Dano Teaches TIME Articles

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.