Read Online Your Republic Is Calling You by Young-Ha Kim, Chi-Young Kim - Free Book Online
Authors: Young-Ha Kim, Chi-Young Kim
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back, could he even read these books? Probably not. He will have to go from an existence surrounded by books to one made up of walls. He selects Simon Singh's
Fermat's Enigma.
Since it is a mathematics book, neither the South nor the North would have an issue with it. He picks out the poetry volume necessary to crack codes in case he gets another order. He hesitates, then puts in his bag Oloikov's
Death of a Soldier,
a novel he has always meant to read.
Ki-yong also grabs his iPod, on which he has more than two thousand songs. How many songs will he be able to listen to in the future? It has taken so long to collect this many. At first, when he got to the South, he listened to cassettes. He was intimidated by the walls of CDs and tapes stacked in music stores without space for even a toothpick between them. He couldn't believe that all these different kinds of music could coexist in the world. He had grown up in a country of marching songs. His countrymen didn't enjoy music in private, but sang in unison to tunes blared from speakers in the streets. The first electronic gadget he bought when he got here was a Sony Walkman. He listened to the South's pop stars, especially Cho Yong-pil and Lee Mun-se, and the Beatles. The Beatles in particular shook his soul to its core.
He listened to "Hey Jude" or "Michelle" alone in his room through the headphones of his Walkman, savoring the forbidden. These songs opened a door to a new kind of happiness, one he'd never experienced in Pyongyang. Later, when he found a more permanent place to live, the first thing he did was set up a small stereo system and a CD player. As time passed and sound quality and fidelity improved, his tastes gravitated toward classical and jazz. And then, before he realized it, the era of the CD had passed and everyone listened to music in the form of audio files. He was diligent about ripping a CD, converting it to MP3s, and storing them in his iPod, but these days he never surrendered himself to music quite as passionately as he did during his first few years in the South.
It isn't only Ki-yong who changed. The world around him has transformed as well. He came south before personal computers became widely available—he learned how to use one alongside South Koreans. He learned FORTRAN and BASIC, and entered the world of word processing through programs like Posokgul. And he transitioned from the world of MS-DOS to Windows, from the Bulletin Board System to the Internet. He actually adapted quicker to this new world than the average forty-year-old South Korean. As a transplant in South Korean society, his whole mission was to adapt. He didn't have the confidence or the courage to resist or reject change. That was a privilege of only the natives.
He unfastens his watch. He takes out a Sunnto scuba diving watch from the drawer and swaps it with the watch he was wearing, which was a part of his wife's dowry. Plated with 14k gold, it's unfashionable now. Unfashionable—it feels foreign to judge aesthetics so fluidly. In his former world, judging beauty and ugliness according to individual standards was one of the most dangerous adventures one
could undertake. Ki-yong's eyes, heart, and hard drive have been completely rewired to become a product of this current world, like a refurbished cyborg. As if someone drugged him, rendered him unconscious, and switched everything out. His old hard drive was thrown into a pool of water and bubbled to its demise.
He was born in 1963 in Pyongyang. But when he came south, he was given the name and identity of Kim Ki-yong, a man born in 1967. The real Kim Ki-yong, an orphan, was born in Seoul. When he was seventeen years old, he left the orphanage and disappeared, and his identity records were expunged. What happened to Kim Ki-yong, the man who lent him this shell? Sometimes he dreamed that the real Ki-yong came back. A man with an erased face stood at the head of his bed. Even though he never said anything, he could tell
Fermat's Enigma.
Since it is a mathematics book, neither the South nor the North would have an issue with it. He picks out the poetry volume necessary to crack codes in case he gets another order. He hesitates, then puts in his bag Oloikov's
Death of a Soldier,
a novel he has always meant to read.
Ki-yong also grabs his iPod, on which he has more than two thousand songs. How many songs will he be able to listen to in the future? It has taken so long to collect this many. At first, when he got to the South, he listened to cassettes. He was intimidated by the walls of CDs and tapes stacked in music stores without space for even a toothpick between them. He couldn't believe that all these different kinds of music could coexist in the world. He had grown up in a country of marching songs. His countrymen didn't enjoy music in private, but sang in unison to tunes blared from speakers in the streets. The first electronic gadget he bought when he got here was a Sony Walkman. He listened to the South's pop stars, especially Cho Yong-pil and Lee Mun-se, and the Beatles. The Beatles in particular shook his soul to its core.
He listened to "Hey Jude" or "Michelle" alone in his room through the headphones of his Walkman, savoring the forbidden. These songs opened a door to a new kind of happiness, one he'd never experienced in Pyongyang. Later, when he found a more permanent place to live, the first thing he did was set up a small stereo system and a CD player. As time passed and sound quality and fidelity improved, his tastes gravitated toward classical and jazz. And then, before he realized it, the era of the CD had passed and everyone listened to music in the form of audio files. He was diligent about ripping a CD, converting it to MP3s, and storing them in his iPod, but these days he never surrendered himself to music quite as passionately as he did during his first few years in the South.
It isn't only Ki-yong who changed. The world around him has transformed as well. He came south before personal computers became widely available—he learned how to use one alongside South Koreans. He learned FORTRAN and BASIC, and entered the world of word processing through programs like Posokgul. And he transitioned from the world of MS-DOS to Windows, from the Bulletin Board System to the Internet. He actually adapted quicker to this new world than the average forty-year-old South Korean. As a transplant in South Korean society, his whole mission was to adapt. He didn't have the confidence or the courage to resist or reject change. That was a privilege of only the natives.
He unfastens his watch. He takes out a Sunnto scuba diving watch from the drawer and swaps it with the watch he was wearing, which was a part of his wife's dowry. Plated with 14k gold, it's unfashionable now. Unfashionable—it feels foreign to judge aesthetics so fluidly. In his former world, judging beauty and ugliness according to individual standards was one of the most dangerous adventures one
could undertake. Ki-yong's eyes, heart, and hard drive have been completely rewired to become a product of this current world, like a refurbished cyborg. As if someone drugged him, rendered him unconscious, and switched everything out. His old hard drive was thrown into a pool of water and bubbled to its demise.
He was born in 1963 in Pyongyang. But when he came south, he was given the name and identity of Kim Ki-yong, a man born in 1967. The real Kim Ki-yong, an orphan, was born in Seoul. When he was seventeen years old, he left the orphanage and disappeared, and his identity records were expunged. What happened to Kim Ki-yong, the man who lent him this shell? Sometimes he dreamed that the real Ki-yong came back. A man with an erased face stood at the head of his bed. Even though he never said anything, he could tell
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