Pictures have the power to pull us into the past. Old photos provoke and at the same time test our memories and can lead us back many years into our youth, challenge us to see old visions, perhaps with a new understanding.

Recently, while sorting through an old briefcase filled with papers that I carried around for many years before settling in this house, I came across some photos from the early years I spent in Korea as a teacher in a boys middle school in the small city of Chunchŏn in Kangwŏn Province, and in one of these pictures I am standing in a group portrait of one particular class.  I had not looked at this picture in twenty years but as soon as I saw it I instantly remembered the day and the occasion and I said to myself, “Chung-il Chil-ban.”

In this black and white photo a large group of boys stands on the steps in front of the school. They are all in their black winter uniforms with brass buttons down the front and their name tags over the breast pocket, and they stare out beneath the brims of the black caps which cover their heads – and I know each head is shaven like a monk’s. Every cap has a brass badge with the Chinese character chung to signify middle school. Most are standing at attention, as they should be. On the left side of the photo I stand with their home room teacher, Hwang-sŏnsaeng. I recall when the picture was taken, on a frigid day late in 1971 when these boys were nearing the end of their first year in middle school, (Chung-il), what we would call seventh grade. The school had five hundred first-year boys altogether, divided into seven home room groups (ban), and these boys were from the seventh home room, (Chil-ban.)

I taught English to all the first year classes, each with seventy boys, so it was hard to really know any of them well, but I had come to know this group better because of my friendship with Hwang-sŏnsaeng. He had told me that morning that his boys wanted to know if I would join their class photo and at first I wasn’t sure how to answer.  I thought I didn’t really belong in a class photo because I wasn’t a home room teacher. No one else had ever suggested such a thing and I hesitated, not sure of the protocol. Wouldn’t I be intruding, I wondered.

“Not at all!” he answered with a laugh. “It was their idea and I think it’s a good one. No one else thought of it so they’ll feel really special if you join them. In fact, they don’t want any other ban to know, so please say nothing. Just come out and join us during recess”

So there I am in the photo, wearing a jacket and tie as was customary for all teachers but without my overcoat, because regardless of the weather it was unseemly for a teacher to wear an overcoat outside during the school day. None of the boys had one and we were expected to share the cold with them, or at least that was our principal’s view of the world and I agreed with him on this if little else.

I had endured a certain degree of regimentation in my own childhood but my experience was nothing compared to the daily life of these boys. They were expected to meet a strict and inflexible set of academic standards reinforced by rigid rules of behavior. The rewards were far distant while the punishment for laxity or any breach of discipline was immediate and severe. Almost all the boys took this discipline for granted and few would test the limits, but a very small number got away with it when they did.  In my recollection these exceptions were always the smallest boys. The word kkoma literally means ‘dwarf’ or ‘midget’ but is also used to mean the smallest child, and teachers as well as schoolboys invariably used the word to designate any very small boy. It was in no way pejorative and in fact suggested a kind of indulgent affection. In this very rough and tumble world with its transition from elementary school childhood to the first year of middle school and its taste of how harsh life might be, the smallest boys were still cute, and they knew it.  But of course, even a kkoma of long standing might have a sudden spurt of growth, and it would never do to push one’s luck.

In this photo the boys are – as always – lined up by height with the tall gangly fellows in the back and the shortest in the front row, and almost all are standing stiff and erect as expected on such an occasion.  But in the front row second from the left is a little fellow who clearly had his own very loose notion of standing to attention. His casual pose with one foot out in front and one elbow held akimbo is a clear statement: “I’m different – at least for now!” What was his name? Where is he today?

I scan the faces beneath the brims of their caps and confess I cannot remember the names of any of these boys – there were so many and forty years have passed. But even without names the picture calls up a strong sense of affection and vivid memories of being with large groups of these boys, and also certain occasions when a few of these boys emerged from the crowd.

In those days, middle school boys were not allowed to go to the movies unless they were in a school group and went together with the teachers. Such occasions were a rare treat and I recall the first time I joined such an outing. We all left school in mid-afternoon and the boys marched to the theater downtown, and once inside each ban sat together. The films we saw were typically old western movies, (John Wayne films were the usual fare), and it was considered an opportunity for the boys to listen to spoken English while reading subtitles to give them the meaning. But I soon realized that among the five hundred boys and the teachers in the crowd I was the only one in the theater listening. It was an odd experience to listen to a movie that everyone else was reading, and the boys – taking advantage of the anonymity of darkness – talked among themselves, called out to each other, joked about the action on the screen and in general behaved with a sense of freedom never attempted inside the school gate.  I realized they were enjoying the film in their own way. There were always one or two outings like these during the school year and I came to understand that the teachers also looked forward to them as a welcome break in the rigorous discipline.

With the coming of spring we had splendid days with vivid green and yellow panoramas of forsythias along the wooded hillsides. These same forsythias (kyenari) were known to every schoolboy from the poems of Kim So-wŏl. It also meant an outing with all the boys – a school picnic – a highly anticipated event for everyone, boys and teachers alike. It was my habit to study the blackboard in the teachers room each morning and thumb through my well-worn, dog-eared Korean-English dictionary, looking up new words. One spring day my eye quickly went down the board and spotted the word sopung, and so I learned that later in the week we would have a one-day break from the usual stern discipline. In the next few days I heard the word sopung shouted on the playground and whispered in the back of the class, until at last the morning came and the boys brought picnic food from home – rice wrapped in seaweed (kimbap) was the usual fare but anything would do – and we all passed out the school gate with a sense of liberation. 

We walked a mile or two outside the town and into farmland, past rice paddies and the hillsides with their stately, dignified grave mounds, and soon found a space wide enough for all of us with a fine view of the mountains and a stream flowing by with very cold water. There were impromptu games with competition between the different home rooms and group singing and of course all the teachers were called on to sing solo for the boys. My own public singing debut – completely unanticipated and unrehearsed, some half-remembered song from my own school days – was done before an appreciative audience of five hundred. How many people can say the same? And then later in the afternoon, bottles of beer – chilled by mountain water in the nearby stream – somehow appeared and were served to the teachers with peanuts and dried fish. Ever since those days if I hear the word picnic I think of bright spring days under a brilliant blue sky in the company of hundreds of boys.

But on other occasions individual faces emerged from the crowd. Early in my time in Chunchŏn, one chilly evening when I left school as the sun was going down, I saw several first-year boys at the school yard gate, gathered around the cart of a street vendor who was making ho-ttŏk, a hot griddle cake with melted sugar in the middle. I had seen the ho-ttŏk man before, had been tempted by the aroma of his cakes, but had never tried one, for I knew that eating on the street was not a proper thing for a teacher to do. But as I passed, by one of the boys called out, “Yang-sŏnsaeng-nim, will you please try one?”  His friends were laughing at his boldness, punching his arm, wondering what I would do.  I thought, why not? and so I joined them and – listening closely – tried to understand their lively talk. Schoolboys would always use the most polite language when speaking to a teacher and adding the honorific -nim to the title, but among themselves they discarded anything like courtesy, dropped all their verb endings, used coarse slang – it was pure boy talk and very hard to understand. Did I speak like this when I was a boy? Of course I did. The teachers always encouraged my efforts to learn Korean but cautioned me against speaking like the boys – it would never do – and when I asked the teachers about the meaning of the boys’ slang they often gave evasive answers, which made me all the more curious. Now in this moment the boldest boy – a kkoma – handed me the ho-ttŏk wrapped in a scrap of newspaper and – with a transition to the most courteous language and with honorific verb endings – asked me to try it. It was very hot and warmed my hand. I bit into it, almost burned my mouth with the melted sugar and savored the wonderful hot sweetness. They all watched my face, could tell I was surprised by the taste and they all laughed – with me? at me? – and asked if I would have another. I said yes but only if they would let me buy, so I paid for the next batch and handed them around. It was perhaps my first close encounter with schoolboys outside the formality of the classroom, and this shared moment and others like it were vividly and suddenly brought back to life by the old photo.

Where are they now? Forty years have passed and they will now be well into middle age.  I can only hope they have prospered as much as their country in all these years. I like to think these boys have been a part of their country’s success – in fact, I’m certain of it. For the best of them –which means most of them – combined brightness with hard work, determination, discipline and another quality – vivacity – which I believe tells much of the story that is their country today.

All these thoughts followed as I saw this old picture again after so many years. Most of the faces in the photo wear a stern expression for this formal occasion but if I stare at them for a moment, then close my eyes and drift back into memory, I see their smiles and hear their laughter again

May 10, 2011