Memories of the Ilgok-dong Lotte Apartment

The Ilgok-dong Lotte Apartment is the place we moved to the year before I became a third-year middle schooler. Until then I'd lived in a place called the Wolgok-dong Kumho Apartment in Gwangsan-gu. Before that — that is, while I was in kindergarten — I stayed at my grandparents' home in the Hyundai Apartment in Baegun-dong, and at the time I attended Seongmo Kindergarten at Wolsan-dong Cathedral, growing up in the atmosphere of a Catholic kindergarten and amid blessings beneath the church. Thanks to the priest, nun, and kindergarten teachers who looked on me lovingly, my childhood — though a brief rupture occurred — later remained in memory as something able to overcome that rupture. Why do I speak of such a rupture? Because I only ever moved after a place had become familiar. For me, the Ilgok-dong Lotte Apartment I've now left was like that.

After moving to the Ilgok-dong Lotte Apartment, I didn't transfer schools right away. Some days still remained until the semester at Gwangsan Middle School ended. So in February I had occasion to come to school for a while, and on those few days I wouldn't go straight home but loitered around the PC rooms near the middle school, only delaying the time I went home. Leaving a beloved neighborhood for a new place was by no means a familiar thing for the young, second-year-middle-school me, so it was natural to feel afraid. That wasn't because I liked Wolgok-dong in Gwangsan-gu, but because, for the second-year-middle-school Gwak Su-chang, there was nowhere to set foot besides the area around the Wolgok-dong Kumho Apartment and that neighborhood. The memories of Wolgok Elementary and Gwangsan Middle began to fade away like that as I moved.

The things I felt moving to the Ilgok-dong Lotte Apartment were, first, that the house was quiet; that a middle school was being built right next to the apartment (though I couldn't attend it); that a mountain was visible out back; that there was a library near the house; that, unlike Wolgok-dong, there was a street with many academies; that no utility poles were visible; and that Family Land, which I'd often wanted to go to, had gotten closer. Ah, one more thing — I should add that I transferred to a boys' private middle school. The classroom of my second year at Salesio Middle School, which I transferred to, was dingier than I'd thought. I got the feeling of having entered a building even older than a public middle school. Gwangsan Middle wasn't a fine building either, but the worn iron doors and high ceilings of Salesio Middle were by no means something I could adapt to. Well, the school's atmosphere itself probably played a part too. The dust-filled window screens, the gloomy staff room, the school atmosphere where no female teachers were to be seen — those may have played a part as well.

The first shocking scene I felt after transferring was the daily life of my classmates. There were two aspects to it: one was that, since there were only boys, the students didn't really know shame. Coming over from a coed school, their lewd jokes and behavior were very shocking at first. I got the feeling of a completely different world. The other was the students' studying — even though they were middle schoolers, more than ten in the class were solving a math workbook called 'High Level' or some such. Honestly, to call it 'some such' — at the time 'High Level' was too hard a math workbook for me. They were books full of ideas I wouldn't dare even attempt, and the sight of several students solving that workbook I'd only just heard of, every break time, as academy homework, gave me a great deal of awkwardness while also stirring a sense of crisis. In the end I, too, bought that workbook and started solving it. I remember it wasn't easy, but I also remember it wasn't something I couldn't solve.

So at some point, following the school atmosphere, I started attending academies here and there. The famous Seon-gyeong Academy (I can't recall the exact name) in Munheung-dong that was famous around that neighborhood at the time, and the math academy attached to the kindergarten building right in front of my house, I didn't dare attend, so I'd go to a comprehensive academy with a shuttle bus running around Yongbong-dong and Ilgok-dong. But there was no way my skills would rise. Upstairs there was an ECC English academy, and I went there for ECC, not for the Jongno M-School below. The short conversations with foreigners I met at ECC weren't bad. Looking back on that academy life, it really feels like wasted time. Of course there was some degree of math preview and English study, but I didn't show any remarkable results. I didn't study especially hard for exams either. I only remember the relief I felt when, by chance, I scored near 100 (on an easy test) in math alone at school and realized I wasn't entirely bad at math. Even then, I remember not throwing math away.

I mentioned above that there was a library near my house; that library later became the start of all my second- and third-year high school study. As a third-year middle schooler I'd go to the library on the pretext of studying during exam periods, but studying never went well. I remember going up to the reading room on the third floor, but the place where I actually spent meaningful time was the book-reading room on the second floor. As a third-year middle schooler I don't remember what books I read. At most I remember reading books like the Avalon Chronicles; I read the Yeolguk-ji in high school, but in any case I only remember going often to read books. Still, the very fact that those books existed was very precious. Looking back, the next time I came into contact with books that much was in college. The chance to have a space to read that many books isn't a common thing.

The playground I went to most during my short middle-school years was the arcade. The arcade I often went to with a friend whose father was a university professor was tucked away somewhere in a back alley of the academy district far below the house. Now it's just an ordinary shop, but in that arcade I played a rhythm game I'd played even before moving to Ilgok-dong. It was a rhythm game called EZ2DJ, and that rhythm game was the one thing — even after moving — that served as a means of remembering the past, so I think I clung to it. Resolving to clear it stage by stage, that was the game I played. I wasn't exceptionally good at that game, but I wasn't bad either, so I did the game and the academies together, improving in my own way. And I remember that whenever the academy ended, I'd always go into a coin karaoke and sing. At the time I still often sang Buzz's songs, and my friend would bring from somewhere and sing 90s songs I was hearing for the first time in my life.

So the third-year-middle-school me finished school going back and forth between maladjustment and adjustment. On the other hand, I was facing high school admission. My mother, who had many thoughts about my schooling, even recommended Gandhi School to me at the time; I only knew that Gandhi School was an alternative school in Sancheong that was accredited but where an entirely different kind of education took place. The winter vacation as I was moving up to third year, she sent me to Australia for something like a month of language study, and the place that arranged it was Gandhi School. Gandhi High School was a place said to cost more than 2 million won per semester in tuition, and in the end I went on to a general high school, and the place I went to was Salesio High School right in front of the house. There, in a place where part of one building was the middle school and another part the high school — the middle school right next to it — I spent three more years.

In the transition from third-year middle to first-year high, I don't remember having done anything especially hard. I didn't properly do math ahead either. Like many third-year-middle / first-year-high students, I often went to PC rooms. My grades dropped a little after transferring (percentile 90% -> 80%), but I thought that wasn't really a problem. I had the vague thought of wanting to go to a science high school or a foreign-language high school, but everyone had such thoughts. By contrast, I didn't put in the effort myself. I entered high school without finding a reason to study.

The biggest change among the academies I joined as I entered high school was attending a Korean-language academy (at the time we called it 'language'). It was run by a language-specialist academy teacher named Yun Dong-gwon; that academy is gone now. In any case, I steadily took those Korean lessons there. That academy, which cost as much as 200,000 won a month, also had fewer class hours than other academies, so I attended with the perception that it was 'expensive.' But thanks to it my language grade never dropped below the 2nd tier, and in a way, not throwing away the academy until my second year of high school wasn't a bad thing.

Among those processes, two things stand out in memory. Both happened at the academy. One was a student attending Salesio Girls' High School who, even though her home wasn't near here, bothered to come all the way to Ilgok-dong for the academy, which I found curious. Taking a bus or being driven by her parents was a good 20-minute trip, and the sight of her parents coming to pick her up each time was novel. The other was a math teacher who came there. All I remember of that math teacher's appearance is a heavyset figure, and I think I took his math class just once or twice; even though I never took his math class again afterward, I heard a math lesson from him that will stay with me for life. That math lesson was the most fun math lesson, and it was clearly the lesson that sparked my interest in math. To the me of the time, drifting between the 3rd and 4th tiers after entering high school, his math lessons made a strange question arise — that I wanted to be good at math. Was I taken in by the talk of a 5-million-won private tutoring?

First-year-high life had something different from third-year-middle life, and the first of these was night self-study. After night self-study, school ended at 9:40 or 9:50. There was nothing to do all night. Other than reading books or studying, there wasn't really anything to do during self-study time. My first-year homeroom teacher was a Korean teacher (a person who, unexpectedly, would later help me at college admission), and I remember the homeroom teacher having many difficulties in the relationship with us kids. The students were quite rude. That homeroom teacher, I later learned, was someone who had studied with my professor at college admission. When Professor Park, who taught composition, mentioned my first-year homeroom teacher, it felt somehow uncanny. It was probably a kind of shock that the school called Salesio High gave me. The realization, in my own way, that high-school-era events could affect a college student's life more than I'd thought.

If I had to name the biggest change I've experienced in life, the change called 'study' is beyond question. Because thanks to that study, I gained the chance to change the people I met, once. To be precise, I properly studied from around the summer vacation of my second high-school year. The reason for studying lay in making grades similar to the other friends who were in student council. The students in student council were all capable people, that's why. I'd been in student council in first year too, but back then I had no such anxiety about grades; precisely in my second student-council term, such feelings and a sense of crisis bloomed in my heart. That was the start of studying for me, and thinking about it now, it really did start from inferiority. I'd already realized back then the fact Adler spoke of — that the driving force of growth is inferiority.

At the same time as starting to study, what I could do was go to the library. I'd gone to a study room a few times before, but I felt the study room was unsuitable as a place of study. It was very stifling. Though the name written on it was Jiphyeonjeon (Hall of Worthies), to me it was less a Hall of Worthies than a sleeping room. So the library I started attending was, of course, where stress relief began at first with frequent 'book reading.' But I was short on time. I had to clear second-year math quickly and produce the grades needed for senior year, and I started studying from a point when the CSAT was still over a year away. Once I set foot in the library during the summer vacation more than a year out, things I hadn't seen began to come into view. There were really many people 'studying' in that neighborhood. When the library opened at 7 a.m., I tried to get there before 9, because at 7 there was even an elder studying for the real-estate-agent exam, and — though I'm not certain — I saw college students coming in too. And among them was a third-year senior from my own school, a senior named Jo Sang-a. The sight of a Catholic believer who always went to church on Sunday mornings, that senior who studied hard, became a model for me. He seems to be working somewhere now after going to Korea University's business school.

After that, my senior-year life had nothing special. I lived like any hardworking senior. Going to the library early and coming back late was my daily goal, and on the days I kept it, without fail I'd come home gazing at the night sky and the moon hanging there. At the time I found grade-study so hard — I didn't really know how to do it, and I didn't like memorizing, so I thought I couldn't solve those worries. But listening to online lectures was still a fun thing, and especially studying what I wanted to study was even more fun, so I remember the senior-year me wanting to seek out and listen to world geography or economic geography, which the school didn't even teach; in the midst of that I was also the senior-year me who struggled to enter something like a geography olympiad. If there were a few more lucky things during exam-prep life, it was that the humanities-track math of the time went only up to part of sequences and limits, so getting a 1st tier in math wasn't a hard goal for me. Even better, thanks to a game I played in childhood, my sequence-reasoning ability was astonishing; I found while solving problems that I had a power where, looking at a problem, the sequence would come to mind and I could transcribe it into a formula — so even though I started late, I wasn't anxious because of math. On the IQ test sheet, the percentile of my sequence-reasoning ability was 99%, so in terms of sequences alone I had top-1% ability. So the senior-year me went all in on study. Of course there were definitely some deviations here and there. But most of me was a senior who studied hard. I had to prove to my parents and to myself the figure of someone who stubbornly insisted on not entering the dorm and would raise his grades, and I had to prove it too in the social-studies subject I'd chosen because I said I wanted to. Maybe that's why a magical thing happened, and unlike my first- and second-year grades, I began getting 1st tiers in Korean and math, and my life simply changed.

The biggest reason study changed my life is that, through study, the people I came to meet changed. My CSAT score was lower than I'd hoped, but seen against my life it wasn't low. So the friends I first came to meet were friends who'd studied well, and as a result there was much to gain from their lives, their ways of conversing, their thinking structures, and so on. I had my college life at the National University of Education that way, and afterward life back in Gwangju passed by so-so.

Life in Ilgok-dong after getting a job in Naju was, as I recall, largely two things. One is the memory of becoming the person who kept the house. After my two parents went down to Haenam and I lived with just my younger sibling, then one day even my sibling went up to Seoul — on that day, having only ever left home in my life, I experienced watching over a home for the first time. That's probably a novel memory of my first 'home.' Commuting took nearly an hour, so living at home wasn't entirely smooth, but in any case I spent my first two years after employment in Ilgok-dong, so my feelings on leaving that house are still complicated even now.

If I were told to go back to that house, I think I probably would. The memories in that house weren't only good, but there aren't many bad memories either. Rather, for me it was the place where I first experienced a new world I'd never have experienced had I only lived in Gwangsan-gu, and so I give it the meaning of being where the change in my life began. Come to think of it, there are quite a lot of good memories.

Having written this, it suddenly occurs to me that I should organize my memories at the National University of Education. There seem to be parts I started writing as a book and left off; when I have time I'll organize them well and post them as writing again.

Organizing one's perception of spaces is always necessary.