27
Between Two Lecture Tours, 1983~1989
Out of job, out in the cold winter street, Dano became a job seeker again. His wife was thunderstruck out of the blue. Tschai, who had previously so often been left without financial means, with no warning from her husband, found herself useless and hopeless this time again. She had tried to meet President Siang of the Daily News, but had been rebuffed at his mansion gate.
A Samaritan or two showed up. Gentleman of the Advertising Bureau of the Daily News, Great Kim was learned to have sought a favor from the News that Dano work for him, but it was later learned that the suggestion had been rebuffed. Some guys in the News, Mr. Pyun included, when Dano had been in the News of course, had made casual efforts to pluck him out of the News and plant in other more lucrative jobs. But then Dano had been reluctant to move. Above all the reasons, Dano liked the News, the alleys beyond the News, the intellectual ambience surrounding the News, the aromas of coffees brewing in the company coffee shop and the music he had listened to between the stairs coming to the top floor.
Tschai was surprised at first, but she was not startled. With time, she was used to the alerts and risks her husband had caused her in his good time. She did not blame her husband. She was not whining at all.
She was on the move again. Using her husband's severance pay less than 5,000 dollars, and plus some more cash money, she contracted a merchandise shop with a local building owner of a newly built merchandise market at Daechi-dong, and opened an accessory store of her own, from whose earnings she would support her family, and finance, for two decades later on, her children's education.
Dano, once he was put into a harsh condition of a job seeker again, was busy at heart. Tense and nervous, of course, and a little on a rush. He couldn't be laid back at all. Everytime he hit the road for the prowl of a job, he took a deep breath and drummed himself up for a joust with a new interviewer.
But mounting the stairs to the office, and sitting with an interviewer, Dano found his legs weakened and his spine chilled whenever he or she mentioned Dano's resume, saying, "You're not a college graduate!" His resume of having worked for the Daily News as a proofreader, not as a reporter, was usually met with a caustic remark of disbelief. "What does a proofreader do?"
The protagonist's years of trials and errors would not intrigue audiences any more. Thing is he wound up a lecturer teaching the TIME Magazine articles and he might mine, in due course, a bonanza of the global law of the language, particularly the English language. The TIME news magazine had long been an emblem of vanity in the intellectual circles of South Korea. Dano also took pride on what he had held TIME in his hand from his earliest high school years on.
What had made the magazine so special? Probably in the same context that the Statue of Liberty had become special to the people around the world: It'd been a nostalgic landscape which would allure the rest of the global people to return to explore.
The people were inquisitive about the events which TIME had had to unravel before them. Given all things considered, TIME had not been an easy English. First of all, the vocabulary of TIME had been indomitably huge which would frustrate any human attempt to look beyond the realm of their vocabulary inventory. Its verbiage of expositions, nominalization and "Free Speech" included, had been frustrating, too: In TIME, the articles had often been essays and vice versa.
Two young men in his thirties, who had heard much about Dano, arranged for him to teach the TIME articles to the young college folks, during the academic recess. With winks at his resume issue, of course. They were the Iron Kim and the Yonsei Park, who had been playing active roles, leading the TIME lecturer team at Hanyang and Ewha Womans Universities. They got so enthusiastic an audience mobbed around them that they did not allow their top- notched lecture to get caught up.
Dano's lecture tour was plural but was nearly spontaneous, which spanned two different universities--Hanyang and Sogang Universities. and was delivered each in an interval of one hour. Dano's lecture tour turned out hilarious at best and disastrous at worst. He had made a mockery of himself, and the rest of colleague lecturers at the same time. He had plummeted himself into the labyrinth of humiliation and self-pity. Stage phobia was probably at work.
He had never before stood before a "huge" audience brimming to the walls of the college auditorium, with the superfluous audience sitting on both sides of the hall and filling the aisle. He had once had his elementary school audience totaling 60 or so students, whereas the TIME audience at Hanyang University at that time stood at several hundreds. He was so overcome with the overwhelming mob scene that he had his throats choked and his eyes blurred, which had him blurt out incoherent utterances.
That was a beginning of a free fall which had been made the moment the lecture had taken a launch. The stairs on both walls of the lecture hall were emptied immediately after the first lesson. The enthusiastic crowd who had occupied the aisle were emptied at the same time.
The speaker and the listeners played interactive to each other: The speaker was scared at the academic landmark in which the withdrawals had taken place and the listeners were scared to the extent that the auditorium was emptied. The speaker in plight went one step further: He owned up to having made interpretational mistakes one day after the other at which time the lecture hall was progressively vacated. The lecture, which had begun with a fanfare of the packed audience, ended up a farty noise.
The 50-minute long train travel, however, after the Hanyang lecture was not a self-incriminating one. He was not at liberty to inflict, or to torture himself because there was another TIME lecture waiting for him at Sogang University, one of the opposite destinations. So his subterranean travel to Sogang had to turn progressive, not retroactive.
His linguistic consciousness sparked at each click-click-clack of the subterranean wheels on what there should be ties, knots that made the ties, major loops that made the knots, and on the epiphany that the English language is the language of relationships. The Sogang lecture, which had begun with the modest number of 150 or so academic audience, ended up with the claps of 100 or so college students.
And what had changed the otherwise gloomy side of the lecture trips was the nocturnal convivialities which had taken place in the periphery of Mapo and Shangrilla Hotel lounges. The congenial buddies numbered mostly two at the least, but numbered seven-some at the most. They were his juniors to five to ten years from the academia and the prep institutions.
The obese Song had been congenial and garrulous; The lanky Park had been smart and polite. They did the initial imbibing of soju with the flavor of haemulpajeon, the onion (Welsh) spread seasoned with oyster and cuttlefish, and with all the eating, drinking and talking done, walked across the Shangrilla lounge, calmly sipping beers and listening to the custom live music sitting on cozy sofas there. The miracle was that there had never once been a boozing, and the noisiest side was that the gathering had from time to time extended to each other's house calls.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Dano Leaves the Job
26
Dano Kicked off the Job, 1981
Thanks to Tschai's superhuman efforts to tighten belts and to save what little money the pair had earned, and thanks to her financial somersaults of some sort, the Dano couple bought a house from a previous owner, called it their own, such as it was, registered it with a real estate registration office of a local jurisdiction, and proudly hung Dano's name plate on the entrance of the gate. Time was over at last that they had been rudely warned by a landlord to move out.
Toung Doung had his two feet stuck in his land, such as it had been. He had always set up a strong footing on what meager land he had taken, tilling, shoveling and picking up rocks for removal. The Toung Doung and Boolim pair, returning bare handed from Daejon, planted apple trees on a new clearing land of his own which had previously been flooded.
Toung Doung did not take to task his son Dano's brash inclination to part with the status quo. He harbored a deep-rooted distaste for his son's recklessness which would amount to irresponsibility. He wondered aloud why his son would not settle as a household owner with wife and children. Why he tried to run from what would appear stable. He did not trust his son but he put an unconditional trust on his daughter- in- law. Even when he saw the son couple off headed for Seoul, Toung Doung said, "I leave my son with you, my dear daughter. I can rest assured because of you."
------------------
Dano left the Korea News Daily on a winter day of the year 1981. In Korean corporate terms, he was "fired on recommendation." He was kicked off a decent job, after all. Dano realized to his bone deep that he had made a great mistake of ditching his hard- earned job in a sewer. He was crazy. He got regret and sorrow seeped in his bone-marrow in the bleary street, left alone, with no one to look after him, with wife and children scared to death about their future.
He had to be patient. He didn't have any reason not to. Was he possessed? Possibly. Was he insane? Probably. Why did he get to his feet and dare yell to his bona fide Managing Editor Mr. Yoon of all the people? He was only being kind and generous to Dano and his colleague proof readers. He deigned to step down to the proofreading desk and merely suggested that Dano and someone else go and meet a returning desk member from a foreign travel at Kimpo International Airport.
A "free" foreign travel which had been provided by the Chun Doo Hwan military regime. Why did Dano have to confront his superior? why did he put an affront on the editor and defy him? On what grounds did he think it was improper for a media guy to welcome his colleague member returning from a pleasure trip at an airport?
Couldn't he do it out of sheer pack mentality? Or out of corporate colleagueship? Did he assert that he was the man of media protocol? It was totally insane. The managing editor swore at Dano? It was just because he had been provoked by Dano's lousy protests against practical considerations.
The managing editor made a gesture of attack on Dano with his fists? Nevertheless it couldn't be any reason for a corporate underling to confront his superior with bloodshot eyes. He had to race to the rest room, wash his face, blow his nose, take a deep breath and say cheese.
Things turned in odd ways: The very person, who had been in charge of the office room, was on his good-intentioned desk tour, when he was so much offended by a fresh underling who had been working for him, and in another unexpected turn of events, he exploded and got physical, to which the very person, who should have run for cover, took an impudent stand, and about which virtually the rest of the room got physical, too. Dano was the very culprit who had made a scene, a really disgusting scene.
Dano had been referred to the Disciplinary Committee of the Daily News which held Dano responsible for all that fiasco. Dano had filed a complaint with the disciplinary committee, but the committee hadn't had any organization which would hear and put a verdict on it. There had been no presiding judge, no witness stand, no questions sought and no answers provided. A few heads on the spot had been a mere sedentary lot with their mouths tight shut.
They hadn't seemed to notice the presence of the complainant. They hadn't even pretended to listen. Dano had made a statement nevertheless to the effect that it had been not right of him to confront the editor, but that any member of the press, who had been registered with the Ministry of Culture of the Korean Government as a reporter or something, should not have taken chonji, a kind of cash bribe or something. The verdict he had been notified from a secondhand was that he had been fired from then and there. Technically, he had been recommended to quit. He had decided not to sue the company nonetheless.
A convincing rumor had it that the press folks had periodically gotten their palms greased from the relevant news sources of the government agencies. Crux of the rumor was that the press people had comprised a press corps of which the head had made a practice to contact the source, take the chonji and divide it among the members. In case of the big source, that is, a central government agency, one spoils-dividing chance had amounted to 1,000 dollars per head.
Dano had questioned at that time the validity of an idea that the government had rightly endowed all the gamut of favors on the whole population of the press, with a huge tax money of the people. All the gamut of favors? They ranged from the reporters' seven days or so of free pleasure trips, low-interest-rate loans to the reporters and their dependents and financial assistance for foreign studies of the cadre desk members.
It's beautiful to stop a nuisance of a crying baby by feeding or releasing it. It's also right of you to console the bereaved who lost their loved ones. It'll be a good Samaritan act of you that you should hand a fresh cup of drinking water to a thirsty traveller. You're supposed to inquire after those who are sick in bed. But it is abominable, disgusting, and deplorable for a dictatorial government to bribe the whole population with specific professions, that is, the news medias of the nation, using a huge tax money of the people, by which the information would be warped and the public opinions distorted, Dano thought.
The Chun Doo Hwan government had done all that. The Chamber of Commerce of any country is built by the contribution of every CC members but the Korean media people had not chipped in to build their own Press Center, or the new designation of the Korea Press Foundation: The Chun Doo Hwan government had built them the facility of enormous profits from which the welfare benefits for the press folks had been financed. The dictatorial government had even built professional apartment complex for the sake of the reporters or the like at Gepo-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul and sold them at a bargain price. The corruption scheme was categorical.
Dano Kicked off the Job, 1981
Thanks to Tschai's superhuman efforts to tighten belts and to save what little money the pair had earned, and thanks to her financial somersaults of some sort, the Dano couple bought a house from a previous owner, called it their own, such as it was, registered it with a real estate registration office of a local jurisdiction, and proudly hung Dano's name plate on the entrance of the gate. Time was over at last that they had been rudely warned by a landlord to move out.
Toung Doung had his two feet stuck in his land, such as it had been. He had always set up a strong footing on what meager land he had taken, tilling, shoveling and picking up rocks for removal. The Toung Doung and Boolim pair, returning bare handed from Daejon, planted apple trees on a new clearing land of his own which had previously been flooded.
Toung Doung did not take to task his son Dano's brash inclination to part with the status quo. He harbored a deep-rooted distaste for his son's recklessness which would amount to irresponsibility. He wondered aloud why his son would not settle as a household owner with wife and children. Why he tried to run from what would appear stable. He did not trust his son but he put an unconditional trust on his daughter- in- law. Even when he saw the son couple off headed for Seoul, Toung Doung said, "I leave my son with you, my dear daughter. I can rest assured because of you."
------------------
Dano left the Korea News Daily on a winter day of the year 1981. In Korean corporate terms, he was "fired on recommendation." He was kicked off a decent job, after all. Dano realized to his bone deep that he had made a great mistake of ditching his hard- earned job in a sewer. He was crazy. He got regret and sorrow seeped in his bone-marrow in the bleary street, left alone, with no one to look after him, with wife and children scared to death about their future.
He had to be patient. He didn't have any reason not to. Was he possessed? Possibly. Was he insane? Probably. Why did he get to his feet and dare yell to his bona fide Managing Editor Mr. Yoon of all the people? He was only being kind and generous to Dano and his colleague proof readers. He deigned to step down to the proofreading desk and merely suggested that Dano and someone else go and meet a returning desk member from a foreign travel at Kimpo International Airport.
A "free" foreign travel which had been provided by the Chun Doo Hwan military regime. Why did Dano have to confront his superior? why did he put an affront on the editor and defy him? On what grounds did he think it was improper for a media guy to welcome his colleague member returning from a pleasure trip at an airport?
Couldn't he do it out of sheer pack mentality? Or out of corporate colleagueship? Did he assert that he was the man of media protocol? It was totally insane. The managing editor swore at Dano? It was just because he had been provoked by Dano's lousy protests against practical considerations.
The managing editor made a gesture of attack on Dano with his fists? Nevertheless it couldn't be any reason for a corporate underling to confront his superior with bloodshot eyes. He had to race to the rest room, wash his face, blow his nose, take a deep breath and say cheese.
Things turned in odd ways: The very person, who had been in charge of the office room, was on his good-intentioned desk tour, when he was so much offended by a fresh underling who had been working for him, and in another unexpected turn of events, he exploded and got physical, to which the very person, who should have run for cover, took an impudent stand, and about which virtually the rest of the room got physical, too. Dano was the very culprit who had made a scene, a really disgusting scene.
Dano had been referred to the Disciplinary Committee of the Daily News which held Dano responsible for all that fiasco. Dano had filed a complaint with the disciplinary committee, but the committee hadn't had any organization which would hear and put a verdict on it. There had been no presiding judge, no witness stand, no questions sought and no answers provided. A few heads on the spot had been a mere sedentary lot with their mouths tight shut.
They hadn't seemed to notice the presence of the complainant. They hadn't even pretended to listen. Dano had made a statement nevertheless to the effect that it had been not right of him to confront the editor, but that any member of the press, who had been registered with the Ministry of Culture of the Korean Government as a reporter or something, should not have taken chonji, a kind of cash bribe or something. The verdict he had been notified from a secondhand was that he had been fired from then and there. Technically, he had been recommended to quit. He had decided not to sue the company nonetheless.
A convincing rumor had it that the press folks had periodically gotten their palms greased from the relevant news sources of the government agencies. Crux of the rumor was that the press people had comprised a press corps of which the head had made a practice to contact the source, take the chonji and divide it among the members. In case of the big source, that is, a central government agency, one spoils-dividing chance had amounted to 1,000 dollars per head.
Dano had questioned at that time the validity of an idea that the government had rightly endowed all the gamut of favors on the whole population of the press, with a huge tax money of the people. All the gamut of favors? They ranged from the reporters' seven days or so of free pleasure trips, low-interest-rate loans to the reporters and their dependents and financial assistance for foreign studies of the cadre desk members.
It's beautiful to stop a nuisance of a crying baby by feeding or releasing it. It's also right of you to console the bereaved who lost their loved ones. It'll be a good Samaritan act of you that you should hand a fresh cup of drinking water to a thirsty traveller. You're supposed to inquire after those who are sick in bed. But it is abominable, disgusting, and deplorable for a dictatorial government to bribe the whole population with specific professions, that is, the news medias of the nation, using a huge tax money of the people, by which the information would be warped and the public opinions distorted, Dano thought.
The Chun Doo Hwan government had done all that. The Chamber of Commerce of any country is built by the contribution of every CC members but the Korean media people had not chipped in to build their own Press Center, or the new designation of the Korea Press Foundation: The Chun Doo Hwan government had built them the facility of enormous profits from which the welfare benefits for the press folks had been financed. The dictatorial government had even built professional apartment complex for the sake of the reporters or the like at Gepo-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul and sold them at a bargain price. The corruption scheme was categorical.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Before the Teletype Printers
24
Before the Teletype Printers, 1975~1980
Years were a bliss. The fleeting passage of time was a healing factor. The scars and traumas, which Dano had suffered in the sorrow over the loss of his grandmother, appeared palpable at first and then progressively got sunk in his mind scape.
Dano's apprenticeship period of three months had been over but his take-home pay envelope turned out thin still. His wife Tschai still went to her seamstress' workshop to supplement his low income so that the couple's two sons, who hadn't gone to kindergarten or children's house, were left in their own brand actions of hazardous character. Naturally the apprehensive pair had always been on the edge in their work places. Luckily enough, their two sons never brushed with the police.
Dano also volunteered to do the night shift work to lighten Tschai's toilsome burdens. As he was adjusted to the nightwork and developed familiar relationships with the other coworkers, he had the opportunities to go to the wire room upstairs, where the teletype printers were disgorging the articles, which was a really bizarre landscape.
It was surreal. No man at work seen. The printers themselves were rattling off words on the long scroll papers which constituted meaningful sentences which made eloquent paragraphs. The hues and cries of the disgorged articles were of catastrophic context: The Chun Doo Hwan clique, which had masterminded the coup in the year 1979, would incapacitate the civilian supremacy to establish the military dictatorship. The hues were suppressed and the cries were of course stifled by the intelligence agencies like KCIA. The foreign news articles were censored by them and the press of Korea at large collaborated with them by truncating or blacking out the articles at issue.
It was the seas over which Dano could hear the uproars of the decimated people and frustrating incidents. The bouncing beats of the teletypes at the wire room sounded to Dano just like Grandma and Mom pounding on the dadimidol, or the rock board used for spreading the dried laundry. It sounded at times a night-long gun battle on the hills of Sun Valley. Or air-splitting shrieks of the drowning refugees on the Cheongdo River. Dano fantasized over the teletype writers across the Pacific and Indian Oceans who were punching the desperate keys and warning the Korean people of an impending dictatorship by the Chun Doo Hwan coup cabals.
25
The Sick Notices on the Board, 1974~1981
Pageboys and girls had been racing to and from the newsroom and linotype room, mounting and dismounting the stairs, until a fresh new method of plying the proofs was worked out. Time reduction process was needed. Some smart guys came up with a bizarre idea of tunneling up and down stairs rooms. The newsroom floor just around the proofreading desk was bored into the ceiling of the linotype room through which the proof-containing boxes were plying between the two rooms. It's just like they were drawing water from a well.
A hell-raising routine almost always began with a spine-shaking yell of the editor in chief. As the thundering whiffs were blowing from the editor-in-chief's desk, fanning out in all directions with the corresponding turf power. The political and economic desks were always hit the hardest and the proof desk was the meekest. The position of each desk said it all, of which the proof desk positioned itself at the entrance of the room by which it symbolized the bottom line of responsibility in the production of a newspaper. Whenever the plastic box containing the manuscripts lowered into the pit, they rang the bell, exclaiming "We are sending them down." And the linotype people did the same sending them up to the newsroom.
Even in the whirlpool of a day's rat race toward the deadline, Dano was an odd man out. He had not been "officially" employed. He was specifically recruited by the editor in chief. He was not a college graduate nor a English major. He was a freak from savagery who happened to step in the civilized society of the urban sophistication. Although he scrubbed himself up and changed from night-shift clothes, his coworker Mr. Kang in his thirties, during day-shifts, was heard to whisper, from time to time, to Tom Banes' ears, "That guy stinks."
"It's a karma," Dano was startled to realize one day during the job, and one day many years later, just out of the blue, that it was a karma at work. The image of himself was that he was, just like his father Toung Doung that had been, digging something from the "pit." His father had been digging coals, as a coal miner of the colony of the Imperial Japan, Dano himself was digging the typed news articles from uncanny containers.
Anxiety used to be a persistent sword which had been dangling above the ceiling of the room in which the Dano-Tschai pair had lived. The pair had to pack and move to another rental place if and when the land lord had come to them and solemnly declared: "You have to be moving!" At that time the prices of the real estates in Seoul had been actually skyrocketing so the land lords had been domineering like tyrants. The pair had more often than not been startled to sit up with spontaneous shrieks out of nightmares.
Anxiety was contagious just like colds. Three son children, including the one which had been born at the Black Rock Town in the year 1978, when moving to new places, had to be scared at the entrance of a new house until the land lord said "O.K." They were usually scared, casually looking askance, and getting feverish at times.
Particularly Kyo, the third and last son, developed an odd convulsion. His vulnerability got his parents in no particular time racing in all directions for any hospital in an exact category. He once succumbed to kyonggi, or children's convulsion, which had astonished his parents to no end. The pediatric doctor they consulted recommended that the parents prepare emergency aspirin and abdominal irrigation syringe.
Tschai had not succumbed to any illness. Dano had not gotten sick during his term of office, either. Ironically, the sick leave notices of the desk reporters had been posted every other day, exaggeratingly speaking of course, on the bulletin board of the news room. Whenever the names of the hospitals and its room numbers, at which the reporters had been seeking asylum from the editor-in-chief's tyranny, remained affixed to the board, Dano took a visit to the hospitals and inquired after their health. Dano was reciprocated in later years by their thank-you calls when Dano was forced to quit the company in the year 1981. They had been a very appreciative lot, feeling grateful for what they had owed, such as it had been.
Before the Teletype Printers, 1975~1980
Years were a bliss. The fleeting passage of time was a healing factor. The scars and traumas, which Dano had suffered in the sorrow over the loss of his grandmother, appeared palpable at first and then progressively got sunk in his mind scape.
Dano's apprenticeship period of three months had been over but his take-home pay envelope turned out thin still. His wife Tschai still went to her seamstress' workshop to supplement his low income so that the couple's two sons, who hadn't gone to kindergarten or children's house, were left in their own brand actions of hazardous character. Naturally the apprehensive pair had always been on the edge in their work places. Luckily enough, their two sons never brushed with the police.
Dano also volunteered to do the night shift work to lighten Tschai's toilsome burdens. As he was adjusted to the nightwork and developed familiar relationships with the other coworkers, he had the opportunities to go to the wire room upstairs, where the teletype printers were disgorging the articles, which was a really bizarre landscape.
It was surreal. No man at work seen. The printers themselves were rattling off words on the long scroll papers which constituted meaningful sentences which made eloquent paragraphs. The hues and cries of the disgorged articles were of catastrophic context: The Chun Doo Hwan clique, which had masterminded the coup in the year 1979, would incapacitate the civilian supremacy to establish the military dictatorship. The hues were suppressed and the cries were of course stifled by the intelligence agencies like KCIA. The foreign news articles were censored by them and the press of Korea at large collaborated with them by truncating or blacking out the articles at issue.
It was the seas over which Dano could hear the uproars of the decimated people and frustrating incidents. The bouncing beats of the teletypes at the wire room sounded to Dano just like Grandma and Mom pounding on the dadimidol, or the rock board used for spreading the dried laundry. It sounded at times a night-long gun battle on the hills of Sun Valley. Or air-splitting shrieks of the drowning refugees on the Cheongdo River. Dano fantasized over the teletype writers across the Pacific and Indian Oceans who were punching the desperate keys and warning the Korean people of an impending dictatorship by the Chun Doo Hwan coup cabals.
25
The Sick Notices on the Board, 1974~1981
Pageboys and girls had been racing to and from the newsroom and linotype room, mounting and dismounting the stairs, until a fresh new method of plying the proofs was worked out. Time reduction process was needed. Some smart guys came up with a bizarre idea of tunneling up and down stairs rooms. The newsroom floor just around the proofreading desk was bored into the ceiling of the linotype room through which the proof-containing boxes were plying between the two rooms. It's just like they were drawing water from a well.
A hell-raising routine almost always began with a spine-shaking yell of the editor in chief. As the thundering whiffs were blowing from the editor-in-chief's desk, fanning out in all directions with the corresponding turf power. The political and economic desks were always hit the hardest and the proof desk was the meekest. The position of each desk said it all, of which the proof desk positioned itself at the entrance of the room by which it symbolized the bottom line of responsibility in the production of a newspaper. Whenever the plastic box containing the manuscripts lowered into the pit, they rang the bell, exclaiming "We are sending them down." And the linotype people did the same sending them up to the newsroom.
Even in the whirlpool of a day's rat race toward the deadline, Dano was an odd man out. He had not been "officially" employed. He was specifically recruited by the editor in chief. He was not a college graduate nor a English major. He was a freak from savagery who happened to step in the civilized society of the urban sophistication. Although he scrubbed himself up and changed from night-shift clothes, his coworker Mr. Kang in his thirties, during day-shifts, was heard to whisper, from time to time, to Tom Banes' ears, "That guy stinks."
"It's a karma," Dano was startled to realize one day during the job, and one day many years later, just out of the blue, that it was a karma at work. The image of himself was that he was, just like his father Toung Doung that had been, digging something from the "pit." His father had been digging coals, as a coal miner of the colony of the Imperial Japan, Dano himself was digging the typed news articles from uncanny containers.
Anxiety used to be a persistent sword which had been dangling above the ceiling of the room in which the Dano-Tschai pair had lived. The pair had to pack and move to another rental place if and when the land lord had come to them and solemnly declared: "You have to be moving!" At that time the prices of the real estates in Seoul had been actually skyrocketing so the land lords had been domineering like tyrants. The pair had more often than not been startled to sit up with spontaneous shrieks out of nightmares.
Anxiety was contagious just like colds. Three son children, including the one which had been born at the Black Rock Town in the year 1978, when moving to new places, had to be scared at the entrance of a new house until the land lord said "O.K." They were usually scared, casually looking askance, and getting feverish at times.
Particularly Kyo, the third and last son, developed an odd convulsion. His vulnerability got his parents in no particular time racing in all directions for any hospital in an exact category. He once succumbed to kyonggi, or children's convulsion, which had astonished his parents to no end. The pediatric doctor they consulted recommended that the parents prepare emergency aspirin and abdominal irrigation syringe.
Tschai had not succumbed to any illness. Dano had not gotten sick during his term of office, either. Ironically, the sick leave notices of the desk reporters had been posted every other day, exaggeratingly speaking of course, on the bulletin board of the news room. Whenever the names of the hospitals and its room numbers, at which the reporters had been seeking asylum from the editor-in-chief's tyranny, remained affixed to the board, Dano took a visit to the hospitals and inquired after their health. Dano was reciprocated in later years by their thank-you calls when Dano was forced to quit the company in the year 1981. They had been a very appreciative lot, feeling grateful for what they had owed, such as it had been.
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