Ardent Student

When I turned ten, my father had me attend a traditional
school in our village, where an old man taught Chinese
classics. At this school, all we had to do was memorize one
booklet each day. I would focus myself and complete the memorization
in a half hour. If I could stand in front of the schoolmaster and recite
that day’s lesson, then I was finished for the day. If the schoolmaster
dozed off in the early afternoon, I would leave the school and go into the
hills and meadows. The more time I spent in the hills, the more I knew
where to find edible plants. Eventually, I was eating enough of these plants
that I could go without lunch, and I stopped eating lunch at home.
At school, we read the Analects of Confucius and the works of Mencius,
and we were taught Chinese characters. I excelled at writing, and
by the time I was twelve the schoolmaster had me making the model
characters that other students would learn from. Actually, I wanted to
attend a formal school, not the traditional village school. I felt I shouldn’t
be just memorizing Confucius and Mencius when others were building
airplanes. This was April, and my father had already paid my full
year’s tuition in advance. Even though I knew this, I decided to quit the
village school and worked to convince my father to send me to a formal
school. I worked on convincing my grandfather and even my uncle.
To transfer into elementary school, I had to take an exam. To study for
this exam, I had to attend a preparatory school. I convinced one of my
younger cousins to go with me, and we both entered the Wonbong
Preparatory School and began our studies for the exam to transfer
into elementary school.
The next year, when I was fourteen, I passed the exam and transferred
into the third grade at Osan School. I had a late start, but I
studied hard and was able to skip the fifth grade. Osan School was
five miles from our home, but I never missed a day or was ever late
for school. Each time I would climb a hill in the road, a group of
students would be waiting for me. I would walk so quickly, though,
that they would have a hard time keeping up. This is how I traveled
that mountain road that was rumored to be a place where tigers
sometimes appeared.
The Osan School was a nationalist school established by Yi Sung
Hun, who was active in the independence movement. Not only was
the Japanese language not taught, but students were actually forbidden
to speak Japanese. I had a different opinion on this. I felt that we
had to know our enemy if we were to defeat it. I took another transfer
exam and entered the fourth grade of the Jung-ju Public Normal
School. In public schools, all classes were conducted in Japanese, so
I memorized katakana and hiragana the night before my first day of
class. I didn’t know any Japanese, so I took all the textbooks from
grades one through four and memorized them over the course of
two weeks. This enabled me to start understanding the language.
By the time I graduated from grammar school, I was fluent in Japanese.
On the day of my graduation, I volunteered to give a speech before
a gathering of all the important people in Jung-ju. Normally in that
situation, the student is expected to speak about his gratitude for the
support received from his teachers and the school. Instead, I referred to
each of my teachers by name and critiqued them, pointing out problems
in the way the school was run. I also spoke on our time in history and
the kind of determination that people in responsible positions should
make. I gave this rather critical speech entirely in Japanese.
“Japanese people should pack their bags as soon as possible and go
back to Japan,” I said. “This land was handed down to us by our ancestors,
and all the future generations of our people must live here.”
I said these things in front of the chief of police, the county chief, and
town mayor. I was taking after the spirit of Great-Uncle Yun Guk Moon
and saying things that no one else dared say. The audience was shocked.
When I left the stage, I could see people’s faces had turned pale. Nothing
happened to me that day, but there were problems later on. From
that day, the Japanese police marked me as a person to be tracked and
began watching me, making a nuisance of themselves. Later, when I was
trying to go to Japan to continue my studies, the chief of police refused
to place his stamp on a form that I needed, and this caused me some
trouble. He regarded me as a dangerous person who should not be allowed
to travel to Japan and refused to stamp the form for me. I had a
big argument with him and finally convinced him to put his stamp on
the form. Only then could I go to Japan.