अ Novel

Episode 13: Ended with a Whimper



There was an onset of acute waist pain the day before yesterday. (November 1, 2010) It came "like thieves." But an onset is spoken wrongly in my case. The recurrence of waist pain is the right statement.

In fact, the onset of waist pain has been an annual or biennial "event" for the past six or seven years. It's been a repetitional and expected incident rather than event so that it can be prevented.

I could do that but I didn't. That's been too much indulgent of me. It's been embarrassing of me that I was not prepared for the evident and worst consequences. I had to reduce weight first of all.

Obesity is known to be the cause of all diseases. I weigh a little too much and I naturally have had high blood pressure and as I stated above I have had waist pain and recently I begin to see the doctor for the treatment of a specific delicate organ of mine.

Voracity is always the problem. I've been an overeater myself. I can't stand hunger. People say I lay waste any meal table set for a certain occasion. I had emptied six tins of meals in the army mess hall, of course during a green army private.

I think it's time I controlled or suppressed over-appetite. "Eat half the meals you are supposed to take," people say. I make every determination to cut down on meals. "Let's make it two thirds rather than half!" That's a deal.

Against the backdrop of the obese guy vulnerable to appetite, Cha Hee was able to control her appetite, keeping her relatively slim physique. Contrary to her husband, who had collided head-on with the establishment, subsequently plunging his wife and family into the edge of famine and homelessness, she was getting along well with the locals and well- prepared, say, for the unfortunate incident.



Cha Hee didn't make a scene, nor did she make another visit to anyone to plead her husband's case. Wife didn't urge me to sue the company, and I didn't think that out, either. Cha Hee was really street smart. Her body and soul was standing fast on earth. Cha Hee didn't imagine something to be done for her or for her family. Cha Hee acted before she thought, or Cha Hee acted while she thought.

Just as my father, as a tenant farmer, was always hitting the field, ploughing the land and cutting woods, Cha Hee used to hit the pedal of the sewing machine since we had come up to Seoul. She hit the pedal even when I was working at The Korea Times because the envelope of the pay check was so lean and she had to make ends meet.

When I was actually fired from the newspaper company, she parted from the sewing machine. She opened a modest shop of her own, instead. Thing is she bid and got a contract from a market building with some money, which had been saved by tightening the belts of the family members, plus a modicum of my severance pay.

It has been 1982, the eighth year since we landed in Seoul. The last and third son was born at Black Stone Town in 1976. Kyo, the Seoul child, like the two older brothers of his, was playing with his peers, who had not gone to the children's house or kindergarten, at the children's playground or something.

Cha Hee, after opening the shop, had played somersault, or existential juggling of some sort. She had cooked meals for the family, gone to the Namdaemun Market by bus with one transfer, and made a good buy of toys, dolls, stuffed animals, and all gamut of colorful trinkets, and coming back to the shop, sold to purchase.

She had earned more from a shop owner of an accessory store than from a seamstress. "Accessory ladies are trendies," she had said, lamenting the lack of fashion apparels on her. But she was reluctant to act out on herself.

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It was not that there had not been one or two persons who had been out to save me from being plugged from the news media society. Kim somebody of the advertising section of the Korea Times had done his best to hire me there, to which the guy had been opposed. I appreciate Mr. Kim for the effort. I miss him badly. I'm looking forward to the day of a no-chance encounter.

There had been not much niche left for me. Which means my job opportunities had been blocked off by a lot of impediments. Of course I couldn't stand behind the podium of an elementary school teacher again. It had been technically impossible and of course it would have been brazen of me to do that.

I was still relatively young but there was not much left in which for me to get a job. It was not necessary to prepare other document except for the official appointment from the Education Bureau of the local jurisdiction, in the teaching establishment. But in the cold reality, they asked for a resume, a valid and powerful resume, to be hired.

Yes, the resume was the problem. They requested the possession of a resume at every place where I went, and they asked for the submission of it when they met me. When they spotted a good resume their faces brightened, and when they did not their faces darkened.

What do you mean by a resume? It is a French word meaning a personal history. It is actually written with an accent on the head of the last syllable "e" (accent aigu), and pronounced as such (raisumei).

What are you supposed to do to feature a good resume which will brighten your interviewer's face? Good birth might be a desirable factor. But integrity, diligence, originality, creativity, and bravery are requisites, I am afraid.

It was just myself that had made me the person of a bad, or poor resume, but no other. I had been lazy and expecting when I had been asked to put a harder push. I had been timid and scared of everything that I had been asked to challenge.

I'm figuratively speaking, of course, but when I look back on "the truncated life" of mine in many corners of life, that is, the frustrated expectations or ambition, was utterly ascribable to myself but to no other. I was totally to blame.

It was naturally so shameful of me that more often than not I had put the blame on society when I was asked to submit a decent resume with a college diploma on it. The smug hubris of the then interviewer was not to blame but the sullen aloofness on the part of the interviewee was to blame.

It was TIME, the world-famous weekly magazine, that had saved me from the feelings of dullness and uselessness. What mattered first of all was not the life condition I could enjoy as the decent income earners. Several young scholars, who had gotten acquainted with me through chance encounters at a downtown foreign language institute or two, got me a stint as a lecturer of the TIME articles, of course with a wink at my resume issue.

TIME was a good material piece for teaching and learning the English language. TIME had actually been a dream piece, and of course it's now been one, too. It's a mystery that TIME news magazine of all the foreign language news magazines with a global fame, which has been being published in English, has from early on become favorites as a teaching and learning material.

I liked TIME as a Normal School boy at Andong City. I liked its general design, the title of the magazine, and its red borderline. I liked the urgency of the headlines taking place at the interval of a week.

I remember I stated somewhere earlier that I had been rumored to be very good at English at the town during my high school years. I also remember I stated that the mistaken notion had originated from the bizarre behavior of mine that I had always held the TIME magazine in my hand.

You tend to be deceived by the understated or overstated facade. Though an old saying goes that you should not judge by appearances, you do and we do that in almost all the cases of the real life. Appearances are really important.

I think that the serious and sincere efforts should be made in both ways: We should try to make good appearances in a variety of aspects of life and we also should make big efforts not to be deceived by them. That seems to be really and equally important.

If you see a man and a woman getting together in a very intimate way, you know by instinct that they are in love. But we are surprised to know that people use the same situation to camouflage that they are splitting.

A podium is a place on which you display your appearances. Steve Jobs shows his best when he makes his presentations, but when I stood on the podium of an auditorium of Hanyang University in Seoul on a winter's day in some year in the 1980s, it meant disaster.

I was overwhelmed with the "huge" audience. As a country boy, that is, as a countryside school teacher, it was the first time that I had ever had such a huge crowd as my audience. The auditorium was really packed, with the leftover students standing against the stair wall and sitting on the aisle floor. The audience of college students seemed to number 350 or more.

All of a sudden, there was a blurry audience down below the podium. The cold sweat ran down my cheeks and on my back, with my mouth going dry and choked. The hour ran long like hell. I didn't remember an iota of what I had said. At last when the hour bell rang, I had no eyes to look at my audience with.

"You're afraid of the stage," people say. But the stage phobia is a misnomer, I'm afraid. My thought is that I had been scared of the audience, but not the stage.

People talk about their dreams of standing on the stage, yes, as an entertainer, performer, or actor. They imagine themselves standing on the stage getting ovation, that is, a standing ovation. But they don't imagine themselves frustrated by the audience. My eternal perception is that the audience is a fearful being. The audience is fear itself.

The thing is, debut on the stage does not count but preparedness really counts. But people hurry success on the stage in spite of their unpreparedness. As a result, they are frustrated at an attempt or in the first phase.

My lecture of the TIME magazine articles at Hanyang University was an onus to me from the beginning because the previous lecturer Mr. Iron Kim had recorded a great success as "the legend" of TIME teaching. The huge crowd which had mobbed my debut lecture was the sheer aftermath of his success.

Alas! A sign of a disaster loomed large from the beginning. The standing audience which had been filling the stairs mostly walked out of the lecture hall in the mid-lecture, and almost all the off-the-seat audience, which had been sitting on both of the aisles, vacated the hall in the second day lecture.

My lecture was disastrous itself. I equivocated on the spots on which clear-cut explanations had been necessary. I very often made evident mistakes to which the foolproof audience was seen from the podium to shake their heads, by which my heart sank.

The seats of the lecture hall were progressively vacated, at which the disappointing academic audience quit the lecture. The perplexed lecturer from time to time had to make confessions of mistakes in the previous day's lecture, by which some bulk of the audience left the hall.

The TIME lecture, which had really begun with a bang, ended with a whimper. The proud number of the packed audience, at the end of the winter-recess campus extravaganza, was reduced to the poor twenty-some guys, for whom I send my heartfelt thanks, and I apologize for the disappointing lecture, to the folks who had come to my lecture with high expectations.