, from time to time, I was wondering about the women visitors, that is, the cerebral visitors. My memory is blurry, that is, it is not certain today that they had visited me only once or many more times after that, whether during the nightly hours or even during daylights, when I had been nodding the idle afternoons away among the hilly bushes or on the grass sniffing the iris.
I was wondering how they had gotten to me. On what route and how? By riding on the wind, riding on the creek, or on a boar's back? And above all, why me? Then why in groups? Had I met them before? Then where? I wondered at the time what they had meant by their solicitation of cohabitation, to begin with?
Despite their sincere entreaties, I was not in a mood to favor a specific girl or two because to me women, that is, girls had belonged in two categories: the victimizer and the victim. My grandma had been a dominant, insistent, and haggling one and My mom an obsequious, low-profile, and whining one.
Grandma had never allowed an instant's break for my mom, that is, with her poor daughter-in-law getting grilled on every gamut of house chores from keeping fire seeds unextinguished, cooking, and thrashing the bean trees, to cleaning the house and husking the barley by grinding it on the wooden treadmill.
My grandma had been domineering, and her son, that is, my dad, by having acted a silent neutral, had opted not to intervene, and I, her grandson as her " darling puppy," had made my lonely mom lonelier by opting to side with my grandma and by opting to ignore the plights of mom because the coward in me had taught me that grandma was so fearful and I would be nutritionally better treated by joining grandma's dining table whereas my mom had eaten on the room floor or from the kitchen outside the room. My belated wakening is that I should have faced up to grandma.
To me, there had been two extreme categories of women: yelling and whining, demanding and ingratiating and masterly and subservient. There had been no women in between, and I had despised both of the two kinds of women populace. I had virtually never talked to any girl of my peers until high-school graduation, as a result.
Years had passed. We the family members weathered the eight full years at the valley of which each year had consisted of four distinctive seasons. My great-grand mother had died after returning home from the refuge camp in Cheongdo of malnutrition and intestinal malfunction during the Korean War, and my second younger brother had also died from the aftermath of the evacuation during the Korean War.
Dad withstood the beatings by the Korean police who had been plodding him to snoop on the partisans, who he had not met and who of course he had not collaborated with. Mom survived, and of course my grandma survived, too. The persistent juvenile harrassment, which had been imposed on me by my elementary school peers, did not end, which was to continue far into the first year class of the middle school. But I survived. I had not been consumed by tigers. I also withstood the seasonal floods and knee-deep snow heaps during my elementary school commute of three final years.
On the day of the move I had a lot of things to do. I didn't actually like what had to be done by me confidentially to be watched by the other members of the family so I got up earlier than the other days and toured the place as if nothing had happened or as if II had been to the privy or to the family well to freshen up in front of the yard.
I liked the place. It's more like I had come to like the place. Actually I didn't like to leave the place. But I had been afraid to say and it had been a shameful thing to say that because the move to a great place had been planned sorely for the sake of me personally, that is, for the sake of my education from the middle school upward.
I liked the place. I did like every bit of it--the sounds, the colors, the flavors, the breaths the fruits and the crops of it. I listened to, watched and conversed with all that. I wondered loud if there could be any other way I would be able to stay at the valley, on the hills and live longer ever after with the iris, lying on the grass and looking up at the autumnal sky studded with clouds.
The unfortunate part about me was that my class performance was good enough to have been placed on top, making me the reader of the farewell address as representative of the graduating class of 80 in the year of 1956 at Oksan Elementary School. Grandma had attended the commencement ceremony, crying over the litany of my school day memories (actually written by my teacher) by her grandson.
On the day of the move I paced around the yard, touching the trunk of the pear tree, saying goodbyes to the persimmon tree, and giving the deep bows to the hills surrounding the house. We packed light. The moving troops had made a detraction of two members since we had lived at the valley (great-grandmother and my brother) and an addition of one (one sister who would later leave the house to become a Buddhist nun.)
The sky was clear with no clouds. The early spring weather was fine, not too cold, not too hot, either. Contrastingly enough, the day of the transfer eight years ago, when my parents had moved in, had been a cold winter day. Though my memory having been blurred, and though it seems that I had heard the footsteps of the moving people, feeling some warmth wrapped in a bedding or something, carried on somebody's back, they might have hit the snow-heaped mountain trails.
A family group of pedestrian moves of ten kilometers or so distance were progressing smoothly with one small incident. An old cat of ours, who had been strutting along leading the silent march, had dropped, before we all knew, out of the moving caravan, straying into a village which first appeared at the end of the descending trail. We had taken the feline betrayal with stride at the time: She must have been bored of dozing off the heated clay fireplace all alone.
Hardly had we the family members downloaded the moving package from the backs of dad, me and a cow, and from the backs or heads of grandma and mom, they were busy unpacking and arranging them in the new house, which was attached to the mill. The mill was run by water, so the people called our house the water mill house.
Grandma was busy moving in a new house but she was not so busy carping on mom as she had been at the Sun Valley. Her grip on mom was getting loose, that is, her intervention with mom's daily routines less frequent because grandma was getting to commute between her first son's and second's, and her first daughter-in-law was added in her list of inventory.
I was busier than before because I had my leisurely laziness lying on the hilly grass looking up at the blue sky, sitting among the bushes or nodding off beside the iris at Sun Valley deprived once and for all, which was replaced by the chores of a mill house.
A bright day nightmare was that my bullying peers were not getting loose on me a little bit. Their pranksterism was reaching a fever pitch, and the worse part was that a real nightmare was lurking around the corner.
The water mill house was erected by the initiative of Great Uncle Bin (the elder brother of my father) and by the carpenter's craft work of my father. An original paddy field was transformed into a water mill house, taking advantage of an established water channel.
The water mill house became a major source of a family income which provided all the resources for life as a family and which financed the schooling fees of me and my brothers. But I and the rest of the family members didn't realize that the mill would turn out to be an origin of a tragic family accident in later years.
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What an unfair world it is that the one party, that is, the predator party enjoys or seems to enjoy the variety in the option of methods of harassing, harming, and killing the other party, that is, the prey party. How absurd it is that the one side, that is, the prey side is ambushed, trapped, and killed, or is inclined to be by the other side, that is, the predator side, with no recourse to any other means.
The scarcity or non-existence of defense methods or tools on the side of the prey, contrasted with the variety of and profundity in offense methods and tools on the predator, forces the poor prey to opt for the utter way of self-destruction. In the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, the South Korean society saw hundreds of middle- and high school girls, who had been trapped in the mire of ijime or something, and lots of the starlets in their 20s or early 30s, who had also been trapped in the mire of hatred and curse of the Internet portal sites, commit suicides.
There should be just a moment you're bound to think that all the world is ganging upon you. In hindsight, that time of the water mill house in the first or second year of my middle school days might have been just the time or the moment, when, the kid, who had been a mere teen age boy, got suddenly old, and the rest of my family members, some of whom had died and some others of whom had gotten separated far apart with their own families, woke up to the glimmers of memory that we had once been the same family living at the same place.
I close my eyes for now and put myself in some perspective on some elevated place, say, on the rooftop of the mill house, commanding some overview of the house in which mom, dad, grandma, and me are housed. Before I know, I see mom coming down from the nearby hill of the walnut trees, which had been located on the left shoulder side when I was stepping off the house toward the middle school. I see her with so pale a face and with unsteady steps, overshadowed by dusk. I was wondering at the time why she had been to the hill by herself at such a bizarre hour with bare arms and hands, and now, almost fifty years later, I am shuddering to my horror.
Some invisible forces, whatever you call them by the name of ghosts, spirits or something, were ganging upon mom and me. I see now decades later that some super-natural forces seemed to be acting on mom and me. Mom was screaming, and me, too.
Mom was a bruised woman, physically already. She had one arm of hers severely smashed, with her loosely worn garments wrapped in belts and cog wheels of the milling machine, while working on it during my dad's absence, who had been on his purchase tour for the seasonal ritual of the clan.
Mom had no allies about her, but had enemies around. Though grandma's tongues became less tart. she did not turn totally friendly toward her poor daughter-in-law. Sharing one room attached to the mill with fully grown sons, my father took nightly visits to a village widow, which might have riled mom to no little degree.
Let me make another painful mention of invisible forces that had been troubling my family, mom and me particularly. Hundreds of miles apart here in Seoul, and decades later in August, 2010, even on some moments' reminiscence, it had been a horrible nightmare. I am still wondering why the invisible forces, or the ghosts or something had taken on mom and me particularly.
Envision one horrible scene in which some ghosts had been taking on mom in loose garments, at a mill house under dim-lit kerosene lamp, not in sweat shorts she should have worn, with one ghost taking a grip on one arm of my mom's, and with the other pushing it under the rolling belt, with the other ghosts clapping and giggling away.
Envision the other nightmarish scene in which a 14-year middle school son of hers had been sleeping. Some ghosts had conspired to make an inception of the cerebral cave, called skull, of the subconscious boy who had been me, making it and setting up the sniper's tripod. I had been able to see to my horror one of the snipers take aim at me.
Now the camera car is rolling along. The audience is ready to watch. Camera one, take scene one, The woman, whose right arm is wrapped in the belt of the milling machine, tries to pull her arm from the rolling belt and wiggles like a worm scared, screaming.
Camera two, take spontaneous scene two. The boy, who is me, sleeping, finds himself aimed at by a sniper or two in some distance, who, in half disguise and mask, is about to pull the trigger. The boy, startled, sits up, screaming.
“Cut off the water!" mom yelled at an invisible person in the room, who must have been me. I was screaming, too at myself and at the cerebral sniper who had made an inception into me and been aiming at me, Scared at myself, and scared at the yell from mom, I ran to the water gate tightly shut on an elevated bank of the water channel and pulled up the hand rope linked to the square slot pegged in the wood-paneled water way.
The fact that the water mill house had been a haunted house was attested to by a word of mouth testimony of my immediate brother, who, having been to my home in Seoul, in the year of 2009, for the yearly memorial service of my late father, after having heard from me about the mysteriously spontaneous mishap of mom and me and about my later traumas, told me to the effect that he had seen, at that time, the people in white, that is, the white-robed ghosts, dancing on the rooftop of the mill house.
The nightmare of the sniper's assassination attempt on me did not recur, which was a really great thing. If the horrorful incident had occurred continually and repeatedly thereafter, my nerve cells, which had gotten extremely taut, might have broken loose. It was not certain whether the white human shapes, or the ghosts, had been dancing on the roof every night of the winter year, that is, I did not certify the frequencies of the ghostly choreograph from my brother.
But the bullying of the peers had continued. What had been their joy in life? That is, what had been the joy of those bullies who had been harassing me, even in the changed places and in the changed days. Had it been their joy of life to plague me. The persistent bullies, realizing that their prey had not been consumed by tigers or torn to pieces by mountain boars, had taken on me with messier and lousier means of harassment.
The predator group, who consisted of three or four bullies, had elected a stooge, or an errand boy, who had done me various kinds of physical harms, representing the group. The stooge went on a bullying spree, nudging my waist without warning, kicking me from behind. or jabbing the ribs, with me getting down with pain, with the rest of the guys gathered in one place, throwing a sidelong glance toward me, giggling and giggling.
Though mom's mangled mass of arm muscles had surgically been treated and repaired to a considerable degree, with the swift first-aid treatment by a local doctor, and the well-timed vehicular transportation of the patient to Euiseong, the county capital, there had been no way to discover, even to notice the depth and width of invisible wounds, that is, my disrupted mental landscape which had been laid to waste, trampled by the intruders.
An epiphany had troubled me to no end that the red eyes of snipers were staring at me from any direction, the bushes, or from the foliage of the roadside trees. An obsession had overwhelmed me that one mishap or the other might overtake mom and dad at any moment. I had been taken ill with an anxiety disorder!
The bad boys, who had taken to a great liking to scare and terrorize me, had been sticky and tenacious like leeches. They had had the same routine as mine from going to school, sitting at the classroom, and coming back home.
But something was different between the bullies and me. They might have risen from their bedrooms, pondering over the joy of riding roughshod over me, over the joy of talking behind me giggling, and over the joy of finding me getting down on the ground with pain, whereas I used to rise from bed feeling anxious how I would be able to withstand the day.
Days passed and passed I pondered from time to time and later very often and very seriously over how to get out of the trouble I had been placed in. Appeal to their mercy? That would have to incur more ridicule and mockery of me. Visit their parents to seek their discipline? That would also have to deteriorate the course of the problem solution.
The day and the place were set offhand to rescue myself from the chaos. I can't exactly recall what day it had been, but I remember it as a warm day, probably a late spring or an early summer's day. The homeroom teacher had called it a short day, and we had been on our way home.
The bullies' paces were not so brisk, leisurely walking as ever, talking to each other garrulously. I was following them at some distance, catching them up, making a feline measurement enough to step up and attack the stooge from behind.
Getting over an embankment, the gang of bullies were walking down on a gravel road which had been built on the parched riverbed. Before they knew, I stepped up, overtook and felled the stooge from behind, mounting the fallen body and punching the face right and left, left and right.
Bullying disappeared overnight! Everything disappeared from my eyes--mockeries, ridicules, nudges, kicks, giggles, and getting down with pain. Everything. It was just what I had vaguely intuited. I had cut off the Gordian knot of being bullied once and for all by knocking down the stooge--the puppet errand boy.
Why hate? I couldn't understand a specific feeling of hatred about a specific person or persons, to begin with. As a lonely boy at a remote valley, I'd missed people. that is, people of any kind. I used to approach them, actually dash to them who used to get over the hill top.
I used to drop by the house of an uncle who'd later been known to be suffering from Hansen's Disease, who'd waved me off, which was so sad. In the annual autumnal ritual of the ancestor worship which had been observed on the valley hill, when I used to meet with the brothers, uncles, and grand dads of the clan, had been a happiest time of my life as a boy.
Had the boy of me reached the puberty at that time? I vaguely recall a note or something, which had been scribbled on a shyly folded paper and sent to me, via a classmate of mine, from a girl or two of a senior class in the coed middle school, conveying coy wishes of an encounter as sister and brother.
I wish I had met the girls at a late hour after class, once or twice , or many more times, escorted first by my classmate, later through the secret exchanges of appointments, on a shady clearing surrounded with tall pines, or deep on the nearby hills or on a river bank far from the town, and had had long heart-to-heart talks.
I had run from all that. I was afraid of the girls, of the chance encounters that I should have to stammer all along. I was afraid of the red eyes which had been glaring from the roadside foliage, and frightened by the mangled arm of mom's, and the bruised face of the stooge's, who had been taken along by his father, protesting to my dad, "See what your son had done to mine!"
Episode 4: Hired and Fired in One Day
That could have turned out worse. Mom might have been deceased if the water mill had kept rolling, not stopped by me who'd dashed to the water slot, with her arm mashed and bleeding profusely. The stooge bruised all over his face could have his life terminated if not restrained by his peers because I had lost my control.
There was another shift, that is a great shift of place and life mode. I had made a pedestrian commuting from my water mill house to the middle school about three kilo meters away for the past three years, and now I settled myself as a freshman of Andong Normal School.
The great shift took on a few major transformations in life. On the central stage of the shift appeared rail road stations and their subsequent surroundings--waiting rooms, ticket office and conductors punching tickets, strange conversations of murmurs between the travellers, the patrolling police, the approach of a man or woman who was bent on solicitations.
You could safely say that the bullyings were gone which were superseded by the sticky words, which in and around the station precinct you could be accosted with by the tenacious solicitors. The street lamps were dim, and the just-arrived passengers were dispersed just like the fallen leaves in the street.
I look back at a boy of 17 or so years. It's midnight. He gets out of the station exit, seems to be self-stranded for a while, which is so awkward, who is approached, accosted to by a strange solicitor walking beside the young man in school uniform and cap, stalling for a while, hesitating to respond, looking around, and after being plodded once again, assuring himself that nobody is around, seems determined to come along.
Getting out of the station plaza, getting around the wall separating the plaza and the main street, the young man is escorted to a room door of a tin-roofed whorehouse, which is lighted, and from which a lady attired in a see-through dress, gets up, gasping in astonishment.
"How green!" she exclaims. There is an uproar among them, arguing about whether to accept the green guest or not. I know that it is time I ordered my boy to run from the scene, truly embarrassed about himself.
Normal School is an extinct three-year- high school system by which the elementary school teachers had been trained. Andong Normal School, one of the nine normal schools in Korea (give or take one or two), had 200 students of which one girls' class had 50 students.
That having been said, it occurs to me who cares. But it's important that our protagonist and narrator had been a student of the 200 students of Andong Normal School during the period of 1958 and 1961 and that there had been 50 coeds. The red eyes of the sniper's had incurred the deep-rooted trauma which had resulted in his protracted sullen glumness. Which is why I hadn't been talked to by a school girl during my school days, and which is why Willowy had noticed my depression and blurted her sober care about it: "Your depression is very contagious!"
There seems to be two major ways for one to describe one's own past life, or for a writer to define a protagonist's life progression: an inducted way or a deducted way.
The inducted description of my Normal School days will be to put seemingly irrelevant pieces of my high-school- day behaviors at its every stage of class, on every tier of disciplines, or on dissimilar events together and hand down some meaning on them. On the other hand, the deducted description of my life during the juvenile years will be to shed light on some significant developments or occurrences and lay assessments on them. I will adopt and follow the latter, which will make my readers less bored and much more intrigued.
A major shift of life, which took place after the transfer to Andong City, was its life at night and its nocturnal circumstances. The night at my hometown at that time meant darkness. The kerosene lamps were seen glimmering in the sparsely scattered homes with thatched roofs. I was shivering at times to hear village dogs bark fiercely, reading The Story of Three Kingdoms on the serialized pages of the then Donga Ilbo Newspaper. The brutal army troops of the crafty Tsao Tsao were killing and vandalizing all along.
On the contrary, the night in the city of Andong didn't mean a mere slip into darkness but it meant another onset of daylight. The banks were closed at that time but the citizens were flocking to the groceries, fish or fruit markets. Joyful families were dining out in the Chinese or Korean restaurants. Non-stressful senior people were sharing small talks in the tea rooms and coffee shops. Several movie theaters were open at night. There were some idle folks at ubiquitous baduk houses, making busy trips to the eager baduk sites, kibitzing.
I think it might be a little harsh on a country boy of me, who'd been traumatized and financially strapped, to send him on a nightly tour of a city he had chosen to live and study, looking at him in perspective as if the boy were an utterly different ego. But I have to, and you will understand and enjoy the experiment because a few interesting personal temptations of trial character are lurking.
On top of the poor financial resources, I hadn't been resourceful, either. I think I seemed to have been starving nutritionally. To get myself out of the nutritional starvation, I used to take prey on some kind-hearted peers, knocking on their Samaritan chords, querying "Haben Sie Geld?" Then he used to take me to a nearby roadside bakery, catering me to a plateful of chrysanthemum bread.
I had been starving scientifically, too. Tens of thousands of books on the shelves of the School Bookstore at the downtown street were a great wonder to me, who had given them lusty stares.
It's time I explained to you readers what my encounter with TIME at a pretty good book store of a small- town city meant to me personally and to the country boy as the main character of this novel and how it had later developed.
TIME was a fixture at the magazine section at the entrance of the book store. It was beautiful. The red borderline was very impressive and the title of TIME was particularly inspirational. My encounter with TIME began with a greeting of wondrous amazement, at which the lady clerk threw me a mischievous smile.
A reluctant purchase turned to another. The acts of turning pages developed into moments of cursory perusal. At first I was afraid of being watched by other customers, so hardly had I bought a copy when I put it into my school bag.
It was a great pleasure to visit the place and fin
d the fresh copies there. There hadn't been many but several, of course. So I had to be in time there. And of course it happened from time to time, and progressively very often that I had been caught red-handed in the act of getting fresh back copes of TIME.
The visitors to the place, in which they watched the odd scene, created the words of mouth, added wings and started spreading them all over town and the school campuses. There had been several high schools and two girls' high schools at that time. They enjoyed the story and enjoyed spreading it. They prided themselves on the fact that the city had a high school boy who reads TIME.
I'm tempted to yell and ask a question of myself what's going on. I want to convince myself to stop any attempt to assess the trivial act of holding in my boy's hand one back copy of TIME, one of the international magazines of world renown, all around the clock, for all to see, and hand down any judgment on it.
Snobbish? Yes. Fake? Yes. A false display of knowledge? Yes, of course. A con game or scam? Utterly no! My boy had no premeditated intention to con people to buy him or his particular idea.
In due course of time, I found myself enjoying it, immune to the idea of right or wrong. I enjoyed hearing the voices in the back alleys. Progressively I found myself enjoying people talk in low voices, or talk behind me at some distance loudly enough: "There goes English!"
On one late afternoon of the early winter, in 1959, two peer students of one neighbor class called on me. They seemed to locate my rented room with some difficulty. They were led into my clamped small room, but after sitting down on the vinyl-covered room floor. they showed some reluctance at first, coughing and aheming, seeming hard to find hard to pronounce the first syllable.
One of the visiting students opened his mouth with difficulty and said to the boy that was me, "Why don't you find yourself a job?" But he couldn't wait for my answer, giving a response to his own query. "Mrs. Moon somebody, who is the wife of a commercial bank president stationed in Seoul, is looking for an English tutor."
"Why me?" I said. He said, "You know why." He said she knew about me, which means that she had heard about the rumor which had been circulating about me in relation to the comprehension of the difficult English language magazine of TIME. I didn't say at that time that the rumor was overblown, and that I wasn't naturally prepared for the job. Instead. I said that I wasn't only willing to take the job. In retrospect, the boy of me had conveyed his refusal to the effect that he was not up to the lady of high caliber.
I was in need of a job, any job, that is. I was always hungry in the first place, The rental room was too clamped, The so-called "self-preparation of one's own meal" in a rented room under so few food resources, was considered really fit for malnutrition.
I was a job seeker myself. I sought one eagerly indeed, but I was hired and fired in one day as a delivery boy of a newspaper. Showing up at a dawning hour at the delivery office of the Kyunghyang Shinmun, which had been situated near Andong Railroad Station, shoving between the other boys, I collected my stuff and raced to my area which covered as far as the 36th Army Division.
I turned out a loser, that is, they found me not up to the task of a newspaper delivery, which necessitated swiftness and exactness. The sun was already high up in the sky, but ten or more newspapers copies were not leaving me. Racing up and down the hill, making a few rounds of the alley roads, I was not able to locate several names. I was hired in one day and fired the next day.
Episode 5: Shaking All Over
It's a fearful world, isn't it? I walk past the uprooted trees in the last night's typhoon rampage. My gut feeling is that the rest of the unbattered plants were severely terrified and scared.
In flashlight, there had been a series of horrible things. At times, one who's not terrified and scared was terror and scare itself. My parents hadn't been terrified and scared, which had terrified and scared to no end. Mom had once been a fearful human being.
My adoring second brother had died suddenly one night after we the family members had returned home from the war evacuation.. It's not certain whether he had died or not. He had only disappeared overnight, and dad and mom had been somewhere near to the mountain hill. That's it.
My parents had been silent all along. A silence pact, indeed. Grandma had said nothing, too. No one had cried or wept. There had not been a stir or furor. My immediate brother and me had asked nothing about the disappearing brother. Which had been so horrible, and still is.
Boars had been fearful in Sun Valley. The Reds, who had been on the run, seemed to have been fearful. The overnight fierce engagement had been really fearful, after which we the family had hit the road for refuge in escape in Cheongdo.
Snows, which had heaped ankle deep in a half day, had been a fear itself. The suddenly swelling river stream, in which I had tripped and fallen, overturned and hit by rolling rocks, while trying to cross it for myself, had been another terror and scare.
Looking back, it seems I have been going through the tunnel of fears. I am afraid that I think that I am afraid. I am afraid of people and things. In my mind's eye, I might have been terrified of the flashlight wrapped under the cozy cocoon of mom.
"I saw the light and an instant's pin pain on my face," mom had once asserted. My parents had lived in a small coastal mining town in Nagasaki-ken about 15o kilo meters far from Nagasaki City, during the five years from 1940 until 1945.
On a home-bound boat returning from Nagasaki, my parents and their close relatives had been torpedoed near Busan Port, from which they had been fortunately rescued from sinking. In my mind's eye, I hear the melee on aboard the ship, wrapped in a cradle.
There ensued a plight after another. The atomic bomb blasts were replaced by torpedoes which were superseded by the beatings by the Korean police (dad) which were placed back by the naggings (mom) which were taken by the real Reds which led to the fierce night battles in the valley.
The replacements of terror and scare have been taking place one after another: One disaster after another, one crisis after another, one chaos after another, and one accident after another. There seems to be a continuity of happenings of worst category. And at each and every happening, I have been reminded to say to myself that that could have been worse.
I hear screams ringing in my old ears. Mom screams "Stop the water!" and I dash to the water gate. Off the Cheongdo River, under the cover of night in the cocoon of the cotton cloth tent, I hear screams from time to time of "Help!" desperately blurted out on every summer night in the Korean War year by somebody while being hit by the rapids and floated along the shore.
I see the falls, which had been felled on the summary executions of partisans done by Oksan Police Box under the command of Euiseong Police Station, taking place one after another and I see them more vividly when I close my eyes, through the holes of the school fence, also in the year of the internecine Korean War. It was noon on an early summer's day or late spring's day. There was not a whiff of wind. There was calm everywhere. There might have been stifled mouths and startled eyes.
Typhoon Gonepass or something raged through the guts of the capital yesterday (September 6, 2010) as if herds of the crazy horses raged through the wild. The metropolitan gapes threw up, the subway lines got warped, the electric lights went out, the windowpanes of some apartment complex got smashed, and I was terribly scared.
Again 50 or so years ago. I got fevers at the time often and I didn't go to school, I lay on the cold rental room by myself, thinking of dad and mom, and more often than not, shivering all over.
The communication was not available at that time between a student and his or her teacher by electric or electronic or by any other means, so when I was absent from class the homeroom teacher dropped by to see what was going on. It just happened from time to time that hardly had I gotten a plate and feasted myself at rice cakes in my lazy daydream when my homeroom teacher Mr. Kim was knocking on the out-of-the-room kitchen door, when a sudden ray of afternoon sunlight was flooding in.
I wish my thoughts could be flexible enough to the extent that they could be collapsible. That my thoughts could be folded and unfolded like bamboo fans. How convenient.
A poetess, who is known to have lived during the 17th century, sang her wishes to such effect.
I wish I could cut it off/
The waist of the long wintry night/
Wrap and put it deep under the warm bedding/
And when the day arrives that he comes/
I wish I would unfold it to no end.(Hwang Jini, 17c)
Why couldn't I keep my peace of mind? Why couldn't I keep myself secure from the intrusion of a sniper, that is, from the spirits' running havoc? How could I keep myself unhurt from the worries about my parents? Have I been destined to make a life of worries? Is the life with no worries impossible?
I wish to convey to a depressed boy that was me my comforting greeting, "Are you all right?" I imagine my thoughts, their close kin and their offspring ensconced in a cozy cocoon encrusted with prickles, put into a sack or a pouch tightly zipped, which would be put into a satchel secured by latches. So secure.
I wasn't actually secure. I couldn't keep myself encrusted with prickles but rather I got myself prickled. I was having profuse internal bleeding. I more often than not absented myself from class, and even when I went to school, I was sitting absent-mindedly alone on a bench of the school pond, away from class.
I didn't have to go to the back alleys around Andong Station again to meet a woman in red, although I was in desperate need of a human contact of some sort. I was reading the story books, instead, I was stepping through a rain forest of human experiences.
I dropped by a second-hand book store called Amazon very often, the owner of which was obese with big smiles, and was very nice to me, saying, "Normal is O.K." He was sitting on a small wooden chair, surrounded with stacks of books, covered with a bedding, always warming himself by a charcoal fireplace. He was very nice with the price for selling and lending books.
I was scared. I was scared of the novels, too, I was scared of all the family feuds, horrorful crimes, or killings. Did I say earlier that I had been scared of grandma and mom? Scared of mom more than anybody else as times passed.
Yes, I was afraid of women. In other words, I knew women were a fearful thing. Grandma and ma and the women at large. I was afraid of the girl students, too. Actually I was looking at them from afar at school ground...I was actually turning my face from them when running into them in the classroom aisles as I was moving from one class to the other. I hadn't talked to any girl and I hadn't been talked to by any during my school years.
I am nervous a little bit, but I am greatly relieved at the same time to have a hindsight like this. I throw a look at my hands and palms, stroke my head as slowly as possible, and pat both shoulders of the boy that was me.
In hindsight, I now find that scared was good, that nervous was O.K. and that terrified was very nice. How nice of me not to have push opened the door frame between the two rooms. If I had been brazen enough to have push opened the door frame between the boy that was me and entered the private room of the land lady.
"Get over here! That room floor of yours is not warm enough. How don't you come over and sleep in my room?" she had said that night, with her voice shaking a little. My guess was that her husband had been on a business trip, with her two daughters on their grand parents' house. My boy could hardly pronounce a word, holding on to a door latch and shaking all over.
Episode 6: Whispering to Their Sad Ears
Andong City was a big place compared to the previous places I had stepped on. One major attribute of a big place, though it could not be the only one, was that it had a river on, around or in its periphery. When I got to Nakjeong Naru, that was that.
The creeks of Sun Valley sounded melodious from one point of place to the other, and thunderous at a particular site. The creeks hankered for a big place, missing a river, and getting together at tributaries.
I now envision water drops, that is, the fate of water drops. I sometimes do. As a country boy I had watched the ill-fated water drops kept stagnant on a small water basin made by cow footprints, which were destined to go on a road to reeky desiccation.
I pity the state in which the water drops had to be kept stagnant. How much they would envy the lucky streak of the peer drops which were to hit the journey for the rivers and the seas. They had made a spontaneous start from the sky onto earth with the utter different landing.
You stand by the river, and you'll appreciate its past, present and its future. You'll also have a moment to ponder over your past and future: You ask yourself whether you'll go along, against, or across it. That is, rivers always have something to do with remembrances.
This writer and narrator now (September 11, 2010) stands by a small stream river which goes into the Han River. It rained steadily here last night, but not cats and dogs. The Weather Bureau said that it rained really hard upstream. Folks sometimes say it poured just with bucketfuls of water.
Setting a side talk aside, coming back to a river port called Nakjeong Naru, I have to decide whether to cross this river or not. The sun is in the middle of the sky, a warm ray of an early autumn afternoon sun is shining on the wide expanse of the river bed, a bus with its passengers from Euiseong gets aboard a wooden ferry boat bound for Sangju.
All is set except one person to cross the river: a boy teacher of 19 who has been appointed as an elementary school teacher to serve at Nakdong, about 12 kilometers from Nakjeong Naru. He wavers between his dutiful responsibility and personal conscience--a guilt feeling that he isn't fully prepared for the job.
Although I as the boy teacher had been appointed by the local Education Board in September someday, 1961, the year the military coup had taken place, the appointment had been one of a supplementary character because the original appointment should have been done at the time of the graduation. I had originally been opted out at the Graduation Assessment Board because my classroom activities and imperative pedagogical activities had been evaluated as too low.
I knew much later that Mr. Kim, the homeroom teacher of my senior class had played a Samaritan, who had done extraordinary efforts to save the poor student of me from having been opted out. So I had barely been able to be listed as one of the graduates of 1961 at the bottom pit.
I am now balking at the idea of crossing the river and sending my boy to the town in which he had been appointed to serve. Since my boy had bungled a lousy mess of not a few things during his service of 18 months there at Nakdong Elementary School, I have second thoughts as to the reiteration of his previous follies unveiled once again for all to see. (cf A Civilized Report:www.textore.com)
I have from time to time my cerebral land trespassed and violated in which I am still standing before the black board at my class room of my initial service, facing the class, talking something and worried about something, I am an elementary school teacher who is 20-some years old. Yes, I am not getting old.
Students are so few about which I am worried. I wonder where they are gone anyway. The room floor of the class is so dirty. I am a little stressful about the condition of the classroom. I have some things left to do. I've not checked attendance yet. I look out the classroom window at the playground where they're playing around. They choose not to notice their teacher that's me.
I feel it a little necessary for me to give my readers a modicum of insight on the improvement of the teacher-recruiting system of South Korea. The 19-year-old elementary school teacher just like me might have been an idiosyncrasy. The system of three-year high school training of elementary school teachers had ceased to exist in 1963, from which a new sophisticated four-year university training had been needed for the elementary teaching profession.
Which does not suggest that the then boy teachers had been misfits for the pedagogical profession. I had been a misfit yes, but I am sure my peers had been superb teachers. The major ground for such assertion was that the curricula had been well organized, the teaching staff of Andong Normal School had been excellent and almost all the students had been hard at work and well adjusted.
It'll be a decent reminder to you readers that I had been greatly indebted to the residents in general and the parents of the dear students of my class who had bestowed a great benefaction of generosity and tolerance on me. I also had owed my colleague teachers who had gone to great lengths to wink at my personal follies as teacher.
I am going to introduce my love that I'd come to know there at my first service. I'm excited and thrilled on the one hand, but I am nervous on the other because I know that you want to know about the numerical orders of the love I had once been enthralled in or enslaved by. I find myself plummeting into a labyrinth of self-doubt, that is, a question about the validity of an attempt at a forced familiarization of a lady who might have been leading her own decent and peaceful life.
Though it might be a little too much presumptuous of me to do that, but if I, who had been terrorized by the witness experience of the summary execution of the Communist partisans, scared to death by the sudden disappearance and secret interment of my brother by my parents, and traumatized by mom's mishap and a spontaneous target experience by a sniper or two with red eyes, were to be allowed a modest opportunity nonetheless to present my girl that is not getting old just like me in my cerebral land, to the global readers of mine, I'll do that gladly.
Now here is a 14-year-old elementary school girl at a small rustic town who is to graduate her six-year compulsory course at a graduation ceremony which is attended by about one hundred and twenty students and a modest faculty of twenty-some teachers who I had been one of.
In due course of the ceremony there comes a time when the graduates sing in unison the farewell song, in which the graduating girls almost always burst out crying, hiding their faces among one another's backs. So much so that it occurs a considerable minutes have to pass and the teaching staff of the graduating classes used to have a hard time trying to calm down the perplexing emotional eruption.
There had occurred an eye-opening scene, the excitement of which could be compared to that I as a mountain valley boy had first seen purple iris in the deep valley beside the pine trunks. The thing is one of the girls, smiling, had started comforting her crying friends, whispering to their sad ears and patting their sad shoulders.
She was familiar to me because her younger sister was my student Iris somebody. Let's call the two girls Iris Sisters. Yes, they were pretty like iris. They were more than pretty: Their physique was so fit, their gaits were steady, and they had a low and shyful voice.
Episode 7:Escorting the Sick Soldiers
What's all that story about? If it were to go on the same or similar route of the previously stated course, would it be worth a try? Wouldn't it be going to be improper of me to have my readers to drink a coffee of bland taste? Isn't it going to be nothing but the insult of the readers?
May be or may be not. What counts I am afraid is that I've met a dream girl in my life and that she has been leading her life of longevity in me as the paragon of the untrammelled novelty and loftiness of gracious deed. She isn't getting old.
I'd asked her a favor of giving me a photo of Iris via her younger sister. The request was met with decline, about which I did not hold a grudge or a spite at all. By the way, I haven't been lucky ever to have a photo of my girl or my woman. Three or four years ago, I'd asked my wife of thirty-some years in nuptial knot a favor of giving me her photo which had been taken in her maiden years. She had declined my request, mumbling some epithets to herself, making me blush in shame and embarrassment.
I decided to go to the boot camp. I wanted to run from the reality, from my girl, and from home. The shameful decline was not the reason at all. Above all, I hadn't volunteered to serve in the army. Thing is that the conscription notice had arrived at a proper time, which I had accepted with gleeful anticipation. I was 23 years old and the year was 1963.
I said hurried farewell greetings to father, mother, grandmother, and to all I was concerned about and to all who were concerned about me. I had my hair shaved off. I hoped to get the dishevelled memories of mine shaved off, too.
A steam train was waiting to transport the shaved recruiters from Euiseong Railroad Station to Nonsan Boot Camp. Some train compartment was somewhat cantankerous. The diligent well-wishers were on hand to wave their sons and brothers off.
Neither of my parents showed up at the station to see their son off, of course, but one of my three uncles, the youngest brother of my father, together with one fine lady, was at the station to buy lunch and say some good things for his nephew. The thing is the uncle, who had been in his early forties and had had his own wife and children, was on his belated elopement.
I was traveling with Iris my love. I felt I was not alone in this wide world because I would be with Iris all the way through the boot camp, in the busy training camp, on the fatigued barracks bed room floor, dreaming of her instead of red eyes of a sniper.
I closed my eyes in the recruiters' compartment and wished Iris would grow all her way up and well through three years of middle school and three more years of high school, and in due course of life I would make a reunion with her.
The weather of the summer in the year 1963 was so hot. The hot asses of the enlisted men of the boot camp got hotter by the wooden bats. Today's barracks life in the South Korean boot camp has made a sea change compared to the year 1963. On the very day I had flunked the M-1 rifle test firing of 300 yard or some distance, I had gotten a real hard beating on my ass by nothing other than a steel pipe grasped in the entire palm.
I'd gotten five beatings. By one beating most of the other guys had made a complete roll over, but I had counted five. On that night I had not been able to lie flat on the barracks floor bed. I had lain on one side, when I had seen the ray of the full moon light knock on the barracks window.
On the light screen seen through the window the worried faces appeared one after another: Grandma commuting between her two sons' houses, mom going on busy house chores with her mangled arm, pop ploughing the field with heavy load on his back. It was felt just like a fairy tale within impossible reach that there was a city and its people over the wall of the boot camp barracks.
My service category in the army was listed as a medic, which had given me a small comfort all through the boot camp training. Yes, time was "like a running river." Each and every routine after routine was progressing fleetingly, when it just arrived the time we made a move to the Army Medical School, which had then been stationed in Masan City.
Let's make some frog jumps to deprive of boredom of the story and enhance your interest in its development. The barracks life of Nonsan Boot Camp had been the life of obeyance to the rules and to the orders of the superiors, but the life of Masan Medical School was that of competition, say, among the enlisted peer soldiers.
About five decades later I do a belated take on the meaning of the flurries of hurried exits from the barracks room on the eve of departure bound for a new and final service unit, winding up the medical school training. What's hilarious is that I realize now how smart they had been at that time and I am now able to catch up on the meaning of all the fuss.
I wish I had not heard about my ranking in the training achievement. They said earlier on the day that I had been placed on the sixth in the alumni class of 200. I was sitting quiet all along and I didn't say to any of them "How did you happen to know?" Of course, they had referred to the related document from the person in charge of Education Headquarters or something.
The thing is that all through the afternoon and the evening of that day and far into the night the readjustment of the rankings had been being done. A new day broke. I was named and taken on board a truck together with fresh faces bound for the Third Replacement Battalion on the front line. I forgot about major army hospitals or field hospitals in the rear area. That was it.
The army unit, that is, the front line medical company for which I had to serve, was situated on the neck of a mountain valley, under which the barracks of the army regiment headquarters and battalion army units were nestled. Some of the the alumni soldiers from Masan Medical School were ordered to serve on pharmacy and dispensary departments, with me on the barrack room service which was composed of four stretcher platoons.
To an army private, hunger was an intimate companion. On the day we the alumni gang of eight privates from Euiseong were deployed to the service unit company, the old-timers gave us extra meal tickets with sympathetic stares and words. I emptied six chow plates at which the kitchen guy, who was handing out the meal, beamed. The other pals seemed to have consumed almost the same amount of meals.
Out of the dining hall, Too Tall Kim somebody said to me, washing his plate, "Can you see your feet, Shimmanni?"
I tried to look down at me. I said, "No, I can't. Can you?"
"Me, either."
Hunger was not just the only companion, but anxiety was the other. Though the cities had been crisscrossed, rivers had been gotten across, and the mountains had been gotten over, the spider webs of anxiety stayed. The gloomy images were lingering.
The sullen gloom in me was so conspicuous. So much so that I was from time to time pointed out and reprimanded by the superiors about the standoffish aloofness, which I couldn't explain. I was progressively categorized and treated, in and around the barrack site, as a synonym of "a U.S. counselor." They were more often than not heard to talk behind my back, "There goes a counselor!", giggling away.
The stretcher guys' barrack life consisted of some monotonous routines: They did hygienic chores, boned up on the first-aid workouts, did some outdoors details, and in case of the inferiors, they had to stand guard during the night.
My emblem of a U. S. counselor was assuredly vindicated and attached fast to me when I, a medic corporal, had been lost, caught by the enemy, listed as a prisoner during the night war game of division level, and sent to my medical company the next morning. The whole company welcomed me with muted pity.
I had a run-in with the military police, too, an addition to the disrepute of a U.S. military counselor. The subject of the criminal infraction was the disobeyance of the commanding order and the allegation was that I, together with Hoon, a sand wrestler in his youth, who had been deployed as battalion medics, during the emergency drill, had slept the drill away in a barrack room of the battalion headquarters, for which both of us two had been put into a detention house in the division military police headquarters for two weeks.
I was summoned one day by Major Sergeant Rhee of the Personnel Section of the company. He asked me about my willingness to serve in an independent army unit. I was able to read his good intention to give me some cheers for my waning months of my army service. I said yes. The year was 1965 and I had some seven or eight months left for my discharge from the compulsory service of 30-some months.
I was ordered to serve as a deployed medic in an armory company, an independent foot company which had been stationed in Anyang, an outskirts city of Seoul. I had mixed feelings of nervousness, freedom, responsibility, and excitement at the same time. I was not to be escorted or transported by any person in formal charge. I was authorized to travel on my own.
Which meant freedom. I was given a free rein. Although I was able to choose any transportation means, I decided to use the train bound for Cheonyangni, Seoul, sitting on a familiar seat of the Soldiers' Compartment. The insignia of first sergeant on me made the seat more comfortable.
I was free to move to any place and to visit any person of my choice. On arrival at the dream station, my heart beat faster and louder. I was determined to be led to where my mind wished to take me. My feet plodded me to go ahead.
It was early afternoon. The warm ray of the early autumn sun was beating on my back, on top, and on my front, which made my warm heart already somewhat warmer. My young boy escort from the waiting hall of the railroad station stopped at an entrance of a brick-roofed house and waved me to go in.
It was an awkward entry with blushing cheeks and lowered heads, but there was a brisk reception on the part of a middle-aged woman who seemed to have gone to the lengths of her life. She took stock of me, up and down and up again, beaming.
"You're so lucky!" she bluntly said.
"What are you saying?" I asked.
"Your mate is a good house wife," she said, beaming again.
"What do you mean?"
"Husband is long in bed. Bedridden..Not done it for a long time...Parched..."
"What?" I stammered.
"You know what. Be a good bridegroom, young man. Rain her hard...Make her wet and drenched. O.K.?" she bristly moved, calling somewhere.
"Wait for some while." she shot me a meaningful smirk.
Popping up her head into a small yet cozy room, she pushed a water basin to me, "Freshen up," she said like an order. I washed my hands and face and dried them with a towel she had given me. "Wait, " she said again, like an order.
There was a cautious knock or two on the room door and after a low response from me, she entered with lowered heads. I was on my feet beside myself and led her closer to me, then she raised her head and looked me in the face, lowering her head sidewise, blushing.
"Let's share greetings," I said, kneeling and giving her a big bow. She was first surprised but soon regrouped, doing the same. I caressed her and pulled her closer, with her leaning against me. She, looking me in the face with burning eyes and shaking voice, said "Wait, " rising.
She started undressing, me doing the same. She took off the outer garment and slowly started uncovering tier by tier of underwear, baring her milky front, me with naked body with no blisters and blemishes on either body part, also with the staff pissed off.
She then turned slowly around and let me look at her rear. I pulled her and let her recline on the bedding and part her legs, with her crimson red opening swelling in a murky liquid. As I produced a condom, she said in a stifled shaky voice, "You don't have to use this," Good riddance.
"You're so beautiful," I whispered to her hot ear, with my left hand caressing her rising nipples. She moaned a little, saying nothing, with her left hand guiding my stuff into her shyly hollow opening. It being so smooth and so soft in gliding into her that I forgot all the worries of the world in an instant in the metronomic cadence of mutual attractions. I came so early that she stayed motionless for a while clinging to me tightly, shaking a little.
I stayed motionless, too. Then I had an arousal again in her. Then she stirred and pushed me softly, turning my back on the floor, with herself on top of me. Startled, I had my eyes wide open under her, when she covered my eyes with her extended palm, gasping for breath. She searched for me with her right hand, me finding the inlet with a gliding ease.
She seemed to start savoring the moment, engrossing herself into the act, closing her eyes and gasping for her breath, of forgetting and losing herself. She came so quickly this time beside herself, blurting out stifled moaning with clenched teeth, gyrating herself up and down, throwing herself on me with a stifled sigh.
I had her this time from her back, a cicada fashion, pulling myself and letting her lie on her left side with her back facing me. An easy shift of posture. She seemed to have turned out to be another person, who had stopped doing it for so long. (She is now parched!)
Her mound and around it was so wet with liquids with hers and mine, which was so exciting. She pulled her two legs and held one a little aloft to part her opening, with me entering into her from behind with such ease. With entering done smoothly and deep, she pulled her two legs closer to her, with me entering deeper. Feeling so good. With each and every entry and exit of my stuff, she turned her face backward with parted lips, With rapid gyration, I ejaculated in her, with her spontaneous cries of orgasm, with her two legs spread wide apart with the onset of sweet fatigue.
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In retrospect, the lesson of this writer's Anayang Armory Affair comes from three aspects. I thought then and I think now that you should motivate yourself but not wait until you will be motivated by others. In other words, you should initiate tasks before you are charged with them.
Arriving at an armory company at dusk, I met with a cold reception of the company. I knew through an interview with a staff sergeant of the company that the medic deployed to this independent army unit from my regiment literally goofed off. My previous serviceman didn't do anything at all. So the reaction of the whole company to me was: "What the heck is another medic here for at all?"
The second aspect and what is considered to be no less critical than the first aspect of the matter is that the company command didn't do anything at all. The company commander didn't blame his own indolence but rather ascribed the heap of the sick soldiers to the red tapes of the army: The regimental and divisional medical headquarters is situated too far away.
On a modest party to celebrate a shift change held the next night, my superior medic defended his negligence of duty for the shortage of medical supplies from Gapyeong, the site of the original medical company. I, as the successor to the shift, didn't accept his excuses, mildly scolding his negligence for the increase in patients.
I did an initial survey of the barrack patients. I was astonished to find that there were not a few number of patients untreated for a long time. Of all the patients, hubalzzi patients, that is, back neck Fusarios patients, occupied the top spot in the list of the patients. I had already witnessed the incidence of the Fusarios cases at Nonsan Boot Camp.
I'm not in the mood to boast about the feat. I've done that already in local online message board to record 8,ooo-some viewerships and the detailed goings-on had already put into a book entitled A Civilized Report. Therefore, I'd like to introduce that matter to my global readers from another angle.
Above all, I'd like to pat my young man on the shoulder and give him a modest nod to his saga of escorting the barrack patients to Soodo Army Hospital in Seoul on a civilian vehicle. I'd like to concede that was the best he could do, and the only transportation channel he had had to use.
The living conditions in and around the army barracks of 1965 on which my young man had had to serve were inconceivable from the viewpoint of today. The regimental medical headquarters were far away; The direct dialing telephones, were not available, much less cell phones; The convenience of the intra-village transportation was not invented; The division of labor between the medicine and the pharmacy was not adopted. In brief, the independent army unit was in impasse, and the company command was incapable and ignorant of the ways to steer them out of the impasse.
It was necessary for him, that is, my young man, to act differently. By the way, I am tempted to say about being different. I am, together with a huge number of colleague citizens of South Korea, confronted with the leftist-orchestrated reality of sort in which the sameness is stressed to an extreme degree. However, I remind you of the reality that is run by the Rule of Difference.
In a strict sense of the word, nothing in this wide world is the same with each other. The sky is high above and earth is down below. A newly born baby, who has begun standing erect, starts learning about difference between mom and dad. All the gamut of learning of the world consists of categories, that is, the perception of differences.
You know a lot about the differences between people and things, can define them, and explain them in correct and plain English, and you are smart, can be designated as a smart guy or gal. You are ignorant about the differences between people and things, are confused from time to time about this and that, and you cannot explain them, but rather fumble about them, then you are a dull guy or gal, and can be designated as an idiot.
What is sanity at all? How do you keep your sanity? First of all, you should strive to enhance the consciousness about differences. You should fight amnesia about things. If you were to lose the consciousness about differences, and if you were to blurt out more often than not blunt remarks, saying "That's the same," or "What difference does it make?" you could be categorized as a person of dullness, bordering on insanity.
The young man that had been me decided to perform his assignment, as a medic who had been sent to a remote unit, differently from FM, that is, the army field manual or something. Although Captain Han somebody, the armory company commander, objected to my original plan at first, he was convinced by me to overcome the differences, agreeing to my plan of escorting the barrack patients by bus.
There might be somebody who is ready to denounce me for not following FM but for following my own rule of escorting the army patients on a civilian vehicle. I know I might seem to be unobservant by not trying to take a routine procedure of obeying the army channel of order and using the army medical ambulance escorted by an officer but not by man.
The main reason was that the patients had long been left untreated, that the degree of the lesion development in the back neck Fusarios had been considered to be serious, and that if you took the routine procedure the state of the lesion would worsen.
Now let me present a scene to my readers in which there will arise a row over the justification of the escort of the army patients by a first sergeant medic himself. To nothing other than Soodo Army Hospital (the predecessor of the Integrated Military Hospital) of all the army medical facilities. Voices are raised and fingers are pointed between a hospital guard and a medic with a Red Cross armband and a first-aid kit on his shoulder over the procedure problem. The first sergeant stands before a file of dispirited soldiers.
In the midst of the row at the entrance of the capital army hospital, the curious insiders, of whom there were medics and army surgeons, came out, popping their heads out to see what's going on. Out of the hospital medics, one or two, or several medics cried out, "Aren't you Shimmanni?" finding me out. I was very glad to see my alumni from Andong Normal School there.
I, together with my sick soldiers, was naturally guided into the hospital, and introduced to a surgeon. In an instant, the issue of army red tapes was gotten away with. My alumnis did all the detailed chores of cutting red tape, with the kind-hearted surgeon treating all the patients with care. He particularly showed me how to treat the lesion.
I liked all the atmosphere of it: with long scrubbed corridors and rooms which were brightly lighted with fluorescent lamps, with young medics in starched khaki uniforms hurrying to service posts, with medical doctors and surgeons sincerely doing their jobs.
Surgeon Lt. Jang somebody demonstrated the amazing feat of treating the Fusarios lesion to Medic Shimmanni that had been me and told him to do the same later. First, sterilize the opening of the lesion and cut it off. Second, extract the pus using sterile gauze and mayo robson and daub streptomycin sulfate. Lastly, cover the opening with sterile cotton and wrap it in gauze. Hostacillin, or an antibiotic injection after treatment, was given. That was so simple.
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I've taken the urine and blood test in a district clinic of internal category, in which I was diagnosed to be a patient of a very delicate disease which could develop in the old people and recommended to go to a university level hospital for a sophisticate test. I am now depressed recalling the worried face of my doctor. I wish I could be able to finish this story.
Pondering the idea of taking the test in a bigger hospital for the exact evaluation of my suspected illness, thrashing the idea and I've settled on an alternative medicine of my choice. I'm not saying I don't trust the contemporary medicine.
I confess that I am so timid that I can't imagine myself lying on a hospital couch and facing glaring eyes of gargantuan machines, and in due course of time bedded in a hospital bed in a patient's wardrobe of faint color. I am so scared and I don't like the idea of looking at the startled eyes of my wife and sons.
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Turning back to the Armory story, my entourage and me were given a satisfactory treatment of their illnesses in the army hospital and an armful of medical supplies from the friendly medics there needed for my medical activities. Back home, I discovered to my amazement that the ice-cold atmosphere of the company was turning into a warm spring.
Nothing had been certain when a party of the armory men had hit the road for Seoul, taking a long walk along the countryside farm road for 30 or so minutes, and riding an inter-city bus from Anyang City to Seoul for one and a half hour, getting off the bus at Kyongbok Palace, around which Soodo Army Hospital was situated.
Now they returned with feelings of fulfillment, smiling and talking to each other. Every one of them was given a full treatment at the best military hospital in the national capital, and was ascertained of a complete cure because they were told that the Fusarios lesion was easy to handle, and because Medic Shimmanni would do the rest of the healing work.
The armory men returned to their barrack room with a story to tell their barrack roommates. The story, which of course was overblown to a great deal, made quick rounds of the company periphery. The medical doctors of the army hospital were very kind and Medic Shimmanni, having had a lot of connections, got gifts from them.
I met the girl on a summer's day on the children's playground of my apartment complex in Seoul, South Korea. It was the middle of June, 2010. She was on a swing, riding it. She was on it, kick pushing it high up with verve.
She was tall for her age. She was thin but not skinny. She had smiling long face and wore funny glasses with no lenses. She was wearing a slung denim skirt reaching down the knee.
I was with Cyon, my grand daughter of six. She wanted to ride on a swing, so I took her to the place, trying to push her on the swing. Cyon said no to my effort. She said she wanted to kick push it by herself. She did it very well.
Time flies. It was like yesterday that Cyon had been on a sitting swing. When Cyon and her parents called on us on every other week, her grandma used to take Cyon to the place, sitting her on the swing and pushing her. On each pushing, Cyon said to her grandma, "much stronger," which meant that she wanted to be pushed much higher.
It once happened that my wife, urged by her grand daughter that she be pushed higher, had given it a real hard push. In an instant, Cyon lost the grip of the swing wire, flying into the air and making a crash landing on the playground, with her mouth full of sand dust.
Though Cyon rejected the idea of being pushed by insisting on doing it herself, push kicking it higher and higher from the ground, I was on nerves, glancing at her frail hands. Of course, she seemed to be holding tightly on the wire, but her over-confidence made me worrisome, still.
Fact is the girl of next swing started talking to Cyon, asking about Cyon's age or something. I said "five years" from the railing on which I was sitting, then Cyon was correcting it, as if muttering to herself "not five years but six years." There was something else the girl was boasting about. She said she was strong, so much so that she could beat the class in arm wrestling. I looked up at her arms which seemed no less frail.
I was worried about their safety, that is, Cyon's safety, above all things. I was wondering why they were talking while moving on the swing. "Why not concentrate?" I wondered aloud. They did not know that they could fall down to the ground with brain concussion. "Hold on, Cyon!" I shouted. And I shouted to the other girl, "Stop talking to each other, O.K.?" Nonetheless, the girl over was giggling.
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I have had a memory of an unwholesome experience as a child. I had been a loner, living as a lonely boy in a remote mountain-deep valley. So bashful and shy I had been that I hadn't talked to a girl, any girl on the village.
It was Dano, the fifth day of the fifth month in the lunar calendar. It was a happy day for all the village folks, who had a lot of things to celebrate. The sky was high and clear. I had been on a swing.
"Get on and fly it," I was told to get on the swing from uncles of the family clan, who had made the village swing for half the day long yesterday. They lifted me up and let me get on it, which was a little tough at first, but some uncle helped me get on it with my two feet.
Before I knew, a girl, who had been much older and taller than me, jumped on the swing, namely my swing, facing me. I was astonished. Shocked was the right word for the occasion. I fell from the swing to the ground as a result, with my left arm broken,
My grandma had raced to the doctor's, or the only doctor's office in the town, carrying her grandson on her back. The doctor had fixed it in a hurried and a wrong way. That's how I have had a warped left arm.
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The girl on the swing loomed large to me. I imagined for just a moment that the fearful girl on a Dano day of my boyhood years materialized. Before I knew, she got off from the swing and appeared beside me. In correct words, she seemed to appear beside me.
"May I sit beside you?" she said. I fantasized for just a while if I was dreaming. The voice sounded as if it was coming from a girl of my earlier memory farther away. I was not able to raise or turn my head toward her. She seemed to have made a metamorphosis of an old man of me into a shy and bashful boy. I found myself actually blushing. Shame on you.
I wondered why she was so immune to a stranger, that is, why she was not afraid of an adult man, regardless of whether he was young or old. I also wondered aloud whether she was cut off from the city legends, that is, the horror stories in which the rapists would take advantage of the extremely young victim's ignorance and insouciance.
I didn't know how to greet to the girl who had come suddenly close next to me just as I hadn't known it as a little boy sixty or so years ago at the remote valley and on the swing on my earlier Dano day. I was at a loss how to respond to the opposite sex. I haven't developed a skill all these years. I only said, "Of course, you may."
I was curious to know the other day just as I had been so as a boy why the girl on the swing approached me, saying hello to me, and the girl far older and taller than me had jumped on the swing, giving me a frontal jump.
Episode 2: "Live with Me, darling!"
Like air, wind is invisible, isn't it? As the wind crosses rivers and mountains, dream also crosses the rivers and mountains, doesn't it? As the wind has no borders, dream also knows no borders, doesn't it?
My earlier life before my parents, if it could have been designated as such, might have been the wind, the river and the mountain, might it not? Something, which could be called me myself, would have been without form, the limit and the border, would it not?
Who am I? Am I some existence which had been formless and traceless, or the sum of what could be termed without form, without trace, and without origin? Am I entitled to ask myself or someone else these silly questions?
As a lonely boy at a remote mountain valley, I had no peers to talk to nor peer pressure that forced me to do this or that. My grandma was busy carping her daughter-in-law, that is, my poor mom, virtually every minute of every day. My Mom was also busy excusing herself, weeping and whining. My Dad was busy, too, hitting the hills cutting the fire woods.
I was busy, too. I was too lonely, which made me busy. I paced up and down at the house ground, walking to the pear tree and touching it in front of the house ground and talking to it, and walking back to the persimmon tree in the rear garden. Then climbing and standing on the elevated footing in front of the house gate and spreading two legs apart, I got my stuff out and gave a urinal shot up far down the ground, which was thrilling.
There was another lonely man at the valley twenty or so paces away from our house who had been sick on his face or something. He of course was ugly and dirty at the same time. He was a real loner who had no family. I stopped by the uncle's house from time to time, when he waved me away, which was so sad.
You might ask me if I was afraid of him. I can assuredly say that I wasn't. To the contrary, whenever I spotted him lingering or doing something on his place, I was glad. Anyway he belonged in the valley.
I was lonely but not so lonely, I bet you. I had a lot of companions with me. Nature was my best companion to begin with. All the sounds of nature were all around me: low yet sometimes high-pitched, rhythmic and melodious yet sometimes cantankerous. The valley creeks were so cold which made me feel good, rolling and rolling among the rocks.
I missed people--cousins, uncles, aunts and grandpas and grandmas of the family clan, who were 12 kilo meters or so away. My real grandma and dad were really worried about the sorry state of my isolation. They sent me from time to time to the clan town where I could be "enlightened."
I missed people so much so that I used to run down the slope which was not so steep each and every time when I spotted the alikes of the family clan. I was really disappointed at the back heads viewed from behind which were about to turn the corner into the down village.
I was fond of people and afraid of them at the same time. In the year of 1950 when the Korean War broke out, a squadron of the Korean Army bivouacked on the peak of the valley hill. My mom took the meal baskets to the place and I dropped by the army tent which was so cozy and comfortable.
I learned to like people and things in the first place. No, I didn't learn that. I came naturally to take care for them. It seems that I wanted people and things in return for what were missing about me. Naturally I didn't learn to hate.
No one got to me to define such human emotions as adoration, hatred, or love. I missed people over the valley because I was so lonely. I needed the outside contact, but I couldn't get it, so I sought solace in nature--the sky dotted with clouds, rolling creeks with melodious sounds, the pines pondering all day and the fresh wind traveling through them.
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The autumnal mountain ritual was the one I longed to have an encounter with because the uncles and grandpas of the family clan came to the place to observe the annual rites of the ancestor worship. My parents were left with the custody of the clan farmland, by the harvests of which they could donate the seasonal offerings to the spirits of the ancestors which had been resting for decades or tens of decades on the hilly graves of the valley.
I liked the autumnal ritual better than the rest of the three seasons because it was the season of richness. I was able to eat cooked rice to my heart's content, that is, to my stomach's content. Bumper crops were stacked high on the yard.
The preparation of the ritual took several days, during which time the advance troops consisting of the dextrous brothers and handy uncles of the clan were deployed to the valley town. All kinds of fish and meat were purchased at a local market and all the gamut of vegetables and mountain herbs were collected, handled with care, cleaned, and suitably oiled, stewed and cooked.
The participants in the ritual numbered 40 to 50 members at each sitting, and the time which was needed for the solemn event took nearly a whole day, from early morning to dusk. The offerings of things and respects were duly observed, and the litany of eulogies for each ancestor trailed long into the valley.
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Just like the wind got across the rivers and over the mountain hills, did the mountains ever try to get across the rivers? Did the hills opt not to move, only desire to stay where they ever were? Just like the wind didn't know the barriers or borders, is it just that dreams do not know the bounds?
The rustic folks in the countryside didn't keep gates at the time, say, in the 1950s. They did have the gates and doors, of course, but they didn't know how to lock them. Some of them did have a semblance of wooden latches, which were mere vertical hangers which could be opened by an extended arm.
There were no barriers of any kind. Not any type of elevated stumbling blocks, or walls either. The winds whiffing of pines travelled with no hindrance. There were no fences to make good neighbors. I walked freely along the creeks, sat under the trunks of pines surrounded with iris, looked up at the sky over the valley hills.
Whereas no one came to me to teach me how to like people and things, I came to learn how to hate them by myself. The flashback tells me that Japan was not the originator of ijime, that is, the only culprit of the flagrantly bullying practice in the juvenile populace. The teenage bullies in some rustic communities in South Korea in the 1950s testify to the truth to the contrary.
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I didn't know who went after whom, but after a few days the army soldiers of the South left the hill barracks on the peak, the army soldiers of the North appeared from nowhere. The real Reds, whose red arm bands and insignia on their shoulders glistened, had asked for a meal. My grandma had given them barley grain meal, which had been husked and twice boiled.
I had been powerless, as a young boy, of course, as to the unhindered invasion of the Red army soldiers from the North, defenseless against the nasty bullying of the peer boys, and speechless about the taller and older girl who had been on a swing and determined to stand before me uninvited.
I was badly upset, giving my sidelong glances to the rifles of short length standing against the wall while the Red Army privates were gulping down the cooked barleys. I had wondered at the time why my country had been so vulnerably exposed to the invasion from the North. Looking at the backs of the young Red privates receding hurriedly from our house, I got mad at my bare arms with no weapon. I dashed to them and stabbed their unsuspecting backs with blazing stares.
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I had rudely been woken up so often at the time when I met the concerned eyes of Dad or Grandma, saying "You're having a dream, aren't you?" I wasn't crying out loud, having free falls from an elevated farm road of a paddy field down below. I wasn't gasping for breath, was I with me meeting eye to eye with a boar with her cubs, me hiding behind a pine tree?
A dream? What was it like? They didn't explain to me and I didn't ask them about it, either. They knew I knew about it, and I thought they knew that, seeing that they didn't try to mention it further.
But actually I didn't know it because I didn't ever see their signs or moves just when we the family members were watching the People's Army soldiers getting to us from across the valley hills, flying their flags. I couldn't notice any signs, sounds of footsteps, or moves.
They came anyway in no time from nowhere when I was nodding off sitting on the grass below the peak in the sunny spring afternoon, or sleeping one more time after having been to the urinal urn, listening to my dad cooking cow feeds outside the room. They came in faraway sounds, in muted footsteps, and in human shapes,
Human shapes? When they came to me especially in human shapes, they were usually attired in mature women's dress. I hadn't ever talked to any girl of my age at the time, much less adult women. They came to me anyway like the wind, and that in groups. They whispered to my solitary ears, "Live with me, dear!"
Episode 3: "Mind if You Become My Brother?"
For quite a long while, and even after many months and years had passed, from time to time, I was wondering about the women visitors, that is, the cerebral visitors. My memory is blurry, that is, it is not certain today that they had visited me only once or many more times after that, whether during the nightly hours or even during daylights, when I had been nodding the idle afternoons away among the hilly bushes or on the grass sniffing the iris.
I was wondering how they had gotten to me. On what route and how? By riding on the wind, riding on the creek, or on a boar's back? And above all, why me? Then why in groups? Had I met them before? Then where? I wondered at the time what they had meant by their solicitation of cohabitation, to begin with?
Despite their sincere entreaties, I was not in a mood to favor a specific girl or two because to me women, that is, girls had belonged in two categories: the victimizer and the victim. My grandma had been a dominant, insistent, and haggling one and My mom an obsequious, low-profile, and whining one.
Grandma had never allowed an instant's break for my mom, that is, with her poor daughter-in-law getting grilled on every gamut of house chores from keeping fire seeds unextinguished, cooking, and thrashing the bean trees, to cleaning the house and husking the barley by grinding it on the wooden treadmill.
My grandma had been domineering, and her son, that is, my dad, by having acted a silent neutral, had opted not to intervene, and I, her grandson as her " darling puppy," had made my lonely mom lonelier by opting to side with my grandma and by opting to ignore the plights of mom because the coward in me had taught me that grandma was so fearful and I would be nutritionally better treated by joining grandma's dining table whereas my mom had eaten on the room floor or from the kitchen outside the room. My belated wakening is that I should have faced up to grandma.
To me, there had been two extreme categories of women: yelling and whining, demanding and ingratiating and masterly and subservient. There had been no women in between, and I had despised both of the two kinds of women populace. I had virtually never talked to any girl of my peers until high-school graduation, as a result.
Years had passed. We the family members weathered the eight full years at the valley of which each year had consisted of four distinctive seasons. My great-grand mother had died after returning home from the refuge camp in Cheongdo of malnutrition and intestinal malfunction during the Korean War, and my second younger brother had also died from the aftermath of the evacuation during the Korean War.
Dad withstood the beatings by the Korean police who had been plodding him to snoop on the partisans, who he had not met and who of course he had not collaborated with. Mom survived, and of course my grandma survived, too. The persistent juvenile harrassment, which had been imposed on me by my elementary school peers, did not end, which was to continue far into the first year class of the middle school. But I survived. I had not been consumed by tigers. I also withstood the seasonal floods and knee-deep snow heaps during my elementary school commute of three final years.
On the day of the move I had a lot of things to do. I didn't actually like what had to be done by me confidentially to be watched by the other members of the family so I got up earlier than the other days and toured the place as if nothing had happened or as if II had been to the privy or to the family well to freshen up in front of the yard.
I liked the place. It's more like I had come to like the place. Actually I didn't like to leave the place. But I had been afraid to say and it had been a shameful thing to say that because the move to a great place had been planned sorely for the sake of me personally, that is, for the sake of my education from the middle school upward.
I liked the place. I did like every bit of it--the sounds, the colors, the flavors, the breaths the fruits and the crops of it. I listened to, watched and conversed with all that. I wondered loud if there could be any other way I would be able to stay at the valley, on the hills and live longer ever after with the iris, lying on the grass and looking up at the autumnal sky studded with clouds.
The unfortunate part about me was that my class performance was good enough to have been placed on top, making me the reader of the farewell address as representative of the graduating class of 80 in the year of 1956 at Oksan Elementary School. Grandma had attended the commencement ceremony, crying over the litany of my school day memories (actually written by my teacher) by her grandson.
On the day of the move I paced around the yard, touching the trunk of the pear tree, saying goodbyes to the persimmon tree, and giving the deep bows to the hills surrounding the house. We packed light. The moving troops had made a detraction of two members since we had lived at the valley (great-grandmother and my brother) and an addition of one (one sister who would later leave the house to become a Buddhist nun.)
The sky was clear with no clouds. The early spring weather was fine, not too cold, not too hot, either. Contrastingly enough, the day of the transfer eight years ago, when my parents had moved in, had been a cold winter day. Though my memory having been blurred, and though it seems that I had heard the footsteps of the moving people, feeling some warmth wrapped in a bedding or something, carried on somebody's back, they might have hit the snow-heaped mountain trails.
A family group of pedestrian moves of ten kilometers or so distance were progressing smoothly with one small incident. An old cat of ours, who had been strutting along leading the silent march, had dropped, before we all knew, out of the moving caravan, straying into a village which first appeared at the end of the descending trail. We had taken the feline betrayal with stride at the time: She must have been bored of dozing off the heated clay fireplace all alone.
Hardly had we the family members downloaded the moving package from the backs of dad, me and a cow, and from the backs or heads of grandma and mom, they were busy unpacking and arranging them in the new house, which was attached to the mill. The mill was run by water, so the people called our house the water mill house.
Grandma was busy moving in a new house but she was not so busy carping on mom as she had been at the Sun Valley. Her grip on mom was getting loose, that is, her intervention with mom's daily routines less frequent because grandma was getting to commute between her first son's and second's, and her first daughter-in-law was added in her list of inventory.
I was busier than before because I had my leisurely laziness lying on the hilly grass looking up at the blue sky, sitting among the bushes or nodding off beside the iris at Sun Valley deprived once and for all, which was replaced by the chores of a mill house.
A bright day nightmare was that my bullying peers were not getting loose on me a little bit. Their pranksterism was reaching a fever pitch, and the worse part was that a real nightmare was lurking around the corner.
The water mill house was erected by the initiative of Great Uncle Bin (the elder brother of my father) and by the carpenter's craft work of my father. An original paddy field was transformed into a water mill house, taking advantage of an established water channel.
The water mill house became a major source of a family income which provided all the resources for life as a family and which financed the schooling fees of me and my brothers. But I and the rest of the family members didn't realize that the mill would turn out to be an origin of a tragic family accident in later years.
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What an unfair world it is that the one party, that is, the predator party enjoys or seems to enjoy the variety in the option of methods of harassing, harming, and killing the other party, that is, the prey party. How absurd it is that the one side, that is, the prey side is ambushed, trapped, and killed, or is inclined to be by the other side, that is, the predator side, with no recourse to any other means.
The scarcity or non-existence of defense methods or tools on the side of the prey, contrasted with the variety of and profundity in offense methods and tools on the predator, forces the poor prey to opt for the utter way of self-destruction. In the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, the South Korean society saw hundreds of middle- and high school girls, who had been trapped in the mire of ijime or something, and lots of the starlets in their 20s or early 30s, who had also been trapped in the mire of hatred and curse of the Internet portal sites, commit suicides.
There should be just a moment you're bound to think that all the world is ganging upon you. In hindsight, that time of the water mill house in the first or second year of my middle school days might have been just the time or the moment, when, the kid, who had been a mere teen age boy, got suddenly old, and the rest of my family members, some of whom had died and some others of whom had gotten separated far apart with their own families, woke up to the glimmers of memory that we had once been the same family living at the same place.
I close my eyes for now and put myself in some perspective on some elevated place, say, on the rooftop of the mill house, commanding some overview of the house in which mom, dad, grandma, and me are housed. Before I know, I see mom coming down from the nearby hill of the walnut trees, which had been located on the left shoulder side when I was stepping off the house toward the middle school. I see her with so pale a face and with unsteady steps, overshadowed by dusk. I was wondering at the time why she had been to the hill by herself at such a bizarre hour with bare arms and hands, and now, almost fifty years later, I am shuddering to my horror.
Some invisible forces, whatever you call them by the name of ghosts, spirits or something, were ganging upon mom and me. I see now decades later that some super-natural forces seemed to be acting on mom and me. Mom was screaming, and me, too.
Mom was a bruised woman, physically already. She had one arm of hers severely smashed, with her loosely worn garments wrapped in belts and cog wheels of the milling machine, while working on it during my dad's absence, who had been on his purchase tour for the seasonal ritual of the clan.
Mom had no allies about her, but had enemies around. Though grandma's tongues became less tart. she did not turn totally friendly toward her poor daughter-in-law. Sharing one room attached to the mill with fully grown sons, my father took nightly visits to a village widow, which might have riled mom to no little degree.
Let me make another painful mention of invisible forces that had been troubling my family, mom and me particularly. Hundreds of miles apart here in Seoul, and decades later in August, 2010, even on some moments' reminiscence, it had been a horrible nightmare. I am still wondering why the invisible forces, or the ghosts or something had taken on mom and me particularly.
Envision one horrible scene in which some ghosts had been taking on mom in loose garments, at a mill house under dim-lit kerosene lamp, not in sweat shorts she should have worn, with one ghost taking a grip on one arm of my mom's, and with the other pushing it under the rolling belt, with the other ghosts clapping and giggling away.
Envision the other nightmarish scene in which a 14-year middle school son of hers had been sleeping. Some ghosts had conspired to make an inception of the cerebral cave, called skull, of the subconscious boy who had been me, making it and setting up the sniper's tripod. I had been able to see to my horror one of the snipers take aim at me.
Now the camera car is rolling along. The audience is ready to watch. Camera one, take scene one, The woman, whose right arm is wrapped in the belt of the milling machine, tries to pull her arm from the rolling belt and wiggles like a worm scared, screaming.
Camera two, take spontaneous scene two. The boy, who is me, sleeping, finds himself aimed at by a sniper or two in some distance, who, in half disguise and mask, is about to pull the trigger. The boy, startled, sits up, screaming.
“Cut off the water!" mom yelled at an invisible person in the room, who must have been me. I was screaming, too at myself and at the cerebral sniper who had made an inception into me and been aiming at me, Scared at myself, and scared at the yell from mom, I ran to the water gate tightly shut on an elevated bank of the water channel and pulled up the hand rope linked to the square slot pegged in the wood-paneled water way.
The fact that the water mill house had been a haunted house was attested to by a word of mouth testimony of my immediate brother, who, having been to my home in Seoul, in the year of 2009, for the yearly memorial service of my late father, after having heard from me about the mysteriously spontaneous mishap of mom and me and about my later traumas, told me to the effect that he had seen, at that time, the people in white, that is, the white-robed ghosts, dancing on the rooftop of the mill house.
The nightmare of the sniper's assassination attempt on me did not recur, which was a really great thing. If the horrorful incident had occurred continually and repeatedly thereafter, my nerve cells, which had gotten extremely taut, might have broken loose. It was not certain whether the white human shapes, or the ghosts, had been dancing on the roof every night of the winter year, that is, I did not certify the frequencies of the ghostly choreograph from my brother.
But the bullying of the peers had continued. What had been their joy in life? That is, what had been the joy of those bullies who had been harassing me, even in the changed places and in the changed days. Had it been their joy of life to plague me. The persistent bullies, realizing that their prey had not been consumed by tigers or torn to pieces by mountain boars, had taken on me with messier and lousier means of harassment.
The predator group, who consisted of three or four bullies, had elected a stooge, or an errand boy, who had done me various kinds of physical harms, representing the group. The stooge went on a bullying spree, nudging my waist without warning, kicking me from behind. or jabbing the ribs, with me getting down with pain, with the rest of the guys gathered in one place, throwing a sidelong glance toward me, giggling and giggling.
Though mom's mangled mass of arm muscles had surgically been treated and repaired to a considerable degree, with the swift first-aid treatment by a local doctor, and the well-timed vehicular transportation of the patient to Euiseong, the county capital, there had been no way to discover, even to notice the depth and width of invisible wounds, that is, my disrupted mental landscape which had been laid to waste, trampled by the intruders.
An epiphany had troubled me to no end that the red eyes of snipers were staring at me from any direction, the bushes, or from the foliage of the roadside trees. An obsession had overwhelmed me that one mishap or the other might overtake mom and dad at any moment. I had been taken ill with an anxiety disorder!
The bad boys, who had taken to a great liking to scare and terrorize me, had been sticky and tenacious like leeches. They had had the same routine as mine from going to school, sitting at the classroom, and coming back home.
But something was different between the bullies and me. They might have risen from their bedrooms, pondering over the joy of riding roughshod over me, over the joy of talking behind me giggling, and over the joy of finding me getting down on the ground with pain, whereas I used to rise from bed feeling anxious how I would be able to withstand the day.
Days passed and passed I pondered from time to time and later very often and very seriously over how to get out of the trouble I had been placed in. Appeal to their mercy? That would have to incur more ridicule and mockery of me. Visit their parents to seek their discipline? That would also have to deteriorate the course of the problem solution.
The day and the place were set offhand to rescue myself from the chaos. I can't exactly recall what day it had been, but I remember it as a warm day, probably a late spring or an early summer's day. The homeroom teacher had called it a short day, and we had been on our way home.
The bullies' paces were not so brisk, leisurely walking as ever, talking to each other garrulously. I was following them at some distance, catching them up, making a feline measurement enough to step up and attack the stooge from behind.
Getting over an embankment, the gang of bullies were walking down on a gravel road which had been built on the parched riverbed. Before they knew, I stepped up, overtook and felled the stooge from behind, mounting the fallen body and punching the face right and left, left and right.
Bullying disappeared overnight! Everything disappeared from my eyes--mockeries, ridicules, nudges, kicks, giggles, and getting down with pain. Everything. It was just what I had vaguely intuited. I had cut off the Gordian knot of being bullied once and for all by knocking down the stooge--the puppet errand boy.
Why hate? I couldn't understand a specific feeling of hatred about a specific person or persons, to begin with. As a lonely boy at a remote valley, I'd missed people. that is, people of any kind. I used to approach them, actually dash to them who used to get over the hill top.
I used to drop by the house of an uncle who'd later been known to be suffering from Hansen's Disease, who'd waved me off, which was so sad. In the annual autumnal ritual of the ancestor worship which had been observed on the valley hill, when I used to meet with the brothers, uncles, and grand dads of the clan, had been a happiest time of my life as a boy.
Had the boy of me reached the puberty at that time? I vaguely recall a note or something, which had been scribbled on a shyly folded paper and sent to me, via a classmate of mine, from a girl or two of a senior class in the coed middle school, conveying coy wishes of an encounter as sister and brother.
I wish I had met the girls at a late hour after class, once or twice , or many more times, escorted first by my classmate, later through the secret exchanges of appointments, on a shady clearing surrounded with tall pines, or deep on the nearby hills or on a river bank far from the town, and had had long heart-to-heart talks.
I had run from all that. I was afraid of the girls, of the chance encounters that I should have to stammer all along. I was afraid of the red eyes which had been glaring from the roadside foliage, and frightened by the mangled arm of mom's, and the bruised face of the stooge's, who had been taken along by his father, protesting to my dad, "See what your son had done to mine!"
Episode 4: Hired and Fired in One Day
That could have turned out worse. Mom might have been deceased if the water mill had kept rolling, not stopped by me who'd dashed to the water slot, with her arm mashed and bleeding profusely. The stooge bruised all over his face could have his life terminated if not restrained by his peers because I had lost my control.
There was another shift, that is a great shift of place and life mode. I had made a pedestrian commuting from my water mill house to the middle school about three kilo meters away for the past three years, and now I settled myself as a freshman of Andong Normal School.
The great shift took on a few major transformations in life. On the central stage of the shift appeared rail road stations and their subsequent surroundings--waiting rooms, ticket office and conductors punching tickets, strange conversations of murmurs between the travellers, the patrolling police, the approach of a man or woman who was bent on solicitations.
You could safely say that the bullyings were gone which were superseded by the sticky words, which in and around the station precinct you could be accosted with by the tenacious solicitors. The street lamps were dim, and the just-arrived passengers were dispersed just like the fallen leaves in the street.
I look back at a boy of 17 or so years. It's midnight. He gets out of the station exit, seems to be self-stranded for a while, which is so awkward, who is approached, accosted to by a strange solicitor walking beside the young man in school uniform and cap, stalling for a while, hesitating to respond, looking around, and after being plodded once again, assuring himself that nobody is around, seems determined to come along.
Getting out of the station plaza, getting around the wall separating the plaza and the main street, the young man is escorted to a room door of a tin-roofed whorehouse, which is lighted, and from which a lady attired in a see-through dress, gets up, gasping in astonishment.
"How green!" she exclaims. There is an uproar among them, arguing about whether to accept the green guest or not. I know that it is time I ordered my boy to run from the scene, truly embarrassed about himself.
Normal School is an extinct three-year- high school system by which the elementary school teachers had been trained. Andong Normal School, one of the nine normal schools in Korea (give or take one or two), had 200 students of which one girls' class had 50 students.
That having been said, it occurs to me who cares. But it's important that our protagonist and narrator had been a student of the 200 students of Andong Normal School during the period of 1958 and 1961 and that there had been 50 coeds. The red eyes of the sniper's had incurred the deep-rooted trauma which had resulted in his protracted sullen glumness. Which is why I hadn't been talked to by a school girl during my school days, and which is why Willowy had noticed my depression and blurted her sober care about it: "Your depression is very contagious!"
There seems to be two major ways for one to describe one's own past life, or for a writer to define a protagonist's life progression: an inducted way or a deducted way.
The inducted description of my Normal School days will be to put seemingly irrelevant pieces of my high-school- day behaviors at its every stage of class, on every tier of disciplines, or on dissimilar events together and hand down some meaning on them. On the other hand, the deducted description of my life during the juvenile years will be to shed light on some significant developments or occurrences and lay assessments on them. I will adopt and follow the latter, which will make my readers less bored and much more intrigued.
A major shift of life, which took place after the transfer to Andong City, was its life at night and its nocturnal circumstances. The night at my hometown at that time meant darkness. The kerosene lamps were seen glimmering in the sparsely scattered homes with thatched roofs. I was shivering at times to hear village dogs bark fiercely, reading The Story of Three Kingdoms on the serialized pages of the then Donga Ilbo Newspaper. The brutal army troops of the crafty Tsao Tsao were killing and vandalizing all along.
On the contrary, the night in the city of Andong didn't mean a mere slip into darkness but it meant another onset of daylight. The banks were closed at that time but the citizens were flocking to the groceries, fish or fruit markets. Joyful families were dining out in the Chinese or Korean restaurants. Non-stressful senior people were sharing small talks in the tea rooms and coffee shops. Several movie theaters were open at night. There were some idle folks at ubiquitous baduk houses, making busy trips to the eager baduk sites, kibitzing.
I think it might be a little harsh on a country boy of me, who'd been traumatized and financially strapped, to send him on a nightly tour of a city he had chosen to live and study, looking at him in perspective as if the boy were an utterly different ego. But I have to, and you will understand and enjoy the experiment because a few interesting personal temptations of trial character are lurking.
On top of the poor financial resources, I hadn't been resourceful, either. I think I seemed to have been starving nutritionally. To get myself out of the nutritional starvation, I used to take prey on some kind-hearted peers, knocking on their Samaritan chords, querying "Haben Sie Geld?" Then he used to take me to a nearby roadside bakery, catering me to a plateful of chrysanthemum bread.
I had been starving scientifically, too. Tens of thousands of books on the shelves of the School Bookstore at the downtown street were a great wonder to me, who had given them lusty stares.
It's time I explained to you readers what my encounter with TIME at a pretty good book store of a small- town city meant to me personally and to the country boy as the main character of this novel and how it had later developed.
TIME was a fixture at the magazine section at the entrance of the book store. It was beautiful. The red borderline was very impressive and the title of TIME was particularly inspirational. My encounter with TIME began with a greeting of wondrous amazement, at which the lady clerk threw me a mischievous smile.
A reluctant purchase turned to another. The acts of turning pages developed into moments of cursory perusal. At first I was afraid of being watched by other customers, so hardly had I bought a copy when I put it into my school bag.
It was a great pleasure to visit the place and fin
d the fresh copies there. There hadn't been many but several, of course. So I had to be in time there. And of course it happened from time to time, and progressively very often that I had been caught red-handed in the act of getting fresh back copes of TIME.
The visitors to the place, in which they watched the odd scene, created the words of mouth, added wings and started spreading them all over town and the school campuses. There had been several high schools and two girls' high schools at that time. They enjoyed the story and enjoyed spreading it. They prided themselves on the fact that the city had a high school boy who reads TIME.
I'm tempted to yell and ask a question of myself what's going on. I want to convince myself to stop any attempt to assess the trivial act of holding in my boy's hand one back copy of TIME, one of the international magazines of world renown, all around the clock, for all to see, and hand down any judgment on it.
Snobbish? Yes. Fake? Yes. A false display of knowledge? Yes, of course. A con game or scam? Utterly no! My boy had no premeditated intention to con people to buy him or his particular idea.
In due course of time, I found myself enjoying it, immune to the idea of right or wrong. I enjoyed hearing the voices in the back alleys. Progressively I found myself enjoying people talk in low voices, or talk behind me at some distance loudly enough: "There goes English!"
On one late afternoon of the early winter, in 1959, two peer students of one neighbor class called on me. They seemed to locate my rented room with some difficulty. They were led into my clamped small room, but after sitting down on the vinyl-covered room floor. they showed some reluctance at first, coughing and aheming, seeming hard to find hard to pronounce the first syllable.
One of the visiting students opened his mouth with difficulty and said to the boy that was me, "Why don't you find yourself a job?" But he couldn't wait for my answer, giving a response to his own query. "Mrs. Moon somebody, who is the wife of a commercial bank president stationed in Seoul, is looking for an English tutor."
"Why me?" I said. He said, "You know why." He said she knew about me, which means that she had heard about the rumor which had been circulating about me in relation to the comprehension of the difficult English language magazine of TIME. I didn't say at that time that the rumor was overblown, and that I wasn't naturally prepared for the job. Instead. I said that I wasn't only willing to take the job. In retrospect, the boy of me had conveyed his refusal to the effect that he was not up to the lady of high caliber.
I was in need of a job, any job, that is. I was always hungry in the first place, The rental room was too clamped, The so-called "self-preparation of one's own meal" in a rented room under so few food resources, was considered really fit for malnutrition.
I was a job seeker myself. I sought one eagerly indeed, but I was hired and fired in one day as a delivery boy of a newspaper. Showing up at a dawning hour at the delivery office of the Kyunghyang Shinmun, which had been situated near Andong Railroad Station, shoving between the other boys, I collected my stuff and raced to my area which covered as far as the 36th Army Division.
I turned out a loser, that is, they found me not up to the task of a newspaper delivery, which necessitated swiftness and exactness. The sun was already high up in the sky, but ten or more newspapers copies were not leaving me. Racing up and down the hill, making a few rounds of the alley roads, I was not able to locate several names. I was hired in one day and fired the next day.
Episode 5: Shaking All Over
It's a fearful world, isn't it? I walk past the uprooted trees in the last night's typhoon rampage. My gut feeling is that the rest of the unbattered plants were severely terrified and scared.
In flashlight, there had been a series of horrible things. At times, one who's not terrified and scared was terror and scare itself. My parents hadn't been terrified and scared, which had terrified and scared to no end. Mom had once been a fearful human being.
My adoring second brother had died suddenly one night after we the family members had returned home from the war evacuation.. It's not certain whether he had died or not. He had only disappeared overnight, and dad and mom had been somewhere near to the mountain hill. That's it.
My parents had been silent all along. A silence pact, indeed. Grandma had said nothing, too. No one had cried or wept. There had not been a stir or furor. My immediate brother and me had asked nothing about the disappearing brother. Which had been so horrible, and still is.
Boars had been fearful in Sun Valley. The Reds, who had been on the run, seemed to have been fearful. The overnight fierce engagement had been really fearful, after which we the family had hit the road for refuge in escape in Cheongdo.
Snows, which had heaped ankle deep in a half day, had been a fear itself. The suddenly swelling river stream, in which I had tripped and fallen, overturned and hit by rolling rocks, while trying to cross it for myself, had been another terror and scare.
Looking back, it seems I have been going through the tunnel of fears. I am afraid that I think that I am afraid. I am afraid of people and things. In my mind's eye, I might have been terrified of the flashlight wrapped under the cozy cocoon of mom.
"I saw the light and an instant's pin pain on my face," mom had once asserted. My parents had lived in a small coastal mining town in Nagasaki-ken about 15o kilo meters far from Nagasaki City, during the five years from 1940 until 1945.
On a home-bound boat returning from Nagasaki, my parents and their close relatives had been torpedoed near Busan Port, from which they had been fortunately rescued from sinking. In my mind's eye, I hear the melee on aboard the ship, wrapped in a cradle.
There ensued a plight after another. The atomic bomb blasts were replaced by torpedoes which were superseded by the beatings by the Korean police (dad) which were placed back by the naggings (mom) which were taken by the real Reds which led to the fierce night battles in the valley.
The replacements of terror and scare have been taking place one after another: One disaster after another, one crisis after another, one chaos after another, and one accident after another. There seems to be a continuity of happenings of worst category. And at each and every happening, I have been reminded to say to myself that that could have been worse.
I hear screams ringing in my old ears. Mom screams "Stop the water!" and I dash to the water gate. Off the Cheongdo River, under the cover of night in the cocoon of the cotton cloth tent, I hear screams from time to time of "Help!" desperately blurted out on every summer night in the Korean War year by somebody while being hit by the rapids and floated along the shore.
I see the falls, which had been felled on the summary executions of partisans done by Oksan Police Box under the command of Euiseong Police Station, taking place one after another and I see them more vividly when I close my eyes, through the holes of the school fence, also in the year of the internecine Korean War. It was noon on an early summer's day or late spring's day. There was not a whiff of wind. There was calm everywhere. There might have been stifled mouths and startled eyes.
Typhoon Gonepass or something raged through the guts of the capital yesterday (September 6, 2010) as if herds of the crazy horses raged through the wild. The metropolitan gapes threw up, the subway lines got warped, the electric lights went out, the windowpanes of some apartment complex got smashed, and I was terribly scared.
Again 50 or so years ago. I got fevers at the time often and I didn't go to school, I lay on the cold rental room by myself, thinking of dad and mom, and more often than not, shivering all over.
The communication was not available at that time between a student and his or her teacher by electric or electronic or by any other means, so when I was absent from class the homeroom teacher dropped by to see what was going on. It just happened from time to time that hardly had I gotten a plate and feasted myself at rice cakes in my lazy daydream when my homeroom teacher Mr. Kim was knocking on the out-of-the-room kitchen door, when a sudden ray of afternoon sunlight was flooding in.
I wish my thoughts could be flexible enough to the extent that they could be collapsible. That my thoughts could be folded and unfolded like bamboo fans. How convenient.
A poetess, who is known to have lived during the 17th century, sang her wishes to such effect.
I wish I could cut it off/
The waist of the long wintry night/
Wrap and put it deep under the warm bedding/
And when the day arrives that he comes/
I wish I would unfold it to no end.(Hwang Jini, 17c)
Why couldn't I keep my peace of mind? Why couldn't I keep myself secure from the intrusion of a sniper, that is, from the spirits' running havoc? How could I keep myself unhurt from the worries about my parents? Have I been destined to make a life of worries? Is the life with no worries impossible?
I wish to convey to a depressed boy that was me my comforting greeting, "Are you all right?" I imagine my thoughts, their close kin and their offspring ensconced in a cozy cocoon encrusted with prickles, put into a sack or a pouch tightly zipped, which would be put into a satchel secured by latches. So secure.
I wasn't actually secure. I couldn't keep myself encrusted with prickles but rather I got myself prickled. I was having profuse internal bleeding. I more often than not absented myself from class, and even when I went to school, I was sitting absent-mindedly alone on a bench of the school pond, away from class.
I didn't have to go to the back alleys around Andong Station again to meet a woman in red, although I was in desperate need of a human contact of some sort. I was reading the story books, instead, I was stepping through a rain forest of human experiences.
I dropped by a second-hand book store called Amazon very often, the owner of which was obese with big smiles, and was very nice to me, saying, "Normal is O.K." He was sitting on a small wooden chair, surrounded with stacks of books, covered with a bedding, always warming himself by a charcoal fireplace. He was very nice with the price for selling and lending books.
I was scared. I was scared of the novels, too, I was scared of all the family feuds, horrorful crimes, or killings. Did I say earlier that I had been scared of grandma and mom? Scared of mom more than anybody else as times passed.
Yes, I was afraid of women. In other words, I knew women were a fearful thing. Grandma and ma and the women at large. I was afraid of the girl students, too. Actually I was looking at them from afar at school ground...I was actually turning my face from them when running into them in the classroom aisles as I was moving from one class to the other. I hadn't talked to any girl and I hadn't been talked to by any during my school years.
I am nervous a little bit, but I am greatly relieved at the same time to have a hindsight like this. I throw a look at my hands and palms, stroke my head as slowly as possible, and pat both shoulders of the boy that was me.
In hindsight, I now find that scared was good, that nervous was O.K. and that terrified was very nice. How nice of me not to have push opened the door frame between the two rooms. If I had been brazen enough to have push opened the door frame between the boy that was me and entered the private room of the land lady.
"Get over here! That room floor of yours is not warm enough. How don't you come over and sleep in my room?" she had said that night, with her voice shaking a little. My guess was that her husband had been on a business trip, with her two daughters on their grand parents' house. My boy could hardly pronounce a word, holding on to a door latch and shaking all over.
Episode 6: Whispering to Their Sad Ears
Andong City was a big place compared to the previous places I had stepped on. One major attribute of a big place, though it could not be the only one, was that it had a river on, around or in its periphery. When I got to Nakjeong Naru, that was that.
The creeks of Sun Valley sounded melodious from one point of place to the other, and thunderous at a particular site. The creeks hankered for a big place, missing a river, and getting together at tributaries.
I now envision water drops, that is, the fate of water drops. I sometimes do. As a country boy I had watched the ill-fated water drops kept stagnant on a small water basin made by cow footprints, which were destined to go on a road to reeky desiccation.
I pity the state in which the water drops had to be kept stagnant. How much they would envy the lucky streak of the peer drops which were to hit the journey for the rivers and the seas. They had made a spontaneous start from the sky onto earth with the utter different landing.
You stand by the river, and you'll appreciate its past, present and its future. You'll also have a moment to ponder over your past and future: You ask yourself whether you'll go along, against, or across it. That is, rivers always have something to do with remembrances.
This writer and narrator now (September 11, 2010) stands by a small stream river which goes into the Han River. It rained steadily here last night, but not cats and dogs. The Weather Bureau said that it rained really hard upstream. Folks sometimes say it poured just with bucketfuls of water.
Setting a side talk aside, coming back to a river port called Nakjeong Naru, I have to decide whether to cross this river or not. The sun is in the middle of the sky, a warm ray of an early autumn afternoon sun is shining on the wide expanse of the river bed, a bus with its passengers from Euiseong gets aboard a wooden ferry boat bound for Sangju.
All is set except one person to cross the river: a boy teacher of 19 who has been appointed as an elementary school teacher to serve at Nakdong, about 12 kilometers from Nakjeong Naru. He wavers between his dutiful responsibility and personal conscience--a guilt feeling that he isn't fully prepared for the job.
Although I as the boy teacher had been appointed by the local Education Board in September someday, 1961, the year the military coup had taken place, the appointment had been one of a supplementary character because the original appointment should have been done at the time of the graduation. I had originally been opted out at the Graduation Assessment Board because my classroom activities and imperative pedagogical activities had been evaluated as too low.
I knew much later that Mr. Kim, the homeroom teacher of my senior class had played a Samaritan, who had done extraordinary efforts to save the poor student of me from having been opted out. So I had barely been able to be listed as one of the graduates of 1961 at the bottom pit.
I am now balking at the idea of crossing the river and sending my boy to the town in which he had been appointed to serve. Since my boy had bungled a lousy mess of not a few things during his service of 18 months there at Nakdong Elementary School, I have second thoughts as to the reiteration of his previous follies unveiled once again for all to see. (cf A Civilized Report:www.textore.com)
I have from time to time my cerebral land trespassed and violated in which I am still standing before the black board at my class room of my initial service, facing the class, talking something and worried about something, I am an elementary school teacher who is 20-some years old. Yes, I am not getting old.
Students are so few about which I am worried. I wonder where they are gone anyway. The room floor of the class is so dirty. I am a little stressful about the condition of the classroom. I have some things left to do. I've not checked attendance yet. I look out the classroom window at the playground where they're playing around. They choose not to notice their teacher that's me.
I feel it a little necessary for me to give my readers a modicum of insight on the improvement of the teacher-recruiting system of South Korea. The 19-year-old elementary school teacher just like me might have been an idiosyncrasy. The system of three-year high school training of elementary school teachers had ceased to exist in 1963, from which a new sophisticated four-year university training had been needed for the elementary teaching profession.
Which does not suggest that the then boy teachers had been misfits for the pedagogical profession. I had been a misfit yes, but I am sure my peers had been superb teachers. The major ground for such assertion was that the curricula had been well organized, the teaching staff of Andong Normal School had been excellent and almost all the students had been hard at work and well adjusted.
It'll be a decent reminder to you readers that I had been greatly indebted to the residents in general and the parents of the dear students of my class who had bestowed a great benefaction of generosity and tolerance on me. I also had owed my colleague teachers who had gone to great lengths to wink at my personal follies as teacher.
I am going to introduce my love that I'd come to know there at my first service. I'm excited and thrilled on the one hand, but I am nervous on the other because I know that you want to know about the numerical orders of the love I had once been enthralled in or enslaved by. I find myself plummeting into a labyrinth of self-doubt, that is, a question about the validity of an attempt at a forced familiarization of a lady who might have been leading her own decent and peaceful life.
Though it might be a little too much presumptuous of me to do that, but if I, who had been terrorized by the witness experience of the summary execution of the Communist partisans, scared to death by the sudden disappearance and secret interment of my brother by my parents, and traumatized by mom's mishap and a spontaneous target experience by a sniper or two with red eyes, were to be allowed a modest opportunity nonetheless to present my girl that is not getting old just like me in my cerebral land, to the global readers of mine, I'll do that gladly.
Now here is a 14-year-old elementary school girl at a small rustic town who is to graduate her six-year compulsory course at a graduation ceremony which is attended by about one hundred and twenty students and a modest faculty of twenty-some teachers who I had been one of.
In due course of the ceremony there comes a time when the graduates sing in unison the farewell song, in which the graduating girls almost always burst out crying, hiding their faces among one another's backs. So much so that it occurs a considerable minutes have to pass and the teaching staff of the graduating classes used to have a hard time trying to calm down the perplexing emotional eruption.
There had occurred an eye-opening scene, the excitement of which could be compared to that I as a mountain valley boy had first seen purple iris in the deep valley beside the pine trunks. The thing is one of the girls, smiling, had started comforting her crying friends, whispering to their sad ears and patting their sad shoulders.
She was familiar to me because her younger sister was my student Iris somebody. Let's call the two girls Iris Sisters. Yes, they were pretty like iris. They were more than pretty: Their physique was so fit, their gaits were steady, and they had a low and shyful voice.
Episode 7:Escorting the Sick Soldiers
What's all that story about? If it were to go on the same or similar route of the previously stated course, would it be worth a try? Wouldn't it be going to be improper of me to have my readers to drink a coffee of bland taste? Isn't it going to be nothing but the insult of the readers?
May be or may be not. What counts I am afraid is that I've met a dream girl in my life and that she has been leading her life of longevity in me as the paragon of the untrammelled novelty and loftiness of gracious deed. She isn't getting old.
I'd asked her a favor of giving me a photo of Iris via her younger sister. The request was met with decline, about which I did not hold a grudge or a spite at all. By the way, I haven't been lucky ever to have a photo of my girl or my woman. Three or four years ago, I'd asked my wife of thirty-some years in nuptial knot a favor of giving me her photo which had been taken in her maiden years. She had declined my request, mumbling some epithets to herself, making me blush in shame and embarrassment.
I decided to go to the boot camp. I wanted to run from the reality, from my girl, and from home. The shameful decline was not the reason at all. Above all, I hadn't volunteered to serve in the army. Thing is that the conscription notice had arrived at a proper time, which I had accepted with gleeful anticipation. I was 23 years old and the year was 1963.
I said hurried farewell greetings to father, mother, grandmother, and to all I was concerned about and to all who were concerned about me. I had my hair shaved off. I hoped to get the dishevelled memories of mine shaved off, too.
A steam train was waiting to transport the shaved recruiters from Euiseong Railroad Station to Nonsan Boot Camp. Some train compartment was somewhat cantankerous. The diligent well-wishers were on hand to wave their sons and brothers off.
Neither of my parents showed up at the station to see their son off, of course, but one of my three uncles, the youngest brother of my father, together with one fine lady, was at the station to buy lunch and say some good things for his nephew. The thing is the uncle, who had been in his early forties and had had his own wife and children, was on his belated elopement.
I was traveling with Iris my love. I felt I was not alone in this wide world because I would be with Iris all the way through the boot camp, in the busy training camp, on the fatigued barracks bed room floor, dreaming of her instead of red eyes of a sniper.
I closed my eyes in the recruiters' compartment and wished Iris would grow all her way up and well through three years of middle school and three more years of high school, and in due course of life I would make a reunion with her.
The weather of the summer in the year 1963 was so hot. The hot asses of the enlisted men of the boot camp got hotter by the wooden bats. Today's barracks life in the South Korean boot camp has made a sea change compared to the year 1963. On the very day I had flunked the M-1 rifle test firing of 300 yard or some distance, I had gotten a real hard beating on my ass by nothing other than a steel pipe grasped in the entire palm.
I'd gotten five beatings. By one beating most of the other guys had made a complete roll over, but I had counted five. On that night I had not been able to lie flat on the barracks floor bed. I had lain on one side, when I had seen the ray of the full moon light knock on the barracks window.
On the light screen seen through the window the worried faces appeared one after another: Grandma commuting between her two sons' houses, mom going on busy house chores with her mangled arm, pop ploughing the field with heavy load on his back. It was felt just like a fairy tale within impossible reach that there was a city and its people over the wall of the boot camp barracks.
My service category in the army was listed as a medic, which had given me a small comfort all through the boot camp training. Yes, time was "like a running river." Each and every routine after routine was progressing fleetingly, when it just arrived the time we made a move to the Army Medical School, which had then been stationed in Masan City.
Let's make some frog jumps to deprive of boredom of the story and enhance your interest in its development. The barracks life of Nonsan Boot Camp had been the life of obeyance to the rules and to the orders of the superiors, but the life of Masan Medical School was that of competition, say, among the enlisted peer soldiers.
About five decades later I do a belated take on the meaning of the flurries of hurried exits from the barracks room on the eve of departure bound for a new and final service unit, winding up the medical school training. What's hilarious is that I realize now how smart they had been at that time and I am now able to catch up on the meaning of all the fuss.
I wish I had not heard about my ranking in the training achievement. They said earlier on the day that I had been placed on the sixth in the alumni class of 200. I was sitting quiet all along and I didn't say to any of them "How did you happen to know?" Of course, they had referred to the related document from the person in charge of Education Headquarters or something.
The thing is that all through the afternoon and the evening of that day and far into the night the readjustment of the rankings had been being done. A new day broke. I was named and taken on board a truck together with fresh faces bound for the Third Replacement Battalion on the front line. I forgot about major army hospitals or field hospitals in the rear area. That was it.
The army unit, that is, the front line medical company for which I had to serve, was situated on the neck of a mountain valley, under which the barracks of the army regiment headquarters and battalion army units were nestled. Some of the the alumni soldiers from Masan Medical School were ordered to serve on pharmacy and dispensary departments, with me on the barrack room service which was composed of four stretcher platoons.
To an army private, hunger was an intimate companion. On the day we the alumni gang of eight privates from Euiseong were deployed to the service unit company, the old-timers gave us extra meal tickets with sympathetic stares and words. I emptied six chow plates at which the kitchen guy, who was handing out the meal, beamed. The other pals seemed to have consumed almost the same amount of meals.
Out of the dining hall, Too Tall Kim somebody said to me, washing his plate, "Can you see your feet, Shimmanni?"
I tried to look down at me. I said, "No, I can't. Can you?"
"Me, either."
Hunger was not just the only companion, but anxiety was the other. Though the cities had been crisscrossed, rivers had been gotten across, and the mountains had been gotten over, the spider webs of anxiety stayed. The gloomy images were lingering.
The sullen gloom in me was so conspicuous. So much so that I was from time to time pointed out and reprimanded by the superiors about the standoffish aloofness, which I couldn't explain. I was progressively categorized and treated, in and around the barrack site, as a synonym of "a U.S. counselor." They were more often than not heard to talk behind my back, "There goes a counselor!", giggling away.
The stretcher guys' barrack life consisted of some monotonous routines: They did hygienic chores, boned up on the first-aid workouts, did some outdoors details, and in case of the inferiors, they had to stand guard during the night.
My emblem of a U. S. counselor was assuredly vindicated and attached fast to me when I, a medic corporal, had been lost, caught by the enemy, listed as a prisoner during the night war game of division level, and sent to my medical company the next morning. The whole company welcomed me with muted pity.
I had a run-in with the military police, too, an addition to the disrepute of a U.S. military counselor. The subject of the criminal infraction was the disobeyance of the commanding order and the allegation was that I, together with Hoon, a sand wrestler in his youth, who had been deployed as battalion medics, during the emergency drill, had slept the drill away in a barrack room of the battalion headquarters, for which both of us two had been put into a detention house in the division military police headquarters for two weeks.
I was summoned one day by Major Sergeant Rhee of the Personnel Section of the company. He asked me about my willingness to serve in an independent army unit. I was able to read his good intention to give me some cheers for my waning months of my army service. I said yes. The year was 1965 and I had some seven or eight months left for my discharge from the compulsory service of 30-some months.
I was ordered to serve as a deployed medic in an armory company, an independent foot company which had been stationed in Anyang, an outskirts city of Seoul. I had mixed feelings of nervousness, freedom, responsibility, and excitement at the same time. I was not to be escorted or transported by any person in formal charge. I was authorized to travel on my own.
Which meant freedom. I was given a free rein. Although I was able to choose any transportation means, I decided to use the train bound for Cheonyangni, Seoul, sitting on a familiar seat of the Soldiers' Compartment. The insignia of first sergeant on me made the seat more comfortable.
I was free to move to any place and to visit any person of my choice. On arrival at the dream station, my heart beat faster and louder. I was determined to be led to where my mind wished to take me. My feet plodded me to go ahead.
It was early afternoon. The warm ray of the early autumn sun was beating on my back, on top, and on my front, which made my warm heart already somewhat warmer. My young boy escort from the waiting hall of the railroad station stopped at an entrance of a brick-roofed house and waved me to go in.
It was an awkward entry with blushing cheeks and lowered heads, but there was a brisk reception on the part of a middle-aged woman who seemed to have gone to the lengths of her life. She took stock of me, up and down and up again, beaming.
"You're so lucky!" she bluntly said.
"What are you saying?" I asked.
"Your mate is a good house wife," she said, beaming again.
"What do you mean?"
"Husband is long in bed. Bedridden..Not done it for a long time...Parched..."
"What?" I stammered.
"You know what. Be a good bridegroom, young man. Rain her hard...Make her wet and drenched. O.K.?" she bristly moved, calling somewhere.
"Wait for some while." she shot me a meaningful smirk.
Popping up her head into a small yet cozy room, she pushed a water basin to me, "Freshen up," she said like an order. I washed my hands and face and dried them with a towel she had given me. "Wait, " she said again, like an order.
There was a cautious knock or two on the room door and after a low response from me, she entered with lowered heads. I was on my feet beside myself and led her closer to me, then she raised her head and looked me in the face, lowering her head sidewise, blushing.
"Let's share greetings," I said, kneeling and giving her a big bow. She was first surprised but soon regrouped, doing the same. I caressed her and pulled her closer, with her leaning against me. She, looking me in the face with burning eyes and shaking voice, said "Wait, " rising.
She started undressing, me doing the same. She took off the outer garment and slowly started uncovering tier by tier of underwear, baring her milky front, me with naked body with no blisters and blemishes on either body part, also with the staff pissed off.
She then turned slowly around and let me look at her rear. I pulled her and let her recline on the bedding and part her legs, with her crimson red opening swelling in a murky liquid. As I produced a condom, she said in a stifled shaky voice, "You don't have to use this," Good riddance.
"You're so beautiful," I whispered to her hot ear, with my left hand caressing her rising nipples. She moaned a little, saying nothing, with her left hand guiding my stuff into her shyly hollow opening. It being so smooth and so soft in gliding into her that I forgot all the worries of the world in an instant in the metronomic cadence of mutual attractions. I came so early that she stayed motionless for a while clinging to me tightly, shaking a little.
I stayed motionless, too. Then I had an arousal again in her. Then she stirred and pushed me softly, turning my back on the floor, with herself on top of me. Startled, I had my eyes wide open under her, when she covered my eyes with her extended palm, gasping for breath. She searched for me with her right hand, me finding the inlet with a gliding ease.
She seemed to start savoring the moment, engrossing herself into the act, closing her eyes and gasping for her breath, of forgetting and losing herself. She came so quickly this time beside herself, blurting out stifled moaning with clenched teeth, gyrating herself up and down, throwing herself on me with a stifled sigh.
I had her this time from her back, a cicada fashion, pulling myself and letting her lie on her left side with her back facing me. An easy shift of posture. She seemed to have turned out to be another person, who had stopped doing it for so long. (She is now parched!)
Her mound and around it was so wet with liquids with hers and mine, which was so exciting. She pulled her two legs and held one a little aloft to part her opening, with me entering into her from behind with such ease. With entering done smoothly and deep, she pulled her two legs closer to her, with me entering deeper. Feeling so good. With each and every entry and exit of my stuff, she turned her face backward with parted lips, With rapid gyration, I ejaculated in her, with her spontaneous cries of orgasm, with her two legs spread wide apart with the onset of sweet fatigue.
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In retrospect, the lesson of this writer's Anayang Armory Affair comes from three aspects. I thought then and I think now that you should motivate yourself but not wait until you will be motivated by others. In other words, you should initiate tasks before you are charged with them.
Arriving at an armory company at dusk, I met with a cold reception of the company. I knew through an interview with a staff sergeant of the company that the medic deployed to this independent army unit from my regiment literally goofed off. My previous serviceman didn't do anything at all. So the reaction of the whole company to me was: "What the heck is another medic here for at all?"
The second aspect and what is considered to be no less critical than the first aspect of the matter is that the company command didn't do anything at all. The company commander didn't blame his own indolence but rather ascribed the heap of the sick soldiers to the red tapes of the army: The regimental and divisional medical headquarters is situated too far away.
On a modest party to celebrate a shift change held the next night, my superior medic defended his negligence of duty for the shortage of medical supplies from Gapyeong, the site of the original medical company. I, as the successor to the shift, didn't accept his excuses, mildly scolding his negligence for the increase in patients.
I did an initial survey of the barrack patients. I was astonished to find that there were not a few number of patients untreated for a long time. Of all the patients, hubalzzi patients, that is, back neck Fusarios patients, occupied the top spot in the list of the patients. I had already witnessed the incidence of the Fusarios cases at Nonsan Boot Camp.
I'm not in the mood to boast about the feat. I've done that already in local online message board to record 8,ooo-some viewerships and the detailed goings-on had already put into a book entitled A Civilized Report. Therefore, I'd like to introduce that matter to my global readers from another angle.
Above all, I'd like to pat my young man on the shoulder and give him a modest nod to his saga of escorting the barrack patients to Soodo Army Hospital in Seoul on a civilian vehicle. I'd like to concede that was the best he could do, and the only transportation channel he had had to use.
The living conditions in and around the army barracks of 1965 on which my young man had had to serve were inconceivable from the viewpoint of today. The regimental medical headquarters were far away; The direct dialing telephones, were not available, much less cell phones; The convenience of the intra-village transportation was not invented; The division of labor between the medicine and the pharmacy was not adopted. In brief, the independent army unit was in impasse, and the company command was incapable and ignorant of the ways to steer them out of the impasse.
It was necessary for him, that is, my young man, to act differently. By the way, I am tempted to say about being different. I am, together with a huge number of colleague citizens of South Korea, confronted with the leftist-orchestrated reality of sort in which the sameness is stressed to an extreme degree. However, I remind you of the reality that is run by the Rule of Difference.
In a strict sense of the word, nothing in this wide world is the same with each other. The sky is high above and earth is down below. A newly born baby, who has begun standing erect, starts learning about difference between mom and dad. All the gamut of learning of the world consists of categories, that is, the perception of differences.
You know a lot about the differences between people and things, can define them, and explain them in correct and plain English, and you are smart, can be designated as a smart guy or gal. You are ignorant about the differences between people and things, are confused from time to time about this and that, and you cannot explain them, but rather fumble about them, then you are a dull guy or gal, and can be designated as an idiot.
What is sanity at all? How do you keep your sanity? First of all, you should strive to enhance the consciousness about differences. You should fight amnesia about things. If you were to lose the consciousness about differences, and if you were to blurt out more often than not blunt remarks, saying "That's the same," or "What difference does it make?" you could be categorized as a person of dullness, bordering on insanity.
The young man that had been me decided to perform his assignment, as a medic who had been sent to a remote unit, differently from FM, that is, the army field manual or something. Although Captain Han somebody, the armory company commander, objected to my original plan at first, he was convinced by me to overcome the differences, agreeing to my plan of escorting the barrack patients by bus.
There might be somebody who is ready to denounce me for not following FM but for following my own rule of escorting the army patients on a civilian vehicle. I know I might seem to be unobservant by not trying to take a routine procedure of obeying the army channel of order and using the army medical ambulance escorted by an officer but not by man.
The main reason was that the patients had long been left untreated, that the degree of the lesion development in the back neck Fusarios had been considered to be serious, and that if you took the routine procedure the state of the lesion would worsen.
Now let me present a scene to my readers in which there will arise a row over the justification of the escort of the army patients by a first sergeant medic himself. To nothing other than Soodo Army Hospital (the predecessor of the Integrated Military Hospital) of all the army medical facilities. Voices are raised and fingers are pointed between a hospital guard and a medic with a Red Cross armband and a first-aid kit on his shoulder over the procedure problem. The first sergeant stands before a file of dispirited soldiers.
In the midst of the row at the entrance of the capital army hospital, the curious insiders, of whom there were medics and army surgeons, came out, popping their heads out to see what's going on. Out of the hospital medics, one or two, or several medics cried out, "Aren't you Shimmanni?" finding me out. I was very glad to see my alumni from Andong Normal School there.
I, together with my sick soldiers, was naturally guided into the hospital, and introduced to a surgeon. In an instant, the issue of army red tapes was gotten away with. My alumnis did all the detailed chores of cutting red tape, with the kind-hearted surgeon treating all the patients with care. He particularly showed me how to treat the lesion.
I liked all the atmosphere of it: with long scrubbed corridors and rooms which were brightly lighted with fluorescent lamps, with young medics in starched khaki uniforms hurrying to service posts, with medical doctors and surgeons sincerely doing their jobs.
Surgeon Lt. Jang somebody demonstrated the amazing feat of treating the Fusarios lesion to Medic Shimmanni that had been me and told him to do the same later. First, sterilize the opening of the lesion and cut it off. Second, extract the pus using sterile gauze and mayo robson and daub streptomycin sulfate. Lastly, cover the opening with sterile cotton and wrap it in gauze. Hostacillin, or an antibiotic injection after treatment, was given. That was so simple.
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I've taken the urine and blood test in a district clinic of internal category, in which I was diagnosed to be a patient of a very delicate disease which could develop in the old people and recommended to go to a university level hospital for a sophisticate test. I am now depressed recalling the worried face of my doctor. I wish I could be able to finish this story.
Pondering the idea of taking the test in a bigger hospital for the exact evaluation of my suspected illness, thrashing the idea and I've settled on an alternative medicine of my choice. I'm not saying I don't trust the contemporary medicine.
I confess that I am so timid that I can't imagine myself lying on a hospital couch and facing glaring eyes of gargantuan machines, and in due course of time bedded in a hospital bed in a patient's wardrobe of faint color. I am so scared and I don't like the idea of looking at the startled eyes of my wife and sons.
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Turning back to the Armory story, my entourage and me were given a satisfactory treatment of their illnesses in the army hospital and an armful of medical supplies from the friendly medics there needed for my medical activities. Back home, I discovered to my amazement that the ice-cold atmosphere of the company was turning into a warm spring.
Nothing had been certain when a party of the armory men had hit the road for Seoul, taking a long walk along the countryside farm road for 30 or so minutes, and riding an inter-city bus from Anyang City to Seoul for one and a half hour, getting off the bus at Kyongbok Palace, around which Soodo Army Hospital was situated.
Now they returned with feelings of fulfillment, smiling and talking to each other. Every one of them was given a full treatment at the best military hospital in the national capital, and was ascertained of a complete cure because they were told that the Fusarios lesion was easy to handle, and because Medic Shimmanni would do the rest of the healing work.
The armory men returned to their barrack room with a story to tell their barrack roommates. The story, which of course was overblown to a great deal, made quick rounds of the company periphery. The medical doctors of the army hospital were very kind and Medic Shimmanni, having had a lot of connections, got gifts from them.
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