Although I look rough and dull on the outside, I'm actually a man with lots of tears. 7 months after we got ruined, when my mother passed away, I wailed and mourned for the first time in my life. Also on my graduation day, as I walked out the school gate alone, I cried. A lonesome graduation, with no one coming and me in my shabby military uniform. I got my diploma as top of the class, but there was no one to congratulate me.
After I discharged from the military my first job was a music teacher at Hwa-Gok High school. While I was at the school I developed and epochal practical examination method. Everytime there are tone-deaf students who get low scores. For them I made it so that they could pick between creativity, performance, and appreciation, anything they're good at. Although they can't sing, students who like music may write a description of their impression of the music, and students who can play the guitar may play the guitar as the exam with me.
It was a pretty worthy life but I had already decided on studying abroad. It wasn't for show, but at that time I couldn't sing the high doe. To break the wall of high tones and get perfection in music, I had to move to Italy. To a tenor, high tones are like our lives. Sometimes, tenors risk their lives for high tones. The internationally tenor Richard Darker's doctor warned him that, "If you sing the high doe, you'll die." so he gave up the high note. In our country, an elderly tenor passed away while singing an epithalamium at a wedding ceremony.
I also had almost died while singing. It was when our home was ruined and my body was weak. I had been singing a special hymn during chapel. It was the song, 'Lord, please give us mercy' and it went up to the high la, so I didn't worry about it much. But after I sang the la note and turned around the blood quickly rose in my brain blood vessel. I suddenly felt suffocated and I had fainted.
And sometime later while I was practicing 'Shim-chung-jun' that the Kim Ja-kyung Opera group was performing, the symptoms relapsed. While I was trying to sing the farmer's song beautifully, my breathing had been blocked.
Medically it's called arrhythmia. For a while, I was scared of singing. To go abroad there were some things I had to settle. First, I had to prepare money for the airplane ticket. And it would also have been so much better if I had a wife to take with me.
I prayed to God. "Lord, I don't ask of anything from a woman. Just that, since I'm short I wish that she'd be tall and it'd be nice if she'd be pretty, and since I can't play piano, I wish she'd be someone who could to play and accompany me."
For a poor school teacher, it was an extreme demand. But the wish came true. I got Young-in Choi, who works as a conductor for the church choir and is the accompaniment at the Ban-sok Church, as my wife. Her height is 1m 73cm.
I settled the 3 years of life as a teacher and started getting ready for going abroad. I had no money in my hands. After long consideration I had a vocal recital at the Yu kwan-sun Memorial Hall. At the time, it was custom to spend your own money at recitals but I earned 370 million won. That money was my study abroad fund. We quickly had a wedding and without our honeymoon, we left to Italy. I told my wife, "We're going on a honeymoon to Italy.". But the honeymoon ended on the first day we arrived in Italy. A long war was waiting for me there.