Chon Hye-rin, who led me to long for life

 

During high school, [mid-20th century author] Chon Hye-rin, whom I learned about from my close friend, and her writings led us adolescent girls to long for a vivid life. We wanted to live like artists such as Chon, whose lives were art itself and who struggled to live in the here and now with all their might. Chon’s description of Munich, which she missed after having studied literature there, made Germany a country which I wished to visit at least once in my life.

 

Then I entered university and learned German culture and German philosophers’ theories while also majoring in sociology and social welfare studies, and my wish to go there became even stronger.

 

I set the goal that I wished to achieve in my 20s: going to Germany. I would have been satisfied if I could only take a short trip to the country, but I wanted to live there as long as possible so that I could feel myself to be part of its local life. In order to reach this goal, I needed money.

 

▲ At the airport in 2014 ©Yeonhwa

Being a college student was like being suspended from becoming a member of society, one who is responsible for the costs of his or her life. As someone who wasn’t economically independent, an overseas trip wasn’t easy to do. None of my family members had even stepped onto a domestic airplane to Jeju Island. The costs of my college life were covered thanks to the lower tuition fee of the provincial national university compared to that of private one, my father’s support, scholarships, and payment from my part time jobs.

 

As both my dad and I had agreed by implication, however, I had to stand on my own feet after graduating from the university. At first, working was just what I had to do to put food on the table. But then I got a concrete reason to work and earn money. I said to myself, “Even if it takes a few years, I’m going to Germany in my 20s!” Suddenly my life became animated once I made this decision, and just thinking of it made my heart pound.

 

My mother passed away too early and too quickly, leaving an empty space in me

 

When I lived in the countryside as a child, work was just a matter of routine which was integrated into people’s daily lives. Farming and taking care of housework were natural to my parents and neighbors. But after my father became a day laborer in construction sites and my mother a textile mill worker in order to earn more money, I could tell from their sweat and fatigue that their work became something different and strange.

 

Because of their lack of education, all my parents could do in the countryside was simple day labor or irregular work. For my parents’ generation, was the goal of life to work hard, earn money, and raise good children, maybe? My parents, who couldn’t graduate from middle schools due to poverty, wanted their children (my brother and me) to enter go to university no matter what it took to get us there. Their children’s graduating from university, getting a good job, getting married, and living better than they themselves did. That was the reason they worked so hard, they would always say.

 

But my mother passed away from liver cancer when I was sixteen. The farewell was so sudden that she couldn’t even use for treatment the money she had worked so hard to earn. Mother. Was she happy? How much of what she wanted did she achieve when she was alive? I thought about so many things that she had to give up. The empty space that she left made me think about leading a happy life and dreaming and achieving the goals.

 

▲ My mother's absense made me consider what it means to lead a happy life ©Yeonhwa

If I can choose, I would like to work in a place with human decency

 

When I was a teenager, I learned about hospice, a special hospital for terminally ill cancer patients and their family members where the workers help the patients to pass away in a more comfortable way. Back then, I felt like that was the job I had to do in the future. Later, I thought I would find my life worth living if I could get a job which helps people to live like decent human beings and die like decent human beings. I know it’s a vague expression, but I wanted to be a “decent” person and work in a “decent” place.

 

It was natural for me, as someone who entered the social sciences department in university, to choose sociology and social welfare as my majors.

 

Although I graduated from university with the certification to become a social worker, that job - which requires meeting with many people and using my energy for the outer world - was not a good fit for me. I wanted to meet people one on one and hoped for a more businesslike job, so I searched for an office job in any field. But as I went through several interviews in companies in an industrial area, I was repulsed by the gloomy air and huge, oppressive buildings.

 

If I had to sell my time and labor, I wanted to work in the place where human decency was respected. After I set up this new criteria for my job, I got a job as an accountant in a community welfare center for the disabled. It was a regular job in a government-subsidized agency where retirement age was fixed. There was nothing like it for a job that 25-year-olds could get, and I was quite satisfied with it.

 

As I worked in the center, I imagined me in 10 years.

  

When I started working there, most workers including me worked overtime at night , doing paper work following the completion and evaluation of a project. The person who had worked in my position before me had left before I arrived, so I hadn’t really been trained properly, which led me to leave the office later than 10 p.m. work for a while.

 

Several months later, rumor had it that the Korea Workers' Compensation and Welfare Service would audit the center, and all employees started to sign employment contracts for the first time. The contract included a clause saying that I agreed to work overtime in consideration of the center's needs. I knew I would have to endure this kind of sacrifice while working in the social welfare industry, but the moment I was confronted with a paper documenting it, disappointment swept me.

 

Coworkers jokingly said, “We, workers of a welfare center, need our welfare, too.” I started to eat porridge and take digestive medicines due to stress-oriented indigestion. My boss’s way of working raised a number of complaints from the employees. My boss, a section chief in her 40s with a 10-year career in psychological rehabilitation, was accustomed to the authoritative attitude and the male-centered bureaucracy. Seeing her, I would imagine what I’d be like in 10 years.

 

As time went by, I felt like I was sinking into a hole. If I was not able to change the here and now and the environment surrounding me, I had to change myself. In the end, almost a year after I began to work, I decided to quit. One of the things that I desperately felt while working in the welfare center for the disabled was gratitude for having a healthy mind and body. That encouraged me to step off my then-path. In the winter of my 25th year, when I decided to seek a new job and a new way of life, I determined to believe in “the brilliance of my youth”.

 

I believe in the brilliance of my youth.

The brilliance which needs no modifier.

I believe in the brilliance of my youth

Please be the warmest, most beautiful youth.

Please be youth which is thrilled by the smallest thing.

Please be youth which is firm even for the biggest emotion.

 

- Youth, Beautiful Youth (Schön ist die Jugend) by Hermann Hesse

 

Priceless job

 

After I decided to quit my job, I took time off to go on my first overseas trip. The destination was Japan, which is the closest and was considered safe (It was before the great earthquake struck east Japan in March 2011.). There, I was a traveler who had stopped working temporarily, but people in the city and the country that I was traveling in were still working and I had to stop to see them every now and then. The cold winter was on its way out.

 

It was in spring, when lots of flowers were in full bloom, that I began my first jobless period in Busan with the money I had saved and my severance pay. I still hoped to go to Germany in my 20s, but I needed more courage to leave for a faraway country. The second best way that I chose was to go to Busan where there is a Goethe Institut.

 

A friend of mine who had lived in Busan suggested, just at the right time, that she could rent me one of her rooms. I signed up for a 3-month course in basic German.

 

As neither a student nor a worker, I wandered around downtown Busan on weekday afternoons, and familiar roads and neighborhood started to turn up in the strange city. Later, I got to know “Baengnyeoneo Seowon [100 Fish Café]” near the Goethe Institut, which is a book café with humanities lectures and book clubs. I went there several times to drink a cup of tea and read books. As the summer began, I started to work there as a part-timer, accepting a sudden suggestion from the owner.

 

The café, which was located in the end of an alley famous for many printers gathered in it, did not have many customers from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. - that is, before the evening lectures. While I worked, I learned how to brew coffee and could take a free lesson. I got a payment once a month, which was not based on working hours, and it was enough for me to use for a month. I lived in a room in the café owner’s house, so room and board was free.

 

Being able to live the way I was, true to myself and upholding my values, was priceless. 100 Fish Café was designated a humanities center as part of the city’s downtown-revival project, and its surroundings, which were turned into a cultural, artistic space, were used as artists’ workshops. For the six months I worked in the café, I met people, including the owner who is also a poet, who led lives in unconventional ways.

 

People with a variety of jobs were striving to live freely, doing what they wanted to do. They stepped aside from the consumer culture where capital seduces you and showed me the possibility of a life of earning less and consuming less. Not caring what others think, not being belittled, living with my all might, and being a master of my own life. This is the attitude I got towards life and work from these experiences with the humanities.

 

Living, working and traveling

 

As of July 2014, I, twenty nine, am unemployed for the second time for more than six months straight. After I quit my job in the café, I worked as an assistant in my university for two years and saved the money I earned. I traveled for two and a half months with that money. Did I go to Germany? No, I didn’t. This felt out of nowhere even for me, but Mexico and Cuba were the destinations of my second overseas trip. Before taking the trip, I had promised to meet the café’s owner and three older girls that I had befriended in Busan, in Cuba. I stayed in Mexico for a month and in Cuba for a half month without being able to speak a single word of Spanish.

 

▲ Havana, Cuba ©Yeonhwa

Mexico City, one of the largest cities in the world, is a vast market for American capital. But, Havana, Cuba’s capital, and its surrounding cities show low development following a severance of diplomatic relations with the U.S. in the 1960s. While I stayed in those two totally different countries, I met and parted with the local people, lots of Korean travelers and many young Asians. The trip which seemed short sometimes and long at other times was a chance to ask myself once again how I should live.

 

And now, I live with people like me in the “Thinking Teahouse Stroll Theater” in Busan. This place started as jobless people’s “laboratory” in a redevelopment area in Busan in July 2011 and doesn’t have a grandiose purpose. Ever since it opened, people there have hosted fun events, amusements and performances, and I would visit it as a guest and a friend. After it was moved to a new place a year ago due to redevelopment, people there were using the place as a workshop and a living space.

 

After the second trip, I needed a cheap place to stay before I got a new job. Where I live now was that place. Currently, two cats and four women including myself live together and all of us are unemployed. But housework is endless and we have to pay the rent every month. To earn the monthly rent, we host various shows once a month. We hold exhibitions using our attic and do performances in birthday parties, for instance. We sometimes leave our home for other cities, searching for a job to lead a happy life with art.

 

▲ “Thinking Teahouse Stroll Theater” ©Yeonhwa

People I’ve met and known through the place I live show, by their existence, that there can be more than one standard in the world. No matter where they stay, they are the masters of their lives. The place I stay right now has become something like a camp where I can live freely and is giving me the power to enjoy my life.

 

I’m leading a happy unemployed life now, and thinking about the homework that I gave to myself: earning money not only to put food on the table but also to go on a trip while living the way I am, proudly. For me, working is a journey of seeking answers to questions about who I am and how I want to live. And I hope that my workplace and home will be the place whose members respect each other’s difference and live like decent human beings. I want to live here and now with all my might. That’s why I work and plan to travel. And I live. [Translated by Kwon-Lee Eunjung]

 

*Original article: http://ildaro.com/6747 Published: July 13, 2014

 

◆ To see more English-language articles from Ilda, visit our English blog(https://ildaro.blogspot.com).

기사 내용과 관련이 없는 글, 욕설을 사용하는 등 타인의 명예를 훼손하는 글은 관리자에 의해 예고없이 임의 삭제될 수 있으므로 주의하시기 바랍니다. 댓글 작성 시 상대방에 대한 배려와 책임을 담아주세요.

• 닉네임
• 비밀번호
• 
• 도배방지 입력