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.