अ Novel

Episode 10: Too Nomadic



It's been a great mystery what had driven Cha Hee to such desperation that night. Why I am saying it is a great mystery is that it hadn't happened in later years again and that it's been considered that a normal person couldn't have done such kind of weidry in such condition: Parents had been lying in a nick of a meter. Of course, the room was pitch dark because it had no glass windows and electric light was off.

Why had she been so horny? A feasible theory is that she had been overwhelmed at that time with an uncontrollable sexual urge, say, with the use of an aphrodisiac or something. She had never touched and heard about that: She was a simple country girl like me.

Why had she been so horny that night? The other feasible theory is that she had been a nymphomaniac or something. Far from that. She had been such a paragon of virtuous girls that she was a favorite daughter of her father: Her father liked to take Cha Hee of the rest of the five daughters.

She had never gone out with a boyfriend or something before me, I assure you. She sang a song after she had known me.
I've never known about love/
Till I've met you/
I've never known tears/
Till I've met you/

Another final theory for her weirdry is a victim theory that states to the effect that a particular female animal is attracted to a loser male, that is, a male animal that has been beaten down by a fierce struggle for mating. Cha Hee of course could not define her motive for her odd sexual urge nor could understand a particular social action theory. But a theory is feasible that she felt an extreme sympathy about the dreary situation in which my parents had been put and the sympathy subsequently turned into an impulsive stimulation on the verge of a sexual urge.

With the winner theory or the predator theory alone (Power is an aphrodisiac: Henry Kissinger), Cha Hee must have left my young man. But she has not left him. Rather, she has stayed, born him three sons, and financed their education. I am afraid a victim theory fits his case.

I had actually been a nomad myself. I hadn't shown a willingness to settle for my parents and for my wife. Too nomadic a life of me might have left my young wife so lonesome at times and tired. My oft-repeated reclaims of and withdrawals from jobs would have gotten her ready for rainy days by herself.

Starting from the winter of 1969, I kept making transfers from Kilan to Sangju to Onyang, where I quit the teaching job, of course forever. It was 1971. While I was making transfers, my parents, who had had a real hard time making ends meet, returned to their original rustic place where there were gravel, dirt, and soil to be ploughed.

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Cha Hee, who sat behind a small sewing machine as a seamstress when she had met my young man at Kilan, used to befriend it even after she had married him and born three sons, during which time she had moved from Kilan to Sangju to Onyang to Oksan and finally to Seoul. My young man, as a mirage seeker, while his wife had been leading a toilsome life as a supporter of herself, her family and her husband, was hitting the tortuous road as a failed higher government job seeker, an insurance salesman, and a day laborer. He had wound up taking a proof reader's job of a local English daily, the Korea Times. The separated family was reunited in 1974 in Seoul.

Grandma's condition got worse. She got confused with dates and names of things at first. As days went by, she had her belongings stolen too often by the daughter-in-law of all the family members. She kept asking for meals as if there had been a famished spirit inside her.

Everything about her began to lose points, angles, edges, orders, disparities, and degrees. In their place took the all the fuzziness, vagueness, and emptiness. She progressively showed blank expressions, asking bizarre questions making her sons and grand children perplexed and the visitors from the family clan flabbergasted.

The worst thing had happened. As grandma had been making rounds of the neighborhood, backbiting her first-son couple for their ill-treatments of her, which had of course been groundless. At this, what had been imploding in the great uncle and aunt couple exploded at last. They got their mother kept in a small back room of the house.

The great uncle and aunt couple is gone and their sons, that is, my cousins, are in their middle seventies and early sixties, and they are not aware that I'm writing about our grandma getting roughed up by her first-son couple for the record. The gist of the regrets is that we the grand children had been mere bystanders and that we had never made any efforts to improve the condition.

I won't particularly forgive myself. I had been such a coward that I had not been able to face up to grandma, when she had been domineering over my mom, for my mom's poor plight, and in later years, I had not been able to challenge my great uncle and aunt couple, when they had been mistreating their mother, for my grandma's pathetic condition.

There had been a very eerie aspect of human consciousness which could be researched in connection with grandma's Alzheimer's disease The crux of my contention is that the brain of a sufferer's would like to be awakened at some moment toward a specific person.

As she told me the story she was surprised by herself. She wondered aloud how such thing was possible. When she had once dropped by, when she had stayed far apart from me at Oksan running a dressmaker's shop, the then ailing grandma and given a courtesy greeting to her, her blank face brightened at once and recognized her.

Though grandma had never had an occasion to familiarize with Cha Hee, or her grand daughter-in-law before, she had recognized her at a first glance, saying "You're Shimmanni's wife, aren't you?" What had at that time been more surprising was that grandma had been pinpointing Cha Hee's destination and the object of her purchase, saying "You've been to Jeomgok Bazaar to buy salt, haven't you?" After that, in a minute, grandma's face had darkened: The gate to her consciousness had seemed to get slammed shut.

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Since I had quit the school teacher's job forever in 1971, after some more trial interviews and promises of calls from certain corporate entities, I got a job at an English daily as a proof reader and started settling, that is, a settlement-looking life in Seoul. That was in the summer of 1974, and the name of a news media was The Korea Times and still is.

I brought my family back home in Seoul. My first son Tai was in Seoul with us, and when I took my second son Hua, who had been in his grand parents' care, to a bus to Euiseong from Oksan, he burst out crying, clinging onto his grandma.

It was in the 1960s when I had first stepped in the capital of South Korea. I had escorted then as an enlisted army medic the sick soldiers of a certain armory company to Soodo Army Hospital stationed at the downtown of Seoul. After the army discharge, I had attended a college class of Seoul for one year. Seoul, in brief, had been just like a stopover city till 1974.

Now I had stepped into a bowel of an office building at the downtown of the capital. The Korea Times building had not been surrounded with the towering office buildings but it had rubbed shoulders with the buildings of power-- The Embassy of the U.S. and the Embassy of Japan buildings and several national agency buildings.

I liked the back alleys leading to The Korea Times building and the aroma of coffees which had been being brewed at several coffee shops. I liked the delicious smells of cooking, which had been getting over the fences of dining houses at the back alleys. I liked the music heard from somewhere around the alleys, prepared or played by someone.

To almost the same degree as, or more strongly poignant than the memory of the niceties, was the memory of famine, anxiety, and fear. My family and, me too, had been famished all the time through the 1970s and early 1980s. The paycheck envelope of a fledgling proof reader of a newspaper had been so lean.

If you walked the corridors or back alleys of power, you might look to the others to be one of the power community members. But you actually cannot and will not. You could be hungrier yourself. In my case, my wife Cha Hee had to run her age-old seamstress' shop at a corner market.

All the folks walking the back alleys of power couldn't be called the people of power. In the same context, all the folks working at a newsroom of a newspaper company couldn't be called the newspaper reporters. Any person who said that today would be remembered tomorrow for telling you that.

But people might be confused, and some people might still try to confuse the others by telling them that the proof readers are also newspaper reporters and that they are the folks that are entitled to prove to the readers that a specific newspaper company belongs to the readers but not to the people of power.

To be brief, the proof readers were not the reporters at all. They still are. They at that time were the ones who were supposed to compare notes with the proofs the linotype operators had typed with the original article scripts the reporters had typed on their typewriter.

I had my office desk placed a few steps further inside of the entrance door. Which means that the proof reading desk, at which I had worked as one of six or seven members, was the tail end of the pecking order of all the seven desks according to its priority of the assignments: The politics desk, the first in assignment rank, was placed contiguous to the chief editor's, and the proof reading desk was placed at the farthest end.

Dirt was near at hand, and filth was my companion. That is, then the rental one-room house was short of all the necessities of life: a toilet, a bath, and a shower. Omission was all the face- and body-cleaning procedure: All that was done as a summary feline fashion. Office colleague Ying somebody was heard at a certain distance that far to talk to my another colleague Tom Banes, "That guy stinks!", throwing a sidelong glance at me.

We were scared and terrified all the time, Cha Hee and me. Of all the fears, the fear of being warned from the landlady of the house to move out. We had more often than not been simultaneously startled to sit up from the bed, screaming, We must have had a nightmare of the same character.

Fears and spine-chilling terrors were clinging to my wife and me. The first two sons, Tai and Hua, didn't get us couple worried more than Kyo. The third son, Kyo, didn't get us reassured because he was exposed to the danger of plunging into the pit of an institutional Korean toilet.

Kyo had hardly done away with toilet training when the kid had to keep house which had been deserted by his mom gone to the seamstress's shop at the corner market of Black Stone Town, by his two brothers gone to their play fields of their own, and by me, his dad, gone for the day shift as one of the Korea Times' proof readers.

Imagine a tantalizing suspense that the Cha Hee couple had been praying their way through their work hours that their son Kyo might not fall into the horrible pit latrine several human heights deeper. The kid had been warned not to squat on the big hole, but to spread a waste paper on a concrete floor distanced from it and to defecate on it.

The thought sends me a shudder of fright that that could have been worse. I now thank to God with an epiphany, thinking that we had been bestowed with luck at that time, my family and me. I want to remind you of the reality that any gamut of communication was not available for the house keeping child: by radio, by dial phone, much less by cell phone.

The other two sons of mine, Tai and Hua, were playing the field with the other children of the town whose poor parents hadn't sent them to children's house or to kindergarten. The kids, who'd left behind in the street at the moment, deprived of a priceless chance to share with their peers, were just like stray dogs.

Things could have been worse. It was very fortunate of us that we all survived. Even while I had been reading proofs at the Times and while my wife had been pedaling the sewing machine at a corner market, Tai and Hua hadn't had a brush with the police, and Kyo had survived the pit latrine, keeping the house, such as it had been.

I am not trying to be difficult about the night-shift work. I am not saying I had been discriminated against the folks of the other desks. I am only saying that they had been more considerate toward the busier and more important pack.

While they hastened the exit from the office, after having done the night shift assignments, toward the company limousine for their return back home, they wanted me to extend the stay till the next morning by spending the warm night at the company bedroom.

Which was, in a certain sense. a real kindness, that is, a practical consideration to keep me from the night chill. When the night shift was done, it was almost always three or four o'clock. The day break was far away.

But I also wanted to keep me warm at my home with my wife. The fellows at the company bunk beds might have been a nuisance: The alcoholic or foot or shoe odors were intolerable at times, and the snores were at a high pitch.

Above all, the early morning chill was what I really disliked. The city bus ride on Bus No. 84 headed for Heukseok-dong, or Black Stone Town, was an unwholesome experience. The cold seat sent me a shudder.

In fact, all those people and things had been a novelty and wonder to a country boy like me. Such wondrous communication gadgets as cell phones and smart phones had not been heard about. Personal computers had just been marketed in South Korea and the major industrial businesses had just launched education programs of email composition and the use of it.

The linotype operating room of The Korea Times was situated at the 2nd floor. The page boys and girls had had a hard and busy time plying between the newsroom and the linotype room. They had usually been racing between the two floors.

The inconveniences of plying the proofs had been so noticeably palpable and the necessity of shortening the time by which we could make it to the deadline was so high that the concerned folks had agreed to bore a hole through the ceiling between the two rooms. As the linotype room folks hollered, ringing the bell, "They are coming up!" the upstairs people ran to the "well" to draw the proofs basket.

One of the virtues of the night shift was that I was able to hear some intriguing stories through the grapevines, or through the old timers. In 40 years' time, the stories, which had sounded so exciting, go the route of becoming the legends. The sagas of the Vietnam War had always been interesting, and the flashback stories of the Vietnam War correspondents had been no less interesting, too.

One night, the chief of the then night-shift workers, Economic Affairs Section Chief Gong somebody, under some influence, revealed his feat as a war reporter. He had once been to Saigon to cover the frontline or something. The then corrupt South Vietnam government or something had put the correspondents from Seoul in plush hotel rooms in Saigon and provided them with all assortments of luxurious room services imaginably conceivable.

What did actually excite or electrify me was not just the palpable experiences of a visible reporter but the impalpable stories by an invisible reporter or something. When I had first witnessed teletypes at a wire room of The Korea Times, it was rather shocking. I for a while guessed that a ghost had been at work. The key boards of the typewriting machines were stroking the letters by themselves.

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On the planet earth of differences, disparities and dissimilarities, don't you also wonder that what happened yesterday also happens today? Don't you wonder that what had occurred to your parents also occurred to you? Why do things reiterate themselves? Do you wish to call them crazy happenstances?

Since I had been discovered of the hidden disease I was taken by my wife to a university-level hospital yesterday morning. I had to go through an ultrasound scanning of a particular intestinal gland of mine. The young resident in charge explained to me on how and with what gadget to use to examine the stuff. After my initial refusal and some arguments, I was taken into the room again. Then the doctor asked me to take a weird posture. Really weird. I realized to my horror that I had my comeuppance.

When my wife had been running an accessory shop of her own after I had been booted out of The Korea Times in the winter of 1981, I had one morning gone to a downtown roadside shop to make a refund of what I had purchased the previous day. That night my wife, who had come home from her shop, talked about a "really" unpleasant experience of that day.

"What a disgusting customer or something!" she exploded, "that came to me and asked for a refund as soon as I opened the shop."
"What time was it?" I asked.
"It was around ten. Why?" she asked.
"Nothing," I said, but I knew to my horror that the time was exactly the hour when I had been asking for a refund of my own.

When I was drawing the well of proofs at the Times I didn't realize that I was reactivating the plights of my father who had been digging the coals as a coal miner of the wartime Mitsubishi Corporation at a small beach town coal mine of Nagasaki, Japan, during the period of 1940~1945.

Figuratively speaking, I had been digging the coals in my own way. That signifies that God's, or Nature's, or Providence's will is that the harsh toils, which had been infringed upon my father, were once again borne on me. I had to live them out, but I hadn't been aware, till then, of my father's harsh toils in Japan. That's been a shameful thing.

The invisible hands had been hitting the keyboards of the wire room of The Korea Times, warning of some imminent danger. The continuous warning issued from the invisible folks across the Pacific was that Gen. Chun Doo Hwan, who had masterminded the Dec. 12 coup of 1979, would take charge.

Tension had gripped the nation, which had been full of the imaginary sounds of gunshots and shrieks. The assassination of President Park by his confident KCIA chief of all the people and the overturn of his government overnight and the issuance of the martial law had put the nation on a raw nerve.

While the alerts out of the national border were brisk at work, the people within the national border were put under a gag. The news scripts of foreign sources referring to the shady movements of the coup authorities were deleted. The social gatherings of political character were not permitted, and if held, they were imprisoned with impunity.

Cha Hee had been very resourceful. Her feet had been brisk at pedaling the sewing machine at a corner market of Black Stone Town and her hands very dextrous in handling the domestic chores. She had gotten family "wealth", such as it had been, by "not spending", that is, by saving "hard-earned money" before spending it, and mainly through an institutional method of kye, which means institutional "mutual funds", which, organized by a small close-knit group, is designed to apportion and collect a specific sum of money from each member in order to give the predetermined specific sum of money to the duly selected member at each chance.

I hope my readers will not get dizzy at a sort of juggling done by this writer himself. You will know the art of tossing things, that is, bats or balls or something, and catching them in rapid succession. The narration of my novel is done juggling fashion by this writer in the juggling way of time sequence, so the date and time of each function could be confusing.

The past occurrences are of course are described mostly in the past tense or past perfect tense, which are sooner or later given a perspective view in the present tense, which is done mostly in retrospective or reflective point of view. in brief, the overall context is that I've sinned and I regret, and I've made mistakes and I feel sorry for that, and I've been indebted and I am grateful for all that.

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My wife did all the troubles of registration and payment of the fees for the diagnosis and treatment of my disease. That has been a dizzying experience done in the throngs of the patients and their families, mounting the escalator and dismounting it, waiting in the multitude looking at the red-letter number plates and names, tension-mounted moments with the consulting doctor, exiting and mounting the escalator and dismounting it again, paying the fees and receiving the specific numbers and going to the automatic machine to push the buttons to get the prescription paper.

She has done all that holding my hand in hers, showing smiles on her face. Just like yesterday and the day before yesterday, she had done all the juggling of house chores, bringing up our sons and funding their education, paying each installment of the kye and at last gaining a big sum of money, and presto! she had finessed the purchase of our own house, and that of an accessory store of her own, in the years i979 and in 1981.