35
White Human Shape and Leaks, 2001~2003
A big fire meant a fright to me Dano. The mountain fires of Sun Valley had left an incurable trauma on me Dano as a boy. The mountain fire had lasted three days and three nights with the deafening blasts of shells and ammunitions which had left undetonated during the Korean War. The word fire used to be a reminder of all the horrible things that broke loose.
Now there was a fire again. It appeared to be a quick yet blunt blow to all the residents. Luckily it happened on a broad daylight. And the luckiest part of all was that the fire was on a top floor house only. There was no deafening blasts, not a whiff developing to a conflagration, either.
But the scene was disastrous. Since human shapes were not seen at the disaster scene, the proprietors of the fire must be going out. It was so sad that an uninhabited house was on fire. Black smoke was billowing into the air. It was two or three p.m. I was just back from a casual outing and was on my way to a hurried home on the 2nd floor house on the same line.
Fire engines arrived with roars of screams, with the firemen dashing onto the scene. You should have seen them. They really shook the earth; Their eyes were on fire, too; They shoved anyone in their way; Their desperate steps vied with each other for forward progression. I, standing near the elevator, was bluntly shoved aside.
In the midst of the tumult over the control of the wayward firework, smashing and shattering noises of the household goods were heard even down under on the ground floor. The throngs of concerned crowds were gathered in threes and fours, pounding their feet and blurting exclaims of astonishment.
Though agitated in the one hand, they were evidently relieved to see their own houses safe and sound and to see the fire broken out on the top floor, but not in the middle floors. In 30 minutes or so they seemed to get the blaze under control as the firemen came out from the elevator, smeared with dirt and smelling of gasoline smoke. They appeared angry and sad.
Clustered, the residents were wondering about the whereabouts of the sad proprietor of the burned-out house, kibitzing about the fire-prevention tips. A fast-paced gossiper kept rumor mills rolling that the culprit of the fire calamity was
the lady of the tragic apartment house, who unwittingly had forgotten to cut the flow of the gas by switching off the gas valve, leaving something boiling on the gas burner.
The poor family were not informed of their tragedy because they had no means of outside contact by wireless and no means of mobile communication at the time, either, only kept in the dark until they stepped into the apartment compound and near at the 26th Block. They could see their top floor house disappeared from sight and the hollow cluster of the wreck left. The lady of the household fainted at the scene and her husband was pretty much struck speechless and motionless. The neighbors of the same line got to the scene but found no words to comfort them.
------------------
Why forget? It'll be useless to deride or blame those who're liable to forget. I almost always found myself without an umbrella when I returned which I had kept company early in the morning. It's been a fatal habit and I had almost always felt remorse for the lost companion. I felt myself a very ungrateful person from time to time. How about the other people? They would be likely more or less forgetful of their thankful companions. I was wondering at leisurely times where the umbrellas of the world had gotten together.
Episodes about forgetful people, particularly of those ladies in their mid-50s abounded. I myself happened to watch with my open eyes a middle-aged Seoul lady step into the swimming pool area naked, with no swimming suits on. A woman pool guard swiftly raced toward her, muffling her with her whole body and turning her around, with no more fuss. But among lots of amnesiac episodes, the episode on the top list would be that of a middle-aged lady, who, going out to the beauty parlor to do hair for her daughter's wedding, when the job done, returned to her home and slept it away.
Women's Sorority of the 26th Block passed the hat among the residents that they chip in to help the tragic fire victims. Through discussion, they agreed to donate five dollars each household, an expression of a modicum of sympathy. The women's sorority club also circulated along pamphlets alerting the residents about how to handle gas and electricity.
---------------------
Of all the living places of Seoul I had lived out, I thought, Eunma (Silver Horse) had had the worst living conditions. Too cold among all things. Through the four years, Tschai, me and their three sons had literally gotten themselves frozen out. The heating system was pristine and ineffective. An apartment management union body, which was deployed from the Central Apartment Management Corporation or something, ran Silver Horse, for which the 20,000 more residents had no voice.
"It's a sheer nonsense," I thought. "It's so preposterous," I said publicly. The union members, with red-colored head bands tied around their heads, with their fists shooting into the air with blood-shot eyes, beating drums and bronze ggoenggari, chanting threatening slogans, made routine rounds of the apartment complex two or three times everyday, which made the residents transfixed dazed and scared.
"Why make so much noise?" I once stepped forward from the watching crowds. "Stop nuisance!" I stood firm before the marching union demonstrators. "What the hell is this fella?" The clamorous troops, restrained out of the blue by a strange man, mobbed around me, with one of them dashing to me to grab me.
"I'm a resident of this apartment complex. I want to live in peace!"
"What the hell are you talking about? Who is there that forces you not to?"
"You're the ones that destroy the peace of us residents, ain't you?"
"This is about our rights, do you know, this fucker?"
The union members and the throng, milling about for some seconds, most of whom were middle-aged ladies, agreed to convince themselves to disperse.
The moves to Eunma had been made for Tschai's sake only, for a small accessory store she had been running at Daechi-dong. It was a source of family financing. The moves from Mokdong to Kepodong to Eunma had shortened the time needed for her commute from hours to a few minutes. I did most of the trouble of packing because books had always comprised the most portion of the moving package.
Tschai got wind of the apartment folks' backbites about her husband Dano. She said brusquely one late autumn morning of 2001, demanding that he not inspire or motivate the residents by facing up to the union members of the management body. He was not entitled to do that. "What kind of entitlement am I supposed to have?" I demanded to know. "You're supposed to have the ownership of the apartment house," she answered. "We only live in a rental house, paying two years' rent in advance."
Despite Tschai's concern about my meddlesome tendency and her advice that I refrain from interfering in the conflicts between the residents and the unionized management office, Mrs. Kang, who was chairperson of the Conference of the Residents' Representatives, telephoned me Dano to come out and help her with her outing. Mrs. Elderly, who was in her middle seventies, said pleadingly, "Mr. Park, please come out and come with me to the meeting of the representatives." Fact was that the representatives of the residents of Eunma Apartment Complex were not able to hold meetings hampered by the militant union members from the management office.
Elderly Kang, who had been moved, consented by her erstwhile residents of three decades and unanimously recommended that she preside over the representatives' meetings of the big apartment complex, said to me, "The union members are in the way. Mr. Park, escort me to the conference room of the residents' representatives, will you please?" "I'm sure I will, Mrs. Elderly!"
Her apartment house was on the 12th floor, situated on the southern sidewalk side. Her rooms were aptly heated for the aged woman, which was so contrasting with the Siberian cold of the northern tip of the blocks, the 23rd to the 26th. Her rooms were simply furnished and on the wall closet mounted on the kitchen sink were tablewares neatly arranged.
"This is Mrs. History of Eunma, who has been living since the construction of this apartment building," a resident representative once introduced Mrs. Elderly to me Dano. She was tall, a little too tall, with her shoulders not stooped a little bit for her age, and slender, of course. "Her hobby is horticulture," the representative explained to me Dano. She was leading a single clean life with the domestic aid of a middle-aged daughter. All assortments of flowers and plants filled her veranda garden.
Mounting an elevator and heading down the ground, Mrs. Elderly told Dano not to have an argument or a fistfight with the union people. "Be patient," she said. Getting near the management office, I found myself holding the old woman by the hand and the union people gathered in groups on both sides of the path they were to pass. "Where're you going," a union guy challenged. "Do ya have the right to ask such a question and do we have any obligation to answer?" I challenged back. "We have some things to talk with the representatives," Mrs. Elderly also defied them.
--------------------
In the midst of the clamour of the marching union members, and in the midst of the din of the sirens from the police cars which used to show up for calls of the repeated clashes between the management folks and the residents, Congressman Hong of the district, whose office had been situated on the uphill overlooking Eunma, did not pop up his head. I was wondering whether Congressman Hong had been pondering over his status only as a representative of the people, but not of the Gangnam residents to which Eunma had belonged.
The geomantic energy of the yin might have prevailed. It was cold in winter and hot in summer. On top of the seasonal meteorological extremities, there were leaks. To cite a mode of speaking from the movie The American President, leaks and nervousness was the problem. Naturally the major effect of the obsolete apartment buildings of three decades was leaks. A few days after the first-floor household ajumma complained about a leak from the room ceiling, there used to be a leak from the 2nd-floor ceiling, and vice versa.
The landlady of Dano and Tschai's rented apartment was Mrs. Hong in Pohang. Everytime there was a leak responsible to the owner of the 2nd floor house, I placed a long-distance call to Mrs. Hong to inform her of the water accident. He then hit the road for the prowl for town plumbers. To guide the plumber to the place of the leak and let him give the price for the plumbing job was my homework. Then watching him fix the leak and after the work done, he paid the bill.
It wasn't a haunted house or something. It was merely hot and cold, situated at the tip of the northern west and, like an old dike, the old apartment house was leaking. Of the three sons of mine, Tai, Hua, and Kyo, Kyo had seen a spirit at his room on the night of the move.
The weather had been summer's in the middle of June. "I've seen a white human shape at the room, looking down at me," Kyo told his father Dano with pensive calm. I, feeling an onslaught of cold chill on my spine, didn't interrogate further on how it was like and what impression he had gotten. But inwardly I was praising my son's composure that he hadn't shrieked, and not made a scene, either.
"The world is replete with spiteful spirits," a local religious sect says. I had a belief in the theory but had a disbelief in their powers. I doubted that they were ubiquitous, that is, I suspected that they would have to reside at cold swamps, in deserted remote houses and at rainy grave sites. So I had once reclined on a roadside grave mound in the mountain hill around the midnight, which had turned out to be a very cozy place.
It was a great experience that Kyo, my third son, had spotted in his room "a strange white human shape." I was wondering why the being of the hinterland, that is, a spirit of the netherworld, had been left in the cramped and reinforced concrete wall, scaring the new resident. I was also wondering whether Mrs. Hong family had decided to vacate her house for the time being to a bridge family, which would have to encounter the ghost and get away with him--exorcise or not.
Obsession might have caused spirits, if any, to be lingering in the dreary patio of the urban living spaces. Malcontent might have been another cause that might be restraining him or her. Might have died from unrequited love. Might have not had an opportunity of consummation. A knowledgeable saying goes that cities have tons of malcontents.
------------------
Months passed. The general atmosphere changed. Although patrol cars from time to time blared in and out of Eunma, militant posters of the union, which were hanging at major sites of the apartment complex, were torn down. Representatives, fleeing the fearful threats of the head-banded union members, sheepishly gathered to prepare for the litigation for the change of the management body.
Dano tussled with the union members but the tussles did not develop into fist fights. He saw to it that he would not be hauled away to the police box or something. But he was hauled more often than not off to eerie places by indescript human shapes or something. He was wondering why they were not resting at night, instead of disturbing his peace. He was lost often, led astray through thorn bushes, and after being awoken, he was angry at the previous night's abuses.
Has there been such weird terminology 'gweejeob' 鬼接, which would be loosely translated into "an intercourse with a spirit," or something. No, it couldn't be a more suitable term. He was forcefully laid. No, he was literally raped, kept in the dark and in powerlessness, by an uncanny malcontented female ghost. Why couldn't he be the master of his own body and soul and repel the evil spirit with one spank and yell?
Awoken, he was enraged with the condition he was forced to be put in, touched and attracted to an indescript force and indescribable heat, and clamped shut, and abused, with his bodily essence erupted. He was liberally violated with impunity and belatedly determined to seek and ferret out the one and throw it into the fire of hell which had done him insult after he will have been dead.
On the very afternoon of Dano's abuse, the ceiling of Room 4, or Dano's third son Kyo's room ceiling collapsed and there were sudden bucketful downpours of water onto the room, which inundated the whole floors. A domestic catastrophe in 30 years' life in Seoul. Done out of the blue. There were yells up to the third floor neighbor. "What's all this about?" A male plumber hurried down the stairs and popped his head into the floor room and said. "It was all my fault. I mishandled the part of the water pipe..." Dano's sheepish interpretation was that the goddamned bitch had had a great belated ejaculation.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Chapter 34:A Flintman in the Era of the Internet
34
A Flintman in the Era of the Internet, 2000~2003
“오늘 아침 보(洑)나오소!” onul achim bo naoso! "People, come out for dike works this morning!" The town crier had cried his lung out, standing on the top of the background hill. to get people together. Then the adult men villagers, after having had breakfast, had come out to work on the dikes taking shovels and picks, building the dikes, improving them and managing them. At that time my father at Sun Valley had struck a flint to make a fire. The letter carriers had run the wilderness, gotten over the mountain hills, and crossed the stream rivers. The newspaper, delivered by a postman three times a week, had given a great joy. And from time to time, it was thrilling that, when a manuscript, which I had put it in writing on paper by pencil, sent to a newspaper company and through the pruning works of the editor, ran on the newspaper's Letters to the Editor section. Really thrilling.
The onset of the Internet, which had been made possible around the end of the 1990s in the Korean society, needed a new mindset of adaptation into and behavior modification for a new society. But the Internet slammed its way so suddenly into the nation that it was unprepared and untrained, which inescapably resulted in conflicts among the community members. The medias, or, the press in general, did not set up paradigms of roles toward their users. The users, too, did not train themselves on the relationships toward the medias and the mutual users.
I had hassles on the online message boards of the medias, especially in the initiation period of the Internet, with the other members over the uses of the online terms. I tried to convince the rest of the other members of the so-called bulletin boards that they were there to "post". They were not supposed to "write" because they were not writers in the exact sense of the word, and because they were not the writers who belonged to the specific writers' association, either. They were not supposed to "read" because the online message boards were not libraries, or something. They were there to "debate." I turned out to be, for a long period of time, the butt of ridicule and criticism to the vernacular newspaper audience.
I did not "write" because I was not a writer who had been registered with any writers' union or something, and granted that I had been one, when I was scribbling something down on an online bulletin board in ways by the consonants and vowels of the local language were combined, and posting it by clicking, I was composing messages, not writing.
I thought aloud that I, and the others as well, had to recognize the difference, that is, the difference of the mode of speaking. I marveled as a "flintman" at the rapidity with which what I had scribbled down on my desktop monitor was immediately published on the online message boards of the medias which might be hundreds or thousands of miles away by one clicking of the mouse. Courtesy of the venerable Mr. Bill Gates of the United States and Mr. Lee Chan Jin of South Korea.
The medias of South Korea were trapped, from the cybernetic start, in the triviality of provincialism and specificity of ideologies. One of those aspects was that they began to record the viewerships by number of every post on their message boards, from which all the plagues originated. What had petrified Lot's Wife also turned the medias of South Korea and their users into turmoil. A really self-incurred disaster. The otherwise innocuous curiosity, combined with provincialism and leftist-leaning extremism, transformed the Internet sites into the hell of hatred and curse.
The craze for the dominance of message board viewerships spurred the competition among the posters themselves. It could be figuratively said that dominant viewerships were like fashion. That is, the more numbers in the recorded viewers of the post in question could be compared to a pretty woman in Prada fashion. Problem was that "devils tended to wear Pradas"
Just like the women in fashion clothes are looked upon in wonder, the online members with huge viewership records were looked upon in awe. That's where the members of the online message boards began to be attracted to numbers. That's why the so-called computer nerds or geeks were from the earliest tinkering with computer buttons on the toolbar of the monitor.
The people, taking after the attributes of the nation, divided by ideologies into two different sovereign entities, tended to take positions on everything, which developed into sides. People took sides. They learned to take sides before learning to think together, work together, and live together. The medias took sides, too, and the audiences tended to be clustered under the umbrellas of the favorite medias.
Hatred was organized, too. People learned to hate medias before they learned to love, to be enlightened by, and to use them in good ways. The ideology of hatred had been created by militant ideologues; Slogans and pamphlets were scattered; Demagogues were rampant. A specific newspaper was pinpointed for destruction by hostile forces.
The Morning Calm Daily was just the one. On what counts? On the charges of benefiting the Japanese empire by extolling the Emperor of Japan. Though the newspaper media had once or twice run the pro-Japanese articles and editorials during the colonization period (1919~1945), it had greatly contributed to the enlightenment of the people nevertheless.
The flag-bearer and mastermind of the anti-Morning Calm Daily was Mr. Quon. Quon, who might have been in his early forties, was rumored to come from foreign studies, having his lecturer's post at several third-tier colleges. He was reputed to be wielding the acerbic pen, who had no hesitation in blurting satirical comments on all the gamut of topics personal to public. Quon had virtually settled on the online message board of the Morning Calm Daily mainly during the night hours and posted pointed messages deriding the media family and their past practices. Problem One was that he was recording huge viewerships of 3,000 to 4,ooo per post, whereas the rest of the posters like me Dano recorded two-digit viewerships. Problem Two was that the media was powerless as to the public hacker, or heckler. Problem Three was he was having "enormous" following, which turned out destructive: The stoppage of newspaper subscriptions increased, such as they were.
Four-digit viewership numbers were a terror in themselves. Quon's messages full of mockeries, slanders, revilement, and derisions seemed to undermine the ramparts of the media and its family to a great extent. I questioned the media's wisdom of no response: why didn't they do anything to keep the devil from running wild? At one instant, the media appeared to let Quon run amok, by which the online message board of the media could get packed with cyber crowds. The media deliberately whetted their impulse to curse and attack a target media online. Nevertheless, could it be justified that one party of the population monopolized morals of society, and thereby lynch the other party with impunity? Wasn't it a kind of popular court? Was it possible that the one party of the population was absolutely right and the rest was totally wrong?
Above all things, I was wondering whether a certain member of society could be excused in violating the others' human rights under the pretext that he was "assigned" to correct and punish the 70-year-old media infraction of the flattery toward the Japanese Emperor. I thought such historical mistakes should be judged and punished by the sovereign entity only, but not by a specific person or a group of persons. I also thought that the statute of limitations should strictly be applied to the history court. The judgement of seditious and perfidious acts of the pro-Japanese inclination by persons or organs, if any, should have been done immediately after the Liberation of 1945. The then Syngman Rhee government had decided to close the deal. It had been an open-and-shut case because of all circumstantial reasons within and without.
-----------------------------
You can envision, of course, a speckless sky, but it hardly exists, and if it does, it exists only for a short while. You can't imagine a river bed without mud. Not only irises but also thorn bushes are populated in a mountain valley. You can't live in a perfect society with perfect people. That would be a hallucination at best, a deceit at worst.
That will be an impossible dream. Nevertheless, you can refer to North Korea that has become "perfect" after all that purge and liquidation of its people for the sake of socialist experimentation for the past 60 years. But it was a distilled nation that the ordinary people couldn't live just like fish can't live in distilled water.
The "distilled nation" of course indicated the one shorn of "the anti-revolutionary elements" who had been speckled with the perfidious pro-Japanese past. The dead Kim Il Sung and his Labor Party had created such a nation at last through the brutal purges, merciless self-criticisms and persistent "political studies." They named the state DPRK, or Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Was it really a democratic state? Bullshit. It was a hoax. Was it a republic? A republic Kim Jong Il's ass. How do you call the entity a republic that had been inherited by Kim Il Sung to his son Kim Jong Il? Was it a popular country, that is, the country "of the people, by the people, and for the people"?
An utter nonsense because the people of North Korea have had no rights even to move their place to live. In Pyongyang live only the privileged class. The dead Kim Il Sung and his clique had brought out their own metamorphosis of a nation through the great fuss of "past liquidation": A really unexpected consequence, or a premeditated result.
-------------------
The attempt at the "past liquidation," which had been masterminded by the then ruling party of South Korea Yollin Uridang, loosely translated as The Open Pen Party, and supported by the leftist radicals, had to be thwarted. Why? Because it could assuredly have incurred the unexpected consequence, or the premeditated result of South Korea's communization. To elaborate, the complete pursuit of the liquidation would have to dismantle the bureaucracy and wreck the industries, from which the anarchistic utter chaos would ensue, which would provide the basis for the proletariat dictatorships led by the labor class.
Why? The leftist radicals would take advantage of such an anti-capitalistic atmosphere, in which the Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966~1974) had run wild, that the people in the hierarchy ladder of Korean society wouldn't go unharmed. Would Dano, the first son of coal miner Don in the Mitsubishi Company go unharmed? He would, but Dano himself found his father blamable just like Lee somebody, the son of a prosecutor in the Imperial Japan because Dano's father had contributed to the wartime logistics of the colonial Japan.
----------------
I sensed a conspiracy of some sort. The Sherlock Holmes in me Dano presupposed some backup forces involved in manipulating huge Quon's post viewerships. So I appealed one day to Quon's supporters to blow a whistle on dirty ways of Quon's to magnify the numbers of his own post viewerships. Coded words would do. The very next day a whistle blower showed up on the message board of the Morning Calm Daily who snitched on Quon's evil doings in some coded words, such as they were.
The crux of the whistle blower's charges was that Quon was abusing "the post of a lecturer" at Seoul City College so that he used his students in order to inflate the viewership numbers of his own post. He taught art history at the college then. He was not punctual. He used to be late for class lecture. He was not driving because he was an environmentalist. So saying he smoked at class for a while, blurting out a biting jest or two targeting the government or the MCD and inciting his students to go trample down the Stars and Stripes at the college gate.
Then he "told" his poor class audiences to click press the anti-MCD messages he used to post at night to pop up the viewership numbers, brandishing his lecture notebook, and threatening to let them "wear pistols" if the results were not satisfactory. In this case the coded expressions "to wear pistols" were interpreted to mean that the students were intimidated by their lecturer Quon to get flunked if the target post failed to attain 3,ooo or more viewership records.
Quon's online terrorisms were allegedly reported even to be financed by a shady organ which could be loosely designated as the Culture and Arts Promotion Foundation. How much? The money amounted to no less than 380,000 dollars. Taking advantage of the online encounter with him at night, I questioned the wisdom of his taking such huge money. I chided him about the illegality of taking money and doing the proxy work of libel on an organized and persistent basis. The online terrorist equivocated by saying that political parties also receive government subsidies from the Central Election Committee, or something.
"Are you a national agency?" I snapped, saying that his behaviors violate the Lawyers' Act or something. I also made a mockery of his pro-Japanese inclinations, pointing to a weird reality that he was living with a Japanese woman. Can there be a more Japanese-prone behavior than that of Quon who took a Japanese woman as wife. Quon "the judge of the era" was more often than not talking to his Japanese father-in-law in Tokyo, "Moshi moshi..." (Hello?) His international telephone line was busy.
A Flintman in the Era of the Internet, 2000~2003
“오늘 아침 보(洑)나오소!” onul achim bo naoso! "People, come out for dike works this morning!" The town crier had cried his lung out, standing on the top of the background hill. to get people together. Then the adult men villagers, after having had breakfast, had come out to work on the dikes taking shovels and picks, building the dikes, improving them and managing them. At that time my father at Sun Valley had struck a flint to make a fire. The letter carriers had run the wilderness, gotten over the mountain hills, and crossed the stream rivers. The newspaper, delivered by a postman three times a week, had given a great joy. And from time to time, it was thrilling that, when a manuscript, which I had put it in writing on paper by pencil, sent to a newspaper company and through the pruning works of the editor, ran on the newspaper's Letters to the Editor section. Really thrilling.
The onset of the Internet, which had been made possible around the end of the 1990s in the Korean society, needed a new mindset of adaptation into and behavior modification for a new society. But the Internet slammed its way so suddenly into the nation that it was unprepared and untrained, which inescapably resulted in conflicts among the community members. The medias, or, the press in general, did not set up paradigms of roles toward their users. The users, too, did not train themselves on the relationships toward the medias and the mutual users.
I had hassles on the online message boards of the medias, especially in the initiation period of the Internet, with the other members over the uses of the online terms. I tried to convince the rest of the other members of the so-called bulletin boards that they were there to "post". They were not supposed to "write" because they were not writers in the exact sense of the word, and because they were not the writers who belonged to the specific writers' association, either. They were not supposed to "read" because the online message boards were not libraries, or something. They were there to "debate." I turned out to be, for a long period of time, the butt of ridicule and criticism to the vernacular newspaper audience.
I did not "write" because I was not a writer who had been registered with any writers' union or something, and granted that I had been one, when I was scribbling something down on an online bulletin board in ways by the consonants and vowels of the local language were combined, and posting it by clicking, I was composing messages, not writing.
I thought aloud that I, and the others as well, had to recognize the difference, that is, the difference of the mode of speaking. I marveled as a "flintman" at the rapidity with which what I had scribbled down on my desktop monitor was immediately published on the online message boards of the medias which might be hundreds or thousands of miles away by one clicking of the mouse. Courtesy of the venerable Mr. Bill Gates of the United States and Mr. Lee Chan Jin of South Korea.
The medias of South Korea were trapped, from the cybernetic start, in the triviality of provincialism and specificity of ideologies. One of those aspects was that they began to record the viewerships by number of every post on their message boards, from which all the plagues originated. What had petrified Lot's Wife also turned the medias of South Korea and their users into turmoil. A really self-incurred disaster. The otherwise innocuous curiosity, combined with provincialism and leftist-leaning extremism, transformed the Internet sites into the hell of hatred and curse.
The craze for the dominance of message board viewerships spurred the competition among the posters themselves. It could be figuratively said that dominant viewerships were like fashion. That is, the more numbers in the recorded viewers of the post in question could be compared to a pretty woman in Prada fashion. Problem was that "devils tended to wear Pradas"
Just like the women in fashion clothes are looked upon in wonder, the online members with huge viewership records were looked upon in awe. That's where the members of the online message boards began to be attracted to numbers. That's why the so-called computer nerds or geeks were from the earliest tinkering with computer buttons on the toolbar of the monitor.
The people, taking after the attributes of the nation, divided by ideologies into two different sovereign entities, tended to take positions on everything, which developed into sides. People took sides. They learned to take sides before learning to think together, work together, and live together. The medias took sides, too, and the audiences tended to be clustered under the umbrellas of the favorite medias.
Hatred was organized, too. People learned to hate medias before they learned to love, to be enlightened by, and to use them in good ways. The ideology of hatred had been created by militant ideologues; Slogans and pamphlets were scattered; Demagogues were rampant. A specific newspaper was pinpointed for destruction by hostile forces.
The Morning Calm Daily was just the one. On what counts? On the charges of benefiting the Japanese empire by extolling the Emperor of Japan. Though the newspaper media had once or twice run the pro-Japanese articles and editorials during the colonization period (1919~1945), it had greatly contributed to the enlightenment of the people nevertheless.
The flag-bearer and mastermind of the anti-Morning Calm Daily was Mr. Quon. Quon, who might have been in his early forties, was rumored to come from foreign studies, having his lecturer's post at several third-tier colleges. He was reputed to be wielding the acerbic pen, who had no hesitation in blurting satirical comments on all the gamut of topics personal to public. Quon had virtually settled on the online message board of the Morning Calm Daily mainly during the night hours and posted pointed messages deriding the media family and their past practices. Problem One was that he was recording huge viewerships of 3,000 to 4,ooo per post, whereas the rest of the posters like me Dano recorded two-digit viewerships. Problem Two was that the media was powerless as to the public hacker, or heckler. Problem Three was he was having "enormous" following, which turned out destructive: The stoppage of newspaper subscriptions increased, such as they were.
Four-digit viewership numbers were a terror in themselves. Quon's messages full of mockeries, slanders, revilement, and derisions seemed to undermine the ramparts of the media and its family to a great extent. I questioned the media's wisdom of no response: why didn't they do anything to keep the devil from running wild? At one instant, the media appeared to let Quon run amok, by which the online message board of the media could get packed with cyber crowds. The media deliberately whetted their impulse to curse and attack a target media online. Nevertheless, could it be justified that one party of the population monopolized morals of society, and thereby lynch the other party with impunity? Wasn't it a kind of popular court? Was it possible that the one party of the population was absolutely right and the rest was totally wrong?
Above all things, I was wondering whether a certain member of society could be excused in violating the others' human rights under the pretext that he was "assigned" to correct and punish the 70-year-old media infraction of the flattery toward the Japanese Emperor. I thought such historical mistakes should be judged and punished by the sovereign entity only, but not by a specific person or a group of persons. I also thought that the statute of limitations should strictly be applied to the history court. The judgement of seditious and perfidious acts of the pro-Japanese inclination by persons or organs, if any, should have been done immediately after the Liberation of 1945. The then Syngman Rhee government had decided to close the deal. It had been an open-and-shut case because of all circumstantial reasons within and without.
-----------------------------
You can envision, of course, a speckless sky, but it hardly exists, and if it does, it exists only for a short while. You can't imagine a river bed without mud. Not only irises but also thorn bushes are populated in a mountain valley. You can't live in a perfect society with perfect people. That would be a hallucination at best, a deceit at worst.
That will be an impossible dream. Nevertheless, you can refer to North Korea that has become "perfect" after all that purge and liquidation of its people for the sake of socialist experimentation for the past 60 years. But it was a distilled nation that the ordinary people couldn't live just like fish can't live in distilled water.
The "distilled nation" of course indicated the one shorn of "the anti-revolutionary elements" who had been speckled with the perfidious pro-Japanese past. The dead Kim Il Sung and his Labor Party had created such a nation at last through the brutal purges, merciless self-criticisms and persistent "political studies." They named the state DPRK, or Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Was it really a democratic state? Bullshit. It was a hoax. Was it a republic? A republic Kim Jong Il's ass. How do you call the entity a republic that had been inherited by Kim Il Sung to his son Kim Jong Il? Was it a popular country, that is, the country "of the people, by the people, and for the people"?
An utter nonsense because the people of North Korea have had no rights even to move their place to live. In Pyongyang live only the privileged class. The dead Kim Il Sung and his clique had brought out their own metamorphosis of a nation through the great fuss of "past liquidation": A really unexpected consequence, or a premeditated result.
-------------------
The attempt at the "past liquidation," which had been masterminded by the then ruling party of South Korea Yollin Uridang, loosely translated as The Open Pen Party, and supported by the leftist radicals, had to be thwarted. Why? Because it could assuredly have incurred the unexpected consequence, or the premeditated result of South Korea's communization. To elaborate, the complete pursuit of the liquidation would have to dismantle the bureaucracy and wreck the industries, from which the anarchistic utter chaos would ensue, which would provide the basis for the proletariat dictatorships led by the labor class.
Why? The leftist radicals would take advantage of such an anti-capitalistic atmosphere, in which the Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966~1974) had run wild, that the people in the hierarchy ladder of Korean society wouldn't go unharmed. Would Dano, the first son of coal miner Don in the Mitsubishi Company go unharmed? He would, but Dano himself found his father blamable just like Lee somebody, the son of a prosecutor in the Imperial Japan because Dano's father had contributed to the wartime logistics of the colonial Japan.
----------------
I sensed a conspiracy of some sort. The Sherlock Holmes in me Dano presupposed some backup forces involved in manipulating huge Quon's post viewerships. So I appealed one day to Quon's supporters to blow a whistle on dirty ways of Quon's to magnify the numbers of his own post viewerships. Coded words would do. The very next day a whistle blower showed up on the message board of the Morning Calm Daily who snitched on Quon's evil doings in some coded words, such as they were.
The crux of the whistle blower's charges was that Quon was abusing "the post of a lecturer" at Seoul City College so that he used his students in order to inflate the viewership numbers of his own post. He taught art history at the college then. He was not punctual. He used to be late for class lecture. He was not driving because he was an environmentalist. So saying he smoked at class for a while, blurting out a biting jest or two targeting the government or the MCD and inciting his students to go trample down the Stars and Stripes at the college gate.
Then he "told" his poor class audiences to click press the anti-MCD messages he used to post at night to pop up the viewership numbers, brandishing his lecture notebook, and threatening to let them "wear pistols" if the results were not satisfactory. In this case the coded expressions "to wear pistols" were interpreted to mean that the students were intimidated by their lecturer Quon to get flunked if the target post failed to attain 3,ooo or more viewership records.
Quon's online terrorisms were allegedly reported even to be financed by a shady organ which could be loosely designated as the Culture and Arts Promotion Foundation. How much? The money amounted to no less than 380,000 dollars. Taking advantage of the online encounter with him at night, I questioned the wisdom of his taking such huge money. I chided him about the illegality of taking money and doing the proxy work of libel on an organized and persistent basis. The online terrorist equivocated by saying that political parties also receive government subsidies from the Central Election Committee, or something.
"Are you a national agency?" I snapped, saying that his behaviors violate the Lawyers' Act or something. I also made a mockery of his pro-Japanese inclinations, pointing to a weird reality that he was living with a Japanese woman. Can there be a more Japanese-prone behavior than that of Quon who took a Japanese woman as wife. Quon "the judge of the era" was more often than not talking to his Japanese father-in-law in Tokyo, "Moshi moshi..." (Hello?) His international telephone line was busy.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Chapters 32.33: The Story of A Miss Pigeon
32
"Forgive Me, Father!" 1993
Someone or something is oriented toward someone or something. Just like bees are guided by airstream, just like salmon are guided by sea stream, just like ocean cruising needs a compass and a navigator, and just like foreign travellers need maps and tourist guides, do those, who go the faraway place of death, need guides of some sort? Since I had missed the one day alloted for the early morning prayer session the previous day, I prepared myself to take part in that day's "morning ritual for the terminally ill parents."
I kept awake through the night for the event. When on daybreak I went up to the ritual building, I found that several applicants for the event had already been there. I filled in the application form with father's name, age, relation, and address. The presiding monk of the ritual stood six feet with strong build, brilliant eyes and resonant voice.
He later introduced himself as Monk Yonghwa, Dragon Fire. His ritual proceedings took on the mode of a premature report with the King of the Netherworld (the Paradise after death). With all the ritual proceedings of the offerings, bows, and mantra chanting done, Monk Dragon Fire gathered me and the others around and gave some pieces of advice.
The few minutes before and after one's death were very important in that the surviving people would have to take some special heed so that the deceased would not be ambushed in the traps of diversion. Yonghwa said that a person who just died had to take a long travel to the Nether World. He compared the journey of a deceased to a mountain climbing, that is, climbing up a steep hill. He looked at me Dano and said, "The bereaving people will have to stop crying for a few minutes and to cheer him up, instead, by whispering to his dying ears, 'Don't be distracted, Father. Go straight, Father!'"
Exiting the portal of Guinsa Temple, I was lighthearted. Like a boy on a picnic, I was thrilled at the reunion with my father in half a month. The intercity traffic transfers were irritating, and his feet were fidgety on the slow buses. After a five-hour bus ride, I was virtually racing the stairs to the sunny sick room my father had been using. When I got into the room, father was sitting up, with Ilseo and his wife before him, surprised by my appearance.
With an elliptical greeting with only knelt postures and no bows, which meant that one's offspring was not supposed to give deep bows to the gravely ill elderly, he threw himself before his father and burst out crying, "It was all my fault, Father!" He kept on crying. He was wrong. He did wrong. He pained him. He hurt him. He begged him to forgive him. Perplexed were all of them present in the room. Don said weakly with sunken eyes, "Stop crying, son. I was not always right. Don't blame yourself so bitterly!"
How sad it would be that the person himself was forced to decide on a place at which he himself would be buried. Don had his intention conveyed to his sons, Dano and Ilseo that his burial place should be prepared in a hurry. He had made sure that he would not be buried at a certain hilly site of Sun Valley, Andong-gun, because it was so far away that he wouldn't be able to "see" his children and grandchildren, and even if they could come from time to time, they wouldn't get to the resting house of his.
When mentioning this, Father indicated his oldest son me Dano offhandedly. He said that "a certain fella with a problem of weight" would balk at the idea of the call at his father's place, because it would be a hard job to do, so he would try to greet from far down at the foot of the mountain hill, instead, excusing himself, "You can see me from here, can't you? Please think that your son's showup here at this spot will suffice." So with the aid of a jiguan, a geomancer, who had been arranged by my best friend Mr. Paragon at Euiseong, Dano and Ilseo took a sunny low-lying place at a stone's throw from the orchard as their father's resting place.
"This place is better than all the other places," the jiguan had said at the time, "in terms of the peace of the deceased and the prosperity for his descendants, protected by the power of hills surrounding it." The comments of "the judge of the earth" were hollow and useless, though, because the place was not a private property of his on which to lie down and rest but belonged to the county property, so in a considerable time the leaser would have to move to another place or something.
Like an elementary school boy, who dawdles on his vacation homework, Don appeared to be under pressure. He had had his "parting plan" with his family suspended by his wife Boolim's sincere request that he put off the occasion in consideration of his sons' inconveniences. Now his grand reconciliation with the oldest son, who had sought forgiveness over wails, was made. And as if driven by a premonition, his first daughter, who, born during Sun Valley days, had turned a Buddhist nun as a young maid by the Buddhist name of Awakening, returned a few days ago to observe and consecrate her secular father's final days on earth.
The date was set for the sad occasion. On the morning of the 15th of March, 1993, by the lunar calendar, Don said weakly, "It is time to go!" He was as light as a bird. Deprived of nutrition and hydration, he might have weighed less than 40 kilograms. He had emptied every bit of nutritional residue from his system. His eyes were sunken deeper than ever. He looked to be the skeletal type of a body. Some secular provisions had been made. Boolim had made him a clean new clothes. Don had made no wills except that he had handed down the apple farm of 6,000 pyong which equals about 20,000 square meters to his second son Ilseo who had been taking care of his parents and doing farm works, with the consent of the other two sons and the approval of heir Ilseo himself.
Don climbed into bed which had been elevated on the head. Like almost all the ordinary seculars, he did not grandsit nor grandspeak at his dying moment. He was not a Buddhist believer, either. He was just calmly waiting for the moment. He had been endowed with an extraordinary encounter, a few years ago, with the Grand Buddha, though, which had been made in the middle of the East Sea, of all the places, in front of Naksansa Temple, Gangneung.
The cerebral fantastic scene, which had been developed on a grand scale, had been conveyed later to his immediate brother under him, Chull, who had framed it up with its saga: The Grand Buddha, materializing himself in the middle of the East Sea, had opened his grand mouth and solemnly pronounced a wise phrase consisting of seven Chinese words meaning in effect, that "After all the concerted efforts of yours with one clear and clean mind, you can rest assured."
A man was dying and the other surviving families were watching him die. For a long, long time he had been a strong supporter of a small decent family with his steely legs and arms. Now he was lying powerless, left alone with all the others waiting to part with him. He was taking last breath very heavily as Awakening kept reciting the mantra for the dying father, pounding the moktagg, a wooden vase sounder. At one moment Awakening pronounced him dead. Dano, who kept standing with the others, felt an awakening chill running his spine. It was around 11 o'clock in the morning, with the April sun racing toward the middle of the sky. The sky fell down.
33
The Story of Miss Pigeon, 1995
Awakening didn't cry. On her face, she didn't show tears nor made a crying sound. But I knew that she was also crying. I knew she was all tears. That is, she was crying with all her face. All face muscles of hers were crying. It seemed, to me Dano, as if minute particles of tears had been oozing out of her muscles. On top of all that, Awakening did all the filial piety she had not done since she had left her mundane father, and she did more than the rest of the family had done through their lives.
Awakening did, on behalf of all her secular family, did observe 49-day condolence prayers at Eunhaesa Temple, Youngcheon. The prayer ritual, which was held after all the secular funeral procedures had been done, was followed by more sophisticated procedures which needed patience.
Don's funeral at his worldly house took five days from start to finish. Because he was not pronounced dead in a hospital bed, his dead body didn't have to be frozen away in a dark hospital freezer. It was on the first half of April and the air was so aptly cool that he could also get away with lying through the condolence visits in the room, behind folding screens and in a cozy coffin with covers, though.
The bereaving relatives also took advantage of the geographical advantage of the rustic community. They put up tents in the garden orchard and treated the visitors who had just left the condolence room with meals, meats and drinks. The condolence visitors from the neighborly rustic towns made ant lines all through the funeral period, paying tributes to his life of honesty, integrity and diligence.
-------------------
Whereas the rest of Don's offspring got more involved in the after-death ritual and the management of the grave mound, Dano got preoccupied with the "reconciliation and reunion with his father." Ilseo planted lawns and watered them, and manicured them. Divinist Odagaga had once told Dano that he had been able to "meet" his deceased father.
"How is it possible for one to meet one's parents again after death? Dano had once asked him. Mr. Odagaga had only beamed. Dano once had gotten a wind, at around the time when his father Don had been digging the family well, from a celestial tip (from cerebral images during sleep) that his father would work as a site supervisor of the Celestial Work Place. So his dead father might not have been in the grave; His father might have been nowhere, or he might have been everywhere.
Dano's dead father once or twice might have "come" to his first son's Mokdong Apartment, but he might have been disappointed at what he had seen. One of his nephews, or, Ilseo's second son said in the presence of the relatives that "I saw grandfather in white durumaggi, (*Korean man's traditional garment which is loosely outfitted) one day at dawn." Innocent young men might have been able to have the opportunity of seeing the dead spirits. Ilseo once asserted that he had seen white ghosts dancing on the rooftop of the water mill plant. Dano's third son Kyo (First, Tai; Second, Hua) would later admit to spotting "the white human shape" at his room of Eunma Apartment Complex at the very night of the move.
-------------------
In secular financial terms, my wife's accessory store was doing well while my book copies were not lucrative. My new book on "the conversion approach" as well as his old ones only got the contract money of about 500 dollars. There had been no more phones, faxes, emails or something from the publishing houses. There always had. The scant letters of recognition and praise for the author's principle of the interpretation of the English prose showed that his readers were scattered yet unorganized.
There was an intermission type of episode in my journey from savagery to civilization: From a flint man to an online netizen. It was just like an experiment, accidentally made, though, with which to verify the efficacy of communication with an animal species classified as avian class. Say, a ship was in distress, with sails broken and blizzards blowing. A poor creature, shaken by terror, starved and frozen, sneaked into a Mokdong apartment house of mine, seeking haven. Spotting a small pigeon, which had flown in, on a snowy day, from an open glass window on the veranda of the 8th floor, I approached him with a great care, with a sound of cooing and a gesture of feeding. A wet pigeon walked toward me with a grudging and suspicious gait. Returning from the Daechi-dong store at eleven o'clock at night, Tschai, sighting a strange visitor, expressed dismay at my idea of keeping it at home. After some exchanges, she O.K.ed the guest's conditional stay: Come spring, it will have to leave.
The avian guest turned out odd. As if to have a right to do so, the busy body who would later be named Goosoon issued a noisy wake-up call at five in the morning. It was not the same kind of a severe din made when cicadas alarmed their villagers. Tschai showed irritation at the noise and the droppings, of all the nuisances. She had some knowledge of the avian droppings. She said the droppings of the pigeons were the most virulent in that they contaminated and eroded soil, and even the concrete pavement. Like the rest of the other world cities, Seoul had the enormous pigeon population around the city, mostly around the subway stations and city parks. Tschai was spreading the waste papers wide under the pigeon's nest.
What the uninvited guest irked the hostess more than the excretion of it was that it expressed its overt emotion toward me Dano and Tschai too obviously. That is, it expressed familiarity toward me Dano to an exhilarating degree whereas it revealed hostility toward Tschai to the extent that she pouted. It cooed rhythmically and literally necked me Dano whereas it pecked at Tschai's hands fiercely.
Once a provisional lodging was permitted to the poor pigeon, Tschai suggested that they name the maverick. She wanted to know first how a biedulggi is termed in Chinese words. As Dano said 'Goo' (鳩), she named it Goosoon (鳩順) by adding a feminine suffix 'soon'. On what grounds she judged the small avian invader a female but not a male? Because the animal liked me Dano so much.
Goosoon liked to be inside the room. Very presumptuous. When I was noticed to be moving inside the room she approached the glass window and pecked at it with its bill and asked to be let in. I was wondering whether it was wise of me to destroy the border between the animal however small, and a human, such as he is. In fact, millions of pets had been allowed to be inside the human living quarters. Once let in, Goosoon liked to sit beside me, and appeared flattering when I was reading, and obsequious when typing or writing something. She didn't eat much. Goosoon didn't get scandalized by rapacity. She ate a minimal amount of grain and drank a few drops of water. She liked to bathe, say, in a small plastic water basin. I dried her after that and let her warm herself on the ondol room floor.
Goosoon liked to be touched. Dano liked to keep her company by keeping her inside the parka or something during the early morning stroll. She seemed to enjoy the warmth there inside. Getting to the Mokdong Park, I used to let go of him and walk freely on the park. She was flying here and landing there and seemed to enjoy watching the folks stroll and play shuttlecocks. At times she disappeared in the peer throng. Then I called her out "Hey, Goosoon," then she came flying to me. When going back home I opted to go first, saying "Goosoon, I'm coming home." When coming back home I found her already in her nest.
On the wee small hours of an early spring, Goosoon returned with mud all over her and exhausted. I wondered what had happened to her. Was she violated? Or raped or something? She did not croon nor alert in the morning. The next time I knew Goosoon appeared to be incubating eggs or something. Once she alighted on the nest, she did not come down unless when she was sipping some liquids. She hardly touched grains. Tschai and me discovered that there were two small eggs in there. Tschai was so touched by her sincerity that she gave a pledge that if she were to hatch eggs into kid birds she would allow them to stay for an extended period of time.
When three weeks or so were up, I found Goosoon got agitated: The eggs remained as it had been. It was a sad Sunday afternoon. The weather was warm; The afternoon sun ray of spring was shining through the glass window. All were gathered there: the Dano-Tschai couple and the poor Goosoon. I sought an expert opinion. A human voice from the receiver of a related authority advised me Dano that I shake the eggs. "If you found the eggs in a liquid state, that means it would not be hatched," he said. I tiptoed and took the eggs and calmly shook them. They were full of liquid. Before I knew, just out of the blue Tschai shouted with rage: "What a useless brazen creature not to bear young!" Her shouts would have sounded thunderous to the ears of the poor creature. Goosoon went flying out never to return.
"Forgive Me, Father!" 1993
Someone or something is oriented toward someone or something. Just like bees are guided by airstream, just like salmon are guided by sea stream, just like ocean cruising needs a compass and a navigator, and just like foreign travellers need maps and tourist guides, do those, who go the faraway place of death, need guides of some sort? Since I had missed the one day alloted for the early morning prayer session the previous day, I prepared myself to take part in that day's "morning ritual for the terminally ill parents."
I kept awake through the night for the event. When on daybreak I went up to the ritual building, I found that several applicants for the event had already been there. I filled in the application form with father's name, age, relation, and address. The presiding monk of the ritual stood six feet with strong build, brilliant eyes and resonant voice.
He later introduced himself as Monk Yonghwa, Dragon Fire. His ritual proceedings took on the mode of a premature report with the King of the Netherworld (the Paradise after death). With all the ritual proceedings of the offerings, bows, and mantra chanting done, Monk Dragon Fire gathered me and the others around and gave some pieces of advice.
The few minutes before and after one's death were very important in that the surviving people would have to take some special heed so that the deceased would not be ambushed in the traps of diversion. Yonghwa said that a person who just died had to take a long travel to the Nether World. He compared the journey of a deceased to a mountain climbing, that is, climbing up a steep hill. He looked at me Dano and said, "The bereaving people will have to stop crying for a few minutes and to cheer him up, instead, by whispering to his dying ears, 'Don't be distracted, Father. Go straight, Father!'"
Exiting the portal of Guinsa Temple, I was lighthearted. Like a boy on a picnic, I was thrilled at the reunion with my father in half a month. The intercity traffic transfers were irritating, and his feet were fidgety on the slow buses. After a five-hour bus ride, I was virtually racing the stairs to the sunny sick room my father had been using. When I got into the room, father was sitting up, with Ilseo and his wife before him, surprised by my appearance.
With an elliptical greeting with only knelt postures and no bows, which meant that one's offspring was not supposed to give deep bows to the gravely ill elderly, he threw himself before his father and burst out crying, "It was all my fault, Father!" He kept on crying. He was wrong. He did wrong. He pained him. He hurt him. He begged him to forgive him. Perplexed were all of them present in the room. Don said weakly with sunken eyes, "Stop crying, son. I was not always right. Don't blame yourself so bitterly!"
How sad it would be that the person himself was forced to decide on a place at which he himself would be buried. Don had his intention conveyed to his sons, Dano and Ilseo that his burial place should be prepared in a hurry. He had made sure that he would not be buried at a certain hilly site of Sun Valley, Andong-gun, because it was so far away that he wouldn't be able to "see" his children and grandchildren, and even if they could come from time to time, they wouldn't get to the resting house of his.
When mentioning this, Father indicated his oldest son me Dano offhandedly. He said that "a certain fella with a problem of weight" would balk at the idea of the call at his father's place, because it would be a hard job to do, so he would try to greet from far down at the foot of the mountain hill, instead, excusing himself, "You can see me from here, can't you? Please think that your son's showup here at this spot will suffice." So with the aid of a jiguan, a geomancer, who had been arranged by my best friend Mr. Paragon at Euiseong, Dano and Ilseo took a sunny low-lying place at a stone's throw from the orchard as their father's resting place.
"This place is better than all the other places," the jiguan had said at the time, "in terms of the peace of the deceased and the prosperity for his descendants, protected by the power of hills surrounding it." The comments of "the judge of the earth" were hollow and useless, though, because the place was not a private property of his on which to lie down and rest but belonged to the county property, so in a considerable time the leaser would have to move to another place or something.
Like an elementary school boy, who dawdles on his vacation homework, Don appeared to be under pressure. He had had his "parting plan" with his family suspended by his wife Boolim's sincere request that he put off the occasion in consideration of his sons' inconveniences. Now his grand reconciliation with the oldest son, who had sought forgiveness over wails, was made. And as if driven by a premonition, his first daughter, who, born during Sun Valley days, had turned a Buddhist nun as a young maid by the Buddhist name of Awakening, returned a few days ago to observe and consecrate her secular father's final days on earth.
The date was set for the sad occasion. On the morning of the 15th of March, 1993, by the lunar calendar, Don said weakly, "It is time to go!" He was as light as a bird. Deprived of nutrition and hydration, he might have weighed less than 40 kilograms. He had emptied every bit of nutritional residue from his system. His eyes were sunken deeper than ever. He looked to be the skeletal type of a body. Some secular provisions had been made. Boolim had made him a clean new clothes. Don had made no wills except that he had handed down the apple farm of 6,000 pyong which equals about 20,000 square meters to his second son Ilseo who had been taking care of his parents and doing farm works, with the consent of the other two sons and the approval of heir Ilseo himself.
Don climbed into bed which had been elevated on the head. Like almost all the ordinary seculars, he did not grandsit nor grandspeak at his dying moment. He was not a Buddhist believer, either. He was just calmly waiting for the moment. He had been endowed with an extraordinary encounter, a few years ago, with the Grand Buddha, though, which had been made in the middle of the East Sea, of all the places, in front of Naksansa Temple, Gangneung.
The cerebral fantastic scene, which had been developed on a grand scale, had been conveyed later to his immediate brother under him, Chull, who had framed it up with its saga: The Grand Buddha, materializing himself in the middle of the East Sea, had opened his grand mouth and solemnly pronounced a wise phrase consisting of seven Chinese words meaning in effect, that "After all the concerted efforts of yours with one clear and clean mind, you can rest assured."
A man was dying and the other surviving families were watching him die. For a long, long time he had been a strong supporter of a small decent family with his steely legs and arms. Now he was lying powerless, left alone with all the others waiting to part with him. He was taking last breath very heavily as Awakening kept reciting the mantra for the dying father, pounding the moktagg, a wooden vase sounder. At one moment Awakening pronounced him dead. Dano, who kept standing with the others, felt an awakening chill running his spine. It was around 11 o'clock in the morning, with the April sun racing toward the middle of the sky. The sky fell down.
33
The Story of Miss Pigeon, 1995
Awakening didn't cry. On her face, she didn't show tears nor made a crying sound. But I knew that she was also crying. I knew she was all tears. That is, she was crying with all her face. All face muscles of hers were crying. It seemed, to me Dano, as if minute particles of tears had been oozing out of her muscles. On top of all that, Awakening did all the filial piety she had not done since she had left her mundane father, and she did more than the rest of the family had done through their lives.
Awakening did, on behalf of all her secular family, did observe 49-day condolence prayers at Eunhaesa Temple, Youngcheon. The prayer ritual, which was held after all the secular funeral procedures had been done, was followed by more sophisticated procedures which needed patience.
Don's funeral at his worldly house took five days from start to finish. Because he was not pronounced dead in a hospital bed, his dead body didn't have to be frozen away in a dark hospital freezer. It was on the first half of April and the air was so aptly cool that he could also get away with lying through the condolence visits in the room, behind folding screens and in a cozy coffin with covers, though.
The bereaving relatives also took advantage of the geographical advantage of the rustic community. They put up tents in the garden orchard and treated the visitors who had just left the condolence room with meals, meats and drinks. The condolence visitors from the neighborly rustic towns made ant lines all through the funeral period, paying tributes to his life of honesty, integrity and diligence.
-------------------
Whereas the rest of Don's offspring got more involved in the after-death ritual and the management of the grave mound, Dano got preoccupied with the "reconciliation and reunion with his father." Ilseo planted lawns and watered them, and manicured them. Divinist Odagaga had once told Dano that he had been able to "meet" his deceased father.
"How is it possible for one to meet one's parents again after death? Dano had once asked him. Mr. Odagaga had only beamed. Dano once had gotten a wind, at around the time when his father Don had been digging the family well, from a celestial tip (from cerebral images during sleep) that his father would work as a site supervisor of the Celestial Work Place. So his dead father might not have been in the grave; His father might have been nowhere, or he might have been everywhere.
Dano's dead father once or twice might have "come" to his first son's Mokdong Apartment, but he might have been disappointed at what he had seen. One of his nephews, or, Ilseo's second son said in the presence of the relatives that "I saw grandfather in white durumaggi, (*Korean man's traditional garment which is loosely outfitted) one day at dawn." Innocent young men might have been able to have the opportunity of seeing the dead spirits. Ilseo once asserted that he had seen white ghosts dancing on the rooftop of the water mill plant. Dano's third son Kyo (First, Tai; Second, Hua) would later admit to spotting "the white human shape" at his room of Eunma Apartment Complex at the very night of the move.
-------------------
In secular financial terms, my wife's accessory store was doing well while my book copies were not lucrative. My new book on "the conversion approach" as well as his old ones only got the contract money of about 500 dollars. There had been no more phones, faxes, emails or something from the publishing houses. There always had. The scant letters of recognition and praise for the author's principle of the interpretation of the English prose showed that his readers were scattered yet unorganized.
There was an intermission type of episode in my journey from savagery to civilization: From a flint man to an online netizen. It was just like an experiment, accidentally made, though, with which to verify the efficacy of communication with an animal species classified as avian class. Say, a ship was in distress, with sails broken and blizzards blowing. A poor creature, shaken by terror, starved and frozen, sneaked into a Mokdong apartment house of mine, seeking haven. Spotting a small pigeon, which had flown in, on a snowy day, from an open glass window on the veranda of the 8th floor, I approached him with a great care, with a sound of cooing and a gesture of feeding. A wet pigeon walked toward me with a grudging and suspicious gait. Returning from the Daechi-dong store at eleven o'clock at night, Tschai, sighting a strange visitor, expressed dismay at my idea of keeping it at home. After some exchanges, she O.K.ed the guest's conditional stay: Come spring, it will have to leave.
The avian guest turned out odd. As if to have a right to do so, the busy body who would later be named Goosoon issued a noisy wake-up call at five in the morning. It was not the same kind of a severe din made when cicadas alarmed their villagers. Tschai showed irritation at the noise and the droppings, of all the nuisances. She had some knowledge of the avian droppings. She said the droppings of the pigeons were the most virulent in that they contaminated and eroded soil, and even the concrete pavement. Like the rest of the other world cities, Seoul had the enormous pigeon population around the city, mostly around the subway stations and city parks. Tschai was spreading the waste papers wide under the pigeon's nest.
What the uninvited guest irked the hostess more than the excretion of it was that it expressed its overt emotion toward me Dano and Tschai too obviously. That is, it expressed familiarity toward me Dano to an exhilarating degree whereas it revealed hostility toward Tschai to the extent that she pouted. It cooed rhythmically and literally necked me Dano whereas it pecked at Tschai's hands fiercely.
Once a provisional lodging was permitted to the poor pigeon, Tschai suggested that they name the maverick. She wanted to know first how a biedulggi is termed in Chinese words. As Dano said 'Goo' (鳩), she named it Goosoon (鳩順) by adding a feminine suffix 'soon'. On what grounds she judged the small avian invader a female but not a male? Because the animal liked me Dano so much.
Goosoon liked to be inside the room. Very presumptuous. When I was noticed to be moving inside the room she approached the glass window and pecked at it with its bill and asked to be let in. I was wondering whether it was wise of me to destroy the border between the animal however small, and a human, such as he is. In fact, millions of pets had been allowed to be inside the human living quarters. Once let in, Goosoon liked to sit beside me, and appeared flattering when I was reading, and obsequious when typing or writing something. She didn't eat much. Goosoon didn't get scandalized by rapacity. She ate a minimal amount of grain and drank a few drops of water. She liked to bathe, say, in a small plastic water basin. I dried her after that and let her warm herself on the ondol room floor.
Goosoon liked to be touched. Dano liked to keep her company by keeping her inside the parka or something during the early morning stroll. She seemed to enjoy the warmth there inside. Getting to the Mokdong Park, I used to let go of him and walk freely on the park. She was flying here and landing there and seemed to enjoy watching the folks stroll and play shuttlecocks. At times she disappeared in the peer throng. Then I called her out "Hey, Goosoon," then she came flying to me. When going back home I opted to go first, saying "Goosoon, I'm coming home." When coming back home I found her already in her nest.
On the wee small hours of an early spring, Goosoon returned with mud all over her and exhausted. I wondered what had happened to her. Was she violated? Or raped or something? She did not croon nor alert in the morning. The next time I knew Goosoon appeared to be incubating eggs or something. Once she alighted on the nest, she did not come down unless when she was sipping some liquids. She hardly touched grains. Tschai and me discovered that there were two small eggs in there. Tschai was so touched by her sincerity that she gave a pledge that if she were to hatch eggs into kid birds she would allow them to stay for an extended period of time.
When three weeks or so were up, I found Goosoon got agitated: The eggs remained as it had been. It was a sad Sunday afternoon. The weather was warm; The afternoon sun ray of spring was shining through the glass window. All were gathered there: the Dano-Tschai couple and the poor Goosoon. I sought an expert opinion. A human voice from the receiver of a related authority advised me Dano that I shake the eggs. "If you found the eggs in a liquid state, that means it would not be hatched," he said. I tiptoed and took the eggs and calmly shook them. They were full of liquid. Before I knew, just out of the blue Tschai shouted with rage: "What a useless brazen creature not to bear young!" Her shouts would have sounded thunderous to the ears of the poor creature. Goosoon went flying out never to return.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
Posts
