A Novel

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You could safely say that the bullyings were gone which were superseded by the sticky words, which in and around the station precinct you could be accosted with by the tenacious solicitors.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 let my boy 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 induced way or a deduced way.

The induced 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 deduced 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 find 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.