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.