Long Holiday and War > IDEAS & IDEALS

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     I am very happy and feel greatly relieved to see that another holiday, Chusok, is over, and that the flow of everyday life is rapidly resuming its normal pace. The streets are beginning to be jammed again with cars, and the huge campus and all the classrooms  that had been completely deserted for more than a week are bustling with students, and coffee shops and dining places around the university are ready to receive custommers again. I am so glad to see familiar faces and scenes, and delighted to hear the accustomed sounds and noises of life after a week-long absence and silence. It is as if a war is over and the people who had fled from the city are returning home to rebuild and reconstruct.  

     Any long holiday, especially Chusok in our country, like the Thanksgiving in the United States, Canada and elsewhere, is one of the two longest and happiest holidays for everyone. We are free from work, allowed to relax at home and have a good time with family and friends. But in reality and practice, long holiday turns out more often than not to be quite the reverse. to be more work than rest. It proves to be more work than rest. It creates extraordinary tension and pressure in the people, costs extra expenditure, and requires special attention, care and effort to observe it. As a result, people come back from their rest very tired at the end of the long holiday, and seem to be very glad to be back at work again.

     Holiday is clearly and sharply opposed to and contrasted with war, as heaven to hell, good to evil, or day to night is. However, it is also true that holiday and war have much in common. As a man who has experienced a war in his life as a little boy, I often feel like to compare a long holiday to war. First of all, a holiday entails unbelievably high number of casualties and fatalities on the highway, as the war in action of the battlefield. And, there are long lines of cars heading for south, exactly like the long lines of war refugees I witnessed during the Korean War. With a big holiday at hand people look worried and hurried. Normal and everyday life suddenly comes to an end. Schools, factories, markets and stores are all closed or abandoned. People disappear from the streets leaving the huge and lively city to the ghosts. The world becomes deadly silent like a graveyard.  

     From my early childhood, I did not like long holidays . For these special occasions, I had to wear new and expensive costumes, which made me uneasy and uncomfortable in them for many days. I couldn’t go out in them to play as freely and comfortably as I could in my usual clothes with my rough friends, and my friends wouldn’t want to play with me as vigorously and roughly in their new suits as they used to do. Often I was often severely scolded by my mother for soiling or tearing my new clothes on the first day I went out.

And, to my great frustration, all of my friends disappeared from sight. All of them seemed to be kept in their house or gone  somewhere with their parents. There was much more to eat, of course, in my house, but I preferred playing wild and rough with my friends outdoors to eating goodies indoors. With no friends around to play with, I felt lonely and miserable. On the eve of one Sollal, lunar New Year's Day, I remember, standing alone on the empty playground in front of my house, I waited and waited for a friend of mine who had promised to come out and play with me, but all in vain, and finally I could not help myself bursting into sobbing. That evening I experienced existential loneliness for the first time in my life.  

     This unpleasant feeling and experience of a long holiday in my childhood was greatly augmented and traumatically engraved in my psyche many years later by the first Christmas I met in the United States as a graduate student - all unprepared and inexperienced. For about a week, I found myself a Robinson Crusoe, stranded all alone at the university dormitory. I had nothing to eat, nowhere to go to buy anything, and nobody to talk with. It seemed like there was not a soul to be found in the whole world. The silence was too heavy, strange and dreadful to bear. Hell or grave could not be worse. In retrospect, I don’t know how I survived that Christmas.

     That loneliness, that uneasiness and discomfort are still with me even now I have become a man, and whenever a big and long holiday comes around, and the number of people and cars on the streets begin to decrease significantly. Sunday is okay, because it is just one day of rest and I need it, and I feel so usual and accustomed to oit. But long holiday that spans almost a week is simply unbearable. It is far from the rest and festivity I need and enjoy. It is much heavier than ordinary workdays, I feel. It is a cumbersome psychological burden for me to carry away or a high obstacle to cross over with care, preparation and determination,  as if I am confronting a war.

     In order to survive a long holiday I takesome emergency measures in advance without fail. I buy some foods and store them. Some medicines too. I have my car thoroughly examined and fixed.  I drive slowly and walk gingerly. I take extreme care and caution not to be taken ill, nor seriously wounded or injured during the holiday. Some hospitals and drugstores are open during the holiday, they say, but I know that doctors, good doctors and experienced nurses, will surely not be available. And , for me, you may know, who have a queer and incorrigible habit of frequenting school office disregarding all the sared holidays including Sundays, it is urgently needed to explore and discover at least one eating place open during kthe holiday for lunch. And, finally, I pray to God earnestly and hard that I and anyone around me may not die during a long holiday. A funeral during a long holiday is simply a disaster for everyone concerned.

     But very unfortunately, with all my preparedness and readiness for the approaching holiday, there is always a powerful foe that overpowers successfully my exquisite defense line. It is the attack of the lonely, poor and the miserable people. In the normal traffics and trades of everyday life the existence of these unfortunate people around me is usually buried in or mixed with the far better-off and more fortunate ones, and they do not pose any serious threat to the security and peace of my mind. But come a happy and long holiday, all those who have no home - the orphans, the homeless, the prostitutes, the abandoned elderly people, daily laborers, especially foreign laborers, and prisoners - all those who have no place to go - rise up and storm fiercely the fort of my mind and heart, and I feel so helpless, weak and powerlessw before them. Aching and bleeding I decide to run away, only turning to God, almighty and merciful, for help.
                                                                                                   (February 18, 2005)