A father's way of teaching ['Our story for Tuesday']

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When the television crew arrived after she had scored a perfect mark on the college entrance exam, the first thing they asked about was her father. She was not surprised. She simply reminded herself, once again, that her score had been earned entirely through her own effort. Her father had a habit of stumbling into her room reeking of alcohol while she studied late into the night, disrupting her concentration.

"Oh, come on — does studying that hard really get everyone into Seoul National University?"

Every time, she quietly hated him for it. The broadcasters and newspapers declared that her father's philosophy — raising his daughter to live like a country farmer — had proven itself right after all. From that point on, what had been a wave of resistance inside her swelled into something closer to a tsunami.

Her father was a novelist who had enjoyed the golden years of 1990s Korean literature with his witty, distinctive prose. Born and raised in Seoul, he had never once left the city before she was born — yet one day he abruptly uprooted the entire family and settled in a small village at the foot of Deogyu Mountain. Everyone said it was exactly like him. He collected unremarkable-looking stones from the stream and arranged them as objects in a living room lined wall to wall with books; he liked to catch fish from the valley with his bare hands and release them again. A voracious reader, he later appeared in a documentary set around Deogyu Mountain, charming audiences with his knowledge and storytelling, and found himself in the public eye once more.

As filming opportunities followed, her own face was naturally exposed to the camera from an early age. Reporters, producers and broadcast writers took whatever she said and shaped it into the message they needed. She gave them just enough to satisfy their curiosity about her father's life as a bestselling author who embodied naturalism, ecologism and environmentalism all at once — a farmer-writer in the countryside. They, in turn, packaged and broadcast the story of this family's way of living, which was every bit as sincere as her father's writing.

They were also curious about how she had grown up with a reputation for being the best student in the region. More precisely, it was less curiosity about her than about how a novelist now celebrated for his erudition raised his children. She had clearly mentioned her father's erratic drinking, but the sharper she spoke, the more the conversation circled back to his ecological approach to parenting, and her criticisms were invariably received as nothing more than a minor, endearing quirk. Perceptive from a young age, she came to understand television that way.

As she saw it, the truth had never come out. Did living bound to nature every day really mean a child naturally developed the academic abilities modern life demanded? Her father had passed on his intelligence, yes — but hadn't he also neglected her education entirely? She had long wanted the public to see that clearly. She wanted to say it plainly: believing you could send your child to a prestigious university by following her father's half-baked philosophy was a delusion. When she confided this to her closest friend from university, the sharp and trustworthy woman gave her a piece of advice.

"It's better not to say things that spit in your own face. People only believe what they want to believe."

She looked at her clever friend and asked in return.

"I suppose you're right."

After that, she stopped speaking about her father altogether. University life in Seoul, far from the mountain village, was wonderfully free. People who discovered who her father was would occasionally ask after him, and she felt a quiet sense of superiority in those moments — but nothing more. City life was convenient and efficient in every way, and the more she experienced it, the more she thought about how unproductive her father's chosen way of life had been. She graduated, began earning her own money, and welcomed the feeling of growing emotionally distant from him. It was, in a sense, the feeling of becoming independent — of shedding the outer shell that was her father.

Time passed. She fell in love with a man in a similar field, and with only her father's name to offer, she was accepted into his family with little resistance and they married. A child came soon after. Day by day the child grew. At some point she began to sense it: the child was bright, but something was missing. Once the child started elementary school, the outside world's assessments became more pointed and more blunt. The question that ultimately mattered most to everyone became: "How will the daughter of the author who raised his children so brilliantly through ecological education raise her own child, and which school will she send them to?"

Above all, the child lacked her own single-minded drive for studying. She told the child the same thing every day: dedication, passion — only those things will protect you. She got rid of the television and filled not just the living room but every available wall with bookshelves, just as her father's house at Deogyu Mountain had been. She pushed her busy husband until both parents were visibly reading in front of the child. Even so, the child's indifferent attitude toward studying did not change overnight. She had always wanted people to understand that which school a child ends up at depends on the child more than the parents. She had known early on that her own child, indifferent to studying, had talent in other areas. Yet whenever she met people, the conversation kept drifting toward the child's academics, and she could find no good way to steer it elsewhere. Her father scolded her, saying that a child does not thrive simply because parents fuss over such things. Every time she heard that, she found herself reflecting on how utterly indifferent he had been to her own education. She stayed on edge, determined that her father's shadow would not fall over her child as well.

On a day when her frustration ran higher than usual, she reached out to her old university friend — the sharp, trustworthy woman who had since become a top instructor at a Daechi-dong hagwon. The friend explained how systematically the Daechi-dong hagwon district operated, and how unwise she had been. It was a moment when she felt humiliated by her child's barely average grades, so the friend's advice was blunt and practical. Even the child of a father who had lazily neglected her — whom she now considered emotionally abusive by her own standards — had made it into a top university. However little interest her child had in studying, if things went wrong, it would ultimately be her own reputation on the line. Her friend was right. She could not afford to let go of her child's education, and so she made a decision.

Through means she could not disclose, she managed to get her child into her friend's hagwon, which had a waiting list of nearly a year. Within a few months, the child's grades rose with remarkable speed and precision. Before long, people began asking: was the daughter of that father really something different, and what was the secret? She could not bring herself to say openly that the hagwon had filled in what she lacked. Or rather, she did not want to hand all the credit to the hagwon. Studying is a habit, and the child was finally building that habit — even if the means was a hagwon. The day the child ranked first in the school, a small parent group invited her to give a special talk. As word of mouth spread and the invitations accumulated, she began earning nearly as much as her salary. Watching the audience's enthusiasm, she changed her thinking: people were finally paying attention to her — not as her father's daughter, but as herself, after years of never quite standing tall in his shadow. When a television crew came to her home, she opened up her house and her child's life to the camera and proudly described her family's reading habits.

"My child reads for one hour every morning and one hour every evening without fail. Mornings are hard, but in the evenings the whole family reads together and talks about what we've read. It's something I've done with my family since I was very young. (When the producer dropped her father's name with a knowing air, she swallowed hard.) My father read far more than people realize. Even out in the mountains, he always found books for me to read. When I got a little older, I read his books myself. The key point here is that it has to feel natural. If you force it, it will eventually fall apart. For it to feel natural, the environment has to be in place first. That's the top priority. There's a saying that when you study abroad in the United States, every subject — social studies, science, everything — becomes an English class. Every subject begins with whether you can truly understand language. Once vocabulary takes off, grades soar. Private education matters, of course. But you still have to understand the material to keep up. So start with reading education. Right now."

People were moved by her words. The brilliant child of a famous author was simply different, they said, and they responded with enthusiasm to her advice on reading education. Media outlets of all kinds reached out, asking for more specific guidance on her methods. A major publisher offered her a book deal, and speaking invitations poured in. Her name began to be known — not as her father's daughter, but as her own person. She barely had time to look in on her child.

She wanted to become a little more famous. Having already used her father's name, she thought she might as well ride it higher — a better car, a better home, and with those, better education for her child. Not long after, she transferred the child to a boarding middle school. The dream of a clever mother would be complete the day her child entered a prestigious university.

carrier@heraldcorp.com