Chapter 31: At Guinsa Temple

31
At Guinsa Temple, Danyang, 1992



It was not just the problem of speed but that of absolute quantity. Stepping out of the exam room of Dongguk University and walking down the slopy road toward the Changchung-dong Street, winding up the four-day war with incompetence and inefficiency, I felt sorry for her and missing Tschai at the same time. He walked with a hasty pace toward the taxi stand.

Tschai had no expectations from husband Dano's belated obsession with a judicial post. That might be a reckless challenge toward the impossible. And that might be greed. She didn't have any idea about her becoming a judge's, or prosecutor's, or lawyer's wife. She was street smart. She was reputed to be tough, so much so that she would be able to plant her own tree roots even in the harsh climate of a desert. She only hoped that her husband would get started as the responsible man and father with a stable job.

Regrettably, I as a household owner, did not get settled in a safe place with a stable job, so the household troops could not stop getting mobile. Tschai planned, organized and materialized the movement to Mokdong Apartment complex. The apartment was the first of their own house in the true sense of the word, in 1989, 15 years since they lived in Seoul. All the resources originated from Tschai which financed the move, supported the household, and financed the education of three son children who had gone to higher and lower-tier schools.

Tschai got troubled by public transit transfers. She could not help but make transit transfers from bus to subway (Mokdong to Mullaedong), from one subway to another subway (transferring from Seoul College of Education Station to Daechi Station of Subway Line No.3). She spent almost four hours on her commuting transits to and from her accessory store at Daechi-dong.

My father got a cancer onslaught. Father's odd and fearful disease, initially begun with minor ailments, considered as stomach ulcer which had been treated with alternative medicines, developed into cancerous tumors. I was standing absentmindedly when my father was being diagnosed as stomach cancer by Dr. somebody at Hanyang University Hospital, in Seoul, looking, as if they were somebody else's, at the malignant tumors which had been clinging to my father's inner organ like leeches.

I vaguely presumed then and later more assuredly from time to time that the tumors might have initially been stained by coal dust in the deep pit of a Nagasaki coal mine, later adulterated by sweaty knobs of the hard labor during the drought and famine years before the 1950s and then warped into gnarled stressful knots caused by the disobedient son and touched eventually by toxic farming chemicals inhaled in the course of apple farming, that is, all the crystalization of the toils, frustrations and stresses.

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Then and there at Hanyang University Hospital, reclining on the hospital couch, Don had his body roughly handled by a resident, an intern and two other young nurses. They might have not noticed the presence of a strange man in his forties because the doctors and nurses had been engrossed in exchanging their own pleasantries about the joyful experiences during the last summer vacation, and they might not have realized that the elderly patient in his seventies lying before their eyes powerless came from the country. They virtually fiddled with the instruments--a computer monitor and a naessikyong, a gastrointestinal endoscopy,-- with a nurse or something fiddling with the monitor and with an intern fiddling with the long horrible hose.

Then and there at Hanyang University Hospital, Don was wiggling like a desperate worm, nauseating and shrieking with pain. "Do then like this," the superior doctor or something directed to his inferior to do otherwise. After a fuss of trials and errors, they were able to show to me, an ugly conglomeration of tumors, with a look of perplexion on his face and with an awkward remark of "Oh, we didn't realize his son was here!"

Rising from his couch Don had said "I almost died!" He should have angered at what he had been treated just a while ago. He did not deserve the clumsy rough treatment. I should have collared the doctors and yelled to the goddamned nurses. But the one was powerless and the other fought the urge to yell. The chief doctor of the Internal Medicine Section said with haughty disaffection to me Dano who called at his office, "The patient, who is 78 years old, that is, relatively old age for cancer treatment, and whose tumors are in a final stage, that is, so widely spread, is judged to be inoperable."

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I could not accept the fact that my father, who had been as stout as a bull and as green as a pine, would be soon to fall. How could it be possible that the huge pine that had been Don should be felled to the ground by the abominable disease of cancer. Don himself might have been self-conceited in his inviolability because he had never been bedridden in his whole life.

The chief doctor's pronouncement of my father's having fallen ill with the terminal cancer struck me as if I had been battered, all of a sudden, by a blunt weapon and by a murky consciousness that I would be parting with my father sooner or later.

Once the hope of a hospital treatment was dashed, Don became a guinea pig for an experimentation with the alternative medicine. Ilseo, my first younger brother, who had been living with the parents, made every effort to cure the disease. He made a mail order for an alternative medicine which had been advertised on a magazine from a medicine manufacturer whose name had been Isanghan somebody who had been living in Naju. Ilseo had not visited Isanghan, nor seen how the medicine had been manufactured, nor questioned, nor asked about the efficacy of the medicine. He believed in people and things in his own way.

Ilseo worked the hardest among the three son children whose filial concern and efforts were being made in four directions, whereas the last son Nara, who had been born at the water mill house listening to the sounds of the rolling mill, was the second most active in the filial efforts. He was in his thirties and worked at the Department of Commerce and Industry as a seventh-grade official. He met Dr. Sang Dong at East West Hospital in Seoul and arranged for him to write a letter of recommendation to Dr. Nugusira in Tokyo who prescribed anti-cancer drugs for Don, whose main function turned out to kill cancer pain. His first daughter and Buddhist nun was largely kept in the dark, and his second and last daughter Hee was getting her heart ached every minute because of her sick father.

Ilseo's filial efforts took his father to a bee farmer at Mushin-dong at the outer precinct of Daegu. Don got roughed up there for almost a month by apian attacks. He virtually was roughing up, with Boolim taking care of him by his side at a hut room of the bee farmer's. He had his body given up for apian stings. The owner of the house, Mr. Amuge, who had had a strong belief in the efficacy of bee venom, stepped across to the couple's hangout and administered the venom to Don's s body parts once or twice a day despite Don's grimaces and grievances. He picked out a bee from a small box of bees, held it in a pair of tweezers and put an end part of a sting on the desired body part. Don had had bulges and fluid scars as a result all over the body. When I visited the place to inquire after my father, Mr. Amuge rattled off case after case of the efficacies of bee sting treatment. He said he had once been a cancer victim but he had had his cancerous body stung by bees himself and cured of the disease.

Ilseo might have had a premonition that the rest of his father's life was numbered. I also had consulted a divinist, who had been practising, by the name of Odagada, his fortunetelling business at Naguon-dong, Chongno-gu, Seoul, who had told me some bad tidings about my father and some good tales about myself at the same time. The guru of the Iching said Don would pass away in two months and me would run into "a right man" in a week or so who would be willing to publish my manuscripts on the Conversion Approach, a theory on the correct interpretation, as a speaker of the second language, of the English writings. Mystery I intuited at the time was how the male oracle had predicted Don's date of demise through me, or a strange person who was sitting before him at the time.

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When the telephone rang, I got a fright as usual through the spine, with my right hand reaching for the receiver shaking and my heart beating faster. It was my brother's voice over the phone that carried not the news of the parental doom but asking a brotherly favor of me. It was a call to know whether I would be able to go down to Guinsa Temple in Danyang to hold prayers for our terminally ill father. Saying that, he informed me that he would wire the money for the expenses.

It was a rather chilly morning for February. I stepped onto the elevator at my apartment house on the 8th floor, went down to the ground floor, got out of it and started walking to the village bus station. I saw a hawk appearing from nowhere circling the sky over the Apartment Complex. What an omen.

During the inter-city bus tour and after the arrival at the destination terminal, I felt as if my feet were being carried. I was not moving my own system. I was not the master of my own motor reflex. I was standing awhile even after passengers had left the place.

It was around noon. Some modest rustic cafeterias around the bus terminal were in full swing. The travellers who had just gotten off the bus walked over to the roadside dining halls. The aromas of cooking foods pricked their nostrils. A woman at a cafeteria across the road was gazing at me Dano as if to invite me to her house.

I had a better idea. I stepped to a phone booth at the corner of the sidewalk, picked the receiver and slid coins into the slot of the booth and heard the phone buzzes going through. It seemed an age. They might have crossed the rivers and gotten over the hills. The coins were heard to drop with the clang. A familiar female voice returned with "Hello." "This is me Dano. How are things going, Miss Choi?" "Going well. Your book is to come out soon, with proof readings done," she said.

The joyful tidings of the impending publication of my book stimulated my hunger. I crossed the road and entered an eating place and ordered deoduckjjim, a stewed condonopsis lanceolata flavored with pungent sauce. It smelled and tasted good. I ate up a bowl of rice in a nano second when the realization struck me cold that I was engrossed in satiating my appetite while my father had a hard time gulping even a plate of soup. That was a shame on him.

I got into a taxi which was waiting at the roadside stand. The driver, looking at me through a frontal mirror, said, "You're going to Guinsa, aren't you?" I took an issue with the mode of his greetings. Then the driver in hat in his middle forties said matter-of-factly that Seoul passengers' usual destination used to be Guinsa.

Moving along a while, the driver then switched to a mode of his vehicular transportation. His suggestion was that unless you were rushed you might as well go slow. He said, "How about going slow?" I took a look at the dashboard. The speedometer of the car directed at 80/km. I said yes. The taxi driver boasted of the landscapes unfolding in the winding four-lane local highway along the blue river with the beautiful mountain hills in the background. They were beautiful, indeed. I then blamed myself who was appreciating the rivers and hills. The mountain hills should have been crumbling and the rivers should have dried ugly.

All through the ride, the driver tortured his passenger with pumoeunjungkyong, the mantra for the filial piety. He switched on the tape and made his passenger hear it out. The recorded voice of the cassette-tape mantra inspired his captive audience during the taxi ride with the "immeasurable love" of the parents, recalled their toils and asked them to repay their debts. The cab driver was used to reading his passengers' mind heading for Guinsa, knew their vulnerabilities and also knew how to subjugate them to ingratiating customers. He might have gawked at me Dano who was lowering his head and spilling tears.

After 40 or so minutes' ride, the cab driver said, "You made it." It was a wide clearing which appeared to be used for a parking lot. I couldn't see Guinsa or something. "You can't get there by taxi," he announced. "Then?" I looked at him accusingly. "You have to walk from here."

Nothing was seen from there. It was a steep uphill. Turning a corner, pushing a flank of a hill aside, a portal was seen standing high up. Negotiating the uphill for a few minutes or so, he got there and stepping on to the entrance of the temple, he was overwhelmed by the huge complex of temple buildings. Really huge.

The first impression of Guinsa Temple was overwhelming. The impression was solidified as I stepped deeper into the precinct. The temple complex found itself hugely in the mountain valley tall and wide. The Buddhist buildings, whose height ranged from five stories to single, were arranged in orderly fashion, along both sides of the thoroughfare, by category of use.

The temple complex was built on the rock foundation with steep upper slope on top of which was located the huge dining hall and its adjacent facilities. I, after having registered under the category of one-week prayer for paternal health with the front office near the portal, was guided to the prayer room of a building on the fifth floor. The accommodation capacity of one room was fifty persons of the same sex but the room was not cramped but spacious enough to house four times as many prayers.

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"Don't get connected," the speaker system of the temple said in a low convincing male voice, not blaring, though. A while ago there had been a morning call and the whole crowds of the religious complex were busy preparing for the day's schedules. And the speaker systems installed indoors and the loud speakers of outdoors were reciting to the attentive ears some religious aphorisms, warning them not to get connected. "If you get connected, you'll pine over those with whom you've been disconnected. If you get connected, you'll get tormented by those with whom you've been connected."

What did they mean by "Dont get connected"? To paraphrase, the phrase might have meant that you should not or did not have to make a relationship or something. It was illogical after all that you could not make a human contact or something unless you get connected because the world consists of relationships, because you are the end result of relationships, because Guinsa Temple consists of relationships. and because the very reason for the existence of the temple is that there are many relationships to handle. Therefore, the context of the aphorism might have been: Don't make a new relationship except one you have sustained or you should have considered substantial. You should not start a superfluous relationship because basic, inevitable and commonsensical relationships would be put in danger.

Standing in a long line of the diverse dining population and stepping slowly along the slopy hillside road leading to the dining hall, getting near the meal distribution table holding the meal tray, sitting and eating among the large number of diners in the huge dining hall in which one thousand people were known to dine at a sitting, and looking at the busy dining room helpers, I had my throat choked with emotion. Meals were good, and side dishes of kimchi and others were good too. I consumed every bit of them. I felt I myself was brazen enough, thinking that my father was having a hard time eating gruels, much less eating solid meals.

Pray? How to begin it with? I was at wit's end as to the matter of the prayer. I didn't pray with sincerity ever, but I did assure to myself that I would take revenge on anything that was in my way. When I had been famished as a kid, I had not prayed to God for rich harvest but I'd decided myself to get rich. When I had been tormented by pranksters for long as a juvenile boy, I'd gritted myself and decided to get even. When my father had been hard at work, seeming to balking at the idea of allowing any person around him a minute's break to pee, I had avoided his contact, not praying for his health. When my grandma had been prowling in all directions for medicinal herbs for her fragile grandson, I had not said a prayer of thanks for my grandma's efforts.

I had been obdurate all along. I had not known as a kid as to how to say even commonplace thanks or regrets. I should have been trained to do that. I once had almost killed my father. My father had been at work 10-meter deep down the earth ground, digging and building an embankment of the family well at the corner of the orchard. Father Don had been digging the earth, with his son me Dano up on the ground bringing up soil and send the rocks down below with which my father would build an internal embankment in which a person only could move around. Don had not been satisfied with the way in which the work was being done. The water had been spilling from the tin box of soils coming up and replacement rocks coming down. In an instant, a rock had slipped off his hand and dropped onto the head of my father, with him screaming. Coming out, Don had had his bleeding scars dressed and bandaged. Though he had not scolded his son, his son should have sought forgiveness nevertheless for his lack of suitable heed. But he had not. He had been scared all over.

The prayer session was guided by a young priest. He had made his appearance from a corner room and introduced himself and Avalakitesvara at the same time. That is, he had introduced a way in which me Dano and others, the room prayers, who had numbered 38 at the time, had had to pray. He said you had to pray to and through the one effective personality--Gwansseumbossal, Avalakitesvara, the Buddha of Great Compassion. She, from the earliest times on, had been so compassionate and so effective that any prayer of yours would come true. So you had to virtually chant Gwansseumbossal with concentration, with the object of prayer in focal mind. You were not forced on any typical position as an ideal prayer position. But you were not supposed to lie on the room floor until midnight.

I was frustrated at first attempt and blushed with shame: I slept away while chanting the prayer word. I had dozed on and off whiling away three hours or so, and I had lain flat on the room floor. At midnight, I found to my amazement ten or so roomers still immersed in chanting the mantra. I went to the washing place and awoke myself by splashing my face with cold water. I sat down again with legs crossed and began the process afresh.

As I kept chanting the mantra, I found myself conversing with my father. As I darted my questions about my father's love toward me, they were returned with more questions about it. I did the late take, a real awakening that caresses, kisses and vocal expressions of love did not just constitute paternal love.

Although my father had not, all through his life, said a word of love to his sons, he had lived out his love with all his efforts. He had crawled on all fours in a hellish pit of a Nagasaki coal mine for his family: That was love. He had kept a vigil through the night, casting a concerned look at his feverish son: That was love. He had walked all the way to the town hospital, carrying on his back his son who had come down with pleurisy: That was love. He had built a nice wooden house of his own with his architectural skills: That was love. He had tilled the fields, toiled day and night through the year and planted apple trees: That was love. He had built a family well that was not dry: That was love. He had succumbed at last to cancerous tumors but he did not complain, nor whine nor accuse anyone about him: That was love.

I shifted gear and swerved off the designated route. Prayer changed to remorse and repentance. The agent appeared identical but the action changed. In fact, the doer changed, too. In the action of prayer, the doer hurted no one, but in the action of remorse and repentance, he hurted himself. He could not help hurting himself. He reflected on his past deeds; He regretted his mistakes; He blamed himself on his father's unhappiness and his pain of disease. Cries blurted out. He cried to his heart's content. Slumberers around him moved and the murmurers of prayer opened their eyes and complained: "What a noise."

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I throw a long glance at my babyhood boy: It'd been an ugly infant that'd bothered my mom and troubled a well-mannered rustic doc who'd been kind and warm to his young patient and his mother all along the way. There's my boyhood kid in the horizon of my memory to the extent of the murkiest and vaguest thread. Long wrapped in the cradle, carried in my grandma's back, and in the further years of boyhood in the back of my dad, the weakling had been to the countryside clinic and surrounded by the affectionate crowd in the ship or in the refuge tent.

"Talking about the troubles of your parents," the mantra praising the parental love mentioning its unfathomability and immeasurability of the deep love, says to its audience to the effect that "it would be far short of its measure even if you should carry your elderly parents in your back and climb Mount Sumi thousands of times..." Oh, Dad, you're here beside me no longer...Oh, Mom, you're far away from here. You should be so lonely in this long winter night, with your frail body in your small room, apart from your old son and your grandchildren.

Chapter 30:Mind Is the Key

30
Mind Is the Key, 1983~1985

The contrast became palpable. The Dano-Tschai couple, who had become man and wife with the union of two independent persons of counter sexes, turned out bizarre. That is, the consummated union, which had traditionally been considered an inalienable entity, actually developed into two utterly different personalities. Whereas Dano still looked to be one personality with nothing but his own physical body which he could call his own, Tschai, who had originally been one person, her own woman, became a changed personality with assets, the offspring of three sons. That is, she bore three son children herself, who went to high school and middle school respectively, who she could call her own.

Tschai's accessory store was doing so well that she was able to support her family. She was also able to finance her three children with tuition fees, their seasonal clothing, and their pocket money. I had been idling away all along, doing nothing to fill the house coffer. I had been thinking aloud that I had been working also hard but Ihad not been able to make my voice heard and myself known. And Tschai had not been in a position to police her husband's thoughts. In appearance, I had been goofing off to her annoyance. Voices were raised frequently; Yells were routinely shared; Fingers were pointed at each other from time to time; The mention of a taboo word, which could be defined and listed in the Civil Court, was made on and off.

After my "goofing off" for the whole year of 1983 and failing in the first one exam of the two- time- chance Judicial Examination, Brother Ilseo wired 1,000,000 won to me Dano, with a recommendation that me Dano move to a quieter place other than my apartment room. Tschai and me decided to accept his kind proposal. Tschai called a taxi to their Dogok Apartment Complex the next day. It was drizzling. The early morning traffic on the drizzling Seoul-Busan Expressway was light.

I once thought big on a great national road of Seoul-Busan Highway, but at a certain point when the taxi swerved to a two-lane provincial road leading to Yongin, Gyeonggi-do, I had second thoughts on the challenge to a judicial post of court judge or something. The realm of language was regarded as supreme, real supreme. Make it or not, the exam would be final, I decided, looking out the car window from the passenger seat at the greenery of early spring passing by.

They were on hand out there to greet me and help me remove the package. My appearance made it more apparent that I turned out an "odd man out" case. That is, I was much too old for the scene to quit it. The landlady of the koshiwon, a lodging house built for the candidates who were preparing themselves for the exams for higher government posts, was an apparent divorcee in her early fifties who were thrown out of resources, desperate to help herself. The monitor, or the captain of the lodgers, guided me to their den of 20 tin-roofed compartments separated by a shallow side corridor. The monitor, who seemed to be in his late twenties, allotted me Room No. 16.

The previous host was just leaving the room as me stepped into the boarding house. A vague impression then was that he had been upset by something or offended by someone else. A more exact impression was that he got distracted by what the lodger himself could not pinpoint. I was wondering what drove him so nervous that he would have to leave the place in a hurry. Entering, I found the room so tightly spaced that a boarder would be able to lie down and set up a desk and a table on the rest of the room space.

Stepping out, after unpacking, arranging and setting done with the books and miscellaneous things, I found out that a group of young boarders assembled around a wooden parallel bar outside the boarding settlement. Point of their talks was that they were having restless nights and that they couldn't concentrate on their study, with the sign of which vividly played on the bloodshot and blurry eyes while they didn't exactly say what had caused their insomnia or something. Room 16 lodger had just left with the other two colleague lodgers.

One of the young lodgers came up with a suggestion that he help me do the sights of the periphery. The Jeong Won Sa Temple was a misnomer because the Buddhist shrine was not like a serious temple but rather like amja, a Buddhist hermitage cell. Walking steep uphill, I discovered that both sides of the hilly road leading to the cell were lined with rocks and decked in weird wild flowers. There was a pond below the cell yard in which there were various kinds of fish swimming. "Everything on the periphery has the monk's touch! He has a hand for beauty," he marveled.

A bell was tolled for lunch. The boarders got out of their den and came down the stairs for the dining hall which was a wooden house unit separated from the koshiwon in which a baap azumma, or a lady cook in her early fifties lived with a young daughter. The young aspiring diners entered the hall shuffling along in their slippers and seated themselves around a long wooden table on the ondol room floor with their legs folded Korean fashion. 'Special' food spread was laid out by the hostess who introduced me to the other guests. The azumma suggested offhandedly to the diners that I be seated at the head table in one of the two opposite seats to which the folks in the room expressed consent with claps.

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The night study went on swimmingly. I was glued to the desk for hours on end even with no break for a release. I got the hard subjects of the Civil Law and Civil Procedure Law alloted for the morning hours whereas I got the piece of cake Criminal Law for the night. When I thought I was ahead of schedule, I memorized model answers which I had prepared, scribbling them on the answer sheet pads. When I once stepped out of the room to pee, I saw the host of Room Nine at the opposite lying on the room floor with the door open and reading a newspaper. He seemed to have heard the first crows of the roosters at the village when he fell asleep sitting on the desk.

At a coffee break after breakfast the next morning, the host of Room 18, a young man in his early thirties with southern accent, invited me to his room. I was surprised at the sophistication with which his room was furnished with a variety of coffee wares. But the point was that he did not invite me to give me a coffee treat but he did want to know about the neighbor's nocturnal wellbeing.

I halfheartedly admitted to having experienced some displeasures, but didn't mention any details. Host of the room Mr. Kang elatedly said, "Room 16 has since been devastated because all the previous hosts have given up on the room. Why don't you move to another place?" I didn't like the idea.

"If a ghost were really at work, what good the mere room movement of a few meters will do? He'll be after me wherever I go. So I'll stand the room there," I said. It's an issue of pride, I thought aloud. It'd be ashamed and pathetic of me if I admitted to having suffered all the gamut of humiliations.

I'd been dragged, pulled, run, crossed, up the steep hill over the rocky crevices through the thorn bushes. I didn't see whoever it was and didn't hear whatever it was, but I was controlled, manipulated, and raped. Yes, raped. In a person's dormancy, if the person couldn't be his or her own person, and if he or she were abused for the sake of unidentified pleasure, you could rightly say that the person was raped.
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In every mealtime gatherings, the seats of absentees were watched with sympathy and fear. I was astonished at the numbers with which the exodus was progressing. The progression was headed toward No. 16. Some interruptions were made, though, because new arrivals made replacements. In the midst of the chaotic fuss over the bizarre exodus, there were some leisurely moments. I was mobbed around by some younger boarding lodgers (or lodging boarders) who were very curious to know what brought him there.

There had been a previous search, of course. I had gone to a koshiwon nestled under Mt. Bomun on the edge of Daejon City. The boarding house for the judicial exam aspirants had been patterned after cabin-type rooms. Entering a patio of the house, I had been received by the landlady of the facility. After a due greeting, she was about to serve me a cup of tea when I almost dropped it.

I was exaggerating, of course. But fact was she was so beautiful. She struck me as fascinating. She had been such a beauty of whom even her toes, which had been not covered in socks at the time, had been beautiful. I was wondering why such a shining beauty had been living in near 'hiding' with frail-looking 'husband' rather than living in the brighter world.

As I took a brief tour of the precinct, I ran into a roomer who tipped me off to what had been brewing among the roomers: "They argue among themselves which often develop into fist fights." With that, I got out of the place because I could not recommend the place to myself or anyone who was preparing the exams for higher government posts.

"Why?" one of the two woman boarders questioned me.
"Because it was preposterous of them." I answered.
"What do you mean by preposterous?" she wanted to know.
"It means that the boarders of the koshiwon in Daejon were not properly served by the cook but thrown into a position to serve the lady cook, instead, in a way that they'd be favored by the pretty cook," I said. All the lodging boarders there nodded their consent.
"We're so lucky then," Mr. Kang said, smiling.
"Why?" Ms. Bahn asked.
"Because our azumma is so homely-faced that we're at liberty not to flatter her," Mr. Kang said, giggling, with the others laughing with him.

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I couldn't have cared less. I braced for every invisible encounter whenever I entered and sat on the study desk. I even made "my soldiers" stand guard on the rampart. I posted a warning alert on the wall:"Ghosts, Off Limits!" Despite all that, nights tortured me to no end, and even on day time I had hair-raising chills. On nights, I was roughly hauled to the field, over the hill, across the rapid river, through the thorn bushes. I had scratches all over me. I stood the brutalities, nonetheless.

The sleuth in me Dano started being active briskly. I thought for days on end what would be the motivating agent behind the conspirator or conspirators to drive out the temporary occupants of the place that the baap azumma had leased in order to house those who were sitting for judicial exams.

The emotional factor of hatred was involved, I concluded for the time being. And the culprit, who had been possessed with driving the exam students, was not a ghost or ghosts but the Buddhist monk himself and the proprietor of the shrine estate, I assuredly concluded.

Was there any lead? None but some circumstantial evidences or clues. First of all, Monk Stout didn't like the idea of leasing the modest housing estate for other lucrative purposes. He originally planned to run a nursing home for the aged who had gotten disabled or unsupported. But his initial purpose was frustrated by Mrs. Lim, a divorcee with a daughter, who had entreated him to lease the facility.

The monk couldn't decline her requests, which was his vulnerability. But he tried to get his frustrated wishes accomplished by other mean methods, that is, by evicting the occupants of the den by his own supernatural powers. What a mean-spirited act of the meanest creature. Why didn't he say that he wanted the facility to be used as a nursing home for the aged so he couldn't lease it for the profitable purposes other than that? Why did he talk one thing and act another? It was considered mean and double dealing.

Supernatural powers? Who in the world gave a particular person or persons such terrifying powers? How was he empowered with such horrendous powers? Was it not against nature? What the hell was meant by the supernatural powers anyway?

Legend has it that some highly trained Buddhist monks or gurus got so powerful that they could enter other persons' cerebral territory and govern their actions, during sleeping hours and through dreams. I conceded that there were such powerful men and I suspected that Monk Stout might be the one of them.

Enter other persons' cerebral territory? In the real world, entering other persons' estate without the proprietors' permission constituted trespassing on private estate which constitutes a crime, of course. Therefore, the behavior of trespassing on other persons' cerebral territory constituted a sheer violation of people's cerebral sanctity, I thought.

Problem was that I could not catch the criminal and keep him collared to the floor. Question was how and where he could materialize himself. Through the nostrils of the slumberer? Or, through the victim's navel as you had seen in the movie Matrix? Or, through the top of the head? Or, through the veins and nerve cells? Once in there, how could he arouse the consciousness of the slumberer and let it do his bidding?

There occurred a small accidental bang which shook the shrine borderline. It was a wordless protest or another demonstration of their powerlessness, wasn't it? The rest of the lodging boarders, who had survived the ordeal of headaches and nightmares, made an onslaught of prankish looting on the kitchen of the temple, that is, the hermitage cell. They sneaked, under the influence of the darkness of night, into the kitchen and looted a big jar containing makkoli, home-brewed conventional liquor of rice. The looters then relished it, drank it with the others and got drunk. One of the revellers ran amok through the hill town all through the night, hollering, "Come on out whoever thinks he is smarter than me!" Monk Stout, with his ears opened to all that's running wild, got enraged to the top of his head, cut off all the utilities which had been connected to the boarding house.

I, chosen as a representative for apologies, with two other young men, walked up the steep slope to the ground of the shrine, where I called for Monk Stout, "Sunim, may we enter the room?" There was no response. I said then, "Sunim, we're entering now." The room was not locked from inside. There was seated a man in his middle 50s with stout build and the medium height. His eyes were warm rather than sharp.

The sleuth in me Dano, while kneeling before him and presenting sincere apologies on behalf of the playful boarders for having stolen the makkoli container and for having made all the wild scenes, tried to detect any lead connecting to conclusive evidence that the monk had done all the bizarre attacks on the boarding lodgers who had had to leave the facility. The suspicion seemed to put into affirmation when the monk, hearing from me that the "candidates" had been suffering from insomnia because of the nightmares, solemnly declared that mind was the key, citing that the housing lot had not been constructed on the graveyards. He said, "Mind causes everything. All the worries and delusions come from the mind." I suppressed the urge to yell at him, "You violated their mind territory, didn't you, you coward monk?"

They were able to switch on the light again and the water came out of the faucet again. Where did the light come from? Up from the Buddhist monk. Where did the water come from? Up from the Buddhist monk. He was the origin of things which enabled people to carry on with. He empowered people and things down under. He was the power and originator itself.

Normalcy returned to routines but the population of "the down town" curtailed to a mere few including me so that the lodging house was about to shut down. Strange thing was that new arrivals came sitting at the dining table, which made me gawk up at the one at "the up town."

Hardly had two months and ten days passed when the second-stage or tier subjective test of the judicial exam got seven days ahead, a last-pitch period. It was early morning. After packing the book box, I called on Monk Stout to his modest dairy farm where he was milking the cows. He wished me a good luck, adding "Do as usual." The jubang azumma had called a taxi for me.

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I liked exams, whichever exam you name it. I liked the moment just like the angler liked it. I liked it in the same context that amorous partners liked the moment. Which could be had the moment immediately by consummation. I liked wires gotten taut to the extent that it would be broken any minute.

An inspector comes into the room with a scroll. Folks stop breathing. Heart throbs make thunderous thumps to every ears. The inspector hangs high on a blackboard of a classroom a wrapped scroll attached with seals. Bells ring which could tear the air into shreds. He unfurls the scroll and reveals the two exam subjects for all to see.

I, who seated myself in Exam Room 16 of Dongguk University, whose vision began to deteriorate these days, rose and went forward to see what the problems were. Eyes were blurring. Veins were running and raw nerves were running wild.

Letters, which were needed to answer the exam problems, consisting of consonants and vowels, were about to burst out but my hands got stalled: My penmanship was so clumsy and so tardy: Noises briskly scribbling around me running on answer sheets sounded like those of a bullet train.

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Suppose a nether world into which the worldly human beings will have to enter and stand it out and get it over with, and you'll be able to make a theory and live it out. It's been a bizarre experience that folks from various places and age levels have shared a sort of a common spiritual trouble: insomnia, fear and headache from nightmares.

A lot of the folks, no, most of the folks had escaped from the place which had been presumed to cause trouble. I had stood it out, then, which is not considered wise now. I think that it's advisable for you to depart from the place, but that if you think you'll have to stand it out you're supposed to exorcise the place or something.

A prominent local theory has it that the world is replete with spirits full of frustrated resentments. Console the resentful spirits around you, and you'll be able to free yourself from the conflicts in your way and get harmonious with them.

Chapters 28.29: Between the Two Lecture Tours

28
Dano Kicked off the Job, 1981

Thanks to Tschai's superhuman efforts to tighten belts and to save what little money the pair had earned, and thanks to her financial somersaults of some sort, the Dano couple bought a house from a previous owner, called it their own, such as it was, registered it with a real estate registration office of a local jurisdiction, and proudly hung Dano's name plate on the entrance of the gate. Time was over at last that they had been rudely notified by a landlord to move out.

Don had his two feet stuck in his land, such as it had been. He had always set up a strong footing on what meager land he had taken, tilling, shoveling and picking up rocks for removal. The Don and Boolim pair, returning bare handed from Daejon, planted apple trees on a new clearing land of his own which had previously been being flooded.

Don did not take to task his son Dano's brash tendency to part with the status quo. He harbored a deep-rooted distaste for his son's recklessness which would amount to irresponsibility. He wondered aloud why his son would not settle as a household owner with wife and children. Why he tried to run from what would appear stable. He did not trust his son but he put an unconditional trust on his daughter- in- law. Even when he saw the son couple off headed for Seoul, Don said, "I leave my son with you, my dear daughter. I can rest assured because of you."

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I left the Korea Times on a winter day of the year 1981. In Korean corporate terms, I was "fired on recommendation." I was kicked off a decent job, after all. I realized to my bone deep that I had made a great mistake of ditching my hard- earned job in a sewer. I was crazy. I got regret and sorrow seeped in my bone-marrow in the dreary street, left alone, with no one to look after me, with wife and children scared to death about their future.

He had to be patient. He didn't have any reason not to. Was he possessed? Possibly. Was he insane? Probably. Why did he get on his feet and dare yell to his bona fide Managing Editor Mr. Yoon of all the people? He was only being kind and generous to Dano and his colleague proof readers. He deigned to step down to the proofreading desk and merely suggested that me and someone else go and meet a returning desk member from a foreign travel at then Kimpo International Airport.

A "free" foreign travel which had been provided by the Chun Doo Hwan military regime. Why did I have to confront his superior? Why did I put an affront on the editor and defy him? On what grounds did I think it was improper for a media guy to welcome his colleague member returning from a pleasure trip at an airport?

Couldn't I do it out of sheer pack mentality? Or out of corporate colleagueship? Did I assert that I was the man of media protocol? It was totally insane. The managing editor swore at me Dano? It was just because he had been provoked by my lousy protests against practical considerations.

The managing editor made a gesture of attack on me with his fists? Nevertheless it couldn't be any reason for a corporate underling to confront his superior with bloodshot eyes. I had to race to the rest room, wash my face, blow my nose, take a deep breath and say cheese.

Things turned in odd ways: The very person, who had been in charge of the office room, was on his good-intentioned desk tour, when he was so much offended by a fresh underling who had been working for him, and in another unexpected turn of events, he exploded and got physical, to which the very person, who should have run for cover, took an impudent stand, and about which virtually the rest of the room got physical, too. Me Dano was the very culprit who had made a scene, a really disgusting scene.

I had been referred to the Disciplinary Committee of the Korea Times which held me Dano responsible for all that fiasco. I had filed a complaint with the disciplinary committee, but the committee hadn't had any organization which would hear and put a verdict on it. There had been no presiding judge, no witness stand, no questions sought and no answers provided. A few heads on the spot had been a mere sedentary lot with their mouths tight shut.

They hadn't seemed to notice the presence of the complainant. They hadn't even pretended to listen. I had made a statement nevertheless to the effect that it had been not right of me to confront the editor, but that any member of the press, who had been registered with the Ministry of Culture of the South Korean Government as a reporter or something, should not have taken chonji, a kind of cash bribe or something. The verdict I had been notified from a secondhand was that I had been fired from then and there. Technically, I had been recommended to quit. I had decided not to sue the company nonetheless.

A convincing rumor had it that the press folks had periodically gotten their palms greased from the relevant news sources of the government agencies. Crux of the rumor was that the press people had comprised a press corps of which the head had made a practice to contact the source, take the chonji and divide it among the members. In case of the big source, that is, a central government agency, one spoils-dividing chance had amounted to 1,000 dollars per head.

I had questioned at that time the validity of an idea that the government had been endowing all the gamut of favors on the whole population of the press, with a huge tax money of the people. All the gamut of favors? They ranged from the reporters' seven days or so of free pleasure trips, low-interest-rate loans to the reporters and their dependents and financial assistance for foreign studies of the cadre desk members.

It's beautiful to stop a nuisance of a crying baby by feeding or releasing it. It's also right of you to console the bereaved who lost their loved ones. It'll be a good Samaritan act of you that you should hand a fresh cup of drinking water to a thirsty traveller. You're supposed to inquire after those who are sick in bed. But it is abominable, disgusting, and deplorable for a dictatorial government to bribe the whole population with a specific profession or two, that is, the news medias of the nation, using a huge tax money of the people, by which the information would be warped and the public opinions distorted, I thought.

The Chun Doo Hwan government had done just all that. The Chamber of Commerce of any country is built by the contribution of every CC members but the Korean media people had not chipped in to build their own Press Center, or the new moniker of the Korea Press Foundation: The Chun Doo Hwan government had built them the facility of enormous profits from which the welfare benefits for the press folks had been financed. The dictatorial government had even built a professional apartment complex for the sake of the reporters or the like at Gepo-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul and sold them at a bargain price. The corruption scheme was categorical.

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What is the media? The media, which had originally been meant by the press, that is, the newspapers, came to subsume broadcasting stations, which had originally been meant by the radio broadcasting stations, came to subsume television stations, in their own definitions. Hereby, a confusion arises as to the use of the terminology surrounding the media. Originally the plural of the medium, a media or specifically the media happens to mean a single news-reporting or news-relaying media. And the medium remains to mean something else to mediate. So, the media folks tend to compromise on the use of the term 'the medias' as to subsume the newspapers, radios and televisions.

What had been the medias for anyway? They had been born and lived for the people in general. Somebody, who had had a noble idea to relay a news of one village, town, and district to the other, made a newspaper, and the people liked it. There had initially been the one and only egalitarian purpose in the newspaper: to relay the news of the town and share it. Changes and shifts of the newspapers and their mode of life took place; Various newspapers with advertisements were published. The curiosities were satisfied through the newspapers by which the people were enlightened, too.

What are the medias for anyway? The medias are born and live for their own corporate profits rather than for people. In short, the egalitarian purpose has been superceded by corporate gains. And a shift in the attribute of the medias has also given their owner power, a huge power, that is. Of course those who work for the medias share a particular portion of it, too. The esteemed TIME magazine has once expounded to the effect that the current medias have come to grab power, that is, a huge power, barring the power to indict people.

To look back on the horizon of the media, or medias, in relation to me personally and my country publicly, it's been really an epochal change, or a sea change. I'd watched with my two eyes the sadonji written by my grandma herself and delivered to the other clan by person. I'd read The Story of the Three Kingdoms, which had been serialized in the Donga Ilbo Newspaper and delivered by the postman one other day. I'd listened through the radio the April 19 Students' Uprising and watched the army tanks roll on the Seoul streets on television. I've found to my amazement in the Korea Times' wire room the teletypes type the surreal articles from across the seas. I've gotten flabbergasted at a weird, truly weird phenomenon that a late-coming media, called online portal, by the name of DAUM, which, becoming very powerful, has turned out a boot camp for an Al Kaida- Korean type. I am now composing paragraphs on a local desk top computer with Bill Gates' operation touches and will electronically mail them to one American publishing company or two courtesy of the gmail.



29
Between Two Lecture Tours, 1983~1989


Out of job, out in the cold winter street, I became a job seeker again. My wife was thunderstruck out of the blue. Tschai, who had previously so often been left without financial means, with no warning from her husband, found herself useless and hopeless this time again. She had tried to meet President Jiang of the Korea Times, but had been rebuffed at his mansion gate.

A Samaritan or two showed up. Gentleman of the Advertising Bureau of the Korea Times, the Great Kim was learned to have sought a favor from the Times that me Dano work for him, but it was later learned that the suggestion had been rebuffed. Some guys in the Times, Mr. Pyun included, when I had been in the Times of course, had made casual efforts to pluck me out of the Times and plant me in other more lucrative jobs. But then I had been reluctant to move. Above all the reasons, I liked the Times, the alleys beyond the newspaper, the intellectual ambience surrounding it, the aromas of coffees brewing in the company coffee shop and the music I had listened to between the stairs coming to the top floor.

Tschai was surprised at first, but she was not startled. With time, she was used to the alerts and risks her husband had caused her in his good time. She did not blame her husband. She was not whining at all.

She was on the move again. Using her husband's severance pay less than 5,000 dollars, and plus some more cash money, she contracted a merchandise shop with a local building owner of a newly built merchandise market at Daechi-dong, and opened an accessory store of her own, from whose earnings she would support her family, and finance, for two decades later on, her children's education.

Once I was put into a harsh condition of a job seeker again, I was busy at heart. Tense and nervous, and a little on a rush. I couldn't be laid back at all. Everytime I took a fresh road for the prowl of a job, I took a deep breath and drummed myself up for a joust with a new interviewer.

But mounting the stairs to the office, and sitting with an interviewer, I found my legs weakened and my spine chilled whenever the person in charge mentioned my resume, saying, "You're not a college graduate!" My resume of having worked for the Korea Times as a proofreader, not as a reporter, was usually met with a caustic remark of disbelief. "What does a proofreader do?"

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My years of trials and errors would not intrigue audiences any more. Thing is I wound up a lecturer teaching the TIME Magazine articles and I might mine, in due course, a bonanza of the global law of the language, particularly the English language. The TIME news magazine had long been an emblem of vanity in the intellectual circles of South Korea. I also took pride on what I had kept the magazine company from my earliest high school years on.

What had made the magazine so special? Probably in the same context that the Statue of Liberty had become special to the people around the world: It'd been a nostalgic landmark which would allure the rest of the global people to return to explore. The folks were inquisitive about the events which TIME had had to unravel before them. Given all things considered, TIME had not been an easy English. First of all, the vocabulary of TIME had been indomitably huge which would frustrate any human attempt to look beyond the realm of their vocabulary inventory. Its verbiage of expositions, nominalization and "Free Speech" included, had been frustrating, too: In TIME, the articles had often taken on the attribute of essays and vice versa.

Two young men in his thirties, who had heard much about me Dano, arranged for me to teach the TIME articles to the young college folks, during the academic recess. With winks at my resume issue, of course. They were the Iron Kim and the Yonsei Park, who had been playing active roles, leading the TIME lecturer faculty at Hanyang and Ewha Womans Universities. They got so enthusiastic an audience mobbed around them that they did not allow their top- notched lecture post to get caught up.

My lecture tour was plural but was nearly spontaneous, which spanned two different universities--Hanyang and Sogang Universities. and was delivered each in an interval of one hour. My lecture tour turned out hilarious at best and disastrous at worst. I had made a mockery of myself, and the rest of colleague lecturers at the same time. I had plummeted myself into the labyrinth of humiliation and self-pity. Stage phobia might have probably been at work.

I had never stood before a "huge" audience brimming to the walls of the college auditorium, with the superfluous audience sitting on both sides of the hall and filling the aisle. I had once had my elementary school audience totaling 60 or so students, whereas the TIME audience at Hanyang University at that time stood at several hundreds. I was so overcome with the overwhelming mob scene that I had my throats choked and my eyes blurred, which had me blurt out incoherent utterances.

That was the beginning of a free fall which had been made the moment the lecture had taken a launch. The stairs on both walls of the lecture hall were emptied immediately after the first class. The enthusiastic crowd who had occupied the aisle were emptied at the same time.

The speaker and the listeners played interactive to each other: The speaker was scared at too evident a landmark in which the withdrawals had taken place and the audience were scared to the extent that the auditorium was emptied. The speaker in plight went one step further: He owned up to having made interpretational mistakes one day after the other at which time the lecture hall was progressively vacated. The lecture, which had begun with a fanfare of the packed audience, ended up a farty noise.

My 50-minute long train travel, however, after the Hanyang lecture, was not a self-incriminating one. I was not at liberty to inflict, or to torture myself because there was another TIME lecture waiting for me at Sogang University, one of the opposite destinations. So his subterranean travel to Sogang had to turn progressive, not retroactive.

His linguistic consciousness sparked, at each click-click-clack of the subterranean wheels, an epiphany on which there should be ties, knots that made the ties, major loops that made the knots, in the English language, and on the basis of those links, there should be a theory built that the English language is the language of relationships. The Sogang lecture, which had begun with the modest number of 150 or so academic audience, ended up with the claps of 100 or so college students.

And what had changed the otherwise gloomy side of the lecture tours was the nocturnal convivialities which had taken place in the periphery of Mapo and Shangrilla Hotel lounges. The congenial buddies numbered mostly two at the least, but numbered seven-some at the most. They were my juniors to five to ten years from the academia and the prep institutions.

The obese Song had been congenial and garrulous; The lanky Park had been smart and polite. They did the initial imbibing of soju with the flavor of haemulpajeon, the onion (Welsh) spread seasoned with oyster and cuttlefish, and with all the eating, drinking and talking done, walked across to the Shangrilla lounge, calmly sipping beers and listening to the custom live music sitting on cozy sofas there. The miracle was that there had never once been a boozing, and the noisiest side was that the gathering had from time to time extended to each other's house calls.