A Novel

Episode 5: Shaking All Over


It's a fearful world. 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've 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 scrared 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. Great grandma and 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's womb.

"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.

In brief, 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 The atomic bomb blasts were replaced by torpedoes which were superseded by the beatings by the Korean police (dad) which were placed back by the naggings (mom) which were taken by the real Reds which led to the fierce night battles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 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.